Photography Reframed: Always, Already, Again

A 4,500-word introduction to the edited collection, Photography Reframed, in the form of a written conversation between the two editors, Ben Burbridge and Annebella Pollen. The introduction reviews the status and development of photography studies, and the book's contribution to it, reflecting on disciplinary approaches, recent changes in higher education, the museum and gallery sector, social and political contexts. The introduction puts the book's contents into critical and historical context, and outlines the collective conditions of its emergence and construction.
Extract from opening section:
BB: Why ‘Photography Reframed’?
AP: First of all, we are taking photography as our subject and placing it within
a range of different contexts, through the contributions of authors from a range of different backgrounds. We do this in the understanding that the scholarship on photography is growing in scale and complexity and yet there is much more to be said. The heterogeneity of photography – universal, increasingly ubiquitous and yet wildly diverse in its purposes and meanings – is one of its most exciting
aspects for its students and scholars. We’ve tried to capture some of that diversity and potential here by taking photography studies out of its familiar territories through new case studies and new approaches to its interpretation, and via new voices as well as those of established researchers and practitioners.
We are also reframing photography in the sense that the form and content of
the book has been developed through an iterative process. What readers hold in
their hands is the result of a series of reframings, revisions and reinterpretations
that have developed over more than five years of research and debate. The
contents of the book, and the further materials that surround it, have been
shaped by a wide range of contributors and editors, and have emerged through
an extended period of conversations, commissions, public events and online
publishing.