Photography's Other Workers

The history of photography is filled with stories of photographers at work—one might think of Ansel Adams clambering up the mountains at dawn or Richard Avedon energetically directing models in the studio. Positing the photographer as the central agent of photographic creation, such stories tend to elide the many forms of labour that take place before and after the moment of exposure. Turning away from the photographer toward those stationed along the production line, this panel explores the often-overlooked contributions of photography’s “other workers,” whose manual, aesthetic, and intellectual labour nonetheless shapes the image. In the process, it also asks how attending to this work prompts us to revise foundational assumptions about the nature of photography as a technical and aesthetic medium.

Possible topics include, among others: the business of commercial photo-processing, industrial labour at the photographic factory and related sites along the supply chain, as well as more informal arrangements of photographic labour, from the contributions of photographer's wives and daughters to the early history of photography to that the so-called "clickworkers" behind contemporary technologies of image generation. Papers that engage with histories of photographic labour from feminist, postcolonial, and materialist perspectives are especially welcome, as are those that reflect on the methodological challenges of tracing histories of photographic labour marked by archival absence and historiographic neglect.