In the context of material culture studies, how might the camera be considered as both a thing and an object? Rather than calibrating our sense of what photography is from the viewer’s experience of images, this paper draws on fieldwork with police photographers in Los Angeles and San Diego, to present a series of proposals for recasting our understanding of what photography is when the camera takes centre stage. As a thing, the camera is presented as a “memory-thing,” a “body-thing,” and a “puzzle-thing,” when it is not performing its ‘intended’ function as an apparatus for apprehending images. Alternatively, as an object, the camera is conceived as a “transducer,” which serves as a model for conceptualizing the apparatus as a technology of affect. In this regard, the camera facilitates exploratory processes of photographic doubt; produces somatic effects on police photographers and their subjects; and affords police photographers the ability to manage empathy for the victims of crime they photograph, by preoccupying the photographer with technical and compositional considerations.

This dissertation looks at what we can learn about photography by directing our attention to the moments in which it is made, that we cannot possibly ever know from studying the images produced in these same moments. What kinds of knowledge are produced in Situ, that are distinct from the knowledge produced by looking at images? In what ways do the presence of cameras make intersubjective experience and processes of recognition specific? What is the camera when it is not conceived primarily as a representational apparatus? To answer these questions, this project departs from standard approaches in photographic theory that typically conceptualize photography via the viewer’s experience of images. Instead, I use an “on-the-ground” approach to witness the processes via which images are made in “photographic events” across three sites in California. These case studies include Scripps Pier in San Diego and the Jaffe Laboratory for Underwater Imaging at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the work of several police crime scene photography units in Southern California and Yosemite National Park. Through an analysis of these sites where vernacular, scientific, artistic and commercial applications of photography converge, the purpose is to build a new vocabulary for the medium, reconstituted as a performative matrix of practices that are socially situated.

The images produced at these sites no longer take center-stage, but emerge as side effects of inter-subjective processes. Conceptualized as a theatrical mise-en-scène, these iterations of the “photographic event” situate photography as a less optical and more bodily technology. Furthermore, this notion of the event complicates the way the study of images typically distribute authorship to the photographer’s intention and instead I argue that we should see agency as vastly more distributed between human and non-human agents. At the same time, the camera is cast as a material thing that alters processes of social interaction and interpersonal recognition. Finally, the now hackneyed metaphor that draws an analogous relationship between photography and the gun is revised, so that photography’s connection with hunting is situated not via the ‘the kill,’ but though practices of trapping, decoy and poaching. In these ways, photography is dislodged from theories of agency versus automatism, the trace or the ‘reality’ effect and the gaze—and re-situated as a mode of non-representational thinking in the context of discourses including tourism studies, ethnography and material culture studies. Methodologically, in its attention to illuminating practice, ethnographic research exposes photography to a form of consideration that has not happened within the discipline of art theory.

This project aims to bring artistic methods of inquiry to bear on current debates about the ontological distinction between persons and things that have emerged in the face of ecological crises. My dissertation presents an experimental ethnography that traces material and immaterial encounters around the Bancroft Ranch House Museum in East County San Diego. An obscure national and state historical landmark, the small museum is housed in an adobe that was built by white settlers on former Kumeyaay land and then bought by the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft in the late 19th century. A historically contested site, the museum also acts as a social hub and market place for a medley of things ranging from artifacts to discarded goods. My work takes its cue from the museum’s unorthodox archive––where the historical and the personal gather in relics as much as in refuse––to revisit matters that have shaped California’s social landscape, such as first contact, missionization, colonial settlement, water rights, and urban development. By following the daily routines of the site’s caretaker, I unravel how eccentric practices and unruly objects destabilize the official settler narrative. At the same time, the site becomes a probing ground to assess current discourses about object agency flourishing within the humanities, social sciences, and science studies. While it is important to reconsider who or what participates in the assembly of a social collective, as scholars such as Bruno Latour or Jane Bennett ask us to do, my fieldwork suggests that decentering the privileged space of the human subject cannot be at the expense of attending to repressed histories and social inequalities that remain unsolved.