Amanda K. Greene, Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024. 222 PP. $54.00. ISBN: 9780262550826.
Photographers whose careers reach back more than a couple decades will be familiar with the era of chemically treated light-sensitive materials. That is, film and photographic printing paper. The practice of a photographer during the craft’s first almost two centuries usually demanded manipulation of black-and-white materials in a dark room, once so familiar that it became one word, darkroom. White light would alter the process, as everybody then knew—because it was too easy to let in light by mistake. Usually the ruined film or print would simply turn black. Other times the “ruin” would not be so complete. It is at this moment that author Amanda K. Greene introduces readers to the concept of glitch.
Greene relates an anecdote from 1929, in which the photographer and model Lee Miller accidentally turned on a light in her darkroom. The negatives were affected. But the image was not ruined. Instead, it gained a luminous pattern of haloes where the light reacted with the emulsion in different ways.
Miller had discovered a process we today put under a general umbrella of solarization. She didn’t discover it, actually. The effect had been known almost since photography’s beginning. But Miller, influenced by the era’s surrealist movement along with surrealist photographer Man Ray saw the accidental effect as a tool. “The effect was particularly powerful in how it reshaped the contours and textures of the photographed human body.” (3)
Working in the darkroom, Lee had made a mistake. Or, in the author’s word, a glitch, a relatively small error. The word apparently dates from 1940s radio but was popularized by astronaut John Glenn in 1962, as he described problems of the early space program.
Based on this idea of disruptive “errors” between technology and human beings, Greene moves on to explore advances new in the interwar era as a way to understand humanness as it is tied to technologies. “Glitchiness has become a descriptor not just of technologies but also of bodies,” the author explains. “Nonnormative bodies create or reveal glitches in sociotechnical structures of meaning making built on assumption of white, cisgender, able-bodied heterosexuality.” (4-5)
At this point the readers who were expecting a historical exploration of photographic practices of nearly a century ago realize they are jumping into a lot more than that. Greene pulls in research from disciplines including feminist theory, rhetoric, media theory and literary criticism to examine the idea of the disruption of glitch within the historical practices of photography.
Traditional historians try to examine the past on its own terms. That is, they try to avoid judging people, practices or events of the past based on values or assumptions of the present. While historians can debate whether that is really possible, Greene turns the table. She emphasizes that she is expressly judging the past based on present understanding. She admits that the word “glitch” didn’t exist in the time frame she explores. “Nevertheless, looking at history through familiar keywords of the present moment, like glitch, can bring us closer to understanding the past on our own terms in ways that animate its relevance to the present.” (6) Greene hopes that “the aesthetic negotiations of the interface between technology and the body in this era might have a lot to say about digital culture today.” But her examination is, as the author declares, at base an approach to feminist media history. (6-7)
Using this approach, the author emphasizes what she calls three “foundational points”: the glitch as a feminist tool to reveal bodies as they interface with technologies; that photography goes beyond a simple image, but is “an assemblage of many devices, techniques, materials and actors”; that new techniques of the 1930s “were binding bodies and worlds together in order to make them appear more palatable,” called the “glitch of interwar culture.” (8) The concept behind this relies on what the author admits is a “jargony” word, technogenesis, but the concept is easy for anyone who lives in a century of dramatic change: how technology changes human life. The truth beyond the headlines, notes the author, is that the change is often subtle, hard to quantify, and open to jerky starts and recurrent pitfalls. That is, the relationship between humans and machines is glitchy. But “glitches accrete into meaningful transformations of the human experience that we can recognizes in retrospect.” (9)
Consideration of technology now obsolete may seem a surprising approach to understanding the glitchiness of today. But the idea of what Greene calls “the circuits between bodies and media” can be studied as a way to understand how human experience and interpersonal interactions are shaped by photography considered through a lens of feminist orientation, “embracing glitchiness as a method of seeing critically and narrating history too.” (10-11)
The choice of interwar photography as a time period for study springs from a conclusion that this marked the beginning of the ubiquitous photo that in today’s digital age has come to infuse human communication. It was the key decade, the first true media age, but the author emphasizes her approach is not to look for causal relationships with the present. Instead, she emphasizes “media archaeology” by examining details or artifacts with a challenge of feminist analysis. (20) This, the author emphasizes, will require cross-disciplinary work and non-linear analysis, both techniques unfamiliar in standard mass media history. How? By relying on the present. Each chapter “utilizes a born-digital keyword—real time algorithmic filters, and sousveillance—as a warped lens through which to encounter the past.” (23-24)
Traditional mass media historians will need therefore to accept an approach probably quite unlike any they have encountered before, as the subsequent work examines a somewhat known history from a novel slant. Chapters consider the interwar tabloid press and its friendliness with Nazi concepts of the perfect body, the glamor photography of Lee Miller that perfected the human skin as almost ceramic ideal “that appeared immune to harm,” (88), and the idea of sousveillance as applied to the new unobtrusive equipment that developed in the 1930s to allow cameras to become almost part of the human body.
Within this examination readers can recognize a 1930s goal of glamor photography not so much as a perfecting of physical features as a concept of beauty, but as a concept of erasing the glitchy vulnerability of the human body, to “erase feeling and difference in ways that can powerfully play into totalitarian agendas.” (109) The glamour aesthetic “fetishizes not only beauty and immortality but also violence,” Greene observes, so became a sort of mass media filtering for a fascist age. (109)
The ubiquitous cellphone camera of today as almost a prosthetic extension of the human body can be seen in the Leica and other 35mm cameras of the 1930s. “With their small size, these devices enabled a new level of mobility and immersion that tightly linked the photograph to the photographers’ body.” (122). Technology in the 1930s made unmanipulated photography possible, the idea of photographic surveillance by the public, watching the watchers, as today we might call citizen journalism or, in Greene’s approach, sousveillance.
The author requests the reader examine photographic history from an unusual perspective. This is not necessary easy. The writing can sometimes challenge with sentences such as: “Miller’s disability aesthetic shows how glamour operates in the relational interface between photographed bodies and readers, reframing algorithmic filtering as an assemblage of ethically consequential practices as opposed to a particular feature of digital cameras.” (110) Some of us may find it necessary to read chapters twice. But Greene does offer insights toward a new approach that, she concludes, is still in process. The work may be considered a starting point: “The history of the social photo and reading the present through the anachronism of the camera eye can help us pierce through the illusions of technological progress.” (171)
Ross F. Collins is a professor of communication at North Dakota State University, Fargo. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge under supervision of Jay M. Winter. He completed an M.A. at the University of Warwick, and B.S. at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Collins has written or edited eight books on topics covering media history and practice, most recently Children, War and Propaganda (revised edition 2023), and a co-edited textbook, Photocommunication Across Media (2018), in which he contributed a chapter on the history of vernacular photography. Collins has also published many scholarly articles, monographs and book chapters examining the French and United States press, and is a former writer, editor and photojournalist.