The Analog Revisited

This collection of essays explores the complexities of the photographic image in the wake of the digital turn. While the digital image has, in effect, effaced the necessity for a pre-existing “reality,” the presumed indexical function of the photographic image has by no means disappeared—technical images continue to organize, if not generate, our shifting modes of perception. How do we reconsider analog photographs, given that they can and are likely to show up on a variety of digital platforms? How do we re-view technical images that make the invisible visible, given that current imaging technologies generate new visualities as such? How does the digital force us to reconceptualize the analog?
Individual chapters engage with a range of technical images approached from various critical and/or theoretical perspectives. One focuses on composite photographic portraits in eugenics and in contemporary art through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of facility. Another assumes a pedagogical approach that pursues the photographic as a metaphor for knowledge practices through staging embodied encounters with digital living. Another explores the work of the artwork through a study of contemporary art photography by means of object-oriented ontology and new aesthetic realism. Yet another presents an infographic genealogy that tracks the technical image across a modernist telematic media-verse. One chapter offers a critical exploration of a silent film hero through her various analog and digital incarnations. Another explores a Lacanian-inspired perspective on the consequences of the shift from analog to digital for the subjects in front of the camera, the posers. One chapter focuses on the analog Anthropocene through an investigation of an Italian film factory and its material and human legacies. A final contribution investigates the relationship between photography and disaster through a discussion of a triple disaster—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident that occurred in Japan in 2011.

renée c. hoogland is a professor of English Literature and Culture at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of 40+ essays and book chapters and three monographs: 'A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation.' University Press of New England, 2014; 'Lesbian Configurations.' Polity Press & Columbia University Press, 1997; 'Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing.' New York University Press, 1994. Hoogland served as the editor in chief of the ten-volume McMillan Handbook Series on Gender and is currently the editor of 'Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.' She is working on a book about photography, entitled 'The Other Side of Nowhere: Thoughts on Contemporary Photography.'