Sabine T. Kriebel teaches at the University College Cork, Republic of Ireland, where she has taught modern art and photography since 2004. Kriebel is author of Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (2014) and has published widely on photography and photography theory, photomontage, and mass-circulation magazines.

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (2012) and coeditor of Photography and Its Origins (with Sheehan, 2015).

Photography and Doubt provides a counter-history, by way of individually authored case studies, to a dominant strand in photographic history that emphasizes the medium's documentary or factual value. Instead, these new essays emphasize that photographic realism and fiction almost always coexist at the levels of production and reception, thus generating a more nuanced account of photography in which instability and veracity cohabit across the medium's larger history.

Photography and Doubt will be an invaluable companion to undergraduate textbooks devoted to standard histories of the medium as well as providing a valuable resource for scholars.

Contents

List of figures

About the contributors

Introduction

Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón

Prelude

Three or Four Kinds of Indeterminacy in the Photograph

Douglas R. Nickel

Part I Between Facticity and Fiction

1 No Room for Doubt? Daguerre and his First Critics

Steffen Siegel

2 Blowing Up the World: On the Evidentiary Cultures of Enlargement, ca, 1893-1917

Jordan Bear

3 A Magician Among the Spirit Photographs: Reflections on Houdini's Doubt

Louis Kaplan

Part II Instabilities of the Medium

4 Reaching Beyond the Index: The Publication of News Photographs

Thierry Gervais

5 The Camera Work of the PM Sketch Report

Jason E. Hill

6 Robert Capa and the Turn to Forensics

Vincent Lavoie

Part III From Aporia to Anomie: Photography Deconstructed

7 Moholy's Doubt

Susan Laxton

8 Max Ernst: Graceful Photographer

Adrian Sudhalter

9 Atomisation, Anomie and Farewell to Photography

Sarah Kelleher

Part IV Indeterminacy

10 Controlling Doubt: Abstract Painting and Photography

John J. Curley

11 Clouded Judgment: Conceptual Art, Photography and the Discourse of Doubt

Heather Diack

12 Methodological Position for Second Degree Art History

Robert Slifkin

Selected Bibliography

Index