UC San Diego

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.