Vernacular Photographic Genres after the Camera Phone

Abstract

What is the place of photography in a book on genre? Genre theory, as Garin Dowd notes, has played a ‘minor role … in the areas of the musical, visual, and plastic arts’, with the most fertile ground found in literary studies (Dowd, 2006, p. 21). In genre studies, visual culture is nonetheless prominent, but mainly in its narrative-based forms, such as cinema and television. John Frow, in his introduction to genre, cites as relevant the following visual or plastic arts — drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, television, opera and drama — but does not mention photography (Frow, 2006, p. 1). In photography studies, meanwhile, genre is neither a key category of analysis nor subject to extensive theorization. Photography critics usually call their object a medium or consider it primarily a technology with specific properties, a distinction behind which many controversies rage. In the key volume Photography Theory, for example, central figures in photography studies lock horns and come to a stalemate over issues such as ‘medium specificity’ and photography’s ‘indexicality’ (Elkins, 2007, pp. 183–196, 256–269). Nowhere in this dispute does genre raise its head.