Minor Photography

The first book to apply the concept of the ‘minor' to the theory of photography.

The notion of the minor, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka, Towards a minor literature (1975), is introduced and connected applied here for the very first time to the field of photography theory. Deleuze and Guattari defined minor literature in terms of deterritorialization, politicization and collectivization. By transferring ‘the minor' to the medium of photography, this book enlarges the idea of ‘the minor' and opens it up to all kinds of mutations in the process. The essays gathered in this book discuss the ways in which photography can make the dominant codes of representation stammer and how it can produce new effects and address people yet to come. The authors consider ‘the minor' as a valuable tool to help photography research move beyond, or in between, binary and hierarchized ways of thinking (of high and low art, for example, or centre and periphery). As such, it aims to contribute to a rethinking of photography as multiplicity and variation. Consequently, the term is connected with both marginal and canonical photographic practices, covering photographers as different as Miroslav Tichy, Paul McCarthy, Tacita Dean, Dan Graham, and Paul Nougé. After developing a theory of the minor, this book explores how the operations of the minor can be found in major art practices. It closes by tackling the question of photography as variation in case studies of belated forms of surrealist photography.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Mieke Bleyen

Part 1 Towards a Theory of the Minor

1 From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Towards a Minor Art Practice?
Simon O'Sullivan

2 Tichy as a Maverick: Singular Figure of a Minor Photography?
Gilles Rouffineau

3 Always in the Middle: the Photographic Work of Marcel Marien.
A Minor Approach
Mieke Bleyen

Part 2 Major Artists - Minor Practice?

4 Fear of Reflections: The Photoworks of Paul McCarthy
Neil Matheson

5 Considering the Minor in the Literary and Photographic Works of Rodney Graham and Tacita Dean
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes

6 Entertaining Conceptual Art: Dan Graham on Dean Martin
Eric C.H. de Bruyn

Part 3 Surrealism in Variation

7 Towards a Minor Surrealism: Paul Nouge and the Subversion of Images
Frédéric Thomas

8 Conceptual Art and Surrealism: an Exceptional, Belgian Liaison
Liesbeth Decan

9 Systematic Confusion and the Total Discredit of the World of Reality:Surrealism and Photography in Japan of the 1930s
Jelena Stojković

Notes on the Authors

Color Section

Format: Edited volume - paperback

Size: 230 × 170 × 10 mm

198 pages

ISBN: 9789058679109

Publication: August 22, 2012

Series: Lieven Gevaert Series 13

Languages: English

Stock item number: 67177

Mieke Bleyen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture and the Institute for Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven.