This interview was conducted by Andrew Fisher and Simon Constantine in the spring of 2026 and focuses on Henning’s recent book A Dirty History of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2026), which rethinks the history of photography in terms of the development of the chemical industries and mineral extraction, early twentieth-century material from the Ilford company archives, the poetics of atmosphere and intertwined economic and colonial impact of coal tar extraction. Henning constructs a constellatory historical investigation into how these intertwined factors combine to inform our understanding of the ongoing environmental impact of chemical-based photographies. The interview focuses, in particular, on the methodological approach and the theoretical framing of these timely critical concerns.
Contemporary art circulates through ‘installation shots’. Overwhelmingly, artworks are viewed through eye-level photographs of depopulated exhibitions. Yet the historical affordances and limitations of the genre have seldom been theorized. This article addresses the ascendance of the installation shot as a process of industrial standardization shaped by market pressures. Departing from considerations of precedents in 1850s France, the article considers the rise of twentieth-century installation shot photography in the context of art’s declining self-evidence. The form, I argue, afforded a legible publicity photograph through which to advertise and disseminate exhibitionary appearances in the absence of other socially expedient means. A technique through which to achieve extra-artistic imperatives, the installation shot predominates within contemporary art. But it has been contested and negated. The article concludes with some reflections on how autonomy might be wrested from the circulation of art images today.
The question of how to deal with photographs from the colonial period and photographic archives is one of the most pertinent in the fields of art history, critical museology and critical heritage studies today. This article approaches these issues by focusing on the role of photography in a novel. It discusses Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King (2019), highlighting intersections between photography, literature, history and memory; interrelations between histories of photography, violence and war; histories of Italian colonialism and the military occupation of Ethiopia. And it pays particular attention to the role of women in these regards. While much emphasis has rightly been given to questions of the restitution of cultural belongings and ancestral remains, this article approaches the issue of photographs and photographic archis, as well as Mengiste's written photographs, through the lens of the 'restitution of Delivered by Intellect to: dignity', a concept discusseby the Savvy Contemporary collective in 2022. Clarivate (cid-255650)
Review of: The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI , Joanna Zylinska (2023) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-26254-683-6, p/bk, USD 45
Review of: Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo , Amanda K. Greene (2024) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 212 pp., ISBN 978-0-26255-082-6, p/bk, USD 39.53
