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Street Life in London: Context and Commentary, by Emily Kathryn Morgan

advanced by André Bazin in 1945, that what makes photography a specific medium is its ability to capture the incidental, ephemeral, the accidental detail – what Benjamin called ‘the spark of contingency’. This is its form of realism and it is obviously quite different from the rhetoric of literary realism – or what Barthes called ‘the reality-effect’. The literary convention mimicked photography’s capture of folds on cloth and dusty surfaces. In realist novels, such as those by Dickens, dust comes to have the connotation of poverty, industrialisation or the prosaic everyday – ‘boredom, repetition, dust’. Later on, the foregrounding of dust, as in, for example, Bataille’s 1929 short text ‘Poussière’ suggests a desire to see the return of whatever is excluded or repressed within modernity. Yet this attitude, as Campany points out, sits very uneasily with ‘a will to sweep aside what the architect le Corbusier has once called the “moth-eaten boudoirs” that stood in the way of progress’. Another interesting excursus is titled ‘Lens, Shutter and Light-sensitive Surface’. With reference to Krauss’s 1977 article ‘Notes on the Index’, Campany discusses instances where dust is the index of the passage of time. Dust Breeding is doubly indexical in this respect. The story goes that Man Ray set up his camera, opened the shutter and went out for a meal with Duchamp. After about an hour, they returned and Man Ray closed the shutter. The anecdote stresses the elongated exposure time and the way the particles of dust slowly falling on the plate glass are doubled by the particles of light slowly falling on the light-sensitive surface. The doubling invites us to imagine the photographic plate as a receptive, neutral surface open to whatever befalls it. Campany’s innovative suggestion is that this way of understanding photography is determined by emphasising one part of the apparatus. The camera is made up of three parts – the lens, the shutter and the light-sensitive surface. When theories privilege the lens, they tend to stress the depiction of space and the conventions of linear perspective and the science of optics. When the shutter is privileged, discussion tends to involve time and duration. When the light-sensitive surface is invoked, ‘it is usually in relation to the question of contact and touch, locating origin and essence in the shadow or trace’. Campany shows how, at different historical moments, differing aspects of photography came to prominence. He also suggests that there is a tension between practices concerned with rapid shutter speed (e.g. ‘the decisive moment’) and those concerned with the indexicality of the medium. He adds that contemporary photography is now a rather slow medium. The essay in A Handful of Dust is relatively brief, yet I have only scratched its surface. There are interesting discussions of photography and abstraction, of Bruce Nauman, Victor Burgin, Ed Ruscha, Vik Muniz and a coda on the work of Sophie Ristelhueber whose work Fait: Kuwait 1991, consisting of images of the Kuwait desert pockmarked by aerial bombardment, is informed by the artist’s encounter with Dust Breeding. Given the book’s range and wealth of material, it is not a criticism but a tribute to it if I point out that Campany could have considered the tumble-dryer lint works of Mary Kelly and Gabriel Orozco or Moyra Davey’s photographs of domestic dust. You are probably already thinking of others.