There is a kind of fatigue in recent literature on photography. The ritual of declaring a ubiquitous abundance of photographic images, both historical and contemporary, is usually accompanied by a compulsion to address this situation and a requirement to analyze them. But how, in what framework, and to what ends?

Understanding photography as a journey, as a set of “itinerant languages,” is one way to respond to this challenge. The Itinerant Languages of Photography, edited by Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles, offers itself as the product of a double voyage of conferences and workshops in different locations in North and South America, and also as a study of the voyages of images. Academics, critics, photographers, and curators make contributions to the articulation of this journey. In the geographic and cultural mixture, the introduction states that three themes are to be addressed: “circulation and exchange,” “photography and other mediums,” and “photography and the archive.” These themes are developed across the essays and photographic plates; some of the objects illustrated also appeared in the book’s accompanying exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Individual essays by the co-editors, Cadava and Nouzeilles, are accompanied by five other essays by scholars, writers, and one well-known photographer, Joan Foncuberta. Foncuberta develops the thesis that there are “too many images” in the twenty-first century, arguing that “excess and access continue to mark the agenda of postphotographic visual culture” (90). Whether or not we agree on what is meant by a “postphotographic culture,” the paradox of his view of “excess and access” is clearly played out across The Itinerant Languages of Photography.

In unfolding that theme, this substantial book brings to light—in very good reproductions—many of the known and unknown work of photographers from South America. In fact, what this project begins to highlight is the neglected field of Iberian photography and its wider context. If it can be named as such, the sub-Iberian context of Portuguese and Spanish-speaking cultures provides a vast territory of photographic practices that are barely recognized, let alone addressed, in the English-speaking world. The many photographs in the book begin to provide a new “map” of photography, which is surely the editors’ intention. The achieved effect is to disrupt the existing canons of Euro-North American hegemony on the history of photography. Yet this disruption is only part of the project. Another is to address the titular phrase, “itinerant languages of photography.” But what does this phrase actually mean?

For many years the idea of photography as a pure semiotic language has been contested. Semioticians like Umberto Eco have argued that photography is not a language. Yet the absence of any clear theoretical alternative (images as rhetorical figures or genres) has hardly been more successful; thus the idea of photography as a language open to all remains a vague metaphor. Maybe we know what this idea of a language means—that is to say, that photography has a kind of specificity that we all recognize. A certain set of idioms? However, Cadava sets out to trouble any such certainty in his opening essay. He challenges the certain visual identity of photography through a historical case study of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s famous early photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras (ca. 1826). Cadava’s assertion, which sets up the framework and argument for the book, is that the identity of the photographic image is articulated through its itinerancy. The journey from plate in the camera to the different uses (and, we might add, abuses), including its “translations” from one form and medium to another, from one place to another, and from one audience to another, is what gives a photograph its meaning. With this opening gambit, Cadava shifts the debate about the language and identity of photography from a philosophical ontology (and the worn-out topic of indexicality) to the social and historical use of images: “How can we begin to describe the life and afterlife of photographs as they get circulated and inserted into different contexts?” (33) Associative, appropriative, and circulative, this book argues that the itinerancy of the photographic image is its identity. I sympathize with this culturalist position. It is certainly productive in the hands of this volume’s contributors. The essays, which address photography from diverse sources—Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, the United States, Venezuela, and so on—begin to defamiliarize the familiar field of photographs whose appearances have become normal. In fact, the project is a meditation on the “traveling languages” of photography.

Yet the method of this “itinerant languages” approach brings up several questions. First, what are the rules of itinerancy and how do they operate? Are there any general principles by which itinerant languages can be understood, beyond a poetic motif of association? Certainly in linguistic theory, from which the analogy to photographic language is usually drawn, the travel of language is accompanied by the migrant worker, the slave, the business executive, the scholar, and the poet, all figures whose itinerant values have changed the cultures of their destinations. What photography brings to its destinations, it can be argued, is a set of already established cultural values with ideology that interacts with the recipient culture and individuals that live in it. No matter how this is visually expressed in photographs, or whether the images conjure up an immediate local meaning or not, this form of movement of images and language begs another question: who are the agents that write this quasi-history of the itinerant voyage? Who is involved in the process of photographs moving about, the account of these photographic images, and the destination of their meanings? Who or where is the author of these meanings? The photographer is one, but the emphasis on what contributor Thomas Keenan refers to in his essay as the “detachability” of the photograph makes it subject to meanings imposed on it by those who use the picture. If this model weakens the idea of authorship, making it less centered in either the photographer (the “death of the author” argument of Roland Barthes) or in the viewer (the “emancipated spectator” by Jacques Rancière), then it does place the meaning somewhere else, contingent on context and the drift of the image. Valeria González argues more specifically in her contribution that the itinerant capacity of the photograph “is exercised through an act of localization” (76). Within this localization she introduces a potential unconscious, a kind of repressed element that suggests at least some of the difficult questions and issues that the optimism of the traveling theory has left aside.

Overall, this book is a very welcome meditation on the Iberian “language” of photography (although I hasten to add that it is not exclusively located in that region of the world) and on a mode of reading photography that actually grapples with social and historical questions of meaning. Indeed, the significance of the archive and memory are, rightly, given a central importance in the book, subject to questioning as to how to locate them in relation to photographic meaning. Aside from these questions about the accumulations of photographs and how they intersect with issues of memory and cultural identity, some of the historical photographs in the book are quite breathtaking, astonishing for their vivacity and difference. That there appear to be gaps in the project (there is no historical overview or chronological sketch, for instance, and particular destinations are left out) means that there is more work to do; or, conversely, it means that this is an effect of the itinerant method. Journeys are only particular paths that others may follow or deviate from. The analogy of the journey, the traveling meanings of the photograph, is a seductive one that is still lured perhaps by the romanticism of that “grand tour” journey made by those old Europeans as a means of discovering a new continent. Inverted here, I find myself, as an English-speaking European, not discovering a new world, but one that is fully engaged in its own re-articulation. Away from the conventional chronologies of photographic history, here are stories that are historical, yet contingent and conditional. Photography, in its very plurality, is refused the old methodologies of art history, which were designed for finite image production and limited historical circulation. Forever the good and bad traveler, the multiple itinerant photograph is something we will certainly be hearing more from, even if the language that it speaks remains uncertain and unsure of its destination.