The affective turn in the humanities and social sciences has only very recently started to have an impact on writing about photography. To date, the main books published on the topic are: Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Suzie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010) (click here for review); Sharon Sliwinski’s Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) (click here for review); and Margaret Olin’s Touching Photographs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012) (click here for review). As this list should indicate, most recent publications focus on the challenge of “regarding the pain of others” via photographic mediation first identified by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). While the significance of emotion was not Sontag’s chief concern, she nonetheless very ably identified the centrality of feeling for the reception of difficult, disturbing, and distressing images. The scholarly books that followed have amplified and deepened her insight.

Much of Feeling Photography addresses this established part of the field and the feelings and experiences associated with it: trauma, horror, pity, grief, loss, contempt, vulnerability, and empathy. As the editors Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu note in their conclusion, the mood of this collection of essays is predominantly “somber and mournful” (352). However, their anthology also substantially broadens the terrain beyond photojournalism and documentary—currently, the core concerns of the literature on photography and the affective turn. In addition, the book moves away from the singular focus on images of pain, while maintaining the emphasis on the political implications of feeling photography.

The collection offers some very useful ways of thinking about the emerging field of affect theory and its applications to the broad domain of photography. In particular, the introduction provides some salient historical precedents for the analysis of feeling in photography: for example, Pictorialist photography was framed in this way in the mid-twentieth century (9), and American reform photography is also argued to be amenable to this reading (11–12). Roland Barthes’s account of the photographic “punctum” is, of course, also acknowledged as central to the history of engagements with feeling in photography (1). Additionally, the editors account for the relative neglect of feeling in photo criticism by identifying an explicit turn away from feeling in the 1980s on the part of materialist theorists of photography such as John Tagg, Allan Sekula, and Victor Burgin (2–3). On the latter point, it is interesting to compare photography criticism with the rest of the visual arts, where the rejection of feeling by art critics is evident in the 1960s in response to the vehemently anti-aesthetic art practices of Minimalism and Conceptual art.

The book also represents a much more catholic approach to affect theory than The Affect Theory Reader (also published by Duke University Press, 2010) which is dominated by Deleuzian approaches, with almost no reference to the large corpus of psychoanalytic theories of affect. Feeling Photography includes feminist and queer approaches to visual culture, as well as essays informed by aesthetics, psychoanalysis, Barthesian semiology, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory, to list just some of the diverse approaches. Similarly, essays address a large range of types of photography: vernacular photography, contemporary art photography, Pictorialist photography, photojournalism, celebrity portraits, identification shots, and photographs in film.

The book is divided into three thematic sections: “Touchy-Feely,” “Intimacy and Sentiment,” and “Affective Archives.” The last two sections are more tightly focused, and, in general, the knitting together of affect theory and visual material is more assured and persuasive in these essays. There are two chapters that do not address the dual concerns of the anthology: namely photography and feeling. Diana Taylor’s chapter, “Trauma in the Archive,” is focused on the performance of trauma with little mention of photography, while Christopher Pinney’s chapter, “Sepia Mutiny: Colonial Photography and Its Others in India,” addresses photography but has little to say about feeling.

Two chapters in the section on “Intimacy and Sentiment” are particularly noteworthy for the depth and complexity of their original archival research; both focus on the emergence of affective norms in North American portrait photography. Tanya Sheehan’s essay, “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” examines the emergence of the photographic smile as the customary facial expression for snapshots in the United States. She unveils the astonishing origins of the smile in mass media images of African Americans eating watermelons. Lily Cho’s essay on Chinese head tax photographs for the purposes of immigration to Canada, “Anticipating Citizenship: Chinese Head Tax Photographs,” shows how the convention of the emotionally neutral identification shot began with these photographs. These two chapters establish very useful coordinates for thinking about the role of photography in codifying feeling, while also opening up a rich seam for further historical research.

Lisa Cartwright’s “Topographies of Feeling: On Catherine Opie’s American Football Landscapes” is another thought-provoking chapter. Reading the affectless photographic style of New Topographics against the grain, she reveals that these photographs of “man-altered” landscapes are marked by and invested with feeling (301). This insight, in turn, is used to analyze Opie’s similarly emotionally cool football landscapes and football portraits. Cartwright draws attention to the interplay between the portraits and the landscapes, discerning in Opie’s football series “a complicated engagement with the disconnections and overlaps between topology and typology” (311). Both bodies and landscapes, Cartwright suggests, are subtly shaped and cultivated by feeling. Cartwright thereby illuminates not only Opie’s football series, but also how two strands of her practice can be interrelated: namely, the well-known portraits of queer subcultures and Opie’s sustained investigation of landscape and urban topography.

One of the few oversights, in an otherwise exemplary coverage of the field, is the growing body of criticism of affect theory, most notably the work of Ruth Leys. Leys’s book From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) is an important contribution to what is now an ongoing debate about the applications and implications of affect theory. Leys’s chief criticism is that an emphasis on feeling tends to personalize interpretation and to thereby disallow argument or debate. As she puts it: “Differences become intrinsically valuable because a concern with disagreements over beliefs and intentions is replaced by a concern with differences in personal experience. The result is that when people have different experiences or feelings, they don’t disagree, they just are different” (154–55; emphasis in original).

While Leys may be correct in arguing that it is not currently customary to debate about how and what we feel, this could be how the field of affect theory develops, so that as well as arguing over meaning (the dominant approach to photography and other visual arts), we could also argue about misapplied emotions, projected feelings, and so forth. In this spirit, there are a number of essays in the volume where I disagree quite radically with the feelings attributed to the images. For example, F. Holland Day’s Orpheus series (1907) is interpreted as “shrouded in traumatic loss” by Shawn Michelle Smith in her essay, “Photography between Desire and Grief: Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day” (34). While the story of Orpheus is about loss, the melodramatic high-camp pose of the beautiful naked young man (reproduced on page 33) is also fabulously kitschy, and, consequently, to a contemporary eye (mine at least) simultaneously erotic, ironic, and funny.

Similarly, I have trouble agreeing with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s reading of Argentinian artist Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena Memoria (1997) in their chapter, “School Photos and Their Afterlives.” Or more precisely, I disagree with their analysis of one component of this work: Brodsky’s reproduction of his class photo of 1967, which is annotated with the details he was able to discover about each member of the group. Two classmates were victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, and their likenesses are circled in red and struck through. Referring to these marks, Hirsch and Spitzer state: “The lines etched into the surface of the print transmit that violence, puncturing us as viewers” (268). At first sight, their interpretation would seem the most fitting reaction to an image referencing the desparecido, or disappeared; but when I saw this photograph in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, what struck me most was its peculiarly deadpan and unaffecting quality. The presentation of death via color-coding and a familiar diacritical mark seemed to me not violent or puncturing, but numbing and deliberately unsensationalized.

It is perhaps no accident that in order to disagree with these two readings, I have shifted from the passive voice customary for academic writing into a personal register. Is this just a function of the differentiation required for disagreement, or the work of affect undoing the assumption of dispassionate authority? These disagreements (and the questions they raise) point to the complexity of expressing, capturing, triggering, or eliciting feeling via images. In other words, feeling is as complicated and difficult to convey and analyze as photographic meaning. This anthology is a substantial contribution to the beginning of that challenging project.