Una historia de la fotografía desde las prácticas amateurs. : Posibilidades epistemológicas y metodológicas.

Núria F. Rius

doi:10.24310/fotocinema.28.2024.17691

Authors

Núria F. Rius Universitat Pompeu Fabra Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4331-5323

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24310/fotocinema.28.2024.17691

Keywords:

Amateur photography, artistic amateurism, photography and gender, children's photography, working-class photography, queer photography

Abstract

This paper analyses the epistemological and methodological possibilities of the study of amateur photography produced between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1960s, a period in which the historical use of photography declined (Bajac, 2010, p. 54). Amateur photography is understood to be produced outside the productive logics of the professional and artistic fields, without implying its impossibility of ever being monetised or circulating in the institutional spaces of art and artistic photography.

This study is based on the hypothesis that amateurism was one of the pillars on which the invention of photography developed, being, therefore, one of the pre-eminent factors in the history of the medium. It was nuclear in the development of photography, as it participated in a historical process of universalisation of the art knowledge of modernity that made it accessible to different social groups. This study contributes to plural and complex historiographical readings in terms of users, genres, circuits, and utilities. It does so by looking at photographic practice from an intersectional perspective, which broadens and strains the model of the 'art history of photography’ (Phillips 1982, p. 35).

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Author Biography

Núria F. Rius, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Núria F. Rius (Barcelona, 1983) holds a PhD from the Universitat de Barcelona with co-supervision from the Université Sorbonne-Paris IV, and currently works as a researcher affiliated with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research focuses on the development of photographic culture in Spain in both the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of the book Pau Audouard. Fotografia en temps de Modernisme as well as various academic articles on amateur and popular photography. She is currently working on exhibitions on amateur photography and film for the Mapfre Foundation (2024) and 'la Caixa' Foundation (2025-2028).

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