On This Day in Photography: Insights from James McArdle

By Chris Francis

On This Date In Photography is a remarkable blog written by Dr. James McArdle, artist and self-declared recovering academic - a retired Associate Professor from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.  As the title suggests, each daily blog post takes the day's date as a starting point for offering rich servings from photography history. More than this though - and of particular relevance to A level students and teachers (with reference to the Personal Study) - is the manner in which James makes imaginative connections across times, places and personalities, many posts connecting rich historical research with contemporary references and concerns.

We were delighted when James agreed to share some insights into this wonderful resource.

What led you to create On This Day in Photography?

My reason for writing the blog was initially because I wanted to prepare material for a book and a survey of historical and contemporary photography. I had to choose a topic for the blog which would expose me to new material. I chose to write daily posts because that forces me to keep writing regularly, and actually, I find that makes writing easier, to have that expectation. 
 
I decided to base the research and writing on one simple rule - it has to be something that happened or is happening on that date. That is what presents me with the possibilities for the day.

Where do you begin with your research?

I go every day to a number of sources. Alan Griffiths’ Luminous Lint is excellent and provides, amongst many other resources, a calendar of photographic happenings. It is a subscription-funded American site however and this leads me to another principle I have adopted for the blog. American photography has been given plenty of exposure and as a photography student in the 1970s everyone looked to the USA. Since I am interested in stuff I don’t know about I don’t write on American photographers except where they are unknown, though of course I do mention them in posts for comparison since everyone knows them and they provide a common talking point.
 
Andrew Eskind and Greg Drake still edit http://photographydatabase.org based on 30 years of research compiled for American publisher of photography books G.K. Hall. It has expanded to include photographers world-wide. I find any resource needs double-checking, and that process of course is not wasted time - you just find out more.
 
David Lowe, Photography Specialist at the New York Public Library, compiles Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) which has a global map interface that is idiosyncratic but actually very helpful once you get used to it.

If I am lucky there may be two or more photographers who were born or died on the day, a significant photo taken or an exhibition that all relate to each other in some useful way that triggers ideas that I would not have thought of otherwise - I am only too happy to be directed by coincidence since the accident of date is just that (unless you believe in astrology), and sometimes the ball just drops into place in this "calendric roulette”. It’s fun.

How do you start with your writing?

The best way to get the writing flowing is to get hold of images by the photographer. Like most photographers I respond to visual stimulus and I find it easy just to get words down by imagining myself taking their pictures myself…that’s stuff we know about. That allows me an entree into the thinking behind the work.
 
Then I research the biographies of the photographers which leads to discovering how they fit into history, including the political, social and technological environments of their country or city. I am eager to find statements by them about their work which I tag in my posts. Then, and only after I have formed and am comfortable with my own ideas, will I look at academic essays, online books, newspaper articles or critiques of the photographer or exhibition. I may quote them or summarise them, acknowledging the source, but because a blog is not an academic exercise, I don’t include a bibliography or footnotes, but I include links where I can.
 
At this point I have bits and pieces of writing that need to come together into a coherent whole. The theme of the post may only become apparent at this stage as the pieces are shuffled and come together. A little editing is needed then to look after tense and syntax. It is a matter then of writing the concluding paragraph. and after that an introduction that will fit into the character limit in Twitter..necessarily a very short, pithy statement with a picture that will find some interested readers; and even just that process of distillation will make me go back and revise or add ideas. A blog post is never set in stone. 
 
Inevitably, once I read the post as  it appears online, I may see mistakes and have to go back in and make corrections, and since this is an intense process, I have to be prepared for new information about the subject to pop up (since I am now sensitised to it), or for other ideas to form in the night or under the shower next morning. 
 
The pressure of writing the next day’s post comes along and I start all over again.

Which photography writings have influenced you the most?

Photographs influence me most; that is where my ideas come from, so photobooks come first for me. It was formative for me to have in the house, as I grew up in the 1950s, the sumptuous slip-covered Moments Preserved by Irving Penn (Simon and Schuster, 1960), The Family of Man (MoMA, 1954), The World Is Young by Wayne Miller and Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Love on the Left Bank) by Ed van were Elsken (1956). Since then the world has filled with photobooks, a bewildering but ever-tempting feast of them.
 
The first photography book I read in depth (and still read and consult) was Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography - my mother gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday in 1968, the year it came out. It was his PhD at the Courtauld Insitute and must be one of the earliest of research at that level; meticulous. It’s illustrations were all monochrome in that edition. It was a lucid, convincing account of the way art and photography interacted - and made it clear that photography could be art. 
 
I loathed Sontag’s On Photography for her supercilious pontificating, and that came out while I was a photography student and led to furious rows with other students who had been told it was God’s Word. Max Kozloff’s writing is clear and to the point, and I recommend in particular his 'Contention Between Two Critics About a Disagreeable Beauty' on Joel-Peter Witkin in his The Privileged Eye: Essays on Photography, University of New Mexico Press, 1987 for a demonstration of incisive critical writing.
 
A helpful history of photography is Nouvelle histoire de la photographie by Michel Frizot (Bordas, 1995), available in a fairly good English translation, which gives a world-view of the medium not found in others which tend to be more US-centric. More recent and both very readable are Charlotte Cotton’s The photograph as contemporary art (Thames & Hudson, 2004) which is thematic in a thought-provoking way and thus still relevant; and  Photography : a critical introduction edited by Liz Wells, Fifth edition (Routledge, 2015) which contains essays by various writers organised chronologically and thematically. Really there is so much online, such as 1000Words (to which I’ve contributed) and American Suburb X, and countless blogs, that we are spoilt for choice.

Finally, I'm interested in what you think of our Threshold Concepts for Photography?

I like the way these statements distil characteristics of photography to make sustaining concepts. They are necessarily generalisations, of course, but helpful in debating the essence of photography because their expression in your Threshold Concepts is deliberately and helpfully provocative. I’d take issue with #4 and #6 but defend #1 #8 and #9 with my blood! All of them are the kind of thoughts that inspire my writing and especially my own provocations expressed compactly as tweets (@JamesmMcArdle). Each is a thread I have been following in my teaching, and now in writing, and with them I feel a connection to what you are doing at photopedagogy.com

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Our many thanks to James McArdle for taking the time to share these valuable insights, and more so for providing such a rich daily dose of photography writing - Cheers James, very appreciated. We look forward to the possibility of collaborating with you in the future.