DDRIG: Seeing Is Knowing: Objectivity and the Creation of French Visual Culture, 1870-1930

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This doctoral dissertation research improvement grant--made by the Science, Technology & Society program at NSF--supports a project that examines the role of nineteenth-century French photography and early French cinema in forming social networks among scientists, expert users, journalists, and other adherents. The objectives of this project include analyzing how technological communities of self-identified adherents legitimate the adoption of technologies; analyzing how communities are important for articulating and defining new forms of professional identity like photojournalists and documentarians; and investigating how pre-existing relationships shaped the way these specialist networks advocated on photography's behalf in France. The broader impact of this project is to relate sociological approaches to technology to the history of modern visual culture. With regard to modern visual culture studies, this project develops an approach that goes beyond emphasizing the emergence of new forms of mass media and popular spectacles to assert the important role that social networks play in advocating new technologies. It also contributes to approaches that derive from sociology of technology studies that focus on the role of designers and users. This project observes how technologies engender broader spheres of sociability--journals, clubs, public lectures, curricula--where ideas, identities, and usages are continually debated and redefined. Consequently, the project seeks to relate and refine both the fields of visual culture and technology studies by seeking to understand how communities of technologists debate and promote the adoption and extension of technologies and do so within specific national and cultural forms.