mercial photographers Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, which discusses the Victorian consumption of their oeuvres ‘as both recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy’. Bear contends that these men deliberately allowed for the processes of staging photographic tableaux to intrude upon their finished photographs, effectively thematising the fictive nature of their work. Signs of artifice were not failings, then, but authorial flourishes that invited viewers to participate in a commercialised game of visual discernment, decoding the constructed nature of photographic representation. Pushing this further, Bear borrows from Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the ‘culture industry’ in order to suggest that such ocular leisure-time was something that gave respite to workers even as it was permeated by the prerogatives of industrial labour. The cultivation of vision encouraged by professional photographers like Rejlander and Robinson gelled with the industrially sanctioned programmes harboured by the Mechanics’ Institutes and their ilk; visual discernment was therefore ‘both commodified and infused with the logic of production’. In an evocative phrase, Bear states it thus: ‘One was never entirely “off-theclock” if one could see’. Yet Bear’s fusion of leisure, looking, and labour feels oddly sealed off from some pertinent theoretical work on the political economy of vision. In particular, the absence of engagement with Jonathan Beller’s theory of the ‘cinematic mode of production’ – which argues, like Bear, that our leisurely visual attention under (post)modernity is exploited as a source of labour and value (The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, 2006) – diminishes the potential force of Disillusioned’s argument. In fairness, Bear’s story of photography finishes in the late 1870s, when ‘a regime of visual expertise’ supplanted the more free-spirited amateurism integral to earlier photographic culture. But Bear’s subtle account of Victorian visual discernment constituting a type of liberal freedom grafted onto the capitalist logic of production is something that resonates strongly with Beller’s analogous – if less measured – thesis regarding later modes of photographic media bringing ‘the industrial revolution to the eye’ and serving as ‘the leveraged management and expropriation of humanity’s “freedom reflex”’. Such lacunae are perhaps more keenly felt because Bear’s account is often of a theoretical, rather than an empirical, nature. Victorian testimony regarding the experience of viewing these photographs – or exercising visual discernment – is thin, leaving the argument feeling a little circumstantial at times. That said, Disillusioned treats us to highly original and incisive analyses of the output of important – yet hitherto undertheorised – Victorian photographers. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies, Bear gives us a portrait of a Victorian political subject forged within early photographic culture, one who is barraged by modernity’s images but is by no means helplessly or passively determined by them. Photography was a ‘key mechanism through which the relative agency of individuals in society was negotiated’; it was not a blunt tool of social oppression, but an ambivalent site of struggle between liberal capitalism’s antagonistic movements towards individual freedom on the one hand, and industrial toil on the other. Disillusioned shows us that the camera produced more nuanced political subjects than has previously been thought.

中文翻译：

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东南亚摄影：调查

商业摄影师奥斯卡·雷兰德 (Oscar Rejlander) 和亨利·皮奇·罗宾逊 (Henry Peach Robinson) 讨论了维多利亚时代对他们作品的消费“既是娱乐，也是现代经济生产力的先决条件”。贝尔争辩说，这些人故​​意让拍摄画面的过程侵入他们完成的照片，有效地将他们作品的虚构性质主题化。因此，技巧的迹象并不是失败，而是作者的繁荣，邀请观众参与视觉辨别的商业化游戏，解码摄影表现的构建本质。进一步推动这一点，贝尔借鉴了阿多诺和霍克海默对“文化产业”的分析，以表明这种视觉上的闲暇时间可以让工人得到喘息的机会，即使它被工业劳动的特权所渗透。像 Rejlander 和 Robinson 这样的专业摄影师所鼓励的视力培养与机械学院及其同类机构所拥有的行业认可的项目相结合；因此，视觉辨别力“既商品化，又融入了生产逻辑”。在一个令人回味的短语中，Bear 是这样说的：“如果能看到，就永远不会完全是“下班的”。然而，贝尔将休闲、观看和劳动的融合与一些关于视觉政治经济学的相关理论工作隔离开来。特别是，乔纳森·贝勒 (Jonathan Beller) 的“电影生产方式”理论缺乏参与——该理论与贝尔一样，认为我们在（后）现代性下悠闲的视觉注意力被用作劳动和价值的来源（电影生产方式：注意力经济与景观社会，2006 年）——削弱了幻灭论的潜在力量。公平地说，贝尔的摄影故事在 1870 年代后期结束，当时“视觉专业制度”取代了早期摄影文化不可或缺的更自由奔放的业余主义。但是，贝尔对维多利亚时代视觉辨别力的微妙描述构成了一种嫁接到资本主义生产逻辑上的自由自由，这与贝勒关于后来的摄影媒体模式带来“工业革命”的类似（如果不那么衡量的话）的论点产生强烈共鸣并充当“人类“自由反射”的杠杆管理和征用”。或许更能敏锐地感受到这种缺陷，因为贝尔的描述通常是理论性的，而不是经验性的。维多利亚时代关于观看这些照片的经历——或行使视觉辨别力——的证词很薄弱，有时让争论感觉有点间接。那说，Disillusioned 让我们对维多利亚时代的重要摄影师的作品进行了高度原创和精辟的分析。通过一系列广泛的案例研究，贝尔为我们描绘了一个在早期摄影文化中形成的维多利亚时代的政治主题，一个被现代性图像所包围，但绝不是无助或被动地被它们所决定的人。摄影是“协商社会中个人的相对代理权的关键机制”；它不是社会压迫的生硬工具，而是自由资本主义一方面争取个人自由的对抗运动与另一方面的工业劳动之间矛盾的斗争场所。《幻灭》向我们展示了相机拍摄出的政治题材比以前想象的更加微妙。