This interesting and well-informed volume aims at making room for the notion of failure in photography, more precisely in the history of photography and the way we write it, ranging here from Talbot to the contemporary digital archive, with a well-balanced selection of examples from various countries, genres, styles, techniques, and periods. An approach that welcomes not only winners but also losers, lacks, mistakes, and dead ends is all the more welcome since it is in synch with the current Zeitgeist. Failure has become a key concept in fields such as film studies, where the ‘death’ of cinema is a hotly debated topic (see André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age [2015]), adaptation studies, where the ‘archival turn’ has foregrounded the importance of adaptations that either went wrong or did not produce any result at all (see Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s Films sans images. Une histoire des scénarios non réalisés de La Condition humaine [2015], and Alain Boillat and Gilles Philippe’s L’Adaptation. Des livres aux scénarios [2018]), and of course the arts and sciences, strongly influenced by actor-network theory and sociology of technology studies with its anti-functionalist axiom ‘form follows failure’ (see the pioneering volume edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems [1987]). It therefore comes as a surprise that the editor as well as several contributors of Photography and Failure insist so heavily on the originality of the ‘pro-failure’ approach. For many years, if not decades, most histories and historians of photography have been paying due attention to the respective merits and limitations of all photographic and printing processes that have been competing in the field – be it that of art, commerce, leisure, or science – and none of them remains silent on the frequent and inevitable suppression of techniques, businesses, and agents that are not fit enough to survive (readers of History of Photography are well aware of the fact that the first photographic self-portrait was that of Hippolyte Bayard, the unsuccessful competitor of Daguerre and others, as a ‘drowned man’). In addition, there exists no serious scholarly research that does not highlight the many small and great disasters that both litter and determine the transformation of photography – the list of these failures is endless. This remark does of course not diminish the value of the individual articles gathered in this volume, but the general claim that this work helps reframe the whole way of looking at the history of photography may prove somewhat exaggerated. Strangely enough, the very short introduction to the book does not really tackle the conceptual range of the term ‘failure’, nor does it specify the scope of the term ‘photography’. The actual introduction is the last chapter of the book, in which Geoffrey Batchen issues an editorial presentation – a postface that is really a preface ‘après la lettre’, so to speak – but which of course has neither the ambition nor the pretence to write a theory or history of failure in photography. It is through reading the various contributions that one progressively discovers that the photographic failures addressed in this book have nothing to do with pictures that are missed or out of focus – a topic studied by photo-historian Clément Chéroux in his book Fautographie. Petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (2003). Fautographie is only mentioned in a footnote on page 77 while the only chapter of Photography and Failure that scrutinises the role of technical errors and drawbacks is one on studio photography in Africa (where the equipment is often missing or defective). In a similar vein, one needs to peruse the whole book to realise that the notion of photography is mainly examined from an institutional point of view, the central question being: does photography achieve in the outside world what it claims to do, or not? Impact and success, or in this case rather the lack thereof, are the key criteria in the various contributions. Once again, such an approach can be perfectly motivated – and the quality of all chapters of the book proves that this path is highly rewarding – but a stronger editorial overview of the basic concepts of relevant research would have been useful. As it stands, this book seems to be rather undertheorised and does not deliver all that one might have expected. This lack of theory comes to the fore in two ways. First, the notion of ‘failure’ is opposed somewhat dichotomously to that of success, with little attention to the whole gamut of possibilities between complete failure and total success. Indeed, the relationship between the failure of photography (of certain types and approaches) and the failure of the photographer (the failure of the latter does not necessarily involve that of the former) is not clear. Second, the outstanding quality of the case studies developed in the various chapters could have been strengthened by a directly comparative approach. However interesting and suggestive the failures studied in this book, it is not always easy to evaluate their degree of representativeness. The painful exile of a great interwar photographer, Ilse Bing, who had to survive by taking a job as dog hairdresser (and thus abandoning photography), and her eventual rediscovery by the New York art scene are powerfully described, but what about other exiles – those, for instance, who were not more or less miraculously rediscovered? Bing’s case is that of a cruel and pitiless failure, true, but in comparison with others this failure remains relative. Reviews

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摄影与失败：一种媒体与失败者、失败者和失望的纠葛，克里斯·贝尔登·亚当斯 (Kris Belden Adams) 编辑。布卢姆斯伯里，伦敦和纽约，2017 年。231 页，包含 30 幅黑白插图。精装 162.00 美元，ISBN 978-1-474-29339-6

这本有趣且见多识广的书旨在为摄影失败的概念腾出空间，更准确地说是在摄影史和我们编写它的方式中，从 Talbot 到当代数字档案，以及均衡的选择来自不同国家、流派、风格、技术和时期的例子。一种不仅欢迎成功者，也欢迎失败者、不足、错误和死胡同的方法更受欢迎，因为它与当前的时代精神同步。失败已成为电影研究等领域的一个关键概念，其中电影的“死亡”是一个激烈争论的话题（参见安德烈·高德罗和菲利普·马里昂的电影的终结？数字时代危机中的媒体 [2015]），适应研究，“档案转向”突出了改编的重要性，这些改编要么出错，要么根本没有产生任何结果（参见让·路易斯·让内尔的电影无图像。Une histoire des scénarios non réalisés de La Condition humaine [2015] 和 Alain Boillat 和 Gilles Philippe 的 L'Adaptation. Des livres aux scénarios [2018]），当然还有艺术和科学，受到演员网络理论和技术研究社会学的强烈影响，其反功能主义公理“形式追随失败”（见Wiebe E. Bijker、Thomas P. Hughes 和 Trevor Pinch 编辑的开创性卷，技术系统的社会构建 [1987]）。因此，令人惊讶的是，《摄影与失败》的编辑和几位撰稿人如此坚持“支持失败”方法的独创性。很多年了，如果不是几十年的话，大多数摄影史和历史学家一直在充分关注在该领域竞争的所有摄影和印刷过程各自的优点和局限性——无论是艺术、商业、休闲还是科学——但没有他们中的一些人对不适合生存的技术、企业和代理人的频繁和不可避免的压制保持沉默（《摄影史》的读者很清楚，第一幅自画像是 Hippolyte Bayard 的自画像， Daguerre 和其他人的失败竞争对手，作为“溺水者”）。此外，没有任何严肃的学术研究不突出那些散布和决定摄影变革的大大小小的灾难——这些失败的清单是无穷无尽的。这种评论当然不会降低本卷中收集的个别文章的价值，但普遍声称这项工作有助于重新构建看待摄影史的整个方式可能有点夸大其词。奇怪的是，这本书的简短介绍并没有真正解决术语“失败”的概念范围，也没有指定术语“摄影”的范围。真正的介绍是这本书的最后一章，其中 Geoffrey Batchen 发表了一篇社论——可以这么说，一篇确实是“après la lettre”的序言——但它当然既没有雄心也没有伪装摄影失败的理论或历史。正是通过阅读各种贡献，人们逐渐发现本书中提到的摄影失败与遗漏或失焦的照片无关——这是摄影史学家 Clément Chéroux 在他的书 Fautographie 中研究的一个主题。Petite histoire de l'erreur Photography (2003)。Fautographie 仅在第 77 页的脚注中提及，而《摄影与失败》中唯一仔细审查技术错误和缺点的一章是关于非洲工作室摄影的一章（那里的设备经常丢失或有缺陷）。同样，需要仔细阅读整本书才能意识到摄影的概念主要是从制度的角度来考察的，核心问题是：摄影是否在外部世界中实现了它声称的目标？或不？影响和成功，或者在这种情况下，更确切地说是缺乏影响和成功，是各种贡献的关键标准。再一次，这种方法可以得到完美的激励——本书所有章节的质量证明这条道路是非常有益的——但是对相关研究基本概念的更强有力的编辑概述会很有用。就目前而言，这本书似乎理论不足，并没有提供人们可能期望的所有内容。这种缺乏理论表现在两个方面。首先，“失败”的概念与成功的概念有些二元对立，很少关注完全失败和完全成功之间的所有可能性。确实，摄影（某些类型和方法）的失败与摄影师的失败（后者的失败不一定涉及前者的失败）之间的关系尚不清楚。其次，可以通过直接比较的方法加强各章中案例研究的卓越质量。无论本书中研究的失败多么有趣和具有启发性，评估它们的代表性程度并不总是那么容易。伟大的两次世界大战期间摄影师 Ilse Bing 的痛苦流亡，她不得不通过做狗美发师的工作（因此放弃摄影）来生存，以及她最终被纽约艺术界重新发现，但这些流亡者又如何——那些，例如，谁没有或多或少奇迹般地重新发现？Bing 的案例是残酷无情的失败，这是真的，但与其他人相比，这种失败仍然是相对的。评论