The Theatre of Photography: Dialogues

Taking as a starting point the opposition of this journal’s title, this essay takes the form of a dialogue that is also an encounter between photography and theatre; a vantage point from which conceptual frameworks can be challenged and even collapsed. In the domains of photography and of theatre, much is made of artifice, authenticity, likeness and liveness. Photography criticism has often emphasised the possibility or impossibility of veracity, on the truthfulness or deceptiveness of photographs, with performance seemingly offering one escape route. Theatre, from the conceptualisation of naturalism from the end of the nineteenth century to the challenge posed to it by performance art, has, despite itself being constituted of an eclectic technological representational apparatus, been seen to struggle with media, sometimes seeking refuge outside it. This introductory dialogue seeks to cast light on the various meeting points of the Theatre of Photography, then further explored in the co-written duologues in this volume. This work emerged from The Theatre of Photography research network