Sarah James in her Photography's Theoretical Blind Spots: Looking at the German paradigm in Photographies (vol. 2 No. 2) explores the notion of photographic seeing in German photographic discourse that is based on the concept of “authored photography” (or Autorenfotografie).

This concept refers to a photographic art – as exemplified by the Bechers – which we can understand as a documentary form of photography that incorporates the documentary, conceptual and aesthetic.The photographer must be considered in terms of the full artistic responsibility which they bear for the photograph. Central to the concept of author photography is the idea that it goes beyond a singular photograph, and can only be understood in the greater context of a photographer’s oeuvre.

According to the art historian Klaus Honnef, the illusion of a singular image as a symbol of the whole of reality or as a general reality complex is the direct result of the false conviction that reality in its extent and totality is easily comprehensible. The photographer’s selection of topics produces the overall context, which comes from a closer understanding of reality, without which his work would be spoilt. Primarily, though, “authored photography” can be understood as based on a subjective way of seeing which is understood as becoming objective.

James says:

Significant in itself, the term Autorenfotografie suggests the reassertion of the author as opposed to its poststructuralist dissolution, and the deliberate reclamation of photographic art from the flood of cultural images. Paradoxically the term was developed to conceptualize photographic practices which could not be less subjective; a documentary photography that avoids expressing a personal vision, resolutely refusing the autographical, the individual, or the creative. However, photographers and critics maintained that a subjective investment in a lived experience was retained in such photography, and in its critical conception of objectivity.

Honnef insists that an aesthetics of photography should not be disavowed but that past aesthetic theories invested in a dialectical construction of aesthetic experience, such as Kracauer’s, offer an extremely productive and under-explored approach to the medium. Here, photography is understood primarily in terms of its creation of a distinctive aesthetic, which unites new elements from the technical structure of the medium with several aspects of the art of earlier epochs.

Honnef utilizes Kracauer’s theory of photography as a source for his own methodological approach to the medium. In Kracauer’s view, the photographer appears as the empathetic interpreter of historical events, thus the photographer’s selectivity is of a kind which is closer to empathy than to disengaged spontaneity, and he resembles the imaginative reader intent on studying and deciphering an elusive text.