Thinking about photography
Debates, historically and now
In his Preface to Photography, A Very Short Introduction, historian Steve Edwards asks us to imagine a world without photography (Edwards 2006). His point, of course, is that it is almost impossible for us to do so; photography permeates all aspects of our life, acting as a principal source and repository of information about our world of experience. It follows that historical, theoretical and philosophical explorations of photographs as images and objects, and of photography as a range of types of practice operating in varying contexts, are necessarily wide-ranging. There is no single history of photography.
As E.H. Carr has observed, history is a construct consequent upon the questions asked by the historian (Carr 1964). Thus, he suggests, histories tell us as much about the historian as about the period or subject under interrogation. Stories told reflect what the historian hopes to find, and where information is sought. He was writing in an era when libraries and archives were the primary research locations. Nowadays we may start by researching online. But his note of caution remains relevant: fact gathering may be influenced by many factors, not least the particular networks used by web-based search engines. It is up to us to evaluate the status of our sources and the significance of our findings.
Further more, the historian’s selection and organisation of material is to some extent predetermined by the purpose and intellectual parameters of any particular project. Such parameters reflect particular institutional constraints as well as the interests of the historian (for instance, academics may be expected to complete research within a set period of time). Projects are also framed by underpinning ideological and political assumptions and priorities.
Such observations are obviously pertinent when considering the history of photography. They are also relevant to investigating ways in which photography has been implicated in the construction of history. As the French cultural critic, Roland Barthes, has pointed out, the nineteenth century gave us both history and photography. He distinguishes between history which he describes as ‘memory fabricated according to positive formulas’, and the photograph defined as ‘but fugitive testimony’ (Barthes 1984: 93).
Attitudes to photography, its contexts, usages, and critiques of its nature are explored here through brief discussion of key writings on photography. The chapter is in four sections: Aesthetics and technologies, Contemporary debates, Histories of photography, and Photography and social history. The principal aim is to locate writings about photography both in terms of its own history, as a specific medium and set of practices, and in relation to broader historical, theoretical and political considerations. Thus we introduce and consider some of the different approaches – and difficulties – which emerge in relation to the project of theorising photography. The references are to relatively recent publications, and to current debates about photography; however, these books often refer back to earlier writings, so a history of changing ideas can be discerned. This history focuses on photography itself as well as considering photography alongside art history and theory, and cultural history and theory more generally.
As with any abbreviated history, this chapter can only offer brief summaries of some of the historical turning points and theoretical concerns that have informed and characterised debates about photography from its inception. Our aim is to identify some key questions and offer starting points for further research and discussion which are taken up in the following chapters and also through the references to further reading (in margins and notes). Photography is ubiquitous and it penetrates culture in very diverse ways. Nowadays, it plays a central role within social media on the one hand, while being a major factor within the art market on the other. These activities go on alongside longer standing fields of operation (including but not restricted to: documentary and photojournalism; people and places; personal, domestic and family photog raphy; travel, exploration and representation of cultures other than our own; commerce and advertising). The questions that we might ask, then, shift according to the type of practice being considered, but whatever the field of operation analysis of the role of photographic images is always pertinent to critical interrogations.
In the 1920s, when Moholy-Nagy commented on the future importance of camera literacy, he could hardly have anticipated the extent to which photographic imagery would come to permeate contemporary communication. Indeed, the late twentieth-century convergence of audio-visual technologies with computing led to a profound and ongoing transformation in the ways in which we record, interpret and interact with the world.
In recent years this has been marked both by the astonishing speed of innovation and by a rapid extension and incorporation of technologies within new social, cultural, political and economic domains. As Martin Lister remarked in 2009, we have ‘witnessed a number of convergences: between photography and computer-generated imaging (CGI), between photographic archives and electronic databases, and between the camera, the internet and personal mobile media, notably the mobile telephone’ (Lister in Wells 2009). Indeed, nowadays the mobile (cell) phone is also the camera.
We often see this ferment of activity as a defining feature of the twenty-first century and, perhaps, think of it as a unique moment in human history. But, in the 1850s, many people also thought of themselves as living in the forefront of a technological revolution. From this historical distance, it is hard to recapture the extraordinary excitement that was generated in the middle of the nineteenth century by a cluster of emerging technologies. These included inventions in the electrical industries and discoveries in optics and in chemistry, which led to the development of the new means of communication that was to become so important to so many spheres of life – photography. Hailed as a great techno logical invention, photography immediately became the subject of debates concerning its aesthetic status and social uses.
The excitement generated by the announcement, or marketing, of innovations tends to distract us from the fact that technologies are researched and developed in human societies. New machinery is normally presented as the agent of social change, not as the outcome of a desire for such change, i.e. as a cause rather than a consequence of culture. However, it can be argued that particular cultures invest in and develop new machines and technologies in order to satisfy previously foreseen social needs. Photography is one such example. A number of theorists have identified precursors of photography in the late eighteenth century. For instance, an expanding middle-class demand for portraiture which outstripped available (painted) means led to the development of the mechanical physiognotrace1 and to the practice of silhouette cutting (Freund 1980). Geoffrey Batchen also points out that photography had been a ‘widespread social imperative’ long before Daguerre and Fox Talbot’s official announcements in 1839. He lists 24 names of people who had ‘felt the hitherto strange and unfamiliar desire to have images formed by light spontaneously fix themselves’ from as early as 1782 (Batchen 1990: 9). Since most of the necessary elements of technological knowledge were in place well before 1839, the significant question is not so much who invented photography but rather why it became an active field of research and discovery at that particular point in time (Punt 1995).
Once a technology exists, it may become adapted and introduced into social use in a variety of both foreseen and unforeseen ways. As cultural theorist Raymond Williams has argued, there is nothing in a technology itself which determines its cultural location or usage (Williams 1974). If technology is viewed as determining cultural uses, much remains to be explained. Not the least of this is the extent to which people subvert technologies or invent new uses which had never originally been intended or envisaged. In addition, new technologies become incorporated within established relations of production and consumption, contributing to articulating – but not causing – shifts and changes in such relations and patterns of behaviour.
Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867) Paris-based poet and critic whose writings on French art and literature embraced modernity; he stressed the fluidity of modern life, especially in the metropolitan city, and extolled painting for its ability to express – through style as well as subject-matter – the constant change central to the experience of modernity. In keeping with attitudes of the era, he dismissed photography as technical transcription, perhaps oddly so given that photography was a product of the era which so fascinated him.
Central to the nineteenth-century debate about the nature of photography as a new technology was the question as to how far it could be considered to be art. Given the contemporary ubiquity of photography, including the extent to which artists use photographic media, to posit art and technology as binary opposites now seems quite odd. But in its early years photography was celebrated for its putative ability to produce accurate images of what was in front of its lens; images that were seen as being mechanically produced and thus free from the selective discriminations of the human eye and hand. On precisely the same grounds, the medium was often regarded as falling outside the realm of art, as its assumed power of accurate, dispassionate recording appeared to displace the artist’s compositional creativity. Debates concerning the status of photography as art took place in periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. The French journal La Lumière published writings on photography both as a science and as an art.2 Baudelaire linked ‘the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of today’ and asserted that ‘if photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether’ (Baudelaire 1859: 297). In his view photography’s only function was to support intellectual enquiry:
Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. Let photography quickly enrich the traveller’s album and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons.
(Baudelaire 1859: 297)
‘Absolute material accuracy’ was seen as the hallmark of photography because most people at the time accepted the idea that the medium rendered a complete and faithful image of its subjects. Moreover, the nineteenth-century desire to explore, record and catalogue human experience, both at home and abroad, encouraged people to emphasise photography as a method of naturalistic documentation. Baudelaire, who was among the more prominent French critics of the time, not only accepts its veracity but adds: ‘if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!’ (1859: 297). Here he is opposing industry (seen as mechanical, soulless and repetitive) with art, which he considered to be the most important sphere of existential life. Thus Baudelaire is evoking the irrational, the spiritual and the imaginary as an antidote to the positivist interest in measurement and statistical accuracy which, as we have noted, characterised much nineteenth-century investigation. From this point of view, for many nineteenth century critics in Western culture, steeped as they were in empiricist methods of enquiry, the mechanical nature of the camera militated against its use for anything other than mundane purposes.
Nineteenth-century photographers responded to such critical debates in two main ways: either they accepted that photography was something different from art and sought to discover what the intrinsic properties of the medium were; or they pointed out that photography was more than a mechanical form of image-making, that it could be worked on and contrived so as to produce pictures which in some ways resembled paintings. ‘Pictorial’ photography, from the 1850s onwards, sought to overcome the problems of photography by careful arrangement of all the elements of the composition and by reducing the signifiers of technological production within the photograph. For example, they ensured that the image was out of focus, slightly blurred and fuzzy; they made pictures of allegorical subjects, including religious scenes; and those who worked with the gum bichromate process scratched and marked their prints in an effort to imitate something of the appearance of a canvas.
In the other camp were those photographers who celebrated the qualities of straight photography and did not want to treat the medium as a kind of monochrome painting. They were interested in photography’s ability to provide apparently accurate records of the visual world and tried to give their images the formal status and finish of paintings while concentrating their attention on its intrinsic qualities.
See ch. 6 for discussion of Pictorialism as a specific photographic movement.
straight photography
Emphasis upon direct documentary typical of the Modern period in American photography.
Most of these photographs were displayed on gallery walls – this was a world of exhibition salons, juries, competitions and medals. In the journals of the time (which already included the British Journal of Photography), tips about technique coexisted with articles on the rules of composition. If the photographs aspired to be art, their makers aspired to be artists, and they emulated the characteristic institutions of the art world. However, away from the salon, in the high streets of most towns, jobbing photographers earned a living by making simple photographic portraits of people, many of whom could not have afforded any other record of their own appearance. This did not please the painters:
The cheap portrait painter, whose efforts were principally devoted to giving a strongly marked diagram of the face, in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible price, has been to a great extent superseded. Even those who are better entitled to take the rank of artists have been greatly interfered with. The rapidity of execution, dispensing with the fatigue and trouble of rigorous sittings, together with the supposed certainty of accuracy in likeness in photography, incline many persons to try their luck in Daguerreotype, a Talbotype, Heliotype, or some method of sun or light-painting, instead of trusting to what is considered the greater uncertainty of artistic skill.
(Howard 1853: 154)
The industrial process, so despised by Baudelaire and other like-minded critics, is here seen as offering mechanical accuracy combined with a degree of quality control. Photography thus begins to emerge as the most commonly used and important means of communication for the industrial age.3
Writing at about the same time as Baudelaire, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake agreed that photography was not an art but emphasised this as its strength.4 She argued that:
She is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in a small minority, but the craving, or rather the necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view … (her studies are ‘facts’) … facts which are neither the province of art nor of description, but of that new form of communication between man and man – neither letter, message, nor picture – which now happily fills the space between them.
(Eastlake 1857: 93)
In this account, photography is not so much concerned with the development of a new aesthetic as with the construction of new kinds of knowledge as the carrier of ‘facts’. These facts are connected to new forms of communication for which there is a demand among all social groups; they are neither arcane nor specialist, but belong in the sphere of everyday life. In this respect, Eastlake was one of the first writers to argue that photography is a democratic means of representation and that the new facts will be available to everyone. Photography does not merely transmit these facts, it creates them, but Eastlake characterised photography as the ‘sworn witness’ of the appearance of things. This juridical phrase strikingly captures what, for many years, was considered to be the inevitable function of photography – that it showed the world without contrivance or prejudice. For Eastlake, such facts came from the recording without selection of whatever was before the lens. It is photography’s inability to choose and select the objects within the frame that locates it in a factual world and prevents it from becoming art:
Every form which is traced by light is the impress of one great moment, or one hour, or one age in the great passage of time. Though the faces of our children may not be modelled and rounded with that truth and beauty which art attains, yet minor things – the very shoes of the one, the inseparable toy of the other – are given with a strength of identity which art does not even seek.
(Eastlake 1857: 94; emphasis in original)
The old hierarchies of art have broken down. Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with ‘truth and beauty’ or with teasing out what underlies appearances. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view; in other words the image captures information beyond that which concerned the photographer.
Photography, then, is concerned with facts that are ‘necessary’, but may also be contingent, drawing our attention to what formerly went un noticed or ignored. Writing within 15 years of its invention Eastlake points to the many social uses to which photography had already been put:
photography has become a household word and a household want; it is used alike by art and science, by love, business and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon and the dingiest attic – in the solitude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the London gin palace – in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and patterns of the mill owner and manufacturer and on the cold breast of the battle field.
(Eastlake 1857: 81)
For Eastlake, photography is ubiquitous and classless; it is a popular means of communication. Of course, it was not true that people of all classes and conditions could commission photographs as a necessary ‘household want’ – she anticipates that state by several decades, during which time the use of photography was also spreading from its original practitioners (relatively affluent people who saw themselves as experimenters or hobbyists) to those who undertook it as a business and began to extend the repertoire of conventions of the ‘correct’ way to photograph people and scenes.
Eastlake’s facts are produced, she claims, by a new form of communication, which she is unable to define very clearly. But for all her vagueness, she does identify an important constituent in the making of modernity: the rise of previously unknown forms of communication which had a dislocating effect on traditional technologies and practices. She was writing at an historical moment marked by a cluster of technical inventions and changes and she places photography at the centre of them. The notion that the camera should aspire to the status of the printing press – a mechanical tool which exercises no effect upon the medium which it supports – is here seriously challenged. For Eastlake calmly accepts that photography is not art, but hints at the displacing effect the medium will have on the old structures of art; photography, she says, bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot select or order the relative importance of things at any time. It does not tease out what underlies appearances, but records voraciously whatever is in its view. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Pictorialists had all but retreated from the field and it was the qualities of straight photography that were subsequently prized. Moreover, modernism argued for a photography that was in opposition to the traditional claims of art.
In Britain, as elsewhere, the idea of documentary has underpinned most photographic practices since the 1930s. The terminology is indicative: the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘documentary’ is ‘to document or record’.
In the days of chemical photography, and prior to the possibilities afforded by internet tools such as Google Earth, the simultaneous ‘it was there’ effect of photographs recording people and circumstances contributed to the authority of the photographic image and, arguably still does so. However, nowadays, in according authority to pictures, we are more likely to question the circumstances under which photographs have been made, their source, the status of the photographer and the purpose for which an image was made. For example, we might view pictures uploaded by local people documenting an incident or set of circumstances as more authentic than images authorised by a company or political organisation. Accepting that digital photography and digital imaging are now major industries contributing within print and online media, when assessing the significance of particular pictures we take into account image-making contexts and purposes. If documentary as a genre involves visual records for future reference, now we are very likely to ask from whose point of view such documents were made.
Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940) Born in Berlin, Benjamin studied philosophy and literature in a number of German universities. In the 1920s he met the playwright, Bertolt Brecht, who exercised a decisive influence on his work. Fleeing the Nazis in 1940, Benjamin found himself trapped in occupied France and committed suicide on the Spanish border. During the 1970s his work began to be translated into English and exercised a great critical influence. His critical essays on Brecht were published in English under the title Understanding Brecht in 1973. Benjamin was an influential figure in the exploration of the nature of modernity through essays such as his study of Baudelaire, published as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973). He is acclaimed as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century, particularly for his historically situated interrogations of modern culture. Two highly important essays for the student of photography are ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). The latter essay and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ are frequently drawn upon in discussion of the cultural implications of new technological developments.
The simultaneous ‘it was there’ (the pro-photographic event) and ‘I was there’ (the photographer) effect of the photographic record of people and circumstances contributes to the authority of photographs. Photographic aesthetics commonly accord with the dominant modes and traditions of Western two-dimensional art, including perspective and the idea of a vanishing point. Indeed, as a number of critics have suggested, photography not only echoes post-Renaissance painterly conventions, but also achieves visual renderings of scenes and situations with what seems to be a higher degree of accuracy than was possible in painting. Photography can, in this respect, be seen as effectively substituting for the representational task previously accorded to painting. In addition, as Walter Benjamin argued in 1936, changes brought about by the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction which produced and circulated multiple copies of an image shifted attitudes to art (Benjamin 1936). Formerly unique objects, located in a particular place, lost their singularity as they became accessible to many people in diverse places. Lost too was the ‘aura’ that was attached to a work of art which was now open to many different readings and interpretations. For Benjamin, whether operating to allow more people to view likenesses of persons, places or existing objects (for instance, reproductions of paintings or sculptures) or facilitating novel forms of visual communication that might not otherwise have occurred, photography was inherently more democratic than previous forms of image-making. Yet established attitudes persist. In Western art the artist is accorded the status of someone endowed with particular sensitivities and vision. That the photographer as artist, viewed as a special kind of seer, chose to make a particular photograph lends extra authority and credibility to the picture.
In the twentieth century, photography continued to be ascribed the task of ‘realistically’ reproducing impressions of actuality. Writing after the Second World War in Europe, German critic Siegfried Kracauer and French critic André Bazin both stressed the ontological relation of the photograph to reality (Bazin 1967; Kracauer 1960). Walter Benjamin was among those who had disputed the efficacy of the photograph in this respect, arguing that the reproduction of the surface appearance of places tells us little about the sociopolitical circumstances which influence and circumscribe actual human experience (Benjamin 1931).
The photograph, technically and aesthetically, has a unique and distinctive relation with that which is/was in front of the camera. Analogical theories of the photograph have been abandoned; we no longer believe that the photograph directly replicates circumstances.
Siegfried Kracauer
(1889–1966) German critic, emigrated to America in 1941. His first major essay on photography was published in 1927 in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The subtitle of his best-known work Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality indicates his focus on images as sources of historical information. Benjamin’s renowned ‘Short History of Photography’ (1931), along with his ‘artworks’ essay (1936), was, in effect, a response to Kracauer’s 1927 essay.
Walter Benjamin (1931)
‘A Short History of Photography’ in (1979) One Way Street, London: New Left Books.
Yet, technologically, the photographic image is an indexical effect based on observable reality. The chemically produced image brought together a range of considerations – including subject-matter, framing, light, characteristics of the lens, chemical properties of the film used and the paper on which a picture was printed, and creative decisions taken both when shooting and in the darkroom. The digital image differs in certain respects, including the greater diversity of image manipulation possibilities, and the visual effect of the surface of the computer screen when compositing, editing and viewing. None the less, the basis in the observable fuels realist notions associated with photography, despite our familiarity with digital manipulation possibilities. Paradoxically, perhaps, we want to believe what we see, even though at the same time we know that photographic images are selective, and may be significantly changed from that originally seen through the viewfinder.
Italian semiotician Umberto Eco has commented that the photograph reproduces the conditions of optical perception, but only some of them (see Eco in Burgin 1982). That the photograph appears iconic not only contributes an aura of authenticity, it also seems reassuringly familiar. The articulation of familiar-looking subjects through established aesthetic conventions further fuels realist notions associated with photography.
Related to this are the interests and motivations that impel photographers towards particular subjects and ways of working. Very many biographies have been written purporting to explain photographs through the investigation of photographers’ personal experiences and political engagements; all too often tribute to the photographer and a particular way of seeing outweighs more critical analysis of the affects and import of a particular body of work. Yet questions of motivation and the contexts and constraints within which photographers operate clearly influence picture-making. Whilst not writing biographically, questions of motivation are woven within Geoff Dyer’s reflections on the nature of photographs (Dyer 2005). Why might a particular subject be chosen, and why do some types of object, pose or place seem to be repeated so often? As a cultural critic he comments that in trying to construct a taxonomy of photographs he found endless slippages and overlaps. This led him towards appraisal of photography via what can be known, or speculated, about the motivations of photographers. His examples are largely restricted to well-known American practitioners, and to documentary modes, yet his musings have wider pertinence as he provokes us to reflect upon the historical emergence of certain themes and subject-matter, and the evolving attitudes towards decorum or explicitness of image-content. Questioning why a photographer might have made and published a particular image is one starting point for thinking about the significance of particular photographs or types of photography.
Thus philosophical, technical and aesthetic issues – along with the role accorded to the artist – all feature within ontological debates relating to the photograph. But in recent years, developments in computer-based image production and the possibilities of digitisation and reworking of the photographic image have increasingly called into question the idea of documentary realism. The authority attributed to the photograph is at stake. That this has led to a reopening of debates about ‘photographic truth’ in itself shows that, in everyday parlance, photographs are still viewed as directly referencing actual observable circumstances.
See ch. 2 for further discussion.
Photography was born into a critical age, and much of the discussion of the medium has been concerned to define it and to distinguish it from other practices. There has never, at any one time, been a single object, practice or form that is photography; rather, it has always consisted of different kinds of work and types of image which in turn served different material and social uses. Yet discussion of the nature of the medium has often been either reductionist – looking for an essence which transcends its social or aesthetic forms – or highly descriptive and not theorised.
Photography was a major carrier and shaper of modernism. Not only did it dislocate time and space, but it also undermined the linear structure of conventional narrative in a number of respects. These included access to visual information about the past carried by the photograph, and detail over and above that normally noted by the human eye. Writing in 1931, Walter Benjamin proposed that the photograph records the ‘optical unconscious’:
It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera from the one which addresses the eye; different above all in the sense that instead of a space worked through by a human consciousness there appears one which is affected unconsciously. It is possible, for example, however roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, but it is impossible to say anything about that fraction of a second when a person starts to walk. Photography with its various aids (lenses, enlargement) can reveal this moment. Photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual unconscious.
(Benjamin 1972: 7)
Benjamin was writing at a time when the idea that photography offered a particular way of seeing took on particular emphasis; in the 1920s and 1930s both the putative political power of photography and its status as the most important modern form of communication were at their height. Modernism aimed to produce a new kind of world and new kinds of human beings to people it. The old world would be put under the spotlight of modern technology and the old evasions and concealments revealed. The photo-eye was seen as revelatory, dragging ‘facts’, however distasteful or deleterious to those in power, into the light of day. As a number of photographers in Europe and North America stressed, albeit somewhat differently, another of its functions was to show us the world as it had never been seen before. Photographers sought to offer new perceptions founded in an emphasis upon the formal ‘geometry’ of the image, both literally and metaphorically offering new angles of vision. The stress on form in photographic seeing typical of American modern photography parallels the stress on photography, and on cinematography (kino-eye), as a particular kind of vision in European art movements of the 1920s. Our ways of seeing will be changed because we can observe the world from unfamiliar viewpoints, for instance, through a microscope, from the top of high buildings, from under the sea. Moreover, photography validated our experience of ‘being there’, which is not merely one of visiting an unfamiliar place, but of capturing the authentic experience of a strange place. Photographs are records and documents which pin down the changing world of appearance. In this respect the close kinship between the still image and the movie is relevant; photography and film were both implicated in the modern stress on seeing as revelation. Indeed, artists and documentarians frequently used both media.
halftone By the mid-1890s ‘halftone’, based on tiny dots of various sizes, could facilitate the tracing of tones of photographs into ink ready for mechanical reproduction alongside written text. Previously engravers were employed in the laborious process of tracing and gouging out images on wooden blocks that were then inked to enable printing. The halftone allowed newspapers and magazines to use up-to-date photo illustrations, enabling mass circulation of imagery, in effect contributing a basis for photojournalism.
In addition, photography was centrally implicated in the burgeoning of print media that dated from the early years of the twentieth century. It was precisely this mass circulation of images that allowed Benjamin to conceptualise photography as a democratic medium. Arguably it was what was happening on the printed page that excited imagination at the beginning of the twentieth century. Posters, photomontage, and – later – photographic magazines such as Time, Life, Picture Post, Vue offered opportunities for experi mentation with image juxtapositions and modes of visual story-telling. However, as David Campany notes in an account of the work of American photographer, Walker Evans, by their very nature, magazines are transient. He suggests that,
The photobook form always has at least half an eye on posterity but the illustrated magazine has a very different temporality and culture significance. It is not made to last, but lives and dies, succeed or fails in the space of its short shelf life.
(Campany in di Bello et al., 2012: 73)
He goes on to argue that the reproduction of documentary and photo-journalistic images made for publication that were ‘essentially ephemeral’ but later singled out for exhibition in museums or inclusion in monographs ‘does little to capture the contingent complexity of their initial page presentation’ (loc cit) remarking that it is only in the beginning of the twenty-first century that researchers have started to consider the history of photo-magazines along with that of the photobook. In some respects this is accurate. But we might also note the influence of photomontage and poster campaigns typical of early Soviet photography on uses of photography within 1970s and 1980s political activism in Britain, Germany, USA and elsewhere.
Indeed, European modernism, with its contempt for the aesthetic forms of the past and its celebration of the machine, endorsed photography’s claim to be the most important form of representation. Moholy-Nagy, writing in the 1920s, argued that now our vision will be corrected and the weight of the old cultural forms removed from our shoulders:
Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.
(Moholy-Nagy 1967: 28)
Modernist photography was grounded in the sweeping away of pictorialism and the rejection of all attempts to simulate ‘artistic’ forms. As with the radical shift that modernism brought about in music, literature, architecture and art, the photographic image was to be a reflexive, self-conscious medium which revealed its own, particular properties to the viewer. This way of working spread around the world, so that (for example) modernist photography in Europe, the USA, Latin America and India can all be studied. But modernism was not a simple blueprint that all societies copied; its particular forms in specific places emerged in response to already existing cultures and histories. The aspiration that a world cleansed of traditional forms and hierarchies of values would be established, one in which we would be free to see clearly without the distorting aesthetics of the past, had to contend with the pressures and embodied histories of existing societies. However, the transformative power of modernism did seem to many to be heralding a new world as exemplified by Paul Strand when he described American photographic practice, which he saw as indi genous and viewed as being as revolu tionary as the skyscraper. As he put it in a famous article in the last issue of Camera Work:
America has been expressed in terms of America without the outside influence of Paris art schools or their dilute offspring here … [photography] found its highest esthetic achievement in America, where a small group of men and women worked with honest and sincere purpose, some instinctively and a few consciously, but without any background of photographic or graphic formulae much less any cut and dried ideas of what is Art and what isn’t: this innocence was their real strength. Everything they wanted to say had to be worked out by their own experiments: it was born of actual living. In the same way the creators of our skyscrapers had to face the similar circumstances of no precedent and it was through that very necessity of evolving a new form, both in architecture and photography that the resulting expression was vitalised.
(Strand 1917: 220)
Here, then, in a distinctively American formulation, photography is seen as having been developed outside history. Strand is claiming that a new frontier of vision was established by hard work and a kind of innocence, that it was a product of human experience rather than of cultural inheritance.
Postmodernism was an important, and much contested philosophical term, which emerged in the mid-1980s. It remains difficult to define, not least because it was applied to very many spheres of activity and disciplines. Briefly, writers on postmodernism postulated the idea that modernity had run its course, and was being replaced by new forms of social organisation with a transforming influence on many aspects of existence. Central to the growth of this kind of social formation was the development of information networks on a global scale which allowed capital, ideas, information and images to flow freely around the world, weakening national boundaries and profoundly changing the ways in which we experience the world.
Among the key concepts of postmodernism were the claims that we are at the ‘end of history’ and that, as Jean-François Lyotard suggested, we are no longer governed by so-called ‘grand’ or ‘master’ narratives – the under pinning framework of ideas by means of which we had formerly made sense of our existence. For instance, Marxism in emphasising class conflict as the dialectical motor of history, provides a material philosophical position which can be drawn upon to account for any number of sociopolitical phenomena or circum stances (Lyotard 1985). This critique was accompanied by the assertion that there has been a major shift in the nature of our identity. Eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy saw humans as stable, rational subjects. Post modernism shares with modernism the idea that we are, on the contrary, ‘decentred’ subjects. The word ‘subjects’, here, is not really concerned with us as individuals, but refers to the ways in which we embody and act out the practices of our culture. Some postmodernist critics argued that we are cut loose from the grand narratives provided by history, philosophy or science; so that we live in fragmented and volatile cultures. This view was supported by the postmodern idea that we inhabit a world of dislocated signs, a world in which the appearance of things has been separated from authentic originals.
Writing over a century earlier in 1859, the American jurist and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes had considered the power of photography to change our relationship to original, single and remarkable works:
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed – representatives of billions of pictures – since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. We will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.
(Holmes 1859: 60)
Holmes did conceive of some essential difference between originals and copies. Nevertheless, he realised that the mass trade in images would change our relationship to originals; making them, indeed, little more than the source of representation.
The postmodern was not concerned with the aura of authenticity. For example, in Las Vegas hotels are designed to reference places such as New York or Venice, featuring ‘Coney Island’ or ‘The Grand Canal’. Superficially the resemblance is impressive in its grasp of iconography and semiotics, specifically, in understanding that, say, Paris, can be conjured up in a con densed way through copying traditional (kitsch) characteristics, for example, of Montmartre. Actual histories, geographies and human experiences are not only obscured, they are irrelevant, as these reconstructions are essentially décor for commercialism: gambling, shopping, eating and drinking. Indeed, communications increasingly featured what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called ‘simulacra’: copies for which there was no original.
Jean Baudrillard
(b.1929) French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, has theorised across a very wide terrain of political, social and cultural life. In his early work he attempted to move Marxist thought away from a preoccupation with production and labour to a concern with consumption and culture. His later work looks at the production and exchange of signs in a spectacular society. His notions of the hyperreal and of the simulacrum are of great interest to those interested in theorising photography, and were among the core concepts of postmodernism.
In a world overwhelmed by signs, what status is there for photography’s celebrated ability to reproduce the real appearance of things? Fredric Jameson argues that photography is:
renouncing reference as such in order to elaborate an autonomous vision which has no external equivalent. Internal differentiation now stands as the mark and moment of a decisive displacement in which the older relationship of image to reference is superseded by an inner or interiorized one … the attention of the viewer is now engaged by a differential opposition within the image itself, so that he or she has little energy left over for intentness to that older ‘likeness’ or ‘matching’ operation which compared the image to some putative thing outside.
(Jameson 1991: 179)
He was among a number of contemporary critics who argue that photography has given up attempting to provide depictions of things which have an autonomous existence outside the image and that we as spectators no longer possess the psychic energy needed to compare the photograph with objects, persons or events in the world external to the frame of the camera. If a simulacrum is a copy for which there is no original; it is, as it were, a copy in its own right. Thus, in postmodernity, the photograph had no necessary referent in the wider world and could be understood or critiqued only in terms of its own internal aesthetic organisation.
This separation of the image from its referent crucially underpins the way in which we can think about the digital image. In analogue photography a picture was formed through transcription, in principle tracing or witnessing actual people, places and circumstances (although, of course, selection, cropping, image retouching and other processes could be used to adjust the image content and qualities). Digital photography operates through a conversion whereby physical properties are symbolised through numerical coding (see pp. 367–8). Furthermore, digital ‘photographs’ can be constructed with no reference to external phenomena. In practice, photography has become hybrid in that we continue to compose pictures in documentary idiom, but can amend and adjust – not to mention, delete – with great ease. The photographs that we see nowadays are normally digital. Yet we continue to ascribe authenticity to photographic images (whether our own personal photographs, photo-journalism, forensic photography, travel and tourism, and so on). As Roland Barthes argued, the photograph is always and necessarily of something (Barthes 1984: 28). But arguably the basis of our belief in photographs has shifted (see discussion in the next section of this chapter).
The advent of the digital has led to a greater integration of industries and practices. As Martin Lister pointed out in relation to professional spheres of photography,
In the period since the 1990s, ‘digital photography’ and ‘digital imaging’ have developed as major creative industries, and have become a taken-for-granted part of the media landscape. The once firm separations between older twentieth-century specialist divisions of skill and labour have become permeable, especially between photography, typographic and graphic design, project management, editorial work, and still and moving image production. Even for those professional photographers who continue to use film for some of its distinctive properties, digital technologies and processes are now an essential part of their post-production practices.
For many others, digital technologies have replaced analogue processes: traditional cameras are replaced by digital and even virtual kinds, films by memory cards and hard drives, ‘wet’ physical darkrooms and optical enlargers by computers and software.
(Lister 2013: 313)
More generally, digital cameras, mobile phones and computer photo applications have become ubiquitous, and the use of data storage facilities for and social media modes of communication are normal, certainly in parts of the world with ready access to electricity and internet connections. As Lister also remarked,
The snapshots once pasted into the traditional family photo-album are now stored in electronic ‘shoe-boxes’, the majority never taking a ‘hard-copy’ form, to be displayed instead on the screens of televisions, personal computers, or the LCD screens of the very cameras with which they are taken.
(Lister 2013: 315)
Here again, the inter-relation of aesthetics and technologies is evident. For instance, an image viewed on a computer screen acquires a translucence that rarely characterizes a traditional printed version, and the scale of images tends to become uniform as the same appliance is used for viewing images of very different types, from those constructed as online commercial advertisements to panoramic landscapes reflecting the environmental concerns that preoccupy several contemporary artist-photographers.
Some photography does not traffic in multiple images but, rather, is constructed for the gallery. Cultural theorist Rosalind Krauss has described photography’s relationship to the world of aesthetic distinction and judgement in the following terms:
Within the aesthetic universe of differentiation – which is to say; ‘this is good, this is bad, this, in its absolute originality, is different from that’ – within this universe photography raises the specter of nondifferentiation at the level of qualitative difference and introduces instead the condition of a merely quantitative array of difference, as in series. The possibility of aesthetic difference is collapsed from within and the originality that is dependent on this idea of difference collapses with it.
(Krauss 1981: 21)
Like Benjamin she noted the loss of aura introduced by the mass reproducability of photographs, but here she draws attention to the impact of this inherent characteristic within the gallery and the art market. The ‘collapse of difference’ has had an enormous effect on painting and sculpture, for photography’s failure of singularity undermined the very ground on which the aesthetic rules that validated originality was established. Multiple, reproducible, repetitive images destabilised the very notion of ‘originality’ and blurred the difference between original and copy. The ‘great masters’ approach to the analysis of images becomes increasingly irrelevant, for in the world of the simulacrum what is called into question is the originality of authorship, the uniqueness of the art object and the nature of self-expression.
Indeed, in a world wherein images, which appear increasingly mutable, circulate electronically, such issues may seem irrelevant. Most of us now experience some of the effects of the ongoing digital revolution. Many of us receive photographs on e-mail, send them via mobile phones, store them in electronic archives, combine them with text to create brochures, or manipulate them to enhance their quality. Photography has always been caught up in new technologies and played a central part in the making of the modern world. However, one feature of the digitisation of many parts of our life is that potential new technologies are discussed in detail long before they become an everyday reality. In terms of photography many people anticipated a loss of confidence in the medium because of the ease with which images could be seamlessly altered and presented as accurate records. That this does not appear to have happened is testimony to the complex ways in which we use and interpret photographs. Nevertheless, these technologies are having a decided impact on the nature of the medium and are changing the ways in which it is used in all spheres of life. These changes continue to be made as the complex mix of technologies leads to the production of new products, stimulates new desires and evolves new forms of communication.
Writing about the problem of attention, Jonathan Crary makes it clear that each new technological form is not simply an extension of a stable, unchanging, quality of human vision. Instead, he argues that:
If vision can be said to have any enduring characteristic within the twentieth century, it is that it has no enduring features. Rather it is embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configurations, and economic imperatives. What we familiarly refer to, for example, as film, photography and television are transient elements within an accelerating sequence of displacements and obsolescences, part of the delirious operations of modernization.
(Crary 1999: 13)
In this account the old notion of particular ways of seeing (of a ‘photo-eye’, for example) gives way to the idea of vision as a mutable faculty that is constantly adapting to a cluster of social and technical forces, while apparently stable forms such as photography or television are themselves being continuously transformed.
The first myth to dispel about ‘theory’ is the idea that we can do without it. There is no untheoretical way to see photography. While some people may think of theory as the work of reading difficult essays by European intellectuals, all practices presuppose a theory.
(Bate 2009: 25)
The purpose of theory is to explain. All discussions of photographs rest upon some notion of the nature of the photographic and how images acquire meaning. Theory offers a system or set of tools whereby we can understand objects, processes and the implications of imagery. The issue is not whether theory is in play but, rather, whether theory is acknowledged. Two strands of theoretical discussion particularly featured in debates about photography towards the end of the twentieth century: first, theoretical approaches premised on the relationship of the image to reality; second, those which stress the importance of the interpretation of the image by focusing upon the reading, rather than the making, of photographic representations. In so far as there has been crossover between these two strands, this is found in the recent interest in the contexts and uses of images.
‘Theory’ refers to a coherent set of understandings about a particular issue that have been, or potentially can be, appropriately verified. It emerges from the quest for explanation and reflects specific intellectual and cultural circumstances. Theoretical developments occur within established paradigms, or manners of thinking, which frame and structure the academic imagination. On the whole, modern Western philosophy, from the eighteenth century onwards, has stressed rational thought and posited a distinction between subjective experience and the objective, observable or external. One consequence of this has been positivist approaches to research both in the sciences and the social sciences; indeed, photography as a recording tool has been centrally implicated within notions of the empirical. (See ch. 2.) Positivism has not only influenced uses of photography; it has also framed attitudes towards the status of the photograph.
Academic interrogation of photography employs a range of different types of theoretical understandings: scientific, social scientific and aesthetic. Historically, there has been a marked difference between scientific expectations of theory, and the role of theory within the humanities. Debates within the social sciences have occupied an intellectual space which has drawn upon both scientific models and the humanities. In the early/mid-twentieth century literary criticism centred upon a canon of key texts deemed worthy of study. Similarly, art history was devoted to a core line of works of ‘great’ artists, and much time was given to discussion of their subject-matter, techniques, and the provenance of the image. The academic framework was one of sustaining a particular set of critical standards and, perhaps, extending the canon by advocating the inclusion of new or newly rediscovered works. A number of major exhibitions and publications on photography have taken this as their model, offering exposition of the work of selected photographers as ‘masters’ in the field. This approach, in literature, art history and aesthetic philosophy, has been critiqued for its esoteric basis. It has also been criticised for reflecting white, male interests and, indeed, for blinkering the academic from a range of potential alternative visual and other pleasures. For instance, within photography the fascination of domestic or popular imagery, in its own right as well as within social history, was long overlooked, largely because such images do not necessarily accord with the aesthetic expectations of the medium and because they tend to be anonymous.
A more systematic critical approach, associated with mainland European intellectual debates, penetrated the Anglo-American tradition in some areas of the humanities, especially philosophy and literary studies, in the 1970s. The parallel influence on visual studies came slightly later. This impact was most pronounced in the relatively new – and therefore receptive – discipline of film studies. But there was also a significant displacement of older, established preoccupations and methods within art history and criticism. Increasingly, methodologically more eclectic visual cultural studies have superseded the more limited focus of traditional art history and aesthetic philosophy although, as has been argued in particular by Geoffrey Batchen, art-historical methods and presumptions have to some extent dominated photo-analysis, leading to an emphasis on photographs as images and thereby displacing critical engagement with photographs as material objects (Batchen 2007, 2008; di Bello 2007). Batchen’s exhibition, Forget Me Not – Photography and Remembrance paid specific attention to various forms in which photography may be physically manifest, from ornate framing, family albums and images in lockets, to lamp-shades or cushions (Batchen 2004).
Indeed, within visual studies there has been an increased interest in the phenomenological, in ways in which other senses, particularly touch and the tactile, interact with the sight contributing to how photographs, as objects as well as images, affect us. As Elizabeth Edwards succinctly suggests:
Photographs are the focus of intense emotional engagement. In premising photographic effect on the visual and the forensic alone, we limit our understanding of the modes through which photographs have historical effect because photographs both focus and extend the verbal articulation of histories and the sound world they inhabit.
(Edwards 2008: 241)
David Bate (2009)
Photography, The Key Concepts. Oxford and New York: Berg. An introductory guide to conceptual issues that includes sections on history, theory, documentary and story-telling and globalization, as well as overviewing selected genres in photography.
In Photography: The Key Concepts David Bate defines three periods in the development of theory relating to photographic practices and the significance of photographic imagery: Victorian aesthetics, mass reproduction in the early twentieth century and critical debates of the 1960s and 1970s that, as he phrases it, ‘rippled over’ into discussions of the postmodern in the 1980s. We might also add a fourth period of theoretical debates wherein the photographic became implicated within ways of thinking about digital imaging and virtual space. His use of the term ‘rippled’ is significant; it reminds us that the framing of particular debates, and of positions argued, is not neatly contained within any one period of history or, indeed, in specific places and contexts. Ideas and positions maybe re-inflected, threading their way into subsequent debates. Here the Hegelian notion of dialectics is useful in suggesting that a thesis and antithesis (anti-thesis) may become synthesised into a position that itself becomes a new starting point or thesis for further critical reflections. Singular dialectical thinking offers too linear a notion of philosophical processes given the cultural complexities of cultural circumstances including spillages between the local and the global, the virtual and the real. Jae Emerling utilises the metaphor of a game of chess as a means of conveying the complexity of the inter-relations of discourses pertinent to critical reflections on photography; each piece moves according to specific allocated rules and each move changes the overall pattern of relations (Emerling 2012). The analogy is pertinent although perhaps fails to indicate the sense of speed and fluidity of change that characterises contemporary digital environments within the global context. Arguably for dialectics to remain intellectually useful we need to think of reflective processes as analogous to a continuously spinning web of intersecting lines of dialectical reflections and developments.
One of the central difficulties in the establishment of photography theory, and of priorities within debates relating to the photographic image, is that photography lies at the cusp of the scientific, the social scientific and the human ities. Thus, contemporary ontological debates relating to the photograph are divergent. One approach centres on analysis of the rhetoric of the image in relation to looking, and the desire to look. This is premised on models of visual communication which draw upon linguistics and, in particular, psychoanalysis. This approach locates photographic imagery within broader poststructuralist concerns to understand meaning-producing processes.
Up until the 1980s ‘photography theory’ within education had been taken to refer to technologies and techniques as in optics, colour temperature, optimum developer heat, etc. ‘Theory’ related to the craft base of photography. In introducing the collection of essays Thinking Photography, artist/critic Victor Burgin argued that photography theory must be interdisciplinary and must engage not only with techniques but, more particularly, with processes of signification (Burgin 1982). Writing in the context of the 1970s and 1980s, and drawing on work from a range of disciplines, he commented that photography theory does not exist in any adequately developed form. Rather, we have photography criticism which, as currently practised, was evaluative and normative, authoritative and opinionated, reflecting what he terms an ‘uneasy and contradictory amalgam’ of Romantic, Realist and Modernist aesthetic theories and traditions. We might ask to what extent this is different now, a quarter of a century later. He also suggested that photography history, as written up until the 1980s, reflects the same ideological positions and assumptions; that is to say, it uncritically accepts the dominant paradigms of aesthetic theory. Burgin warns against confusing photography theory with a general theory of culture, arguing for the specificity of the still, photographic image.
Victor Burgin (ed.) (1982)Thinking Photography, London: Macmillan. A collection of eight essays, including three by Burgin himself, which, although varying in theoretical stance and focus, all aim to contribute to developing a materially grounded analysis of photographic practices.
In relation to this, as we have already seen, a number of critics have focused on the realist properties of the image. Film critic André Bazin in the 1950s, in his key essay on the subject, emphasised the truth-to-appearances characteristics of the photographic (Bazin 1967). Albeit within wider-ranging terms, Susan Sontag, in her 1970s series of essays collected as On Photography, also discussed photographs as traces of reality and interrogated photography in terms of the extent to which the image reproduces reality. Similarly, Roland Barthes emphasised the referential characteristics of the photograph in his final book Camera Lucida (Barthes 1984).
Susan Sontag (2002)On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, new edition with introduction by John Berger. A collection of six essays on various aspects of photography which, despite seeming slightly out of date in its concern with realism, still offers many key insights. Her programme on photography, It’s Stolen Your Face, produced for the BBC in 1978, was based on this collection.
Roland Barthes (1984) Camera Lucida, London: Fontana. First published in French in 1980 as La Chambre Claire. In this, his final book, Barthes offers a quite complex, rhetorical, but nonetheless interesting and significant set of comments on how we respond to photographs.
Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.
(Sontag 1979: 11)
Because of the disjunction between the thinking, seeing photographer and the camera that is the instrument of recording, the viewer finds it more difficult than with other visual artifacts to attribute creativity to any photographer.
(Price 1994: 4)
In philosophical terms, any concern with truth-to-appearances or traces of reality presupposes ‘reality’ as a given, external entity. Notions of the photograph as empirical proof, or the photograph as witness offering descriptive testimony, ultimately rest upon the view of reality as external to the human individual and objectively appraisable. If reality is somehow there, present, external, and available for objective recording, then the extent to which the photograph offers accurate reference, and the significance of the desire to take photographs or to look at images of particular places or events, become pertinent.
Despite the broader promise of its title, Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, centres primarily on the photograph as image and on the indexical, that is, ways in which the image stands as a reference to or trace of actual phenomena (Elkins 2007). His focus is on photography as art; everyday photographic phenomena and practices are not core considerations, although, as many photography theorists have argued, contexts in which we view photographs, what we want of particular images (for instance, of family, friends, places, or celebrities), and how they relate to broader contemporary debates and currencies (for example, political concerns, or new phenomena within popular culture) are equally as significant as the image in itself. But the publication offers an example of ways in which the relation between the image and its referent continues to pre-occupy photo theorists
Susan Sontag defined the photograph as a ‘trace’ directly stencilled off reality, like a footprint or a death mask. On Photography offered a series of interconnected essays, essentially based on a realist view of photography. Her concern was with the extent to which the image adequately represents the moment of actuality from which it is taken. She emphasised the idea of the photograph as a means of freezing a moment in time. If the photograph misleads the viewer, she argued this is because the photographer has not found an adequate means of conveying what he or she wishes to communicate about a particular set of circumstances. Her focus was on the photograph as document, as a report, or as evidence of activities such as tourism. She commented that the use of a camera satisfies the work ethic and stands in when we are unsure of our responses to unfamiliar circumstances, but can also reduce travel and other experiences to a search for the photogenic. Sontag also discussed the ethics of the relationship between the photographer as reporter and the person, place or circumstances recorded. The photographer, especially the photojournalist, is relatively powerful within this relationship, and thus may be seen as predatory. She pointed out that the language of military manoeuvre – ‘load’, ‘shoot’ – is central to photographic practices. Given this relative power, in her view it is even more important to emphasise the necessity of accurate reporting or relating of events. Photographs are not necessarily sentimental, or candid; they may be used for a variety of purposes including policing or incrimination.
Sontag’s discussion veers between the reasons for taking photographs and the uses to which they are put. It is marked by a sense of the elusiveness of the photo-image itself. She noted our reluctance to tear up photos of rela tives, and the rejection of politicians through symbolically burning images. She describes photographs as relics of people as they once were, suggesting that the still camera embalms (by contrast with the movie camera, which savours mobility). Thus she drew attention to the fascination of looking at photographs in terms of what we think they may reveal of that which we cannot otherwise have any sense of knowing, characterising photographs as a catalogue of acquired images which stand in for memories. Photographs can also, she suggests, give us an unearned sense of understanding things, past and present, having both the potential to move us emotionally, but also the possibility of holding us at a distance through aestheticising images of events. Photographs can also exhaust experiences, using up the beautiful through rendering it into cliché. For instance, she notes that sunsets may now look corny; too much like photographs of sunsets. The overall impact of her essays is rhetorical in that she makes grand claims for photography as a route to seeing, and, by extension, understanding more about the world of experience. Throughout, we have the sense that meaning may be sought within the photograph, providing it has been well composed and therefore accurately traces a relic of a person, place or event. Yet the collection does not include examples of actual photographs and there is no detailed analysis and discussion of specific images.
In her book The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (1994), American critic, Mary Price, argued that the meaning of the photographic image is primarily determined through associated verbal description and the context in which the photograph is used. By contrast with Sontag’s emphasis on the relation between the image and its source in the actual historical world, Price starts from questions of viewing and the context of reception. Thus, she suggests, in principle there is no single meaning for a photograph, but rather an emergent meaning, within which the subject-matter of the image is but one element. Her analysis is practical in its approach. She takes a number of specific examples, aiming to demonstrate the extent to which usage and contextualisation determine meaning. Related to this, in No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites discuss iconicity and photographs as public art through focusing on nine examples of pictures, with documentary or photojournalistic origins, that have become iconic; photographs for which meaning now transcends the specific circumstances of their making as they have come to represent particular ideologies or political attitudes (Hariman and Lucaites 2007). Whilst meaning may once have been anchored through context and caption, as we shall demonstrate in the case study of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ 1936 (see below), many further references become woven into what such an image has subsequently come to connote. This study is significant for its analysis of ways in which photographs may acquire political significance through reference to collective memory.
Robert Hariman And John Louis Lucaites (2007) No Caption Needed, Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Realist theories of photography, then, can take a number of different starting points: first, the photograph itself as an aesthetic artefact; second, the institutions of photography and the position and behaviour of photographers; third, the viewer or audience and the context in which the image is used, encountered, consumed. The particular starting point organises investigative priorities. For instance, ethical questions relating to who has the right to represent whom are central when considering the photographer and institutions such as the press.
Sontag takes a particular position within debates about realism, stressing the referential nature of the photographic image both in terms of its iconic properties and in terms of its indexical nature. For Sontag, the fact that a photograph exists testifies to the actuality of how something, someone or somewhere once appeared. Max Kozloff challenged Sontag’s conceptual model, criticising her proposition that the photograph ‘traces’ reality, and arguing instead for a view of the photograph as ‘witness’ with all the possibilities of misunderstanding, partial information or false testament that the term ‘witness’ may be taken to imply (Kozloff 1987: 237). In his earlier collection of essays, Photography and Fascination, Kozloff starts from the question of the enticement of the photograph. He concludes that:
Though infested with many bewildering anomalies, photographs are considered our best arbiters between our visual perceptions and the memory of them. It is not only their apparent ‘objectivity’ that grants photographs their high status in this regard, but our belief that in them, fugitive sensation has been laid to rest. The presence of photographs reveals how circumscribed we are in the throes of sensing. We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.
(Kozloff 1979: 101)
However the relation between the image and the social world is conceptualised, it is worth noting that the authority that emanates from the sense of authenticity or ‘truth to actuality’ conferred by photography was a fundamental element within photographic language and aesthetics. This authority, founded in realism, came to be taken for granted in the interpretation of images made through the lens.
It is precisely this that sets lens-based imagery apart from other media of visual communication. Again, to quote Kozloff, ‘A main distinction between a painting and a photograph is that the painting alludes to its content, whereas the photograph summons it, from wherever and whenever, to us’ (1987: 236). Chemical photography is distinct from the autographic, or from the digital, in that it seems to emanate directly from the external. Inherent within the photographic is the particular requirement for the physical presence of the referent. This has led to photographs (along with film and video) being viewed as realist in ways that, say, technical drawing or portrait painting are not (although they are also based upon observation).
That this was the case needs to be clearly acknowledged and addressed in order to understand theoretical debates as they were engaged historically as well as the legacies of this for contemporary debates. It is no coincidence that indexicality has become a contemporary focus of enquiry (for example, Elkins 2007). Perhaps one of the most curious facets of contemporary imaging is that, despite knowing the extent to which pictures can be and are manipulated and the ease with which this can be achieved through various software, we suspend disbelief and continue to ascribe authenticity to photographic images. What was – and remains – at stake in terms of provenance and authenticity in relation to the evidential authority of the photographic image continue to preoccupy many historians and theorists.
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world, we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.
(Berger 1972a: 7)
In the late twentieth century two key theoretical developments, semiotics and psychoanalysis, significantly contributed to changes within the humanities and both figured in debates relating to the constitution of photographic meaning. Semiotics (or semiology), the idea of a science of signs, originated from comments in Ferdinand de Saussure’s General Theory of Linguistics (1916) but was not further developed until after the Second World War. Essentially, semiotics proposed the systematic analysis of cultural behaviour. At its extremes it aimed at establishing an empirically verifiable method of analysis of human communication systems. Thus, codes of dress, music, advertising – and other forms of communication – are conceptualised as logical systems. The focus is upon clues which together constitute a text ready for reading and interpretation. American semiotician C.S. Peirce further distinguished between iconic, indexical and symbolic codes. Iconic codes are based upon resemblance, for instance, a picture of someone or something; indexical codes are effects with specific causes, for example, footprints indicate human presence; symbolic codes are arbitrary, for instance, there is no necessary link between the sound of a word and that to which it refers.
The key limitation of semiotics as first proposed, with its focus upon systems of signification, was that it failed to address how particular readers of signs interpreted communications, made them meaningful to themselves within their specific context of experience. It became common to use the term ‘semiology’ to refer to the earlier, relatively inflexible approach based upon structuralist linguistics, and to use ‘semiotics’ to indicate later, more fluid models, incorporating psychoanalysis, wherein the focus is more upon meaning-producing processes than upon textual systems. Social semiotics, taking account of questions of interpretation and context, inflects the emphasis specifically towards cultural artefacts and social behaviour.
Roland Barthes was known for his contribution to the semiological analysis of visual culture, in particular from his early work, Mythologies. Working inductively from his observations of differing cultural phenomena, he proposed that everyday culture could be analysed in terms of language of communication (visual and verbal) and integrally associated myths or culturally specific discourses. The central objective of this early work was the development of all-encompassing models of analysis of meaning-production processes. Later works, including The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and Camera Lucida (1984), were no longer focussed on sentences or images as texts so much as on ways in which meaning might be deciphered. These works take more account of the individual reader, of processes of interpretation, of psychoanalytic factors, and of what we might term cultural ‘slippages’ – thereby implicitly accepting a degree of unpredictability in human agency or response.
Roland Barthes
(1915–1980) Studied French Literature and Classics at the University of Paris, and taught French abroad in Romania and Egypt before returning to Paris for a research post in sociology and semiotics. He taught a course on the sociology of signs, symbols and collective representations at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and became known for his contribution to the development of semiology, the science of signs, first proposed by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916 but not fully explored until after the Second World War. Barthes’ publications include Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1964), The Empire of Signs (1970) and Image, Music, Text (1977), which includes his well-known essay on ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’. Camera Lucida, originally titled La Chambre Claire (1980), was his last work, and the only publication devoted entirely to photography.
Camera Lucida was motivated by an ontological desire to understand the nature of the photograph ‘in itself’. In semiotic terms, the photograph is disorderly because its ubiquity renders it unclassifiable: ‘photography evades us’ (Barthes 1984: 4). The style of writing is narrative and rhetorical, the tone is personal: he starts from discussion of himself as reader of the photographic image, asking why photos move him emotionally. In Part One he develops a commentary upon the nature and impact of the photograph using examples from documentary and photojournalism. In Part Two he focuses on his own family photographs, particularly images of his mother – some of which date from ‘history’, that is, a time before his birth – in order to contemplate more subjective meanings (this discussion is not illustrated). However, the objective is not to do with specific genres. For instance, there is no discussion of commercial imagery, nor of fine art uses of the medium. His purpose is essentialist in that he seeks to define that which is specific to the photograph as a means of representation. He is not concerned with the taker of a photograph (the photographer or, as he terms it, ‘operator’) and the act of taking but, rather, with the act of looking (the spectator) and with the ‘target’ of the photograph, that is, the object or person represented within the ‘spectrum’ of the photograph. Thus he observes that the knowing portraitee adopts a pose which anticipates the representational image, and takes account of the fact that this piece of paper will outlast the actual person who is the subject of the portrait becoming the ‘flat death’, which both exposes that which has been and precedes actual death.
Barthes concludes that it is ‘reference’ rather than art, or communication, which is fundamental to photography. Central to his exploration is the contention that, unlike in any other medium, in photography the referent uniquely sticks to the image. In painting, for instance, it is not necessary for the referent to be present. Painting can be achieved from memory, (chemical) photography cannot. From this emerges the time-specific characteristic of the photograph. It deals with what was, regardless of whether the terms or conditions continue to obtain. For Barthes, photography is never about the present, although the act of looking occurs in the present. In addition, the photograph is indescribable: words cannot substitute for the weight or impact of the resemblance of the image. The photograph is always about looking, and seeing. Furthermore, the photograph itself – that is, the chemically treated and processed paper – is invisible. It is not it that we see. Rather, through it we see that which is represented. (This, he suggests, is one source of the difficulty in analysing photography ontologically.) Likewise, the characteristics of the screen on which we may be viewing – mobile phone, computer – are disregarded, even though the screen size and surface affects visual qualities that are in turn influencing our responses.
What, then, is the attraction of certain (but never all) photographs for the spectator? As writer-lecturer Philip Stokes has pointed out in relation to the potentially boring experience of looking at other people’s family albums, ‘in every dreary litany there is an instant when a window opens onto a scene of fascination that stops the eye and seizes the mind, filling it with questions or simply joy’ (Stokes 1992: 194). Why do some images arrest attention, animating the viewer, while others fail to ‘speak’ to the particular spectator? Barthes proposes that photographs arrest attention when they encompass a duality of elements – two (or more) discontinuous, and not logically connected, elements which form the ‘puzzle’ (our term, not his) of the image. Here he distinguishes between studium, general enthusiasm for images and, indeed, the polite interest which may be expressed when confronted with any particular photograph, and the punctum (prick, sting or wound) which arrests attention. Previously, in an essay entitled ‘The Third Meaning’, he had suggested that photographs encompass the obvious and the obtuse, implying play of meaning within the photograph as text (Barthes 1977c). This leads him to explore why, when so many images are noted as a matter of routine, only some images make an impact on us. Here, again, he makes a detailed distinction between the photograph which captures attention through ‘shouting’ or because of the shock of revelation of subject-matter (for instance, a particularly startling photojournalistic image), and the punctum of recognition which transcends mere surprise, or rarity value, to inflict a poignancy of recognition for the particular spectator. This, he proposes, emanates more often from some detail within the image which stands out, rather than from the unity of the content as a whole. He sees this effect as essentially a product of the photograph itself. This, we would suggest, limits his discussion. The noticing of detail is also a consequence of the particular spectator’s history and interests – even a relatively insignificant detail might offer a key point of focus for a person. Indeed, as Margaret Olin observes, in his discussion of punctum Barthes describes a ribbon of braided gold that is not actually in the James Van Der Zee image that he is analysing, but appears worn by his aunt in one of his family photographs reproduced elsewhere (Olin 2009). As Olin suggests, this displacement, a Freudian slip, a trick of memory, reflects the centrality of Barthes’ own family pictures and memories as well as his quest for his mother as the motivator for Camera Lucida. But it also illustrates the point that the poignancy or joy of recognition is founded in the relation between the spectator and the photograph.
Barthes goes on to suggest that the photograph in itself, through being contingent upon its referent, is outside meaning. In this sense he views it as ‘a message without a code’ (to use a phrase drawn from his earlier essay on the rhetoric of the image). Thus he suggests that it is the fact of social observation which is immediate rather than the photograph. For Barthes, photography is at its most powerful not because of what it can reveal, but because it is, as he terms it, ‘pensive’. It thinks. Of course Barthes does know that a photograph is not a thinking subject: the photograph itself is an inanimate piece of paper. The photographer thinks, the portraitee poses, and the spectator may respond reflectively. Animation occurs only through the act of looking.
Barthes’ precise use of words (which, in the French, offers careful nuancing but, in translation, may seem over-precious), and the personal tone, to some extent obscure the general argument which is more phenomenological than semiotic in its method. His discussion is useful in reminding us of the essential contingency of the photograph. Like Sontag, he draws attention to its referential characteristics; unlike Sontag, who relates this to a range of practices, he defines this as that which characterises the medium, but it does not necessarily follow that this is a representation without a code. On the contrary, it is impossible to contemplate the image without operationalising a range of aesthetic and cultural codes. Ultimately, he also takes relatively little account of the specificity of the spectator and reasons and contexts of viewing. Despite his emphasis upon looking, and seeing, he focuses centrally on the image as text rather than upon the relation between image and spectatorship. This does limit his ontological conclusions.
The individual as spectator, the reception and usage of photographs, and the nature of processes whereby photographs become meaningful subjectively and collectively have remained central to contemporary debates. Here the influence of psychoanalysis has to be taken into account alongside semiotics, together with the concerns of social history.
Psychoanalysis, founded in Freud’s investigations of the human psyche (from the 1880s onwards), centres upon the individual in ways which are now taken for granted but which, at the time, reflected certain revolutionary strands of political and philosophical thought. For political theorists the individual became viewed as the basic social unit; also, as someone expected to take personal responsibility for social and economic survival. Philosophers such as Nietzsche, regarded by many as the father figure of individualism, emphasised personal moral responsibility, engaging, in particular, with what he conceptualised as the enslaving influence of Christianity. Individualism is a taken-for-granted feature of twentieth-century Western experience. We talk of the individual consumer, individual professional responsibilities, individual responsibilities within the family, and so on. Yet this emphasis is relatively new. Psycho-analytic understandings of individual subjective responses to social experience have offered new models of insight into human behaviour in ways which have been challenging academically (as well as offering therapeutic means of coming to terms with personal trauma).
Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939) Freud’s copious writings and his work with patients form the basis of the discipline of psychoanalysis, used both as a therapeutic method and as a tool to understand interpersonal relations and cultural activities. Psychoanalysis has irrevocably changed the way we understand the world and ourselves. Possibly Freud’s most important contribution to modern thought is the concept of the unconscious, which insists that human action always derives from mental processes of which we cannot be aware. Many photographers have used the ideas of Freud as the basis of their work.
As already noted, Victor Burgin’s Thinking Photography (1982) focused on debates within the theory, practice and criticism of photography. The book’s authors set out to challenge the notion of the autonomous creative artist, to question the idea of documentary ‘truth’ and to interrogate the notion of purely visual languages. The intention was to situate photography within broader theoretical debates and understandings pertaining to meaning and communication, visual culture and the politics of representation.5 The history of theories of art as they relate to – or ‘position’ – photography is also a key theme. The eight essays (including three by Burgin himself ), while they vary in their theoretical stance and critical style, share ‘the project of developing a materialist analysis of photography’. What Burgin is concerned with is photography ‘considered as a practice of signification’; that is, specific materials worked on for specified purposes within a particular social and historical context. Semiotics is one starting point for this theoretical project, but, as Burgin states, semiotics is not sufficient to account for ‘the complex articulations of the moments of institution, text, distribution and consumption of photography’ (Burgin 1982: 2).
In effect, this collection of essays traced a particular trajectory through Left debates of the 1970s, centring on questions of class, revolutionary struggle and the role of the artist, through semiotics, to questions of realism, psycho-analysis and spectatorship. (Questions of gender are addressed, although, notably, no essays by women theorists are included.) The book posits two key theoretical starting points: materialist analysis, as represented in the reprinting of Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Author as Producer’ (first published in German in 1966) and the semiotic, represented in Italian semiotician Umberto Eco’s essay, ‘Critique of the Image’. The other central historical reference is that of Russian Futurism and the formalist– constructivist theoretical debates which followed.
Classic Marxist models of artistic production are addressed, critically, in the penultimate essay of the book, ‘Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror’, by Simon Watney. Focusing on seeing, vision and the social nature of perception, Watney discusses various 1920s/1930s manifestations – in Russian aesthetic debates and in Brecht – of the proposal that through alienation, or ‘making strange’, new ways of ‘seeing’, politically and aesthetically, may be forged. The subtitle, ‘The Shattered Mirror’, refers to the rupturing of any notion of the photograph as a mirror or transparent recorder of reality. (It does not carry the psychoanalytic implications which, as we shall see, characterise Burgin’s contributions.) The essay situates ideas of defamiliarisation in relation to past practices in order to reflect upon modern European and American work which he exemplifies, briefly, through reference to French photographer Atget; Bauhaus theorist-photographer Moholy-Nagy; and American documentarian Berenice Abbott. He argues that the project of defamiliarisation in photography rested upon acceptance of the fallacy of the transparency of the photograph. In other words, if we relinquish realist theories of the photograph, the problem of employing effective techniques for defamiliarisation dissolves.
Semiotics, in conjunction with psychoanalysis, informs Burgin’s own three essays which, respectively, develop a series of related points about: the nature of the photograph as conceptualised in the context of new art theory; the experience of ‘looking at photographs’ from the point of view of the spectator; and exploring the psychological nature of the pleasurable response to the image. Thus he was concerned to trace links between the image, interpretation and ideological discourses. The model is most fully developed in ‘Photography, Phantasy, Function’, wherein the main part of the essay draws upon Freud to discuss psychological aspects of the act of looking, noting that looking is not indifferent. Thus he draws our attention to the voyeuristic and fetishistic investment in looking, arguing that to look is to become sutured within ideological discourse(s). He further argues that the photograph, like the fetish, is the result of an isolated fragment or frozen moment, and describes the fetishistic nature of the photograph as one source of its fascination.
What has all this got to do with making photographs? Visual methods of communication are, of course, embedded in particular cultural circumstances and therefore reflect specific assumptions and expectations. For instance, as has been argued, given the nineteenth-century desire for empirical evidence, photography was hailed for its apparent ability to represent events accurately. This desire or expectation persists in fields such as photo journalism. Furthermore, theoretical concepts interact. For instance, criteria based upon established visual aesthetics inform the assessment of what makes a ‘good’ photograph, photojournalistic or otherwise. Similarly, questions of representation pertaining to, for example, gender or race, which have contributed to the challenge to the canon within literary studies and art history, are relevant to photography.
The key point is that theoretical assumptions founded in varying academic fields, from the scientific to the philosophic and the aesthetic, intersect to inform both the making and the interpretation of visual imagery. One consequence of the postmodern debates of the second half of the twentieth century was a broadening of theoretical concerns. Similarly, debates con cerning the import of digital imaging and online space at the turn of the twenty-first century. New developments not only impact on practices but also on ways in which theoretical concerns are framed. As Martin Lister remarks,
Most discussions of ‘digital photography’ fail to remember that there is no single thing called photography, but there are many ‘photographies’ (Tagg 1988: 14–15). As a technology, photography has given rise to many different practices, uses and genres. However, many assessments about the ‘impact’ of digital technology have been flawed by a tendency to generalise about ‘photography’ as a whole.
(Lister in Wells 2009: 328)
As he notes, one of the initial responses to the import of the digital was a concern with photographic ‘truth’, a notion that, as we have seen, is founded in empirical ideas that suggest that the relation between an image and its referent is its the crucial constituent. He adds,
Although this claim or belief was only ever true of some kinds of photography (documentary, photojournalism, the biographical snapshot, and related forms of ‘straight’ photography where photographic realism and its use as evidence and testimony, were once particularly high) it was rapidly generalised to be a threat to ‘photography’ per se. It became a question about the very ontology of all photography. However, the new ability to manipulate and synthesise diverse photographic image elements could hardly be experienced as a threat to advertising, art or fashion photography. These are kinds of photography where an enhanced ability to manipulate the ‘real’ is sought after and welcomed; cases where celebration rather than regret would be more appropriate.
(loc cit)
In other words, photography/photodigital is not a singular field; it encompasses a range of genres, practices and, indeed, differing moral considerations (touching up a fashion plate is of an entirely different ethical order to, say, photo-montaging a gun into the hand of a criminal suspect). That there may be differences in principle between chemical and digital processes may be relevant but not necessarily significant in particular genres or circumstances. Preoccupation with realist debates risks distracting from questions of reception and social uses of photographic imagery within which the indexicality of the image is only one consideration amongst many others.
If we take the context and interpretation as crucial components within meaning-production processes, then questions of authenticity in the sense of the relation of the image to the circumstances pictured become less important than the story-telling aspects of photography. As Lister also points out,
While it is perfectly possible to consider the difference between the photo-mechanical process of traditional photography and the electro-mathematical processes of digital imaging as an ontological issue (that is, as a matter of fundamental differences in their mode of being) it is also necessary to deal with their use in social practice where such differences do not always have meaning. In fact, where ‘new’ digital media are concerned, the widespread transformations that they have brought about in traditional media are matched by an enormous range of uses. While they may do so in radically different ways, digital media can, and are, used to perform most of the functions of old media. It follows then that in investigating their relationships, different kinds of photography, and different affordances of digital image technology move in and out of the foreground of our attention.
(loc cit)
Yet, in common with other fields of the arts, photography criticism still tends to be normative, evaluating work in relation to established traditions and practices. At its worst, criticism masks personal opinion, dressed up as objective or authoritative with the aim of impressing, for example, the readers of review articles in order to generate respect and support for the reviewer. At its best, criticism helps to locate particular work in relation to specific debates about practice through elucidating appreciation of the effect, meaning, context and import of the imagery under question.
So, in order to think about photographic communication, we need to take account of communication theory in broad terms as well as focusing specific ally on photographs as a particular type of visual sign, produced and used in specific, but differing, contexts. The photograph, therefore, might be conceptualised as a site of intersection of various orders of theoretical understanding relating to its production, publication and consumption or reading. Central to the project of theorising photography is the issue of the relation between that which particularly characterises the photographic (which, as we have seen, is its referential qualities), and theoretical discourses which pertain to the making and reading of the image but whose purchase is broader, for instance, aesthetic theory or sexual politics. What is crucially at stake is how we think about the tension between the referential characteristics of the photograph and the contexts of usage and interpretation.
Given the ubiquity of photographic practices, a twofold problem emerges: first, to analyse ways in which clusters of theoretical discourses intersect, or acquire priority, in particular fields of practice; and second, to define and analyse that which is peculiar to photography. If we take Barthes’ final words on the subject, it is primarily its referential characteristic which variously lends it particular credibility, force or significance. If we start from the greater diversity of positions – semiotic, psychoanalytic and social-historical – outlined in Burgin’s edited collection, then the focus must be upon the political and ideological. Within contemporary developments ideas about the fluidity of virtual space and globalization have also become central to theoretical concerns, not least because of the extent to which photographic media have become integral within international border agency controls and other sur veillance systems. The project of theorising photography thus relies upon the development of complex models of analysis that can take account of these rather different starting points.
Within this conceptual approach it is not the objective presence of the image which is at stake, but rather the force-field within which it generates meaning. This contrasts with semiological stress on systems of signification. In effect we are invited to consider not only the text, its production and its reading, but also to take account of the social relations within which meaning is produced and operates.6 Here, the semblance of the real underpins processes of interpretation. Photography is reassuringly familiar, not least because it seems to reproduce that which we see, or might see. In so far as visual representations contribute to constructing and reaffirming our sense of identity, this familiarity, and the apparent realism of the photographic image, render it a particularly powerful discursive force.
Nowadays, many people think about photography only within the wider world of image-making, and reflect on the dominance that ‘the visual’ has in a global, post-industrial society. It is a truism that we are saturated with images, but it is arguable that the more images we make and receive, the more ‘natural’ and unexceptional they appear. Vilém Flusser once put this in a rather dismissive way:
people taking snaps are unable to decode photographs: They think photographs are an automatic reflection of the world. This leads to the paradoxical result that the more people take snaps, the more difficult it becomes to decode photographs: Everyone thinks there is no need to decode photographs, since they know how photographs are made and what they mean.
(Flusser 1983: 59)
Jae Emerling (2012)Photography, History and Theory. Focussing on photography as art, this publication argues that histories of photography are inextricably inter-related with theoretical discourses. This is pursued through reference to ‘Frame’, questions of documentary ‘truth’, the archive, and ‘Time-images’, with particular reference to writings by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault and Vilém Flusser. The discussion is complexly woven, so might be taken as a further, more advanced, step towards immersion in questions of the ontology of the photographic.
Thirty years on from Flusser’s observation, we swim in a world of images that was unimaginable at the time. But if photographs are ‘coded’ there are no simple rules to ‘decode’ them. To do this we need to try to understand not only the ways in which an information system structured around images functions, but also the nature of the medium of photography itself. This inevitably leads us to undertake the study of the history of photography; of its social and cultural functions; of its particular aesthetic; its distinctive genres, and its relationship to other media. We need to consider, amongst other things, the ways in which we receive and are affected by photographs and how they illuminate aspects of human existence. The way we set about these tasks, the way we interrogate the nature of photographs over time, will be determined by the organized and structured sets of questions that we bring to bear on them – that is, by the theories we employ.
The photograph as testament
Given that Lange took a number of shots of the woman and children, why is it this image which has become so famous? A number of critics have commented upon this:
The woman is used purely as subject. She is appropriated within a symbolic framework of significance as declared and determined by Lange. Indeed, the other images taken by Lange at this ‘session’ add to the sense of construction and direction. They remain distant, though, and lack the compelling presence which Lange achieves in the Migrant Mother image. In this Lange creates a highly charged emotional text dependent upon her use of children and the mother. The central position of the mother, the absence of the father, the direction of the mother’s ‘look’, all add to the emotional and sentimental register through which the image works. The woman is viewed as a symbol larger than the actuality in which she exists. As Lange admitted, she wasn’t interested in ‘her name or her history’.
(Clarke 1997: 153)
Lange made five exposures of the woman and children in a tent (see figures 1.2–1.5). One image was selected for publication and this became one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century. We can see that this image excludes literal detail (reference to the whole tent and the woodlands beyond, or to domestic objects) which might anchor the image to a particular place and time.
1.2–1.5 Migrant Mother, alternative versions
Stryker’s emphasis on the drama of the photograph reflects his drive to use pictures for emotional impact.
That the image was in accordance with the intentions of the photographer, and, indeed, of the FSA project, is confirmed by Roy Stryker, director of the project, in an interview:
Stryker: I still think it’s a great picture. I think it’s one of America’s great pictures …
Interviewer: Would you want to say anything about what that picture means to you personally?
Stryker: I can, in two words. Mother and child. What more do I need to say? A great, great, great picture of the mother and child. She happens to be badly dressed. It was bad conditions. But she’s still a mother and she had children. We’d found a wonderful family.
(Doherty et al. 1972: 154)
Clearly the potential for the image to transcend its particular location and socioeconomic context was recognised by those involved in this project. In this sense, the image reflects a humanitarian notion of universal similarities in the condition of humankind. Many critics have noted this, for instance:
For Lange, a compelling photograph presented an engaging human drama that addressed questions larger than the immediate subject. Her subjects gained importance from external value systems…. ‘We were after the truth’, she wrote, ‘not just making effective pictures’. She was concerned with the human condition, and the value of a fact was measured in terms of its own consequences…. Today, the subjects of Lange’s picture are, as Therese Heyman has observed, ‘figures in history whose hardship the present viewer is incapable of healing – symbols of timeless sorrow’.
(Tucker 1984: 50–1)
Indeed, this picture was included in the exhibition, ‘Family of Man’ (organised by the American curator, Edward Steichen, in 1955 as a sort of indirect response to the Second World War).7 The exhibition set out to emphasise all that humanity has in common. Roland Barthes commented on the ‘ambiguous myth’ of community whereby diversity between peoples and cultures was brought into focus in order to forge a sense of unity from this pluralism (Barthes 1973).
Here Tucker is taking a critical stance, discussing the impact of the picture in terms both of culture and ideology and of the reception of the image, acknowledging differences between now and then.
Note also that she credits her source. This allows us to find the original context of the Heyman quote to check whether we agree with Tucker’s interpretation. Crediting sources is a part of good academic practice, as it acknowledges previous critical contributions and helps the reader to find further information.
This essay by Barthes is included in his early collection, Mythologies. He draws our attention to, and questions, the fundamental premise of the exhibition. See general discussion of Barthes (pp. 31–3).
Genre and usage
The FSA project was essentially documentary. However, control of the reproduction of images did not lie in the hands of the photographers. As photohistorian, Naomi Rosenblum notes, the FSA in effect acted as a photo agency supplying pictures for photojournalistic use:
In common with other government agencies that embraced photographic projects, the F.S.A. supplied prints for reproduction in the daily and periodical press. In that project photographers were given shooting scripts from which to work, did not own their negatives, and had no control over how the pictures might be cropped, arranged, and captioned. Their position was similar to that of photojournalists working for the commercial press – a situation that both Evans and Lange found particularly distasteful.
(Rosenblum 1997: 366–9)
One of the central principles of the documentary aesthetic was that a photograph should be untouched, so that its veracity, its genuineness, might be maintained. Even minor violations of this principle were frowned upon:
Lange’s great Migrant Mother photograph had always bothered her a little. Just at the instant that she had taken the picture, a hand had reached out to draw the tent flap back a bit further and the photograph had caught a disembodied thumb in the foreground. That thumb had worried Lange. So, when she prepared the picture for American Exodus, the thumb was retouched out of the negative.
This was a simple technique that she had employed hundreds of times during her career as a portrait photographer. For Stryker it was a lapse of taste. He was quite bitter over the incident.
(Hurley 1972: 142)
Image in context
The FSA project was a response to the economic crisis of 1929 and the ensuing economic depression of the 1930s together with the collapse of sharecropping agriculture in a number of the south-west states of the USA. It aimed to document and record statistically the position of the rural poor, but the photographers it employed eschewed a mere photography of record in favour of works that stressed the depiction of human destitution and distress. Such images had a clear political purpose, but one that has been criticised for individualising what were collective problems with potentially collective solutions. Abigail Solomon-Godeau:
Commenting on the works of Dorothea Lange, the film maker Pare Lorentz noted the following: ‘She has selected with an unerring eye. You do not find in her portrait gallery the bindle-stiffs, the drifters, the tramps, the unfortunate, the aimless dregs of a country.’ In other words, the appeal made to the viewer was premised on the assertion that the victims of the Depression were to be judged as the deserving poor, and thus the claim for redress hinged on individual misfortune rather than on systematic failure in the political, economic, and social spheres.
(Solomon-Godeau 1991a: 179)
Here Solomon-Godeau is concerned with the political implications of that to which the image testifies.
In analysing this quote, we want to ask whether Lorentz is accurate in his comment – are there examples of photographs by Lange which might contradict his view? (Several other photographs by Lange are included in Andrea Fisher (1987) Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, London: Pandora). Furthermore, do we agree with Solomon-Godeau’s interpretation of his comment? Finally, what distinction is being made here between ‘individual misfortune’ and ‘systematic failure’ and what political positions underpin each of these phrases? (Pare Lorentz was head of the short-lived US Film Service, formed by Roosevelt, and director of documentary films including The Plow That Broke the Plains, 1936 and The River, 1937.)
Image-text
The image is titled Migrant Mother. This caption, together with the formal organisation of the photograph, are key elements of its appeal. Yet in A Concise History of Photography by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, published in 1965, the same picture is captioned Seasonal Farm Labourer’s Family, a title which seems less potent since it implies the presence of a working father. The original title and date are given by Andrea Fisher as ‘Destitute pea pickers in California, a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936’.
Titles contribute to holding the meaning of pictures, to limiting the potential range of interpretations or responses on the part of the audience or reader. Examining – or imagining – alternative titles for an image can help us understand how the title lends resonance to the picture.
Aesthetics and art history
Western aesthetic philosophy is concerned to examine principles of taste and systems for the appreciation of that which is deemed beautiful. Thus the aesthetics of photography have been concerned with formal matters such as composition, subject-matter, and the organisation of pictorial elements within the frame. It has also encompassed questions of technique – sharpness of image, exposure values, print quality, etc. Karin Becker Ohrn tells us that:
Many of Lange’s prints were poor. She made them according to no formula, and they varied widely in density, making it a challenge to print them.
(Ohrn 1980: 228)
This concern with print quality is often seen as excessively formal, privileging matters of technique at the expense of content, meaning and context. However, different contexts require differing levels of attention to print quality. While a mediocre print may be adequate for newspapers given their low-quality reproduction, gallery exhibition demands high-quality visual resolution. Shift in usage of the image required a different degree of precision.
These failures of technique were unimportant when the photographs were reproduced in books and journals, but towards the end of her life, Lange presented her work in a number of major exhibitions, and this required careful technical work to take place:
The prints were processed to archival standards and placed on white mounts. The final result was superb; the print quality was commended by several reviewers of the exhibition.
(ibid.)
The context of viewing is also influential. Naomi Rosenblum comments:
The images were transformed into photographic works of art when they were exhibited under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art. For the first time, photographs made to document social conditions were accorded the kind of recognition formerly reserved for aesthetically conceived camera images.
(Rosenblum 1997: 369)
If the photograph is in a book or magazine concerned with social conditions, its status as evidence is foregrounded. Lange’s photographs were published by the FSA in 1939 as a book titled An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. The title directs the reader to consider the group of photographs sociologically; the focus is upon the implications of the content. By contrast, when exhibited in the art gallery the context invites us to look at the picture in aesthetic and symbolic terms. For instance, art historians have observed that Lange’s photograph is related – in terms of both subject-matter and framing – to the many paintings of the Madonna and Child in Western art.
As gendered image
In traditional art history, questions of genre, form and technique, as well as subject-matter deemed appropriate for artistic expression, are central. When photographs are reappropriated within the gallery context, specific art-historical traditions associated with them come into play, becoming, as it were, laid over the picture.
A number of feminist photohistorians have looked at the FSA in terms of the participation of women photographers and the gendering of the image. Lange has been cast as ‘mother’ of documentary. Thus, for instance, Andrea Fisher in Let us Now Praise Famous Women discusses her contribution:
Dorothea Lange became a key figure in securing the humanism of documentary. She was repeatedly represented in popular journals as the ‘mother’ of documentary: the little woman who would cut through ideas by evoking personal feeling. Through her pathos for destitute rural migrants, the New Deal’s programs of rural reform might be legitimized, not as power, but as the exercise of care. Her place in the construction of documentary rhetoric was thus crucially different but every bit as important as Walker Evans’, more widely recognized as the paradigmatic figure of documentary. Where Evans was thought of as the guarantor of honest observation, with his flat-lit frontal shots, Lange was lauded as the keeper of documentary’s compassion.
(Fisher 1987: 131)
Fisher argues that Stryker over-edited the FSA work and in so doing obscured the work and the role played by women in the project. She particularly argues that representations of femininity played a crucial role in the rhetoric of the FSA photographs, both in terms of the gender of the photographer and subjectmatter.
Here Fisher draws attention to the centrality of ‘motherhood’, a concept which was brought under scrutiny in feminist critiques of the 1970s.
In hailing Lange as the ‘Mother’, Stryker placed her as the mirror of immutable motherhood that many of her photographs would subsequently suggest. Her consuming empathy for her subjects became synonymous with her subjects’ caring for their children. Though only a fraction of her images conformed to the transcendent ideal of mother and child, it was the image of the Migrant Mother which soared to the status of icon, and became the hallmark of Lange herself:
The naming of Lange as ‘Mother’ folded across the reading of her images. It not only prioritized certain images, but became intimately embedded in the sense that could be made of them.
(Fisher 1987: 140–1)
Photography critic John Roberts has summarised her argument thus:
Fisher argues that one of the principal ideological props of the way FSA photographs were used to construct an American community under threat was the image of the maternal. She cites Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1937) as a primary example of this, one of the most reproduced photographs of the period, so much so in fact that it could be said to stand in iconically for the Depression. For Fisher the way the image was cropped and contextualised reveals how much the image of a damaged femininity came to symbolise the crisis of community for the American public. Anxious and in obvious poverty, the woman holds on to her two children, suggesting the power of maternal values to overcome the most dire of circumstances. Here is a woman who has lost everything, yet heroically, stoically keeps her family together. Here in essence was what the magazine editors were waiting for: an image of tragedy AND resistance. That this image became so successful reflects how great a part gender played in the symbolic management of the Depression.
(Roberts 1998: 85)
Fisher herself offers a slightly different account:
The incessant picturing of women with their children was never prioritized by Stryker for his photographers; it was not a conscious political device. But perhaps it arose, like the whole of Stryker’s enterprise, as part of that widely felt nostalgia for a mythic American past: an American essence as natural as the land, and so located in an immutable rural family. But only for an urban audience could the land achieve this mythic status, and the rural mother the status of universal touchstone. Perhaps, too, that desire for lost plenitude found in the image of the Mother its most appropriate analogue.
(Fisher 1987: 138; our emphasis)
Here, questions of gender are seen as interrelating with other sets of ideas about Americanness. Fisher points to the power of this interaction.
Questions of gender have been discussed both in relation to the photographer and to the content of the image as a particular representation of, in this instance, maternity. But Roberts takes this up in terms which contain overtones of conspiracy, seeing the gendering in terms of political rhetoric. When we look back to Fisher herself we find a different emphasis. This illustrates, once again, the importance of checking original sources. As we see, Roberts has imposed a specific inflection on Fisher’s original research.
Semiotics focuses on the formal components of the image, emphasising the centrality of sign systems. Sign systems are viewed as largely conventional; that is, primarily consequent not upon ‘natural’ relations between images and that to which they refer but upon cultural understandings. As noted (p. 31), for American semioti cian C.S. Peirce, signs may be iconic (based upon resemblance to that represented), indexical (based upon a trace or indicator, for instance, smoke indicates fire) or symbolic (based upon conventional associations). Chemically produced photographs incorporate all three constituents: images resemble the person or place or object re-presented; they are indexical in that the subject had to be present for the photograph to be made, which means that the image is essentially a ‘trace’; and images circulate in specific cultural contexts within which differing symbolic meanings and values may adhere.
Reading the photograph
As we have noted, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a shift in photography theory whereby images became viewed as complexly coded artefacts to be read as cultural, psychoanalytic and ideological signs. For Barthes, in his later writings, specifically Camera Lucida, the photograph signifies reality, rather than reflecting or representing it. The emphasis is upon what the viewer as ‘reader’ of the image takes as the principal cues and clues for use as the basis of interpretation.
In reading photographs we may choose to concentrate on the formal qualities of the image; for example, its arrangement within the frame, or the dispositions, stances and gestures of its subjects. Alternatively, or additionally, we may seek to locate the work within the history of image-making, noting similarities and differences from other works of the same kind. Or we may want to explore the way in which the image may be examined from the standpoint of a number of disciplines or discourses which exist outside the photographic.
John Pultz begins his analysis of Migrant Mother by referring to these ideas in the context of a reading of the gestural system at work within the image. He then moves to consider the woman’s body within the tradition of painting; and concludes by commenting on the gendered nature of the space within which the image is set:
Migrant Mother … centers on the female body, the body that is socially constructed through the gaze, and has the quality ‘to be looked at’. In Migrant Mother, Lange builds a narrative around a woman and her three children, centered on the single gesture of an upraised arm. As the two older children turn their heads away from the photographer (out of shame or shyness?) and an infant child sleeps, the mother alone remains awake and vigilant. Her arm is upraised, not to support her head but to finger her chin in tentative thought. The picture is created around certain notions of the female body, including the idea of the nurturing mother. Lange drew on traditional, such as Renaissance depictions of the Virgin and Child and the secularised versions of these that began to appear in the mid nineteenth century with the rise of the Victorian cult of domesticity. Moreover, even though Migrant Mother was made in a public space, the close cropping of the image creates within the frame itself a protected, interior, feminised space.
(Pultz 1995a: 93)
Freudian theory has been acknowledged in Western academia, especially in the latter part of the twentieth century. Within photography criticism, two influential ideas derived from psychoanalytic theory have been that of the function of the gaze, and of analysis of the way in which what might be thought of as ‘abstractions’ may be inscribed upon the body – literally embodied. These ideas form the background to Pultz’s discussion of how we look at this image. Note that in this instance it is the interrelation of gender and of aesthetics which is woven into his analysis. However, we might ask whether Pultz believes Lange’s reference to the virgin and child was conscious on her part.
Image as icon
Halla Beloff wants to grant the image an iconic status that takes it out of the realm of representation altogether:
Such is the power of the camera that we can easily think of photographs as having a kind of independent reality. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is a picture that has entered Western consciousness. She is not a mere representation.
(Beloff 1985: 15)
‘Icon’ here refers not so much to the verisimilitude of the image but to the symbolic value invested in it.
Here, there is a notion of photographs as containing ‘reality’ – a commodity that, as it were, leaches out over time, so that the initial complexity gives way to the merely iconic. Do we agree with this? Or does the image continue to be ‘troubling’?
It is, indeed, one of the key examples selected by Hariman and Lucaites in their useful discussion of the political ramifications of images, iconicity and public culture (Hariman and Lucaites 2007). Part of the iconic power of the work derives from its multiple appearances over the years, in many contexts and forms. For instance, in 1964 it appeared on the cover of the Hispanic magazine, Bohemia Venezolana, and in 1973 was referenced in Black Panther magazine (figures 1.6 and 1.7). Paula Rabinowitz comments on this aspect of the photograph in the following terms:
I do not need to remind my readers of the power of images – a power that includes their ability to exceed the original impulse of their creation. For instance, the troubling story of Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’, told and retold, offers with acute poignancy an example of discourse as repository of meaning – the photograph as much as its checkered history includes a woman and her children, a photographer, a government bureau, popular magazines, museums, scholars, and a changing public – an image and tale composed, revised, circulated, and reissued in various venues until whatever reality its subject first possessed has been drained away and the image becomes icon.
(Rabinowitz 1994: 86)
1.6 Reference to ‘Migrant Mother’, Bohemia Venezolana, 1964
1.7 Reference to ‘Migrant Mother’, Black Panther magazine, 1972
In summary, critical writings appropriate and ‘re-frame’ images in relation to particular sets of concerns. This image has attracted extensive discussion from a range of perspectives, reflecting many differing concerns. Our procedure here was to seek out, select and analyse specific quotes as examples of different ‘takes’ on the picture.
See ch. 4 for further examples of analysis of specific images.
Inventions – the name by which we call devices that seem fundamentally new – are almost always born out of a process that is more like farming than magic. From a complex ecology of ideas and circumstance that includes the condition of the intellectual soil, the political climate, the state of technical competence, and the sophistication of the seed, the suggestion of new possibilities arises.
(Szarkowski 1989: 11)
From its inception photography spread to every continent and most countries, but we now live in a globalised world that is increasingly connected. It is one in which billions of messages and images are exchanged every hour. The invention of photography was a pre-condition for the existence of such a world, but photographs also comment on and critique globalisation. In these conditions it is hard to imagine anyone setting out to write a synoptic and encyclopaedic history of world photography. In the last century histories of photography were produced that helped to structure the way in which the medium was understood and appreciated. Today, useful and informative histories of photography continue to appear, often organised around the material available in particular archives.
Typically, histories of photography offer a series of histories of photographers illustrated with examples from their work. In the twentieth century, in common with other areas of the arts, such as painting or the novel, there was a tendency to conflate the history of the subject with the work of particular practitioners. The central purpose of this opening section is to compare key books, published in English, most of which are variously titled The History … or A Concise History ….
What is the story of photography? It was invented in 1839, or so we have commonly been led to believe, but this apparently simple statement masks a complex set of factors. It is true that it was in 1839 that both Fox Talbot in England and Daguerre in France announced the processes whereby they had succeeded in making and fixing a photographic image. But the idea of photography long precedes that date.
To a large extent the history of photography prior to 1938, when Beaumont Newhall first published his commentary, then entitled Photography, A Short Critical History, has been represented as a history of techniques. The focus was not on what sorts of images were made, but on how they were made. This approach is to some extent reflected in museum collections wherein it is the instruments of photography which are prioritised for display, with photographs acting as examples of particular printing methods, detailed in accompanying descriptions. The subject-matter of such photographs (and associated aesthetic and social implications), if acknowledged at all, is presented as being of secondary importance.
Beaumont Newhall (1982) The History of Photography, New York: MOMA, fifth edition, revised and enlarged. This remains a key text, although, as a number of critics have commented, it is limited in its compass by its foundations in the MOMA collection which is primarily American in orientation and idiosyncratic in its holdings, having been built up over the years according to the interests and tastes of its particular curators.
Key archives in Britain for equipment and techniques:
- The National Museum of Media, Bradford
- The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, Wiltshire (National Trust)
So, was the story of photography always an account of changing technologies? Martin Gasser suggests that this history is more complicated (Gasser 1992). Considering German, French, British and American publications written between 1839 and 1939, he identifies three emphases: first, what is termed ‘the priority debate’; second, histories of the development of photography written primarily as handbooks detailing methods and techniques and also potential uses for photography; third, histories of the photograph as image. It is worth noting that it is the proliferation of material in the second of these categories which has led to the false assumption that the first hundred years of publication were largely devoted to technologies and techniques. Aside from any other consideration, a number of the papers published in the early years of photography made assertions about the intrinsic nature of the medium and speculated on its potential uses.
Before considering histories of the photograph as image, the priority debate deserves brief comment. This debate is concerned with who first achieved the fixing of the photographic image. A number of historical accounts exist whose primary purpose is to argue – usually through a combination of biography and discussion of photographic techniques – that someone other than Fox Talbot in Britain or Daguerre in France ‘invented’ photography. These two men were the first to announce their findings publicly (in the appropriate scientific journals of the time, in Britain and France) in 1839. But it is also clear, from contemporary correspondence, that Fox Talbot was not alone in Britain in his experimentation. Similarly, in France, Nicephore Nièpce was responsible in the early 1820s for key discoveries leading up to the daguerreotype. As every history of early photography emphasises, the challenge did not lie with the development of camera and lens technology. The principle of concentrating light through a small hole in order to create reflection on the wall of a dark chamber was known to Aristotle (384–322 BC). The photographic camera was based on the camera obscura, described as early as the tenth century AD, of which the first illustration was published in 1545. The problem which preoccupied experimentation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was how to fix the image once it had been obtained.
daguerreotype Photographic image made by the process launched by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France in 1839. It is a positive image on a metal plate with a mirror-like silvered surface, characterised by very fine detail. Each one is unique and fragile and needs to be protected by a padded case. It became the dominant portrait mode for the first decades of photography, especially in the United States.
The credit for discovering practical chemical processes lies with no single person, nor, indeed, with any particular nation, although the ascription of credit has always had nationalistic overtones with, for example, the French, keen to downgrade British claims (1839 was within a generation of the Battle of Trafalgar). Likewise, strenuous rewritings of history allowed the German photohistorian, Stenger, writing in the 1930s during the ascendance of Hitler, to claim German experiments of the eighteenth century as fundamental for photography. Re-examining the prehistory, Mary Warner Marien urges caution in two respects: first, she warns against too uncritical an acceptance of the work of early photohistorians. She notes the extent to which the burgeoning of research in the field since the Second World War has both uncovered new findings and suggested new ways of thinking about previously known facts within the history of photography; recent research represents only the beginning of a much needed archaeology of early photography. In addition, she emphasises the broader historical context of political, technological and cultural change within which photography developed. The overall point is that, in considering the origins of photography, a stance which is both cautious and critical should be adopted (Warner Marien 1991). Geoffrey Batchen offers a more detailed discussion which points to the complexities involved in reappraising early photography in terms of who founded it, where, and for what purposes (Batchen 1997).
While earlier writing on photography had not exclusively focused on technology and techniques, since the Second World War art-historical concerns have become more central, together with a new stress on connoisseurship of the photograph as a privileged object analogous to a painting. A number of the books which we now take as key texts on the history of photography were first written as exhibition catalogues for works collected and shown in institutions. For instance, Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography stems from a catalogue written to accompany ‘Photography 1839–1937’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 1937. The broader context for the introduction of art-historical methods and concerns into photography collection and exhibition includes the development of art history as an academic discipline and, more particularly, the increasing influence of art criticism within modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Here it is relevant to remember the emphasis upon art as a set of special practices which informed modernist thinking. A central feature of modernist criticism was that of maintaining a clear distinction between high and low culture, a differentiation which was equally evident in the writings of some Marxist critics as it was among conservative critics. If photographs were to take their place in the gallery, they inevitably became caught up within more general intellectual trends and discourses.
Since the Second World War, then, the predominant approach to writing the history of photography has been to focus on the photograph as image. Two classic histories, still consulted, are Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography (now in its fifth, revised edition); and Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s History of Photography, which, as we have seen, was organised in its earliest form in relation to developing technologies but has subsequently been rewritten to take fuller account of photographs as specific types of image. It is worth pausing to consider and compare these two publications; together they established a specific canon for the history of photography which has been the basis for further development – or taken as a starting point for challenge – ever since.
Helmut And Alison Gernsheim (1969) The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914, 2 vols, London and New York: McGraw-Hill (first edition, 1955). One of the two classic histories. It is interesting to compare later editions with the first edition in order to see how their interests and research developed.
Educated as an art historian, and appointed onto the library staff at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Newhall was invited to research its first major photography exhibition. His historical overview, which formed the principal essay in the exhibition catalogue, described changing techniques, but also included comments on specific photographers and particular periods of aesthetic development. Newhall was one of the first to introduce aesthetic judgements into the discussion of photographs, but, at this stage, as he has noted himself, he avoided the identification of artists, thereby refusing MOMA’s expectations of what an exhibition catalogue should be. It was only in the third edition of his History of Photography that emphasis on photographers and an account of the work of practitioners emerges. In this edition he also, for the first time, introduced chapters on straight photography, documentary and ‘instant vision’, thereby acknowledging characteristics specific to photography. The third edition thus represents the beginning of an engagement with the idea of photography theory as distinct from art theory.8
Similarly, it is only in later editions that Helmut Gernsheim refocuses the history to comment more extensively upon particular practitioners. His contribution to the history, developed in collaboration with Alison Gernsheim, was founded in the study of their collection of nineteenth-century photographs.9 The full title of their research, first published in 1955 and dedicated to Beaumont Newhall, is The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914. The second edition, in 1969, was divided into two volumes, with considerably more emphasis on illustration than previously. The third, revised edition appeared in the 1980s, by then under the single authorship of Helmut Gernsheim (since the death of his wife). The first volume of The History of Photography focuses on the origins of photography in France, America, Great Britain and Germany.10 A chapter on Italy was added later, in the third edition, which was published in 1982. A summary version of the research was published in 1965 as A Concise History of Photography, offering a shorter, and thus easier entry into his work. This version includes a brief, and highly selective, discussion of modern photography up to the 1950s. (For purposes of studying the nineteenth century, the two-volume edition, which is in large format, with good-quality picture reproduction, is recommended for the detail of observation and the range of imagery.)
Both Newhall and Gernsheim focus upon Western Europe and the United States (with no comment, for instance, on Soviet Russia or South America). The key difference between Newhall and Gernsheim lies in Gernsheim’s relative concentration on the nineteenth century, and his greater emphasis on technical aspects of photography. His study is more lengthy and less literary in approach than Newhall’s. This may reflect the origins of Newhall’s essay as an exhibition catalogue, which meant that he had to take account of the problem of succinct communication to a diverse audience. Further differences may stem from nationality: Newhall was American; Gernsheim was born in Germany but was naturalised British. As has already been noted, they were working in relation to particular archive collections, the former drawing upon the collection at MOMA with, inevitably, a central focus upon developments in America, as well as upon the research in Europe conducted prior to the 1937 exhibition. The Gernsheim collection focused on the nineteenth century, and was centred upon British photography.
Both publications proceed to a greater or lesser extent by way of discussion of great photographers. Gernsheim notes that their collection was organised not only in files about photographic processes, apparatus, exhibitions, but also folders on important photographers (see Hill and Cooper 1992). Newhall, as an art historian, was accustomed to emphasis on the contribution of the individual artist, and by the fifth edition of his work, the contribution of individual photographers and the authority of their work is clearly a priority. This has the effect of raising the profile of certain ‘masters’ of photography, thereby defining a canon, or authoritative list, of great practitioners. It also renders history as a relatively simple chronological account, devoid of broader social context. The canonisation of photographers as artists, in line with the emphasis on individual practitioners in other art fields in the Modern period, characterises many contemporary publications. For instance, Photo Poche publish a three-part ‘history’ organised as brief biographies with comments on photographers, accompanied by one image selected from their lifetime’s work. Similarly, The Photography Book, published by Phaidon, in cludes 500 photographs by 500 different photographers (presented alphabetic ally by surname). Such collections offer useful starting points for identifying the style of particular photographers, but the socio-historical contextualisation is strictly limited. By selecting known practitioners, rather than sets of ideas or types of practice, such books have the effect of reinforcing the canon of acclaimed photographers and marginalising practices which cannot be illustrated through reference to specific names.
Paul Hill And Thomas Cooper (1992) Dialogue with Photography, Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications.
Also see: Vicki Goldberg (ed.) (1981) Photography in Print, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Nathan Lyons (1966) Photographers on Photography, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Christopher Phillips (ed.) (1989) Photography in the Modern Era, New York: Metropolitan Museum/Aperture.
Mary Warner Marien (2014) Photography, A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd.
There are several consequences of canonisation: first, changing attitudes to photography as a set of practices have tended to become obscured behind the eulogisation of particular photographers, their photographs and their contribution. Second, the focus (led by male historians) has been upon male photographers, with the consequence that the participation of women has been overlooked or obscured. Third, there has been relatively extensive dis cussion of professional and serious commercial practices, but relatively few accounts of popular photography or of more specialist areas of practice, such as architecture or medicine. Fourth, as has already been mentioned, pho tography history has tended to prioritise aesthetic concerns over broader and more diverse forms of involvement of photography in all aspects of social experience, including personal photography, publishing and everyday portraiture.
More recent histories published in English have offered broader perspectives. Of these, the most comprehensive is Mary Warner Marien’s Photography, A Cultural History which considers a range of amateur and professional uses of photography, from art and travel, to fashion and the mass media. Although organised broadly chronologically, it is structured primarily in terms of discussion of particular practices rather than technologies or practitioners, although both the latter are acknowledged in mini case studies which feature throughout; the book is clearly written and amply illustrated. The central focus is upon developments in Europe and North America, but it also takes advantage of recent research into non-Western photography. Gerry Badger’s The Genius of Photography (published to coincide with a BBC television series under the same title) weaves together the thematic and the chronological (and includes a useful historical timeline). The subtitle, ‘How photography has changed our lives’ indicates his focus on the import and impact of photographs on human experience. Naomi Rosenblum’s A World History of Photography likewise offers an excellent, well-written account which is thorough and markedly international in its compass. The device of including three separate sections on technical history allows her to focus on images and movements in the main body of the text, which is extensively illustrated.
Gerry Badger (2007) The Genius of Photography – How Photography has Changed our Lives, London: Quadrille.
Naomi Rosenblum (2007) A World History of Photography, New York, London, and Paris: Abbeville Press. Previous editions, 1984, 1989, 1997.
Mark Haworth-Booth (1997) Photography: An Independent Art, London: V&A Publications. Haworth-Booth was Curator of Photography at the V&A. This book was published to coincide with the establishment, in May 1998, of a permanent photography gallery at the V&A for showing works from the museum’s collection.
Ian Jeffrey (1981) Photography, A Concise History, London: Thames and Hudson.
Jean-Claude Lemagny And AndrÉ Rouille (1987) A History of Photography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mark Haworth-Booth’s discussion of Photography: An Independent Art offers an eminently readable account of the development of the photography archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. While focusing upon images in that particular collection, his discussion is informed and informative about more general developments in photography as both art and technology. Likewise, Ian Jeffrey’s account Photography, A Concise History is purposeful and generally clearly written. This book set out to be a radical reappraisal of the history of photography as written to date, although Stevie Bezencenet has argued that it was less than successful in its re-evaluation on the grounds that to produce a history of photography now requires a diversity of academic approaches (Bezencenet 1982b). She also notes that Jeffrey offers another history overwhelmingly concerned with male practitioners, making the point that, however radical his declared intentions, his work mirrors the established formula of a chronological account of changes and focuses on dominant modes of photography and particular practitioners.
Lemagny and Rouille’s account is of interest to the English reader, for its central starting point is within French culture which, in effect, recentres France within photography history. While discussion of photography in Britain is more limited than in some of the other accounts, the references to Europe as a whole are more comprehensive. This book is an edited collection. Despite the editors’ stated intention of holding a balance between discussion of photography as a field in itself, and discussion of the broader context within which it functions, some chapters succeed in being more analytic than others. While expressing strong criticisms, in reviewing the book Warner Marien suggests that its strengths lie in two chapters on photography as art, and she adds that in general this collection takes more account of contemporary theoretical ideas than do most works of this kind (Warner Marien 1988). Likewise, Michel Frizot’s A New History of Photography is written from a French perspective, as indicated, for instance, in its emphasis in early chapters on the spread of the daguerreotype. Organised chronologically, it offers groups of images juxtaposed with specific thematic discussions which range from the technical to particular fields of practice. In a similar vein, Graham Clarke explores how we understand a photograph through a brief intro ductory historical overview of practices in terms of genres: landscape, the city, the portrait, the body, documentary, fine art, and photographic manipulations.
Michel Frizot (ed.) (1998) A New History of Photography, Cologne: Könemann.
Graham Clarke (1997) The Photograph, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The year 1989 saw the publication of two major historical overviews, both designed to accompany retrospective exhibitions celebrating 150 years of photography. The title of Mike Weaver’s The Art of Photography (1989) reflects the location of this exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, London. This was the first ever exhibition of photographs to be held there and, as such, both the show and the accompanying publication emphasise the image as art and the status of the photographer as artist. Similarly, John Szarkowski’s Photography Until Now (1989) – which accompanied the MOMA celebration of 150 years of photography – in relying primarily on the MOMA collection reinforces the American canon (which includes a number of European photog raphers). Szarkowski trained both as an art historian and as a photographer before working in the MOMA collection for 30 years. His interests centred upon the formal and technical properties which distinguish photographs from other visual media, and in the status of the unauthored or vernacular photograph. However, the production values of both of these publications are high, which makes each a useful source for visual reference and research.
John Szarkowski (1989) Photography Until Now, New York: MOMA. Published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name on the occasion of the 150 years’ celebration.
If you are coming to the story of photography for the first time, Rosenblum offers a good, clearly written starting point for engaging with this history. Alternatively, Szarkowski and Jeffrey complement one another in taking America, or Europe, as central starting points. Indeed, Szarkowski specifically comments on the difference in the situation of photography in the US, as opposed to Europe, at the turn of the century. He suggests that American (he specifies ‘Yankee’) photographers were more inclined towards reportage than their European counterparts, having invested less in claims for the status of the photograph as art, since America lacked the depth of artistic tradition that was central to post-Renaissance Europe.
Val Williams (1986) Women Photographers: The Other Observers, 1900 to the Present, London: Virago. Revised edition (1991) The Other Observers: Women Photographers from 1900 to the Present.
Each of the histories reviewed above reflects, to a greater or lesser degree, an established selection of photographers and their images. Similarly, histories of photography specific to a particular country or region tend to draw upon established sources and archives, thereby in effect re-affirming orthodoxies in terms of the canon of well-known photographers. The ‘great masters’ approach has been challenged variously. Anne Tucker, in The Woman’s Eye (1973) was among the first to draw attention to the considerable participation of women as photographers historically. As the title implies, she suggests that what we see photographically – that is, subject-matter and treatment – to some extent reflects gender. This question of gender has been pursued by Val Williams in her discussion of British women’s participation in a range of practices, including the local (studio) and the domestic (the family album), and, like Mary Warner Marien, her historical account takes stock of commercial practices. A more recent collection of essays on European women photographers includes individual critical studies of the contribution of specific women photographers particularly in Sweden but also in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland and France. The essays, which make extensive use of archive materials, are simultaneously biographical in introducing the work of photographers not necessarily familiar to us and analytical in appraising the context and import of their work within a range of personal and professional spheres of practice. By contrast, Naomi Rosenbaum, in reappraising photo-histories, focuses primarily upon work by American women photographers. Likewise, Jeanne Montoussamy-Ashe (1985) reinstates black women into the history of American photography, noting, for instance, documentation for the 1866 Houston city directory which lists ‘col’ against the name of a female photographic printer. (Some women are also listed in D. Willis Thomas’ Black Photographers bio-bibliography (1985), again American.) In all instances, what is at stake is to note the presence of women within a particular field and to consider ways in which gender, positively or negatively, contributed to constructing or limiting the roles played. By contrast, Constance Sullivan’s Woman Photographers (1990), considering European (including British) and American examples, has stressed women’s participation as artists, arguing that women’s work historically has demonstrated equivalent aesthetic values to those which characterise the work of their better-known male contemporaries, while often bringing different subject-matter into focus. This book is particularly useful for its quality reproduction of images. But the fundamental point is that each author focuses on putting women back into the picture even if, ultimately, they challenge the canon rather than canonisation.
Lena Johannesson And Gunnilla Knape (eds) (2003) Women Photographers – European Experience, Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
Naomi Rosenblum (2010) A History of Women Photographers, New York, London and Paris: Abbeville Press.
Also see: Liz Heron And Val Williams (1996) Illuminations, Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, London and New York: I B Tauris.
Van Gelder and Westgeest (2011) examine the particular nature of photography as a visual medium through a series of case studies including comparison of photography with painting, virtual places and time-based art. They also explore the way in which it has functioned as a documentary form and has been used to delineate and critique social and cultural issues.
Hilde Van Gelder And Helen Westgeest (2011) Photography Theory in Historical Perspective, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
There has been a further challenge to the dominance of the ‘great masters’ history of photography from those who have re-examined the status and significance of popular photography. By ‘popular’ we refer to personal photography, or to photographs which may have been commissioned from professional photographers, but were intended for personal use (see chapter 3). The term also extends to include postcards exchanged between individuals, and pictures made to record events or membership of clubs and societies. The high street portrait studio is also a legacy of Victorian photography, and was by no means confined to major cities. Such studios were often family enterprises, or were run by women photographers.
The contribution of particular photographers, and the economic circumstances within which Victorian and Edwardian photography was pursued, has become a focus of much recent research. But one of the points about reviewing popular photography and rethinking its significance is that concern with the authoring of images is related to questions of provenance (establishing where and when a photograph was taken) rather than to questions of artistic significance. This is because popular photography is increasingly used as social-historical evidence. Personal albums, and other materials, are viewed as a form of visual anthropology and are catalogued within a number of archives, of differing scale and thematic concern. Public museums and libraries may have photographic collections within their local or regional archive; and there are many independent collections.11 Such rich collections offer myriad research possibilities. They also contribute to the ‘Heritage’ industry wherein photographs play a high profile as ‘evidence’ from the past. As such, they are displayed, or used as reference for the design of reconstructions of buildings or machinery, or republished as postcards.
Photographs are commonly used as evidence. They are among the material marshalled by the historian in order to investigate the past. They have become a major source of information by which we picture, understand or imagine the nineteenth century. Historians have for the most part had an uneasy relationship with the medium, as their professional training did not introduce them to an analysis of visual images. It was television that first raided the many photographic archives for images of historical interest; this necessarily led to some difficulties, not least of which was that of an archive used in a general way to illustrate commentary, with scant regard for the purposes for which the photographs were made. The social historian may be interested in changing modes of dress, or agricultural and industrial machinery. Photographs are used as evidence of such changes, which means that the detailing of the source and date of the photograph – that is, its provenance – becomes especially important. Hence we come across titles of publications such as ‘The Camera as Historian’ or ‘The Camera as Witness’.12
Social history has also become a form of popular entertainment. For example, around the world Heritage Trails are undertaken with portable digital devices which download appropriate talks, photographs or moving images at key points. These trails locate historical events within the landscape in which they originally took place, so that civil wars, industrial unrest, royal ceremonies or great engineering feats can all be celebrated. Photographs are often key documents here as they validate the accuracy of the narrative that, in fact, has often been constructed in relation to them.
Popular education also led to a growth in the use of photographs for the analysis of local or community history.13 There are a number of reasons why people are interested in using old photographs: some have an ethnographic curiosity about the kinds of clothes or tools that were common at a particular period, while others are fascinated by the characteristic stance and gait of workers in particular trades. Social and labour historians who wanted to gain some idea of ordinary life and work in the Victorian era have also been drawn to the examination of visual material; not merely for the information provided by photographs, but also to begin to recognise in the faces and stances of the subjects something of the real people in the scenes that have been the subject of so many accounts and narratives.
Photography was used throughout the nineteenth century in the service of political and industrial change. One reason for landscape photography was governmental employment of photographers for civil and military mapping purposes. For instance, the British government used photographers for a military survey of the Highlands of Scotland in order to help quell anti-English rebellion (Christian 1990). Similarly, in America, early landscape photography in the West was often commercial in origin: Carleton Watkins’ employers included the California State Geological Survey and the Pacific Railroad Company (Snyder 1994). These photographs, along with others made for less systematic purposes, are used as a form of social-historical evidence. Examples range widely: for instance, Alison Gernsheim used photographs as a basis for a survey of changing fashions (Gernsheim 1981). The status of the photograph as evidence is not questioned. Likewise, books based on past photojournalism are common.14 Such books purport to present the past ‘as it was’, taking for granted that this is what photographs do. As is asserted on the inside cover of one such book presenting pictures of Britain and Ireland, ‘More than words, more than paintings or prints, old photographs convey an immediate, undistorted impression of the past’ (Minto 1970).
Such use of photographs reflects a broader set of academic assumptions. Traditionally, British historical, scientific and social scientific method was characterised by empiricism. The nineteenth century was a period of extensive technological and social change, typified by faith in progress and ‘modernity’. Modernity has to be distinguished from modernism. Historians have argued constantly about when ‘modernity’ begins, but it much pre-dates the twentieth-century art movements – aesthetic and philosophical developments in art and design – that are called modernism. Modernity is usually dated from the middle of the eighteenth century. Important changes included the transformation of the economy through new techniques of production; the development of new materials and commodities; the growth of industrialisation and, related to this, the expansion of towns and cities as people moved to live in centres of employment; the creation of new kinds of communication systems and forms of display. In Britain, France and elsewhere, such changes were underpinned economically through imperialism (which made available raw materials and cheap labour from other parts of the world) and through the low pay and poor working conditions experienced by industrial and agrarian labour at home. All these factors contributed to the increasingly public and urban nature of modern life, and to emphasising the separation of the aristocracy (in Britain), the professional and entrepreneurial middle classes, and the workers.
Photography not only developed in the Victorian era but was also implicitly caught up in nineteenth-century interests and attitudes. The Victorians invested considerable faith in the power of the camera to record, classify and witness. This meant that the camera was also entrusted with delineating social appearance, classifying the face of criminality and lunacy, offering racial and social stereotypes. In one of few histories to investigate the photograph neither primarily as image nor as technology, Alan Thomas in The Expanding Eye considers ways in which early uses of photography reflect and reinforce nineteenth-century concerns. Centred upon Victorian Britain, his account focuses on the popularisation of photography both in terms of uses of photographs (it is one of the first accounts to give a whole chapter to photography as family chronicler) and in terms of representation of the everyday. Thus he includes discussion of personal uses of photography in, for instance, the family album; portraiture (including theatre portraits); and photographs which investigate rural and urban working and living conditions. Likewise, Mary Warner Marien, in the publication which preceded her comprehen sive cultural history, critically considers the history of the idea of photography, its cultural impact and implications in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including discussion of the photograph within mass culture.
Alan Thomas (1978) The Expanding Eye: Photography and the Nineteenth-Century Mind, London: Croom Helm.
Mary Warner Marien (1997) Photography and Its Critics, A Cultural History, 1839–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
One of the consequences of extensive social change was a series of social surveys, which were designed to try to understand further how different social groups responded to the changing times and sought explanation through the quantitative assembly of information. In 1851 the Great Exhibition celebrated industrial and technological achievement. In that same year, the British Census recorded differences in work status and living circumstances.15 The motivation for the Victorian survey was not simply academic. Also in 1851 Henry Mayhew published his London Labour and London Poor. This first survey of living conditions was illustrated with wood engravings based upon photo graphs, and therefore stands as an early example of the photograph being used as documentation. It became common for authenticity to be stressed through using such phrases as ‘drawn from an original photograph’. The photo graphic image was already being mobilised as witness.
In the 1970s and 1980s a number of academics and critics became centrally interested in the institutional structures through which photography functioned. They replaced a primary concern with the immanent image with the study of the ways in which photography was caught up in the social articulation of power and control.
John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, London: Macmillan.
John Tagg has written extensively on the uses of photography within power relations, noting that photographs became implicated in surveillance very early on. He employs the genealogical method typical of the work of French philosopher, Michel Foucault. In The Burden of Representation Tagg traces intersecting ways in which photography was involved in maintaining social class hierarchies through delineation of, for instance, prisoners or the poor. He insists on the need to trace the complex relations between repre sentation, knowledge and ideology in terms that take account of fundamental class interests at stake. In his essay ‘The Currency of the Photograph’ (Burgin 1982) Tagg focuses on what he terms ‘the prerequisites of realism’. His title metaphorically references the notion of the photograph as symbolic exchange, while simultaneously referring to the values implicated in such an exchange. Thus he discusses the relationship of the photograph to reality, the constitution of photographic meaning, the social utility of photographs, and the institutional frameworks within which they are produced and consumed. This work has been criticised by writers who argue that, in teasing out the structures through which photography creates and sustains meaning, these critics neglected the primary object of study – the photograph itself. Ian Jeffrey puts it this way:
Historians in the 1970s tried to take account of the new persuasiveness of photography by drawing on the work of the French theorists, Foucault and Lacan in particular. Foucault, with his interests in management and surveillance, stimulated attention to photographic recording, with respect to prisoners and marginal. Unfortunately, the new historians were more devoted to their theory sources than they were to the material in question. The result was a macaronic writing, splintered by attention to an excess of sanctified theoretical texts. All the same, the determination to broaden the scope of photographic studies was admirable.
(Jeffrey 2001)
Michel Foucault
(1926–1984) One of the most influential of French philosophers of recent times. He enjoyed a distinguished career as a scholar and academic which culminated in his appointment as Professor in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. In the 1960s Foucault rejected humanism and philosophies of consciousness and set about the construction of a new kind of critical theory. His concerns were with the way in which specific social institutions and practices construct the objects and forms of knowledge and help to determine our human subjectivity. Some key works in this project are, in English translation: The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970); The Archeology of Knowledge (1972); The Birth of the Clinic (1973); Discipline and Punish (1977); The History of Sexuality (1978).
However, reappraisals of the uses of photography within social anthropology, and within the records of colonial travellers implicated in European imperialism, have drawn attention to the political and ideological implications of using photography to define social types viewed as different or Other. As a number of critics have variously observed, such definitional uses of the image contribute to legitimating colonial rule (Edwards 1992). Furthermore, as Sarah Graham-Brown has argued, there is a complex interplay between imperialism and patriarchy, within which women become particular sorts of exoticised victims of the stereotyping of the colonial Other (Graham-Brown 1988).
Elizabeth Edwards (ed.) (1992) Photography and Anthropology 1860–1920, New Haven: Yale University Press. An impressive collection of essays on the subject which takes advantage of access to key archives including the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, where Edwards was Curator of Photography.
See ch. 4, pp.196–201.
In his ‘The Body and the Archive’ (1986), photographer and critic Allan Sekula traces the attempts of Victorian men of science to delineate, record and classify particular ‘types’ of human being (Sekula 1986). They used physiognomy and phrenology to show that it was possible to read from the surface of the body the inner delineation and moral character of the subject being studied. They employed the developing science of statistics in order to demonstrate that science – aided by one of its new tools, the seemingly impartial eye of the camera – would reveal and systematically record the varieties of criminal faces.
In this complex article Sekula is particularly interested in photography’s relation to police procedures, but mad people and native peoples from other cultures were similarly subjected to processes of measurement and scentific appraisal. In 1869 T.H. Huxley was asked to make a photographic record of people from a number of races:
Huxley … was asked … by the Colonial Office to devise instructions for the ‘formation of a series of photographs of the various races of men comprehended within the British Empire’. The system he conceived called for unclothed subjects to be photographed full- and half-length, frontally and in profile, standing in each exposure beside a clearly marked measuring stick. Such photographs reproduced the hierarchical structures of domination and subordination inherent in the institutions of colonialism.
(Pultz 1995b: 24–5)
But a number of further issues beg attention in considering surveillance, social survey and other ‘mapping’ usages of photography. In referring to the photograph as ‘fugitive testimony’, Barthes draws our attention to the fleeting nature of the moment captured in the photograph and the extent to which contemporary experience (we are looking back with eyes informed by circumstances and ways of thinking of the 1990s when this book was first conceived), along with limited knowledge of the specific context within which – and the purpose for which – the photograph was taken, make the image an unreliable witness. Photography is involved in the construction of history. But when photographs are presented as ‘evidence’ of past events and circumstances, a set of assumptions about their accuracy as documents is being made. Such assumptions are usually acknow ledged through statements of provenance: dates, sources, and so on. But this is to ignore wider questions relating to visual communication and ways in which we interpret photographs.
Not all accounts of history are of a formal kind and over several decades photography has been used by those who want to construct history around the notion of ‘popular memory’. Here the photographs are often of a personal nature, through which communities might begin the process of establishing their own non-formal history; accounts which might well challenge or be oppositional to more official versions. One problem with this is that photographs have often been treated as though they really were a source of disinterested facts, rather than as densely coded cultural objects:
Ultimately, then, when photographs are uncritically presented as historical documents, they are transformed into aesthetic objects. Accordingly, the pretence to historical understanding remains although that understanding has been replaced by aesthetic experience.
(Sekula 1991: 123)
We should note that the ability of photographs to inform us about the processes and narratives of history is challenged by the fact that they are, in themselves, constructed objects. Debates about the loss of facticity in the manipulated digital world are only the latest iteration of a debate about the photography’s relationship to the real. Sarah Kember asked:
Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always already lost in the act of representation?
(Kember 1998: 17)
One answer to this question is that human beings have, over a long time, invested a great deal of psychic energy in the notion of photography’s ‘realism’.
This requires us to recognise that photography is part of a scopic regime that is far wider and has a much longer history. We must consider the cultural identity of the ‘viewer’ who sees with the centred, focused eye of the camera, a way of seeing shaped over centuries.
At the centre of this history of Western visuality stands the humanist self.This is a conception of the human subject who is understood to be the rational centre of the world and the prime agent in seeking its meaning and establishing its order. The humanist subject searches for certain and objective knowledge.
In her own reflection on the question, Kember stresses that this subject and this scopic regime are part of a larger scientific system and mode of enquiry, ‘fashioned in Enlightenment philosophy and by Cartesian dualism and perpectivalism’ (1998: 23). It is a system in which the viewer is understood as a centred, knowing subject coaxing information from a passive supine nature. She reminds us that however dominant this rational-scientific system and the centred humanist subject became over a period of some 500 years, this position was always unstable and gendered. It was gendered because typically the ‘knowing subject’ was figured as male and ‘supine nature’ as female.
It was unstable, because it was a system that depended upon (and was simultaneously troubled by) a desire to exercise power and control over nature and over others. Seen in this context we can understand that our ‘panic’ about the computer’s threat to photography’s realism does not actually take place at the level of the image itself. It is cultural panic over the potential loss of our centred, humanist selves, with our ‘dominant and as yet unsuccessfully challenged investments in the photographic real’ (op cit. 18). The perceived threat is to our subjectivity, where a more fundamental fear is triggered which concerns ‘the status of the self or the subject of photography, and … the way in which the subject uses photography to understand the world and intervene in it’ (loc cit).
Photography, accordingly, depends not only on its technology or the way it ‘looks’ but also upon our historical, cultural and psychic investment in it as a way of seeing and knowing. It affords us a position, an identity, a sense of power, and it promises to fulfil a desire for security.
If our psychic responses to images, formed within particular regimes of the visual, have been important in determining how we understand photographs, so have the social and institutional forms that have structured them.
The history of photography is to a large extent shaped by the characteristic ways in which photographs have been collected, stored, used and displayed. With the passage of time the original motive for the making of a photograph may disappear, leaving it accessible to being ‘re-framed’ within new contexts.
The extraordinary growth in the use of cameras in mobile phones means that both personal memories and political events are being directly inscribed as images, and almost instantly published on social networks and websites. The ways in which this will change the manner in which history is recorded and understood can, at the moment, only be guessed at, but it is clear that that the photographic visual will be of primary interest.
Let us assume that a photograph of a homeless, unemployed man, published in a 1930s magazine to advance some philanthropic cause, is shown, massively enlarged, on the walls of a gallery decades after it was first made. Originally tied to the page with a caption and an explanatory text, it now stands alone as some kind of art object. How are we to read such an image? As an example of a genre? For its technical qualities? As part of the oeuvre of a distinguished practitioner? As a work of art, or as an historical object which conveys specific information or exemplifies ‘pastness’? Do we try to make sense of it in terms of its distance from our own lives, or because there are many similarities to prevailing conditions? Do we try to read through the image some notion of human nature, of how, regardless of political context or the specificity of time, it would feel to be destitute and suffering? Or do we see it merely as a photograph, one among many and to be distinguished in terms of its formal, aesthetic qualities rather than its relationship to a world outside itself?
The very ubiquity of the medium has meant that photographs have always circulated in contexts for which they were not made. It is also important to remember that there is no single, intrinsic, aboriginal meaning locked up within them. Rather, there are many ways in which photographs can be read and understood, but in ‘reading’ photographs we rely on many contextual clues which lie outside the photography itself. We rarely encounter photographs in their original state, for we normally see them on hoardings, in magazines and newspapers, as book covers, on the walls of galleries or on the sides of buses. Their social meanings are already indicated to us and they are designed into a space, often accompanied by a text that gives us the preferred readings of their producers and allows us to make sense of what might otherwise be puzzling or ambiguous images. Indeed, commercial uses of photography, especially in advertising, often play on the multiple possible connotations that are provoked by the image.
Increasingly, our access to photographs is online, and new kinds of contextual format are being created. In these hybrid forms there is little sense of an image that is carefully framed and contextualised. Photographic images are hauled in from many sources; they are cropped, altered, distorted or enhanced with little respect for the original. Here, we need to look at the unceasing flow of images as an interesting new form.
Nevertheless, it remains the case that a major determinant of the way in which we understand photographs is the context within which we view them, and key institutions shape the nature of photography by the way they provide this context. This approach to understanding photography was particularly influential in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s and was central to the concerns of a number of magazines at that time, pre-eminently Ten/8 and Camerawork (Evans 1997). As was argued, photographs are weak at the level of imminent meaning and depend for their decoding on text, surrounding, organisation, and so on. Although collections of photographs have always been assembled, photography’s ambig u ous status with regard to Art has often meant that they were not displayed in museums as objects in themselves, but rather, used as a source of supplementary information to some more valued objects.
Jessica Evans (ed.) (1997) The Camerawork Essays, London: Rivers Oram. Includes 15 essays originally printed in Camerawork between 1976 and 1985.
Around the world there are now moves to bring together museums, libraries and archives. This is, in part, a response to the development of digital technologies and the implied promise of online access to every artefact. Any study of the use of photographs within conventional museums will tell us much about their status and function over time. From the earliest days they were used to record and illustrate other objects, but found no place in major collections in their own right. This status was gradually accorded to them during the twentieth century.
Not all critics have unequivocally celebrated this change. Most notably Douglas Crimp has argued that the entry of photographs into the privileged space of the museum stripped them of the multiple potential meanings with which they are invested. They were removed from the many realms within which they made sense, in order to stress their status as separate objects – as photographs. Crimp is particularly interested in the work of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in transforming photographs into objects of merely aesthetic attention. He is not alone in drawing attention to the way in which MOMA embraced photographs as art objects, brought them into the privileged space of the gallery and surrounded them with the apparatus of scholarship, appreciation and connoisseurship formerly reserved for paintings and sculptures.
Douglas Crimp (1995) On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A collection of key essays originally published in October and other journals.
But Crimp also examined the practice of the New York Public Library which, becoming aware of the number of photographs it possessed and of their historic and financial value, created a Department of Photography. They scoured all sections of the huge library for a trawl of photographs, which were removed from multitudinous subject areas and reclassified as photo graphs, often under the individual photographer.16 Crimp comments of photography that:
Thus ghettoized it will no longer primarily be useful within other discursive practices; it will no longer serve the purposes of information, documentation, evidence, illustration, reportage. The formerly plural field of photography will henceforth be reduced to the single, all-encompassing aesthetic.
(Crimp 1995: 75)
What is lost in this process is the ability of photography to create information and knowledge through its interaction with other discourses. Photographs, doomed to the visual solitude of the art object, lose their plurality and their ability to traverse fields of meaning. They are treated as though they are unique and singular, rather than as the kind of industrial object – capable of being multiply reproduced – that constitutes their real existence.
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart “Mixed Box” in ELIZABETH EDWARDS and JANICE HART Eds) (2004) Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London: Routledge.
The idea that the defining feature of photography is to be found in photographs’ ability to be endlessly reproduced derives from Walter Benjamin’s important essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). More recently there has been an increased interest in the materiality of the photograph. Its physical existence and the kinds of questions that can be asked about the material on which it has been reproduced, and the nature of the processes through which it came into existence. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart have drawn attention to the fact that while scholars have analysed the taxonomic meaning and functions of archives within the museum the material objects themselves that make up ‘the archive’ have been largely invisible, natural ised within institutional structure, their own social biographies as objects obscured and denied precise critical attention (Edwards and Hart 2004: 48).
In Steven Hoelscher (ed.) (2013) Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World, Austin: University of Texas Press, vii.
In addition to photographs that can be found alongside other exhibits in museums, there are also, of course, specialist photographic archives. These, too, now function digitally with only specialist researchers examining the material photograph itself. These often have a particular resonance as an archive of representation is consulted both for the things it shows and for the way in which it shows them. Describing the now digitised Magnum archive Geoff Dyer pertinently says:
The Magnum archive presents a constantly shifting, mutually illuminating relationship between what is depicted and how it is depicted. It records a world history of events while simultaneously enacting and demonstrating an incomplete history of photography, of the way the medium and the uses to which it has been put have developed over time: the aesthetic imperatives and choices that have shaped our ideas of what constitutes news, a story, a photograph.
One of the advantages of access to archives is that many people have found this an easy way to research their own and family history, which has made many more people familiar with the working of at least some archives. At the same time, many artists have a new interest in making work that draws on or responds to archives of older images. Jane Connarty comments on the importance of the archive for art practice in the following terms:
The themes of history and memory have been central to cultural production and discourse through much of the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Photography, film and the archive are associated with the concept of memory, functioning as surrogate, or virtual sites of remembrance, or as metaphors for the processes of recalling the past. The experience of viewing archival photographic prints or film can have a seductive, even spellbinding effect on the viewer; their material and aesthetic qualities acting as a trigger to memory, evoking a sense of time and nostalgia, or conjuring fantasies of history.
(Connarty and Lanyon 2006: 7)
The power of the photographic archive was central to Allan Sekula’s article ‘Reading an Archive’ (1991). There are, of course, many different kinds of archive, from those held in museums to commercial or historical collections or family albums. They are found in libraries, commercial firms, museums and private collections. What they have in common is the fact that they heap together images of very different kinds and impose upon them a homogeneity that is a product of their very existence within an archive. The unity of an archive, he argues, is imposed by ownership of the objects themselves and of the principles of classification and organisation by which they are structured.17
This contrast between the material form of the photograph and that of the digital image is one of the challenges that face those people who are constructing museums that will archive and display digital works alongside more conventional artefacts.
For a critical account of these processes, see: FIONA CAMERON AND SARAH KENDERDINE (eds) (2007) Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Of course, artists have also explored the importance of materiality in photography in interesting ways. For example, Mohini Chandra’s interesting collection shows the backs of her family photographs with studio stamps, handwritten notes and explanatory glosses, but does not reveal the photographs themselves. MOHINI CHANDRA (2001) Album Pacifica, London: Autograph
Photographs of many kinds, which may have been taken for different – perhaps even antagonistic – purposes, are brought together: ‘in an archive, the possibility of meaning is “liberated” from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context’ (Sekula 1991: 116). But archives play an important function in the creation of knowledge. Characteristically, an archive seeks to grow; it aspires to completeness and through this process of mass acquisition a kind of knowledge emerges:
And so archives are contradictory in character. Within their confines meaning is liberated from use, and yet at a more general level an empiricist model of truth prevails. Pictures are atomized, isolated in one way and homogenized in another.
(Sekula 1991: 118)
But if serious historians have sometimes neglected to read photographs in the complex way they deserve, the heritage industry has used photography as a central tool in its attempt to reconstruct the past as a site of tourist pleasure. Here, photography becomes a direct way through which our experience of the past is structured.
John Taylor (1994) A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Many critics have been worried by, or contemptuous of, the touristic use of historical materials and of the function of the visual. For example, Donald Horne claims that photography is an essential part of the tourist experience because it allows us to convert the places we visit into signs which we can then possess. Photography, he suggests:
offers us the joys of possession: by taking photographs of famous sites and then, at home, putting them into albums or showing them as slides, we gain some kind of possession of them. For some of us this can be the main reason for our tourism. Between them, the camera and tourism are two of the uniquely modern ways of defining reality.
(Horne 1984: 12)
Similarly, Robert Hewison argues:
Heritage is gradually effacing history, by substituting an image of the past for its reality. At a time when Britain is obsessed by the past, we have a fading sense of continuity and change, which is being replaced by a fragmented and piecemeal idea of the past constructed out of costume drama on television, re-enactments of civil war battles and mendacious celebrations of events such as the Glorious Revolution, which was neither glorious nor a revolution.
(Hewison in Corner and Harvey 1990: 175)
This is brought into particular focus in ch. 2, on documentary, and ch. 3, on personal photography.
Now the archive is raided not for photographs as aesthetic objects, but for photographs as signifiers of past times. Blown up from their original proportions, sepia-toned and hung on gallery walls, or recycled as advertising imagery, photographs retain their implicit claim to authenticity. This kind of commodification of the image continues to raise complex questions about how history is constructed and photographs employed to visualise the past.
