SOCIAL ABSTRACTION AND REAL ABSTRACTION
In this half of the book I want to focus on the question of abstraction and violation. If the figural suppression of the index is a violation of photography’s social ontology, the catachresistic relationship between the figural and the nonfigural is mediated in turn by the overlapping forces of social abstraction (the material and symbolic structures of domination expressed in the heteronomous character of the built environment, the social divisions of the landscape, and the repetitive, inertial logic of commodity relations) and real abstraction (the organization of production and consumption through the discipline of the value-form, the internalization and naturalization of the value-form as “free competition”).1 In other words the two competing and overlapping pathways of figural and nonfigural photographic practices are a consequence of these inertial and heteronomous forces of the commodity form on photography. For despite the sense of photography as an expanding and pullulating system (in Azoulay’s sense), the photographic document has invariably imagined and experienced itself as constrained: constrained by the index, constrained by pictorialism, constrained by photographic two-dimensionality, and constrained by photographic spontaneity, but most acutely and paradoxically constrained by photography’s truth-telling powers itself. Just as the material truth of the event is never quite secured by the photograph, the reception and circulation of these would-be provisional or “failed” photographs are always prevented from finding their audience, in some instances through direct censorship, but more commonly through the residual expulsion of the photograph from the symbolic through the nonsymbolic labor (reifying work) of the circuits of mass culture. Most nonphotographic images or artworks don’t feel these pressures so profoundly, because their audience requirements are not based on the empathic and relational drive of the social ontology of the photograph: the need to exchange knowledge in the here and now, to bear witness, to break the continuum of appearances. Anxiety about art’s marginalization is not a condition of art’s sense of immediate expectation: whatever audience the artwork may find will be found later rather than sooner. So the penetration of social abstraction and real abstraction into the production and reception of the photograph finds a profound anxiety and frustration in relation to where the photograph goes and how “speedily” it reaches its destination or destinations. This is why so many photographers give up trying to master the relational and empathic codes of the document altogether and move into other photographic modes and into the studio and the figural. For the figural, above all else, guarantees a notional control over the event that helps to diffuse this anxiety over the photograph’s indeterminate temporal life. The time of the photodocument as it tries to find a position for itself in the circuits of commodity exchange invariably cannot compete with the accelerating and self-forgetting temporality of real abstraction itself: the ferocious turnover of the commodity as the luxuriant and sensuous life of the image under capitalism-become-image (hence the recent emergence, as I discuss below, of the category of “aftermath” photograph as a critical compensation for this). The social ontology of photography, then, has to live in and shape a destiny for itself, inside the forces of real abstraction and social abstraction as a matter of common practice. So although, I insist below and in the next chapter on the ways in which photography continues to resist, mediate, and challenge abstraction, there is no photography—no photographic imaginary—that lives, or might live, on the other side of its effects. The challenge to abstraction, then, cannot be conducted outside of abstraction, as if abstraction were a mere excrescence or supplement, for social abstraction and real abstraction as the constitutive forms of commodity relations precede thought. “The essence of the commodity abstraction…. is that it is not thought-induced; it does not originate in men’s minds but in their actions.”2 However, the forces of abstraction are not themselves abstract, they have a history, and a particular violent and accelerated history over the last eighty years.3 This is why the defeat of social modernism in the 1930s is so significant, for it was a victory not just of liberal pluralism over leftist political content, but of the corporate rights of image-makers and distributors to further open up popular image production to capital accumulation. Since the 1950s, consequently, the deflected, broken, repressed temporality of the photographic has been a primary consideration of photography’s life inside the exigencies of abstraction. In addition this is also why the documentary tradition’s crisis has primarily been a crisis of its relationship to the (historical) event. If documentary practice cannot act directly in the name of the event—if it cannot freely report the worldly event back to the world—then why continue to talk of documentary practice as an agent of change?
Firstly, then, let us look at how photography has constructed its relationship to the “event” under these conditions.
THE “SINGULAR EVENT” AND THE NONSYMBOLIC
What has distinguished the claims for photography’s temporal distinctiveness across its fields of practice and its ideological domains over the last one hundred years has been the photograph’s connection to what was once commonly known as the “decisive moment,”4 or here, what I will call, for my purposes, “singular event.” In bringing a reflective stillness to the contingencies of a passing scene or to the movement of bodies, the photograph exercises what we might call the hidden or spontaneous powers of convergence. Indeed, these powers of convergence represent the veridical core of reportage and the photodocument since the 1900s, shaping photography’s public emergence as a “truth-telling” medium. In this respect Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” has the virtue of identifying what is crucial to the photodocument’s powers of convergence: the photographer’s existential proximity to the world. But for my purposes here, by “singular event” I mean something quite different, or more conceptually capacious, than Cartier-Bresson’s notion. For Cartier-Bresson the “decisive moment” has a precise formal content. The “decisive moment” does not represent the imagined moment of temporal intensity of the prephotographic event—its peak—but rather, more circumspectly, the moment of temporal conjunction, the moment when the internal elements of an observed scene appear, subjectively, to cohere pictorially. In this way photography’s powers of reflective stillness are subject to a highly subjectivized account of convergence. The “good” photograph lies in getting the “decisive moment” right. This is why the “decisive moment” was so favored by modernist critics of photography: it allowed photography’s spontaneous powers of convergence to be fetishized as evidence of the “photographer’s eye.” My understanding of “event” here refers more generally to what happens to the “decisive moment,” as the moment of imagined convergence, and as a space of historical disclosure. That is, how the “event” of the photographic process—photography’s cut into the continuum of experience, its temporal “pulls,” so to speak—constitutes the “event” of the photograph, how these “pulls” constitute the syntax of photography’s historicity. In other words, the photograph’s essential contingency and contemporaneity recover for us the “pastness” of the past and—as the discursive life of the image unfolds in time—the moment’s historical textuality. This is why the historical particulars of the photograph have always had a privileged relationship to the representation of the event as a form of historical knowledge. Once edited and cropped or transformed by a text or in juxtaposition with other images, the “singular event” is open to systematic meaning.
Today, though, this sense of the event for photography—or the notion of photography as an event—no longer appears to be available to photography in quite the same way. This is reflected most immediately in photography’s transformed relationship to its own critical history, in particular documentary practice. Much of the debate on reportage, realism, the photodocument, photojournalism, and the snapshot now takes place in the artworld, which has been the key site of photographic production and theory since the 1980s. Currently there is little critical theorization of the photographic image as a form of historical practice outside of this context. Even Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography focuses primarily on artists’ engagement with documentary modes. However, this is not to say that documentary photographers or photojournalists, or reportorial image-makers have all become artists (although some have, as I discuss below), or that they do not still work according to (some of) the critical demands of realism, or that significant numbers of photographs within these traditions are not being produced and being seen in commercial and nonart contexts (for instance, the revival of Mass-Observation strategies through the Internet discussed in the last chapter), or that no photojournalists manage to get their photographs in the Sunday supplements, or that no interesting work is being done in the area of “scientific” imaging. But rather, it is to say that these images, overall, have no public circulation as part of what we have already discussed as the decline of documentary-image culture. My contention, then, is that in the wake of the demise of this culture and the theoretical extension of art-as-photography, there has been a contraction in the temporal efficacy of the photodocument. Photography no longer believes it speaks to the moment. This loss of symbolic space and distinction, of critical “immediacy,” is, of course, at one level a consequence of long-term political and social transformations: with the decomposition of (an older) class politics since the 1980s, documentary culture is no longer available to so confidently speak to collective working-class interests or the interests of the dominated, and to therefore link the “event” to its public representation. But, perhaps more significantly, this process of decomposition is ideologically overdetermined by the extensive penetration of the commodity form (through photography) into everyday experience and thus the increasing cultural valorization of the photodocument as blank “information.” As Vilém Flusser puts it—in many ways summarizing the general argument on social abstraction for photography—the imagined transparency of photography under the universal expansion and dominance of the commodity form lies in the fact that its naturalism is held to be “nonsymbolic,”5 that is, to be without any discernible, embedded “textuality” or connection to external social and historical forces. The image, in its perceived neutrality or functionality (in illustrated magazines, technical journals, pornography, and so on), appears to be “free” of the demands of conceptualization, of the need for interpretation and judgment. The resilience of the nonsymbolic, therefore, despite the successful critique of this naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s within photographic culture and the institutions of higher education,6 expresses one of the binding actions of late capitalist reification: the convergence of an increasingly depoliticized public culture and the functional requirement of commodity culture to continually displace and overrun (nonfunctional) spaces of reflection and engagement; in other words, in mass culture the nonsymbolic tends to crowd out the symbolic.
However, if the naturalizing force of the nonsymbolic is residual and prereflective, it is not simply exclusionary. In many instances it is actually inclusionary and productive, insofar as the photograph interpellates the viewer as one who is presumed to know historically, on the basis of what is already commonly known historically. In this respect, the naturalization of the popular photograph also operates, on another level, through a process of circular confirmation. The photographic referent is assumed, isomorphically, to be an index of the historical event or narrative that the photograph is taken to be an exemplary representation of. This, of course, is the outcome of the place of preformatting within the nonsymbolic functions of the photograph: the tendency for our experience of the historicity of the photograph (and thus the historical process) to be based on a limited and normative set of generic categories: “the horrors of war,” “ethnic conflict,” “national identity,” “the community.” These generic conditions of meaning are very powerful, and now have become largely invisible, operating as the “vanishing mediators” of ruling editorial interests and perceptions. This, in turn, generates a further process of generic preselection when the photograph is “called up” from the archives as part of historical narration. The production of a historical narrative or historical sense is formed through a given hierarchy of key photographically mediated moments, for instance, the construction of “1960s-ness” from such core elements as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, hippies and yippies, Pop culture, and the moon landing, and so on. This generic (and USled) mortification of history, then, is subsumed by the general ideological conditions of the nonsymbolic. The reduction of the historical to the preselection of these events is held to be self-evident and noncontentious—the history “of our times”—and, therefore, without need of any further comment or support.7
This naturalizing of photography’s “history effect” is precisely that which defines Barthes’s early account of myth.8 But today the naturalization of the photograph is brought to a further pitch of intensity with the vast expansion of the nonsymbolic functions of the photograph and the concomitant narrowing of photography’s channels of distribution. This has produced a culture of the image in which the naturalizing apparatuses of the dominant ideology (presently neoliberalism) reproduce and extend the nonsymbolic across all domains of image-production. Furthermore, this is articulated and reinforced by the extensive technical transformations that have overtaken photography since the 1990s. One of the most obvious of these transformations is the vastly increased diffusion and mutability of the image under the network flow of video-fication and digitalization. This has resulted, crucially, in the severe narrowing of reportage and documentary photography within the circulation of social meaning, placing a further strain on the idea of the photograph as the place where the flow of nonsymbolic “information” stops and critical exchange begins. Where documentary practice could claim, even up to the late 1970s, some residual connection to political praxis and the social process (certainly in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Latin America), today this has been eroded by the depoliticized formatting of documentary and reportage. The would-be democracy of the Internet has not changed this, despite the revival of Mass-Observation–type practices such as lomography and indymedia. Lomography and indymedia and similar initiatives are excellent at circulating images. But one of the paradoxes of the current period is that a huge number of images circulate, but few images take on a discursive and political life beyond their passing moment of consumption. This is not helped by the social pathologies of the Internet itself: its tendency to increase the fetishistic content of formatting and genre in its widespread identification of the real and authentic—in the “intimate” spaces of the blog—with the sexually transgressive, culturally grotesque, and socially adventitious, which further crowd out the social-relationality of the photodocument. Similarly the rise of new forms of mass photography needs to be offset by the new realm of surveillance and insecurity about photography on the street, which has been reinforced by an increasing popular awareness and sensitivity toward photography as intrusive and “objectifying.” The democratic resistance to being photographed without acknowledgment—as a basic right—and the desire to photograph in one’s own name (and in turn to be photographed with one’s consent) at the same time create a huge aversion to what we might call the first two avant-garde principles of documentary practice: first, the notion that the photographer steps into the experience of the everyday unannounced in order to tell the truth of the appearance and flux of division, conflict, and daily oblivion; and second, the notion that the photographer is part of a collective space in which the photographer and his or her subjects share a public and visible modernity.
The latter in a sense is the basis of all street-photography from the 1920s, reflected in the widespread drive on the part of the photographer from the 1920s to the 1960s to see photography as a transformative intervention into the continuum of daily appearances. As Dziga Vertov declared in 1922, reportorial photography and film represent first and foremost the “art of movement,”9 in which photographer and filmmaker inhabit and move with and through the crowd, just as Siegfried Kracauer declaimed in his essay “Photography” in 1929, “The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters, but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself,”10 and as such where the photographer as natural flaneur is most at home. Similarly, in 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson announced famously in The Decisive Moment, “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve it in the art of living,”11 as if to suggest that the photographer, the street, and photographic truth are inextricably fused. Now, these three examples represent very different and critical moments in the history of photography’s relationship to the avant-garde and modernism (let us not forget that for Vertov, as for Rodchenko and other revolutionary street-photographers, the life of the street was inseparable from the action and dynamism of the working class and the display of its power); but nevertheless, they all pinpoint a social and cultural continuity between photography’s capacity to move with a kind of unguarded and probing sensitivity and acuity into everyday life and the energy of the street. Today this has broken down, for the reasons mentioned above, to the point where the presence of the professional or amateur photographer moving freely through the crowd unannounced is perceived as a direct threat, or if not a direct threat, then at least an indirect threat identifiable with the action of someone who is considered to be, shall I say, eccentric or untrustworthy. For who takes a photograph unannounced? Either the police or someone who appears to want to photograph no one but strangers and, therefore, who seems to be acting in a way similar to the clandestine actions of the police themselves. One contemporary photographer who has directly addressed the crisis of the photographer as an unannounced stranger is Bruno Serralongue. He works for newspapers without official documentation, taking photographs of demonstrations, strikes, and political events at their margins, operating as a “distant witness.”12
The singularly important role of photography to arrive unannounced, therefore, is presently caught between photography’s two most powerful socially legitimizing forces: its role as a form of state surveillance and its role as a socializing and consensual force inside and outside of the family. Thus photography occurs all the time on the streets of cities globally; there are probably more images taken on the street than ever before, but these images are largely taken on cell phones, and are invariably the focus for shared moments between known individuals. People familiar to one another photograph one another in close view of one another as part of an exchange of image as commemorative or diaristic tokens. Indeed, cell phone technology actually encourages this approach: the quick, impulsive photograph taken at close range as a repetitive act of affection or daily record between friends, family, and acquaintances.
This production of a mass photography within the bounds of these forms of microsociability, then, reflects another aspect to the crisis of documentary culture as a social practice: street photography is now the space of diverse clusters of image-production and image-exchange directed toward the maintenance of small social networks that help to push the intrusive and socially directed photographer and socially directed photography out of the public arena into the realms of the pathological and criminal. As such, using a camera freely on one’s own rather than a cell phone socially as part of a group with another person, the photographer is invariably confronted with a question: why are you taking a photograph? Followed by: you can’t take photographs here. Now, of course, street photographers from Lewis Hine onward have invariably been asked the same question when they have arrived to take photographs for the purpose of embarrassing those in power. There is nothing unusual about photographers being turned away from areas that are sensitive to the interests of the powerful; and there is nothing new about radical photographers being criminalized. But the repeated asking of this question today seems to reflect a wider privatization of photographic culture as it comes into alignment with the technologies and modes of presentation and exchange of digitalization and the release of the self-image under celebrity culture: the social bond between photography and the life of the street that Vertov, Rodchenko, Kracauer, and Cartier-Bresson took for granted has been overtaken by the mass and diffuse exchange of images of self-commemoration. The link between cell phone photography and microsociability, consequently, has produced its own internal logic of surveillance: taking photographs outside of the domestic sphere reproduces its consensual borders through the form of tokens of enclosed self-representation.
This eradication of photography’s critical intimacy with the historical event—the event that is subject to exemplary and sustained political reading—is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Even at the height of the documentary movement in the 1930s, photography’s relationship to the event was not innocent of formatting and genre and the pressures of the nonsymbolic. The public emergence of photography starting in the 1900s, in fact, is a history of photography’s relentless struggle with the agents of distribution over what constitutes the “event” and therefore how the “event” is historicized and brought to visibility once it leaves the photographer’s hands. The problems encountered by the Farm Security Administration photographers at both the production level and once the images were in the hands of editors are a case in point. Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee, among many others, all suffered at the hands of editorial preformatting during the selection process for publication (“too political,” “too black,” “too miserable,” and so on).13 The production of historical representation—as the representations of the many—and the state’s ratification of the photo archive are interdependent. “There is no political power without the control of the archive, if not of memory,” to quote Derrida.14 However, what video-fication and digitalization have accelerated is the underlying process of this preformatting. In other words what video-fication and digitalization provide for the dominant nonsymbolic functions of the photograph is an easier passage through to the process of ideological naturalization (at the state level), as the rapid turnover of generic images becomes the sole criterion of newsworthiness, visibility, and profitability. In fact, at the point where photography now meets the horizon of its historic and long-range social and critical commitments (photojournalism, reportage, documentary practice), countersymbolic practices feel very much incidental to the dominant nonsymbolic effects of photography. Where once the symbolic (and countersymbolic) functions of these traditions exercised some public and critical leverage, they now appear increasingly derailed by these dominant forces. Indeed, it might be said that the critique of naturalism has actually contributed to this displacement. For although the critique of naturalism has been one of the critical and interdisciplinary successes of the academy over the last thirty years—releasing a huge amount of countersymbolic energy from below between 1975 and 1995—it has paradoxically also allowed the critique of photographic transparency to ally itself with a prevailing left-liberal critique of realism and documentary practice. That is, if naturalization had to be expunged from “thinking on photography” in order to wrest photography from the nonsymbolic, then realism and documentary, as the would-be political and historical “cognates” of this transparency, had to be excised as unwelcome and atavistic objects of desire; the crisis of photographic truth coming to stand synecdochically, in a period of general political retreat for the left, for the failure of the (modern) politicization of culture.15 In other words, one of the political consequences of the critique of photographic truth is that it has allowed an unfortunate conflation of realism and documentary with the nonsymbolic.
We are at a particular juncture, therefore, in which the old institutional arrangements are no longer operative. Yet, if the photo document has now effectively been separated from critical notions of realism, documentary culture, and the public sphere, this is not the whole story; and because it is not the whole story, we are in a position to ask how photographers might operate in this restricted climate and, moreover, what photography is now as a set of disparate and diffuse practices that gives some cultural specificity to a defense of the social ontology of photography. In this it requires us to briefly suspend our political narrative (indeed our preconceptions about the centrality of a certain kind of documentary ethos for photography) in order to look closely at photography’s relationship to technology and its technical history, because it is on the basis of a close analysis of how photography’s technological and technical history intersects with the categories of realism, documentary, and reportage that we will be able assess photography’s present and future critical possibilities. In this regard I want to focus on an issue I raised in chapter 3: namely, we mistake the political efficacy of documentary practice once we fail to recognize its relatively marginal position within the political economy of culture, even at the height of left-documentary practice in the 1930s. The crisis of documentary culture does not represent an absolute decline from a position of unassailable authority; and photography’s transformation and adaptation of its technologies and technics over the last eighty years tell us why this is the case.
THE CULTURAL FORM OF THE PHOTOGRAPH: PHOTOGRAPHY AS A HISTORICALLY SUBORDINATE PRACTICE
If the history of photography is a history of its struggle over how practitioners have defined and foregrounded the “event,” this struggle is inseparable from photographers’ use and adaptation of new photographic techniques. Thus, we can see pretty clearly—with the exception of photography’s very early history, when it had no technological competitors—the photographic document has actually been in a subordinate position to the dominant photographic technology of the last century and of this one—namely cinema. There is no history of photographic “realism,” “truth,” and the “symbolic” in the twentieth century—and therefore no conception of the “singular event”—without taking into account how the photographic both mediates and rises to the challenge of the moving image.16 Consequently, photography’s claims on “realism,” “truth,” and the “symbolic” are indivisible from the photodocument’s perceived technical inadequacies and limitations (which are very different from the assumption, in photographic naturalism, that the photographic document is the gateway to unmediated truth). Modernism in photography is born, therefore, at the point of modern photography’s crisis and self-doubt, and not as a reestablishment of the photograph’s would-be transparency.
Two things are identifiable from this antihistoricist account of the apparatus. Firstly, that the meanings of “realism,” “truth,” and the “symbolic” do not preexist the photographic apparatus, but are produced out of its retheorization in relation to an emergent dominant visual apparatus. Secondly, that the cultural functions of technically superseded apparatuses are never superseded en bloc; rather, their subordination becomes a means of reconfiguring what the apparatus is judged capable of accomplishing and what the dominant apparatus, in contrast, is thereby unable to accomplish. A superseded technical apparatus, consequently, does not disappear at all, but repositions itself, relationally, to the dominant apparatus, opening up a space for the reinvention of the cultural possibilities of the subordinate apparatus. This is clear from the history of photography’s relationship to cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the 1920s and the 1930s the photographic document radically reinvented its form and its understanding of its audience in the light of the new Russian and German cinema. Some photography directly mimicked the “cut” of cinematic form and became diegetic and sequential (as in the Soviet avant-garde), but, generally, photography defined its nascent modern identity in relation to the dominant sensorium of cinema.17 That is, photography opened up its working procedures to the interruptions of cinematic time and space. This is why from the 1920s to the 1980s photographers, whether they adopted a montage model of composite elements (after Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein) or simply invoked the contingencies of the “everyday,” largely labored within the cinematic paradigm of “expanded perception.” In this, Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” is itself an echo of this cinematic model; the photographer uses the convergent powers of the photograph in order to position the single image within an imaginative and dramatic continuum.
Thus the rise and demise of documentary culture are a profoundly heterodox and modernist experience. And, therefore, any notion of documentary culture’s dissolution has to recognize that the self-definition of the photodocument was, at key points, determined by its reflection on its own cultural subordination. Indeed, it is precisely photography’s increasing awareness of its subordination to film and mass culture that provides documentary practice with the intellectual and cognitive driving force of its retheorization in the 1930s. One significant example of this, as we have seen, is Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), another is Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document: Photographs, 1932–1940 (1939/1940), first published, in part, in Fortune (1939) and Look (1940). In the original preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, written in 1939, Agee reflects on the limitations of conventional documentary practice and on his own weaknesses as a would-be documentarist writer, as a spur to rethinking the formal challenges of documentary practice’s ethical commitments: “The effort is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis and defense.”18 It is film technique that stands behind this. Similarly, Siskind’s Harlem Document takes the cultural limitations of documentary practice as read in order to destabilize the conventional documentarist conflict between “bearing witness” and the making of convincing pictures; filmic and complex in structure, Harlem Document was produced from elaborate shooting scripts.19 This means that we need to keep the objective demise of documentary culture separate from the more tendentious notion that documentary culture is the place where the truth-telling powers of photography were once secured politically through a commitment to a stable photographic realism and then later eroded. For, it is precisely the confusion of the latter with the former that fuels much of the confused understanding of the political fate of the photodocument and documentary culture today. Just as documentary culture is separated from modernism in order to render it formally mute and therefore render its political demise more easily digestible, the arrival of digitalization is assumed to be antithetical to photography. This is not surprising, because digitalization is indeed a profoundly anticinematic and “antiphotographic” apparatus, leaving its effects less open to the kind of appropriation that would enable the photographer to sustain a working relationship with the craft of image-making. With its instant powers of diffusion and its immediate retrieval and miniaturization of the image (its rapid switch from big to small and vice versa), digitalization essentially destroys the to-be-looked-at-ness of the discrete photodocument, in turn further reinforcing the general conditions of distracted consumption of the naturalized image. Thus, where cinema and photography shared a cultural space in the first half of the twentieth century, despite photography’s subordinate role, photography and digitalization have in crucial respects diverged culturally.
This is expressed through a narrowing of how photography now views its historically subordinate position: on the one side, a defeated documentary culture and an erosion of the claims of the “singular event” that need to be mourned, and on the other, an aggressive and intrusive digitalization that needs to be tamed. One of the effects of this is that the adaptation and articulation of digital form within photography after the legacy of modernist-documentary practice (and the countersymbolic work of the 1980s and 1990s) have been highly conflicted and conservative. Thus, digitalization’s most ambitious and successful use has been in the work of artists who have wanted to extend the critique of photographic naturalism into the domain of photographic illusion (such as Wall and Andreas Gursky). Postproduction digital effects have become the means by which the real is self-consciously conjoined from discrete elements, transforming naturalism’s idea of the photograph as a neutral transcription of appearances into its very opposite: the figural (metaphoric) construction of the real, as in painting. Where this process of digitalization is less favored is among those documentary photographers who see the formal ambition of this painterly figuralization as appropriate to the new culture of the photograph, yet who see its reliance on the “staged” image as a further unwarranted diminishment of photography’s relationship to the event. In this they reassert the indexical integrity and authority of the photodocument in an attempt to secure the realist complexities of photographic space. Nevertheless, this process of differentiation remains a highly circumscribed one. This is not a return to documentary practice as traditionally conceived, for all the reasons outlined above. On the contrary, this is a photography of the event in which the event is displaced from its conditions of immediacy from the outset, so to speak. Indeed, we might say that this is a photography of the event, after-the-event.
All photographs, of course, are after-the-event, documentary and staged alike. The “singular event” always comes late, insofar as the singular event is part of a continuum of other “singular events.” There is no primary “singular event” to any given event, which defines and identifies that event. All the same, there is a clear sense that photography has arrived after-the-event to record what remains of the event, or what can be reconstructed from evidence that an event of significance or import has taken place. Essentially, this is a photography of the event-as-aftermath, and, as such, it tends to stress the ineluctability of the recent past through emphasizing the melancholic allure of photographic stillness. This kind of elegiac and mournful photography has a long history across its premodernist and modernist-documentary forms: Alexander Gardner, Roger Fenton, Mathew Brady, and Jacques-André Boiffard, through to Richard Misrach, Willie Doherty, and Joel Meyerowitz. But as David Campany has argued, this is much more than the recodification of one particular branch of reportorial and modernist-documentary practice, and therefore, much more than the reformulation of a genre. Rather, more broadly, it represents photography trying to reposition its relationship to the event in order to establish a new reportorial role for itself by making a case for the necessary lateness of the photograph. In a world of the diffuse and mutable image, of instant digital grabs, of the general crisis of documentary culture, of the cell phone snapshot, photography can only arrive—and perhaps more importantly should only arrive—late. “This is a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media.”20 Lateness, therefore, becomes a kind of virtue, the thing that digitalization and video-fication are unable or unwilling to secure, and indeed that they abhor. Thus, in the late photograph the subordinate function of the photodocument finds a new cultural function, unifying reportage, photojournalism, and documentary practice in a “posttraumatic” account of history and the event, as in the “war” photography of Luc Delahaye and Simon Norfolk. For, in arriving late to the scene of conflict, the bodies have largely gone.
SIMON NORFOLK AND LUC DELAHAYE: CONTEMPORARY “LATE PHOTOGRAPHY” AS THE “MILITARY SUBLIME”
It would be wrong to emphasize the emergence of this kind of photography as representing a general or systematic position among contemporary documentary photographers. In many instances the bodies quite obviously have not gone; and certainly in the case of Delahaye and many other postcombat photographers (such as Lori Grinker, Nina Berman, Tim Hetherington, James Nachtwey21), the dead or traumatized body, in many instances, still remains a primary focus of concern. For instance, a residual human presence distinguishes a number of Delahaye’s panoramic aftermath-photographs. These landscapes invariably include a figure or even a group of figures, but their presence is absolutely incidental to the evidential force of the photograph, indeed, they are invariably there simply as markers of scale and of the “void” produced by bombing, or of the devastating impact of natural disaster, as in Aftermath in Meulaboh (2005). Yet broadly, the notion that the body isn’t there or, if it is there, cannot or shouldn’t be freely assimilated into the space of photography does point to a significant change in orientation in how recent documentary photography thinks about its connectedness to the temporality of the event, in line with the things I have been saying so far about photography’s cultural subordination and the expansion of the nonsymbolic; and this has much to do with the perceived political limitations of documentary practice and photojournalism within the category of “late photography.” This is why this kind of “war” photography, for all its partiality, is particularly exemplary both for a discussion of lateness and for the politics of photography now. “War” photography—or more accurately the attempt to produce a photography of war—establishes a profound relationship to the conditions under which the production of the image find itself under capitalism, inasmuch as the demands for access and the hoped-for symbolization of the “singular event” highlight the exigencies of truth and realism as well as the requirements of the nonsymbolic (naturalization and censorship) within the system as a whole.
As Norfolk has declared in an interview, his former commitment to (leftist) photojournalism (particularly for the antifascist Searchlight magazine) entered a political crisis as the pressure to conform to the preformatting and genre was diminishing documentary photography’s relationship to any sense of cognitive complexity. In this, his turn to large-format, panoramic photographs of war zones “post-conflict” (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Palestine) was an attempt to reawaken a certain attentiveness—common in a lot of postdocumentary practice—in what he felt to be the lost or diminished spectator of photography. And, interestingly, it is the very absence of the human figure for Norfolk that allows him to resecure this spectator and by extension reestablish the repoliticization of the image.
I’m trying to stretch [the] idea of what a battlefield is…. It’s partly because of that that people aren’t there—but it’s also…for me, I think people gobble up the photograph. They become what the photograph is. For me, people just aren’t that important; it’s about this panoptic process, it’s about this kind of eavesdropping, it’s about this ability to look into every aspect of our lives. And I think if you put people into these, I don’t know—it would draw viewers away. It would draw viewers into the story of the people.22
So, the politicization lies in the conjunction and display of “inhuman” forces within the scan of the panoramic, which is also characteristic of Delahaye’s own move from photojournalism to a similar large-format “postconflict” landscape production. As with Norfolk, Delahaye’s disappointment in the transformative possibilities of photojournalism and the demise of photojournalism’s critical spectator led him to a photographic form that was directly, as he says, “incompatible with the economy of the press.”23 In this respect what links Delahaye’s and Norfolk’s move to, broadly speaking, the art-document is the way in which large-format photography is able to secure a cognitive delay in perception or, more precisely, to allow the spectator of photography to reconnect their absorption in the photodocument to a rare sublimity. Another kind of politicization enters the frame. The resecuring of photography’s politicization, far from being the recording of the event in all its intense and conflictual unfolding or instrumental horror (the moment of its heightened critical temporality), is identifiable with those incidents and details that emerge as a result of the atemporal recovery of the event.
THE ATEMPORALITY OF THE POSTPHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPH
Before the advent of the televisualization of the image in mass culture, photography and cinema functioned, in their respective reportorial roles, as the places around which collective meaning was formed and challenged. This generated a specific kind of photographic temporality: photographs were produced on the basis that they were able, irrespective of the ambivalence of any given sign, to generate a coherent political effect (“this happened,” or more accurately “this happened, but if you don’t believe me, ask him or her, who was also there,” to reiterate our discussion of Ricoeur).24 As I have stressed, this can no longer be guaranteed as a public act for photography, given the weakening of photography’s interventionist role and its dialectic appropriation of the cinematic model. This has led photography, as a consequence, to draw on that which it has tended to distrust as much as celebrate—its mournful powers of stasis—which places photography’s relationship to the event more generally in a precinematic space. A major outcome of this shift is a convergence between what is left of reportorial and documentary practices and the older painterly functions of photography. The late photograph in its elegiac and mournful modes not only tends to remove the body from the picture, but also identifies the political allegorically with the ruin and the remnant. Some aspects of postmodernism in the 1980s made a virtue of this,25 but here it functions not as a critique of photographic transparency, but as the place where photography openly declares its public and social limits.
Consequently, in “[foregoing] the process of the event and ceding it to other media,”26 this kind of photography breaks with much of the critical temporal language associated with photography’s appropriation of cinema. Gone is the notion of the photograph as an act of interruption, displacement, interrogation, rearticulation—of generalized movement and cognitive disruption, the avant-garde language of denaturalization—to be replaced by the photograph as a site of “glacial” contemplation, as if the splendor and beauty of Ansel Adams’s Yosemite pictures were the only available model for a workable and satisfying account of the event. The photodocument, then, seems to be clearing a space for itself in the face of innumerable political, cultural, and technological impediments. But if this move is not exactly the final resignation of documentary practice in the face of neoliberalism and digitalization, it does nonetheless point to a profound reassessment of photography’s subordinate cultural form: photography—the work seems to be saying—is at its most perspicacious and relevant when it foregrounds its mordant and memorial role. That is, photography is at its most potent and vivid when it claims back an allegiance with the detemporalizing effects of aesthetic experience (distantiation, “stepping back,” the precipitousness of the sublime) as against the discontinuities and contingencies, or cuts, of cinematic denaturalization. (The rise of the studio photograph in the 1980s is yet another, and obviously familiar, indication of this.) This is why it is harder these days to distinguish photojournalism and documentary practice from the artistic appropriation of the photodocument, because both sets of practices are increasingly reliant on this circumscribed notion of the event-as-aftermath.
Where does this assessment of lateness leave the place of the photodocument in the culture? Has photography ceded, in any meaningful sense, all its previous interrogatory functions? Has the event-before-the-aftermath of photography been lost irrevocably to video-fication and digital televisualization? Is the photodocument now profoundly internal to the figural functions of art in its mediation of its cultural subordination?
Well, we can’t analyze these questions outside of the current neoliberal political and cultural settlement. When I talk of the failure or unwillingness of recent photography to revivify and reimagine its subordinate cultural role, this is largely a political question that lies outside of what photography might or might not want to do, or imagines itself to be doing, within the present political economy of photography. Much photography is late photography now, and therefore outside of what we commonly regard as documentary culture, precisely because the critical and cognitive link between the photodocument and the transformation of social experience is suppressed, not just in the wake of the hegemony of the nonsymbolic, but as a result of the determination of the state to decouple where necessary the “singular event” from the political process, what Éric Alliez and Antonio Negri have rightly called neoliberalism’s “state management of nihilism.”27 The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most obvious and latest examples of this. (Although, of course, the digital image does not escape this process of censure and exclusion either; the photodocument is by no means alone in this, just as no war in the twentieth century, even the Vietnam war, has failed to prevent the photographer getting “close”). Yet, if the state management of nihilism has no space for the photograph—in any constructive and transformative sense—this does not mean that subordinate forms of cultural production, such as the photodocument, are thereby defined by these conditions. For, what the history of modernist culture under capitalism teaches us is that an experience of cultural subordination can also be a countervailing force for negation, liberation, and self-transformation. This is something that the argument for the lateness of late photography tends to miss.
The turn to the event-as-aftermath may relieve photography of some of the burdens of an older and critically over expectant documentary culture, but there is nothing to prevent photography using the freedom from these burdens to find other routes into the symbolic. This is why the atemporal conditions of the postphotography photodocument represent an instructive moment in the emergence of a new framework for the photodocument. That is, these new conditions of lateness enable the photographer to work through the representation of the event in ways that are internally complex, allowing the photodocument to reconnect with its sequential and diegetic modes of presentation. Thus, instead of opting for a melancholic closure of the event-as-aftermath, the event-as-aftermath can equally become a space for the discursive reconstruction and extension of the event. And this process of discursive reconstruction can, of course, be, in principle, infinite. The time-of-the-event, then, lies in the efficacy of the reconstructive process itself—there is no event outside of its symbolic reconstruction—and not in any imagined identification of photographic truth with the immediacy of the “singular event.” This does not obviate the empirical exclusions of lateness. Veridical content cannot be magicked back into existence. If the bodies are gone, the bodies are gone. If the face is not there to look back at us, the face is not there to look back at us. But nonetheless, this approach allows the atemporality of the photodocument now to be reconnected to a very different model of artistic/photographic practice and historical agency. In this respect another kind of cultural form for photography—for late photography—comes to mind. Instead of recalling the photodocument to a pictorial tradition of painting and (essentially) to the viewing conditions of the museum, the photodocument becomes the sequential and intertextual building block of a practice of reading within the archive.
THE LATENESS OF THE ARCHIVE
In the 1980s and 1990s work on the archive emphasized it as a productive machine for meaning. Archives were not simply incurious repositories of things, their neutral contents awaiting redeeming eyes and hands, but intellectually organized forms of rationalization. This is why state and public photographic archives were the objects of extended scrutiny during this period, because in the organization of their materials state archives made clear how archival referents were produced through the processes of archival accumulation and selection. Allan Sekula analyzes this in his work on nineteenth-century police photo archives: the “criminal” body—its modes of state recognition—is produced out of an endless accumulation and refinement of a predetermined criminal physiognomy, derived from the pseudosciences of phrenology and eugenics.28 What the positivism of this rationalization disguises is a doubling of reified truth. The truth of the photograph is produced twice: once as tendentious science and then as tendentious sociology. Sekula, though, is less interested here in the broader archival conditions of our culture itself: that is, how the archive is not just the instrumental expression of state power, but, in a culture given over to the rapid utilization and turnover of word and image, the organizing commodity-condition of image and text.29 The archive is precisely, then, what lies waiting for all images, particularly those—the majority—that achieve no sustained circulation. However, if Sekula doesn’t formulate a general theory of archivization, he does highlight one of the constitutive challenges of photography for the early (modernist) documenters: that the life of the image depended on its ability to resist or defeat (however briefly) the inexorable pull of the archive.
Can any connections be traced between the archival mode of photography and the emergence of photographic modernism? To what degree did self-conscious modernist practice accommodate itself to the model of the archive? To what degree did modernists consciously or unconsciously resist or subvert the model of the archive, which tended to relegate the individual photographer to the status of a detail worker, providing fragmentary images for an apparatus beyond his or her control?30
In fact, such connections can be traced, as I have touched on: modernism, the political demands of documentary culture, and the archive are essentially interwoven. Thus the “decisive moment” and the “singular event” are better seen as attempts precisely to avoid not only the nonsymbolic emptying of mass culture, but the “symbolic” void of the archive. “Expressive high modernism” and modernist documentary converge on this very point. But as I have demonstrated, the social and political conditions, under which the “singular event” might productively escape or defeat archivization and therefore produce new forms of symbolization, have become highly circumscribed. We need, therefore, in conditions of photography’s inevitable lateness, a different understanding of the relations between the “event” and the archive. That is, an understanding of how the interrelationship of the “event” and the archive allows us to generate a more productive (political) understanding of lateness (and, as such, the “singular event”).
Photo archives are sites, essentially, where the lateness of the photograph is made normative. For if the photo archive—state, public, commercial, and domestic—is where “events” live, so to speak, once photographs are removed from circulation and from immediate use, then the archive is a place for sustaining the “evental” content of the photography. The photographic event is subject to a continuous passage from dormancy in the archive to its “evental” reinscription outside of the archive. This is to say that because the continuing life of the photograph is the result of its recovery from the archive, the photographic “event” is in a permanent and fluid state of relationality between the archive and its extra-archival existence. The nonsymbolic roles of photography, however, function to stop or block this relationality and fluidity. This is why the mass cultural photo archive—as a capitalist and imperialist meta-archive—is the most powerful of fixed “evental” structures. Its enormous distributive power enables the stabilization and naturalization of the historical event on a global scale. Thus, if archives are structures of meaning in process, things that are produced through the act of accumulation (the result of prior judgment, editorial decisions, and so on), then the reclamation of photography from the archive always promises a practice of counterproduction, of counterarchiving, of interruption and reordering of the event. Accordingly, we might say that the “singular event” consigned to the archive is never late, or is never subject to lateness, because it is always able, through a continuous process of symbolic construction and reconstruction, to retemporalize itself. In this light Derrida’s work on archivization in the 1990s allows us a more systematic understanding of the archive. For Derrida, under this general reconceptualization of the archive-as-productive, the archive becomes “a movement of the promise and the future no less than a recording [of] the past.”31 This is because the movement from dormancy to reinscription of the “event” is always linked to the unwritten or underwritten (messianic) content of the event’s connection to futures past. Indeed, a spectral messianism is at work in all archives, insofar as the recovery and reinscription of materials always promise a break with the dead continuum of the present (the meta-archive), and therefore “what is no longer archived in the same is no longer lived in the same way.”32 This very Benjaminian formulation points to another possible reading of the crisis of documentary culture and the subordination of the photograph: under the hegemony of the nonsymbolic and the state management of nihilism, work with and work on the archive take on a particular critical productivity, a place of historical defense, as much as a place of critical appropriation, in a period where mnemotechnics are increasingly necessary as a radical and revolutionary resource.33 There is an important sense here, therefore, that under the vast archivization of our culture “the politics of the archive is our permanent orientation,”34 promising, if not a new documentary culture, then at least a new documentary theorization: not the separation of event and archive, but their inter-relational positioning.
This is why one of the key forms of this process of retemporalization and any future retheorization of the documentary work remains the photo-text book. In the photo-text book not only is the photodocument restored to its literary/historical and narratological conditions of visibility; it provides a space of systematic relationality for the reinscription of the photograph. The photo-text book is a place where “event” and counterarchive, or the “event” as counterarchive, are made coherent. But, more to the point, the photo-text book allows photography to bring its subordinate cultural form into a possible workable critical alignment with the discursive character of digital form. The stop-start diffusion of the digital image and the interdependence and mutability of image and text on the Internet are no longer the antithesis of the to-be-looked-at-ness of the photograph, but offer a sympathetic and compatible setting for the interruptive and narratological reconstruction of the “event.”
The reassertion of the book form over painterliness, then, presupposes a tentative response to my reflections on the subordinate cultural role of photography. What kind of model of artisticness does the late photodocument want to ally itself with, in lieu of the demise of an older documentary culture and the rise of “lateness”? A model in which the photograph always moves to a default position—the death of the event and mourning for a lost photographic immediacy—or a model in which the event is brought into extended discursive life, not just as a result of its expansion into readerly artistic form, but as a result of the digital transformation and extension of the book form itself?
One of the virtues of the photo-text book in the modernist culture of the 1920s and 1930s—as in, for example, Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but also, importantly, in Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege (1919), Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Pro Eto (1923), and Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929)35—was that it allowed photographers and writers to incorporate the veridical demands of the photodocument within the general space of a modernist spectatorship.36 And crucially, this was both a political and a formal strategy. In refusing to separate the veridical from artistic spectatorship, a realism of the event and a modernism of form were seen as interdependent and, therefore, as an exemplary form of cultural politicization. There was no photography of the “singular event,” only a multitude of events that the author was compelled to select from and ascribe singularity and meaning to. This produced a symbolic relationship to the event that was always conscious of the discursive and ironized conditions of visibility and truthfulness of the event. The destruction of this culture of the image and its tentative alliance of documentary practice with the deflationary modes of modernism, in the late 1930s, was one of the main casualties of the cessation of social modernism. Yet, despite the historical demise of these practices, the use of the photo-text book to open up the literary and theoretical rearticulation of the event continues to provide a valuable set of reference points for photography after the photograph after documentary culture. That is, at no point do these forms of photo-book work assume that the veridical content of the photograph can carry its content unmediated to its audience, as if the truth of photography lies solely in the immediacy of the photodocument.
One contemporary photographer who has drawn on this modernist legacy and who in turn plunges into the current conflictual conditions of lateness and the photodocument in a way very different from Norfolk and Delahaye is Geert Van Kesteren. If Norfolk and Delahaye accept the physical and symbolic limitations of arriving unannounced in war zones and elsewhere under present conditions, Van Kesteren subverts these limitations by adopting the egalitarian possibilities of cell phone technology to create a clandestine Mass-Observation-type archive of Baghdad life during the Iraqi war. Confronted by the sheer impossibility as a Western photographer of arriving unannounced in Baghdad during the war, he and his assistants commissioned numerous residents in Baghdad to document the everyday appearances of the conflict on cell phones and small digital cameras. Many of these were taken from inside a car in order to avoid arrest. These images were then edited and compiled in a book, Baghdad Calling (2008),37 in which this counterarchive of nonofficial images—everyday scenes of Baghdad life never seen in the West as well as more familiar shots of the recent aftermath of insurgent and Allied violence—was interspersed with photographs taken by Van Kesteren of Iraqi refugees and with interviews conducted by him with refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Turkey on the politics and horrors of the American invasion. In this sense the book form becomes a complex subduction of photographic form and traditional “evental” documentary temporality in the spirit of the multitemporal space of the modernist photo-text book, and it therefore identifies the representations of the war—of war—explicitly with an analytical or reflective lateness. That is, what we have identified with narcissistic self-representation and microsociability (the cell phone camera) is given a conceptualizing function in the spirit of lomography (photograph those things that stand outside of a given schema, framework, or genre), which then forms a part of a number of first-person political narratives. The photographer-as-collective-author, therefore, acts very much as a director of photographic technique and form: he draws on the clandestine possibilities of cell phone technology in order to retemporalize—through text and the production of new metonymic chains of the counterarchive—the “evental” and generic-symbolic reduction of the invasion. This combination of proxy cell phone images, postevent documentation, and oral history, inventive as it is, however, is not a solution to the political and temporal crisis of documentation; yet in social conditions where the mourning for the lost event of photography and the crisis of photography’s indexicality are commonly conflated—and as such are taken to represent the very end of the photodocument—these multitemporal image-text stratagems need to be taken seriously in relation to any critically emergent notion of lateness. Thus we need a more nuanced understanding of lateness.
There is the lateness of those who in missing the conflictual “event” find solace in the aestheticizing tendencies of the photographic sublime and, as such, use such lateness in conjunction with the critique of realism in order to “refictionalize” documentary practice in the manner of recent photography-as-painting. This is a lateness that is essentially trapped in its melancholic attachment to the “lost” event. But there is the lateness of those who choose to work outside of the temporal constraints of arriving on time and who, therefore, at a significant level, have worked through a process of mourning for the lost event (as does Van Kesteren). Thus, arriving late may also free the photography from the fetishization of immediacy (without denying that the objective loss of the event for photography is an indisputable political reality, a reality that drives the necessary recourse to mnemotechnics).38 Hence, arriving on time may not be congruent with arriving on time at all. Arriving on time, in fact, may be the most inauspicious of times, the most premature of times, for what is “on time” may, in its expectations of “directness” and “clarity” and “truth” (and the “decisive moment”), conspire with preformatting and the generic and, therefore, with what is already known, with “dead time,” with politics-as-spectacle, with the nonsymbolic. Nevertheless, if lateness is the space in which we stand, this does not, contra Derrida, mean that we should always be content with arriving late; the counterarchive cannot renew itself (and its promise to the future) solely through a process of reinscription. There is no promise of the counterarchive—of the “event” living in the present—without the risk of “getting close” and “getting close, by getting lost,” so to speak; no promise of the archive without the renewal and extension of singularity.
Hence, this places an unforgiving responsibility on the photographer, even under the regime of the nonsymbolic, to “get in the way” and to “get in the way” again. So, if the temporality and efficacy of “getting in the way” have been broken politically in some sense, this does lessen the requirement to do so. For if the theoretical issue for photography is not loss of immediacy per se—of asserting the life of the photodocument over that of the archive—the archive nevertheless has to be renewed from outside of its borders. Thus, without photography’s willingness to violate and be violated, this renewal becomes an impossibility and, as such, effectively subordinates the photodocument to the atemporal forces of real abstraction and social abstraction.