Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 1: Thinking About Photography, 4th ed, 2009

Photo found at http://yimvmd.blogspot.ae/2010/09/bodyworld.html

Aesthetics and Technology

This chapter places photography within the context of wider intellectual movements, beginning with the 19th century debate about the camera as an instrument of science or of art.  The photograph came to supplant the painting in producing facsimiles of reality and from a very early date there was mass acceptance of the idea that photographs are reproductions of reality, small snippets of truth.  Individual photographers, in their style and subject, became inheritors of the attributes of Great Masters.  With the arrival of late 20th century post-modernism, all defining narratives were said to have been lost in a world grown increasingly interwoven.  Authenticity, the unique vision of the master, was no longer possible nor sought after, as was the idea that reality was somehow reproducible.  But even in an age of widespread production and consumption of digital images, the idea that photos are somehow real remains common currency.

Price & Wells note the camera’s appearance in an age of criticism where discussion often centered on how to define photography and distinguish it from other forms and practices.  They note the lack of consensus, the absence of any definable uniform practice or product, and the character of discussion:  a tendency toward reductionism - attempting to define an essence - or detailed description - avoiding any type of theory.  Perhaps one of the  more interesting ideas raised in this chapter is the camera as the product of need, rather than agent of change.  They note that technical elements were already in place in the early 19th century, and that as early as the late 18th century there are notes in the literature of ideas for capturing and processing light.  What socio-economic forces led to the invention of the camera?  One driving force was the demand for portraits, which was soon met by the new technology, putting painters - like film processors at the dawn of digital - out of work.


Contemporary Debates

All discussions of photographs rest upon some notion of the nature of the photograph and how it acquires meaning, The issue is not whether theory is in play but, rather, whether theory is acknowledged.  (.25)

Photographic theory proceeds from three paradigms for understanding and investigating the world:  scientific, social scientific and aesthetic. The middle of the three draws from the other two.  Early 20th century interrogations followed on from the literary model of Great Masters and sought to develop a body of critical standards for deciding which artists were worthy of canonization.  In the 1980’s Victor Burgin noted that photography never developed it’s own critical theory, but simply borrowed from the wider culture of arts.  Visual and cultural studies have since provided new ways of engaging with photography, in which images might also be seen as products of material culture.   Investigators might also look at image rhetoric, or how the elements of the image create and convey meaning.

The authors proceed with a review of realism as expressed in the writings of Sontag, Elkins, Price, Harimann and Kozloff.  They begin by noting that any discussion of photographic realism is founded on the idea of a “reality” external to the individual, as something that can be measured, recorded, and objectively verified.   They note three approaches to realist theories:

1. the photograph as aesthetic artefact
2. photographic institutions and the role of the photographer
3. how images are consumed

In On Photography, Sontag “veers between the reasons for taking photographs and the uses to which they are put.” (p28)  She describes the photograph as a “trace,” something which freezes time, comparable to a footprint or a death mask.  She notes many uses of photographs and therefore sees them as devoid of inherent nature or character, what Price and Wells refer to as “the elusiveness of the photo image.” (p28) Sontag warns of how cameras can turn travel into the search for the photogenic, as well as the power of the photograph to aestheticize suffering and despair.  The photograph holds out the danger of exhausting experience, turning everything into cliche. She observes a kind of totemic power in photographs evidenced in our reluctance to destroy family photos or the practice of burning effigies or reviled politicians, comparing the camera to a kind of embalming machine that produces relics.

In Photography Theory James Elkins explores the indexicality of the photograph, how it stands for a trace or reference to reality, in the context of photography as art.  Mary Price argues in The Photograph for consideration of photographic context, or how images are consumed, suggesting no single meaning for any photograph (which recalls Barrett’s discussion of Doiseneau’s image, At the Café Rue de Seine).  Hariman and Locaites demonstrate this idea in No Caption Needed by exploring iconic images that have transcended their original contexts.  Kozloff felt the photograph as witness was subject to the same shortcomings of human witnesses:  misunderstanding, incomplete information, and deception.

Regardless of theories that suggest otherwise, Price & Wells stress the need to accept the social and cultural authority conferred on photographs to represent reality in ways no other visual media is as yet able.  “The photographic is distinct...in that it seems to emanate directly from the external.”  (p30)

Turning to how images are read, two key theoretical developments are noted:  semiotics and psychoanalysis.  Of the first, a strict version was initially proposed, one that would establish an empirically verifiable means of analyzing human communication.  After realizing that this could not be done without taking account of the reader, a softer version was proposed to include elements of psychoanalysis and sociology.  Semiology came to refer to the former, semiotics to the latter.  Two primary exponents of semiotics are introduced, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes.  Of Eco the authors note that he was concerned with cultural conventions of understanding and found the iconic sign in photos “completely arbitrary.” That is, the thing represented in the photo has no inherent meaning, only one structured through conventional ways of seeing and interpreting.

Of Barthes much more is said, two and a half pages worth (compared to Eco’s single paragraph), most of which covers Camera Lucida.  Price & Wells note that despite Barthes’ emphasis on seeing or looking, “he focuses centrally on the image as text rather than upon the relation between image and spectatorship.  This does limit his ontological conclusions.”  (p34) Barthes felt that because of its ubiquity, the photograph remained unclassifiable.  He nevertheless noted some important features.  He saw that photography differed from painting in that the referent was attached to it.  Painting can be done from memory and the end product need not resemble its source of inspiration.  As a result of the adherence of the referent, the photograph is time-specific.  It is never about the present, but always about the past.  It is also indescribable.  The impact of the photograph cannot be captured in word.  And the photograph itself - the paper and chemicals - is always invisible.  Regarding the abundance of images, he noted the difference between seeing and looking. We see millions of images but only look, or attend, to a select few.  What causes the punctum, this prick of interest?  Barthes suggests it is a properly of the image itself, which Price & Wells see as failure to account for the reader’s history.  Barthes also seems to contradict himself here in claiming the photo is “a message without a code.”

Next to semiotics, the other major reconsideration of the photograph has been the application of psychology. Price and Wells note that although now part of our assumptions about the world, the idea of the individual as as an ethical unit forming the building block of society – as worker, voter, consumer – is a relatively new development. Psychoanalytic theories of individual responses to social experience have shaped economic, political and even art theory. Marxist models, for example, posit alienation as the experience of workers to the appropriation of their means of production. Artists sought to magnify this alienation through new ways of seeing, of demonstrating how images were socially constructed and used against them (see Watney's Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror). The photograph was no longer a simple reflection of reality, but a possible tool for liberation – or enslavement. Much the same argument was employed by feminists to show how photographs stereotyped women. The point here is to show how meaning is socially constructed. Victor Burgin's “Photography, Phantasy, and Function” (1982) is cited for drawing attention to the psychologically loaded act of looking.

In summary, Price and Wells return to the primarily referential nature of photography (the requirement of an object at the time of creation) while stressing the need when theorizing to consider context of usage and the creation of meaning and interpretation. What is then at stake is not the image itself, but “the force-field within which it generates meaning.”  A case study of Dorothy Lange's Migrant Mother follows, including excerpts demonstrating a variety of theoretical concerns, such as genre, aesthetics, gender, and iconography.