Barrett, Criticizing Photographs, Ch 5: Photographs and Contexts, 3rd ed, 2000

Having explicated his classification scheme, Barrett proceeds in Chapter 5 to explain that without prior knowledge it is often difficult for the average viewer to place any one photograph in one of his six categories (which we will recall are:  descriptive, explanatory, interpretive, ethically evaluative, aesthetically evaluative, and theoretical).  This contextual information can be internal, original, or external.

Internal context is provided by the photograph’s subject, medium, form, and the relationship between them.  Barrett cites the rather obvious example of one of Edward Weston’s peppers.   We understand the pepper is displayed as an object of aesthetic appreciation, rather than as a botanical description.  (If we know something about the photographer and his work (an example of original context), this interpretation is even more obvious.)

Original context aids in understanding images of a theoretical nature, those that comment on art and art theory and which may appear on the surface to be about not very much at all.  Having adequate background knowledge is essential to having some clue as to what the image represents.  This may be true as well of images which require specific cultural or historical knowledge.  (Of course, this assumes there is a “correct” interpretation which can be unlocked only with the “correct” contextual information.)

External context is provided by the situation in which the photograph is presented or found.  Barrett provides the example of Robert Doiseneau’s image, At the Café Rue de Seine, 1958, featuring a man and a woman at a bar. The photograph first appeared in a magazine in a feature about Paris cafes.  It later appeared without the photographer’s consent in a temperance pamphlet, and later still in a tabloid illustrating a story on prostitution.  The context provides three unique ways of reading the image. 

Issues with External Contextualization

Should images never intended for museums be placed in museums?  How does this affect the work?  How does it affect the practice of photography?  Barrett cites Martha Rosler complaining that the process of museumification results in a shift from a focus on the work and its subject to the producer, in which high art becomes about the self, a kind of a cult of the artist.  As early as the 1930s, Marxist critic Walter Benjamin complained of the aestheticization of poverty, of how the camera succeeded in making suffering visually appealing.  Sontag argues the same in her critique of Smith’s Minamata photos, that the “aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it.  Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.  As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions.”

Barrett’s chapter concludes with a rather lengthy interpretation of Barbara Kruger’s Surveillance.