[...] attention to the photographic album since the mid-1960s can be said to constitute in itself a model ‘thought community’, an idea of album sustained by interdisciplinarity.

In this marriage of sociology and social history, the typicality of the album is often stressed as a function of its collective authorship – compilation by agreement, rather than individual authorship.

Historiographers and photographic theorists follow suit, speaking of the family album, rather than the mother’s or the aunt’s memoir of family life.

When it comes to the autobiographical album, many sociologists and psychologists take the position that albums encode memories, or camouflage them behind social rituals or psychological screens.

Indeed, some photographic theorists have argued that the construction of alternative realities is the personal album’s main function.

pp.223-224

Sociologists acknowledge the mysteries of all personal documents, advising that albums are virtually useless unless examined in the company of their compilers, or at least with members of their circle, who can interpret the social arrangements and signs.

p.244

On the basis of these encounters, they report that photographic albums preserve a wealth of stories – photographic memories that are revived in the telling and can be preserved on tape. But anthropologists, folklorists and cultural theorists add a certain complication, stating that no recounting of an album, however close to the source, should be considered as fixed because individual and collective life-stories evolve over time, depending on the storyteller and the listener.

Suspended Conversations argues that the photographic album can nevertheless be understood by recognising its original function as a mnemonic device for storytelling and situating it in the realm of orality.

The oral flows from anthropology, ethnography, psychology, folklore, linguistics and literature, and is condensed in an illuminating study by Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy.

p.245

There are striking similarities between what Ong calls the ‘psychodynamics of orality’ and photographic experience, beginning with the evanescence of sound and photographic instantaneity, and continuing in the album’s predictable patterns of content, structure and presentation.

In an oral culture, tellers and listeners need memorable and accessible recitations. Variations on narrative tropes, rather than novelties, work best – they are readily recalled by the teller; they stick in the listener’s mind. Such formulaic images should be simple, casting individuals and scenes in perfect clarity.

Translated to the contents of photographic albums, we observe patterns of social and physical types. This is the well known levelling effect of the carte-de-visite - kings, tradesmen and exotic human specimens photographed in the same style and placed in the same album.

This effect is perpetuated in the snapshot – there is significance beyond habit in its compositional clichés.

Repetition is another mnemonic fixative. Albums are full of repetitions: situations are revisited or recreated with slight variations; actual images are often repeated in different arrangements.

In oral compositions, patterns of organisation are driven by the need for repetition; formulas are not only typical, but are recycled within the same recitation.

For photography this means copious, comparative description: albums show us the same things from many angles; we also see the same angle on many things.

The syntax of an oral composition is additive. Likewise, a photographic album fits together like a kit of parts by systems of association that tellers and listeners know well and readily supply during the album’s presentation.

Oral recitation, or storytelling, follows the rules of performance. Empathy and participation are essential, the performer and audience surrendering to, absorbed in, the pooled experience of the community.

p.226

[In oral cultures] The past must be viable in the present, for the purpose of storytelling is to keep the community alive. What this means for the album is a shift from the absolute solidity of material culture to a state of in-between, fully realisable only in performance.

The album is a meeting place, not an encyclopedia. When we sit and look at an album together, we do not necessarily look at every image. As we converse – as we tell the album’s story to each other – we glide over certain images, and linger on others.

[Langford discusses three stages of a process of interpreting a family album]

pp.226-227

Stage three then explored the compiler’s expression of autobiographical and collective memory through image selection, annotation, organisation and presentation. Respecting the compiler’s choices and trying to understand them, then working imaginatively to narrate their presentation, brought out the performative aspects of the album, thus restoring its original function of keeping memory alive in the present.

p.227

In broader terms,  the study proved that images selected and organised in anticipation of storytelling preserved visual memory in a framework of oral consciousness.

[Langford's] challenge was to commit more fully to ‘the psychodynamics of orality’: by shifting the focus of inquiry from identification (the detective-work of naming and listing) to process (looking and talking); by really changing one’s habits of attention to make orality and photography – the oral-photographic condition – the nucleus around which other states of awareness and epistemological projects would be grouped.

Photographic theorists do not live in an oral society, nor is the photographic album a pure product.

The photographic album is a syncretic object, its narratives of life-stories, both transitory and inscriptive. Removal from the private sphere to a public collection tips the balance towards inscription by cutting the performative cord. Most attempts to read this alienated object, and here I mean literacy in the broadest sense, have led us to consider the album as a closed text.

[Langford will discuss an anonymous album from the McCord Museum]

p.228

Our methods of classification, the habits  of literacy which bias interpretation, lead us to make lists. In oral societies, as Ong stresses, there is no such thing as a list, and when we look at an album we can see why.

What the list [captioning compiled by acquiring institution] preserves with authority is the justification for the acquisition, which is the anticipated use of the album.

This album, as described, fits within the collective memories of the communities for whom the McCord Museum has traditionally mattered and functioned as a meeting point.

pp.228-234

[Langford describes her process of interviewing five women about the album]

p.234

[...] all five of the respondents  had memories ‘in common’ with the compiler: their empathy emerged in digressions, in question directed at me.

p.235

Conducting these interviews, the most curious thing to me was a pattern of what one might call ‘a will to separation’. In constructing a family for the child, all family arrangements were entertained save the one closest to the respondent’s own.

As the youngest in a family of four, separated by a gap of six to ten years from the siblings I adored, I felt that the compiler’s situation was different from mine; I had my own explanation for the older girl posing with Dad: she was certainly not his daughter.

pp.235-236

In short, our responses were guardedly empathetic: faced with this hypertrophic ego, none of us was prepared to surrender our own inner child, or the uniqueness of our adolescent experiences. Neither was our compiler: the album was in fact the inner child’s preserve.

My meetings with women over the album, their efforts to extract the compiler’s identity, and the nuances that they brought to their performances  of the album when asked to tell it as a life story, forced me to consider my own visual habits and blind spots.

[Langford discusses threes images from the album in depth]

p.237

Just as the girls were once photographed by elders, the teenagers photograph one another, often holding cameras. Photography is the coin of the affective realm: photographs are comparable in this respect to valentines or autographs.

How does an awareness of the compiler’s process shape our understanding of this album? By attending to the disparate sources of the photographs, we become conscious of the compiler as a highly specialised curator of photographs and photographic experiences – we look at a composite version of her life that she has arranged to create certain effects and contain certain messages.

In terms of photography and photographic experience, the breakdown of the album into the various streams of production, and the recognition that clusters of photogenic events and places – holidays, camp, graduation – have been successfully combined into a first person narrative of fourteen years, exemplify the workings of memory, and our ability to rehearse its processes through collective photographic reception.

p.238

Conversations about the album flow naturally from the means of its creation which are themselves a composite view from distinct social and psychological perspectives.

[Discussion of adolescence]

p.240

Repetition is a very strong factor here. The ending rehearses the poses and motifs of the beginning, and yet there is a sense of incompleteness, a curtain pulled down over the uncertain future.

[Langford goes on to relate information about the life of Margery Paterson, the album's compiler, who developed tuberculosis after high school]

p.242

Margery Paterson’s album teaches us a simple lesson, one that is hard for institutions to absorb. There is no such thing as a family album, but only personal albums concerned with, or situated within, a particular configuration of family and community.

In this case, we have an album formed in parallel with or quite possibly influenced by, early twentieth century theories of female adolescence – its socialisation and its control. But this is only the first level of instruction.

pp.242-243

For Margery Paterson’s album also insists that, if our interest in collective memory is genuine, we are going to have to attend to Maurice Halbwachs’s essential definition: ‘While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember’.

Suddenly, we have an album that spotlights the conditions of girlhood and adolescence from the perspective of a young woman exiled by her illness, and photographically reliving the freedom and promise of her younger years. An application of the oral-photographic framework restores Margery Paterson’s agency, gives her back her voice.

 

http://jameselkins.com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/camera-dolorosa.pdf

There’s lots more writing and notes and ideas to be had on his website: http://jameselkins.com/

[...] it could be said that snapshots are to the history of photography as photography is to the history of art; each represents a significant threat to the stability of its host discipline.

[Batchen describes three vernacular photographs]

It’s been said that Americans alone take about 550 snapshots per second, a statistic that, however it has been concocted, suggests that the taking of such photographs might best be regarded as a neurosis rather than a pleasure.

What should a history about the snapshot look like, be like, sound like?

But perhaps we should turn this problem around and look at it from the other side: the snapshot, precisely because this is the most numerous and popular of photographic forms, represents an interpretive problem absolutely central to any ambitious scholarship devoted to the history of photography.

Oblivious to the artistic prejudices that still guide much of that scholarship, family photographs challenge us to find another way of talking about photography, a way that can somehow account for the determined banality of these, and indeed most other, photographic pictures.

But to find that “other way” we are first going to have to displace, or at least complicate, existing models of writing about the history of photography.

[Batchen discusses written histories of photography]

These accounts established a coherently linear narrative occupied by a canon of photographic artists and master works drawn almost exclusively from Europe and the United States.

“A History” soon became “The History” and this has meant that a modernist art historical discourse, with its narrow emphasis on avant-garde practice and aesthetics remained the dominant way of talking about photography’s history throughout the twentieth century, whether this “talk” took the form of books or exhibitions.

Moreover, most photographs are actually about conformity, not innovation or subversion. So they don’t readily fit the usual art historical narratives.

If you examine cartes-de-visite portraits or snapshots or wedding pictures, to name just a few of photography’s many neglected genres, you’ll discover that each example captures a unique pose, even if that pose obediently repeats a million other, very similar poses. They are all the same, but they are all also just slightly different from each other. If we’re going to consider all of photography in its history, we will need to develop a way to deal with this visual and political economy of “same but different.”

A normative history that privileges avant-garde practice, even those practices that at some point contested the establishment of their own time, is still a normative history.

What I’m suggesting here is that we need an avant-garde approach to history, not another obedient history of the avant-garde.

To reiterate: the problem I have with our existing, standard histories of photography is not just a matter of content (of what’s included or excluded from that history). My concern is with the mode of historical discourse itself, and with the conceptual infrastructure on which this history is built.

How do you write a history for something that escapes easy definition, has no discernable boundaries, and operates on the principle of reflection (how, for example, do you separate a photograph from what it’s of or from the unfolding context of its reception)? How do you invent a voice (or voices) for this history that can speak to photography’s emotional effects as well as its physical and formal characteristics and economic and political ramifications? How can you speak of and from a local position and yet encompass photography’s global reach and its multiple expressions of cultural difference?

These questions collectively constitute the problem that now faces us; the need for a systemic transformation of the way the history of photography is represented such that this history can, for the first time, engage with photography in all of its many aspects and manifestations.

[Batchen discusses recent writers and scholars on photography]

This [Batchen's] history necessarily features practices involving collective hands and/or now-unknown makers (many of them women), thereby displacing the biographical and phallocentric bias of most current photographic histories.

But principal among Visual Culture’s dangers, apparently, is its affinity with “anthropological discourse” and therefore with an analytical relativism that erases cultural and temporal specificities. [According to Hal Foster]

[Discussion of Hal Foster's arguments about a 'posthistorical reduction']

Anthropology has traditionally looked at such activity as something that has utilitarian value. Images are created for some purpose. Images do things. They are social objects, not simply aesthetic ones. They are meaningful only when seen in relationship to a wider social network of beliefs and practices, economies and exchanges. As a consequence, I would argue that this view has so far enhanced, rather than reduced, an emphasis on the specificity of social context, and a sensitivity to the complications, ethical and otherwise, of writing in the face of difference.

Although Foster worries about the prevalence of the “disembodied image” within Visual Culture, scholars trained as anthropologists who consistently write about photography, such as Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Pinney, have in fact insisted on a close attention to the materiality of their objects of study.

It is hard to deny that the “ethnographic turn” in Visual Culture encourages a skeptical attitude to the notion that there is “a sexuality” or “an unconscious” that somehow transcends the specificity of its historical circumstances. If there are many photographies, then, it follows, there can also potentially be many sexualities and even, perhaps, more than one unconscious.

The editors of October rightly feel that art history itself is at risk here and for some reason want to defend it, thus reinforcing their own continuing alliance with ruling-class values and interests.

But it’s precisely because I feel that history does indeed matter, and that an art history of photography is now so inadequate to the task at hand, that I gravitate to the still-open range of possibilities signified by Visual Culture.

For me, then, Visual Culture promises, not an alternative to our current ways of understanding the history of photography, but an eruption within that history which threatens to totally transform its existing parameters.

[Batchen asks how the snapshot can be incorporated into the histories of photography]

[...] the advent of digital technologies means that this kind of photography [snapshots] has now taken on an extra memorial role, “not of the subjects it depicts, but of its own operation as a system of representation”.

This suffuses snapshots with the aesthetic appeal of a seductive melancholy, whatever their actual age or the particularities of their subject matter. Certainly it’s hard now to see these rectangles of gelatin silver or vivid color, with their white edges and glossy sheen, except through a distorting haze of modernist nostalgia.

Urging women to become the family’s historian, Kodak aggressively associated the snapshot with memory and loss, and with specifically middle-class values and sentiments, and insisted that photography be regarded as an essential part of everyday life. This is certainly an important story to tell. But surely it’s not the only one.

[On a recent surge in the publication of books of snapshots]

Are these publications a tribute to the snapshot, or to the sharp eye of their collector/curator? Are they exercises in photo-history, or just in art appreciation and pseudo-morphism? What do these publications actually tell us about the snapshot as a cultural or social phenomenon or even as a personal experience? Answer: very little.

What they do tell us quite a lot about is the continuing influence of a certain kind of art history on the study of photography. More particularly, they imply that the making of value judgments – in Foster’s view an activity that separates art history from Visual Culture – is an appropriate way to go about making sense of snapshots.

[Batchen discusses Other Pictures and Photo-Trouve]

A representative history of the visual culture of photography has to acknowledge and account for boredom and ubiquity, the medium’s most abiding visual qualities.

Any study of the snapshot worthy of the name must surely address itself to the dynamics of this contradiction (boring picture for me, moving picture for you) by way of a theory of photographic reception. This means looking more closely at the relationship of the snapshot to a network of expectations and obligations extending far outside the picture itself. In short, it will mean having to consider the snapshot photograph as both a complex social device and a personal talisman, rather than simply as a static art object.

[On the vernacular photographs reproduced in the essay] We don’t know these people, and probably never will. But we can still imagine the scenario that has led to these moments, for this is an experience we have all shared.

As a collective activity of picture-making, snapshots show the struggles of particular individuals to conform to the social expectations, and visual tropes, of their sex and class; as I’ve already suggested, everyone simultaneously wants to look like themselves and like everyone else – to be the same but (ever so slightly) different. Before all else, snapshots are odes to conformist individualism.

Snapshots thereby work to reconcile personal and mass identity. But this social imperative still doesn’t entirely explain why we find our own snapshots to be so moving, given their otherwise low-brow aesthetic qualities.

Maybe we have to ask whether the relative lack of imagination shown in these sorts of photographs in fact shifts the burden of imaginative thought from the artist and subject, where historians usually seek it, to the viewer, who is invited by such pictures to see much more than meets the eye.

Certainly, when I examine a snapshot of a loved one, I see how they once looked, but I also project how I feel about that person onto the picture. The snapshot conjures how they were then and how I am now, in the same all-encompassing look.

[The materiality of the photo] It’s a reminder that snapshots could potentially be reproduced in large numbers but in reality they are often unique images. Such deformities are also a reminder that these pictures were once regularly touched by their original owners.

Snapshots are touchable objects but they are also often prompts for speech. The subjects of these snapshots were once named aloud, talked over, joked about, libeled and ridiculed, reinterpreted and contested in oral exchange. Snapshots were rarely contemplated in respectful silence and nor should they be now. But what is a snapshot when it has been rendered mute?

What else do found snapshots have to tell us, beyond the sad fact of their own death as meaningful personal artifacts?

Well, they might also be regarded as a collective declaration of faith in the midst of an increasingly skeptical, secular world. Like every photograph, the snapshot is an indexical trace of the presence of its subject, a trace that both confirms the reality of existence and remembers it, potentially surviving as a fragile talisman of that existence even after its subject has passed on.

It is the need to provide witness to this existence – to declare “I was here!” in visual terms – that surely drives us to keep on photographing, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the picture that results.

We have to have them (to know we have them), but we don’t necessarily have to see them. The irony is that we take photographs in order to deny the possibility of death, to stop time in its tracks and us with it.

But that very same photograph, by placing us indisputably in the past, is itself a kind of mini-death sentence, a prediction of our ultimate demise at some future time. It certifies times past and time’s inevitable passing. Every snapshot, no matter what its subject matter, embodies this paradoxical message, speaking simultaneously of life and death.

[On Bourdieu] Among other things, he points out that family snapshots can be taken with any sort of camera, and that, equally, a snapshot camera can take a variety of kinds of picture; what makes a snapshot a snapshot is its function, not its pictorial qualities, and this function is determined by the network of social relationships of which it is a part.

[On snapshots] We have to have them (to know we have them), but we don’t necessarily have to see them.

This influential essay – part autobiographical novel, part philosophical rumination – is also an account of photography in which the snapshot experience is, for once, given a central role.

I have argued elsewhere that Camera Lucida, with its carefully calibrated choice of illustrations, its peculiar temporal convolutions, its supplementary logic, binary terms, and inverted layout (a layout in fact borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 “Little History of Photography”), offers an historical view of photography that is deliberately structured like a photograph.

In short, the book seeks to tell us certain things about photography by itself becoming photographic, by giving us a specifically photographic experience.

Like Benjamin before him, Barthes burrows into the very flesh of photography by allowing his text to take on many of its most salient attributes, such as the play between negative and positive that is at the heart of most photographic practices.

Abandoning chronology as an organizing principle, he looks primarily at ordinary photographs, rather than masterworks, opening up the entire field of photography for examination and eschewing any reliance on art historical prejudices. Aiming only to be representative, rather than comprehensive, Barthes even proffers the possibility of a history based on just one (unseen) photograph.

In short, the analytical approach demonstrated by Camera Lucida produces a history that is actually about photography, not just of photographs.

Barthes thus does something that none of these other histories of the snapshot has dared to do – he describes the essential snapshot, but does not make it visible, demanding that we do that work for him in our mind’s eye. As a consequence, infinity and zero – every snapshot ever taken and this evoked, but forever absented one – are made to turn in on each other without pause.

Using Camera Lucida as a possible model for another mode of historical accounting, I have proposed we adopt a similar sort of analytical oscillation to the one found there, a back and forth between whatever orphaned examples of snapshot culture we encounter in the world and our own prized photographic reliquaries, between cliche and sublimity, sameness and difference, truth and fiction, public and private, infinity and zero, without letting either term ever rest on its laurels.

For it is surely only here, here within the unstable spacing of this kind of oscillation, that a truly photographic history for the snapshot can plausibly be staged.

p.49

Nature as a whole is a system in which information disintegrates progressively according to the second law of thermodynamics. Human beings struggle against this natural entropy not only by receiving information but also storing and passing it on – (in this respect they differ from other forms of life) – and also by deliberately creating information.

This specifically human and at the same time unnatural ability is called ‘mind’, and culture is its result, i.e. improbably formed, informed objects.

The process of manipulating information – called ‘communication’ – is divided into two phases: In the first, information is created; in the second, it is distributed to memories in order to be stored there. The first phase is called ‘dialogue’, the second ‘discourse’.

p.51

The camera creates prototypes (negatives) from which as many stereotypes (copies) as one likes can be produced and distributed – in which case the concept of the original, in the case of the photograph, has scarcely any meaning anymore.

As long as the photograph is not yet electromagnetic, it remains the first of all post-industrial objects. Even though the last vestiges of materiality are attached to photographs, their value does not lie in the thing but in the information on their surface.

This is what characterizes the post-industrial: The information, and not the thing, is valuable. Issues of the ownership and distribution of objects (capitalism and socialism) are no longer valid, evading as they do the question of the programming and distribution of information (the information society).

Until photographs become electromagnetic, they are a connecting link between industrial objects and pure information.

p.52

In the case of the photograph [as opposed to objects like shoes or furniture], the information sits loosely on the surface and can easily be conveyed to another surface. To this extent, the photograph demonstrates the defeat of the material thing and of the concept of ‘ownership’. It is not the person who owns a photograph who has power but the person who created the information it conveys.

It is not the owner but the programmer of the information who is the powerful one: neo-imperialism. The poster is without value; nobody owns it, it flaps torn in the wind yet the power of the advertising agency remains undiminished nonetheless – the agency can reproduce it.

This obliges us to revalue our traditional, economic, political, moral, epistemological and aesthetic values.

Electromagnetic photographs, films and television images do not illustrate the devaluation of the material thing nearly as well as photographs attached to paper in the old-fashioned way.

pp.52-53

In the case of classical photographs, there are still valuable bromide prints – even today the last vestiges of value attach to the ‘original photograph’ making it more valuable than a reproduction in a newspaper.

p.53

Like all apparatuses, the apparatuses of photograph distribution also have a program by which the program society to act as part of a feedback mechanism. Typical of this program is the division of photographs into various channels, their ‘channelling’.

In theory, information can be classified as follows: into indicative information of the type ‘A is A’, into imperative information of the type ‘A must be A’, and into optative information of the type ‘A may be A’. The classical ideal of the indicative is truth, that of the imperative is goodness, and that of the optative is beauty.

This theoretical classification cannot, however, be applied in practice [...] nevertheless, the distribution apparatuses practise precisely this theoretical classification.

pp.53-54

Thus there are channels for supposedly indicative photographs (e.g. scientific publications and reportage magazines), channels  for supposedly imperative photographs (e.g. political and commercial advertising posters) and channels for supposedly artistic photographs (e.g. galleries and art journals).

p.54

Of course, the distribution channels also have borderline areas, in which a particular photograph can slip over from one channel to another. The photograph of the moon landing, for example, can slip from an astronomy journal to a US consulate, from there onto an advertising poster for cigarettes and from there finally into an art exhibition.

The essential thing is that the photograph, with each switch-over to another channel, takes on a new significance: The significance crosses over into the political, the political into the commercial, the commercial into the artistic.

In this respect, the division of photographs into channels is in no way simply a mechanical process but rather an encoding one: The distribution apparatuses impregnate the photograph with the decisive significance for its reception.

Photographers are involved in this encoding. Even at the time of taking photographs they have their eye on a specific channel of the distribution apparatuses and encode their images as a function of this channel.

The symbiosis, characteristic of taking photographs, between camera and photographer is mirrored in the channel.

pp.54-55

For example: Photographers take photographs for a specific newspaper because the newspaper allows them to reach hundreds or thousands of receivers, and because they are being paid by the newspaper; in this, they act in the belief that they are using the newspaper as their medium. Meanwhile, the newspaper is of the opinion that it is using the photographs as an illustration of its articles in order to be able to program its readers, that accordingly photographers are functionaries of the newspaper apparatus. As photographers know that only those photographs that fit into the newspaper’s program will be published, they attempt to fool the newspaper’s censorship by surreptitiously smuggling aesthetic, political or epistemological elements into their image. The newspaper on the other hand may well discover these attempts to fool it  and publish the photographs anyway because it thinks it can exploit the smuggled elements to enrich its program. And what is true for newspapers is also true for all other channels.

p.55

Every distributed photograph allows photography criticism to reconstruct the struggle between photographer and channel. It is precisely this that makes photographs into dramatic images.

It is positively disconcerting how often standard photography criticism does not read off from photographs this dramatic confusion of the photographer’s intention with the program of the channel. Photography criticism habitually takes it for granted that scientific channels distribute scientific photographs, political channels political photographs, artistic channels artistic photographs. In this respect, the critics function as a function of the channels: They allow them to vanish from the receiver’s field of vision.  They ignore the fact that the channels determine the significance of the photographs, and thus they give support to the channels’ intention to be invisible. Seen in this light, the critics collaborate with the channels against the photographers wanting to fool the channels.

pp.55-56

We are dealing here with a collaboration in the bad sense, a trahison des clercs, a contribution to the victory of the apparatus over the human being. This is characteristic of the situation of intellectuals in post-industrial society, in general. The critics, for example, ask questions such as ‘Is photography art?’ – as if these questions were not already being answered automatically by the channels concealing this automatic, programmed channelling and making it all the more effective.

p.56

In the light of standard photographic criticism, photographs get an uncritical reception and are therefore able to program the receiver to act as if they are under a magic spell; this action flows back in the form of feedback into the programs of the apparatus.

p.117

[...] what Barthes and other writers have done is to bring within the range of possibility an acknowledgment on the part of the rest of us that what they have discovered and named must exist for us too. They cannot name our precise wound; they can only name their own; but we may now with tentative assurance begin to understand what their use of their photographs was. They have invested photographs with meaning; their language directs us to the idea of unseen truth in the photograph.

Awareness of metaphor in the use of mask, even the most literal, is almost irrepressible in the case of the photograph as opposed to painting.

pp.117-118

The reason for the difference in our regard lies in the notion of the photograph as a transcription of the real, the photograph thus becoming itself the mask concealing what is behind it and thwarting confrontation with the real.

p.118

[Price discusses Barthes's use of Avedon's photograph of William Casby]

p.119

This photograph suggests a mask because it looks like one.

The position vis-a-vis the viewer is as if the head were pinned on a bare wall at eye level. The mask is the “essence” of slavery because, according to Barthes, it is “the product of a society and of its history.” In less exalted prose, the more appropriate word might have been “typical,” and Casby’s photographed face-mask might have represented the type, slave.

p.120

Barthes is using “mask” in the large sense of that disguise inherent in the process of making a photograph. The removal of what might well go back to Lucretius to name, the film or skin of appearance, creates a mask by the act of removal.  The photograph is the film or skin of appearance. At the very least it calls attention to the fact of being a mask (transcribed from reality) by removal.

In addition, the removal of the mask not only certifies its existential “maskness” but because it looks exactly as real objects look, or as we have learned to see them, the mask is taken as true depiction of those objects.

pp.120-121

Once again, the reason we take it as true depiction is that the photograph bears a strict and necessary relationship to its source in the visible world.

p.121

This way of using mask is very like the use of the word veil before photography was invented. It is an acknowledgement that perception is imperfect, lack of epistemological certainty is the norm; we always envision as we see. The emphasis is on the impenetrability of the particular, the individual. With a shift of emphasis, the individual can represent a type (for example in the photographs by August Sander or Sir Benjamin Stone).

The other, literal, use of “mask” is the particular face-covering that conceals what is behind it when it is attached to the face by ties behind the head or hooks over the ears or when it is more substantially made to fit over the entire head and sit on the shoulders. By metaphoric extension it is the literal covering that conceals anything.

Barthes has invested mask with both the literal and extended metaphoric meanings.

Mask is a concept often used about photography and photographs; one meaning may be dominant, but all possible meanings are implicit unless the definition is expressly limited.

[Price discusses Walker Evans's 'Subway portraits' taken by a concealed camera]

 

Here the outer appearance is taken as mask of the true inner being, a mask wrought by the will of the person who displays it but a mask penetrated by the photographer, or, as [James] Agee suggests, dropped by the subject.

The photograph has removed and preserved the “film,” which is the photograph.

pp.121-122

In Barthes’s discourse it was thought of as the removed mask. In Evan’s subway photographs, however, the suggestion is that Evans has been able to surprise the subjects without their usual masks, without their conscious presentation of self. They are stripped of properties, personal context, and private setting. They have no names, past , or future. Their exposure without masks reveals macabre isolated individuals looking at nothing. Yet if they have no pose (are unaware of the camera), they have stubborn individuality.

p.124

Another kind of mask occurs in an Arbus photograph called A house on a hill, Hollywood, CA. 1963, in which a pure facade, visibly supported behind by a strutwork of scaffolding, is silhouetted against a mackerel sky lit by a setting sun.

The facade is a mask with nothing behind it. It is a Hollywood structure made to give the illusion of a house, but the photograph, by including the supports in the rear, deliberately exposes the elements of the illusion, destroying one effect to create another.

Arbus’s total acceptance of the wounds both inflicted and endured by humans is illustrated in photographs that display the wounds as if they were the norm, creating a disbalance between mask-photograph and reality-wound. But is nature also complitious? One seems to be asked to lie in wait with Arbus until the veil is rent for a second and the trauma both of nature and of person is exposed. the visual affect , however, is not of complicity but of indifference on the part of nature.

Nature is both removed and awesome and yet can be made to stand still for a picture in which it will suggest the impersonality of the natural world.

p.133

Richard Avedon and his models tend to know who they are. How they are is the modern question. Photographs are less an answer than a reflection of the questions, a way of resisting the flux of time so as to contemplate the questions.

p.173

Each of the metaphors used, whether the term is aura, mask, or language, illuminates the idea of the photograph.

Benjamin, Proust, Musil, and Barthes, as well as Keats with his negative capability, are all saying, in individual poetic and imaginative modes of expression rather than philosophic (aesthetic or logical) modes, that certain perceptions are originally oblique and private; they retain a penumbra of mystery and are conveyed to others in the languages of the imagination.

p.174

The aura of photography is the aura of the very temporality Benjamin recognizes in photography, the aura of reality, contradicting his first premise, that the phenomenal world does not have aura.

The aura of reality: no matter what the culture, intentions, predispositions, deceptions, or philosophical beliefs of the photographer, the camera, in some fundamental sense, does not lie.

Distortions and even ineptitudes are registered in a sane, optically logical system that can be understood. When the photograph shows a bowed side of a building, or a building prenaturally big at the bottom and small at the top, the viewer does not for an instant imagine that the structure curves or leans in that way but does not doubt for an instant that there was a building in front of the camera.

The viewer must interpret where interpretation will disclose the original state of affairs to good purpose.

p.175

In still photographs, the act of preservation, the historical seizure of the object in the moment, is itself both a tribute to worth and a defining factor in establishing worth.

Factual information about the contexts of photographs, about the persons, places, and circumstances involved in terms of both individual and society, will contribute the innumerable particulates that help constitute the secular aura of the subjects of the photograph.

Interpretation is necessary for the viewer. It is not accumulated documentation alone that constitutes aura, for after the critical process of gathering and offering the facts comes the language of interpretation itself. Looking, thinking, discriminating, and expressing characterize the investments in the language of secular aura.

Secular aura, as well as the traditional aura of the sacred, has to have something real to associate with itself. It cannot just float around like smoke.

Creations of the hand and mind which shape the world by art are admirable in invention and execution, yet at the same time a stubborn residue of skepticism exists about formulations that contradict or weaken apprehension of the world as real and solid outside the self.  This skepticism is not appropriate for photography because the photograph must be imprinted with what has been presented to the camera; it must literally receive something physical from out there, if only what can be described as interrupted light.

This is the factuality of the photograph. The photograph authenticates the objects. The objects authenticate the photograph.

p.176

To condemn photographs as trivial on the grounds that they lack the shaping power of imagination is to emphasize the threat of irrelevancy, to insist that only contingency governs choice of subject from the world of possibilities.That is one absolute. The other end of the continuum is the view that the photographer exercises such choice and discrimination that his work on paper has been entirely invented. Stated so, both are obviously false, yet often photographs are judged with implicit reference to one or the other.

[...] the answer to what [a photograph] means may be attempted even in the absence of other specific knowledge. Every bit of knowledge is useful, and every attempt at making a meaningful interpretation is useful. But some interpretations are more interesting than others, and among the most interesting I find those of writers who imagine a meaning.

p.177

Photography is essentially a way of making the world look back at the viewer.

The fascination of photographs consists partly in the knowledge that peering into a photograph, studying it closely, will result not in finding ideas but in recovering what may be identified as reality; then in an instantaneous process ideas will be constructed to account for the reality. Ideas may exist already prepared to seize the appropriate visual conformation. Research into who, what, when, where, how, and why might provide valuable information, but just as in the case of the sociological information about the Hill/Adamson photographs, the answers to these factual questions may not account for the interest of the photograph.

The secular aura of the photograph is constituted by investment and endowment, just as the aura of the sacred object is constituted.

Overlapping descriptions from different sources, words recognized as accurate in naming the qualities or depictions of the secular object, will establish the secular aura. The individual figure, photographer or viewer, enters a looking-glass land with eyes wide open, but cannot immediately interpret what he sees. To photograph is one way of arresting time in order to contemplate.

p.150

Benjamin’s touchstone is Proust, the first great imaginative writer to make extensive use of the wonder and the magic of photography.

pp.151-157

[discussion and analysis of Proust's grandmother's transformation]

p.154

Proust’s metaphor suggests that the photograph is a record only of surfaces and has no power to hold memory. It subtracts the entire emotional affect of a person because it cannot help limiting itself to literal phenomena of physical surfaces.

The eye of the camera is the eye of the stranger. It subtracts emotional context, leaving in this case the withdrawn, indifferent bones of age. The photograph is not, here, a repository of memory.

p.155

Proust uses the photograph as a metaphoric instrument of vision when Marcel becomes witness and observer of his grandmother’s ordinary appearance as if seen by a stranger.

pp.155-156

The use of the photograph as metaphor for bare fact becomes more complicated when Marcel, much later, after his grandmother’s death, is struck by the sight of the actual, not the imagined photograph of his grandmother taken by Saint-Loup.

p.156

“I kept my eyes fixed,” Marcel says, “as on a drawing which one ceases to see by dint of staring at it, upon a photograph that Saint-Loup had taken, and all of a sudden I thought once again: ‘It’s grandmother, I am her grandson,’ as a man who has lost his memory remembers his name, as a sick man changes his personality.” The click of attention, the shift of focus so that what was lost is found, or what was forgotten is remembered, is familiar.

[Proust's] The use of photograph as metaphor is a literary device, to be sure, a means of deepening understanding of character. It also illustrates that use of the photograph which will teach us its meaning.

We can even find in Proust a prototype of Barthes’s recognition of a significant photograph and the difference between that photograph and any other that might be imagined.

p.157

Time past, the age of the woman in the photograph, its deceptive or unexpected disclosure of meaning, the contradiction between the formal photograph, in which the woman presents herself, and the informal, unprepared appearance of the, if not more real, woman, the more private, the more securely perceived and valued as the user’s own, these elements are the same in Proust’s simile and in Barthes’s discovery of his mother.

pp.158-159

[analysis of poem by Robert Lowell]

p.162

[On Proust] The time of the photograph stretches from the moment of its taking to the moment when Marcel discovers the grandmother’s true purpose in having her picture taken and from that moment back to modify the earlier memory of its being taken.

pp.162-163

What remains for Barthes is not in fact photograph but many because he is not writing fiction, and part of his search for any photograph which he can regard as truly depicting the mother is in discarding or discounting the myriad everyday ordinary and undescribed photographs that do not satisfy him.

p.163

The peculiar fact that Barthes recognized the aura of that love in a picture of the mother when she was five, that is, of his mother before he was born and long before she assumed the form he must first have seen, is a measure of the fictional possibilities in vision.

Photography is neither mirror with a memory nor window but a picture of that which is about to become a memory, a capturing of what, in the present which is about to become the past, is to be remembered. This is not to confuse picture with memory itself, because memory is internal, private, and kinaesthetic, like dreams.

It is all very well to say that the external world is caught, if fragmentarily, in a photograph. The question is, What does the resultant picture mean?

For Proust, it was the external world in the literal person of his grandmother stripped of the veils of illusion with which any beloved person is enveloped that he imagined as a photograph. In this view, the photograph reveals the plainest surface unaffected by feelings. Surface is foregrounded. Volume exists in space, person exists in flash, flash is transitory, and the old lady is everywoman, anywoman.

p.165

[Describes how the original frontispiece image of Camera Lucida relates to the absence/presence of the winter-garden photograph]

The concepts of absence, negative space, and the idling machine are all telling metaphors for an aspect of seeing. In the vocabulary of sight as well as in the vocabulary of literary criticism, the concept of “negative” is significant.

p.166

The phrase “negative capability” was invented by Keats to mean a state ” when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” [...] Keats is saying let the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts remain.

[Barthes's] act of choice recalls Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a machine “idling” as a paradigm of potential movement for which the impulse or lever to start has not been activated.

Barthes’s search is an instance of the engine idling until the one picture activates the full flood of feeling and memory. Barthes recognized the shape, the negative space, of absence, and sought the image to fill the space.

It is a sign of our times that Barthes looked for a photograph.

Beyond the fact that many photographs of his mother existed, he sought the verification of her being that only a photograph could give him. He wanted something beyond “simple resemblance,” something only he could provide and the existence or effect of which he could never prove. The evidence of the authentication of her existence.

The something beyond “simple resemblance,” was the aura without its objects.

pp.167-170

[Price discusses Musil's novel The Man without Qualities]

p.171

It seems that if at the later time of looking at an earlier photograph one dissociates oneself deliberately, or even involuntarily, from intimate feelings about it, or if one disavows such feelings, it might be the same as looking at the picture of a stranger. After all, if one had not already had a familiarity with such a photograph and with what  the younger self had looked like, one might well not recognize it.

Three instances of writers finding meaning in a photograph of a self with a mother figure might suggest that some psychological interpretation is necessary. This is not my interest. For my purposes, the significant aspect is the choice of photograph to educe meaning.

p.172

Proust’s example of Marcel as stranger-witness to the stripping away of illusion is like a stripping away of aura, like the rending of a veil, as if the resulting exposure of photograph were the hidden reality.

Barthes’s photograph of his mother, real but unseen by his readers, fills a gap in his imagination. It is the more real to him because it is so private, so distant in time, so invested and endowed by him with significance.

Musil gives the character of Ulrich less range of interpretation. Ulrich seems closer in this respect to the ordinary viewer of photographs, that is, the response is dependent more on attitudes toward family, childhood, self, or the past than on visual acuity.

My emphasis on literary imaginations is a deliberate choice of approach. An earlier chapter mentioned that many interpretations of photographs are couched  in the vocabularies of the writers’ professions, whether art history, sociology, political history, or literary theory. The literary approach without theory allows the acknowledgement of these interpretations but avoids the special vocabularies and indeed bypasses the special expertise to confront the photograph not abstractly, as “photography,” but particularly, in its individual intimacy.

A kind of discomfort for some readers may ensure from a lack of a theoretical structure. This too is deliberate – for the sake of the freedom to see a photograph without aura. Only if inspired by the photograph itself to speculation and description does one invest that photograph with aura. What is said about a photograph depends on what is perceived by the viewer, who must, according to the use intended for the photograph, resolve, explicate, or ignore the significant tension between “heightened by life” and “paralyzed by fact.”

pp.134-135

Before photography, according to Ivins [William M, Ivins, Jr.], the syntactical analysis of a picture preceded the handmade reproduction, which became a symbolic representation of its original. references for reproduction are the woodcut, etching, or lithograph that reproduce a work of art. But the reproduction of the work of art by means of photography becomes equivalent to the reproduction of the syntaxless world of real objects in any photograph.

p.135

A picture is seen first as a whole and then analyzed in any order of parts, unlike the sentence in which each word has a place, in which the order of words may have meaning, and in which every part is related to a whole statement unintelligible until the sentence is completed. Verbal statements, Ivins reminds us, can be exactly repeated, but until the invention of photography visual statements could not. His use of the grammatical term syntax is a metaphor for the ordering of parts.

p.136

The point to emphasize is that photography as language is either a metaphor (a comparison) or it is nonsense.

p.137

[Price discusses Berger's opposition of painting and photography, and reproduction of paintings]

p.138-140

[Price discusses photographic 'metaphors' - the mirror, skin]

p.141

The imagined retention of an image, that is, the memory reenacted , preceded the the possibility of securing an actual image.

Just as you cannot step in the same river twice, so you cannot take the same photograph twice, and for the same reason. That which may seem the same is different precisely, even if not only, in being literally different in time.

Benjamin calls this recording of objects “the perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory”, which, “encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of the imagination.” Volitional memory, as Benjamin uses the term, is conscious memory. But it is not only that which we wish to remember; it is our identity as well as our past; it is the extent of experience and learning and the limit of self-knowledge. When a record of a particular state of affairs, say a photograph, is accepted as evidence that such was the state of affairs, flexibility is reduced or corrected, and there is little play of memory as invention, fancy, or even recovery.

Memory plays an important part in Benjamin’s metaphor of aura [...] Benjamin’s ostensible purpose in elaborating the metaphor of aura is to reinvest original works of art with aura and to strip aura from the upstart photography. I now wish to claim boldly that aura is a concept applicable, despite Benjamin, to photography.

Despite Benjamin is only partial truth; although Benjamin denies aura to the photograph, the language of his description of actual photographs tends to supply it. The aura of photography consists in more than a century and a half of recognition, familiarity, and incorporation into culture; articles of clothing have as much as that.

pp.141-142

The aura of photography becomes manifest in figures of speech in which two aspects are assumed. One is the existence of the external world which is registered by means of the camera and film. The other is the puzzle, mystery, and magic of such registry.

p.142

To imagine that an object returns a look is to activate the memory of what has been forgotten and distant from consciousness, so that, according to Benjamin, the volitional memory is not the whole of memory.

pp.142-143

The reciprocity of the relation between object and conscious (volitional) or unconscious memory can be expressed in various ways, but Benjamin is intensifying the connection between object and response by insisting that the investment of the object is first an act by the responder and then by virtue of that investment, which creates aura, exists as an entity capable of returning the glance.

p.143

The metaphor is complex; in this expression of it, the object invested with aura need have no intrinsic value, or no reference to systems of value outside the intensity and expansive power of personal response. It need not be a work of art. One such object is the madeleine that released Proust’s memory.

An object that is a work of art also has an aura. This time, instead of being the activator to an individual memory, it is the historical tradition, the cultural memory, in which all can participate.

The idea of investment is continued through all the uses of aura. Furthermore, in Benjamin’s continuing explanation, not only objects but words have an aura, which neatly moves the argument back to the question of language.

pp.144-145

Benjamin’s conclusion is that “if the distinctive feature of the images that rise from the mémoire involontaire is seen in their aura, then photography is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of the ‘decline of the aura’” The photograph has no aura itself; it can have no tradition, no place of being, no associative thickness, and individually it can have no history in Benjamin’s view. The fact of reproducibility, understood as vitiating or even entirely dissipating the aura, means there is no unique object for the accumulation of associations.

p.145

The photograph has contributed, according to Benjamin, to the decline of that great nebula of association, inheritance, investment, or endowment, emanating from object and word, the aura.

[Price discusses two examples of aura]

p.146

[Price discusses Benjamin and Baudelaire's 'unreturned glance']

The figure of the broken glance between one person and another, the glance directed like a beam but received nowhere, is, for Benjamin, a figure of man’s disconnectedness, illustrating the social alienation he believes characteristic of modern society.

In a passage from Proust, a surprising reversal occurs in the metaphor of interaction between object and viewer: “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them.” Instead of an object’s losing an invisible layer, it gains an invisible layer, again the accretion of memory, history and tradition that Benjamin calls aura.

p.147

The image of the past must be imperfectly understood, ambiguous, and indeterminate in order to sustain its constant renewal; the photograph, depicting some aspect of the past which is both evidenced and determined by the existence of the photograph, falsifies it in fixing it because such fixing is partial and limiting. The frame excludes more than it includes.

pp.147-148

[On the shock as discontinuity between object and gaze, breaking the aura]

The shock is individual, wounding, and isolating; man is no longer able to assimilate the world around him. The world changes so rapidly, and crowds man so closely, buffets him with so much information, that it constantly distracts him from that wholeness achieved in an earlier age when objects had auras.

p.148

Even before the data has so piled up, all the time knowledge was proliferating, man was peering at the world with the same old eyes and processing information in the same old brain. Man’s eye and brain never comprehended the whole of the world.

What there is to be known has grown so great in range and so specific in detail that we seem to know less simply because what there is to be known has increased so much.

Invention of the several parts of the photographic process was participant in the disastrous proliferation of those inconsequential bits of information. The camera records an instant, a fragment of time. The camera is a factor isolating, perpetuating, and conveying a moment of shock according to Benjamin.

Against the world’s increase in speed Benjamin wished to oppose and praise the slowness of tradition, the stillness of revered objects, the quiet of expectations daily fulfilled.

p.149

Benjamin turns the word aura in his writing as if he were turning a crystal ball, intent on the image forming within the center but speaking from various points of view in turn, none of which excludes the others, each of which in turn, and finally simultaneously, illuminates the center that holds them all at once.

p.47

It is because the question of reproducibility extends far beyond the realm of art that it raises the possibility of the democratization of death. Not only does technical reproducibility change our relation to death, but the incursion of the technical media into our everyday life introduces us into what Jünger calls, speaking of technology in general, “a space of absolute danger” [In Of Danger]

This danger can be registered, according to Benjamin, in the reproducibility that transforms us into a recording apparatus.

p.49

The techniques of reproduction, Benjamin suggests, disperse the unique occurrence of the artwork into a mass whose reproduction sets it into circulation and motion. No longer to be understood in terms of the traditional values of singularity and originality, this mass artwork now belongs to a network of unforseeably mediated relations that, encountering a recording apparatus, comes to itself as a reproduced mass.

What links the artwork to the masses – or the making of films to the formation of masses – is that both have their origins in techniques of reproduction. They are both produced, that is, according to the structure and operation of technological reproduction.

pp.49-50

Benjamin’s interest in the production techniques of film and photography corresponds to his conviction that what takes place on a film set or in a photography studio is related, if not identical, to what takes place outside this same set or studio: the emergence or mobilization of images.

p.50

Jünger reads the pervasive violence of technology in the transformation of humanity into a new type of technologized, functionalistic human beings. The features of this transformation, he suggests, are legible in the increasing uniformity of social life, the technologizing of the everyday world, and the growing militarization of society.

For [Jünger], war not only names the central experience of modernity; it also plays an essential role in our understanding of technological reproduction in general and of photography in particular.

p.51

Pointing to the mass of archival photographic material given to us by the war, Jünger evokes the relation that for him exists between war and photography. We could even say that, for this aesthetician of war, there can be no war without photography.

Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, German and English bombers dropped incendiaries both to trace bombing areas and to light up nocturnal targets.

To say that there would be no war without the production of images is to say that there could be no war without the flash of the camera. In the experience of the German light-wars, the technology of warfare comes together with the techniques of perception.

p.52

Linking war to photography and weapons to images, Jünger argues that modern technological warfare gives birth to a specifically modern form of perception organized around the experience of danger and shock.

Identifying the contemporary zone of danger with the realm of technology in general, he claims that a modern type is arising in response to “the increased incursion of danger into daily life”., whose aim is to develop an anesthetized relation to danger: “If one were to try to describe the ‘type’ that is emerging today, one could say that its most striking characteristic is the possession of a ‘second’ consciousness. This second, colder consciousness is indicated by the ever more marked ability to see oneself as an object.” [from Photography and the 'Second Consciousness']

p.53

The technologies of perception, Jünger suggests, facilitate the reproduction of a kind of accord or consensus among the masses. This consensus signals the objectification of our views of the world, our transformation into things that can no longer experience pain.

Like the artificial eye of the camera, whose gaze stands “outside the zone of sensibility”, our manner of seeing neutralizes what it sees and thereby brings it under the understanding of photography. If photography is indeed a “revolutionary” fact, it is because it has turned the entirety of the world into a photographable object.

For Jünger, however, the technical media and photography are also a means of disciplining the masses.

In particular, the disciplinary function of the technical media works to distract or disperse the masses - to take them away from themselves in order to prevent them from experiencing pain directly.

The numbing effect of the media is linked in Benjamin and Kracauer to the distraction and dispersion that characterize our response to film.

p.55

[...] in an age whose signature is total reproducibility, Jünger tries to envision an idea of a modern community, a return to the logic of togetherness inscribed within the values of Gemeinschaft that, remaining faithful to the new demands of this technological era, can be mobilized in order to give direction and form to the contemporary masses.

For Benjamin, it is precisely this mobilization – one that, expressing the truth of the masses, gives them a figure or form – that lies behind the fascist mobilization of masses.

p.56

What makes a mass masslike, Benjamin explains, are the techniques of reproduction and photography that enable a mass to see itself in the face – to see itself looking at itself – as if it were looking in a mirror. If fascism works to allow the masses to view themselves according to the laws of self-reflection, if it wishes to give a face to the masses by means of the media, Benjamin claims the masses can never be given a face.

The contrast between Jünger and Benjamin here could hardly be more striking. If Benjamin notes that Baudelaire’s mass has neither a face nor a gaze with which it might see itself looking at itself, it is because he wishes to write against the fascist formation of masses. He wants to interrupt a mobilization of film and photography whose aim would be to give the dispersed and distracted masses not only a face but also a form and a voice.

p.57

Although we could say that there are many relays between Jünger’s thoughts on photography and those of Benjamin - they each claim that the experience of photography involves an encounter with danger and shock, that technology in general has brought us nearer to death, that every document of civilization is touched by a certain barbarism – Benjamin meets Jünger’s desire for total mobilization with an insistence on immobilization, his desire for expression with an interest in what remains expressionless, his wish for community with the dispersion of community, the aura with the aura’s disintegration, and the giving of a face with what never has a face.

pp.57-58

That fascism names the filmic and photographic mobilization of the identificatory mechanisms of the masses means that there can be no politicization of the human face that does not belong to an ideological combat zone.

p.44

What is at stake in the question of technological reproducibility – in the question of photography, for example – is not whether photography is art, but in what way all art is photography.

For Benjamin, as soon as the technique of reproduction reaches the stage of photography, a fault line traverses the whole sphere of art: photography transforms the entire notion of art. The presumed uniqueness of a production, the singularity of the artwork, and the value of authenticity are deconstructed.

By substituting a plurality of copies for a unique original, technologically produced art destroys the very basis for the production of auratic works of art – that singularity in time and space on which they depend for their claim to authority and authenticity. Every work is now replaceable. The changes in the technical conditions for the production and reception of art constitute a break with tradition that effectively removes the previous ritual or cultic bases of art and facilitates the predominance of the political function of art.

p.45

If politics, however, fascist no less than communist, depends on photography and film’s capacity to exhibit and manipulate bodies and faces, then all politics can be viewed as a politics of art, as a politics of the technical reproduction of an image.

[discusses fascist regime with regards to art/photography]

[...] the entirety of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay can be read as a critical response to the fascist effort to mobilize works of art – including photography and film – toward both the production of an organic community and the formation of this community (the German people or nation) as a work of art itself.

pp.45-47

Benjamin’s insistence on the disintegration of the auratic character of the artwork, for example, belongs to his effort to deconstruct the values of originality and community at work within the fascist program of self-formation and self-production.

p.47

To the extent that the essence of the political is to be sought in art, then, there is no aesthetic or philosophy of art that can undo the link between art and politics.

Whereas fascism aestheticizes politics, Benjamin wishes to politicize aesthetics.

p.42

[Benjamin] suggests that technical reproducibility can only be understood by considering the historical relations between science and art – especially in terms of their relation to the historical conditions of production and reproduction. 

[..] Technical reproduction is not an empirical feature of modernity; it is not an invention linked to the so-called modern era. Rather, it is a structural possibility within the work of art.

p.43

[citing Weber ...] What interests Benjamin and what he considers historically ‘new’, is the process by which techniques of reproduction increasingly influence and indeed determine the structure of the artwork itself [...] – or even, of our existence in general.

For as we know, every moment of our life, of our relation to the world, is touched directly or indirectly by this acceleration, an acceleration that had already prepared for the coming of the camera – where replication and production tend to merge. 

Indeed, the technology of the camera also resides in its speed, in the speed of the shutter, in the flash of the reproductive process.

An instrument of citation, the camera here cites the movement of lightning, a movement that never strikes the same place twice. In the same way reproducibility has always reproduced itself, but never in an identical manner.

There can be no understanding of photography without a thinking of the relation between photography and the history of technology. This is why technology can never simply clarify or explain the photographic event. This is also why the age of technological reproduction includes all history.

P.55

For Plato, true philosophy did not tell tales, but poetry, on the other hand, could be accused of spinning stories foreign to truth. Plato’s line, so I’ve heard tell, is that true philosophy rises above the charms and double-dealings of rhetoric; it neither tells tales nor practises the art of persuasion. The task of philosophy is to safe guard the truth from tall stories and the fabrications of fiction, which are the source of error, lies and illusion. The gates of Plato’s ideal city are shut to those who spin yarns and tell tales: the poet is banished and fiction is relegated to the other side, opposite the truth.

Truth/fiction: a line is drawn and fiction is excluded from entering truth’s domain.

The line in the middle comes to mark the place of the other with a loss or lack. B becomes the minus, the negative of A. And so the story goes on: difference is the lack of identity, fiction is the negative of truth and abstraction is the minus of reality.

p.56

Traditionally, truth is to be ‘right’, When truth is missing there is ‘wrong’ and according to this logic, fiction (as the minus of truth) becomes open to the accusation of illusion, falsehood and lies. Yet it seems to me that before we can tell the truth we have to tell the fiction. Before we can tell the same we have to tell the difference.

p.57

I have heard it said, often enough to become somewhat of a commonplace, that we live in a world of images. I have heard it said that we live in a world where images are posted everywhere.

In the late twentieth century, on planet Earth, we heard of a discovery: nothing solid or substantial stands behind the surface of the image. This discovery, which perhaps is neither so new nor so very extraordinary, finds that we earthlings can no longer be sure of a singular reality which comes before and remains outside of the image, appearance or sign.

One of the theories we hear is that a real world is not waiting ‘out there’ to be reflected, represented or captured by the image. The very idea of an independent reality is thrown into question and things can no longer be proven in quite the same way.

Indeed it has been said that behind the photograph there is no essence – of truth, reality or referent – which provides its origin and point of return.

p.58

One of the stories we hear, one of the theories perhaps we fear, is that the real world is a fiction.

One tale that may be told is that the very idea of some thing coming before and remaining outside of the surface of the image is only an effect of the surface itself.

From such a story told, the theory may unfold that we live in a postworld. We may easily agree that we live in a world where everything comes after. Indeed, we may agree that we live in the world that is without origin.

And as this theory unfolds, the story may be told that having nothing before we are only left with fiction and image, only appearance and sign.

In the beginning, the image.

Gone is the referent which came before and was the past of the sign. Gone is the prior reality which stood steadfast and remained independent of the image. Gone is the essence which waited to be discovered whole behind the front of appearances. The singular truth is fallen, anteriority is no more and gone is the unity of the one.

Hearing that we are left with just images or fictions, just abstractions and signs, it is easy to conclude (once again) that something is missing, something is lacking, something is not.

p.59

Without reference to  depth beyond, signs only dance with other signs, images only refer to other images.

And I must say that I am not astonished at all to hear the pronouncement that if there are only signs and surface effects then the referent, along with the real world and the documentary photograph, is no longer, is no more, is dead.

The twist in the tale of this loss is not just that the logic should call for us to pronounce the loss of the real world, the death of a referent which authoritatively came before , but also that it first requires us to agree that the real world or referent was really ‘that’ and only that.

Abracadabra: deny the presence of something, say that it is no more, and then we come to affirm its presence, albeit absent.

I may say that the referent is only an effect of representation, only an effect of the sign. Yet glory be, the more the referent’s anteriority and authority is denied, and the more this is lamented as a loss, the more forcefully its presence, albeit absent, is affirmed.

The referent is dead: long live the referent. Oh! the world is a fabulous place.

There is yet another story which I have heard told, a tale which is somewhat more lengthy. In unsettling the one and the other, such that we become unsure which is ‘either’ and which is ‘or’, the line in the middle begins to gather momentum. The story here is that the line in the middle picks up speed and whilst doing so turns into a stream. In this tale a stream flows and gnaws away at its two banks; it picks up speed in the middle and carries away the one and the other. Here we have a stream – a line and a middle – which is without beginning or end. Here we have a stream – a line and a middle – which is without beginning or end.

p.61

M is for middles and many things. M is for the many stories and meanings that may be told. That we are neither one thing nor the other, that we are neither inside nor outside but somewhere between, may soon become a tale of numbing neutalisation. Indeed, the story may be told that indifference infects the land. All too quickly the line in the middle turns the land to sand and we become lost to the perpetual shifting of the bleached white sand.

Rather than turning all to desert sand, the unsettling of binary difference may turn into a tale of implosion. The story here is that the line in the middle mixes up the one and the other to such an extent that the very difference between the two inwardly collapses.

p.62

The relationship between one and the many ceases to be that of an opposition; the issue of difference has taken quite a different slant. That we may speak of a singularity is not a matter of seeking an inside and outside, a text and a context, a center and circumference. For in this tale we are in the world, indeed worlds, of networks and nodal points. And with this sort of milieu we shall never arrive at a thing-in-itself which has intrinsic properties independent of its environment.

Things turn out to be inter-connections between things which in turn are inter-connections between other things. yet these ‘lines’ (in the middle), these interconnections shall never lead us to an all-knowing Theory of Everything. There is always an element of uncertainty; these lines and connections rarely proceed in a straightforward manner. Any one con-nection may produce a multiplicity of effects – a multiplicity of other connections, other lines.

And here we require prudence: how will one line affect others? In this tale emphasis is put upon considering others; as the philosopher might say, ethics is given priority over epistemology and ontology.

In this tale where we are always enetering things in mid-flow, I hear that no one thing can assume the determining part, the cause or the origin.

For in this world it turns out that any such cause is already affected by other things.

Knowledge is not such a proclamation of certainty – I know that I know! – but more, as I heard from a Hebraic tradition, an understanding that any interpretation is provisional and open to alteration and re-interpretation. Any theory, any story, or indeed truth, is that which could always be otherwise.

p.63

‘So,’ the child remarks with zest, ‘maybe I shan’t be speaking of a loss of an independent real world or telling tales of the death of the referent. Perhaps I shall say that the existence of an independent real world is one story amongst others. As for apples and images – well, I might just tell the tale that with both ‘things’ and ‘signs’ (both nature and culture) we always start in the middle and that in so doing the question of the referent, its absence or presence, becomes more a question of connections, of effects and affects.

p.61

The problem is that this multiplicity of imagery [found in private and public archives] is often not accorded any significance and consequently not ‘mapped’. Such a process involves an attitude, before anything else – one which recognises the value of so many diverse images and how they can be made more meaningful, accessible and useful.

The task of redressing the historical balance is not only one dealing with an elitist and distorted view of facts and events. It mainly has to deal with a much greater vice – that of omission, of an absence.

pp.61-62

As opposed to the privileged, mainstream historian, who is privy to the various research collections and institutes, government reports and documents, supported by a lavish academic back-up system – the socialist/feminist historian is face with a job more akin to a social archeologist. The evidence and material have to be ‘dug out’ of numerous and diverse sources, ranging from the popular press, invitations to meetings, personal accounts in letters and interviews – the list is endless.

p.62

In this context, the use of photography offers both vast potential and enormous problems. The use of visual mass media like photography or film records of specific political events, debates and development (of the type not likely to be kept by the dominant media) is of crucial value to the continuation and furtherance of class/gender struggle. This type of evidence and analysis is a way in which the past is made real for a social grouping – history is made our own,  and we are offered a place in it which we can understand and criticise.

This raises, in turn, a serious problematic for the photographer/activist in this area of ideological struggle and cultural confrontation.

What is required from us is a different, critical approach towards the image as evidence – a process of interrogative ‘reading’, where the assumed ‘facts’ within the image are investigated in terms of our own knowledge and experience. We need to be critics at the level of the status of the individual image, as well as the whole process of constructing the past. Whether by amassing an alternative version of events with images, or whether we create strategies for ‘re-reading’ existing ones – the role of photography in the retrieval of our past is a vital one.

The construction of history using a patchy and arbitrary collection of images as the basis for theorisation and analysis is clearly inadequate. What is necessary is the committed, long-term organisation of historical pictorial statements, through a process of consolidating and improving radical historical research/action archives. In this struggle, the options of the future depend on a well-documented and analysed past – this investigation and mapping of history is a form of socialist movement.

pp.62-63

Activities ranging from postcard collection to sessions demystifying cameras, lectures and seminars, publications and exhibitions – all these have contributed to the building up of far more than just another archive, or a photographic picture library for activists to use. The combination of recording and analysing, teaching and theorising, has created a tradition of an alternative use of photography as history, and of the history of photography.

p.63

For such a system to thrive and be continued, this individual effort has to be supplemented by a political system of links to the labour movement, so that the long term of the project is protected.

[discussion of Manchester Studies Archive]

p.64

[discussion of the Consett Photo-Archive and the Beaford Archive]

Like Consett and others, [Beaford] also commision new work, so that the archive becomes a live and growing resource with the potential for investigating relationships between the past and the present and working through the implications of that.

Documentary imagery is the basis for most of these archives and it is not necessarily exciting visual material. The strength and dynamic of this imagery is based upon its informational and revelatory function, rather than its aesthetic one. However, in order to survive, most of these archives rely partially or substantially on subsidy from the State, whose criteria is frequently measured in terms of ‘creative photography’. In order for these projects to be protected, it is necessary to use them continually, thereby demonstrating their importance for our heritage.

p.82

Up until 1888 – that is, for the first half-century of the medium’s existence – anyone who wanted to make photographs had to practice photography.

p.83

George Eastman changed all that, permanently, when he introduced the first Kodak camera in 1888. ‘You press the button, we’ll do the rest,’ read the slogan under which is was advertised.

Not only did this make it unnecessary for the camera user to process his/her own film and make his/her own prints, it actually made that impossible, at least at first: the film for this camera initially was such that amateur processing was impracticable.

Historians of photography are prone to celebrating this a triumph. I’d suggest that, in fact, it was in another sense a setback of major proportions. This was a time when a continually widening segment of the public was acquiring craft expertise in the first democratically accessible visual communications system. The Kodak No. 1 – by appealing to people’s capacity for laziness – allowed the ‘luxury’ of foregoing any study of that craft.

By permitting camera users to remain ignorant of the processes they were employing, this [Kodak's] approach to photography remystified the medium – made of it a  prototypical ‘black box’ – right at the juncture when its demystification was underway among the population at large.

[I consider this a setback] because the camera is, on at least two levels, an instrument for the control of perception. Not only does the user employ it to tame and organize visual perception, but through its structure the originators of the camera and their descendants – those who design the cameras, films, and papers of our time – dictate how we will see.

p.84

The only truly effective way to come to an understanding of the degree to which ‘the medium is the message’ in photography is to study the medium itself – that is, the process of production. Only in that fashion can one discover the medium’s inherent biases – the kinds of ideas and information whose transmission it facilitates, the kinds that it inhibits or obstructs.

Globally, there is now an enormous population of camera users, only a tiny fraction of which actually practices photography.

Social historians of the far future will find it astonishing that in a culture which produces billions of photographs annually much of the population still believed that cameras take pictures, that photographs don’t lie, that seeing is believing.

They’re ideas of which an entire culture could be disabused by a widespread emphasis on media education.

The relationship to photography that this [photographic] industry promotes is one of rampant, event literal mindlessness. How else can one explain the fact that at least two major manufacturers are advertising their wares with slogans promising ‘decision-free photography’?

p.85

Decision-free information? Decision-free perception? Decision-free self-expression? Decision-free communication? By their nature, such acts cannot be decision-free – at best, the decisions they involve can be deferred, left in the hands of others.

The phrase ‘at best’ assumes, of course, that the avoidance of decision-making in a positive goal in life.

When did the premise of our public discourse change so drastically that ‘freedom from decision’ ceased to be a totalitarian threat?

Media education, including a study of photography [...] is an oppositional force, an embrace of decision-making, difficulty, uneasiness.

It was not, however until the 20th century and the period between the two world wars that the photograph became the dominant and most “natural” way of referring to appearances. It was then that it replaced the world as immediate testimony.

It was the period when photography was thought of as being most transparent, offering direct access to the real: the period of the great witnessing masters of the medium like Paul Strand and Walker Evans.

It was in the capitalist countries, the freest moment of photography: it had been liberated from the limitations of fine art, and it had become a public medium which could be used democratically.

pp.52-53

Yet the moment was brief. The very “truthfulness” of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photogrpahic propaganda.

p.53

In the first period of its existence photography [...] was an implement. Now, instead of offering new choices, its usage and its “reading” were becoming habitual, an unexamined part of modern perception itself.

The invention of the lightweight camera [caused] the taking of a photograph [cease] to be a ritual and became a “reflex”.

p.54

What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do, is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists.

p.55

The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind’s eye, the faculty of memory.

Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. They offer appearances – with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances – prised away from their meaning.

Photographs in themselves do not narrate.

Compare the exposure time for a film with the life of the print made, and let us assume that the print only lasts ten years: the ratio for an average modern photograph would be approximately 20,000,000,000: 1. Perhaps that can serve as a reminder of the violence of the fission whereby appearances are seperated from the camera from their function.

The private photograph [...] is appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it.

A mechanical device, the camera has been used as an instrument to contribute to a living memory. The photograph is a momento from a life being lived.

The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience

p.57

It is because the photographs carry no certain meaning in themselves, because they are like images in the memory of a total stranger, that they lend themselves to any use.

Has the camera replaced the eye of God? The decline of religion corresponds with the rise of the photograph. Has the culture of capitalism telescoped God into photography?

p.58

Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned.

If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgement, into the rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered, and condemnation is close to being forgotten.

At first, the secularisation of the capitalist world during the 19th century elided the judgement of God into the judgement of History in the name of Progress. Democracy and Science became the agents of such a judgement.. And for a brief moment, photography, as we have seen, was considered to be an aid to these agents. It is still to the historical moment that photography owes its ethical reputation as Truth.

During the second half of the twentieth century the judgement of history has been abandoned by all except the under-privileged and dispossessed. The industrialised, “developed” world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility.

pp.58-59

Such opportunism turns everything – nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics – into spectavle. And the implement used to do this – until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone – is the camera.

p.59

The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgement are also lost to us. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

p.60

Is there an alternative photographic practice?

Today no alternative professional practice (if one thinks of the profession of photographer) is possible. the system can accommodate any photograph. Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future. This future is a hope which we need now, if we are to maintain a struggle, a resistance, against the societies and culture of capitalism.

In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives on in an ongoing continuity.

The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.

p.61

Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments.

It is just possible that photography is the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved. Such a memory could encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity. The distinction between the private and public uses of photography would be transcended.

p.62

The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.

The task will determine both the kinds of pictures taken and the way they are used. There can of course be no formulae, no prescribed practice. yet in recognising how photography has come to be used by capitalism, we can define at least some of the principles of an alternative practice.

For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.

p.64

What makes these photographs so tragic and extraordinary is that, looking at them, one is convinced that they were not taken to please generals, to boost the morale of a civilian public, to glorify heroic soldiers or to shock the world press: they were images addressed to those suffering what they depict.

The alternative use of photographs which already exist leads us back once more to the phenomenon and faculty of memory. The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with word, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.

Normally photographs are used in a very unilinear way – they are used to illustrate an argument, or to demonstrate a thought which goes like this:

———————————>

Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event.

\       |       /
\     |     /
- – - – - -   +   – - – - – -
/     |     \
/       |       \

p.65

If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory. We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is.

[Berger cites Brecht, and applying his thoughts on acting to photography]

pp.65-66

Such a context replaces the photograph in time – not its own original time for that is impossible – but in narrated time. Narrated time becomes historic time when it is assumed by social memory and social action. The constructed narrated time needs to respect the process of memory which is hopes to stimulate.

p.66

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it.

p.67

A radial system has to constructed around the photograph so that is may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.