Thoughts on the role of the photograph and perception of Identity

Thoughts on perceptions of identity and the role of the photograph. 

Laurie Haynes:  4 January  2006 (revised 30 sept 07)

 In terms of viewing an image, there is a social and cultural matrix that will exert an influence on the creation of connotation. This signified ‘reading’ is located in what Sartre termed the psychology of the imagination. How does a two dimensional simulacra of a three dimensional actuality (although this actuality can be further challenged in the context of ‘truth to appearances’) become absorbed and referenced by the psychosocial motor functions of the brain? Is such a complex construct achievable unless the viewer has an understanding of the notion of ‘inner viewing’ as defined by Roland Barthes as ‘The act of viewing reflects the tensions of a relationship which cannot be defined through the image as external or the thought as internal’. Contextually if the image is the central point of focus of a context-dependent interpretation of the relationship between seeing and understanding, then images lack ‘The specific’ they are subject to a continuous process of reinterpretation which is referenced from either experiential exposure to similar ‘events’ or via  exposure to similar images or visual abstractions.  Significance is implied/referenced out of the historical context of presentation and performance. The ensuing multiple positioning of the image is central to the postmodernist debate on the variability of meaning and brands notions of specific identity as unstable, creating, rightly,  a dissolution/rejection of the notion of photographic truth. An interesting intellectual position from within which to examine truth to appearance in photographic images is the context of finality. In terms of experiencing what are essentially ephemeral events, length of exposure to that which is fixed as psychologically significant has a bearing on our ability to recall the point of that exposure. Our ability to examine the detail, in terms of social role-play, political context, key protagonists etc, will depend on our prior knowledge or exposure to similar social role-play, and our understanding of the dominant culture or cultural iconography. The real details of what has occurred has a finality in terms of truth to appearance that occupies the same time frame as the event. Binocular vision and the ability to use differential focus helps us fill in the missing information as does the physical scanning of the scene and its attendant peripheral motion, but real detailed investigation is essentially limited to the exact time and place of exposure.  The photograph does not have that sense of finality.  We can, to all intents and purposes, re-examine the point of interaction over and over again. This of course is as flawed as the functions of memory and falls prey to the particular traits of mono-ocular eccentrism, in that the frame is set with specific boundaries that do not allow for reading of associated events that occur outside that frame of reference. The photograph has no real value as a cultural signpost as we may be viewing events that exist outside of our direct cultural knowledge. Therefore, to create meaning we will imbibe or install an alien cultural reading on the depicted scene or event.The objectivity of the lens falls foul of the subjectivism of the maker and is in any case fundamentally flawed in that it serves only to convey a narrative sign that has essentially no real meaning; it is a simulacra of a reality that is not real, but a shifting chimera of multiple identities and readings. This absence of ‘finality’ allows for an endless proliferation of ‘readings’ and by association, ‘meanings’ It therefore follows that to resolve those differences we have to enter into a discourse that will seek for a defining metaphor with which to fix meaning. The frame on the photograph does not fix the image in time, place or social significance, but serves to abduct the ‘real’ from the conveyed reality and leave in its stead a chasm that begs to  be filled with the rhetoric of the image. The image ceases to be the signified and becomes part of the process of signification, a mere trigger. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes position is that meaning is “more” than text (written or photographic), more than words (spoken or heard) and it is only through an exploration of the gap between self-image and photograph, that is between identity and comprehension, that one can begin to understand the interpretive flexibility which needs to be used in discussing a photograph. This presents us with a lack of objectiveness that disrupts any attempt at either classifying or talking about the photography in a meaningful sense, That the identity or significance portrayed by and in the photograph is a movable feast produces a visual object without content, and although as much as we would like to believe that the camera see’s, Intellectual seeing is a sub-conscious psychological  activity that is associated with contextualsing events, thoughts, experience, something the camera can never do.When we consider the content of photographic images it is important to separate ‘the photograph’ from ‘the image’  The photograph as an icon is contextualise  by questions of sight, object verification, and ultimately truth, whilst any realisation of ‘The Image’ is an act of Conscious will and subject to different intellectual parameters. As an Icon the photograph will always have a sense of autonomy. A facsimile existing outside of the casual relationships of the moment of making; context removed, politically impotent, simply an object, albeit one that can have an attached significance. That significance is the province of subjective vision, a mental interface between the photograph and the viewer born out of a desire to ‘understand’. A  construct of perception and thought, a conscious and unconscious continuous process of revision and re-positioningBut the Photograph has become important as a tool for the classification of objects and events. People subscribe, albeit unwittingly, to the notion of photographic truth and the phrase, ‘the camera never lies’ has become a part of everyday speech. The strength of this position has allowed the photograph to exert an influence over social role-play and cultural identity. Central to this is the topic of implied reality and the photographs unique classification. ‘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 a photograph does’ Berger John: “Uses of Photography”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980).In this quote Berger is paraphrasing Susan Sontag, and essentially this serves to underline the sense of uniqueness, recognised by both individuals as central to the imbedding of implied truth and reality within the photograph. The fact that it represents some form of actuality gives the photograph a superiority as a ‘sign’ without equal in the mind of the ‘mass’. To deconstruct or challenge that implied truth the viewer needs to be either aware of,  or engaged in the critical debates surrounding the photograph and be complicit with the rejection of ‘implied truth’; if not, then it follows that the viewer enters into a relationship with the photograph that accepts the notion on some subconscious level that the ‘camera never lies’ and will read the abstracted information contain within the photograph as ‘significant’ ,as a social sign This hypothesis, which is a central one in all discussions about photography, is one to which I will return in this essay. It is the idea of possession which interests me – the notion that there is a reality outside of the photograph for which the print becomes the representation. Berger extends his argument with the assertion that a photograph ‘fixes the appearance’ of an event. In the cut and thrust of everyday life, the photograph made in an instant preserves what the eye might otherwise not capture. This is the point at which image and photograph must be seen as dramatically different. For although the photograph has an existence separate from both the viewer and the event of making, it can never be removed from the process of interpretation. The idea that a photo can capture a moment in time happens to be a specific ideological statement born out of, and sustained by Western cultural conceptions of representation. This has as much to do with notions of the observer and the observed as it does with the presumed relationship of an apparatus to reality.The question I am asking here is not what the difference is between the real and the photographic but to what degree, if any, the photograph initiates a temporal and spatial break between consciousness and the process of depiction. Clearly what is of interest to an observer of a photograph is the way in which he/she can manipulate time, not simply look at a moment torn from a continuum. Control is the key here and unlike Sontag or Berger one must approach the way a viewer marks out the aesthetic boundaries of the photograph in order to deal with the consequences of “taking”. This must be carefully linked to the desire to manipulate memory or hold detailBarthes categorised the photograph as signs without meaning, yet Images are seen as “sources” for meaning, their ever present cultural role constituted not by a reversible process of exchange but by a set of intrinsic characteristics to which viewers supposedly respond – the idea of effect. At one and the same time then, the image “leads” by example, refining its control as it presumably gains more power, whilst also representing the culture within which it operates. Suggestions about effect must be seen for what they are, interpretive responses to both the experience of viewing and to the institutions of image creation and distribution.  This must be viewed as the kind of contradiction which provides our culture with the ideological framework for the production of meaning in an image and in this lies the interface between the visual language of Art and the purely representative simulacra that is the photograph. The question of effect however, generates an even greater confusion in which the image becomes the “object” whose visible properties are equated in a literal sense to “the furniture of the world”. The presumption of this argument is that the image converts what it has appropriated into pictures, leaving intact those properties of the world of “things” automatically retrieved by the camera. Thus in the simplest sense the name of an object is not transformed as it mutates into an image. This would then suggest that there be no conflict between its classification in language and the manner of its usage as a photographic print. The image as a result, is defined as an amalgam of the real and the representational, as a kind of bricolage between different modes of signification. But what are the criteria which can be used to compare the image and the object? Can one make sense of those criteria by privileging the meaning of the object upon which it is then assumed the image relies? And if the image and object are always to some degree “representational” then at which point does the image intervene to confirm that a process of signification has taken place? If the image merely translates the already given set of representations which have been conferred upon the object, then does that exhaust the possible range of meanings which can be attributed to the image? Images are seen as carriers of meaning and as such there is an assumption of reality which is often equated to a powerful effect. This implied truth is then used as an argument to explain the referential power of the image. For without reference the image would not have meaning. Any object or artefact recognised by the viewer is dramatically different in terms of substance or spatial actuality from an image of the same object. The naming, the classification, is not the same in both instances. For example, The iconographic cowboy with all his associated semiotic significance dominates a whole genre of film media. In the film Shane, the unknown man with an unknown past takes on almost mythical significance which is far removed from the cultural symbol that is ‘Cowboy’  But the dominant visual form ‘The Cowboy’  creates more than a simple equation between reference and the language of interpretation. The Cowboy, his role,  context, and purpose, all questions that are addressed in this film have all been raised and this in a rather simplistic discursive field seeks  transforms, or reposition The cowboy in a connotative form. It is this discursive field which makes the connections between object and image arbitrary. There is no pure moment of ‘The Cowboy’ as image which escapes its placement and the use to which it has been put. In this sense there need be no synonymity between image, language and object. If there were, the actual work of interpretation would simply rely on a presumed unity of reference, discourse and representation. An objection could be made here that a cowboy is just a cowboy. But it is precisely the desire to negate the significance of discursivity, of enunciation, which leads to the conflation of representation, language, and the image. Images cannot exist outside of their context of use. The context may dramatically alter the way in which an image fits into a referential category established through natural language, and may upset the criteria used to establish reference in the first place. The contrast then between object and image is a fundamental one. The Cowboy as image must be validated, whereas the Cowboy as object doesn’t have to be. The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special intention. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either. (Sartre in Barthes 20) To be Continued: Laurie Haynes