Defining the Erotic: Laurie Haynes

Defining  the Erotic. 

As we have discussed, representation is dependent on a continual referencing of the object, in this case the image. This referencing draws upon a culturally dependent reading that will attempt to rationalise that which is ‘seen’, and in the case of the photographic, it is not the ‘photograph’ as object, rather the image within the boundaries of the frame, that are the ‘seen’.

The act of looking is mediated by both a conscious and subconscious recognition of the cultural act of viewing, which results in signification. This signification has many different identities, and serves to classify the image in a way that creates ‘recognition’ of the cultural codes and convention of that image.

For instance when we view photographic images of ‘The Family’, the classification/recognition is entirely personal and the images serve as triggers or memento mori, that fix the representation of actual events (The Photographs are not the event, but are signs that an event has taken place) Such images are made available to only intimate social group members, and carry imbedded a codex for viewing which is mediated by both the social and cultural frame of reference of the viewer. In lay persons terms, it means that to be shown such pictures positions you as part of that social/cultural group and you will respond in an appropriate manner that reflects and acknowledges the intimacy of presentation/viewing.

Now you may be thinking where is all this going? In this instance I am preparing the ground to investigate a mechanism of both viewing and object classification which essentially stands outside the contemporary social/cultural framework.

 The Erotic can be considered as a sub-cultural frame of reference that is dependent on an individual positioning of personal objectification. The Oxford English Dictionary classifies the word Erotic as an adjective, therefore descriptive: of, or causing sexual love; tending to arouse sexual desire/excitement. Now I consider this description to be overly simplistic, and not really striking any intellectual or emotional chord with my own concept of the erotic. What that is, is hard to define in terms of visual iconography, as I consider the Erotic to be dependent on a complex positioning of both intellectual and emotional trigger’s, that have long strand points (a chain of associated textual and visual signposts) of socio-cultural reference that are very hard to encapsulate in a simple statement. In short I know what I consider erotic, but it is mediated by a whole panoply of social interaction which can be object dependent, but is often a mental construct. There are however objects that are symbolic of the erotic, and wherever you have symbolic objects, you will get symbolic objectification.

 The erotic is gender/sexuality specific. There is  a chasm of difference between the female definition of the Erotic and the male. In terms of ‘Photographic history’ if we consider that early photographers used the visual devices and iconography of High Art, then the nude body is a prominent subject. The erotic has a lineage that predates photography by two thousand year or more. Erotic drawing and painting exist that depict the symbolic sexual objectification of both sexes. In Japan, for example, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented. At the point of inception of the photograph, Japanese illustrators where still producing ‘Pillow books’ which essentially where used to introduce women to the concept of sexual love in graphic detail. In Japanese culture theses books were intimate tokens of love and esteem, and were accepted as part of the culture. European photographers, transformed or perhaps abducted these images and culturally positioned the erotic photograph as ‘outside’ the social mores of society. The resulting images which in some case copied faithfully the ‘poses’ of the pillow book, where secretly traded in the higher echelons of society, where their risqué charms became the subject for private collection and viewings amongst gentleman. But Erotic Art as a specific context was not a new thing. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text I Modi was an woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601 Caravaggiopainted the “Love Triumphant,” for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec,and of course Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. Erotic Art of this type was common in the Early 20th century. Artist E. J. Bellocq is best remembered for his down-to-earth photographs of French prostitutes in domestic settings in the red light district of New Orleans. In contrast to the usual pictures of women awkwardly posed amid drapery, veils, flowers, fruit, classical columns and oriental braziers, Bellocq’s sitters appear relaxed and comfortable. What is unuseual about Bellocqs studies is that they were to all intents and purposes largly unknown, A respected photographer on one hand, Bellocq had a darker side to his art which was realised in the images of La femme d’nuit. The critic David Steinberg speculates that the prostitutes may have felt at ease with Bellocq because he was “so much of a fellow outcast”, very similar in many respects to toulouse Lautrec.One of Mandel’s early outdoor photos.Julian Mandelbecame known in the 1920s and 1930s for his exceptional photographs of the female form. Participating in the German “new age outdoor movement,” Mandel took numerous pictures in natural settings, publishing them through the Paris-based studios of A. Noyer and PC Paris^. It is interesting to note that this work was not deamed erotic, but rather a romantic ideal that typified a whole philosophy that was adopted by the orchestrator’s of the Third Riecht, as the model of arian perfection. Deviant Art which included erotic images by Schiele and others being confiscated and destroyed. Another noteworthy nude photographer of the first two decades of the 20th century was Arundel Holmes Nicholls. His work, featured in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, is artistically composed, often giving an iridescent glow to his figures Following in Mandel’s footsteps, Nicholls favored outdoor shots.Many photographs from this era are damaged; Bellocq, for instance, frequently scratched out the faces of his sitters to obscure their identities. Some of his other sitters were photographed wearing masks. Peter Marshall writes, “Even in the relatively bohemian atmosphere of Carmel, California in the 1920s and 30s, Edward Weston had to photograph many of his models without showing their faces, and some 75 years on, many communities are less open about such things today than Carmel was then”    

Socially the early images are very significant. In 19^th century Japan women were the property of men, and ‘models’ from all classes were ‘procured’  without protest. European society, having gone through a social revolution that recognised the rights of the individual was a different matter. No ‘decent’ Women would be party to erotic photography, even when dressed in the academic finery of ‘Boudoir photography’

The models, both male and female came from the streets.

The economically repressed underclass of petty thieves and prostitutes. Erotic/pornographic images exist from France, Germany, England, and  Italy, and they all have the same common denominator. Class, and economic dependence. If you examine the images closely, you will see that in almost all the subjects and scenes, no matter how carefully crafted and dressed, the models show clear evidence of having spent a considerable time bare foot.

So early erotic photography was produced to sexually titillate the visual palettes of the ruling classes. The images were made by men, for men.

You are all familiar with term the male gaze, and it is true that the vast majority of Erotic images are made for exactly this, but there are images that make emotional and intellectual connections that completely negate the objectification of breasts, buttocks, and the pudenda. Now I am not making any distinction about the moral objections to the erotic, it exists in many forms, and the positioning is entirely subjective. But I feel that the erotic is an appropriate subject for visual investigation, in that we are by nature under the yoke of the visual; and use the language of the image to navigate an emotional and social connection with the world in which we live.

If you consider the hierarchy of desire, then sexual needs figure very prominently, and it is therefore easy to understand the proliferation of erotic photography. But there exists a world where such imagery is not connected with sexual objectification but social connection.

Social connection could be defined simply as ‘belonging’.

 If you are outside society, a loner, then you will feel disconnected and seek out a society that represents your inner vision of who you are. You become part of a sub-culture. Many sub-cultures co-exist within the mainstream, making points of connection that symbiotically cement the structure of society together.

 But there is a need for recognition of the individual and collective social group. Symbolic objectification is one of the devices that position such recognition; and it is displayed all around us. This display is often culturally removed from the place of origin, and owes its transmigration directly to the photographic image. For example consider skin art and  body piercing. Originally a specific ritual which would be used to delineate either the tribal nature of a collective society or to mark a right of passage. The motifs are now used to identify sub-cultural groups or alternate lifestyle. These images are in turn also often fetish-ised or eroticised to further delineate the social division. Clothing is also often used for exactly the same purposes, and rightly or perhaps wrongly is infected by the genetic catch-all title, The erotic.

The erotic image could then perhaps be typified as an in image which provokes an emotional, intellectual and physical response which are all interdependent, whereas pornography is primarily limited to the physical. So therefore if the individual sets out to create an erotic image it is doomed to failure, because the erotic cannot be staged, it just is; the ultimate movable feast.

(c) laurie Haynes. This document may be used for academic or research purposes on the condition that the author is credited. all other uses restricted.

  

This is not for the fainthearted, but it does explain some of the debates that surround the photographic image

The role of the Photographic image in the transmigration of cultural identity.  

Laurie Haynes

The paradox of representation

An  examination of the rationales of Roland Barthes-Jean-Paul Sartre  

  ‘One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realised then, with amazement I have not been able to lessen since “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor’. (Barthes 3)The eyes of the emperor’s brother once looked straight into a camera, in this case “manned” by a photographer whose duty it was to take pictures of the rich and powerful. Jerome’s eyes had been privileged enough to look into Napoleon’s eyes and as a consequence the photograph established a relay between Roland Barthes, the brothers and the readers of Camera Lucida. This juxtaposition of time and space is at the root of a radically different kind of photographic history as autobiography created by Barthes in Camera Lucida through an openly self-reflexive act of imaginary reconstruction. Barthes provides us with the social and cultural matrix at the heart of his activities as a viewer. Camera Lucida is part analysis, part theory, a personal examination of the role of photography in Barthes’ life and homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, The Psychology of Imagination. Of course the title of the book is also a play on Camera Obscura and as such refers to the history of the medium of photography, to its origin as a device, which transformed the three-dimensions of the “real” world into a flat surface. The deliberate ambiguity of the term Lucida allows Barthes to “look” at photographs both for what they are, and as triggers for bringing out the ‘inner’ light of thinking and interpretation. For Barthes the eye is only capable of seeing if the subject who is looking has mastered an understanding of inner vision as well. The eye reflects the tensions of a relationship which cannot be defined through the image as external or the thought as internal. This brings up the crucial question of context. If the image is the fulcrum of a context-dependent interpretation of the relationship between seeing and understanding then images lack specificity. They are the “site” of a continuous process of reinterpretation produced out of the historical context of presentation and performance. This “instability” which is at the heart of postmodernist reflections of the variability of meaning in all texts, foregrounds images as processual – there is no fixed moment of projection or apprehension. (This would have a dramatic effect on the notion of the photographic archive and on presumptions of photographic truth.) Let us for a moment imagine the photographic scene described above. Jerome goes to a studio or perhaps the photographer comes to his house. The photographer experiences a fair degree of discomfort for indeed there is power in those eyes and a glance in the wrong direction could be misinterpreted. Some days later Jerome sees the photo and declares that, “it is not me”. He insists on a touch-up and then requests a proper portrait, painted in oils. To what degree are Jerome’s reflections on his photograph a result of a difference in perception between himself and the photographer? Jerome obviously has a self-image which does not match the produced image – the photograph has increased the gap between image and reality, at least in the eyes of the man who has seen the emperor. Does the absence of finality suggest an endless proliferation of meanings? With regards to interpretation are we dealing with a meta-critical task circumscribed by discourse and dependent on an ideal for which lack is the defining metaphor? In a sense as the boundaries of the photograph expand “it” becomes a trigger, not for a specific repertoire of elements, but for a performance which is more oral than it is visual. It may be the case that to see means to listen, both to one’s own verbal explanations and to those of others. This conversational model doesn’t end up replacing the photograph as the trigger for discussion but encourages a process for which the photograph may not be the main focus. Barthes’ proposal 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 lack of specificity (almost equivalent to a lack of “objectiveness”) makes the dilemma of talking about photographs both open and closed – a contradiction which is paradoxically as post-modern as it is primitivistic. Barthes spends much of Camera Lucida worrying about this tension, about the innocence of a face captured without the knowledge of the subject, which gives that individual “life” but also rips away “their” thoughts and produces a visual object without content. Thus, as much as we might desire it, the photograph does not see although it is somewhat convenient to look at Jerome’s eyes as if they have seen Napoleon’s. Yet clearly, it would have been possible to generate that image with one’s eyes closed, to see “in” the imagination, to be in control of the look through desire. Photographs and images – I will introduce an important distinction here. The former inevitably plays into questions of sight and object, questions of verification and truth – the latter is the result of an act of consciousness and therefore subject to a different, though related set of questions. The former must be seen to gain status, though as Barthes suggests, a photograph ‘ … is always invisible: it is not it that we see’ (6). Images cannot claim the autonomy of photographs. Images can never be separated from vision and subjectivity. Images are part of a mental process, the result of an interaction between photographs and viewing subjects. Images are products of perception and thought, conscious and unconscious, looped in a spiral of relationships which are continuous – a continuum. Time, in this loop, does not rely on the movement of a clock but is instead located in the physical periodicity of the photograph. Jerome is seated in a chair which “comes” from the 1850s and this “location” of meaning allows Barthes to assume that history is present though clearly the photograph plays only a fragmentary role in this presumption. Often, the assumption is made that photographs have an existence outside the exchange between viewer and object. ‘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’.1 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 moment and flow and flux of everyday life, the photograph 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 the viewer 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.2 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 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. Images are seen as “sources” for meaning, their ever present cultural role constituted not be 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 helmsmanship 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. And this must be understood as the kind of contradiction which provides our culture with the ideological framework for the production of meaning in the image. 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 fixity which is often equated to a powerful effect. Effectivity is then used as an argument to explain the referential power of the image. For without reference the image would not mean, yet clearly, the object named “gun” is dramatically different from the image named gun. The naming, the classification, is not the same in both instances. For example, the statement that the image of a magnum dominates the film Dirty Harry, by Don Segal, creates more than a simple equation between reference and the language of interpretation. The gun, its use, its context, the function which it has in the film, have all been raised and this rather complex discursive field exceeds, transforms, even re-names the object. It is this discursive field which makes the connections between object and image arbitrary. There is no pure moment of the gun 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 gun is after all a gun. But it is precisely the desire to negate the significance of discursivity, of enunciation, which leads to the conflation of representa-tion, 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 gun as image must be validated, whereas the gun 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 intentionality. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either. (Sartre in Barthes 20)Crucially then, the photograph is often confused as the site of perception, as if it has qualities which evade the glance in its direction. As soon as there is a spectator for the photograph an image results. The image is never able to dilute its continual role as a pivot for the pro-cess of substitution. There is no prior moment in time when an image gains the status of an object. It cannot acquire that status through the photograph. The image has to transform the object in order to represent it photographically, which means that the object has ceased to exist in one form, and new conventions have been introduced to give it meaning in another form. All that remains is its name, or the representational system used to classify it. In that sense we can say that images are representations, which represent, representations. As such they operate at a level of autonomy that does not bind them to a set of pre-determined referential properties. However, the status of reference as a property cannot be eliminated. We can then begin to talk about autonomy and reference co-existing, and the image being stripped of its referential qualities in order to make a discursive field in which new forms of reference and linguistic description are possible. What purpose is there then, in drawing an equation between photograph and image and language? Reference tends to become pinpointed as the term of an inevitable identity when it is precisely the site of a process of construction. Photography both initiated and sustained an institutional structure to uphold the idea of the memory trace – a concept not born in an ontological sense from within the properties of the medium itself. Crucially, it is vantage point which is the central raison d’ tre for the conceptualisation of trace, since it is founded on a implied Cartesian perspective which makes it possible to theoretically envision a moment outside of subjectivity. Yet the photograph never functions with that kind of intrinsic autonomy. What must be recognised here is that the photograph is a subset of the image. At an institutional and a cultural level there is nothing to prevent the photograph from being separated from the image. The choice, once it is made, tends to transform the observer’s gaze into a function of the photograph, which as Barthes has so eloquently argued naturalises the artifice of the exchange. The result is a reversal of image and photograph with the latter taking precedence over the former in a chain of relations which are then described as representational. In other words, the process of thinking which is simultaneous to the act of viewing is sub-divided into an opposition of representation and depiction. The viewing subject becomes a witness to representation as if they have not created the interaction. In this sense the photograph comes to signify an absence, but it is not so much the real which is missing but the viewer themselves. Jerome “saw” an image. In other words he saw himself as if the foreground provided by the photograph was not filled with a specific or expected meaning. He looked through, in the Barthian sense, at an absence and created a presence. Yet he claimed the photograph was at fault – that the photograph was incorrect and not his vision of it. In part, he confused the relationship of image and photo. In the “royal” sense, he assumed that his perception was correct and the photograph was wrong. This act of replacement where the photo takes on a life of its own, and thus a power separate from the eye which views it, confers a status upon the object which in fact eliminates the eye. Thus it is not so much the photograph which disappears but the capacity of the viewer to reflect upon his or her relationship to the picture. Consciousness, sight and photograph are seen to be one and the process of visualisation is presented as dramatically different from the imagination. Though Jean-Luc Goddard quite wisely inverted the following opposition between the Lumiere brothers and Georges Mali’s, it remains at the heart of debates around the production of meaning in images. For Lumiere an image was photographic if it matched the requirements of human vision, that is, if it had something like a recognisable form so that the screen (in the case of the cinema), or the photographic print, would display the needs of the “eye” within it. To Mali’s on the other hand, the eye was impoverished and conditioned by every day life to exclude the real source of its capacity to “see”, which was the imagination. The durability and longevity of this opposition has, among other factors, been a conditioning element in discussions of realism with regard to images. For our purposes however, images are in need of a quite different set of definitions, and thus the opposition suggested above – illusion versus reality – connotes a rather complex bind from which it may not be possible to generate any clear conceptualisations. Goddard’s assertion that Lumiere was a creator of fantasy and Mali’s was a true realist does not confront the possibility that the polarity may not exist within the framework put forth by the filmmakers themselves, and thus Goddard’s inversion may fall pray to the very ideology which he was trying to avoid. Barthes takes up this debate by asserting that photographs are never, in a general or immediate sense, distinguished ‘from their referent’: ‘ … it is not possible to perceive the photographic signifier, but requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection’ (5). Barthes via Sartre: ‘To determine the properties of the image as image I must return to a new act of consciousness: I must reflect. Thus the image as image is describable only by an act of the second degree in which attention is turned away from the object and directed to the manner in which the object is given’ (Sartre 1). This assertion of a primary and secondary level to the act of perception is in Sartre’s case related to an activity of inner reflection. Barthes has transposed this to the photograph and in so doing has made the photograph a part of consciousness – photo to eye. The viewer is able to engage in a secondary act as a result of the way in which photographs carry their meaning within them. The idea that ‘the photograph carries the referent within it’ sine qua non means that the viewer has not engaged in a process of construction of meaning in the first instance, just as the photographer has only been an accessory to a process over which he or she has no real control. This presumption, to which I will return, assumes that a photograph of a house carries the meaning of house with it. But the argument can be made that there is no logical necessity for the house to be so named nor for the photograph to be dependent upon the external meaning, house. The drift between internal and external is crucial here. For while the photograph establishes a boundary which marks off the “real”: it also disavows its own limitations. As the photograph is transformed into an image those limitations expand or contract through the language which is used. But what would happen if the photograph of a house were described as an image of a lion sleeping in his lair in Africa? There is an explosion of possibilities; a surrealistic juxtaposition of potential constructs which reveals that the photograph changes into an image at the instant it is “apprehended”. There is a tendency to look for meaning in the photograph, which as a result becomes a container to be filled, as it were, with the traces of the signifying properties of the objects or subjects it enframes. Here, vision becomes an accessory to what has influenced the process of depiction – the unsteady eye is replaced with a truthful picture – an image produced by technology to make the act of viewing possible. Paradoxically, because of this, the photo can at one and the same time be a vehicle of debasement and/or an arena of scientific activity. A crucial assumption is invoked: to understand a photo means distilling what is visible, that is “visualising” in the most concrete way possible those elements which presumably communicate information. Fundamentally, the photograph takes on the qualities of a subject and generates processes of interpretation through its mapping of a referential structure, and this produces the paradoxical notion that photographs have a language. The suggestion is that their meaning is organised along linguistic lines, which of course is only possible – even if we have the most reductive notion of language itself – if the photograph has a consciousness. There is an ambiguity to reference in photographs and it lies with the paradoxes of materiality and loss, the simultaneity of presence and absence. The following example illustrates this. When Neil Davis, an N.B.C. cameraman, died in Thailand during an abortive coup (1985), he fell after being shot, but his camera continued to run. His death, according to the news media that used the footage, was recorded by him. Of course that is impossibility. But what it points out is a fascination with visualising that which can never be seen, preserving the process of dying as if life and death can conjoin through the power of the image. To “see” death in a photograph, or for that matter on a screen, one must see the death of an-other. But what then is one seeing? The photograph of Neil Davis showed his body in the arms of his soundman. It was on the front pages of many newspapers. But even as I say this, my language is, so to speak, simplifying the complexity of the relationship between the newspaper picture and the work of interpretation and analysis. Yet it is precisely this process of simplification which converts the image into a photograph and reverses the relationship between apprehension and perception. I saw Davis’ dead leg and lifeless torso. His leg was twisted into an impossible position and then frozen. I didn’t see his face because he was holding onto his camera. Yet this description only hints at the profound sense of disgust which I felt at the way in which his death brought to life my own fears, at the need which I felt to personalise an event which had taken place many thousands of miles away from my home. In so doing I located his death within the confines of the photograph and confirmed my narrative of his pain as a function of what I had seen. To return to my previous point, this is why the photograph seems to slip out of the control of the viewer even as she reasserts control by placing the meaning back into the photograph. During the Vietnam War Buddhist monks burned themselves in front of the television, movie and still cameras. It was an act of supreme sacrifice, supreme protest. But it remained, once preserved in the form of a photograph or on the screen or on television, not the record, not even the preserved etchings of death, but the death of our separation from the act itself. One saw, through an empathy for those men, what it meant to be seen dying. The monks knew that the substance of their protest was visual, spiritual and political, but they also understood better than anyone else that “seeing” death was only possible from within life, and even then there was no guarantee that anyone would mourn. Thus, the act of preserving their self-immolation photographically was itself an activity of death, because the “visualisations” provided by images cannot be quantified, cannot be reduced to the convenience of the image as a representation. And what the image replaces is not the reality from which it has been “taken” (Does the camera remove some part of the real onto celluloid? Is the piece of reality, which the photograph appropriates, replaced or returned after it has been taken? Or is reality in any case merely an image awaiting some form of recognition by the camera?) but the viewer, who is seen as an appendage to a set of givens which seemingly delineate for him or her, the boundaries between cognition, fantasy and the visible. Thus, my conversion of Neil Davis into a dead body is as much an act of the imagination as it is recognition of the event itself. And the possibility that the real and imaginary can act together at one and the same time to produce my experience of Davis’ death suggests that this photograph may be playing a far less significant role in the networks of meaning which I put in place to understand my experience. ‘I look at a portrait of Peter. Through the photograph I concentrate on Peter in his physical individuality. The photograph is no longer the concrete object which gives me the perception; it serves as material for the image’ (Sartre 21). So arbitrary is this relay of relationships that the notion of convention is often used to explain the repetitive appearance of what Sartre describes as the ‘indifference’ of the object to what it signifies. The photograph appears over and over again, millions of times, creating an associative network of meanings. However habitual, conventions are only as solid as the cultural and social institutions which sustain them. The relative impermanence of the photograph is the reason why it can function as an accessory to memory but never be memory itself. This is because memories are a function of consciousness and not of the photograph. The family album doesn’t inform the viewer about the past as much as it makes possible a narrative signpost of memory. The moment of the photograph can never be repeated, which is at the heart of the nostalgia that is felt for the events or people depicted. Any resemblance between Peter and his photograph can only be posited or proposed if Peter exists within the moment of his image, forever. This suggests that we are inevitably dealing with various levels of approximation which paradoxically tends to harden the notion of convention and thus of representation. ‘The entreaty to perceive Peter has not disappeared, but it has entered into an imaginary synthesis’ (Sartre 23). This imagined synthesis is based on truth. Whatever the constraints, the assertion will always be, “that is Peter.” There is an irony which haunts this relationship between truth, representation and image and it has come to the fore with notions of the post-photographic. It is now the case that most photographs can be digitally altered through computer technology. This movement from the chemical to the electronic has provoked some serious questioning about the photograph as a representational device, particularly with respect to photojournalism (Ritchin). The paradox is that as computers allow for a complete redefinition of photographic representation the argument is that chemically based images were somehow more faithful to what they depicted. The post-photographic construction of meaning becomes the site for precisely the same kinds of questions that have always haunted photographs, questions centred on whether or not the truth is present. The beauty is that digitally re-mastering if not digitally producing photographic prints merely points out what has always been the case. Photographs have always been subject to design and redesign, to constructivist and deconstructive practices which have made truth the playground for imagination. Sight is a mental construct since the connections of seeing, perceiving and knowing are at best only available to us through hypotheses about the result of their interaction. When we speak then of seeing, are we speaking of a process? or of the products of that process?  As the word process suggests, the maelstrom of visual activities which accompany the viewing of a photograph cannot simply be reduced to the technological insistence represented by the print. The desire to make the print the pivot for all of this says more about the desire of the viewer than it does about the photograph itself. The visual properties of a photograph are quickly enhanced by the activities of viewing. This transforms photographic prints into an image. Meaning is in large measure defined by the context in which the image is viewed, not as a result of the aesthetic constraints initially put in place by the photographer. This process not only creates the possibility of substitution (I substitute myself for what I see), but also transforms the object of sight (what I see is no longer separate from me, thus, though it speaks, I only hear what I have said). The activity of viewing allows the spectator to engage in projecting as well as transforming the image into a site of meaning. What we have then are not simply photographs, they do not represent the activity of perception within them. They can only be understood as instances of viewing, or if one were to give them a topographic description, images are found between print and spectator. This does not mean that every image is different for every viewer. Rather it means that what is shared by an audience, and there is much which is shared, cannot be located outside of the exchange process which in an endlessly circumscribed fashion establishes, denies and re-establishes the limits of the process of spectating. I would suggest that there is very little permanence to the photographic print. It merely permits a viewer or viewers to speak (or write) about image-based configurations which are subject to almost continuous interpretation and re-interpretation. This lack of fixity seems to be in direct contradiction with the status of print itself. But as image, a print merely provides a context. It does not have the status of a language, does not speak to the viewer. The spectator, in speaking to it, generates the potential for reference which is a part of what Goddard recognised when he claimed that Georges Mali’s was a documentarian. In other words, Jerome’s eyes see nothing other than hypotheses of himself as a viewer. He has not looked into Napoleon’s eyes, even though, in an imaginary jump, Barthes proposes that he has. Sartre suggests that the notion that ‘ … an image is inherently like the material object it represents’ (3), is deeply flawed. The disjuncture between mind and object is so profound that it is the idea of the image as a join between consciousness, reflections upon experience and the object, which legitimises all three aspects of what seems like a similar process of exchange. Thus the photograph enters into a per formative context in which the imagination plays a far more significant role than the print itself. Can we gain access to what Jerome is thinking by looking at his photograph? Obviously we can in some respects, though in so doing the photo becomes part of a wider field of meaning – image – the deviations of which are both arbitrary and ambiguous – his thoughts are my own though I confer the act of possession upon him. Jerome, as such, does not enter my consciousness in a direct sense. The image however, does permit an endless narrativization (excuse the americanisation) of Jerome’s potential thoughts – stories within stories – the reason Camera Lucida is an essay written in the first person as if it is about to become a fiction. This tone of contingency is at the heart of Barthes’ project, an analytic strategy in which representation and signification are never fixed. This means that the photograph is always on the verge of becoming an image and is therefore dependent on the degree of investment that the viewer wants to make of it. What is at stake here is how we can talk about the production and reproduction of knowledge in our society. In addition, there are important questions which have to be asked about the object we wish to study. An over-emphasis on the visual characteristics of the image often results in a kind of detached definition of meaning and comprehension. Thus images are often labelled as sites of fantasy and illusion, and this is meant in a pejorative sense as if images stand outside of our culture while at the same time producing it. The further suggestion, which grows out of this hypothesis, is that specific images have a determining effect on the way in which viewers think and act. This then confirms a power source, so to speak, which seems to be coming from a place beyond the social and cultural relations which are at its very base. What interests me is not whether images have an effect, but why so much power is imputed to them. The image (in order to function, to work) always breaks away from the technology which produces it. The result is not simply an “object”. Ironically, the viewer is engaged by a time-bound moment of communication simultaneously framed and unframed, magnified, flat, ghost-like, which to be experienced cannot simply be observed. This is of course a rather unpropitious instance since the validation for the experience must be found in a relationship and not simply in the object. Herein lies the problem and it is one which Barthes explores in great depth. It is always easier and convenient to conflate Jerome with the idea that he was the brother of Napoleon. It is seemingly more concrete to talk about the photograph by prioritising its content. This gives a presence to Jerome, which makes his otherwise ambivalent status as an image transparently dependent upon his status outside of the image. It is the received history of Napoleon which acts on Barthes, and it is those texts with which he is engaged. There are an infinite number of things which Barthes could have said about the photo, and yet he chose to mention his own shock at the historical connection to Napoleon. It is not an accident that of all the photos in Camera Lucida the one which is missing is the photo of Jerome. Let us consider this piece of paper on the table. The longer I look at it the more of its features are revealed to me. Each new orientation of my attention, of my analysis, shows me a new detail: the upper edge of the sheet is slightly warped; the end of the third line is dotted … etc. No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there (Sartre 7).Sartre’s subjectivism is taken up with a vengeance in Camera Lucida. There clearly is a need to place some mediators between the discourse of the imaginary as it is externalised by a subject and the piece of paper or photograph. The range of that which suggests itself as really photographable for a given social class (that is, the range of ‘takeable’ photographs or photographs to be ‘taken’, as opposed to the universe of realities which are objectively photographable given the technical possibility of the camera) is defined by implicit models which may be understood via photographic practice and its product. (Bourdieu 6)Bourdieu goes on to discuss the cultural norms which he feels are at play when a photograph is taken. These norms, he suggests, are class based (he never mentions ethnicity or gender) and this is perhaps the least interesting element of his argument. For our purposes, Bourdieu develops a clear argument for the social and cultural configurations which he feels constrain the popular imaginary from conceiving the photographic act in anything but the most limited of ways. The contrast here between a phenomenological and objectivist approach is most pronounced in the following quotation from Barthes: In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. [Author's note: Barthes' term for a process of perception which doesn't have an immediate effect, meaning is not apprehended in an instant.] But the punctum [the opposite of the studium - immediacy, almost shock at the recognition of meaning] is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is at stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (Barthes 96)Thus as Sartre has also suggested (Psychology of Imagination 23-24), the image is a place within which endless additions can be made because the activity of “observation” is immediately enriched by the imaginary. But for Barthes the question of the death of Lewis Payne somehow brings the photograph to another level. He is able to confirm the death although he will never “see” it, able that is, to bring history into the argument at the same time as he poeticises both his discourse and the event. As an additional example he sees his mother as a child and anticipates her death. The visible then pivots on the photographic in much the same way as the photographic anticipates its relationship to the historical moment which it is forever creating and denying. Let me reverse the terms of the argument for a moment. How then, does an image become a picture? It would be difficult to talk about an image without also talking about the pictorial. The pictorial is a quality which one attributes to the image. It would be incorrect to assume that the pictorial is based, in a simple sense, on the visual. If there is a picture in an image it acts somewhat like a proposition, proposing that is, the relationship between a concept and a visual trace. A trace, however, doesn’t have to have a relationship with that which it is designating. A visual trace can have a life of its own but it is ultimately a performative device fitting into a context of communication and exchange. Its structure is not sequential, that is, a series of traces need not be related, one to the other, for there to be meaning. A visual trace pivots on the space between meaning and communication. In that sense its materiality will not be the result of any one cause. Its materiality can in fact be produced by the absence of the photographic. It may be necessary now to refine the concept of the image and to talk about projection, a process which performs the visual, disrupts linearity, and which undermines the presumed equilibrium between signification and representation. The performance of the visual produces a series of traces and what results is an “afterimage”, but that describes very little of what happens to the pictorial when it is transformed into an impressionistic configuration of shades which alter what at “first-sight” seems to be immediately accessible. First sight, lost sight, memory of sight, the indicators of displacement and replacement. The traces of which I am seeking here are not signs, but lost sights. Their power lies in their contingent nature and their incompleteness. One would have to introduce here, a variety of different questions. Is there a difference between an image which is succinct and one which is not? Can one talk about an image as schemata? Can the inherent plurality of the image be disengaged? Is there a system which organises visual traces into coherent expressions? Can the boundaries of the image be clearly and easily established in relation to the viewing process? For Edison and Lumiere the image was a scientific instrument which could research the real by capturing its essence. In part this was done so as to be able to see what the eye could not. Thus ironically, the fragmentation of space, the stopping of time, and the reduction of movement to a pattern of visual traces, became vehicles for seeing more, not something different, thus expanding vision, going beyond the real to a level which could explain and simultaneously duplicate it. The desire to make patterns of movement intelligible (the galloping horse, the running motion of a human being) made it seem as if science and image were natural partners. History was also subsumed under the same process, and newsreels were not accidentally named. The play on the words real and reel reflected the need to constantly assert truth, in a sense to force truth into and onto the image. To produce truth meant to duplicate reality, that is to replace projection with reproduction. Yet, if we are ready to accept that images do not simply reconstruct the real or just re-contextualise its properties, then we must also accept the reciprocal effect which the transformational qualities of the image confer on reality. The projected image represents a relationship between a number of different levels of meaning. And it is the stresses and strains of that relationship which produces the idea of a photograph. Acting more precisely at the level of a relation, the image is the clearest evidence of the difficulty which photographs have with replication. Meaning will not be found as a result in reality, or in the image, or in the process of projection, but in the manner in which all these elements interact, in the very “site” which is created in their interaction. None of these parts of what is an endlessly divisible whole are the privileged site of truth because they can never claim to be outside of the links which unite them. As a result, images do not express a real, which is absent from the photograph and then brought to life by projection. This is where the relationship between image and projection breaks down even further because of the inability of the technology to reveal or verify its own limits. Clearly the relationship between the photograph and reality is one of inter-dependence but it is precisely the reason why a photograph does not display reference. Photographs taken in the home for example have to be context-ualised by the life narrative into which they are placed. What they display are the traces of a process which is both descriptive and interpretive. A photo is a meta-communication about an event, a person, an object. It is not simply “acting in place of”, “standing for”, “replacing” what it seems to be picturing. Often the photograph is described as a window or a mirror of the real. The power of these metaphors lies in their equation of the visible with the communicative. But the visual can only be communicated to someone, which means that the window will never be static and the mirror will not have an easily definable frame or a simple surface. A photograph opens up many questions about degrees of communication, about levels of replacement and substitution, and it may be very important to ask whether a photo can ever be emptied of meaning. While it is true that pictures communicate quickly and quite universally, those characteristics tell us very little about the depth of the relationship which the viewer develops with a photo. Photographs do not only exist for recognition but also play a rather complex role in relation to identity and knowledge. Thus, the home photo album is as much a source of story telling as it is a pivot for the illustration of memory. But what it comes to exemplify is not simply what we recognise in it, but the capacity which we have to produce a narrative out of its contents. The photograph communicates about itself and about its viewers, but crucially neither part of this process can be isolated from the other. Often there are hints of this circular self-reflexivity in the photographs themselves, as when a smile is missed or a frown is caught. The artifice of making the photographic appear natural contributes to its aesthetic as if the photo can transcend the subject it pictures. The limitations of the act of taking a photograph are precisely that it puts in question the possibility of subjectivity, which is in part why it is scary to be photographed. At the same time, subject, photograph and photographer share the same relay of voyeurism which they are afraid of revealing at the aesthetic level. For example a photographed face (as in Sartre’s example of Peter, above) is a face which has been photographed, which means that from the outset the viewer has to reconstruct it. This produces a conflict which is the “site” of an intervention by the spectator. As a result, the viewer has to produce the illustrative qualities of the photograph. The photographed face as a portrait exists at a different level from the face to which it seems to be referring. However, if the referential process is itself subject to a variety of con-tradictory constraints then reference may be the least important aspect of what is from the beginning a relationship of transformation. This inevitably prioritises communicative exchange over reference. Crucially then, a photograph of Clint Eastwood, to take another example, has at best a very distant connection to the “real man”. The various levels of signification, which constitute his symbolic existence, pivot not around his absence but around the impossibility of his presence. In that sense a photograph doesn’t replace him, but is merely part of a vast system of signification into which he is constantly placed and which precludes the possibility of Eastwood ever coming to life as an exemplification of what he has come to signify. It is in this sense that he is a production. Inter-views with the “real man”, newspaper articles about him, films in which he acts, all of these merely confirm a continuing spiral away from the simplicity of reference. In a similar sense, the creation of meaning in an image is not a process which is either internal or external to the real – its signifying processes do not reflect the real of which they are a constituent element. For an image to reflect that which constitutes it, the reflection must cease to be a representation. The distinction between signification and the real, especially as it is applied to the image, produces a division between reflection and reproduction. Yet significations are precisely the material upon which the real must also be built or constructed. For as soon as the distinction between the real and signification is introduced, the material world is “represented” as having greater significance. The connection is then re-introduced as a function of duplication which tends to stress the power of the symbolic over the real. Yet clearly, neither can exist without the other. The notion of reflections denies relations of meaning and creates a context in which a neutral technology generates a neutralised content. Thus, reflection strips the visual of its conceptual framework while asserting that concepts can be expressed and explained through representations. The image in and of itself, does not name what it depicts. It merely sets in place a process of potential identity. The visible is therefore merely a fragment of what is signified. Take the ironic name, news photo (which is related to newsreel). The name softens the effect of the disjuncture between information and picture, and an aura of truth is created around that disjuncture. The truth may be in the way that disjuncture is suppressed. The picture of that suppression can only be included in the photographic with great difficulty. One can then say that the “material” does not exist prior to signification. Rather, meaning is material. It becomes possible for a representation to represent a representation and so on. What is important is where we choose to place the boundaries. The distance of the spectator from it in part shapes the boundaries of the photographic print. The closer one gets to the print, the more the boundary is disrupted. The print has not changed but our relationship to it has. There is here, potentially, an endless series of relationships. The pivots for meaning will be found not in some “pure” visual apprehension, but in the conjuncture of boundaries chosen to produce the visual, that is, the way the conjuncture is understood, related to, constructed. Barthes, confronted by all of these paradoxes, collapses the contradictions into the theoretical proposition that the photographic act and the apprehension of meaning are imbued with a kind of ‘madness’ which various institutional, social and cultural processes attempt to control. The madness is situated in the lack of control which viewers have over their relationship to understanding, because, for the most part, the photographic process drains as much as it confers. In the end he returns to an argument that denounces the lack of authenticity produced out of this process and calls for an abolition of the image. I will not conclude this article with a wrap-up statement to explain Barthes’ anxiety, or provide an easy answer to resolve the dilemmas he described. Suffice to say, for the moment, that Barthes anticipated the arguments of Jean Baudrillard in the latter part of Camera Lucida, and in so doing returned to the existential tradition outlined by Sartre in The Psychology of Imagination. The image and the photograph become bearers of loss and yet remain the subject of discussion. It is precisely this “endless” flow which must be grappled with in a continuum of image production which will always be responding to paradox as well as generating contradiction. Unlike Barthes, I see no need to confront the breaks as if they must be soldered together. Rather, and with jouissance, I embrace the irony that we must never give up learning why all of these “breakdowns” are a necessary condition of modernity and the post-modern context.

---

Notes1. John Berger, “Uses of Photography”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Berger’s essay is dedicated to Susan Sontag and he quotes her as follows: ‘A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (50). 2. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991).

---

Works CitedBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press, 1981. Berger, John. “Uses of Photography”. About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 48-64. Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle Brow Art. Trans. Shaun Whitside. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1990. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Ritchen, Fred. “Photojournalism in the Age of Computers”. The Critical Image. Ed. Carol Squiers. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990. 28-37. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. London: Methuen, 1972.

---

defining social documentary

The primary goal of this session is to get you, the students thinking about traditional notions of documentary and then to create a list of features, characteristics, or traits that would act as a signpost  for further examination both in terms of History, but also in terms of ‘Truth to Appearence’. This could serve as a foundation for signifying  the fluid nature of documentary and  hopefully get you  to confront your own attitudes and expectations on the subject. 

Questions to Consider

• What is a documentary?
• What are its characteristics?
• What do we expect it to do and why?

Scholars interested in culture and social life have had difficulties for some time over  drawing the line between social research and documentary studies, Documentary photography  and film making in particular. Some social scientists clearly embrace documentary studies as a vital complement to their own work, but others dismiss them for a lack of vigour or depth; or for neglecting social theory in favour of anecdotes, evocations and the pictorial.  As image makers is it important that the social documentary photographer has a knowledge of social science? or is it enough that he/she turns the lens on a subject and leaves the debate/rhetoric to others?

Some will argue that it is imperative that the photographer has a least some rudimentary grasp of the social sciences as a valid foundation for documentary, while others will still find ( even when that foundation exists) the subsequent images overly abstracted, impersonal, insensitive to a fault, pedantic, or perhaps beside the point. Central to this debate would be the topic of Visual Anthropology, from  the point of inception photography was being used as a tool of science, serving to add validity to the empirical classification,of types-things. As we have already discussed all photography is essentially an abstraction, context removed-semiotically impotent. But if that is the case how does one explain the overwhelming power of the rhetoric surrounding the image in the context of social documentary? Yet again when come to that fine line that defines our actual experience, contrasted against that we perceive to be actual experience. The photograph has the ability to ’suspend or perhaps abduct our disbelief’ to the point that we accept a notion of photographic ‘truth’ .I think that there is covert elements of humanist philosophy working quietly behind the scenes. If it were true that there was no such concept as photographic truth, what would be the point of picking up the camera and turning it on our fellow human beings? If however you accept that there are people who have genuine concerns over the plight of the human race, and that these people record events to expose injustice, inequality, suffering, and/or perhaps juxtapose these topics against others that show more positive aspects of humankind, then perhaps you can buy into the illusory world of photographic truth. Perhaps it is this balancing of good and evil that gives social documentary its power. I would be interested in hearing the opinion of others

The continuation of watching the detectives

Frank secured a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph its society at all strata. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips .Which occupied much of the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. He traveled in the forgotten hinterland of abandoned homesteads and empty highways, his work a marked contrast to the popular images of towering cities, cocktail parties and a burgeoning economy the resulting photographic essay 

The Americans: Robert Frank

 Was only made possible with the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans,  Only 83 of those 28,000 images were finally selected by him for publication in The Americans. Frank’s journey was not without incident. While driving through Arkansas, Frank was arbitrarily thrown in jail after being stopped by the police; elsewhere in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had “an hour to leave town.” The car  he was driven in was found to be ‘without proper title’ (it was legally owned by Peggy Guggenheim) and frank was  arrested for being in possession of a stolen automobile.Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac on the sidewalk outside a party and showed him the photographs from his travels. Kerouac immediately told Frank “Sure I can write something about these pictures,” and he contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans. Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture, which felt an affinity with Frank’s interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave Frank’s photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques.This divergence from contemporary photographic standards gave Frank difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. Les Americains was first published in 1958by Robert Delpire in Paris, and finally in 1959 in the United States by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” Though sales were also poor at first, Kerouac’s introduction helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat phenomenon. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became considered a seminal work in American photography and art history, and the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. In 1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled Robert Frank: Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at MOMA in New York in 1962. It is interesting to contrast the work of Robert Frank with that of Harry Morey Callahan (October 22, 1912– March 15, 1999) who strangely enough died on my Birthday.  Callahan was an American photographer who is considered one of the great innovators of modern American photography. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and started photographing in 1938 as an autodidact. By 1946, he was appointed by László Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Callahan retired in 1977, at which time he was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design.Callahan left almost no written records–no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day’s best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.He photographed his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara, and the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived, showing a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. He also worked with multiple exposures. Callahan’s work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He was well known to encourage his students to turn their cameras on their lives, and he led by example. Even as he did this he was not sentimental, romantic or emotional. Callahan illustrated the centrality of Eleanor in his life by his continual return to her over 15 years as his prime subject — she was subject more than model — but the images are not about who she was, what she did, what she thought as an individual. Callahan’s art was a long meditation on the possibilities of photography as it might be used playfully, but not naively.Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere–at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried every technical experiment–double and triple exposure, blurs, large camera and small. The attitude of respect and warmth permeates the endeavor.In 1950, his daughter, Barbara, was born, and even prior to her birth she showed up in pregnancy photographs. From 1948 to 1953, Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large expanses of park, skyline or water. No matter how small a part of the scene they are, they still dominate the viewer’s perception.Callahan’s work is personally oriented; many of his pictures artistically interpret his family relationships. His early work experimented with representational abstraction; his later work in color included additional subject matter, both city and landscapes as well as multiple exposures.Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which actively collects, preserves, interprets and makes available materials that are essential to understanding photography and its history and which holds more archives and individual works by 20th-century North American photographers than any other museum in the world, maintains the photographic archives of Harry Callahan.Callahan died in Atlanta in 1999. His estate is represented in New Yorkby the Pace/MacGill Gallery. External linksMasters of Fine Art Photography: Harry Callahan Masters of Photography: Harry Callahan George Eastman House Harry Callahan Series Museum of Contemporary Photography Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson,  One final footnote: The American actor Clint Eastwood was so enamoured with Callahan’s personal and highly evocative photography that he paid homage to him by using his name for the lead in  ‘Dirty Harry’ films

Keep checking, there is a lot more to come. Happy reading

watching the detectives: The emmergence of popular culture

Watching the detectives

The emergence of American ‘Art’ photography and the impact of popular culture. Having briefly touched on the influence of Alfred Stieglitz in founding a school of Fine Art Photography, it is worth examining the contextual climate of ‘Fine Art’ in more general terms. The Post war period witnessed a change of direction in art practice which in The United States is best categorised by the movement termed ‘Abstract expressionism’ This title whilst not hard to define in terms of the key protagonists,  has a wide ranging definition in terms of creative output. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, which, as we have discussed has its emphasis on the spontaneous, automatic or subconscious act of creation. Jackson Pollock’s dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that in turn had its roots in the work of Max Ernst, which in turn can trace a direct lineage to European expressionism. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his “white writing” canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the “all over” look of Pollock’s drip paintings.The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and is even applied to work which is not especially abstract or expressionist. Pollock’s energetic “action paintings“, with their “busy” feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning (which are figurative paintings) and to the serenely shimmering blocks of color common to Mark Rothko’s work (not  usually called expressionist but which Rothko denied was abstract), yet all three are classified as abstract expressionists.Abstract Expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works (and what could be more spontaneous than photography)  most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it; An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock.Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression but also by the Social Realists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.  The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of such painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery.  The Political repression ‘The McCarthy era’ after World War II was a time of extreme artistic censorship in the United States, but since the subject matter was often totally abstracted, it became a safe strategy for artists to pursue this style. Abstract Art could be seen as apolitical, or if the art was political, the message was largely for the Art insider.Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially the San Francisco Bay area. To me the period is characterised as being socially unsettled.A time when the previous status quo both politically and artistically were being if not overturned, then re-examined. Individually the remnants of an older art establishment were rejecting their previous artistic position/heritage, while collectively a new generation was searching for a voice. A vacuum begs to be filled, and filled it was with a new language of art that in the United States in particular was entirely more demographic; serving as a mirror for a deconstructed society. The language of the visual now in ascendant, the great American painting now sharing the limelight with the Great American novel.But where was photography in this new beginning? The Answer is sharing a language and source of inspiration with the elder sibling. In post war America  the scatter gun objectification of the lens capturing the imagination of  the new consumer society. What was fruit for the mass, Cinema-Television-Advertising serving  as a palette of inspiration for the artist. The camera became draftsman, holding fixed forever that ephemeral moment of Artist and subject. The photographic image, abstract at its point of birth, yet denoting a ghost of the real, becoming in its connotative form growing in  inference and influence. The progeny of this state of flux was popular culture. No more apt term could conjure up the essential zeitgeist of the moment. The post-modern society with its disconected social and artistic tissue on display, replicating the flicker of the moving image with its ever present re- positioning of the flavour of the moment.The purely popular reigning supreme over the intellectual, the academic. Popular culture and it’s offspring, Pop Art, serving to represent a new society. But Photography in the post war era was not all primarily focused on the ephemeral here and now. Photographers like Robert Frank essentially turning the lens inward in a more reflective way, seeking to record the emotional pulse of an America largely forgotten. The post war generation (or those who survived the war) did not all relocate to the large commercial cities. Many returned to the homestead, to a lifestyle in many ways deposed by the mechanics of war. Trying to desperately pick up the threads of neglected relationships. Fathering small children often for the first time and trying to rebuild a sharecropper economy if not killed by the great depression now often terminally sick. Frank traveled in the  hinterland of abandoned homesteads and empty highways, his work a marked contrast to the images of towering cities, cocktail parties and a burgeoning economy.

Watch this space, to be continued: 5/10/07

Perception and Reality

.

Perception and reality

 

In order to clarify it we need a theory for the relationionship between the perception of things and the mediated perception of things. Mediated or indirect perception is of three common types

 

·         That which depends on the understanding of images and pictures

 

·         That which depends on the understanding of speech

·         That which depends on the understanding of writing

 Mediators. The hypothesis is that direct or first-hand perception is that which comes from environmental sources and that indirect or second-hand knowledge is that which comes from mediators. It is further assumed that the uniquely human media of information-transmissions are of two types, iconic and symbolic. Iconic mediators have been described (e.g., Morris 1946) as “similar” to what they stand for; symbolic mediators are not. But this is not very satisfactory. I have tried to define with no great success models and pictures, but the best I could come up with (not that this wrong, but it does not satisfy ‘my’ intellectual position on the subject) The iconic mediators:  being specific to what they stand for by proportion or by projection whereas vocal speech and written language, (and in some cases visual texts are symbolic mediators, specific to what they stand for by convention (Gibson 1954). The symbolic object is informative because of the establishment of a social code; the iconic object is informative by non-social laws of stimulus information. A license plate corresponds to an automobile by virtue of conventional rules but its shadow corresponds to it by optical rules. It is here assumed that perspective geometry derives its validity from experience of similar shapes and forms in our personal environment. Ideal pictorial perspective is therefore not a an empirical form (although from a scientific viewpoint the geometric rules can be proven), but based on an iconic relationship directly formed by modes of representation The child begins to develop the understanding and the production of speech at about the same time, at the age of one year, and does so spontaneously in a family group. Just when he begins to comprehend the iconic mediators is not clear. He is given models in the form of toys and dolls and pictures in the form of drawings and photographs (Hochberg 1962) but not much is known about what he perceives, but I suspect that the visual perception of objects (I include family members in this classification) is almost entirely subjective, being directly referenced by the individual child’s ‘hierarchy of needs’, certain objects satisfying certain needs. I know this is going to sound like the worst form of tautology, but a small child is entirely driven by the senses, and this leads to a subjective objectification. The symbolic nuances of representation, both intellectually and cognitively unrecognised, allows objects to reign supreme. Visual representation fixes the child’s place in its world, and starts a chain reaction of subsequent visual objectification that is dependent on the recognition of ‘signposts’ that match actual experience. But the child of today is also subjected to constant barrage of visual symbols that match or replicate experience. These symbols do not conform to it’s knowledge of the ‘real’ but substitute a simulacra of the known/real. The mechanisms of viewing the ‘real’ are therefore abducted and the child subconsciously has to mediate actual experience with this new form of representation. To allow understanding of this repositioning of the already familiar, the child accepts the facsimile representation. The mechanics of reading a symbolic representation are born. To be continued.

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   

Defining Modernism and Post-Modernism

Defining Modernism and Post Modernism

 

Modernism

 

This progressive movement of society is associated with what has been described as modernity or modernism. It is essentially a historical period in Western culture and has its origins in the Enlightenment at the end of the 18^th century(1890) and for academic purposes can be seen to be over by 1940.

 The Enlightenment, and the historical period that it brought in,  can be argued, as characterised by three major tenets.

 

• Intellectually, there was the power of reason over ignorance

 

• There was the power of order over disorder

 

• There was the power of science over superstition

  These three statements were regarded by many as universal truths. It was believed by the left wing intellectual elite, that by accepting these fundamental changes in social control/behaviour, that the old ruling classes  predominantly supporting the outmoded hegemony of rule by church and state  could be defeated. Modernity was ‘revolutionary’ and in many respects the French Revolution of 1789 was the personification of these features. They heralded the advent of capitalism as a new mode of production and a transformation of the social order. These basic beliefs provided the basis upon which humanity was to be able to achieve progress. Instead of looking backwards to a Golden Age, enlightenment was now seen as possible in the present through the application of reason. It was through reason that enlightenment, the conceiving of infinite possibilities, would enable the emancipation of humanity to take place: emancipation from ignorance, poverty, insecurity and violence. 

Until quite recently, there was a common belief that despite all the trials and tribulations suffered throughout the world, there was a general movement towards human emancipation. This was especially true in western civilisation, and from 1850 onward there was the ability to examine this progress via the mechanism of the photographic image. Social disorder quietened, and it was truly felt that society was making progress. There were blips in this movement, it was not smooth: wars, famine, natural and man-made disasters took place, but in the main these were resolved and the forward motion continued. In art terms the socio-political advances that were manifest during the modernist era, had less to with social order, than with an overturning of any notion of romanticism, or pictorialism. The modern was defined as being the age of man and machines. Function mediated with form- simplicity in ascendance over the ornate. Art, in context reflecting the utopian ideal of man at the centre of rational thought, shedding the shackles of superstition, and building a brand new age; The age of the machine.

Europe was once again at the forefront of this vanguard. In particular Northern Europe. Bauhaus in Germany-Structuralism in Russia- linguistics in France- Science in Britain. Art reflected this brave new world, Buildings adopted a new aesthetic, industrial design (a new concept born in the Modernist era) furnishing these building and Art, Print-Photography-and sculpture in particular winning out over painting. Dada, Surrealism, cubism and finally the expressionists, all finding a new way of working to express this modern age.

Moving forward to the late 1950’s, a movement began amongst French intellectuals, that questioned this view of society as moving onwards and upwards, and that there was some unseen driving force within society. It rejected any notion that we were still within the modern era brought in by the Enlightenment two hundred years earlier. The modern world according to these new thinkers had clearly brought in the era of industrial capitalism and scientific thinking but it had also brought in the world of Auschwitz, of the possibility of nuclear war, the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, of neo-colonialism, Euro centrism, racism and Third World hunger. If this was the legacy of modernism, it wasn’t very pleasant. Had the ideas of the Enlightenment brought us to this? If it had, they thought, to what extent had it been justified by grand theories of society? Wasn’t it more appropriate to see these theories as quite dangerous? They also felt that if modernism had brought in the type of society loosely described as modern industrial society then surely we had now gone beyond it? Had we not now entered a new age, and age that would not be truly resolved until the late 1970’s – the age of post-modernism?

 

It is against this climate that we must examine the concept of post modernism.

 So what is post-modernism? 

A major problem we have is trying to find a useful definition of post-modernism. Most definitions are hopelessly vague and often inconsistent with each other. There is a considerable amount of confusion about the terms: modernity, modernism, post-modernity and post-modernism. Modernism and post-modernism have tended to be associated with aesthetic ad intellectual movements such as that in architecture and literature; modernity and post-modernity have tended to be used to refer to changes in social and economic institutions However, this is not a hard and fast distinction. Much of the talk of post-modernism has been concerned with social and economic change.

To get any further we need to examine distinct trends.

 Art 

Firstly, there is post-modern art – not just painting and sculpture but also architecture, music, literature, drama etc. It’s main features are a lack of depth and of meaning. There is a diversity of forms and content. The art critic Suzy Gablik gave a talk in Los Angeles where she spoke about the

… ‘multidimensional and slippery space of post-modernism [where] anything goes with anything, like a game without rules. Floating images … maintain no relationship with anything at all, and meaning becomes detachable like the keys on a key ring. Dissociated and decontextualized, they slide past one another failing to link up into a coherent sequence. Their fluctuating but not reciprocal interactions are unable to fix meaning.”

While this may sound strange, you do not have to go to Los Angeles to see what she was talking about. Throughout the UK, for example, new buildings have been going up over the last decade or so that seem completely out of keeping with anything that has gone before. Many of our cities have been ‘rejuvenated’ by architects who have been given free reign to satisfy their professional fantasies. London Docklands is a good example here. Take the Docklands Light Railway through what used to be one of the world’s busiest ports and you will see post-modern architecture in all its glory. Similarly, adverts and pop videos are good examples of post-modern art. Using operatic arias to promote football matches, classical music to persuade us to fly a particular airline, watching Pavarotti in the Park – there is no longer a distinction between high and popular culture (‘anything goes with anything, like a game without rules’).

Culturally, the growth and influence of the media whether it is the advertising industry, television or film has also led to tremendous changes in how people see the world. Many post-modernists would argue that image is everything, image is reality. Disneyland, MTV, MacDonald’s is real life. Real life is what we see on television, television becomes real life. Krishan Kumar maintains that post-modernists see the media in a quite different way to those who regard it as merely a method of communication.

For them the media today do not so much communicate as construct. In their sheer scale and ubiquity they are building a new environment for us, one which demands a new social epistemology and a new form of response. The media have created a new ‘electronic reality’, suffused with images and symbols, which has obliterated any sense of an objective reality behind the symbols … In hyperreality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real …” krishan kumar

 

The second trend within post-modernism is a philosophical one. In the 1970s, the group of French philosophers, I have already mentioned, mainly on the Left, had become disillusioned with the heady days of the late 1960s when Western Europe and the United States were in political turmoil. For a short period in 1968, there seemed a strong possibility that major political changes could take place throughout the Western world as a result of action by students, trade unionists, anti-Vietnam war protesters, liberal Communists and militant Socialists. This was not to be and in France where the struggle was arguably the most intense, this led to a waning of the huge influence previously wielded by the large Communist Party (to which most of these intellectuals owed allegiance). This disillusionment led to their disengagement with politics and their distrust of grand theories, such as Marxism, which they felt attempted but failed to explain the reality of social life and began to form ideas that slotted in to the themes explored by contemporary artists. Despite their many disagreements, they stressed the fragmentary and plural character of reality. They denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality. Any ideology or social theory that justified human action as a means to progress or order was condemned as meaningless. The grand social theory or narrative that justified human activity, whether it was Marxism, liberalism or Fascism is no longer credible, they argued. There are no universal truths. All they have done in the past is legitimate the power of those who know and deny power to those who do not know.

 

New Times

 

Thirdly, these two trends, in art and philosophy, seemed to reflect what was going on in the social world. It was felt by many, particularly on the British Left, that we were actually living in what they called ‘New Times’. At the heart of these ‘New Times’ was the shift from the old mass-production Fordist economy to a new, more flexible, post-Fordist order based on computers, information technology and robotics. Marxism Today, wrote (in 1988) that our world is being remade.

Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralization and internationalisation are in the ascendant In the process our own identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being transformed. We are in transition to a new era.

Many people accept that we do live in a different kind of society today to that of a relatively few years ago. However, what type of society is it that we now live in? A number of theories have already been put forward, some of which you may be familiar with.

   

How to write an academic essay

This is something for all you undergrads out there. Writing an essay at University level is completely different from the essays you created at school, there are very strict rules that must be followed. This document gives you a detailed overview of what is required. Warning!!! You need to check with your own academic staff on the preferred system for referencing material. Hope this helps

A guide to writing academic essays

Notes for guidance:  

It is essential to read this guide carefully before you select an essay topic or begin your research. Most students find it difficult to write essays and this guide is designed to help plan your research and structure your essay. Even if you are experienced in writing essays, this guide is still indispensable, since it outlines the formal requirements for art theory essays. Different University subjects, courses or disciplines do not necessarily follow the same bibliographic format or requirements for citation of sources.

If you did well with your school essay writing do not assume that you will automatically succeed with tertiary writing. Some students find that the gap between school essays and academic essays is more like a chasm: since the emphasis in tertiary writing shifts substantially from the simple presentation of facts to interpretation and critical analysis. Also, it is not uncommon to read student essays from secondary school level in which material is taken unacknowledged, directly from text books-the Internet or teacher notes. Such practice is unacceptable in tertiary writing and is regarded as plagiarism which is a serious transgression in academic writing. There will be more on plagiarism later in this guide.

An essay is a written exposition or elaboration of your view on a particular topic, subject or issue. Within a stipulated length, usually 1200 to 3500 words, your essay will consist of a clear statement of what you think about a particular issue or topic followed by a logical argument supported by strong, well documented evidence. The essay is also an important learning process and assessment instrument, since when you begin your research on a selected topic you often have no idea of what your view or argument will be. The process of research, planning and writing of your essay helps you shape, clarify and finally expound your thinking or analysis. Many notes and several drafts of your essay might have to be written before your argument or perspective on a particular topic falls into place. This is why it is imperative to allocate enough time in your study programme for writing preliminary drafts.

Students often lament that they discovered what they really wanted to say at the end of a hastily written essay, when they had no time for a rewrite (in my experience about 70% of level one students experience this problem).

The information and evidence used in formulating an argument, in essay form, will come from texts (mostly books and journals), electronic sources and actual works of art. When writing about art the most important focus of your analysis should be original art objects or exhibits; but any judgements you make about works of art should be informed by what has been written about them, and your interpretation should be measured against the existing research in your field of interest. Therefore wide reading is essential in any art theory essay. However, choose your source material intelligently, many “coffee-table” style art books contain misleading generalisations and factual information that is dated or incorrect. Also, ‘A’ Level textbooks are poor source material for most tertiary writing.  Encyclopaedia articles (in particular that student’s favourite ‘Wikepedia’ may be useful in initially surveying a topic but you will need to consult more specific secondary (and better informed) sources.

Most of the information you access on the Internet using generic search engines and sites such as Google will fall into the encyclopaedic category. Only very refined searching of specialist databases will allow you to access high quality and primary material. There will be more later on how to access this material via the Internet

The diagram and description below should help explain the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources of information.

 Most Internet sources
Encyclopaedia entries
Art survey books

Art Objects
Catalogues
Letters
Documents

Monographs on artists
Stylistic Analysis
Journal article 

If for instance, you are researching an essay on Rembrandt, one of the most up to date forums would be ‘The Rembrandt Research Project’, this would be an example of primary research. The information contained in this inner circle is constantly changing and expanding with continuing research, while the outer circle (secondary research)  changes more slowly. This is exemplified in the results of the Rembrandt Research Project.

Select a topic most relevant to your studio interests. Usually topics or questions are of equal difficulty, however sometimes lecturers set one or two more demanding or challenging questions to extend experienced students. Check with your lecturer if you have any doubts about the compatibility of your selection to your educational background and interests.

Stages in essay writing

Step 1

Compile a working bibliography of books, articles, catalogues, videos, films and any other sources you think will be relevant to your chosen topic. To do this, use the subject index catalogue in the library and consult the Art Index, and other periodical indices, that are also held in the Library. If you are reading this on a computer connected to the University of Derby intranet network, you may be able to go directly to the library index for books, catalogues videos and films. The Bibliographie de l’Histoire d’Art,established in 1991, is the international scholarly reference database in art history that incorporates the older indexes, the RAA (Repertoire d’Art et d’Archeologie) from 1973 to 1989 and the once primary index the RILA (International Repertory of the Literature of Art) from 1975 to 1989. The focus is European and American art with abstracts in both French and English.

The following are the most useful. Expanded ASAP Int’l Ed. which has over three million articles (from 1980 – 2003) and includes journals such as Art News, Art in America, Art forum, the Art Bulletin. Unfortunately, the original illustrations or images are often omitted or degraded in the Expanded Academic online versions, although more recently this seems to be improving. This is not the case with the Project Muse (John Hopkins Press) database which includes good quality black and white images and also contains several electronic journals which are exclusively published on the Web.

Another source is  Britannica Online- which is of course the definitive encyclopaedic source for general information. It is also worth checking if the Library subscribes to The  Oxford Reference Online. This not only includes the Oxford Dictionary but most importantly gives access to Oxford Dictionary of Art, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms as well as A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. A word or phrase query will automatically search across all these and many other Oxford reference works. What is more, a full-citation is shown below each entry ready to be clipped and pasted into your notes.

You may find links to the above and many more databases on the Library Journal and Reference Database site. Your lecturer will generally direct you to others, if they are relevant to your topic.

For general Internet searches take care using generic search sites such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Instead, first go to the Art Theory Resources site and use the links that are included there, as these have been checked for quality. (The exception to this is the case where you may be searching for a reproduction of a particular painting or print. The search engine Google now has an image search feature which is very powerful or comprehensive and certainly the quickest way to find a reproduction.)

Particularly useful under the Art Theory Resources listings are links to electronic journals and home sites for print journals – which often have the contents of the latest edition.
When you access Internet sites take great care to carefully document the address and full particulars for correct citation of any information you collect. Always record the date of any connection you make as this must be included in your citation. The Internet is now a major resource but still a supplement to print sources and the most up-to-date relevant art information is still to be found in text based journals or periodicals. For this reason, it would be expected to find at least four or five references to art magazine or journal articles, as well as references to books and other sources, in a successful first-year essay. At this stage, when you have completed your working bibliography, ask your lecturer if he or she will check if you have missed any major source on your topic.

STEP 2

Read/view the sources you have chosen and make notes to use in the formulation of your essay. When making notes, or photocopies of information you might use in your assignment, always add the bibliographical details of the source, including page numbers. You will need this if you decide to quote the information in your essay. When taking notes from books and articles be sure to distinguish between your own musings/words and material you transcribe as this will avoid any possible problems with inadvertent plagiarism when you come to write the essay. When reading articles online or material from Web sites be sure to record all the relevant source information you will later need for citation, including the date of access. While searching for information, avoid clipping blocks of text from screen and pasting it into your word-processor unless you add all details of the source including the URL. Otherwise, this material will be useless when it comes to writing your essay. It is always safest to save the entire file you are reading in a directory on your computer for later access when formulating your argument. Also note, that if a site has no designated author, be it institution, corporation, individual or magazine title, do not use the material.

It is usual to spend about 60% of your allocated time on Steps 1 and 2. 

STEP 3

When you are familiar with all the major facts and issues that are pertinent to your topic, decide what argument you will adopt in your essay. Next draft a plan of your essay by writing short notes on the content and order of each paragraph. Usually this is followed by the writing of a full first draft.

Your first paragraph will state your main argument regarding the topic. The body of the essay will expand and defend the argument stated in the opening paragraph. Information you have collected will be used to support your arguments and your final paragraph will round off your discussion with a suitable conclusion.

STEP 4

Write your final draft, add your bibliography, check all footnotes and re-read. Most important of all, carefully proofread before submission. Be sure your presentation follows the stipulated format. Make and retain a copy of your essay. A clean copy may be needed later for reassessment by another marker in cases of appeal or disputed results.

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged copying of the ideas or words of other writers or authors. Plagiarism in essays will make them unacceptable for assessment. This refers to both direct transcription and paraphrasing other material (putting it into your own words).

Most students understand that to copy another student’s assignment and present it as your own work is fraudulent behaviour and such practice is the most obvious and serious breach of academic integrity. When this form of plagiarism is detected it results in automatic failure of the subject for the student involved and possible disciplinary action by the Faculty or University.

You may be aware that there are now many so called “Cheat” sites on the Internet offering (usually at a price) completed essays on countless topics. It is unlikely you will find an example that precisely answers a given question, but if you find a similar topic and access to read it is free, by all means do so. You may pick up some tips on structure or useful pointers to sources. However, never clip any of the information to paste into your essay. Not only is this plagiarism but it is relatively easy to detect through a Web search using your text as a search string.

However, most breaches of plagiarism occur because: firstly, students have not developed the writing skills to sufficiently wean themselves from the phrases, style and words used in the sources found in their Library research and, secondly, they present the ideas and information taken from Library sources without acknowledging the original author.

There are art historical facts, which are generally known and agreed upon. That the Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded by Alfred Barr in 1929, is an example and would not need acknowledgement in an essay. However, it should be obvious that you would not write in an essay that Monet earned 24,800 francs in 1873  from the sale of his paintings without telling the reader how you came by such precise and little known information. We might assume you had access to Monet’s account books and that you spent considerable time tabulating this figure. Equally so, if you claim that Monet earned ten times the average annual income for Paris in 1873, you would need to show the origin of this calculation.

When you present any precise or contentious evidence in your essay you must add a full reference or citation that will accurately take the reader to your source so that they can check the veracity of your information or judge the quality of your source. Both Monet examples above are taken from the same source (Paul Tucker Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982, n33, pp. 194/5) and by citing this book in your footnotes and adding it to your bibliography you also acknowledge that your work is dependent on the intellectual effort of others. In this case, Paul Tucker. ( I in turn used and referenced the information on Monet for an academic essay in 1999).

Presumably, if you used the factual evidence or data on Monet’s income in an essay it would be to draw some conclusion about his attitude to selling his art or his relationship to dealers and buyers; or, to put Monet’s work in the context of the developing economic and social forces associated with modernity. This is where problems can occur with plagiarism since Tucker has explored these issues in his book. Any direct quotes or phrases taken from Tucker would naturally be referenced. In addition, if your conclusions are in any way dependent on, or, in any way parallel, the views or ideas of Tucker you must acknowledge this in footnotes. To give a specific example, here is a direct quote from Tucker’s book:

  ‘Monet was no economist, but the subjects he painted were drawn from the progressive world. And the people we know who bought his paintings, like the opera singer Faure, the banker Hecht, or the department store owner Hoschede, were immersed in it. Monet was able to profit from many people’s patronage, for he made a considerable amount of money during these years, far more than earlier historians ever imagined. He was doing so well that two years after he left Paris for Argenteuil – a flight to the suburbs that was typical of his time – he was able to move to a bigger, more expensive house’. 

After reading your notes you might write a sentence in your essay such as:

 ” Monet was part of the modern world in the sense that he was not the mythological artist starving in a garret but very much a comfortable member of the middle-class, living in the suburbs.”

Clearly, this is dependent on the above quotation and the source would need to be acknowledged. You would do this by adding a number at the end of the sentence which would refer to a footnote which might look like this:

This has been demonstrated by Paul Tucker, in Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982 

Alternatively, you may remodel the sentence to read:

 “As Tucker has shown, Monet was part of the modern world in the sense that he was not the mythological artist starving in a garret but very much a comfortable member of the middle-class, living in the suburbs.” In which case, the footnote would take this format: Paul Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982,

It is a relatively easy process to learn and follow the formats for citation of references, which are listed later in this guide, although it takes some experience to understand the degree of referencing or acknowledgement necessary in academic writing. To help you understand the requirements, the first essay you write in first-year Art Theory is treated, in part, as a diagnostic test of your understanding of the rigorous requirements of academic writing and research. Your lecturer will carefully highlight any unacceptable examples of plagiarism in your semester one first-year essay and detail remedial strategies. Put bluntly, this means that this is the only essay you submit in which breaches of minor plagiarism will not make the essay inadmissible for a passing grade. Second-year and third-year essays which contain any form of plagiarism will be unacceptable for assessment. This will be regardless of whether you completed first-year studies in this University or not. Lecturers are very familiar with the primary and secondary sources that relate to their specialist  subject and can generally detect plagiarised passages quite easily. However, sometimes dramatic variation in style, vocabulary or expression might suggest plagiarism, even though the source may not be precisely locatable. In detecting plagiarism, a lecturer may use their professional judgement to question the construction of a particular essay so all students are advised to retain their working notes and drafts for every essay they write. These offer some evidential proof that your essay is of your own making and should only be discarded after the marked essay has been returned.

 1.  It is in order to use short, relevant, direct quotations from other authors to expand or support points you make. However these should be used sparingly, and of course must be acknowledged. Remember your essay or argument should present a clear structure not a compilation of quotations you have collected. Generally, no more than two or three brief quotations would be used in an essay of average length (2000 words). 

2.  Direct quotations are indented or enclosed in quotation marks [" "] and the footnote added at the end of the quote. If a direct quotation is longer than three sentences it must be indented. When a quotation is indented, the quotation marks are not necessary and should not be used and the citation note number is added at the end. Do not bracket the source or page numbers of the quote, simply add the footnote number. To acknowledge the source of a phrase, add the footnote at the end of the sentence in which it occurs. If you paraphrase a passage of material, again just add a footnote at the end of the last sentence. It may sometimes be necessary to make it clear as to the extent of your borrowing. For example, your footnote might begin with: “Much of the content of this paragraph is taken from….” or “This phrase is used by….” or “These few sentences summarise the view put forward by…” or “I have developed this idea from…”. As a general rule there is no need for such additions; just cite the source.

3.  Do not use note form. An essay should be a coherent, logical piece of analytical prose.

4.  Avoid the use of personal pronouns such as “I feel…..” or, “in my opinion”. They are not necessary, since it is understood that the essay is an expression of your views.

5.  Do not use vague or ill-informed generalisations such as “all art is about beauty”. Take care with the use of art historical terms such as Impressionism, Realism or Postmodernism. When such terms are capitalised this generally signifies a reference to their art historical meaning. For example, an Impressionist painting would refer to a work by Monet or one of his contemporaries, whereas an impressionistic painting might refer to any painting in the Impressionist manner or style. It is safest to always define what the terms mean in the context of your essay.

6.  Generally colloquialisms have no place in formal writing. Words and expressions such as dodgy, daggy, nerd, nerdy, do-gooder, ratbag or con-artist would not normally be used, except for dramatic effect.

7.  Your essay must be written as near as possible to the stipulated length. Plus or minus divergence of over 200 words may be penalised.

8.  Footnotes or endnotes are not added to the word count in the length of your essay. [note: some word-processing programs, such as WordPerfect, include footnotes and endnotes when listing word count, others, such as Word, do not.]

9.  In formal essay writing, the convention is to refer to artists by their surname; although use the full name when you first mention an artist in your essay. It is also usual to add birth/death dates in brackets after the first full name reference. However do this only for artists not generally known or those who may be confused with another, with a similar name. If you are uncertain, add the dates.

10. Use italics or bold for the titles of paintings and other   

works of art you mention in your essay (alternatively, you may underline for titles, but be consistent). Also take particular care to give enough information to identify the particular work by adding location or collection and date. Adding the date is the minimum requirement. Check with your lecturer if additional information is required as for some studies, such as Museology, you may be required to add all details on medium and dimensions. Titles of works of art are also given maximal capitalisation, e.g.: The Endless Enigma.

11. Discussion between students working on the same topic is useful but do not exchange notes or bibliography with another student. Such collaboration will make both essays unacceptable for assessment, as an essay must be the expression of your own ideas and effort.12.Non-sexist or gender-inclusive language should be used in all your writing and while still accepted, the generic “he” should be avoided. Sexist language is language that discriminates against women, usually by exclusion. All writers should avoid sexist language since many readers find it offensive if not insidiously disempowering.

 

Sexism in published texts

When you need to quote from a published text, especially from another era, and you encounter sexist language there are a number of approaches you can take.
The words in question can be paraphrased, not quoted directly, thus avoiding the sexist expression.

The word sic, enclosed in square brackets, can be inserted immediately after the sexist expression. (sic meaning “thus used”)

In some cases where it is clear that the language is not the work of the author the expression can be left intact.

Avoid the use of man in the generic sense
The word man should be limited to reference to male human beings. When man is used in a generic sense to refer to male and female human beings it not only creates confusion but implies the absence or invisibility of women. In the interests of clarity and equality replace the generic man with one of the following:
humans, humanity, human beings, humankind, man and woman, women and men, people, individuals, human race

  

For compound words where man is used as a prefix or suffix here are alternative words and phrases:

mankind manhood (generic sense) spokesman chairman	humanity, humankind, people adulthood spokesperson, advocate, intermediary chair
draftsman (generic) craftsman	draftsperson craftsperson, artisan, craft worker, technician

Man as a verb

to man the desk

to staff the desk

In idioms and phrases

the man in the street one-man show

the average person, ordinary people solo exhibition, one-person show

  

This document is intended as a guide only, if you are unsure vis-à-vis the suitability of what you are writing you should raise your concerns during a group tutorial, you may well find that you are not the only person experiencing similar problems.

Laurie Haynes  September 2007