Body and the Lens: Photography 1839 to the Present (Perspectives) 0810927039, 9780810927032

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JOHN PULTZ

The Body and he Lens PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE PRESENT 1839

^y

7

The Body and Photography 1839

the Lens

to the

Present

The Body and Photography 1839

the Lens

to the

Present

John Pultz

HARRY

N.

PERSPECTIVES ABRAMS, INC., PUBLISHERS

—

Acknowledgements A

great

number of people have made

personally only a few of them.

book

It

For copies of photographs

and

possible

goes without saying that

and museums who

photographers, estates, galleries, text.

this

Spencer

at the

I

I

have room to thank

am

indebted to the

provided the works illustrated in the

Museum

of Art,

I

thank Robert

Hickerson, museum photographer, and Midori Oka, registration

Many of the in

to

its

were

ideas presented here

photography that

members

Some of their

first

developed in

graduate seminar on the body

a

held at the University of Kansas, spring 1994;

I

for listening to a

work

in progress

intern.

my

heartfelt thanks

and for frankly sharing

insights appear here. For help at crucial points

I

their ideas.

thank Margaret Killeen,

Michael Willis, and Bobbi Rahder. Finally, for reading and commenting on the manuscript

The

project

I

thank Julia Blaut and,

would not have been

as always,

possible without the

encouragement of Tim Barringer

and Lesley Ripley Greenfield, of the Perspectives series. Jacky close,

Colliss

Harvey, an editor

demanding reading of the

who managed

Susan Earle.

I

was fortunate

to

work with

to provide both constant support

Susan Bolsom-Morris, picture editor, was

text.

and

her efforts to obtain the best illustrations for this text.

Frontispiece Clementina, Lady

Hawarden Young

Tim

Series Consultant

Girl with Mirror Reflection,

Barringer (The Victoria and Albert

Series Director,

Harry N. Abrams,

Museum)

Eve Sinaiko

Inc.

Harvey

Editor Jacky Colliss

Designer Karen Stafford,

page 42

DQP, London

Cover Designer Miko McGinty Picture Editor Susan

Bolsom-Morris

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Pultz, John.

The body and

the lens

Pultz.

cm.

p.

photography 1839 to the present

:

—

/

John

(Perspectives)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 2) and index.

ISBN 1.

0-8109-2703-9

Photography, Artistic

History.

3.

—History.

Body, Human,

2.

in art.

I.

Portrait

Title.

II.

photography

Series:

Perspectives (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)

TR642.P85 1995 778.9*2—dc20

94-37844

Copyright

©

1995

Calmann and King

Ltd.

New York A Times Mirror Company reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be

Published in 1995 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated,

All rights

reproduced without the written permission of the publisher This book was produced by Calmann and King Ltd.,

Printed and

bound

in

Singapore

London

a

tireless in

(detail)

Contents INTRODUCTION

ONE

The Body

in

Photography

The Nineteenth Century: Realism and

The

First

Photographic Portraits

13

7

Social Control

The Spread of Portraiture

13

16

Colonialism, Race, and the "Other" 20

Criminology, Psychiatry, and

TWO

Human Locomotion

26

Death and

War

1850-1918: Gender and Eroticism in Pictorialist Photography Artistic

The Body and

Women as

Photographers,

THREE

Nudes and Pornography 38

Women as

Subjects 46

The Exception: The Male Body

FOUR The Great

Surrealism in Europe 72

Acting Out 82

1930-1960: The Body in Society

89

Depression, Class, and Liberal Politics 90

and the Era of the Second World

Collectivity

War 97 War

Sexual Orientation and Domesticity during the Cold

103

1960-1975: The Body, Photography, and Art in the Era of Vietnam Turmoil and Social Upheaval

Political

The

59

1900-1940: Hetero sexuality and Modernism 65

Masquerade 77

SIX

37

the Sexuality of Children and Adolescents 40

American Formalism 67

FIVE

32

Feminist Politics of Performance and

Photography Since 1915: Gender,

Documentary Photography Redefined AIDS, Gay

144

Politics,

Politics

117

Body Art

in a

Consumer

Homoerotic Body 157

and Critiques of Formalism 160

BIBLIOGRAPHY 170

PICTURE CREDITS 172

INDEX 173

127

and the Postmodern Body

Media and the Body

Liberation, and the

113

143

Society 150

;*'.1

5

INTRODUCTION

The Body

in

Photography

The

emergence

nist

in recent years

of postmodern and femi-

thinking demands a reappraisal of

represented in the visual

arts.

No

how

the

body

of visual delight and innocent erotic delectation, the body

now

understood to be the

site

is

longer a simple object

of a highly charged debate.

is

New

body in the visual arts is central to society's construction not only of norms of sexual behavior but of power relationships in general. Asking how, and by what means, a body is represented produces more valuable answers than do stylistic analysis and connoisseurship. This book examines how the human body has been represented by photography throughout the history of this most theories insist that the representation of the

modern of all media in the visual arts. Photography has been the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century and a half, and has done more than any other medium to shape our notions of the body in modern times. This book investigates how photographic representations of the body shape and '

(German,

b.

_

x

1

1

Gelatin-silver print 11

/." (29.1

x 38.9 cm).

Sander Gallery,

not only obvious issues of personal identity, sexuality,

....

1935)

and

DieVergrasungderHande, 1979

reflect

gender, and sexual orientation but also issues of power, ideology,

New York.

3

/a

politics.

Postmodern theory argues against assume that categories such are understood to

mean

as

essential definitions

which

"male," "female," or "the body"

the same things in

all

cultures or at

all

periods.

These terms

ther the

are historically

and culturally

body nor photography has any

set

variable.

Nei-

meaning, any

absolute or unchanging essence; rather the meaning of each

determined by

social, historical,

fore, the bodies discussed in this their separate contexts.

of

posit the existence

And

since the

As

and

and introduces "art"

- photography - that

visual, this

wide variety of practices

book

is

considers

have emerged

that

in the late 1830s.

re-examination of photography based in post-

theory, this text will in

and margin.

are considered within

unlike histories of photography that

medium's invention

a critical

modern ter

as a

book

a unified subject

essentially truthful, mechanical,

photography

is

and cultural contexts. There-

It

many

places

seem to invert cen-

reconsiders photographs that are well

less familiar

and those made

as

ones,

moving between

documents. In rejecting

those

known made

as

a formalist his-

tory of art which looks at photographs in isolation, tracing

developments of style and technique, this book assumes a methodology that is pluralistic, drawing as appropriate on ideas from Marxism to the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan, and on methods taken from anthropology, literature, history,

and sociology,

as

well as art history.

In the process of surveying in

photography,

this

book

how

the

body has been presented photography

will begin untangling

from the Modernist rhetoric that has been used to define it throughout its history. Photography and Modernism grew up together; as an industrial product, photography stands as a metonym for the industrialization that defines the modern era.

GRANITE LINE

SCATTERED ALONG A STRAIGHT 9 MILE LINE 223 STONES PLACED ON DARTMOOR

2.

Richard Long

(British, b.

1945).

Granite Line (Scattered along a straight 9 mile line

223

stones placed on Dartmoor),

1980.

Introduction

Photography

also a

is

metonym

for the Enlightenment, the

philosophical thinking that arose in the eighteenth century and that has

dominated the Modern

era.

The Enlightenment valued

empiricism, the belief that experience, especially of the senses,

is

the only source of knowledge. Photography seemed the perfect

Enlightenment tool, functioning like human sight to offer empirical knowledge mechanically, objectively, without thought or emotion.

The

existence of photography also buttressed the

Enlightenment account of the coherent individual, or

subject.

A

of relationships within the photographic process camera to subject, lens to film, observer to photograph - repro-

whole

series

duce the position of a privileged, unique Enlightenment subject: the observer apart, freely viewing

The writing of

some object or

scene.

the French historian and philosopher Michel

Foucault (1926-1984),

who

has led the critique of Enlightenment

thinking, suggests a means to separate photography from the rhetoric of

Modernism. In

his

books Foucault explored major

social institutions created in the nineteenth century: psychiatry

Madness and Civilization), medicine

(in

Clinic),

and criminal

(in

The Birth of

justice (in Discipline and Punish).

He

cluded that these building blocks of a presumably free and eral society

were actually subtle means of

social control.

control exerted by these institutions suggested to

him

the

conlib-

The

that the

free,

unique Enlightenment individual was a mythical character

who

never existed. Foucault refused to refer to persons

viduals," calling

to

which they

them

instead "subjects," to convey

as "indi-

the degree

are subject to (and constructed by) these

means of

social control.

Foucault found instruments of control throughout society,

and

his writings suggest that

photography was one of the means

of establishing and maintaining power. Rather than us freely using photography as a tool under our control, his writings

would suggest

photography controls us, with the images produced through it becoming additional means of control. Foucault further asserted that power produced knowledge that

(not vice versa), and that without free individuals there could be no impartial knowledge. Rather, all knowledge is the product of power because everyone is subject to social control. There was for Foucault no viewpoint from which one could make objective observations; all vantages were affected by power. If Foucault's relationship of knowledge to power is accepted, the knowledge

produced by photography cannot be disinterested, rational, and neutral. Instead that knowledge, and the means of its production, constitute what the Italian communist theoretician

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) would

call

an "apparatus of ideol-

ogy," used by a ruling class to establish and maintain

hegemony. Both Foucault and Marxist

its

cultural

have argued

critics

this

position.

Photography was invented at a period of social conflict throughout Europe and America, when a series of proletarian uprisings convinced the bourgeoisie and aristocracy that the capitalist system upon which they depended required social stability. The British art-historian and photographer John Tagg (b. 1949) argues that photography,

century, existed

first as

then as a means of

The

means of celebrating the individual and

writings of Foucault, Gramsci, and

service of a free sees

active

a

social control.

reject the idea that

and

born out of the mass culture that

into being following the revolutions of the late eighteenth

came

and

photography

liberal society.

photography not photography

Tagg suggest

that

as

is

This book follows their lead, as

an

structured. Their writings urge

implicated in a whole series of

as

we

an objective medium, in the

an innocent tool but rather

means by which society

us to see

is

power

relationships that exist within society, especially those of gender,

and

race,

class.

These ideas will dominate the text but will be

developed in consideration of specific photographs in specific contexts.

Chapter

One

explores how, from their

first

appearance, pho-

human body have been

tographic representations of the

twined with power relationships and

social control.

This

interis

seen

law-enforcement, ethnographic, and surveillance photographs, and in photographic studies of criminals and the

in

insane,

all

of which serve to define societal norms. Chapter

uses feminist theory to consider social control

Two

and the fabrica-

tion of patriarchal structures through both aberrant

and seem-

women. nudes made by American pho-

ingly "normal" representations of

Chapter Three looks tographers,

who

first at

created nudes at once enticing and cold, then at

work of European Modernist photographers, who took

the

a

view of the body than did their American counEuropean photographers anticipated postmodern acts

less puritanical

terparts.

of deconstruction, revealing the very process by which the body is photographed. In

Chapter Four the body

is

examined

disorder in the twentieth-century it is

as a

documentary

symbol of

social

tradition,

where

used to fabricate symbolic responses to specific ideologies.

The "documentary" body

is

contrasted with works that subvert

the early Modernist presentation of the body, altering

10

Introduction

it

through

3.

Frances Benjamin Johnston

and photochemical means. In Chapter

optical

new

new

five, the

body

(American, 1864-1952)

moves

to the center of

Trade School, Brick Laying,

how

can be manipulated. The actual act of performance often

Hampton

Institute,

1900. Platinum

1

899-

art object,

with

a

with photography

print. Library

of Congress, Washington,

D.C.

it

becomes the

art,

Chapter Six considers photographers purified formalist language of

consciousness of

as its

documentation.

who

use the highly

Modernism, but apply

it

to

more

self-consciously problematic subjects. In their work, bodies are socially connected, entering clearly defined social discourses at

the time of their making. These photographs are explicitly political,

dealing with problematic sexuality and notions of self-

identity. roles;

Most of these photographers

act out

they refuse to seek any "true" or "real"

assumed or

fictive

self.

Introduction

11

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