Photography, Narrative, Time: Imaging our Forensic Imagination [1 ed.] 9781783202386, 9781783201778

Citation preview

Photography Narrative Time

Greg Battye

Imaging our forensic imagination

Photography, Narrative, Time

Photography, Narrative, Time Imaging our forensic imagination

By Greg Battye

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2014 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Series: Critical Photography Series Editor: Alfredo Cramerotti Series ISSN: 2041-8345 (print), 2042-809X (online) Cover design: Holly Rose Copy-editing: Janine de Smet Cover photograph: Greg Battye. Bondi (1984) Production manager: Bethan Ball Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-177-8 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-238-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-239-3 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents List of Figures

vii

Foreword

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1.  A Different Kind of Look: Picturing Narrative

13

Chapter 2.  What Narrative Is

33

Chapter 3.  Made for Each Other: People and Photography

51

Chapter 4.  Time

69

Chapter 5.  The Eternity of a Moment: Evidence

89

Chapter 6.  A Cognitive Turn

111

Chapter 7.  Scripts and Schemata

129

Chapter 8.  Possible Worlds

143

Postscript

171

References

175

Index

183

List of Figures Figure 1: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932. Copyright Magnum Photos / Snapper Media. All rights reserved. Figure 2: John Singleton Copley, American, 1738–1815. Watson and the Shark (1778). Oil on canvas 183.51 x 229.55 cm (72 ¼ x 90 3/8 in.). Museum of fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs George von Lengerke Meyer. 89.481. Figure 3: Greg Battye. Bondi (1984). Copyright the author. Figure 4: Larry Clark. Untitled, 1971. Black and white print 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Figure 5: From Evidence, Sultan and Mandel (2003). Copyright Mike Mandel and the Estate of Larry Sultan. Figure 6: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive. Figure 7: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive. Figure 8: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive (detail). Figure 9: Von Eckardt’s model for operation of scripts in relation to photographs. Reproduced with the kind permission of Barbara Von Eckardt. Figure 10: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive. Figure 11: Mark Hogencamp. After crash-landing during WWII, Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol. Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved. Figure 12: Mark Hogencamp. Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol (Detail). Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved. Figure 13: Mark Hogencamp. General Patton comes to Marwencol to inspect the troops. Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved. Figure 14: Mark Hogencamp. Hogie marries Anna in front of the SS soldiers who captured him. Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved.

16 21 25 28 93 101 103 105 137 140 163 164 165 167

Foreword From the Series Editor to the Reader On complex matters Complexity science grew out of the study of chaotic systems in the 1970s. It started from within the physical sciences and then expanded progressively to include processes such as infrastructure networks within logistic, the spread of disease within biology, climate change, finance, sociology, and many other fields. It is one of the fastest-growing areas of science. Despite the great variety of complex systems we live with, they behave similarly. In visual terms, I would argue that a multi-level narrative in a single image is a good case in point for a complex system. A narrative is such a complex system that encompasses not only intentional meaning (of the author) or unintentional interpretation (of the audience), but also a range of spaces for possibilities for the story to unfold otherwise, in space and time, as well as similarities with other narratives factual or fictional. It seems to me that what is narrated (and managed) visually is more about behaviour than content, since it implies a personal response to the matter exposed. That is, image-makers adopt simple rules to generate a rather complex knowledge system. And this system has largely replaced older sources of knowledge in popular use, such as text, or oral histories. So what am I confronted with when in front of an image? Is it about seeing the links in unmatched data, or unrecognized patterns? Is it about reduction of those complex systems of reading into basic building blocks, which in turn can be modelled and re-shaped independently from the author of the image? The perceived totality of any complex visual narrative is formed not only by the appearance and understanding of its component parts (what is represented in the image) but also by the relationships between those parts (the foreground / background relation; the time / age of the image and of the observer; the context / action shown; the casual / staged relation; etc.). Complexity has indeed increased in every field since the modern age, but particularly in the visual culture field. It is quite hard to disentangle interactions and connections between various parts of a visual narrative. It is telling that, traditionally, sciences have tackled complexity by dissecting complicated systems in order to study each element or cause / effect

Photography, Narrative, Time

relation separately. But this has caused drawbacks, since failing to spot patterns of interaction has left out important connections that would explain phenomena more thoroughly. For example, in December 2013, an academic conference aptly titled ‘Grip on Complexity’ took place in Amsterdam, organized by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The conference explored a number of cases in which a lack of ‘connecting the dots’ caused myopia within the scientific community. One of the cases was about why scientists disagree about what constitutes healthy food. It would seem a rather straightforward business. Instead, since the microbiologist’s vision differs from that of the cell biologist, each one is unable to tackle the question properly; both fail to consider the organism in its entirety. Hence the surge, spanning a couple of decades, of complexity science as a new approach to tackle collective phenomena. It has involved scientists from different fields with the objective to make sense of ‘transversal’ issues. The study of visual complexity also has started to take place; for instance, the discipline of visual culture studies is well established in many regions around the world. Has this, however, produced a new development in the way that a common ground emerged, say, between artists, journalists, cyber activists, or advertising art directors? Could such an emerging for cross-discipline research into different collective phenomena be sustainable? Would it be possible to formulate common techniques and a common approach to visual complexity in reading a visual narrative? Could this generate resilience, predictability, or a grip on what is produced and diffused visually today? Many questions, too little answers. The attention ought to be on the connectedness of the various part of a visual narrative, and the method for reading it has to come from different fields. I admit that I am not sure if this ultimately would ‘stabilize’ the overall visual system, or rather break it up even more. But surely the traditional ‘isolate-and-reduce’ method to visual literacy rarely works well. We appreciate art, or reportage, or visual gaming, or simulation engineering, but we miss the links between the four that may as well address the same subject. The robustness of our capacity to decode our life passes through the possibility to combine these unlikely bedfellows, as amplifiers of our ability to process and do things. The combination might provide some surprising insight into our own, highly connected society. Alfredo Cramerotti Editor, Critical Photography series

x

Preface In the opening pages of his 1982 edited collection, Thinking Photography, Victor Burgin pointed to what he saw then as some undeveloped and incompletely conceptualized aspects of photographic critique and analysis: Photography criticism, as it is most commonly practised, is evaluative and normative. In its most characteristic form, it consists of an account of the personal thoughts and feelings of the critic in confronting the work of a photographer, with the aim of persuading the reader to share these thoughts and feelings. [...] The dominant discourse of such criticism is an uneasy and contradictory amalgam of Romantic, Realist and Modernist aesthetic theories. The ‘history of photography’ predominantly supports such criticism in that it is produced within the same ideological framework. (Burgin 1982: 3) Via the pieces gathered together in the book, including his own, he set out to begin freeing photographic criticism from ‘the gravitational field of nineteenth-century thinking,’ by providing a better framework for talking about the ‘central issue of the production of meaning in photography’ (11–12). As with much of the best critical work at the time, part of Burgin’s solution was to position his alternative critical framework within Marxist cultural theory, itself then strongly focused on a reimagining of the production of meaning, at a whole-of-society level. But while Thinking Photography deservedly became, and remains, a classic in its field, neither it, nor the many subsequent works that it inspired and informed—nor, indeed, Marxist cultural theory itself—seem to have fully dislodged the tendencies and traditions in criticism that Burgin rightly sought to tackle. The task, more than 30 years later, is at best incomplete. Meanwhile, things have moved on. Photography itself has not merely survived the transition to the digital realm, but has burgeoned in ways that could never have been imagined in 1982. In doing so, it has so thoroughly colonized other areas of human activity that a special effort is now required to conceptually disentangle photography from those activities, and to see just how extensively the production of photographic meaning has changed. The dynamic, socially mediated environments within which photographs are circulated and/or generated, and of which they have become an integral part, now strongly

Photography, Narrative, Time

shape the ways in which both images and their meanings are disseminated, reproduced, altered and shared. Although these instabilities have prompted some significant revisions to the theoretical perspectives commonly applied to photographs, many of the same kinds of framework that Burgin pointed to in 1982 are still in use, with results at least as problematic as those he sought to remedy. This book seeks to contribute to that ongoing process of revision, by taking up two topics that have been tackled only rarely in the critical literature of photography, and making a tentative start on a third one. The first of these topics is narrative. This has been an active field of investigation for much of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to literature and to time-based media products such as film and television, but also as a topic in its own right, independent of the kinds of texts in which particular narratives might be realized or applied. Under the influence of both structuralism and post-structuralism, much of this work has taken the form of investigations of narrative as a property or attribute of texts, but increasingly narrative has come to be seen as a phenomenon created by, and within, the interactions between a text and its readers or users. Cognitive science, and its contributions to literary theory, has been an important driver of this more recent work on narrative, but while this work has found occasional application to painting and drawing, little of it has so far been taken up in the domain of photographic analysis and critique. Time, the second main topic, has made more frequent appearances in the photographic literature, and is an essential ingredient in narrative. For much of the history of that literature, however, there has been a concentration on the brief time of the actual photographic exposure as though that were the default temporal relationship between photographs and the periods of time they might represent or refer to. Yet photographs have many ways of indicating time, referring to time, or connecting with time, and understanding these varying temporal relationships is central, not only to narrative understanding but to understanding the potential for many other shades of photographic meaning, as well as the unique meanings of particular individual photographs. The third thematic topic, less comprehensively treated but still a significant thread through the work, is what I have termed ‘forensic imagination,’ a phrase adopted from Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2012) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Disappointingly for my own peculiar purposes, Kirschenbaum hardly mentions photography—one confirmation, perhaps, of my assertion that photography has permeated the media landscape so thoroughly that it is often no longer visible as a separate entity— but for me, at least, his phrase captures something of why photographs and photography have become more important even as they also become less obvious. This connects with both time and narrative; one thing photography appears to help us with is the cognitive task of assembling and maintaining a representation of, and explanation for, the narrative thread of our own lives and the intersections of our lives with those of others. By making nodes—photographs—that allow us to occasionally hit the ‘pause’ button on the otherwiseunstoppable and sometimes incomprehensible continuity of time, we gain a few moments xii

Preface

in which we can catch our living narrative breath, individually and collectively. These nodes can be revisited, rediscovered, and reconfirmed whenever we want or need to know who was who, what was what or where was where. This certainly applies, very literally, in the field of legal forensics, but it applies equally well to exacting scientific work, to banal and inconsequential everyday activities, and to groups, organizations, corporations, even to whole countries, just as much as to individuals. A few other books have been so significant to my work that they are repeatedly referred to. I have been painfully aware that this may make some passages read more like journal articles, but the only alternatives seemed to be either to sacrifice detail and clarity, or to pretend that some things were my idea when in fact they had a clear prior external origin. Patrick Maynard’s The Engine of Vizualization: Thinking Through Photography (1997) is to my mind the best philosophical account of photography ever written, and although I take issue with one small aspect of it that I believe has been changed by the digital revolution that had only just begun when Maynard’s book was being written, I have found it to be a comfortably solid base to rest many of my ideas on. David Campany (2008) and Max Kozloff (1987, 1994) have both enunciated ideas that became key parts of my own thinking. Brian Boyd (2009) and Lisa Zunshine (2006 especially), who have both contributed enormously to the development of cognitive literary theory, have written nothing at all about photography (that I could find, anyway) and disagree markedly with each other within their own field, so they might be surprised to find that they have jointly revealed and made sense of, for me, many significant reasons for photography’s usefulness and appeal. Acknowledgements Others have of course contributed to this book, some deliberately and some more obliquely. My imperfect memory and the passage of time may leave some gaps, but I have tried to acknowledge all who made a contribution, whether at my request or unknowingly, and sometimes even by accident. It all began, an alarmingly long time ago, as an academic project on photography and narrative: I thank John Scott for suggesting the connection between narrative and photographs in the first place, though I also recall his asserting that I had thought of it first. Whoever is correct, it was the beginning of a wide-ranging conversation that continues to this day, for which I am most grateful. My colleagues at the University of Canberra have given me intellectual stimulation and friendship, without which I could not have maintained my motivation to complete research of this kind, above and beyond the load of everyday teaching and administration. The University itself has supported me with leave to study and travel for projects and conferences of varying degrees of relevance to the book. David Tait has been very generous in inviting me to take part in funded research projects that enlarged and developed my understanding of several aspects of my own writing, often in unexpected ways. Through these projects also, I have been privileged to make contact with Christina and Sydney Spiesel and Neal xiii

Photography, Narrative, Time

Feigenson; all three have provided collegial input to my work, but I must particularly single out Christina for reading and commenting on the draft of this book and, more importantly and over a much longer period, managing somehow to combine unswerving friendship with uncompromising—and thus invaluable—critical feedback. Barbara Von Eckardt gave very generously of her time and thoughts on narrative in single photographs, and granted permission to use the diagram of her two-factor script model that appears on page 137. The Banff Centre provided me with the most wonderful studio space I will ever experience (a boat! On dry land! Up in the air!) in which to work on a very early draft of the book. For an idyllic, short (and probably rare) period, the wonderful librarians in that Centre also showed me what a difference a good library can make when its staff members outnumber its users. While obtaining rights to photographs for use in the book was essentially a commercial transaction, some of those with whom I dealt went out of their way to give me more than the expected levels of assistance. In the photographic archive of the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney, Caleb Williams spent generous time with me on several occasions, going through individual works from the collection, and also making available some of his own critical writing on photographs in the archive. Curator Holly Schulte provided the actual image files from the archive, and was similarly generous with her time in guiding the final choice of suitable photographs, as well as with aesthetic and technical photographic advice. I thank the Museum for allowing me to use some images that might otherwise not have been available. Mike Mandel responded positively and incredibly quickly to my request to use an image from his exhibition and book (with the late Larry Sultan), Evidence (1977). Larry Clark allowed use of a photograph central to one of my arguments about time and narrative, in exchange for an assurance that appropriate recognition would be given to him and to the Luhring Augustine Gallery; to both, I emphasize my gratitude once more here. Two people in particular guided me on the tortuous path between the words on my computer screen and the production of a book. My heartfelt thanks go to Bethan Ball at Intellect for her rapid and responsive support and advice on many occasions, and for her tolerance as I wrestled with deadlines. Helen Bethune Moore revived an old friendship as she generously brought her exceptional publishing and editorial skills to bear on the index. Some readers might question the relationship between the images actually reproduced in these pages, and images for which either a link is provided to a website on which it may be found, or which are simply described. Several forces are at play here: some pictures will never have been seen by any readers, while others will already be very familiar to almost everyone. Some photographs, or parts of them, are central to a particular argument while others are merely illustrative and could be substituted for, without great loss. Some images are easily accessible via the Internet, in several places and in colour, so that it seems quite unnecessary to include them in the book, while others may be accessible now but might not remain so. Some images would have been disproportionately expensive relative to their usefulness to the book, while others were so reasonably priced that it seemed perverse not to include them. I plead guilty to self-indulgence with only two of the inclusions: my own photograph xiv

Preface

from Bondi Beach, which does provide an opportunity for a certain kind of relevant analysis (and was provided free!) and thus seems justifiable; and the photograph provided by Mike Mandel from Evidence, which is so perversely and wonderfully inexplicable that I could not bear not to have it in the book. Quite a few of the information sources are also web-based. This used to be regarded as problematic, but I believe the days of treating the Internet as intrinsically unreliable are already long gone. The Internet is a container, and no more a source of information in and of itself than is a bookshop. I have avoided web-based sources likely to be treated a priori as meriting scepticism or disdain, even though many of those (such as Wikipedia) incorporate editorial histories that allow far greater opportunity for reader judgement of reliability, and much more opportunity to immediately correct genuine errors of fact, than any written source can. Readers should be appropriately sceptical about everything they read; form, surroundings and outward appearance can never guarantee truth or reliability, in any medium—something of which we should not need reminding, in a book about photography. My heartfelt thanks go to my partner Georgia. This is as much for her forbearance as for the many things she did, on top of her own demanding work, to keep the wheels of our lives turning while I hunched over the keyboard. Not a few recreational opportunities have been missed because of work on this book, and I am eternally grateful for her tolerance. The perspective of this book overall is necessarily multi-disciplinary, and thus many readers will have far greater expertise than I, in one or another of the disciplines that combine to form the whole. If there are errors, poor arguments or other shortcomings, then they are almost certainly mine, and I would like to hear about them. Right or wrong, there is in any case much more to be said, about everything here. Criticism and analysis never come to an end, and what really matters is that we keep on talking. I hope that interested readers will join the conversation. Now read on.

xv

Introduction

T

he January/February 1992 issue of American Photo magazine boldly proclaimed, on its front cover and in a special essay inside by Charles Hagen, ‘The Triumph of Photography’. This grand declaration, expressed in sweeping terms, now appears prescient:

Never before has photography received the kind of attention it’s getting now. Major museum exhibitions are opening across the country and around the world. Conferences and symposiums devoted to this or that aspect of the medium are being held somewhere nearly every month. Auction prices, though stifled by the recession, remain solid, and the market is attentively watched by the larger art world. Photography and photographers are now well known and often celebrated […] Photography has been recognized for the central role that it plays in our culture. (Hagen 1992: 50–51)

At the time though, the tone of this piece seemed shrill, and almost defensive. The digital turn that was about to sweep not just through photography, but through all information systems and technologies, had already emerged from the wings: tucked away in a ‘roundup of new and noteworthy products’ on page 98 of the very same magazine was the first of Nikon’s DCS (Digital Camera System) series, a modified Nikon F3 with a 1.3 million-pixel sensor and a ‘portable storage pack [that] transmits edited photos directly over phone lines or downloads into a Mac II computer. Price, around $20,000.’ Small wonder, at $20,000, that digital photography looked then to be a highly specialized rarity, and was not yet widely acknowledged for what it would become. It was the recognition of photography, in the form of a ‘flood of major photography books’ that Hagen’s essay painted as such a triumph, ‘a new golden age of ink and silver.’ Towards the end of the essay he acknowledges the entry of the digital newcomers by suggesting, in what now reads as a wishful tone, that ‘historians note that, in general, new technological inventions don’t replace old systems but are simply added into the mix of available choices.’ Anticipating and predicting the nature of technological change is always either difficult or impossible, and the point here is not to criticize an unsurprising failure to foresee, in 1992, how the world of digital imaging might unfold over the following decades. The reluctance to admit that silver-based photography would all but disappear in the face of the digital onslaught is different: it indicates something of the scale of two intertwined misconceptions about the nature of photography that persist in some quarters even to this day. The first of

Photography, Narrative, Time

these is that ‘real photography’ is or was unavoidably tied to the silver-based technology which was its home and its life support for so long; the second is that any change away from that technology—particularly to digital imaging, with its Janus-faced promise/threat of simple, flexible and easily-concealed alteration—would lead to photography’s demise. Predictions of photography’s imminent collapse and disappearance have haunted it almost since birth. Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was an enthusiastic early practical photographer and, initially, an advocate of the notion that photography could become one of the fine arts. But when Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield, joint founders of the science of sensitometry and keen amateur photographers themselves, published research showing an unalterable mathematical relationship between exposure, development and the density of photosensitive materials, the effect on Emerson was overwhelming. As a scientist he had to accept the result and the result meant, for him, that ‘photographers could not control tonal values to the extent he had thought they could, and that their art was therefore quite limited, or not art at all’ (Emerson 1891 cited in Goldberg 1981: 197). In response Emerson published a funereally black-bordered pamphlet, The Death of Naturalistic Photography (1891) in which he painfully lamented what he now saw as fatal shortcomings: […] The medium must rank the lowest of all arts, lower than any graphic art, for the individuality of the artist is cramped, in short, it can hardly show itself. Control of the picture is possible to a slight degree […] But the all-vital powers of selection and rejection are fatally limited […] No differential analysis can be made, no subduing of parts, save by dodging—no emphasis—save by dodging, and that is not pure photography […] therefore to talk of getting values in any subject whatsoever and of getting them true to nature, is to talk nonsense. (Emerson 1891 cited in Goldberg 1981: 197; emphasis in original) Emerson might be pleased to return today to an era that offers something much closer to the complete pictorial control that he sought, and without contradicting anything fundamental about Hurter and Driffield’s discoveries. He would be even more astonished, probably, to find that photography in some form has become an almost universally-practised activity. Even in 1977 photography was ‘almost as widely practiced as sex and dancing’ (Sontag 1977: 8); by now it seems to have outstripped both. Reliable statistics on the scope of photography as an activity are hard to come by, but nobody who has paid ordinary attention to the material conditions of middle-class life in any first-world country for the last two decades could fail to see that even if only by observation, photography is indeed triumphant. Camera ownership is virtually universal in first-world countries and not far behind elsewhere. Now we have cameras spreading into other devices—phones and computers most notably, but also cars, missiles, surfboards, skiing goggles, pens, clothing, toys and even robotic dogs. Even though the quality of some of these devices (particularly those in mobile phones) now approaches or even exceeds the image quality of dedicated cameras, dedicated camera sales still continue to increase. 4

Introduction

The upending, by the Internet and by the increased rate of private camera ownership, of the arrangements by which advertising and sales of hard-copy magazines and newspapers previously supported the incomes of their employees has led to the disappearance of a large segment of the professional photography industry. But the shrinkage of this distinct professional grouping, in favour of an inexorable trend towards universal participation in photography by ordinary people in an increasing number of aspects of their ordinary lives, only provides further support for the notion that photographic image-making is following the path already carved in workplaces by writing, typing and computing: from a specialized skill to a universal and expected one. As well, of course, there is distribution. The contrast between then and now is most starkly seen in the domestic context; once upon a time most people had their negatives developed and printed, through the agency of a pharmacy or photographic shop, after which they were shown to friends, perhaps mailed to a select few distant friends or relatives, stored in albums, shoeboxes or sheds, and often gradually forgotten. Only photographs of the most special occasions, in most cases, would ever reach an audience, even a potential one, of more than a hundred people. Now, in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Snapfish, Fotki, Picasa, Photobucket, Snapbucket, MyAlbum, PicPlz, Instagram, Hipstamatic … the point requires no further labouring. Wherever income levels, technological capabilities and free time allow, people want to make, duplicate, edit and share photographs. Even in the age of the Internet, the number of books of photographic images, and books on how to take photographs, wildly exceeds the number that Charles Hagen celebrated—and is in turn wildly exceeded by the number and variety of websites, blogs, Facebook pages and e-mails filled with photographs of all kinds. Across the globe, people are participating in forms of photographic exhibition and exchange that Hagen could never have imagined when he extolled the Triumph of Photography back in 1992. But … why? Amplifying our capacities: Cameras Consider the humble shoe. The shoe is a technology that has significantly contributed to the ability of human beings to spread across the world, and to colonize geographical locations that would otherwise be prohibitive for human habitation. The shoe provides protection, not just from snow and ice, but also from harshly uneven or stony ground. It shields the tops of our feet from the sun, and enables the wearer to walk over thorns or broken glass, and to be protected from insects, snakes or corrosive materials. Beyond their basic survival functions in protecting their users from the elements, shoes have been specialized in numerous and variable ways as ‘tools that amplify our bodies’ capacities’ (Riello and McNeil 2006: 3)—almost a classic definition of technology itself. And beyond that, there is the desirability of shoes in fashion, as symbolic and representational devices. Shoes are alluring aesthetic vehicles in their own right, even unattached to a foot 5

Photography, Narrative, Time

and even if utterly impractical as things to wear for any identifiable purpose. Famously they have been fetishized in both Marxian and sexual senses; they are potent symbols of social grouping, wealth (or not) and taste (or not). Even without going to fetishizing extremes, we all sometimes wear shoes which are far more colourful, attractive and elaborate, and far more exactingly manufactured, than is necessary for any of their pragmatic functions. Nevertheless, the pragmatic origins of shoes mean that we understand that we want shoes, and we understand why we want shoes. How about cameras? In some ways cameras can be seen as remarkably similar: beyond their practical everyday applications they, too, can function as symbols of wealth, discernment and social attainment. Photographers, particularly amateurs, are much given to acquiring new cameras because of their impressive and elaborate features, including some purely aesthetic features only distantly related to ‘amplifying the capacities’ of their owners. It’s very clear that we want cameras, but far less clear what it is we want them for other than, and prior to, their symbolic value. To say that we want cameras in order to make pictures simply begs the question: it’s like saying we want shoes in order to encase our feet. The next question is: why do we want to encase our feet? The strong desire to have the ability to make photographs indicates that the making of photographs must in some way be a helpful or adaptive activity. So what is it about photographs? How does photography assist us? In the case of other activities that have moved from being a specialization to being almost universal, there is nearly always an employment-related motivation. Writing is required for almost any level of participation in almost any workforce, and has for that reason been a compulsory aspect of formal education systems for hundreds of years. But making photographs is probably no more frequently a required part of doing most jobs than is drawing or painting. The fact that making photographs is an activity so widely indulged in, that it is a response to so many different kinds of situations, activities and moods, that photographic equipment is so willingly purchased despite the comparatively high cost to a domestic budget, all indicate that photographs serve some purpose beyond anything individuals, even keen photographers, are willing or able to fully articulate. What is it about people, or photographs—or both, presumably—that produces such need, such desire, such enthusiasm, for making pictures of what is in many cases already right in front of our eyes? The scope of this book This is both an obvious question and an ambitious one, and brings us to the need for some clarification of the scope of this book. Firstly, it seeks to add its voice to the many attempts to characterize photography overall as a distinctive cultural practice, and to characterize photographs as pictures that are also distinctly different from all other pictures, even with the enormous diversity that exists between different kinds of photograph. While the book cannot even scratch the surface of all the styles, modes, physical manifestations, genres or 6

Introduction

applications of photography, it seeks to make some generalizations that are applicable across a range of the activities to which the word ‘photography’ may be applied. It is about both production and reception—about taking/making photographs and about using, interpreting and understanding them. To the extent that many of the sharing activities afforded by the Internet now embrace both production and reception, binding them into loops that are both recursive and expansive, it deals also with photographs as socially mediated entities. This is important, as many of the modes of meaning-making that we now think of as having been brought into being by the Internet have actually been in existence for as long as photography itself, but it is the Internet which facilitates the critical mass of engagement and participation that makes these modes viable and valuable. One thrust of this book is to introduce some different perspectives to the discussion of what makes photography so prevalent and thus so important. Many words, many disciplinary perspectives and many theoretical frameworks have been brought to bear on photography for almost two centuries, and they have generated new knowledge and new understanding in abundance, while also raising many new questions. The last few decades, though, are notable for a remarkable flowering in the application of some of the insights of psychology and cognitive science to literary studies and to film and media studies, but photography has attracted little interest from these approaches. Given the enormous interest in photography as an activity, and in particular its fundamental position as a component of social media, this is surprising. The overlapping essays in this book do no more than open the discussion, and try to indicate some strands of continuity with the modes of analysis that have dominated photographic theory for 50 years or more. Hopefully, others will come along to join in, to supplement, quibble, qualify and correct. Given the overall orientation of this book, there is less emphasis here on some of the issues commonly used as a basis for revealing what photography is all about—power, identity, objectivity, aesthetics and sociological factors—except insofar as they serve to confirm the nature of photography as a multifaceted activity. From the beginning, photography is conceived of as, in the words of Patrick Maynard (1997: 3) ‘a branching family of technologies, with different uses’—and its products, individual photographs themselves, no matter where or when they were created, are acknowledged as existing in a swirling context of changing uses, and sometimes of changing meanings. Although photographic sets and series are often rich in meaningful relationships, the book is almost completely limited to consideration of single photographs, and mostly to photographs without textual reference or assistance. In practice, published photographs very rarely appear without accompanying text, and once the text and the photograph have been presented together, it is almost impossible to subsequently remove the influence of the text from the mind of anyone who has seen the two combined. Inevitably some titles are used in the book to refer to photographs and other pictures not actually included in the text, since such pictures must be identified in some way. The images included in the book are also captioned with the titles that have been historically awarded to them, where that applies, in the interests of historical accuracy and completeness and to facilitate connections between images and text, for readers. As far as possible though, the book is about single photographs, 7

Photography, Narrative, Time

isolated from sources of supplementary meaning or explanation. The goal is to see how photographs fare, as conveyers of meaning, when left—or reduced—to their own devices. While the various concerns, benefits and consequences of the change from silver-based analogue photography to digital technology arise here and there throughout the book, they are not intrinsically at issue; at least, not in the sense sometimes found elsewhere, in which the difference between the two is cast as a chasm to be bridged only with the greatest difficulty. For my purposes, digital photographs are the same as analogue photographs, and any exceptions to that are made contextually clear. Such differences between the two modes as are significant for this book are in photography rather than in photographs, and mostly in the areas of use and distribution where, in summary, I want in effect to argue that it is only in its digital form that photography has finally achieved the condition to which it always aspired. Far from being ‘real’ photography, silver-based photography was a good first draft: a reliable technology which with reasonable cost, acceptable speed and tolerable environmental effects, produced high-definition pictures via the marking, by light, of a photosensitive surface. In principle, if not in fact, no effect or variant of the former chemical process is unavailable to the digital world. Now, though, we have the additional benefits of all the new and rapidly developing modes of storage, transmission, transformation, exchange and display; which, judging by the ever-expanding enthusiasm for their use, people would always have wanted had they been available, just as much as they want them now. For all those reasons, the book is about photographs, photography, and people, in more or less equal measure. Because the action of light on silver nitrate in the early eighteenth century was essentially an accidental discovery, it’s possible to find many references to photography itself being ‘discovered;’ yet photography was made, by and for people; shaped always from and with available materials and processes, and cumulatively improved as opportunities arose, but always in the service of human ideas and human perception. Without people, there would be no photography, and everything about the medium and its products must always be understood in the light of how people have wanted, invented, changed and used them. Similarly, while many of the photographs discussed were either born art, achieved art, or had art thrust upon them, any still-running arguments about whether or not photography is art are essentially dodged. As Brian Boyd (2009) points out, many things are either nearly art, or resemble art, or occasionally can be art, or are sometimes labelled as art in certain instances because we particularly enjoy those instances, and want to describe them in a grander fashion. Some instances of gymnastics, skywriting, horticulture, architecture, synchronized swimming, ambient sound recording, musical instrument making, circus skills, stand-up comedy, and even crop circles probably qualify in this manner. Sir John Herschel’s 1839 coined word, ‘photography,’ is sometimes parsed from its Greek origins as ‘writing with light’ rather than ‘drawing with light,’ and in this respect at least, photography most closely resembles writing. Is writing art? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is this complicated? Not really. Each chapter principally addresses a single topic, but in concert they are intended to enlarge our view of what photography and photographs are and what they do; partly to 8

Introduction

present them as capable of bigger things than they are generally given credit for, and partly to scrutinize more carefully some of the credit they may already have been given wrongly, or too easily. It simply isn’t true to say that ‘every picture tells a story,’ but I argue that at least some photographs can and do tell stories, and that it’s important to be able to work out why, when, and how. I further argue that this limited possibility of narrative is one of the reasons for photography’s wide and deep appeal. Where narrative exists, fiction is never far behind, and although photography has often been conceived as having a special ability to tell or reveal truth, there’s some examination here of the frequent uses of photography to make fiction. With respect to time, it seems as though far too much photographic analysis has been concentrated on the split second of the actual exposure, as though that were the only time period a photograph can depict, and as if no photograph could ever really refer to time stretching before and after that instant. A better understanding of the relationships between a photograph and that extended time before and after, and between the act and practice of photography and our various (and mostly unspoken) concerns and anxieties about time, can help explain why we want to make photographs. Neither narrative nor a sense of extended time would be of any relevance for photography were it not for the psychological attributes of people that bring such considerations into play. Part of understanding how narrative works has always involved understanding the mental processes used in synthesizing and mobilizing certain attributes of texts, and some of these are covered in this book. What I hope is an original contribution to that coverage, though, is some material adapted from the exciting interface between cognitive science and literary theory. Theory of Mind, or mind-reading, appears to have particularly powerful implications for any medium that causally depicts people and their behaviour, and while the unravelling of these implications has been well embarked on in respect of literature, film and television, consideration of photography lags behind. Far more remains to be said on this, but the book aims to make a start. To a limited extent, the book binds together personal experience as a photographer with analytical experience derived from both teaching and research. I have been a practical photographer since childhood, a professional photographer for a short period, and a teacher and researcher, first in photography and then in communication more broadly, for nearly three decades. Many of the issues discussed in the book arise from questions raised, but never satisfactorily answered, during the course of that time: from taking photographs of my own, from looking at photographs made by others in galleries and in books, and perhaps most of all from watching friends, acquaintances and strangers, in many countries, taking, making, sharing and poring over thousands upon thousands of photographic images. Beyond concerns with the moment of exposure, another sense of time provides a thread through some chapters. The societies and cultures where photography is practised most widely, and in the widest variety of contexts, are the cultures in which people are most preoccupied with time. Affected cultures—predominantly western, and middle-class or wealthier—demonstrate this through their anxiety about the speed and efficiency with which 9

Photography, Narrative, Time

work is carried out, through personal expressions of frustration about the lack of time for relaxation and family, by high valuing of exactitude in the timing of events and the keeping of appointments, and through occasional but common laments and warnings about the shortness of life in general and the consequent need to not ‘waste’ time. In some manner yet to be fully determined, it seems that photography often acts as a means of dealing with time: keeping track of changes over time, understanding the effects of time and even attempting to defeat the indefatigable march of time. Of course, the time issue is confounded with the distribution of wealth. The societies and groups in which photography flourishes to the greatest degree are those in which the greatest amount of disposable income may be safely directed towards activities that are not directly related to food, shelter and survival. Conversely, the societies and groups in which such surplus income exists are partly in that situation because of having developed a tradition for spending their time mainly in fostering economically productive activities. We all, in one sense, have the same amount of time, and we all have as much time as there is; what makes for difference is how we are able, and how we choose, to ‘spend’ the time we have. Nevertheless, it perhaps is not surprising that the societies in which people are most concerned about the rapid passage of time, and who perceive a shortage of time to the greatest degree, should exhibit such enthusiasm for a means of ‘stopping’ time, for a way of partially and selectively stemming its flow. In the context of anxiety about our inability to slow the relentless passage of time, there’s a strong appeal to being able to ‘hold a moment’ in one’s hand or on a screen, and contemplate it indefinitely. Perhaps it’s only another confounding, too, that some of the nations best known for time efficiency and for concerns about spending time to the greatest effect—Japan, Germany, South Korea and the US— are also those known for producing the best cameras. And maybe it’s only accidental that, anecdotally at least, tourists from nations with the shortest annual holidays seem to take more photographs on their holiday travels than do other people. In 2004, Victor Burgin wrote of the ‘remembered film’—the total world of subjectivity surrounding a film, excluding the film itself, but including every other material artefact that might connect with the film, such as advertising posters, trailers and other memories attached to the film in various ways. His conceptualization and inclusion of this wider field of reception, for film, provides us with an apposite model of how we might also extend our understanding of photographs. Some of these memories, as Burgin vividly shows, are false even though they might also be strongly retained and repeatedly ‘replayed.’ He gives the example of a memory he has of sitting in a cinema and viewing a certain film with his mother when, in fact, he had not yet been born at the time the film would have been showing. Nevertheless, a memory is (becomes) a memory whether accurate or not, and it also becomes associated with certain events, actions or things whether accurate or not; thus does it become an important part of the subjectivity included in Burgin’s examination. Some of this subjectivity has been included, in different ways, in previous work on the interpretation of photographs, but Burgin’s work reminds us that any model of how we read, use, remember and interpret photographs will be more robust to the extent that it does not 10

Introduction

depend entirely on the photograph itself. As the discussion of presence in Chapter 4 shows, our minds never cease to multi-task, and we are ceaselessly attending to a variety of inputs, internal and external, no matter how focused we might believe ourselves to be on a single task. Some of the photographs discussed here are well known, while others are obscure or have never been published before; but no matter how frequently some might have been seen, at each encounter the viewer’s subjective state will be uniquely different. Repeated encounters with a photograph greatly open up the possibility of reading the photograph as a narrative, widening the senses of time over which events can unfold. Some photographs, it will be argued here, are inherently narrative, and can only be usefully read if one admits to contemplation of what will have come before and after the depicted moment. Some such photographs may quite narrowly limit the range of implied possibilities in these before-and-after worlds; others may leave before-and-after so unnervingly open and undefined that it is a more free-ranging sense of need for narrative closure that attempts to come to our rescue by presuming a framing that resembles a story. Nevertheless, a better reading of the total subjectivity of the photograph seems to be the framework that can allow simultaneous or inclusive contemplation of these extremes, and of the many narrative-like positions between them. The notion of photography as a forensic activity is taken up in several ways in the course of the book. Some of the photographs discussed, notably in Chapter 5, are literally and formally forensic: connected with the operation of police work and courts as an investigative technology, as a record of investigation and as evidence. In a wider sense though, many of the book’s concerns show photography as an activity that is intrinsically forensic in nearly all its domains: as always concerned with recording, retaining, investigating and clarifying what has been, and how, and why. This applies both to the making or taking of photographs and to how we read them. Even photographs predicated on imaginary or fictional constructions are, ultimately, as much about the world as it is, as they are about the world as it might be. As Matthew Kirschenbaum (2012) writes: We live in a time of the forensic imagination, as evidenced by the current vogue for forensic science in television drama and genre fiction. Forensics in this popular sense returns us to the scene of the crime; as a legal and scientific enterprise forensic investigation has its origins in the same nineteenth century era that produced the great inscribing engines of modernity […] Photography and microscopy, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Samuel Clemens’s extraordinary twins, Francis Galton and (somewhat later) Edmond Locard— all lend their testimony to forensics as a signature discourse network of modernity at the juncture of instrumentation, inscription, and identification. But forensics is commemorative as well as juridical, and fundamental to the arts as well as to the sciences. (Kirschenbaum 2012: 250) Even now, after so much has already been written on the subject, photographs continue to be understood and used as traces of the real that speak for themselves, without the need 11

Photography, Narrative, Time

for inferential support. This book seeks to both show the need for that support, and in a few instances, to provide it. As a category of communicative object in contemporary life, few things are as commonly encountered as photographic images, yet we still give them little thought. If Michael Leyton (1992: 2) is correct that ‘all cognitive activity proceeds via the recovery of the past through objects in the present,’ then these important objects in our present deserve a different kind of look.

12

Chapter 1 A Different Kind of Look: Picturing Narrative

A

photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932 (Figure 1) encapsulates a key aspect of his peculiar talent perhaps more than any other single image from his illustrious career. On a grey day, in a flooded urban space enclosed by a high, spiked metal fence, a bowler-hatted man leaps from the end of a ladder lying in a pool of shallow water and is caught by Cartier-Bresson’s shutter a split second before the man’s descending heel breaks the smooth surface of the water. No supplementary information is given, other than the title. Can we induce, with a satisfactory level of certainty, what has happened in the moments before the one depicted? Do we know what will happen next? On engaging with the photograph, there’s a tension quickly established between the sliver of time crystallized by the depiction and the extension of time that we know must have surrounded that sliver, before and after, in the reality from which it has been abstracted. We continue to look at the photograph not just because the extended time is both implied and missing: we know, or feel, that there’s planning and consequence, action and reaction, cause and effect, anticipation and result all caught up somewhere here too, but we can’t exactly see any of those, either. The photograph presents us with these puzzles while simultaneously making clear that it can offer no solution, and no further information. We feel as though it’s going to continue to unfold, but we also know that it’s all over. Max Kozloff notes, of such predicaments: No matter how visually explicit, its story content is moot. […] Most of the time […] we make confident determinations about the incident without being aware that they’re conjectural. By the shortest common-sense route, we work on a number of cues that invite us to make a provisional settlement of the narrative issue framed by the picture. (Kozloff 1987: 3) What leaps out for me in this paragraph is Kozloff ’s use of the terms ‘story’ and ‘narrative.’ He’s actually talking about a Cartier-Bresson photograph too, though a different one; one even less resolved as to its antecedents and its future. Nevertheless, the topic of narrative is confidently—presumptively, even—dropped on the table. Perhaps we’re not surprised at this, because it’s by no means the first or only time that narrative properties have been attributed to still photographs. But really, we should be surprised. We all probably have some intuitive idea about how narrative works in the most common and typical places we find it: verbal stories, whether written or delivered orally, and

Photography, Narrative, Time

Figure 1:  Henri Cartier-Bresson. Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932. © Magnum Photos / Snapper Media.

16

A Different Kind of Look

whether mediated or not. With a little thought, though, it seems clear that in the narrative media that contain both verbal and visual information—plays, films, TV programmes and so on—the visually performative or pictorial components are not merely subservient illustration, but are bound up with, and do much of the work of, constructing and conveying the narrative that is the complete work. We could take away the pictures and still have a mostly intelligible narrative (think, for example, of the soundtrack of a TV comedy); with a slightly greater level of difficulty, and some approximation and guesswork, we could remove the soundtrack from a TV show and still have a serviceable narrative of sorts. But what if neither soundtrack nor movement is present? Is it possible that still photographs, at least some of them, alone and unassisted by descriptions or captions, might meet essentially the same requirements for narrative as those which so qualify a passage of text? The Cartier-Bresson photograph sharply raises some of these fundamental questions about both time and narrative, and about the connections between the two. It prompts speculation, but constrained speculation, about the context of the tiny moment it so successfully isolates, and the great popularity of the photograph over the years indicates that it engages viewers beyond merely documenting the fact that once upon a time, in Paris, a man jumped (nearly) over a puddle. Ian Jeffrey sees the image as an exemplification of the almost heroic national attributes he finds celebrated in Cartier-Bresson’s work: Cartier-Bresson’s special subject is French society. Indeed, he is a prime originator of a modern image of the French as an idiosyncratic people. Their idiosyncrasies, however, are tempered by prudence, in which the photographer has a special and continuing interest. His subjects habitually look out for themselves. Even when the game is up, something might still be salvaged. In a celebrated picture from 1932, of a flooded roadworks in the Place de L’Europe, Cartier-Bresson catches the instant just before a leaping man touches down on still water […] the picture is eloquent beyond virtuosity and irony; the sandspit and ladder pushed out into the flood tell of improvisation, of a last resort in the face of a hopeless situation. That is: the camera captures an instant, but it also gives a ground plan of a predicament against which the moment can be weighed and understood. (Jeffrey 1981: 191) By making this discrimination between the instant and the ‘ground plan,’ between the figure and the ground of how the photograph speaks to us, we have a first inkling of how something like narrative might work in a photograph. Critics, theorists and photographic enthusiasts have long asserted, mostly without a perceived need for rigorous justification, that individual pictures, including photographs, can be narratives; to the extent that such photographic narratives exist and because they are uncommon, they promise to explain a part of the widely shared fascination for photography and photographs. This chapter begins with some hints as to what kind of thing narrative is—an issue which also continues as a thread throughout the book—and then specifically examines possible examples of singlepicture narrative, initially in the context of a brief and selective look at narrative painting. 17

Photography, Narrative, Time

Picturing narrative: Time and space Visual works, and particularly paintings, are sometimes said to be narrative, or to have narrative properties, but clearly this is something that might be said on a casual or emotive basis, rather than as a description argued strictly from the attributes of the work in question. There are distinct problems for ‘still’ pictures—that is, for single-frame works that are not film or video or animation—in showing change or transition over time, something that even intuitively appears to be a necessary property of genuine narrative. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) was not the first work to set forth the notion of a distinction between literature and the visual arts on the basis of time and space, but his distinction was laid out with a confidence and clarity that has conferred increasing authority on his work over time, so that Laocoon is always referred to whenever the need arises to draw a line of separation between spatial and temporal arts. Although the Renaissance had already produced a series of distinctions between painting and poetry, and also between painting and sculpture, it was Lessing’s ‘characterization of narrative literature as a ‘temporal’ art (as opposed to ‘spatial’ arts like painting and sculpture)’ which ‘seemed too evident to be seriously interrogated’ (Buchholz and Jahn 2005: 551). In Chapter 15 of Laocoon, Lessing brings to an end his discussion of another critic’s work with an almost off-hand comment, stated as an assumption, that painting necessarily deals with subjects which exist in space simultaneously, while poetry deals with a sequence of events in time. In the following chapter he goes on to elaborate this idea in his own terms: I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry,—the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time,— and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side, or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other, in time. (Lessing 1969: 91, quoted in Mitchell 1984: 98) As Mitchell remarks of this, ‘nothing […] seems more intuitively obvious than [this] claim that literature is an art of time, painting an art of space’ (Mitchell 1984: 98). He shows, however, that even within Lessing’s own framework [t]he distinction between the temporal and spatial arts […] turns out to operate only at the first level of representation, the level of direct or ‘convenient relation’ […] between sign and signified. At a second level of inference where representation occurs ‘indirectly’ […] the signifieds of painting and poetry become signifiers in their own right, and the boundaries between the temporal and spatial arts dissolve. (Mitchell 1984: 102) The notion of ‘convenient relation’ refers to what is easily or intrinsically achieved, within a given art form: thus, in the case of painting, the representation of bodies—physical 18

A Different Kind of Look

entities—is straightforward, whereas the representation of actions is difficult and sometimes unachievable. The reverse applies to written forms. As Mitchell points out, this understanding of the significance of inference does not abolish the distinction between texts and images as such, but it does remove ‘the space-time differential as the basis for [that] generic distinction’ (103). As Lessing himself concedes, ‘All bodies […] exist not only in space, but also in time. […] Painting can imitate actions also, but only as they are suggested through forms’ (Lessing 1969: 91–92, quoted in Mitchell 1984: 102). In contemporary times, Lessing’s comments have been the starting point for a lengthy and continuing debate about the potential or actual spatiality of literature, a debate which need not concern us here. The idea of temporality in painting—and thus in pictures, generally—continues to have been subject to relatively little systematic theoretical examination, even though painters themselves have often accepted it as a challenge rather than an orthodoxy to be obeyed. One issue in establishing any kind of unified conceptual framework for narrativity in pictures is the degree to which theoretical positions are unavoidably tied to the choice of example. Australian aboriginal paintings, for instance, sometimes refer so closely to particular independently existing stories, as realized elsewhere and in other forms such as oral rendition, song or dance, that it would be strange and self-defeating to deny their narrative significance. Equally though, it would be clumsy to then suggest that all traditions of painting share this same, or indeed any, relationship to stories. Looking at photographs, of course, is likely to lead us towards other notions that are equally resistant to generalization— but before we can go down that path, we surely need to isolate the means by which any picture can be, or represent, a narrative, or can have narrative properties. The word ‘narrative’ has often been used to describe some kinds of painting, and even liberally applied to entire schools or traditions of painting. As a broad distinguishing feature it has, for instance, particularly been ascribed to the genre of ‘history painting’ which flourished across England, Europe and North America up until the Victorian era (see for example Barlow 2005). This characterization of history painting as broadly or generally narrative is, as has been specifically observed, ‘very loose’ (Steiner 1988: 8), particularly if used to create the expectation that a narrative is somehow to be found lurking in the corners of any given example of the genre. There is a problem of carts and horses here: the term ‘history painting’ appears to be derived originally from the Latin word historia and probably thus means ‘the painting of stories,’ rather than the illustration of actual historical events. But since the academic discipline ‘history’ generally frames its content in story form, history and story are already thoroughly intertwined. History painting as a genre typically depicts moments in pre-existing narratives, but moments chosen and depicted with a view to standing for some extension of time. Often they concern religious themes, and they may be either historical, mythological or, quite often, somewhere between the two. They are most often large works, frequently with many ‘characters,’ and hence considerable work may be required on the part of the viewer in order to decipher the nature of the relationship between the known pre-existing narrative and 19

Photography, Narrative, Time

the particular interpretation of that narrative as rendered in the moment depicted by the painting. Here we begin to see one aspect of Lessing’s characterization of objects as being situated in both space and time. Just as a text unfolds over time, because it is arranged so as to be read sequentially, so the effort of deciphering a painting takes time, and the time thus invested is easily merged, even confused, with the sense of time already present in, or represented by, the pre-existing narrative to which it refers. Some sense of extension of time is thus perhaps imputed to the work itself. Those who might want to maintain a hard spatio-temporally-based distinction between writing and images will usually protest, at this point, that while the order of events in a written text is inscribed by and within the text itself, any sense of temporal order in a painting must be inferred rather than directly represented, and cannot be controlled by the painting itself. Against that, though, we must balance the fact that our reading of a written text is not strictly controlled by the text either: the text provides a preferred reading, it is true, but in actual experience reading a verbal text is highly variable both within and between individual readers, involving a mix of different kinds of eye movements and cognitive/ memory strategies—looking back, or above or below the current line of text, making quick summarizing glances at paragraphs, speeding up or slowing down over familiar or unfamiliar words, re-reading difficult sequences, glancing ahead to confirm or deny developing hypotheses and so forth. The material on our sense of presence, in Chapter  4, directly addresses some of these questions of cognitive deployment in everyday tasks, something we tend to regard as simpler and more linearly constant than it actually is. Semiotics and structuralism have given us an understanding of the extent to which all texts are read both syntagmatically and paradigmatically; it’s no longer possible to simply claim that the preferred reading set out by a text is the only one. Further, any attempt to adhere to Lessing’s initial hard-line distinction between text and image appears to trap us not just into seeing (for example) history paintings as no more than a two-dimensional representation of certain figures in certain spatial relationships to one another, but also into reading verbal texts as nothing more than fixed sequences of described events. Falling into this trap means that we are neither required nor even allowed to make inferences about what might be metonymically or metaphorically intended (or, even, fruitfully present without having been intended by the author or artist). Lastly, visual images have devices to guide, even if not to control, our viewing of them: the reader will recall any number of times in which he or she has been told, of a visual work, that a certain feature ‘leads the eye to’ another feature or ‘forces us to look at’ something in a certain manner. Pictures can have preferred readings too. Painting examples I must crave the reader’s indulgence in tolerating a little more discussion of painting before starting on photographic examples, because it provides clarity, subsequently, about what photographic pictures can or can’t do, and why they can or can’t do it. Several of the properties 20

A Different Kind of Look

already attributed to history painting can be seen in the first example: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) (Figure 2). This work demonstrates the mix of the historical and the mythological, by treating a factual event as fiction in the heroic mould; it also demonstrates ‘history painting’s concern with a narrative of significant human action, conveyed dramatically through facial expression, gesture, and posture’ (Thistlethwaite 1988: 21). It is narrative to a degree; that is, on Werner Wolf ’s ‘multifactorial and gradable’ sliding scale of narrativity (Wolf 2003: 181), it has some clear narrative aspects, but it may be understood and enjoyed at other levels. Specifically in that connection, it addresses Wolf ’s three cultural functions for narrativity: it ‘enables a conscious perception of time,’ ‘provides a possibility of accounting for the flux of experience in a meaningful way,’ and ‘is the basis for communicating, re-presenting and storing memorable sequences of experience’ (Wolf 2003: 184). It certainly ‘refers […] to the experience of the “characters” in the narrative world’ (Wolf, 186) and its entire purpose is, indeed, to offer a re-experiencing of the events of the narrative to its viewers.

Figure 2:  John Singleton Copley. Watson and the Shark (1778). Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

21

Photography, Narrative, Time

The Copley painting depicts an actual event. Brooke Watson was a self-made man who triumphed over twin adversities: he was orphaned as a child, and at the age of 14 in 1749, while swimming in Havana Harbour from a boat on which he was a crew member, he was attacked by a shark which so mauled his lower right leg that it had to be amputated below the knee. At the time this commissioned work was finished in 1778, he was ‘a man of consequence—an MP and a director of the Bank of England, who would later become Lord Mayor of London, Chairman of Lloyds, and a baronet’ (Hughes 1997: 91). All the narrative features can be observed through a textual analysis of the painting, in the manner that we would carry out naturally and informally when standing in front of it. The content of the picture clearly demonstrates that the event was a significant one for Watson, but as part of the broad sweep of history it is relatively trivial. What the painting must achieve is to make this personal trauma appear heroic since heroism is, in and of itself, more appealing to the general public interest. Copley achieves this superbly through pictorial technique: he has foreshortened the arrangement of salient figures and objects in relation to the picture plane, thus creating a powerful sense of urgency, and he draws on ‘a virtual encyclopaedia of the history of art’ (Thistlethwaite 1988: 16) to dramatically enrich their gestures and poses. The subject is thus rendered almost fictional, in the heroic mould; our knowledge of real space and the representation of space, together with the allusions made via costume, gesture and figure placement, imply that we should read both the substantive episode and its representation, as ‘an allegory of good against evil’ (Thistlethwaite 1988: 17). Such a connection further encourages the viewer to speculate constructively about the sequence of events involved. The fact that we are not told, within the picture, of Watson’s actual fate only serves to increase suspense and thus to maintain viewer interest in the outcome. The painting gives us a view of the event that a photograph, even had it been possible to make one, could never provide. The shark is supernaturally large—one of many oddities about its rendition, though the need for dramatic effect has in any case clearly trumped any obligation towards biological accuracy—and its great length is used to make a graphic link from the harbour background to the centre of the action, where the heroic scenario of the risk to Watson’s life is played out to the full. As befits the genre, the picture is very large (182.9 x 229.2 cm), and the time necessary for the viewer’s eye to move around and through it, guided by the arrangement of figures and events, becomes a period in which the viewer comes to sense those figures and events as belonging to a particular meaningful sequence: a story. So far though, the kind of narrative associated with such paintings is either one supplied independently of the painting itself (and often given explicitly in the title, as for example in Eugene Delacroix’s 1827 Death of Sardanapalus), or, as with young children, prompted by a process of imaginative identification with the painting’s ‘characters’ and likely, for that reason, to be quite viewer-specific. An example of the latter is John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl (held by the Birmingham [UK] Museums and Art Gallery, and viewable on its website). This painting poses a particular kind of anxiety-producing problem greatly favoured in the eroticized romanticism of many Pre-Raphaelite works, in which beauty, particularly female beauty, was 22

A Different Kind of Look

held to have a moral dimension. In the painting, a beautiful blind girl who appears to lack any form of support other than an implied ability to play the small musical squeezebox that sits in her lap, sits by a roadside facing away from a double rainbow which, perhaps to emphasize her misfortune, she can never see. She may be begging, though this is not clear; she is accompanied by a much younger girl who is clearly a dependant, possibly her own child. By conflating the viewer’s desire for the girl with a simultaneous wish to remedy her plight, Millais’ painting constructs a narrative dimension that stretches between two situations: the problematic one depicted and the kind of resolution the viewer might hope for … or lust after. Again, though, we may appropriately cast this—and many Pre-Raphaelite works—in terms of Wolf ’s model of narrative as a cognitive frame or ‘schema’ (Wolf 2003: 184), on which I enlarge in Chapter 7. The connection between Pre-Raphaelite painters and photography is worthy of more detailed investigation than can be offered here. Because the Pre-Raphaelites were working at the time of photography’s origins and were sometimes either practical photographers themselves, or at least interested in the works produced by photographers, they made conceptual use of photographic techniques, and influenced both the subject matter to which photography could address itself, and the pictorial approach which might be taken. Wolf (2005) demonstrates the confluence of nearly all these factors in a discussion of another John Everett Millais painting, Ophelia (held by the Tate Gallery in London, and viewable on its website). This work depicts the death of the character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as described within the play (Act iv, Scene vii) by Queen Gertrude: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indu’d Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. In the painting, Ophelia floats face upwards in the ‘brook,’ hands up and open in a pose often used in religious paintings to symbolize the acceptance by martyrs or saints of God’s decision as to their survival, and apparently singing, oblivious of her fate. She is held up by air trapped in her ‘clothes spread wide,’ but clearly this can only be temporary, and she will indeed eventually be pulled ‘to muddy death.’ Even if we did not know the story of the play, the scene is rendered in such intense visual detail that it ‘incit[es] us to construct an explanatory narrative’ (Wolf 2005: 432), and elements such as the ‘weedy trophies’ that she 23

Photography, Narrative, Time

has dropped in the stream, and which have been moved by the current from near her hands to beside the end of her skirt, ‘indicate that she has been in the water for some time’ (Wolf 2005: 432). According to Wolf, the character in the picture is caught in a particular moment which, according to our knowledge of narratives and the world, must be preceded by certain causes and may be followed by her death. By inciting such projections the painting arguably displays a central feature of narratives, namely, the meaningful change of a situation. (Wolf 2005: 432) Even with the modes by which time is extended in looking at and understanding a painting, as discussed above, each of the examples so far nevertheless strictly depicts a fixed moment in time—the same limitation as is, generally speaking, thrust on photographs by virtue of the ‘instantaneous’ nature of the shutter action and perceived so often as an unambiguous barrier to narrative. One more example shows us more about how paintings can escape this limitation of momentary depiction, through use of narrative techniques that operate within the painting itself, without the need for external assistance. The question this should prompt is: can a photograph do the same? Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home (1862) is another PreRaphaelite work (also available on the Tate Gallery site). Martineau was a close friend and a pupil of William Holman Hunt, an original founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. Christopher Wood describes The Last Day in the Old Home as ‘one of the most intensely novelistic of all Victorian pictures’ which ‘combines the narrative methods of [William Powell] Frith with the moralistic approach of Holman Hunt’ (Wood 1981: 71). Wood’s description of the application of these ‘narrative methods’ in the work is instructive: This moral tale shows a feckless young aristocrat, who has gambled away everything on the horses, now drinking his last glass of champagne in the ancestral home. It is one of the outstanding examples of the Victorian narrative picture that can be read like a book, as well as looked at. Every object in the room has significance—the picture of horses, the auctioneer’s lot numbers, the sale catalogue on the floor, the newspaper open at the word ‘Apartments,’ the old mother paying the family retainer, who in turn gives her the keys—the observer becomes a detective assembling clues, solving the problem of who everyone is and what is happening. (Wood 1981: 72) Here we are able to understand much more about how and why the viewer might be able to construct a specifically narrative interpretation from the information provided by the picture. Beyond the clues mentioned by Wood, there are emotional clues as to the passage of time, its direction and its significance. The trees outside the window are yellow and thinning 24

A Different Kind of Look

with autumn, signalling a change to a less favourable and less comfortable period. The flow of interactions across the painting, from the grandmother at far left, through the exhausted, imploring mother in the centre, to the as-yet-unrealizing young son at far right, indicates how the young aristocrat’s irresponsibility will not only erode his family’s former comfortable circumstances, but will pass inexorably to his son. This sorry prediction is confirmed by the way in which the son mimics both the direction and the unseeing optimism of his father’s gaze, as they share a carefree toast to their jointly mistaken vision of the future. These elements are not incidental to the painting’s meaning, but its central focus: if the viewer does not understand their significance, then the meaning of the work as a whole is lost. For Martineau, the moral understanding he hopes his intended audience will arrive at is predicated on their understanding the narrative. Photographs To photographs. I begin from personal experience, with a photograph of my own—the one shown at Figure 3 (and on the cover of this book), taken by me at Bondi Beach in about 1984. Though I was already well aware of Cartier-Bresson’s work and the ‘decisive moment’ idea at the time I took the photograph, and already thinking rather vaguely about what ‘decisive

Figure 3:  Greg Battye. Bondi (1984).

25

Photography, Narrative, Time

moment’ meant in terms of the moments before and after it, I had not hitherto taken any photographs that might open themselves to narrative interpretation in this manner. Although I had planned the picture to some extent, having earlier spotted the two men walking in conversation along the beach promenade and decided that they would make a good subject against the range of other activities in the area, the spatial arrangement of people in the frame is undoubtedly partly luck. It’s those spatial arrangements, though, that stimulate my mental quest for a narrative explanation. While the couple at left, at the edge of the promenade, do seem to be holding a conversation with each other, as are my original intended subjects on the right, I can be fairly sure, from my memory of the actual scene at the time, that there are no other connections between the people in the frame. Spatially, however, relationships exist that seem to imply such a connection. The fellow with the cloth cap positioned between the heads of the two walkers at right, the couple in discussion at left, and an older man down on the sand who seems to be looking up towards the man at left holding the chair, all appear to be occupying certain positions, as though placed on a stage. At one further remove in space, down on the beach, there’s a distant person between almost every pairing of each of the people already noted, and between the outer figures and the edge of the frame. Because their placement doesn’t seem accidental, and because there are either eyeline matches or (seemingly) directional gazes that require careful inspection to distinguish actual social connections between the ‘characters’ from accidental graphically-implied connections, the picture sustains continued looking. I can’t find a way to claim that this photograph gives me anything like what I would want in a full-blown story, but it appears to qualify for placement on Wolf ’s ‘sliding scale’ of narrativity, albeit at the low end. There is a sense of movement and development, and something distinctive about how it sustains continued looking time. Perhaps, if I want to indulge in self-congratulation about the time depicted and elided in the picture, it even qualifies as a ‘decisive moment’: We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. (Cartier-Bresson: 1952, quoted in Goldberg 1981: 385) Cartier-Bresson is talking here about what we might term the ‘found’ photograph, as opposed to the carefully pre-designed studio photograph, or the constructed montage. In one of the very rare articles, and almost certainly the oldest article, directly addressing the question of the narrative capacity of isolated single photographs, Manuel Alvarado’s Photographs and Narrativity (1980, republished 2001) uses the Cartier-Bresson photograph at Figure 1 (p. 25) to set out two analytical strands for distinguishing different kinds of narrative photograph: The first would analyse the order of events implied by the photograph, whether ‘fictional’ or ‘documentary’ … the second would question the actual history of the production, 26

A Different Kind of Look

circulation, and consumption of the photograph within particular institutions and under the regulation of technological, economic, legal and discursive relations and practices. (Alvarado 2001: 151) In the following pages, Alvarado goes on to characterize the advertising photograph as one which has specific and different narrative attributes, centred on the construction of a fictional world that is intended by the advertisers. This fictional world is enclosed, not only to screen out the questions raised above by shifting attention from the signified to the sign, but to strongly imply, and partly answer, a fictional set of questions in the domain of the signified. He has therefore actually distinguished three, rather than two, analytical strands or modes according to which some photographs either work to produce narratives, or are most appropriately analysed as narratives: 1. The sense which applies to the ‘found’ picture, where the photograph is a window rather than a frame (Szarkowski 1978: 18–19) and the spectator is most concerned with what is depicted in the ‘now’ of the picture (the signified), what has happened leading up to this time, and what will happen next. Cartier-Bresson’s Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932, like much of his work, is a photograph of this kind. 2. The notion of the currency of a given image, its history, the accumulated uses to which it has been, is being, or will be put, and the accumulated meanings which thus attach to it—that is, in semiotic terms, to the sign itself. Here the spectator’s role will vary, and knowledge of these roles for any given viewer also becomes part of the narrative attaching to the image, by being reinvested in (semiotics again) the signified. 3. The advertising image, in which a closed fictional world—a possible ‘world’—is created, such that the spectator is most concerned with questions raised within that world. Not all such images are necessarily narrative by any means, but narrative questions and issues of time are frequently and deliberately a characteristic of these photographs. Alvarado does not move beyond very broad photographic categories—essentially binary divisions into documentary or fiction, advertising or non-advertising. In particular, he does not venture into photography that is constructed or positioned as art, an arena in which there has been considerable deliberate playing with narrative devices and possibilities. Later chapters in this volume take examples from art photography into account, but a few examples will demonstrate something of how the first two of these analytical strands can work. Somewhat surprisingly, because elsewhere in the same book she specifically denies the existence of photographic narratives, Susan Sontag’s discussion of how photographs can ‘actively promote nostalgia’ is enlisted to illustrate Alvarado’s first sense of narrative, when he quotes the last line of the following: A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in 27

Photography, Narrative, Time

another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. (Sontag 1979: 15) A sad and disturbing photograph by Larry Clark (Untitled, 1971 from the portfolio Tulsa, 1980, at Figure 4) exemplifies all of Sontag’s notions in a remarkably apposite way. It shows a pregnant young woman injecting herself with something, probably amphetamines, in a starkly bare room. She might, of course, be treating herself for a medical condition, but somehow the explanation of drug abuse always overtakes any provisional hopes we might have for a less ominous scenario. In response we feel a longing for things to be otherwise— which combines poignantly with our knowledge that, since the photograph can only depict the past, the consequences of the depicted situation will by now have made themselves plainly felt. This sense of what precedes and follows the depicted time is not accidental to the meaning of the picture, but absolutely central. One can discuss the formal properties of any representational form, photographs certainly included, but the significance of this

Figure 4:  Larry Clark. Untitled, 1971. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

28

A Different Kind of Look

photograph, its very reason for existing, has simply not been grasped unless the viewer is seized by the sense of implied time around this unfolding drama. Both the pregnancy and the drug use have antecedents which, though unknown in detail in relation to this individual, are generically familiar, and so the photograph unavoidably implies a before and an after, through which we cycle in several iterations, as we consider the sombre weight of the depicted moment, ‘the here-now and the there-then’ (Barthes 1977b: 44). It would be hard to find a better example of Alvarado’s core point: ‘No longer can the photograph be simply a moment seized from events: its meaning is (in part) constructed by its implicit ordering of events ‘before’ and ‘after’ it’ (Alvarado 2001: 151). The Larry Clark photograph also provides a way to move into further consideration of Alvarado’s second narrative category, which ‘would question the actual history of the production, circulation and consumption of the photograph within particular institutions and under the regulation of technological, economic, legal and discursive relations and practices (Alvarado 2001: 151).’ Clark began working life in commercial door-to-door portraiture, in a business owned by his family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He subsequently also studied photography formally, moved to New York City and was then drafted into the army where he served for two years in Vietnam. In the late 1960s he had returned to Tulsa, where he used his considerable photographic talents to portray life as he was then living it. His photographic subjects were his friends and acquaintances and their ordinary—if sometimes violent, tragic and destructive—lives. This is the period which yielded the Tulsa portfolio, possibly still the most widely known of all his work, and the source of this photograph. Though part of one of Larry Clark’s most important portfolios, we are not in any way obliged to see this picture as part of a series. Even so, for those aware of other photographs from the series, the terrible authenticity of Clark’s body of work somehow hangs over each one of them. They are not fiction, but neither are they purely documentary; they are cool images, made calmly and almost casually, but made by an artist for whom the depicted events are so ordinary that they require no histrionics of representation, and cause no upset to his craft. Each picture from Tulsa speaks to us, strongly and directly, about the emotional tone of Clark’s life at that time, and the life of his friends, and there is a seamless continuity between what comes to us as external knowledge, phrased in the form of narrative information about Clark, and any narrative we derive directly from an image such as Untitled, 1971. Once we know something of Clark’s own life and how it was reflected in the photographs he was taking at the time, we can be more certain that the pregnant woman is not treating herself for a medical condition, and our hopes for her future-that-has-already-happened begin to falter. I wrote, above, that it was surprising to see Susan Sontag being enlisted to support the notion of narrativity in photographs, and we should be surprised because of remarks in her On Photography, by now even more extensively quoted, that occur not long after the quotation used by Alvarado. She is referring to Brecht’s oft-quoted assertion, brought to

29

Photography, Narrative, Time

light by Walter Benjamin, that ‘a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about that organization’ when she says: In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. (Sontag 1979: 23) The full quote from Benjamin is interesting, pointing as it does to the potentially more informative (and perhaps therefore more narratively powerful?) value of the constructed picture: [Less] than at any other time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let’s say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up. (Benjamin quoted in Burgin 1982: 39; emphasis in original) A fair test of this assertion is to look at a photograph of the Krupp works, and one of the best known is a picture of the Krupp works and its then owner, Alfred Krupp, taken in 1963 by Arnold Newman. (The photograph can be seen on the Getty Images site). Newman was commissioned to take this portrait at the steel works which, under the original Alfred Krupp (1812–1887) had pioneered the Bessemer steel process that was later used by the same factory to develop long-range artillery for use in World War I. Under the later direction of this younger Krupp, the subject of Newman’s portrait (who had been born Alfred Von Bolen but had adopted the Krupp name when he married into the family), the firm had directly supported Hitler’s rise to power and, during World War II, made extensive use of slave labourers who were successively shipped to extermination camps as they became too weak to stand up to a regime of forced overwork. At the time of Newman’s portrait, Krupp had only recently been released from imprisonment as a war criminal. Newman’s challenge was to reflect Krupp’s history and acts in his photograph, given that the Alfred Krupp he met appeared ordinary, even decent: Now, you never see Satan on earth at all like he is in pictures. Very often, devils are very sweet, gentle people in appearance. The worst people in the world. Today’s real villains are, as Hitchcock said, unrecognizable in broad daylight. Well, that’s the way Krupp was. He looked like a nice, distinguished gentlemanly human being. (Newman quoted in Diamonstein 1981: 149) 30

A Different Kind of Look

As the photograph shows, Newman met the challenge admirably. Further anecdotal confirmation of his success is given by the story of Krupp’s later attempts to have publication of the pictures stopped, which included agents of the firm breaking into Newman’s hotel room in Essen, after the shoot, to re-photograph his polaroids from the shooting session, and taking these to New York to prevaricate with the commissioning magazine’s editors. Krupp also declared Newman persona non grata in Germany (summarized from Diamondstein 1981). Not all of this story will be known to those who view the photograph, particularly half a century or more after the event, but what seems unarguable is that this story, if known, would be given as a response to anyone else who wanted to know ‘about’ the photograph. As soon as we ask who is represented in the photograph, we are in effect asking to hear the story that attaches to it; this may be the story of the Krupp firm, or the story of the making of the photograph—or both, since they may be conceived as one. This notion of ‘attachment’ of narratives to pictures—Alvarado’s ‘actual history of the production, circulation and consumption of the photograph within particular institutions and under the regulation of technological, economic, legal and discursive relations and practices’ (2001: 151)—needs to be distinguished from a much more everyday phenomenon. We may give supplementary information to a viewer about the most personal and idiosyncratic snapshot, and it is always likely that such information will be in narrative form. It is also, however, likely to be variable, both over time and between informers. But the situation with the Newman photograph and other genuine cases of attached narrative is that a single strong, and relatively unchangeable, story will always be associated with the image, and will either be provided together with that image, or so strongly sought by viewers as an explanation that they will eventually locate it. One more example will serve to partly exemplify both Alvarado’s notion of a ‘closed fictional world’ and Benjamin’s idea of ‘something […] constructed, something artificial, something set up.’ On pages 34 and 35 of Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Morris 2011), there’s a long panorama made by Roger Fenton soon after he arrived on the killing fields of the Crimean War in early 1855. Fenton is most widely known for his two photographs entitled Valley of the Shadow of Death, which Morris examines in great detail in his first chapter in the same book, looking for proof within the photographs of which one was made first, and hoping by that means to confirm or deny remarks made presumptively by Susan Sontag, and others, about their order of production. His investigation is a fascinating application of forensic photography—or, perhaps, the forensics of photography—to solve both a photographic question and a theory/meaning question, and an excellent example of an attached narrative. The long panorama, a separate work, is reproduced in Morris’s chapter on the two Valley of the Shadow of Death photographs by way of background to Fenton and his work, but has its own relevance to my narrative questions here. The panorama is in 11 parts, each part a separate exposure, but joined into a single sequence. Conceptually, it’s a single picture, with each exposure having demonstrably been made with the purpose of contributing to the whole; the edges align exactly, in a manner that could never be achieved by chance or luck. At the time, there would not have been any 31

Photography, Narrative, Time

alternative means of producing a panoramic photograph. A commentary on the photograph by Richard Pare, author of a monograph about Fenton, is provided on pages 31 and 32 of Morris’s book, from which the following is summarized. Although not embracing a full 360º sweep, the panorama covers the plateau of Sebastopol on which the war was actually fought, with a neat British encampment on the left, a battery of artillery in the centre with soldiers milling nearby, further encampments in the distance to the right of the guns, then a distant view over the plains on which the fighting took place, and then at the far right, a cemetery with graves of senior officers. (Ordinary soldiers, at that time and in that war, would have been buried with less recognition of their death, and less regard for their individuality and posterity.) Obviously the divisions between separate exposures are clearly visible in the panorama, but nevertheless it’s a remarkable technical achievement for its time, and a fascinating document of the war and its conduct. Pare doesn’t conclude this himself, but the photograph strikes me as a clear example of an early narrative photograph, possibly even deliberately so. Fenton was attached to the British Army and paid by them, and unlike the team of photographers assembled by Matthew Brady in the US Civil War less than ten years later, he had no brief and no scope to reflect the horrors of war, even though it is very clear from his notes and letters that such horrors were easily and frequently within his reach. The Crimean War ranks as possibly the stupidest and most wasteful war of all time, but Fenton’s task was to help generate support for the war effort, by making photographs for consumption in Britain which cast the war in a heroic light, and which would assist in moving public opinion away from the campaign’s endemic issues of governmental and military mismanagement. Photographs of neat encampments, soldiers in dress uniform, weapons and ammunition in carefully organized rows and stacks, and formal portraits of commanders and individual ‘characters’ among the enlisted men and the many ancillary servants of the war, could all make the war seem an engaging and appealing enterprise to newspaper readers—and potential enlistees—back home. We have no way of knowing the extent, if any, to which Fenton chafed at the limitations imposed on him by his employment. It’s possible that he had no fundamental personal or ideological objections to the Crimean campaign, but the quality of his total oeuvre suggests somebody who was both thoughtful and observant. The panorama seems to slip past the constraints on reporting the misery of the real war, and to offer a reminder of what war always, intrinsically and inescapably, is. It does this by constructing what seems to be a narrative. If we accept the assumption that the preferred reading direction for the whole panorama is from left to right, as it would be for writing or for printed text, then we see at first the neat encampments, then in the centre the young soldiers wandering apparently freely, as though promenading recreationally on a common, and then at right, a materially enacted conception of the likely final destination for many of those soldiers: the cemetery. It’s a start to be able to see that maybe, sometimes, single photographs might be able to say something about time, and something about events or states of affairs, that go beyond the immediate moment strictly depicted in the image. But to find a way of looking both more critically and more inclusively at other photographs that we might bring into this fold, we need to look at some ways of characterizing what narrative is. 32

Chapter 2 What Narrative Is

T

he Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph at Figure 1 is remarkable at a number of levels. In formal terms alone, the photograph is aesthetically spectacular. Though barely visible because the contrast is low, a perceptive viewer can discern two pairs of advertising posters at the upper left of the photograph: two for a piano performance by the Chopin specialist Alexander Brailowsky (1896–1976), and two in which the tiny figure of a dancer, in silhouette against a white space resembling the shape of a large inverted comma, mimics and reflects the man’s own movement in the horizontal ballet jump known as a grand jeté. As the leaping man moves to the right, so this silhouetted figure on the poster moves left—reinforcing, in another plane, the reflections in the pool of water that both figures hold in common. The differing directions of their movements also emphasize a contrast between the two figures, and this contrast is further sharpened by the presence of a third figure, who separates the two and moves away from both ‘leapers,’ and away from the viewer, with a dour hands-in-pockets shuffle. We are moved to consider all this, however, because as already discussed, the photograph also represents one of Cartier-Bresson’s most assuredly ‘decisive moments,’ thus invoking questions about time. Cartier-Bresson has described the core of his own approach to the ‘decisive moment’ on several occasions, but in The World of Cartier-Bresson (1968), a book which includes this picture, he states it again in terms which open the way to the extended sense of time required for narrative: ‘Of all forms of expression, photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight’ (Cartier-Bresson 1968: Preface). Not just the instant, then, but the instant in its flight; the instant may be what we read first, but the instant is significant because its temporal context, a context we only understand if the instant chosen has indeed been a—or the—‘decisive’ one. Firstly, we are confronted with how uneasily the tenses of a photograph sit with each other. The photograph tells us something about a future, but a future that is itself now in the past. The ‘present’ of the photograph has been uprooted and despite its momentary and fleeting nature, of which the photograph also speaks so eloquently, suspended in eternity. It is the future into which our sense of the extension of time, from the moment shown, most clearly extends. We know, not from any knowledge uniquely required for or contained by this photograph, but from our knowledge of the world and of gravity, that what goes up must come down. The man must descend into (must long ago have descended into) the water, and the consequences of this for both the man (wet feet)—and the scene (disruption of the smooth surface of the water which so sharply isolates the moment, and which so

Photography, Narrative, Time

strongly characterizes the aesthetic appeal of the image) are unambiguous. Something of the past is present in the picture—we see splash marks along the ladder, so we know where the man has come from. Another dimension of the past, common to all photographs, is implied too: if we are looking at a photograph, whatever it depicts must by now be in our past, the ‘absolute’ past. The leaping man has descended and departed, the posters have faded and peeled off, and the mysterious third man has long since shuffled into the mist. The development of narrative itself has obviously been quite independent of the development of pictures. Historically, studies of narrative as an abstract textual form or property have always begun with language; at first with spoken stories, sometimes constructed ‘on the run,’ but at other times memorized at great length partly with, and by virtue of, narrative structure. With the advent of writing, it became possible to diversify the modes and styles of textual construction; by, for instance, reducing the emphasis on some aspects (such as repetition and rhythm in poetry) that were at least partly present in order to provide support for memorization and oral recital. Three histories are so deeply and thoroughly intertwined in these developments that it is now almost impossible to speak or think of them as separate; yet each affects, and is affected by, the others. The first of these is the development of actual stories themselves; of narrative instances. If the surviving examples are representative of the whole field, then from the beginning, stories were mostly tales of moral example, social group history and individual heroism, all perhaps focused on reinforcement of social group identity. Over time, stories have changed and developed enormously, and subdivided into countless variants of length, content, style, approach, complexity, meaning, and more. Part of this process of change has involved a diversification of medium: from the original single voice in what was presumably a social setting, to the ‘expert’ poet or storyteller, to live dramatic performance, to written text and to written plays, to printing and the mass production of printed texts, to the broadcast media of radio, television and film, and now to the further blending of all these mediated modes and genres through the Internet. Each of these stages has been an accumulation rather than a substitution: all former modes and styles have been retained as the new ones have pioneered further narrative territory. This capacity of narrative to generate, inhabit and shape so many media forms is one confirmation of David Herman’s characterization of narrative as ‘Basic and General Resource for Thought’ and as ‘a pattern-forming cognitive system that organizes all sequentially experienced structure, which can then be operationalized to create tools for thinking’ (Herman 2003: 170–171; emphasis added). Without attempting, at this stage, to generalize about how this might relate to photographs in particular, we can at least observe in passing that any system as fundamental to human mental processes as narrative seems to be is probably always ‘switched on,’ and thus almost certain to be engaged when reading and understanding pictures. The second history is the history of the investigation of narrative, a subject of fascination from at least Aristotelian times, and running always in parallel with the multi-stranded development of stories themselves. It is only since about the middle of the twentieth century that narrative has become an autonomous intellectual object of study and line of inquiry. 36

What Narrative Is

This very process has assisted the rich theoretical developments through which narrative can now be discerned as a phenomenon common to, but transcending, multiple media forms and multiple modes of engagement with those differing media forms. The third history is the recursive accumulation and reinvestment of stories and story structures, and the accretion of social knowledge of those stories and structures. These become part of how we encode and decode the stories that are part of our own lives, and narrative has become, in some circumstances, a mode of explanation—for example, in the field now known as narrative therapy. By all these means, narrative has long been, and increasingly become, a key structuring principle at various stages in the construction, arrangement, organization, transmission and understanding of information of many kinds. Herman elaborates on his description of the ‘Basic and General Resource for Thought’ by pointing out that the notion ‘story’ itself spans both an abstract cognitive structure and the material trace of that structure left in writing, speech, sign-language, three-dimensional visual images, or some other representational medium […] Hence, narrative is at once a class of (cultural) artifacts and a cognitive-communicative process for creating, identifying, and interpreting candidate members of that artifactual class. (Herman 2003: 170) Things get even more complicated, too, once we attempt to agree on concrete instances of narrative and narrativity that depart markedly from the central verbally conveyed norms of narrative—written or spoken stories, plays, films, TV programmes and the like. On the one hand, it is understandable and appealing to simply marvel at the apparent ubiquity of narrative, as Roland Barthes does when he describes narrative as ‘[a]ble to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances’ and as ‘present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation’ (Barthes 1977a: 79). But this marvelling doesn’t help what Werner Wolf describes as the theoretically minded scholars […] who emphasize the distinctive natures of individual arts and media and strive to employ an equally distinct terminology in their discourse [and who] would perhaps be reluctant to apply the term ‘narrative’ indiscriminately to the visual arts. (Wolf 2003: 8) As already observed, photographs and photography intersect with narrative only in rather limited areas, so the discussion of narrative in this volume is limited to a small part of the body of intellectual work on narrative, and also to a subsection of the approaches and attitudes to narrative within that body of work. Given these limitations, the approach is eclectic; such an approach is partly justifiable by virtue of the recent course of narrative 37

Photography, Narrative, Time

theory, which has become increasingly interdisciplinary in its methodologies, its descriptive and explanatory goals, and its example subject matter. Herman points to the confluence of a number of research initiatives, three of which can be singled out as especially important […and] which happened more or less concurrently […] the rise of structuralist theories of narrative in France in the mid to late 1960s; the advent of the sociolinguistic study of personal-experience narratives, in research pioneered by William Labov and Joshua Waletsky in the late 1960s and early 1970s […] and the focus on narrative by cognitive psychologists concerned with story grammars and with scripts and schemata beginning in the 1970s. (Herman 2003: 5) This book makes use of aspects of all three of these research traditions as needed, to contextually draw attention to the ways in which some photographs can have narrative properties. Perhaps perversely, it occasionally re-describes the examples given by some theorists in the language of other theoretical frameworks: the photographs so poetically described by Roland Barthes in the language of semiotics can be differently but similarly illuminated if seen, for example, through the cognitive lens of scripts and schemata. Almost every means of characterizing narrative incorporates the idea of either a passage between two identifiably separate time periods or moments, or a sequence of events that takes place over, or through, time. For any medium in which an experience of the passage of time is intrinsic (such as film or television), the experience and awareness of time will be ever-present, because the work itself has a circumscribed and invariable duration. That duration will nearly always differ, however, both from the time represented in (by) the work, and from our subjective experience of that duration. Lived time, our subjective experience of any temporal duration, is subject to the factors discussed in relation to ‘presence,’ in Chapter 4, and may actually have more bearing on how we understand time ‘in’ a photograph than do some of the explanations of time representation and time encoding in narrative theories based, as they mostly are, on literature. Nevertheless, to see the importance of time and why it poses such interesting problems for photographs, a short tour through some of those narrative theories is useful. By confining our unit of account to the single photograph, we’ve already eliminated one narrative possibility that is quite widely practised, but which is not the focus of this book: multiple images. There is little mystery about the idea of depicting the passage of time and telling a story with (by means of) pictures, where they are multiple, separate and sequential. Even just two pictures of the same subject clearly allow the specification of two situations, related via visual information so as to permit or encourage the viewer to understand them as a story: as before and after, as introduction and conclusion, or as a process of development. Almost of necessity, the use of more than one picture from the same viewpoint introduces the element of time. Frequently, multiple pictures also introduce a sense of plural spaces, which while not directly part of most characterizations of narrative, can indirectly assist in the creation of a sense of time, and reinforce a notion of change between one picture and the other. 38

What Narrative Is

Further, it seems at least intuitively reasonable to suppose that the greater the number of related images at one’s disposal, the nearer one might come to being able to make sentences or propositions; to negate, qualify and so on, using only pictures. Even if no concrete examples exist of any series of pictures which actually move quite as far as this in the direction of imitating verbal language, we can see that the potential complexity in relationships between separate pictures makes the construction of narrative very much easier. Lacking these tools then, the form of narrative we might look for in some single photographs will of necessity be unusual: limited in scope and occurrence, and minimal by comparison with narrative in other contexts. Structures and strategies In the search for something so ineffable, a couple of strategies need to be adopted. Broadly, we can look for necessary and sufficient conditions for narrative, stated so as to allow for their application across both literary and pictorial forms, or we could look for aspects of the experience of narrative that distinguish narratives from our experiences of other kinds of texts. The former involves an examination of attributes of narrative texts themselves, the latter an examination of interactions between (possibly) narrative texts and their readers or viewers. Since the former strategy assists the latter, both are useful. The most basic distinction in narrative representation is that between telling and showing. While it might reasonably be expected that literary forms such as poetry and literature would correspond only to telling, and pictorial forms such as painting and photography only to showing, David Bordwell makes explicit the degree to which there is, or may be, complete theoretical overlap: Diegetic theories conceive of narration as consisting either literally or analogically of verbal activity: a telling. This telling may be either oral or written […] Mimetic theories conceive of narration as the presentation of a spectacle: a showing. Note, incidentally, that since the difference applies only to ‘mode’ of imitation, either theory may be applied to any medium. You can hold a mimetic theory of the novel if you believe the narrational methods of fiction to resemble those of drama, and you can hold a diegetic theory of painting if you posit visual spectacle to be analagous to linguistic transition. (Bordwell 1985: 3; emphasis in original) Bordwell’s inclusion, by implication, of painting as a still pictorial form which might possess narrative qualities is gratifying in view of some much more conservative views of narrative further below. We should note also that even within a single medium—even a medium such as television, in which both showing and telling are the obvious and universally employed modes of narration, and indeed even in real life—it may not be possible to sensibly separate showing from telling. Such confusion may itself become an integral part of a narrative mechanism. 39

Photography, Narrative, Time

A simple example drawn from contemporary culture illustrates this point. In an episode of the British police procedural drama The Bill (Langdale 1998) a policeman conveys (contrary to proper practice, and having been warned against such action) to two criminals the location of a third man against whom the first two have a grievance. He is hoping that the resulting internecine conflict will eliminate at least one of the parties, all of whom he perceives as undesirable and dispensable. The policeman achieves this by wordlessly placing a matchbook, on which is printed the address of the hotel in which the third criminal is resident, on a snooker table in view of the first two men. Is this showing or telling? Part of the narrative, in fact, hinges on just this issue: asked later if he told the two criminals the whereabouts of the third, the policeman denies that he did. Our negative views of this policeman (already established in previous episodes and earlier in the same story) are reinforced precisely by the fact that we know his answer is sophistry: in this case, showing and telling are exactly the same. In looking at necessary and sufficient conditions for minimal narrative, a few authors have attempted to synthesize a collective view that is more or less agreed upon by their fellows, even though each of the contributors tends to emphasize different aspects of the overall structure. Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis (1992) render a version of such a definition as ‘the recounting of two or more events (or a situation and an event) that are logically connected, occur over time, and are linked by a consistent subject into a whole’ (69). One of the most widely quoted definitions of a minimal narrative form is that developed by Gerald Prince in the Introduction to his Narratology (1982). He begins by defining narrative ‘as the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence’ (Prince 1982: 1), thus foregrounding time as a vital element from the very beginning, and he then proceeds to make some important qualifications with respect to the nature of the time sequence, and the independence from each other of the events or situations. Firstly, with respect to time, he notes that although the telling of certain facts or representations will necessarily take place over time, this does not of itself produce narrative. The temporal dimension of narrative must be one that arranges the events represented in temporal relation to each other, within the telling. Equally, although a represented entity will almost inevitably unfold its representation over time and may involve a chain of events, it may be represented as one event, so that the telling is, again, not a narrative. ‘With narrative […] we speak of temporal sequence not only at the representational level but also at the represented one’ (Prince 1982: 2). Secondly, Prince points out that the events in a narrative may satisfy the time requirement, but if they are such that one event presupposes or entails all the others, the condition of plural ‘events’ is not really met (Prince 1982: 3–4). To deal with these problems he then elaborates on his initial position to reach the following: ‘narrative is the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other’ (Prince 1982: 4; emphasis in original). This may be seen as one version of the general definition given in Stam et al. above. It is a version which is strict with respect to the independence from one another of the events or situations in a narrative, but which actually fails to clarify some important points in that general 40

What Narrative Is

definition: specifically, that narrative involves a recounting (referred to specifically by others as narration), and that the subject of that recounting is such as to link the parts of the narrative into a whole. Prince’s later Dictionary of Narratology (1988) has a definition of narrative which embraces the significance of recounting but not the importance of the subject: The recounting (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictitious events communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two or several (more or less overt) narratees. (Prince 1988: 58) However, in the substantial discussion following this definition in the Dictionary, Prince acknowledges both the importance of the continuant subject, and the integrity or wholeness of a narrative, in distinguishing a narrative from a random series of events. Under the same heading in his Dictionary, Prince also makes further fine distinctions about the nature of both events/situations, and recounting. Among the former is the potentially confusing comment that ‘a dramatic performance representing (many fascinating) events does not constitute a narrative […] since these events, rather than being recounted, occur directly on stage’ (Prince 1988: 58). In terms of the distinction made above, by Bordwell, between showing and telling, Prince’s distinction here seems to provocatively favour telling to the complete exclusion of showing. To be sure, a dramatic performance is indeed not, itself, narrative; but it narrates, and it narrates by showing. Narration may equally be done by telling, as in a written or spoken story. This confusion results from Prince’s use in the Dictionary of the term ‘recounting’ as a synonym for both ‘narrative’ and ‘narration’: the definition for narrative begins with ‘The recounting […]’(Prince 1988: 58), while the second of four meanings for narration gives ‘The production of a narrative; the recounting of a series of situations and events’ (Prince 1988: 57). This should not be taken as a criticism of Prince, but rather as a warning sign that the substantive meanings of these terms vary so much and in such subtle ways, within and between the contexts of their application, that exactitude beyond a certain point is probably unobtainable. Within this limitation, and also under the definition of ‘narrative,’ Prince makes some invaluable broad observations about its function. Among the latter is a passage which beautifully renders the importance of narrative to humanity in general: By definition, narrative always recounts one or more events; but, as etymology suggests (the term narrative is related to the Latin gnarus), it also represents a particular mode of knowledge. It does not simply mirror what happens; it explores and devises what can happen. It does not merely recount changes of state; it constitutes and interprets them as signifying wholes (situations, practices, persons, societies). Narrative can thus shed light on individual fate or group destiny, the unity of a self or the nature of a collectivity. Through showing that apparently heterogeneous situations and events can make up one signifying structure (or vice versa) and, more particularly, through providing its own brand of order and coherence 41

Photography, Narrative, Time

to (a possible) reality, it furnishes examples for its transformation or redefinition and effects a mediation between the law of what is and the desire for what might be. Most crucially, perhaps, by marking off distinct moments in time and setting up relations among them, by discovering meaningful designs in temporal series, by establishing an end already partly contained in the beginning and a beginning already partly containing the end, by exhibiting the meaning of time and/or providing it with meaning, narrative deciphers time and indicates how to decipher it. In sum, narrative illuminates temporality and humans as temporal beings. (Prince 1988: 60) Taken together with the possibility that a dramatic performance may narrate by showing, this latter passage is important because it seems to at least leave open the possibility that some photographs might narrate in a similar fashion. ‘Recounting changes of state, constitut(ing) and interpret(ing) them as signifying wholes,’ seeking ‘one signifying structure’ in ‘heterogeneous situations’ and ‘discovering meaningful designs in temporal series’ are phrases well suited to invoke photography’s unique concern with time, a concern with ‘exhibiting the meaning of time and/or providing it with meaning.’ As is discussed further below, photography’s apparent preoccupation with selecting and excising a more or less instantaneous moment belies its real concern, in many instances, with the extension of time surrounding that moment. Prince’s generous description of narrative’s general function may be the door to understanding an application for photography in that role. Returning for a moment to the photograph of the puddle-jumping man in Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932 (Figure 1) we find, at the very least, a comfortable correspondence between the photograph and Prince’s passage about narrative in his Dictionary. The history and immediate future of the man’s movement, caught so as to show without doubt that he is jumping from the ladder in an attempt to clear the remainder of the puddle with dry shoes, surely tells us of a ‘change of state’ that has been ‘constituted and interpreted as a signifying whole.’ Cartier-Bresson’s own take on the decisive moment, emphasizing propitious graphic arrangement rather than the idea of a crucial event in the world, similarly accords with parts of Prince’s characterization. When Cartier-Bresson says that ‘[…] inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it’ (Cartier-Bresson quoted in Goldberg 1981: 385), this sounds very like Prince’s ‘showing that apparently heterogeneous situations and events can make up one signifying structure,’ and also very like marking off distinct moments in time and setting up relations among them, by discovering meaningful designs in temporal series, by establishing an end already partly contained in the beginning and a beginning already partly containing the end. (Prince 1988: 60) Prince’s Dictionary is rewarding to consult on some related issues. Under ‘minimal narrative’ in the Dictionary we find two minimal forms that appear to be much more inclusive of 42

What Narrative Is

narrative possibilities in non-verbal media than the definitions already given: ‘A narrative representing only a single event: “She opened the door”,’ and ‘A narrative containing only a single temporal juncture (Labov): “She ate then she slept”’. (Prince 1988: 53). It is not difficult to see how a photograph might convey such events, including the arrangement of events in the single temporal juncture in the correct order, and Kafalenos takes a similar, if not even more minimal, position when she concludes, from Barthes’ reading of the Lewis Payne photograph in Camera Lucida (Barthes 1984: 96) that ‘any photograph of a living being can be read as evidence of the elements that constitute a minimal narrative: an initial state and an event that changes it’ (Kafalenos 2005: 428). The very simplicity of these examples appears to provoke questions about the nature of the distinction between story and narrative. In common parlance the words are often used as though they were interchangeable, and it seems that the simpler the narratives (or stories) become, the more difficult it becomes to draw a line between the two. If ‘she opened the door’ is a minimal narrative, why is it not a story? One first move is to consult Prince’s Dictionary under ‘story’ where we find, inter alia, the following: The content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression plane or discourse; the ‘what’ of narrative as opposed to the ‘how’; the narrated as opposed to the narrating; the fiction as opposed to the narration (in Ricardou’s sense of the terms); the existents and events represented in a narrative. (Prince 1988: 91) This entry in Prince’s Dictionary continues through five meanings of ‘story,’ each of which generally emphasizes an aspect judged by a particular author to be of distinct importance, and each of which generally takes on the role of distinguishing between two main principles of organization, including story/discourse, fabula/sjuzet and chronology/causality. Prince’s Dictionary definitions are mostly very clear, and very helpful to a reader who might be having difficulty with the original texts by any of the authors mentioned here, including his own Narratology, yet they cannot confer more clarity than actually exists. There is a need in a book such as the present one, where narrative is a concept to be applied rather than the primary area of study, to not multiply possible models of narrative beyond a certain useful threshold. For that reason, Gérard Genette’s assertion at the very beginning of Narrative Discourse Revisited, is that his three-part division: between story (the totality of the narrated events), narrative (the discourse, oral or written, that narrates them), and narrating (the real or fictive act that produces that discourse—in other words, the very fact of recounting) […] gives a better account of the whole story of the narrative fact. (Genette 1988: 13; emphasis in original) This is hard to resist as a general proposition, because it seems to effect both simplicity and clarity without reducing the power to make useful distinctions about the texts to be 43

Photography, Narrative, Time

observed. (One cannot help but warm to Genette when he says later on the same page, of the formalist opposition [story/plot], and particularly of its French translation [fable/sujet], that the ‘terms are so inappropriate that I have just hesitated, again as always, over which is which.’) In the context of the present book, this three-way distinction allows us to make the particularly useful distinction of singling out narrating as an area of particular interest, and again to see that for a minimal narrative form such as the photographic picture, it is possible that the process may be more valuable and rewarding than the end product. Since the story, as well as the narrative, will be minimal, our central interest should perhaps be in photographic pictures which narrate, as much as in the minimal story they do narrate. Prince’s Dictionary gives us an entry for ‘minimal story’: A narrative recounting only two states and one event such that [1] one state precedes the event in time and the event precedes the other state in time (and causes it); [2]  the second state constitutes the inverse (or the modification, including the zero modification) of the first. (Prince 1988: 53) This actually seems rather strict for a ‘minimal’ position, in terms of its insistence on internal causality and its prescriptive nomination of inversion as the only acceptable mode of closure. While closure is generally one of the more satisfying features of stories, it does not seem to be a necessary one. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan gives the example of the Chekhov story Lady with Lapdog in which ‘the chain of events does not display any obvious inversion or closed cycle: the state of affairs at the end is different from the initial one, but they are not symmetrically related (the characters are not “happy” as opposed to “unhappy” or vice versa’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 19). Not specifying a mode of closure, or not requiring closure at all, seems more likely to allow for the possibility of narrative photographs, but the causality requirement is a harder nut to crack. Is causality really always a necessary element in narrative? In response to a similar, but earlier, version of Prince’s definition of the minimal story, Rimmon-Kenan argues ‘that temporal succession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 18). Her argument is based on what she sees as the ‘counter-intuitive nature of Prince’s requirements’ as well as on a notion, discussed by her earlier in the same work, that ‘causality can often (always?) be projected onto temporality’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 18; bracketed question in original). Currie (2006 and 2010) has also argued more recently and more comprehensively that a causal connection between events or perceived events is not necessary for narrative, warning firstly that ‘[c]ausation is a difficult notion, and there are widely differing views about what is causally connected to what’ (Currie 2010: 28), and that consequently we should not struggle here to refine such notions so as to produce a general and philosophically defensible analysis of cause; the operation of narrative does not depend 44

What Narrative Is

on any such notion, and we would do violence to many narratives by requiring them to observe the conditions of a precise philosophical theory of cause. (Currie 2010: 29) Experiencing narrative Earlier in this chapter I made a distinction between two strategies in the search for photographic narrative: on the one hand, looking for necessary and sufficient conditions, stated so as to allow for the identification of minimal narratives in both literary and pictorial forms; and on the other, looking for aspects of the experience of narrative that distinguish narratives from our experiences of other kinds of texts. The idea of a minimal narrative looks fruitful in this context simply because a photograph will always, by virtue of its idiosyncratic temporal limitations, be a minimal narrative if narrative at all, but the second of these strategies may actually make much more sense out of the narrative-like feeling that I am suggesting viewers have about certain photographs. Currie’s work takes us very much to that second strategy, emphasizing as it does the idea of narrativity—the degree to which a text can be said to be a narrative, rather than the on/off bifurcation implied by the notion of a minimal narrative. He draws attention to the importance, for narrativity, of expressiveness about time as an alternative way in which a narrative might exhibit a strong interest in the importance of time—an alternative to what we probably think of as the default mode, which is to account for the temporal sequence and arrangement of actual events in a story. Currie (2010) talks firstly of film, specifically of the enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais 1961), ‘with its pervasive ambiguities and contradictions in the representation of space, time and causality, as well as perception and memory’ as an example of a narrative—incontestably a highly unusual one—in which ‘lack of specificity about time in the story is compensatable by features expressive of a concern for time’ (Currie 2010: 53). Although he does not extend the argument immediately to photographs, such an extension seems temptingly implicit; many photographs, and particularly those in which the moment of the shutter’s release is critically related to a revelatory or explanatory moment in the unfolding of the depicted event/s, demonstrate an intense concern with time without necessarily being able to arrange those events in an unambiguous sequence, let alone to communicate knowledge of any causal relationships between them. We can’t, though, entirely let go of causality because perceived causality, whether or not perceived for good reason and on a sound basis, seems frequently to be an important psychological element of narrative understanding. Not only may a reader or viewer ‘project causality onto temporality’ as Rimmon-Kenan suggests, but they may well not even distinguish between, on the one hand, ‘genuine’ (commonly agreed) instances of causality, and on the other, instances of an event following, but not being caused by, a prior event. In philosophical terms this is known as ‘the fallacy of false cause, sometimes called post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)’ and is ‘the error of arguing that because 45

Photography, Narrative, Time

two events are correlated with one another, especially when they vary together, the one is the cause of the other’ (Walton 1995: 374). According to Prince (1982: 11), it is exactly this ‘confusion between consecutiveness and consequence, chronology and causality, [which] constitutes perhaps the most powerful motor of narrativity,’ and Roland Barthes suggests the same thing: Everything suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc—a good motto for Destiny, of which narrative all things considered is no more than the ‘language.’ (Barthes 1977a: 94) Neither this ‘confusion’ nor perceived causation seem very satisfactory explanations for what is actually taking place when events are sewn together by a reader or viewer to make, or to perceive, a narrative; but this ‘black box’ notion may be as close as we can come to a universal description of the internal characteristics of narrative. Fairly clearly, it just isn’t the case that the same kind of thing is happening in every narrative circumstance. Currie quotes David Velleman’s (2003) distillation of the essence of narrative as ‘an arc of development the audience finds satisfying in certain ways, however its events are represented as being connected’ (Currie 2010: 29). The events may even be completely and genuinely independent, but ‘Let the queen laugh at the king’s death and later slip on a fatal banana peel: the audience will experience the resolution characteristic of a plot’ (Velleman 2003: 7, quoted in Currie 2010: 30). The synthesis by viewers of this kind of ‘arc of development’ appears at least to be consistent with, and partly to account for, how and why we perceive narrativity in some of the photographs mentioned in the previous chapter, such as Larry Clark’s Untitled, 1971 (Figure 4), Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp, and Roger Fenton’s Crimean battlefield panorama. The ‘arcs of development’ work differently in each case. In the case of Untitled, 1971 we extrapolate from the shown scene to a likely future, based on external (to the photograph) knowledge of the consequences of drug use. In Newman’s portrait, enough of the Krupp factory is represented in the photograph behind the eerily-lit figure of Krupp himself to imply a connection between the man and his harshly industrial surroundings, and to impel us to ask someone about him, if we don’t already know of the man’s history; the explanation will undoubtedly be in narrative form. In the Fenton composite picture, the key visual elements are in representational correspondence with the physical landscape, as well as being in left-to-right reading order, and each element is susceptible at least to a post hoc perceived causality—soldiers, artillery, battlefield, cemetery. This is not to discount causality and temporality as influences on narrative understanding when they do take a more obvious role. Returning yet again to the Cartier-Bresson photograph of the leaping man, it’s really not difficult to perceive and understand some fairly 46

What Narrative Is

unambiguous causality and temporality in operation. The man isn’t jumping backwards, or jumping out of the large pool, because the surface of the water in front of him is still unbroken. We understand at least something of the order of events prior to his jump, because the splashes around the rungs of the ladder indicate where he has come from, and how recently (temporality). Because of our general experience of puddles and of what human movement looks like, we understand why he’s jumping and where he is heading (causality). Most photographs, though, don’t provide such clear implications about events that are not directly represented, and other authors have also therefore found an emphasis on the subjectivity of narrative to be more helpful than an emphasis on attributes of the photograph. Bence Nanay (2009) steps back from detailed accounts of causality in single photographs to concentrate instead on the experience of engaging with pictorial narratives, and photographic narratives in particular; on how our minds work when dealing with narratives, and how we identify something as a narrative. He points to Edward Branigan’s categorization of narrative as ‘more than a way of classifying texts’ and rather as ‘a perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which represents and explains experience’ (Branigan 1992: 3; emphasis in original), which sounds rather like Velleman’s ‘arc of development.’ Nanay also deals with another difficulty posed for narrative photographs, the incorporation of more than one event. He proposes a distinction between what is represented in a picture and what is depicted, such that ‘even though a picture can depict one event only, it can represent more than one event. Thus, it is perfectly possible that a picture represents a narrative’ (Nanay 2009: 121; emphasis added). But his more important distinction is to relieve us of the restriction of seeing what is represented in the photograph as limited only to the duration of the exposure, and to draw our attention to the idea of action. This he sees, in the case of photographs, as being quintessentially represented by Cartier-Bresson’s jumping man: It is a striking feature of the literature on narrative that it completely ignores a concept that, intuitively, has a lot to do with narratives: that of action. A naive conception of narrative would be a text or picture where something happens. And something happening usually takes the form of someone doing something. Further, narrative pictures very often, maybe even almost always, represent actions. Cartier-Bresson’s photograph represents a man’s action of jumping. […] My claim is that it is a crucial (maybe even necessary and sufficient) feature of our engagement with narrative pictures that an action of one of the characters in the picture is part of what we are (supposed to be) aware of when looking at the picture. (Nanay 2009: 124; emphasis added) Nanay’s idea of action coincides more comfortably with a naive interpretation of what the photograph depicts. Having conducted a small informal survey on the Cartier-Bresson photograph myself, I can report the following: asked, ‘What does this picture show?’ people will say, almost exactly, ‘He’s jumping off the ladder,’ followed by either ‘to get over 47

Photography, Narrative, Time

the puddle,’ or ‘to stop getting his feet wet,’ or words to that effect. The latter part of the statement concerning causality or motivation is interesting in that it confirms that perceived causality is important as part of the meaning, but the use of the present participle ‘jumping’ also confirms that viewers of the photograph see a whole action represented, even though the depiction shows a man suspended in mid-air. Nobody, it seems, thinks to describe the man as suspended, or to describe his exactly depicted position and situation as though they had no knowledge of what might have come before or after. As Nanay says, Perception is not momentary: it has a temporal dimension; we have no reason to believe that the object of perception cannot be also temporally extended. When one sees a tomato, we do not say that one sees one part of it (the front) and imagines another (the back). We see the entire tomato. According to Thompson Clarke’s famous analogy [Clarke 1965], perceiving is like nibbling: when we nibble at a piece of cheese, we do not only nibble at the part that we actually touch. We nibble at the entire cheese. […] Rather than saying that we see the man in the air and imagine him landing in the puddle, we should rather say that we see him jumping […] It is misleading to say that Cartier-Bresson’s photograph represents two separate events, one visible in the picture, one only imagined. It represents only one thing really: the action of jumping, as we see the action of jumping in the picture. (Nanay 2009: 122) The idea of the single action seems more in accordance with natural perception of the photograph, but it rather pulls the rug from under stricter requirements, as described earlier, for narrative to necessarily require two or more events or a change between two or more states of affairs. The exact specification of these requirements varies, as we have seen, between authors, and tends to be driven at the level of fine detail by the kinds of examples chosen. At this point Nanay indulges in some sleight-of-hand by essentially declaring CartierBresson’s photograph to be a narrative, so that his task becomes one of accounting for this assumed fact of narrativity, rather than proving narrativity on the basis of an argument not dependent on the particular photograph. His principal goal is to account for our sense of narrative engagement, the experience of narrative, rather than to isolate the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for it to be a narrative—and a perception of represented action, by a ‘suitable spectator,’ is what he finds to be the trigger for engagement. This has the further advantage of allowing for individual differences in both the picture and the spectator; as per Currie (2010: 35), narrativity is not absolute but ‘comes in degrees,’ in both people and texts. Support for narrativity and its graduated nature as a key idea in visual narrative is also provided by Werner Wolf, in several places but most fully in ‘Narrative and narrativity: A narratological reconceptualization and its applicability to the visual arts’ (Wolf 2003). There he outlines the kind of cognitive framework that can operate in the case of pictures and provides several observations that allow us to see narrativity as present in a variety of pictorial texts, without sacrificing rigour. 48

What Narrative Is

Wolf points firstly to what he sees as the main value of one of Gerald Prince’s contributions to the analysis of narrative structure, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Prince: 1982) wherein, inter alia, a distinction is made between ‘actual narratives and their defining quality narrativity,’ a quality that Prince holds to consist of ‘a plurality of factors or narratemes, not all of which must be present in order to render a text a narrative’ (Wolf 2003: 181). Narrativity ‘hence emerges not as a categorical quality […] but as a multifactorial and gradable quality’ (181), which is of significance because it allows any given cultural artefact to be positioned on a sliding scale of narrativity, rather than having to assume a single position in a system of binary opposites. A text (in any medium) will have greater or lesser narrativity to the extent that a greater or lesser number of narratemes, of greater or lesser centrality to its functioning, are present—or not. Wolf also positions narrative as an acquired cognitive (macro-) frame or ‘schema’ (Wolf 2003: 184)—what he calls a ‘frame narrative’—which has three cultural functions. It ‘enables a conscious perception of time,’ ‘provides a possibility of accounting for the flux of experience in a meaningful way,’ and ‘is the basis for communicating, re-presenting and storing memorable sequences of experience.’ (Wolf 2003: 184). Representationality and experientiality are each essential parts of narrative’s character: by this means narrative ‘refers both to the experience of the “characters” in the narrative world and to the re-experience offered to the recipients of the narrative’ (Wolf 2003: 186). These are important ideas to which we will return later; they also provide an important further backdrop to our understanding of action in narrative. Interpretation of even quite limited actions from the perspective of what events they could cause or be caused by is also, as much of Lisa Zunshine’s analysis in Why We Read Fiction (2006) shows, a common cognitive practice in real life and a practice used in literature to advance narratives. Action is a potential driving principle for narrative in both pictorial and literary forms, making it all the more valuable in analysis of those narratives. Conversely and in a different sense of action, photography is of all technologies surely the most suitable for capturing, representing, depicting, recording, retaining and analysing action. Clearly, there is more to learn in detail about how the perception of action might operate on the mind of the perceiver. Before that though, we should look more broadly at why so many people find photographs, among all picture types, so appealing, and at the ways in which they seem to be made for each other: people and photography.

49

Chapter 3 Made for Each Other: People and Photography

J

ust what kind of a thing is photography, that people are so fond of it and attribute such significance to its products? The long-surviving question still occasionally posed—‘is photography art?’ hints at two things: that people are not quite sure what photography is, and that they suspect it might be quite important. One way of responding to the ‘is it art?’ question is to acknowledge that whatever else photography (the activity and its products) might be, it can be viewed as a family of technologies and capacities with which images can be made—of various and many kinds, from many different materials, for an enormous and diverging range of contexts, with a more or less infinite range of purposes. Pretty clearly, since art itself has no limits to the technologies and methods it may embrace, art and photography will intersect and cross at many points. Empirically speaking, complete agreement about where those overlaps and meetings occur is unlikely, but the lack of agreement about concrete, particular instances should not be a barrier to general agreement that photography can be art. The point is more that photography can be many other things, too. Another way of responding to the art question is to take a different view of art: that art is not a purely cultural (in any sense) activity, and in particular not a status-laden cultural activity, but a form of human adaptation in the strict Darwinian sense of that term. It is derived from play, and has direct and identifiable benefits for human reproduction and survival. This view is advanced by Brian Boyd, most comprehensively in On The Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (2009) which focuses in particular on stories and the deeply human significance of narratives, but which also places art general firmly in the centre of human cognition—not, in other words, in a supporting role, or as a by-product of some allegedly more fundamental activity. In this view of art, making and sharing pictures, regardless of the technology employed to make them, is something that uniquely and fundamentally satisfies a particular human cognitive need. Photography begins to look more and more like a technology which not only meets and extends that need, but has been symbiotically shaped by it, and continues to further shape it. Photography’s unusual relationship with time, and our uniquely human preoccupation with time and time’s consequences, make for the presence of unexpected kinds of meaning in some photographs, including narrative and fictional meanings not hitherto conceived of as possible for a medium seemingly limited to the depiction of durationless instants. Some applications of photographic technologies and principles are mundane, industrial, and have little to do with pictures in any usual sense. Patrick Maynard, in The Engine of

Photography, Narrative, Time

Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (1997) makes something of the fact that microchip circuits were, at the time of writing his book, manufactured by means of a silver-based photolithography process that seemed to fundamentally invert the takeover of chemical photography by digital ones: […] personal computers were made possible by the emergence in the early 1970s of microprocessors, tiny solid-state structures that depend, crucially, upon the process of microfabrication of computer chips, which is itself a ‘photolithographic’ technology. That variant of what might be called a classic photo-technology is necessarily a chemical, not an electronic, process. Without photo-technological miniaturization, computer circuits would simply be too large, too slow, too undependable, and far too expensive […] Far more than photography relies on electronic and digital technologies, those technologies rely on standard chemical photography. (Maynard 1997: 6; emphasis added) This rather pleasing irony has now been eroded by new forms of lithography using digitally controlled Projection Electron Beam Technology, which eliminates the mask that was produced by conventional silver analogue processes, but which on the other hand can be seen as retaining the very essence of photography, and the very same sense that is retained between chemical photography and its digital descendants: writing, or in this case inscribing, with light. By eliminating chemical processes from the chain of photographic production completely, we can see a change to the nature of photography that is even more fundamental. It was Maynard who, on the very first pages of The Engine of Visualization, characterized photography in the manner I have borrowed for the beginning of this chapter: as ‘a branching family of technologies, with different uses, whose common stem is simply the physical marking of surfaces through the agency of light and similar radiations’ (Maynard 1997: 3). But with the digital change that was only beginning in 1997 having now swept not just through photography, but through nearly every process and device of every kind on earth, it seems time to make an important change to this definition. Sharing and the digital turn For the whole of the period in which silver-based photography flourished, and throughout all of the many processes that preceded it, the final result was always, indeed, a marked surface. Even if another interim material—such as a photographic negative, in the case of silver-based photography—was the actual recipient and recorder of the focused light collected from the subject matter via the lens, the ‘master’ version of the information was the photographic print: the marked surface that would be ‘read’ by those for whom the photograph was produced. In the digital age, however, the marked surface seems only arbitrarily related, and only by virtue of being one choice among several, to the true master version of the information 54

Made for Each Other

collected: the digital file. The file may be displayed on the screen of a computer, a television set or other similar device, or it may be printed, and with each of these choices come further subsequent choices: size, colour, level of resolution, and so on. The file may be transferred from one device to another without signal loss or corruption, and may even be displayed not as what it describes or encodes, but as what it actually is: an array of digital numbers, describing the attributes of each of the pixel values that in combination allow the photograph to be rendered as a visual entity, together with any compression information and contextual metadata. Every visually comprehensible realization of the file, every printed or screendisplayed version, necessarily fails to realize all the other possible choices, and the file is thus the only entity uniquely containing all of the information about the light falling onto the image sensor over the period of exposure. This change in fundamental nature from a marked surface to a digital file is significant, not only because it marks a divide between photographic picture-making and all other forms of picture-making, but because it facilitates a radical extension to what was already, historically, a close integration of photography with personal, social and cultural life. This integration, itself always partly driven by a commercial quest to generate the largest possible consumer market for photographic equipment and supplies, has long been a motivating force for the development of photographic technologies. George Eastman’s offering of the mass-produced, easy-to-use Kodak camera to the public in 1888 began a sequence of advertising slogans that can now be seen to encapsulate the broad developments, and changes over time, in our understanding of the uses to which photography could most appropriately be put. The earliest Kodak slogan—and still perhaps the most memorable, despite the conceptual distance from contemporary views and uses of photography—was ‘You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,’ implicitly emphasizing not just the democratization of the medium and its move from the formal studio to the private home, but also an empowering of all family members as participants in the construction of domestic narratives: George Eastman quickly recognized the important role that women and children could have in integrating his cameras into daily life; as early as 1893, Kodak advertising was targeted directly to these groups. Eastman understood the central role women played in recording and documenting family life, as well as the untapped market children represented for his company. This focus on the domestic sphere also created an entirely new genre of photographs, those of candid private moments valued as a form of personal memory. (Collectors Weekly 2013) An advertising poster for the 1913 portable Kodak roll film folding camera, by then a considerably more sophisticated apparatus than the early box cameras (and thus a device we might have expected to see in the hands of a man, bearing in mind then-prevalent assumptions and conventions about male superiority in technical matters) showed a well-dressed female world traveller pointing her Kodak at a European lake scene, above and beside the two-stage slogan ‘Take a Kodak with you: Let pictures, made from your own point of view, keep the 55

Photography, Narrative, Time

story of your personal impressions.’ Many things are cleverly foregrounded in this and other Kodak advertisements of the time: the advocacy of pictures rather than words as a diarizing mechanism; the importance of one’s individual viewpoint and the ease with which it can be captured and reflected by a device which literally and physically shares that viewpoint; the construction of a personal narrative through image-making; and the preservation of an otherwise-transient experience for later revisiting via those same images. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Kodak managed to firmly establish the idea of the ‘Kodak moment’: the instant of time upon which photography could confer almost magical special properties by capturing and creating a concrete, summative representation of an enjoyable social occasion. Early uses of the slogan were about retrospection: with Kodak film, even though by mid-century less likely to be in a Kodak camera, one would be able to look back on a ‘Kodak moment’ repeatedly, and derive the same enjoyment from it again. By 2001, Kodak had realized that the key relationship was not between an individual and the image, or between the collective human subjects portrayed by the photograph, but between the people who could connect to each other via sharing of that photograph: the slogan accordingly mutated to ‘Share Moments, Share Life.’ In 2010 a revision of the slogan to foreground the immediate present—‘The real Kodak moment happens when you share’—indicated that Kodak had finally realized, by then too late to save the company from its more agile and digitally savvy competitors, what picturesharing was all about in the age of the Internet. With the sharing protocols made available by social media and e-mail, pictures themselves had assumed a new role: rapid, multi-purpose positioning within pre-established but dynamic networks, free of captions or textual props, but aided by tags and other digital tools to make webs of meaning that included, but extended beyond, the personal and the familial. Surveying theoretical views over the past century, it is sometimes as though we can see photography prefiguring itself in anticipation of the changes that digitization has eventually wrought. No other aesthetic or representational system, even for other sensory modalities, has ever spread throughout the width and depth of society quite so thoroughly and so rapidly. With sound, for example, arguably more essential to human communication and thus to survival, the universally appreciated art of music has similarly grown and developed under a digital regime of use and exchange, yet still it appears to be outweighed by the sheer mass of photographs. Increases in photography as an activity, and in the number of pictures in use and circulation, have followed in the footsteps of every advantageous technological development and every extension of the economic resources able to be directed to it, from domestic through to professional and industrial contexts. Many photographic technologies have reached and passed the limits of their scope and influence, but always and only because other technical means have superseded them. There seems to be no limit to the making of photographs. Pierre Bourdieu, in Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1990) identified many of these trends in their pre-digital form. The book is a touchstone for a certain kind of French sociology, and is based on an intriguing blend of empirical and subjective information. Bourdieu’s work was most concerned overall with the sociology of culture, and the book 56

Made for Each Other

is as much about photography as a sociological tool for analysing the stratifications and divisions of French family and society as it is an explication of photography itself. He also, however, reflects on the cultural segmentations and genres of photographic practice, and on photography’s problematic status in relation to traditional and more culturally legitimized systems for expression and representation, such as painting. The milieu in which Bourdieu and his colleagues were writing (the book was published originally in French, in 1965, as Un art moyen) was probably one of the most technologically stable periods in the history of photography: the late flourishing of silver halide film and paper, prior to the onset of digitization. Silver halide photography had been developed to a remarkable level of sophistication, probably close to the limits of any practical further improvement, so that even years into the introduction of commercially viable digital photography, doubts continued to linger as to whether or not digital images could ever be the equal of those made with the tried and trusted silver analogue methods. Photographic genres had become surprisingly fixed, under the mixed influence of several forces: comparisons with (and imitations of) painting, categories of professional application, socially established pictorial genres and content conventions, and technological limitations. At Bourdieu’s time of writing, photography thus implicitly presented itself as a stable, clear vizualization framework which both shaped, and was shaped by, the social structures and forces that were his main interest. Only thus could it be said that ‘the most trivial photograph expresses, apart from the explicit intentions of the photographer, the system of schemes of perception, thought and appreciation common to a whole group’ (Bourdieu 1990: 6). We should note that Bourdieu manages to dismiss ‘the explicit intentions of the photographer’ merely by mentioning them and then failing to further discuss them. The relative importance of individual intentions and ‘schemes […] common to a whole group’ is surely contextually arguable, as is his conflation of the physics of photography with its social purpose when he says that: ‘Photography is considered to be a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world because (from its origin) it has been assigned social purposes that are held to be “realistic” and “objective”’ (Bourdieu 1990: 74). Bourdieu also makes class distinctions which, even in 1965, and certainly for readers of the English version in 1990, must have seemed rather quaint, and the more so given the attitudes about photography to which he links them. At least one reviewer singled out Bordieu’s unreflective categorizations of ‘peasants’ who allegedly see photography as ‘a frivolous luxury fostered by urbanites’; ‘clerical workers’ who understand photography to be ‘a minor art’ and are ‘uncertain of its legitimacy;’ ‘urban manual workers’ who ‘accept traditional practices without further aesthetic considerations’ (Bourdieu 1990 paraphrased in Vromen 1992: 157). Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s vision does prefigure some aspects of contemporary prosaic uses of photography, particularly in continuously renewing a sense of integration for social groups: […] it becomes clear that photographic practice only exists and subsists for most of the time by virtue of its family function or rather by the function conferred upon it by the 57

Photography, Narrative, Time

family group, namely that of solemnizing and immortalizing the high points of family life, in short of reinforcing the integration of the family group by reasserting the sense that it has both of itself and of its unity. (Bourdieu 1990 quoted in Gonzalez 1992: 127) Even at the time of writing, Bourdieu’s neglect of social groupings other than the family, of social groupings that also make use of photography as a marker and preserver of membership and unity, seemed neglectful if not actually perverse. Gonzalez, in the review just mentioned, points to ‘school classes, sports teams, political parties, tourist groups, pornographic and fashion models, criminals, militia, medical subjects and anthropological subjects’—a strange list in its own way, too—as some of the other groups for which photographs also importantly reinforce a sense of collective continuity. But Bourdieu’s concentration on the family serves to throw into sharp relief the manner in which the subjective sense of ‘family’—or, perhaps, the sense of ‘primary social group’—has changed between Bourdieu’s time and now, and changed in large measure through the concerted influences of digitization and photography. Even a casual inspection of the largest photographic aggregation and sharing site in the world, Flickr, indicates the scale of the Flickr extension to the Kodak notion of sharing: there are explicit invitations to share contacts within Flickr, via Facebook and Twitter or through Yahoo!’s search engine; there are mechanisms for joining and creating groups and communities, links to external organizations such as Getty Images, and, since 1998, a pilot project in partnership with the Library of Congress to ‘increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge’ (The Commons FAQ, on the Flickr website) about photographs in those collections, and presumably also about any photographs within Flickr’s constantly expanding purview. The whole idea of ‘family and friends,’ Kodak’s original purview, has therefore been not just enlarged, both numerically and conceptually, but inverted. As of early 2013, Flickr was home to 350 million images, by more than 50 million registered users, in more than 1.5 million Flickr groups. And while Flickr is the largest of these aggregation sites, at the time of writing nearly 40 other sites compete to offer similar services and by that means to control their own segments of the same advertising market. (Figures from the Ranker website: Benson 2013.) Despite the scale of the change from the Kodak days, on several grounds this development may also be seen not as new and different, but as a return to something natural and ordinary. Firstly, it’s a return to a sense of participatory culture, but on an unprecedented mass scale. As Clay Shirky writes: The atomisation of social life in the twentieth century left us so far removed from participatory culture that when it came back, we needed the phrase ‘participate in culture’ to describe it. Before the twentieth century, we didn’t really have a phrase for participatory culture; in fact, it would have been something of a tautology. A significant chunk of culture was participatory—local gatherings, events, and performances—because where else could culture come from? This simple act of creating something with others in mind 58

Made for Each Other

and then sharing it with them represents, at the very least, an echo of the older model of culture, now in technological raiment. (Shirky 2010: 19) Added to that, as Shirky points out in an earlier book (Shirky 2009) there is a peculiar empowering or amplification of individual actions that is brought about by the Internet, and by digitization generally. Photographs can be grouped and meaningfully organized— and thus, subsequently, more easily searched and shared—so effortlessly that the process of organization is an almost organic by-product of aggregation and storage. This propensity for organization and grouping does not come about, and could not come about, as a consequence of photographs being marked surfaces: it happens, precisely, because they are digital files, and because their status as files means that other information such as tags may easily be attached to them. As long as other cultural artefacts can be made in, or converted to, digital form, the same propensity applies to them as well. Shirky points to just a few of the social benefits that accrue jointly from the fact of sharing, and the manner in which digital protocols such as tagging allow that sharing to be done: Flickr provided some of the first photos of the London Transport bombings in 2005, including some taken with camera-phones by evacuees in the Underground’s tunnels. Flickr beat many traditional news outlets by providing these photos, because there were few photojournalists in the affected parts of the transport network (three separate trains on the Underground, and a bus), but many people near those parts of the transport system had camera-phones that could e-mail the pictures in. Having cameras in the hands of amateurs on the scene was better than having cameras in the hands of professionals who had to travel.   The photos that showed up after the bombings weren’t just amateur replacements for traditional photojournalism; people did more than just provide evidence of the destruction and its aftermath. They photographed official notices (‘All Underground services are suspended’), notes posted in schools (‘Please do not inform children of the explosions’), messages of support from the rest of the world (‘We love you London’), and within a day of the bombings, expressions of defiance addressed to the terrorists (‘We are not afraid’ and ‘You will fail’). (Shirky 2009: 34–5) We must be cautious about teleological fallacies here, but it does appear that re-positioning photography from the analogue to the digital world has facilitated something that we always wanted to do with photographs: organize and share them, thus also sharing important information about the world they depict. Photography has facilitated this kind of informationsharing on such a massive scale that it is difficult to see how it could ever be bettered by any other organizing principle or mechanism. On its own this is not enough to justify referring to digitization as ‘natural,’ but it is certainly as though the world of digitization and digital 59

Photography, Narrative, Time

communication is the world for which photography has always been waiting, and which fits it like a glove. It’s no longer an entirely crazy idea, in fact, to think that reality itself might be digital. An entire 2012 issue of New Scientist (‘Reality: The Definition,’ 1 October 2012) devoted itself to serious discussion of such possibilities as the universe being composed of binary information: the idea that physical existence and mathematical existence are the same thing. In an experiment at the University of Chicago’s Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center for which, at the time of writing this book, the test equipment is still under construction, physicist Craig Hogan will examine the hypothesis that space itself may not be smooth and continuous, but a product of digital information ‘imprinted’ on two-dimensional ‘sheets,’ and thus actually composed of bits (Moyer 2012). Hogan is not alone. Dick Lipton, a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (‘Georgia Tech’) has argued that the world as we ordinarily experience it is digital (Lipton 2009). On closer examination Lipton is making a slightly different point, but one that feeds very comfortably into the notion of digital photography as ‘natural’: Lipton’s real idea turns out to be that ‘all things can be represented by sequences of zeroes and ones’ (emphasis added) which is saying no more than that we can in principle simulate, imitate, or represent anything by digital means, as long as we have the capacity (memory storage, computational speed and so forth) to do so. In one sense this is not only obvious, but almost tautological. It does, however, make clear that a long-standing belief of the late twentieth century—that the silver halide system of photographic recording and representation was somehow fundamental to photography—was simply a mistake, a misunderstanding brought about by the accidental historical order of technological discovery. If discovered now, after the comprehensive penetration of all our lives by digital photography, silver halide photography would still be the fascinating craft that it continues to be, but in no way would it be considered to be a revelation of ‘real’ photography that somehow trumped and superseded digital photography. Photography has retained its continuous identity— writing with light—through numerous processes: the Pantographic process, the Calissotype process, the Heliographic process, the Tardiochromic process, the Daguerrotype process, the Photogenic process, the Talbotype process, the Calotype process, the Collodion process … and more. But it is now hard to see how any other principle or mechanism could unseat digital recording, or substitute for it, in future. Photographs, pictures and representation So far most of this chapter has been about the uses to which photography is, and has been, put: photography as a site, a medium and a channel, for diverse modes of human exchange and communication. What of the individual photograph? The enormous range of ends and means, and the endless variety of kinds of photographic output, immediately pose obstacles to the making of useful generalizations, but it’s possible, nevertheless, to throw some light on what 60

Made for Each Other

makes photography distinctive, so as to be able to better talk about what makes the meaning of some photographic images very distinctive indeed, within the field of images in general. It seems reasonable to start from the position that, barring some of the industrial applications of photographic processes (such as photolithography in the manufacture of computer chips, mentioned earlier), and concentrating on the kinds of photography and photographs that are of interest to this book, photographs are pictures. Dictionary definitions of photographs generally begin with this idea, which seems straightforward—until one attempts to clarify just what a picture is. Mark Rollins (1999 and 2001) has usefully summarized and categorized the difficulties of pictorial representation and the theories advanced in response, and though he is able to condense the issue down to ‘two basic questions: What is a picture? And how do pictures have content?’ (Rollins 2001: 297), he also deftly demonstrates why and how pictorial representation is no simple matter. He divides theories of depiction into perceptual and nonperceptual accounts, and then further divides perceptual theories into four: ‘resemblance [which may have both non-perceptual and perceptual aspects], causal, mental construction, and information-based accounts’ (2001: 298). Some aspects of all of these turn out to be useful when we come to analysing pictorial meaning in specific photographic pictures, but for the moment, resemblance-based and causal accounts of depiction seem the two obvious ones to associate with photography. Firstly, resemblance theory: in essence this says that a picture represents something or someone because it looks like that thing or person. This seems the most straightforward account, yet it is also the most vulnerable, because we can easily ask (and indeed we need to know) on what basis this alleged likeness is perceived. Rollins invokes Nelson Goodman’s (1976) distinction: Resemblance is both symmetrical and reflexive: a picture and its object each resemble the other; a picture resembles itself more than anything else. But objects do not represent pictures, nor do pictures represent themselves. Therefore, resemblance is not a sufficient condition for representation. (Rollins 2001: 300) As a method of resolving the basis for alleged likeness, Rollins suggests a ‘reconstrued’ version of resemblance theory, based most prominently on the views of David Marr (1982) as to how people perceive the similarity between a picture and its object. According to this view, the mental operations used to recognize an object depicted in a picture are the very same operations used to recognize the object itself. If we see a dog, and subsequently a picture of the dog, the same object-recognition area of the brain will be responsible for our perceptions in each case, and we will see (literally) the similarity between the two, and thus understand that the picture represents its object. Part of this theory as framed in particular by David Marr (1982) involves the assertion that ‘vision depends on certain basic operations shared by all perceivers, operations that are not affected by 61

Photography, Narrative, Time

differences in background knowledge. Early vision is thus modularized, that is, segregated from other sense modalities and higher cognitive processes’ (Rollins 2001: 300; emphasis in original). This hypothesized segregation of similarity-perception from ‘higher cognitive processes’ is intended to strengthen the theory by positioning it as resistant to interference from those processes. In Rollins’s eyes this is both unlikely and, even if it were true, ‘not […] enough to motivate a resemblance theory of pictorial representation in any interesting sense’ (Rollins 2001: 301). But while he argues that higher-order processes and background knowledge are likely to come into play and to interact with direct perception, he seems to assume that this can only conflict with that direct perception, and lead to a failure of representation: ‘Because higher-order processes do have access, in principle, to all sorts of background knowledge, objects in pictures may not look similar to the same objects in the world’ (Rollins 2001: 302). This seems odd. Imagine a case in which there is actual substantive identity between an object and its representation, but limited visual grounds to be able to say that the representation ‘looks like’ the object—say, a dog directly perceived in the back yard in sunlight, and a black-and-white photograph of the same dog made years earlier, indoors, from a different viewpoint, on a dull day. Even a non-dog-owner will very likely be able to see (understand) that the photograph represents the same dog, and this is of course possible not in spite of higher-order processes and background knowledge, but because of them. Cognition, it seems, is always involved in perception. The second of Rollins’s major groupings of pictorial representation types is causal relations, which emphasize the causal chain between a pictured object—the subject matter of a photograph or painting—and the representation that results from the activities of the photographer or artist. Again, and as was noted in the previous chapter in relation to the complexity of causal contribution to narratives, subtle difficulties arise as soon as we look harder at the nature of causation and what is being caused. A painting or even a photograph may represent an imaginary object or a situation—a possible world—which never actually happened (think of visual advertising, and particularly photographs in advertising), in which case the start of the causal chain is difficult to specify. There is also a gap to be bridged between the referent of a picture and the meaning of the picture, such that specifying a picture’s referent may not accurately or properly explain what it is a picture ‘of.’ If we shift the emphasis from the cause of the picture to the cause of the picture’s effects on those who see it—a ‘recognition’-based causal approach—then, in Rollins’s words once more, we find that a ‘picture, P, represents an object, O, if a perceiver interprets P rightly, based just on his ordinary perceptual ability to recognize O’ (2001: 303–4). But this, now, sounds very close to a resemblance theory—to the idea that a picture looks like its object because the same mental structure is brought into play by both looking at the object and looking at the representation. We seem to be back where we started. We need to find a way through this minefield in order not to be distracted by the very real philosophical problems of representation when, in later chapters, we move from generic visual representation to the meaning of individual photographs. Two escape routes suggest 62

Made for Each Other

themselves, one theory-based and one practical. The theoretical approach is provided for us by Patrick Maynard in The Engine of Visualization (1997) when he distinguishes (page 114) between a photograph of something and a photographic depiction of something. If I take a photograph of a friend dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, I am making a photograph of my friend: one that presumably disguises his identity to some extent, but is nevertheless produced by pointing a camera at him and producing a photographic image in which his costumed and made-up form is the central visual subject. I am, however, making a photographic depiction of Abraham Lincoln. These two statements are perfectly consistent with each other, and we understand the relationship, just as we understand the finished result, the photograph. Without everyone being able to make exactly this distinction and exactly this imaginative interpretation, fiction films could not do what they do so well. When I watch Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall (2004), I know that I am seeing Bruno Ganz playing Adolf Hitler, but I know also that I am seeing Hitler, and seeing him in a manner which allows me to understand quite a lot about who and what he was. Maynard offers the further advice that we should avoid discussion of photography as a sign system. This is difficult to do entirely, for any reading of such breadth and variety of texts on photographic theory as is necessary to produce a book of this kind will encounter extensive use of semiotic ideas and terminology. I plead guilty to their presence in some places in this volume, on the grounds that, contextually, the ideas in such sources may have much to offer. Nevertheless, I can see the merits and the importance of what Maynard argues, and for the most part this book heeds his advice. Accordingly, I provide a brief summary of the argument for this avoidance here, based entirely on his discussion in The Engine of Visualization (Maynard 1997: 59–62). Firstly, Maynard points to the fact that to say a photograph ‘functions as signs and symbols’ (59) means only that a photograph is not the same as that which it depicts or represents, a fact that is probably obvious to everyone significantly beyond the age of the children discussed in the empirical studies described below. (It was apparently not obvious, though, to either André Bazin or Christian Metz, both of whom (e.g. Bazin 1960: 8; Metz 1974: 43) postulated essentially literal identity between a photographic image and its object. Proper investigation of this conundrum exceeds the space reasonable to allocate for such a purpose in this book.) We should not, in other words, be deluded into thinking that use of the terms ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ has in any way explained or articulated the nature of depiction or representation. Worse, use of the terms tends to make a dualistic separation between the ‘mark’ and the meaning—between the trace on the recording medium left by the light coming through the lens, and the meaning of the photographic image so made. This separation ‘turns out to be a disaster for any account of the arts of marking’ (Maynard 59) whether we are talking about a silver-based or a digital recording system. Secondly, Maynard indicates the inherent variety in different sorts of visual displays— basic differences as to purpose and function, going way beyond any superficial differences in appearance, medium, etc. Use of the word ‘sign’ suggests ‘a mythical common function for 63

Photography, Narrative, Time

all such markings’ (60) and is often used to group their functions into two types, ‘bringing to mind what is not present’ and ‘referring’ (60). There are problems with both of these: a sign may in fact be about calling to mind what is present (a hole in a pavement) or it may be self-referential. Many signs do indeed refer, but many do not; even many words—primary agents of meaning—do not refer to anything, actually or intentionally. Thirdly, there is a problem in seeking the essential nature of something via its function(s). Everyday classifications of objects may indeed sometimes be arranged via the typical function of those objects, but this may reveal little or nothing about the object. ‘[W]hen we look for something of the right shape or weight to fill in for a certain job, a function may link the thing and the situation, but it is accidental to the nature, including the functional nature, of the item selected (61; emphasis in original); so, while ‘the general function of visual display usually does serve further functions, maybe even cognitive ones […] this fact should not tempt us to suppose that all these cognitive functions are of one general kind’ (61). Maynard’s distinction between a photograph of something and a photographic depiction of something provides a theoretical approach to representation that seems straightforward, and compatible with our ordinary experience of individual photographs. But there is still the question of how such experience becomes ordinary; how the capacity for making the connection between a photograph of a thing, and the thing of which it is a photograph, becomes installed in the human psyche. It may be either built-in—part of the human ‘operating system’ from birth—or learned. We don’t even need to immediately sort out which is the case, but some evidence that this capacity is manifest in people generally, at a very early age, prior to language, and without instruction or conditioning, allows us to more firmly anchor our speculation about what it is that people might derive from particular photographs. Understanding photographs And evidence there is. Pierroutsakos and DeLoache (2003) established that ‘infants’ manual response to pictures is driven by the resemblance of depicted objects to the real objects they represent’ and that infant enthusiasm for attempting to manually interact with the depicted objects was ‘directly related to how realistic they are: the more depicted objects look like real objects, the more manual investigation they evoke’ (Pierroutsakos and DeLoache 2003: 141). The authors used ‘highly realistic’ photographs of objects likely to be appealing to young children (toys of different sorts, a cup, a rattle, etc.) and presented photographs of the same objects in both colour and black-and-white, as well as line drawings of the same objects traced from the photographs. Attempts by the infant subjects to investigate the depicted object (as registered quite specifically by, for example, grasping behaviour such as curling the fingers after making contact with the page) was in direct proportion to the realist cues in the images. Photographs evoked more responses than line drawings, and in both cases, colour provoked more investigative attempts than black-and-white. A second contiguously 64

Made for Each Other

reported study by the same authors, also with nine-month-old subjects, examined but effectively eliminated the alternative hypothesis that infants might merely be drawn to investigate any high-contrast visual stimuli, even if non-pictorial. Even more surprisingly, Jowkar-Baniani and Schmuckler (2011) investigated the ability of infants as young as nine months old to recognize the correspondence between a real object and a schematic visual representation of the same object—a line drawing—‘even when these 2D representations are fairly abstract’ (Jowkar-Baniani and Schmuckler 2011: 220). The line drawings preserved the general outlines and shape of the objects, but included only very limited information about visual contrast that was present in the real objects (such as a darkcoloured nose on a sheep doll, represented in the corresponding drawing only by its shape, not the dark colour). The results confirmed that infant subjects do indeed ‘recognize the correspondence of 2D representations and 3D objects’ (221), but the relatively weaker level of interest and interaction by Jowkar-Baniani and Schmuckler’s infant subjects also partly reinforced Pierroutsakos and DeLoache’s conclusion that the high infant interest in their own test pictures seemed to be a function of ‘strong’ (that is, photographic) representative realism and resemblance. Research of this kind is unavoidably subject to questions of reliability, since the actual thought processes and perceptions of the infant subjects must necessarily be indirectly derived from observations, by others, of their behaviour. Nevertheless, the results of these and other similar studies consistently indicate that human beings understand pictorial depictions, and particularly photographic depictions, without being instructed in how to do so and without needing to draw complex language-based inferences about reference or resemblance. Those who have insisted that we need to learn a ‘language of pictures’ in order to understand them, notably Goodman (1976) and Gombrich (see especially his preface to the Millennium version of his Art and Illusion in 2000), appear to be wide of the mark. The infant experiments testify to the significance of two aspects of photographic understanding. The first of these is the causal relationship between a photograph and what it depicts, referred to earlier in this chapter: the manner in which the subject of a photograph determines—‘causes’—the appearance and nature of a photograph that is said to be ‘of ’ that subject. The second is the role of imagination in understanding, using and interpreting this ‘caused’ image. Causal determination and imagination may appear initially to be in conflict, but parsed appropriately they are not only compatible but complementary. It’s possible to isolate philosophically difficult instances of the causal relationship, but broadly and pragmatically, we know and accept it as connecting three things: the subject of a photographic picture; the light which falls on that subject, is reflected back into the camera lens and focused by it onto an image sensor or photosensitive material; and the resultant photographic image, whether on a screen or on hard copy. If an object is positioned in front of a camera such that it can be seen through the camera’s (properly functioning) lens or viewfinder, the object is lit sufficiently for visibility, the lens is focused correctly on the object, and the camera’s shutter speed and aperture controls are set to capture an appropriate (let’s say ‘normal,’ for the moment) exposure, then we can say that 65

Photography, Narrative, Time

the resulting image of the object is ‘caused’ by the photographic process: by the combination of lighting, lens choice, exposure settings and so on. Barring a fault of some kind in the camera, or some opaque barrier coming between the object and the camera at the moment of exposure, the image must be made. The light will never, for instance, meander off in some other direction and ‘choose’ not to go down the lens barrel; the camera, unless faulty, will not fail to capture that light and record the image. The image is, in principle and in character if not in fine detail, predictable just from our knowledge of the set-up. This is not mystique, or guesswork, but physics. The physics—the inevitable and inescapable determinism linking the object in front of the camera to the image produced in the camera—underlies many of our attitudes to photography, such as the acceptance of photographs but not drawings as evidence in forensic or legal situations. Oddly though, it also partly blinds us to the exact nature of photography’s transparency: that ‘photographs, as bearers of natural meaning, are necessarily accurate’ but that we should understand them ‘as things that have their own meanings which may or may not correspond to the facts and which we have to decide whether or not to trust’ (Walton 1984: 266; emphasis in original). The natural meaning of a photograph of my friend dressed as Abraham Lincoln is that it represents my friend; the meaning that may or may not correspond with this fact is that it is also intended to look like, and thus in some way represent, Abraham Lincoln. The infant subjects, particularly those in Pierroutsakos and DeLoache’s experiments, are experiencing the first stage in the process of coming to terms with photography’s transparency. ‘Only in the most exotic circumstances would one mistake a photograph for the objects photographed’ (Walton 1984: 249)—but the infants are in exotic circumstances, relative to their short life experience thus far. They are discovering, perhaps for the first time, that the following experience is possible: that something which so closely resembles an object with which they have previously interacted is not, in fact, that object, but a new and different object—a photograph—that looks like the original object. Imagination Looks are important. They are ‘a guide to how things are, to properties that belong to the factual content of an experience’ (Pettersson 2012: 772). The photographs of the toys in the infant experiments were successful in invoking attempts to interact with the depicted objects because they preserved key aspects of the look of the objects: the point of view and perspective that the infant might have if encountering the real object, lighting and exposure conditions that ensure both successful seeing and clear photographic exposure, focus and depth-of-field settings that make for a clear image, and so on. No one would doubt that an infant who is normally used to seeing a toy bear from about his or her arm’s length away, in a directly frontal position, in diffuse interior daylight, might not connect this experience with a photographed view of the same bear from behind and below, in high-contrast daylight. 66

Made for Each Other

We, as experienced adult viewers and interpreters of photographs, can do this, and we can understand that imagination is required to succeed in the task: to imagine the bear rotated, inverted, differently lit. And it’s difficult for us to observe imagination at work in such an apparently mundane task as looking at a photograph—but not because we can’t easily distinguish between when imagination might or might not be a necessary part of the task, but because it’s always a necessary part of the task: Given that we have, in the first place, to look at their marked surfaces in order to be incited and guided to some imagining seeing, pictures of things convert that very looking into an object of the imagining. We imagine the represented situation, and also imagine of that looking that it gives us access to it that it—our own perceptual activity—is seeing what is depicted. (Maynard 1997: 107; emphasis in original) We need imagination not just for making the leap from seeing a photograph of my friend to understanding that the image depicts Abraham Lincoln, but in order to make the leap from looking at the patterns of light and shade and/or colour on the flat surface of a photograph, or on a screen, and understanding that it represents my friend. Maynard describes photography as an ‘imagining technology’ (Maynard 1997, Chapter 4 in particular); to fully understand the significance of that phrase we need to attend first to his description of technologies in general as ‘extenders or amplifiers of our powers to do things’ (1997: 75; emphasis in original) and then to ask ourselves: what powers does photography extend or amplify? We already know that the making of pictures is one application of photography, and the most common though by no means the only one, so it seems inadequate, even circular, to say no more than that photography amplifies our ability to make pictures. Beyond all the thousands of words written about photography’s ‘capturing’ and ‘freezing’ of ‘moments’ and ‘instants,’ it seems much more useful to consider how photography has magnified our conceptual powers, our ability to understand things as they already are, as well as to conceive of what is not now, but could possibly be. Pictorial depiction in general is, as Maynard says, ‘one of the central imagining technologies for all peoples’ (1997: 114), and photography has certainly by now become the most easily applied, widely used and imaginatively flexible tool of pictorial representation and depiction in the history of the planet. To understand more about what this imagining technology does and can do, however, and to get past the limitations of ‘instants’ and ‘moments,’ we need to look more closely at what these instants and moments are and what they comprise: at time.

67

Chapter 4 Time

P

hotography inhabits the specious present. This is the term given to the interval of time experienced as the present, in consciousness; the notion that this interval is ‘specious’ arises from the conflict between, on the one hand, the apparent logical necessity that the present can have no duration (by definition it cannot be the future, and once it has passed, no matter by how brief an interval, it is by definition no longer the present) and on the other, our subjective experience of the present as an interval of indeterminate, but somehow subjectively observable, extension. The term was used first by E. Robert Kelly, writing under the pseudonym E.R. Clay (see Andersen and Grush 2009: 277) and Clay’s description of the problem was taken up and elaborated upon by both William James and C.D. Broad and by others since (see Le Poidevin 2011). However, the conundrum of how we can attribute duration to any interval of time was first raised by St Augustine (AD 354–430). In Book XI, Chapter XI of his autobiographical Confessions, he suggests that neither the present nor the past can have duration in and of itself: A long time does not become long, except from the many separate events that occur in its passage, which cannot be simultaneous. In the Eternal, on the other hand, nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present […] all time past is forced to move on by the incoming future […] all the future follows from the past; and […] all, past and future, is created and issues out of that which is forever present. The present, then, lacks duration because it is no more than the interface between the future and the past; the past has neither duration nor any other property, since it has ceased to exist, and by extension, a similar problem afflicts the future, since it does not yet exist. In Chapter XIV of the same book Augustine also said, however: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ Contemporary analytic philosophy would find even less room to quibble over whether or not the notion of the present is really so forbiddingly difficult, and for the purposes of a book on photography, we can probably agree that the experienced present is something we all understand in pragmatic, everyday terms. Specious or otherwise, however, photography inhabits the present on two intersecting planes which seem to give rise to a genuinely different and elaborated understanding of the present, and to a more multifaceted understanding of time and our situatedness in time. The experience of looking at a photograph has the effect of expanding not only the brief moment of exposure that brought the image into existence, but also our experience of the

Photography, Narrative, Time

extended present in which we look at it. A photograph seems to allow the possibility, never attained but seemingly always on offer, to put ‘now’ on hold while we deal with it properly and thoroughly. In one of many odd bifurcations of time and space that uniquely attend photographs, the present of the photograph is experienced as ‘a paradox […] an unresolved oscillation’ (de Duve 1978: 113) between an event yet to take place in the photograph’s future, and the same event that has already taken place in the viewer’s past. This is appealing because it appears to address, or at least to share, something we encounter constantly in direct experience—that ‘now’ is always, by the time we have enunciated it or even conceived of it, ‘just then’ (just a moment ago). We conceive of ourselves as continuous, as continuously present, and as continuously in the present (we can only be in the present, after all) but that same present is also being continuously discarded and renewed. In his early but influential examination of the paradoxical relationships between time and photography, Thierry de Duve set out a number of bifurcations extending across photography (the practice or activity), photographs (objects), and perceptions and responses to photographs. His bifurcations are rhetorical rather than empirical, and drawn up for the purpose of sharpening the two poles of the ‘unresolved oscillation of our psychological responses towards the photograph (de Duve 1978: 113). One of his key distinctions is between, on the one hand, the ‘snapshot,’ a term he seems to apply to a combinative syndrome of fast exposure, dynamic subject movement, and spontaneous use of the camera; and on the other hand, the ‘time exposure,’ by which he seems to mean any considered, carefully constructed view of a still or relatively unmoving subject. A quickly-grabbed press or sport photograph would exemplify the former, while ‘the funerary portrait’ (de Duve 1978: 113) exemplifies the latter. He concedes at the end of the paper that ‘there is no such thing as an empirical definition of snapshot and time exposure’ (124–5) but his categorization does illuminate and clarify something of the tension that always challenges us when we look at a photograph and attempt to reconcile our subjective and always-moving present with the implied time-sense of any photograph. De Duve’s admittedly soft distinction between snapshot and time exposure does allow him to add a new dimension to the ‘new space-time category’ that Roland Barthes had already identified: ‘spatial immediacy and [i.e. combined with] temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then’ (Barthes 1977b: 44). More nuanced contemporary ideas about time and its perception in physics, philosophy, psychology and astronomy allow for a number of different treatments of the conundrum of the durationless or ‘specious’ present. In their own ways, however, all these disciplines have famously raised further questions about time, questions that sometimes pose so great a challenge that it is all we can do to truly comprehend them, let alone to answer them. For a phenomenon that drives so much of what we do, one that we measure so accurately and feverishly, we remain remarkably helpless when faced with the task of defining just what time is. Augustine’s answer to his own puzzle was that our perception of time and the past exist in memory. One modern pragmatic answer, it seems, is to take photographs. Photography does not help us with the task of defining time, but it does appear to be of 72

Time

significant material comfort—a psychological prop, of sorts—in dealing with time: with its relentlessness, with the ineffable difficulty of grasping and holding the present, and with the impossibility of revisiting the past. Exposure time and cognition Much of the history of photographic interpretation has been centred on the formal attributes of photographs and photography, and interpretation has thus often been made hostage to some fixed ideas about the significance of exposure time. Much has been made of the undoubted contrast between the slow, accumulative manual process necessary for the production of a painting, drawing or sculpture, and the brief, mechanized operation of the lens shutter in order to produce (‘take’) a photograph. Not surprisingly, this has in turn led to a consequential preoccupation with exposure time as a principal determinant of how photography conveys time, represents time and encodes time. Here is David Hockney, painter and sometime photographer, talking about the photo-collage projects (‘joiners,’ in his own terminology) that dominated his work from about 1982 to 1987: I had wanted to put time into the photograph more obviously than just in the evidence that my hand pressed the shutter, and there it was, it could be done. The big joiners […] took about four hours to do. Consequently there are four hours of layered time locked in there. I’ve never seen an ordinary photograph with four hours of layered time. That’s much longer than you would take to look at it! This is what it’s overcome. For me the main problem in photography always came down to that. Any painting or drawing contains time because you know it took time to do. (Hockney and Joyce 1988: 18; emphasis in original) Photography, by contrast with almost every other means of making pictures, and even with most other popular means of conveying information, certainly appears to be a medium of the instant: a medium which intrinsically resists extension over time. It is a medium not merely perceived, but extolled, for its presentation and preservation of a moment that has been explicitly excised from the flow of time as ordinarily experienced; a medium from which time is apparently absent. This widespread conventional understanding of photographic time, even of the duration of exposure alone, does not stand up well to further examination, and any such examination firstly needs to take into account what happens across the whole of the sequence: from the conception of a picture, through its production, to the reception and viewing of a completed photograph. Even the most opportunistic photographs, reactively or impulsively taken to ensure a visual record of a dynamic event that is about to end, necessitate successful anticipation and some thought in advance. This thought and anticipation is not easily or properly separated from the resulting photograph. It is implied by the existence of the 73

Photography, Narrative, Time

photograph and included in our understanding of how the photograph is made—just as we understand, at least generically, something of the thought processes that go into making a painting or drawing. On a continuous spectrum from instant snapshots through to elaborate studio pictures, preparation and planning are minimally involved in the former category, but clearly and overtly involved in the latter, with a wide range of other levels of pre-meditation somewhere in between: casual family or holiday photographs, real estate agency pictures, images of objects for sale on Ebay, and so on. With all but the instant-reaction shot, and despite the automation and improved accuracy and sensitivity of so many camera functions, it is still necessary to think about framing, direction of view and focal length, and time is still required to shape, cajole, or otherwise organize subjects and subject matter. Certainly any ‘serious’ studio photograph necessitates considerable and generally iterative conceptualization, preparation and post-production, and may involve many trials of lighting, exposure, design, lens choice and other variables before an intended result (or an accidental but felicitous one) is achieved. The most elaborate studio photographs, where the person who releases the shutter is quite likely to be an employed technician rather than the person who takes ultimate creative credit for the photograph, makes clear what applies less obviously but consistently across all forms and genres of photography: the release of the shutter button is the culminating, summative act in a sequence, not the act of making the photograph. The very word photography— writing with light—should always act as a reminder that the person who determines how much light should fall on the photosensitive surface, and from what directions and sources, is the person responsible for creating the photograph. In the studio grand-production genre of photography, this final responsibility might rest with one person, but many others are likely to be involved; in the everyday snapshot case, one person is responsible for every aspect of recording the image, but the tasks of focusing, setting depth of field, shutter speed and aperture and, in particular, measuring, controlling, and if necessary supplementing light, are delegated, to varying degrees and with varying degrees of conscious awareness, to the camera itself. In such cases, the summative task of clicking the shutter button is likely to be perceived as the act of taking the photograph, since it brings all the other functions into play, and is generally the only deliberate action needed to record an image. At a cognitive level, the mental activities that comprise the conceptualization, planning and realization of the photograph, if brought into awareness at all, are likely to be perceived by the photographer as interwoven with, or possibly part of, the social and communicative contexts that surround the making of photographs, rather than part of the dedicated picture-making process. Cognition is similarly interwoven with human capacities for time perception, and with the situational relativity of perceived duration. Thus, since the most commonly employed photographic exposure times are extremely short by comparison with our everyday experience of time, the time it takes to produce a photograph is widely if approximately construed as ‘instantaneous.’ Leaving aside, for the moment, the time devoted to conceptualization and 74

Time

planning, we should first examine both the physics and the metaphysics of the idea of the shutter speed as ‘instantaneous.’ The most commonly used shutter speeds in handheld still photography probably vary between about 1/100 of a second and 1/250 of a second. The former is generally fast enough to alleviate any blur potentially caused by movement of the photographer’s own hand on a handheld camera, while the latter is typically fast enough to avoid or greatly reduce any motion blur resulting from a rapidly moving subject, without having to either use an extremely large aperture, change the exposure index rating, or use flash or other supplementary light. It’s also fairly common, though, at least for keen amateurs, to use long exposures—several second or even minutes—to capture subjects in low light, or to capture a changing condition such as the (apparent) movement of the stars. These time durations have, of course, evolved and changed in parallel with the development of photosensitive recording materials, from extremely low sensitivity (and thus very long exposure durations) initially, through to the contemporary ‘instantaneous’ exposure. The very act of taking or making photographs has continued since its inception to provide a variety of physical challenges to both photographers and their subjects, and in a way it should be surprising to find that photography has so successfully shaken off its earlier association with uncomfortable and extended waiting. Early subjects for a daguerreotype portrait ‘had no qualms about sitting stock-still under the midday sun for up to a quarter of an hour’ (Sagne 1998: 103) in order to reach the required exposure, and even well into the second half of the nineteenth century, professional portrait studios bristled with as many clamps and other devices devoted to keeping the unfortunate sitter immobilized, as for supporting and steadying the camera. Handheld cameras only really became practical after the invention of the dry plate, with its greater sensitivity to light, in 1879, and George Eastman’s mass-produced roll film in 1889 significantly further reduced the weight of a camera, making both true portability and handheld exposure times possible even though the sensitivity of film remained low. This opened up an explosion of new photographic subject matter, but simultaneously introduced new difficulties with any form of movement, including the movements unavoidably made by the photographers themselves. Subjects in everyday scenes, freed from studio clamps for the duration of exposure, could effectively disappear simply by moving at an ordinary walking pace as the shutter opened, and the movement of the photographer’s own hand during the exposure could threaten the sharpness of the photograph. And to add to both of these, any attempt to capture a particular important moment within a scene containing even slow movements required an exactitude and skill in anticipation for which nothing but repeated trials—at, for most people, prohibitive cost—could provide training. In terms of human subjective experience, even 1/60 of a second is fast, and faster than most things we can consciously observe, or do. Human reaction times are extremely task-dependent, highly variable between different human subjects and even variable according to the nature of the sensory input, but a good visual choice reaction time for a healthy young adult is ‘about 190 ms (0.19 sec) for light stimuli and about 160 ms for sound stimuli’ (Kosinski 2013). 75

Photography, Narrative, Time

Related to this, where photographing people is concerned, is the fleetingly changeable nature of many facial expressions, and the consequent difficulty likely to be experienced in intentionally recording a particular expression photographically. Paul Ekman’s work on micro-expressions (Ekman and Friesen 2003) tells us that: Although most facial expressions last more than one second, micro-expressions last well under a second—perhaps 1/5 to 1/25 of a second. Micro-expressions are typically embedded in movement, often in facial movements that are part of talking. And they are typically followed immediately by a masking facial expression. (Ekman and Friesen 2003: 151) Neither is the face the only source of ‘leakage and deception,’ as Ekman and Friesen describe it, of clues to what people are really thinking or feeling, and thus a crucial element of what the photographer might hope to record: Inconsistencies and discrepancies in speech, body movement, and voice are other important clues. We know that people, at least in our culture, tend to manage their facial expressions more than they do their body movements, and perhaps more than their voices. (Ekman and Friesen 2003: 152) Compounding this, for the photographer hoping to anticipate, react to and record a crucial expression or body movement, is the delay between pressing the camera’s shutter button and the actual release of the shutter. Oddly, this was never a problem with analogue (mechanical) shutters and only began to plague photographers in the early days of digital photography, where it has now mostly been effectively addressed. However, it caused immense frustration for early adopters of digital cameras for many years, precisely because it threw into sharp relief the importance of being able to release the shutter in maximal synchrony with the photographer’s own aesthetic decision-making and reaction time. In summary then, what appears to be a matter of an ‘instant’ or a ‘moment,’ depending on the subject matter and style of photography, is a complex and causal/interactive sequence of subject-photographer-machine interactions, taking place over what is necessarily a longer time than the moment of exposure itself—several moments at least, we might say, collectively. Knowledge, skill and experience on the part of the photographer will cumulatively tip the balance towards deliberate intention and design, and away from luck or chance factors, but the eventual photograph may still be partially and unpredictably determined by factors other than the intentions of the photographer, because of what happens in these other moments. Here we begin to understand more about the complexity of Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment,’ and about his unusual skill. The inevitable link between photographs and the optical, electronic and mechanical instruments and processes necessary for their production have always worked against 76

Time

establishing a clear understanding of what it is that photographers, rather than cameras, do. If we are to attribute appropriate agency to photographers, then we must attend to the events that take place prior to and beyond the time of exposure. The exposure is the event that is initiated by the photographer’s actions, and exposure time itself is generally so brief that it clearly cannot encompass both the initiation and the completion of any intentional human act. But there is also a point to be made about the relativity of the exposure time itself. In terms of physics, the science for which the measurement of time and the consequences of time are perhaps most critical, even 1/1000 of a second is an interval within which a lot can happen. A lot? Well … consider, for instance, the origin of the entire universe. Time: A short astronomical excursion Via traces still visible from platforms such as the Hubble space telescope, science has enabled us to look in detail at what happened in and around the very beginning of the universe, when an incomprehensible ‘singularity’ of infinite density and temperature suddenly expanded to essentially infinite size. There is an identifiable sequence of six distinct ‘epochs’ in this process, culminating in the Hadron Epoch, by which stage the fundamental forces which act within and between atomic particles had become separate from each other, and the universe occupied something close to the volume of the universe as it exists now, although very different in physical composition. The entire time between zero (the big bang itself) and the end of the Hadron Epoch occupies one second, and the middle of the Hadron Epoch is somewhere between 10-4 and 10-3 seconds from the big bang—or in photographic fractions, between 1/10,000 of a second and 1/1000 of a second. By comparison, at the time of writing, the fastest shutter speed generally available in a commercial DSLR camera is 1/8000 of a second, while one second falls comfortably at the low end of a wide range of long exposure times that might be used for low-light photography. The range of exposure times ordinarily used in photography is thus able to encompass the entire duration of the beginning of existence itself; to merely describe it collectively as ‘instantaneous’ would be to discard everything about the extraordinary changes within that time period which make it so interesting. And as we shall see later, although intentional actions can’t be contained within typical photographic exposure times, changes in the behaviour and appearance of a photographic subject certainly can—in ways that differentially affect painted and photographed portraits. Of course, there are instances of photographs made with exposure times so unusually long or short that the period of exposure is intrinsically bound up with the meaning of the picture. Long exposures, in particular, are sometimes mentioned in discussions of how longer periods of time might, as per David Hockney’s view, be literally and physically embodied in photographs. As one might suspect, there’s a website devoted to long photographic exposures (Klenke 2010) on which one can find exposures made not only over months but over years. 77

Photography, Narrative, Time

They are interesting both as photographic artefacts and as historical documents, but I’m not sure they answer any questions in this context. Subjectively, they seem timeless rather than infused with extra time; it’s as if the sense of experiential time has rather been drained from them, leaving the photographs as a spiritless blur that directly challenges Hockney’s characterization. By contrast, very short exposures answer questions that we haven’t even asked. What does the first few milliseconds of a nuclear explosion look like? Harold Edgerton’s remarkable 1952 photographs from the Nevada desert show us, yet we cannot apply the test of verification that we might ordinarily expect to be able to make of a photograph: we can’t make a comparison with a direct perception and/or memory of the same scene, because that information is simply unavailable to us by any other means. Such short durations have no meaning in terms of ordinary biological experience. The Edgerton photographs show something we could never see, for several obvious reasons: the distance from it that we need to be in order not to be vaporized, the brightness that would immediately blind us, and time: the speed with which a nuclear explosion unfolds. Edgerton’s photographs, easily discoverable on the web in many locations, were exposed for one nanosecond (10-9 seconds), with gaps of one millisecond (10-3 seconds) between successive frames. Viewing time In the quotation further above, David Hockney presents two modes of duration connected with pictures—the time it takes to make the picture and the time it takes to look at it—as though this simple bifurcation covers the universe of time possibilities. This is neither accurate nor helpful. For one thing, the relationship may be an inversion of the one that Hockney describes: a very simple picture, whether a photograph or a painting or drawing, may require a lengthy and intense visual inspection, and some detailed and introspective consideration, in order to properly assess its meaning. Imagination, a necessary part of understanding, is always at work, but requires time to apply itself to the problem at hand and is, in any case, only partially under the control of its owner. We may very quickly grasp that Jeff Wall’s 1982 photograph Mimic depicts three people walking down a city street towards the camera, but that is not the meaning of the picture. On the other hand, some photographs that might be far more visually elaborate than Mimic, and slower to produce, might be required to be fully understood extremely rapidly, such as from a rapidly passing vehicle. Much visual advertising falls into this latter category, for example. Most importantly, it is no more intrinsically reasonable to presume that a photograph depicts only the time it took to make the exposure (or to make a montage assembled from many photographs), than it is to presume that a painting depicts only the time it took to create the painting. It’s even more unreasonable to assert that viewing time—the period we spend looking at, thinking about, and reacting to a photograph—is tied in any way at all to either exposure time (clearly a ridiculous limitation) or even to any understanding of 78

Time

conception and production time. The question of what actually takes place when we look at a photograph, and how long it might take, requires wider investigation. Film director Agnès Varda’s series of brief programmes on French television in 1983, Une minute pour un image (described in Krauss 1990, from which the following is summarized) presented a single photograph on screen for one minute, accompanied by a voice-over commentary in which one person voiced her or his reactions to, and thoughts about, the photograph. The photographs chosen were generally the works of photographers of some note, from various contexts (advertising, art, documentary, etc.), while the speakers came from an even wider variety: photographers (commenting on works other than their own), art critics, writers and political figures, but also many ordinary people with no particular relevant expertise or experience. In response to strong public interest in the series, each photograph was then published together with its commentary in the French newspaper Liberation. Using the latter source, Rosalind Krauss (1990) translated and analysed some of these responses; here is one in which a businessman comments on a photograph by Marie-Paule Nègre: It’s the arrival of a train, it’s the arrival of a train in a dream, a woman waits for someone and obviously makes a mistake about the person; the man she was waiting for obviously is […] he isn’t in the shot, he has aged, and she was waiting for someone much younger, more brilliant than the little fellow we see there […] She dreams and in her dream she is also much younger, at the time when her feelings developed as she would have liked to recover them there, now. It’s a dream that doesn’t work out. (Krauss 1990: 17) Krauss’s principle concern is with the almost universal failure of the commentators to engage with the photographs other than as an extended ‘attempt to say what it is that [they are] looking at’ (Krauss 1990: 16), as nothing more than ‘a potentially endless taxonomy of subjects’ (18). This tendency, despite Krauss’s frustration with it, aligns with the ‘window’ end of John Szarkowski’s influential 1978 division of photographs into ‘mirrors’ and ‘windows.’ In this dichotomy, ‘windows’ are descriptive photographs that deal in a direct and realist manner with some aspect of the shared physical world, often an aspect that is identifiable to some degree in terms of time and place, while ‘mirrors’ are ‘romantically selfexpressive, exhibit concern for formal elegance rather than description, are generally made from a close vantage point for simplicity by abstraction, and favour subject matter such as virgin landscapes, pure geometry, the unidentifiable nude, and social abstractions […]’ (Barrett 1990: 51–52). Perhaps this tells us that, other things being equal, a person asked to look at and comment on a photograph they have not seen before will expect the image to be descriptive, or at least expect that its descriptive aspects are somehow the first order of priority in making meaning from the image, even if non-descriptive meanings are subsequently also to be found there. Perhaps more significantly, the reflex descriptive tendencies of Varda’s commentators also aligns with a consequence of the difference between the selectivity of ordinary seeing 79

Photography, Narrative, Time

as we experience it, and the all-encompassing view of the camera; between biological vision and photographic vision. Considerable empirical evidence is available to attest to the selectivity of vision, and to how attention shapes perception. In looking at any scene, different parts of the retina must be employed in order to best perceive all that is present in the gestalt, the whole of the experienced percept: the fovea, the small area at the centre of the retina with the most dense concentration of cone photoreceptors and the most acute colour vision, can see only a few central degrees of the whole visual field and must thus scan that field extensively and rapidly in order to quickly assimilate high levels of detail that provide key information, while the peripheral retina has more rods and is much better than the fovea at seeing movement and dim light levels. Attention is the mediating factor; we scan the visual field, filtering our visual experience in order to best apply our scarce high-acuity resources, and making hypotheses about what is salient and merits further attention. As well, as Maynard (1997: 207) points out, we are actually aware that this is what we do, and we are aware that at any given moment a significant part of the visual field is only broadly, rather than sharply and specifically, at the forefront of our conscious awareness. The camera makes no such distinction, capturing potentially almost limitless detail depending, obviously, on the precise nature of the photographic apparatus, its settings and the lighting conditions. There will always be what Maynard, referring to Henry Fox Talbot’s description of levels of detail in a plate from Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, describes as a ‘partiality in what the photosystem ‘sees’ (Maynard 1997: 207); that is, the camera might render objects and surfaces as varying in hue or tonality or reflectivity, perhaps because of differences in light quality or because of the presence or absence of moisture, whereas human perception of the actual scene filtered through such knowledge would change how we see and understand the same object or surface. Other forms of picture such as paintings or drawings, being similarly filtered through similar forms of knowledge prior to or in concert with mark-making, have at least the opportunity to eliminate this ‘photographic partiality’ in a similar fashion, although phenomenological approaches to painting (such as impressionism) may further complicate the issue by deliberately seeking to represent percepts without the overlay of knowledge that is independent of those percepts. Such ‘partiality’ aside, all photographs firstly pose a task of scanning and attentionallocating similar to that experienced in directly seeing a scene. With the photograph though, the task is much harder, and requires correspondingly greater effort. Clues present in the original direct experience—movement, depth perception, information from other senses such as sound or smell and sometimes even colour—are absent in the mute two-dimensional surface of a photograph. Given only one minute, and with the pressure of knowing that one’s words will be pored over on public television and in the newspaper, it seems hardly surprising then that the first task for Varda’s respondents was to appraise what their presented photographs were pictures of, to catalogue what could be seen and understood as represented. They have been asked to speak their unguarded initial thoughts, so that is exactly what they do. 80

Time

The point here is not to contradict or negate Krauss’s understandable desire for different forms of interpretation and analysis to have been demonstrated by Varda’s time-pressured respondents, but rather to argue that what they might have needed in order to do so, and to move beyond their initial cautious stocktaking, is … time. The volume of detail available—‘mechanical vision in all its brute triviality’, the ‘sheer vagrant, superfluous and irrelevant abundance of photographic description’ (Kozloff 1994: 238) is likely to tax, even to overwhelm, anyone confronted with an unfamiliar photograph. The viewer will be hoping that, indeed, ‘the least visible thing about a photograph evolves out of what it shows!’ (239), and so must be certain that she or he is confident about what it is, what it does show. No matter how richly complex the ‘superfluous and irrelevant abundance’ of detail might be, on the other side of the ledger of our viewing time there is also an awareness that the detail in a photograph is irrevocably finite. Our viewing time is ultimately foreclosed by this awareness, however much of the available detail we have already actually examined. But against this must be factored the matter of space, whether the physical surface area of a photographic image itself or the space represented in the photograph, or both. A very large photograph requires not just eye movements but head movements, and possibly even movement of the entire body, and the time needed to scan such a photograph with such movements will be proportionately greater than for a small image that can be encompassed with one look. Understanding the depicted space may take even longer, however. Space may be ambiguously or multiply represented—as when, for instance, a photograph makes use of reflective or distorting surfaces or materials in the scene to produce ambiguity on the image plane. Space may also occupy various points on a scale between literal and non-literal, such as in Oscar Gustave Reijlander’s Two Ways of Life, where the viewer must divine that distance from the centre of the image stands for time in the future of the ‘characters’ in the photograph, and that two separate possible futures are represented simultaneously. Or, a photograph may represent aspects of the same space in many different ways, as in David Hockney’s photo-collage ‘joiners,’ where the same space is represented, and partly but inconsistently duplicated, in multiple overlapping images combined to form one overall picture. All of these manifestations of space in photographs ultimately invoke not only the taking of time, but movement; either actual movement as in the viewing of the very large photograph, or an acknowledgement, perversely or otherwise, of movement as the thing that, above all, a photograph can indicate but never actually have. The experiments in ‘photodynamism’ of the Bragaglias, Anton Giulio and Arturo, which preserved the sense and detail of duration of a movement through space by means of a long exposure, solved a problem that we should now see as historically situated, both technically and conceptually: successful representation of the entire, transitional nature of a movement, rather than either the ghostly blur of a moving figure in an early daguerreotype, or the accumulated sharply-separated moments of a Muybridge array (see discussion in Scott 1999, especially pages 216–19). The Bragaglia photographs sought a way of embodying time in photographs not just in its own right, but in order ‘to capture the psychic and emotional impulses expressed in movement and intuited by the spectator’ (Scott 1999: 218). In this they failed; not through 81

Photography, Narrative, Time

any technical shortcoming, because the photographs did indeed capture the physical imprint of the full duration of some movements, and in an aesthetically appealing fashion. In doing so, however—in limiting their subject matter almost completely to the careful depiction of a constrained movement, and in thus eliminating or excluding facial expressions, bodily indicators of emotion, and environmental or circumstantial context—they also eliminated the very cues that turn out to be of greater significance in conveying senses of time in a photograph, and which may provide information about its past and the future. Time, space and presence Christian Marclay’s astounding 24-hour-long film The Clock edits together clips from an eclectic array of films and TV programmes chosen only for their inclusion, somewhere within the minute or so embraced by each scene, of a watch, clock, or other time display. Each shot of one of these timepieces tells us not just the time in the film, but the actual time of day or night at which the viewer is seeing the scene. Shots are sewn together where possible by matching eyelines or matching action, or by extension or anticipation of audio tracks across the cuts, from each film segment to the next wildly different one. As an audience member, one is at first disbelieving, then unnerved, and then increasingly absorbed as one’s mind desperately attempts to construct a coherent plot, and as each display of a clock or watch brings confirmation that yes, that really is the time. Right now. In this admittedly highly unusual case, film seemingly manages to draw together the two senses of time referred to in Isaac Newton’s ‘Scholium to the Definitions’ in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year. (Newton 1934: 6) The Clock is anything but typical of the film medium in general, but part of its point is to draw attention to these two senses of time and thus to film’s potential capacity to contrapuntally weave them into a single integrated experience. In one perfectly literal sense, the film as a whole is indeed a clock, a device for telling time at any point in every 24-hour cycle, so long as it continues to be replayed, and this we may take to represent ‘true’ time. But as the film proceeds, and as we make transitions at irregular intervals from one scene to another and from one fractured narrative to another, all the while attempting to sew these disparate fragments into a whole and to resist the repeated fraying of any single thread of temporal continuity, we are repeatedly made aware of our own sense of ‘relative, apparent, and common time.’ 82

Time

In contrast with film (or, at least, the potential of film as demonstrated in Marclay’s Clock), photography takes what at first seems to be an indivisibly small fraction of time, and splits it apart. Perversely, this is probably most readily observable via the convention of the freeze-frame in cinema, where in the midst of a stream of single frames presented so rapidly that we read them as natural movement, we are suddenly compelled to read a single frame, intensely, for as long as it is presented. As David Campany observes: Technically speaking, they are, of course, single photographic frames repeated to give the illusion of time at a standstill, but we tend to read them culturally as photographs too. The moment we register that the image is a freeze we have in place a number of possible ways to read it photographically: as a poignant snapshot, a telling news image, a family album photo or a mythic emblem. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a freeze frame resistant to photographic reading. (Campany 2008: 54; emphasis in original) The freeze-frame is thus a kind of theoretical junction-box: viewed from the perspective of cinema, it shows us an ‘idealized instant—the pinnacle of the action, the clearest facial expression or the perfect composition’ (Campany 2008: 54). Viewed from the perspective of photography, it enables us to see, and potentially to review and revisit, the concept of the ‘decisive moment,’ within the very context that has revealed—or proven, or perhaps produced—its decisiveness. In any film that uses freeze-frames appropriately and judiciously (it’s not hard to also think of instances in which freeze-frames have been used out of laziness or lack of creative thought), we can almost see film as aspiring to the condition of photography: the film leads us to the moment at which a single, ideal, condensed image conveys everything that the film can or would want to convey—including indefinite, unresolved openness. Campany (57) points to the example of the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatres Cents Coups), a silent freeze-frame showing the face of the lead character Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud), turned to camera, expressionless ... and thus available to support the greatest range of interpretations. It’s simultaneously fixed and limited, and free to go anywhere—but also constrained in that freedom, being just as inflected by the story that has led up to the frame as well as by what is in the frame. Single photographs are only sometimes in a position to take advantage of a backstory, and as already stated, the point of this book is to look hardest at isolated photographs, those without supporting information. In these instances—in every photograph, in some way—there is always the phenomenon of dual time to be taken into account. Sometimes this is an unavoidable implication of the picture, whether conscious and deliberate on the part of the photographer or not. War photographs, for example, frequently promote or demand strong emotional engagement with the subject matter, and provide rich material with which to make an imaginative emotional and cognitive leap. In this way we are moved to connect what has been, what might have been, what is now and what was then. Photographs of bodies such as the American Civil War battle-aftermath images by O’Sullivan, Gardner, 83

Photography, Narrative, Time

Brady and their nameless assistants, or Felice Beato’s pictures of the overtaken fort at Taku during the Opium Wars in China, or indeed almost any photograph of war’s aftermath, have such obvious implications for the time period leading up to what is depicted (that is, in general: not long before the making of this photograph, the bodies shown here were living people) and for the viewer (that is, both the present of the photograph and the past of the photograph are now in the past of the viewer) that it is sometimes difficult to understand why some authors appear so unwilling to include them in discussion of photographic reading. Susan Sontag, for example, acknowledges that ‘the ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say “there is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit— what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way,”’ but then on the same page concludes that the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses […] In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be understood in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. (Sontag 1979: 23) This time implication need not necessarily be simple or unidirectional. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reproduces (Barthes 1984: 95) a photograph by Alexander Gardner of Lewis Payne, who had tried to assassinate US Secretary of State W.H. Seward in 1865. Gardner had made the photograph in the cell where Payne waited to be hanged, and Barthes is struck forcefully by the ‘defeat of Time’ (96) in it, and in historical photographs generally, as expressed most economically in the caption he gives to the photograph: ‘He is dead and 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 the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. (Barthes 1984: 96; emphasis in original) Barthes draws attention to the fact that this effect, the forced contemplation of the effect of time, may be present even where no people, alive or dead, are represented: At the limit, there is no need to represent a body in order for me to experience this vertigo of time defeated. In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of ‘reality.’ (Barthes 1984: 96–97) 84

Time

I said, above, that ‘photography takes what at first seems to be an indivisibly small fraction of time, and splits it apart,’ and Barthes’ description of his reaction to the Saltzmann photograph sounds rather like a subjective description of that experience. Since it is a report of Barthes’ mental state at the time he is looking at the photograph, we can properly interpret it not as a mixture of separate sensory inputs, but rather as a description of his total experience of presence at the time he is looking at the photograph. We can do this firstly because he explicitly includes ‘my present’ as an ingredient of his consciousness at the time, and secondly because there is every reason to include all cognitive and sensory inputs he might be receiving, as he regards the Salzmann photograph, in any proper and complete description of his sense of presence at that time. This changes how we understand the nature of presence—and, possibly, how we might understand another aspect of photography’s interactions with our sense of time. In 2003 Carrie Heeter, Virtual Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University in San Francisco, published a remarkable examination of some assumptions made about our sense of presence. Her field is the development of virtual environments, and for researchers in this field, the approximation of ordinary, unmediated human sensory experience while using virtual environments is a constant principal goal. However, as she says in the abstract, ‘the underlying assumption is that, in the absence of technology, everyone experiences continuous presence at a constant intensity throughout their lives.’ Instead, Heeter suggests, ‘even a simulator providing perfectly mediated sensory perception might not automatically induce a strong, perceptual sense of presence because reality does not always induce a strong continuous sense of presence. (Heeter 2003: 335; emphasis added). Heeter reports on her experience of a visit to the US Space and Rocketry Center’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. The Center houses rockets, capsules, shuttles, simulation equipment and other hardware from the US Space Program, and runs hands-on space-related experiential activities with an emphasis on ‘teamwork, decision-making and leadership’ (US Space and Rocket Center 2013). Heeter’s visit was part of some research into the creation of a Virtual Space Camp programme, and so she had strong motivation to attend carefully and fully to every aspect of her time and experience there, but she also used the visit as a single-subject observational experiment ‘to explore issues and to question some of the research community’s prevailing assumptions about presence’ (Heeter 2003: 335), by carefully observing her own sense of presence during a range of tasks at the Camp. The results were similar to the way in which we might all, if similarly skilled in structured introspection and pressed for complete honesty, describe our sense of presence in many everyday experiences: I was physically on a real shuttle, with my natural human auto-stereoscopic full field of view, complete passive haptic feedback, and natural navigation (walking, climbing, sitting, bending, and touching). Despite this total physical realism, far beyond what simulations today can provide, I did not particularly feel as if I were there. (Heeter 2003: 336) 85

Photography, Narrative, Time

Heeter tentatively derives a number of variables affecting presence during her time participating in the Space Camp experiential exercises, and expresses them as possible universals: among a much larger number of these in her article are, for example, that ‘the level of presence induced will relate to the novelty and predictability of an experience’ (336), that ‘there are individual differences in how and when presence is experienced’ (338), and that ‘presence occurs during periods of time when cognition (processes such as perception, attention, learning, thought, and affect) is closely tied to current perceptual stimuli’ (340). Clearly these and her many other observations would require considerable empirical work to confidently demonstrate that her picture of presence is complete and accurate—but she is a trained professional observer in the field, and her paper includes some analysis of the consistency of these ideas with other relevant academic work. The last of Heeter’s observed variables that I have listed above (‘presence occurs during periods of time when cognition (processes such as perception, attention, learning, thought, and affect) is closely tied to current perceptual stimuli’ (340)) is one that seems to me particularly salient. If we take this statement quite literally, then clearly presence is an experience which is as likely to be initiated by (for example) closely attending to a photograph—perceiving it, thinking about it, being affected by it—as by anything in the salient physical and sensory environment of the ‘real world.’ As happened for Barthes, one might in such a circumstance feel oneself to be present ‘in’ the photograph, and made dizzy, almost literally, by a sense of the real (local, non-photographic) ground no longer being under one’s feet. In such a situation the two senses of time distinguished by Newton, and foregrounded in The Clock, start to pull apart again; we oscillate between presence in the time—and space—of the photograph’s depiction, and presence in the real world in which the photograph is a physical object. Some of the comparative task analyses provided by Heeter in her article closely follow Barthes’ description of ‘the vertigo of time defeated,’ even though Heeter’s variable sense of presence is portrayed only as a revelation of how ordinary experience works, not as the description of a problem. She compares the sense of presence experienced over time during three different activities: playing racquetball, watching a movie, and driving on a highway. Cognition during each task is diagrammatically represented as being differentially distributed between two poles—either closely tied to current perceptual stimuli, or unrelated to current stimuli. Racquetball requires close attendance to current perceptual stimuli at all times; watching a movie involves ‘periods of intense focus and periods of contemplation unrelated to the current movie stimuli’ (342), while highway driving, alarmingly but realistically, allows for considerable cognitive activity unrelated to the task: ‘long periods of being lost in thought, combined with moments of danger (or navigation) that draw cognition quickly into synch with current perceptual stimuli’ (343). As already acknowledged, not every photograph can draw a person into ‘long periods of being lost in thought,’ but some do. Any attempt to generalize about how we experience time in relation to photographs must deal with this capacity to be moved by a photograph, to be mentally relocated to a place that is ‘other’ in both space and time. Our inescapable 86

Time

immersion in time may make it forever impossible to succeed in our struggle to comprehend it, but photographs seem to be one of the tools in that struggle: Human gestures, human actions, involve time. We move through time, we live time, we are creatures of time. Photography retrieves for us small shards of time, and we should relish our astonishment at this fact. Photography juggles time. Yet we can only know these shards and other simulacra of times gone by in the present, in the now. The longer we contemplate a photographic image, the longer we stay in the now. Staying in the now, instead of furiously rushing towards the future, has psychological advantages, and profound reverberations in our lives. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed somewhere in the Tractatus, those of us who live in the present live in eternity. That is, we remain outside of time even while clocks tick their artificial minutes away. Perhaps the real measure of a photograph’s greatness is that in its presence we experience a priceless relief from mortality, we engage in such intense thought that we have a sense of being outside ourselves, even for the eternity of a moment. (Jussim 1989: 60)

87

Chapter 5 The Eternity of a Moment: Evidence

I

n 1977 two San Francisco photographers, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, mounted an exhibition of photographs in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Called Evidence, it ‘comprises 59 photographs they found during three years spent searching the archives of more than 100 US Government agencies, scientific laboratories and corporations’ (Biber 2011: 576). A book of these photographs, also called Evidence (Sultan and Mandel 2003) was initially published in the same year as the exhibition, and subsequently republished once more in 2004. Selections of the photographs can be found in several places on the web (e.g. Shea 2011). Mandel and Sultan were looking for … what, exactly? By 1983, having been encouraged by grants from the US National Endowment for the Arts to bring a similar methodology to the world of news photography, with an exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum, May 7–June 7, 1983, they were ready to confess that at the time they had started the search for the photographs in Evidence, they were not clear about what they were seeking. As they progressed, they found themselves concentrating on photographs in which people were shown demonstrating or testing a function of a technological device. The artists extracted these photographs from the everyday world and gave them new meanings through placement in a different context, in a way similar to Marcel Duchamp’s creation of ‘ready-mades.’ (Lewallen 1983: 3) Here speaks an exhibition-curatorial voice rather than a photographic or artistic one. To be sure, Mandel and Sultan have moved the images to a new context and thus radically changed how we see and understand them, but the genius of their work, that which gives each image its almost shocking visual pungency, is not to substitute a new context, but to radically and completely cut the pictures loose from their old one. It’s neither surprising nor, mostly, problematic that those connected with the exhibition business, whether curators, gallery owners, reviewers or even gallery visitors, will seek to approach the works that make up any single exhibition as in some way a related set. This happens even where every work in an exhibition is by a different person, and different in size and media: the collected works must be conceived of at some level as one group, one show. And because ‘narrative’ remains a buzzword that nobody feels particularly obliged to define but which always sounds as though it might confer special meaning on what is otherwise disparate, opaque or amorphous, it has often been the practice to describe a

Photography, Narrative, Time

group of otherwise-unrelated pictures in an exhibition as being subtly joined by their own underlying, self-generating narrative. Try inserting the phrase ‘narrative of the exhibition,’ appropriately restricted with quotation marks, into your search engine and you’ll soon see what I mean. Of course, many exhibitions do have a narrative that joins their component works together, and which importantly does confer meaning that is an important aspect of both the individual components and the set. As well, in both the exhibition and the subsequent book of Evidence, the pictures are placed in a sequence—it’s not possible to position them other than in a sequence, in either mode—with the result that ‘almost strictly due to the sequencing, the pictures take on a cryptically ethereal feel’ (Shea 2011). Constance Lewallen tells us, too, that ‘[Evidence] is structured in the photo-narrative style of such books as Robert Frank’s The Americans; there is a subtle order to the progression of images’ (Lewallen 1983: 3). One need not argue that the arrangement and sequencing of the photographs is unsubtle or in any way aesthetically unpleasing in order to strongly deny any underlying narrative, deliberate or otherwise. We know that the photographs in Evidence are sourced from thousands of originals produced by organizations completely independent of each other, and are the results of activities that are similarly isolated from each other even where the images come from the same organization, so if they can be sensibly said to connect with each other, then whatever does this connecting is categorically not a narrative. But further, it seems to me that this is an instance where, other than for the purpose of formal comparisons (lighting, grain, lens type and so on), the serious viewer is obliged to look at each photograph in exactly the way that the exhibition strongly signals to us: as adrift in space, unmoored to any textual or contextual hint of explanation: Without captions or narration, the images all appear to document scientific experiments or processes which are facilitated by unexplained technologies: a young man in strange underwear is connected by electrodes to a wall clock; a robot does push-ups; five men wearing space suits are crowded into a box; a gloved hand restrains a monkey; a group of men wearing helmets walk knee-deep in foamy bubbles. There are explosions, burns, wires; most images defy simple description. Seeing the list of institutions from which they were gathered, the viewer is variously amused, appalled or mystified that anyone thought to conduct these experiments and, what is more, photograph them. (Biber 2011: 1) There are wonderful touches of sheer coincidental propinquity, too. In one photograph, reproduced here as Figure 5, three men stand beside some kind of communication tower which is being raised into place by a cable attached to a gantry standing to their, and the picture’s, left. An aeroplane, flying relatively low but nevertheless in the far distance, is so positioned in the frame that its nose appears close to, and heading precisely towards, a small square box on the very tip of the communication device. Even if the communication 92

The Eternity of a Moment

Figure 5:  From Evidence, Sultan and Mandel (2003).

93

Photography, Narrative, Time

device has to do with aeroplanes, the spatial and directional placement of the aeroplane in relation to the communication device from the viewpoint of the photographer is clearly incidental to the requirements of the experiment or activity that is being undertaken. But what placement! I should be so lucky. If one wanted an outstanding example of Barthes’ punctum at work, this is surely it. The viewer can hardly stand to look elsewhere in the picture, other than to repeatedly and futilely seek an explanation for how and why this remarkable and seemingly-but-impossibly purposeful relationship between the aeroplane and the communication tower has come about. Here, ‘inside movement,’ is undoubtedly ‘one moment at which the elements are in balance;’ but is it in any sense critical? One can only shrug one’s shoulders. The title for the collected pictures, then, is powerfully ironic: we have to believe that these are indeed evidence—but we literally haven’t got a clue what they are evidence for. We’re quite used to the idea of propositions being presented without evidence (glance at the letters column of any newspaper or even, alas, at the transcript of almost any party-political speech), but to encounter the reverse—evidence presented without the proposition it was intended to test or support—is not merely novel, but distinctly unsettling. Humour springs up to offer a partial rescue: Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, remarks in a commissioned essay accompanying the 2003 edition of Evidence, that the pictures seem both ‘uproariously funny and desperately sad’ (quoted from Biber, 576). But neither humour, nor the search for some meaning in the sequencing of the images, will provide an answer to the gnawing questions with which each image taunts us: what is going on here? What led up to this? And what happened subsequently? The fact that nobody is ever going to be able to provide a reliable—dare I say, evidencebased—answer to these questions does not in any way suppress our urge to silently ponder them. On the contrary, it is exactly the desperate desire for answers that we know will never come which drives our interest in the pictures. The aeroplane picture contains an unusually clear visual conundrum, but with all the photographs, the viewer searches the finest details of the image, never giving up hope that somehow an explanation, or even a clue, will be revealed or even hinted at. The tension is relentless: I must find out what is happening here, and I will never find out what is happening here. And in continuing to search for answers, we’re loosely aware—from the scripts for other life situations in which explanations for mysteries have eventually been provided—that any genuinely satisfying answer would need to be in the general form of a narrative: something like ‘this was the … laboratory, where tests of/experiments on the … were being conducted to see if (a proposition) was possible/true/safe/whatever. The photograph shows (situation or person description). The test indicated that (result).’ No matter what a curator or publisher might hope that we feel about this kind of exhibition or book, we are not terribly concerned with finding a narrative linking each picture with the others—but we’re desperately keen to find the unique narrative for each single, isolated, inexplicable photograph.

94

The Eternity of a Moment

More and more evidence I say ‘this kind of exhibition or book’ because, surprisingly, Sultan and Mandel’s book and exhibition are not only not unique, but are not even uniquely titled. In 1992 Luc Sante, writer of several other books on photography, published a new and unrelated book, Evidence. This was a book of 55 far more gruesome photographs of crime scenes, mainly murders, selected from a part of the New York Police Department’s collection of crime-scene photographs taken between 1914 and 1918 that had been dumped in the East River, and later recovered and rehoused in the New York Municipal Archives. Sante subsequently did his research in, and made his selection of pictures from, this archive. Sante’s book is in many respects the opposite of Sultan and Mandel’s. Not only does he concentrate on grim brutality rather than on inexplicable technical oddity, but he also provides an appendix that contains whatever detailed information he was able to find on each picture. While Sultan and Mandel’s pictures each float in their own caption-free space of nothingness, Sante’s photographs are accompanied by a commentary and, where factual information such as news clippings are no longer retrievable, he speculates constructively, and in a manner tied to what can be seen in each photograph, about what has happened. Some of these commentaries veer away from the individual photographs to address wider issues: photography more generally; memory; crime, of course; death; order and randomness. Narrative is undoubtedly a common thread, and Sante’s inability to resist providing a story himself makes a stark contrast to the restraint shown by the earlier authors. Like a cat with a mouse, Sultan and Mandel know just how much we will want, even need, stories for their strange pictures, and their cruel artistic refinement—even had they been in possession of factual information with which to satisfy our narrative urge—is to withhold those stories. Katherine Biber (2011), already cited above, is concerned with the shaping of archival policy in order to take account of all the competing interests affecting the use and treatment of evidential material after it has served its purpose in the resolution of disputed facts in the courtroom. Biber, an academic lawyer herself, rightly takes issue with Luc Sante’s own description of the evidential function of the photographs in his book as mere affectless records, concerned with details, as they themselves become details in the wider scope of police philosophy, which is far less concerned with the value of life than with the value of order [… and which] serve death up raw and unmediated. (Sante 1992: 60, quoted in Biber 2011: 577) She would be entitled to bristle at the notion that the justice system as a whole is not ‘concerned with the value of life,’ but her worries are more sophisticated: Sante, she says, has ‘confused the “record” with the “system” from which it emerged, and the “document” with “proof ”; he says that “evidence” is “raw and unmediated,” which every lawyer knows is not true’ (Biber 2–11: 577). I would have to agree, although I write as one who has occasionally had need to

95

Photography, Narrative, Time

tell lawyers, too, that evidence, especially photographic or video evidence, is by definition and by inclination never unmediated. Unlike Sultan and Mandel’s deeply and insolubly strange images, Sante’s pictures portray events—predominantly homicides, and mostly with a domestic connection or setting—with which most of us thankfully have only highly mediated experience, through fiction television and film, and news reports in various media. There is a shock in being confronted with a photographic image of a real dead body in a pool of blood, someone whose fate is clearly the end result of violence we probably only know through fiction—and most likely only through the kind of fiction that is intended to allow us to project ourselves into the exciting role of the victor in an idealized, largely bloodless and highly choreographed encounter. Between fiction and news, I would suggest that fiction programmes offer the most frequently encountered and influential framing for events of this kind. A professor of forensics has observed to me (Professor James Robertson, private communication) that juries in murder cases, in jurisdictions where murder is a rare crime, are surprisingly unlikely to offer a guilty verdict, seemingly on the grounds that murder is understood to be a crime that can happen on television, but not in real life). The forensic imaginary Photography has also joined in the game of using fiction to reflect upon its more traditional applications in the forensic tradition. In the early 1970s, Les Krims satirized forensic photography in The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheat Murders, though with aims mostly as unclear as the anti-leftist sentiments that infuse his website (Krims 2010). His overtly staged scenes have as much of the look of factual reality as is unavoidable simply by virtue of their being photographs, but they don’t go far beyond that, in any direction: they aren’t truly forensic in any sense of the word. Like much of Krims’s work, the sense of polemic is stronger than that of narrative, but the polemics are so mixed and so unusual that it can be hard to determine exactly what it is about forensic photography that he might be trying to say. More recently, and with her attention more finely tuned to the details of what must probably now be identified as its own genre, Los Angeles photographer Melanie Pullen has produced a series of High Fashion Crime Scenes based largely on her own particular enthusiasm for Luc Sante’s 1992 Evidence (Stephen Wirtz Gallery 2006). In highly saturated colour as befits actual contemporary crime-scene photography, but in contrast to the black-and-white images that inspired her, Pullen’s work deliberately and carefully conflates public enthusiasm for forensics (CSI had started in 2000, but even in 2012 was still one of the most watched television shows in the world) with the infinitely accommodating fake-spectacle world of fashion photography. Anonymous models, barely or partially visible in dimly lit landscapes or cramped, unkempt interiors, mimic the results of violent crime and tragedy, all dressed up in the likes of Bulgari, Gucci and Vivienne Westwood. Pullen’s photographs in this series have some quasi-political goals: they certainly raise questions about the flat affect that 96

The Eternity of a Moment

characterizes so much fashion photography, and they almost satirize the very authenticity of real crime photography. With their meticulous attention to the fragmented and fragmenting visual tropes that run through Sante’s Evidence pictures, and so many other crime-scene photographs of the period, the pictures have an alarming familiarity: parts of lifeless bodies caught in mirrors; protruding feet alerting us to bodies hidden inside objects or under furniture; the suspended legs of many hanging suicide victims. Because of the antecedents to which they refer so strongly, narrative is an overpowering presence in Pullen’s photographs, almost like a perfume. Of course, there’s no sense of rapid or momentary change as in, say, Cartier-Bresson’s puddle-leaping man, as if the depicted situation has been arrived at from some startlingly different configuration of events and bodies only moments before. Neither is there any feeling of calm before the storm, as though sweeping change is just about to happen, moments after the shutter was released to capture what we actually see. If anything there’s a sense of supreme stillness—lifelessness, one might say—that is completely consistent with the subject matter, both literally and referentially. Other than captions of one or two words, often names of models, Pullen doesn’t provide supplementary information—because none could exist, at the level of the crime narratives being referenced. But even if only conceptually, there’s a desire on the part of the viewer to know more about the narrative within which each photograph’s mise-en-scène must surely sit. Ideas are situated: Pullen’s photographs aren’t in any sense direct copies of the ‘true crime’ scenes that inspired her work, they are wholly novel constructions, and the discipline necessary to thematically and visually integrate the crime and fashion elements can surely only work if supported by some concept of the events—the sequence of events—that would lead up to the situation she depicts, and perhaps beyond. Or so our minds tell us. Standing in front of one of her crime/fashion pictures, we’re also running through all the old mental scripts for crime narratives. We’re probably never going to find out what Pullen might have conceived of as the generative background to one of her photographs, just as we’re never going to find out what’s behind the Sultan and Mandel photographs. We’ve become the Pavlov’s dogs of narrative, metaphorically salivating at the presentation of each photograph (bell), not because any given picture actually provides a narrative reward, but because we are conditioned to expect narrative in the company of imagery of this kind—and when it’s absent, our minds must fill the gap. It’s exactly why we worry and chafe at each of the Sultan and Mandel pictures too: we feel the phantom limb of a story, and can almost move its fingers; but when we look for it, it just isn’t there. When I wrote, above, that crime-scene photography has become almost a genre, I was thinking principally of the various crossovers between true forensic photography in the legal realm, and fictionalized, satirical or other creative imitations of such imagery. Real forensic photography, however, by virtue of its professional approaches and standards if nothing else, may also be regarded as a genre in its own right. Having examined Luc Sante’s photographs rescued from the East River and rehoused in an archive, there is a pleasing symmetry about turning now to a very similar collection, closer to my home, to find some individual photographs with a remarkably similar history. 97

Photography, Narrative, Time

Housed in the historic brown sandstone Police and Court Building (1856–1886), nestling among skyscrapers right opposite Sydney’s iconic Circular Quay, the New South Wales Historic Houses Trust’s Justice and Police Museum (J&P) is home to an archive of an estimated 130,000 glass plate and acetate negatives of police investigation and evidence photographs, covering the period between 1912 and 1964. In the words of the J&P site it ‘may be the biggest police photography collection of its type in the southern hemisphere,’ and it includes images ‘from every imaginable variety of law breaking across six decades of the 20th century [… including] mug shots, accident scenes, crashes, murders, fires, forgeries and fingerprints, as well as Sydney streetscapes and domestic spaces’ (Sydney Living Museums 2013). As with Mandel and Sultan’s Evidence, these photographs have largely been separated from the documentation that might have linked them to the lives and events they depict. This is not because such documentation has been consciously removed, but because, like the Sante photographs retrieved by the New York Municipal Archives, the J&P photographs comprised a long-forgotten police archive that had been abandoned in the basement of a warehouse in Sydney. Police work is intense, and primarily (and properly) focused on the now, and on what has yet to be remedied rather than on what is past and resolved. With the pictures having completed their primary tour of evidential duty through the New South Wales justice system they would no doubt at some stage have been presumed to be no longer of use or worth. By the time they had been rediscovered, the warehouse basement had flooded and most accompanying documentation had been either lost or destroyed. Surviving information, in the form of pencil notes on the paper envelopes enclosing the negatives, is limited and inconsistent, and where it occurs at all, it includes no more than approximate dates and locations, surnames linked to the cases or events and, sometimes, the names of photographers. Stories swirl around and through these photographs in so many ways. A large and continuing collaborative sequence of projects between Ross Gibson and Kate Richards, including physical multimedia installations and blogs and collectively known as Life After Wartime (Gibson and Richards 1998) has at its heart the creation of multiple and overlapping stories. The most recent, at the time of writing this book, is Bystander, an immersive interactive multimedia environment that allows exhibition visitors to generate, in response to their own movements through the exhibition space, unique sequences of photographs from the archive accompanied by overlaid text and music composed by the authors. In Gibson and Richards’ own words, the Bystander exhibition environment ‘is a kind of performative story-generator haunted by Sydney’s recent past. Depending on the behaviour of visitors, a variable and volatile world of audiovisual narrative evolves endlessly but cogently’ (Gibson and Richards 1998). In Bystander, and in other parts of the Life After Wartime project such as their Crime Scene Exhibition, another interactive installation, we again see what I referred to earlier as a ‘curatorial’ tendency to find, or make, relationships between pictures even when the formal information that might conventionally assist that process is absent. This is a particularly appealing thing to do with the J&P photographs because of the strong threads and links to known or partly known external narrative structures, particularly historical ones, and it 98

The Eternity of a Moment

provides a valuable way of connecting the sociological and historical feel of the era with the individual particularity of the photographs. Sydney’s complex and difficult economic and social development, in the period reflected by the J&P archive, includes two world wars, the 1930s depression and—secondarily attendant upon these traumas—desperate poverty, high unemployment, and crime waves so violent and widespread that the city’s fame spread around the globe, for every bad reason. But Ross Gibson also takes up the challenge of addressing individual photographs, and does so in the form of short, almost haiku-like poetic responses, all of which loosely take the form of narrative. These short texts vary in many ways, inevitably given the variegated nature of the photographs, but they always engage in some way with a sense of the time that hangs, brooding and sullen, over the photographs. Examples can be seen in the Accident Music series accessible on the Justice and Police Museum’s blog, From the Loft (Gibson 2010 and continuing). Notably and unusually, the sense of time that inhabits Accident Music is often extended by the device of speculating about, even summoning, a future for the photograph, rather than dwelling only in the implications of the past that each picture hints at. These speculative futures are mostly not firmly subtended by the photographs themselves, and certainly don’t refer to any of the minimal descriptive information that might be available; rather, they somehow take wing from a visual possibility the image offers in its isolated, single state. In Accident Music 118 for instance, a photograph of an open window above an unruffled single bed carries the brief official archival caption: ‘Kings Cross, Suspicious Death, 1954.’ The image itself is peaceful, contemplative, and it’s that tone that Gibson runs with: Autumn will come soon. Cooling in stealth. Delivered slyly down in a dull waiting dusk. Chaffing winds will move the light around. Coloured clouds will assemble to cook a new mood.

(Gibson 2010)

Gibson adds poetic value to the photographs in such a way as to bring to life their potential, all that they can stand for, although, of course, another different narrative would certainly come forth from another person, and even from Gibson himself on another day. His narrative is not completely unrelated to the formal description; that is, it’s not just the result of a kind of poetic quick-association test, but a serious take on the emotional flavour of the photograph that is also consistent with, but not dependent on, the caption information—the sense of loss, that someone who was here is now not here. There is implicit acknowledgement that yes, somebody has died, but those who are still here must recover and go on, if only to honour the dead and to make their lives retrospectively whole, perhaps by helping to resolve the suspicion that surrounds their death. What Gibson does is to make concrete the fact that narrative is at the forefront of our minds as we attempt to make meaning from each photograph, not just in the absence of any other information, but even with that other information. 99

Photography, Narrative, Time

Imagination and the real: Reading true crime Must we be poets to take this step into narrative? Let’s look at some other photographs from the J&P archive and find out what we can induce from the picture alone. We should start by reminding ourselves that forensic photography is ordinarily initiated for a number of reasons: to produce clear, easily readable pictures of crime scenes or other evidence, informed by the ability to recognize significant elements or areas of later dispute; to show in those photographs, as required, the physical nature, fine details, positions and relationships of and between objects; to record transitory or perishable items or relationships; and overall to make, to the greatest extent possible, images that are uninflected by the process of making the images, consistent with showing everything that might be required to meet all the other requirements. To enlarge on this last point, it might for instance be necessary to both illuminate an object in order to provide clear visual information about it for a court, for example, but also to photograph the same object with the ambient lighting pertaining to the event in question. The requirements are not the same as for other photographic disciplines; an architectural photographer and a forensic photographer would thus be most unlikely to photograph the interior of a room, for example, in the same manner. Starting from what is directly observable and moving into the full flow of inference and interpretive supposition, what can we get from a single photograph, how do we support our knowledge and at what point do we turn towards narrative? Figure 5 shows the interior of a down-at-heel kitchen/living room, with a Dover cooking and heating wood stove on top of which sits a small Primus pressurized-kerosene ring-burner. The placement of the Primus indicates that either it is warm weather and that heating is not required, or at least that the wood stove was not lit at the time the Primus was placed there, since the potentially pressurized fuel tank of the Primus is sitting directly above the Dover’s hotplate—a very dangerous arrangement, if the wood stove were to be lit. The saucepan immediately behind the Primus ring-burner, and the kettle to the right of it, are both positioned consistently with being used either on the Primus or on the Dover, and would almost certainly have been stored on the Dover’s hotplate when not in use. The top of the Dover, it would seem, is the ‘kitchen’ for the room’s residents, as is confirmed by the presence of another nearby pot and two lids at the right of the photograph. A striped curtain, or a piece of fabric functioning as a curtain, is slung on a thin wire or cable that stretches across the opening of the bare brick fireplace within which the Dover sits; in the photograph, it is pulled to the left side of the fireplace. It’s likely that an arrangement of this sort would be used for clothes drying, in wet weather, but the presence of the curtain also seems to be either a feminine element in its own right, or a means of concealing a working area, the stove, from the rest of the living area: the room we’re looking at, in other words. The desire to separate cooking and living spaces, and to preserve a space for socializing that is not overtly intruded upon by the flavour of work and necessity, is not exclusively a female one, but typically and conventionally so. 100

The Eternity of a Moment

Figure 6:  Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.

The presence of a decorative impulse is further confirmed by a fringe of cloth, with scalloped edges, that hangs down from the mantelpiece. Symmetrically arranged there, equidistant from the centre, there are also two photographs, very difficult to make out in the gloom (the actual ambient light unassisted by flash, though of course we don’t know the time of day); the one on the right is a full-length standing three-quarter profile portrait of a woman, but the one on the left is so dark as to be indistinguishable. Given that the resident/s of this household demonstrably have few resources to call on, and that some of those few resources have been stretched to take care of these niceties, we can surmise that there is, or has been, a woman living here; with slightly less certainty, we can say that the presence of both newspapers and alcohol, and used matches on the floor, makes it quite likely that a man has been living here also. The roughly made stool in front of the fireplace  has a masculine, workaday appearance. The newspaper on the table is open at what seems to be a full-page, or at least full-page-length, advertisement for Sunlight Soap rather than at editorial content, perhaps indicating that the newspaper is being used as table protection rather than as reading material. 101

Photography, Narrative, Time

We can probably assume that there’s a bedroom elsewhere, and some kind of washing and toileting facilities, although the presence of what is either a sofa or chaise longue (we can only see one arm), at the right of the frame, suggests the distinct possibility that the room we can see incorporates sleeping arrangements as well. It would not have been unusual in the prevailing economic circumstances for one room to be virtually the full extent of the premises—often a former kitchen for a larger main house, pressed into service as a bed-sitter. Many of the sad spaces in this archive are rooms rented by relatively poor people to even poorer people, and this room is by no means the worst. But the core of its tragedy, while no doubt exacerbated by poverty, goes far beyond poverty. On the floor to the left, in front of the stove where even in these straightened circumstances one might hope to find warmth, food and, maybe, companionship, there is a pool of what can only be blood. We can hope that it’s something else, but whatever else we do or don’t know, we know that this is an evidence photograph—and the dark pool on the floor is certainly part of the evidence. Something here has gone from bad to worse. It seems that a man and a woman have been living here—probably unemployed and for that reason not just impoverished but in each other’s company more than might have been tolerable, particularly in a limited space. The tablecloth and some of the furniture are of good quality, so there’s a hint that the residents, if also the owners of these, may have fallen from formerly better economic circumstances into much harder times. Alcohol—a depressant—is in plentiful supply. It’s all consistent with a narrative frame we know about: an atmosphere of blame and threat, and quite possibly of actual violence, almost always from the man to the woman; miserable physical circumstances with no prospects of improvement; and a pervasive, inward-looking sense of failure that is repeatedly reinforced in what passes for conversation. In this tinder-dry emotional world, maybe it only takes one carelessly (or deliberately, or unwittingly) lit match—an accusation, a bitter comment, a minor slur repeated once too often—for the fire of blind depressed violence to explode beyond a diminished capacity for extinguishment. I’ve emphasized poverty here, but of course not every tragedy starts with poverty. In Figure 7 there’s a complete contrast, at least on first inspection. The room is brightly lit; the photographer’s flash is the most likely source of that light, because a very bright reflection is visible in a metal lid or baking tray that is upside down on the floor at the far lower right of the picture, as well as in a corner of the sink and in the enamel handles of the oven. In those oven handles we can actually see two separated sources of light: the brighter one probably the flash, and the lesser one most likely a fluorescent tube. The modern (for its time, perhaps around the late 1950s or early 1960s) fixtures and fittings of the room, however, and its clean white surfaces, make one feel that it would in any case be well lit. This is a comfortable middle-class kitchen of its time. The Streamline Success gas stove and oven is an upmarket model which costs nearly twice as much as one of the most widespread Australian mid-range ovens of the time, the ‘Early Kooka’ (the enamel emblem on the oven door of the Early Kooka featured a kookaburra, a large Australian kingfisher named for 102

The Eternity of a Moment

Figure 7:   Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.

its loud laughing call). This Streamline was probably the best in its range, as it includes a separate warming drawer below the oven as well as six, rather than four, gas burners. Apart from minor damage or burn marking on the enamel on one corner of the oven door, it is in excellent condition and very clean, as are bench tops, tiles, cupboard doors, and—apart from the obvious exceptions, discussed further below—the floor. The kettle, coffee percolator and teapot on the stove are all clean and carefully cared for, and the four cups on the bench top are good china porcelain. There’s a set of kitchen scales on the bench behind the cups and its weighing basket appears to hold some cooking ingredients; there’s a shiny battery-powered lighter for the gas jets. All these things, in their own quiet way, are indications that norms of domesticity are being comfortably observed. There are two small glass tumblers to the right of the sink, of the kind that might have held either some of the Penfolds Maison Marnay brandy from the bottle on the sink at the far left of the photograph, or some of the beer from the empty bottle behind that; or both. The tumblers are either coloured glass, or may still contain brandy; the level in the two glasses (if it is a fluid level rather than the upper limit of a decorative colouring in the 103

Photography, Narrative, Time

glass itself) is comparable to the amount removed from the bottle. If it’s neat brandy, it’s a problematically large serving (and unconsumed, prior to whatever drama has unfolded), but if it’s mixed with something and the bottle has only been opened this evening in order to make mixed drinks, then quite a few have been consumed already, and by only a small number of people. There are other possibilities: Maison Marnay was an iconic Australian consumer brand before imported spirits became as widely adopted in middle-class homes as they are today, but it might well have been used in cooking as well as for mixed drinks in a home which had the means for such things—as it seems this one did. Is it significant that there are two glasses, rather than four as for the teacups? There’s a small cut-glass tumbler inverted on the sink at left, perhaps the used glass of a guest who has now departed. The curtainless windows are dark, so it’s now evening or night. If my surmises about the glasses and the teacups are correct, then there has been a small gathering, probably of two couples—the default guess would be the couple who live in the home presented in the photograph, and a couple who are friends or familiar acquaintances. It’s been enough of an occasion to get out the good cups and saucers, and for some of those present—three seems a good guess—to have a drink. Beer first, and then brandy; the beer bottle is closer to the window, so it has been put there first. And just as dinner, two very generous servings of something unidentifiable, has been served out … all hell has broken loose. We know that it’s almost certainly a woman, the wearer of the shoes, who has been assaulted; in the era in which this photograph was taken, the chances that a man was about to prepare a tasty dessert with the flour scattered on the floor are lamentably small. The attack has been brutal and sudden, and a surprise. There are no signs of a prolonged fight or struggle prior to the serious—life-threatening, if not directly fatal—injury obviously sustained by the victim, or of her grasping any of the potential weapons of selfdefence—a bottle from the sink, a piece of cutlery from the bench, even a kettle or coffee pot. One moment the victim is standing or walking across the room with the flour, the next she’s been hit so hard that there’s enough blood to splash over a wide area of the floor. There’s a struggle on the floor, hand and body marks in the blood and the scattered flour, the shoes come off … We can’t tell what has happened in the end, how it has all turned out for the victim, but things don’t look good at all. There’s a deeply unsettling disconnect between what appears to be an ordinarily run household in which there is material comfort, even generosity and warmth, and the horror of what has stained the floor. What took place to change a polite social occasion with friends into what looks like (at least) attempted homicide? Is there an occasion or a time of year when people are more likely go a bit crazy, and for tempers to flare? There is, sometimes, and the clue is in a word partially visible (Figure 8) in a newspaper heading just discernible at the back of the bench between the milk bottle and the salt container: i-s-t-m-a. It’s Christmas, or near it; a time when people who are already unstable can all too easily make molehills turn into mountains. If friendly banter gets a little out of control, or if jokes go a bit too far, or if flirtatious fun looks like something else, perceptions can be distorted 104

The Eternity of a Moment

Figure 8:  Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive (Detail).

and wildly disproportionate emotions slip their leash. It’s never defensible, but everyone knows the general outline of the backstory, and Christmas is specifically recognized as a stage on which it’s likely to play out: The Christmas holiday period is traditionally a time for celebration. However, the festive season often brings many detrimental health effects, which nurses may encounter when coming into contact with patients over the coming weeks. While many people will be looking forward to having time off work, the impact of Christmas can be profound and not always positive. The effects range from increased stress, family conflicts and alcohol misuse to heightened loneliness, increasing mental health difficulties and domestic violence. (Hairon 2008: 33) Of course, there is other information to be gained from both pictures, along the lines of some of the sociological and socio-economic observations already included above. This is 105

Photography, Narrative, Time

one of the reasons why these photographs, and others of their kind, are taking on such an important new role in their new archival homes. With specialized forensic knowledge, there would be more to be said about the photographs’ evidential role—but we’ve gone about as far as we can go, or need to go, on that path for our current context and purposes. It’s probably useful to think about audiences at some stage, too. Certainly the original intended viewers for these photographs—the police, judges, lawyers and, possibly, jury members but certainly not the press or the public—would have been looking at them with a perception variously informed by a still-vivid memory of the events depicted and/or by formal reports or other information, and certainly as a window onto a reality already imprinted on their minds through those other sources and channels. The distancing provided by complete unfamiliarity with the circumstances, by the erosion of any lingering memories, and by the transplantation of the photograph from a utilitarian context into an aesthetic one, would seem to make for a whole new sense of how the photograph speaks to us. But does it? I’ve tried to argue that beyond whatever ‘factual’ information can be derived from these photographs, the form into which viewers attempt to assemble an explanation for such shocking images will be that of a story, one fed by our forensic (in whatever sense) examination of what the image shows. The suggestions I’ve made so far are my own responses, but I can’t help believing that there’s a universal thread to them, one that transcends all but the most formal or technical viewing circumstances. Certainly there is a desire to account for the events of the second photograph, particularly, without which any viewer might continue to be haunted by a fear that violence of this kind might spring out of nothing, out of nowhere. Such a desire, surely, applies in the same way to anyone who sees the picture, in almost any context, and it has sometimes been connected to desire of a different kind. Jay Clayton (1989) isolated two broad areas shared by those theorists who have an interest in both desire and narrative, in any medium: on the one hand, the mixed feelings of dissatisfaction with formalist approaches to narrative, and on the other, a rather surprising apparent agreement that narrative and desire are linked through violence, and in particular that violence and eroticism are inextricably intertwined at the very heart of narrative. A connection between narrative and violence may even be seen as inherently manifest in photographs: in an analysis of the representation of time in photographs, Thierry de Duve (1978) discussed the possibility that a traumatic effect may be produced by a photograph ‘not because of its content, but because of immanent features of its particular time and space’ (119). This paradox, seemingly unresolved and unresolvable in some cases, is that: Either the photograph registers a singular event, or it makes the event form itself in the image. The problem with the first alternative is that reality is not made out of singular events; it is made out of the continuous happenings of things. In reality, the event is carried on by time, it doesn’t arise from or make a gestalt: the discus thrower releases the disc. In the second case, where the photograph freezes the event in the form of an image, the problem is that that is not where the event occurs. The surface of the 106

The Eternity of a Moment

image shows a gestalt indeed, emerging from its spatial surroundings, and disconnected from its temporal context: the discus thrower is caught forever in the graceful arc of his windup. (de Duve 1978: 116) Thierry de Duve quotes the example of the famous press photograph by Eddie Adams, showing then South Vietnamese Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executing a Vietcong soldier in a Saigon street in 1968. Clearly this was an extremely violent event, but for de Duve, the trauma lay not in the event depicted but in the splitting of time accomplished by the photograph. He talks of this in terms almost exactly similar to those later used by Roland Barthes in response to the Alexander Gardner photograph of the young assassin, Lewis Payne. Here is de Duve: I’ll always be too late, in real life, to witness the death of this poor man, let alone to prevent it; but by the same token, I’ll always be too early to witness the uncoiling of the tragedy, which at the surface of the photograph, will of course never occur. Rather than the tragic content of the photograph, even enhanced by the knowledge that it has actually happened […] it is the sudden vanishing of the present tense, splitting into the contradiction of being simultaneously too late and too early, that is properly unbearable. (de Duve 1978: 121) The talk of the splitting of time here seems somehow too strange, too idiosyncratic (does he really believe that to be the wellspring of our emotional response to the photograph?) to form a base on which to stand any unified way of looking at photographic narrative. More importantly, although the point about splitting time is significant in itself, and often relevant to constructing a sense of time in a photograph, the situation in the Justice and Police Museum photographs is an inversion of the Eddie Adams picture (and of the Gardner photograph of Payne). Instead of being presented with depictions of people to whom something is (in the photograph) about to happen, and to whom we thus know (because the photograph always depicts the past) this same thing has already happened, the Justice and Police Museum photographs present us with the results of what has happened to somebody, but not exactly what has happened, and not the person to whom it has happened. We could probably squeeze a bit more out of the two Justice and Police photographs in terms of desire, by way of closely examining the feelings a viewer—particularly a viewer in, say, a jury empanelled to decide on one of the cases to which the pictures relate. There’s certainly an elevated sense of free-floating threat that comes with knowing that these events aren’t just something that somehow happens only in the world of representation, but are real. To the extent that the images are not accompanied by explanations that specifically exclude and protect the viewer from being swept up in the same kind of situation, the viewer is likely to perceive their own generalized desire for safety as heightened or challenged. A.H. Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs—desire being ‘what happens to need when it enters history, 107

Photography, Narrative, Time

language, culture, and society’ (Clayton 1989: 50, emphasis added)—positions the need for safety as second only to the primary physiological elements of survival (oxygen, water, food, shelter, etc). This would seem to indicate that our desire for safety is probably also close to our hearts and our minds. For all that it is only rarely genuinely threatened in contemporary western middle-class society, the desire for physical safety is surely likely to become much more sensitive and more acute when exposed to depictions of safety successfully breached. It’s quite obvious, however, that there are some forces pushing in exactly the opposite direction. Many people enjoy the carefully calibrated experiences of physical danger offered by adventure sports such as abseiling or skydiving, and in the same fashion they seek the stimulation offered by vicarious contact, through media products, with events that either are violent, or seem to involve a looming threat of violence or unpleasantness. It’s a cliché to point to the predominance of stories of murder and mayhem on television every night, but that predominance is materially relevant to how we process and react to photographs such as Figures 6 and 7. Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, observes that the notion of fiction as escapism appears to be in conflict with what most stories are about: that is, in his words, ‘trouble’: We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang. Take a look at the carnage of the bestseller lists […] See the same on popular TV shows. Look at classic literature: Oedipus stabbing out his eyes in disgust; Medea slaughtering her children; Shakespeare’s stage strewn with runny corpses. (Gottschall 2012: 49) Here I have to make a confession: less than 5 per cent of the total of the Justice and Police Museum photographic archive is taken up by documentation of murder scenes (Williams 2005: 6), yet it is just such scenes that I have selected, in part unthinkingly, but in part also secure in the knowledge that they will be of interest to readers. I know, without having to consider the question at length or in depth, that while readers might find the photographs repellent, they will also fall under their spell, and will most likely be trying to work out other possible sequences of events for themselves—their own accounting for what is shown, and what they see as significant. We are all, given the opportunity, enthusiasts in forensics. Talking pictures ‘Shown’ is the key word here. With the evidential photograph more than any other, we know that in any of the contexts for which it was originally intended (the police investigation, the courtroom), various people will be speaking on its behalf—making arguments about what it does or does not demonstrate, or indicate, or confirm, or deny. This is just as well because, despite the best rhetorical efforts of the television series CSI and its various fellow travellers, 108

The Eternity of a Moment

neither the photograph nor the scene it depicts can ‘speak’ for itself, or ‘tell’ the viewer anything. In Barthes’ terms the photograph is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality [is] that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered [… a] message(s) without a code. (Barthes 1984: 44–5) The photograph is said to lack code because of the physical causality of its production, tying it to the objects it depicts. Within the very moment of exposure, all influences of planning, control and intention are removed, and for as long as the shutter is open, the camera can do nothing but record the light that is focused on the sensor or film by the lens. The resulting image combines what is intended to be there—that which the photographer pointed the camera at, framed in the viewfinder, and focused on—but it also includes everything else that is in the frame and in focus, whether anyone intended it or not, and at exactly the same level of detail (assuming focus, lighting, etc. are all in order). For this reason we need to be very careful not only about assertions of photographic ‘objectivity,’ but also about the terms in which that notion of objectivity is sometimes explained or qualified: in particular about the idea that the camera shows us ‘what we would have seen had we been there ourselves.’ More than 35 years after they wrote it, it’s still difficult to do better than Joel Snyder and Neil Allen on this issue: The notion that a photograph shows us ‘what we would have seen had we been there ourselves’ has to be qualified to the point of absurdity. A photographs shows us ‘what we would have seen’ at a certain moment in time, from a certain vantage point if we kept our head immobile and closed one eye and if we saw with the equivalent of a 150-mm or 24-mm lens and if we saw things in Agfacolor or in Tri-X developed in D-76 and printed on Kodabromide #3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up, the original position is reversed: instead of saying that the camera shows us what our eyes would see, we are now positing the rather unilluminating proposition that, if our vision worked like photography, then we would see things the way a camera does. (Snyder and Allen 1975: 151–2) But wait, there’s more. Any analogy between the eye and the camera runs into more and more trouble, the closer one looks. For a start, seeing is something accomplished by the visual system as a whole, by two eyes working stereoscopically in concert with the brain. The image formed on the retina, while essential, is only one aspect of it. The three-dimensional percept assembled by eyes and brain together is very much a dynamic entity. Physically, the retinal image is of necessity constantly refreshed by saccades, tiny rapid movements of the eye, whenever the head is stationary relative to the visual target. Without this movement to refresh the chemical receptors, vision temporarily fails. Saccades are cancelled for the duration of any 109

Photography, Narrative, Time

smooth eye movements or head movements relative to a visual target, since this accomplishes receptor recovery in the same fashion. As the retinal image is therefore in constant slight movement, there is no privileged single focused image that could ever be regarded as the equivalent of the camera’s single exposure. Perceptually and cognitively, the situation is even more complex and only really open to inspection in experimental circumstances. We do know, however, (and we can observe some of this subjectively, with practice) that the visual system as a whole is constantly realigning its concentration on parts of the visual field: discarding information that is irrelevant for the moment, shifting attention rapidly from tiny details to broad gestalts, attending as required to contrast, edge detail, colour, movement, shape, parallax divergence and, of course, to even more complex perceptual configurations such as facial recognition. This is so different from anything done by a camera (still or moving) that any attempt at analogy between the eye and the camera will confuse important distinctions to a far greater degree than it explains anything of significance about either system. The unavoidable (causal) resemblance between a photograph and that which it depicts will nearly always effortlessly allow us to identify what it depicts, but that very resemblance conceals the fact that the photograph itself can’t ‘tell’ us more. The photograph flattens and conflates intended information with accidental or unavoidable detail, blending it into a single rectangular matrix of finely delineated but value-free data that has, precisely, no code: no instructions for unravelling what is meaningful and interesting, and separating that from what is mere visual dross. There’s something about the sense of sight that makes this attribute of photographs … well, hard to see. With hearing, it’s much more easily demonstrated, and some readers may already have experienced this effect. Go to a loud party and try making a sound recording in a large room full of shouting, talking, laughing people, using a procedure analogous to that employed by the forensic photographer: place a single monaural omni-directional microphone in the centre of the room, and record a few minutes of the general sound. Then in a quiet space the next day, play it back and try your luck at separating one sound from another, identifying who said what, where they were standing, and so on. The single microphone, roughly analogous to the single lens of the camera, flattens all sound into a single mass from which the separate strands that would give it greater meaning just can’t be extracted. Something similar happens with photographs, but it seems that unlike the flattened-sounds example, with pictures our brains can’t help but take up the challenge. As we’re constantly reminded, a photograph shows only the very briefest of moments, the time of the exposure; but that brief instant sits within a continuity of time that extends before and after, about which we will always tend to make inferences that spring from, and play into, our narrative habits. The photograph is the captured prisoner who won’t speak; it won’t respond to the inferences, and may not confirm or deny them either, but it won’t resist if we speak of them ourselves. To learn more of that, we need to turn away from the photographic object, and towards the mental workings of the people who make, use and share them: a cognitive turn.

110

Chapter 6

A Cognitive Turn

F

or a medium that is everywhere, and in use in some form by everyone, either as producers or as consumers, every day, photography is sometimes strangely absent from areas of theoretical discussion in which one might expect it to find a comfortable home. This is not just a recent phenomenon. Back in Chapter 2, I drew attention to how Roland Barthes (1977a: 79) leaves photography out of his long and otherwise persuasive list of narrative forms. For someone who has written so much about both narrative and photography, and whose fixation on photographs seemed to infuse and connect his personal life and his academic writing, we have to question whether or not the omission is accidental; nowhere else in his writing is there any sign of reticence about calling a photograph a photograph. Neither, since cinema, drama, novella and other obvious narrative candidates are specifically included, can we presume that photography is absent from Barthes’ list only because its inclusion is implied without question. Much more recently, an abundance of work with apparent potential relevance to photography has emerged from the application of cognitive science to literary theory and to film. Some of this, notably David Bordwell’s work on the representational (rather than structural) aspects of film narrative, starting from his 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film, has been going for 20 years or more. However, the twenty-first century has brought a rich crop of new work on Theory of Mind and evolutionary history, in particular, which sheds remarkable light into the far corners of how cultural products of many kinds—stories, films, books, paintings—work to assist our comprehension of, and engagement with, the world. Many, but not quite all kinds of cultural product—because once again, photography is left off the agenda. Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film talks about painting and perspective but doesn’t mention photography at all, even though film is a fundamentally photographic medium. Lisa Zunshine’s work on the stimulation of Theory of Mind by fictional representations covers examples from television and painting as well as literature, but makes no mention of photographs. Neither Brian Boyd’s definitive volume on evolutionary literary theory, On the Origin of Stories, nor any of his other work mentions photography at all, despite the book taking careful account not just of painting, but of art much more widely, with art conceived of as a cultural practice in which almost everyone participates in some way. This exclusion can’t be laid at the door of concerns about photography being, or not being, art. The most puzzling aspect of the exclusion is that photography appears to address, sometimes more than any other medium or activity, the very issues that some of these authors have problematized. Art or not, photography is also hugely participated in and, in the age of photographic ‘sharing,’ ‘posting’ and ‘pinning,’ very participatory.

Photography, Narrative, Time

The implications of cognitive literary theory cluster around narrative and the significance of narrative, but are illuminating for many other reasons as well. In producing their own original insights into cognitive theory and its new applications in the humanities, particularly in creative fields, Zunshine and Boyd have each synthesized a broad spectrum of research by others, in the various original disciplines on which their respective work is based. Both have extensive prior research publications in literary studies and an acute ability to read art works more generally, but both also exhibit a wide and deep understanding of the cognitive research itself. Although they do not have a common perspective on all of the implications of their shared theoretical starting points, both offer insights that, while not hitherto applied to photography, nevertheless can make for a clearer view of what photographs are, what photography does, and why it is so popular. Zunshine’s 2008 article in Narrative, on the embodiment of moments of Theory-of-Mind transparency, outlines firstly the implications of Theory of Mind itself, ‘the term used by psychologists and philosophers to describe our ability to explain behaviour in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, desires and intentions’ (Zunshine 2008: 67). This ability, also known as ‘mind-reading’ although not to be confused with telepathy or magic tricks, is not entirely reliable: we proceed on the assumption that our readings of behaviour and bodily states are correct, and we have to do this because ordinary social interaction and communication would rapidly become impossible were we not to do so. We know full well, however, that we are sometimes wrong, and as Zunshine further points out, we are often pleased to capitalize on our knowledge that such readings are difficult or impossible, as when we express silent thanks that our occasionally inappropriate thoughts or feelings are not transparently visible to others. Attributing intention and other mental states to any complex system appears to be an irresistible means of understanding and predicting a system’s behaviour and future actions, whether it be people, other animals, insects, plants or even robotic vacuum cleaners. Theory of Mind is ‘both predicated on the intensely social nature of our species, and makes this intense social nature possible’ (Zunshine 2008: 67; emphasis in original). Two key observation-based assumptions support Zunshine’s argument about the implications of Theory of Mind: firstly, that it is a ‘hungry’ adaptation with a constant need to scrutinize any and all information on the basis of which to make hypotheses about internal mental states, and secondly, that these ‘promiscuous, voracious and proactive’ (68) mind-reading activities are informed by our knowledge that ‘people’s observable behaviour [is] both a highly informative and at the same time quite unreliable source of information about their minds’ (69). Both these assumptions need drawing out a little further to show why they might have implications for photography. The ‘hungry’ nature of mind-reading, firstly, means that it is not (as the name might confusingly suggest) merely a deliberate and intentional act, but a permanent condition of our perceptual systems, so pervasively active that we are not consciously aware of much of its work. The analogy with sight is useful: if our eyes and brains are working properly, and there is light, then not only will we be able to see, we will 114

A Cognitive Turn

also not be able to not see. Unless something is wrong with a part of the visual system, or there is some kind of physical impediment in the environment, we cannot choose not to see. In the same way, once we have achieved a certain level of physical maturity and, as long as we are free from certain serious mental illnesses such as some types of schizophrenia or autism, we cannot choose to turn off our mind-reading. Significantly, this ‘voracious’ seeking for the stimulation provided by reading the minds of others extends beyond ‘direct interactions with other people,’ to ‘imaginary approximations of such interactions, which include countless forms of representational art and narrative’ (Zunshine 2008: 68). The potentially enormous significance of this for our social structure started to become even more apparent with the intriguing discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s. These are neural networks in primates (and possibly in other mammals as well, but demonstrated in primates) that are so strongly attuned to the observed actions of others that they fire corresponding areas of the observer’s brain in sympathy with those actions. Although observed at first in experiments involving simple mirror firing of an observer’s motor circuits, triggered by watching somebody else actually perform the corresponding simple motor action, it has become clear that mirror neurons ‘fire when we see others act or express emotion as if we were making the same action, and allow us through a kind of automatic inner imitation to understand their intentions and attune ourselves to their feelings’ (Boyd 2009: 103–4). No wonder we read romance novels and thrillers, flock to movies of every kind … and, as I shall argue, make photographs. Zunshine’s second assumption—that our observations of people’s behaviour are simultaneously ‘highly informative’ and ‘quite unreliable’—looks a little trickier. For one thing it’s reflexive, and recursively so. When I ‘read’ somebody’s facial expression and bodily movements in order to get an indication of his or her feelings and intentions, they will intuitively know that I am doing this, because they know (even if they are only sometimes aware of it) that they will be doing their best to ‘read’ me at the same time. My conscious awareness of the reading of them that I’m doing is similarly uneven and irregular, but I do also know that they know I will be reading them, and they also know that I know that they will be reading me, and … so it goes on, into many levels of what Zunshine calls ‘embedment.’ This process is one in which the unreliable nature of each embedded layer—not just the successive readings, but also of reactions to those readings, readings of the reactions, reaction to the readings of the reactions, and so on—has obvious potential to spiral out of control. Representations of such risks and their consequences have long been a staple theme and driver of dramatic and comedic entertainments in various forms and media. In Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine describes two examples which overtly foreground the paradox of our moth-like attraction to the irresistibly intertwined flames of informative and unreliable behaviour—at the same time as they play with it. One example (Zunshine 2006: 30) is a Bruce Eric Kaplan (‘BEK’) cartoon from a 1998 New Yorker in which a husband, in dispute with his wife, says to her, ‘Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel’—six levels of embedment. Four layers is about the maximum that an audience can realistically follow, and even four is 115

Photography, Narrative, Time

pushing at the very outside of the envelope of what can be held in mind while still absorbing new developments as a story unfolds. It seems, however, that even though we would require specialized knowledge to even think of voluntarily articulating this idea, we have a pretty good intuitive grasp of how many levels are possible; hence the joke here. The second example (Zunshine 2006: 30–31) is an episode of the US sitcom Friends (Junge 1999) in which Phoebe and Rachel attempt a practical joke at the expense of Monika and Chandler, based on knowledge that the former two wrongly believe to be unknown by the latter two. The escalating humour of the situation is a textbook example of the compulsions and pitfalls of mind-reading, hinging both on levels of embedment of knowledge (‘They don’t know that we know they know we know!’) and on cumulative misreading of behavioural cues on both sides. As if all this weren’t enough, our simultaneous need to read other minds accurately from actions and behaviour, and to be read by others as we wish to be read (which might, of course, be a wish to be read accurately or a wish not to be read accurately) means that we end up performing our bodies so as to bring about the desired result. But again, sometimes we are performing and sometimes we’re not, so there’s yet more room to be read accurately or not, as genuine or not, and as performing or not, with all the permutations of those possibilities. This puts us in something of a bind, but all we can do is to go on, and to do our individual and collective best to constantly improve our mind-reading skills. The drive to do that shows up in several ways and its consequences are observable, if Boyd and Zunshine are both correct, at both the species and individual levels, as well as in some of the cultural products we make. Art as adaptation At the species level, according to Boyd, art is a key adaptation—using that word in its strict Darwinian sense—for the development and refinement of our Theory of Mind. In On the Origin of Stories he goes to some lengths to distinguish this idea from, and argue against, Steven Pinker’s (1997) view of art as ‘an evolutionary by-product deploying our capacity for design to deliver high-energy treats to our cognitive tastes’ (Pinker 1997 quoted in Boyd 2009: 81), pointing out that if that were the case, natural selection would surely have eliminated art in favour of some other activity more directly advantageous to survival or prosperity: if and only if art were useless, more ruthlessly utilitarian and competitive realists with a lesser inclination to art would have survived and reproduced in greater numbers, and over evolutionary time their descendants would have supplanted those with a disposition to art. (Boyd 2009: 83; emphasis in original) 116

A Cognitive Turn

Boyd characterizes art in an inclusive manner, as ‘a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information’ (Boyd 2009: 85; emphasis in original). In passing, I note that this is a definition of art that can comfortably accommodate much of photography, even including a lot of applied photography, but we’ll come back to that later. Sharing of attention is crucial to photography, at the most basic level: if there’s one thing that every photograph says, no matter how humble, or how extraordinary, or how exotic, it’s ‘look at this.’ The benefit bestowed on us by all this play and this attention to patterns—surely including photographs, given the ease with which they can encapsulate certain kinds of patterned information that would exceed the descriptive capacity of most people—is that we extend the opportunities to indulge our ‘promiscuous, voracious and proactive’ appetite for mind-reading. Remember, mind-reading is happening all the time anyway, and we can’t turn it off. We do it whatever the context or environment we’re in: sometimes with new people and sometimes with the inscrutable or mercurial moods of our closest family and friends; sometimes on the basis of gross bodily movements observed at a distance, and sometimes on the basis of the flicker of an eyelid from six inches away; sometimes with humans, and sometimes with other animals. Because humans ‘uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche”: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence’ (Boyd 2009: 89), and this ability to detect patterns and relationships everywhere in the world, in every facet of our existence, is so vital to our survival that we never cease to cultivate it. From the moment a baby first meets and responds to its mother’s gaze, during the whole of our uniquely long period of development and formal education, and right through to the end of our lives, these skills are continually being constructed, revised and reinvested. Their maintenance and revitalization is a lifelong project. One of the many things art can do, then, is to provide a sandbox in which we experiment with mind-reading and its various possible consequences without risk. The benefits in a natural selection environment are not difficult to see: As for play, so for the cognitive play of art we can specify the design conditions in advance. If there are cognitive capacities in which flexible fine-tunings and widening the range of options deployed at short and context-sensitive notice can make decisive differences— and our aural, visual, vocal, manual, and social skills all qualify—then individuals with stronger motivations to practice such behaviours in situations of low danger and adequate resources will fare better. A predisposition towards the patterned cognitive play of art will establish itself in a species in which cognitive skills are paramount. (Boyd 2009: 93–4) So far, so good. But Boyd’s subsequent argument concentrates mostly on storytelling, where he is again both eloquent and thorough on the benefits of narrative, which he sees as benefitting ‘audiences, who can choose better what course of action to take on the basis 117

Photography, Narrative, Time

of strategic information,’ as well as storytellers, ‘who earn credit in the social information exchange and gain in terms of attention and status (176).’ Narrative also especially helps coordinate groups, by informing their members of one another’s actions. It spreads prosocial values, the likeliest to appeal to both tellers and listeners. It develops our capacity to see from different perspectives, and this capacity in turn both arises from and aids the evolution of cooperation and the growth of human mental flexibility. (Boyd 2009: 176) To the extent that photographs can be narrative, as argued elsewhere in this book, and to the extent that photographs are art in the sense of that word that is used by Boyd, we can start to see how some photographs might contribute to the kinds of ‘social information exchange’ that Boyd is talking about, while others might pass muster as kinds of fiction. But to see why photography might be not just a bit player on the Theory of Mind scene, but a uniquely apposite medium for individuals to track, experiment and play with their own Theory of Mind performance, we need to combine Boyd’s emphasis on art as an adaptation evolved from play with Zunshine’s insights into the individual search for reliable embodiments of mental states. Zunshine points to a few key consequences, for cultural representations of various kinds, of the never-ending battle between the performance of ‘our [own] bodies […] to shape other people’s perceptions of our mental states’ (Zunshine 2008: 70) and our ‘intense sociocognitive scrutiny’ (69) of everybody else’s behaviour in order to hopefully perceive their mental states correctly. The first of these consequences is that while in daily life we mostly manage with near-enough-is-good-enough mind-reading, the signal moments when we either give thanks for a performance that has prevented others from reading what would have been an embarrassing activity of our own minds, or become aware that our own reading of somebody else has been importantly incorrect, or where ‘bodies spontaneously reveal their true feelings, sometimes against their wills’ (72)—are actually rare, and notable. For this reason, in turn, our cultural representations tend to dwell on such moments, and to foreground them, both as experiences in their own right and as drivers of other events. As Zunshine says, ‘spectacular feats and failures of mind-reading are the hinges on which many a fictional plot turns’ (72). The episode of Friends described above turns on just such a mix of plot events. Brief lives The second consequence is that such rare and privileged views of somebody’s innermost thoughts and feelings as are accidentally or unguardedly provided by their behaviour are, indeed, moments: they are transient and very brief. They are also, obviously, highly valued by our ‘hungry’ Theory of Mind because that is precisely what it is always searching for, and they are highly valued in cultural representations because they are the moments in 118

A Cognitive Turn

which we learn of the true state of mind of characters, something which is ordinarily—and strategically—opaque to readers or viewers. Zunshine points to some sharply observed examples in novels and films, showing that the brevity of such states, even in fiction, is necessary to maintain consistency with felt experience and self-knowledge. In real life, we scramble to conceal discovered transparency because we’re always aware of the need to maintain our ability to perform, and thus conceal, effectively. Any depiction of transparency that is unrealistically extended becomes inauthentic: we know that the character would have resumed performance and concealment more rapidly than that, because we know how crucial it would be for our own performing abilities to swing into action. The knowledge that such moments are brief and transient isn’t even new, and that knowledge itself has been represented in cultural products. In William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, when Antonio and Shylock initially discuss the terms of Antonio’s proposed loan (Act I, Scene iii), Shylock first vents his considerable rage—a transparent view of his real feelings, we understand—at the insults that have previously been thrown at him by Antonio, and rhetorically considers the angry and sarcastic response he might reasonably make to Antonio’s request, because of this treatment: You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gabardine […] What should I say to you? Should I not say ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath, and whispering humbleness Say this: ‘Fair sir, you spit upon me on Wednesday last; you spurned me such a day; another time You call’d me a dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys?’ Act I, Scene iii, lines 110–11, 119–27 Functionally in the play, this is intended as background for the audience as much as direct address to Antonio, but Antonio replies briefly, to the effect that he may well treat Shylock again in exactly the same manner and that Shylock should regard this as purely a business arrangement, making it easier for him to extract any penalty for possible non-payment. Shylock immediately resumes performance of the public-relations persona he uses for dealings with his Christian customers, and does so with such singular obsequiousness that his new behaviour further signals a new mental state, and a vital plot element: he now has a plan to undo Antonio: Why, look you, how you storm! I would be friends with you, and have your love, 119

Photography, Narrative, Time

Forget the shames that you have stain’d me with, Supply your present wants, and take no doit Of usance for my moneys, and you’ll not hear me; This is kind I offer.

I. iii. 135–40

It’s clear, then, that moments of transparency are rare, brief, and sought-after both in real life and in cultural representations. Here, then, is surely one thing that certain genres of photography try to do, and one reason we so value certain photographs. Press photographs of a certain kind frequently aim to capture moments of transparency, and are often valued to the extent that they succeed in ‘catching someone out,’ particularly politicians and others in the public eye who may have something to lose by revealing what they truly think or feel about a situation, or whose speech or action is constrained by a wider policy agenda. But on a less fraught scale, much domestic and social photography is also about catching and sharing moments of either transparency or concealment. The patterns of use and dialogue around such photographs shows a lot about what we hope or fear they will, or won’t, or might, reveal. Consider typical conversations within families, about photographs that might seem to an outsider merely felicitous, fortuitous but certainly innocuous: ‘I’d like to send this photograph of you to Aunt Jane.’ ‘Don’t you dare send that to anyone outside this house. It makes me look so uncool, and dad looks like a bloodhound.’ ‘It’s not uncool, it’s nice, before you had your hair cut too short, and I think dad looks fine, he had just been yawning.’ ‘It’s not too short, everyone likes it, and I’d rather use that one Joel took last night at the party.’ ‘Oh good grief no, that’s hideous.’ And so on. What we want to make transparent, or to conceal, about ourselves is quite often in conflict with what others want to see revealed or concealed. This can extend to the most subtle readings of an image, and to the finest nuances of expression or gesture, or how a piece of fabric appears to sit, or where a shadow falls. Where one person wants transparency (or what they take to be transparency), another may want performance—but may not recognize either performance or transparency for what it actually is, when they see it. This is exactly the reason why professional press photography and formal photographic portraiture, even in the age of near-universal camera ownership, remain viable professions: matching the firing of a camera shutter exactly to the precise instant of either real and interesting transparency, or required/agreed performance, is not a simple task. Recognition of what is at stake in our reception of photographs has historically, on rare occasions, been voiced in terms consistent with this cognitive perspective on behavioural transparency. In response to a comment by John Berger that capitalist society lacks ‘space for the social function of subjectivity’ and that photographs are consequently understood to be less ambiguous—more objective—than they really are (Berger 1982: 100), Max Kozloff writes: Photographs make the possibilities of social misapprehension very pointed and critical. If their ‘truth’ quotient weren’t so high, they could not deceive as indiscriminately as they 120

A Cognitive Turn

often do. But if they were outright fictions, they wouldn’t grant me the privilege of feeling that I can hold the world, sporadically, in a set of miniature durations. Because I  am informed, though only partially, by this set of images, I am all the more prone to inject my internal states into it. (Kozloff 1987: 4–5) These ‘possibilities of social misapprehension,’ of course, come to the surface most notably when photography and other, similar or related technologies are pressed into service to try to resolve the difficulties we have in dealing with reading interpersonal transparency and concealment. Zunshine points to a constant arms race going on between cultural institutions trying to claim some aspects of the body as essential, unfakeable, and intentionality-free, and individuals finding ways to perform even those seemingly unperformable aspects of the body. (Zunshine 2008: 70) ‘Cultural institutions’ may sound like a reference to museums and art galleries, but she has in mind the kind of social infrastructure that makes use of fingerprints, polygraphs, DNA readings and the like—and perhaps, though she doesn’t mention them, photographs as used in, for example, security passes or passports. Her point is to highlight the anxiety that results from conflict between our need to read minds through behaviour and appearance, and our knowledge that behaviour and appearance can’t be read with total reliability. We are so familiar with how photographs work in such contexts that we are not surprised at their use; but stand back for a moment, and consider how odd it might be, in some contexts, that in a contest for proof of authenticity between a passport photograph of a person, and the actual real person depicted by that passport photograph, it’s the photograph that we take as the proof that the person is who they claim to be. The real impact of Zunshine’s ‘arms race,’ though, is felt in the domain of cultural products and representations such as the novels and films she refers to. As she puts it: Writers, artists and movie directors have to keep inventing new ways of forcing the body into a state of transparency because as soon as one way of doing it emerges as an established convention, it becomes vulnerable to subversion and parody. (Zunshine 2008: 78; emphasis in original) This is very observable, for example, in television documentary where for some years, successive documentary genres and styles have fallen prey to satire and parody at such a rate that to attempt to reuse a thoroughly satirized style for straight documentary purposes is to invite ridicule, or even to confuse viewers into thinking that they are watching a satire, but one that just isn’t very funny. Some programmes deliberately sail close to the wind on both tacks. The UK comedy The Office (and to some extent its US offspring of the same 121

Photography, Narrative, Time

name) with which Zunshine begins her 2008 article, is comedy fiction shot in an ad-libbed mock-documentary style and is so uncomfortable to watch, because of its insistence on forcing its characters into moments of transparency on which the camera then mercilessly feeds, that it takes on many of the values and meanings of a real documentary in its examination of certain kinds of workplace interpersonal interactions and management styles. Press photography: Critical moment meets brief transparency A related phenomenon can certainly affect some genres and styles of photography, where it seems possible to depict, and to celebrate, forms of behaviour that are neither truly transparent nor properly performed, but partly an artefact of the medium itself. As already mentioned, press photography, at least of a certain kind, is extensively driven by this phenomenon. There is an uneasy ongoing ‘truce’ of sorts between press photographers who follow politicians, the news organizations that employ the photographers, and the politicians whose activities are of obvious interest to both. There’s a constant tension, for the photographers, between: revealing something about their human subjects which others have not managed to capture; situating those subjects attitudinally with respect to the overall views of the publication and its audience (either or both of which may be unfavourable); and nevertheless ensuring at least minimal cooperation from those same human subjects, for ongoing future photographic coverage. On June 26, 1974 Horst Faas, best known for his work as both a photographer and picture editor in relation to the Vietnam war, took a photograph of then-President Richard Nixon, as Nixon commenced a two-day state visit to Belgium en route to a summit in Moscow. By this stage of his second term, Nixon was deeply unpopular at home (he was to resign in disgrace over the Watergate affair less than two months later), and within the overall framework of respect for the office of the presidency, he had become fair game for depictions of any moments of ‘embodied transparency’ that revealed what so many people by then felt to be the ‘real’ Nixon: narcissistic, preoccupied with his own survival, and uncaring. Shot from in front of the president as he walked towards a lunchtime meeting with Belgium’s King Baudouin, the photograph shows Nixon looking at the watch on his left wrist, rather than at a man whose hand he is shaking at the same time with his outstretched right arm. The easy implication to draw is that the exact time of day is of greater importance to Nixon than the man, and that the handshake is at best insincere. The gazes of all those behind and around Nixon also seem to converge on the watch, further emphasizing its relative importance and thus also further diluting any importance for the neglected hand-shakee. The photograph won second prize in the 1974 World Press Photo contest, under the title ‘US President Richard Nixon finds a moment for his admirers,’ and can be seen on the World Press Photo site in a slightly cropped version (Faas 1974). A version closer to the whole 35 mm frame can also be found on a CBS News Gallery site, and a very cropped version, the top half of the frame only, appears across two pages of Harold Evans’s 1978 Pictures 122

A Cognitive Turn

on a Page (Evans et al. 1978: 105–6). The cropping in the latter version has the effect of concentrating the viewer’s eye and mind entirely on the contrast between Nixon’s attention to the watch, and the apparently uncaring handshake. In case we still don’t get the point, even in the cropped version, the caption in Evans et al’s book reads in part: ‘Time check: a visual moment of great descriptive interest. President Nixon, hand in one place, mind in another, during a walkabout tour’ (Evans et al. 1978: 105), and Evans goes on to speak, in the text on the opposite page, of Nixon being ‘caught with his sincerity down.’ Two tropes are at play here in an incompletely-stated fashion: the idea of a moment of embodied transparency, which we understand will be brief anyway, and the photographer’s notion of the ‘decisive moment,’ which for at least some photographs carries the unspoken implication that the photographed moment is the one—perhaps the only one—in which embodied transparency is encapsulated and revealed. Evans rightly observes, of the Nixon photograph, that ‘we are apt to say the photograph is a decisive moment’ (106), but he also usefully reminds us that Henri Cartier-Bresson himself saw such moments as graphic rather than temporal: not a moment when something in the world crystallizes to a pinnacle of meaning which a camera might then record (or not), but a moment when the constant flux of movement as seen (and with luck and skill, recorded) within the photographic viewfinder arranges itself for a brief time into a pleasing, coherent, balanced, graphically and dynamically satisfying pattern. This comes through repeatedly in Cartier-Bresson’s essay in The Decisive Moment (1952): Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. […] In a photograph, composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of elements seen by the eye. […] But inside movement there is one moment at which the  elements are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. […] you’ll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless. (Cartier-Bresson in The Decisive Moment, quoted in Goldberg 1981: 384–5) Undoubtedly, a combined exactitude in capturing both movement and moment are at play in Horst Faas’s Nixon picture, but there lies the rub. As Clive Scott confirms, the decisive moment [for Cartier-Bresson] was not when meaning suddenly and unequivocally came to the surface of reality; it was rather a moment when meaning was made available, when the image became unreliable, when it moved out of its own field of reference. (Scott 1999: 63; emphasis added) And there was, of course, plenty of meaning to be ‘made available.’ By June 1974, Richard Nixon was for most people no longer a man or a president, but a toxic character script, 123

Photography, Narrative, Time

waiting to pounce on and infect any representations of himself: the captions used for the photograph in Evans’s book indicate something of the effect, but the meanings were there anyway, and would have overwhelmed the photograph whether captioned or not, given the clearly conflicting behaviours it apparently presents. Whatever we make of the photograph at the level of plain denotation, it works to mobilize those negative associations. But there’s a deeper problem here, not with Nixon but with what the very idea of the ‘decisive moment’ does with our notions of time and events, and what counts as an ‘event.’ The World Press Photo award and the nature of the captions indicate, though of course not in such specific terms, that this photograph has successfully captured a flash of embodied transparency: that the shutter was pressed exactly as Nixon’s ‘sincerity’ was ‘down,’ and that in the resulting picture we see the true nature of the man, briefly but tellingly revealed. We have been successfully persuaded, by the very idea of the ‘decisive moment’ being the key intersection between fleeting embodied transparency and the timely skill of the photographer, that a picture of this kind is akin to a golden nugget lying in the dirt, or a diamond in the rough: a special event, lurking in the midst of reality’s flow of events, waiting to be discovered—or missed. David Campany (2008) makes two instructive points about this kind of mental framing of ‘decisive moment’ photographs; one about an effect of the mechanics of photography, and one a more philosophical issue about the nature of ‘events.’ The first results from his comparison of two photographs on opposite pages of Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book, The Decisive Moment: on the left page is our puddle-leaping man behind the Gare Saint Lazare (Figure 1), and opposite him on the right page, an older man on the Allée du Prado near Marseille, standing quite still and looking directly at the camera. As Campany says: The first photo looks like a decisive snapshot because we can see the arresting effect of the fast shutter. The second looks calmer because the scene is calmer. In reality, both might have been shot the same way, with the same shutter speeds, but a photograph tends to look ‘decisive’ if there is something to arrest. (Campany 2008: 26–7; emphasis added) This characterization still allows for the possibility that sometimes there really is a distinct event which is caught by the shutter’s action, but might not have been: Eddie Adams’s photograph of the summary execution in a Saigon street in 1968, Robert Capa’s 1936 falling soldier (possibly, though frequent allegations that the photograph is a fabrication have long raised questions about the actual nature of the ‘event’), or Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s cousin Bichonnade sailing in mid-air down a flight of stone steps in 1905. But to take up the second of Campany’s points about ‘decisive moments,’ perhaps we should see Faas’s photograph, and many of Cartier-Bresson’s, as ‘everyday situations made eventful only by [their] precise framing and timing.’ (Campany 2008: 27). Decisiveness is thus configured and understood, in these cases, as something we bestow retrospectively, having also retrospectively decided that there was an event to be captured which could only have been captured by taking a 124

A Cognitive Turn

photograph at this exact moment. So not only is there circularity, there’s a real question about the event itself: in the Horst Faas example, is there an event here, and if there is, is that event anything to do with embodied transparency? Max Kozloff has a similar question, in relation to the same photograph: But more important, the act did not occur in the guise we perceive it—congealed in time and illusive space. The photographer did not instigate the scene, which would have had no trouble occurring without him. Yet his picture manifests the activity for us as no other record could. We’ve come to trust the spectacles bruited by such images, even though they would accord very little with our bodily experience had we played a role in them. For we would have been ‘in time’ with the proceedings, swamped by all their confusing, unedited features, instead of outside of it all […] outside their time. (Kozloff 1994: 254; ellipsis in original) What seemed to be an example of embodied transparency par excellence, a sharply delineated moment of truthful revelation, is starting to dissolve into artefactual nothingness. Part of the problem seems to be that the two notions of embodied transparency and decisive moment are intertwined and overlapping, and if one is unseated or falsified, the other can too easily dissipate as well. If there’s no embodied transparency, then we should probably be looking elsewhere for decisive moments—in graphical arrangements or patterns of movement, as Cartier-Bresson tried to tell us. Evans unravels the potential types of such moments from a news perspective, on pages 107–26 of Pictures on a Page. There are some of the usual suspects among the examples: a Don McCullin photograph of a Turkish woman who has just learned of the death of her husband in fighting on Cyprus in 1964, and Cartier-Bresson’s picture of a woman in Dessau displaced persons’ camp in 1945, triumphantly identifying a Belgian collaborator with the Nazis. Certainly these and many similar photographs display powerful and transparent emotions, but so overtly and so canonically that there can hardly be any mystery about what they show, or how they work. The emotions in these cases are not so much transparent as incandescent, and even if the captured manifestation of them is brief by virtue of the brief exposure, it’s clear that they stand for a far more long-standing emotion, with a longer period of expression either before or after, or both, the depicted moment. Perhaps, to find photography’s complicated relationship with embodied transparency, we’re looking in the wrong place, and for the wrong thing. Zunshine’s approach to pictures, in her 2008 article, makes the case for involvement of one of the usual suspects, though for paintings or drawings, not photographs: ambiguity. She addresses two unusual and quite circumscribed kinds of genre painting: ‘problem pictures,’ which according to Pamela Fletcher, ‘referred to ambiguous, and often slightly risqué, paintings of modern life which invited multiple, equally plausible interpretations’ (Fletcher 2003, quoted in Zunshine 2008: 78) and an overlapping subgenre, ‘proposal pictures,’ which depict couples caught in certain moments of intimate discussion which, according to Stephen Kern, ‘highlight the woman’s moment of decision after the man has proposed that the relationship move to some 125

Photography, Narrative, Time

higher level of intimacy’ (Kern 1996, quoted in Zunshine 2008: 80). As Zunshine says on the same page, ‘to make sense of such scenes we have to attribute intention to each character, or to a group of characters if the painting encourages us to construct them as sharing a certain attitude.’ But the first thing we encounter in looking at both genres is ambiguity, and that is what drives the pictures: our ‘hungry’ Theory of Mind is searching intensely for clues about what is going on, what the characters’ postures and expressions mean, who might or might not have been wronged, and so on. For all that they are paintings and that every element in the pictures is therefore included by choice, there’s a remarkable similarity to photographs in one respect: where a photograph cannot help but incorporate a wealth of fine detail extra to its main intended visual content, whether relevant or not, so these paintings often exhibit a richness of fine visual detail that is of little or no use in determining ultimate meaning. As it takes some time to assess this detail, this is part of the visual satisfaction provided by the pictures—but the trail leads, always, through the forest of that visual detail to the clearing of tantalizing ambiguity. As Fletcher (2003, quoted in Zunshine 2008: 78) reports, many of the enthusiastic Edwardian fans of these pictures wrote to the artists who produced them seeking, almost desperately, resolution to the state of ambiguous meaning with which the paintings seemed to taunt them. Rather than putting these supplicants out of their misery, the artists often escalated the ambiguity deliberately, by giving answers that varied from person to person, or by responding differently to the same person on different occasions. Looking at the phenomenon from our very different present, we must acknowledge the ambiguity of the paintings as their main subject and purpose: not just a means to some other end, but a meditation object with which viewers might exercise their Theory of Mind. Photography is anything but a stranger to ambiguity. Visual ambiguity and visual ‘false scents’ have long been a staple of certain kinds of photograph, from art photography through to the most gauche levels of amateur recreation. Portraying or viewing an object or a person in an unresolved and ambiguous manner is a constantly renewed theme, and post hoc accidental ambiguity is often celebrated in publications and by circulation via the web and social media. And it’s because of social media that we can now observe some things about photography and cognition that were not possible to achieve prior to the existence of social media and the web. Sharing ambiguity: May I have your attention, please? The first of these observations goes back to Boyd’s notion of attention-sharing: Our extreme sociality amplifies our predilection for the cognitive play of art, through both competitive and cooperative processes, especially through our unique inclination to share and direct the attention of others. […] Art generates a confidence that we can transform the world to suit our own preferences, that we need not accept the given but 126

A Cognitive Turn

can work to modify it in ways we choose; and it supplies skills and models we can refine and recombine to ensure our ongoing cumulative creativity. (Boyd 2009: 15) Boyd’s paragraph, above, reads almost as a description of Pinterest™, the ‘Virtual Pinboard’ social photo-sharing website, where one may ‘pin’ (upload and display) either one’s own pictures or pictures found elsewhere on the Internet. The term ‘pin’ may refer to either an image added to Pinterest, or to the act of adding that pin to a ‘board’—a virtual pinboard. Pins link back to original sources, as long as all users follow etiquette, so users may link through pins, or persons, or boards. Not every picture is a photograph; some are drawings or computer graphics, and some are photographs of text, but the fundamental currency of the site is photographs. These photographs are, broadly, of things rather than people, and the site implicitly assumes that photographs are transparent, or ‘windows’ in Szarkowski’s (1978) terminology. Click on the ‘about’ menu on the entry page of Pinterest and you’ll find the statement that ‘Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing things you love;’ keep on looking though, and it becomes pretty clear that it’s not just about ‘collecting’ and ‘organizing,’ but about changing and exchanging too: exchanging ideas about how to change one’s surroundings, about what to value, nurture and strive for. This is an activity that might reasonably be described as ‘generat[ing] a confidence that we can transform the world to suit our own preferences, that we need not accept the given but can work to modify it in ways we choose’ (Boyd 2009: 15). Generating the ideas and the confidence to carry out such modifications is in turn achieved by shar[ing] and direct[ing] the attention of others: photographs of things are not on Pinterest merely to depict them, but in order to create meaning about life goals and interests by building community around them. To see how effective this sharing of interests is, one need only look at its potentially limitless meta-expansion through the ‘notes’ that a user may optionally attach to a pin. The collective term ‘notes’ includes ‘repins,’ where one may copy a pin (a picture) from another Pinterest board to one’s own, because it contributes in that new context; ‘likes,’ where one expresses approval of a pin (a picture) by adding it to one’s own profile’s ‘likes’ section; and ‘mentions’ where, as with Twitter, one can also ‘mention’ a pin to a particular user by using the ‘@’ symbol to direct it to their username. Since one may log in to Pinterest via either Twitter or Facebook, there’s also potential to spread items to, and with, those media as well, and to direct other websites to Pinterest items with the ‘pin it’ button. With each of these moves, supplementary or revised meaning is mobilized for the picture, and attention is thereby shared or extended. As observed earlier, photography already seemed to be comfortably accommodated within Boyd’s definition of art, defined as quintessential attention-sharing. But with photographs so easily broadcast to the world, circulated strategically, targeted to chosen individuals, swapped, forwarded, copied, cropped, edited, montaged, pasted or otherwise pressed into service in multiple related ways for so many people, it’s difficult to think of a more felicitous 127

Photography, Narrative, Time

or widely used means of attention-sharing than that which photography, turbo-charged by its application to social media platforms, has now become. The richness and profusion of photographs on social media has presented us with the potential (and for some people, actual) new problem of photographic satiation; yet in learning to encompass that surfeit, we’ve also learned some things about how we understand imagery of people, building on our already continuously developing knowledge  of how we directly understand actual people: faces and bodies. Speaking of the Tumblr site #Whatshouldwecallme, which links user-defined descriptions of frequently encountered life situations with animated GIFs or photographs that instantiate them, Jeff Binder notes Zunshine’s ‘arms race,’ which ‘causes mental states to appear to “retreat” from the possibility of transparent expression, as more and more tropes are proven subject to defective performance’ (Binder 2012), and then observes: But I wonder if there isn’t a sense in which the conventionalization of emotional expression can bring people closer to other people’s minds. I’ve long been a defender of artfulness over ideas of authenticity that exclude it, and conventional bodily reactions—or GIFs that get passed around in lieu of them—provide a way of expressing emotions whose intentionality can be clearly seen by all. They don’t transparently convey emotions, to be sure, but another level of expression can take place that appeals to the audience’s ability to understand the underlying intention, which does not involve communication through the act, but which is a precondition for all acts of communication. (Binder 2012) The idea that ‘conventional bodily reactions […] provide a way of expressing emotions whose intentionality can be clearly seen by all’ is intuitively appealing, but to understand something of how photographic depictions of those ‘bodily reactions’ become ‘conventional’ necessitates venturing into yet another theoretical framework, one that extends the cognitive approach but also steers back towards questions of narrative: scripts and schemata.

128

Chapter 7 Scripts and Schemata

S

cripts and schemata perhaps unlock the potential of photographic narrative more clearly than any other theoretical framework. These two closely related terms have their roots in a number of areas of psychology, principally Gestalt psychology, spatial perception, and some of Jean Piaget’s work on the development of knowledge in children. Of the two, schemata are the wider, more inclusive concept. The term may be used for a range of organized patterns of behaviour or mental activity, in any system, biological or robotic, that is capable of some sensor/feedback-based mode of interaction with its environment. In that rather broad sense of ‘mental,’ schemata may represent the external environment to the system, and/or assist in organizing new perceptual information about that environment. Scripts are subroutines of expected conventional behaviour for use in conventional or frequently encountered situations, based on schemata. Both ideas have found wide application in psychology, in areas as apparently independent of each other as perception studies and psychotherapy, and have also been applied to a surprisingly wide range of other disciplines including artificial intelligence and robotics, motor skills performance and, more recently and perhaps most surprisingly, literary studies. The connection between all these areas and narrative is perhaps difficult to see at first but, inversely, these wide-ranging applications of scripts and schemata probably serve to illustrate something of narrative’s fundamental connection to the nature of human existence. Gestalt psychology and form Gestalt psychology’s big idea was that the totality of any complex perceptual organization determines the appearance and understanding of its component parts, and the relationships between those parts. This was typically illustrated in relation to visual perception but was held, at least by unstated implication, to apply in some degree to other senses as well. Music is the most obvious of these: our untutored and unthinking ability to connect separate notes into a melody is, exactly, the understanding of the notes as parts of a systematic whole, rather than as a sequence of independent events. Although Gestalt theory was never strictly systematized or quantified in empirical terms, it took on a life of its own in the fields of art and design where we can now see some of its residual ideas reduced and clarified into pragmatic imperatives. The original Gestalt psychologists saw form as the fundamental unit of perception. They held that by virtue of an excitatory action upon the sensory nervous system of a viewer, exerted by the form ‘inherent’ in a visual stimulus pattern overtly composed of separate parts, the

Photography, Narrative, Time

parts would be perceptually joined into the whole and perceived as belonging to, and having, that form. Shape perception and figure-ground perception, and their practical realization in various modes of artistic representation, especially through ideas such as ‘negative space,’ are importantly grounded in Gestalt theory. This overall understanding also found its more detailed expression in Gestalt theory’s several ‘laws of organization,’ some of which have survived to now constitute modes of analysis for pictures, including photographs, and as an important basis for teaching and working in design. The ‘laws’ are often contextually defined or described and so differ from source to source, but briefly they are: Closure: the notion that the mind will supply the missing pieces of a form or shape if enough of the most salient features are represented. So for instance, an array of dotted lines in the shape of a circle, even with quite large spaces between the dots, will still be perceived as representing a circle although the complete circle is not literally present in the representation. Continuation or continuance: the idea that ‘we perceive the organization that interrupts the fewest lines’ (Hochberg 1987: 289) or, in art terminology, that the viewer’s eye can be ‘led’ by devices such as perspective lines or by the directed gaze of someone who is depicted in a picture. Similarity: the idea that purely visual similarity between objects, as opposed to knowledge about what the objects actually are, will cause objects to be seen as related. Proximity: that other things being equal, objects that are close to each other will be more likely be perceived as members of the same group (the same ‘gestalt,’ the same organized whole). Alignment: as the word implies, objects that are clearly aligned, whether via their edges or centres, will be seen as belonging to a gestalt. It’s not hard to see that these are very close relatives of some of the higher order and more general effects found in other cognitive research contexts, such as primacy and recency. However, virtually all of these ‘laws’ do find particularly powerful expression in specialized areas of graphic design such as typography, and they can also be seen at work in photography, particularly in constructed or staged photographs where the opportunity arises to use design factors in the content and arrangement of the image. This language of design has already made its way into some of the earlier analyses of photographs in this book, and will again further below. Jean Piaget made use of schemas in his work on the early-childhood development of knowledge, and his work connects back to the schemata in Emmanuel Kant’s 1787 Critique of Pure Reason. For Piaget, the ‘schema is the internal representation of some generalized class of situations, enabling the organism to act in a co-ordinated fashion over a whole range of situations’ (Arbib 1987: 696).

132

Scripts and Schemata

What both Gestalt theory and Piaget bring into play is that which made scripts and schema theory so important in the development of artificial intelligence: the interplay between the attributes of the external world and the knowledge that a viewer brings to that world. The developers of artificial intelligence systems, computers designed to learn and mimic human cognitive abilities, became rapidly aware that in order for any computer to be able to exhibit such quasi-cognitive powers, it would need not only to be able to properly perceive the immediate attributes of a sensory stimulus or a problem situation, but would also need access to something like the huge store of experience of previous similar or related situations that biological systems have. Humans, in particular, are able to draw selectively on aspects of an enormous fund of such knowledge and experience—one of the great advantages of a long developmental stage, relative to other animals—with split-second rapidity and without conscious thought or deliberation. Two powerful solutions to the problem of how to incorporate such abilities into artificial intelligence—frame theory, and its subsequent further development, knowledge scripts—have in turn found their way back into how we think about human behaviour. Frames and scripts Frames and scripts are both strategies for turning the general notion of ‘context’ into something more explicit, something that enables us to understand the effect or difference produced by specific kinds of context. Frames deal with essentially static situations, while scripts deal with sequences of action that are standardized—subroutines of actions leading to the same or similar result, and performed in more or less the same sequence and manner each time, even by different individuals. Seeing that a particular kind of arrangement of planes surrounding a volume of space is a room would be a frame; understanding that a person standing with a small paper-covered cylinder in his mouth while rummaging in his pocket with one hand is searching for a source of flame, and will shortly pull out matches or a lighter from his pocket to ignite his cigarette, is a script. The most influential work on scripts is Roger Schank and Robert Abelson’s Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. They define a script as follows: A script is a structure that describes an appropriate sequence of events in a particular context. A script is made up of slots and requirements about what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. Scripts handle stylized everyday situations. […] a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation. (Schank and Abelson 1977: 41)

133

Photography Narrative Time

Schank and Abelson distinguish between three different kinds of script: ‘situational’ scripts, which involve our knowledge of what to expect and how to behave in certain repeated everyday situations (filling the car with petrol, attending a funeral, going to the cinema); ‘personal’ scripts, which are more like character roles (‘cheerful chief cook at office barbecue,’ ‘penitent child,’ ‘wronged spouse’), and ‘instrumental’ scripts, which require and involve knowledge of how to reach a particular objective in the physical world. The cigarette-lighting example, above, is an instrumental script. What Gestalt theory, frames, scripts and schemata brought to the understanding of narrative was not a contradiction of, or an alternative to, structuralist narratology, but rather a supplementation and enrichment of it. This has taken considerable time to coalesce, and its application here to photographs is something of a work in progress, based on a number of similar ideas in other textual disciplines, as well as on writings in photography which use similar notions without directly attributing them either to scripts and schemata, or to other aspects of cognitive theory. Scripts appear to offer the particular strength of allowing for an expanded, but still fairly rigorously structured, sense of time in photographs, certainly going beyond the fixation on the ‘frozen moment,’ the duration of exposure, as the only time period legitimately tied to a photographic depiction. Early structuralists, spurred on considerably by Vladimir Propp’s 1828 Morphology of the Folktale, centred their work on the search for the essential nature of the narrative sequence. Working almost exclusively with verbal texts, they wanted to know what kinds of sequences were and were not narratives: which ones were narrative but minimally so, which were sequential but not narrative, which ones were interesting and which not, and so forth. Their work was confined to looking at the texts themselves; simplifying, purifying and distilling, and deriving functional elements as well as generalizations and rules for the use of those elements, from the most successful instances of narrative sequence. Some of this work has already been presented in Chapter 2, by way of establishing why narrative is such a high-wire act for photography. As David Herman’s Story Logic (2002) describes, the ‘Francophone structuralists’ gradually arrived at a realization that form alone wasn’t enough for a story, in any medium. The year 1977 seems to have been a big year for this realization: Tzvetan Todorov noted that a ‘sequence can be processed as a narrative not just because it has a certain form but also because its form cues readers, listeners or viewers, in structured, non-random ways, to interpret the sequence as a narrative’ (Todorov 1977: 231, quoted in Herman 2002: 95). Roland Barthes in turn subscribed to the influence of both form and context when he described the logic of a narrative sequence as initiating a ‘process of seduction such as we have learned it from all the narratives which have fashioned in us the language of narrative’ (Barthes 1977: 102). Independently, in 1988 the philosopher Nigel Warburton took up the issue of context in temporal understanding of photographs when he responded to, inter alia, Susan Sontag’s derogation of photography as a medium which cannot narrate. This aspect of Sontag’s views had also been supported by another philosopher, Stephanie Ross, in 1982, and Warburton 134

Scripts and Schemata

deals with both. Sontag and Ross had both taken what appears to be an unnecessarily strong view of the implications of a photograph being ‘a trace, something stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (Sontag 1979: 154) which, Ross agreed, ‘prevents any single photograph from being a narrative, and thereby prevents us from gleaning the understanding that narratives provide’ (Ross 1982: 10). Warburton’s response addresses this idea head-on, in terms that seem so intuitively obvious, once stated, that one loses the sense of how it would be possible to disagree: [Sontag’s] conception of narrative does not take into account the fact that both descriptions and depictions of states of affairs at an instant almost always imply facts about what has gone before, and about what in all probability will ensue. When presented with a photograph of a family of emaciated Ethiopians, we can quite reliably infer from the photograph that the people pictured had not eaten for many days before the photograph was taken. […] The same sort of considerations apply to a written description of the appearance of the Ethiopians […] and we could infer the same sort of facts about what had happened immediately prior to and following the described instant. (Warburton 1988: 176–77; emphasis in original) But Warburton’s explanation that the photograph implies certain facts only moves the same problem back one step: we still need to know something about how such implication works. It’s still open to someone to argue, as some have continued to do, that since the photograph itself cannot tell us about anything that lies beyond the duration of its exposure, it also has no powers of implication; that any such implication is coming from information that is strictly unconnected, and certainly not logically or necessarily connected, to the photograph. Warburton provides more detail about the context of photographs, and mentions the kind of issues that typically arise in the presentation of documentary or news photographs, such as captions and/ or accompanying editorial material, and the general questions surrounding their usage, but he does not explicitly deal with the knowledge brought to a photograph by the viewer. Just as the notion of ‘implied facts’ requires some unravelling, so does the issue of exactly how the viewer combines knowledge already in their possession with whatever is ‘in’ the photograph. The insight offered by those who brought schema theory into literary interpretation, such as Guy Cook (1994) was not just to include the reader’s knowledge, but to see that the apparent power of the most effective and engaging texts—for Cook, what counted as literariness—actually resulted from a clash between reader expectations as brought to the text, and a revision of those expectations impressed on them by their encounter with the text. Narrative occurs not in the sequence of events that is ‘in’ the text itself—not, in other words, where early narratologists were looking to find it—but in the interface, the interplay, between text and viewer/reader. Herman describes this well: As stereotyped sequences of events, scripts, in particular, help explain the difference between a mere sequence of actions or occurrences and a narratively organized sequence, 135

Photography, Narrative, Time

that is, a molecular narrative. Narrative at once anchors itself in and deviates from experiential repertoires stored as scripts, unfolding as an interplay between what Jerome Bruner (1991: 11–13) calls ‘canonicity and breach.’ In other words, a sequence of actions, states, and events qualifies as a narrative by virtue of how it situates remarkable or tellable occurrences against a backdrop of stereotypical expectations about the world. (Herman 2002: 85) Canonicity and breach, as Bruner outlines them, are actually essential ingredients in transforming a script into a narrative. Scripts themselves are in essence canonical—known, conventional and predictable—and that is why they are scripts; they prescribe appropriate behaviour in some defined situation. They are a ‘necessary background’ to narrative, but do not in themselves constitute narrative. For a script to become a narrative and to have ‘tellability’—for it to be worth telling—it must contain an element of surprise or difference in relation to the script from which it is a departure, but it must also contain the script, with sufficient detail and adherence to its canonical form for both the script and the departure from it—the canon and the breach—to be recognizable by the receiver of the narrative. Success in making a narrative therefore also requires a sense of what is canonical in lived human actions and experience, as well as in representations or depictions of such experience, and of the extent to which the canon can be breached in both actuality and in depictions without becoming incomprehensible. Scripts in photographs Scripts, together with the notions of canonicity and breach, are potentially powerful tools of analysis in a non-verbal medium. Barbara Von Eckardt (unpublished conference presentation and personal communication) proposes a two-factor model (Figure 9) for the operation of multiple scripts, and varying degrees of canonicity and breach, which allows us to see where and how a range of tellable narratives might occur in some photographs. It also helps us to see why only some photographs are likely to be the bearers of narrative, and indeed why some attempts to tell stories in quite conventional verbal form also fall short. In Figure 9, the ‘increasingly tellable zone’ indicates the area in which narrative occurs. Elaborating on both the diagram and on Von Eckardt’s own related description of the conditions under which a photograph might tell a story, we find that a photograph will seem, to a viewer, to ‘tell’ a story if: • The photograph depicts a readable, recognizable scene. This might be an actual scene that is known to the viewer, or a scene that is reliably identifiable as a particular genre. • The viewer recognizes that the photograph depicts that scene or type of scene. • There exists a script or action sequence such that the depicted scene belongs on one of its instantiations. 136

Scripts and Schemata

• Looking at the photograph of the scene triggers a mental representation of the script or action sequence in the viewer. • The scene contains some ‘tellability’ element—a breach—such that inclusion of the element turns this instantiation of the script into a story. • The viewer recognizes that the altered instance of the script is a story. • The viewer is either able to imagine this story in a tellable form, or recognizes that an imaginative viewer would be able to do so. (Von Eckardt, slide sequence) The third Justice and Police Museum photograph (Figure 8, in Chapter 5) provides an apposite example of scripts in operation. Although there’s no sense of any imminent of just-completed change or movement in the photograph—unlike, say, the Cartier-Bresson puddle-leaping man in Figure 1—there certainly are some features that enable us to put a temporal framework on the depicted events, and in that way to see it shaped to a significant degree as a narrative, without needing to resort to supposition and also without interfering with any other mode of analysis of the photograph. In the earlier analysis of the same photograph (pp. 104–5) I drew attention to the fact that the setting seemed to be close to Christmas. This we may take as a frame, a static aspect of the circumstances within which events unfolded. Since, however, the point of acknowledging that it is Christmas is to invoke knowledge of the behaviours that characterize

Figure 9:  Von Eckardt’s model for operation of scripts in relation to photographs.

137

Photography, Narrative, Time

Christmas—entertaining and/or being entertained, consuming alcohol in greater amounts and/or more frequently and so on—this knowledge also forms part of the script or scripts. Taking Herman’s quotation above as our guide, this photograph does seem to meet Herman’s (2002: 85) description of ‘situat[ing] remarkable or tellable occurrences against a backdrop of stereotypical expectations about the world.’ The task of characterizing this in strict terms as a narrative against Herman’s description, however, requires also that it be specifically shown to depict a ‘sequence of actions, states, and events’ (emphasis added). Using Von Eckardt’s model, there are firstly several linked scripts at play. We have the nearness to Christmas, and the kinds of occasion and behaviour expected as probable consequences. Not all such behaviours need to be proven to have operated in this circumstance, since all that is required is for our pictured situation to qualify as an instance of the general script, and the newspaper heading seems sufficient proof that this script applies here. We also have at our disposal a script about the kinds of behaviour to be expected on social occasions in comfortable middle-class homes, and this is confirmed by the condition and décor of the kitchen itself, its clean and well-equipped appearance, and the presence of food and drink. The food and drink, even including the flour on the floor, is also the basis of a script. These are all pretty clearly canonical—to some extent the photograph itself contains normative information about how such a room should be organized and maintained, and what kinds of thing would ordinarily happen in it. There’s also an enormous breach, in the form of evidence of a sudden and savage attack— the blood, the shoes pulled or flung off, the flour packet dropped, and indications of struggle, probably a struggle for life, in the scattered flour and the smeared blood. This script is at once both shocking and familiar: shocking because of our knowledge of any photograph’s causal origins, combined with the provenance that confirms its evidential nature, but familiar through intermediation—through exposure to other representations or discussions of domestic violence, both real and fictional. There could hardly be a more marked contrast with the comfortable and normal-seeming surroundings but, perhaps exactly because this script seamlessly links visceral particularized horror with frequently reinforced general knowledge, the level of breach does not exceed the bounds of comprehensibility outlined in Von Eckardt’s model. The number of scripts is not excessive, and neither is there extraneous information that conflicts with these perceptions, or which opens other unanswered questions. Nevertheless, it’s still only a momentary exposure, a fraction of a second, that is explicitly presented to us by the photograph. The depicted event is in the past, both the past of the photograph and, even further, our past now, as viewers, but how can it meet Herman’s requirement—and indeed the requirement of all narrative theorists, in some terms—of a sequence? To some extent the answer has already been provided by the earlier discussion of this photograph, but it’s still worth fitting it into the strict terms of Herman’s description of where narrative arises. The food and drink script provides us with a sequence. The victim, or her body, has been removed from the scene, and obviously the perpetrator is not present. What remains in the scene, since this is an evidential photograph, is what was there at the time of the incident, 138

Scripts and Schemata

and we may presume that nothing has been either added or removed. The food and drink that is visible appears to fall into three categories. Firstly, there has been tea or coffee for four people, obviously not as a post-dinner beverage since dinner has not been consumed, so this has most likely been served in the late afternoon. Secondly, a pre-dinner drink of either beer or brandy, for an indeterminate number of people; the brandy is of mixed drinks (or as discussed earlier, cooking) quality, and neither drink would typically be part of a meal. Thirdly, there is the meal itself, for two not for four people, and neither delivered to a dining table nor eaten, apparently not even partially. It’s reasonable to assume that had a table been situated in the kitchen, it would be retained there in an evidential photograph, but the space and comfort level of the house makes it more than likely that a dining table exists in a separate dining area elsewhere. The tea/coffee, brandy/beer and dinner already strongly suggest a sequence, though admittedly one that is highly probable rather than unambiguously proven. But the breach event—the attack—and the two servings of dinner on the bench and sink are surely in an unambiguous sequence. It’s simply inconceivable—‘incomprehensible’ in the terms of Von Eckardt’s model—that an attack of this kind would take place and that one of the participants, or indeed anyone at all, would then prepare a meal and serve it out, leaving the blood, shoes and flour in situ. Together with the flour on the floor, which is most likely associated with preparation of a dessert, there is a sequence of events here that is as unambiguous in its order as would be many narratives in other media—short stories or films, for example. This all sounds very laboured, and of course the real point is not so much that one can grind through an almost syllogistic process to arrive at such conclusions, even though in some cases of evidential photographs, that might well happen, for legal rather than narratological reasons. Where a photograph is open to fruitful narrative analysis in this way, it’s most likely that a sensible and observant viewer will arrive at similar conclusions about the nature of the depicted events—rapidly, intuitively, and probably without needing to think about them. Until the application of script theory, however, this means of theorizing how and where the narrative is constructed was not available. Far from opening some imagined floodgates of narrative and declaring that every photograph really does tell a story, the script-canonicity-breach model also makes clear that many, perhaps most, photographs are not narrative at all. The earlier Justice and Police Museum photograph (Figure 6) also has a script of sorts about poverty and close-kept company, as already partly outlined in the ‘Evidence’ chapter (Chapter 5), but there’s either less of a sense of a canon breached or less of a gap between canon and breach, and far less clarity about what other scripts, and how many, there might be. In other photographs from the same archive such as Figure 10, below, there is little if any sense of a script, and no evidence of any major change of state or of the forces that might bear on such a change. There’s plenty more to make the picture appealing and interesting, of course: undoubtedly a pervasive sense of general foreboding for a start, conferred on it principally by our 139

Photography, Narrative, Time

Figure 10:  Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.

knowledge that it comes from an archive of actual forensic photographs and must, therefore, be evidence of a serious crime or accident. While there’s no clear script, the photograph does seem to present the opening passage of something: the disturbed bedclothes, seen in a mirror image that wafts the enticing aroma of film noir across our perceptual field, are sufficiently awry to introduce a hint at breach of the canon of a clean, neat, safe bedroom, but there’s no blood and no sign of fighting or struggle. The photograph has straightforward aesthetic appeal: flash has almost certainly been used, judging by the uniformly bright illumination level and the drop shadow of the cantilevered glass extension to the dresser top, but considerable care has been taken to avoid any specular highlights in the very shiny woodwork of the dresser and the wardrobe. Both objects are finished in a veneer of silky oak, and everything about the grain and polish of that fine wood surface is beautifully depicted, so beautifully that it easily becomes one of the most prominent features of the photograph. At one level this is no more than a good example of the conflation of intended information 140

Scripts and Schemata

with accidental or unavoidable detail, touched on in the earlier chapter on evidence. But it also raises, not for the first time, questions about whose interests, and the exact nature and extent of the interests, being served: in the making of these photographs, in their role in evidential processes, and in their new life in the archive. Certainly not all photographs can provide us with the narrative sustenance which, if authors like Jonathan Gottschall and Brian Boyd are correct, we want to draw out of everything that surrounds us; but our hunger for narrative certainly seems to ensure that there are few limits to where we’re prepared to look: including the worst of times, and the worst of all possible worlds.

141

Chapter 8 Possible Worlds

P

hotography, the medium that staked much of its life on never telling a lie, is of all humanity’s inventions the most finely suited to creating convincing evidence for situations and things that do not exist. Across all its disciplines, the desire to trick, to confound, and to deceive with photographs is ever-present and widespread; advertising provides us with some of the most strident examples as well as some of the most subtle ones, but in art photography too, there is a notable enthusiasm for playing on our postmodern doubts about the status of the photograph—for the creation of images which simultaneously support and undermine their own veracity, which erode their own connection to some aspect of the external world even as they ostensibly depict it, and which often act deliberately to cast doubt on photography itself. Much of this springs from a confluence of developments in photography’s maturation as a visual tool, mostly at the hands of artists, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a period in which the basis for photography’s status moved away from a presumed special and inbuilt relationship to ‘truth’ and away from an evaluative structure based only on perceptual realism, towards the condition already understood for film, text and other media: a means of conveying information, the truth-value of which (on occasions when that is the main concern) is to be determined by examining the contents of the whole package in detail, not by merely glancing at its wrapper. This change, particularly in the context of the move from analogue to digital methods and materials in photography, has been extensively discussed throughout the intervening decades and is significant in this context because such freeingup seems to allow greater play for narrative, and indeed for fiction, in a medium otherwise thought for so long to be more a servant of the courtroom than of the stage. The development of photography as a potential medium for fiction, for drama and for play has also been assisted by some of the developments with which postmodernism was partly concerned: the assumption by all camera-based media of a role in creating a secondary reality, and the consequent blurring of the line between information and entertainment: With the advent of hyperreality, therefore, simulations come to constitute reality itself. In the 1980s, TV programmes appeared in the USA which directly simulate real-life situations such as The People’s Court which re-enacts the trials and tribulations of the petty bourgeoisie, while TV evangelists simulated religion and Ronald Reagan simulated politics. (Best and Kellner 1991: 120)

Photography, Narrative, Time

This was an obvious game for photography to join, and so from that period began a strand of experimentation, stretching the medium beyond the roles of authenticity and objectivity that had for so long been its lot. Because of those very roles, which were felt to be intrinsic to photography but had never constrained film or television, or indeed any other entire medium, in quite the same way, photography was in a strong position to surprise by doing something different. There has always been a small but healthy school of make-believe and experimentation among photographers, but this time it was artists who took the initiative, and unlike photographers, who often remained predominantly concerned with a modernist approach to photography’s formal properties, the artists were interested in photography both for its content and for the value that might lie in subverting that content. This project made use of what we have already identified as photography’s tenuous narrative attributes, but a connecting line can also be drawn to literary and philosophical precursors for alternative worlds, where questions of ‘what if?’ have so often been hypothesized and exercised. Doreen Maître (1983) distinguishes four different kinds of possible world in literary narratives, each of which has a surprisingly exact counterpart in photography: 1. Works involving largely accurate reference to actual historical events (true fiction). 2. Works dealing with imaginary states of affairs which could be actual (strongly realistic texts). 3. Works in which there is an oscillation between could-be-actual and could-never-beactual (Todorov’s conception of the fantastic). 4. Works dealing with states of affairs which could never be actual (Todorov’s marvellous). (Maître 1983, summarized and quoted from Marie-Laure Ryan 2005: 449. The Todorov reference is to Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1973) Two linked theoretical ideas from the cognitive material in the previous two chapters connect narratives with possible worlds, and provide plausible frameworks for looking at photographs in the light of Maître’s categories. The first of these is ‘storyworlds,’ the integrative idea extensively laid out in David Herman’s Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002): ‘a jointly narratological and linguistic approach to stories construed as strategies for building mental models of the world’ (2). This is an extremely complex matter even for textual narratives, where the elements, patterns and structures for making meaning are much more fine-grained, and subject to more far-reaching and sophisticated rule-bound behaviours and controls than ever apply to images of any kind. However, there are particular riches of visual complexity to be found in photographs, which certainly resonate with the distinctive attributes that Herman advances for storyworlds: For one thing, the term storyworld better captures [than ‘story’] what might be called the ecology of narrative interpretation. In trying to make sense of a narrative, interpreters 146

Possible Worlds

attempt to reconstruct not just what happened […] but also the surrounding context or environment embedding existents, their attributes, and the actions and events in which they are more or less centrally involved. […] Further […] to make sense of actions performed by narrative participants, interpreters embed those actions in what Georg Henrik von Wright (1966) called the larger acting situation that forms an essential component of the description of any action. (Herman 2002: 13–14; emphasis in original) Secondly, following Monika Fludernik and others, Werner Wolf (2003) positions narrative as an acquired cognitive (macro-) frame or schema (Wolf 2003: 184)—what he calls a ‘frame narrative’—which has three cultural functions. It ‘enables a conscious perception of time,’ ‘provides a possibility of accounting for the flux of experience in a meaningful way,’ and ‘is the basis for communicating, re-presenting and storing memorable sequences of experience’ (184). Representationality and experientiality are each essential parts of narrative’s character: by this means narrative ‘refers both to the experience of the ‘characters’ in the narrative world and to the re-experience offered to the recipients of the narrative’ (186). The meaningfulness of these last two qualities can, in turn, be grasped because a narrative either creates, or refers to, a possible world in which time and change play a vital role and which consists of discrete and specific elements, in particular: identical and recurrent anthropomorphic beings as the experiencers of change, and some kind of action or events as a manifestation of this change. (Wolf 2003: 189; emphasis in original) It is photography’s history of almost fetishized attention to actuality which makes for such nervous tension around its dabbling in fiction, and which also probably makes Maître’s first category by far the largest of the four in photographic terms—certainly so large that the few photographs and photographers discussed in these pages should not be understood to be representative or typical. So many iconic documentary photographs can be shown to be either actual fictions or, at best, re-enactments, rehearsals, or repeats of real events, that such ‘reality fictions’ should almost constitute a substantial genre of their own. Some examples are both well known as re-enactments but nevertheless also celebrated for their residual documentary worth; others maintain widespread respect as ‘pure’ documentation despite extensive efforts to demonstrate their real origins, while others have become the target of astounding vitriol for deviations from true documentary that are really so minor as to hardly merit mentioning. Works involving largely accurate reference to actual historical events (true fiction) As Maître’s categorization begins from the most truthful end of photography’s variable relationship with reality, we should do the same, and an intriguing variant on the first category is Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the American flag-raising on the island of Iwo Jima 147

Photography, Narrative, Time

during World War II. Rosenthal took several photographs of the event, of which one has become a particularly iconic image of the US war in the Pacific, and one of the most widely reproduced photographs of all time. Rosenthal’s photograph, a genuine and rapidly made recording of an unscripted event, came quite unjustly to be regarded as a fake and a re-enactment. A version of the explanation appears in Harold Evans’s Pictures on a Page (Evans et al. 1978: 145–8). The photograph itself is also widely reproduced on the Internet, for example in a New York Times article on the occasion of Rosenthal’s death in 2006 (Goldstein 2006). The following description is summarized from both sources. There had indeed been two separate flag raisings on Iwo Jima on the day, 23 February, 1945. A smaller flag had been raised at first, but a larger one was requested (possibly following some competition around making a souvenir of the smaller one), and substituted for it. The flag had a practical purpose as a signal to other troops, and to ships, that US victory over the island was near, and it needed to be as visible as possible; a bigger flag could be seen from further away. Rosenthal did not photograph the erection of this first flag. He had posed two other photographs of the second flag once raised and fixed in place, one picture with a small number of the original soldiers holding the improvised flagpole, and another picture of a larger group, cheering under the billowing larger flag. The photograph that was actually published, however, to immediate acclaim but not to Rosenthal’s immediate knowledge, was the very first shot he had quickly snapped of the second flag-raising, without even looking through the viewfinder, when he saw that the pole was going up and that he risked missing it unless he acted quickly. Adding to the confusion, when Rosenthal was asked a few days later if he had posed ‘the’ photograph he agreed that he had, believing at that stage that the published photograph which he had not yet seen must be one of his deliberately posed ones, rather than his initial impulsive snapshot. All this was much to Rosenthal’s cost: despite the fame of the photograph, and its continued use for more than half a century to symbolize US military heroics, he was accused of having arranged a restaging of the flag-raising for the purposes of his photograph, and of posing the small group of soldiers who erected the hastily improvised pole and flag. This firmly attached narrative demonstrates something of how uncertainty can quickly surround even a truthful representation of events, and bring about the formation of a resilient fiction, one which is remarkably resistant to erosion by contrary factual information. Rosenthal had to endure decades of accusations that he had staged the photograph, even including a suggestion that the Pulitzer Prize he had won for it in 1945 should be revoked, and he suffered considerably from his inability to quell the inaccurate—fictitious—version of how the photograph had been made. In Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph, we can at least be reasonably sure (as sure as we can be of anything) that what it depicts is what happened, at a certain time and place, and that Rosenthal was not a causal agent in what took place in front of his camera. Two more examples will provide a more rounded view of the uneasy relationship between, in the words of Maître’s first category, ‘largely accurate reference’ and ‘actual historical events,’ and start to 148

Possible Worlds

show something of why documentary or near-documentary photographs can arouse such strong emotions. Robert Capa’s photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936, also published as Death of a Loyalist Soldier and now commonly known as the ‘Falling Soldier’ is at least the equal in iconic reputation of Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima picture. Capa’s image supposedly shows a Spanish Loyalist (Republican) soldier, caught at the instant of his death either from a sniper’s bullet through the head or, according to Capa’s various, and varying, accounts at the time of publication and later, from a burst of Falangist machine-gun fire. The photograph was originally published in a French magazine, VU, on 23 September, 1936. Although public debate about its authenticity began in 1975 following allegations relayed to British author and journalist Phillip Knightley and published in his 1975 book The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam; The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, the photograph has also continued to be described and published in quite recent times as though unquestioningly a documentary record: The much more famous photograph taken by Capa two years earlier, showing a Loyalist soldier falling at the instant of his death, allowed the reader to come close to the most powerful unknown, the one uncrossable boundary, death, while remaining physically unscathed—even, perhaps, while drinking a coffee. (Ritchin 1998: 594) It’s worth noting, though, especially in view of further comments below about the continuing significance of this photograph, that the context for Fred Ritchin’s quoted comment is not a forensic examination of the particular photograph, but a discussion of the undoubtedly powerful impact of photojournalism of this kind, prior to the advent of television. The most detailed evidence against the authenticity of Capa’s photograph post-dates Ritchin’s comment and, to be fair, competing views and evidence continue to emerge. Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer, published a highly detailed defence of Capa’s photograph as a truthful documentary record in Aperture (Whelan 2002), incorporating readings of the disposition of the soldier’s body by a homicide detective from the Memphis Police Department, himself a photographer. More recently, the photograph has undergone even more specific attacks, also supported by strong evidence. In 2009, a comprehensive investigation by a Spanish communications academic, José Manuel Susperregui, proved beyond reasonable doubt that the photograph was not made at Cerro Muriano as Capa had said, but in the hills close to another town some 35 miles (56 km) away—and much too far from the battle lines for a stray bullet to have reached the soldier from any forces known to be in the area at the time (summarized in Young: 2012). Such firm proof, even if strictly only about the location, does immediately cast a shadow of doubt over everything about the picture, and most certainly over Capa’s claims for it. Nevertheless, Willis E. Hartshorn, Director of the International Center of Photography in New York (which owns the Capa archive) has continued to defend the ‘Falling Soldier’ as genuine, cautioning against jumping to the conclusion that 149

Photography, Narrative, Time

everything about the photograph is false just because the location is incorrect: ‘Part of what is difficult about this is that people are saying, “Well if it’s not here, but there, then, good God, it’s fabricated,” […] That’s a leap that I think needs a lot more research and a lot more study’ (Rohter 2009). The third example of Maître’s ‘true fiction’ category is a collective one: the drought pictures made by photographers of the Information Division of the US Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1936 and 1937, and the reactions to the works they produced, then and since. The worst effects of the Great Depression were by 1935 being particularly felt in already-poor rural communities in the centre and south-west of the United States, where agricultural land had already been excessively deforested, over-farmed and was now reduced to dust by drought. A major goal of the Resettlement Administration (RA), which preceded the FSA, was to take farming families and migrant rural workers from exhausted land and move them to government-owned ‘model’ farms and planned communities, where the deployment of better farming methods on still-fertile arable land would allow them to make a living successfully. The year 1936 was an election year and Roosevelt was pursuing his second term; he needed to gather popular support for the significant expenditure that would be necessary to ensure the success of the FSA’s activities. Then as now in the United States, the idea of using government funding to relieve even the most extreme poverty smacked of the  ‘socialism’ that so many Americans feared beyond any reason or analysis, and the FSA had to be able to demonstrate to the rest of the country that thousands of their fellow citizens were living in extreme poverty from which they could not escape without government assistance. The photographers of the Information Division were asked to document the plight of the farmers and rural workers, through themes that would make the narrative of their lives understandable and engender support for both their cause, and the government’s chosen method of relieving it. The FSA project later expanded significantly, firstly by extending its coverage to the whole country, and later by covering US forces in action in World War II under a merger with the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942. After the war, at a time when the project’s director, Roy Stryker, feared that critics of the project (of which there was a surprisingly large number) would seek to have the photographs destroyed, they were moved to the safety of the Library of Congress. An archive of the FSA/OWI photographs can be found on the Library of Congress (2012) website. Much has been written about the photographs of the FSA—and about the photographers, some of whom already had considerable reputations, and some of whom made their reputations through their FSA work. Although credited in many quarters, to this day, with the development if not the actual sponsorship of documentary photography in the United States, and to some extent worldwide, the perceived political orientation of the project made it a lightning rod for ideologically motivated criticism, often expressed in extreme terms. Film-maker and critic Errol Morris has catalogued the history of some of these reactions in fine detail, and my discussion here is based to a large degree on the account in his book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Morris 2011). 150

Possible Worlds

It’s sufficient, for the arguments to be made here, that we examine just a few of the photographs and questions followed up carefully by Morris in his book. Arthur Rothstein, then a young photographer with the FSA (but, significantly, trained neither in photography nor journalism, but in economics (Morris 2011: 158)), made a photograph in Pennington County, South Dakota, in May 1936, showing the bleached skull of a dead cow in the foreground of an unambiguously drought-affected landscape. Landscape photographs generally benefit from a sense of scale and from the accentuation of distance that can be provided by an object in the foreground, and Rothstein gave into the temptation of moving the skull, reputedly by no more than ten feet (3 m) (Morris, 129) through several shots, in order to get the most powerful photograph with the benefit of the foregrounded skull. Three of the resulting images, confirming clearly that the skull has been moved, but also not by a great distance, can be found among Rothstein’s photographs from South Dakota on the Library of Congress FSA/OWI website. The picture was not published until July, by which time the drought had markedly worsened. Neither Rothstein, nor any of the newspapers that published the photograph prior to the disagreements surrounding it, claimed that the skull was that of a cow which had died as a direct result of the drought. The caption on two of the Library of Congress images used the phrase ‘overgrazed land’—possibly a red rag to South Dakota farmers, who might have resented an implication of poor land husbandry—but as Morris shows, there’s no evidence even that these words were Rothstein’s rather than those of a cataloguing librarian. The caption under the photograph published in The Washington Post for Friday July 10, 1936 reads: ‘From Pennington, S. Dak., comes this photo of a bleached skull on a sun-baked, grassless plain, giving solemn warning that here is a land the desert threatens.’ Neither the photograph nor its caption, therefore, carried any implication that any person was responsible, let alone culpable, for the cow, the parched land or the drought. But the reaction, particularly from the South Dakota newspaper the Fargo Forum, was vitriolic: There never was a year when a scene like this couldn’t be produced in N. [sic] Dakota, even in years when rainfall levels were far above normal. What we see here is a typical alkali flat […] one can find these in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, wherever one chooses. The skull? Oh, that’s a moveable ‘prop,’ which comes in handy for photographers who want to touch up their photographs with a bit of the grisly. (Fargo Forum, quoted in Morris 2011: 128) By late August of 1936, accusations of ‘fraud’ in connection with the cow skull photograph were in newspapers across the country—New York, Washington, Fargo again several times, Kansas, Burlington, Chicago and more. An editorial in the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that a reader had done a ‘post-mortem on the skull’ (Morris 2011: 132) and had determined that ‘as an exhibit of the effect of the drought in western North Dakota it is clearly a fake’ (Morris 2011: 133). 151

Photography, Narrative, Time

This is almost surrealistic in its stupidity; one is reminded, most unfortunately, of the lowest echelons of contemporary debate over climate change. It’s hard to do better than Morris’s own comment on this episode: What makes these accusations of photo fakery utterly perverse is the claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought. The photographs led the viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a severe drought. But the Dakotas were experiencing a severe drought. One of the worst droughts in American history. Was the real issue that the cow had died of old age rather than drought? Or that the cow skull had been moved less than ten feet, as the FSA claimed? Or had been moved at all? Or that multiple photographs had been taken? Or was it merely an attempt to shift the nature of the debate from the agricultural problems facing the country to an argument about photography and propaganda? (Morris 2011: 133; emphasis in original) There is always good cause for a genuine objection to be made about changing the nature of what is before the documenting camera, and many quite reasonable and measured objections have been raised about Rothstein’s procedures, and about many other FSA photographs. Rothstein himself confused matters in relation to another 1936 photograph, Fleeing a Dust Storm, for which he subsequently provided sequentially changing accounts that made it difficult to assess the degree to which the photograph had been truly ‘found,’ or posed (see Morris 2011: 169–73). No doubt partly because of the unresolved nature of such instances, the debate about the documentary status of the FSA photographs is still going. But such debates point back to what is shared, in only slightly varying terms, by all of Maître’s four categories: they are about the depiction of possible worlds, worlds characterized by the values for which the photographs are perceived to stand. Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph doesn’t require defending, other than against people who are uninformed about which of his pictures were posed and which not. Independently of anyone’s beliefs about it, the photograph unambiguously is that very rare thing: an unpremeditated, unmodified, quickly composed response to action and movement. It was, and is, highly valued precisely because in that quick, intuitive and reactive moment, Rosenthal symbolically encapsulated so much about the US Pacific war at that juncture, and how the press and the public at home wanted to see it represented: heroic progress, not yet complete but struggling towards victory; improvisation in overcoming the odds; a small but united force of soldiers helping each other in difficult circumstances; and so on. The picture fed into a mixture of hope and belief that was already there, waiting to be satisfied; a world view for the times; a possible world. Despite doubts about the authenticity of Capa’s Falling Soldier that have pursued the picture for decades, it too maintains its iconic status in what seems to be an untouchable parallel universe. The Spanish Government—at the time of writing, a nominally socialist government that is effectively a descendant of the Republicans who lost the Civil War, leaving 152

Possible Worlds

Spain under the fascist rule of General Francisco Franco for four decades—has continued to defend the documentary status of the photograph as an emblem of that tragic struggle. Long prior to the challenges mounted this century, Caroline Brothers, in her 1997 book War and Photography: A Cultural History, had made one of the most thorough investigations of the Capa picture up to that time (see pages 178–83 in particular), and concluded that it was highly likely to have been set up and posed. But the manner in which she phrases her conclusions hints at why and how its survival is assured: On the strength of the historical evidence it therefore appears that the Death of a Republican Soldier provides no documentary record of any moment of death; indeed its relationship with the truth in its most orthodox sense is at best heavily undermined. So what is the nature of the evidence, if any, it contains? As an archetypal symbol of death in war the image will retain a certain aura, even if its status is diminished, although as a touchstone for war photographers its power will fade. For the historian, however, its value as evidence is only enhanced. No longer the documentation of an individual death in a particular battle at a specific time and place, the photograph bears the traces of something broader, of the desired beliefs of a particular historical era […] what this image argued was that death in war was heroic and tragic, and that the individual counted and that his death mattered. (Brothers 1997: 183) The same applies to the FSA photographs: no amount of dialogue about who moved a skull or a pair of shoes, or whether two children and their father in a dry windswept landscape were truly ‘fleeing a dust storm’ or just posing for effect on a dusty day, can ever remove what the photographs stand for. As Morris says in his concluding words to the FSA chapter in Believing is Seeing, writing of the dust storm picture: In the 1930s, it was a plea for help; now it is a story of triumph over adversity. We see the father and his two sons hunkered down, heading for the chicken coop. It is an image that defines the boy, his brother, and his father. It becomes part of how the boy, now grown, sees himself and his family. It becomes his connection with a father who is no longer alive. It is not just that day that is captured in the photograph; it is how he has come to see his childhood. And how we have come to see an entire era. It brings time forward, but also compresses it, collapses it into one moment. It is the idea that the photograph captures that endures. (Morris 2011: 185; emphasis in original) To see how these and certain other photographs work, then—how they construct particular meanings, and why they retain those meanings in the face of comparisons with their physical referents, whether justified or not—we need to attend less to the physical world they depict, and more to their narrative properties. 153

Photography, Narrative, Time

The FSA photographs and the wider activities of the FSA itself have generally been described in political or socio-economic terms, but it’s difficult not to be struck by how such descriptions appear to be an instance of the kind of thing Herman, and other authors quoted by him, claim for storyworlds. An extensive Indiana University website of information about the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ describes what the FSA was about: The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational and press information to the public. Under [Roy] Stryker [Head of the Historical Section of the FSA and manager of its photographic project], the Information Division adopted the goal of ‘introducing America to Americans,’ so Stryker hired photographers to document the plight of the poor. Stryker sought photographs that ‘related people to the land and vice versa’ because those photographs supported the idea that poverty could be changed through reform. Stryker’s plan was to photograph migrant workers in a way that would tell a story about their daily lives, and to achieve this, he assigned his photographers various themes. For example, [Dorothea Lange] focused on the subject matter of cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing. (Celebrating New Deal Arts and Culture 2009) Herman construes storyworlds as ‘mental models of a special sort’ (Herman 2002: 17), and quotes P.N. Johnson-Laird arguing for the superiority of mental models, over formal mental logic, in accounting for processes of inference. It sounds remarkably like what Roy Stryker had been asked to do: It is now plausible to suppose that mental models play a central and unifying role in representing objects, states of affairs, sequences of events, the way the world is, and the social and psychological actions of daily life. They enable individuals to make inferences and predictions, to understand phenomena, to decide what action to take and to control its execution, and above all to experience events by proxy; they allow language to be used to create representations comparable to those deriving from direct acquaintance with the world; and they relate words to the world by way of conception and perception. (Johnson-Laird 1983, quoted in Herman 2002: 17) Again, photographs aren’t mentioned anywhere by Herman as kinds of text to which this notion could be applied, but it’s not hard to understand documentary photographs as ‘enabl[ing] individuals to […] understand phenomena […] and above all to experience events by proxy,’ and as ‘representations comparable to those deriving from direct acquaintance with the world.’ Such phrases resonate strongly with the FSA’s role. The idea that what the FSA was doing was creating a storyworld is even further reinforced when we understanding the alternative storyworld that could with little trouble have been created by the FSA: not by changing the internal details of any one picture, but by choosing different pictures. Anyone trawling through the full web archive of FSA photographs online 154

Possible Worlds

via the Library of Congress website will be able to find many images that are essentially the same, in character, approach and subject matter, as the relatively small number of FSA images that are repeatedly published. But John Edwin Mason from Virginia University has assembled a selection of mainly post-1940 FSA photographs (Mason 2010) which show a quite different view of the people and the times. To succeed in generating sympathy for the poor farmers and sharecroppers, and to gather wide support for the remedial action proposed by the government, the photographs needed to show their human subjects with ‘the kind of expression people are supposed to wear in documentary photos dealing with social problems’ (William Stott, quoted in Morris 2011: 161). But there’s a strong ‘mean reversion’ in life, emotionally as in every other respect; people generally just don’t stay miserable all the while, even in conditions of great austerity, and they are resourceful about finding enjoyment and amusement where and when they can. As Mason says on his site, ‘The FSA/OWI archive is, in fact, surprisingly full of people having a good time.’ To show ‘people having a good time,’ of course, would most likely have brought about the failure of the project—because it would have constructed a world in which people’s lives were accepted and enjoyed, rather than one in which they suffered unrelenting indignity and hardship. Walker Evans, possibly the most widely known photographer of the FSA team, extensively photographed the Gudger family and the interior and exterior of their humble home several times in the FSA project; the images are in the Library of Congress archive, and many of the shots that show the Gudgers’ clearly impoverished circumstances are included in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s 1941 poetic/ethnographic work, Let us now Praise Famous Men. But in the Museum of Modern Art (which has extensive holdings of Walker Evans’s photographs), there’s a photograph of the Gudgers (reproduced in Morris 2011: 160), dressed for church in their best Sunday clothes, scrubbed clean and posed against the weatherboard wall of a building which seems, though unpainted, to at least be in good condition and structurally sound. This world is a very different one: not rich, but seemingly unproblematic. As William Stott remarks, it ‘goes too far [for use in its intended socio-political purpose] in suggesting that, “Hey, these are real people. These people are okay. We don’t need to worry about them.”’ (Morris 2011: 160). Imaginary states of affairs which could be actual: Strongly realistic texts We need worry even less, with respect to material circumstances, about the people in Tina Barney’s photographs of her affluent family (examples at Borden 2006). Born into comfortable Long Island and New England wealth, Barney has said that she ‘began photographing what I knew’ (Borden 2006), and what she knew was her own family and friends, and their domestic surroundings. Her photographs make a convenient, if slippery, transition from the first of Maître’s four literary world types into the second: ‘Works dealing with imaginary states of affairs which could be actual (strongly realistic texts).’ But there’s something amiss, something that isn’t 155

Photography, Narrative, Time

being shared with the viewers: what we rather see is ‘works dealing with actual states of affairs which could be imaginary.’ Strongly realistic to be sure, but with an inflection of dramatic imagination that is hard to pin down: it isn’t in every picture, and it isn’t achieved or encoded in the same manner, where it happens. The people and places in the photographs are ‘real’—her real friends and family, in their real bathrooms and real bedrooms and extraordinary real formal lounges and dining rooms—but they’ve certainly been posed and directed, even if casually, and mostly they are carefully lit—so carefully that the lighting falls just short of disappearing into invisible naturalism. The pictures are large in scale, shot with a large-format camera, and saturated in colour, so that the richness of the images rivals that of the surroundings depicted and is close to that of large formal paintings. There’s plenty that’s real, and rich, about Tina Barney’s photographs, even if the sense of wealth alone means that the depicted world must be understood as fictional in the sense that it can never be experienced—other than through representation or mediation—for the majority of viewers. There’s also the recognition of the camera, by its subjects, that occurs in nearly every photograph. These pictures are enterprises that could not be made without the collusion of all those present: Barney herself, her subjects, and the assistants she sometimes employs. Everything in them is real and looks real, yet little about them feels true. Because one of our first responses to any photograph is inevitably to contemplate its actual referent—what was actually in front of the lens at the time of exposure—there’s often interplay between that irredeemably factual referent, something or someone we can usually recognize, and another world to which the photograph also refers. In Tina Barney’s universe we find a real world depicted by realist methods, but one that doesn’t seem to have a foothold in the world as we, the viewers, generally experience it. In most of the photographs we could firmly include under the second category in Maître’s four literary world types, ‘Works dealing with imaginary states of affairs which could be actual (strongly realistic texts)’ we have photographs that initially appear to overlap with the factual-historical first category because they clearly delineate a comprehensible referent which either is in the real world, or could be—but the other state of affairs, the ‘imaginary’ world towards which they gesture, may be hinted at in many ways and with different levels of perceptual realism. In this second Maître category, the first photographer and body of work to consider— in many senses the original and still the best—is Cindy Sherman and her Film Stills of 1977–1980, the work for which she is probably best known to this day. In all of them ‘the artist herself, bewigged, costumed, and heavily made up is the sole protagonist’ (Grundberg 1990: 120), but none could be said to be a photograph of Cindy Sherman. There are many agendas at work here; all are probably involved in some way in deflating ‘our image of the artist as a glamorized Nietschean superhero’ (Grundberg 1990: 121). There are ambiguous and complex statements about gender roles via a choice of stereotyped female ‘characters’ which manage to simultaneously invoke both glamorous film stars, and vulnerable, depressed, lonely, ‘ordinary’ women. Less immediately identifiable now, but highly recognizable when the works were produced, there’s a reference to film stills themselves, as a genre. The words 156

Possible Worlds

‘film’ and ‘stills’ are used advisedly; we are expected to understand these pictures as stills from films that don’t actually exist. Barthes has acknowledged the special qualities of the ‘real’ film still—the small selection of images from a film displayed outside a cinema or in its foyer, used in earlier times to lure casual ticket-buyers, in The Third Meaning: [T]o a certain extent (the extent of our theoretical fumblings) the filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped as the film ‘in situation’, ‘in movement’, ‘in its natural state’, but only in that major artefact, the still. For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema) and of then losing everything of these photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room. (Barthes 1977: 65–6) This fascination is the central hub around which Sherman’s ‘Stills’ revolve, never quite coming to rest. There is, of course, no film from which they are extracted: no point of reference either to an objective reality or, in a heightened take on postmodernism’s foregrounding of already mediated images, not even a point of reference to a representation of such reality. The style always props up our narrative expectations, and always dashes them. If a further categorization of these works were needed, we might follow the lead of Michael Kohler (Kohler 1995: 34) and refer to them as ‘Self-Presentations,’ since Sherman herself is in one sense the subject (the model). Others have followed the same approach: Eileen Cowin is another significant artist-photographer who has often placed herself in the frame in the service of creating a world that slides uneasily between reality and fiction, often within a single frame. In her Family Docudrama series from the early 1980s, tense domestic scenes play out in an essentially ‘straight’ realist mode, but with a dreamlike, heightened sense of presence imparted through lighting—a sense of presence which positions the audience as voyeurs and interlopers in the depicted scene, rather than as observers of the gallery object. Max Kozloff discusses both Sherman and Cowin (see Kozloff 1987: 132–3) but sheds more light on how the two artists create their respective worlds in a passage actually aimed at unravelling the operation of time in real film stills: Being spatial, the single image is perceived in the real time of the spectator. The first concern of a narrative image is to superimpose its temporal metaphors on the actual viewing duration, whatever length the viewer gives it. As long as we look, or as briefly as we look, we have the same allusive moment. It cannot be reduced or extended, and certainly it can’t be interrupted, since we have the visual whole of it each time we engage with the image. The film stills naturally obey all this, and, just as naturally, they want to contradict it. They counter as forcefully as they know how, the idea that we have the whole of what was there to see, even as they would give out what was most representative 157

Photography, Narrative, Time

or fetching to see. […] Since the entire tale is lodged in the medium that actually has the time to store it, this spatial fragment must surely be aswim somewhere in a finite, continuous narrative. This explains why, as soon as I contact the image, it invariably gives me the impression that it’s already ‘started.’ (Kozloff 1987: 131–132) Both Sherman and Cowin have subsequently moved to slightly different approaches, although for each, the work discussed above has been a laboratory and a formative basis for later work. Sherman has continued to unpack many of the thematic issues of the Film Stills—gender in representation, the nature of the external signifiers of character and role, the status of sex and sexual signifiers, and the vulnerability of flesh itself. Many of these later works continue to make reference to other media, particularly to movies and television, but they seem more concerned with the depiction of the psychological nature of moments extracted from the mainstream of purposeful and conventionally motivated life, and less concerned with use of narrative as a means of connecting the images to an external reality. By the time of her 1992–1993 Sex Pictures, real bodies and real situations had disappeared, and although in her recent (2008) society-portrait installations there is a return to nearrealism in the characters she still constructs with herself as model, the earlier traces of a brooding external narrative world have largely disappeared. Cowin’s more recent work has similarly subdivided and refined her earlier themes and approaches, and multiplied her methods so as to include video, text and installations as well as multiple still images. Oscillation between could-be-actual and could-never-be-actual: Todorov’s conception of the fantastic Barney, Sherman and Cowin all either signal, or actually realize, the possibilities of constructing a separate reality, another world which may be either exactly like ours or utterly different, though always as dependent on what is in viewers’ heads as it is on what is in the image itself. So many photographic artists have practised in variants of this mode that any attempt to portray a representative cross-section of them here would be futile, but certainly no discussion of such works would be complete without Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, each of whom provides a rich link between ‘Works dealing with imaginary states of affairs which could be actual (strongly realistic texts),’ Maître’s second category, and the third category, ‘Works in which there is an oscillation between could-be-actual and could-never-be-actual (Todorov’s conception of the fantastic).’ In Wall’s case, the oscillation has largely taken place in reverse temporal order across the trajectory of his career. Some early and mid-career works such as Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) (1992) have no possible referent in our real world and are almost propositional; they must establish the rules for an alternative world in which certain impossible things can happen. In Dead 158

Possible Worlds

Troops Talk, Soviet troops who have sustained clearly fatal injuries are shown talking to each other, comparing notes and even sharing jokes, as victorious mujahideen soldiers move among them to pick over the spoils. By contrast, other works are almost indistinguishable from documentary realism. A 1989 photograph, Outburst, shows a furious male supervisor in a fabric sweatshop, waving his fists threateningly in the face of an employee; it’s a picture that could probably have been made, and not too long ago would only have been made, in a documentary realist mode, but here it’s meticulously staged and directed. Wall’s 1983 Mimic, in which a bearded, rather unkempt and aggressive-looking Caucasian man, his resigned and possibly embarrassed girlfriend in tow behind him, makes a silent racial gesture at a man of Asian origin who is passing him on the street, is also staged, acted and directed, despite its highly naturalistic appearance. Jeff Wall famously rejects almost all attempts to categorize himself and his work, so even though there’s something being communicated here that is largely indistinguishable from what we might have understood if these latter works had been made in a genuinely socialdocumentary mode, we shouldn’t assume that that is what they are ‘about.’ It’s clear that Wall is very concerned with the gallery object itself, the finished work, and he has often indicated the importance, to himself, of presenting ‘photographs that demanded equal status with paintings’ (Lubow 2007). Rather mystifyingly, he also categorizes his work as neither photography, nor cinema, nor painting, though he admits to connections with all of those, and seems primarily to regard it as cinematography. Certainly it is often received as a kind of cinema: Characters in search of a plot suck you into multiple narratives and leave none resolved. While Hollywood was insulting its audience with over-explication, Wall’s single frame movies evoked the urgency and relevance of 70s American cinema. (Smyth 2005: 29) The method and process of producing his big, highly detailed images is very similar to filmmaking, with a long lead-up period of rehearsing actors, searching out locations, and building elaborate sets, followed by a lengthy period of shooting and editing the photographs. The final works are often elaborately montaged combinations of many shots and many layers, but the montage itself is never visible as such—the seamless realism of an apparent single photographic frame is the aesthetic principle by which the final result must stand or fall. In method if not in other respects, Gregory Crewdson’s small-town American tableaux are somewhat similar, but on some occasions at least, he is overtly and specifically oriented towards the making of what he sees as stories. ‘What I’m after, what I’ve always been after,’ he has said, ‘is a picture that tells a story.’ (Grant 2004: 20). Many of his brooding, unhappy images though, also seem to involve repeated revisiting and reworking of remembered events from his own childhood, and concentrate more on the construction of an emotional environment that does not necessarily set out to be narrative, but which is probably received as narrative in most circumstances simply because of the rich detail. His small-town USA 159

Photography, Narrative, Time

scenes are art-directed with a meticulous intensity that is sometimes greater than that applied to movies, and are often so large in finished form that they subtend a similar angle at the viewer’s eye as might be experienced in the back rows of a cinema. Untitled (Woman at the Vanity) (2004) for example, is 146 by 222 cm. Crewdson works with a team including, among many others, a permanent director of photography, a production manager, a camera operator, a production designer and an art director. His models are often actors, and are essentially directed by Crewdson in the same manner as would be required for a film, often by reference to a narrative running in his mind in which the ‘characters’ have a history, and perhaps a future. Wall and Crewdson both construct worlds that certainly oscillate, at least between one image and another, between ‘could-be-actual and could-never-be-actual.’ Of the two, it seems that Jeff Wall’s images refer more often to a world that exists only in one single image and is unlikely to be repeated, though he has made reference to paintings and other preexisting conceptual structures, as in, for example, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993). Crewdson’s photographs are more likely to refer repeatedly to a world that differs in detail from picture to picture, but is at base the same: Gregory Crewdson makes narrative cinema photographs, yet at the heart of all his spectacular productions is the same basic human gesture: an exhausted person standing or sitting, slump-shouldered and vacant. The gap between the pacified humans and the over-active staging can be so extreme as to be humorous, undercutting the slightly sinister moods. (Campany 2008: 140) Crewdson began developing his approach in the 1990s, making miniature landscape dioramas that he then photographed. This is a fairly well-worn path; several notable photographers have worked with toys, purpose-made miniatures or mannequins to make photographs that refer in some way to a real world, even though what they depict is likely to be related to that real world through symbol or metaphor rather than direct mimesis. Two particularly influential figures who have continued to inspire many others working in this manner are Bernard Faucon and David Levinthal. Faucon is unusual by virtue of having a circumscribed period of photographic work, beginning in 1976 and ceasing in 1995, although festivals and retrospectives of his work continue to be held. An early and particularly influential series of scenes entitled Les Grandes Vacances (‘The Long Vacation’, or perhaps ‘The Summer Holidays’) reconstructed the experiences of a young boy in ‘a world without grown-ups’ (Kohler 1995: 146) using life-size mannequins combined, in some cases, with at least one real child. Use of life-size models allowed the use of life-size locations and artefacts, which heighten both the synthetic realism and the dreamlike impossibility of every scenario. The sense of narrative, while minimal and unresolved, is similar to that described by Kozloff for (real) film stills: ‘They counter as forcefully as they know how, the idea that we have the whole of what was there to see’ (Kozloff 1987: 131). Though referred to as a series in the sense that they were produced one by one 160

Possible Worlds

over a period, the works make no claim to be parts of the same story. Each is very much self-contained, even to the extent that Faucon ensured that the physical staging required to make each photograph remained in existence only for the minimum time necessary to successfully record the image, it being then disassembled or destroyed. The photographs thus remain the sole resulting product. David Levinthal’s work with dolls and miniature staged scenarios began in the same general period as Faucon’s, but has continued long after much similar (and sometimes imitative) work came to an end in the late 1980s. He has continued an interest in the contribution made to the socialization of children by toys, and has also long been interested in using photography and toys to investigate major nodes of social controversy—race, the holocaust, sadomasochism. The most relevant of Levinthal’s work to this book, however, is some of his oldest. In a collaboration with fellow Yale University School of Art graduate student Garry Trudeau, later to be famous for the Doonesbury cartoon strip, Levinthal produced Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43, a meticulously researched ‘collage of military photographs, maps, archival illustrative material, and excerpts from diaries, public announcements and other written sources’ (Coleman 1992: 55) masquerading as actual documentation of Hitler’s campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The book was not serious history in the sense that the non-photographic documents it contained, prepared by Trudeau, were either recycled from public sources or faked, while the photographs made by Levinthal were table-top dioramas ‘peopled’ with toy plastic soldiers. The works still occupy top position in the list of works on Levinthal’s own website (Levinthal 2013), and are always similarly prominent in any contemporary discussion of his work and history. Many viewers of these images will be immediately reminded of the dioramas which are often a feature of war museums, and which are frequently derived from documentary photographs, but Levinthal’s project both used and transposed that derivation. What was very serious about Hitler Moves East was that it turned ordinary forensic investigation inside out: it questioned the nature of photographic evidence, of photography as evidence: ‘ironically, it has managed to become an authentic document of the period in which a major phase of the inquiry into the medium’s veracity and credibility began’ (Coleman 1992: 54). Hitler Moves East deals with the photographic codes of documentary authenticity itself, with the ‘very sign system that makes falsification and forgery possible’ (Coleman 1992: 56). This, in a sense, is its possible world, one which both could be actual and sometimes is actual—but we may not know which is which. States of affairs which could-never-be-actual (Todorov’s marvellous) War imagery is so prevalent in all our imaginations that it is not surprising to see it used by people who have not participated in war or violence directly, but on whom war or violence have nevertheless taken their toll. An unusual example of this is Marwencol, a microcosmic world made by, photographed by, and in multiple senses lived in by, its creator 161

Photography, Narrative, Time

Mark Hogancamp. It’s also the name of a 2010 documentary film about Hogencamp’s life and the astonishing—marvellous—photographic work that has emerged from it (Malmberg 2010); marvellous because, unlike the rather theoretical orientation of Hitler Moves East, the photographs made in this miniature world of plastic dolls are almost painfully inflected with human stories and human emotion. In 2000, Hogancamp was attacked and brutally beaten by five men outside a bar in his home town of Kingston, New York. He suffered serious brain damage and after nine days in a coma and nearly six weeks in hospital, was discharged with brain damage that initially threatened his ability to talk, eat or walk—and which completely disrupted his memory and his former life. Although physiotherapy and occupational therapy helped him to regain his motor skills, lack of medical insurance eventually made the cost of such treatment prohibitive. Determined not to let his attackers win, he resolved to make his own therapeutic environment. Mark Hogencamp had served in the navy, and his childhood hobby had been collecting toy soldiers and models; after naval service he had worked as a carpenter and showroom designer, and throughout all this time, he had been an accomplished amateur artist. In a process that appears to have been a life-saving one for him, his life skills, his work experience, his hobbies and his need for continuing therapy now coalesced to form one dominant preoccupation: the making of a new world. He tackled this literally, by building an enormous, dynamic, constantly evolving one-sixth scale Belgian World War II town in his backyard. This he named ‘Marwencol,’ a portmanteau word constructed from his own first name and the first names of two women on whom he had had crushes. He populated his town with an unusual mix of characters in the form of plastic models, blending representations of actual wartime historical figures with icons of himself and his family and friends. And from the start, and increasingly as his town evolved, he made photographs of it all. While retreating from the real world and what it had served up to him, Mark was building a new, half-physical and half-conceptual domain: one in which strong and decisive women, quaintly conventional male romantic values, and a benevolent sense of military order and straightforwardness, all combined to produce an idealized society of a most unusual kind. Several themes are recurrent: unsurprisingly, the photographs often demonstrate a yearning on his part for safety from violence—violence that is ever-present in Marwencol, either as a potential threat, or as an event sometimes fully realized in unflinching detail. Vigilance against such possibilities, the strength of women and the search for a woman’s love, are also repeatedly presented. Many interwoven storylines from Hogencamp’s imagination have served first to create, then to integrate and, ultimately, to make meaning from, Marwencol: semi-historical meaning, graphic and dramatic meaning, and personal meaning. Without photography, the physical entity that is Marwencol would still have been a remarkable accomplishment, but a private one. Marwencol isn’t a theme park, and the photographs aren’t mere visual records of a static entity. The physical Marwencol and the photographed Marwencol are symbiotic twin planets, eccentrically orbiting a shared centre of gravity. The photographs reorganize and recombine physical settings and characters, 162

Possible Worlds

continually reworking and reinvesting them to stage new scenes and to depict new themes and stories. The tiny sets are positioned carefully against natural full-size backgrounds, placed so as to neutralize size cues and thus to produce the sense of an extended real space and environment. The static fixedness that ordinarily characterizes even the very best of model tableau photography is mysteriously absent here: the characters of Marwencol seem to be caught in the midst of actions, the motivations for which are conveyed to us through eyeline direction, posture, expression, gaze and pose, much as might be the case for the characters in a comic strip or the human models in an advertising photograph. Hogencamp has ‘an uncanny feel for body language, psychology, and stage direction’ (Salz 2006), one that would be unusual even if his subjects were human; but he manages to bring out this same level of expressiveness in tiny plastic dolls. In Figure 11, Mark’s own character is shown approaching some of the women of Marwencol, having (the caption tells us) crash-landed nearby. There’s no evidence within the photograph of any crash-landing, and neither could we know, if this is the first photograph ever seen from Marwencol, that the character is Mark. But there are purely photographic aspects to admire before we embark on speculations about meaning or identity.

Figure 11:  Mark Hogencamp. After crash-landing during WWII, Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol.

163

Photography, Narrative, Time

Consider, firstly, that the images are not transformed with Photoshop or similar software: what you see is what was in front of the camera. The willow trees behind the three Marwencol women and their army vehicle are real—and, therefore, not immediately behind the vehicle as they convincingly appear to be, but some 20 metres or so further back. The figures are so small that if the scene is placed too near the trees, the figures and the trees will reveal their respective real sizes; too much distance between them, though, and the sharpness of focus will vary too much between tree and figure, revealing that there is actually a greater distance between them than their placement in the frame implies. Similarly, the placement in the frame of the grouped figures and their vehicle, and the background trees, cleverly conceals the details of the ground texture in a direct line between the camera and the trees, details that would otherwise also provide a clue to the real distances between them. This is already photographic craft of a high order, but with the posing of the three female soldiers we enter a different realm entirely: inspired and inspiring attention to detail, and a meticulous sharing of attention, both within the photograph and with viewers. Observe

Figure 12:  Mark Hogencamp. Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol (Detail).

164

Possible Worlds

each figure in the close-up above: the coquettish gaze and careful smile on the slightlylowered head of the middle figure, the interested direct gaze of the figure on the left, and the uncertain sideways regard, from under the protective rim of her hat, of the figure on the right. Hair, clothing, bodily postures and even finger positions (the finger in the trigger guard of the seated soldier’s rifle, for example) are arranged with almost hyperreal resemblance to human figures. In the image below, General Patton comes to Marwencol to inspect the troops, the vehicle in which General Patton (in the rear seat, at right) is again placed against a natural background, with a short depth of focus used both to concentrate our attention on the vehicle and its occupants and to naturalize the background setting. Since a real person (General Patton) is identified by the caption, Hogencamp chooses to partly conceal the model’s face with the stolidly gazing driver in front, leaving only as much of the Patton-figure’s face as is consistent with the image and memory of the General that still probably comes first to many viewers’ minds: the late George C. Scott, in the title role of Franklin Schaffner’s Patton (1970). The driver is attending to the road ahead, and his look shows us something of both the requirements of that task, and the seriousness of his responsibility. Rather than

Figure 13:  Mark Hogencamp. General Patton comes to Marwencol to inspect the troops.

165

Photography, Narrative, Time

allocating, to the remaining two soldier-figures, either the default forward gaze of the models themselves, or another arbitrary or indeterminate position, Hogencamp succeeds in giving them expressions as nearly human as one can imagine a small plastic figure ever having. Both soldiers look obliquely out of frame, as well they might in exercising vigilance in their roles, but they undoubtedly also have something of the boredom of the soldier: another dreary ride, another meaningless task, another day in which nothing really happens. This is attention-sharing of an unusually sophisticated kind. Hogencamp may or may not have read about mind-reading, but he understands, deeply, how his dolls must be made to look in order that we, those who look at them, will not be able to hold ourselves back from making hypotheses about their ‘mental’ states, their motivations, and their behaviour and actions. Further, he understands that it is really only with a photograph that the effect can be produced, since only a photograph can so specifically and irresistibly direct how we pay attention: from which direction we see the dolls, with what lighting, which areas will be in focus and which not. The sophistication of Hogencamp’s depiction means that our ‘promiscuous, voracious and proactive’ (Zunshine 2008: 68) mind-reading is triggered, regardless of our simultaneous rational understanding that we are looking at small plastic dolls. Our deep-seated knowledge that ‘people’s observable behaviour [is] both a highly informative and at the same time quite unreliable source of information about their minds’ (69), together with our ‘intensely social nature’ (67)  impels us to scrutinize them for clues that might explain and predict the figures’ current ‘thoughts’ and likely future ‘behaviour.’ Notice that for this to happen, we don’t all have to arrive at the same hypotheses or make the same predictions, and we don’t have to pretend that somehow we’ve forgotten that they really are dolls. The phenomenon is a product of how our minds work, and a product of the fact that some photographs, if produced with sufficient and specific care, trigger mind-reading just as a real environment would—whether we want it to or not. The photographs create the conceptual world that is Marwencol: a storyworld literally realized in exactly the terms described by theorists of narratively organized discourse models such as David Herman: ‘Storyworlds are thus mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why and in what fashion in the world to which interpreters relocate […] as they work to comprehend a narrative’ (Herman 2005: 570). Each photograph links to and cumulatively builds this storyworld, via a dynamic framing narrative that is Marwencol’s history and future. Parts of just such a framing narrative have been overtly articulated by Hogencamp, on occasions in Malmberg’s documentary and in newspaper articles, but viewers are likely to form one of their own, even as they survey the extensive gallery of images on the official Marwencol website. Most of the photographs work as single frames, although Hogencamp’s method of working through and with a framing narrative, and the ongoing continuity of certain characters and locations, dictates that some single photographs will be strongly related to each other and thus understandable also as

166

Possible Worlds

groups or sequences. But the truly special quality of his work is in the photography itself, and at the level of the individual image. There’s mental work to be done by viewers to steer through the conventions governing relations between the inhabitants of Marwencol, where a kind of permanent truce is also routinely punctured not only by war but sometimes by undercurrents of gender conflict and witchcraft, and by romantic realignments, jealousies and even weddings. In Figure 14, Hogie marries Anna in front of the SS soldiers who captured him, ‘Mark’ marries ‘Anna’ in front of four SS soldiers who have been killed and hung upside down in town. A copy of this photograph is included with the DVD version of Malmberg’s documentary as purchased by the author, and we’re told in a caption on the back of that picture that ‘Anna felt like it was the perfect backdrop for our wedding pictures.’ In this unsettling domain, unmanipulated photographs of tangible and comprehensible objects vividly represent a world that is possible, but highly unlikely to be actual.

Figure 14:  Mark Hogencamp. Hogie marries Anna in front of the SS soldiers who captured him.

167

Photography, Narrative, Time

The photographs of Marwencol draw together a surprising proportion of the themes of this book. There is narrative: not in all photographs, and certainly not as an absolute but as a ‘multifactorial and gradeable quality’ (Wolf 2003: 181) where it occurs in individual photographs, and as a framing narrative. Although there could hardly be critical moments of the kind shown in Cartier-Bresson’s puddle-leaping man in Figure 1, certainly many of Hogencamp’s photographs depict significant, even crucial moments in the unfolding of his overarching framing narrative. There are at least overtones of Currie’s (2006) and Zunshine’s (2006) perspectives on the perception of causation, and repeated examples of Nanay’s (2009) sense of narrative engagement engendered by depictions of action. We could hardly have more literal examples of Boyd’s (2009) notion of art as derived from play and having direct benefits for survival, as Hogencamp deals with his past, re-encountering it and restaging it with new solutions. In interpreting the Marwencol pictures, we find ourselves projecting our own internal states into the photographs just as Kozloff (1987: 5) suggested, triggered perhaps by the breaches of canonicity and the clashing of scripts. And the result, surely, is a possible world in which time and change play a vital role and which consists of discrete and specific elements, in particular: identical and recurrent anthropomorphic beings as the experiencers of change, and some kind of action or events as a manifestation of this change. (Wolf 2003: 189; emphasis in original) Mark Hogancamp’s photographs depict a present that is connected to both the publichistorical past and his own past; they are also about his own hopes for the future. Each single tableau connects to the totality of the world that is Marwencol, but in doing so they provide a perception of Mark’s reality, and provoke thoughts for every observer, about their own reality. If ever a storyworld has been realized not just through photographs, but through photography, Marwencol is that realization. David Herman’s notion of how storyworlds relate to narrative seems apposite here: Again, it would be difficult to account for the immersive potential of stories by appeal to structuralist notions of story, that is, strictly in terms of events and existents arranged into a plot by the narrative presentation. Interpreters of narrative do not merely reconstruct a sequence of events and a set of existents but imaginatively (emotionally, viscerally) inhabit a world in which, besides happening and existing, things matter, agitate, exalt, repulse, provide grounds for laughter and grief, and so on—both for narrative participants and for interpreters of the story. (Herman 2002: 16; emphasis in original) David Bordwell, also, speaks of narration ‘as a process, the activity of selecting, arranging, and rendering story material in order to achieve specific time-bound effects on a perceiver’ (Bordwell 1985: xi; emphasis in original) and that, too, is what the photographs of 168

Possible Worlds

Marwencol do; they may not be narratives to everybody’s strict satisfaction, but they narrate. They show, straightforwardly, and they document what is before the lens; but they tell of things beyond what we actually see. In John Taylor’s words: Every aspect of documentary can be simulated in fiction—the look, the evidence and the argument. What distinguishes documentary from fiction is the way that viewers read the texts, what assumptions they make about them, and what they expect from them. These distinctions are notably sharp in photography, which always presents the fragile mortality of those in view. (Taylor 1998: 37) ‘Those in view’ in Marwencol are toys, but toys playing many roles: the action figures from which they originate; the real people for whom Mark Hogancamp has made them stand, and the movie stereotypes with whom we all have a shared familiarity—but also people from our own lives, from the violent to the vulnerable, superimposed on our readings of images which bring to mind what we value, hate, love and fear. Just as a single moment photographically extracted from time can bring to mind the extended duration that surrounds it, so the replacement of real people with these replicas may, for a moment, remind us again of the real and fragile mortality of those so replaced. If fiction—and photographs—can bring us to this truth, then that is as it should be.

169

Postscript I write these last few pages fresh from reading some of the many debates on the Internet about photographic images produced with a digital photography application for mobile phones, Hipstamatic. For me, it’s a salutary confirmation of why I wanted to write this book. Hipstamatic enables users of Apple’s iPhone and Windows Phone to make square-format photographs filtered by software effects. That is not unusual in and of itself; camera-phone applications now seem to multiply almost daily. This one, though, is special because it closely imitates the characteristics, particularly the imperfections, of analogue film-based images, including those of very early cameras. It comes with several filters styled as virtual ‘lenses,’ ‘films’ and ‘flashes,’ and further options for all these can be purchased or, in some cases, downloaded free. Philosophically and attitudinally, it can be seen as linked to the nostalgia behind the low-cost plastic 35 mm film ‘retro’ cameras now often found in art gallery shops; the tag line on the front page of Hipstamatic’s website (http://hipstamatic.com/classic/) says ‘Digital photography never looked so analog.’ Yet it also perfectly encapsulates the key disruption wrought upon analogue media by the digital world: images may be immediately e-mailed or shared through social media, directly from the application on the mobile device, and this social connectivity is clearly a core aspect of its user experience and appeal. Predicated as it is on the ongoing sales of unlimited future ‘lenses,’ ‘films’ and so on, Hipstamatic encourages experimentation with combinations of filters and effects, unconstrained by any systematic conceptual relationship between the actual analogue origins of the filters, the nature of the subject matter, and the resulting image. Since some residual knowledge of analogue photography remains in circulation among users of the application and viewers of its images, much of the online conversation about Hipstamatic is a dialogue between, on the one hand, latter-day modernists who espouse the merits of straightforward and unmanipulated images, and on the other hand those who would prefer to see experimentation proceed apace, and who simply enjoy the visual variety it produces. None of this is to devalue the aesthetic or practical merits of Hipstamatic, which often produces impressive and beautiful results and which has the practical benefit of allowing photographs to be made in circumstances where a real camera might draw problematic attention. Nevertheless, the ironies here are multiple and intertwined. The effects treasured by Hipstamatic users are often exactly those which photographers of the historical periods referred to in such images struggled to eliminate; yet now we find the same effects

Photography, Narrative, Time

highly valued, seemingly for their synthetic sense of extended time that is perceived as adding … something. I’d be happy to wager a large amount on the probability that many users of Hipstamatic and similar applications, and many of those who offer acerbic comments on the Internet about the ethics of using or not using certain filters in certain images, weren’t old enough to use a camera and might not even have been born when the vintage film cameras being imitated by Hipstamatic were in everyday use. The latter-day modernists who advocate filter-free purity and simplicity are the ideological descendants of Beaumont Newhall’s ‘straight’ photographers (Newhall 1972: 196), and so appear to have historical backing for their views. I’m not sure that that helps; it’s pleasing to see so many enthusiasts taking photography so seriously, but I’m concerned at their scant awareness that Hipstamatic is by definition not a medium within which ‘straight’ photography can be pursued. It’s intrinsically, if indiscriminately, nostalgic; beyond the particulars of its subject matter, every image is about a new generation’s reverence for a medium and a tradition that its users profess to love, but of which they are unlikely to have direct experience. If creating an artificially extended sense of time between the apparent and real temporal origins of these filtered images—an implied gap between how the photograph looks and what it depicts—is a way of building some feeling of narrativity into the image, along the lines I have discussed in this book, then perhaps I should be more comfortable with it. But if so, it has been achieved at the expense not just of representational truth, but of some jarring disjunctions of meaning. In this irony-laden swirl of uncertainty about what a photograph is and why it looks as it does, there may be risks to how we understand photography itself. The first stop in the journey to find an explanation for such uncertainty has generally been to blame technological change. When digital photography first arrived, there were concerns that a spell had been broken; that the uncoupling of photographic prints from their causal connection to the marks made by individual photons would somehow breach photography’s special contract with truth. But now, with digitization having actually led to several defiant decades of continuous growth in popularity and participation, photography seems vulnerable to a very different problem: dissipation of its sense of identity. Universal, egalitarian and preoccupied partly with navel-gazing—with re-presenting the textures of its own historical modes of representation—photography is now permanently adrift on an ocean of infinite technical and aesthetic possibilities, and that ocean is rising. Changes in technology shouldn’t disrupt our understanding of the basic nature of the medium, but the history of theoretical accounts of photography has been significantly coloured by a tendency to see photographic images only as static artefacts of certain social and technical periods, and of the imaging technology pertaining to the period of their origin. If that view is extrapolated even from the past into the present, let alone into the future, then with photography having now become merely one approach to collecting and shaping digital data, its distinctiveness does indeed seem to be under threat. The nostalgia that infuses Hipstamatic begins to look like one reaction to this phenomenon: a desire to re-attach photography to an earlier, comfortingly familiar technology, and by that means to 172

Postscript

re-invoke for it the sense of a distinctive and stable identity that it seemed to have in the past. Insofar as photographs often do speak so eloquently about time, this is an understandable development. With so many wonderful pictures nevertheless being made by so many people, and only continued further expansion in sight, it would be churlish to portray all this as some kind of disaster. My purpose in this book has rather been to uncover what, if anything, continues to make photography and photographs distinctive—and to do so in terms that might better enable us to follow the threads as, inevitably, photography continues to evolve and expand. The diminution in our understanding of photography’s distinctiveness comes about not because of technological change itself, but because our preoccupation with technological change has directed attention away from the continuities that remain underneath it. There is a thread of continuous and stable meaning that joins all of photography together, and it is one that connects seeing, time, memory and imagination. Joining together some loose ends in that thread is what I’ve tried to do in the preceding chapters. Many of photography’s most interesting and distinctive attributes either are cognitive phenomena, or are connected to or dependent on cognitive phenomena, and what’s in these pages has only scratched that surface. It’s an area in which future research could be very fruitful. Even Hipstamatic indicates that the passage of time continues to be of prime interest for all of us; together with memory and imagination, I believe that our interest in time also means that photographs can sometimes play small roles in our ongoing preoccupation with stories. I’ve sought to tease out when and how that happens, while also indicating that the phenomenon should not be assumed, and is not necessarily widespread in the medium. The medium itself, by contrast, becomes more widespread every day, and there will always be more to be said about it. The story moves on, but this is my stop.

173

References Alvarado, Manuel. 2001. Photographs and Narrativity. In Representation and Photography: A Screen Education Reader, ed. M. Alvarado, E. Buscombe and R. Collins. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan: 148–63. Andersen, Holly K., and Rick Grush. 2009. A brief history of time-consciousness: Historical precursors to James and Husserl. Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2): 277–307. Arbib, Michael A. 1987. Schemas. In The Oxford Companion to The Mind, ed. R.L. Gregory. New York: Oxford University Press: 695–7. Barlow, Paul. 2005. Introduction: The death of history painting in nineteenth-century art? Visual Culture in Britain 6 (1, Summer 2005): 1–13. Barrett, Terry. 1990. Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Barthes, Roland. 1977a. Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives. In Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath. London: Fontana: 79–124. 1977b. Rhetoric of the Image. In Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath. London: Fontana: 32–51. 1977c. The Third Meaning. In Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath. London: Fontana: 52–68. 1984. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. R. Howard. London: Fontana. Bazin, Andre. 1960. The ontology of the photographic image. Film Quarterly 13 (4, Summer 1960): 4–9. Benson, Clark. 2013. Flickr. Ranker. http://www.ranker.com/review/flickr/30154775. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. 1982. Another Way of Telling. London: Writers and Readers. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: The Guilford Press. Biber, Katherine. 2011. Evidence from the archive: Implementing the Court Information Act in NSW. Sydney Law Review 33 (3): 575–98. Binder, Jeff. 2013. Strongly Stated: A blog about belief. Wordpress. 2012. http://stronglystated .wordpress.com/tag/gifs/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Borden, Janet. 2006. So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Larry Sultan. The Art Institute of Chicago 2006. http://www.artic.edu/ aic/exhibitions/story/barney.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen.

Photography, Narrative, Time

Bourdieu, Pierre, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Dominique Schnapper. 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Trans. S. Whiteside. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Original ed., Un art moyen. Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge. Brothers, Caroline. 1997. War and Photography: A Cultural History. London, New York: Routledge. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry 18 (1, Autumn): 1–21. Buchholz, Sabine, and Manfred Jahn. 2005. Space in Narrative. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.-L. Ryan. London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group: 551–5. Burgin, Victor, ed. 1982. Thinking Photography. Houndsmills: Macmillan Education. Burgin, Victor. 1982. Photographic Practice and Art Theory. In Thinking Photography, ed. V. Burgin. Houndsmills: Macmillan Education: 39–83. 2004. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books. Campany, David. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1932. Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932. Paris: Magnum Photos. 1952. The Decisive Moment (excerpt). In Photography In Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. V. Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster: 384–6. 1968. The World of Cartier-Bresson. New York: Viking. Celebrating New Deal Arts and Culture. 2009. Documenting America: The Photography Project. Indiana University Libraries. http://www.indiana.edu/~libsalc/newdeal/photo.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Clark, Larry. 1971. Untitled, 1971. Black and white photograph, 27.94 x 35.56 cm (11 x 14 in.). New York: Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Clarke, Thompson. 1965. Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects. In Philosophy in America, ed. M. Black. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 98–114. Clayton, Jay. 1989. Narrative and theories of desire. Critical Inquiry 16 (1, Autumn 1989): 33–53. Coleman, A.D. 1992. ‘Hitler Moves East’ turns fourteen. Camera and Darkroom 14 (1, January 1992): 54–6. Collectors Weekly. 2013. Antique Kodak Cameras. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/cameras/ kodak. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Cook, Guy. 1994. Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copley, John Singleton. 1778. Watson and the Shark. Oil on canvas, 183.51 x 229.55 cm (72 1/4 x 90 3/8 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currie, Gregory. 2006. Narrative representation of causes. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (3, Summer): 309–16. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Duve, Thierry. 1978. Time exposure and snapshot: The photograph as paradox. October (5, Summer 1978): 113–25. 176

References

Diamondstein, Barbara. 1981. Visions and Images: Photographers on Photography. London: Travelling Light Photography. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. 2003. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expressions. Cambridge, MA: Malor Books. Emerson, Peter Henry 1891.The Death of Naturalistic Photography. In Photography In Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. V. Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981: 197–8. Evans, Harold, in association with Edwin Taylor and National Council for the Training of Journalists (Great Britain). 1978. Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Faas, Horst. 1974. US President Richard Nixon finds a moment for his admirers. Black and white photograph. The Associated Press 1974. http://www.archive.worldpressphoto.org/ search/layout/result/indeling/detailwpp/form/wpp/q/ishoofdafbeelding/true/trefwoord/ photographer_formal/Faas%2C%20Horst. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Fletcher, Pamela M. 2003. Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture, 1895–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Flickr. The Commons: FAQ. http://www.flickr.com/commons. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Genette, Gerard. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gibson, Ross. 2010. From the Loft. Accident Music. Historic Houses Trust of NSW. http://blogs. hht.net.au/justice/index.php/category/accident-music/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. 1998. Life After Wartime. http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Goldberg, Vicki, ed. 1981. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present. New York: Simon and Schuster. Goldstein, Richard. 2006. Joe Rosenthal, Photographer at Iwo Jima, Dies. New York Times, 21 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/business/media/22rosenthalcnd.html?pagewanted= all&_r=0. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Gombrich, Ernst H. 2000. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Millenium ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gonzalez, Jennifer A. 1992. A contemporary look at Pierre Bourdieu’s photography: A middlebrow art. Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1, Spring): 126–31. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Grant, Annette. 2004. ART; Lights, Camera, Stand Really Still: On the Set With Gregory Crewdson. New York Times, 30 May. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/arts/art-lightscamera-stand-really-still-on-the-set-with-gregory-crewdson.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Grundberg, Andy. 1990. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974–1989. New York: Aperture. Hagen, Charles. 1992. The triumph of photography. American Photo (January–February): 50–51. Hairon, Nerys. 2008. How Christmas festivities and pressures can damage health and well-being. Nursing Times 104 (50/51): 33–4. 177

Photography, Narrative, Time

Heeter, Carrie. 2003. Reflections on real presence by a virtual person. Presence 12 (4, August 2003): 335–45. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Frontiers of Narrative. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2003. Stories as a Tool for Thinking. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. D. Herman. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications: 163–92. 2005. Storyworld. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.-L. Ryan. London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group: 569–10. Hirschbiegel, Oliver. 2004. Downfall. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Written and produced by Bernd Eichinger. 155 min. Germany: Constantin Film. Historic Houses Trust of NSW. 2013. From The Loft. NSW Historic Houses Trust. http://blogs. hht.net.au/justice/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Hochberg, Julian. 1987. Gestalt Theory. In The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. R.L. Gregory. New York: Oxford University Press: 288–93. Hockney, David, and Paul Joyce. 1988. Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce. London: Jonathan Cape. Hughes, Robert. 1997. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. London: The Harvill Press. Jeffrey, Ian. 1981. Photography: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson. Jowkar-Baniani, Gelareh, and Mark A. Schmuckler. 2011. Picture perception in infants: Generalization from two-dimensional to three-dimensional displays. Infancy 16 (2): 211–26. Junge, Alexa. 1999. The One Where Everybody Finds Out. Friends, season 5, episode 14. Directed by Michael Lembeck. Broadcast [US] 11 February, 1999. (Warner Bros. Entertainment 2009). DVD. Jussim, Estelle. 1989. The Eternal Moment: Photography and Time. In The Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image, ed. E. Jussim. New York: Aperture: 49–60. Kafalenos, Emma. 2005. Photographs. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.-L. Ryan. London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group: 428–30. Kern, Stephen. 1996. Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, 1840–1900. London: Reaktion Books. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klenke, Stefan. 2010. The Longest Photographic Exposures in History. http://itchyi.squarespace.com/ thelatest/2010/7/20/the-longest-photographic-exposures-in-history.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Knightley, Phillip. 1975. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam. London: Deutsch. Kohler, Michael. 1995. Arranged, Constructed and Staged: From Taking to Making Pictures. In Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography, ed. M. Kohler. Zurich: Edition Stemmle: 15–46. Kosinski, 2013. A Literature Review on Reaction Time. http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/lab/110/ reaction.htm. Accessed 6 October 2013. Kozloff, Max. 1987. The Privileged Eye: Essays on Photography. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 178

References

1994. Lone Visions, Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1990. A Note on Photography and the Simulacral. In The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. C. Squiers. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Krims, Les. Les Krims 2010. http://www.leskrims.com/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Langdale, Phillipa. 1998. Dog Eat Dog. The Bill, series 14, episode 105. Written by Rod Lewis. Broadcast 13 November, 1998 [UK]: ITV. Le Poidevin, Robin. 2011. The Experience and Perception of Time. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.N. Zaita. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/. Accessed 6 October, 2013. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1969. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766). Trans. E. Frothingham. New York: Noonday Press. Original ed., 1766. Levinthal, David. 2013. David Levinthal. http://davidlevinthal.com/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Lewallen, Constance. 1983. Newsroom, 1983, Mixed Media Installation. Exhibition brochure. University of California Berkeley Art Museum. http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/images/art/ matrix/61/MATRIX_61_Mandel_and_Sultan.pdf. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Leyton, Michael. 1992. Symmetry, Causality, Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Library of Congress. 2012. America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWL, 1939–1945. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Lipton, Richard J. 2009. The World is Digital. Wordpress.com. http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/ 2009/10/04/the-world-is-digital/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Lubow, Arthur. 2007. The Luminist. New York Times, 25 February. Maître, Doreen. 1983. Literature and Possible Worlds. London: Middlesex Polytechnic Press. Malmberg, Jeff. 2010. Marwencol. Produced by Jeff Malmberg et al. 83 min. DVD. Marclay, Christian. 2010. The Clock. Single-channel video with sound, 24 hours. USA. Marr, David. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. Martineau, Robert Braithwaite. 1861. The Last Day in the Old Home. Oil on canvas, 107.3 x 144.8 cm (42 ¼ x 57 in). London: Tate Gallery. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martineau-the-lastday-in-the-old-home-n01500. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Mason, John Edwin. 2010. How Photography Lies, Even When It’s Telling the Truth: FSA Photography & the Great Depression. http://johnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_ mason_photogra/2010/03/how_photography_lies.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Maynard, Patrick. 1997. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Millais, John Everett. 1851–2. Ophelia. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm (30 x 44 in). London: Tate Gallery. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506. Accessed 11 September, 2013. 179

Photography, Narrative, Time

1856. The Blind Girl. Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 82.6 cm (24.5 x 32.5 in). Birmingham (UK): Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1892P3. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1984. The politics of genre: Space and time in Lessing’s Laocoon. Representations (6, Spring 1984): 98–115. Morris, Errol. 2011. Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. New York: The Penguin Press. Moyer, Michael. 2012. Is Space Digital? Scientific American, 17 January. http://www.scientific american.com/article.cfm?id=is-space-digital. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Nanay, Bence. 2009. Narrative pictures. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (1, Winter 2009): 119–29. Newhall, Beaumont. 1972. The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day. Rev. and enl. ed. London: Secker and Warburg. Newman, Arnold. 1963. Industrialist Alfried Krupp, Essen, Germany, July 6, 1963. Gettyimages. http://corporate.gettyimages.com/marketing/m05/edit_newsletter/index.aspx?language=enus&gi=2&pg=11. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Newton, Isaac. 1934. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Trans. A. Motte and F. Cajori. University of California Press. Pettersson, Mikael. 2012. Shot in the dark: Notes on photography, causality and content. The Philosophical Quarterly 62 (249): 759–76. Pierroutsakos, Sophia L., and Judy S. DeLoache. 2003. Infants’ manual exploration of pictorial objects varying in realism. Infancy 4 (1): 141–56. Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton. 1988. A Dictionary of Narratology. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Resnais, Alain. 1961. Last Year at Marienbad. Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Produced by Pierre Coureau and Raymond Froment. France. Riello, Giorgio, and Peter McNeil. 2006. A Long Walk: Shoes, People and Places. In Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. G. Riello and P. McNeil. Oxford: Berg: 2–28. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen. Ritchin, Fred. 1998. Close Witness: The Involvement of the Photojournalist. In A New History of Photography, ed. M. Frizot. Copenhagen: Konemann: 590–611. Rohter, Larry. 2009. New Doubts Raised Over Famous War Photo. New York Times, 17 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/arts/design/18capa.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Rollins, Mark. 1999. Pictorial representation: When cognitive science meets aesthetics. Philosophical Psychology 12 (4): 387–413. 2001. Pictorial Representation. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. B. Gaut and D.M. Lopes. London: Routledge: 297–312. Ross, Stephanie. 1982. What photographs can’t do. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1, Autumn): 5–17. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. Possible-Worlds Theory. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.-L. Ryan. Oxford: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group: 446–50. 180

References

Sagne, Jean. 1998. All Kinds of Portraits: The Photographer’s Studio. In A New History of Photography, ed. M. Frizot. Copenhagen: Konemann: 102–29. Salz, Jerry. 2006. Aftermath: Anxiety, Play and Imagination in Ample Evidence. The Village Voice, 23 May. http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-05-23/art/aftermath/full/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Sante, Luc. 1992. Evidence. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux. Schaffner, Franklin J. 1970. Patton. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Schank, Roger, and Robert Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. New York: L. Erlbaum Associates. Scott, Clive. 1999. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion Books. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. W.J. Craig. 1962. London: Oxford University Press. Shea, Daniel. 2011. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan: Evidence. Book review. Ahorn Magazine (3). http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_3/review7_shea_mandelsultan/review_shea_evidence2. html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together. London: Penguin. 2010. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: The Penguin Press. Smyth, Cherry. 2005. Jeff Wall. Art Monthly (292): 28–9. Snyder, Joel, and Neil Walsh Allen. 1975. Photography, vision, and representation. Critical Inquiry 2 (1, Autumn): 143–69. Sontag, Susan. 1979. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. 1992. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. Ed. E. Buscombe and P. Rosen, Sightlines. London: Routledge. Steiner, Wendy. 1988. Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stephen Wirtz Gallery. 2006. Melanie Pullen: High Fashion Crime Scenes. Press release. http://www. wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2006/2006_10/pullen_2006_frame.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Sultan, Larry, and Mike Mandel. 2003. Evidence. 2nd ed. New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Sydney Living Museums: Justice and Police Museum. 2013. The Archive Gallery. Historic Houses Trust of NSW. http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/higlights/archive_gallery. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Szarkowski, John. 1978. Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. New York and Boston: Museum of Modern Art. Taylor, John. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War. New York : New York University Press. Thistlethwaite, Mark. 1988. The Most Important Themes: History Painting and Its Place in American Art. In Grand Illusions: History Painting in America, ed. W.H. Gerdts and M. Thistlethwaite. Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum: 7–58. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. Narrative Transformations. In The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 218–33. 181

Photography, Narrative, Time

U.S. Space & Rocket Center. 2013. The Ultimate Camp Experience. http://www.spacecamp.com/. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Velleman, David. 2003. Narrative explanation. Philosophical Review 112 (1, January): 1–25. Vintage Everyday. 2012. A Look at Photos From Kodak’s Glory Days. http://www.vintag.es/2012/ 01/look-at-photos-from-kodaks-glory-days.html. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Vromen, Suzanne. 1992. Review: Class attitudes and ambiguous aesthetic claims. Contemporary Sociology 21 (2, March): 157–8. Walton, Douglas. 1995. Informal Fallacy. In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. R. Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 373–6. Walton, Kendall. 1984. Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism. Critical Inquiry 11 (2, December): 246–77. Warburton, Nigel. 1988. Photographic Communication. British Journal of Aesthetics 28 (2, Spring): 173–81. Whelan, Richard. 2002. Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier: A detective story. Aperture (166): 48–55. Williams, Caleb. 2005. Haunted by a Vitality that is No More: Interpreting the Photograph in the Crime Archive. Scan (3, December). http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=65. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Wolf, Werner. 2003. Narrative and narrativity: A narratological reconceptualization and its applicability to the visual arts. Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 19 (3): 180–97. 2005. Pictorial Narrativity. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.-L. Ryan. London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group: 431–5. Wood, Christopher. 1981. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Young, Bruce. 2012. Death in the Making … For the Last Damned Time. National Press Photographers’ Association, 2009. https://nppa.org/news/25265. Accessed 11 September, 2013. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ed. J. Phelan and P.J. Rabinowitz, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. 2008. Theory of mind and fictions of embodied transparency. Narrative 16 (1, January): 65–92.

182

Index Bold italics are used for images within the book. A Abelson, Robert, see Schank, Roger Adams, Eddie, 107, 124. See also war photography adaptation art as, 53, 116–8 Darwinian, 53, 116 advertising, see also aggregation sites; ‘remembered film’ and narrative, 27 and uses of photography, 55 and viewing time for images, 78 as deception, 145 as support for the photography industry, 5 depiction of action in, 163 aggregation sites, 58–9 alignment, see Gestalt Allen, Neil Walsh, see Snyder, Joel Alvarado, Manuel, 26–7, 29, 31 analogue photography, 8, 54, 57, 59, 145, 171 art and cognition, 8, 53, 62, 113–4, 116, 126 and photography, 3, 4, 8, 53, 56–7, 95, 113, 117–8, 126–7, 145–6, 155–68 spatial vs temporal, 18–20, 72, 107, 157–8 art photography, 27, 126, 145 artificial intelligence, 131, 133

Augustine, St, 71–2 Confessions, 71 Australian aboriginal painting, 19 B Barney, Tina, 155–6, 158 Barthes, Roland, 29, 37, 38, 43, 46, 72, 84–86, 109, 113, 134, 157 Camera Lucida, 43, 84 Battye, Greg, 25 Bondi, 25 Bazin, André, 63 Benjamin, Walter, 30, 31 Berger, John, 120 Biber, Katherine, 91, 92, 94, 95 Binder, Jeff, 128 Bordwell, David, 39, 41, 113, 168 Bourdieu, Pierre, 56–8 Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, 56–7 box camera, 55 Boyd, Brian, ix, 8, 53, 113–8, 126–7, 141, 168 On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, 53, 113, 116 Brady, Matthew, 32, 84. See also war photographs Bragaglia, Anton Giulio and Arturo, 81 Brailowsky, Alexander, 35 Branigan, Edward, 47 Brecht, Bertolt, 29

Photography, Narrative, Time

Broad, C.D., 71. See also specious present Brothers, Caroline, 153. See also Capa, Robert War and Photography: A Cultural History, 153 Bruner, Jerome, 136 Burgin, Victor, vii–viii, 7–8, 10 Bystander (project), see Life After Wartime

closure narrative, 11, 44 visual, 132 cognition, 53, 62, 73–7, 86 Confessions, see Augustine, St continuation/continuance, visual, 132 convenient relation, 18 Cook, Guy, 135 Copley, John Singleton, 21, 22 Watson and the Shark, 21 Cowin, Eileen, 157–8 Family Docudrama, 157 Crewdson, Gregory, 159, 160 Crimean War, 31–2 Crimean War photographs. See Fenton, Roger Culture, 9, 56–9, 76 Currie, Gregory, 44–6, 48, 168

C Camera Lucida, 43, 84. See also Barthes, Roland camera(s) digital, 3, 171–3 exposure time, 47, 53, 72–8, 81. See also temporal duration of exposure handheld, 75 Kodak, 55–6. See also Eastman, George ownership of, 4, 5, 10, 120 production of, 10, 75–7 symbolic value of, 5–6 camera-phone applications, 171–3 camera-phones, 4, 59, 171–3 Campany, David, ix, 83, 124, 160 canonicity and breach, 136–40, 168 Capa, Robert, 124, 149–150, 152–3. See also war photography Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 3, 1936, 148. See also Brothers, Caroline captions, 17, 56, 92, 97, 124 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 15–7, 25–7, 35–6, 42, 46–8, 76, 123–5, 135, 168 Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932, 15, 16, 17, 27, 42 causality in narrative, 43–8 in representation, 61–2, 65, 76, 109–10, 138, 148 Chekhov, Anton, 44 Clark, Larry, x, 28, 28–9, 46 Untitled, 1971, 28 Clay, E.R., 71

D Darwinian adaptation, 53, 116 de Duve, Thierry, 72, 106–7 ‘decisive moment(s)’, 25–6, 35, 42, 76, 83, 123–5. See also Cartier-Bresson DeLoache, Judy, 64–6 digital photography and social software, 59 imitation of analogue images, 171–3 relationship to analogue photography, 3–5, 8, 54–7, 59–60, 63, 45, 172–3 digital reality, 60 documentary, 26–7, 29, 121–2, 135, 147–50, 152–5, 159, 161, 169 Downfall, 63 Driffield, Vero Charles, 4 dry plate, 75 E Eastman, George, 55, 75 Edgerton, Harold, 78 Ekman, Paul, 76 Emerson, Peter Henry, 4 The Death of Naturalistic Photography, 4

184

Index

Evans, Harold, 122–4, 125, 148 Evans, Walker, 155 Evidence (Sante), 95 Evidence (Sultan and Mandel), 91–5, 93 evidence photographs, 101, 103, 105, 140. See also forensic photographs exposure time, 47, 53, 72–8, 81. See also temporal duration of exposure

frame narrative, 49, 147 framing narrative, 166, 168 G Ganz, Bruno, 63. See also Downfall Génette, Gerard, 43–4 Gestalt theory, 132–3 Gibson, Ross, 98–9 Bystander, 98 Crime Scene Exhibition, 98 Life After Wartime (project), 98 Gombrich, Ernst, 65 Goodman, Nelson, 61, 65 Gottschall, Jonathan, 108, 141

F Faas, Horst, 122–5 US President Nixon Finds a Moment for his Admirers, 122–3 Facebook, 5, 58, 127 fallacy of false cause, 45–6 Faucon, Bernard, 160–1 Les Grandes Vacances, 160 Fenton, Roger, 31–2, 46 Valley of the Shadow of Death, 31–2, 46 Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center, University of Chicago, 60 fiction, 11, 21–2, 26–7, 29, 31, 39, 43, 53, 63, 96–7, 108, 113, 115, 118–9, 121–2, 138, 145–8, 156–7, 169. See also possible worlds fictional world, 11, 27, 31, 156 film (movie), 10, 45, 63, 82–3, 113, 157. See also motion pictures film stills, 18, 156–8, 160 film, roll, 55–7, 75, 109, 171 films, see motion pictures Fletcher, Pamela, 125, 126 Flickr, 5, 58–9 forensic imaginary/imagination, 11, 96–7 forensic photographs, 31, 100–06, 137–41, 101, 103, 105, 140 forensics as related to photography, 11, 31, 66, 96, 100, 108, 161 ‘found’ photographs, 26–7, 152. See also Cartier-Bresson, Henri

H Hadron Epoch, 77 Hagen, Charles, 3, 5 Hamlet, 23 Heeter, Carrie, 85–6 Herman, David, 36–8, 134, 135–6, 138, 146–7, 154, 166, 168 heroism, 22, 36 Herschel, Sir John, 8 heterogeneous situations, 41–2 Hipstamatic photography, 171–2 history painting, 19–21 Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–1943, see Levinthal, David Hockney, David, 73, 77–8, 81 Hogancamp, Mark, 162–4, 168–9 After crash-landing during WWII, Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol, 163 Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol (Detail), 164 General Patton comes to Marwencol to inspect the troops, 165 Hogie marries Anna in front of the SS soldiers who captured him, 167 Hubble space telescope, 77 Hughes, Robert, 22

185

Photography, Narrative, Time

L Laocoon, 18 Last Year at Marienbad, 45 laws of organisation, see Gestalt Theory Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 18–20 Laocoon, 18 Levinthal, David, 160–1 Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–1943, 161, 162 Lewallen, Constance, 91–2 Library of Congress, 58, 150–1, 155 Life After Wartime (project), 98 lighting, 66, 74, 80, 92, 100, 109, 156, 157, 166 Lipton, Dick, 60 literary theory, cognitive, 113–4

Hunt, William Holman, 24 Hurter, Ferdinand, 4 I image(s) and causality/causation, 62, 65 and memory, 165 and representation, 61–2, 64–5 and time, 71, 81–3 capabilities of, compared to text, 19, 20, 37 digital vs analogue, 57 formation of, in a camera, 66 multiple vs single, 38 narrative, 21–2, 27, 31, 39, 92, 94, 106, 146, 157–8 prevalence of, 5, 12 retinal, as distinct from photographic, 109–10 imagination, 11, 65–7, 78, 156, 161–2 imagination, forensic, viii, 11, 66–7, 100 imagining technology, 67 infants’ response to photographs, 64–6 Internet, 5, 7, 8, 36, 56, 59, 127, 171–2

M Maître, Doreen, 146–7, 148, 156 Malmberg, Jeff, see Marwencol Mandel, Mike, x, 91–2, 93, 95, 97. See also Sultan, Larry Evidence, 93 Marclay, Christian, 82–3 Martineau, Robert Braithwaite, 24–5 The Last Day in the Old Home, 24–5 Marwencol, 161–9 Mason, John Edwin, 155 Maynard, Patrick, ix, 7, 53–4, 63–4, 67, 80 The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography, 54, 63 Metz, Christian, 63 micro-expressions, 76 Millais, John Everett, 22–3, 24 The Blind Girl, 22 Mimic, 78, 159. See also Wall, Jeff Mitchell, W.J.T., 18, 19 montage, 26, 78, 127, 159 Morris, Errol, 31–2, 150–3 Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, 31 motion pictures Downfall, 63 Last Year at Marienbad, 45

J Jeffrey, Ian, 17 jumping man, see Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932 K Kafalenos, Emma, 43 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, viii, 11 Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, viii, 11 Kodak, 55–6, 58. See also Eastman, George Kosinski, Robert, 75 Kozloff, Max, 15, 81, 120–1, 125, 157–8, 160, 168 Krauss, Rosalind, 79, 81 Krims, Les, 96 The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheat Murders, 96 Krupp, Alfred, 30–1, 46 186

Index

Marwencol, 162 Patton, 165 The 400 Blows, 83 The Clock, 82, 83, 86 music, 56, 131

Newton, Isaac, 82, 86 nostalgia, 27, 171

N Nanay, Bence, 47–8, 168 narrative, see also Gestalt theory; painting; possible worlds; scripts and schemata; structuralism; subjectivity Alvarado’s modes of, 27, 29, 31, 148 and cognition, 53, 62, 113–128 and desire, 106 and story, 43–5 and time, 9, 35, 40, 48, 83–5, 106–7 as abstract textual form, 36 as organizing system in thinking and information, 36–7 attributes of, 27, 146 diegetic vs mimetic theories of, 39–41 engagement, 48 experience of, 39–40, 45, 48 historical development of, 36, 37 in evidential photographs, 91–109, 137–141 in linear media, 17, 18 in multiple images, 38–9 interpretation, 24–5 mimetic, see diegetic vs mimetic minimal forms of, 40–45 of photographic exhibitions, 91–2 pictorial forms of, 19–20 single photographs as, 15, 26–32, 99, 134–141, 157–160, 166–9 social value of, 117–8 structure of, 37–49 telling vs showing, see diegetic vs mimetic temporal dimension and time, 40 narrativity, 19, 21, 26, 29, 45–6, 48–9 Newhall, Beaumont, 172 Newman, Arnold, 30–1, 46

P painting and ambiguity, 125–6 and representation, 62 as narrative, 18–25, 39 as spatial not temporal, 18–20 related to other art forms, 57, 73, 78, 80, 113, 159–60 Pare, Richard, 32 Patton, 165 Payne, Lewis, 43, 84, 107 perception, 21, 45, 48–9, 57, 61–2, 65, 72, 74, 78, 80, 85–6, 131–2, 147, 154, 168 photo-collage, 73, 81i ‘photo-dynamism’, see Bragagalia, Anton Guilio and Arturo photographic exposures, length of, see exposure time photographic depiction, 61, 63–7 photographic narrative, see narrative Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, see Bourdieu, Pierre photolithography, 54, 61 physics, 57, 60, 66, 72, 75, 77–8 Pierroutsakos, Sophia, 64–6 Pinker, Steven, 116 Pinterest, 127 Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932, 15, 16, 17, 27, 42. See also Cartier–Bresson, Henri poetry, 18, 36, 39 possible worlds, 145–69 post hoc, ergo propter hoc, see fallacy of false cause Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 22–4 presence, 10–11, 20, 38, 85–6, 157 Prince, Gerald, 40–4, 46, 49

O On Photography, see Sontag, Susan

187

Photography, Narrative, Time

processes, photographic, 8, 53–5, 60 Pullen, Melanie High Fashion Crime Scenes, 96

and narrative, 11, 25–6, 37, 41–5, 134–5, 97 and scripts/schemata, 136–7, 139 and storyworlds, 168 as explanation, 105–6 in painting, 22–3 in single photographs, 15, 37–8, 83, 159 storyworlds, 146–7, 154, 166-8 structuralism, 20, 38, 134, 168 studio photography, 74–5 subjective experience, 38, 71, 75 subjectivity, 10–11, 47, 120 Sultan, Larry, x, 91–2, 93, 95–8. See also Mandel, Mike Evidence, 93 symbols, 5-6, 23, 63, 148, 153, 160 Szarkowski, John, 27, 79, 127

R ‘remembered film’, 10. See also Burgin, Victor representation, 18–20, 39–40, 49, 56, 60-5, 81, 106, 113, 132, 137, 147, 154, 172 resemblance, 61–5, 110 Richards, Kate, see Gibson, Ross Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 44–5 Ritchin, Fred, 149 roll film, 55, 75 Rollins, Mark, 61–2 S Sante, Luc, 95–8 Evidence, 95 Schank, Roger and Abelson, Robert, 133–4 Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, 133 schemata, 23, 49, 131–141 Scott, Clive, 81, 123 scripts, 94, 131–141, 168 semiotics, 18, 20, 27, 38, 63–4, 161 Shakespeare, William, 23, 119–20 Sherman, Cindy, 156–8 Shirky, Clay, 58–9 shutter speed, 65, 74–7, 124. See also cameras; exposure time sign system, signs, signified, see semiotics silver nitrate, see analogue photography similarity, 61–2, 132 Snyder, Joel, 109 social grouping, 6, 36, 55, 57–9, 118, 126 social media, 6–7, 36–7, 56, 126–8 Sontag, Susan, 4, 27–31, 84, 134–5 On Photography, 29 specious present, 71, 72 spectator, 27, 48, 81, 157 story, see also narrative and adaptation, 116–8

T television, 11, 38–40, 121 television programmes CSI, 96, 108 Friends, 116 The Bill, 40 The People’s Court, 145 Une minute pour un image, 79 temporality, 18–20, 35, 38, 40, 42–8, 72, 82, 107, 123, 134–5, 137, 157 temporal duration of exposure, 77–8, 81, 135 and micro-expressions, 76–7 in narrative, 35, 38, 47, 157–8, 169 perception and understanding of, 53, 71–5, 78, 82, 134, 169 tense, 35, 84, 107 textual construction, 36–7 The 400 Blows, 83 The Clock, 82, 83, 86 The Merchant of Venice, 119–20 The World of Cartier-Bresson, see Cartier-Bresson, Henri Theory of Mind, 9, 113–8, 126 188

Index

Von Eckardt, Barbara, 136–8 Model for operation of scripts in relation to photographs, 137

time, 9–10, 15, 18–21, 24, 27, 28–30, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44–5, 53, 71–87, 99, 106–7, 110, 122–5, 134, 147, 157–8, 168, 173. See also temporality; temporal duration time exposure, see exposure time Todorov, Tzvetan, 134, 146, 158, 161 Trudeau, Gary, 161 Twitter, 58, 127 Tulsa, 28, 28–9. See also Clark, Larry

W Wall, Jeff, 78, 158–160 Dead Troops Talk, 158–9 Outburst, 159 Mimic, 78 Warburton, Nigel, 134–5 war photography, 31–2, 83–4, 152–3, 147–50, 152–3, 161–2, 167 Watson, Brooke, 21–2 Watson and the Shark, 21, 21–2. See also Copley, John Singleton Whelan, Richard, 149 Wolf, Werner, 21, 23–4, 25–6, 37, 48–9, 147, 168

U Untitled, 1971, 28–9, 28, 46. See also Clark, Larry US Civil War 32, 83. See also Brady, Matthew; war photographs V Varda, Agnès, 79 Une minute pour un image, 79 Velleman, David, 46–7 viewing time, 78–84 Von Bolen, Alfred, 30–1

Z Zunshine, Lisa, 49, 113–6, 118–9, 121–2, 125–6, 128, 166, 168

189

Photography Narrative Time

Greg Battye

Imaging our forensic imagination

Providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs, Greg Battye focuses on the story-telling power of a single image, rather than the sequence. Drawing on ideas from painting, drawing, film, video, and multimedia, he applies contemporary research and theories drawn from cognitive science and psychology to the analyses of photographs. Using genuine forensic photographs of crime scenes and accidents, the book mines human drama and historical and sociological authenticity to argue for the centrality of the perception and representation of time in photographic narrativity. Greg Battye is professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Australia.

intellect | www.intellectbooks.com