THE WEIGHT OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography History Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings [1 ed.] 9789054877042

Citation preview

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The Weight of Photography —

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The Weight of Photography

Johan Swinnen & Luc Deneulin

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Johan Swinnen dedicates this book to Ella De Meyst. Exactly on the day of the 100th birthday of Henri CartierBresson, 22 august 2008, his granddaughter Ella was born. Since that moment he has been looking forward to spending time with her, learning anew to see art and the world. Luc Deneulin dedicates this book to George Rodgers.

Table of contents

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Contents —

Preface

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Acknowledgments

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General Introduction: Thinking about the Theory of Photography

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A Foreword about Thinking Johan Swinnen & Luc Deneulin

42

Homo Futuris: A World of Possibilities (among others) Jean Paul Van Bendegem

43

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The Majority World Looks Back Shahidul Alam

51

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Daguerreotypes by Southworth & Hawes Convey Mid-19th Century America through its Luminaries and Ordinary Citizens Michaël Amy

67

3

Architecture of Destruction The (In)Human Spatial Condition Ariella Azoulay

79

4

Freeze! Annette W. Balkema

135

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Principles for Interpreting Photographs Terry Barrett

147

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Body Representations in Art and Photography Ben Baruch Blich

173

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Camera Lucida, another Little History of Photography Geoffrey Batchen

191

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Jean Baudrillard, the World Behind the Mirror Johan Swinnen

211

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Violence Inflicted on Images Jean Baudrillard

217

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For Illusion is not in Conflict with Reality Jean Baudrillard

237

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Creating a Museum of Photography (1896-1898) The Collection Pictorialist Photographs of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels Tamara Berghmans

251

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The Motionless Journey Xavier Canonne

275

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Counting the Teeth: Photography for Philosophers A.D. Coleman

281

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In-between Ways Tom De Mette

289

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Leni Riefenstahl’s Career as a Photographer Reassessed Luc Deneulin

309

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Towards a Theory of Photography Hubert Dethier

323

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Prejudices in the History of Philosophy of Photography from Benjamin to Barthes Willem Elias

347

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The Digital Imprint. The Theory and Practice of Photography in the Digital Age André Gunthert

423

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Of Bodies and other Things. German photography from the Weimar to the Berlin Republic Klaus Honnef

433

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Table of contents

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Beings Between: Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine as Hauntological Practice Louis Kaplan

441

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‘Perceive the City.’ Brussels’ Photographic Memory in Phases. The Relationship Between the City and Photography Danielle Leenaerts

459

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Questioning the Document: The Art of Alfredo Jaar Jan-Erik Lundström

483

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The World in Light Cartier-Bresson’s Time Signatures Michel Onfray

497

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The Identity of Photography Michel Onfray

505

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The Modern Condition of Photography in the Twentieth Century Michel Poivert

515

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Visual Memory as Mental Inscription on the Formation of Contexts Rolf Sachsse

549

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Weightless Photography Jan Simons

557

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The Hybrid Photograph Johan Swinnen

577

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The Image Revealed: Roger Kockaerts The Paradox of Photography or the Non-Knowledge of Photography Johan Swinnen

593

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Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Majority World Photography Johan Swinnen

605

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Pictures of Pictures: Interview with Lynne Cohen Jian-Xing Too

617

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Photography and Anthropogeny From Granular Images to Indexed Indices Henri Van Lier

641

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.Art - A place for Internet Art in the Museum of Contemporary Art Karen Verschooren

647

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Reproduction and the Revenant Derrida and Genet Hubertus v. Amelunxen

673

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The Crypt of the Gaze Hubertus v. Amelunxen

693

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Photography after Photography The Terror of the Body in Digital Space Hubertus v. Amelunxen

701

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Space-in between: on Women and Landscape Photography in Britain Liz Wells

719

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Exit: Madly or not at all: from Stiegler to Swinnen Luc Deneulin

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Formerly Published

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Personalia

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Johan Swinnen & Luc Deneulin

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Preface —

In The Weight of Photography eminent scholars explore questions relating to the nature of representation. Thinking about philosophy and theory of photography lead to the fundamental philosophical question: what is photography? The boundaries of contemporary theory of photography are difficult to define, older texts about photography (from the ones by Benjamin to those by Baudrillard) seem now more complicated than we ever imagined. This book is an extraordinary, progressive and multicultural attempt to bring different topics together and to guide the educators and students. We would like to stimulate key debates in photography theory and place them in their social and political contexts. To give this book a certain focus and ensure an audience, we ask the readers, students in higher education at universities and art colleges included, to address themselves to the following clusters of questions: 1. The recent appearance of a Belgian-published anthology of essays about photography entitled The Weight of Photography prompts a number of pressing questions. In the midst of an increasingly global culture, is there (has there ever been?) a distinctly European perspective on the study and practice of photography? What is indeed the ‘weight’ of photography in Europe today? 2. Histories of photography, as presented through books or exhibitions in the twentieth century, have been dominated by Europe and North America. The PALIC-method (Photography Anthology Learning and International Conflict) was developed as a new scientific research and educational tool in which the arts and social inquiry merge. This method is aimed at

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building a dialogue between culturally diverse groups and at examining individuals’ perceptions of their own social reality. It is the counterpart of the ‘Western eye visits the Majority World.’ With the PALIC-method – as an exercise in multiculturalism with its messages and its means – the visual history and communication can be a reference for further development of visual culture marked by interactions in relationship to the writing of a new history of world photography. Do photographers all over the world have the same relevance in perspective of the triangle artist-artwork-spectator and context? 3. The iPhone might be said to embody the current state of photography, with the still image indivisible from the moving and with both incorporated into a digital global communication device. Given this post-medium condition, does it any longer make sense to talk about photography as a distinct entity? Should we any longer have museum departments, exhibitions, schools and academic classes devoted to photography alone? Has photography in fact become weightless? 4. Nowadays, with the reproduction of images on computer networks, the problem of thinking about images became more complex than ever. Conceiving a theory seems harder than ever. New technologies had a tremendous impact on images that surround us, in photography, film, video… Nobody can refrain from looking at the machines with images, images that are produced, being reproduced and transformed. We can speak of a iconic inflation as a fact, while some persons try to stop this by trying out the extreme possibilities of the new media. How can a link be made between persons who work with images, who produce them, who spread them all over the planet and a photography theory? These four questions are only examples: the publication of The Weight of Photography brings together more than thirty essays and marks a growing interest in the suggestive but very problematic relationship between our experiences of photography, video and film – time-based mediums par excellence – and our perception of the visual world. Pictures are absorbed into critical contemporary art practices.

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As essential collection of contemporary thought, The Weight of Photography provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already interested in discussions about photography, art, history, education, culture and criticism. Johan Swinnen Luc Deneulin Brussels, March 1, 2010 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

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Acknowledgments —

Much of the material presented in The Weight of Photography is based on research we have conducted during the past eight years. We wish to thank all the persons, too many to list individually, who helped us with our numerous research trips, archival visits and interview sessions. We were happy that we could organize the Symposium ‘Boxed’ (Maastricht, the Netherlands, 11-13 November 2002) under the umbrella of the ‘European Society for the History of Photography’ (ESHPh). The 19th symposium (presided by Johan Swinnen) focused on the research of the historical development of photography from its origins up to the present while integrating this research within a cultural and scientific context. We like to thank the photographers, historians, photography historians, philosophers, sociologists, ethnologists, academics, curators, artists and private collectors as well as many important European, Canadian and American institutions who participated to the symposium. Unfortunately, in 2004 the organization made an end to the original academic concept of the Society. The elected board as well as Johan Swinnen (who was at that time vice-president) resigned after the move of the organization, with a different concept, to Austria. Those who contributed to The Weight of Photography are all experts in history, theory or criticism of photography and include a few persons who participated at the symposium ‘Boxed’. We wish to express our gratitude and appreciation for their generous help in making this book possible, as well as to the photographers and their copyright holders.

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Acknowledgments

We also wish to thank our students and scholars for their interest in the science and theory of photography. During all these years, their enthusiasm has been very motivating. Finally, we would like to thank all the collaborators of ASP who helped us realizing The Weight of Photography. Johan Swinnen Luc Deneulin

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General Introduction: Thinking about the Theory of Photography —

‘The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed through the photographic lens. Analysis and reproduction are of no help in solving this problem. The techniques of photography take us beyond the replica into the domain of the trompe l’oeil. Through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image’ At the same time, photography transforms the very notion of technique. Technique becomes an opportunity for a double play: it amplifies the concept of illusion and the visual forms. Complicity between the technical device and the world is established. The power of objects and of ‘objective’ techniques converge. The photographic act consists of entering into this space of intimate complicity, not to master it, but to play along with it and to demonstrate that nothing has been decided yet (rendre évidente l’idée que les jeux ne sont pas faits). ‘What cannot be said must be kept silent. But what cannot be said can also be kept silent through a display of images.’ Jean Baudrillard, Photography, or The Writing Of Light, 20001

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1. Making Meaning The purpose of the aesthetics of photography is to experience how to judge and to appreciate photographs and to provide a context for expressing this judgment verbally on the basis of an argumentation. It is important to value and to preserve photographs. Appreciation presupposes nuances, it requires judgment and implies rejection and acknowledgment. Appreciation cannot exist without a critical attitude, which one ought to develop. In order to appreciate and to judge, one needs to be able to compare. Consequently, it should be possible to look at photographs: to remember the images, to retain and to process them. Appreciation and judgment are not the same as considering something to be pretty. Appreciation implies understanding and learning to sense things that do not immediately attempt to impress by their beauty or charm, which means that appreciation is totally different from a sentimental association and acquaintance with photography that only serves to confirm what we already knew, felt and thought before. Feelings play an essential part in this process, but there are many types of feelings. Feelings can be educated, trained, expanded and extended. There are many means for this purpose, aesthetics for instance, but also the relatively young science of semiotics. In order to get a clearer insight in the manner in which photography generates meaning, it is necessary to elucidate the divergent photographic approaches to the photographic data. Semiotics approaches photography as a system of signs. We can define semiotics as the science that studies all languages insofar as these make use of signs for the purpose of communicating content (i.e. of signifying). A communicative situation can be conceived as a threefold relationship: a direct relationship between the viewer and medium as well as between medium and reality on the one hand, and an indirect relationship between the viewer and reality on the other hand, the latter being brought about by the mediated and modified by the role of the medium. By means of photography, a message is transmitted which, once it is understood, acquires a certain meaning. The problem with the above model is the part played by the medium in this process. The question raised in this context is what influence the medium might have on the content of the message. Stuart Hall has clarified this

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by emphasizing the activity between the sender and the receiver of the message.2 The message is just as much the result or the product of the way in which the sender is using the medium as of the way in which the receiver interprets this message. A certain degree of shared knowledge, both of the codes and of the reality to which the message refers, ought to exist between both parties if the message is to be communicated as it was intended to be. We will now take a closer look at the importance of the role played by the medium of photography in this process of bestowing meaning. When we intend to discover the specificity of an image, we cannot but compare this type of communication process with another very intimately familiar medium of transmitting and transferring meaning within our culture, namely verbal language.3

2. Walter Benjamin, the pioneer In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin analyses the communication media and its relationship with art and the public. Benjamin does not speak about the death of art because of the media, but he does consider it has suffered a radical transformation. His ideas can be put in relationship to those of the School of Frankfurt. The text can be compared to Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay The Cultural Industry, written in the 1940’s. In this essay, both philosophers give great importance to the mechanical reproduction of a culture that is reproduced in multiple series from one original. The mechanical reproduction also means the beginning of planning of series, associated to formats, which can cause the appearance of clichés. Adorno and Horkheimer are critical of this industrial production of culture, because it leads to a simplification of culture that is not produced consciously but as a consequence of the industrial production logistics. On the other hand, they also consider that while programming the cultural production, product consumption also being created. The receiver of industrialized culture alienates himself because that is what mass culture offers. It is what they call the ‘recognizing effect.’ This idea is rather simplistic because a chart, in which the communication media always manipulate in the same way, cannot be measured. This idea is

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also related to the ‘hypodermic needle’ theory of the American empirics, which is also rather simplistic. When the members of the School of Frankfurt immigrated to the United States when Hitler came to power, they had a frontal collision with the North American ideas. However, they did share the American vision of the public, in relation to the impact of the communication media. Adorno and Horkheimer, nevertheless, did not understand that the industrial culture, while appropriating the popular culture, also revived it. They did not see that the mass culture also created a new sensibility. Benjamin’s text, on the other hand, shows differences with the School of Frankfurt in the interpretation about the mass culture, especially in relation to the public. Benjamin did not consider that art lost its virtue because of industrial production but rather that the same thing happened as with many other things, first it is something for minorities and it later extends to the rest of society. The same thing happened for example with newspapers. Benjamin does not consider the modern spectator as an alienated one, but he sees him as a critical one. This is of course the case with film audiences, which is a good example, because cinema follows the same techniques as any industry, the construction of a whole from fragmented pieces. Through cinematographic editing, pieces are united and unity is created in the perception of the spectator. Benjamin compares this to the collage technique or the technological architecture of the Eiffel Tower. For him, the film spectator is a critic who participates in the final result of the work; besides, cinema is an analytical mechanism of the real world. It is an organ of modernity, like cubist painting, based on fragmentation. However, Benjamin observes that the film spectator does not react the same way a person does to a cubist painting, this is due to the fact that the camera films in such a way that it is comprehensible for everyone. Here, we must disagree with Benjamin, because we can not forget that the cinematographic montage is based on a series of conventions assumed by the public that have consolidated themselves throughout the history of cinema. That is why the first audiences of Griffith’s films, like Birth of a Nation, came out horrified, because they had not yet assimilated the conventions that lead to the viewing of the fragmented presentation as a spatial and temporal unity. According to Benjamin, even without knowing

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the cinematographic prose, its grammar is public. The difference with painting is that, if the camera is an extension of the eye, as Vertov stated, this does not happen with the canvas and the brush. Cinema has changed our way of looking and narrating. The distinction between author and public, and emitter and receptor is getting vague, since both functions are mixed. The School of Frankfurt did not appreciate this modern phenomenon. This vagueness in the distinction between author and public, at least where the visual is concerned, is still more evident in younger people, much more so than in older people. The reason for this is that younger people are already trained, in fact they have been bombarded with images since birth. Advertising, television, cinema, all contribute to create, in the minds of the young people, a visual language that doesn’t lead only to understand the visual aspects, but to its creation as well. The concept of modernity is the key to understanding Benjamin’s thoughts about art: with the arrival of modernity, art liberated itself. The work of art is no longer part of a ritual. This means a loss in the cultural value because art is no longer associated with the sacred (religious or civil). On the other hand, it also carries a greater artistic freedom. For Joseph Beuys ‘every person is an artist.’ This means that art is no longer the work itself but the look of it and that is why it is in everybody’s range. This new conception of art generates an artistic production that is no longer for minorities. The technical difficulty is eliminated, because it is no longer valued. Now, only the result, the essence of the work itself is. To paint like the great maestros required being a virtuoso. That is no longer an obstacle. Gilles Deleuze talks about the difference between pose and cut. This is more or less the difference between classical and modern art. While the pose was an auratic representation of the characters, the cut is a postauratic representation that contains any instant that is not prepared. We can remember for example the creation of the cronophotography that allowed the decomposition of the horse’s movements in many instances that permitted us to empirically see the movement of the horse. Such discoveries illustrate perfectly the change that modernity has caused in the idea of art.

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3. Semiotics, problematic of images The term ‘semiotics’ derives from the Greek word ‘semeion.’ Consequently, semiotics stands for the science of signs, the term ‘semiology’ is also used, however there is no difference in meaning.4 Max Bense provides the underneath definition: ‘Semiotik oder Zeichentheorie, Semiologie, Semasiologie (Pasigraphie) u.s.w. ist die allgemeine Lehre von dem Zeichen, wie sie im Zusammenhang mit Logik und Ontologie bzw. Erkenntnisweise seit Platon eine wichtige Disziplin der Philosophie ist. Spezielle Semiotik, d.h. die Zeichenlehre einer speziellen Wissenschaft wie Medizin, bedarf eine Begrundung durch die allgemeine Semiotik.’ (Semiotics or sign theory, semiology, semasiology (pasigraphy) and the like, is the general science of the sign, as this science has, in addition and relation to logic and ontology, been an important discipline within regard to the knowledge of things within the body of philosophy ever since Plato. Special semiotics, in the sense of the theory of signs of a specific science like medicine, need to be based upon general semiotics).5 Umberto Eco gives the following definition of the term: ‘Die Semiotik ist die Wissenschaft, die alle kulturelle Prozesse als Kommunikationsprozess und damit Semioseprozesse untersucht. Ihre Absicht ist es zu zeigen, wie den kulturellen Prozessen Systeme zugrundeliegen, die sich aus Zeichnen, semantischen Regeln zu deren Gebrauch und syntaktischen Regeln zu deren Verknüpfung zusammensetzen.’ (Semiotics is the science which has as the object of its research all cultural processes in their quality of communication processes and thus of semiotic processes. It attempts to show in which manner all cultural processes are based upon systems which in their turn are composed of signs and semantic rules that govern their use and syntactic rules that govern their interrelations respectively).6 Max Bense emphasizes the importance of philosophy (logic, ontology and epistemological theories), whereas Umberto Eco puts more of an emphasis on cultural processes or – in other words – on the importance of human intervention/mediation in the communication process via signs. It is obvious from Bense’s definition that the two domains in question (the philosophical and the cultural) cannot be strictly separated.7

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Hubert Dethier gives this concise synthesis of semiotic analysis according to Umberto Eco: ‘According to Eco, a semiotic analysis ought to attempt as much as possible to: 1. Relegate what appears to be natural and spontaneous to the domain of culture and to show that it is subject to rules and regulations 2. Reduce every system of communication to the dialectics of code and message. Eco proposes to use the word ‘code’ instead of language, because the term ‘language’ would evoke strong associations with spoken language.’ Eco wants to do away with the application of the model coined by the linguists to other systems of communications, such as film. The purpose of semiotic analysis is to point out where genuinely new and different things are happening, as well as to demonstrate that we are tied to conventions, codes and ideologies, in those very instances where we believed ourselves to be free.8 Semiology attempts to provide explanations for communication by means of images. From semiotics we derive some insights, which may prove to be useful to analyze photographs in a systematic manner. A photograph is always a representation of an object, to which it refers. Semiotics refer to this transmission by means of the term ‘sign.’ A sign is something that stands for something else: a photograph of a person is not the person in question, but a representation of that person, which refers to the person in question. A photograph is composed of many elements, each of which can be a sign. The first step in the process of an analysis is the perception, registration and identification of all elements or constituent parts of a photograph that might contain meaning/content. This analysis on the level of perception and the identification of what one sees is called ‘denotation.’ A next step is the interpretation of these elements: what does the identified element in question refer to? A single element on a photograph does not say much by itself. The final meaning of a photograph is based on the combination of these elements and their interpretations. This is the final step: bestowing meaning upon the photograph as a whole, in its entirety. This process of interpretation of a photograph is called ‘connotation’ (literally: supplementary meaning) and refers to the interpretation on the level of associations and emotions, evoked by the image.

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Quite illuminating with regard to the often confusing terminology that is used in the field of this young science is the publication ‘Semiotiek van het beeld (Semiotics of the image)’ by J.M. Peters. This study mainly deals with film, but it contains numerous references to painting and to photography. J.M. Peters’ formulation of the semiotics of the image is: ‘A logic of the image which investigates the relation between image and thinking, or, in other words, the formulation of thoughts into images.’9

4. Camera Work On the basis of the predominance of one of the above three aspects, sign systems can be differentiated from each other. This also applies to the verbal linguistic system with regard to the image. For verbal language is of a predominantly symbolical nature: the relation between the word and its meaning is arbitrary, yet it is based on conventions. At times this relation is indexical (in the case of personal or demonstrative pronouns or temporal categories), at times it is iconic (in the syntactical structure of a sentence – as it presents a chronology – and in plurals). The sign system of images is of a predominantly iconic nature: the image obtains meaning as a result of the fact that we recognize it as a representation of an object that exists in reality. In its quality of representamen (the medium), the image sign is indexical, since it stands in a physical-causal relation to reality. This relation can either be fairly direct, as a result of the technological possibilities which photography and film put at our disposal, or otherwise via mediation, i.e. via the mediation of a subject interpreting an object, in the process creating a new sign which, in its turn, is subsequently drawn or painted. Additionally, the represented object can function as a sign within its very representation: a sign that – in its turn – can be iconic, indexical or symbolical. To a great extent, the way in which a given image operates is determined by its iconicity. Van Zoest points at the ‘existential hierarchy of sign systems, in which the reasoned and rational clearly fall short of the irrational and instinctive.’10 The author refers to the manifest predilection for the iconic sign, which appears to be about to supplant the symbolical

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sign. The iconic sign is of an insightful, seductive and intrusive/obtrusive nature. This is most certainly the case with regard to photographs. A photograph seems to register reality without transformations, without interventions by man. A photograph appears to be analogous with reality and instantaneously interpretable. However, this only applies to the meaning of the photograph on the first level, being the level of denotation (the literal meaning). But we actually never encounter a purely literal image. The meaning of a representation is not only of a literal – based on sensorial perception – as well as of an iconic nature, but also has meanings on a second level, the level of connotation. After having understood what an image represents, it will evoke several different meanings, which are anchored and result from our broader frame of references to culture. This acquaintance with culture enables us to engage in communication and to sustain it, since members of a social group share common conventions and codes amongst them. In summary, we could state that the word is of a predominantly symbolical nature, whereas the image is predominantly iconic. In addition to the level of denotation, the image has the power of conveying other associative meanings, on the level of connotation, which are anchored in our arsenal of broader cultural references. This type of knowledge is expressed in codes: significant/signifying systems that create/generate a text with which we are more or less acquainted and which influences our actions. Codes function as conventions. The term ‘codes’ refers to a signifying system, a set of implicit rules. A code is determined both culturally and historically and is not limited to one sole text, but can be deduced from a number of texts as a common quality. The above also applies to a photograph, which, at first view, is not coded. There is a body of rules, such as opting for a particular type of perspective from a certain distance, which co-determine its meaning and which start to function as some sort of norm. Consequently, a photograph can be considered to be both non-coded as well as coded. The differentiation between ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’ meaning is an operational differentiation; they do not to succeed each other, but occur simultaneously.

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To Eco, the crucial problem of semiotics is its relationship to reality. Does reality exist beyond the conventions and the intervention of culture? Does this reality have any meaning beyond the models (i.e. bodies of codes) that are imposed on it? In this case, there ought to exist a code of codes that would precede culture and semiotics would be an impossible science. According to Eco, this code of codes is nonexistent, or at the very least, semiotics owes it to itself to deny the existence thereof, it is a ‘structure absente’ (absent structure). In ‘The Name of the Rose’, William of Baskerville represents this polarity of the semiotic interpretation of the world, a fault that surfaced during the late Middle Ages. Eco gives this formulation: ‘The Ancients conceived of the world as a reservoir of signs in twofold manner: either they were the mysterious words of a divine language (the world as a voluminous book, bearing the imprint of God’s finger), or they were an arsenal of indices, in the secular and religious meaning of the word.’11 The difficulty in discovering which particular signifying units of a photograph generate a particular parcel of meaning lies within the photograph’s complexity. While the system of verbal language is marked by and is based on linearity (words and sounds are uttered successively, not simultaneously), a representation could be characterized as ‘simultaneous.’ The meaning of an image is determined and conditioned by a number of qualities (which Eco calls ‘figures’) which have no meaning by themselves, but which co-determine the meaning of the image by the value they acquire. Amongst these qualities – which are necessary prerequisites for any representation – one could list: the distance to the represented, the framing, the angle from which the represented image is shown and the composition of the whole. These qualities cannot be isolated from the image as a whole, but it is possible to analyze their impact and their influence on its meaning. On the other hand, and in addition to the above, the data, which a representation simultaneously presents, can each by themselves constitute a sign. They constitute a coherent whole on the basis of the very way in which they converge in a given representation: a new and more complex sign (Eco calls this a ‘sema’).

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As such, we assess that an image is eminently complex: it is composed of a number of simultaneous, yet different elements, which are the result of the specificity of the medium on the one hand, and of the represented on the other hand. Each of these elements is an autonomous sign. On the basis of the convergence of these signs, a new and more complex sign is constituted.

5. On Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Movement-image’ and ‘Time-image’ Gilles Deleuze’s approach to cinema remains to date one of the most interesting and original approaches to an art form that is only about one century old and also tells us a lot about thinking on the medium of photography. Bergson tried to elaborate a philosophical analysis of film, yet he was limited by the fact that the media was in its infancy. Deleuze, clearly influenced by Bergson and using his approach as a starting point, has created a whole new form of philosophy of film and cinema analysis, depending on the point of view we wish to choose that is applied to and form all the forms, genres, styles and filmic schools. However, he does not attempt to create or affirm a particular formula of complete analysis of this art form, nor does he pretend to establish a complete and exclusive philosophical interpretation of cinema. He is mainly a philosopher interested in cinema, and he uses it to satisfy his intellectual needs. However, Deleuze does not exclude interpretation. His two books on film, Movement-Image and Time-Image, are essential to the understanding of cinema and its evolution throughout the 20th century. We will not try in this text to analyze or describe all the aspects of his theory. We will focus mainly on the difference between movement-image and time-image and some key aspects of both. Although Deleuze does emphasize the fact that he does not wish to make a historical study of cinema, he makes an essential difference between pre and post World War II films, identifying these two periods with movement-image and time-image, respectively. Movement-image for Deleuze has its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, and is dependent on movement and action. The characters are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react and take action in direct fashion to the events around them. 24

General Introduction

A clear example can be shown through the film Double Indemnity, a classic film of the film noir genre, linear in its temporality (although the story is actually a long flashback in the beginning) and with a linear narrative, where the main character, Walter Neff, tries to outwit his mentor Keyes, under the influences of the femme fatale. His actions are determined by the action of the other characters, and his decisions are the main motor of the narrative. Time, as Deleuze affirms, is determined and measured by movement. The time-image, on the other hand, has its main representation in the European modernist or art films. In this case, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act or react in a direct and immediate way. As Gilles Deleuze describes, it is a ‘breakdown in the sensor-motor system’, creating a pure optical and aural image. Although this is a much more abstract and difficult conception to interpret, we can find an example in The Double Life of Veronique. This film is centered on the main characters, Veronique and Weronika, and while being the same, they live in different places and in different realities. They are both unaware of the existence of the other, but have a feeling of completeness and safety, found by one when seeing the other, and lost by the other when the first dies. Their actions and decisions are not relevant in the narrative aspect of the story, but only their emotions and how the camera shows those emotions to the viewer. Some of the characteristics that Deleuze sees in the time-image are the non rational links between space and time, creating disconnected spaces; the characters are passive, not active or relevant in their actions or decisions for the advancement of the story; the themes are centered on inner mental imagery, rather than on external actions, causes and consequences of the moving-image. However, Deleuze finds that the main difference between his movement-image and time-image is the non-rational cut of the latter, the incommensurable links between shots. Classic movement-image is based on a rational order system that is intended to make the story as legible and smooth running as possible. Time is implied and subject to movement. In relation to the moving-image, Deleuze observes that movement is distinct from the space and that it always occurs for a concrete duration.

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He finds three key aspects to movement and change that are represented in cinema. • The first is the existence of sets or closed systems with perceptible objects. • The second is the movement of translation established between those objects and that modifies their respective positions. • The third is the duration of the whole, that is constantly changing. For Deleuze, movement is what happens between the objects or parts, and expresses the duration of the whole. He notices as well, and here is where he elaborates his first approach in distinguishing movementimage and time-image, the fact that there not only exist instantaneous images, but also and principally movement-images, sections of duration, and time-images, duration images that are beyond movement itself. Deleuze rightly considers that although these three types of images are present in any film, one of them is always predominant. He affirms that editing actually consists of the combination of these three elements, the disposition of movement-images (in one of its aspects). Therefore, depending on what type of movement-image is predominant, we will be able to talk about an active, perceptive or affective montage. In the transition to the time-image, Deleuze establishes three characteristics to the weakening of the movement-image. The movementimage had a clear representation in all American films before WW II, the weakening of the American comedy and musical however had a direct impact on the transition to the time-image. Another reason for this weakening is the raised consciousness of the minorities and their influence in society. A third reason is the influence of new narratives and literary modes, e.g. the Italian neo-realism film. Although the movement-image and the time-image appear in both, pre and post WWII cinema, it is almost impossible to create a pure timeimage that is also accessible to the public. Hollywood films had and still have a predominance of action-image, while modern and alternative cinema give an important role to the time-image. For Deleuze timeimage frees itself of the sensory motor link to create a pure optical and sound tactile image. The crystal-image, the basis of the time-image, fuses the pastness of the recorded event with the presentness of its viewing. It is the indivisible

26

General Introduction

unit of the virtual image, subjective, in the past, recollected, that exists outside of consciousness, in time, and the actual image, objective, present and perceived. Time is seen as a constant two way mirror of the future and of the past, projected in the present. Time-image exists between the actual and the virtual image, it deals with memory, confuses mental and physical time. While Bergson described two types of memory, habit formed memory and pure recollection, (pure memory lives forever and is stored within consciousness), Deleuze compared the equivalent for the time-image with the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition (amnesia, hypnosis, etc.). European directors were more interested in these failed forms of recognition (Fritz Lang’s M is a good example), breaking with the action-image predominant in American film. We will not enter in a long description of the more accessible movementimage. Deleuze’s theory is full of abstractions and concepts that are difficult to understand without a visual reference in films, and even then, the difference between movement-image and time-image is not always very clear. His philosophical approach is far from complete, and with the new technologies and the incorporation of digital cameras and the internet, a new philosophy of cinema and photography needs to be written. In any case, it will have to take into consideration and follow Deleuze’s footsteps in this matter.

6. Bricolage of Readings about Light: Lévi-Strauss In order to be able to analyze mythological thought and art, Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept of ‘bricolage’ (tinkering). The ‘bricoleur’ uses his hands, but in a manner that is entirely different from the craftsman. The rule of the game he adheres to (his rule of thumb) is that he always uses the means which he has at his disposal: in other words, the material as well as the tools he uses are per axiom fortuitous, heterogeneous and limited and do not stand in any pre-arranged relation to the project at stake.12 In the case of an engineer, each construction element can only be used for the very part for which it has been specifically designed for beforehand. To the ‘bricoleur’, every thing represents a cluster of both actual/

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concrete and of possible relations: they are operators and are only useful for activities of a certain kind. The engineer actualizes events (= purpose/goal) by means of structures (= means). The ‘bricoleur’, on the other hand, materializes structures (= goal/purpose) by means of events/circumstances (= means). In the field of mythology, meaningful significant fragments are amalgamated to form a different myth (a new structure out of preexisting material). The ‘bricoleur’ needs to engage in a dialogue with his materials in order to get an overview of all possible answers/solutions (permutations) to the problems at stake. The faculties of adaptation of each and every thing are limited from the very onset, since they have all been used before and have functioned in another structure: each element already has meaning. Similar to characteristics of the ‘bricoleur’, in myths the constituent elements always lie in between perceptions and concepts: they are signs. Perception, an image, is hard to dissociate from something concrete; a concept, however, can refer to something and this potential is unlimited. The sign is something concrete, yet it is able to refer to something, but this faculty of reference is limited. In Lévi-Strauss’ view, art can be located somewhere in between scientific thought and bricolage, since the artist shares characteristics of both the scientist and of the bricoleur. Art originates from a balance and this balance is always precarious, consequently, there always is a tension between structures and ‘événement’ (necessity and contingency), created by both the artist and the spectator. Lévi-Strauss describes mythological thought as a sort of intellectual ‘bricolage’/tinkering. It is characterized by the fact that, in order to express itself, it makes use of a collection of materials which are eminently heterogeneous and, regardless of their quantity, remain limited.13

7. The photographic act The publication L’Acte Photographique by Philippe Dubois analyses three putative definitions of photography departing from the tripartite scheme of the semiologist Peirce.14 In the first instance, photography can be considered as a mirror of reality. In this case, one conceives of it as an iconic sign, and more precisely a sign in which the similarity

28

General Introduction

with the referent (i.e. reality) is of quintessential importance. Secondly, photography can also be seen as a transformation of reality. This is a reaction to the realists. In this case, one focuses on the potential of photography to change or distort reality, inspired by inner motives and stirrings. In this case, photography is conceived of as a symbolical sign. Thirdly, Dubois introduces the concept of photography as a trace of reality. It is neither identical to reality, nor is it necessarily a distortion thereof, but it does have an optical chemical relation with the world. In this conception, photography is an index, a sign based on a natural relation with its referent. Dubois writes the rest of his book based on the latter position, thus emphasizing the way in which a photograph originates. Hence the title of his book: ‘The photographic act.’ Where does Dubois’ analysis of the photograph as an optical-chemical print lead? Not so much to spectacular or revolutionary conceptual concatenations, but rather to some clarifications with regard to the nature of photography. The most sensible remarks, in this respect, deal with borderlines. Dubois argues that, since photography is a trace, it doesn’t have to be ‘a priori’ mimetic by nature, which means ‘a literal representation.’ The photograph doesn’t have to represent the object on the photograph, but it may (it can be an iconic sign). On the other hand, he states that a photograph can (sometimes) acquire meaning/content. In order to clarify the nature of representation, Dubois introduces three qualities or characteristics: uniqueness (each shot is unique), the testimony/witness (by nature, every photograph bears witness of certain things) and the indication (the photograph shows something which is there). On the basis of the last quality, and on what had also been stated by Roland Barthes, the author concludes that, in the final analysis, photography cannot say anything and will probably always remain enigmatic. A photograph does not clarify or interpret anything and it does not comment. This is an almost nihilistic conclusion, which seems to be shared by a great many contemporary documentary photographers. The inherent danger of this conclusion is that photography might end up becoming rather gratuitous and fortuitous. Towards the end of his book, Dubois defines what, in his view, is the very essence of photography: it is a cut, a section through time and space, and in this sense, it is unique.

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Since it is a section, it entails an ‘hors-champ’, an out-of-the frame, that can only arouse our imagination and suspicions and in the process often makes a photograph titillating. Since the beginning of civilization, with the creation of language, and particularly, written language, one of the main ideas behind every cultural revolution has been the democratization of culture. For example, the revolution led by Gutenberg and his printing machine permitted large quantities of text to be reproduced and, therefore, be available for a larger part of society. The image remained a very specialized and almost prohibited element, except for the very elite, until the creation of photography. Photography brought back to life the importance of the image and permitted those incapable of drawing to create images. More importantly, it allowed an exact representation of reality. Slowly people started to use photography to see themselves, portrait themselves, and preserve that image as an objective representation, more reliable than memory. George Eastman had a major role in this democratization of the image. He created the first Kodak camera, with which the only thing the user had to do was to take the picture. ‘You push the button, we do the rest.’ Eastman’s creation, the first real approach to bring the photographic image closer to the mass’s, was a very effective way of marketing the product, and in fact the principle idea remains today, Kodak being the leader in the photographic market that sets the standards for the rest. Kodak’s selling technique is based on two very particular concepts: simplicity and reliability. The first cameras already had the film incorporated. These were taken to the laboratories that later handed over the printed copies and a camera with a new film. Film cartridges were invented some time later, making the process even simpler. Eastman’s actions transformed photography into a mass consumption product. Today, who in our Western society does not possess one? Are the concepts simplicity and reliability outdated because digital cameras have invaded the markets? Are the ideas still useful and true? One of the main differences inside the photographic market is the existence of two major groups (there are more, but of less economic and marketing importance): the snapshot taker and the amateurs. The difference basically relies in the importance or consciousness each group

30

General Introduction

gives to photography. While the action of the snapshot taker is almost unconscious, relying on the transparency of the practice while ignoring the opaqueness of the processing, the amateur photographer performs his actions in a semi-conscious state, creating images beyond the mere remembrance or entertainment arrives later at a semi-professional position.

8. The new photographic consciousness: Metz, Bazin and Wollen If we consider art photographs as visualizations of a psychological reality, we open up possibilities of understanding photography via psychoanalysis. The semiotics of cinema has progressed along these lines. Christian Metz is a film semiotician who relies on tradition of de Saussure for his analyses.15 Metz created a broad syntagmatic scheme as a device to analyse film in segments. In this respect, he assesses that these segments can consist of one or more shots; in the former case (one single shot), he calls this an autonomous shot (‘plan-séquence’), the latter is labeled ‘syntagma’ (7 types). This means that he distinguishes between 8 autonomous types of film segments. The formalization of these film segments in a scheme grants a clearer insight into the relevance of formal phenomena in film and as such is a relevant tool for practical film analysis. To put it in a more concrete manner: by means of studying the form, one can gain access to its deeper meaning on the level of content and in the process get a clearer insight into the relation between form and content. Notwithstanding this, we could state that the semiotics of film is actually still looking for the right direction. It all began with the formalists in Russia during and immediately after World War I (Eichenbaum, Tynianov, Brik, Shklovsky). In 1933, Jacobson wrote his essay ‘The regression of cinema.’ In a conversation with Apra and Faccini, he recanted how far he had advanced in the above-mentioned contribution, however not without shifting some points of emphasis. When the collected works by Eisenstein were published, a semiotics of film emerged ‘sui generis’ based on these

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writings. In the meantime, the Frenchman Bazin had developed an aesthetics of film, which ran counter to Eisentsein’s approach. Christian Metz, a student of Bazin’s, wrote Le cinéma: langue ou language? which gained notoriety afterwards.16 Film does not constitute a language, it is only a language act, a ‘parole.’ In the meantime, also he had repeatedly nuanced and adapted his views. In Italy, Pasolini was the first person to draft a semiotics of film.17 In contrast with Metz, he assumed that film did indeed constituted a language, furthermore a language with a twofold articulation. Pasolini also recanted some of his insights in later publications and expanded his theory. In addition to Pasolini, Eco designed his model in 1968 and introduced a third articulation. In Versus (1972), Eco set about it in a different way. In L’indice del realismo (1971), Bettetini evaluates, in a thoroughly critical manner, a broad range of the propositions he had advanced in Cinema: lingua e struttura (Cinema: language and structure) (1968). In La sémiologie des moyens de communication audio-visuelle et le probléme de l’analogie (The semiology of audio-visual communication media and the problem of analogy). (1973), which he wrote together with Casetti, he finds himself confronted with ‘deux façons différentes de concevoir la pratique sémiologique’ (two different ways to conceive of the praxis of semiology). The existent semiotics of film are based on two theories of sign systems, one based on de Saussure, the other on Ch. S. Peirce. The work of semioticists thinking in the wake of de Saussure (Barthes, Metz) is very logocentric by nature. In this respect, Barthes has no qualms in categorizing the semiotics of film as a province of (general) linguistics. Followers of Peirce manage to disengage themselves from the spell of linguistics (Eco, Bettetini, Wollen). Together with Bettetini and through the intermediary of Morris Peter Wollen was the first to develop a semiotics of film along the lines of the Peircean model.18 Peter Wollen’s semiotics of film is founded on Peirce’s second triad: ‘The classification which is important to the present argument is that which Peirce called “the second trichotomy of signs”, their division into icons, indexes and symbols. A sign is either an icon, an index or a symbol.’19 For the sake of clarity, we reproduced the description as it is be found in Wollen’s writings. His proposal to divide film signs into three categories might help us to differentiate between divergent types of connotation and denotation:

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General Introduction

• the icon: a sign whose signifiant (signifier) refers to the signifié (signified) on the basis of the resemblance, of similarity therewith; • the index: the standard for an entity, which is inextricably linked with, yet is not identical with this entity; • the symbol: an arbitrary sign whose signifiant (signifier) stands neither in a direct, nor in an ideal relation to the signifié (signified), but refers to it according to the rules of a specific convention. With regard to the above, James Monaco writes: ‘Despite the fact that Wollen does not fit the triad “icon, index and symbol” into the categories “connotation/denotation”, it can be considered to be of a predominantly denotative nature. It goes without saying that portraits are icons, but, in the Peirce/Wollen system, diagrams also resort under the category of “icons”. The index is much more difficult to define. Referring to Peirce, Wollen proposes to subdivide the index into two types: a technical type – medical symptoms are an index of the state of health, clocks and sun dials are an index of time – and a metaphorical type, one recognizes a seaman by his sea-legs (only in this instance do the Peirce/Wollen categories touch upon the connotative). Symbols, the third category, in their turn, are easier to define. Peirce and Wollen use the term in a rather broad, expanded sense: words are symbols (since the signifiant-signifier refers to the signifié-signified in keeping with convention and not on the basis of similarity).’20 It appears from the above that the Peircean scheme is better suited for the purpose of the semiotics of the image than the scheme of de Saussure. Not so much because this scheme might accidentally be a more fitting one to approach photography or film, but rather because it can explain every type of semiotics. The linguistic (non-semiotic) scheme by de Saussure and the one devised by Hjelmslev definitely cannot be applied outside the context of verbal language(s).21

9. Aesthetics and semiotics in philosophy It is obvious that there is a vacancy for semiotics in the field of philosophy, as a complement to aesthetics. In this respect, Umberto Eco provides us with a relevant illustration, borrowed from his own experience: ‘I had written four books on aesthetics before I got interested in semiotics, but also after that, I always continued my research in the field of art.

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Aesthetics is not a neatly confined discipline which could only be approached via a psychological or a metaphysical methodology: it is a much broader, more inclusive domain. Because I am attracted by what cannot immediately be expressed by means of words – certain things remain “indébatable” (cannot be spoken/discuss about) – I use semiotics as a way of approaching certain problems and to elucidate some aspects thereof. Of course, an aesthetic experience cannot be grasped or quantified by means of semiotics, but the latter can be instrumental in explaining some of its characteristics. When I deal with the problem of color, as was the case on the occasion of the lecture on Mondrian, I start with a categorization in a first instance. But still, the fact remains that, beyond a certain point, our aesthetic experience of color blows away all these categorizations. And yet, it is language that provides us with the possibility of conveying new, unknown colors, as Joyce did.’22 In the above quotation, Willem Elias finds a formulation of the importance of the relationship between semiotics and aesthetics. On the one hand, it is a conflicting or contradictory one, since the former is usually approached in a quantitative manner, whereas the latter deals with impressions of a qualitative nature; on the other hand, a combination of both is experienced as an enrichment, in the sense that they both complement each other and fill the gaps between them.23

EXIT The 20th century began with one of the most exciting and important cultural revolutions in history. The development of cinema, the natural evolution of photography marked the beginning of the century and has become its most representative elements. If we had to describe culturally this century with just one phrase it would probably be ‘The Century of Cinema.’ However, the last decade of the 20th century has been the witness of another, even greater revolution, thought by many to be the greatest revolution in human history that only recently we have begun to perceive and only partially understand. The Digital Revolution has changed the planet. If, in the 20th century it was Cinema, in the 21st it will be Computers. We have created an electronically linked planet, destroying

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General Introduction

all the barriers of space and time between one point of the World and another. Today, anyone can write, draw or create a musical work, and that creation can be seen, literally by millions, anywhere in the World, instantly. Reproduction, that mass culture element that destroyed the ‘aura’ of an artwork according to Benjamin, is no longer necessary, since any creation in the digital world actually exists everywhere and nowhere. The final democratization of Art, that which destroys the vast gap between artist and viewer, transforming artist into viewer and, specially, viewer into artist, has taken place. The social, political, economic and cultural and artistic consequences this revolution is having and will have, are and will be unprecedented in the history of civilization. From an artistic point of view, this revolution has a greater meaning than any other in history. Since it not only changes the way to create art, but also the whole concept of art in a way that was impossible to imagine before. Two concepts have worried artists and art philosophers for the past two centuries: time and participation. With the revolution, both concepts have changed radically. The essence of the digital work is, as its name indicates, the finite character of its nature. Any digital representation, be it image, sound or text, is basically information, data expressed in a binary code, 1’s and 0’s, and translated by a machine into text, sound or image. We have transformed our analogical and infinite world into a digital and finite one (although infinitive for human perception). We have basically cut time and space into little fragments. The main reason, as we can effectively point out, that we can now handle that information. The image becomes information, and all information can be manipulated. The first step into this transformation of our analogical and infinite world into an infinite data based reality, was photography. Since the beginning of civilization, man has looked at his reflection in the water and dreamed of grabbing that image and preserving it. Painting was a first approach to this idea, from the rural paintings in caves that had magical meanings, to the portraits of Nobles and Monarchs and the nearer in time movements of Impressionism, Symbolism or Expressionism. However, the painting and the object represented, was basically temporal. Time does not exist on the canvas (except to represent the period or year of creation). Bergson wrote: ‘The essence of time is that it goes by’ (‘Matter and

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Memory’). Photography not only stopped but also captured time. This was its essence. Man was now able to capture an instant, any instant, to capture reality and preserve it. The dream of the prehistoric man had come true. The first pictures were portraits, sightings, prepared images that resembled and were influenced by the work done on the canvas. But with investigation and technological developments, we are now able to capture and ‘see’ moments and instants of reality that would have been impossible otherwise. From Muybridge’s first experiments to observe the apparently unobservable, to Harold Edgerton’s pictures of the practically invisible, the function of photography was to stop time and capture the reality that was present in that particular instant. It was a first way to cut our infinite reality into tangible pieces that can be preserved. Later, cinema was born. If photography stopped time and represented space, films went one step further and captured and represented both, space and time. Movies were a way to capture periods of time and represent them, as many times as we wished. It was a first attempt to cut the linearity of time, its constant and unstoppable flow, capture it and represent it. It was the second step in transforming the untouchable infinity of our world into a modifiable and observable nature. Cinema transformed reality from infinite time and space into 24 frames per second. And in the passing from the 20th to the 21st century, we have learned to create new realities as well. The first main characteristic of digital art, and Net Art, its real objective and meaning of existence, is that space and time are no longer obstacles, in fact they are no longer present in the work of art itself. With Digitalization and the World Wide Web, the work of art exists and does still exist, everywhere and nowhere. And we have finally learned how to transform all aspects of our reality, image, sound and text, into bits of information, data, subject to manipulation, creation and transmission. However, we must question, what is the meaning, the essence of art in this new world we have created? What is art? And here we come to the second concept that has worried artistic thinkers and philosophers and that has changed the whole perception of art: participation.

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General Introduction

We are witnessing the culmination of centuries of scientific discoveries, technical creations, political changes and cultural innovations. The incorporation of digitalization and internet is yet another important step towards the complete democratization of art. It has transformed our society, the way we understand it, the way we think about it, the way we perceive and act inside of it as its members. Digitalization and the internet can be regarded as one, or at least one derives from the other. But from a cultural point of view they are two different things and both have an impact on our civilization in different aspects. However, they are so complex and their impact so wide, that we must here make a separation, not only in the way they influence and transform our society and its culture, but in the artistic activities upon which they have an impact as well. The importance of the internet in the democratization of art can be seen in the fact that it permits not only a much larger cultural reception, more people can now receive written texts, pictures, music, videos, and all through the computer alone, but incorporates for the first time the process of creation to the cultural mass. Until now, people were passive receivers of art and culture. They learned how to read, how to write, they listened to music and watched films. They were readers, listeners, viewers, passive receivers of culture. And all of a sudden they find themselves with the ability to create. It is not only this new ability that is the cause for this revolution, but the fact that anything we create can be read, listened or viewed, instantly and at anything anywhere in the world by millions of people. Suddenly, we are all potential journalists and writers, painters and photographers, musicians and filmmakers. We can point out that the once passive viewer or receiver of art has now become the main component of the work, not only to complete it but actually to initiate it and give it content. Digital Art follows the ideas inspired by basically two artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century: Dada and Fluxus. To explain the current usage of digital art, the conception and meaning of this art, as well as any other artistic movements of the past decennia, we must consider the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, as well as the Fluxus artists and their initiative in incorporating the receiver of art in the artistic product itself. 37

The Weight of Photography

Duchamp’s influence is indispensable to understand digital art. The Dada artists initiated the concept that any object of our everyday lives can be art, thus taking away the artistic value from the object itself, and therefore any virtuosism from the artist, and giving it to the idea, the concept. Although resumed in very simplistic terms, Digital Art takes hold of this idea and leads it to the extreme, since there is actually no object, only the concept. On the other hand, and always keeping the Dada influence in mind, Fluxus artists incorporated several ideas like the chance component in art, and they continued developing the essential link between everyday objects and events and art while giving the artistic product or concept multiple interpretations. Called sometimes anti-art, Fluxus films for example called into question the common associations viewers bring with them when watching a film, commercial or alternative. But the main idea was to incorporate the viewer/listener/reader, the receiver of art, into the artwork itself, incorporating ideas like the uniqueness of every work of art at a certain time (Paik’s film Zen for Film, where every projection is different), and the active participation of the audience in the work in order for the work or exist. Of course, this has always been the case, any work of art has its meaning only when viewed, a movie is made to be seen, a composition to be heard. But these artists, Dada and Fluxus, elevated this concept to a principle and essential point. Although Digital Art commenced in theory in the 1970’s, it was done so by scientist who worked for military and defense projects, or other non-artistic institutions. Its basic tool, the computer, was not available to consumers until the 1980’s and even then, after the first explosion of this new art, it did not have any relevance in the artistic world, until rather recently. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the computer is such a novel tool, so the digital world had yet to create the necessary software tools and teach the artists how to use them, the same way cinema had to create its own language of shooting and editing. However, the most important reason is that the final phase of this digital revolution did not occur until the 1990’s. Digital works took the object out of the picture and focused mainly on the concepts. They also involved the participation of the public. Therefore, it is only logical to assume that the real artistic revolution would come with the internet. In fact, the idea was, at least potentially, to involve the whole world in the artistic process.

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Digital Art, or Net Art, is already done almost exclusively through the internet. Even cinema and other mediums will forcefully have to change their current structures and distributing policies with the incorporation of digital possibilities in all aspects of the artistic and cultural world. With the simplification of the tools of creation, everyone will become artist and viewer at the same time. Still, we are not at the end of the Digital Revolution. It is now very difficult to imagine a world without computers and that was not so 40 years ago. It is almost even harder to imagine an internet-less world. Digital Art is still in its infancy but the medium and the concepts are rapidly growing, incorporating more people and more sectors of reality. Soon, even Virtual Reality, the final objective of the digitalization process, will be accessible to all. The language and the means are still to be created and developed, but we are nearer now than ever before to a real democratization of culture and art! Johan Swinnen & Luc Deneulin

Notes 1

J. Baudrillard, Photography, or The Writing Of Light Ctheory (Paris, 2000).

2

S. Hall; ‘Encoding/decoding’ in: Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinson (London, 1980), pp. 128-138.

3

In this respect, consult the elucidating contributions on visual comunication in: S. Aerts, M. Bekaerts et al, ‘Beeldboek’ Andere Sinema, nr. 87, October 1988.

4

The term ‘semiology’ was coined by F. de Saussure. The term ‘semiotics’ is derived from Ch. S. Peirce. Source: H. Dethier, Inhoudsanalyse, semiologie, teksttheorie, part I, Free University Brussels, (Brussels, 1987)

5

Quoted in: H. Dethier, Inhoudsanalyse, semiologie, teksttheorie, part I, (Free University Brussels) (Brussel, 1987) p. 1

6

Quoted in: V. Kluwe, Gestaltung in der Fotografie und ihre Bildwirkung: Aspekte einer theoretisch und empirisch orientierten Fotosemiotik, (Berlin, 1982) p. 47 For a detailed account on the art philosophical implications and for a state of affairs of what is called ‘the second phase in semiotics’ which holds that the sign is not an element in reality between a great many others, but much rather

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a characteristic of all elements of reality in its entirety we refer to: Willem Elias, ‘Met het oog op openheid... de kunstfilosofie van Umberto Eco’ Nieuw Tijdschrift van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel, vol. I, nr. 1, January 1988 7

Quite interesting with regard to an overview of different directions in semiotics and exemplary for a thorough research of sources is: B. Hoebers, De foto in de Vlaamse Pers. Een inhoudsanalyse, (unpublished M.A. Dissertation), promotor Prof. Dr. H. Dethier, Free University Brussels, Brussels, 1979

8

H. Dethier, Film op Weg, University of Amsterdam, Institute for Aesthetics, 1975, p. 18

9

J.M. Peters, Semiotiek van het beeld, ACCO, Leuven, 1979, p. 5

10

A. Van Zoest , Semiotiek. Over tekens, hoe ze werken en wat we ermee doen, Ambo, Baarn, 1978, p. 49

11

S. Aerts, M. Bekaerts et al. ‘Beeldboek’, Andere Sinema, n 87, October 1988, p. 86

12

C. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage, Paris, 1962.

13

H. Dethier, Film op Weg, University of Amsterdam, Institute for Aesthetics, 1975, p. 1

14

Ph. Dubois, L’Acte Photographique, Editions Labor, Bruxelles, 1983. ‘L’Acte Photographique’ is also the name of a conference organised by the Sorbonne University, Paris (November 5th-7th 1982): G. Mora, ‘L’Acte photographique’ in: Les Cahiers de la Photographie, nr. 8, ACCP, Paris, 1983

15

J. Simons, ‘Interview with Christian Metz’ in: Skrien, nr. 151, 1987. In this important interview, he talks about a comparison between photography and cinema, which he transposes to a comparison between fetishism ans fetish. Additionally, he talks about Peirce, Barthes, Arnheim and Bazin.

16

C. Metz, Le cinéma: langue ou language?, Communications 4, Paris, 1964

17

The semiotics of Pasolini is principally aimed at discovering the structures of the sacral against the backdrop of a world which, at present, is experienced as profane. One single continuous sequence take would be the representation of this profane world. ‘Film’ consists of introducing structures and consequently also elipses in this continuous sequence. When these structures refer to sacral structures, we arrive at film according to Pasolini.

18

P. WOLLEN, ‘Fire and Ice’, in: Photographies, nr. 4, Paris, 1984, pp. 118 120. In this article about photography and film, the British critic P. Wollen introduces the metaphors of fire and ice. Film stands for dynamism, the simultaneous burgeoning of all things, the flaming of fire. The photograph is static and stands for distance, stifling and the moment frozen in time.

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19

P. Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Cinema One, Secker & Warburg, 1969, p. 122. Cf also: Eisenstein’s Aesthetics, a lecture at the British Film Institute, November 16th 1967, and The Concept of Communication(s), lecture at the British Film Institute, May 19th 1969

20

J. Monaco, Film, Wereldvenster, Weesp, 1984, pp. 142-143

21

The semiotician André Vandenbunder formulates his critique of Wollen as follows: ... The fundamental criticism we wish to formulate with regard to Wollen and which obviates all previous criticism pertains to the fact that he isolated only one triad from the Peircean model and, by doing so, has dislocated and disrupted this model as a whole. The triad he embraces is the second one. However, this triad cannot be disconnected from the first and the third one (...).

22

P. Groot, M. Brouwer, Gesprek met Umberto Eco (Conversation with Umberto Eco): ‘Steeled in the school of the old Aquinas’, in: Museumjournaal, vol. 26, nr. 5, 1981, p. 236

23

W. Elias, Filosofie van de kunst en educatie, Free University Brussels, (Brussels, 1989) p. 328

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A Foreword about Thinking

Johan Swinnen & Luc Deneulin

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The history, theory and criticism of photography are based on thinking. The essays in this book are preceded by a contribution of Belgian philosopher Jean Paul Van Bendegem, whom we like to consider a fellow traveler. Van Bendegem inspired our free yet humanistic way of thinking. His work also influenced the selection of essays presented in this book. As such, we hope the reader will keep in mind this theory about thinking.

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Homo Futuris: A World of Possibilities (among others) Jean Paul Van Bendegem —

The impossibility of the topic. Thinking about humankind, whether in the close, near or distant future, is as easy as it is impossible. Even an extremely rough, first-order analysis makes clear the staggering complexity of the issue. Just think along with me for a few lines. First of all, do we think about an individual human being or do we think about societies (whether we mean by ‘society’ a political unity, an economical entity, or something else)? Are we trying to imagine what it will be like to walk around (if we will still do that) in the streets (if there still will be such things) of Ghent (or any other town, if that is what we will still call them)? Or are are we trying to figure out whether democracies will be able to maintain their survival in the midst of all the other ways to organize and govern a society. Secondly, if we are talking about individuals on what level(s) do we wish to do so? On the biological level? Are we as daring as to predict evolution? What will future man look like as a biological species? Or on the psychological level? How will future woman look at the world, perceive it, react to it, live with it, interact with it? Or on the social level? Who do we deal with? How do we deal with the other? Thirdly, if we consider the individual perspective too limiting, and we opt for the broader picture, what then? Even if we restrict ourselves to a basic picture of a society as a set of units (= individuals) in a ‘field of forces’, that could be economical, political, legal, scientific or technological, then

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how do we predict the future state of this forcefield? Are we serious about predicting what the economy or economies will look like in the future? Or, even more impressive, are we supposed to figure out what the sciences will invent or construct, and how it will translate into technological tools that will affect our daily lives? Fourthly, since we will need to talk about economics, we will have to talk about resources. So we will need to talk about the earth as a source that supports life on its crust. Actually, this goes together with the biological question of evolution, seen as an intricate game between the individual and the environment. Apart from human beings, does it mean we will have to reflect on the future of the planet as a whole? And does this imply that we need to look beyond the earth and into space and dream of space flights, exploring the near infinite resources to be found there? Such questions lead us straight to issues about the role of humankind in the universe. So fifthly, and perhaps quintessentially, do we really want to consider questions about the meaning of life, about the role humans are supposed to play, whether or not in interaction with a superior force of being transcending this poor and imperfect world? These questions have been around for some time (an understatement!) and no satisfactory answers have been for any of them. But, if we reject these questions, are we sure that we will be able to give any meaningful answer to any of the other questions mentioned above? For that reason, are we sure that we can treat any of these questions without involving all the others? If (w)holism is supposed to have some content, its main effect seems to be paralysis.

The primordial question to ask is clearly this: where to start? Possibilities. Here is a silly idea: if you do not know where to start, if you cannot make a choice, look at all possibilities. Indeed, a completely silly idea, but, as it happens, a useful one (this is commonplace: silly ideas are often helpful for they allow us to see more clearly the distinction between good and bad ideas, concepts or approaches). All hinge on the fact of what a possibility is meant to be. This sounds not so much silly but trivial. But does it? Suppose you have not yet decided what to do this evening (which is, of course, in the very near future). You can start to

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list all the detailed possibilities there are, but often it helps to narrow down this list, not by eliminating items from it, but by grouping them into subsets and labeling them. So, the first question might be: shall I stay at home or go out? If it is clear that you do not want to leave the house, we are done. If the other option is chosen, then the choices can be refined: cinema, pub, or brothel? All this may perhaps sound rather ‘yeah-yeah’ish, but it does produce an interesting result as the following exercise will try to show.

No man, no future, that seems clear. So let that be our first ‘grand’ scenario: Possibility 1 | Humankind becomes extinct. The next question must be: if humankind can be threatened by extinction, what are the possibilities then? Assume that the extinction has a set of causes or, why not, let us include even the next possibility. • Possibility 1.1: Humankind becomes extinct as an act of God or another superior being or entity. This readily solves all our problems, no further questions need to be dealt with and we are literally done. Unless one is so eager to know when it will happen that eschatology flourishes (which it actually does). • Possibility 1.2: Humankind becomes extinct by external causes. Why should we not share the same fate as the dinosaurs (if that is what happened, of course)? A meteorite is on its way to earth and Bruce Willis is on holiday, so it actually hits the earth and that’s it. Actually, this does not look as bad as it is. After all, dinosaurs were swept away from the face of the earth and what happened? We came along. Continue this thought: if we are swept away, who knows what will come along. And, yes, I do know that evolution is not goal-oriented, so it is perfectly possible that, for instance, dinosaurs return (with a vengeance, I imagine). • Possibility 1.3: Humankind becomes extinct by internal causes. In other words, humans cause their own extinction. Here no direct, easy answers can be given. Therefore, we must differentiate. • Possibility 1.3.1: The causes have primarily to do with humans. The

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basic example here is all types of warfare we know of, with less, more or just plainly crazy sophistication. Although this does not necessarily have to lead to total extinction, it is not easy to see what possible futures could be like, if some humans survived in a world destroyed by, e.g., a nuclear war. And, at any rate, few seem to be interested in the future of humankind in this type of scenarios. • Possibility 1.3.2: The causes have primarily to do with humans and the environment. This should sound familiar, because this is not so much a possibility as a real scenario we are experiencing today. The earth’s resources are shrinking, the environment is becoming increasingly polluted, climate changes, whether moderate or not, are affecting our daily lives (the very idea of a war over water is a gruesome expression of this reality), and we basically have no idea what the best strategy is for the future, apart from restoring the present situation to a past situation (quite similar to solving a computer problem by resetting the computer to a previous date before the problem manifested itself). Perhaps it is possible to say meaningful things about the near future, but it seems clear to me that the distant future is precisely that: too distant to see clearly. So time to change our perspective.

The future is ours. Let us now consider the second ‘grand’ scenario. Possibility 2 | Humankind manages to survive. Phrased in these terms, what could the next step be? It is extremely tempting to ask the question ‘How?’, but that would be a bad strategy, I think, for that would immediately introduce technical matters and that would end my story right here. Let’s try this: • Possibility 2.1: Humankind remains the same. Of course, I do know that the expression ‘remains the same’ introduces an even more difficult problem, namely, what does this expression mean? A banal example: am I still the ‘same’ person as twenty years ago? This question becomes even more difficult to answer when applied not just to a single human, but to the entire species. Nevertheless I think we can have some idea. Let us use this as a criterion (to avoid the

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definition problem): if a person from the future were to visit us, and we could have a conversation with him, her or it, as if we were talking to humans today, then these beings from the future and us are roughly the same. (Yes, I know I am proposing a Turing Test for Homo Futuris here, but why not?) • Possibility 2.1.1: Humankind remains the same without human intervention. A somewhat boring scenario, but a genuine possibility. Due to climate changes, the near exhaustion of natural resources, mankind will over the generations be reduced to a few million spread all over the earth. Their environment will be seriously reduced, they will revert to the ‘simple life’, if you like, and since they are in close harmony with their environment, nothing much happens. This is, of course, just one possibility sub 2.1.1, but I felt I had to mention it since the extreme ‘boom’- and ‘doom’-scenarios we are familiar with today, tend to ignore the zone in the middle, whereto this scenario definitely belongs. • Possibility 2.1.2: Humankind remains the same because of human intervention. This may sound rather silly, but why not? Why could one not have the idea that humans should remain the way they are – perhaps because of a religious worldview? – and that, if changes are detected, everything needs to be done to stop them. It goes to show that a form of conservatism (almost in a literal sense) is perfectly compatible with embracing all forms of modern technologies. • Possibility 2.1.2.1: Human intervention is purely technical or biological. What comes to mind here are all kinds of genetic repairs. If human beings are changing, it has primarily to do with changes in genetic material, i.e., mutations (or similar processes), and these, in principle, can be undone. Or, if sexual preferences were to undergo radical changes, e.g., heterosexual couples become a strict minority, then one could set up schemes for artificial insemination and so forth. Again, high tech solutions for non-progressive worldviews can go hand in hand. • Possibility 2.1.2.2: Human intervention is on the mental level. This scenario comes down to the idea that we have to ‘resist’ changes. So, even if, e.g., we do biologically change, we need not accept these changes. It becomes a matter of finding

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reinterpretations or representations in such a way that these modifications do not affect the ‘essence’ of what it is to be human. A typical example is the view that, although the WorldWide Web embraces the whole planet (well, more or less, but that is a different matter) whereas in the past one had to make do with local news only, nevertheless this represents a mere change in size of information channels (a quantitative measure), but it does not affect us directly (a qualitative change). But what if the experienced changes are genuine? Then we move to the next ‘sub-grand’ scenario. • Possibility 2.2: Humankind changes. Looking at our own past over a sufficiently large timescale, this statement seems rather trivial, so it is reasonable to assume that the same will hold for the future (although this symmetry argument needs separate justification of course). This leads immediately to the following distinction. • Possibility 2.2.1: Humankind changes because of evolutionary processes. A rather plausible possibility, since mutations occur whether we like it or not. Imagine a child or children being born with the beginnings of a third eye at the back of their heads. It is not life threatening, they seem to function alright, so why not. However, to have ‘back vision’ so to speak, must radically and literally at least change one’s perception of the world. In that sense, it is perfectly imaginable that changes occur and are accepted without any problems. If it changes, it changes and when it does, it does. • Possibility 2.2.2: Humankind changes because of human intervention. Finally, I think, we have reached the ‘Homo Futuris’ scenario. I could continue now with a list of sub-sub-scenarios (is it a technological, biological, psychological, sociological, mental ... intervention or something else altogether?), but I will not do so due to lack of space. So let me close this section with spelling out the interesting result I promised: this rough classification shows that the ‘Homo Futuris’ scenario is a mere possibility among plenty of others. It therefore calls for some modesty and that surely is an interesting outcome and really the point I wanted to make in this short exploration of a world of possibilities.

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But wait, something is not right. The intelligent reader will have noticed that apparently it does seem possible to say something about the future of mankind, notwithstanding the pessimism of the opening section. Or does it? Indeed, something is not right. There is actually an implicit assumption present, that anybody who went along with me in this argument accepted unknowingly, an assumption that effectively contradicts the (w)holism of the opening paragraphs. The clever trick of the decimal classification suggests that these possibilities are (to a certain extent) independent of one another. Which they are clearly not, as soon as one starts to think about it. Just one example: AIDS. It is clear that this problem cuts across several possibilities: it has to do with possible extinction of humankind, so scenario 1.2 seems the right candidate, but, of course, if AIDS is seen as a punishment of God, it is rather scenario 1.1 we should consider. But, as far as we can ‘fight’ the disease, we have to look at possibilities sub 2. But suppose that humans adapt their immune system to AIDS, possibly with the help of some genetic engineering, is this then scenario 2.1 or 2.2 or a combination of both? I must therefore offer my apologies to the reader, because I have been misleading him or her in a rhetorically disputable way. However, the call for modesty remains as my failed attempt clearly shows.

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1 | Shahidul Alam

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The Majority World Looks Back Shahidul Alam

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It was a grand opening. The ‘Who’s Who’ of development in Britain was there, championing the noble cause – the Millennium Development Goals, making poverty history. The Bob Geldof circus could perhaps be pardoned. Geldof is neither a development worker nor someone particularly knowledgeable about the subject. But for the organizers of the ‘bash’ at the OXO Tower on London’s South Bank to produce such a culturally insensitive event was revealing. Apart from parading a few young black people from Africa, who extolled the virtues of ‘development’, there was little contribution from the Majority World.1 The key speakers, typically white Western development workers, spoke of the role that they were playing in saving the poor of the global South. The token dark-skinned people, having played their part, were soon forgotten. The centerpiece of this celebration was an exhibition entitled Eight Ways to Change the World. White Western photographers took all the photographs. No one questioned the implication of such an exercise. When I confronted one of the organizers he explained that the curator – a director of a Western photographic agency – had decided not to use Majority World photographers because they ‘didn’t have the eye.’ The sophisticated visual language possessed by the Western audience was presumably beyond the capacity of a photographer from the South to comprehend, let alone engage with at a creative level.

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This represents a shift from the position of 20 years ago when we started asking why Majority World photographers were not being used by mainstream media and development agencies. The answer then had been: ‘They don’t exist.’ Today our existence is difficult to deny. The Internet, the fact that several majority world agencies operate successfully, and that photographers belonging to such agencies regularly win international awards, means we are no longer invisible. Now it’s a different set of rules. We have to prove we have the eye. A similar statement about blacks, women, or minority groups of any sort would raise a storm. But when such prejudice is used against a group of media professionals from the South, who happen to represent the majority of humankind, no one appears to bat an eyelid. I have, of course, faced this situation before. There was, for example, a fax from the National Geographic Society Television Division asking if we could help them with the production of a film that would include the Bangladeshi cyclone of 1991. They wanted specific help in locating ‘US, European or UN people... who would lead us to a suitable Bangladeshi family.’ The irony of making such a request to a picture agency dedicated to promoting local voices had obviously escaped them. We had gotten used to requests for iconic objects of poverty that international NGOs insisted existed in abundance and had to be photographed – but which locals neither knew nor had heard of. Charities and development agencies need to raise money from the Western public. The best way to pull the heart strings – and thereby the purse strings – is to show those doleful eyes that a few pennies could save. Perhaps photographers from the South cannot be trusted to understand this. Perhaps they are so hardened to such images of daily suffering that they are unable to appreciate the impact these sights might have on western audiences – and the coffers of Western aid agencies. But certain changes have been taking place, forcing various adjustments. Media budgets have become tighter than they were. Flying people to distant locations is expensive. Having Western photographers ‘on the ground’ can be dangerous in some cases – and costly in terms of insurance premiums. Better to have locals in the firing line. So, slowly, local names have begun to creep in. Certain rules still applied of course, such as the vast differentials in pay between local and Western photographers.

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Stories about Nike regularly make the headlines, but the exploitative terms on which local photographers work rarely surface. The Bangla saying ‘kaker mangsho kak khai na’ (a crow doesn’t eat crow’s meat) seems to apply to journalism: criticism of the media is taboo. Not only do the workers on the media sweatshops have to work for peanuts, they need to know which stories to tell. None of this journalistic independence rubbish: gimme stories that sell. This, of course, affects Southern photographers. When they know certain stories sell, they themselves begin to supply the ‘appropriate’ images. A man known to carry a toy gun in the streets of Dhaka is repeatedly photographed at religious rallies, and despite common knowledge that it is a fake gun, news agencies run the picture without explaining the nature of the situation. Numerous wire photographers have been known to stage flood pictures and in one famous instance, a child was shown to be swimming to safety in what was known to be knee deep water. The photograph went on to win a major press award. Money also affects publishers. Smaller budgets require careful shopping. The Corbis, Getty and Reuters image supermarkets are rapidly squeezing out the ‘corner store’ suppliers and a small majority world picture library simply can’t compete. But there are other factors in the equation. Development isn’t simply about money. What about developing mutual respect; enabling equitable partnerships; providing enabling environments for intellectual exchange? What about creating awareness of the underlying causes for poverty? These are all integral parts of the development process. When all things are added up, cheap images providing clichéd messages do more harm than good. They do not address the crucial issue: poverty is almost always a product of exploitation, at local, regional and international levels. If poverty is simply addressed in terms of what people lack in monetary terms, then the more important issues of addressing exploitation are sidelined. However, the type of imagery required from the Majority World is broadening. This is coming less from growing political sensibility and more from global economic shifts. Negative imagery is seen as a deterrent to

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foreign investment in emerging markets. With multinationals interested in cheap labor, and a wider consumer base, a different profile is now required to stimulate investor confidence. So, along with the standard fare of flood and famine, are stories of Indian and Chinese billionaires and how they have benefited from capitalism. Furthermore the new ‘inclusive’ media now take on more ethnic-minority journalists. But when they come over to do their groundbreaking stories, it is the rookie on the streets of Dhaka who provides the leads, conducts the research, translates, drives, fixes, and does all that is necessary for the story to emerge. If things do go wrong – as when the British TV Channel 4 attempted an ill-fated exposé in Bangladesh in late 2002 – the Western journalists are likely to be home for Christmas while the local fixers face torture in jail. Lacking the advantages of our Western counterparts, image-makers in the South have had to rely on ingenuity and making-do in order to move from being fixers, to authors in their own right. We have had to be pioneers. With one filing cabinet, an XT computer without a hard drive, and a converted toilet as a darkroom, we decided we would take on the established rich-world photo agencies. On 4 September 1989 Drik Alokchitra Granthagar was set up in Dhaka. The Sanskrit word Drik means vision, inner vision, and philosophy of vision. That vision of a more egalitarian world, where materially poor nations have a say in how they are represented, remains our driving force. The European agencies I had encountered wanted a minimum submission of 300 transparencies and told you not to ask for money for the first three years. This constituted a massive investment for a Majority World photographer, and virtually ruled out her entry into the market. We had a very different approach. If a photographer had a single good image which we felt needed to be seen we would take her on, try and sell the picture and pay her as soon as the money came in. It allowed the photographer to buy more rolls of film and carry on working. The photographers didn’t have printing and developing facilities so we set up a good quality darkroom and trained people to make high quality prints. They had no lights so we set up a studio.

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The only gallery spaces available were owned by the State or foreign cultural missions, none of which would show controversial work. So we built our own galleries. Few would publish pictures well so we built our own pre-press unit and published postcards, bookmarks and calendars that we sold door-to-door to pay for running costs. Photography was largely male-dominated, so we organized workshops for women photographers. There were no working-class people in the media, so we started training poor children in photography. We couldn’t afford faxes or international phone calls, so we set up Bangladesh’s first email service and lobbied for the introduction of full-fledged internet. Professor Yunus, the Nobel Prize winner, was our first user. We set up electronic bulletin boards on issues important to us, such as child-rights and environmental issues. We started putting together a database of photographers in the South, and wrote off to as many organizations as we could, offering our services. No one replied. Undeterred, we put together a portfolio of black-andwhite prints, largely by Bangladeshi photographers. On a rare visit to Europe, I visited the office of the New Internationalist (NI) in Oxford. Dexter Tiranti greeted me warmly. He had received our letter, but hadn’t given it too much importance. An agency in Bangladesh seemed too far distant for the NI to work with on a regular basis. Having seen the portfolio however, Dexter sat me down at his desk and started ringing picture users across Europe. I remember feeling envious of this ability to simply pick up a phone and call someone in another country, but was grateful for the contacts. Dexter asked us to submit pictures for the NI Almanac. The next year we got a letter from him that stated: ‘The photographs are beautiful and the reason we are using only six is because we can’t really have too many from one country.’ Others Dexter had phoned that day, and many others we have contacted since, have responded similarly, and so picture sales slowly grew – but it was no easy ride. Our problems weren’t simply ones of surviving on slender means and competing against agencies based in London, Paris and New York. Our activism created problems on our home soil too. We had, by then, set up our own website and had helped to establish the first webzine and internet portal in the country. Our email network had been put to use

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when Taslima Nasrin was being persecuted. The website became the seat of resistance when pro-government thugs committed rape in a university campus. So the site, and later the agency, came under attack. The day after our human rights portal www.banglarights.net was launched all the telephone lines of the agency were disconnected. It took us two-and-ahalf years to get the lines back, but that never stopped our internet service and we stayed connected. Later, Drik became the seat of resistance when the Government used the military to round up opposition activists. I was attacked on the street, during curfew and in a street protected by the military. I received eight knife wounds. So we learnt to walk a fine line. It wasn’t just the government that found us unpalatable. The US embassy felt it couldn’t work with us because we opposed President Clinton’s visit to Bangladesh. The British Council demanded we take down a show that talked about colonialism, and threatened that future projects might be jeopardized when we openly opposed the invasion of Iraq. Death threats, some real, some less serious and a whole range of sabotage attempts have been part of the path we've traveled. Current strategies are more subtle. We know we will never be given work by certain agencies and that visas for some of us will be more difficult to get, but it is certainly not all negative. The main strength of Drik has been its friends and their support. None of what we have achieved would have been possible without the contribution of a large number of people, ranging from ordinary Bangladeshis who have rallied when it mattered, to influential people thousands of miles away who have provided moral and material support. Combining our compulsion to be socially effective with the requirement to be financially independent has remained our biggest challenge. It is a difficult balancing act. Taking a principled position has other drawbacks. People work long hours for salaries below the industry norm. There are few perks. But working at Drik is a special experience; a great high. Not everyone can survive on these highs, of course, and job satisfaction doesn’t help pay the bills, so we need to be competitive and ensure a level of quality so that we can hold our own despite the political pressures. Nearly twenty years down the road, we now have a workforce of around seventy. Graduates from our school of photography, Pathshala, hold senior positions in major publications.

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The working-class children we've trained have gone on to win Emmys and other awards, and I believe Majority World photographers feel they have a platform. The big agencies like Reuters and Getty can provide images at a cost and a speed impossible for independent practitioners to match, a very real consideration for picture editors under time pressure and working to tight budgets. The fact that Corbis (owned by Microsoft) is buying up picture archives like the Bettman is important for their preservation, but the images that now exist 200 feet below the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania are no longer accessible to the students, scholars and researchers. An important part of our visual history is now in the control of one person – Bill Gates. Father Paul Casperg, who has been working for many years with the tea plantation workers in Kandy, has an interesting story to tell. Nearly thirty years ago, in his Masters thesis at the London School of Economics, Father Casperg was able to show that an increase of two pence (four US cents) in the price of a cup of tea being sold on the British railways would, providing it went to the Kandy tea plantation workers, result in more income than the total foreign aid received by the Sri Lankan Government. Father Casperg rightly concluded that it was fair trade that Sri Lanka needed, not more aid. That is what fair trade imagery organizations like majorityworld.org are trying to do. By invoking ethical standards in the trading of images, these organizations address not only the distorted and disrespectful depiction of people of the global South, but also the economic divide. Organizations that call for Majority World governments to be more transparent and accountable need to reflect upon their own ethical standards when it comes to depicting and dealing with the South. Practices such as not allowing photographers to retain copyright or film are justified by the ‘convenience’ of distributing images. Such ‘convenience clauses’ are rarely applied to Western photographers, who know the law and can exercise their rights. We are resisting, though. The new portal, majorityworld.com, supported strongly by its lobbying partner majorityworld.org, has built on the extended groundwork done by Drik. DrikNews.com, though still very

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young, threatens to give the wire agencies a run for their money, and photographers in the South are pooling their resources, including developing close partnerships with like-minded Western organizations. Recently, I was sitting with a small group of photographers, painters and filmmakers in a corner of the top floor gallery of the Voluntary Artists Society of Thimpu. At the end of the showing of a film on Chobi Mela IV – the festival of photography in Asia – projected on a bed sheet pinned on the gallery wall, the conversation veered to pooling resources in neighbouring countries. Sharing computers, scanners, and contacts, we talked of bus routes to neighbouring countries, and finding public spaces for showing work. What we needed was an on-line solution that would serve all Majority World photographers. Having purchased expensive software produced in the West for selling pictures online, we were further bled by consultancy fees we had to pay every time we needed to adapt it to our situation. So, eventually, we developed our own software. It is an inexpensive but highly efficient search engine that local newspaper archives can use. Developed using largely open-source modules it is constantly updated using feedback from users from all over the globe and it has worked well on low bandwidth. Groups in Bhutan, Peru, Tanzania and Vietnam recognize that the wire services and the big agencies have a different agenda. If it’s a guerilla war against the corporations that has to be fought, then we need different tools. Light, flexible, inexpensive and potent ones. A revolution is taking place. As new names creep into the byline, unfamiliar faces step up to the award podium and fresh imagery – vibrant, questioning and revealing – makes it to mainstream media, a whole new world is opening up. A majority world.

Notes 1

A term introduced by the author, and being increasingly used, to replace the terms ‘developing world’ or ‘third world’ which most Southern practitioners consider to be derogatory.

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1. Shahidul Alam [Floating Forest] This was taken when I was new to photography. I was learning to pre-visualise things. I was also experimenting with infra-red photography. I felt I could make the leaves levitate. The decision to cut off the top of the trees and to use the lack of detail on the ground, caused by the infra-red film was deliberate. The leaves were the ‘magic carpet’ in this ‘floating forest.’ Kew Garden, London, UK 1983

2. Shahidul Alam [Grouse Hunt] I was the only non-European in the group. Eight artists had been selected by the Arts Council in Britain to do a feature on ‘work’ in the first phase of International Photography Research Network IP(R+N). For me it made more sense to work on people who had so much influence on the nature of work in distant countries like mine, and I chose to work on the lives of the upper class in Britain. This photograph of Lord Devonport going on a grouse hunt is part of my series People of Leisure. Northumberland, UK 2003

3. Shahidul Alam [Student in Prison Van] Jagannath Hall was known for being pro ‘Awami League’, the opposition party. When the police raided the university hall of residence, smashing rooms and herding students into prison vans, a student cried out to his friends for his identity card, in the hope that it might help in obtaining his release. Dhaka, Bangladesh 1996

4. Shahidul Alam [Pengasih Drug Rehabilitation Centre] The Pengasih Centre was unusual as it was run entirely by former drug addicts. ‘No one understands addicts as well as we do’, said Kumar as he took me round the backstreets of Kuala Lumpur. While officially Malaysia implemented the death penalty for drug dealing, in practice I found they were remarkably tolerant. This drug addict would come into the centre in the Pink Triangle to sleep, eat, and rest. No questions were asked. ‘I became an addict when I was jailed’, he told me. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2001

5. Shahidul Alam [The Sea] I had arrived immediately after the Tsunami. Initially to provide relief, and then went on to document the disaster. I had met a little girl Shanika, who had lost her twin sister, her mother and two other sisters, to the Tsunami. She had been away at her aunt’s and had survived herself, but knew the sea was to be feared. I tried to photograph the sea, as Shanika might have seen it. Hikkadua, Sri Lanka 2005

6. Shahidul Alam [Women with Pitcher] The sugarcane plantations in Maharashtra used exclusively migrant workers. They had less rights, were more vulnerable and less able to organise themselves. But a local headmaster was doing exactly that. Organising the workers for a nationwide strike they planned. I donated a set of prints for them to sell or use in any way they could for their movement. The water of nearby ponds were too polluted by factory waste for the workers to use, so every morning the women would walk a long way to bring in drinking water. Aurangabad, India 2000 7. Shahidul Alam [Woman Wading] It was the worst flood in a century. For me the story was not about the destruction, but the tenacity of the people who carried on despite adversity. As this woman waded to work in Kamlapur, a nearby photographic studio, aptly named ‘Dreamland Studio’ was open for business. Kamlapur, Dhaka, Bangladesh 1988

2 | Michaël Amy

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Daguerreotypes by Southworth & Hawes Convey Mid-19th Century America through its Luminaries and Ordinary Citizens Michaël Amy —

A daguerreotype is a photographic image recorded by a fine deposit of metallic mercury on a very thin layer of pure silver laid onto a thicker copper plate. The polished plate is made light-sensitive by exposing the silver surface to fumes of elemental iodine and bromine. It is then exposed to light projected within a camera. A positive image consisting of nothing more than the highlights of the recorded subject materializes after several minutes, once the plate’s silver coating is exposed to fumes of heated mercury. The plate is then bathed in a solution of sodium thiosulphate, which gives the image permanency. Finally, it is toned and further fixed with a solution containing gold chloride. Since the image projected within the camera is recorded directly onto its final support, each daguerreotype is unique, offering a mirror reversal of the recorded subject. One of a number of ways in which the daguerreotype differs from paper-print photography is that the daguerreotype is seen as a positive only at certain angles of illumination and viewing in, from which the fine mercury deposit appears light against a dark surface reflected by the polished silver. The daguerreotype image is characterized by great sharpness of detail and by the subtlest tonal transitions, which add to the corporeality of the whole. However, these intimately scaled images are also evanescent, as they seem to vaporize before our eyes when we modify our viewing angle ever so slightly, reversing the values.

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The George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., owns close to half of the estimated 2,500 extant daguerreotypes produced by the mid-19thcentury Boston firm of Southworth & Hawes. They constitute the largest group of works in this medium originating from a single studio. Happily, Grant B. Romer and Brian Wallis, the curators of Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, drew from a variety of collections besides that of the Eastman House. The resulting exhibition, with its massive accompanying catalogue raisonné, is visually, emotionally and intellectually riveting. On January 7, 1839, the French government presented at the Academy of Science in Paris Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s invention of a way of recording and fixing a stable image of the visible world onto a polished metal plate. This photographic technique, perfected in 1837, was named the daguerreotype after its inventor. That same month, William Henry Fox Talbot announced at the Royal Institution in London a method of fixing the image projected inside a camera obscura onto paper, through the mediation of a negative. Although Talbot’s invention, known as the calotype, would eventually trump Daguerre’s, it was not immediately embraced. Unlike Daguerre, Talbot patented his invention and charged a fee for the use of it, which slowed its dissemination. In addition, the image obtained through Talbot’s technique was not, at first, as sharply focused and nuanced as the one that was achieved by daguerreotype. Shortly after the first printed instructions for making daguerreotypes reached America in September of 1839, the pharmacist Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) was called from Cabotville (now Chicopee), Massachusetts, to New York City by his former classmate, the artist Joseph Pennell, to ‘Learn respecting the new art.’1 Once Southworth arrived, Pennell introduced him to the artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, who was then experimenting with the new technique. Southworth became so enamored of the revolutionary method that he accepted Pennell’s invitation to join him in producing ‘likenesses’ In spring 1841, both men moved to Boston, where they established a studio in Scollay Square. Pennell left the partnership in 1843 when Southworth 1 All quotes by Southworth were drawn by Grant Romer from primary sources in the Eastman House archives. Used in press materials, the quotes were originally selected for an exhibition Web site that was not realized.

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relocated to a larger space on Tremont Row, and was replaced by the painter Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901). The Southworth & Hawes partnership lasted almost 20 years, with the exception of a two-year interlude from 1849 to 1851, when Southworth participated in the Gold Rush. The exhibition tells the story of Southworth & Hawes’s remarkable artistic collaboration, which lasted until the partnership was dissolved in the early 1860s. Included in the exhibition are a chair that often appears in these photographs and a head support that helped a sitter stay still for minutes on end, as well as various devices used for making and viewing daguerreotypes. What never ceases to amaze is that works of such a high order were produced very early in the history of photography. Southworth & Hawes explicitly aimed to produce works both of great technical excellence and artistic worth. Southworth stated that the goal of the photographer should be to ‘want to make a picture so that every time that you take it up you will see new beauties in it.’ He wrote eloquently about the daguerreotype process, highlighting the meticulousness with which he and Hawes practiced the technique. Although extraordinarily delicate, a great many of the firm’s daguerreotypes are remarkably well preserved. In large part this is due to the care with which the images were developed and ‘coated with a leaf of pure gold, which protects it as a varnish does a painting . . . and sealed under glass, with a border between’ ‘to secure Daguerreotypes from injury.’ Another reason for their outstanding preservation is that Hawes’s children from his marriage with Southworth’s sister Nancy (who also worked in the studio) took extraordinary measures to preserve the works, even after daguerreotypes had fallen into disregard. Southworth & Hawes, who excelled even in the notoriously difficult area of group portraits, achieved renown for the way in which they exploited the studio’s large overhead skylight to model their sitters in light and shadow. Often, a series of daguerreotypes of a single subject was produced with variants in the pose, which also explains why Southworth & Hawes daguerreotypes have survived in so great a number. The client chose the image he or she preferred, and the others were kept by the studio. As the second largest city in the nation, and seen to exemplify all that was best in the young republic in a bustling population of merchants, politicians, and religious and cultural figures, Boston was the ideal place

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to open a portrait studio. The lifelikeness and novelty of the daguerreotype medium, recording one’s appearance, character and status in a matter of minutes, appealed to sitters coming from a wide variety of walks of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lola Montez were among the many notables who passed through the studio at Tremont Row. The photographers liked attracting famous people, as this both increased their visibility and allowed them to make a profit by selling the leftover photographs to third parties. Images of celebrities could also be translated by printers into woodcuts, lithographs and engravings that would disseminate a likeness far and wide. Not surprisingly, Southworth understood that a certain decorum applied to the portrayal of public figures: ‘A likeness for an intimate acquaintance or one’s own family should be marked by the amiability and cheerfulness, so appropriate to the social circle and the home-fireside. Those for the public, of official dignitaries and celebrated characters admit of more firmness, sternness and soberness.’ The remarkable portraits of Daniel Webster and the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw, show these men as stoics, looking into the distance as if weighing the future. The severity of their expressions brings us back to Roman Republican portraiture, which honored great men by showing them exactly as they appeared. Webster sits with his arms slightly spread, allowing him to dominate the field. The cropped column and doorway behind him are characteristically out of focus. A magical portrait of Grace Greenwood shows the journalist and author turned toward the right in seated threequarter view in front of a dark background. Her gaze is intense, with her lovely, wide-open, moist eyes seemingly on the verge of tears. In addition to the luminaries, there are many people in these images whose identity is now unknown. There is, for example, an unforgettable bride shown in full-length, with her head turned almost in pure profile towards the right and one hand placed over her abdomen. The diagonal formed by the drapery on the right gives the impression the figure is slightly pulling back, as if wary. (Certain images of women were tinted by hand, though not this one.) Southworth & Hawes were renowned for using large, highly polished plates, well-suited to including multiple figures. A standout is the portrait of a seated old woman in a bonnet, who looks at us as, in turn, a young girl

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with hand raised to her chest and head in profile gazes up at her elder. Likewise wonderful is the study of three stern young women, with its contrast between the youngest girl, standing at the center, who appears extremely self-assured, and the one on the left, with her expression of insecurity. Southworth & Hawes were gifted photographers of children – no easy matter when long exposure times were required. The small and intimate bust-length portrait of Alice Mary Hawes, who looks down, sadly it seems, is among the most moving images in the exhibition. So sharp are her hairnet and plaid, white-collared dress that she seems literally within hand’s reach. (Images with such compelling detail more forcefully convey a sense of the transience of the lives they represent.) 19th-century photographers could also be called upon to make postmortem portraits, such as the touching image of a young child lying in its white dress, hands clasped together and one leg thrown over the other. Southworth & Hawes on other genres, as well. A set of photographs shot from above record John Collins Warren making history, as he reenacted the surgical use of ether in the amphitheater of Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846-47. Other daguerreotypes show the streets of Boston, shot from a high vantage point, along with its buildings, tombs and cemeteries, and ships in dock. There are also some striking images of Niagara Falls and the suspension bridge over the Niagara River; the palm of Captain Jonathan Walker, branded for helping slaves escape; as well as a crucifix, flowers, clouds in the sky and ephemeral frost on a window. By the early 1850s, Boston became one of the principal centers in the nation for the introduction of glass-plate photography, and many major studios began to abandon the daguerreotype. Southworth & Hawes were forced increasingly to turn to making wet-plate collodion photography and paper prints. The gradual disappearance of the daguerreotype, so central to their artistic vision, eventually forced the men to go their separate ways.

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‘Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes’ was jointly organized by the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York., and the International Center of Photography, New York. The exhibition opened at ICP (June 17-Septembre 4, 2005), traveled to the Eastman House (Octobre 1, 2005-January 8, 2006) and was later on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (January April 2, 2006).

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1. Southworth & Hawes American, active ca. 1845 to 1861 [Lawrence Lot, Mount Auburn Cemetery] ca. 1853 Daguerreotype Whole plate George Eastman House Collection

2. Southworth & Hawes American, active ca. 1845 to 1861 [Postmortem Unidentified Child] ca. 1850 Daguerreotype Whole plate George Eastman House Collection

3. Southworth & Hawes American, active ca. 1846 to 1861 [Young Girl with Portrait of George Washington] ca. 1850 Daguerreotype Whole plate Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of I.N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937

4. Southworth & Hawes American, active ca. 1845 to 1861 [Group of Women] ca. 1850 Daguerreotype Whole plate George Eastman House Collection

5. Southworth & Hawes American, active ca. 1845 to 1861 [Albert Sands Southworth] ca. 1848 Daguerreotype Half plate George Eastman House Collection

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Architecture of Destruction The (In)Human Spatial Condition Ariella Azoulay —

The image of the sovereign as a founder of cities who imports architects and engineers from far and wide to help him leave his own stamp in space is familiar to us from ancient history. Something of this dimension of ruling power is perpetuated in our times by the sovereign’s right to initiate and build monuments that transform urban space and to do it without any competition, contract, or civil consent. Such an architectural privilege, in modern France, for example, belongs to the president of the republic and has an explicit monarchic connotation: fait du prince. In a democratic state, the sovereign may enjoy this privilege only as long as he makes measured and careful use of it. In such states, the monument glorifies the president through the pleasure and benefit he extends to the general citizenry. In the forty years of its rule, the occupation regime has made extensive use of this privilege reserved for the sovereign, massively disrupting Palestinian space through three forms of intervention: construction, the administration of movement, and destruction. The fact that Israeli occupation rule is not recognized as sovereign and its subjects do not recognize its authority has not kept it from expecting absolute and sweeping application of this privilege while depriving the subjects of any status that would allow them to negotiate over the changes in their

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habitat. In each of these three forms, the occupation regime has conducted itself as foreign rule whose sole purpose is to establish its control and possession of space, rather than to develop that space to improve the living conditions of the local population. The three forms of intervention have deepened and reflected the polarized, conflictual power relations between the occupiers and the population of non-citizens living in the Occupied Territories. Land use, movement restriction, development, and the use of resources were all subjugated to these polarized relations from the very beginning in a gradual and escalating process and have turned the Palestinians into provisional residents of a space whose shape and transformation are forever subject to the whims of the regime and its Israeli citizens. Almost nothing in Palestinian space has remained constant, and many of its inhabitants live displaced in their homes, a new type of internal exile in their homeland. Where once orchards and orange groves grew, roads are now paved. Houses previously Palestinian have been confiscated and used to build colonies or army bases. Familiar thoroughfares have been blocked. Use of new ones has not been allowed, public space has become out of bounds for civilian use, movement is subject to constant surveillance, and even house walls have not protected their dwellers from various types of invasion and penetration of their living spaces. The enforcement of power relations between the occupiers and the population of the Occupied Territories has meant not only the Palestinians’ dispossession and the transfer of property to Jewish colonists. It has also meant taking over strategic sites throughout the space and spreading forces over points numerous enough to control and perpetuate these polarized relations in space.1 Since the first intifada, much information has been collected by various bodies and organizations about these three forms of spatial intervention by the sovereign. Much has been written about construction, which has changed the appearance of space under occupation – construction in the colonies and the checkpoint system, in particular. However, the major part of the occupation regime’s activity in space since the second intifada, activity that has received relatively little attention in its implications on Palestinian habitat, is expressed in the way the sovereign has reversed its prerogatives over the power of construction. Instead of flourishing construction, the occupation regime has utterly changed

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space through destruction – not whimsical, ad hoc random destruction, but rather methodical, controlled, and administered destruction, present everywhere. Both construction (by Jews and for Jews), and destruction (for Palestinians) inflicts a permanent damage on the local population (interferes with its ability to move about, to work, school, and medical clinics) and provokes its resistance.2 To neutralize such resistance or to reduce it, the ruling power must exercise extensive military might, and in order to shape space, it needs soldiers more than it needs architects, engineers, and builders. The Oslo Accords divided the Occupied Territories into distinct areas of Israeli and Palestinian control. But even after the accords, the occupation regime did not cease to apply massive military force as the final authority regarding the administration and organization of space in the Palestinian Authority’s domain, as well. Apparently the regime needs to prove publicly and unequivocally that no walls can stand in its way and that it has no respect for the privacy of dwellings. The homes of those it suspects of resisting the occupation are the preferred venue for its show of force: ‘Let them learn their lesson.’ Often, the residents of these demolished homes are not the suspects themselves, but members of their families. However, resistance to the occupation’s might is not its only pretext for demolishing houses. Thousands of houses, gardens, orchards, and groves are destroyed merely because their location disrupts the occupation’s operations or prevents some colony or other from developing and expanding. In areas that have remained under its full control, the occupation regime applies legal and civil tools to demolish the homes of thousands of Palestinians whose petitions for building permits it has persistently rejected, dooming their dwellings to the status of illegal constructions. From 1967 to the present, the Israeli Defense Forces have demolished about eighteen thousand houses in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.3 This number does not include houses damaged by gunfire or stray shells and not intentionally demolished. Beyond devastating the foundations of public space and its relations with the private sphere, the occupation regime has developed its own unique spatial language of blockage, separation, and subjugation, preventing its subjects from maintaining

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a public space in which speech, gaze, and action are supposed to take place as free, spontaneous, and unpredictable play. Such disruptions of spatial order afflict what Hannah Arendt has described as ‘the human condition’ and generate an inhuman spatial condition. The Palestinians are deprived of the free use of space in all three forms of their vita activa: they are not free to move around spontaneously and find their way into and out of places, they are not free to use space in their work, commerce, and other forms of economic and professional activities, and they are not free to create open spaces for public gathering, free speech and free association without being limited, controlled and monitored by the occupying authorities. This severe and ongoing disruption of social space produces a unique situation: the main option for public gathering and relatively free use of space takes place at the various sites of destruction, right after the dramatic event of destruction wrought by the occupying power which, not assuming responsibility for the consequences, transforms the damages into spatial scars. During the actual demolition, Palestinians are ordered away from the site and allowed back only after the irreversible has become fact and the three-dimensional house has turned into mere two-dimensional array of rubble exhibiting a characteristic texture. During the actual demolition, Palestinians are ordered away from the site and allowed back only after the irreversible has become fact, the three-dimensional house has turned into mere two-dimensional texture, the street has become inoperative and a kind of new square has be opened in its midst. The ruling power justifies the disasters it wreaks and shirks its responsibility for the victims who have become dispossessed and displaced. The void left behind by the sovereign power is partially filled by the Palestinian Authority, by the residents themselves under the harsh restrictions that the army imposes upon their freedom of movement and action, and by the various aid organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, the agency that cares for refugees of the past as well as for new types of refugees that Israel produces in the present or the Red Cross.

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The disaster taking place in public space takes two forms: the spectacle at its moment of occurrence and its ongoing results, which the subjects cannot remove on their own most of the time. These two appearances help perpetuate the power relations between the occupier and the population of the Occupied Territories and the subjugation they constitute, and for the reduction of the possibilities Palestinians have for conducting the various forms of their praxis in their common space. The sovereign pulling the strings that produce the disaster is both present and absent from the scene. He acts as one who relies on the disaster and the emergencies that it produces to magnetize the subjects in his absence, to administer and supervise their movement, to rivet them to their basic needs, and to paralyze their ability to act. Thus, the gathering around a disaster inflicted by the occupier has become the permissible and most common type of public gathering in the Occupied Territories – a gathering around an ‘image’ or ‘spectacle.’ The products of destruction scattered everywhere thus function like public squares. The occupier, as inherently stupid as occupiers are, assumes he can determine how the spectators in the public square will gaze at the horror show he has generated and what moral and lesson will be drawn from it. He assumes that he can ‘etch their consciousness’ with the following conclusion: ‘We have delivered an unequivocal message to the population – any person involved in terrorism, as well as their next of kin, will pay a steep price for it.’ Destruction requires immediate care and ways and means to provide for the urgent basic needs of the victims. But the flagrant ongoing presence of the results of destruction in their space, at times not removed for months or even years, creates a ‘world’ in the sense that Arendt has lent this term. Its forms are the stable, permanent environment that the inhabitants know and in the textures of which they dwell. When most conditions necessary to maintain a polis are denied these residents, when the disaster scene from which the sovereign has withdrawn and that he abandons is the only environment where he hardly ever forbids their public gathering, the disaster site transforms into a political space where the three domains of the vita activa, otherwise partially forbidden, take place.* In the photographs one might see that the gathering of *

Instead of identifying the political only with freedom and with the third domain of action as does Arendt, I rely here on my discussion of the political as taking place in these three domains (paper presented at the second workshop for visual studies, Bar Ilan University, May 2008). 83

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Palestinians around the site of destruction is not harnessed only for the urgent needs of survival: they are rescuing their victims and providing urgently needed care, professionally administrating their affairs, and restoring their public space as a space of freedom. In this a public square, where Palestinians convene around a common object of their gaze and whose limits they establish during their encounter, they create a bond between the disaster site and the rest of the city. Thus, for example, for those standing at the rim of the huge pit opened under Sami al-Shaer’s home, there is more than a gaze of wonder at the extent of its destruction. Their faces are sealed and distant. At times, they show contempt toward those who forced them to act within a public space whose basic form is disaster. With the unfathomable patience of those who recognize the limits of the occupier’s intervention and who know he will never be able to destroy their public space completely and deny them their basic political right to assemble in it, they scrutinize disaster and deny its perpetrators’ pretension of thus delivering an unequivocal message. They face the power of human destructiveness with awe. But they also confront the stupidity of the occupiers, who invest such enormous efforts and means in practices of blockage and separation that mean, among other things, limiting disaster to one side of the space so that the occupiers will perceive themselves as outside the space of disaster, separate from it, safe and immune. The Palestinians’ observation of the feats of destruction transcends the urgency that disaster produces, opening a wider perspective. Through it, disaster may be seen not only as a particular event at a given point in time, but as a form of continuous control. The more the occupier devastates space and tears it asunder with events that bring disaster, blockages, and separation, its grip deepens, becoming more and more impossible to unravel. The population of the Occupied Territories, doomed to observe their own disaster, look through it at the occupiers who observe disaster from afar and deny their own active part in generating it. In disaster itself, they refute the occupiers’ pretension to control the limits of disaster and to deny the way in which it touches them, too, gripping them in spite of all their efforts to detach themselves from it.

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The five series of photographs presented here, interspersed throughout – five visual claims, as it were – address the destruction of the built environment in Palestinian space and the administration of movement as related policies. The first two series – ‘Types of Destruction’ and ‘Textures of Destruction’ – attempt to characterize destruction without assuming or accepting the categories offered by the ruling power. The ruling power’s military and legal language distinguishes between various cases of destruction according to the many justifications that the army provides for the havoc it wreaks: ‘illegal construction’, ‘dwellings harboring individuals suspected of terrorism’ or even its own ‘operational needs.’ Presenting side by side a photograph of a concrete ruin and an architectural scheme that illustrates the type of ruin at hand is part of the effort to deconstruct the category that has become too general and abstract – ‘house demolition’, and in its stead propose a primary typology of the sovereign’s actions in the Occupied Territories. The categories offered here instead are based on distinctions in various types of destruction resulting from the techniques applied and the different textural types of the ‘architectural’ stamp that destruction leaves upon Palestinian space. This initial sorting enables one to shift one’s gaze from the population of the Occupied Territories as the reason for or justification of destruction to the language of the occupier who has turned destruction into a sophisticated and available toolbox. This sorting enables one to see how different forms of destruction that were applied at specific points and that may have been perceived at a given point in time as unbearable eventually became an obvious tool to be honed and used by trained soldiers. The two succeeding series – ‘Types of Blockage’ and ‘The Architecture of Separation’ – focus on procedures by which the occupation regime actually produces a disorientation of space in which legibility and coherence have been totally disrupted. Most of these procedures, if not all of them, slow down Palestinians’ movement in space nearly to a halt. They also show how these procedures allow Palestinians only measured movement amid ‘architectural’ components such as slabs of concrete, parts of walls, barbed-wire fences, plastic barriers, and other elements that generate an entirely new cartography.

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‘Types of Blockage’ shows how what is near at hand, always within seeing distance, and accessible in remembered past becomes inaccessible to Palestinians. The architectural syntax of different types of blockage points reflects this effect par excellence, but is also apparent wherever Palestinians find themselves at the threshold of their own homes, but prevented from entering, whether because the homes have been physically blocked or have been turned into army outposts. ‘The Architecture of Separation’ emphasizes the spatial delineation of separation between Jews and Palestinians. In addition to the discriminatory partition that grants Israelis relative freedom of movement and leaves Palestinians with space that is fragmented and blocked, this partition reorganizes the field of vision, a field no longer to be shared. In this split field of vision, Israelis’ and Palestinians’ gazes are no longer supposed to meet. The fifth series, ‘The Architecture of Fear’ and ‘The Language of Subjugation’ focuses on various blocking points and presents the spatial and design language used by the occupation regime to administer the movement of Palestinians in space. It shows how the occupation regime ensures that crowds will not be allowed to form, but rather must continue to move or stand in single file. As they drag themselves along, one by one, their movement is controlled and supervised individually. The photographs provide extensive information related to time and space, technology and movement, demography and administration, topography and control. Like the keys of a map, icons of the temporary components of the architecture – spread throughout space – accompany this series and the one showing the architecture of blockage. The icons present the gamut of temporary, mobile components used by the sovereign’s minorranking authority-bearers. These components now comprise a ‘kit’ that can be rapidly deployed at any point in space and change, limit and block the movement of people, wares and vehicles. These components have become so familiar, incorporated in Jewish-Israelis’ bodies as protective devices while embodying subjugation in the Palestinians themselves.

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These series of photographs attempt to illuminate the dual injury inflicted by the occupation regime upon Palestinian space, both public and private. Public space is administered and controlled by the explicit military presence of the ruling power, and the inhabitants’ potential civil actions within it are totally reduced. The private sphere is penetrable, vulnerable, and perforated, and its inhabitants are liable at any time to become homeless and unable to dream of more than filling their basic existential needs. The sovereign demonstrates his power and might by publicly demolishing the limits of the Palestinian home, crushing its intimacy. What was just now indoors – where only relatives and family members were welcome – is suddenly bared amid the ruins: ceilings collapsed, belongings crushed and torn and scattered about. The private indoors is projected onto the public outdoors, and public space is administered centrally as though possessed by the ruling power, emptying it of its political nature. With these series of photographs, I mean to characterize the inner grammar of the faits du prince responsible for the inhuman spatial conditions in the Occupied Territories. The photographs insist that Israeli jews observe Palestinian space together with the Palestinians in the way this fragmented and blocked space is imposed on them, unraveling the illusion of total separation that is the occupier’s basic principle. It is this illusion alone that enables the infliction upon Palestinians of injustices that Israeli citizens would never tolerate were they ever to be inflicted upon them. The separation is actually between what is bearable and even justifiable (that is, in the eyes of the Israelis and inflicted upon the Palestinians) and the unbearable and unjustifiable (that is, what should not be inflicted upon the Israelis). Behind the illusion of physical separation, the occupation regime keeps raising the threshold of the unbearable, along with the Separation Wall between the two regimes. The occupation regime exercises enormous power in checking and limiting the extent of destruction to the one side, and indeed, the landscape shown here remains mostly that of the Occupied Territories. But the ruling power

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is required to apply force not only upon the populations of the territories, but upon its own citizens as well, in order to make destruction’s unbearable sights seem bearable by token of their remaining limited to the one side. At the same time, actual participation in this destruction, presumably a heinous crime were it perpetrated on the other side, is regarded as an honorable duty. But here the occupation regime’s inherent weakness, its blind spot, is exposed. The effort it invests in destroying Palestinian space and the Palestinians’ public space are viral, as it were. The public sphere flawed by the ongoing disaster inflicted by the occupation regime upon its Palestinian non-citizens seeps into the other, the Israeli side. On the Palestinian side, directly affected by disaster, the public sphere is limited by the way in which it is controlled and by its constant state of emergency, whereas on the Israeli side that perpetrates disaster and administers it, the public sphere is flawed by the erasure of disaster because it is the disaster of others – by its erasure, denial, and disguise and by the mobilization of Israeli citizens to take part in its production and justification.

Notes 1

Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, compares the Israeli takeover of Palestinian space to the game of Go, in which the goal is not defeating one’s opponent, but rather to block his ability to move. Jeff Halper, ‘Matrix of Control’ Middle East Report 216 (Fall 2000).

2

I have pointed out various practices of spatial resistance in the exhibition Act of State: 1967–2007 at the Minshar Gallery, Tel Aviv, Spring 2007.

3

See the website of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions on the history of house demolitions at http://www.icahd.org/eng/projects.asp (last accessed September 8, 2008). The committee, together with Palestinians and international volunteers, rebuilds some of the demolished houses; BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency an Refugee Rights, ‘A History of Destruction,’ (May 18, 2004), available on-line at http://electronicintifada.net/ v2/article2700.shtml (last accessed September 8, 2008).

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Miki Kratsman

1. The Architecture of Destruction

1.1 Rafah, 2005 Most of the apartments in this building were deserted sometime before it was demolished. Its location not far from the Qatif colony block made it an easy target for shooting and shelling, and life in it became unbearable. According to the army, Palestinian fighters used its deserted apartments for hiding, and that sufficed to doom it to destruction. During the al-Aqsa intifada, home demolition practices were enhanced into a sort of assembly-line procedure in an accelerated process of operational effectiveness by which thousands of buildings are demolished in the Occupied Territories every year. A principal condition for this operational efficiency is to detach the process from non-operational considerations that might delay and encumber it. Such detachment enables the regional commander to decree demolition without waiting for the confirmation of his superiors and even to skip the early warning phase that allows the owners to appeal to the courts for an injunction or interim order. No one asks why that particular house

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is being blasted or why houses are being blasted at all. The building is selected by the General Security Service (GSS). The soldiers accept the mission unquestioningly and the necessity of blasting a residential building as a matter of course. The extensive technological and operational know-how that the defense forces have accumulated as a result of the frequent observation of house demolitions in real time has enabled them to simplify the process of destruction and to break it up into regular phases, so that just a handful of soldiers is able to carry it out in a mere quarter of an hour. They can do this without depending on an engineer or the crack-unit members who have been especially trained for such missions. The procedure is clear and explicit, and the operation of the equipment is known to all combat soldiers. The destruction workers arrive in several armored personnel carriers that move into civilian space, approach the building destined for demolition, and surround it. After breaking in the door, the first group of soldiers enters and begins by identifying the beams and foundations. With a nail gun, one of the soldiers ‘hammers’ size 10 nails into the center of each of the beams and supporting columns. A second group of soldiers carries explosive charges into the building (each containing about 10 kilograms of advanced-type explosives) and hangs them on the nails, while other soldiers chain the explosives to each other with a detonator connected to a wireless operation system. The soldiers’ retreat a few hundred meters away and count down until the blast is heard. It lasts several seconds and shakes the entire area. Hanging the explosives on beams and support walls makes ceilings collapse, and the entire building implodes as if made of some flexible material. In some cases, the army sends in bulldozers the next day to finish up the job, grinding the building to dust. In others, it leaves the destruction incomplete, indifferent to the fact that the half-hanging structure constitutes a safety hazard.

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1.2 Rafah, 2005 At the center of the photograph, a five-story apartment building. Two of the stories have been totally ruined, and another two have been partially damaged. The ‘targeted’ blast spared the first story. It is perforated from ongoing exchanges of fire in the area, which have not been considered assaults or included in the statistics of home demolitions. Advanced technologies of targeted destruction enable the army to carry out ‘controlled demolition’ which ruins ‘only’ the apartments of those it suspects of terrorism. The fact that the rest of the building’s residents are forced to live in a ruined, mangled building is irrelevant to military logic. The army continues to provide ready-made pretexts for its actions and boasts of maximal precision and gradually minimized damage to innocents. This operational discourse remains coherent because the security forces have the exclusive authority to determine who are guilty and who are innocent. The security forces announce their possession of evidence that remains largely confidential, and they are the ones to carry out the sentence under military considerations, leaving no room for

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appeal. (When appeal was possible, it would nearly always be deferred.) An Amnesty International 2004 report investigated and doubted the army’s claims that Palestinians used the houses it demolished for shooting or assaults or were partly ‘deserted’, ‘empty’, or ‘uninhabited.’

Nir Kafri

Outer walls made of bare, unplastered cement in the Occupied Territories cannot attest to a building’s being uninhabited, as is plainly visible, for example, in the two bare buildings seen behind the building in the foreground of the photograph. The constant threat that looms over Palestinian construction and the ongoing economic depression are some of the reasons why Palestinians commonly dwell in buildings bare of outer plaster layers, from whose roofs iron rods still protrude so that construction work might be resumed as soon as resources are available again. The specter of future destruction haunts them constantly, scarring the present and shaping norms of spatial organization, dwelling, and movement in both private and public space. The holes blasted in these classical dwelling ‘boxes’ are a constant, present reminder of the likelihood that any Palestinian, regardless of his or her activity, might be instantly thrown out of his or her dwelling and witness its demolition.

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1.3 Tul Karem Refugee Camp, 2002 In their pioneering days of ‘Wall and Watchtower’ Jewish settlers new to Palestine would erect an entire environment within a few hours, between midnight and dawn, unilaterally creating facts on the ground in the face of the British Mandate and the local Palestinian population. Like some inverted projection of this ‘Wall and Watchtower’ operation, the demolition of homes of suspected terrorists now takes place. The soldiers surprise the residents when they appear at night at the house destined for demolition. They have about six hours, until sunrise, to make the building uninhabitable and then get back to their base. They leave behind dispossessed families whose belongings usually are also turned to dust. The demolition is not an arbitrary act, but a result of a complex preparation that involves of planning, tools, means, edicts, justifications, and precautionary measures. The army arrived at midnight at the home of Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian suspected of murdering five Israelis at Kibbutz Metzer. They concealed dynamite ‘fingers’ in the house’s inner walls without damaging its beams and foundations. The action lasted ten minutes. This too, was the time allotted the residents to salvage some of their belongings. Precise engineering planning and the calculated use of explosives enabled the army to focus the demolition on one specific apartment in an apartment building, sparing neighbors: ‘so far, we did not touch Sirhan’s place, because it is on the third floor, and we were concerned about the floors underneath and adjacent buildings. We chose a controlled, microscopic blast that would make the ceiling of a certain floor implode.’ The concern for ‘focus’ of which the commander of this demolition boasted resembles the army’s focus on targeted assassinations. Such concern attracts most of the attention to targeting the demolition itself and on ways to obtain higher precision, oblivious to the fact that the target for such a focus is determined by a ‘field jury’ that unilaterally passes sentence and determines the limits of this focus. Thus, for example, after the army ‘surgically’ targeted and assassinated Sirhan Sirhan himself, it proceeded to demolish his parents’ house ‘precisely’, without damaging neighboring houses. After evacuating the family and finishing their preparations, including a thorough videotaping of the home and of the father who confirmed that this was indeed the home of Sirhan Sirhan, the soldiers vacated the house and waited for the blast. The blast took place as planned, and the damage was done ‘only’ to the

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activestills.org / Keren Manor

family dwelling. The commander of the action confirmed by radio that ‘the relevant floor is no longer usable, while the rest of the building is intact’, and the destruction forces withdrew.

1.4 The bulldozer, Sur Bahr, 2007 Use of bulldozers is usually reserved for the demolition of illegal construction. The building is crumbled slowly and methodically. Destruction begins at the building’s right angles and outer walls. Once the outer shell is removed and the volume of the separate apartments is reduced to the various strata of floors and ceilings, the bulldozers pursue their gnawing like children savoring each layer of a chocolate-coated wafer. The duration of the work varies according to the height of the building and the number of rooms on each floor. Normally, no more than a day is required to turn the building into a texture of stone rubble and another few hours to complete pulverization and removal.

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1.5 The pile, Wadi Qaddum, East Jerusalem, March 2007 The bulldozers usually commence their work only after the residents and their belongings have been removed from the building. Since the demolition order applies only to the building, execution includes evacuation, as well. The inhabitants usually evacuate themselves, and the security forces make sure they are kept away while army employees identifiable on the spot in their orange-colored vests are busy removing belongings. These are packed by alien – sometimes very crude – hands: mattresses, beds, chairs, refrigerator, a baking oven, a wash basin, cushions, a table, and games are all heaped next to the building soon to be demolished, absorbing layers of dust that will be etched into them for an eternity of shame, a reminder of having been salvaged courtesy of the occupier kindly sparing the owners’ unnecessary suffering.

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1.6 The spectators, Sur Bahr, East Jerusalem, 2007 The residents who have evacuated themselves for fear of the law’s long arm are distanced from the site. Usually, they find an opening through which they peek at the destruction of their home to the unfinished symphony of bulldozers. A group of neighbors share their witnessing, perhaps practicing for their own near future. Some of them might be standing there throughout the hours of demolition, while others emerge every time the house changes its material state. Seemingly at this last stage, when the rubble has been nearly flattened and evenly covers the ground, they assemble for a last farewell.

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1.7 Surrounding the building, a-Tur, East Jerusalem, 2007

activestills.org / Oren Ziv

To protect the act from possible resistance expected from the evacuees, a huge crowd of policemen and soldiers is posted at several foci around a building destined for demolition.

1.8 The tent, a-Tur, East Jerusalem, January 2007 The location of the Red Cross-supplied tent marks the outer circumference of the rubble. The tent is too small to contain belongings, so these are all piled up in front of it, objects accumulated over the years. In the small yard created in front of the tent sit the evacuees, bracing themselves for the coming hours.

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1.9 Brazil camp, Gaza Strip, 2007 Late at night, several days before they were photographed standing on the rim of the crater, at the sound of the familiarly chilling roar of a fighter plane, many of them opened their windows in order to minimize the damage from the blast that would soon rock their dwellings. They know the outcome of F-16s penetrating the camp’s sky, their bodies and possessions having refuted time and again the Israeli Army’s pretensions at sophistication and precision. With their utterly meager means, they try to protect themselves from the horror and to minimize as much as possible the span of injuries. Daem al-Az Hamad, a fourteen-year-old girl living about three hundred meters from the spot where the bomb fell, turning the house into a crater, was killed by a house beam flying toward her parents’ home. The army insists that it is not responsible for her fate, claiming that destruction was precise, wrought ‘only’ on Sami al-Shaer’s house. This house was targeted because the army thought its yard contained a tunnel for

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smuggling arms. The spectators (over twenty people) standing at the rim of the enormous crater (about thirty meters in diameter, seven meters in depth) gaze at various focal points of destruction (most of the house walls along the Philadelphie Road adjacent to the camp are perforated sieves by now), embodying the gap between the laundered, semilegal language the army uses to justify its actions and the appearance of this space in which destruction looks anything but focused. The pure human violence exercised here, swallowing the house and leaving hardly a trace, interests this audience, in its amazement not letting it vanish, but holding onto it, a wake of memory: No spectator is safe from it, and it might reappear and surprise them at any time. Spectators standing together around the crater is one of the few forms of public gathering in a public space that the occupation regime not merely tolerates, but even initiates and supplies with ample spectacle.

1.10 Ein Beit Ilama refugee camp, Nablus, 2007

Miki Kratsman

The hole frames Mrs. Rajab, who is moving in her home across the wall. Today she passes the hole by as if she is already accustomed to its presence and accepts it. This hole was broken violently one night last September, taking her whole family by surprise. Immediately after the hammering and slight blast, they heard dogs barking and strangers moving around – Hebrewspeaking Israeli soldiers. The soldiers use dogs to move ahead and be the first to take gunfire and blows expected on their movement through the ‘tunnel’ they produce inside the houses. This

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hole in her home, throwing her together with her next-door neighbors in unfamiliar ways, is one of a series of several dozen holes broken by Israeli combatants during nights of searching for a suicide bomber. The holes in the walls at the homes of the Rajab, Namruti, Taha, and other families enable the soldiers to proceed, unseen inside the crowded camp in a relatively straight line. The walls do not constitute an obstacle, nor does the privacy of families living inside the houses that they devastate on their mission merit any respect. Moving through walls is part of the novel warfare developed by the Israeli Army during the second intifada. In a sense, this warfare is the inverse of the methods developed by the army in the early 1970s to crush resistance among refugee-camp dwellers. This inversion of space relations between open and closed, solid and air, mobile and static seems to resonate with various postmodern theories. In fact, this type of warfare, like the theories that inspired it, is produced by circumstances of a postmodern situation that sometimes threatens to obliterate the distance between the practices of power and the theories that address it. In the early 1970s, the army looked for ways to clear swathes inside the dense texture of the camp, through which it would move undisturbed, visible to all, obtaining deterrence and control of the space, razing whole building blocks in the process. Now the army seeks rapid contact with individuals targeted amid the civilian population and minimal friction while present in Palestinian territory. The two kinds of warfare differ greatly, but they share a significant common denominator, the Palestinian home is no obstacle to the army’s movement.

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1.11 Rafah, 2004

Military Photographer

The D9 bulldozer moves forward, devastating anything in its way. It acts relatively quickly to ‘clear the area’ of anything the army has designated as a target. It does so with a cast-steel blade installed in front, pushing anything in its way, piling up soil and stone, uprooting obstacles, while a ripper in its rear cracks open hard objects and material. Side blades resembling sharp fingernails installed on some bulldozers enable them to apply concentrated force on small objects. The bulldozer is very powerful, and its upgraded protective armor turns it into a terrifying tool capable of enormous damage and injury without its operator even sensing its extent. In the twelve days in May 2004 of Operation Rainbow, army D9 bulldozers demolished 183 houses in Rafah, partially damaging dozens of other buildings, razed miles of paved road, and devastated electricity, water, and sanitation infrastructures. Cameras installed in the bulldozers’ front parts recorded the destruction. Were the army to hand over to the public even a single one of these photographs taken by those cameras installed in the bulldozer’s front, we could know something about what the army sees and the kinds of visual material it wishes to scrutinize. Perhaps we could also have in full action the photographer who took the photograph we are viewing now. But this photography is courtesy of the army, which released it for publication through a Wikipedia site, the Hebrew version of the free encyclopedia, to which the army apparently must be generously contributing. Here, then, is a photograph that the army wants us to view and to use without even needing its approval or copyright.

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What is it about this photograph that the army chose to publicize? What exactly is the link between the act of photography that produced it and the action it describes – home demolition? The most obvious answer lies on the performance level: through the photograph, the army states that home demolition is no contemptible act, but rather a justified action taking place in broad daylight, in view of the camera. But that is not all. The photograph, like the act of destruction, is meant not only for the eyes of the community in whose ears justifications are recited and waiting for approval. It is also destined for the eyes of the community being deterred and horrified. Home demolition, in the words of the deputy to the state attorney, advocate Shai Nitzan, is a way of ‘aiming, among other things, to deter potential terrorists, after having clearly learned that family is a central motive for them.’ The photograph, especially chosen by the army, with a Palestinian boy at its center – he, too, being a ‘potential terrorist,’ according to the self-same operational logic, like any other Palestinian boy – is supposed to serve as a deterrent for people whose family is important to them. The boy looking at the might of the Israeli Army is supposed to internalize the military logic that chooses targets of destruction and to acknowledge its justifications. If he does internalize this, the army implies, he will give up his resistance to the occupation and his struggle for his civil aspirations (being governed like others) and his nationalist hopes (enjoying self-determination or at least participation in the regime to which he is subject). But the army cannot control the way in which a young boy, forced to escape the jaws of this terrifying tool that wreaks destruction everywhere, will appear to the viewers. The boy is familiar with these scenes of devastation – he has probably seen too many already and still does not seem willing to accept them or to recognize their movement as the embodiment of justice. While his body is terrified of the powerful D9 and runs forward, he cannot tear his gaze away from the colorful shreds of houses mangled in the dirt.

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1.12 Al-Muqata’a, Jenin, 2001 The contingency plan to demolish the government building in Jenin was prepared long before the order was issued. Many contingency plans to demolish public buildings or other ‘strategic’ structures in Palestine exist and have been waiting for the right moment to execute them, already having been practiced by soldiers. Those soldiers supposed to carry out this demolition in Jenin waited a few days at the ‘assembly area’ as long as it remained unclear whether the plan would be carried out. Then the Twin Towers came down. The army recognized a window of opportunity while the attention of the world was riveted on the Manhattan horror scene. This is how one of the men of the Engineering Corps among the building’s destroyers described it: ‘As soon as the second plane hit the second tower, we got the okay to go ahead. The army always does this when there is something special on the world scene. Say, for example, when Princess Diana was killed and world attention suddenly went elsewhere, they (the army) give us the “Go ahead”. There are a thousand and one contingency plans that would eventually make a lot of noise, and this way no one even hears about it.’

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Indeed, destruction of the al-Muqata’a compound, built of three wings, as well as the inner yard where its residents used to grow vegetables for their consumption and the neighboring mosque (and the killing of nineteen Palestinians by bombing from the air) raised not a murmur in the local and international media. This photograph was taken accidentally by a journalist who happened to come to Jenin about a month later. He first heard of the destruction from Palestinians: ‘Here at this place there was a garden and decorative fish pond. For years, we received Israeli officers here royally (under the coordination arrangements between Israeli and Palestinian security forces in the days of the Oslo Accords). This is how they reciprocated.’ The demolition of al-Muqata’a was a combination of bombing from the air and a ground operation by the Engineering Corps. Bombing from the air, precise as it might wish to be, can never obtain the level of precision desired by the army. Inside the building handed over to the Palestinians when the Israelis withdrew from the city under the Oslo Accords, an electronic surveillance device was concealed, and only an Engineering Corps crew could see to its destruction, so that it would no be suddenly revealed in the rubble. The various wings of the building became unusable, but the fact that their destruction was not completed turned it into a safety hazard and an additional monument of devastation.

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activestills.org / Yotam Ronen

2. Textures of Destruction

2.1 Al-Furaddis village, Hebron region, 2008

activestills.org / Anne Paq

The heavier rubble has been removed. The site where the house once stood is covered with masonry shards, like an expensive vase that has been smashed to smithereens.

2.2 Hebron, 2003 As in some delicate filigree, building blocks have been removed from the metal rods, and the house now resembles a transparent hothouse. Here and there, concrete beads hang from the ceiling, as if someone had tried to regulate the entry of light.

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2.3 Anata, East Jerusalem, 2006

B'Tselem

Clothes torn out of the closet add some color to the stone mosaic. Does the child, whose gaze lingers from the neighboring hill on the geometry flowing out of what once was a house, identify familiar shapes?

2.4 Jenin refugee camp, 2002, after Operation Defensive Shield The massive destruction of about five hundred houses, most of them in the Hawashin neighborhood, created vast ‘plazas’ inside the camp’s dense fabric. The rubble layer covering them created a potholed texture that hampered movement in the camp and created local gatherings. New hills, too, consisting of the remains of pulverized houses, contributed to the camp’s altered topography.

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2.5 Walaja Village, 2007

activestills.org / Yotam Ronen

The houses of the Gilo colony seen in the background have been sanctioned by the law. The Palestinian house in Walaja was defined by the same law as illegally built and was demolished.

2.6 Ruins of a house on the road from a-Ram to Ramallah At times, the stones are elegantly compressed and create a pile bearing no traces of the house from which it was generated. The clean ground around it reinforces the illusion that these are, perhaps, stones meant for masonry and building.

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2.7 Issawiya, East Jerusalem Several days later, as the site of a demolished house loses its aura, passersby throw empty bottles or refuse bags into the empty space, where they blend in with the rubble.

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3. Types of Blockage

3.1 Hebron, 2007

Dafna Kaplan

The matching stones inlaid in the windows are the visual seal of the confiscation of the house from the Palestinian family who lived in it.

3.2 Luban a-Sharqiyah, north of Ramallah, 2003 Under the trappings of a military outpost – the Israeli flag, barbed-wire fencing and camouflage netting – is a Palestinian home. The army needed to position itself at this site, and the family living there was removed indefinitely.

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3.3 Hebron, 2007

B'Tselem

Concrete modules stretch across the street between two houses. Behind them, Jews reside in houses previously inhabited by Palestinians. In front of them dwell Palestinians whose city – over half of it – is blocked to them, and they are prohibited from moving in other parts. In addition to these walls that obstruct movement in the streets, Hebron also contains sixteen manned checkpoints.

3.4 Beit Hanoun, year unknown (during the second intifada) A direct hit to the middle of the bridge disabled it. The army, suspecting that launchers of Qassam rockets use this bridge in order to transport rockets, justified blocking any Palestinian movement between Gaza and Beit Hanoun.

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3.5 Jaayous, 2002

B'Tselem

In places where the Wall has separated Palestinians from their fields, schools, and workplaces, gates have been erected for the local population, open three times a day. Eighty-seven such gates are scattered along the Separation Wall. Every gate is the site of a new waiting line, a tool for stealing time.

3.6 Between Qalqiliya and Tul Karm, 2003 At places where the topography has provided a ‘natural’ gap in the Separation Wall, the army makes do with barbed wire.

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3.7 Beit Ur al-Tahta, 2001 Before erecting the Separation Wall, the army delineated separation with concrete blocks such as the one in the photograph. After the Wall was built, the blocks remained to create ‘local separations.’ Hundreds of separation lines now crisscross the West Bank with these concrete blocks. The military ‘invention’ of providing the Occupied Territories with commodities at back-to-back installations, where two trucks meet, the one laden with produce, the other empty, and wares are transferred, has not solved food shortage, so Palestinians improvise their own ‘back-to-back’ operations over such concrete blocks.

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3.8 Beit Ur al-Tahta, 2001 Any improvisation is a provocation of the occupier. The abundant rubble from home demolitions had served to cover the concrete blocks and the space in between them that enabled the transfer of goods from one side to the other. The army does not rescind its monopoly, even in the ‘backto-back’ domain. A while after such an improvised site was installed by Palestinians, the army blocked it.

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activestills.org / Anne Paq

4. The Architecture of Separation

4.1 The Separation Wall in Bethlehem, around Rachel’s Tomb, 2006 A view from the Ayida refugee camp. The windings of the Wall in Bethlehem. The illegibility of space in this fragment of the Separation Wall delivers its absurdity in a nutshell. The Separation Wall does not delineate a border between two entities that have gone their separate ways, but is a new formation of the occupation’s control of the population through separation. The occupier pursues his self-image as separate from those who live in the Occupied Territories, although the means and efforts he invests in maintaining separation impose unceasing friction with them.

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4.2 Year unknown (during the second intifada) Heavy boulders block passage on the road leading to Teko’a colony. The separation between Jewish and Palestinian vehicles takes place on roads that lead to this place. Chances that Palestinian traffic will even access this fork are null.

4.3 Kharbata, 2005

Miki Kratsman

The high road for Jews, the low road for Arabs.

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4.4 Near Anata, East Jerusalem, 2007

Ian Sternthal

Separate roads. Right for Palestinians, left for Jews.

4.5 Gilo, Apartheid road, 2005

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5. The Architecture of Fear - The Language of Subjugation

5.1 Road 443, 2006 The arrangement in a straight line – like objects in a showcase – of the various items seen in the photograph differentiates them from the scrap thrown at random into the plot directly behind them. Beyond this formal difference – random piling versus orderly arrangement – their presence at the roadside might seem odd to strangers from countries where civil space has not been corrupted by occupation or apartheid. In this local space, however, such signs – a watchtower, camouflage netting, a field latrine, concrete segments ‘sewn’ to each other to form a wall, chickenwire fencing – and their unexplained combination are a familiar sight to both Israelis and Palestinians. Even when each of these items separately does not ‘iterate’ its ‘intrinsic’ meaning, and even when the logic of their syntax is hardly decipherable, they produce general ‘sayings’ such as ‘the army is here’ or ‘there are Palestinians nearby.’ The relative intelligibility of these phrases for passersby is due to the fact that such sayings are present in many different places and are perceived as an obvious part of the landscape. Their familiarity enables them to appear later in different contexts without standing out as odd or being taken for what they are in fact – tools of harassment. Beyond the general meaning of such phrases, whose fleeting and repeated familiarity suffices to naturalize them, for the people who

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experience them closely on an everyday basis, they contain concrete and immediate meanings that shape people’s movement in space. Israelis – especially soldiers and colonists – see them as means of protection from Palestinians, and they soon learn to operate them and to expand their uses. They perceive Palestinians as the human raw material to be directly processed with these tools. The Palestinians, especially those who have not given up their basic right to move in space and are forced to be subjected to the use of these tools, recognize each of these components and know how to decipher the nuances of their syntax. Most of them develop such interpretation skills in order to lighten – even if slightly – the burden that such components place in their path. Some of them do this in order to resist – violently or nonviolently – the blunt way in which such tools deny them freedom of movement in public space. The bluntness of such tools is part and parcel of a comprehensive logic of the occupation regime, meant, at any given moment, to reiterate to the Palestinians their subjugation through instruction, deed, and sign. This bluntness aims to spread into various dimensions of existence, including the interpretative plane – the ways in which Palestinians will decipher the various signs. Thus, for example, the army persists in showing Palestinians watchtowers such the one in the photograph as supervisory elements in space, even though the second intifada yielded a crop of hundreds of reinforced pillbox posts, making the watchtowers less and less necessary. Most of the older watchtowers have been covered with camouflage netting and a decoy guard dummy of the type used for target practice placed inside. Several times a day, soldiers climb up the post with provisions so that it will not occur to the Palestinians that the tower is empty and that for a given amount of time they have been left unsupervised. In the picture, a segment is seen of an entire compound surrounding a blocking post. If the frame were wider, one would see a checkpoint, located a bit farther on the right. The purpose of the checkpoint – filtering and even totally denying entry to Palestinians who might come from villages such as Kharbata or Beit Likia to Jerusalem – is achieved more effectively when the road leading to it is already lined with policing signs that make the rules and their authorized makers clear to Palestinians.

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5.2 Azoun Atme, 2006 Blockage points are usually a part of an entire compound, some of it visible, the rest invisible, some of it permanent, other parts temporary, sprawling around the blockage point. Photographs documenting checkpoints and barriers usually present only a segment of the entire spatial compound, which consists of the total spatial distribution of a military force and which changes according to specific geographic-topographical conditions and updated intelligence on the movement of Palestinians in the area. Normally, however, every such segment embodies the principle of the whole: organizing space in a way that ensures Israeli control and sovereignty and Palestinian subjugation and obedience. The fear that such power relations will be disrupted and that the Palestinians might move out of their assigned places accounts for the expanding architecture of fear that creates compounds of spatial control. A small, but typical section of this architecture is seen in the photograph. A violent uprising of Palestinians – present and past, individual and collective – against the rules of the game imposed upon them is usually translated into an upgrading of the protection level of the security forces and the proliferation of components that aim to subjugate the Palestinians to the rules of the game and restrict their movement ever more tightly. The concern for the soldiers’ safety – metonymically perceived as the concern for the Jewish citizens of the state – has been constructed for years as an objective above and beyond any discussion or debate, and

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any deployment on the ground is considered and measured only with this concern in mind. The stalled lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are taken into consideration only within a secondary discourse that deals with reducing the negative effects of the concern for the soldiers’ security. Thus, after the army callously spreads its forces inside the civil life space of the Palestinians, it initiates various ‘humanitarian’ actions in order to minimize to a certain extent the damages it inflicts upon them and to show some consideration for their lives. But humanitarian concern is shown within the invariable assumption that when Jewish lives are to be protected, the lives of Palestinians are dispensable. The Palestinian uprising against this assumption is perceived as a direct threat to the soldiers. The soldiers, sensing the threat to their lives from the moment they step inside the Occupied Territories, wish to protect themselves and remove this threat. In order to protect the soldiers and give them a sense of security, the army constantly improves the inner syntax of the blockage compounds: Instead of exposed watchtowers, it installs reinforced concrete spires with narrow observation slits at the top, enabling monitoring through remote control. Instead of bare ground on the way to the checkpoint, the army spreads barbed-wire spirals. Instead of dirt or paving, the army lines the road or path with tin sheets that produce noise when anything or anyone moves on them. Instead of raising fences that are man sized, fences two and three stories high are erected when necessary. Instead of wire fences, the army places modular concrete walls. Instead of permitting an uncontrolled stream of people to flow, the army slows down movement by narrowing passages.

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5.3 Azoun Atme, 2006 For Israelis, such tools as shown in the photographs embody the ‘no choice’ assumption. Not only is the landscape in these pictures familiar, it even gives most Israelis a sense of security: shreds of camouflage netting, various metals, shades of khaki, shooting slits, field glasses. These tools aim to quench the visceral fear that afflicts Israelis when they drive on these roads paved on Palestinian soil, roads that whisper to them that around the next curve, someone is lying in wait, ready to pounce. Someone is probably sitting in that army trailer, watching over the road, someone leaning out the top of the tower with his gun drawn, ready to snipe at anyone who would wish them harm. Sometimes they even suffer from these tools themselves, when they happen to get stuck in a line of waiting cars, for example, stalled as a result of a flying checkpoint that the army is ‘forced’ to place on a road that Palestinians were not even supposed to use, but they realize there is ‘no choice.’ They understand that the Wall and the pillbox posts are now the landscape with which they must live, day in, day out. This plight seems minimal to them, compared with the benefit attributed to these tools, and in any case, their suffering as a result is immeasurably less than the Palestinians.’

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5.4 Makkabim checkpoint, 2001 Most of the time, Israelis who – daily – cross checkpoints of the type placed along apartheid Road 443 speed on without stopping. The concrete cubes placed in three half lines across the road require them to slow down and slalom in between them for a very short distance, after which they accelerate back to their normal driving speed. Palestinians are not supposed to drive here – although their banning is not anchored in any writ of law – and from the dominant Israeli point of view, those living in the villages should find themselves some source of livelihood that does not necessitate travel by car. The fact that before the road was widened (on lands confiscated from Palestinians) and traffic on it restricted to Jews alone, it was a central artery used by Palestinians to move between the southern Ramallah region and villages lying to its southwest – this fact is meaningless. An unstressed routine seems pervasive at this checkpoint and others like it, thanks to the hundreds of checkpoints and barriers throughout the West Bank. The minimal blockage tools throughout this checkpoint prove the effectiveness of the other blockage points, with which it creates a single continuity. This minimalism indicates that this tool is actually meant only to confirm that other tools, at different points in space, have already done the job and distanced the Palestinians from here. Police presence at such checkpoints, too, is meant as a final backup to prevent entry of Palestinians who have dared and managed to make their way to the road in spite of the costly means placed as obstacles.

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B'Tselem / Suha Zaid

There are sufficient clauses in the current traffic laws that they can be found to have broken to prevent their entry. The Israeli flag stuck on top of the guard shack embodies perhaps more than anything else the place where the Israeli sovereign now prefers to show his clout.

5.5 West Bank, 2004 Digging a ditch across a road that only Palestinians are allowed to use is a way to ensure that Palestinians will not be able to reach the roads serving Jews on a daily basis, as in the Makkabim or Atarot areas. A wide and relatively deep ditch is opened in the middle of the road, assuring not only that Palestinians will not reach the mixed roads, but also that their lives will proceed very slowly, with many disruptions, and that not much time will be left for other matters beyond the basic concerns of livelihood and daily survival. The army does not make do just with digging a ditch, however. Like a gardener regularly and devotedly visiting and tending his plants, the soldiers devotedly frequent these barriers to make sure that Palestinians have not sabotaged them. The development of tools to ensure that Jewish traffic along the roads and at other checkpoints will not be disrupted is the outcome of the occupier’s dual effort: on the one hand, to separate Jews from Palestinians, and on the other to be ‘there’, occupying the place of separation in order to preserve partition and ensure its existence. These blocked roads are not included in the 734 kilometers of apartheid roads that the Palestinians are not permitted to travel at all.

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5.6 Beit Likiya, 2001 Some of these barriers are produced with an ecological rationale. The army recycles for other uses the debris that it produces when it demolishes houses. This pile is one of 208 heaps of rubble placed at the entrance to villages or as barriers on roads and one of 486 blockage points of various types scattered at different points in the West Bank in addition to the 100 permanent checkpoints and numerous ‘flying’ checkpoints on which there are no precise data. The explicit purpose of such blockages is the prevention of vehicular traffic. But when debris is scattered from one side of the road to the other, pedestrian movement is blocked, as well. Only people young enough to climb these artificial hills can cross. Behind one another, in single file, they create a virtual path of sorts to the left

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of the barrier, each in turn deepening the footsteps of his predecessors. They know that the gap and discrepancy between their fate and the free movement enjoyed by those traveling the road to their right will assure that the occupation regime to which they are subjugated will not reign forever.

5.7 Flying checkpoint, Trans-Samaria Road, 2001 The Trans-Samaria Road (Road 5) stretches from northern Tel Aviv in the west to the Ariel colony and Samaria (the northern West Bank) in the east. The eastern part of this road was paved in the 1990s on Palestinian lands, mostly for the use of Jews. The fantasy was of total control in a sterile zone, but the presence of Palestinians necessitates the disruption of the relative calm in which the Jewish population rides these roads as their very own and requires the erection of ‘flying checkpoints.’ A platoon commander who served for two years at the checkpoints says: ‘You get out there and identify areas where Palestinians travel the roads, and you put up a flying checkpoint.’ The flying checkpoint has evolved and become a mobile unit ready for use at any moment – two iron rods with a red-and-white stripe in the middle, two spikes on a rope, spike strips on the asphalt, a Stop sign and a Slow sign. The soldiers serving in the Occupied Territories must maintain such a kit in their vehicles when they go out on patrol. Its availability enables the soldiers immediately to carry out the ‘full blockage’ or ‘partial blockage’ of Palestinians’ lives.

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The commander: A flying checkpoint is an assignment, by all means. . . It could be the result of an intelligence alert, or because we haven’t been there for quite a while and need to be seen everywhere. And then we say ‘Let’s put up a checkpoint between this village and that hamlet.’ It usually happens at unexpected times. . . A checkpoint has to be a surprise. . . The bad guys need to know we’re always around. We expect the Palestinians to go from there to the village and tell others ‘The army is everywhere.’ The army has to seem present everywhere in order to keep the Palestinians from rebelling, but also because of the invincible fear that some of them might indeed rebel. The Palestinians have managed to etch into the soldiers’ minds the fact that they can always surprise them, appear, and resist. Before it is a violent power, such resistance is first and foremost a political power, the power of people to act freely as they combine their actions with those of others. They cannot be deprived of this power except by exterminating them as human beings. But Israel exterminates only individuals in its targeted killings. Whoever has not been targeted and killed might produce violence, and therefore Israel cannot be free of the fear that all those who have not been targeted and killed might produce violence. The soldiers in the photograph, protected with their bulletproof vests, armored vehicle, helmets, and goggles, try to preserve the surprise element on their side and the side of their mates who are just now putting up a flying checkpoint on the road. Since the rules of the game here are not agreed upon by the two sides, the battle of this flying checkpoint, too, will be decided only sporadically, through either obedience or violence.

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5.8 Al-Tufah checkpoint, 2003 The components of this checkpoint – concrete cubes, sandbags, plastic barriers, tin sheets, and barbed-wire spirals – are no different from those used at other checkpoints. But its syntax, looking like a random collection of patches that have sprawled with time, is gradually disappearing. It is being replaced by a lean, tight, sterile syntax of modern installations that are supposed to provide a constructed answer to problems that here were given local, improvised solutions. The new installations remove some of the visual ‘disturbances’ in sight: The Palestinians are required to walk amid potholes, and the path indicated by sharp rock shards is a dangerous tripping ground. The route is not clearly marked or bounded by fences that would protect the soldiers against some Palestinian outburst, and the relations between the heart of the checkpoint and its periphery are no longer differentiated. In spite of its disorder and the improvisation that is evident in every connection made between its components, one of the army’s guiding principles in administering the movement of Palestinians is present here: narrowing movement into a single file of individuals kept as distant from one another as possible. In current military lingo, this is called ‘laning.’ It not only assures control over the actions of those waiting in line, but also prevents the checkpoint area from becoming an agora, a public space where the many assemble and become a power that – together – determines the conditions of its own existence.

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5.9 Huwwara checkpoint, 2003 The longer the checking of individuals at the head of the waiting line takes, the longer the line stretching far beyond the end of the shed that the army provides grows. But as the line at this checkpoint grows longer and the dangers it entails increase, the army diffuses pressure to other places and produces a general slowing down of the system. Thus, too, the soldiers are sometimes required to throw a concussion grenade to straighten up the line. Most of the time, when the width and length of the line is under control, one soldier suffices to get back in line any person who dares step out of it.

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5.10 Qalandiya checkpoint, 2007

B'Tselem

No doubt these installations are more photogenic – the waiting hall is spacious, the ceiling high, the shed has ample room for everyone, the ground is paved, the colors are not depressing, there are taps for the thirsty and an ashtray for the smokers. Everything indicates that the quality of life of those having to pass the checkpoints has been taken into consideration.

5.11 Beit Furiq checkpoint, 2004 Alongside the new and relatively spacious installations, which only a very small percentage of the Palestinian population can enjoy, another species of new installation has been developed, containing nearly

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everything necessary, but without wasting a single centimeter of air or ground space. The width of the turnstile bars has been reduced from 80 to 60 centimeters, and the ceiling has been planned to be precisely high enough so that no one will be injured by it, but also so that no one might feel that the sky is the limit. Even slits for daylight have been preplanned so that crowding will not become unbearable.

5.12 Huwwara checkpoint, 2006 The necessary minimum does not omit gender considerations: anarrow cubicle is ready and waiting for the invasive body search of women, requiring privacy.

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5.13 Huwwara checkpoint, 2007

activestills.org / Anne Paq

The ongoing enforcement of the policy of slowing down traffic in the Occupied Territories is supposed to reduce pressure at the checkpoints. Different tools ‘lane’ the Palestinians into long waiting lines in order for them to reach the new metal detectors in an orderly, restrained manner. Sometimes it works, as on the day this photograph was taken.

5.14 Watchtower at the entrance to Hebron, January 2006 In order for this sophisticated pillbox post to be effective and enable remote control, numerous ground troops are needed to go on doing the ‘dirty work.’ The only way to make this work cleaner is to slow down the Palestinians altogether and make them stay away from public space. The army can also provide food directly to their homes in order to ensure calm and reassure the soldiers who, fearful, hide behind protected shooting slits. 131

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5.15 The Erez crossing into Israel, 2007 The door opens, and a lone Palestinian enters the cell. Another door closes behind him. He receives a laconic instruction to raise his hands, the check is carried out, the front door opens, and the Palestinian can now leave this place to his successor. The checking itself is not time consuming, but the way there might consume about half a workday. Should one file a complaint for lost working hours? Invasion of privacy? Discrimination? Complain to whom? Architectonic schemes: Meira Kowalsky

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Freeze!

Annette W. Balkema

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Perception seems to point at the row of houses like a pistol: freeze! And the houses do freeze while they are tracked down in serial movement. It is nighttime; the houses stare with empty windows, and no one is around. Could this really be a crime scene? No doubt, the houses quietly defend themselves against the perceptual intrusion. What do they reveal in the serial grip, what do they expose in the liquid repetition of being tracked down in a perceptual shot? They show their garages, their garage doors, and their parked cars: tokens from the world of movement. How to understand that paradox of the frozen detail stretched out in space and time in the streaming image? What is that intensity of the liquid repetition in a vibrating wave? What is that fascination for Sven Pählsson’s Sprawlville – the video work I am referring to?1 And how could those questions connect to photography? The paradox of the frozen detail in the streaming image and its intense and intimate forms of liquid repetition is connected with the desire for repetition of information. In fact, the desire for repetition of information is characteristic of the screen-based loop and how its visualized information is produced. Of course, the static scenes of non-screen-based art such as photographs could also invite watching over and over again. However, that produces a repetition of information that is incompatible with the former. No matter how often the digestion of a non-screen-based scene is repeated, the repetition of the static visualized information of its quiet frame remains utterly different from the repetition of the dynamic,

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visualized information the streaming, crowded, noisy screens and scenes the screen-based loop produces. One of the methods of analyzing the discrepancy between static and dynamic visualized information is the two-line analysis mode the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze introduced into the discourse on visuality in the second half of the 20th century. This specific form of streaming dualism entails a streaming series of notions – rather than merely two opposite ones such as black-white or bodymind of classic and more rigid dualism – plotted on two imaginary lines spreading out from one point called a composite. In the context of FREEZE!, the composite under discussion is repetition of visualized information starting with the screen-based loop’s dynamic visualized information versus its counterpart, the repetition of static visualized information of non-screen-based art such as photographs. In a two-line analysis mode, one could argue that the static, visualized information non-screen-based art and its non-moving scenes conveys is a form of horizontal, extensive information, whereby the motion or development of the information implied keeps on revolving in symmetric patterns. That implies that the informative effect a non-moving scene produces is explicable and verifiable in one survey of the non-moving window. Conversely, the screen-based loop and its dynamic, visualized information cannot be grasped and verified at once. Screen-based information contains an intensive form of envelopment, evolving in dissymmetric vertical layers, rather than symmetric horizontal patterns. Those intensive, vertical layers possess a specific degree of depth. They are not extended in space but, rather, compactified.2 Such intensive, compactified verticality is connected with the streaming speed of the information of the screen-based loop, and the light it emanates, which makes one suspect that there is more, much more information to be extracted. All screen-based information is the cause or the birth of an ongoing stream of additional information begging for continuous interpretation. That creates the desire to watch the screen-based loop again and again. The notion of intensive, compactified verticality based on superstring theory where matter consists of strings vibrating in 26-dimensional or 10-dimensional space is a notion hard to visualize. In any case it is hard

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for our 3-dimensional brains to understand hyperspace dimensions going beyond the common 3D. Therefore, I would like to launch a work of art into the discussion that has the capacity to horizontally portray the phenomenon of intensive, compactified verticality. Although that phenomenon as such is connected with screen-based information and streaming speed, strikingly enough, it is a non-screen-based work where both the lack of speed and an idiosyncratic form of horizontality enable the survey of compactified, intensive verticality. The work I am referring to is Sichtbare Welt (Visible World) (19872001), by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Sichtbare Welt comprises slides, fourteen light tables, and an overwhelming amount of light. The fourteen tables are covered with three thousand slides depicting photographic shots ranging from green hills to high rise buildings, from airport views to river banks, and from rocks covered with snow to a variety of blooming flowers. But it is the component of light that produces the strong association with compactification and its specific form of depth while turning the work into a ‘pseudo’ non-screen-based work. The expanse of the line of tables – they are arranged in a row and stretch out into space – gives Sichtbare Welt a dazzling horizontality. That in itself does not need explication; the composition of both horizontality and light create that demand for further interpretation. In Sichtbare Welt, the information produced in a screen-based loop has turned into a frozen stream on the fourteen tables and its rows of slides. One could spend hours extracting Sichtbare Welt’s crowded information. Therefore, the work is not only magnificent as an installation with its fourteen tables and three thousand slides. Each table, each collection of slides, and each single slide of Sichtbare Welt, whether depicting flowers, airports, or mountains, invites one to watch the work again and again. But both the quiet frame of a static, non-screen-based scene and the dynamic, streaming, noisy screen-based loop reveal much more about the difference in information they produce. So, let’s return to the discussion of visualized information and its distinction between horizontal information produced in symmetric, extensive patterns of non-screenbased art, and vertical information, produced in dissymmetric, intensive layers of screen-based art. The horizontal information and symmetric

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patterns of the non-screen-based scene seem to lodge in an informational world where forms of possible and real information are produced. In this world, shifts of informational layers or informational levels do not occur. One can only speak of developing patterns of information, since the realization of the possible information a non-screen-based scene contains will always imply resemblance and convergence of information. Thus, patterns of information or effects of information may develop, but they will never produce novel information. In other words, non-screenbased scenes tend to only produce information about themselves and their own developing worlds, no matter how often they are watched. The informational world where the streaming, noisy screen-based loop produces its vertical, dissymmetric, intensive layers is different. The world of the screen-based loop is the world where virtual and actual information reign. In such informational, noisy screen-based worlds, virtual or potential information desires to become actualized and transformed in every repetition of the screen-based loop. However, that desire is not linked with psychologically defined forms of pleasure or deficiency. Rather, it is a desire understood as a pure production of continuous junctions, connections, and dimensions. In that sense, desire functions as a bridge to other worlds. Therefore, actualized, transformed information desires to move in shifts, layers, and levels implying the promise of involving different and divergent worlds. Thus, the world of the screen-based loop necessarily implies novel information linked with a desire that could only reign in the promising, virtual world of the screen. That desire enacts its capacity to open up window after window while creating or actualizing all sorts of novel worlds – visible or not. In contrast with the world of the non-screen-based scene and the realization of the possible, symmetric, informational patterns it contains, the world of the streaming screen-based loop continues to move from virtual to actual information and vice versa involving intensive, dissymmetric layers of virtuality characterized by infinite desire and novel, liquid, repetition. The sense of intensive, compactified verticality, the sense of virtuality linked with informational desire, is based in the light the screen-based loop emanates and the speed of its streaming information. Indeed, the phenomenon of light is linked with potential or virtual information. One

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could argue that the connection of light with veiled, virtual information to be actualized lies in how light vibrates in unseen dimensions. While watching a screen-based loop, we tend to be captivated by the promise of those virtual, unknown, informational windows beyond our visual comprehension. From a peculiar, electronic form of altitude, we keep on trying again and again to explore the brilliant, intensive, compactified vistas the screen-based loop and its windows are willing to expose. However, we will never get the full picture; we will never get all the available information. There will always be more windows to be opened. That ongoing stream of information is both alarming and fascinating. Yet, the concept of light has the capacity to act as a component to further clarify the informational difference between the screen-based loop and non-screen-based art such as photography. A non-screen-based work including the phenomenon of light is Andreas Gursky’s Prada III (1998). Prada III is a huge C-print of 183 x 205 cm portraying a display case in a Prada store where three long shelves or rows each hold twelve neatly folded, black Prada garments. The display case emanates light. Although the work is without screen-based streaming speed, the horizontal, serial repetition of the garments provokes desires similar to the streaming, liquid repetition thanks to the light the display case radiates. However, in Gursky’s Prada III as well as in Pählsson’s Sprawlville another form of repetition can be noticed. That is the phenomenon of repetition of isolated or cut-out details, be it garments in Prada stores or isolated garages, garage doors, and parked cars. Nonetheless, the streaming repetitive scenes in Sven Pählsson’s Sprawlville are forms of detail repetition accompanied by tremendous motion and speed, whereas the details in Prada III radiate quietness and silence. In a theoretical sense, perception connected to streaming visual information and the phenomenon of light is a challenging view, albeit not an entirely novel one. Philosophers who want to say things about perception and light run up first of all against urbanist Paul Virilio’s work. Virilio unerringly knows how to incorporate the light screens radiate in his perspective on perception.

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For example, in ‘Optics on a Grand Scale’, one of the chapters in Virilio’s book Open Sky, he introduces the concept of indirect light, a type of light different from either the natural light of the sun or of the electric light light bulbs spread in the darkness of the real world. Indirect light is linked with the light screens radiate either in the real world of the natural world or in the real-world of the screen. Virilio refers to Einstein and his famous equation E=mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light) when expanding the concept of the speed of light into novel time concepts such as time-light, speed-time, or dromoscopic forms of time where dromos correlates with speed, racing & running like in a hippodrome – an arena for speeding horses – producing time conceptions such as underexposed, exposed, and overexposed. Those temporal concepts based on the speed of light correlate with the concepts of the flash of being there and localities by elastic tie designed by Merleau-Ponty in his posthumously published working notes from the period 1959-1961. Merleau-Ponty’s elastic ties connect the body and the mind and is no doubt to be understood as another way of erasing the rigid dualist body-mind construction and related face-to-face concepts based on Descartes’s work from 1641. Merleau-Ponty’s bouncing and vortical elastic ties reminiscent of bungy-jumping points to the mobility of a veering and vortical perception while creating forms of localities by elastic tie also called quasi-localities. That perceptual bouncing could be linked with the motion of the mind’s eye diving from the real world into the real-world or screen-based world and vice versa in conscious and unconscious motion. In a Merleau-Pontean field of configurations created by veering elastic lines, side-other-side movements, and figures and levels, consciousness is understood as ‘having a figure on a ground or on a level’, where unconsciousness functions as a pivot in the MerleauPontean, vortiginous configuration continuously producing forms of perceived-nonperceived connected with quasi-localities or the nonspace of the mind. (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 189, 191, 197). The flash of being there, quasi-localities, and a bouncing perception in and out of a configuration made up of elastic ties succeed in creating a visualization of a figure of thought based on the interplay of veering lines enabling Merleau-Ponty to speak of a ‘polymorphic, immersed perception’ surrounded by a field of dimensionality (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 195, 228).

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Another figure of thought implying intermingling and interacting lines is designed by the aforementioned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In the Deleuzian multiline-based network, movement is not produced by body-mind torsions and elastic lines. It is based on two components: a two-line streaming mode of analysis based on the thought of philosopher Henri Bergson and the form of motion produced by quantum mechanics and its emission of particles and exchange of packets of energy producing the concept of nonlocalizability. In Deleuze’s multi-line based network called multiplicity, the concept of nonlocalizability is based on a principle playing a major role in quantum mechanics called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That principle states that one can never be sure of both the location and the speed of a particle. Deleuze’s multiplicity mode of analysis creates a fascinating visualization of a figure of thought where a correlating, open system of two streams of interacting concepts all based on the interplay of lines, dimensions, strata, planes, spaces, and plateaus produce concepts such as reterritorialization and deterritorialization, stratification and destratification, planes of consistency or BwO’s and planes of organization or development, and molar and molecular lines drawn by all kinds of machines and producing lines of flight – ‘flashing like a train in motion’ – which indicates a metamorphosis into another multiplicity. (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 198) How does perception occur in the multiplicity’s ongoing streaming forms of connectivity and nonlocalizability? The mobile, open system and the interacting lines and dimensions of the multiplicity crowded with notions and concepts yield two interacting spaces called smooth space, correlating with the domain of the molecular line, and striated space, correlating with the domain of the molar line. The latter, striated space, is the domain of perceptible, formed matter, where a canopying sky functions as a horizon for perceptual measurement – Virilio would call that the domain of an apparent horizon or backdrop of human action. The former, smooth space, is the domain of intensive streams and forces where the optical perception of striated space is substituted by a haptic perception referring to all senses. Smooth space is not canopied by the sky but occupied by intensities such as ‘wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of sands’ (Deleuze and Guattari

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1996: 479). – Virilio would call that the domain of a transapparent horizon where the traditional perspective of vanishing lines is replaced by the lines of light or vanishing pixel points. Thus, perception could be associated with bundles of lines and forms of nonlocalizability; with bouncing, elastic lines and quasi-localities; and with the speed of light producing pulsating pixel points and lines of light. However, a screenbased perception immerses into even more specific lines which at the same time involve components such as nonlocalizability and light. A screen-based, immersed perception dives into lines of light associated with digital lines. What, then, are digital lines? In Nox, Machining Architecture, architect and artist Lars Spuybroek links digital lines with splines once used in shipbuilding, where splines in the form of slats of wood used to be bent into shape or a curved form by heavy weights. Today, ‘a digital spline starts out as straight and becomes curved by feeding information to it.’ (...) ‘A curve is an intelligent, betterinformed straight-line’, says Spuybroek (Spuybroek 2004: 355-356). The lines of light surrounding a screen-based, immersed, perception are such curved, better informed lines. We only have to feed more information into the lines designed by Virilio, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze in order to turn their lines into the intelligent lines of light a topical screen-based perception demands. That information is linked to a mode of analysis I would like to call the hyperspace mode of analysis. I mentioned above that in hyperspace, lines are understood as strings vibrating in the 10 and 26 hyperdimensions created by superstring theory and its conception of matter. Vibrating strings are the better-informed lines of light producing forms of intensified, dissymmetric information compactified in hyperdimensional forms. Such compactified information curled-up in hyperdimensions can never be entirely grasped. Screen-based perception triggered by the streaming speed of electronic, visualized information and its intensive, dissymmetric layers of informational depth is a form of perception that knows that visual information based on the phenomenon of lines of light can never be fully localized or communicated. That is the reason a screen-based perception desires to continuously open up window after window swarmed with visuality and information to be detected in electronic, compactified forms of depth.

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But wherein lies the promising potential of the vibrating wave, of the liquid repetition stretched out in time and space Sven Pählsson’s Sprawlville exposed to perception? That potential lies in the capacity to vibrate impure resemblance and impure equivalence. Why impure? The vibrating wave appears to intensify perception at each vibration, appealing as it were to other levels, other degrees of perception, where resemblance and equivalence slightly shift in each vibration. Thus just as a violin string vibrates at different frequencies creating musical notes E, G, and B, repetition seems to create different frequencies of details each time it vibrates. However, a string is more than a vibrating musical instrument. The essential feature of life on earth is the stringlike DNA molecule, a basic building block for other forms, which contains the complex information and coding of life itself. In the case of both the vibrating music string and the stringlike DNA molecule, a large amount of potential or virtual ‘intelligence’ is packed into it. Could one claim that perception’s fascination for the vibrating multi-dimensional detail lies indeed in the possibility to detect an abundance of virtual intelligence in it? Multi-dimensional details vibrating in streaming images: they certainly do not occur in a ‘flat’ Euclidean space. In the language of Euclidean space, parallel straight lines or running perpendicular in three dimensions form a network for perspectival perception. However, perspectival perception will drown in the streaming image and its digital lines. Perspectival perception only knows rigid dimensions such as a line with one dimension: length; a plane with two dimensions, length and breadth; and a solid with three dimensions: length, breadth, and height. Even worse, for perspectival perception a point has no dimension at all. Did anyone in the 21st century ever perceive a pixel point as having no dimension? Did anyone in our day ever perceive the language of Euclid’s flat, idealized geometric figures such as perfect circles, triangles and squares in whirlpools, while diving in swimming pools, or in the waves of the ocean? I would like to argue that a topical perception seems to desire the language of curved environments which bend and twist in infinite diversity. That spatial language is crowded by cylinders, spheres, and tubes. Perspectival

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perception is out of date in a screen-based, electronic space where a liquid, multidimensional, topological milieu has supplanted the straight, one-dimensional line with tortuous, enveloping, flexuous tubes. Topical perception requires more than that, though: it is the repetition of the multi-dimensional voluminous detail it really wants. One garage door, one car, does not suffice. It is the series of details in which perception now rejoices; it is the liquid repetition, the vibration of the wave as a well-informed digital line or a compactified, vibrating string which it demands. However, there is a slight problem with vibrating waves. First of all there is a difference between a sound wave, a water wave, and an electronic wave, no matter how deep a violin may clarify the intelligence hidden in strings, and no matter how much a whirlpool wave may tell us about the language of topological space. The frozen detail extended in time and space as a vibrating electronic wave raises some questions. Obviously, light is the stuff without which we would not have electronic art or new media art. How does light move? Indeed, in waves. Not surprisingly, it is the metaphor of the wave which emerges time and again while talking and thinking about electronic visual art. There is something peculiar, though, about light waves and movement. While sound waves move in air, water waves in water, light has nothing to wave in. Scientists once came up with the substance of ether. However, there is not something we could call the ether: unlike water and air, experiments have shown that ether does not exist. So, light waves move in some sort of vacuum. But how could that be, light travelling through a vacuum? That problem is solved, in physics, by the Kaluza-Klein theory which states that the ‘vacuum’ through which light travels is a vibration – good luck, we are back to the theme of vibration – which exists in four dimensions of space and one of time. In fact, we are talking about five dimensions or a form of hyperspace. Hyperspace, thus, higher – dimensional space-time, higher dimensions of space than the intuitively – even infants know the concepts of up and down, forward and backward – accepted three dimensions of our everyday world, play a role in the aforementioned superstring theory, a more advanced version of the Kaluza-Klein theory. The old KaluzaKlein theory could not determine the correct value of N, N standing for multi-dimensions. In 1984, physicists Michael Green and John Schwarz

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connected the Kaluza-Klein theory with its most advanced version: superstring theory. Superstring theory does not only postulate that all matter consists of tiny vibrating strings, but also develops a beautiful picture of heterotic strings. The heterotic string consists of a closed string with two types of vibration, clockwise and counterclockwise, which are treated differently. The clockwise vibrations live in a ten-dimensional space. The counterclockwise live in a 26-dimensional space, of which 16 dimensions have been compactified or curled up. Once again, how do we have to understand that beyond the three spatial dimensions of length, breadth and width, and the fourth temporal dimension of time, there are more dimensions, such as a vibrating vacuum in which light travels, such as a ten dimensional space or a compactified 26th-dimensional space? That depth of understanding is difficult to grasp, since it is even hard for perception to visualize a fourth spatial dimension. Only mathematicians and physicists have succeeded in assuming multidimensional space while solving mathematical equations. Strikingly, in multidimensional space, in hyperspace, the formulation of physical laws show ‘their true brilliance.’ (Kaku, 1994: 12) Could it be true that the multidimensional space of media art is connected to perception’s true brilliance? Could it be true that, in the vibrating electronic pixels, in the curved, digital lines of the light of the screen, perception obtains its true intensity?

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Notes 1

Pählsson, Sven (1965, lives and works in Oslo, Norway and New York, USA,): Sprawlville (2002). www.svenpahlsson.com

2

The notion of compactification refers to the compactified dimensions of superstring theory where matter is considered to be composed of vibrating strings. Some of those strings are curled-up or compactified in 26-dimensional space and some in 10-dimensional space. (Cf. Kaku 1994: 158.)

Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone Press (London, 1987) Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsonism, Urzone Inc. (New York, 1988) Kaku, Michio, Hyperspace, Oxford University Press (Oxford 1994) Spuybroek, Lars, NOX: Machining Architecture, Thames & Hudson (London, 2004) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, 1997) Virilio, Paul, Open Sky, Verso (London, 1997)

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Principles for Interpreting Photographs Terry Barrett

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The most important thing I can do as an art educator is to involve people in interpreting imagery. Interpretation is central to looking at all images, historical and contemporary, those we call ‘fine art’ as well as those daily seen in visual culture. Following is a list of principles that can guide the intelligent interpretation of images of all kinds, and especially photographs. These principles are not mine: I have gathered them and formulated them from the writings of artists, photographers, curators, critics, historians, aestheticians, literary critics, and from personal experience in teaching. I have put the principles into a set, but it is a loose set. The set is intentionally eclectic, but I think non-contradictory, although some of the principles are drawn from theories that resist one another. The set is meant to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. I have not numbered the principles in order to imply that the set is open-ended and that it can be contracted or expanded. Although the principles are stated with authority, they are tentative, open to revision, and non-dogmatic. Above all, the principles are meant to be useful, as well as theoretically sound. As an educator, I have often put them into practice and can attest to their effectiveness in furthering serious thought and considered response to images with learners of all ages. Due to limits of space, I elaborate on some of the principles and show examples of how they work in practice, and others stand as self-explanatory.

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Some of the principles apply to all images, and others are specific to photographs. I refer to images when speaking about all artefacts, and to photographs when attending specifically to images made in the medium of photography. Some, many, or all of the principles may seem as obvious as truisms, but many of the principles are not obvious to students whom I teach, and some of them are not embraced by colleagues with whom I work.

All images require interpretation This principle counters the belief that ‘art speaks for itself,’ a false belief that many students and some professors hold implicitly and use in practice. This principle is fundamental to the rest that follow. It is also fundamental to Arthur Danto’s theory of art that asserts that an artwork is different from an ordinary object because it is about something. Because it is about something, an artwork requires interpretation to function as an artwork.1 Noël Carroll succinctly summarizes Danto’s theory as containing these five major propositions: 1 2 3 4 5

A work of art is about something, A work of art projects a point of view, A work of art projects this point of view by rhetorical means, A work of art requires interpretation, and The work of art and its interpretation require an art-historical context.2

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– Elementary school children, examine each other’s personal collections of postcard art reproductions, in grade three of a public school in Dayton, Ohio. (All photographs courtesy of the author.)

The principle also is in adherence with Nelson Goodman’s philosophy that art has important cognitive value.3 Art, as well as science but differently from science, offers us views of the world that provide powerful insights, valuable information, and new knowledge. However, images provide insights, information, and knowledge only if we interpret them.

Photographs carry more credibility than other kinds of images and especially require interpretation Photography is a very persuasive and omnipresent form of communication and persuasion in popular visual culture, and we ought to teach people to carefully think about what they consume.

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To interpret an image is to respond to it in language To interpret a work of art is to make sense of it. In Paul Thom’s words, to interpret is to see something as ‘representing something, or expressing something, or being about something, or being a response to something, or belonging in a certain tradition, or exhibiting certain formal features, and so forth.’4 To interpret a photograph is to ask and answer questions such as these: What is this object or event that I see or hear or otherwise sense? What is it about? What does it represent or express? What does or did it mean to its maker? What is it a part of? What are its references? What is it responding to? Why did it come to be? How was it made? Within what tradition does it belong? What purposes might it have served its makers or patron? What pleasures did it provide those responsible for it? Did it solve, lessen, or contribute to problems? What needs does it relieve? What does it mean to others? What does it mean to me? Does it affect my life?

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– Teenage high school students look at photographs that they and their classmates have made. One set of students is from an English literature class, and the other is in a class of beginning Photography. Each of the English students chose a different photograph made by a Photography student, wrote an interpretive paragraph about it, and then read their interpretation to the whole group.

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Richard Rorty says that ‘reading texts is a matter of reading them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens.’5 Texts refers to photographs as well as poems. Seeing what happens means examining what connections we can make between a photograph, a dance, or a poem and our relevant experiences of books we have read, music we have heard, emotions we have felt in situations we have lived or heard about from others. Some of these connections are meaningful and worth pursuing toward greater knowledge and insight about the image in question, ourselves, and the world. Other connections are less worthy and we let them fade away. To interpret is to respond in thoughts, feelings, and actions to what we see and experience, and to make sense of our responses by putting them into words. When we look at an image, we may think thoughts and notice feelings, move closer to the work or back away from it, squint and frown, laugh, sigh, or cry, blurt out something to someone or to no one. Our initial responses to a work of art are usually inchoate, incipient, beginning rumblings of undistinguished emotions and vague thoughts. When we make the effort and are able to successfully transform these initial thoughts and feelings into articulated thoughts and identified feelings in language, we have interpretations.

Photographs and photographers alter what they picture

People tend to look through photographs rather than at them This principle asserts what Kendall Walton refers to as the transparency of photographs.6 People tend to look at a picture of a beach as if it were the beach. We need to teach people to look at a photograph as a constructed image of the world, rather than as a chunk of the world itself: Not to do so is neither to understand nor to appreciate the photographs we see.

Photographs should be seen as opinions

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Feelings are guides to interpretations This principle offsets any false notions that interpretation is a coldly intellectual endeavor. Feelings are essential to understanding images. As Goodman wrote: ‘In daily life, classification of things by feeling is often more vital than classification by other properties: we are likely to be better off if we are skilled in fearing, wanting, braving, or distrusting the right things, animate or inanimate, than if we perceive only their shapes, sizes, weights, etc.’ About emotions in interpreting art, Goodman asserted: ‘The work of art is apprehended through the feelings as well as through the senses. Emotional numbness disables here as definitely if not as completely as blindness and deafness…Emotion in aesthetic experience is a means of discerning what properties a work has and expresses.’7 Israel Scheffler elaborates upon Goodman’s thoughts and applies them to interpreting art: ‘Reading our feelings and reading the work are, in general, virtually inseparable processes.’ Scheffler works to destroy the false dichotomy between thinking and feeling. Faculties of thought and emotion are integral: ‘Emotion without cognition is blind, cognition without emotion is vacuous.’ 8

Photographs are made from light reflecting off of people, places, and objects in the world This principle refers to what Charles Peirce would call the indexical aspect of the photographic sign: the photograph is caused by what it shows.9 It also acknowledges Roland Barthes’s definition of photography: ‘That which has been.’10 It is in alignment with Realist theories of photography.

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Photographs are factual and fictional; factual and metaphorical This principle balances Realist notions of photography with Conventionalist notions, both of which hold explanatory power. It reminds us that photographs are born of Renaissance conventions for picturing reality; that photographs are humanly as well as mechanically made; that photographs are neither magically nor scientifically independent of culture.

Photography is a subtractive medium and painting is additive The painter begins with a blank canvas; the photographer’s viewfinder is never empty. Photographers generally remove clutter from the viewfinder until they have the distilled image that they want; painters generally build layer upon layer of media to achieve the image they want. Neither way of working is better than the other, but they are significantly different ways of working and thinking with media. Thus, Edward Weston’s Peppers may be thought of as photographic, and Joel Peter-Witkin’s photographs as painterly.

The subject matter of a photograph is always cut from a larger context The photographer, unable to picture all of the subject matter, selects aspects of subject matter, selects format, moves into or away from the subject matter, selects depth of field, focus, framing, what to include and exclude, the instant to expose, and later in the darkroom or at the computer makes further sections of tone, color, contrast, deciding what to emphasize and what to minimize.

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Photographs are instantaneous They are of measurable instances in the world. They are made in discrete instances of time. They stop motion. In Roland Barthes’s thinking, they are a bit like a death.

Photographs have unique properties of selectivity, instantaneity, and credibility 11 The search for unique properties of a medium is a Modernist endeavor and we live in a Postmodernist milieu. Nevertheless, these Modernist characteristics inform us about Postmodern practices as image-makers turn away from or bow to earlier modes of image making. Many photographers play-off of and unmask Modernist modes of working with their photographs: for example, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Duane Michals, Sandy Skoglund, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, and many others.

Subject matter + medium + form + context = content Subject matter is the people, places, and things depicted in a work of art. Subject matter is different from subject. Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, sometimes used the subject matter of flowers in his photographs but the subject of those photographs is not flowers but can be interpreted to be sensuality. Medium is the materials and processes with which artworks are made: for example, clay, acrylic paint, bronze, silver gelatin, dye, and so forth. Considerations of the characteristics of media and how the image maker has used them is important to understanding the work being interpreted.

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Form refers to how an image has been put together by its maker (or altered by its editor). Form is a combination of how subject matter, materials, and elements of art are put together according to some organizational principle. Form is synonymous with composition. Context refers to 1) the causal environment of the image, or the time, place, and circumstances in which it was made, and to 2) its presentational environment, or how and where it is seen by viewers. Content is the meaning of an image; what the work is about; what the work expresses or communicates. To state the content of a work of art is to interpret the work. Sometimes content is misused to mean only ‘social content,’ but all imagery has some kind of content, including abstract and non-representational imagery.

Language accompanying a photograph can over-determine the photograph’s meaning Robert Doisneau’s photograph, At the Café, 1958, was first published in Le Point as part of a light photo essay on Paris cafés. Later it was sold by Doisneau’s agent without his consent to a temperance league and published in a brochure about alcohol abuse. Still later, with no one’s consent, it was used by a French gossip tabloid and printed with the caption ‘Prostitution on the Champs-Élysées.’12 It also is presented as ‘high art’ in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Each of the verbal messages accompanying Doisneau’s photograph likely determined how people read the image.

Photographs mean through use Using a wide-angle lens and small light at end of surgical viewing scope, Lennart Nilsson made a color photograph of a living embryo within the womb, Living Embryo, 1965. Seen in a coffee-table book of photographs, it is an awe-inspiring image of life and technical photography. Imagine it, though on a placard, waved by an angry demonstrator in front of

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an abortion clinic. The meaning of Nilsson’s photograph will change radically according to these two different uses.

Judgments of an image can preclude alternate interpretations of that image Following are three short writings by adults in an art appreciation class at an art museum in response to the photograph by Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987, a color image of a white plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. The three following writings progress from a dismissive judgment and no interpretation, to a judgment and some acceptance, to a thoughtful interpretation of controversial images in society. The judgment of the first respondent denies her the possibility of interpreting the image. I do not feel Piss Christ has a place in our society! For one, I think the so-called artist has a very sick mind to think of urine as an art form. The United States is in majority of being of Christian faith. Piss Christ demoralizes and insults our beliefs and morals we have, as Christians, learned over time. (School teacher, Ohio) This piece is highly offensive to me. I don’t like people who denigrate things that are important to me. However, artists have a responsibility to help us see things in a new light, from a perspective that we may not otherwise recognize. Therefore, as much as I personally do not like this piece, I am forced to conclude that it does have a place in society. (Nancy­, adult student, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio) One positive consequence of controversial images is the very debate and discussion they engender. The church continues to play too large a role in secular life. This image can initiate dialogue. (Walsh, adult student, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio)

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The critical activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about photographs are interrelated and interdependent Richard Avedon’s exhibition and book, In the American West, was widely reviewed by critics, and each of them explicitly described, interpreted, and judged it, and made their theoretical assumptions implicit. In the following brief quotations, it is clear that how they judged the work influenced how they described it and interpreted it; and their theoretical stances toward photography intermeshed with and influenced each of their critical statements. Douglas Davis, generally favorable of the work, described the subject matter as ‘ranchers, housekeepers, rodeo riders and oil drillers, pig men, meatpackers and an army of unemployed drifters.’13 Susan Wiley disapproved of the work and described the subjects as ‘a catalogue of the odd, the bizarre, the defective, the deformed, the demented and the maimed.’14 Richard Bolton was particularly vitriolic in a negative review of the work and asked in print: ‘Were they told that, had they been less dirty, less debilitated, or had better taste, or better posture, they might not have been chosen to be photographed?’15 Vicki Goldberg is a champion of Avedon’s work and to justify it, she cites Billy Mudd, a truck driver and subject of In the American West, who said that seeing his portrait in a museum was the most profound experience of his life and indeed had made him change that life for the better.16

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Images attract multiple interpretations, and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations This principle holds that there is more than one admissible interpretation and that it is desirable to have different interpretations of a single image. Differing interpretations of the same work of art stand along side each other and attract our attention to different features of the same work. One interpretation shows us this aspect of the work of art, while another shows us that aspect. If we only had one interpretation, we would miss the insights that other interpretations provide. The following two paragraphs written about Skoglund’s Radioactive Cats exemplify this principle at work. (The photograph shows many bright green cats climbing all over a gray, poverty-stricken kitchen apartment, with a woman looking into an open refrigerator, while an elderly man sits at a table.) One is written from the point-of-view of the woman at the refrigerator, and the other from the point-of-view of the cat standing on the fallen chair. The first is written by a teacher, the second by a young boy. Imagined voice of the woman at the refrigerator: I know I came over here looking for something but I can’t remember what it was. It feels like someone is pulling on me all the time. He never does anything to help. I’m so tired. I just want to sleep. Why can’t I get a good breath? Why can’t he help me? What is it that smells rotten in here? I know I was looking for something. There must be some way to get him to do something. Why are my feet so cold? Didn’t I come here for a reason? Why is he mumbling at me? I just want to go to bed and sleep and not deal with this mess. What was I looking for? (Art teacher, Alaska) Imagined voice of the cat on a fallen chair: I am so angry that I am radioactive that I knocked down this chair. I think I will do the same to the people that did this to me. Not only are my friends radioactive, but most of my family. We are all going to go back to the nuclear power plant, after we trash this guy’s house. It is also very hard to catch rats at night because now we glow in the dark. (Bobby, eleven years old, Columbus, Ohio)

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Think about the possible riches of interpretive nuance we would obtain if we read twenty paragraphs, one from each student in a class, each assuming a different point-of-view of some one or some thing in the photograph.

All images are in part about the cultures in which they emerged A particular work of art is what it is because it is embedded in a particular culture, time, and social practice, and it is made with some human intent that can often be recognized by examining the work and its context.

All images are in part about other images

– College students first examined photographs by Cindy Sherman, and then tore ads depicting women from magazines, making connections between Sherman’s images and their source material in popular culture.

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Interpretations imply world-views We approach images with personal worldviews. In Nelson Goodman’s words, ‘there is no innocent eye. The eye comes always ancient to its work obsessed by its past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons.’17 The three brief quotes that follow about photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe reveal the worldviews of the critics that influence their criticism of Mapplethorpe’s work. I can not bring myself to describe these pictures in all their gruesome particularities, and it is doubtful that this newspaper would agree to publish such a description even if I could bring myself to write one. (Hilton Kramer)18 They (Mapplethorpe’s photographs) debunk the whole idea of pornography – helping society to get rid of that self-hating concept that ghettoizes sex, that implies that some parts of our sexuality are too unspeakable to mention, too private to be public. (Veronica Vera, artist and model for Mapplethorpe)19 Writing from a gay perspective, critic and photographer Doug Ischar expresses appreciation for some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, especially because they provide ‘representational visibility’ for gays, ‘constructing a productive gay presence in contemporary art, that keeps us visible,’ countering ‘a long tradition of homo-sexual invisibility.’ (Doug Ischar20)

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Once the interpreter’s worldview is identified, choices follow: 1) we can accept the worldview and the interpretation that it influences; 2) reject both the worldview and the interpretation; 3) accept the worldview but disagree with how it is applied to the artwork; and 4) reject the worldview but accept the specific interpretation it yields.

There is a range of interpretations any image will allow An image cannot mean anything that we might want it to mean. Artworks ought not to be treated as if they were Rorschach inkblots, with interpreters seeing in them anything they want to see. Umberto Eco argues that all works of art set limits as to how they can be interpreted. He asserts that texts have rights. The rights of the text are established in part by the ‘internal textual coherence’ of the work that sets itself firmly against any ‘uncontrollable drives’ of the interpreter.21 Stephen Davies, an aesthetician, states: ‘Interpretations are never indifferent to truth.’22 Some students in my college classes worry that we overinterpret images. I am more afraid of underinterpreting them. Jonathan Culler also is not afraid of overinterpreting and instead worries about squelching opportunities to bring to light connections or implications not previously noticed. Culler requests that interpreters ‘ask about what the text does and how: how it relates to other texts and to other practices; what it conceals or represses; what it advances or is complicitous with. Many of the most interesting forms of modern criticism ask not what the work has in mind but what it forgets, not what it says but what it takes for granted.’23

Meanings of images are not limited to what their makers meant them to mean Jerry Uelsmann, photographer: ‘I don’t have an agenda when I begin. I’m trying to create something that’s visually stimulating, exciting, that has never been done before but has some visual cohesiveness for me, has its own sort of life.’24

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This principle asserts that artists’ intents, when they are available, can be very useful to interpreters of those artists’ works of art. This principle, however, resists the belief that the work means what the artist wants it to mean. It also asserts that meanings of works of art are not limited to what their artists intended them to mean. As Minor White, the photographer and influential teacher of photography, said: ‘Photographers frequently photograph better than they know.’25 In Israel Scheffler’s words, ‘Once the text is produced, it is objectified, released, given birth, assuming its own career beyond the maker’s control. To understand it is to see its structure, its organization, its references, its various interpretations…’26 Conventionalism opposes Intentionalism. Conventionalism is the view that the meaning of a work is the set of meanings that can be put upon the work based solely on the linguistic, cultural, and artistic conventions operative at the time the work was produced. Eco refers to ‘the intention of the text,’ meaning that the text photograph provides guidelines or indicators within itself as to how it ought to be interpreted.27 ‘Intention of the text’ is different from ‘intention of the artist’ in that it is a much broader concept and may include the artist’s intent, but certainly includes linguistic, cultural, and artistic conventions operative at the time the work was produced. From an educational perspective, to rely on the artist’s intent for an interpretation of an artwork is to put viewers into a passive, receptive mode as interpreters. Reliance on the artist’s intent unwisely removes the responsibility of interpretation from the viewer; it also robs the viewer of the joy of interpretive thinking and the rewards it yields in new insights into the art and the world.

Interpretations are not so much right as they are more or less reasonable, convincing, informative, and enlightening This principle agrees with aestheticians such as Richard Margolis and Michael Krausz who argue that a ‘singularist approach’ that demands one right interpretation, is a mistaken view of both cultural objects and interpretive practices.28 29 Artworks are not the kind of things that yield

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simple and single interpretations; and interpreters of artworks are not the kind of responding individuals who are looking for simple, single meanings. Karen-Edis Barzman, an art historian, also cautions against the notion of a single, correct interpretation: ‘Given that we come to objects and their texts as a plurality of subjects (with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age), can any of us really serve as arbiters of truth for reading audiences, which are heterogeneous communities of individuals?’30 This principle maintains that interpretations are not so much right, certainly not absolutely and definitively right, but that interpretations are more or less reasonable, convincing, informative, enlightening, persuasive, fresh, profound, well argued. Conversely, interpretations can be unpersuasive, redundant, irrelevant, boring, fragmented, obvious, trivial, strained, and far-fetched.

Some interpretations are better than others, and some are simply wrong Umberto Eco talks of unsuccessful interpretations: ‘certain interpretations can be recognized as unsuccessful because they are like a mule, that is, they are unable to produce new interpretations or cannot be confronted with the traditions of the previous interpretations.’31

A good interpretation tells more about the image than it tells about the interpreter This principle mitigates against preference statements. Statements of likes and dislikes are mere psychological reports about the viewer and should not be mistaken for interpretations nor for reasoned judgments about the image in question. The principle should deter rambling statements made by critics to demonstrate their own brilliance. The principle can also resist personal narratives of the viewer’s that are not made relevant to the image being interpreted. 164

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The objects of interpretations are images, not imagemakers This principle mitigates against ad hominen and ad feminem statements about individuals, especially those whoseimages might be offensive to some: for example, Joel-Peter Witkin, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano.

Good interpretations have coherence, correspondence, and completeness The criterion of coherence asks that an interpretation make sense in itself. The criterion of correspondence asks that the interpretation aptly match what can be seen in and known about the work that is being interpreted. The criterion of inclusiveness asks that the interpretation account for what can be seen in the work and that which is known about the work’s causal environment.32

Interpretation is an endeavor that should be both individual and communal As an educator, I want to teach for interpretations that are both personal and communal. Richard Rorty argues that all interpretations should be personal in the sense that there should be no difference between interpreting a work and using it to better one’s life. For Rorty, a meaningful interpretation is one that causes one to rearrange one’s priorities and to change one’s life.33 Hans Gadamer asserts that to interpret an artwork is to appropriate it, to make it one’s own.34 Immediate Family, a book of photographs by Sally Mann of her children, is controversial for some adults because of the nudity of the children and what some see as sexual content. The book, however, was not controversial for a class of elementary school children who are approximately of the same age as the children in Mann’s photographs. The following two short writings exemplify personal, reflective, and interpretive thoughts

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on Sally Mann’s photographs by young girls. By sharing their individual experiences of the photographs with their classmates, the children achieved a communal understanding of Mann’s work. This community of sixth-grade boys and girls who wrote about Immediate Family could be informed by the adult community as to the threats some adults see in the work, and in turn, these children could inform that adult community with the sensibilities of children.

– In a public school in Ohio, twelve year-old students first examined pages from Immediate Family by Sally Mann, individually wrote interpretive essays about the images, and then read them to the whole class.

I think that Sally Mann tries to show the world many things about children. First, I think that she tries to show people that children just want to grow up. She also tries to show people that children have pride in themselves, they are not ashamed of what they do. They are not ashamed of their bodies.

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She also wants to show people that children are curious. They want to get all they can out of life. She also shows how much energy children have – they really want to get in and do things instead of just sitting back and watching. She shows us that each child is an individual. They really want to just be themselves. Last, but not least, Sally Mann shows that children are people too! They aren’t just little things that sit on the couch and watch TV. They are real living things that want to get involved and learn. (Vickie, age twelve) Sally Mann’s photographs tell the world that children are very playful at heart, yet very serious. A few photographs tell how some children grow up way too fast. In a majority of the photographs, the children had clothes on but in some they didn’t. This shows that children don’t think it matters if you have clothes on or not. It’s what’s inside that counts. Some of the photographs also tell the world that even through play children can work very hard. But some photographs were disgusting like the ones showing dead animals. Sally Mann works very hard to show the world that children are just kids. Let them grow up at their own pace, but don’t let them be babies forever. Kids can be kids. Give them a chance! (Susan, age twelve)

The admissibility of an interpretation is determined by a community of interpreters and the community is selfcorrecting

Although I am advocating for personal interpretations and understandings, importantly, this principle balances the personal with the communal. In addition to Gadamer’s insistence that we ought to appropriate images through interpretation and make them our own, Paul Ricoeur adds the restriction that an artwork has an existence of its own, and must be understood as well as appropriated.35

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This principle is also in agreement with Michael Krausz who argues that there is a range of admissible interpretations established by pertinent practitioners. Interpreters orient other interpreters as to what features of artworks are significant or salient. The community of interpreters provides rules, guidelines, values, and procedures that indicate appropriate methods and maneuvers to be pursued when interpreting works of art. The range of admissible interpretations for any work of art is socially constituted by consensual agreement of pertinent practitioners.36 Or as Eco asserts, certain readings prove themselves over time to be satisfactory to the relevant community of interpreters. An interpretation that is too personal is just that: it does not inform the community of interpreters about the image. An interpretation that is wholly communal and that has no personal meaning for a viewer who holds it, is merely trivial knowledge for that viewer.

Good interpretations invite us to see for ourselves and continue on our own Some interpretations discourage further interpretations. Karen-Enid Barzman names ‘master readings’ those art historical or scholarly interpretations that seek to close interpretive discussions rather than further them. In their manner of interpreting, master readings assert their own correctness or truthfulness with a sense of absoluteness. Such interpretations have ‘a dependence on so much erudition that the reader is disarmed and even daunted at the moment of reception,’ moments in which the writer implicitly affirms power over the reader. Such interpretations position the viewer as a passive and powerless recipient of fixed meaning, namely, the interpreter’s. Such interpretations harmfully deny the plurality of interpreters and suffocate thought. ‘They presume to read authoritatively for their audiences, universalizing their own situated perceptions, fixing meaning with the stamp of finality, and thus rhetorically denying their readers the possibility of intervening interpretations themselves.’ In agreement with Barzman, this principle asks interpreters to ‘refuse finality in the fixing of meaning’ and instead asks viewers to actively engage critically and to produce interpretations

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of their own. In Barzman’s words, ‘We produce meaning – we produce meaning – and the meaning we produce is partial, contingent, and cannot be universalized.’37

Notes 1

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1981.

2

Noël Carroll, ‘Art: Function or Procedure - Nature or Culture?,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 55, No. 1, 1997, p. 20.

3

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976.

4

Paul Thom, Making Sense: A Theory of Interpretation. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, p. 64.

5

Richard Rorty, ‘The Pragmatist’s Progress,’ in Umberto Eco, Interpretation and

6

Kendall Walton, ‘Transparent Pictures,’ an address delivered at the Department

Overinterpretation, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 105. of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, June 2, 1982. 7

Nelson Goodman quoted by Israel Scheffler, In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education, NY: Routledge, 1991, p. 7.

8

Israel Scheffler, In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education, NY: Routledge, 1991, p. 9.

9

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers I-VIII. Hartshorne, C, Weiss, P, & Burks, A, (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1931-58.

10

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981, p. 85.

11

For the first and more complete explanation of selectivity, instantaneity, and credibility, see Terry Barrett, ‘Teaching About Photography: Credibility, Instantaneity, and Selectivity,’ Journal of Art Education, Volume 39, Number 3, May 1986, pp. 12-15; for a more recent version, see Barrett, Interpreting Art: Reflecting, Wondering, and Responding, Chapter 6, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

12

Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society, Boston: David R. Godine, 1980,

13

Douglas Davis, ‘A View of the West,’ Newsweek, September 23,1985, p. 82.

14

Susan Wiley, ‘Avedon Goes West,’ Artnews, March 1986, pp. 86-91.

pp. 178-179.

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15

Richard Bolton, ‘In the American East: Avedon Incorporated,’ Afterimage 15, No. 2, 1987, p. 14.

16

Vicki Goldberg, ‘Age of Avedon,’ Vanity Fair, September 2002, pp. 351-352.

17

Goodman, p. 7.

18

Hilton Kramer, New York Times, July 2, 1989.

19

Veronica Vera, published letter, New York Times, July 30, 1989.

20

Doug Ischar, Afterimage 17, 1990.

21

Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 95.

22

Stephen Davies, ‘Relativism in Interpretation,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53:1 Winter, 1995, p. 9.

23

Jonathan Culler, ‘In Defense of Overinterpretation,’ in Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 111.

24

Jerry Uelsmann, Uelsmann: Process and Perception, Gainesville, FL: University of Press Florida, 1985, p. 23.

25

Minor White, ‘Criticism,’ Aperture 2, No. 2, 1957, pp. 29-30.

26

Scheffler, p. 36.

27

Eco, p. 25.

28

Richard Margolis, ‘Plain Talk about Interpretation on a Relativistic Model,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 53, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 1-7.

29

Michael Krausz, ‘Interpretation,’ Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 520-526.

30

Karen-Edis Barzman, ‘Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 3, Summer 1994, p. 330.

31

Eco, p. 150.

32

E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 190-194.

33

Rorty, p. 97.

34

Hans Gadamer quoted by Ron Bontekoe in ‘Paul Ricoeur,’ Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, V 4, 162-166. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 162.

35

Paul Ricoeur quoted by Bontekoe, p. 166.

36

Michael Krausz, Michael Krausz, ‘Interpretation,’ Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 520-526.

37

Barzman, p. 331.

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APPENDIX • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • •

All images require interpretation. Photographs carry more credibility than other kinds of images and especially require interpretation. Photographs and photographers alter what they picture. People tend to look through photographs rather than at them. Photographs should be seen as opinions. To interpret an image is to respond to it in language. Feelings are guides to interpretations. Photographs are made from light reflecting off of people, places, and objects in the world. Photographs are factual and fictional; factual and metaphorical. Photography is a subtractive medium and painting is additive. The subject matter of a photograph is always cut from a larger context. Photographs are instantaneous. Photographs have unique properties of selectivity, instantaneity, and credibility. SUBJECT MATTER + MEDIUM + FORM + CONTEXT = MEANING Language accompanying a photograph can over-determine the photograph’s meaning. Photographs mean through use. Judgments of an image can preclude alternate interpretations of that image. The critical activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about photographs are interrelated and interdependent. Images attract multiple interpretations, and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations. All images are in part about the cultures in which they emerged. All images are in part about other images. Interpretations imply world-views. There is a range of interpretations any image will allow. Meanings of images are not limited to what their makers meant them to mean.

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Interpretations are not so much right as they are more or less reasonable, convincing, informative, and enlightening. Some interpretations are better than others, and some are simply wrong. A good interpretation tells more about the image than it tells about the interpreter. The objects of interpretations are images, not image-makers. Good interpretations have coherence, correspondence, and completeness. Interpretation is an endeavor that should be both individual and communal. The admissibility of an interpretation is determined by a community of interpreters and the community is self-correcting. Good interpretations invite us to see for ourselves and continue on our own.

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Body Representations in Art and Photography Ben Baruch Blich —

Introduction The purpose of my paper is to present, discuss and debate the problem of body representations in art and photography. In fact, my interest in the problem of representation, i.e.: of conveying information by visual images, goes back to my paper Pictorial realism (Blich 1991), in which I raised the question as to the nature of pictures. A visual image: a painting, an illustration, a photograph and the moving picture in the cinema are all enigmatic vehicles of information. They are considered the most common and most readily perceived means of communication, much easier to create and apprehend than words and sentences, but as soon as we try to explain the reality for which they stand for, it becomes clear that unusual perceptual processes are involved. On the one hand their relation with reality is denotative, and as such they truly reflect and frequently also preserve reality, serving as an easy channel for acquiring knowledge. Yet on the other hand, pictorial rendering raises the complex issue of understanding the act of visual perception: what do we see in pictures? Real lively objects, real scenes, or do we interpret what is actually seen, i.e.: the conventions of colours, lines, dots etc., to be seen as if real objects. This equivocal understanding of pictures stems mainly from our dilemma on how we are to treat the ‘aboutness’ of pictures.

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While pictures are made of paper, canvas, covered with paint, dots, lines, all to be perceived on their own merit, they are also, after all, vehicles of representation, in which we are presumed to identify real objects. Indeed, visual images raise epistemological questions as to how we perceive them, and through them, the world we live in. By confronting painting to the photographic act of representation, I intend to examine remarks colloquially referred to their extent of similarity that lies between them and reality in general, and to the human body in particular. I will show that photography in this respect, alludes to, and sometimes even takes painting to be its source of inspiration. Yet on the other hand, I will show that photography has an advantage on painting even when it strives to convey metaphors, in this case the body as a metaphor. The discussion starts with a note on the epistemology of photography in comparison to painting. Then I go on to discuss the many facets of the human body as represented by painting and photography.

Visual information by Painting and Photography Among the possible means of communication, pictorial representation has accumulated a momentum that none of its counterparts, including language, can credit itself with. Today, more than ever in the history of mankind, pictures have become the main means of transferring information: in education, in moulding public opinion, in advertising, not to mention their traditional role in the visual arts. With the penetration of photography into the arena of representation in the middle of the 19th century, the rules of rendering were changed, and with that the scope of images, which, for ages had been exclusively in the hands of artists. Though it seems odd at the beginning of the third millennium to be still justifying the act of photography, it is nevertheless true to say that the history of modern times is ipso facto the history of the camera. Modern life has flirted with the camera, has worshiped it, and, to a certain extent, modern times would not have been possible without it.

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It is true that in contrast to the hand-made, one-off, traditional craft of representation by painting, photography is an easy, straight forward, technological, mass medium, that each and everyone can handle. Photography does not need much learning or skill to produce, especially today in the digital era, in which the camera is part and parcel of our cellular telephones. Photography is no longer a myth, it has freed itself from the obscure darkroom, from Plato’s cave, to become a medium that not only represents, preserves and artistically exhibits reality, but also dramatically has violated, traditional epistemology by constituting new and unfamiliar attitudes towards the act of representation. Though a photograph is easy to manage and produce, still to this day we are amazed and fascinated by being able to hold in our hands images representing ourselves. On the one hand a photograph is a pictorial representation, and it enhances visual information as paintings do, and yet, on the other hand, a photograph is a real depiction, and as such, deliberately brings to our attention, scenes which traditional vehicles could not portray. Being the most realistic vehicle of representation, photography moulds new and sometimes unexpected points of view onto the scenes depicted, and as such it brings to the open questions concerning perception as well as ethical dilemmas. It was Walter Benjamin who taught us ‘that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert’ (Benjamin, 1968, p. 231), that is: the aura of being a one-off rendering customarily attributed to the traditional means of representation, does not play a role in photography. According to this view, advocated later by Slavoj Zizek and others, the camera is indeed an intricate agent; it serves as a vehicle of documentation, of memory, of preservation (Sontag 1977), and by the same token, it is a voyeuristic vehicle which invades the private and transfers the scenes depicted into the spectator’s possession. The gaze, the seeing, the information retrieved from the photograph, is the essence of the camera’s attributes and the bottom line of the photographic epistemology. One does not simply look and register a photographic scene; one sees and perceives a photographic scene in the same way a child, according to Jacques Lacan, (Lacan 1949) recognises for the first time its own image in the mirror – a stage which marks the child’s ability to reflect on his own body and construct his own self.

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The reflection of the self in a photograph, a mirror, or in the water, as in case of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, is indeed one of the major problems Western civilization is preoccupied with. Painting, sculpting, engraving, carving, were for centuries in the service of mimesis, the only pictorial vehicles denoting the real and the imaginary alike. With the penetration of photography the rules of mimesis were changed, and with it, the status of the observer: from a passive stance to an active, involved, critical observer. The same is true of the object represented by a photograph. From an aesthetic experience, as in the case of a painting, we are faced with a reification of the object depicted by the camera, or, to use Laura Mulvey’s (Mulvey 1989) terminology, the photograph is an agent of fetishistic scopophilia, since what is seen by the photograph is not only an aesthetic experience, something pleasing to look at; a photograph is also an object through which we experience a frame, a window onto reality, and that very photograph, the frame, may become an object in itself, a fetish, replacing the so called ‘real scene.’ To look at a photograph is in many ways to become a voyeur, to unveil the forbidden, the private, and be exposed to real scenes as if they had happened to ones self. To substantiate that statement we can compare a painting made by a skilful painter with a photographer: let us take as an example Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, and place it next to a photograph of a similar scene: Eddie Adams’s A street execution of a Vietcong prisoner (1968). This comparison will point out that being exposed to a painting is in many respects a different experience from being exposed to a photograph. It is true that both pictures depict horrible and horrifying scenes. And yet, if you disregard for a moment aesthetic values and artistic excellence, and concentrate on the information retrieved from the two depictions, and reflect on the epistemological point of view each one of them demands, you may agree with me that a photograph is a spectacle, a hyper-reality representation because it complies not only with truth and objectivity, but also with what is so eloquently defined by Guy Debord (Debord 1992) as the transparency of vision, and to what is labelled by Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1992) as the precession of simulacra.

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Being a transparent vehicle, a photograph is an icon, a simulacrum, which precedes and in many ways also facilitates the scenes it exemplifies. Not that we would not have knowledge about horrible executions without a photograph, but a photograph has the power of articulation, and it turns vague knowledge into a concrete testimony, giving it an ontological credibility. Practically speaking, a photograph is in the position of replacing reality, and as such it represents a state of affairs we would not have been exposed to unless by the act of photography. Moreover, in contrast to a painting which may successfully (or occasionally may fail) to symbolize a certain idea or value (as in the Renaissance art), a photograph has always a reference, and is expected to be relevant even when it depicts aesthetic scenes (landscapes, sunsets, impeccable bodies, etc.), or when it alludes in a roundabout way at political atrocities (as in the case Adams’s photograph). This in turn has an impact on the viewer’s position towards the scenes he sees in a painting and in a photograph. Since a painting is an opaque medium, that is, it denotes a certain scene, let us say – two human bodies at a certain posture, but represents an idea, for example the idea of Creation, as in the case of The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo, a photograph, on the other hand, always denotes the scenes it represents, and will hardly refer at an idea without depicting the real scene. That is why a photograph goes beyond the represented and functions as a simulacrum, whereas a painting is a visual story recruiting narrative devices, such as metaphor, oxymoron, etc. in order to be able to convey its ideas. Goya’s painting is an illustration of a real execution which took place during the French occupation of Spain; it is a painting which denotes an execution, but its intension is to convey the idea of rebellion, liberty, etc. But since the scene is aesthetically depicted, that is, the painter used narrative devices to convey his message (combination of colours, contrasts, etc.), the painting may aesthetically please the viewer and fail to convey its horrible message, as in the case of Adams’s photograph. Would it be incorrect to say that a photograph, due to the nature of its characteristics, is a vehicle which has the power to put the viewer in an awkward position, embarrassing him by the gaze the photograph implicitly imposes on him? Whereas a painting, though horrible and repelling, as in the case of Nicolas Poussin’s The rape of the Sabine Women, or Theodore

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Gericault’s Medusa and many other paintings, as well as scenes in the theatre, for example Othello’s strangulation scene, not to mention scenes in the cinema – are all directed towards the aesthetic, and hardly call for the viewer’s involvement or put him, by the very act of looking at the painting, in the same epistemological position, a photograph (of the same scene) would do. It is, therefore, inconceivable to think nowadays on a painting as a vehicle of information, or take it as a means in moulding our points of view. Again, look at Adams’s execution photograph, would it not elicit questions as to the position taken by Adams? Why did he photograph the scene? Why did he not intervene to stop the execution? And perhaps the most annoying assumption is that probably the execution took place only because of Adams’s presence, and that his camera urged it. Poussin, Goya and Gericault are all excused of raising these question, not only because a painting is a narrative interpretation of the scenes depicted; the same goes also with photography, which is an interpreting vehicle as well, but unlike painting photography has changed the rules of denotation and with it the conventions of perception. A painting would never impose on the viewer the burden of justifying the act of perception: am I looking at a picture as in the case of a painting, or, by looking at the picture, I witness scenes beyond it, as in the case of photography? Am I examining the picture from its aesthetic and narrative points of view (painting), or by being exposed to the picture, I am ipso facto involved, an accomplice, invading the subject’s private as in the case of photography. These are not simple minded questions, and the fact that I raise them vis-à-vis photography, means that in my view the camera, although a mechanical, automatic vehicle, is a medium that puts us, the viewers, in a reflective state of mind, compelling us to adjust the scenes exemplified by the picture, with our dissonant interpretations of the real and the quasireal alike. This is indeed the crux of the difference between a painting and a photograph; the one is a narrative aesthetic display, whereas the other brings to the open ontological questions, and with it the unresolved ‘distinction between what we really see and what we infer through the intellect’ (Gombrich 1972, p. 15). To conclude: we all live in reality, and we all have a certain amount of knowledge as to how reality manifests itself, and yet, when we talk

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about scenes we witness, paint them and photograph them, and try meaningfully to interpret their various manifestations, we consciously or unconsciously turn to use different levels of language games – the language we commonly use (if there is such a thing), and languages of representation, used by painting and photography. Reality, so it seems, is a theory laden concept, exemplified by various sign systems, and my purpose was to point at two options: the one advocated by painting, and the other by photography.

The body The human figure, the body and its parts, were for centuries and are still to these days in the focus of the arts. Bodies were painted, sketched, sculptured, engraved, etc. Poets and writers were inspired by the human body and eloquently described it. The new two modern media – photography and the cinema, could not disregard the body, and turn their face from it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that photography is possessed and haunted by the body ever since. My intention in this part of my paper is to discuss several artists, some of them are notoriously known as photographers, whereas others are commonly defined as multimedia artists, and examine their interpretations of the human body. Before doing so, let me say that to understand photographs and be able to apprehend their iconography, one has to bear in mind that they continue developing what was already debated by traditional means of rendering in the visual arts, such as painting. Though photographers do not refer consciously to the history of painting, and some of them deny any influence from other media, it seems to me correct to say that they can not refrain from absorbing into their work ideas painters dealt with. After all human figures were painted in the history of Western civilization since antiquity, and I am confident that all of you are familiar with hundreds if not thousands of paintings which portray the body, and therefore to deny any connection between painting and photography, would be a careless conclusion.

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And indeed, painting, especially 19th century painting, has much to do with the photographic point of view made by the camera. The first painter, which impressed me deeply, is Theodore Gericault, who in a series of sketches painted legs, limbs, hands, heads gathered from dead people, and portrayed them as in the genre of still life (see his series of paintings ‘severed limbs’ painted in 1818). The paintings are actually studies made by Gericault as did many artists before him, and yet he is the first who actually painted them as dead parts, as organs dissected from corpses as if to put an emphasis on the fact that the human body is made of fractions, is an assembly of parts, and has nothing in common with our concept of the divine human being as portrayed by the Renaissance artists. Though artists, philosophers and scientists, seem to reach and construct their notions individually, the truth is, even today, that they unknowingly lean on ‘background’ knowledge articulating intuition, hypothesis and theory. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise to find out that the new bodily formation concepts in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were attributed mainly to the idea that nature is a mechanized system. Advocated firstly by Thomas Hobbes, who in a roundabout way expanded the exclusion of theological necessitation by recruiting Euclidean geometry as the basis for his analysis of nature, and elaborated later on as a materialistic reductionism by Charles Darwin and Ivan Pavlov. In the course of this model Hobbes defined space and motion as the sole means of reality, coupled with the notion of interaction he concluded that sensible change is due to the fact that there is nothing but bodies in the universe. Substance is synonymous to ‘body’, which exists independently of our thoughts. This materialistic trend was attenuated for a sort period of time by Hobbes’ contemporary René Descartes. Though he did not completely reject materialism, at least vis-à-vis the inanimate world, he endowed human beings with immaterial and immortal spirits which were not subdued to causal processes. A turning point in spreading materialism as the sole basis for the understanding of the universe at large and in particular the human being, appeared in Julian de la Mettrie’s book published in Leiden 1748, L’Homme Machine. As a medicine doctor who fled from Paris to find refuge in Holland and Prussia, de la Mettrie expressed the view of man

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as a self-moving machine. By enumerating bodily needs, such as hunger and sleep, and by pointing at its processes in acquiring knowledge of languages, habits, moral conduct, and aging – de la Mettrie embarrassed the well established belief that the spiritual soul is the sole explanation of human behaviour. Since man is a segment in nature, and nature as such is a collection of laws, human being’s actions are constituted on natural causes. Sensation, intellectual abilities, thoughts, passions and even beliefs, were identified as inner bodily motions. Hobbes, de la Mettrie, Holbach, Descartes, if to mention well known names who have transformed European thought during the 17th and 18th centuries towards the idea of nature as a mechanized system, had atomized the human body, stripped it of its appearance and Godly qualities, only to render it on physical qualities such as size, shape, colour, motion, weight, etc. Bodies had become matters in motion, randomly interacting, without any specific divine cause. It should not surprise us that less than hundred years later, in 1818 Mary Shelly published her epic novel Frankenstein which was an expression of the romantic aspiration towards creating a human body made by man (and not by God), to overcome sickness and death. And that Gericault’s paintings, painted at the same year, were in fact a visual statement of the materialistic point of view, advocated later on by Charles Darwin (Darwin 1881), who treated the body not as a divine Godly impeccable created substance, but as an accumulation of organic parts, each assigned to accomplish a job, like a machine, created in the course of evolution. This is in part the reason for painters like Francois Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and above all – Gustave Courbet, the 19th century artist, who made an explicit reference to the body, the erotic body and to its organs. Let me in brief mention the Odalisque by Boucher (painted in 1745), who invites us to look at her private quarters in which she offers her body and her flesh, in a tempting look. Or Fragonard’s Bathers (painted in 1765), a painting influenced by Rubens, in which fluidly bodies are painted in extreme erotic context.

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Courbet went a step further in his paintings, The sleepers (1866) A woman in the waves, and in his provocative painting The origin of the world (1866). Looking at these paintings, one can not stay indifferent to the allusions to pornography at large, and especially to hard core pornography. Courbet stripped off not only the clothes of the figures he painted, but explicitly pointed at their sexual organs, ignoring their identity as in the case of The origin of the world. His paintings can be interpreted on the borderline between traditional high art, and mass production art, and the reason I find them in the twilight zone between traditional art and modern popular culture, is the fact that none of the subjects he painted refer or disclose information as to their background, or give us a clue why they were depicted in the paintings, except for exhibiting in public their organs. It is in these paintings that Courbet and Gericault have prophesized the agenda of photography, and both paved the road for thousands of photographs depicting the human body. The first photographer who complied with this agenda was Eadweard Muybridge. Eadweard Muybridge is in no doubt a pioneer, and may I say a paradigm photographer, who took his work to the extreme by placing his subjects as if they were specimen of scientific research. His endless series of pictures, of animals and human beings alike, are a testimony to this interpretation: Muybridge is not a documentary photographer; Muybridge is a scientist who has in a roundabout way turned the camera into an involved agent in the process of seeing. Due to his studies the camera has become a medium, an apparatus, of representing movement one could not perceive and experience without. As such it has extended the borders of information and has conditioned our knowledge; it is the utmost modern vehicle to absorb and by the same token – create knowledge, much the same as was the telescope in the days of Gallileo. By stripping off the clothes from the figures photographed, and isolating them against a bare background or a grid for purposes of measure, Muybridge elevates perception into Plato’s world of ideas. These studies have become an historical cornerstone of photography one can not ignore.

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And indeed, photographers of all periods could not but relate to Muybridge’s works, especially those who took the body as their subject matter. Man Ray on the one hand together with Cindy Sherman and Gilbert and George, and on the other – Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Jeff Koons – in spite of the differences among them, dialectically correspond with Muybridge, and in many ways continue his experiments. Man Ray in his 1947 series labeled Mr. and Mrs. Woodman, had opened to my mind, a new frontier in the understanding of the human body, which was adopted later on by Cindy Sherman, and to some extent also by Helmut Newton. It is a series of well staged scenes, which exibit encounters between two subjects – Mr. and Mrs. Woodman. By using special puppets which customarily are used as model mannequins, Ray empties his pictures from any direct reference to reality; after all what we see are not human beings, but models, and yet by using puppets as models of movements and of postures, Ray sheds light on the body as an object. By extending the semantics of the body to refer also to models, Ray had opened the gate before artists such as Cindy Sherman, who constantly and some may say – obsessively, raises in her works an existential question of identity. Now it is true that Ray has objectified the body, and has emptied it from subjective personal identity, but by doing so he raised the meaning of the photographic act: from a scientific objective means of rendering reality (as in the case of Muybridge), into an involved vehicle which is in the power to make statements concerning the human condition. And indeed, his works at large, as well as this bitterly humorous series of Mr. and Mrs. Woodman as marionettes of love and lust, were influenced, no doubt, by Freud’s Interpretation of dreams, in which the unconscious, the dream, and the absurd condition of the human kind, are revealed and debated. The camera in Man Ray’s hands is an anarchistic vehicle as it maneuvers us to apprehend facts concerning our body we tend to repress or deny, and by using a model of two figures, of two puppets, Ray rewinds our fantasy and turns it to be true.

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Using an artifact, such as a puppet or a doll, either as a model or as a means to elicit in the viewer sentiments towards his or her own existential condition, is meticulously done by Cindy Sherman, who steps one pace ahead and endows to the body a new, and a morbid meaning. I refer to her series of works done in the beginning of the nineties, in which anatomical figures and parts of dolls, replace the complete human figure. Some of the critics who referred to her work have defined it as an expression of hysteria, others have given it a feminist meaning and stated that they continue her previous works. These are all legitimate and interesting interpretations, and yet I want to point at another option which puts her work in line with Theodore Gericault, Muybridge and Ray, and state that these special works in which the body is dissected and deconstructed, are the utmost expression of the loss of humanity, of despair, of fear, of nihilism. In an interview Cindy Sherman said that her works are meant not only for the pleasure of the viewer, but as she said her intention was to ‘bite him back’, to put the spectator in the position of gazing at her works, invading the scenes she presented as in pornography. Her provocative series of body parts constructing hybrid dolls which are made of training mannequins, were correctly described by Amanda Cruz as ‘gruesome, hilarious, which we can not help but relate because they appear so familiar’ (Cruz 2001, p. 12). It is, indeed, a shocking series as the sexual elements stand for death, power, aggression, beauty, sadness, etc., and they compel the viewer to reflect on his or her dreams, uncontrolled thoughts, desires, as if the stimuli presented are not fictional but constitute a realistic context. The added value of Sherman’s photographs, is what I refer to as an epistemological revelation which puts the educated and sensitive spectator who is familiar with the history of body representations in art, in a reflective position, as he or she are required to observe their intimate body, private erotic images, and their subconscious libidinal dreams in a photograph exhibited in a public arena such as a museum, a gallery, a book.

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In order to deepen our understanding of Sherman’s approach to the body let me compare her works with Mapplethorpe, Newton and Jeff Koons. One does not need a sensitive eye to see the differences between them. Whereas Mapplethorpe, Newton and Koons treat the body as a signifier, that is – with the help of the body they point at and signify state of affairs beyond the photograph, Cindy Sherman’s works should be taken as presenting an end on their own, that is – they should be treated as relics which serve as a signifier and a signified of the missing abused body, of the deformed amputated parts of the body, of the mutilated body. Cindy Sherman represents the absence, the void, the silent, as did Gericault in his sketches mentioned above; Mapplethorpe, Newton and Koons depict the presented, the attendant body, as in the paintings of Boucher, Fragonard and Courbet. Indeed, when we come to examine their works, especially those made by Mapplethorpe, one can not ignore his insistence on the presented, on the real, on the well balanced, clear, aesthetic body, even when he depicts parts of a body, like a hand, a leg, and sexual organ. It was Arthur Danto (Danto 1996) who nicely defined Mapplethorpe’s works as a rare combination of Dionysus and Appolon, the two opposing gods in Greek mythology, one representing lust and ecstasy the other representing order, virtue and steadiness. Later on it was Germano Celant (Celant 1992) who added Narsissus to the list of gods characterizing Mapplethorpe’s works, who play a major role in Mapplethorpe’s understanding of the body. It seems to me correct to say that his approach to the body as well as his treatment of parts of the body, such as a hand, a leg, a head., and sexual organs – are all depicted under the veil of Appolon, i.e.: they are well staged, delicately photographed, and yet on the other hand – the subjects chosen and their contexts, unveils Mapplethorpe’s indulgence, sadomasochistic undercurrent, and fetishism. Take for instance his model Lisa Lyon, a body builder, he photographed for almost 3 years, and who served in his photographs as an epitomized body – both male and female, a masculine physical identity with a female embodiment. It is one of the best examples in which the body becomes not only a means but also an end for Mapplethorpe to express his desire

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for a body full of energy, a virile dynamic body, a ‘kind of deity for whom everything is possible – a very strong and unreal sexual power’ concludes Celant (Celant 1992, p. 48). By glorifying the body and its organs, it might be wrongly thought that Mapplethorpe takes the viewer back to the Renaissance, to the ideal impeccable body, ignoring sickness, death, misery, and mutilation. This is indeed a wrong interpretation; Mapplethorpe’s works are loaded with aggression, with loneliness and fear, he successfully disguised behind his Renaissance approach to the body. In spite of the body’s glamorous appearance, and its healthy athletic built up, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his obsessive drive to exhibit the body and present it as an offer to the gods, Mapplethorpe (and the same goes with Helmut Newton and Jeff Koons), is publicly referring to his actual self, to Robert Mapplethorpe, the private concealed person. In that sense, the body depicted is an expression of the needs he strives for, and one may conclude that his works presented in books and galleries were done for the one and only receiver, i.e.: Robert Mapplethorpe. The same goes with Helmut Newton. Newton took the ordinary fashion model, stripped her off, and stressed her erotic and pornographic aspects. By displacing the fashion model from her ‘natural’ context – the fashion show, and transplanting her in a cold, alienated environment – an office, a cellar, a garage, an hotel room, he undermined the glamorous side of the fashion model and pointed at her carnal, erotic aspect. His insistence on undefined backgrounds, and his use of dolls, window shows mannequins, and especially his insistence on an obscure, film noir, narrative in his photographs, Newton skillfully takes Mapplethorpe’s legacy of legitimately depicting the naked body, to defy any reference to the straight, to the normative, to the virtuous. Newton’s bodies are chaotic, sometimes even mutilated, maltreated, confined, and to some extent they are surrealist, all meant to stir our imagination, our daydreams, our hidden and forbidden sentiments towards what are considered models of beauty.

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Putting their insured bodies in unusual environments, twisting them, ordering them to perform harsh gestures and movements, dressing them with strange clothes, and above all – photographing them in quasipornographic scenes, Newton no doubt challenges and provokes the innocent eye of the viewer as if to seduce him to look again and again at the photographs, as do voyeurs who can not but look and gaze without any conscious control. This very trend was brought to the extreme by Jeff Koons who had bluntly exposed himself and his wife, known as ‘La Cicciolina’, in his series Made in heaven as part of his artistic project which glorifies mundane and ordinary objects, personas and labels. It is one of the rare occasions in which the artist, in this case the photographer, turns the camera at his private and intimate world, as if to defy voyeurism and fight back the notion attached to the camera as an intruder, an invader, as a means to get hold of the concealed. Koons opens the door for us, and by exposing himself and his wife, he undermines the tasks attributed to the camera as a vehicle of representation which presents scenes one would not be able to see without. Moreover, Koons and let me add also Gilbert and George, are calling upon us the viewers to see their bodies as they themselves do. In the case of Gilbert and George we see pictures in which Gilbert and George are staged in between brown human excrement, and the message of the body, that is to say – the body depicted from its bodily anal perspective, is an existential message, which puts forward their decaying and old bodies to say that ‘we are human being, dressed up in suits or not, full of complexities, of differences. We are naked, we are full of shit – that is what we are trying to show. It is a kind of existence, the realism of existence. That we are here’ (cited from the Stedelijk Museum catalog, 1996). In between the lines we can hear that Gilbert and George attribute to their bodies an existential meaning, that is to say – they take their anatomical built up to symbolize the fact ‘that we are here.’

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This exhibitionist approach to the body, shared also by Jeff Koons, is in fact a new interpretation of the body and of the role of the camera as well. If the body in previous interpretations was seen as a scientific specimen or a victim, and the camera as a means by which we the viewers invade the private and the concealed, now under Koons and Gilbert and George approach, the body serves as an existential statement and the camera is its reflection. To conclude my paper, let me return to one of my earliest statements. The fact that we are corporeal, that we are all bodies, and the fact that most of us are familiar with the look of our bodies and the ways they function, does not entail that the images we produce by the photographic vehicle, are formed by the same ‘language game.’ The photographic image, in spite of its causal link to the object depicted, is nevertheless a subjective product, and as such it contributes to our understandings as to what bodies are, and in a roundabout way it enhances our beliefs in the power of the camera to create as much as possible points of view vis-a-vis our reality. Would it be a fair conclusion to say that without the camera we would not be able to grasp our own intimate image of our body? Would it be a far fetched assumption to say that with the help of the camera we reflectively construct our reality? There are no straightforward answers to these question, yet we can say for certain that without the camera these questions would not have risen at all.

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Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, Simulation and Simulacra, translation by: Glaser, S. F, Michigan University Press (Michigan, 1981) pp. 1-42 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York, 1968) Blich, Baruch Ben, ‘Pictorial realis’, Empirical studies of the Arts, vol. 9 (2) (1991) pp. 175-189 Celant, Germano, ‘The Satyr and the Nymph: Robert Mapplethorpe and his Photography’, Mapplethorpe, Electa (Milano, 1992) pp. 11-65 Cruz, A., ‘Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty years of Cindy Sherman’, Cindy Sherman – Retrospective, Thames & Hudson (1997) pp. 1-17 Darwin, Charles, The descent of Man and Selection in relation to sex, Ams Press (1871) Debord, Guy, La Societe du Spectacle, Gallimard (Paris, 1967) Danto, A., Playing with the edge: the photographic achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe, University of California Press (1996) Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A study in the Psychology of Pictorial representation, Princeton University Press (Princeton, 1960) Lacan, Jacques, ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’ Revue francaise de psychanalyse, no. 4 (Paris, 1949) pp. 449-455 Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Visual and other Pleasures Indiana University Press (1989) pp. 14-26 Popper, Karl, ‘Epistemology without a knowing subject’ Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1967) pp. 106-152 Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Dell Pub. Co. (New York, 1977)

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Camera Lucida, another Little History of Photography Geoffrey Batchen —

Those of us interested in providing an appropriate historical framework for photography are faced with a veritable mountain of methodological problems. Photography implodes reality and representation, time and space, leading Roland Barthes to describe it as ‘an anthropological revolution in man’s history’, a ‘truly unprecedented’ type of consciousness.’1 But photography’s peculiarities – its faithful replication of what it sees; its simultaneous articulation of past, present and future; its capacity for endless reproduction and shifting of shape; the infinite number of its product – represents a seemingly insoluble historiographic challenge. After all, how do you write a history of a ‘consciousness’? How do you write a history for something that escapes easy definition, has no discernable boundaries, and operates on the principle of reflection? (How, for example, do you separate a photograph from what it’s of or from the unfolding context of its reception?) How do you invent a voice (or voices) for this history that can speak to photography’s emotional effects as well as its physical and formal characteristics and economic and political ramifications? How can you speak of and from a local position and yet encompass photography’s global reach? The problem is to transform the way that the history of photography is represented so that this history can, for the first time, engage with photography in all of its many aspect and manifestations. One place we might look for a model

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of how to go about conceiving such a history is Barthes’ own little history of photography, his last book Camera Lucida.2 Some have said that Camera Lucida was the worst thing that ever happened to photographic discourse, because the book appears to abandon Barthes’ earlier commitment to the political analysis of images in favor of a textual hedonism. And it’s certainly true that Camera Lucida – with its stated dissatisfaction with sociology, semiology and psychoanalysis as systems of analysis, its epicurean, autobiographical tone, and its interest in formulating ‘the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no photography’ (CL, 9) – seems in every respect to be the antithesis of this same author’s work from the 1950s and 1960s. Having seemingly abandoned both the science of semiotics and the politics of Marxism, the Barthes of Camera Lucida instead ruminates on the nature of the photographic medium, seeking, as he says on his first page, ‘to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’, by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images’ (CL, 3). He pursues this ‘ontological desire’, as he calls it, by way of his own personal responses to various photographs (perversely, the most important of these – a portrait of his recently deceased mother as a young girl – is never reproduced). All this seems very different from the trenchant ideological analysis that motivated the essays we find in Barthes’ Mythologies.3 Despite this apparent divergence of aims, I want to argue that there is in fact a sustained politics at work in Camera Lucida, and that this politics is found in the way Barthes deals with history; I propose, therefore, that Camera Lucida is best read, not so much as a book of critical theory, but as a history of photography. Most discussions of Camera Lucida tend to focus on the problem of distinguishing studium from punctum, and on the intricacies of Barthes’ rhetorical flourishes and learned asides. And then, of course, there is the undoubted allure of the book’s sub-theme: death (photography’s, his mother’s, and his own). This focus, and the fact that Camera Lucida doesn’t look or read like our standard histories, has, I suspect, distracted attention from the broader structure of the book and from its carefully calibrated survey of photography’s history.

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It is worth noting, for example, that Camera Lucida is comprised of two equal parts, each divided into twenty-four sections. One half of the book is thus a mirror image of the other. Such a structure is not unprecedented in the history of small histories of photography. As Sabine Gölz has pointed out, Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay, A Little History of Photography, employs the same kind of division. In a comparison of the final printed version with an earlier manuscript, Gölz argues that Benjamin even swapped paragraphs around to ensure that his key definition of aura remained at the exact halfway point in the text, becoming the fulcrum around which turns his greater argument about the political potential of photography. Gölz also describes how Benjamin’s dense montage of references and strategic metaphors of light and shadow set out to textually ‘photograph’, or assimilate, both reader and author, as if we are looking into the reflective surface of a daguerreotype and seeing ourselves staring back.4 Like Barthes, Benjamin chooses to illustrate his history with relatively banal photographs.5 But these pictures nevertheless induce a number of poetic readings from him, as if Benjamin too is seeking to explain the punctum-like effect of his own subjective response to certain photographs. He speaks, for example, of the ‘unruly desire’ evoked in him by Hill and Adamson’s photograph of a Newhaven fishwife and, even more powerfully, of ‘an irresistible urge’ to search a picture of Dauthendey and his fiancée for signs of her future suicide. He looks, he says, for ‘the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where, in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment, the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.’6 This dizzying temporal convolution is again reminiscent of Barthes’ description of his own photographic experiences in Camera Lucida. Other correspondences between these two little histories are more subtle. Carolin Duttlinger, for example, has noted the fact that Benjamin misidentifies (she says deliberately) the woman with Dauthendey in the photograph that has inspired his temporal rhapsodies. For this woman is actually his second wife and not the mother of Dauthendey’s six children who went on to commit suicide. Benjamin drew the details from a biographical account written by Dauthendey’s son but apparently chooses,

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in the interests of positing a photographically induced delirium, not to remember exactly what he has read there. The photograph therefore ends up inducing an emotive response to something other than itself.7 Barthes too is guilty of a strategically faulty memory. As Margaret Olin and others have recognized, Barthes thinks back to a photograph reproduced earlier in his book and realizes that ‘the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing… a slender ribbon of braided gold’ (CL, 53). However, if we look back ourselves, we see that both women in the Van der Zee photograph are actually wearing pearls. The gold necklace he remembers is worn instead by Barthes’ aunt, and not in Camera Lucida but in a family photograph reproduced in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Olin links this slippage from one photograph to another to a more disturbing possibility – that the famous Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’ mother never actually existed.8 Could it be that Barthes intends it to function only as a fictional archetype, the ur-photograph? If so, it's a clever rhetorical strategy. Whether real or imaginary, its place in his book is a space into which every reader projects their own punctum and enacts their own primal relationship to a lost loved one. It would seem that both Barthes and Benjamin are willing to cross the line into fiction when it suits their purposes; that is, they lie when it allows them to describe a greater truth.9 Despite these various similarities, Barthes notoriously fails to reference Benjamin’s work in his bibliography or marginal notes (both of which are unfortunately deleted from the English edition).10 The structural duality of Camera Lucida does however obediently repeat Barthes’ own enduring interest in the complexities of binary thinking. ‘For a certain time,’ Barthes writes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, ‘he went into raptures over binarism; binarism became for him a kind of erotic object.’11 We see the evidence of this erotics in Barthes’ frequent coupling of binary terms as a means of description, and especially in his descriptions of the functioning of photographs: denotation/connotation and studium/punctum are the most obvious examples.12 So it should come as no surprise to find Barthes manifesting this same binarism as the very infrastructure of Camera Lucida. But what has to be decided is the function of this structure and the significance of its duality.

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There are twenty-four photographs illustrated in black and white in Camera Lucida, along with the single color reproduction of a Polaroid image by French photographer Daniel Boudinet. It’s interesting to consider this selection of pictures for a moment, free from the framing text that informs their meanings in the book. The illustrations appear at regular, if unpredictable, intervals and come to us in no particular chronological order. Ten of them are from the nineteenth century, with the earliest (which Barthes mistakenly captions as ‘The first photograph’) dated to 1823 and the latest, including Boudinet’s work, taken in 1979, the year in which the book was written. So, while famously claiming to make only himself ‘the measure of photographic ‘knowledge’ (CL, 9), Barthes nevertheless manages to offer his readers a full survey of photography, including examples from the 1820s, the 1850s, the 1860s, the 1880s, the 1890s, 1900, the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s. Not a bad coverage for a selection that pretends to be arbitrary and entirely personal. Of course certain photographers, and thus certain kinds of photography, are privileged within this selection. There are four pictures by Kertész, and two each by Nadar, Wessing, Avedon, Mapplethorpe and Klein. There are also two pictures by unknown photographers. Some have complained about Barthes’ bad taste, about the bourgeois mediocrity of his choices. As it happens, Barthes has a bit to say about the role of taste in his book, claiming to be able to transform his own individual preferences into a ‘science of the subject’, into a ‘generality’ (CL, 18). The continued popularity of the book, despite the banality of his picture selection, would seem to lend some credence to this claim. Certainly, by making himself such a central rhetorical element of his account of photography, Barthes makes us self-consciously aware of his authorial role, both as writer and curator. This is unusual in history books, which usually prefer to adopt a tone of distanced objectivity, as if history thereby gets to magically speak itself. Not so in Camera Lucida, which opens with a first-person account of the author’s ‘amazement’ at the contiguous relationship that photography enjoys with the past and is inflected with Barthes’ voice throughout. We

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are always aware of him as the producer of the text we read, and of his historical account as an entirely subjective, and therefore biased and contestable, one. Barthes is also anxious to emphasize his own amateurism; he speaks, he tells us, not as a photographer but from the point of view of the spectator, as an everyman. His choice of pictures seems equally amateur, very much in keeping with his own taste and interests (accordingly, his bibliography includes a 1976 issue of Rolling Stone as well as books by Lacan and Proust). Late in the book, however, he claims a special privilege for this taste – the taste of the amateur – at least as far as photographic practice is concerned: ‘it is the amateur...who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the noeme of Photography.’ (CL, 99). The implication of Camera Lucida is that the amateur historian is similarly privileged, able to offer insights into photography beyond the capacity of the blinkered professional. Looking at the images that Barthes chooses as illustrations, there’s no doubt that he prefers to talk about photojournalism and portraiture – that is, about public forms of photography – rather than about other, more visually-innovative genres. These are for the most part very familiar sorts of pictures, the kind you might see in your daily newspaper or that you might encounter through a casual perusal of certain popular photography books (he actually takes many of them from the same 1977 special issue of Nouvel Observateur where he would have also read a French translation of Benjamin’s ‘Little History’). But his choices are still politically inflected in a number of interesting ways. One portrait by Avedon, for example, is, Barthes tells us, of a man born a slave, while another features an African-American labor leader who has just died (‘I read an air of goodness,’ Barthes says, ‘no impulse of power: that is certain’ CL, 110). Another group portrait just happens to be by a relatively-neglected African-American photographer, James van der Zee, which Barthes relates to struggles for racial justice. Other pictures show political leaders (Queen Victoria) and political assassins (Lewis Payne). We also get two scenes from the conflict in Nicaragua, in 1979 the latest site of American imperialist ambition. None of these is an innocent

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choice. Nor are Barthes’ occasional references to his own homoerotic desires (‘the photograph is handsome, as is the boy’ CL, 96). Once again, the presence of the personal, and the narrowness of the choices, works to signal to the reader that this selection is not – cannot be – comprehensive and makes no claims to be so. This distinguishes Barthes’ approach from that taken by most other historians, who present their selection as The, rather than A, history of photography.13 The fact that his selection of photographs is idiosyncratic suggests that the choice of photographs is not as important as the way they are analyzed. History, for Barthes, is a mode of reading, not a procession of self-evident masterworks. The implication is that these pictorial selections could be changed over and over again, and that, if we could each develop the capacity for critical reading, all of us could curate our own history of photography. Camera Lucida demonstrates, in other words, that same shifting in power from author to reader that Barthes had advocated back in 1968 in his famous essay ‘The Death of the Author.’14 What is most striking about his selection, however, is his total disinterest in avant-garde practice (note the absence, for example, of anything overtly coded as art), and this, I suspect, is taken by some critics to be his real offense. The assumption behind such a criticism is that avant-garde practice is, by definition, political practice. The function of good art history is to privilege the historical avant-garde in the medium’s history and to thereby provide a model (both artistic and social/political) for similarly transgressive action in the present. Despite his own association with avant-garde literature and abstract painting, Barthes did not seem to be convinced of the efficacy of this approach to the history of photography. Perhaps he recognized that a normative history that privileges avantgarde practice, even those practices that at some point contested the establishment of their own time, is still a normative history. It merely feeds an art world economy for whom such ‘dead’ avant-gardes are only so many commodities, intellectual and otherwise.15 In Camera Lucida, Barthes seems to be interested in exploring the possibility of inventing an avant-garde form of history, not in providing yet another history of avant-garde pictures.

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The bibliography in La Chambre Claire cites Beaumont Newhall’s 1964 edition of The History of Photography, published by the Museum of Modern Art and still the founding model for most of our prevailing survey histories of photography. Recent examples of the genre by Michel Frizot and Mary Warner Marien have added breadth to Newhall’s story, but have otherwise retained his chronological narrative structure (with its inevitable hints at linear progress) and his art-historical value system, with its emphasis on origins and originality.16 These kinds of histories actually tell us relatively little about their subject; they instead tell us a lot about certain select photographers and a bit about a few individual photographs. History is here subsumed to the demands of biography and art, rather than being shaped by the specific qualities of its subject. We are presented with photographers (the masters) and photographs (the masterpieces) but are told almost nothing about photography, the historical phenomenon and cultural experience. This is precisely what, in its few short pages, Camera Lucida does tell us quite a lot about. Barthes had an intense and sustained interest in history, and in photography’s place in it. In Camera Lucida he repeats his argument that ‘it is the advent of the Photograph – and not, as has been said, of the cinema – which divides the history of the world.’ (CL, 88) In Barthes’ historical schema, then, the study of photography enjoys an exhilarating urgency and importance, and his personal ruminations about this photograph or that take on an unexpected weight, for they bear on the whole history of modern life. Moreover, by adopting the voice of the generic Spectator, Barthes provides the beginnings of a history of photography’s reception. He doesn’t just tell us what a photograph looks like, but also how that look feels, at least to him. He thereby opens up the whole question of the photographic experience – of the emotions stirred by photographs – as something proper to the concerns of critical historians. Now, all this truck with sentiment and emotion, with first-person pronouns and autobiography, is bound to make some academics a little nervous. Not only does it border on narcissism but it also loses the rhetorical attachment to objective science that gives third-person histories like Newhall’s their scholarly tone and ability to persuade (Camera Lucida,

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by contrast, offers a photography one could cry over). But this is precisely the point that Barthes wants to make, the point that the personal must be taken seriously as the field within which the political operates. But his turn to the personal is also in keeping with Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of the index, key to Barthes’ ontological definition of photography. ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor’ (CL, 3), is Barthes’ response to his viewing of a photograph of Napoleon’s brother. This amazement, he tells us, is the prompt that led to the writing of the rest of the book. An index is, Peirce says, ‘in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses of memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other. . . Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity.’17 Peirce’s notion of indexical semiosis collapses any sharp distinction between a referent and the psychological associations a viewer brings to it. In Peirce’s theory of semiotics, in other words, there is no real outside of the activity of representation. Equally, there is no activity of representation without ‘the senses of memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign.’ An equivalent oscillation back and forth between photograph and viewer, and between text and reader, is a central element of Barthes’ discussion throughout Camera Lucida. This leads us back to the question of politics. In his 1971 essay, ‘Mythology Today,’ Barthes offers a critique of his own earlier efforts at demystification. Barthes argues there that ‘it is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked... it is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance but to fissure the very representation of meaning.’18 As he says, ‘the historical field of action is thus widened: no longer the (narrow) sphere of French society but far beyond that, historically and geographically, the whole of Western civilization. ‘The task, he argues, is ‘no longer simply to upend (or right) the mythical message...but rather to change the object itself, to produce a new object, point of departure for a new science.’19 His discussion of photography in Camera Lucida, which he claims to be of the order of ‘a new science for each object’ (CL, 8), should be regarded as a contribution to this other ‘new science’ as well.

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Consider again Barthes’ decision to divide his book into two equal parts, one a ‘palinode’ or retraction of the other. Early in the book he tells us that ‘the Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive’ (CL, 6). He goes on to conclude that ‘this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there,’ this special relationship between a thing and its indexical trace, is what constitutes the essence of photography, that quality which distinguishes it from all other systems of representation, the quality that makes photography such an ‘unprecedented type of consciousness.’ His mode of analysis throughout Camera Lucida – indeed, the very organization of the book itself – therefore emulates what he sees as photography’s own most ‘fundamental feature’ (CL, 9) – the binary economy of its composition. Note, for example, the dualism of his own quest for the essence of photography, seeking it first in a plurality of photographs and then in its exact opposite, the qualities of just one, a dualism given concrete form in the book by its division into two equal parts. In similar fashion, he opens his book with a color reproduction of Boudinet’s untitled picture, but provides neither a caption nor any textual commentary. Compare this to his extensive commentary on the picture of his mother that he never reproduces; in Camera Lucida, one appears as the doppleganger of the other. Indeed, the absent presence of the Winter Garden photograph is a void into which every reader projects their own banal snapshot, such that zero and infinity turn in on each other without pause. In this manner, Barthes provides a textual space into which the entire history of photography can be funneled without a single picture from it being reproduced. His choice of title also deserves close analysis. A camera lucida is a drawing device invented before photography. It involves a glass prism that focuses light reflected into it from both a scene and from the paper placed beneath the instrument and then merges these two light sources on to the back of the retina of an individual observer.20 It is an instrument in which one sees an image only in one’s own mind’s eye,

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making looking into an entirely private and individual experience. Barthes perversely chooses the term for this inward-looking, cameraless apparatus to represent a book ostensibly devoted to our common experience of looking out at camera pictures. Everywhere you look, the book is fraught with binaries of this kind, with each term presented as an inverse of the other. Such a structuring device also happens to emulate the binary relationship of negative and positive that is at the heart of so many photographs (inseparably so in an ambrotype or a daguerreotype). In order to talk in an incisive way about the experience of photography, Camera Lucida is itself structured like a photograph; framed by the anterior future tense its author identifies with photography (Barthes is dead, and he is going to die), this book has become, before all else, a photographic object. This in itself – this strategic reiteration of binary thinking – is not particularly remarkable. The Bush and Blair administrations have, for example, been anxious to insist on a clear separation of Good and Evil – the very terms conjured by Barthes to describe the photograph – to justify their killing of more than 65,000 Iraqi civilians over the past four years.21 This particular use of binary rhetoric is a sharp reminder that politics is always already in play at this micro-level too, for, as we well know by now, every binary opposition comes to us as a hierarchy ordered to suit explicit political interests. There’s no point contesting the larger argument unless you also disrupt the logic that sustains it, wherever you find it in action. In this case, to undermine the political economy that would neatly separate good from evil is to also undermine the rationalization of state-sanctioned murder. And this continuous implosion of binary terms is precisely what Barthes manages to orchestrate throughout Camera Lucida. If Barthes’ book indeed resembles a photograph, then perhaps it is best thought of as a daguerreotype, requiring a constant mobilization of its constituent parts in order to become itself. ‘The Photograph,’ he tells us, ‘represents that very subtle moment when... I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object’ (CL, 14). This undecidability is maintained in his discussion of punctum: he begins

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by distinguishing it from studium, ‘that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste’ (CL, 27), usually a collection of visual features intentionally coded in the photograph by the photographer and recognized by the spectator as a consequence of a shared cultural knowledge. Punctum, as we all know (the term having become one of those tired clichés of photographic discourse), is an element that somehow breaks or punctuates the studium, ‘this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.’ (CL, 26). It bruises him, giving him a pleasure mixed with pain, a sort of ecstasy. Not that punctum is an easy thing to pin down. Barthes, for example, describes it as both an instrument (‘like an arrow’) and the vestige of its impact (‘this wound...this mark’), that is, as both a thing and its index, both a prick and a ‘little hole’ (CL, 26-27). Punctum, it seems, has a sexual connotation, whereas studium, he says, ‘is of the order of liking’ (CL, 27). This distinction between studium and punctum, between shared and private meaning, intention and chance, has preoccupied many a faithful reader.22 But anyone who swallows the bait and maintains this distinction, who separates one from the other – who speaks, for example, of ‘the’ punctum – has missed the complexity of Barthes’ overall argument. For what matters here is not the difference between studium and punctum, but the political economy of their relationship (what matters is precisely their post-structural inseparability). After various refinements of his definition – ‘very often the punctum is a detail’ (CL, 43), but a detail that can also ‘fill the whole picture’ (CL, 45), even if only ‘after the fact’ (CL, 53), looking back – Barthes comes to what he calls his ‘last thing about the punctum’ (CL, 55): ‘whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.’ (CL, 55) In fact, in the French edition of Camera Lucida, Barthes calls punctum a supplément rather than simply an addition. This is a significant, even a loaded, choice of word.23 Consigning punctum to the logic of the supplement is to displace it from certainty, to put it in motion, to turn it in on itself. The most important element of the photograph is also, apparently, something supplemental, unnecessary, in addition to requirements. Like the referent, it is both

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there in the photograph and not there, both natural (a matter of indexical science) and cultural (brought to the image by a human observer), and therefore not quite either. And indeed it isn’t long before Part Two of Camera Lucida has collapsed the very distinctions that Part One has labored so hard to establish. ‘I now know,’ he says, ‘that there exists another punctum... this new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time’ (CL, 96). What was once confined to only a few select photographs is, he recognizes, a constituent element of all of them. The photograph that pierces him most powerfully, the infamous Winter Garden photograph of his mother, is also one of the most banal, so banal that he cannot show it to us – it is, for us, no more than studium. It turns out that the same photograph can be both studium and punctum (the one is always already in the other), just as every photograph, no matter what its subject matter, speaks, not just of ‘what-has-been,’ but also of the catastrophe of death in the future. Barthes can no more separate studium from punctum than Saussure can sustain his separation of signifer and signified; every photograph, like every sign, is produced within the dynamic play of this impossible relationship, of this haunting of one by its other.24 This dynamic, more than the momentary thrill of new vocabulary, is the most difficult and potentially most productive legacy Camera Lucida offers to a new generation of photography’s historians. Difficult, because the logic of supplementarity, in which neither inside nor outside, essence or context, is allowed to determine the identity of photography, is so difficult to grasp and so hard to sustain in one’s own work. Productive, because it is at this level, within the grain of what makes any photograph function meaningfully as a photograph, that political work must now be fought. History remains a powerful site for that work, as evidenced in the way Barthes goes about representing his own little history of photography. Abandoning the linear, chronological narrative, the illusory claims to comprehensiveness, and the hierarchical values of most existing studies of photography, this is a history driven by a single, unanswerable question: what is photography? By inserting this ontological anxiety at the heart of his narrative, Barthes sets no direction for that narrative in advance.

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Readers are instead taken on a quest – part philosophical rumination, part social history, part visual culture, part detective novel – that is as much about themselves (about ‘consciousness’) as photography. Like Benjamin before him, Barthes burrows into the very flesh of photography by taking on many of its most salient attributes; put into motion, these attributes then become the structuring principles of his text. He thereby directly engages photography’s dissemination and reception as well as its production, encompassing all its many aspects, whether visible (images and practices) or invisible (effects and experiences). He looks primarily at ordinary photographs, rather than masterworks, opening up the entire field of photography for examination and abandoning any reliance on art historical prejudices. Aiming only to be representative, Barthes even proffers the possibility of a history based on just one (unseen) photograph. In short, the historical approach demonstrated by Camera Lucida produces a history that is actually about photography, not just of photographs. And what of the history of Camera Lucida itself? Appearing in 1980, the book was written at a liminal moment in the history of the history of photography. By the late 1970s, photography, whether as historical object or professional practice, had become fully institutionalized, having at last found a secure niche in universities, art schools, museums and the market place as well as in the culture at large. For various reasons, this proliferation in turn generated an anxiety about the future of photography amongst its intelligentsia, evidenced equally in postmodern art practices and self-conscious historical scholarship.25 The ramifications of this turn are still being debated today, in all sorts of ways. ‘Photography’s apotheosis as a medium-which is to say its commercial, academic, and museological success-comes just at the moment of its capacity to eclipse the very notion of a medium and to emerge as a theoretical because heterogeneous object. But in a second moment, not too historically distant from the first, this object will lose its deconstructive force by passing out of the field of social use and into the twilight zone of obsolescence.’26

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The ‘post-medium condition’ proposed here by Rosalind Krauss joins ‘the death of photography,’ ‘post-photography,’ and ‘photography after photography’ as phrases coined by scholars to describe an identity crisis for photography that is said to have emerged in the 1960s, but only became fully apparent with the introduction of digital technology in the 1980s.27 Not that technological changes in themselves did away with photography; they were but one aspect of a larger process of epistemological and social change that has meant photography can no longer simply be itself. In other words, Camera Lucida appears on the scene just as the photography it sought to describe was about to disappear from view. As Joan Fontcuberta has written, ‘the dramatic metamorphosis from the grain of silver to the pixel represents nothing more than a screen which conceals the evolution taking place in the whole framework that provided photography with a cultural, instrumental and historical context.’28 Both Benjamin and Barthes closely associate photography with history, and their little histories with their own experience of actual photographs, as if the fate of one rests in the form of the other. So what happens if we assume that Fontcuberta is right, that the ‘whole framework’ for photography, the very context that made it meaningful as photography, has indeed metamorphosed into something else? Has ‘Photography’ perhaps already gone, transformed into a ghost of its former self? ‘It has already disappeared,’ says Barthes in 1979. ‘I am, I don’t know why, one of its last witnesses... and this book is its archaic trace’ (CL, 94). Exactly what photography, then, are we today trying to be the witnesses of? What are the contemporary identities, the political economies, the physical and conceptual forms, of this phenomenon whose history we would now seek to engage in and as our own? Any account of photography written after Camera Lucida is haunted by such questions, just as surely as by the specter of the photographic image. What we don’t know yet is quite how these questions should be answered. It is fair to say that we are now at a moment that sees itself as being after postmodernism but which has yet to attract the burden of a proper name or the motivation of an enabling politics. The invention of such a politics, and with it a

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‘historicity’ appropriate for the times in which we live, therefore remains the most pressing task to face the present generation of photography’s historians. Even 25 years after its initial publication, I believe Camera Lucida remains a good place from which to begin.

Notes 1

Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ (1964), Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 44.

2

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang (New York, 1981). English translation by Richard Howard.

3

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Hill and Wang (New York, 1972). English translation by Annette Lavers.

4

Sabine Gölz, ‘Incendiary Reading: Close-ups of Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”,’ a public lecture given at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, on October 3, 2003. Benjamin’s ‘A Little History of Photography’ was first published in Literarische Welt in the September and October issues of 1931. It was first published in English, in a translation by Stanley Mitchell that renders it as ‘A Short History of Photography,’ in Screen, 13: 1 (Spring 1972). It was subsequently translated by Paul Patton as ‘A Short History of Photography’ in Artforum (Volume 15) in February 1977 and by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter as ‘A Small History of Photography’ and published among the essays in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979).

5

I have argued elsewhere that banal photographs, precisely because of the lack of imagination evidenced in the actual picture, can work to shift the burden of imaginative thought from the artist to the viewer. They are an open invitation to see more than meets the eye. This might lead us to the following paradoxical proposition: the more banal the photograph, the greater its capacity to induce us to exercise our imaginations. This paradox perhaps helps to explain why such creative writers as Walter Benjamin (who favored the work of commercial photographer Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget), Jorge Luis Borges (who illustrated a book with the most banal photographs ever produced by his countryman Horacio Coppola), and W.G. Sebald (who was notorious for choosing unexceptional illustrations for his books), as well as Roland Barthes (who illustrated Camera Lucida with strikingly middle-brow pictures), all picked relatively unimaginative photographs to accompany their

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texts. See my ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,’ in Martha Langford ed., Image and Imagination (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press & Le Mois de la Photo, 2005), p. 268. 6

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931), One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsly Shorter (Verso, 1978), p. 43.

7

Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Benjamin and Barthes: Towards a Science of the Particular?,’ a paper delivered at the ‘Thinking Photography-Again’ conference, at the University of Durham, UK, on July 9, 2005. See also André Gunthert, ‘Le complexe de Gradiva: Théorie de la photographie, deuil et résurrection,’ Etudes Photographiques, No. 2 (May 1997), pp. 115-128.

8

Margaret Olin, ‘Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s “Mistaken” Identity,’ Representations, p. 80 (Fall 2002), pp. 99-118. It is worth noting that, although it reproduces a generous selection of Barthes’ family snapshots, a recent exhibition catalogue from the Centre Pompidou does not (can not?) show us the Winter Garden picture. See Marianne Alphant and Nathalie Léger eds., R/B: Roland Barthes (exhibition catalogue, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002).

9

Olin suggests that perhaps the Winter Garden photograph is, again by means of mental slippage, a stand-in for an image of Franz Kafka at the age of six mentioned by Benjamin in his ‘Little History.’ Kafka is shown standing in a kind of “winter garden” landscape, of the sort constructed out of props in a photographer’s studio. As Duttlinger has pointed out (see note 7 above), Benjamin discusses this photograph of Kafka in two texts, and in one of them actually becomes Kafka; that is, he projects himself into the picture through a first-person account of the pose and setting. Olin argues that Barthes similarly transposes a photograph of himself as a young boy over the missing photograph of his mother at age five. See Olin, ibid, p. 111.

10

Benjamin’s ‘Little History’ was in fact published in a French translation in a special issue of Nouvel Observateur (No. 2, November 1977). Barthes lists this magazine in his bibliography in La Chambre Claire and also lists two of the essays that were included in it, but never mentions the Benjamin text by name or acknowledges his debt to it.

11

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 51.

12

For his discussion of denotation and connotation, see Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ pp. 32-51. In a striking parallel to studium and punctum, Barthes posits a similarly complex binary relationship for plaisir and jouissance in his

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book The Pleasure of the Text, first published in 1973. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 13

The titles of histories are in fact often out of their author’s control. For discussions of how the titles of their histories came to be chosen, see, for example, Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993), 177, and Michel Frizot, ‘A Critical Discussion of the Historiography of Photography,’ Arken Bulletin, Vol. 1 (2002), p. 58-65.

14

Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), Image Music Text, 142-148.

15

For more along these lines, see my ‘Art since 1900: review,’ The Art Bulletin, LXXXVIII: 2 (June 2006), p. 376-377.

16

Michel Frizot ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998). Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: PrenticeHall, 2002).

17

Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’ (c. 18971910), in Justus Buchler ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 107-108.

18

Roland Barthes, ‘Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today’ (1971), Image Music Text, p. 167.

19 20

Ibid, p. 169. See my ‘Detours: Photography and the Camera Lucida,’ Afterimage, 18: 2 (September 1990), p. 14-15.

21

See my ‘Requiem,’ Afterimage, 29: 4 (January/February 2002), p. 5. Although estimates of the number of Iraqis killed as a consequence of the Americanled invasion vary considerably, the New York Times quotes Iraq Body Count when claiming that at least 30, 051 civilians were killed between 2003 and October 2005. See Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Rising Civilian Toll Is The Iraq War’s Silent, Sinister Pulse,’ New York Times (October 25, 2005), A12. In January 2007, the Associated Press reported that the United Nations had estimated that 34, 452 Iraqi civilians had been killed in Iraq during 2006, with a further 36, 685 wounded. See ‘34, 452 Iraqi Civilians Killed in 2006, U.N. Says,’ New York Times (January 16, 2007).

22

Few of these readers, however, address themselves to the strategic politics that motivates the positing of such a division. Although the logic of his own narrative collapses any distinction between these two experiences of the photograph, Barthes argues that, given the “explosion of the private into the public,” there is a political purpose, a “necessary resistance,” behind his efforts to “reconstitute the division of public and private.” See Camera Lucida, 98.

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23

Barthes’ choice of this particular word can’t help but conjure the work of his compatriot Jacques Derrida, and in particular Derrida’s ‘supplementary reading’ of Rousseau’s Confessions in Of Grammatology, first published in 1967. As Barbara Johnson puts it, Derrida shows how “the logic of the supplement wrenches apart the neatness of the metaphysical binary oppositions.” See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hoplins University Press, 1976) and Barbara Johnson, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (University of Chicago Press, 1972, 1981), xiii.

24

As Derrida puts it, “this concept of the photograph photographs all conceptual oppositions, it traces a relationship of haunting which perhaps is constitutive of all logics.” Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes,’ (1981), in Hugh Silverman ed., Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty (Routledge, 1988), 267. Barthes freely admits in ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ that the distinction between his earlier terms, denotation and connotation, has only an “operational validity, analogous to that which allows the distinction in the linguistic sign of a signifier and a signified (even though in reality no one is able to separate the ‘word’ from its meaning except by recourse to the metalanguage of a definition).” See ‘Rhetoric,’ p. 37. For a provocative commentary on Saussure’s ‘impossible’ definition of the sign, see also Vicki Kirby, ‘Corporeal Complexity: The Matter of the Sign,’ Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York & London, Routledge, 1997), p. 7- 50, pp. 163-169.

25

Some examples of this inward turn in the study of photography’s history might include the publication of Susan Sontag’s On Photography in 1977, the special issue of Nouvel Observateur on photography issued in November 1977, the establishment of a photography collection at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 1978, the special issue of October magazine devoted to photography in 1978, the lecture series organized in 1979 by the Art Institute of Chicago titled ‘Towards the New Histories of Photography,’ the special issue of Cahiers de la Photographie published in 1981 under the title ‘Quelle histoire la Photographie!,’ and the creation of the Centre de la Photographie in Paris in 1982.

26

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium,’ Critical Inquiry, 25: 2 (Winter 1999), p. 295.

27

See, for example, Anne-Marie Willis, ‘Digitisation and the Living Death of Photography,’ in Philip Howard ed., Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late

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Twentieth Century (London: John Libbey, 1990), p. 197-208; Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Burning with Desire: The Birth and Death of Photography,’ Afterimage, 17: 6 (January 1990), pp. 8-11; William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Geoffrey Batchen, ‘On Post-Photography,’ Afterimage, 20: 3 (October 1992), p. 17; and the various essays in Hubertus v. Amelunxen et al. eds., Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age (Siemens Kulturprogramm & G+B Arts, 1996). 28

Joan Fontcuberta, ‘Revisiting the Histories of Photography,’ in Joan Fontcuberta ed., Photography: Crisis of History (Barcelona: Actar, 2003), pp. 10-11.

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—

Jean Baudrillard, the World behind the Mirror Johan Swinnen —

From my diary May 1999 In 1981, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard was given a camera during a tour of Japan. He took his first photographs from the plane over Siberia. After a small-scale exhibition in 1986 he had his first real show in Paris in November 1992. He admired Luigi Ghirri and although he denies any direct influence, he refers to Warhol and Hopper. In the purest sense of the word the photographer is conservative, since photography is a huge reservoir of forgotten images with deeply hidden meanings. Every photographic image is crammed with signs and meanings, of which most people use only a small part in everyday life. But a photograph is not only a reservoir of submerged feelings, it also contains countless creative opportunities. This is why the photographer is also very progressive. He not only conserves what has been forgotten (our relationship with history), but is also a creative and plastic designer of new worlds, fantasies and utopias. The photographer’s intense concern with a subject like man shows the potential inherent in the visual language of photography. Baudrillard defines paroxysm as ‘literally (paroxyton) the penultimate moment, just before the end. Not the ultimate or extreme moments,

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which are (etymologically too) beyond the end. The suspense (possibly violent, but not necessarily) when confronted with some choice which may never have occurred…’ Jean Baudrillard brilliantly formulates the pleasure one experiences from the frozen image: ‘The photographic image is dramatic, because of its silence, its immobility. What things dream of, what we dream of, is not movement, it is immobility. The power of the unmoving image is more intense than the power of mythical opera. Even films use the myth of slow motion, as the film uses the myth of slow motion and the frozen frame as the high points of drama.’ A lot happens in our world that would undoubtedly be overlooked without photography. With regard to the photographs in this book he is showing in this book he writes: ‘We can only see the object when it observes us. We can only observe it when it has seen us. Just as we can only imagine the world if we first want it to imagine us. That is the hope, the secret agenda: to be seen, desired and imagined by the object and the world. In fact I do not want to concern myself with the photograph, I want the photograph to concern itself with me. In any case we are photographing a world from which the real, living subject has disappeared just as completely as primitive man. So why not simply photograph things where the disappearance of the human being is clear, and where the latter is in a certain way more truly present by being created solely as an allusion in transparency? For a certain time the object remains the living site of the disappearance of the subject. The image, says Plato, is located as the intersection of the rays of light emanating from the object and those that emanate from looking.’ In this way Baudrillard’s philosophy of photography and his photographic practices are defined by a photographic style which may take reality as its starting point but in which through photographic technique and style reality is approached from a specific perspective. This visualist photography is characterized by an alienation from perceived reality and sometimes has a markedly illusory nature.

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Johan Swinnen [Jean Baudrillard] Paris 1998

The Weight of Photography

From my Diary May 2009 The French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard died in Paris on 6 March 2007 at the age of 77. He believed that people were trapped in an imaginary satisfaction. Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was an extremely active sociologist and philosopher. In our personal meetings we laughed a lot – both out loud and inwardly, for he was a thinker with an ironic take on the virtual. ‘Laughing is speaking on slippery ice.’ Yes, there are gradations in the discourse of laughter, just as there are in the way we think about images. ‘I’m not a professional photographer. I came to photography by way of what you might call a diversion or a hobby’, Baudrillard told us. And, surprisingly for someone who wrote more than 50 books: ‘I’m more passionate about the world of images than I am about the world of texts.’ Baudrillard used the camera for his pleasure, but his photography is by no means amateurish. His images remain suspended in the memory like enthralling abstractions. As a photographer he froze reality in an image, and it was that standstill that enabled the interpretation to begin. The right moment has gone by and the space is delimited two-dimensionally, possibly with the illusion of the third dimension, the depth. As an example of this position he regularly referred to his terrifying experience during the earthquake in Kobe which he (and I) witnessed first hand in 1995. In 1998 I was commissioned to put together a photography exhibition and a book on the occasion of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Ivo van Hove was the artistic director and he wanted the 1999 edition of the festival to include a plastic section alongside the music and theatre. I set out to do some research aimed at finding a theme that would give the project Attack! Photography on the edge a theoretical framework. With a view to providing me with some inspiration, my in-house philosopher Willem Elias gave me the book Le paroxisme indifférent (the Indifferent Paroxysm) as a gift. I read it at one sitting and that same night I wrote the rough outline of what would later become a statement. I discovered a philosopher who moreover succeeded in putting his nihilistic philosophy

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into images, a process he referred to as paroxysm. Baudrillard was fascinated by objects hovering on the verge of decay, teetering on the edge of the abyss. ‘The most interesting moment of paroxysm is not the end, but the moment just before the end. In the photo a secret has to be kept’, Baudrillard says in his book. ‘What pains me is the aesthetisation of photography – the fact that it has become a Fine Art and has moved into the bosom of culture.’ It gave me a good feeling. I had found an ally.

Willem Elias [Jean Baudrillard and Johan Swinnen] Paris 1998

In the autumn of 1998 Elias and I visited him in his apartment in Paris. We enjoyed Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the ailing Western world immensely: paroxysm, or an onslaught of fever in the face of death. He showed us all his portfolios. Right up to the present day, his photos reflect the fatal strategy that Baudrillard advocated in political philosophy: capitalism has to push itself to the edge of the abyss. And that is happening

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all the time. It is walking of its own accord right up to the boundaries of credibility. Baudrillard refers to this as the ‘transparency’ phase, the phase in which the prevailing values become wholly transparent. ‘We live in an implausible diversion, a hyper-reality.’ In his writing and photographs, Baudrillard the nihilist fulfilled the old role of the wise philosopher. He wanted to keep society from the path it had (not, in fact) chosen. He broke with the notion that the photo is a modernising way of looking at the world or with the fact that the photo itself only contained a worldview. For him a photo was more of a refraction. It shows the world’s breaking capacity, in detail and with equal weapons. With reference to Attack! I asked him to write a statement about his own work. He replied by return fax with the following message: ‘Dear Johan, it’s difficult to answer this questionnaire, because for me photography is not a classified activity. It is inspired by the object, and the object’s and the world’s surprise. It’s the object that does all the work. It’s a gift with which the world regales us. As Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, it’s not you that takes a photo, it’s the photo that takes you.’

3 March 1999 He did not have any aesthetic ambition and felt like the odd man out among all the professional photographers at the Holland Festival. He often told me that he found real photographers to be virtuous and erudite and admired them on account of their proximity to their subject. His favourite photographers were Luigi Ghirri and Sophie Calle. In his philosophical texts he had a hunger for revealing the explicit images of sex or violence, which created confusion. But as regards his own aesthetic photographic work, he adopted an ironic stance: ‘Most of my photos are pure chance. After all, in the photo a secret has to be kept.’ When I last met him in his apartment in Paris in February 2007, when the essays ‘For illusion is not in conflict with reality’ and ‘Violence inflicted on images’, and ten photos to illustrate The Weight of Photography were handed over, it was already clear that he had swapped philosophy for the camera, which he wanted to use to get objects to talk. He took photographs by way of a change, in order not to have to write. It gave him access to another world – the world behind the mirror. 216

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—

Violence Inflicted on Images Jean Baudrillard

—

The image, too, shares the fatal destiny of signs and metaphors: the fall into reality. The image as such is bound neither to truth nor to reality: it is appearance, and is bound to appearance. This is its magic link to illusion in the world as it is: the illusion which reminds us that reality, just like the worst evil, is never sure, and that maybe the world could do without it, just as it could do without the principle of reality. I think that an image touches us immediately: far beyond its representation, it touches our intuition, our perception. On this plane, an image is always a total surprise. Or at least, it should be. And unfortunately, in this sense, one could say that images are rare, since the power of an image is more often than not intercepted by everything one wants that image to say. The image is so often deprived of its originality, of its own existence as an image, and destined to a shameful complicity with reality. It is often said that reality has disappeared under the profusion of signs and images. And it is true that there is violence within an image but this violence is largely compensated by the violence inflicted on the image: its exploitation for the purpose of documentation, testimony, message, its exploitation for moral, political, or advertising ends, or simply as a source of information. This is where the end lies for the destiny of the image, both as a fatal illusion and as a vital illusion.

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The Iconoclasts in Byzantium destroyed images to wipe out their meaning (the visible face of God). Contrary to appearance, and despite our cult of idols, we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overloading them with meaning, we kill them with significance. Most present-day images only reflect the misery or violence of the human condition. And here lies a complete contradiction: the misery and violence touch us less when they are overcharged with meaning. For the subject of an image to affect us, the image must exist in its own right: it must impose its original language on us. To enable a transfer to reality, there must exist a counter-transfer back to the image, and this must be resolved. Today, through images, misery and violence have become a leitmotif in advertising: Toscani has introduced sex, AIDS, war and death into fashion. And why not? After all, advertising which uses good fortune is no less obscene than advertising which uses misery. But on one condition: the violence of the advertising itself – of fashion, of the medium – must be shown. And advertisers are incapable of this. Fashion and mundaneness are themselves, in a sense, a spectacle of death. The world’s misery can be read just as easily in a model’s figure and face as it can in an African’s skeletal body. The same cruelty can be read everywhere, if you can spot it. This ‘realist’ image does not capture what is, but rather, what should not be – death and misery – which should not exist from a moral and humanitarian point of view (while at the same time exploiting this misery in an intensely immoral way to further aesthetic and commercial ends). These images, behind their so-called ‘objectivity’, bear witness to a profound denial of reality, as well as a denial of the image, which is called to represent something which it does not want to be: having been assigned to perform a forceful violation of reality. So most photos (and media images in general – in fact anything which can be classified as ‘visual’) are not real images. They are simply news reports, realistic snapshots, or aesthetic performances, enslaved to every available ideological device. At this point an image is nothing but a visibility operator – the medium for integral visibility which is complementary to Integral Reality, the

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becoming-real doubling as becoming-visible at all costs: everything must be seen, everything must be visible, and the image is the venue for this visibility par excellence. This is where the banality of the image links up with the banality of life, just like in reality TV shows such as Big Brother and Loft Story, among others. This is where integral visibility begins, where everything is exposed and where one comes to realise that there is nothing else left to be seen. Making oneself into an image means exposing one’s everyday life, one’s disappointments, desires and possibilities – it means renouncing all secrets. It means expressing oneself, talking, communicating tirelessly. It means being open to scrutiny at all times, over-exposed to media lights (just like the woman whose every personal detail is aired over the Internet twenty-four hours a day). Is this kind of self-expression the ultimate form of confession, which Foucault talked about? In any case, it is an act of violence against a singular being, as well as against the image in its singularity. In Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, one sees a young blonde woman urinating serenely as she chats, indifferent to both what she is saying and what she is doing. A completely useless scene, but which is ostensibly saying that nothing must escape the merging of reality with fiction, that everything is acceptable in a give-all-show-all-enjoy-all spectacle. This is what transparency is all about: forcing the whole of reality into the visual orbit (the orbit of representation – but is it representation at this stage? It is exhibition, which in fact holds hostage the viewer’s gaze). Anything which fulfils no purpose, need, desire or effect by its visibility, is obscene. And obscenity usurps the rare and precious space of appearances. This is how the image dies, in this forced visibility, as a source of power and control, beyond even the ‘panoptic’: no longer is it about making things visible to an outside eye, but rather making them transparent to themselves. The power of control is in a sense internalised, and people are no longer victims of the images: they themselves are transformed into images.

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In Jorge Luis Borges’ fable, The People of the Mirrors, there is the idea that behind every representation, behind every mirror image, lies a defeated singularity, a conquered enemy who resembles you, who is forced to resemble you. So it follows that behind every image, something has disappeared (this ambiguity is in fact what makes the image fascinating: something in the image has disappeared). The Iconoclasts had understood this quite clearly: they denounced icons as a means of making God disappear (but maybe God himself had chosen to disappear behind the images?). In any case, today it is no longer God, but rather we, who disappear behind our images. No longer is there a danger that someone may steal our image or prize our secret from us. We no longer have an image or a secret. We have nothing left to hide in this Integrated Reality which envelops us. This is the sign both of our ultimate transparency and our total obscenity. The ultimate violence inflicted on the image is that of the image of synthesis, which has emerged from nothing out of numerical calculation and the computer. It marks the end of imagination, even of the image, of its fundamental ‘illusion’ since, in the operation of synthesis, the referent no longer exists, and that even reality no longer has a place to happen, since it is instantly produced as Virtual Reality. No longer do we have this direct capture of an image, this presence of a real object which will in an instant become irrevocable, which created the magical illusion of a photo, and made a singular event out of the image. The virtual image contains nothing of this precision, this punctum in time (to use Roland Barthes’ expression), which existed in the photo-images of not so long ago, and which bore witness to the fact that something had been there, and was there no longer: a definitive absence charged with nostalgia. Digital and numerical production effaces the image as an analogon; it effaces reality as something that can be imagined. The photographic act - this moment of disappearance, both of the subject and the object in simultaneous confrontation – disappears in digital and numeric

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processing: the shutter release wipes out the world and the look for just an instant, like a split-second blackout, a moment of death which triggers the mechanical performance of the image. All this inevitably leads to the death of photography as an original medium. The essence of photography disappears with the analogue image. This essence still had a direct relationship between the subject and the object: a last respite against the dissemination and multiplicity of images without referent – against the numeric avalanche awaiting us. The problem of reference was already a practically insoluble one: what happens to reality? What happens to representation? But when, in a Virtual world, the referent disappears, fades away in the technical programming of the image, when there is no real world facing a sensitive film (the same goes for language which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there can be no real representation possible. And that is not all. What distinguishes an analogue image from a numeric one is that the former plays a disappearing game, a game of distance, of arrest, on the world: the nothingness at the heart of the image, which Warhol described. But in the numeric image, or more generally, in a synthetic image, the negative – the ‘deferred’ – no longer exists. Nothing dies in it, nothing disappears. The image is simply the result of an instruction and a programme, heightened by the automatic diffusion from one support to another: computer, mobile phone, television screen, and so on – the automatic working of the network responding to the automatic working of the construction of the image. So, should absence, emptiness, the nothingness at the heart of the image be saved? A photographic image is the purest of images because it simulates neither time nor movement, and holds itself to the most rigorous unreality. All other forms (cinema, video, synthesis) are but attenuated forms of the pure image and its break from reality. The intensity of the image is proportionate to its denial of reality, of the invention of another scene. To make an image from an object means removing each of its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, scent,

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depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning. It is at the price of this disincarnation that the image can assume its power of fascination, becoming a medium of pure objectality, becoming transparent to a more subtle form of seduction. To put back all these dimensions, one by one: movement, idea, meaning, desire, to multimediatise the image in order to make it more real, or rather, better simulated, is a complete contradiction. The technique in itself gets caught in its own trap. To conceive an image in its pure state, you have to come back to a radical truth: an image is a two-dimensional universe, entirely perfect within itself, in no way inferior to the universe of reality and the universe of representation, which is a three-dimensional universe. The twodimensional universe is its incomplete phase. It is a parallel universe, another scene with no depth, and it is this missing dimension which give it its own charm and genius. Everything which adds a third dimension to an image, whether it be relief, time, history, sound or movement, or even idea and meaning – anything which is added to the image to bring it closer to reality and representation, is an act of violence which destroys it as a parallel universe. Every added dimension annuls preceding ones. The third dimension annuls the second. As for the fourth - the Virtual dimension, the numeric, Integrated reality dimension – this one annuls all the others – it is a hyperspace with no dimension. It is what appears on our screens, where the image as such no longer exists (but neither does the universe of reality, the universe of representation). So you always have to pare down, pare right down to find the image in its pure state. This paring down reveals the essential, which is that the image is more important than what it says, in the same way as language is more important that what it means. Reality is blurred: it is not focused. Were it focused, it would be ‘objective reality’, adjusted according to models of representation – just like a camera lens focuses on an object. Fortunately, definitive focus of the world never happens. The lens makes the object move, or vice versa, but in any case, there is movement.

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In one of his aphorisms, Lichtenberg speaks of tremor: any gesture, even a precise one, is preceded by a tremor, a blur, a part of which always remains. When this tremor, this blur, is not present, when a gesture is purely operational, and completely focused, one is on the edge of madness. And a true image is one which takes account of the tremor in the world whatever the situation or the object, whether it be a war photo or a still life, a landscape or a portrait, an artistic photo or a news photo. At this stage, the image forms part of the world: it is caught in the same destiny, in the metamorphosis of appearances: a fragment of the world’s hologram, where every detail is a refraction of the whole. The distinguishing feature of a photo is not that it illustrates an event, but that it becomes that event. Logic would have it that the event, reality, occurs first, and that the image then comes to illustrate it. Unfortunately, more often than not, this is indeed the case. Another scenario holds that the event never really happens, that in some way it remains alien to itself. Something of this alienness survives in every event, in every object, and probably in every individual. This is what the image is answerable for, and to do this, it must in some way remain alien to itself. It must not consider itself a medium or an image. It must remain a fiction, and thus echo the insoluble fiction of the event. It must neither be caught in its own trap nor allow itself to be locked in the return-image. The worst for us is the impossibility of a world without return-image – a world which is not continually recaptured, seized, filmed, photographed before it has even been seen. This is fatally dangerous for the ‘real’ world, but also for the image, because where the image only recycles reality and immerses itself in reality, there is no longer an image, not even as an exception, an illusion, a parallel universe. In the visual flux which submerges us, it does not even have the time to become an image. Can a photograph be an exception in the destruction of images: can it give them back an original power? For this to happen, the chaotic functioning of the world would have to be suspended: the object would have to be captured in that unique fantastic moment, the moment of first contact, when things have not yet realised that we are there, when absence and emptiness have not yet dissolved.

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In fact, the world itself would need to assume the photographic act – as though the world were to take on the means of appearing without us. I dream of an image which is an automatic transcription of the world’s singularity – like the one the Iconoclasts dreamed of in the famous Byzantine controversy. Their only authentic image was that in which the divinity was immediately present, like the Veil of the Holy Face – an automatic transcription of the divine singularity of Christ’s face, with no intervention by human hand, in a sort of immediate transfer (similar to the negative of a photo). However, they violently rejected any man-made (cheiropoietic) icons, which for them were only images of the divine. Photography, however, is in a sense ‘acheiropoietic.’ An automatic transcription of light, without passing through reality and the idea of reality, the photograph, by virtue of its automatic working, is the prototype of literality, stamped by the hand of man. The world produces itself as a radical illusion, a pure trace, with no simulation, with no human intervention, and above all, not as a truth, because if there is a product of the human spirit par excellence, it is truth and objective reality. There is great conceit involved in giving a meaning to a photographic image. Objects are made to pose. And things begin, themselves, to pose in the light of meaning, as soon as they sense someone’s gaze on them Haven’t we always held the profound illusion of a world which would work without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, exempt from our all too human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language working for itself, in its material state, in its literality, without passing through meaning – this is what fascinates us, just like an anagram, an anamorphosis, the ‘figure hidden in the carpet.’ Could it be that the photograph, too, works as a revealer, in both the technical and metaphysical senses, of the ‘image hidden in the carpet’? The world beyond polished glasses is more important than the world beyond the seas, and is possibly superseded only by the world beyond death. (G.C. Lichtenberg.)

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Objects, under light, are only a pretext. If there were no objects, the circulation of light would be endless, and we would not even be sensitive to it. If there were no subjects, the circulation of thoughts would be infinite and there would not even be an echo in the conscience. The subject is where thought stops in its infinite circulation; it is where it reflects itself. The object is where light stops, it is what reflects light. Photography is the automatic transcription of light. The silence of the image can only be equalled by the silence of masses and the silence of the desert. The dream would be to be a photographer without a lens, roaming the world without a camera, in short, to go beyond photography, and to see things as though they too had gone beyond the image stage, as though you had already photographed them in a previous life. In fact, maybe we have already gone through the image stage, via a sort of animal stage, the mirror stage being simply a echo of all that in our individual lives. There is no such thing as a self-portrait. It is the world which, through the image, makes its self-portrait, and we are only there to oblige it – although the pleasure is shared. Inversely, every image should be observed with the same intensity as our own image in the mirror. The photo is always also the death wink in Samarkand’s story. The story tells of a missed appointment with reality… perhaps because of a preference for that other world. Would we not prefer any other universe parallel to the real universe? Any other life to the life given to us? There is universe more beautiful than the universe of detail or fragment. Delivered from its wholeness and from its transcendental ventriloquism, detail has no choice but to become mysterious. Every fragment torn from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of reality and of its wholeness.

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It is enough for it to be elliptical. It is enough for it to be exceptional. Every singular image is exceptional. And it puts an end to all the others. A lens so sensitive that it would only capture beings which are really there, and not those which pretend to be there, or those so absent to themselves that the film would not pick them up, as it does not pick up ectoplasms or vampires. In any case, a lens picks up both the way we are there, and the way we are no longer there. That is why, in our heart of hearts, we play dead when faced with the camera’s eye, just like God faced with the proof of His existence. Everything in us crystallises negatively when faced with the material imagination of our presence. Focussing is performed on absence, not on presence. The singularity is that of an object, an image, a fragment, a thought which, according to Mark Rothko’s beautiful phrase ‘opens and closes simultaneously in all directions.’ Strip reality from the principle of reality. Strip the image from the principle of representation. Rediscover the image as a point of reconvergence between the light coming from the object and the light coming from a look.

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1. Jean Baudrillard [Roma] 1994

2. Jean Baudrillard [Paris] 1986

3. Jean Baudrillard [Lisbonne] 1993

4. Jean Baudrillard [Montpellier] 1988

5. Jean Baudrillard [Belgique] 1991

6. Jean Baudrillard [La Bocca] 1994

7. Jean Baudrillard [Florida] 1986

8. Jean Baudrillard [Australie] 1994

9. Jean Baudrillard [New York] 1993

10. Jean Baudrillard [La Biela] 1995

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For Illusion is not in Conflict with Reality Jean Baudrillard

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Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, the bourgeoisie their mirrors, and we have our pictures. We think we can impose our will on the world through technology. But technology enables the world to impose itself on us, and the shock of this discovery is considerable. You think you are taking a photograph of a scene or a subject because it pleases you to do so – but in fact it is because the subject itself wishes to be photographed. You just have a minor role in the subject’s own scenario. The photographer is merely the instrument by which things make an ironical appearance. A picture is the pre‑eminent medium for the huge advertisements the world and the objects in it make for themselves, relegating our imagination to the background, forcing our passions to focus on the outside world, break­ing the mirror we hypocritically hold up to them to capture them. The miracle today is that appearances, long reduced to voluntary servitude, are now rais­ing their heads and triumphantly turning against us through the very technology by which we seek to banish them. Today, appear­ances are emerging from another source, from their own place of origin, the heart of their everyday reality, rushing and tumbling in from all sides and proliferating in joyous abandon.

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The joy of photography is an objective plea­sure. Those who have never felt the objective enthralment of an image, early in the morn­ing, in a town or in the desert, will never understand the pataphysical delicacy of the world.1 If something wishes to be photographed, it is precisely because it does not want to reveal its inner meaning, to reflect or be reflected. It is because it wants to be intercepted directly, violated on the spot, exposed in every detail. If something wishes to become a picture, it is not so as to live on for ever, but to enable it to disappear. And the photographer can only be a good medium if he enters into the game, exorcising his own vision and judgement, and revelling in his own absence. The detailed fabric of the subject matter, the lines, the way the light falls – this is what must signify the suspension of existence of the photographer himself and thus the irruption of the world onto centre stage, and this is what creates the tension in a photograph. Through the picture, the world imposes its discontinuity, its fragmentation, its artificial instantaneity. In this sense, the photograph is the purest image, because it does not simulate time or movement but remains rigorously unreal. All other forms of image (film, video, virtual reality etc.) are merely weaker representations of the pure image and its discon­nection from the real. The intensity of an image depends on its denial of the real, and the invention of a new scene. Making a picture of an object means stripping it of all its dimensions, one by one: weight, relief, scent, depth, time, continuity, and of course meaning. This disincarnation is what lends the image its power of fascination, transforming it into a medium of pure ‘objectness’, and allowing a more subtle form of seduction to shine through. Putting all these dimensions back into the picture one by one: relief, movement, emotion, the idea, meaning and desire, to achieve a better effect or to make the picture more real – a better simulation in fact – is a complete misconception of the nature of an image. In doing so, technology is caught in its own trap.

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The desire to take photographs may well spring from the observation that, when view­ed as a whole in a search for meaning, the world is rather disappointing, whereas if one focuses on the details and allows oneself to be surprised by them, the world is always perfect­ly self‑evident. The dizzying proliferation of detail in the object. The magical eccentricity of the details. In photography, objects succeed each other in a technical operation which corresponds to the succession of their banality. Accordingly, an image is for another image, a photo for another photo: a contiguity of fragments. No ‘vision of the world’, no view: the refraction of the world, in all its details, and with equal arms. The absence of the world in each detail, like the absence of the photographer etched into every feature of a face. This illumination of the detail can also be achieved by intellectual gymnastics, or through the subtle perception of the senses. But here it is achieved by techni­cal means in one fell swoop. Perhaps it is a trap. The nature of objects is such that their own disappearance transforms them into them­selves. In this way, they mislead us by creating illusions. But it is also in this way that they are true to themselves, and that we should be faithful to them: in their minute details, in their precise figuration and in the sensual illu­sion of their appearance and succession. For illusion is not in conflict with reality; it is a different, more subtle reality which cloaks the former with the sign of its disappearance. Every object photographed is no more than the trace left by the disappearance of the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, the almost per­fect decomposition of the world, in which we can only discern a glimmering illusion of this object or that, transformed by the photograph into an insoluble enigma. From the vantage point of this radical exception, you have an unobstructed view of the world. It is not about conjuring things up. It is about the art of disappearing. Only that which appears through its own disappearance is truly Other. Even though this disappearance must leave a trace, must be the trigger for the appearance of the Other, the world, the object. Moreover, this is the only way the Other can exist: as a result of your own disappearance. 239

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'We shall be your favourite disappearing act!' The only deep desire is the desire for an object (including a sexual object). In other words, not my longing for what I miss, or for someone who misses me – which is more sub­tle – but for someone who does not miss me, and is perfectly able to live without me. He or she who does not miss me: that is what the Other is, that is what radical otherness is. Desire is always a longing for that perfec­tion that is foreign to us, and at the same time a desire to break it or take it apart. One can only be passionate about people or things whose perfection and impunity one longs to both share and shatter. Taking a photograph does not mean taking the world as an object but making it become an object, excavating the otherness hidden beneath its apparent reality, revealing it as a strange attractor and fixing this strange attraction in an image. Basically, going back to being ‘a thing among things’, each of which is strange to the others but in collusion, opaque but familiar ‑rather than a universe of conflicting subjects which are transparent to each other. The photograph brings us closest to a uni­verse without images, in other words, to pure appearance. The photographic image derives a dramatic dimension from the conflict between the desire of the photographer to impose some kind of order or vision, and the desire of the object to impose itself in all its discontinuity and immediacy. Preferably, the object will pre­vail, and then the image/ photo is one of a fragmentary world for which no formula or sum of the parts can be found anywhere. Photography is therefore very different from art or film, in that through an idea, a vision or movement, the latter always sketch the out­lines of a thing in its totality. From the philosophy of the photographer to the philosophy of the eye, of distancing oneself from the world to capture it better, to the anti‑philosophy of the object, the discon­nection of objects from each

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other and the random succession of parts of objects and details. Like syncopation in music or the movement of particles. Photography is what brings us closest to the fly, with its compound eye and the broken lines of its flight. To capture the object, the photographer must lose himself. And this is his last adven­ture, his last chance to shed his identity by reflecting the world, a world in which he now occupies the blind spot of representation. The object itself has far more scope, since it has not passed through a mirror phase and therefore is not concerned with its image, identity or resemblance – because, without desire and with nothing to say, it avoids all comment and interpretation. If one succeeds in capturing something of this diversity and singularity, something changes in the ‘real’ world, and in the very principle of reality. The aim must be that, instead of the pres­ence and representation of the photographer being imposed on the object, the object should become the locus of his absence, his disappearance. The object may be a situation, a source of light, a living being. It is essential that there should be a break with the over‑effi­cient machinery of representation (and with the moral and philosophical dialectic which goes with it), and that through the pure event of the image, the world should emerge in its insoluble self‑evidence. This is a reversal of the mirror. In the past, it was the photographer who was the mirror reflecting the world. The object reflected was merely the content of the mirror. But now the object says: ‘I shall be your mirror !' Photography is an obsessive, compulsive, ecstatic and narcissistic activity. It is also a solitary activity. The photographic image is discontinuous, focusing on one point, unpre­dictable and irrevocable, precisely like the sta­tus quo at a given moment. Any alteration, correction or stage‑setting will look gro­tesquely aesthetic. The solitude of the photog­rapher in space and time corresponds to the solitude of the object and its compulsive silence.

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The photographer should fix his eyes on the object, observe it intensely and transfix it with his gaze. It is not the object that should be posing but the person behind the camera who should hold his breath to create a void in time and in his body. Mentally he should hold his breath too, emptying his head of all thought processes, so that the surface of his mind is an unwritten page, empty as a roll of film. He should no longer regard himself as a repre­sentative being but as an object functioning in its own cycle, without consideration for the mise‑en‑scène, in a delirious circumscription by of himselfand the object. There is an enchant­ment in this that can also be found in games – that of stepping out of your own image and surrendering to a blissful fatalism. It is you and at the same time not you who is playing. In this way an emptiness is created in you and around you, by a process of shutting‑in which works like an initiation. You no longer project yourself in an image – you conjure up the world as a singular event, without comment. A photograph is not an image in real time. It preserves the moment of the negative and the suspense of the negative. This slight shift is what enables the image to exist as such, as an illusion distinct from the real world. And this is what lends it the discreet charm of a past life, a quality not found in digital images or video, which play in real time. In virtual reality, the real has already disappeared, and these images are not images at all in the strict meaning of the word. A photograph can generate a shock, a state in which life is suspended in a phenomenal immobility, interrupting the fevered flow of events. A freeze‑frame freezes the world. But this suspension is never permanent, since one photograph refers to another, and the only possible destiny of an image is to be an image. Nevertheless, each one is different from all the others. Through this kind of distinction and secret complicity, the photographic image has regained the aura it lost with the advent of the cinema. But film too can recapture this special quality of the image – as a part of the story but yet outside it – through its own static intensity, even though it is animated with all the energy of movement – crystallising a whole train of

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events in one still image, a principle of condensation directly opposed to the principle of dilution and dispersion common to all our images today. In Godard for example. It is rare for a text to present the same clari­ty; instantaneity and magic as we can find in a shadow, light or a material. But here and ere, in the writings of Nabokov or Gombrowicz for example, the written word captures something of the material, ‘objectal’ autonomy of objects without qualities, something of the erotic power and supernatu­ral disorder of a meaningless world. True immobility is not that of a static body, but of a weight at the end of a pendulum that has just stopped swinging, and is still vibrat­ing imperceptibly. It is the immobility of time in the moment – that of the ‘instantaneity’ of photography, behind which the idea of movement can always be felt‑ but no more than the idea. The image is there to keep the movement under control, while never showing it, which would destroy the illusion. This is the immo­bility things dream of, the immobility we dream of. And filmmakers are turning more and more to the nostalgia of slow‑motion sequences and freeze‑frames to convey high drama. The same is true of silence. And the paradox of television will no doubt turn out to be that it breathes new life into the charm of the silent image. The silence of the photo. This is one of its most precious qualities compared with film or television, which we keep having to silence, not always successfully. The silence of the image, which needs no commentary (or ought not to need it!). And the silence of the object, if lifted out of the deafening hurly‑burly of the real world by the image. Regardless of the noise and violence surrounding it, the photo restores the object to immobility and silence. In the heart of urban confusion, it creates the equivalent of a desert, a phenomenal isola­tion. Only through photographs can we move through cities in silence, travel the world in silence.

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Photography reports on the state of the world in our absence. The camera explores this absence. Even in faces or bodies charged with emotion, it is this absence that the cam­era explores. The best subjects for photogra­phy are therefore those for whom the other does not exist, or no longer exists: primitives, the poor, objects. Only the inhuman is photo­genic. This is the price of mutual astonish­ment and therefore our complicity with the world, and of the world with us. Human beings are too sentimental. Even animals and plants are too sentimental. Only objects have no sexual or sentimental aura. Taking a photograph of them is not a cold­-blooded assault. Since they are not concerned with their resemblance to each other, they remain wonderfully themselves. And by using technology, you cannot but reinforce the magical self‑evidence of their indifference, the innocence of their mise‑en‑scène, highlight­ing what they represent: the objective illusion and subjective disillusion of the world. It is extremely difficult to photograph indi­viduals or faces. This is because it is impossible to get someone in focus when his own psychology is still so unfocused. Any individual is the locus of such an extensive mise‑en‑ scène, such a complex construction and deconstruction, that the camera strips him of his character, in spite of himself. He is so charged with meaning that it is almost impossible to separate him from it to discover the secret form of his absence. There is always a moment, or so it is said, when even the most banal or heavily masked individual shows his true identity; this is the moment to capture. But what is more interest­ing is his secret otherness. And rather than seeking the identity behind the mask, one should seek the mask behind the identity‑ the shadowy figure that haunts us and keeps us from our identity – the masked divinity which haunts every one of us, for an instant, sooner or later. For objects, savages, animals, primitive people, otherness is a fact, singularity is a fact. An animal has no identity, but that does not mean that it is alienated – it is a stranger to itself and its own ends. Because of this, it has the charm of all creatures who are un­aware of their own image and

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thereby enjoy an organic familiarity with their body and all other bodies. If you can discover both this complicity and this unawareness, you are get­ting close to the poetic quality of otherness – that of a dream and RBM sleep, where identity dissolves into deep sleep. When it comes to being photogenic, objects, like primitive people, have a head start on us. They are naturally free of psychol­ogy and introspection, and retain all their charm in front of the camera. Free of representation, they lose nothing of their presence. In the case of the human subject, this is much less certain. Is it the price of his intelligence or a sign of his stupidity that the subject usu­ally succeeds, through a superhuman effort, in negating his otherness and existing purely within the limits of his identity’ We need to make him more enigmatic to himself, and human beings in general a little more foreign or strange to each other. Not taking them as subjects, but making them become objects, become ‘other’ – that is to say, taking them as they are. 'You have to capture people in their rela­tionship with themselves, that is to say, in their silence’ (H. Cartier‑Bresson). We live largely by the machinery of the will and representation, but this is not the whole story. Of course, everyone has a will and desires, but secretly, one’s decisions and thoughts spring from another source; in this very curious interaction lies our originality. It is not in the mirror in which he recognises himself, nor is it in the camera which seeks to recognise him. Resemblance is always the trap, and the greatness of a picture is that it is able to defy all resemblance and seek out else­where that which comes from elsewhere. There was a time when facing the camera was a dramatic event, a time when the picture itself was at stake, a magical and dangerous reality. At the beginning of the century, pho­tographs of peasants or burghers surrounded by their families radiated their unwillingness to submit to the camera, with fear, defiance and pride infusing them with the same fierce and deadly earnestness that can be seen in pic­tures of primitive people. Their whole being freezes and their eyes dilate at the prospect of the picture, and they spontaneously take on the stance of the dead.

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The camera immediately becomes wild to. All possibility of promiscuity between the photographer and his subject is ruled out (unlike common practice today). The distance between them is unbridgeable, and the photograph is the tech­nical equivalent of Segalen’s radical exoticism. All this lends a true nobility to the photographic event – like a distant echo of primitive culture shock. In the heroic period, the photographic rela­tionship was a duel, and death was part of it. The death‑like immobility of the subject, his lack of expression (but not of character) are as powerful as the mobility of the camera, so that the two are kept in balance. The destiny he carries in his head, and his mental universe, are imprinted directly on to the film, and this can be seen as clearly today as a century ago, when the photo was taken. As we capture the savage or the primitive with our cameras, they capture us in their imagination. According to Roland Barthes, this virtual death or disappearance of the subject in the heroic period is still present in the anthropo­logical heart of the image. The ‘punctum’, which stands for the void, absence and unreality, set against the ‘studium’, which is the whole context of meaning and references. It is this emptiness at the heart of the image that gives it its magic and power, and this empti­ness which we usually drive out by filling it with meaning. At festivals, in galleries, museums and exhi­bitions, images are dripping with meaning and messages, aesthetic sentimentality, recog­nisable stereotypes. This is no less than pros­titution of the image to its meaning, to what it wishes to convey – it is held to ransom, either by the person behind the camera or the media. Death and violence are present everywhere in our profusion of images, but in a pathetic, ideological, spectacular form which has noth­ing to do with the ‘punctum’, with this quality, this fatal figure inherent in the image which has been expelled from it. Instead of the image encompassing death, it is death that encompasses the image (in the external form of an exhibition, a museum or the cultural necropolises that exalt the art of photography). 246

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The image is off‑stage. A photographic mise‑en‑scène is a nonsense, whether it is an integral part of the picture or the input of the institution. If the image is buried under com­mentaries, entombed in aesthetic glorification, surrendered to cosmetic surgery and the ministrations of museums, the hallucinatory core of the image is bound to be lost. No trace of a confrontation between the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ will be left, just the circulation of the medium. The fundamentally dangerous form of the image will degenerate into the cultural circulation of masterpieces. What I deplore is the aestheticisation of photography – its promotion to the ranks of the Fine Arts, clasped in the bosom of culture –. Because of its essentially technical nature, the photographic image has come from somewhere beyond aesthetics, revolutionising our representation of the world. When photogra­phy burst on the scene, it challenged the aes­thetic monopoly of art over the image. And now the tables have been turned: art is swallowing up photography, rather than the reverse. Photography is rooted deeply in a different, ­strictly speaking non‑aesthetic dimension, rather like trompe l’oeil, a sub‑current which can be found throughout the history of art and which remains relatively untouched by the great art movements passing over it. Trompe l’oeil only appears to be realistic; in fact it represents the self‑evidence of the world, presenting such a minutely detailed ‘realistic’ image that it takes on a magical power. Like photography, trompe l’oeil retains something of the magical status of the image, and therefore of the radical illusion of the world. A wild, primal form, closer to the origins and the horrors of representation – concerned with external appearances and the clarity of the world, but a clarity that deceives – it is therefore the oppo­site of a realistic view, and even today, still less valid in terms of judgement and taste than in terms of pure fascination. Through its non‑realistic manipulation of techniques and technology, cutouts, immobil­ity, silence, the phenomenological reduction of movement and perhaps of colour, the pho­tograph must be the purest image and the most artificial. A photograph is not beautiful, it is worse than that, and as such, takes on objectal force in a world where the aesthetic principle is fading. Photography derives its originality from technology.

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It is precisely the technical character of our world, and paradoxically, the camera, which reveals the non‑ objectivity of the world by focusing on that which escapes analysis and resemblance. Technology transports us beyond the bounds of resemblance, right into the heart of the trompe l’oeil world of the real. This in turn transforms our view of technology: it becomes the locus of a double game, as a magnifying mirror of illusion and forms. There is a com­ plicity between technical instrumentation and the world, convergence between an objective technique and the intrinsic power of the object. And photography could be the art of quietly entering into this complicity, not to control the process but to play the game and to make it clear that the game is not over yet. The world in itself does not resemble anything. As a concept and a discourse, it has a lot to do with a great many things, but as an object pure and simple, it is unidentifiable. The photographic operation is a sort of reflex writing, automatic writing registering the self‑evidence of the world, which is not evident at all. Within the generic illusion of the image, the problem of the real no longer arises. It is wiped out straight away by its own movement, as it passes spontaneously beyond the domain of what is true or untrue, real or unreal, good or bad. The image is not a medium that we have to learn to use correctly. It is what it is, and it is outside the scope of all moral considerations. In essence, the image is immoral, and the world’s metamorphosis into an image is an immoral process. It is our task to escape from our representation and become the immoral vector of the image. It is our task to become an object again, to become ‘other’ in a seduc­tive relationship with the world.

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We must allow the silent complicity between the object and the camera free play, and between appearances and technology, between the physical quality of the light and the metaphysical complexity of the technical apparatus, without allowing vision or mean­ing to intervene. For we are seen by the object, dreamed by the object. The world reflects us, the world thinks us. This is the fundamental principle. The magical quality of photography is that the object does all the work. Photographers will never admit this, but persist in claiming that all originality lies in their inspiration, their photographic interpretation of the world. And so the photographs they make are bad, or too good, by confusing their subjective vision with the miraculous reflex of the photo­ graphic act.

Notes 1

Alfred Jarry’s concept of pataphysics or ‘the science of imaginary solunons’ examines ‘the laws of exception.’

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Creating a Museum of Photography (1896-1898). The Collection Pictorialist photographs of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels Tamara Berghmans —

Every once and a while a collection of photographs turns up in the storage of a museum. Often the collection is incomplete, with most of the masterpieces missing. On moments like these we are aware of the necessity of good preserved archives and the preservation of collections. But what is today the significance, besides the historical value, of such an ‘amputated’ collection?

Introduction In 1996 boxes with Pictorialist photographs are found in the cellar of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels (RMAH).1 Where did these photographs come from? Did anybody know of this collection? If so, why then were they left behind at a place without any care taken? It is important to know that this international collection was not the least: between 1895 and 1901 the Belgian government acquired 67 photographs, in a period where acquisitions like these were rare. How did this collection end up here? What was the purpose of this collection? In what kind of circumstances did the government buy these photographs? What is the quality of the photos? Are there important representatives

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of Pictorialism (1890-1910) present? Who chose these photographs? For how much money were they acquired? What happened to the collection after the purchase?

Collecting We tell the story about a unique purchase of a collection of Pictorialist photographs. When we take a closer look, it is in the first place remarkable that the government acquired this collection. Secondly it is noteworthy that from the 67 photographs there are only 27 photographs left today. It is not clear how and when these photographs disappeared. In the third place it is important to know that the photographs were purchased in order to found a Museum of Photography in Brussels in the Royal Museums of Decorative and Industrial Arts (Musées royaux des Arts décoratifs et industriels), the former RMAH. These museums were divided in 4 sections and the art photography was part of the Industries of Modern Art (Les industries d'art moderne).2 When we know that Austria was the first to organize an art photographic Salon in 1891, it is clear that Belgium, with his first Salon of English Photographic Art in 1892, has been one of the pioneers in promoting art photography. The Belgian government starts acquiring a collection of art photographs from the Salon photographique of 1895, organised by the Association belge de Photographie (ABP). These photographs are enlarged with the purchase of another international collection of Pictorialist photographs of the Salons of 1896, 1898 en 1901. Important names such as James Craig Annan, Robert Demachy, Heinrich Kuhn, Léonard Misonne (figure 1), Nicola Perscheid, Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz are present in the collection. The ABP was founded in 1874 and placed under the supervision of King Leopold II (1865-1909) and with Prince Albert (1875-1934) as honorary president. In 1907 the association counts 700 members over the whole country, with sections in the most important cities: such as Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Louvain. The goal of the ABP was purely artistic and scientific. It wanted to promote the photographic progress

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1. Léonard Misonne Belgian, 1870-1943 [Chemin poudreux] 1898 Carbon print 29 x 37,5 cm Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussel

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through magazines, expositions, communications and publications. Till 1936 the ABP was in Belgium one of the most important photographic organisations. The secession movement Le Cercle d’Art photographique L’Effort (1901-1910?) was founded in 1901 with it’s most important members Léon Sneyers and Léon Bovier and with honorary members Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) and Robert Demachy. When these photographs appeared several years ago in the RMAH in Brussels, photo historians knew of the existence of this collection, but they didn’t give any notice to it, except for a few notes in some publications.3 The collection gets more attention, when the RMAH organises in 1998 a few conference days (26-28/06/1998) and a summer-exhibition Photographie 1896-1898 Fotografie with the remaining photographs.4 In the same year a small publication De verzameling fotografieën van de Picturalisten is written by photo historian Marie-Christine Claes and introduced by Claudine Deltour, responsible for the section Photography and Film in the RMAH. Two years later, in 2001, the museum organises the permanent exhibition Onbelicht. De fotografie in het Jubelpark. But they don’t show all the remaining Pictorialist photographs. Only 11 photographs, from the Belgian photographers, were exhibited, while the rest stayed in storage, where the photographs were not being conserved in a proper way. Still in their original frames and covered with carton, they were placed without any system in or against shelves. It is not clear whether there has been any change in preservation on this moment. It will take until 2001 that the collection is thoroughly examined.5

History The journey of these 67 photographs has been long and full of obstacles. It begins in 1896, when the president of the ABP announces in the Bulletin de l’Association belge de Photographie (BABP) a letter from the photographer Hector Colard. He is the pivot behind the founding of a Museum of Photography in Belgium: ‘The President informs the commission that he has received a letter from M. H. Colard, declaring the creation by the government of a Museum of Photographic Arts in

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Brussels, annexed to the Museum of Decorative and Industrial Arts. The government has already acquired several photographs and hopefully the museum will be accessible to the public very soon. M. Colard is right to remark that Belgium is the first nation to decree this measure in favour of us. The president adds that we can only congratulate ourselves because of this creation that will give a new boost to the Photographic Arts. He will thank M. Colard for his communication and he expresses the hope that the commission of the new museum will make a selection among the works that are exhibited at the moment and will propose the government to acquire the selection.’6 Nothing has been realised from the original intention to hang the photographs in a Museum of Photography. In 1898 they didn’t find a good location for the photographs. Because of this the collection was not open for the public. All the photographs were condemned to be stored in the bureau of M. Brunfaut, the chief supervisor of the museum, where they didn’t come out for a long period. After this first announcement of the founding of a Museum of Photography, the BABP gives little notice of further developments. More information is found about a Museum of Documentary Photography (Musée des Photographies documentaires). The museum was founded in 1895 by French example. On May 9th 1894 Léon Vidal (1833-1906) founded in Paris at the Cercle de la Librairie at Boulevard Saint-Germain 117 a Museum of Documentary Photography.7 Both museums, the one in France and in Belgium, were not occupied with artistic photography, as their respective names already indicate. Nevertheless some confusion is possible because this Museum of Documentary Photography was also situated in the RMAH. The founders were aware of this mix-up as becomes clear from the Bulletin du Photo-Club de Belgique: ‘We want to remark the great distinction that has to be made between the photographic collections of the Royal Museum of Art and History and the Museum of Documentary Photography of the Photo-Club de Belgique.’8 The president of this Belgian Museum of Documentary Photography was Ernest De Potter and in 1901 the museum possessed 23000 clichés.

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In 1905 this Museum of Documentary Photography changes its name to International Institute of Photography (Institut international de Photographie) and becomes a section of the International Institute of Bibliography (Institut international de Bibliographie) situated in the Rue du Musée in Brussels.9 It is not known what happened with the collection of Pictorialist photographs between 1898 and 1955. Due to damage caused by water the photographs are transferred to the Little Narthex inside the buildings of the RMAH. From 1956 till 1976 the association Ars Photographica is the joint manager of the collection. The purchase from 1898 and 1901 will be enlarged with another series of photographs and also photographic equipment. Due to lack of space the whole collection, now in total 1400 inventory numbers, leaves the RMAH. On March 15th 1975 Ars Photographica exhibits the collection in the Schippershuis at the Grand Place in Brussels. With this Ars Photographica and R. Roeland, president of Phocigraf (association of Belgian dealers and importers of photographic and cinematographic material) wanted to initiate a National Museum of Photography, although this museum already existed with the Provinciaal Museum voor Kunstambachten Sterckshof in Deurne (the former FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen).10 The lease for the museum at the Grand Place is not prolonged, so Ars Photographica has to close it’s museum at September 30th 1976. From correspondence between the Sterckshof and Ars Photographica it becomes clear that there have been negotiations going on to save the collection Pictorialist photographs from Ars Photographica: ‘Repeatedly the Working Committee (of the Sterckshof) has insisted to take official steps to lend the photographs from the Belgian Pictorialist Period, property of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, to the Sterckshof. I recall that M. De Roo [chief curator RMAH] promised this to M. Baudouin (curator Sterckshof). I don’t see any reason why the RMAH in Brussels should leave this very valuable (sic.) photographs with Ars Photographica, now the Museum in Brussels [from Ars Photographica] is abolished!’11 In 1977 the collection is stored in a house from the French Ministry of Culture.12 Later the photographs are given into custody Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. In 1996 the collection finally returns to the RMAH.

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Significance of the Collection We have to ask ourselves what kind of photographs were acquired from the 4 above mentioned Salons and what was the meaning of these purchases in that period. Art photography was still struggling against prejudices and with internal differences of opinion. The Pictorialist photographers themselves were convinced of the fact that their photographs were art, but how did the rest of the population look at these photos? Now this acquisition of art photographs seems important in the history of photography, together with the recognition of the Belgian government. But we may not forget that Pictorialism is connected with the revaluation of the arts and crafts and that this purchase has to be seen in connection with this. Although this purchase was important, we cannot be blinded by the significance we would give it nowadays. In the beginning of the twentieth century these photographs were contemporary art and some of the art photographs couldn’t be distinguished from paintings or aquarelles. We have to keep in mind that these photographs could have been bought, because they were cheap paintings. The commission in charge of the choice of the photographs was composed under the presidency of Karel Buls (1837-1914), Mayor of Brussels. Other members were the Realist and Neo-Classic sculptor Paul de Vigne (18431901), the symbolist painter Xavier Mellery (1845-1921) and some other artists and politicians. It is striking that the selection committee didn’t have any photographers in it. All the different tendencies of Pictorialism are represented in the collection of photographs, from the naturalistic to the more impressionistic images. The themes in the collection are landscapes, portraits, studies, sea sights and genre scenes. The general image of the collection corresponds more with photographs from a magazine like Die Kunst in der Photographie, then the more progressive Camera Work. We have to keep in mind that the collection represents only a small period from 1895 till 1901, while Pictorialism goes on till 1910, so a lot of the renovators are not included.13 Not every photograph attests to be from the best quality for our contemporary eyes, but in those days they used different standards then they do now. It is difficult to imagine oneself in the conceptions of the bourgeoisie of that period. 257

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The American press sees the purchase of the Belgian government of Le Vase Noir / The Black Vase (figure 2) by Edward Steichen, as a pioneer in the recognition of photography: ‘It is the first time a government has interested itself to this extent in photography and purchased a photograph to hang among the old masters.’14 And further: ‘His photograph, The Black Vase, which he exhibited in the Brussels Photographic Salon, was purchased by the Belgian Government, which ordered it hung in the National Gallery in Brussels. The hanging of a photograph in a gallery with paintings brought loud protests from the artists. It is the first time a photograph has been officially recognized as worthy of a place in a national collection.’15 From the research of the purchase prices we can conclude that most of the photographs were acquired for the price of 50 Belgian Francs (BEF) for 2.16 Besides that it is remarkable that different photographs were donated. The most expensive photograph is Les Troglodytes (figure 3) by the Swiss photographer Fréderic Boissonnas (130 BEF). The cheapest one, La Peleuse de pommes de terre, by the Dutch photographer M.B. Albach, cost only 5 BEF. What is the meaning of these prices? Was this a lot of money? To find out what the value of the money was in 1895-1901 we took a closer look at the standard wages of an unskilled labourer, a bricklayer. The weekly wage of a bricklayer in Brussels in 1895 was 26.70 BEF and in 1901 28.20 BEF. The cheapest photograph is 5 BEF. This means that he couldn’t have afforded a luxury product such as a photograph. But we have to keep in mind that the buyer here is the Belgian government. A different look on the price problem is when we convert the prices according to the basis index of the National Institute of Statistics. The value of money in 1895-1901 was the same as in 1914. The basis index of 1914 was 100. With a simple calculation we can transpose the value of the prices in 1898. For example: a photograph of 50 BEF would have the value of 8,900 BEF in 2001. This means that the Belgian government didn’t pay a lot of money for the photographs, next to the fact that a lot of the photographs were donated. We also have to keep in mind that most of the Pictorialist photographers were rich bourgeoisie, that didn’t have to live from the sale from their photographs.

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2. Edward Steichen American, 1879-1973 [The Black Vase] ca. 1901 Carbon print 20,4 x 15,4 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

3. Frédéric Boissonnas Swiss, 1858-1946 [Les Troglodytes] May 1893, surrounding of Genève Carbon print 56 x 45,5 cm Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussel

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An extract from a letter written by Baron Prosper de Haulleville, chief curator of the RMAH, to the former Minister of Agriculture and Public Utilities demonstrates why he thought these photographs should be acquired and which (art historian) value they have and will have in the future: ‘The expenditure (fr. 1.245) is relatively minimal (the price of the frames are included in this amount); and the importance of the acquisition is enormous. Photography, understood like the authors of the works mentioned here above have done, is no longer an industry; it’s a true art, and one of the finest. Like a document of art history, these works one day will have considerable value. A modern Museum of Industrial Art has to necessarily reserve a special place for a collection this modern and otherworldly. If you share my opinion, M. Minister, will you authorize me to acquire these proposed works.’17

Missing Photographs Our research of the collection was based on the original sources, in particular the photographs themselves. The inventory of 1973 of the RMAH was also an indispensable document. Nevertheless it is with this incomplete inventory that the first difficulties start: from the 67 purchased photographs there are only 33 descriptions left (or ever made) and reproductions from the complete collection do not exist. This means that we don’t have an image of most of the missing photographs. Only on the basis of the 10 descriptions of the inventory and according to the French translations of the photographs – as published in the Bulletin de l’Association belge de Photographie of 1898, we can look for the missing photographs. In this case ‘missing’ can have different meanings: the photograph was destroyed (by ignorance or negligence), has left the museum (by accident or theft) or is still present in the museum, but nobody knows where.18 For example, in 1997 Marie-Christine Claes found Au Cloître by the English photographer Margaret Watson between some old cardboard boxes and two years later Claudine Deltour finds in a similar situation Mon Ami A... (portrait from the Belgian photographer Alexandre) by René De Man.

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Our goal was to find as much information about the missing works as possible. The difficulty in finding the specific photographs from that collection lies in the fact, specific to photography, that there can exist more prints from one negative. This means that it is only sure that a photograph is from this particular collection, when can be demonstrated that it is the right print. This proof could be the vignette of one of the Salons from which the photograph was acquired or the presence of the inventory number of the RMAH. When we take a closer look at the missing photographs, it is striking that important names such as Steichen and Stieglitz disappeared. In order to find more information about these two photographs I made a visit to New York in September 2001 to do research in the Edward Steichen Archive in the MoMA and the Alfred Stieglitz Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.19 According to Weston Naef, curator of Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, 3 other prints exist from The Black Vase by Steichen: one in the MoMA, another one in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and a last one in the possession of Joanna Steichen, Steichen’s widow.20 The photograph in the Metropolitan Museum is printed around 1902. The photograph from Joanna Steichen, according to Howard Greenberg, was a part of the personal collection of Steichen. It seems unlikely to him that this print would travel to Belgium and would then come back to the US.21 The third photograph in the MoMA was not found in the collection.22 By lack of evidence, it is impossible to proof that the Belgian government acquired one of these prints. In the case of Stieglitz’s photograph Rentrée à la Maison / Scurrying Home (figure 4) we contacted Sarah Greenough, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The print we are looking for is probably a photogravure ‘produced for Pictorial Photographs: A Record of the Photographic Salon of 1895 (London, 1895). During the mid-1890s Stieglitz routinely exhibited photogravures because they were larger and more visually effective in the large photographic salons. As Stieglitz showed photogravures of Scurrying Home at both the London Salon and RPS [Royal Photographic Society] exhibitions that year, I strongly suspect that he showed one at Brussels too. It is hard to know which exact print it might have been, but I doubt ours was shown at Brussels.’ All Stieglitz’s photographs in possession of the National Gallery come from his personal estate.23 262

4. Alfred Stieglitz American, 1864-1946 [Scurrying Home] 1894, Katwijk aan Zee Photogravure National Gallery of Art, Washington

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When we have a look at the museums in Belgium, we see that the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen possesses 5 photographs with the same (French) title as the ones from the RMAH: Projet de frise by the English photographer Carine Cadby, Gros Temps à Brighton by Jules Rigaux, Coppelia (figure 5) by Edouard Hannon, Christ au tombeau (figure 6) by Léon Bovier and L’Effort by Léon Sneyers. Only one photograph has the proof that we are looking for. None of the other photographs are in their authentic frame and some photos are placed on a new support, so the original inscriptions are lost. Neither are the photographs present in the 1973 RMAH-inventory, so no information is given. It is impossible to trace the origin and date of the purchase or donation, because the inventory of the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen was formed in 1964 and all the photographs that entered the museum before this date are indicated with the number 1963. We only know that the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen acquired the 5 photographs before 1964. It is sure that Christ au tombeau (1896) from Léon Bovier belongs to the original collection of photographs from the RMAH. On the back are 4 vignettes present: one from the Deuxième Exposition d’Art photographique (1896) and another from the first Salon of the Cercle d’Art photographique L’Effort (1901). The photo was acquired from the Salon of 1901. It is not known how this photograph turned up in the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen, but it is sure that he disappeared in the RMAH between 1901 and 1955.24 Although there isn’t any hard evidence for the 4 remaining photographs, we would like to propose the hypothesis that they also belong to the collection of the RMAH. From the inventory we can see that Coppelia (FP.120) and Projet de Frise (FP.121) entered the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen together. Apart from this, it can’t be a coincidence that 5 missing photographs occur together in a different collection. In addition it seems obvious that the photographs would still be in Belgium and Antwerp is one of the most plausible places.

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5. Edouard Hannon Belgian, 1853-1931 [Coppelia] 1895 39,9 x 17,2 cm FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen

6. Léon Bovier Belgian, 1865-1923 [Christ au tombeau] 1896 Carbon print on canvas 24,5 x 58 cm FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen

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Conclusion The first step in the research at the collection Pictorialist photographs of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels is made, but there are still a lot of questions and mysterious disappearances left. It is too conspicuous that important names such as Stieglitz, Steichen, Perscheid, ... are missing. This story is one of the many examples on how an institution should NOT deal with a collection of photographs. But let this be a motivation for us, the new generation of researchers and curators, to do better in the future. The need for well-kept archives, consistently drawed-up inventories and scientific research is, even today, huge. We have to keep in mind that photographs are very vulnerable objects that need special care and precautionary measures in case of conservation and restoration. This collection needs further scientific historical research and a more interdisciplinary approach. We cannot ignore the social and art historical context when we study the collecting of art photographs and the intentions of creating a museum of photography. These Pictorialist photographs were seen in their time as industrial modern arts, a section in the museum of art, but that was not on the same level as painting. This collection of photographs shows us that there existed in a very early stage in the history of photography an interest in collecting art photographs, not only from the photographer’s point of view, also from the museum. The fact that they wanted to place them in a special room, apart from the rest, can be seen in two ways: photography could have been seen as a special art form, that deserved a place for her own, or was not artistic enough to be put with the rest of the art. We have to keep in mind that the collection, today, would have a different value, when it would be complete. We can try to trace the original meaning with the help of contemporary sources, but what is the actual meaning of a collection like this? Where do we place this collection in the history of photography? A lot of histories of photography are written with a collection of photographs in the back of their heads. But can we write a history by rightly – or wrongly – giving a special merit to a specific collection? Maybe we are not ready yet to answer these

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questions. Important in the research on photography is in the first place the theoretical support, which is necessary for defining photography and for the specific vocabulary of this medium. Secondly we need profound study of the sources, with a special attention for the slumbering images in the collection. A wide and interdisciplinary effort from the researcher is needed to really understand photography, as an event. The research on the history of photography exceeds the work of one person. In the future we will have to come to some kind of teamwork, a co-operation of all the different disciplines, to interpret the true value of this collection and the ideal platforms for this would be the museums and universities. ‘“I was ever really fighting for a new spirit in life, that went much deeper than just a fight for photography,” wrote Stieglitz. “I did not know in time that I would be broadening the fight, a fight that involved painters, sculptors, literary people, musicians.” His network, now in place, began connecting the artists associated with Paris – French, American, or otherwise – to a New York audience, French artists in Paris to American artists in Paris, sculpture to photography, photography to watercolors, watercolors to literature, the great masters to the unknown, the younger generation to the older ones. Was it possible that the cloisters of the art world have been penetrated surreptitiously via the route of photography?’ 25 I would like to express my thanks to Claudine Deltour-Levie, Curator of Photography and Film at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels for her kind co-operation.

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List of the photographs * remaining photographs that are still in the RMAH ** missing photographs ° photographs found in the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen M. B. Albach (NL, ?- ?), La Peleuse de pommes de terre, ≤ 1896** Alexandre (Albert Edouard Drains, BE, 1855-1925), Dans le Brouillard et la Fumée (1895)* Alexandre (Albert Edouard Drains), Étude de portrait, 1897/8* Alexandre (Albert Edouard Drains), La Forge, 1895** Alexandre (Alexis) Hamilton Allan (GB, ?- ?), Martha, 1898** James Craig Annan (GB, 1864-1946), Une Petite Princesse, 1895* James Craig Annan, Portrait d’une Dame, 1895* James Craig Annan, Une Charrue en Lombardie, ≤ 1895** James Craig Annan, Un Requiem à Venise, ≤ 1895** Ernest R. Ashton (GB, ca. 1867-1951/2), Un Écrivain public, 1896** Frédéric Boissonnas (CH, 1858-1946), Les Troglodytes, 1893* Léon Bovier (BE, 1865-1923), Christ au tombeau, 1896 ° Carine Cadby (GB, ?- ?), Projet de frise, ≤ 1895 ° Eustace G. Calland (GB, ?- ?), Fin d'après-midi, ≤ 1895** Jos Casier (BE, 1852-1925), Un soir à Heyst, ≤ 1896** Hector Colard (BE, 1851-1923), Les Rayons et les Ombres, 1895* Hector Colard, Mon Neveu, ≤ 1895** Hector Colard, Étude, ≤ 1895** William Crooke (GB, ?-1928), Lord Rutherford Clark, ≤ 1895** Henry-E. Davis (GB, ?- ?), Le Soir, ≤ 1895** George Davison (GB, 1854-1930), Wivenhoe, 1895* George Davison, Fowey, ≤ 1895** George Davison, La Route de la côte, 1895** Robert Demachy (FR, 1859-1936), Liseuse, 1895* Robert Demachy, Méditation, 1895** René De Man (BE, 1848-?), Mon ami A…, 1895* René De Man, Portrait de Mlle A.D..., ≤ 1895** John H. Gear (GB, ?-?), La Fin d’un jour d'automne, 1896* Alfred Géruzet (BE, 1845-1903), La Fenaison, ≤ 1895** Karl Greger (GB, ?-?), Cathédrale de Dordrecht, 1895*

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Edouard Hannon (BE, 1853-1931), Au Soleil levant, 1895* Edouard Hannon, Coppelia, 1895 ° Hugo Henneberg (AT, 1863-1918), Coucher de soleil en hiver, 1895* Alfred Horsley Hinton (GB, 1863-1908), Solitude fleurie, ≤ 1895** Frederick Hollyer (GB, 1837-1933), Portrait de Walter Crane, 1895* Heinrich Kühn (AT, 1866-1944), L’Été, 1895* Antoine Kymeulen (BE, 1855- >1906), Crépuscule sur l’Escaut, 1898* Antoine Kymeulen, Portrait du baron de Haulleville, 1898** Reverend F. C. Lambert (GB, ?-1932), Fumée et Brouillard, 1895* Reverend F. C. Lambert, La Porte de la chaumière, 1895** René Le Bègue (FR, 1857-1914), Figure décorative, ≤ 1895** Ferdinand Leys (BE, ?-?), Dame en noir, 1897* Jos Maes (BE, 1838-1908), Une Trombe, 1896* Jos Maes, Une Éclaircie, 1896** Jos Maes, Approche de l’orage, 1896** Jos Maes, Ciel clair, 1896** Léonard Misonne (BE, 1870-1943), Chemin poudreux, 1898* Robert Pauli (BE, ?-1899), Un Mayeur, ≤ 1895** Lucien Pavard (BE, ?- ?), La Belle Blanchisseuse, ≤ 1896** Nicola Perscheid (DE, 1864-1930), Le Faucheur, 1900** Jules Rigaux (BE, ?- ?), Gros Temps à Brighton, ≤ 1895 ° Jules Rigaux, La Clouterie, ≤ 1895** Henry Peach Robinson (GB, 1830-1901), Au Large d'Arron, ≤ 1895** Ralph Winwood Robinson (GB, 1862-1942), Un Grain imprévu, 1895* Baron Albert de Rothschild (AT, 1844-1911), Tête d'étude, 1896* René Rousseau (BE,? - > 1903), Le Laboureur, 1898* Edmond Sacré (BE, 1851-1921), L’Étude, ≤ 1896** Otto Scharf (DE, 1858-1947), Pays marécageux, ≤ 1898** Léon Sneyers (BE, 1877-1949), L’Effort, 1901 ° Edward Steichen (US, 1879-1973), Le Vase Noir, ≤ 1901** Alfred Stieglitz (US, 1864-1946), Rentrée à la maison, 1894/95** Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (GB, 1853-1941), Brouillard, 1895* Marcel Vanderkindere (BE, ca. 1870 - ca.1935), A Marée basse à Nieuport, 1898* Philipp von Schoeller (AT, 1845/6-1916), Pêcheuse hollandaise, 1895* Philipp von Schoeller, Cäcilie, 1896** Margaret Watson (GB, ?- ?), Au Cloître, ≤ 1896* Walter D. Welford (GB, ?- ?), Jour de lavage à Dinant, ≤ 1896** 270

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Notes 1.

Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis (KMKG) or Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire (MRAH). Also referred to as the Jubelparkmuseum of Musée du Cinquentenaire

2.

Marcel Vanderkindere, ‘Le Musée de Photographie artistique au Parc du Cinquantenaire’ Bulletin de l’Association belge de Photographie (vol. 25, nr. 7, 1898), pp. 447-448.

3.

Claude Magelhaes; Laurent Roosens, De Fotokunst in België 1839-1940, (Exhibition Catalogue) Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof (Deurne-Antwerpen) 1970; Jean-Claude Lemagny, André Rouillé, A History of Photography. Social and Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge University Press (New York, 1987); Claire Leblanc, Première Approche du Cercle d’Art photographique Bruxellois. L’Effort(1901-1910), (unpublished Master thesis) Université Libre Bruxelles (Brussels,1996); Marie-Christine Claes & Claudine Deltour-Levie, ‘Le Musée de la Photographie et du Cinéma des Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire’ La vie des Musées. Association francophone des musées de Belgique (Brussels, 1996), pp. 35-42.

4.

Speakers on the conference of 27/06/1998 were: Claudine Deltour-Levie ‘Les collections Photographie et Cinéma du Musée du Cinquantenaire’, Jacques Perriault ‘L’archéo-cinéma’, Didier Pilon ‘Image numérique et grand public’, Remy Poinot ‘Technologie des Images numériques, internet et télétransmission’, Francis Delvert ‘L’aventure du Vélocigraphe’, Johan Swinnen ‘Welke geschiedenis van de fotografie?’, Marie-Christine Claes ‘La photographie en Belgique au XIXe siècle’, Sylke Heylen ‘Het conservatierestauratie project 1997-1998’, Gabrielle Claes ‘La préhistoire du Cinéma au Musée du Cinéma à Bruxelles’, Eric Bourgougnon ‘Le projet du nouveau Musée de la Photographie à Bièvres’, Annie Gérard ‘Hommage à Paul Nemerlin’ and Daniel Hermelin ‘Histoire d’un musée.’

5.

This paper is based on De collectie foto’s van de Picturalisten van de Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis te Brussel, aangekocht door de Belgische regering tussen 1895 en 1901, (unpublished Master thesis) Brussel: Vrije Universiteit Brussel 2002 (3 vol.).

6.

‘Assemblée générale annuelle, tenue à Bruxelles le 12 avril 1896’ Bulletin de l’Association belge de Photographie (vol. 23, n° 5, 1896), pp. 328-329. ‘Le président informe l’assemblée qu’il a reçu une lettre de M. Hector Colard annonçant la création par le gouvernement, à Bruxelles, d’un Musée

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photographique annexé aux Musées royaux des arts décoratifs et industriels. Plusieurs oeuvres ont déjà été achetées par le gouvernement et il est à espérer que le Musée sera bientôt accessible au public. M. Colard fait, à juste titre, remarquer que la Belgique est la première nation qui décrète cette mesure en faveur de notre part. Le président ajoute qu’on ne peut que se féliciter de cette création qui donnera un nouvel essor à l’art photographique. Il remerciera M. Colard de sa communication et il exprime l’espoir que la commission du nouveau Musée fera un choix parmi les oeuvres exposées en ce moment et en proposera l’achat au gouvernement.’ 7.

‘Association du Musée des photographies documentaires, Fondée le 9 mai 1894. Statuts’ Le Moniteur de la Photographie (n° 12, 15/06/1894), p. 191.

8.

‘Photographie documentaire’ Bulletin du Photo-Club de Belgique (1901), p. 136.

9.

Email Marie-Christine Claes, 22/10/2001.

10. Correspondence Provinciaal Museum voor Kunstambachten Sterckshof, letter from Jan Walravens to Petrus Thys, 5/02/1975. 11. Correspondence Provinciaal Museum voor Kunstambachten Sterckshof, document from Laurent Roosens to Jan Walgrave and Roger Coenen, 29/12/1976. ‘Herhaalde malen heeft het Werkcomité erop aangedrongen opdat officiële stappen zouden worden aangewend om het aantal fotobeelden uit de Belgische pictoralistische periode, eigendom van het Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Roosens bedoelt hiermee de KMKG) te Brussel, in bruikleen zouden worden afgestaan aan Het Sterckshof. Ik meen mij te herinneren dat dit trouwens enigszins een belofte was van Heer De Roo aan Heer Baudouin. Nu het Brusselse museum is opgedoekt zie ik geen enkele reden meer opdat het M.S.K. te Brussel deze zeer waardevolle (sic) fotobeelden verder zou belaten bij Ars Photographica!’ 12. Letter O. J. Ameel, president of Ars Photographica, to M. Defosset, Mayor of Etterbeek, 16/03/1977. 13. Email Pool Andries, 12/07/2002. 14. ‘A Master of Photography’, newspaperclipping from the scrapbook of Steichen’s mother, undated: Edward Steichen Archive, MoMA, New York. 15. ‘Photography as High Art’, newspaperclipping from the scrapbook of Steichen’s mother, undated: Edward Steichen Archive, MoMA, New York. 16. 1 EUR = 40.33 BEF (Belgian Francs). 17. Letter 2/01/1896 (n° 5163) from chief conservator Baron Prosper de Haulleville to the Minister of Agriculture and Public Uitilities: 87/B, Bruxelles, Musées

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royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Acquisitions 1890-1920 in: T 004/01, (A. Cosemans) Bestuur van de Schone Kunsten. Vroeger Fonds (Binnenlandse zaken: onderwijs, cultuur en wetenschappen). : ‘(…) La dépense à faire (fr. 1,245,-) est relativement minime (le prix des cadres est compris dans cette somme); et l’importance de l’acquisition est grande. La photographie, comprise comme l’ont fait les auteurs des pièces ci-dessus déterminées, n’est plus une industrie, c’est un véritable art, et des plus fins. Comme document de l’histoire de l’art, ces pièces auront un jour une valeur considérable. Un Musée d’art industriel moderne doit nécessairement réserver un compartiment spécial à une collection si moderniste et si curieuse. Si vous partagez mon avis, Monsieur le Ministre, veuillez m’autoriser à faire les acquisitions proposées.’ 18. Document Marie-Christine Claes (27/10/2001), Synthèse des informations: photo pictorialistes, p. 1. Period 1: 1898-1955: 25 photographs were lost between the purchase in 1898 and the registration in the new general inventory (RMAH) from 1943. Period 2: 1901-1955: 3 photographs were lost between the purchase in 1901 and the registration in the new general inventory (RMAH) from 1943. Period 3: 1973-1983: 10 photographs were lost between the transfer from the Muller section and the visit of Steven F. Joseph in 1983. 19. The mayor part of my research in New York (September 2001) was troubled and made impossible by the attacks on the World Trade Center, 11/09/2001. 20. Email Weston Naef, 23/05/2001. 21. Letter Lisa Hostetler (Registrar Howard Greenberg Gallery, 15/08/2001) and personal communication Howard Greenberg, New York, 7/09/2001. 22. Email Rachel Crognale, Department of Photography, MoMA, New York, 12/05/2001. 23. Email Janet Blyberg, Assistent Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 16/11/2001. 24. Document Marie-Christine Claes (27/10/2001), Synthèse des informations: photo pictorialistes, p. 3. 25. Annie Cohen-Solal, Painting American. The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, 2001)

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The Motionless Journey Xavier Canonne

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‘Conscience is without movement. And it is only when movement is absent that we can perceive the movement of what we call time. If time passes, something else must remain motionless. And it is the conscience of oneself that does not move.’ Leo Tolstoy. Journal The long stretch of time during which Christine Felten and Véronique Massinger talk, above the liners, the Atlantic clouds drifting past the aeroplane window, is already reminiscent of one of their photographs. On the small screen set into the seat, Casablanca is being shown. ‘We will always have Paris’ evokes the hope of departures in damp airports. Here we are on a day which began early, and which will not end for a long time, at the mercy of the tropics and time zones which take us a long way and leave us there just a short while later. The sky has closed its eye and languidly rocks the passengers in a plane which seems to want to escape the night, preferring the dusty pink which now tints the horizon. The day is just beginning to cast its shadows around São Paulo, as though to conclude the photograph which they will not take, but which you can be sure they have thought about, as they scribble busily in their notebooks. This is no longer later; it’s hardly now; it’ll be soon. At breakfast time we will dine on one of this immense city’s avenues, then we will have lunch at dinnertime, and I will call you in your night, with my broad daylight voice.

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I feel somewhat privileged to accompany them on this first trip to Brazil. They don’t really like talking about their work conditions, the choice of a spot, the preparation required before a shoot, the time it takes to record an image, or its chance of success. This story belongs to them like an old recipe, which they just consult from time to time, without ever wanting to learn it by heart. I'll have to watch myself, and not harp on about it. However, I will have to insist that they tell me more than what I can guess: we're here to look for a caravan to refurbish, and I need to understand what it is they’re looking for, rather than what they find: I need to know why they prefer one spot to another, since, on a later, second trip, they will take photos and mix images of Europe with those of Brazil, in their own special way of blending time. And I will try to fathom whether it is Christine or Véronique who is pulling the other along, before realizing that the two of them are equal driving forces operating the same machine, inseparable for the duration of the caravana obscura, this still eye on the edge of the landscape. – In the shade of the trees, leaning over the river, the child watches the river running over the flat stones, caressing them like a naked body. Absorbed by the constant, silent flow, he no longer sees the water, but the time he is stealing despite the cries of the adults calling him. This fleeting moment, which he hopes to filch from the others for himself, is like a secret meeting, for him alone, a motionless trip into the murky reflection. When his eyes will once again focus on the contours: when, after this deep reverie, he will lift his head to look for the path, the daylight, still now piercing through the emerald foliage, will have gone. – I still mix up their names and hotel rooms. There’s no point in trying to sort them out, they are always in each others’ rooms, comparing sketches, travel notes, doing tests in metal basins to check the paper and how it has survived the airport scanners which we were unable to avoid. Through the window of the bus which is plummeting towards stunning valleys on its way to Rio, Christine and Véronique are constantly scribbling, making

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notes of the time of day and the light, fighting sleep. Rio hardly seems to hold them back, like a postcard they must penetrate. A friend leads us through a suburb where the trees block out the sky. Is this the same Brazil that we’re seeing, they and I, who had promised myself the beach and the sparkling bay? They leave me in Copacabana. They have fallen for São Paulo, and decide to return there before sunset, to see the light, and move to the other side of the bus for the return journey: they say they're working and I wouldn’t dare make a joke of it. – A few motels, two or three brothels and a string of car salesrooms along an endless avenue through the outskirts of São Paulo give way to compounds in which outboard motors and blue plastic swimming pools seem to be marooned. The caravans will appear soon: we haven’t seen a single one since we arrived and we are beginning to wonder whether Brazilians go camping at all. And when we do find a few dozing in the shade of a warehouse (dogs bark, but the caravans lie still), it’s almost like finding a long-lost friend. That one’s too big, this one’s too small, the one over there would be too difficult to disguise, that one, all pink, is fun, but it’s not wide enough, this other one, which used to be a mobile dentist’s surgery, would be right, but we feel bad about asking them to take it to pieces. Christine and Véronique examine them with a real expert eye, as though they were buying an apartment, and the taxi driver who brought us here doesn’t really understand what we want with a caravan. It’s in a nearby compound, ringing with the sound of jackhammers, that they eventually find the one they will take out onto the Brazilian roads. – In the park, near the deserted Biennale pavilion whose vast stands are deserted, they dream in the fiery sunset, and scan the shade, looking for light, like gold dust. Night is not their domain, that night which quickly enfolds the public park, while the noise of the city gets louder as twilight descends. The time on my watch is clearly not the same time that they are experiencing. What I need is a sundial in order to be in sync with

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them. On my way back to the hotel I reflect that if certain species have a different perception of time, the same must apply to human beings, since the landscape that a walker sees is not what a cyclist, and much less a motorist, sees. It’s the same for Christine and Véronique, sitting by the caravan like night guards. – Life flows, like blood to the temples, like the slow, smooth flap of a wing, like a thread unwinding from its spool, or grains falling in a sand-timer; like the hand of the wind over the plain, or the landscape passing in front of a sleepy traveller, a shadow lengthening on a deserted beach, flowers closing in the evening in a still garden, like the breath of someone sleeping in a room, while the procession of clouds drifts by on a moonless night. – ‘Capture time,’ they keep saying. The expression suits them perfectly. Capture time, capture it in the trap of the caravan and the paper, accompany it, give yourself time, in the infinitive, and in the conjugated future. Have enough time so that some will be left to catch the light around the caravan. In Brazil, where they returned, under a different brightness of a different sky, they harvested a new crop of images. They had to start from scratch: taming the new caravan, moving it on the roads, working it like a new piece of equipment. Despite the beauty of the country, they have managed to avoid the traps of exoticism, of description. These photographs of Brazil are not a parenthesis, nor an interlude in their work: they are themselves, over there just like here, with essential images, with no concessions or shortcuts: a pursuit and not a conclusion. And the coffee plantations in Ipanema – not the beach, but the fields which stretch to the horizon – like the ocean of coffee which dries, surrounding the Campo de Mayo factory where homeless people live, the arrow of the sun fired into the wound of a lake, or the site in Salesopolis which will soon be flooded by dam waters: all these are now associated with images of Namèche, Bruxelles, Belleville or Tourcoing, lengthening these other hours. Over here a river gurgles, the leaves flutter, over there the land’s loins bleed and twist like a panting animal. Even the caravans,

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so quiet under the eye of Saõ Paulo, are now tidied away like boxes on a shelf, where I can only just recognize Mauricio’s depot where we found the one which will soon be handed over to a school. And the light, which opened the parenthesis, has no intention of closing it. – Sister Anne, can’t you see anything coming, the fable asks, like a refrain, and while I was writing, evening came. Christine and Véronique, the crossings-out on the pages, the words scribbled on the sheets of an unlikely journal of a trip to Brazil, allow me to claim back some of the time that has passed.

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Counting the Teeth: Photography for Philosophers A.D. Coleman —

I don’t consider myself a philosopher, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t read philosophy, both for my own enrichment and because some of the ideas therein deepen my understanding of the evolution of photography. Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences, and his concepts of the paradigm and the paradigm shift, pertain usefully to any discipline (even though Kuhn has disavowed responsibility for the application of his ideas to any field beyond the hard sciences). Karl Popper’s discussion of ‘objective knowledge’ – by which he means objectified knowledge, knowledge encoded in durable, transmissible physical forms – illuminates the cultural function of the photograph as a communicative artifact. For obvious reasons, I pay special attention to philosophical writings directly related to my own field. So I’m familiar with pre-photographic commentaries from philosophers on imagery and visual perception going back to the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti’s observations on the camera obscura from the 5th century BCE, as well as the contemporary work of Nelson Goodman and W. J. T. Mitchell, not to mention Richard Rorty’s meditation on photography. Of course Croce referred to photography intriguingly, albeit briefly, in his Aesthetic, as did Pierce and Bergson around the same time. Locke, well before them, offered a discourse on the camera obscura. All food for thought, surely.

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Because I have taught surveys of photography criticism, in which I attempt to lay out the full spectrum of thinking about the medium, I’ve spent time with the 20th century contributions of André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Stanley Cavell, and Vilém Flusser – and, it should go without saying – with the pertinent work of Barthes, and other contemporaries (as much of it as I can find in English and the several other languages that I read). Both out of interest and as a professional necessity I engage with my colleagues in criticism, of course, especially those who write about photography and/or ‘photo-based art’ by artists using photography. Since such activity has virtually taken over the contemporary art world, most art critics nowadays have to grapple with photography willy-nilly, and their visible discomfort with it much resembles that of philosophers forced to the same challenge. For example, the U.S. philosopher Arthur C. Danto has written periodically on photography in his role as a critic of contemporary art (I’m not sure he’s addressed the medium formally in his role as philosopher). Though I respect his insights into other forms of art, Danto turns inexplicably simplistic and literal-minded whenever he discusses photography, apparently unable to address anything save the literal subject matter of the photographs in question, roughly equivalent to assessing a Cézanne still life on the basis of your attitudes toward fruit. So I come to the project of others’ philosophizing about photography with an outsider’s perspective and a critic’s predilection: that is, with the goal of putting that project in crisis, by finding ways to perturb the philosophers’ frequently ill-informed assumptions and mindless consensus. In short, I’m inclined to make trouble, and I hope to achieve that here. In reading philosophy, I consider it always useful to keep in mind that Aristotle’s reasoning led him to conclude that adult women had fewer teeth than adult men, and that his hermeneutics never required him to test this hypothesis by looking into a human female’s mouth and counting. I also think it helpful to ask myself the significant question articulated by the American pragmatist philosopher William James: What is the experiential life return of holding (and living by) this or that belief? And,

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like the U.S. poet William Carlos Williams, I find myself drawn to operate according to the proposition ‘No ideas but in things’, in other words, I choose to work under the assumption that, once I have enunciated my hypothesis, I’m obligated to look into a woman’s mouth and count. With those three guideposts at hand, let me use this opportunity to sketch the following: 1. What I would hope to discover in either an individual or collective ‘philosophy of photography.’ 2. If we consider this set of essays now in your hands as a collectively generated scholarly dissertation on its chosen theme, The weight of photography, what I would expect to find in an imaginary concluding section devoted to ‘questions meriting further study.’ Appropriately or not, my expectations of a hermeneutically coherent ‘philosophy of photography’ include the following: • I would require such a philosophy to begin by offering working definitions of the terms photograph (in both its noun and verb forms) and photography. • I would expect such a philosophy of photography to discriminate among and assess in turn different primary classes of photographs as objects. One such distinction would distinguish between the direct-positive image versus the image made by the negative-positive process. A second would separate lens-derived imagery from such lensless forms as pinhole-camera images and photograms. Another would involve the differences between representational and nonrepresentational but light-generated photographs (examples of the latter would include Frederick Sommer’s prints from smoke traceries caught on glass, or Lotte Jacobi’s ‘photogenic drawings’). Yet another would distinguish between images like those just mentioned and images produced by such means as painting on photographic paper with developing chemicals or burying photographic paper in the earth, allowing heat and life forms and the elements and time to alter it, and developing the results. Any objective scientific analysis would classify all of the objects just listed as photographs. Yet they have radically different relationships to both reality and actuality. Since semiotics claims scientific (and not scientistic) status for itself, it must acknowledge scientific evidence and incorporate it into its

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•

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methodology, while at the same time engaging with these substantive differences among types of photographic objects. I would require a philosophy of photography to address the profound epistemological differences between a photograph made with a directpositive process (e.g. daguerreotype, ambrotype, tintype, Polaroid) and one made via any of the negative-to-positive processes (e.g. calotype, platinum or silver-gelatin print), since the first kind constitutes an interpretation while the second constitutes an interpretation of an interpretation – surely a noteworthy distinction, from a philosophical standpoint. I would demand of a philosophy of photography that it recognize the profound implications of the different orders of knowledge embedded in the negative and any subsequent print positive, considering both the interpretive bias inherent in the act of negative exposure and development and the interpretive bias implicit in any positive derived there from. This would also require questioning the issue of the substrate in any negative or positive and its relation – neutral or interferential – to the superstrate. Since there already exists an extensive body of research into what is called the ‘philosophy of science’ it seems to me that anything aspiring to the status of philosophy while addressing a technology (such as photography) rooted in science and operating at least in part according to scientific principles has some obligation both to engage with the philosophy of science and to address itself to the scientific aspects of the medium of photography itself. This strikes me as particularly the case when the discipline that many contemporary philosophers of photography consider as their bedrock, semiotics, defines itself as a ‘science of signs.’ Laying claim to the status of a science carries with it a burden of proof – proof of acceptance of the rigors of scientific procedure. Thus I’d look to a philosophy of photography for evidence that those promulgating it (at least those who subscribe to a semiotic approach) have a clear understanding of the differences that scientists in all fields have established between hypothesis, theory, and law, and that they hold themselves rigorously accountable to those distinctions. I assume any informed philosophy of photography would reject and actively contradict any assumption of the photograph as a neutral

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and uninflected object, understanding and positioning it instead as an artifact generated via a culturally loaded technology – in short, as an utterance of the individual who produced it, as a manifestation of that individual’s particular culture, and as evidence of the culture(s) from which sprang both that that individual and the technology employed. Thus this philosophy would construe the photograph never as transcription but always as description, with bias inherent at and inevitable in each of the three levels just cited. • I would envisage such a philosophy as eager to engage with the various tendencies, morphological shifts, and formal movements in photography – such as (in the nineteenth century) the contest between realism and naturalism, and (in the twentieth) that between pictorialism and purism or straight photography – instead of restricting itself narrowly to the development of postmodernism from modernism. As each of these earlier phases and approaches has a different epistemological (and, in some cases, ontological) set of premises, the differences among them demand assessment. • This means that I would expect any philosophy of photography to come to terms with the observations and insights and beliefs of the medium’s practitioners, from Talbot to Nadar to Man Ray to Edward Weston to Diane Arbus to Hollis Frampton and on into the immediate present. Should a philosopher in considering photography not have to grapple, just for example, with the photographer and filmmaker Frampton’s assertion in regard to photographic print-making that ‘to a mind committed to the paradoxical illusions of the photographic image, the least discernible modification (from a conventionalized norm) of contrast or tonality must be violently charged with significance, for it implies a changed view of the universe, and a suitably adjusted theory of knowledge’? • I find it noteworthy in this regard that the only photographer whose voice is heard at any length in the present collection is Lynne Cohen. Most photographers do not qualify as philosophers, though they certainly think, and in many cases read philosophy and derive understandings there from that they apply to their creative work. By the same token, most philosophers do not qualify as photographers, though they use their eyes to look at world and at photographs, and sometimes even make photographs themselves. While it may seem a

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bitter pill to swallow, philosophers need to consider the possibility that those who actually practice a given craft or discipline on a professional level may have understandings of and insights into it – including its philosophical ramifications –unavailable to the non-practitioner or the casual amateur. • Which is to say that just as any self-respecting ‘philosophy of poetry’ would have to contend with at least the variant poetics enunciated by literature’s major schools, an authentic and thoroughly researched philosophy of photography would consider seriously and at length – rather than dismissively or derisively – the full range of beliefs and ideas actually held by experienced practitioners of that medium, as reflected in their published theories, credos, manifestos, critical and historical writings, and tutorial texts, as well as their ruminations in their journals and correspondence. The goal, logically, would be to extract any potentially valuable insights and concepts from those whose ideas are grounded in the actual full-time engagement with praxis. • This implies, as I see it, the possible existence of something I call the hermeneutics of performance: those understandings of a medium that derive explicitly and exclusively from the feel of craft as absorbed by a medium’s committed performers. It also implies – and I recognize the temerity in this proposition – that philosophers need to have an awareness of the actual issues of performance in any communicative or creative medium about which they opine, and that the glaring absence of such awareness inevitably weakens their work. • Beyond addressing those writings by performers in the medium, philosophers of photography – if they seek credibility amongst any but other philosophers – need to familiarize themselves with the writings of the medium’s various historians, critics, theorists, and other close observers, past and present, on the assumption that, even when not officially certified by any academy as philosophers, those who pay close attention to a medium for decades may have something to offer the discourse. Aside from what are now a small handful of the mandatory ‘usual suspects’ in academic-paper footnoting –Barthes, Burgin, Sekula, Berger, Sontag – it’s rare to find such a commentator even referenced, much less addressed at length. One would not know from this that photography has a rich and diverse literature whose almost

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complete absence from ‘the discourse’ suggests that it’s considered entirely irrelevant to philosophical scholarship. If that’s the case, then philosophers should have the courage and honesty to assert and defend that claim forthrightly. If this gap results from ignorance of that literature, then of course that too requires enunciation – and explanation. Next, some questions that I would put to philosophers regarding their considerations to date of photography: • I note with interest that, although you take great pains to define most of your terms, none of you feel any obligation to define the words photograph, photography, or photographing. The absence of any definition of your basic subjects seems to me fundamental, to the extent that it could be considered to impeach all your commentaries. Can you explain and justify this curious lacuna? • I feel sure that, as trained and certified philosophers, you are not so naive as to assume that there is only one kind of photographic object, one form of photography, and one way of photographing. Yet the tacit definitions of the above concepts commonly assumed in your texts apply only to lens-derived imagery of recognizable objects as represented in negatives encoding only a single short exposure and subsequently rendered uninterpretively in a print embodying only that lone exposure (or a comparable direct positive, such as an SX-70 or daguerreotype). Thus the notions you put forward, by and large, do not engage with or even pertain to much or all of the photographic work of Man Ray, Ellen Carey, Minor White, Michal Rovner, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Kruger, Marcel Breuer, Joel-Peter Witkin, and a host of other photographic picture-makers past and present. In effect, your thinking is almost entirely irrelevant to much historic praxis in photography and a wide spectrum of contemporary praxis – especially postmodernist praxis. I assume this is purposeful, not an oversight. If purposeful, should its premises not be articulated and explained? • Perhaps this situation results in part from the fact that in his wellknown 1961 essay ‘The Photographic Message’ Roland Barthes addresses photography only in its photojournalistic and advertising usages. This makes Barthes’s essay, and any discourse premised on it, roughly equivalent to one addressing written and spoken

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language that considers exclusively the language of advertising and mass-media reportage. But that’s a radical delimitation, since of course there are dozens if not hundreds of other uses of the word. Similarly, there are many other kinds of photograph, many other forms of photography, and many other ways of photographing than those singled out by Barthes. Nonetheless, it becomes clear from countless citations in postmodernist texts on photography that this essay by Barthes functions as a cornerstone of postmodern discourse on photography in general. Do you not feel that the limited sphere of his concern – and of subsequent citations of his text – excludes a great deal of photographic activity worldwide? And should those who cite him not be obligated to point out the restrictions of his concept, i.e., that Barthes meant his ideas to apply only to advertising photography and photojournalism? After all, a philosophical consideration of either ‘language’ or ‘speech’ that concerned only commercial and media uses of either would have to at least acknowledge and demarcate the vast areas of linguistic activity left out as a result of that arbitrary decision, since – in the present instance – this means that Barthes’s methodology is self-confessedly useless as an analytical tool applied to (just one example) any photographs intended to function as art. No photograph transcribes the actual world. Photographs – at least of the kinds that we generally refer to when we use that word – describe. Of those photographers who use cameras, some seek to describe in their images the ways in which the world performs itself before their eyes and lenses. Some actively evoke performances from the world. We cannot necessarily tell which is which in any given image, or even in an entire body of work. Thus the relation of the photograph to both truth and fact is slippery, and equivocal at best. Therein lies the ultimate challenge to photographer, audience member/average viewer, critic, and philosopher alike. No ideas but in things. Requiring that one look into the woman’s mouth and count her teeth represents photography’s gift to philosophy. Philosophy’s gift to photography awaits its unveiling.

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In-between Ways Tom De Mette

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On a hybrid ontology between humans and technology A while ago I was discussing metaphysics with a fellow philosopher. The discussion mainly focused on ontology and technology. At the end we agreed on the necessity that for ontology to be shared by humans and technology, technology would have to be anything but the technology we know today. I argued that this was possible, at least in a possible world. Possible worlds come down to thought-experiments in philosophy. In my point of view thought-experiments wherein possible worlds are created, is not solely a privilege of philosophy. Images, be it still or moving images, are products of this exact privilege. Photography, cinematography, virtual environments are most likely to be thought-experiments, visualized by artists. Even science regularly turns into science fiction when it concerns the relation between man and technology. For some time now, it seems that philosophy, art and science have teamed up to think experimentally on shaping the future of man and technology. This essay explores this alliance.

Humans are poor technology Being human discloses an inconvenient truth: we are poor technology. It’s common knowledge that technologically, we have rather poor means to connect us with the real world. We also have a poor ability to use our

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technology. Our senses are inadequate to have complete knowledge of the world. And even if we were given senses that enabled us to complete our knowledge of the world, we would still fail. At this point, our brains are too much of a mystery to fill in the blanks. Fortunately, our mind is not a blank. What we don’t know for certain to be real or true is completed with possibilities. But first, let’s raise the burning question: what is it to be human technology? Apparently this question is easy to answer: our senses are our primary technology. Our senses give us the ability to know the nature of things. This involves a rather traditional notion of ontology. This kind of ontology is mainly concerned with epistemology, rather than with the fundamental ontological state of being. For Martin Heidegger, ontology is a complex concept. It is not only the study of beings as such, but it is an inquiry into the existence of beings, particularly of Dasein. The fundamental question for Heidegger focuses on the meaning of ‘what it is to be’ a specific being. Another difficult concept in Heideggerian metaphysics is technology. Heidegger’s notion of technology is not considered by any means technological, but rather ontological. At least, technology should make humans reflect on the grounding of being. The consequence of this engagement between human beings and technology is that technology insists on humans to think about their being and – to extend – reflect on the beingness of technology. This reflection of Dasein, based on its pre-ontological understanding of being, could well lead towards an inquiry into the essence of technology’s beingness as being human. The human senses are primary media to know and understand the natural world. Technology can be used to extend this ability. To some, wearing glasses is incorporating technology in such a way that it is integrated into our being, into what it is to be human. Wearing glasses amounts to being a cyborg, a cybernetic organism.1 This seems by far the most trivial connection between man and technology. Obviously, wearing glasses compensates the inability of our visual senses. We extend our vision with artificial eyes to look at the world, from our innerspace to the outer limits of the universe. We can recreate smells to enhance our inability to sense refined fragrances. All kinds of food additions feed our illusion of complete taste. And what about our sense of touch? Now, there’s a challenge.

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All these efforts of compensating our poor ability to know and understand the world are also part of what it is to be human technology. Human thinking fills in the blanks of our sensory knowledge, by adding ideas, by constructing concepts, by reasoning and reflecting. Even without having to wear glasses, without any means to extend and compensate our poor senses, we are cyborgs by nature. The presentation of things made by means of the senses, are presented again in addition with the knowledge that is already present in the human mind. The knowledge available to man through former experiences enables reflection. The connections made between presentations and reflections are called judgments. The ability of human thinking together with our sensory and cognitive abilities, the ability of human thinking and the ability of judging are intermediating in such a way that all these abilities are constantly attempting to complete our image of the world. The interaction between sensing, knowing and thinking lead us to ideas of the nature of things. Therefore, notions of the world not only give us new knowledge about the world, but also enable new ways to come to understand the world. On a sensory level, this interaction of media engages humans to try and use their abilities differently, and thus stretch the natural boundaries of our human technology. This is what is to be human technology. These processes provoke man to include an ontological notion of technology in his reflection on the intermediation of his technological abilities. We will regard this inclusive reflection as bodily. The complex interaction of human and technological abilities used to have knowledge and ideas about the nature of things, about the world, we will call: bodiliness. Bodiliness is a (self)conscious-being that is a being-in-theworld. The whole complex of this being is placed in what Thomas Nagel refers to as the Psychophysical Nexus.2 At present not much is known about this Nexus. It’s mostly an idea, based on a thought-experiment including scientific facts and philosophical theories. Some seriously doubt whether man will ever be capable of understanding its complexity. These philosophers predict that complete knowledge of the Nexus, and thus of the natural world will remain out of our reach.3 This Psychophysical Nexus of mental, imaginary and physical processes and events is supervened by phenomenal consciousness.4 We will propose this kind of interaction as secondary human technology. It’s clear that this human technology

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consists of a more profound connection between man and technology. This is where intermediation between humans and technology attempt to transcend the limits of human capability. Though this connection seems superficial, we consider it to be natural. Given the immanent limitation of the human mind, its poor abilities to connect with the natural world, the human urge to transcend these limits by interacting with technology, amplify a paradox that is all too human. The human paradox is human nature itself. It’s human nature to transcend the immanent boundaries of the human mind by thinking up possibilities. Thinking possibilities is no less than an interaction between human knowledge and human imagination. In this natural strive man appears to be out of bounds. The interaction between knowing and imagining is limitless. We consider the paradox of human nature to be the ground of being human as well as the ground of being technological. Actually, this proposition claims that being human is being technological. Through intermediating with technology man is placed in a position of reflecting on the self and the technological nature of his being. This reflection is not merely thinking but thinking of being as being. By doing so, man and technology become ontologically connected. The transition of the complexity of human nature towards technology as being human is bridging ontology between man and technology. This bridge is philosophical and it is the core of the concept of bodiliness. This new ontology provokes man to inquire being as such as well as being as being. This beingness fundamentally discloses the possibility of ontological connectivity between humans and technology. Thus we propose that a human being is technological and that being technological is human. Hence, bodiliness is being hybrid by nature.

Thinking bodily media The Kantian theory of metaphysics as a critical ontology pursues to disguise human nature as paradoxical. Man is conscious of his false assumption that human knowledge is limitless in its abilities to fulfill the illusion of completeness. Kant exposes our ability to think as humans, to use our imagination, is to sustain this illusion, in such a manner that our knowledge remains speculative. Let’s face it: certainty is a goal that

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man has set for himself in order to elaborate the intermediation of his limited abilities. Science has insisted on the pursuit of this certainty. However, in the outskirts of scientific research, mad scientists gather with conceptual and information artists and philosophers to intersect on immersive territories. Artists and scientists can be partners to give direction to science.5 Examples of these intersections are for grabs. Let’s talk about information arts. Information arts are a way to think bodily media. We will concentrate on the concept of cyborg, as a construct to think ontology between man and technology. Our analysis of the cyborg is etymorphological: we analyze how science and art in cybernetics and informatics give body to the cyborg. In first-order cybernetics the cyborg is considered a mechanical hybrid. Suppose that man was capable of creating a machine in his own image. Not only would man be a Nietzschean God, it would also implicate that man would no longer be a mystery to himself. The workings of the human mind, of human consciousness, particularly phenomenological consciousness, would reveal its mystic: at last we would be able to solve the mind-body problem. The concept of being part human part machine originated in the last century, on the brim of industrial revolution. It was science fiction literature that first gave birth to the idea of cyborg.6 To understand what the cyborg means in regard of bodiliness, we will explain what it means to be cybernetic. The term cybernetics is ascribed to Norbert Wiener.7 Wiener theorized mathematically on cybernetic systems from a control perspective. Notions of information and communication – what Wiener refers to as feedback mechanisms – come down to a study of control systems that generate processes through feedback in order to come to self-regulation. Information and communication, which constitute the interactivity between man and technology, are regulative and purely instrumental. Scientists like Kevin Warwick attempt to bridge the gap between information and communication as being strictly instrumental. Warwick’s experiments with implants of preprogrammed chips in the human body can be considered a means to transcend the boundaries of human communication on the basis of information. The communication in Warwick’s experiments consists of calculations of information. However, Warwick declares that we already have the technology to communicate

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from brain to brain, without any form of interface. What Warwick wants us to believe is that we have to learn a new language that makes all other languages obsolete. Warwick is talking about the language of thoughts. If we were to communicate directly on a neurological level, we would overcome possible misunderstandings that originate from a system of symbolical coding and decoding. Supposing that science could make all interfaces superfluous, there remains at least one interface that is bodily necessary to actually realize the interaction from brain to brain: our language. Language is a cultural interface. Lev Manovich considers the notion of cultural interface in relation to cinema.8 Manovich is not referring to HCI (Human-Computer Interface). He’s talking about hybrid experiments with visual media like photography and film. When used to create art, both of these media have their own language, their own system of coding and decoding signs. The calculus that Warwick uses to send and receive information through preprogrammed chips is mathematics, also a language system and thus a cultural interface. Therefore, Warwick’s proposition on direct communication without any kind of interface is false. We will argue on the notion of cultural interface further on. Let’s look at another cyborg: Steve Mann. The main difference between Warwick and Mann in their perspective on the cyborg is that Mann uses the human body, and more specifically human skin, as an interface. His WearComp-experiments are based on the idea that humans are flesh and blood in a highly technological world. Naturally, wearable technology is not new: mobile phones, portable laptops, PDA’s and handheld-GPS are well integrated in our everyday lives. Mann’s WearComp tries to transcend this immanent use of new media by exploring the possibilities and limitations of this usage. By thinking this intermediation from a different point of view, namely in relation to personal freedom, social relations, power structures and our existence, Mann investigates these media as bodily media. His experiments raise an ontological question: in what way and to what extend does the technology that we wear on our body and touch with our skin get under our skin?9 Mann also bridges a gap between first-order and second-order cybernetics. Second-order cybernetics inquire on self-regulation through feedback

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by control mechanisms as artificial intelligence. The main difference between first-order and second-order cybernetics is that second-order cybernetics believe these feedback mechanisms to be living, organic and social instead of strictly mechanical. The intermediation between man and technology is an organic synergy whereby man and technology are mutually shaped. An artist (or mad scientist) that is involved with the inquiry on this bodily intermediation is Stelarc. In his early works (EXOSKELETON, his SUSPENSIONS) Stelarc was focused on the mechanical cyborg of firstorder cybernetics. More recently, he shifted towards digital technology and virtual worlds. Stelarc investigates the bodily environment wherein man and technology intermediate organically. The hybrid that Stelarc creates originates in exorcizing cyberaesthetics wherein body and environment are digital extensions of one another. The natural boundaries between man and technology fade. The old skin is cast off and our familiar body of flesh and blood opens up it’s being to the alien, the non-human or inhuman. In 2006 a range of artists participated in an exhibition called THE LAST GENERATION. They reflected on the juxtaposition between analog and digital media. Curator Max Henry captures the hybrid aesthetics of bodily mediation quite accurate: ‘The virtual seeped into our consciousness like a stimulant drug, and we find ourselves in an ambiguous artistic terrain that is grounded in the intangibility of matter.’10 In science fiction and cyberpunk the merging of the familiar and the alien, of different media (analog and digital) and realities (real-life and virtual) has been a phantasm for quite some time. Perhaps there’s another kind of cybernetics developing, cybernetics that rethink the etymology of the cyborg. Experiments by cyborgs like Warwick, Mann and Stelarc show us that intermediation between man and technology is possible, provided that there is a cultural interface. This interface initiates a reflection on notions like information and communication. This reflection transcends the shear instrumental mode by raising ontological questions and therefore provoking humans to think beyond their limits and use their illusion. Consider the worldwide web:

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Web 1.0. is a battleground of information warfare. Search engines like Google, online auctioneers like eBay invest heavily in PageRank-systems and try to gain as much information on their users as possible in order to optimize, manipulate, steer (first-order cybernetics!) the way users search for information on the net. Optimizing the interactivity between man and information technology can be considered a subtle way to gain power over human behavior in such a way that it attempts to rule out spontaneous, unpredictable and irrational behavior. It limits the human mind trying to transcend its boundaries and explore new possibilities. The idea of Web 2.0 as a platform to which all users can contribute and bring in content as well as social and cultural values is therefore an example of organic synergy between man and technology. This intermediation stretches further than cybernetics. It rethinks cybernetics as informatics. Through this transition the cyborg evolves towards the iborg and the ciborg.11 Digital and online platforms like Web 2.0, Wikipedia, Linux, Flickr and practices like podcasting, blogging and vlogging (e.g. The Dumpster) appear to be much more than brandbreeding. These digital media are Consumer-Generated Media (CGM). CGM are media that revolve around communication on information and interactivity through information in such a way that users have to interact ontologically with the media themselves. Iborgs and ciborgs have to be creative in order to interact with these media. The intermediation between man and technology does not limit itself to the paradigm of human communication but incorporates all kinds of other human processes and activities. For this ontological mediation to be possible, man also has to rethink technology. Designing interfaces for digital media is often paired with man’s fear and hostility towards the machine. The digital interface balances continuously on a tightrope between being human and being inhuman. This is considered not merely a technological problem but a paramachinical problem.12 Theories like Activity Theory base their understanding of the relationship between humans and technology on the notion of the human mind as a product of our interaction with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity.13 Interaction Design is regarded an applied art of facilitating interactions between humans through products and services that have some sort of awareness. To meet this goal of facilitation, Interaction Design focuses on the behavior of these products and services, on how products and services work.14

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The allied endeavors of scientists, artists and philosophers, the cyborgexperiments as well as Activity Theory and Interface Design, can all be viewed as ways to rethink the connectivity between man and technology on the basis of a possible ontology. Ultimately, these efforts think of man and technology as bodily media that can co-exist.

Interstitial aesthetics15 Rethinking the connectivity between man and technology is looking at something differently, from a range of different perspectives, perspectives that go beyond what we humans know about what is natural, real, technological and human. Rethinking equals immersion in order to emerge a new ontology between man and technology. It is reflecting on being human and being technological. It is imagining possibilities and stretching boundaries. It is thinking as bodiliness. Manovich’s theory allows thinking digital media as bodily media. Drawing from artistic experiments like Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a moving camera, Manovich integrates philosophical reflections in the scientific discourse on new media. In the ‘Language of New Media’ Manovich proposes a set of principles that enable rethinking digital media: numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. His method is based on the notion of language that allows mapping digital media. This mapping method seems to provide a common model for structuring the complexity of digital technology. At first, Manovich’s proposal doesn’t seem innovative in a way that it could make rethinking the connectivity between man and technology possible, when compared to other methods and models, However, there is one peculiarity in his method: Manovich provides a set of principles that not only helps man to understand and structure digital technology, but allows interpreting the principles of digital media in a non-literal sense. He isn’t really concerned with the cybernetic logic of GUI’s that we find in interfaces of websites, cd-roms, dvd’s, computer software and games. For Manovich this literal interactivity is a myth.16 So what does he mean by non-literal interactivity? Manovich recognizes the chaos that exists in-between the connectivity of man and technology. In order to consider man and digital technology as bodily media, we must

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accept the notion of hybridity. Hybridity is the key feature of both human and digital media. Some go as far as stating that humans are the first hybrids.17 Rethinking man and technology as bodily insists on a different notion of features like interactivity, virtuality and reflectivity. Each of these features characterizes bodily being as being-in-between. Within the realms of the in-between, humans and technology intermediate chaotically. Digital technology engages man as medium. The human is even considered medium of media.18 Connecting and interacting with digital media as a hybrid, gives man access to the so-called Interzone. We find this notion of being-in-between that refers to Bruno Latour’s Kingdom of the Middle.19 But perhaps it is Heidegger who first consequently pointed out the ontological meaning of being-in-between with his notion of Dasein. Where else can Da-sein be if not in the in-between, in the Interzone or the Kingdom of the Middle? It would be false to view this in-between as a place or a position. The in-between is neither topology nor topography. It is chaos, intermediating. Being-in-between is becoming. As being-inthe-world Da-sein is becoming with reality itself. Hence, the real world is always virtual: it is asymmetric and through bodily intermediaton continuously becoming. The real is pluralistic. Digital media are bodily in the sense that the features of bodiliness, namely interactivity, virtuality and reflectivity, make plurality of the real possible. By allowing man to imagine and create possible worlds, virtual realities, man connects and interacts with technology in a non-literal, non-logical and even nonrational way. It takes imagination to complete to the knowledge of the natural world and our human nature. Some philosophers decide that we can’t have it both ways: the connectivity between humans and technology can’t be situational as well as symmetrical.20 This raises a new ontological question: is being-in-between situational or symmetrical? Our answer is no. Being-in-between is always asymmetric, it is in a way that it is becoming, in a sense that it is somewhere in-between, both everywhere and nowhere. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have indicated this problem as the impossibility of position.21 The impossibility of position does not allow bodily intermediation between man and technology to be contained or embodied. Digital media provide man with a range of possibilities to become as being in territories that can’t be mapped.22 Bodiliness is decentralizing and dislocating, it’s being-as-rhizome. Digital media as bodily territories create a rhizome wherein the intermediation between hybrids is chaosmosis.23 298

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Reflectivity is perhaps the most immersive of all bodily principles. Beingin-between is always becoming, endlessly metamorphosing (as Rosi Braidotti puts it) or some kind of ontological metabolism (as Catharine Malabou suggests).24 In any case, reflection seems immanent in order to continuously transcend being as being. Our notion of reflectivity is primarily based on Manovich and his set of principles that lead us to understand the complex structure of digital media, but also and more importantly enabled us to interpret the key features of digital media in a non-literal, philosophical sense within our thought-experiment of conceptualizing bodiliness and by doing so, thinking ontology between man and technology. However, as we stated earlier, Manovich is inspired by the visual arts, in particular photography and cinema. To some extend, Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema might be considered a predecessor of Manovich’s theory of digital media. Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema provided a method for mapping images that helps structuring the function of the brain as a screen. For Deleuze film makes bodies out of grains and the screen is non-literal. Deleuze’s analysis of cinema as movement in space criticizes sensory-motor schemas that regulate, like a regime, our perception and reflection. The Movement-Image is a mechanism or neural network that moves image by image in a methodical and normative chain.25 The function of the Movement-Image seems to indicate a certain analogy with first-order cybernetics. The Movement-Image provides a total image of reality and leaves no possibility for extended perception or ontological reflection for that matter. With the Movement-Image all is given. Deleuze’s inquiry on reflection proceeds towards another kind of image: the Time-Image. The Time-image is a crystallized image. It’s a thinking image in the sense that thinks of images as vague. Deleuze explains the reflective function of the Time-Image by some sort of mirroring principle. Crystallized images dislocate man in his perception of images and engage human thinking to complete this asymmetric, pluralistic perception with his ability to visualize virtual reality based on memories. In a way, Deleuze made the image interactive. His notions of the Time-Image and the brain as screen open up new ways for man to reflect on his self and the other. By reflecting through crystallized images he thinks and rethinks what it is to be human and to be non-human, to become as being in interacting with technology.

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What is the point of this ontological reflection? The point is that through attempting to connect and interact with technology based on the possibility of ontology, man not only expands the knowledge of the natural world and his human nature, he discovers the otherness, the non-human in himself that is technology. Furthermore, he might also come to understand how technology can be less alien and more human. This is the ultimate goal of the hybrid aesthetics that are created through intermediation and reflection. We will illustrate with a few examples in the (digital) time-based arts. Online chatting and gaming, keeping a weblog, camming, etc. are common practices that show humans being present in the virtual world. Putting the family photo album on the internet isn’t that much different from creating an avatar in Second Life. Man can be who or whatever he wants or desires to be in cyberspace. Digital technology provides man with supernatural powers. Digital media allow humans to transcend what they are in real life and let them live the phantasms of their virtual self. In the presentation and the reflection of the self, man is not only transmitting and interchanging images of himself, he’s actually creating vague, crystallized images. He’s making reality. In doing so, man should also meet with the challenge to think and rethink his connectivity with digital technology. Finally, his hybrid aesthetics should make co-existence between man and technology possible. Some artists are already involved in this quest to co-exist. Ana Voog has been online for a decade with her AnaCam-project. AnaCam is online art of living. It is a 24/7 connection between Voog’s life and the outside world. It is interactivity, virtuality and reflectivity through bodily media that transcends voyeurism and exhibitionism. It’s looking inside someone’s life towards the within of your self. In 2005 two Icelandic artists Jóhann Jóhannsson and Erna Ómarsdóttir collaborated on a project that involved dance and music: IBM 1401 – A user’s manual. The music was based on an old Icelandic Hymn that computer engineers once programmed the IBM 1401 computer to perform. The music is performed live with a laptop and a Hammond B3 organ and transmitted through Leslie-speakers that interact with the movements of Ómarsdóttir. IBM 1401 – A user’s manual is no

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ordinary choreography. It is an attempt to explore the ability of man and technology to co-exist: ‘The choreography uses elements of the body as machine to dance as a mysterious, uncanny and intangible energy, much like electricity. The choreography explores both mechanical movements and organic movements and juxtaposes the two, seeking to find the link between them.’26 The French Electro-duo Daft Punk made Electroma, a feature film about two robots that want to become human. In Cultural indigestion II / civil prostration, a performance by Belgian body artist Merlin Spie, the intermediation between what is human and what is non-human is brought to the point of suffocation of nature by culture. The bodily fixation up to point of suffocation shows Spie as being-in-between. The natural reflex to gasp for air is driven to the limit of the human intolerable only to be made digestible afterwards in the creation of artifacts as installations, pictures and drawings. In this creative process Spie mixes natural resources as tears, snot and sperm with artificial resources as plastic and polythene. Other examples of mixing natural and artificial resources in order to create an artistic connection between man and technology as hybrid media can be found in the carving and scratching into film or adding human hair in order to project shapes and forms on the screen. Pioneering artist Len Lye and the young French artist Camille Henrot use this technique.27 These pre-digital experiments are not merely practices of hybrid aesthetics. They also raise ethical questions concerning the artistic integrity of video-artifacts. While scientists aim to restore and to perfect the quality of sound and image, artists are driven to distort and draw creativity from the imperfections of technology. Artists seem concerned with this paradox between art and science, between aesthetics and ethics: ‘The ethical responsibility not only for the image content, but for the substance of the image as well prohibits the unnecessary and wholesale conversion of the image information. Time-based errors should be recognized as such and corrected, but not converted back as surface errors.’28 Digital art also integrates aesthetics and ethics in another way. As we have discussed, cinema is regarded a cultural interface by Manovich.

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We elaborated on this idea by indicating that language as interface is necessary for man and media to interact. Filmmakers create their own language when they visualize their ideas through images. Choices of colors, cinematography, camera positions, editing, etc. are all part of the way they code their images for the spectator to decode and interpret. The theory of film as language is called film semiotics. Film semiotics provides the spectator watching a film with methods to read the film. For semiotician Christian Metz film is not a language, but like a language, it’s becoming a language because it uses language systems to tell stories.29 Trough this notion of language film is able to communicate signs and meanings. Metz makes a distinction between denotations and connotations (paradigmatic and syntagmatic). The decoding of these connotations is a process of comparing the part with the whole (synecdoche) and associating details with ideas (metonymy).30 A filmmaker that has created his own visual language is Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni is well known for his color existentialism. A remarkable example of this reflective synergy between aesthetics and ethics is his film Il deserto rosso (red desert). Antonioni explained that the use of the color red in his film transcended the realm of the individual and became cultural in its connotations. Hence, Antonioni wasn’t really interested in the estrangement of man by the industrialization of his environment. He wanted to criticize man and his fear of the alien. Il deserto rosso is a scream in the desert, a chaosmosis in a rhizome where Antonioni confronts man and machine with their otherness. In a Deleuzian sense, Antonioni’s film is a crystallized image that projects chaos and fear of co-existence onto our brain as screen. Many digital filmmakers follow in Antonioni’s footsteps. Films like Immortel (ad vitam) by Enki Bilal and Avalon by Mamoru Oshii develop their own hybrid aesthetics by combining different media and thus different language systems. They emerge their artistic aim to create new ways of looking at the world and at ourselves differently by adding ethical concepts and questions. Immortel deals with issues like eugenetics and transhumanity. It’s a sophisticated mixture of analog and digital media that plays out the paradox between scientific perfection and imperfection of the image. Avalon focuses on a war simulator and raises questions on the diffusion of human consciousness concerning reality, violence and death. 302

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The use of digital technology in art finally pieces together our concept of bodiliness as a philosophical attempt to bridge the ontological gap between man and technology. Through rethinking digital media as bodily, as media that can be interpreted on the basis of non-literal principles and features man and technology can be thought of as connected in a way that transcends the human and the technological. What connects humans and technology is hybridity. Perhaps we must keep the distinction between man and technology in the sense that man is hybrid by nature and that technology is hybrid by culture. It will probably still take a while for man to really start developing technology that can be regarded as more human and less alien. Luckily, many scientists, artists and philosophers seem to be intrigued by the connectivity between man and technology. They present us with ideas, images, thought-experiments that keep our mind open to reflect on being human and being technology.

Notes 1

Haraway, Donna J. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1985. New York: Routledge, 1991: 149-181.

2

Nagel, Thomas. The Psychophysical Nexus, 2000: 434-471.

3

Colin McGinn (1991) argues that human understanding will remain on the surface of consciousness in order not to drown in the hidden structure of consciousness. On solving the Mind-Body problem, McGinn (1995) consider this to be a problem that transcends human knowledge (transcendental naturalism).

4

For the notion of phenomenal consciousness we refer to Ned Block (1995). Block’s consciousness dualism makes a distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Block’s key argument is that without phenomenal consciousness, human consciousness would simply be unthinkable. David Chalmers (1996) considers phenomenal consciousness to be a fundamental quality of human consciousness.

5

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts. Intersections of art, science and technology. 2002, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

6

The Cyborg Handbook (1995) includes a popular sci-fi article by M.E. Clynes and N.S. Kline called ‘Cyborgs and Space’ (1960). The Cyborg Handbook also

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names sci-fi authors like Edmond Hamilton, Catherine L. Moore and Isaac Asimov as literary pioneers of the Cyborg-idea. 7

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine (Second Edition), 1961, New York: MIT Press.

8

Manovich, Lev. (1997). Cinema as a Cultural Interface. Homepage: http:// www.manovich.net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html. Accessed 2005 Sept. 12.

9

Mann, Steve and Niedzviecki, Hal. Cyborg. Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. 2001, Canada: Double Day.

10

Henry, Max. The Last Generation. 2005, New York: Apexart. http://www. apexart.org/exhibitions/henry.htm. Accessed 2006 Jan. 20.

11

The iborg can be considered a concept that combines the basic idea of cyborg (cybernetic organism) with the notion of information (or information and communication in the case of the ciborg) as primary resource to establish a living, organic and social (bodily) synergy with technology.

12

Poster,

Mark.

Postmodern

virtualities.

In:

Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/

Cyberpunk. Cultures of Technological Embodiment. 1995, London, Sage: 93. 13

Kaptelinin, Victor and Nardy, Bonnie A. Acting with Technology. Activity Theory and Interaction Design. 2006, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

14

Saffer, Dan. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. 2007, Berkeley: New Riders: 4-6.

15

The term ‘interstitial’ is ascribed to William Gibson in the Salon Book Review (1999) of his cyberpunk novel ‘All Tomorrow’s parties’ that is part of the Interstitial Trilogy. For an insightful text on the term ‘interstitial’ we refer to Dr. Tama Leaver: Interstitial Spaces and Multiple Histories in William Gibson’s Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 9 (2003): 118-30, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/ limina/Vol9/7Leaver.pdf.

16

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. 2001, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press: 27-48.

17

De Kerckhove, Derrick. Hybrid: Elements of a Re-mix Culture. In: Ars Electronica 2005 – Living in Paradox. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag: 14.

18

Oosterling, Henk. De mens als medium der media. Radicalisering van een middelmatig denken. In: Filosofie in cyberspace. Reflecties op de informatieen communicatietechnologie. 2002, Kampen: Uitgeverij Klement: 309-328.

19

Latour, Bruno. We have never been modern. 1993, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

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20

Ihde, Don. Bodies in Technology. 2002, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 67-87.

21

We're referring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I. L’Anti-Œdipe. (1972), Capitalisme et Schizophrénie II. Mille Plateaux (1980) and Nomadology. The War Machine (1986).

22

We're referring to a documentary film made by Marc Neale on William Gibson called ‘No Maps for These Territories’ (2000).

23

Guattari, F. Chaosmose, (1992) Paris: Gallimard.

24

We're referring to Rosi Braidotti (2002) and Catharine Malabou (2004).

25

Flaxman, Gregory. The Brain is the Screen. Deleuze and The Philosophy of Cinema. 2000, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 5. See also: Gilles Deleuze’s Cinéma 1 : L’Image-Mouvement (1983) and Cinéma 2 : L’ImageTemps (1985).

26

Jóhannsson, J. and Ómarsdóttir, E. (2004). IBM 1404 – A User’s Manual. Downloaded on February 2. in 2006 at http://www.johannjohannsson.com/ ibm1401/. To watch the video performance of IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual, go to http://www.ausersmanual.com/stage/.

27

To see art works online by Len Lye, visit YouTube: http://youtube.com/ watch?v=PaYi6FlB4cw. For art works by Camille Henrot, visit the artist’s homepage: http://www.camillehenrot.com/.

28

Gfeller, Johannes. Time-based Arts - Time-based Errors: A Plea for a Restoration Software Based On Lines. Abstract of a lecture presented at the Symposium ‘Digital Heritage: Symposium on Video Art in Germany from 1963 to the Present’ (2005, July 1 till 5.). http://www.40yearsvideoart.de/main. php?p=2&n1=4&n2=4&lang=en. Accessed Mar. 23.

29

Monaco, James. How to read a film. Movies, Media, Multimedia. 2000, New York: Oxford University Press: 157.

30

Monaco, James. How to read a film. Movies, Media, Multimedia. 2000, New York: Oxford University Press: 168.

Bibliography Boghossian, Paul. and Peacocke, Christopher. (eds.). New Essays on the A Priori. 2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. 2002, Campbridge: Polity Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I. L’Anti-Œdipe. 1972, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie II. Mille Plateaux. 1980, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Nomadology. The War Machine. 1986, New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement. 1983, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps. 1985, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. de Mul, Jos (red.). Filosofie in cyberspace. Reflecties op de informatie- en communicatietechnologie. 2005, Kampen: Uitgeverij Klement. Featherstone, Mike en Burrows, Roger (eds.). Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk. Cultures of Technological Embodiment. 1995, London: Sage. Flaxman, Gregory. The Brain is the Screen. Deleuze and The Philosophy of Cinema. 2000, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gfeller, J. (2005). Time-based Arts - Time-based Errors: A Plea for a Restoration Software Based On Lines. 2005, http://www.40yearsvideoart. de/main.php?p=2&n1=4&n2=4&lang=en. Accessed 2006, Mar. 23. Gray, Chris, Mentor, Steven and Figueroa-Sarriera, Heidi J. (eds.). The Cyborg Handbook. 1995, New York: Routledge. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmose. 1992, Paris: Gallimard. Haraway, Donna. J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991, New York: Routledge. Henry, Max. The Last Generation. 2005, New York: Apexart. http://www. apexart.org/exhibitions/henry.htm. Accessed 2006, Jan. 20. Houston, Frank. William Gibson: All tomorrow’s parties. Salon Book review. 1999. http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/10/29/ gibson/. Accessed 2006, Mar. 6. Ihde, Don. Bodies in Technology. 2002, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kaptelinin, Victor and Nardy, Bonnie A. Acting with Technology. Activity Theory and Interaction Design. 2006, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. We have never been modern. 1993, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

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Malabou, Catharine. Le Change Heidegger. Du Fantastique en Philosophie. 2004, Dijon-Quetigny: Non&Non/Les Editions Léo Scheer. Mann, Steve. and Niedzviecki, Hal. Cyborg. Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. 2001, Canada: Double Day. Manovich, Lev. Cinema as a Cultural Interface. 1997, http://www. manovich.net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html. Accessed 2005, Sep. 12. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. 2001, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press. McGinn, Colin. The Problem of Consciousness. 1991, Oxford: Blackwell Publications. McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. 1995, New York: Basic Books. Monaco, James. How to read a film. Movies, Media, Multimedia. 2000, New York: Oxford University Press. Saffer, Dan. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. 2007, Berkeley: New Riders. Schöpf, Christine and Stocker, Gerfried. (eds.). Ars Electronica 2005 – Living in Paradox. 2005, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine (Second Edition). 1961, New York: MIT Press. Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts. Intersections of art, science and technology. 2002, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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—

Leni Riefenstahl’s Career as a Photographer Reassessed Luc Deneulin —

Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is a well-known name in cinema history and especially famous for her films Triumph des Willens (1935) and Olympia (1938).1 In the 1970s, Leni Riefenstahl started a second career as a photographer with the publication of her, commercially very successful, photographic books. The Nuba tribes of Southeast Sudan are the main theme of the photographs in these volumes. Shortly thereafter, she discovered a new subject for her photography – the world under water – when she started diving at the age of seventy-two. This also resulted in the worldwide publication of her photographs.

Hitler on Ice Going back in time to the very first information about Riefenstahl taking photographs, one arrives at 1932. Leni Riefenstahl had just met Adolf Hitler, at her own request, and was working in Greenland with the director Arnold Fanck, the father of the German ‘mountain film’ genre of the 1920s and 30s. She had first worked as an actress in his 1926 film Der heilige Berg and the role she played in the film, set in Greenland, called SOS Eisberg was her sixth and last collaboration with Arnold Fanck. Shooting took almost a year and the Germany Riefenstahl left in 1932

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had completely changed when she returned in April 1933. The context in which Riefenstahl attended the premiere of this film in August 1933 was completely different from what it had been for the premieres of the previous films she had acted in. After the premier she announced that she was very honored that the Führer had asked her to make an artistic film about the National Socialist Party Rally that was to take place one month later. She gave a Nazi salute on stage and that was the beginning of the Riefenstahl-Hitler association that exists to today. It was during the shooting of this film in Greenland that Riefenstahl took rather strange photographs. Since filming was progressing very slowly – Arnold Fanck could wait for days, even weeks for the right light or right weather – there was a lot of free time. Besides her reading Mein Kampf to other members of the cast – she had received a copy from Hitler just before her departure to Greenland – she was sometimes seen for hours putting photographs of Adolf Hitler in different positions on ice walls and then photographing them. 2

Leni Riefenstahl: photography lessons for Heinrich Hoffmann and presents for the Führer In 1932, Leni Riefenstahl co-produced and co-directed a film in which she played the leading part. One year later, in the Third Reich, the names of the other persons involved were removed from the credits and the film became a ‘Leni Riefenstahl Production.’ A stills photographer, Walter Rimml, had been appointed to take photographs for the press. However, in her Memoirs, published in German in 1987, Riefenstahl describes herself, all of a sudden, as having been a photographer from the early years. Hitler admired Das blaue Licht as well as the photographs – which Riefenstahl had presented as her own – so much that he asked Riefenstahl if he could come and visit her with his experienced personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. He thought that Hoffmann could still learn quite a lot from Riefenstahl’s photography. Other persons who were present gave a slightly different version: Riefenstahl supposedly asked whether Hoffmann would not be interested in seeing ‘her’ photographs. In any case, in the early thirties, Riefenstahl became the photographer of photographs she had, in fact, neither made herself nor even financed.3

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In 1934, some months after the very successful release of her Der Sieg des Glaubens, she postponed her projected feature film Tiefland to make Triumph des Willens, Tag der Freiheit and Olympia as well as war footage in Poland and only started working on it again in 1940. She was not the only director, a lot of names were mentioned in the wartime press but, Riefenstahl later took all the credit for herself.4 A stills photographer, Rolf Lantin, was appointed and took quite impressive photographs using special filters during shooting in Bavaria. His photographs were published regularly after 1940 in the German press to keep interest in the film – and Riefenstahl – alive. A set of photographs, in a luxury binding inscribed ‘A present to my Führer for his birthday, 1943 – Leni Riefenstahl’ was found a few years ago. They were presented and signed ‘Photographs by Leni Riefenstahl.’ Today, some other photographs taken by Rolf Lantin on the set of Tiefland are still considered to be photographs taken by Riefenstahl and are published as such.5 With the photographs that were taken during the shooting of the only two feature films she ever co-directed, Leni Riefenstahl added some fiction to reality for the sake of being admired by the Führer as a photographer.

The beginning of a career as a photographer: what’s in a name? With her name still linked to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler, and with never-ceasing press coverage due to her, sometimes provocative, sayings like ‘Canaris was a traitor’ or ‘Triumph des Willens is a film about peace’, Riefenstahl remained very well known in Germany in the decades after the end of the war.6 In the seventies, she had an unexpected comeback when her books with photographs of Nuba tribes in South Sudan appeared: Die Nuba, Menschen wie von einem anderen Stern (1973), Die Nuba von Kau (1976) and Mein Afrika (1982), all published in various languages and reprinted to this day, sometimes in very luxurious editions like Africa (which contains the photographs of the three books and some extra material) published by Taschen in 2002. This extremely large and heavy book was issued in a limited edition of 1.250 signed and numbered copies and sold at a price of 2.500 euros.

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The path to getting the photographs she took in Africa in the late fifties and early sixties published was, in fact, quite thorny. In the early sixties, she went to almost all of the editors of major German magazines who, fearing that the name Riefenstahl would give rise to protest, refused to publish any of her hundreds of photograph. The first magazine she found willing to publish a few photographs was Kristall in 1964; however, the magazine neither sold well nor was it well known in Germany. But, Riefenstahl was not the kind of person to give up so easily. At long last, in 1969, the famous Der Stern magazine agreed to publish a few Nuba photographs – one, even on the cover with the title: ‘Photographs that nobody has ever seen.’ Other magazines followed, even abroad, and the name Riefenstahl became linked to photography. This gave her the opportunity to make a few photo series for The Sunday Times Magazine. One was a series of photographs about the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. The expectations were very high, given the qualities attributed to her film about the Olympic Games of 1936. Although called ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Second Olympics’, the color photographs are similar to enlarged frames from the film Olympia and are (with Riefenstahl having less opportunities in the stadium than in 1936) rather disappointing. It is easy to see that the use of color for a sporting event was not yet one of Riefenstahl’s aptitudes. It must have been clear to her as well; the photographs were never republished nor shown in the many photographic books and exhibitions that were, and are, organized all over the world. Another assignment came from someone Riefenstahl had never heard of, but who was a fan of her films: Mick Jagger. When he married, he could think of nobody else than Leni Riefenstahl to take photographs of himself and his wife. She accepted and went to London where she took several series of photographs; some were published in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1974. The color photographs, just like the ones of the 1972 Olympic Games, were neither published nor exhibited again. Although the German press was rather negative when the first book with photographs of Africa was published, sales were unexpectedly good and the book, including a translation of the introduction written by Riefenstahl about the Nuba tribes, was published in several countries.

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The English version, The Last of the Nuba, drew the attention of Susan Sontag who wrote an article with the exquisite sounding title of Fascinating Fascism.7 According to Susan Sontag, the photographs taken by Riefenstahl form the third panel of her fascist triptych, the first being the mountain films and, the second, the films she made during the Third Reich. These three parts also belong to ‘fascistic aesthetics.’ The road from the documentaries Riefenstahl made during the Third Reich to her photographs can also be seen as a rather accidental one; one objection against Susan Sontag’s theory of a logical ‘triptych’ is the fact that more than half of the work of the so-called first and second panel was considered lost until the 1990s and cannot have been seen by her.8 Looking at this work it contradicts various elements of Susan Sontag’s theory. Leni Riefenstahl had been longing for a career in the movies since the early twenties. She had acted in six mountain films but was, in fact, quite unhappy with the kind of roles which were almost like being an extra: the real characters in these films were the mountains themselves. Riefenstahl had dreamed of working with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Joseph von Sternberg, Georg Wilhelm Pabst and so on, but no one seemed interested in working with her. When it became clear that no director would hire her, Riefenstahl co-directed a film with Bela Balasz, Das blaue Licht, in which she took the leading role. The press were not enthusiastic and, for Riefenstahl, the ‘Jewish press’ was not honest; she surprised her Jewish friends and collaborators with statements like ‘As long as the Jews control the press, I will never be successful.’ A few months later, Hitler came to power and that was to mean success for Riefenstahl; the first film she made for him, Der Sieg des Glaubens, was the most viewed film in the 1933–1934 season and the Nazi press had no doubts: Germany had a film director who was at least as important as Sergeï Eisenstein. More film commissions – and more success – followed. A few years after the end of the war, she tried to make a new film about modern slavery, Schwarze Fracht (Black Cargo). She went to Africa with a small crew but could not find the extras she had in mind; very beautiful, tall, strong, black men. According to members of the crew, she actually had no script, no concrete plan and no clear concept although she has

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explained, over and over again, that she could not make films anymore because producers boycotted her for what she called ‘the few months I worked for Hitler.’ The people who were with Riefenstahl on that film saw how she worked and were not amazed that producers withdrew from the project: without the correct infrastructure, financial means and unlimited number of collaborators she had had at her disposal for films during the Third Reich, film making was not an easy thing for her. However, a few months later she saw a photograph taken by George Rodgers in the late forties portraying two African wrestlers in a magazine and these wrestlers were exactly the men she had imagined for her Schwarze Fracht. Although that project had been cancelled, Riefenstahl thought: ‘Why not make a film about the tribe these men belong to?’ What she never mentioned, however, is that she first wrote to George Rodgers to ask him where she could find these Nuba wrestlers. George Rodgers, who had photographed concentration camps in Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war, wrote a rather polite answer to Riefenstahl: ‘Given our very different backgrounds, it is best that we do not have any contact.’ Riefenstahl decided to search for them in Africa; at least she knew that they were in Southern Sudan. Riefenstahl describes how dangerous, and especially how hard, it was to find the Nuba tribes and how she ‘discovered’ other Nuba tribes but, according to anthropologists, this is all much exaggerated.9 Making a documentary about these tribes was not easy particularly with her limited budget; it was all in contrast to the facilities she used to have in the Third Reich. It was then that she started taking photographs instead of filming; photographs that would spread throughout the world and which would give her a name in the history of photography. Many photographers and anthropologists have taken photographs of the Nuba, yet their work is less known. And, according to one of them, James Faris, it was also meant to be: too much publicity about these tribes could lead to mass tourism that would dramatically change their lives. The photographs of the Nuba are a lot more sensational than photographs taken by others, sometimes long before or after her. Riefenstahl’s photographs are staged, certain rituals that no longer existed were

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performed just for her photographs; she provided the people with cream for their bodies so they would look better in the photographs and would even pay for ‘blood.’ Some elderly people still had ritual scarring, sometimes on whole parts of their bodies, as decoration. By the time Riefenstahl was with the Nuba, this was no longer a tradition, but she paid people to do it and took many photographs of them making these body decorations, which involved a lot of blood. Nuba specialist James Farris has described the texts in her books, which give the impression of being anthropological, as pure nonsense. To describe the Nuba as people who knew no money, no clothes, only lived with nature and for beauty, the beauty of the body, is more than exaggerated – it is simply the impression she tried to create. As Riefenstahl so often described, the time she spent with the Nuba was the happiest in her life and the friendship with some of the Nuba the most noble she ever experienced. Yet, her widely published photographs had the consequence that the different Nuba tribes became popular tourist attractions in the seventies and eighties leading to a complete change in their way of living. Leni Riefenstahl went back to the Nuba in the 1970s but found them changed and no longer interesting: ‘civilization had taken its toll.’ She continued scuba diving and photographing – and even started filming – under water and this was to result in the film she presented at her hundredth birthday, Impressionen unter Wasser. Her first book about life under water, Korallengärten (1978), was almost as successful as the Nuba books but this must have been more due to the name Riefenstahl, and the fact that it was a photographic book with almost no text, than to the quality of the photographs: it is not difficult to find, albeit in a smaller format, numerous similar photographs in books and magazines produced by scientific researchers whose names are less well-known. Another point that created a feeling of sympathy for these photographs is the admiration that existed for this woman who continued scuba diving until her death, being the oldest person to do so. A second book of photographs was published in 1990, Wunder unter Wasser. There seemed to be something new in those photographs: they

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were very clear, such a contrast was hardly ever seen in underwater photography, the colors were extremely lively and the background was uniformly dark instead of being hazy which was usually the case with photographs of this kind at the time. The framing seemed almost perfect. However, when her film was released, it became clear for the viewer who could analyze the film frame by frame that most of these photographs were, in fact, enlarged frames from the film and not real photographs. By the beginning of the 1990s, exhibitions of her work were being organized; one of the first was a very big exhibition in Tokyo in 1992. The Nuba and the underwater photographs were in the foreground and one could see references to what seemed to be an overview of her artistic work in pictures: the mountain films and Olympia. All references to the Third Reich, and especially the National Socialist Party rally films, were covered over. Similar shows started taking place in other parts of the world. With the success abroad, an exhibition was organized, at long last, in her own country, in Hamburg in 1997. This was not without protest: a large crowd of people was waiting to boo Riefenstahl who, when notified of this on her way to the opening, went back home. With each exhibition, a certain collection of photographs was taking on more and more importance: photographs of the Olympic Games in 1936. They were very much admired and the Camerawork Galerie in Berlin organized an exhibition of Olympic photographs in 2000.10 There was some protest, such as ‘In 1936 propaganda, now money’ but much admiration as well: ‘Photographs over 60 years old that look so artistic.’ In the meantime there had been an evolution in the acceptance of Riefenstahl and she was able to attend the opening. Sales of the ‘silver gelatine photographs’ were unexpectedly high. Similar exhibitions were held in the United States and, later, in other countries. Online sales of signed portfolios containing similar photographs also started.11 In 2000, Taschen published Leni Riefenstahl. Fünf Leben, which contained some Olympia photographs, as well as Leni Riefenstahl Olympia, seemingly a reprint of a book that had been published in Germany in 1937. This book, with almost no text, consists of images of the 1936 Olympics and the making of the film Olympia. Many of the photographs that were for sale are identical to the ones in this book. 316

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On Leni Riefenstahl’s website, which she kept up-to-date until her death (one would wish it was not in red, white and black), one will not find the Olympics she photographed in 1972 under ‘photographs’ but a whole series from 1936; most of them can be seen in the book Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.12 The protest, as well as the admiration, actually redirected attention from one important question: When and how did Leni Riefenstahl take these photographs? The film Olympia, premiered on Hitler’s birthday in 1938, stands as one of the best sport documentaries ever made. The credits of the film are limited to ‘Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Music: Herbert Windt.’ But, in fact, the film was made by cameramen like Willy Zielke who were often talented filmmakers. The film was extremely innovative in sport filming, and is still impressive today for its technical aspects and artistry; however, this was hardly the work of Riefenstahl herself. With all the admiration going to Riefenstahl, the film finally lead to some bitterness as well: Willy Zielke who, in 1938 film brochures, was credited with having made the whole prologue, quickly saw his name disappear. The same applies for Hans Ertl who took the most innovative shots. With her travels abroad and with only one name on the film – hers – Riefenstahl, as a young woman, was admired as a first-rate filmmaker, and sometimes still is for this film. Yet, her role was rather that – thanks to her position in the Third Reich – she could have unlimited financial means and, above all, the talented people she wanted, even when some were reluctant to work for her; however, refusing Riefenstahl was like refusing Hitler. While Riefenstahl was editing the film with several assistants in 1937, a book, almost entirely of photographs, was published, Leni Riefenstahl. Schönheit im Olympischen Kampf. This book contains exactly the same images as the book Taschen published in 2000. However, even if a seemingly exact reprint of this book was published in Germany in 1988, it is very interesting to consult the 1937 edition in order to understand when, and how, Riefenstahl took those photographs. On the very last page of the 1937 book, one finds a few lines that were omitted in 1988

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(and also in other versions, such as the Taschen publication). Credits are given to a certain number of people for having chosen frames from the Olympia film and processed them into enlarged frames: ‘The choice of frame enlargements from the film was made by Guzzi Lantscher. The work to make the enlargements was done by Gertrud Sieburg and Rolf Lantin.’13

– Courtesy IOC, Lausanne. This image was for sale as an original photograph by Leni Riefenstahl in 2008. Title: Der Speerwerfer, signed by Leni Riefenstahl | Price: 12,000 US $ Seller: Gallery Fahey-Klein (Los Angeles) | As the captures I made of the scene with ‘Der Speerwerfer’ from the prologue of Olympia, there is no doubt that this is not a real photograph but a frame.

Yet, an enlarged frame is by no means a photograph.14 A famous frame published in this book, and one of the first to be sold out at the Galerie Camerawork, is Der Speerwerfer (The Javelin Thrower).15 While running, both of the athlete’s feet are off the ground. This could only have been taken with a film camera since this is too rapid to be seen by the human eye – not even in the film. By looking at this excerpt frame by frame, however, one can see the detailed movements of this athlete, almost in Muybridge-style. It is even less a photograph by Riefenstahl, since she did not do the camerawork. Moreover, one should consider that Olympia was not even her property after the war. In Leni Riefenstahl’s last denazification session, the film was described as propaganda made with or without the intention of being so. A company, ‘Transit-Film’, had been created for films of this kind made during the Third Reich and they owned it. Riefenstahl, however, was the only filmmaker to go to court,

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claiming that Olympia (and also Triumph des Willens) was her exclusive property. She did not win but, after several attempts, was granted a percentage of the rights to these films. One should emphasize that real photographs were taken during the Olympics, for publication not only in newspapers and magazines but also in books, including Was ich bei den Olympischen Spielen 1936 sah by Dr. Paul Wolff.16 These photographs are, indeed, of better quality and much sharper than the enlarged frames from Olympia; moreover, it is a pity that they have been forgotten in favour of the fake photographs as there is no doubt they can withstand an aesthetical comparison with them. Riefenstahl had been able to sell photographs that were really not photographs, she signed them, she gave them an exclusivity aspect like 1/10 or 1/20 and was highly acclaimed for them. However, they are not very exclusive: in a one second of film, there are 24 frames, and two frames that follow each other are only very, very slightly different. If the frame following the one considered by Riefenstahl as a photograph is taken and enlarged, one gets an almost identical image, which can be presented again as a Leni Riefenstahl photograph and get a 1/20 exclusivity mark. On all the existing ‘photographs’ still for sale in 2008, the number of prints, as well as the title of the ‘photograph’ (e.g. Der Speerwerfer), is handwritten by Riefenstahl who then added her signature to make it complete. Much more than the link Riefenstahl-Propaganda, another link must be made: Riefenstahl-Fake. The example of the Olympic photographs is only one of many, of Riefenstahl claiming credit (and money) for something that was not, or not really, created by her.

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Notes 1

Other films are: Das blaue Licht (co-directed by Bela Balasz) released in 1932, Der Sieg des Glaubens in 1933, Tag der Freiheit in 1935, Tiefland in 1954 and, finally, Impressionen unter Wasser in 2002.

2

Based on the research for my book Leni Riefenstahl which will be published by ASP Brussels in 2010.

3

The film would never have been realized without the financial help of Harry Sokal. When Hitler came to power less than a year after the release of Das blaue Licht, Harry Sokal, a Jew, fled from Germany. After the war he was very bitter about Riefenstahl, because he had supported her in her dancing career as early as in 1923. He had been struck by her anti-Semitism and her admiration for Hitler as from April 1932, which was, for him, the main reason why Nazism attracted her. At that time, however, he was convinced Riefenstahl would change; she had so many Jewish friends, some of them communists, like Bela Balasz. According to him, in April 1932, hardly any of his Jewish friends really thought Hitler would play any political role in Germany. Source: see note 2

4

A few names of directors who worked on Tiefland: G.W. Pabst who returned unexpectedly to Germany in 1943, after having left in 1933, Arnold Fanck and Hans Reinl.

5

In Leni Riefenstahl. Fünf Leben, Taschen, Cologne 2000, we find a mixture of still photographs made by Rolf Lantin and enlarged frames from the film under Tiefland. They are all presented as photographs by Riefenstahl. The heirs of Rolf Lantin, the family Naundorf living in Paris, are still in court against the ‘Leni Riefenstahl Produktion’ company. Source: letters from C. Naundorf 2005, 2007.

6

For an impression of the numerous articles that were published about Leni Riefenstahl, see the bibliography I am still working on and which is growing every month: http://users.skynet.be/deneulin/books.html (choose ‘articles’).

7

First published in The New York Review of books, February 6, 1975, later in a slightly different version in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, Picador. New York 1980, 73-105.

8

Fanck’s two films Der heilige Berg (1926) and Der grosse Sprung (1927), the original version of Das blaue Licht (only rediscovered in 2002), Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933), Tag der Freiheit (1935). Although the footage Riefenstahl made in Poland during the war for newsreels is still missing, numerous

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photographs have been found, as well as documents about the shooting. Susan Sontag also considers Tiefland as a pure Riefenstahl product which it is not. 9

James Faris, “Leni Riefenstahl and the Nuba” in: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, no. 13, Oxford 1996, 95-97.

10

The Camerawork Gallery sells photographs by people of the calibre of Diane Arbus, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Man Ray, Helmut Newton and Robert Doisneau, to name only a few.

11

Olympia photographs are still for sale in the United States; in Gallery FaheyKlein (Los Angeles) for about $ 12,000. http://www.faheykleingallery.com/ featured_artists/riefenstahl/riefenstahl_option_frames.htm (08/08). See also: http://www.daco-verlag.de/catalog/fotoeditionen.htm (08/08).

12

Leni Riefenstahl’s site: http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/Olympic Photographs on that site: http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/photo/p_olym.html (08/08).

13

According to the same source, the book contains some real photographs about the making of the film, mostly with Leni Riefenstahl in the centre of them. Arthur Grimm and Rolf Lantin made them.

14

As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson point out, frame enlargements are of lesser quality than still photography, which is ‘real’ photography, frame enlargements are never photographs There is often confusion between (production) stills and frame enlargements. Bordwell and Thompson define a still from a film as a photograph taken during the filming; hence, the references in the credits to the person specialized in still photography, the stills photographer. A still will never be exactly the same as a frame enlargement; the conditions should be that they are taken at the same time from exactly the same point of view, which is impossible. If taken just after the shooting a still can be quite similar to a frame of the shot, depending of whether anything has changed to the filmed matter, light, film stock used, etc. See: David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art, an introduction, McGraw Hill, New York 1997, 37-38.

15

See image 1, this image is still sold as a photograph made during the Games of Berlin by Riefenstahl. It can be bought for about 10,000 $ at http:// faheykleingallery.com/

16

Paul Wolff, Was ich bei den Olympischen Spielen 1936 sah, Karl Specht Verlag, Berlin 1936. It was also published in English under the title Sport Shots, William Morrow & Company, New York 1937.

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—

Towards a Theory of Photography Hubert Dethier —

Do we need a philosophy of photography? It seems obvious to us that we do. Let us replace philosophy with thinking, and photography with imagination or fantasy, as the Belgian philosopher Leopold Flam did in his unsurpassed work Denken en Existeren (Thought and Existence).1 What has thinking meant until now? What is thinking? When is someone thinking? One may think of something or someone who is absent. In thinking, what is absent is made present. How is this possible? Through imagination or reverie? ‘If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance – an explosion – of aberrant images, then there is no imagination’, writes Gaston Bachelard.2 Without imagination, human beings would be unable to think, because a certain distance is necessary in order for them to be thinking. This distance is realized through the imagination. Both Kant and Fichte have recognized the importance of imagination for thinking, and Sartre likewise engaged in an in-depth discussion of imagination. And then there is the work of Gaston Bachelard. Imagination plays a key role in psychoanalysis, not only in the explanation of dreams, but in its anthropological meaning. For Jung, part of the imagination, its most ancient element, has an archetypal character. To reflect on the thought process without taking into account the imagination is to regard thinking in too abstract a manner, and thus in effect to falsify it. Thinking is linked to something – the mind thinks of something, and not only of something but of something that is in the world and belongs to the world. For this reason, the word ‘is’ plays a very important role.

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Thinking always involves something that is, but not being itself, from a distance, as something that was. Thinking can never embrace the ‘now’, for hardly has it fixed its attention on something and already it is gone. Similarly, every feeling that is the subject of thinking is gone in a twinkling. Hence thinking becomes an act of imagination – it is never a matter of calculation or counting, for those are not a part of the thought process. Someone who is unable to think can often be good at counting. However, creative mathematical activity does go hand in hand with thinking, and also requires imagination. Through imagination, thought goes beyond itself; true thinking transcends thought in such a way that this transcendence is never complete, for the complete transcendence of thinking is the end of thinking. To think requires one to think without thinking. From that point on, you have true thinking – otherwise thought is simply abstract, an empty word. Such thinking-unthinking is realized in the imagination, in feeling, in the very notion of reality. This reality is not the world, but is that which is given to the individual, that which is there without his or her doing anything. This reality is kept at a distance, and thus it becomes an impediment, a boundary that must be conquered. Reality is the boundary, for without it, thinking collapses, imagination disappears and is replaced by fantasy. Imagination cannot do without reality, and fantasy once had a relationship with reality – it is an uprooted imagination. Sensation and perception gain their depth (third dimension) and their meaning through the imagination, which is continuously present. Someone says something, shows something, and for it to be understood, it must be completed, for it is always fragmentary; it is the imagination that completes it. A person’s perception and identification are so fragmentary that we can only approach their totality through the imagination. It goes without saying that we cannot do this alone but need some help from another, who sparks our imagination, provides it with suggestions, for otherwise it can easily end up in fantasy. Thus we are not faced with lifeless objects before us, for inanimate things belong to a reality of signs that incite, stimulate, prick our imagination, thus enabling us to think. Every thought presupposes, therefore, the working of the imagination in all its various aspects: distance,

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outlook and transience. We have not yet addressed outlook explicitly, because we wish to review it here first. Through the imagination comes outlook, which we might call the secret of things or people. Approaching the secret of a person through his outlook means getting to know him. The other, general type of knowledge about this person does not concern him as he is in himself. I note that x was born in a certain country, speaks this or that language, belongs to a particular class and era. There are thousands like him. This alone does not mean that I know him. I will only discover this particular person by getting to know his outlook, for with this I will also have discovered his past and present. True knowledge of a person begins with his outlook, in the form of a dream, a utopia, a desire or a plan. If a person no longer has any outlook for the future, he ceases to be an individual, for one’s outlook is never general. For the ‘general’ to exist, there must be personal participation. An individual’s outlook says what he wants to achieve, and above all what he wants to be. His whole individuality and uniqueness rests in that outlook. For this reason, he cannot stick to his dreams. A dream is likewise personal and belongs to one’s individuality, but only in its isolation, its decline, and yet on the other hand in its generality as well; for in dreams, general images – what Jung called ‘archetypes’ – are made present. An outlook is not a limited individuality or isolated subjectivity, but belongs to that participatory subjectivity which has succeeded in reaching beyond itself to a level of inward participation. It is at that moment that true thinking begins. Thinking does not consist exclusively of concepts, judgments or conclusions. Logic belongs among the specialties of thought. Not only are feeling and willing parts of thinking, but so too are dreaming, imagining, behaving and moving. Thinking is the ‘near distance’ in all possible situations that an individual encounters. Let us take the example of music. While most of the arts rarely give the word to the artist to speak of his or her work, as Flam remarks in Denken en Existeren (p. 93), there are a considerable number of musical artists who bring music into their thoughts, making it possible for musical novels to exist. Music cannot exist without thought, as Flam

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demonstrates: it always expresses a thought, even in a simple dance tune, so that one can listen to dance music without dancing or even feeling like doing so. Music is a conceptual art and therefore demands, over and above skill, a thorough-going existential experience that finds its expression in the work. For instance, the existential experience of Mozart was interpreted by Kierkegaard and developed in his reflections on Don Giovanni. Some forms of art have less need of thinking. Examples of these are painting or sculpture, although much can be said about them. However, the art of poetry cannot possibly exist without thinking, which is fundamental to this art form. With Flam, we wish to make the following distinction, among others, between the various sorts of thinking: musical, poetic, pictorial, sculptural, architectonic and prosaic thinking. Musical thinking moves in rhythmical fashion, flowing from one point to the next and thus forming an organic whole. Schopenhauer explicitly mentioned that he thought in this way, and Bergson, too, thought musically. Poetic thinking seeks the deeper meaning of words, which are regarded not as mere signs, but as having a symbolic meaning. Poetic thought therefore has a tendency, in one way or another, toward secrecy, toward both the hidden and the revealed, toward revelation. To think poetically is to think in a revelatory way, thinking in flashes, as if by intuition: Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Pictorial thinking is clear and orderly, though not always systematic: it favors the line, the contours or a particular color within the thought process itself. There are thoughts that are colored, that summon up a particular color because they are pictorial. Sartre often developed a pictorial type of thought, very closely related to Buffet’s world of color. The majority of the examples he gives are pictorial.

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Sculptural thinking is primarily Greek in origin. Every Greek idea takes as its starting point a tangible image that can serve as a model. Plato’s Idea is a statue. The Greek style has the quality of a sculpture. Raphael portrayed this sculptural way of thinking in his ‘school of Athens.’ The architectonic manner of thinking builds a thought up following a plan: it has a foundation, a cornerstone, it is a system rather than an organic whole, as is the case with musical thinking. Architecture was perhaps in many respects the starting point for this way of thinking. A great many terms are architectonic in origin: ground, basis or foundation; being open; conclusion, beginning (entrance) and end (exit); construction; collapse; chaos (a heap of stones); order, cosmos (the world is a house); higher and lower (floors); servants and slaves lived downstairs, the lords upstairs; the arch, overarching, supporting the building. Prosaic thinking limits itself to the official, the generally accepted – it is a useful, sometimes learned way of thinking, keeping to what is given, the manner (mannerism), the style, and has no interest in creating. By contrast, the other forms of thought are poetic because they create. It could be said that a photographic mode of thinking can to a great extent be inspired by all the aforementioned types of thought. Before going more closely into the Hegelian notion of Kunstreligion (the religion of art), in which all these considerations of imagination are developed in a penetrating and lucid manner, we offer a few preliminary reflections on beauty, which is related to all that has been said above and lends it ultimate meaning. Imagination, as we have already noted, serves to provide depth and makes it possible to think and ask questions. Since imagination is related to thought and knowledge, it creates a desire for the beautiful. Beauty is that which is understandable, comprehensible. A beautiful face is one that can be understood, and therefore it is reassuring, it belongs to a certain order. The experience of the beautiful therefore means the experience of the meaning of a person or of a thing, a tree or an action. A woman’s face is beautiful if it expresses a very specific sort of comprehensibility of the human being, if it reflects an understandable world. If it does, then it reassures us, is calm

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and has a calming effect. At the same time it suggests an action, for in an orderly world, one can engage in action. For that reason, it is innocent and awakens passion. It is outside of all morality, all distinction between good and evil, for beauty is neither good nor bad. If beauty were good, then it would annoy; if bad, then it would be ugly. Everything the beautiful does, sets one free, for beauty means liberation, certainly as a subjective experience, as a relationship with the imagination. Having a desire for beauty can thus be regarded as a desire for freedom, and especially for freedom from all morality. For this reason, beauty is regarded, from the perspective of the moral-religious person, as something evil, sinful, diabolical. As a result, it will seek refuge in the beautiful-as-good, which is usually a saccharine, false beauty. It will reach a few high points in reflecting that which it regards as diabolical or appalling, precisely in that which may be considered ‘beautiful.’ Because beauty is directly related to the imagination, one might be tempted to conceive of it as pure subjectivity. But this is not the case, precisely because the imagination itself is related to reality, to being. In the West, art has long ago lost its decorative character. It is an essential human reality. It usually has been and continues to be related to problems that transcend day-to-day reality, and thus has always had a metaphysical quality. Its decline means that it has become decorative. We have been speaking of art in general, without specifying the type of art we have in mind. The decorative element in art means that it is felt and experienced as art. True art no longer presents itself as art. A musical work reaches the height of musicality when it no longer makes us think of music. Art appears as a mediation to something that is beyond our daily experience. Consequently, to limit ourselves to the medium means to betray art itself. For art must be transcended in order to attain its meaning, to reach that to which it points. The content itself is not given at the outset, but is discovered through the form, which unceasingly creates its content. There is an irony to art: if it exists for itself, then it ceases to be art and becomes decor; but if it exists for some other purpose, then it becomes in itself a broad field of being and of experience. That is what Hegel had in mind in his Aesthetics and his Religion of Art.

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The ‘religion of art’ in the Aesthetics of Hegel The religion of art is associated with the arising conscious of bourgeois subjectivity. It developed the principle of reality, in particular after the 13th century, as the emanation of a revolutionary and suppressed class. It was during the 15th and 16th centuries that this class, having begun the social struggle two centuries earlier, gave expression to its novelty. On the one hand, this was through the rebirth of the ‘invincible spirit’ which had previously revealed itself to the Greeks and Romans. (Man, in experiencing the rebirth, is conscious of being part of a completely new period. This is because he becomes conscious of the original model, an almost unsurpassable inheritance of a high order). On the other hand, it was due to a Promethean and heroic individualism which resisted tradition and made man the rival of God and Nature, which he improves. This is the way in which the contemplative credo was replaced by the active cogito. The Cartesian cogito is an active and energetic form of knowledge which desires to master the world, not by praying but by working in accordance with knowledge. In formulating the cogito, Descartes brought to consciousness a movement which reached its first culmination during the Renaissance. In this respect it is quite immaterial as to whether we know the source of this formulation, which gave a philosophical foundation tot the development of bourgeois subjectivity.3 Art which has a Cartesian character, as decisive for the cogito, was therefore a liberation from everything which can to some degree inhibit man: sin, guilt, feeling. Descartes’ doubt, by placing the world in parenthesis, puts an end to sin and the I IS, because the way in which it thinks is totally selfconstituted. Therefore, also in the case of Descartes, Prometheus replaces sinful Adam. ‘Through his knowledge he wants to become master of Great Nature and hence of his own limited nature. Spinoza thought along similar lines, and therefore equated God with Nature; sin became unnaturalness. Al this forms a totality which in Giordano Bruno, Descartes and later in Nietzsche and Shaftesbury.’4 Man becomes the post of his existence, a virtuoso or an ‘alter dues.’

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The religion of art, as the awakening consciousness of bourgeois subjectivity, answers to the active and energetic knowledge of the cogito. This is characterized ‘by its sense of reality, its organizing activity and reconciling rationality, its dream of an ideal situation and the cult of the infinite subjectivity of the genius.’5 Art discovers and discloses reality, it clarifies once again an obscured reality, making man open to receive the mystery. Normally speaking we only see a scheme of reality, but with the help of images we learn to see the world in all its nuances. Art renders the genuine reality by transfiguring the vulgar reality, presenting to the world a significance which is not arbitrary, in one way or another being part of the reality to which it indirectly and meaningfully refers. The sense of reality is first made possible by the secret, that which subjectivity can never completely encompass. In the whispering silence of the secret, spinning and weaving in the work of the post, the finitudes appear in their true meaning and existence becomes conscious of its essential purpose in life. ‘The poet lives in a holy Silence, where everything acquires a fixed form and the world does not dissolve in a chaos of obscurity. The sense of greatness is born in the silence of the post and therefore, freeing himself from that which binds him, he starts out on the adventure of the Spirit.’ With the help of the secret the artist posits a reality of the ‘great’, a greater-reality which points to a harmonious order of disposition and concurrence. In this way it creates an opening for the sense of infinitude. When art answers to reality it tries to surpass and transcend it. Not stopping at any one reality, including that which it has produced, it always pushes onwards, elsewhere. The role of art in life is always to bring a flow, a movement into Existence and thus to open up new horizons for it. It resists chaos by deciphering the hard features of the world and by attempting to surpass every reality with a new one. In this sense the attitude of the work of art towards reality is pious: ‘it presents us with the possibility of seeing the world, not as an incoherent and oppressive chaos, but as a dynamic and synthetic whole.’6 As thought in

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search of the secret, it bestows on us the feeling of reality, of space and of the objects which surround us as immediately given sensory signs; in the first place it presents us with the sense of the inner landscape. As subjectivity it is receptive to the reality experienced in the dream, a dream we only perceive when vision is not falsified by inauthentic conventional symbols and by a hypocritical sensitivity which betrays people. Art which answers to our reality should initially take account of what occurs deep inside of us. Its task is to shake us awake out of the impersonal and vague slumber into which we sink due to the dominating influence of a coarse reality.7 The work of art gives expression to the inner experience of reality in such a way that it goes beyond the words and ideas which are very common, and therefore vague, even if it makes use of them. Due to this ‘going beyond’ and to the mysterious pointing ‘further’, beauty is reflected in the work of art as a comprehensible world and the deteriorated reality is retrieved. For Hegel, beauty is the abstract unity of sensory matter, signifying the purity of matter in form, color and sound. Ugliness is directly related to human organic life which can be smelt, felt or tasted. In breaking with the audio­visual character of beauty, pop art has introduced the other sensory world of ugliness and repulsion. It is not related to nature as it really is because, as meaningful order and audio-visual harmony, this is never ugly. Antonin Artaud wanted to be freed from his body and his organs and desired instead the glorious body of a living-dead statue which would not remind one of any organic function. In the same spirit, the work of the Platonic Renaissance is the rendering of an aesthetic reality or ideality which evokes the concrete body as little as possible without therefore becoming unreal. Art is neither the poetry of the bream nor the prose of reality. It stands in between both, becoming a sphere of life in its own right. Therefore it is neither a dream-world nor a purification of sensory reality, out instead, the genuine experience of this same sensory reality, even though a pronounced inclination for the representation dominates. For an artist like Leonardo da Vinci this means that the work of art should bring about a harmony between the concrete ideal and its external reality. Art makes man at home (heimisch) in the world which surrounds him, and in this way the poetic

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individual inhabits (eingewohnt) reality. This unity is no illusion, it is a secret inwardness by means of which man is connected to his environment. Art remains for him the means of giving full expression to his essential personality, end of developing, of becoming himself and hence of realizing a world generated by the human spirit. Formerly, the purpose of art was to make audio-visual reality meaningful by unifying it. The feeling for unity can be called reason. It makes something beautiful ‘if it is as it should be. Art acts evocatively, it extends its image to other images, and orders the chaos of our impressions.’8 Artistic activity makes it possible to discover the relationship between the areas of the perceived, the real and the imagined. It not only makes possible communication and concurrence between certain images, but, as was indicated above, it is also directed towards the unveiling and discovery of new areas of BEING. Drawing, sketching and painting should be seen as the urge to construct or to make something and to orientate oneself. They answer to an attempt to appreciate the world by bringing to the fore its essential and characteristic aspects and by transfiguring the ordinary, deteriorated reality into a stronger, truer, manmade anti-reality. The work of art first copies reality in order to become gradually that reality itself. Art as ‘artefact’ becomes itself real. The Platonism in this view is clear. The image has a dual significance: a) it is an archetype, an instructive model, a target-point, an idea or ideal. Following the movement which started during the Renaissance with the discussion on the ars poetica of Aristotle, the poet does not just describe things as they are but rather as they should be. He begins with reality and imitates it, but in such a way that he improves it. In the realisticidealistic view of art the poet imitates by choosing the most beautiful of many moments and unifying them all. Dispersed reality is reduced to a uniform image, to one idea. b) the image is a scheme, a general and abstract summary of a reality which can be experienced, and which can never be completely rendered or reflected, no matter what the image. And so we come to the third significance of the image: ‘The imagination makes an image of experience or the world, it makes it visible and conceivable. Without the

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image of the imagination there can be neither thought, acquaintance nor knowledge.’9 Thus Einstein appealed to intuition. For him it meant a conjectural and guessing imagination. Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of the aesthetical as being founded on the reduced model (the omission of certain dimensions) implies the same reflection of the whole, whereby the loss of perceivable dimensions is compensated in terms or comprehensibility: art is a way of understanding. The knowledge which is to be found in art belongs to that which is given, to Nature, because it is given in the model. Through the medium of art, the chaos, i.e. the surplus of meanings in the world, is reduced to one single meaning, the chaos is humanized. For Andre Malreaux art was simply ‘la mise en forme des éléments ou monde pour l’orienter vers sa partie essentielle.’ The image has a rationalistic character, since it arranges and organizes a series of events, making them tangible, comprehensible and intelligible. ‘Without the image nothing can be either understood or comprehended. Not only does the image have a rationalistic character, but this is precisely why it makes a construction of the manifold data or experience, a house of the world, or in short, a world. A world is a rational or well-arranged totality in which the separate facts find their rightful place (home); this is the point from which the separate events can be organized, co-ordinated or given a place. As soon as someone is unable to absorb the mass of the data of experience and adheres to disorder and chaotic data, then as far as this person is concerned there is not a world but a labyrinth instead.’10 This means that concrete existence is reduced to a form which is the correct expression of the artist’s intentions. What is expressed must be on the same level as the means of expression, neither above nor below it. If the expression corresponds to the intention of the painter then his work is beautiful, it creates an idealistic dialectics of the synthesis, a house of the world, which makes the exceptional and the miraculous possible. If what is expressed lies below the level of the intention the work is ugly, it points to the negative dialectics of nonsense, in which the blunted outlook of the labyrinth looms up in all its horror. If it stands above it then the beautiful is replaced by the forbidding, the elevated or the holy (to which a

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painter as Vandereycken, e.g. in Apokalyps, occasionally makes a discrete appeal, without abandoning for one moment cohesion and harmony as the correspondence between qualitative differences, as ‘world’ and visual echo-phenomenon). A world is characterized by the possibility of having an entrance, an exit and passages and ways passing through it which always lead to a way out. There is neither en entrance, an exit nor paths in a labyrinth. When someone reads a book without being able to make any connection between the points recounted, then it has become an unbearable labyrinth, a non-world ... A work of art can never be a labyrinth. It is always a world. At first sight Picasso’s Guernica is a labyrinth of which one neither understands nor comprehends anything; after looking at it attentively the eye begins to perceive in it an arranged order which follows a particular line. This guiding principle leads the eye out of the labyrinth and into the world, just as Ariadne’s thread helped her lover to return from the maze of the Minotaur into the visible world of the sun… 11 12 Alain emphasized the reconciling rationality of art because, in the face of all the grimacing horror, it presents us with peace and calm: ‘un abri contre la détresse et l’ennui.’ He also ventures to speak of a ‘région de la beauté qui est à l’abri de la banqueroute’ and describes art as a reconciling activity which reestablishes an inner order and in which man as aesthetic subject finds consolation, courage and encouragement. The suffering and passions which he has withstood are most acutely expressed in art, in such a way that they are transfigured so that he can master them and is able to bear them. Consolation means that the passions are brought to a halt and that an open space is created which is a prerequisite for understanding; reconciliation with suffering through insight and the consciousness of human failing. By experiencing suffering to the full it loses its sharpness and turns into serenity, making it possible for the inner voice to speak again in harmony with other voices. It is here that the nature of the religion of art is brought into clear relief. Modern man no longer seeks through prayer the consolation of a transcendent God. Art consoles him immediately and completely. The suffering that he has undergone becomes transfigured: it

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comes within his reach and makes him capable of bearing it, because art is equally a form of understanding. In Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony consolation resounds in the chorus, pointing out that man’s suffering has not been for nothing, that the Harvester is coming to bind all the ears of wheat into sheaves. The consolatory and reconciling character of art, whatever its nature, is often underscored by artists, aesthetes, psychologists and philosophers. Flam makes a connection between consolation and Sigmund Freud’s theory of sublimation: What does consolation signify? When a mother loses a child, she finds consolation in the idea that it has gone to heaven, and therefore, that it is still alive although totally absent from her. Such consolation can be satisfactory when accompanied by the knowledge that it could and had to happen in that way and in no other. Here we are not concerned with an external, superimposed necessity but rather one of consent, whereby someone is able to want what has happened because it is part of the profound rationality of the world. The mother wanted the death of her child, she gave her consent to it, because God decreed it so and because it was therefore good. In this way consolation makes the mother a tacit accomplice to the death of her child. It is in this sense that Hegel understands freedom as comprehended necessity, but subsequently he passes on to historical consolation. Another form of consolation is the reconciliation with suffering through insight, the consciousness of human failing, and through the sense of finitude. Art, especially music, gives full expression to this form of consolation, along with such a complete experiencing of suffering that one becomes master of it, that it loses its sharpness and passes into serenity.13 The modern religion of art has continually pursued, and also often attained, this serenity in the plastic arts, in the novel, drama, poetry and music. This aspiration towards reconciliation and serenity through the means of art can lead to aestheticism, which did indeed happen and it occurs primarily in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois circles. However, it can also be an incitement to continue the struggle, in spite of the suffered defeat, as in Majakowski’s poem, Und wenn auch (1927).14

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Mit leisem Schall entfaltet sich das Zeitumgsaug: von allen Grenzen ballt es sich wie Pulverrauch, Für die im Sturm Erwachsenen wär dies nicht neu; wer Im Vergangnen nachgesehn, harrt ohne Scheu Die Sturm flut der Geschichte frisch, kommt sie uns In die Quer, schäumt Krieg und droht vernichterisch,gemach wir schneiden ihren Gesicht:so teilt der Kiel das Meer. Here also the work remains in the movement of Platonism which emphasizes both consolation - forsaking an atomically broken reality - and a Gnostic philosophy of life, namely, exile in the world: man’s task is to free himself from his errant dispersion and to return to the Pleroma, through en Increasing renunciation of an existence centered on desire. Man, as the other side of nature, as anti-phusis, has turned away from Order, the Foundation, in order to become distracted by the finitude of the theoretical and practical finite Spirit. He is limited in his knowledge and in what he does by morality. Out of this limitation, this chaos, his eyes are raised, and consciousness, the will and thought rise up to the true universal, to Order, to Unity, to the reconciliation in which he will find peace. Anxious and despairing is the restlessness of the insecure, nowhere finding anything to hang on to, a new security in an eternal rest where the

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manifold nature of things falls away, time stands still and death imposes silence. It is conscious of the narrowness of sensory reality because it believes in purity as limpid sincerity and Simplicity (the abolition of double meanings or ambiguity). Beauty is a reflection of this simple and therefore comprehensible world, it does not accept any limitation. The melancholic attraction to profound rationality which beauty arouses is a fundamental part of the artist’s romantic feeling for life, as the thirst for the absolute, which is purity, the liberation from distraction. Because the beautiful gives a particular expression to and representation of the true it can be comprehended, belonging as it does to the Order or absolute Idea. Therefore, in art one can speak of an immediate and sensory form of knowledge. In the Renaissance it was still regarded as one of the highest means of representation in which truth acquires being. Furthermore, it brings about another form of reconciliation which is related to the specific character of beauty. The intellect cannot ‘grasp’ beauty because it wanders from one point to another and is dispersed in everyday life. Thought is sensitive to distinctions, not to unity. While beauty is infinite and free, the intellect is trapped in the finite, in the partial and therefore in falsity. Just as in Kant’s aesthetics and later, in Lévi-Strauss, this presupposes that ‘knowledge in art’ occurs without our cognitive faculties having to perform any work. In understanding, the subject is not free, having to submit to the constraint of the object which is free. The reverse takes place in the case of the will which remains in the realm of the finite; the object is dominated by the will to which it is made subordinate. A beautiful object reconciles the opposing forces. Being inward it changes the finite into the free infinite, it stimulates and inspires by extending its image over other images. A beautiful object corresponds to the inner experience of a reality which points elsewhere, it is not dependent on feeling or on the subject and therefore it is enclosed in itself, alone. In practice, desire recedes, creating a free space: distance as an audio-visual area of contemplation. The subject renounces his own aims with regard to the object, viewing it in its finality, as being an aim in itself. The sensory singularity of the object fades away and turns into pure form.15 The artist frees himself from desire by granting the object its independence, keeping it free from his own self-interest: by not engulfing and inwardly destroying

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it but by contemplating it at a distance, through the creation of an audiovisual area or a rational cosmos.16 For Hegel, he purpose and content of art was to portray everything that is human, to make man conscious of his slumbering emotions and to bring him into contact with the high and the low. Art points through the outer layer of appearance to the depths of reality. It increases the inner contradictions and the dichotomy of feelings and passions. In this way it manages to subdue the wildness of actual passions. Art mitigates the isolating power of the passions by elevating them in the representation. In passion man cleaves to the object of his desire. with the help of the representation he becomes conscious of his passion and, taking distance from himself, he acquires a sense of freedom towards it. The expression mitigates the violence of suffering. Art shows nature and spirit as being in and for themselves, it brings order to the chaos of perceptions. Underneath its surface it points to a spiritual content which it causes to appear in a sensory form. It makes a representation of the world, a rational and dynamic totality which shows a way further for life, ‘as long as man is sensitive to art his life will also make sense, the future will continually grow without his having to ask what the purpose is of all his trouble and efforts.’17 The sense of reality, organizing activity, the secret and reconciling rationality all summon up the image of a lost paradise, a bright realm which the aesthetic subject strives to regain. The past is situated in the bright twilight of a spiritual fatherland (Greece for Hölderlin), a wonderful childhood (Rilke, Proust), an artificial paradise (Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Malcolm Lowry, the eroticism of Georges Bataille), the good old days (Gaston Bachelard) or a radiant future (Aragon). A certain moral idealism can be found in the religion of art, and this forms the real meaning of the sense of reality. The invisible has penetrated the visible. ‘Reality has been superseded or realized by ideality. In this process the dream plays a decisive role. Utopia, as contemporary reality’s design for an improved reality, points ahead to progress’, a notion which thoroughly pervades the religion of art.18 The cacophony of death does not destroy chromatic music, it is an enriching improvement on it, just like rhythmic, concrete, electronic music. There can be no stagnation because stagnation signifies the termination of art, something which the religion of art does not accept. There are always new possibilities, for progress takes place in the infinite.

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Art is not a movement towards a motionless end fixed goal; the idealizing activity of art itself creates a goal, only to set itself a new one when the first has been attained. The secret also becomes clearer in the idealizing activity of art, in its movement towards an ideal. ‘It sparkles from the past on the surface of a grey or dissatisfied present, or it discovers in itself the germs of new life, it is pregnant with a new day which cannot be well defined, it ‘beckons’ as the gods ‘beckon.’ The given reality which is present in the work of art is the ‘holy shrine’ of a past relived and a dawning morrow.’19 The religion of art retrieves a deteriorated reality or ‘Being’, and restores order to the chaos, but this does not make it an abstraction, for it acquires reality through the artist. He leads an exceptional and creative life, appearing as a religious hero, a genius. In this way the religion of art has created a new and modern polytheism, a pantheon of great men, linked with the cult of the genius which forms the exceptional character of the new way of thinking. It can even be said that modern philosophy is connected to the cult of the genius and the hero, in contrast to the Middle Ages when it was the saints who were worshipped. Since the 18th century there has been no philosophy which did not participate in the worship of heroes or geniuses; this is related to the idea of being creative. A creative person can also be called a poet. The poet is not only the writer of poems. He is also someone who acts. This is how man is seen as action (an idea which can be found in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Sartre and in pragmatism as a whole). The movement started with the discussion on Aristotle’s ars poetica (translated into Latin in 1492 by Giorgio Valla). Poetry has a didactic function, it has to help people to think properly (logic) and to live properly (ethics). First of all it is a matter of imitation.20 Therefore the poet must know a lot and above all be well informed about science. He must know about the different art forms and the sciences, being as he is a teacher of mankind. The poet does not only describe things as they are, but rather as they should be. Reality is his point of departure, but such that he improves it. Here we could speak of a realistic­idealistic view, not only of art, but also of man. This has found expression in the work of Bernardo Tasso, Julius Caesar Scaliger,

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Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. The poet imitates by choosing the most beautiful of many moments and by unifying it all. The example of Zeuxis, how he drew the image of a beautiful girl by using many models, has been cited. A dispersed reality is reduced to one simple image, one idea. Here lies the foundation for the cult of the genius. Just as the one image becomes exemplary for numerous real people, the genius is the example for all mankind. He is the best of them; stemming from man in his actuality, he is the quintessence of real man who recognizes himself in the genius. From here it is just a small step to the concept of a creative existence. The new polytheism was formulated by Goethe, and in the world-historical figures of Hegel as well as in Carlyle’s hero-worship, but also in the present-day cult of the ‘passionate lives’ of ‘great men’ or in the veneration of certain sport and film heroes, notwithstanding Heidegger’s ‘schritt zurück’ and the idea of a ‘thinker’ of the ‘unthought.’ The great hero, the artist of genius, does not come into being due to some caprice, but there is a call for him, he is awaited. Even his childhood is determined by his future. In ‘Les Mots’ Sartre has given a striking account of this as self-criticism and, simultaneously, as a criticism of the cult of the genius in the modern religion of art. A connection can be made between this aesthetic-religious cult of the genius and the fascist and Nazi notions of leadership, or the Stalinist personality cult, another term describing the cult of the genius. Here it concerns a new form of aesthetic polytheism which has become widely disseminated. There are the statues, there is the cult of birthplaces or residences, there is the Pantheon in Paris, Westminster Abbey in London and the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. It is not only a matter of an aesthetic worship of saints, but of a new aesthetic polytheism which was already defined very clearly by William James. There are some who initiate the cult of one God, as Romain Rolland did of Beethoven. Others, like André Breton, have various Gods. In this respect the inspiring-inspired relationship of master and disciple should also be taken into account. Present-day art is unthinkable without the admired artist, who leads an exceptional and creative life. The concept, ‘creative’, is modern, running parallel with that of work. Marx pointed to the abolition of (alienating) work through end in socialism, and through the free activity of individuals, signifying a creative existence. Therefore, the cult of the genius is related,

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in a certain respect, to democracy, in that it presupposes an increasing individualization of man. And thus the concept of a creative existence and the socialist demand for a creative existence, at least, for its possibility, are themselves a result of the religion of art. There is no sense in approving or disapproving of the religion of art, since it is part of a reality which spans several centuries and in many ways reflects the Western manner of thinking and feeling, reaching from the mercantile, bourgeois society to that of socialism. What is possible is to turn ones back on it, as Sartre has explained: one does not have the right to write when millions of people are suffering from starvation. Much can be said in answer to this, and the polemic which took place between Pierre Simon and Francis Berger in L’Express was the reaction of two artists, both deeply connected to the religion of art, to someone who was himself up to his ears in the cult of the genius of the religion of art. Sartre’s plays have something grand about them because they bring to the stage the great hero, the one who is capable of suffering, struggling and dying. It is true that Sartre has his doubts about him (Huis Clos) but he keeps on returning to him (as in Les séquestrés d’Altona). This is undoubtedly related to a religious phenomenon, a branch of which can be found in what Karl Jaspers calls ‘philosophical belief.’ In many ways it points to the post-Christian period, which began approximately at the time of the Renaissance and, having withstood all kinds of high and low points, still continues today. The concept of genius is specific to modern thought from Dante to Sartre.21 Thus this whole way of thinking has at its foundation and in its elaboration an aristocratic spiritualism, which is furthermore an essential aspect of humanism, which has never been directed to all mankind, but always to the few. The whole of the literature and art from the 18th century up to the present day is not directed to the many; even while speaking in the name of everyone it starts out from the concept of the genius as being the creative and exceptional individual. The crisis in contemporary thought is precisely the doubt as to its possibility.22 There are no geniuses any more, the stars are extinguished.

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To a large extent the history of European philosophy should be related to the cult of the hero, the genius, and even fame or renown, whereby the philosopher becomes the expression of ‘man’, at a certain moment becoming his consciousness and guiding him. At the same time, the very special meaning of eroticism should be indicated here, since it is adopted in the ‘philein’ of philosophy. The new philosopher thus has a lyrical, poetic origin, literally to begin with, but gradually more in the sense of someone who creates. The philosopher becomes the most exalted concept of creative man, an example for all, for scientific researchers, poets, writers, painters, sculptors and composers. This is why they philosophize in their work, and why the philosopher appears as the great genius who inspires all other geniuses. (Here lies the meaning of Nietzsche’s pronouncement, which appeals to Plato’s pseudodialogue claiming that every philosopher wants to be God; Sartre ascribes it to the pour-soi). Every philosopher starts to regard himself as a totally new beginning, as a break with, and also a completion of, the old. The concept of genius has a religious background which should be known in order to be able to understand the foundations of the new way of thinking up to the present-day. The word ‘genius’ is related to ingenium (gignere, produce, cultivate) and to genius (protective spirit). The genius is a demon of the male generative power.23 According to Sprenger the Latin word genius perhaps stems from the Arabian jinnee (genie), veil, covering, concealment, shrouding or dejection of spirit, ghost or demon.24 Genius is related to spirit (spiritus, anima, person, genius) and in a certain sense it could be said that the meaning of the word ‘spirit’ as used by Hegel is equivalent to genius. According to the belief which was widespread in the Ancient World, everyone is given a protective spirit who is his ideal Ego, and consequently his life’s goal, his destiny, his star (cfr. the star above the stable in Bethlehem). Alongside this protective spirit there was also a torment or (daemon) who accompanied each person. Here we are clearly dealing with S. Freud’s classification of man into the Super-Ego (protective spirit or genius), Ego, and Id (tormentor or demon). The genius is a demigod who stands between the godhead and man, he is an intermediary, a Saviour who liberates man from the demon by carrying him (which is what Jesus

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does, since He expels the demons, bears all sins and eventually is crucified by the demons, not by God). Each individual establishes himself in an Ideal-Individual, as Socrates appealed to a Daimonion, who is equivalent to the genius and who protected him by exhortation (the Daimonion and the Super-Ego are identical here). According to Zilsel the modern concept of genius has the following sources: enthusiasm, as formulated among others by Plato (also by Democritus, and readopted by Shaftesbury): the poet or thinker does not draw out of himself, but is possessed by the god and therefore far removed from the ordinary sensory world, his experience is exceptional (in the sense of the vates, the prophet, whence the poet-prophet, the poet-philosopher). the Daimonion of Socrates, a special protective spirit who guides the individual and makes him aware of danger. the cult of the heroes.25 Scipio’s dream as recounted by Cicero: those who excel most meet again in Elysium. Longinus’s treatise on the sublime (1st century A.D.); praise of the poet and orator, glorification of Great Nature (megàle phusis). The significance of Nature for the new way of thinking has already been indicated, its decisive meaning being the woman who inspires the artist (less so in the case of the philosopher, even though she plays a role for Descartes, Spinoza and especially Schelling; Max Scheler).26 The famous men (viri illustres) of Latin literature (the famous man replaces the saints and the priest, he is an honored demigod with a cult of his own). The Renaissance has mixed these elements and thus created a whole new form of religion, one of the worshipper of art, science or nature. (For Beethoven music is nothing less than a religion, whose high priest is the composer). The man of genius becomes a creative god, who nevertheless does not draw out of himself, but imitates, he follows an example, although in such a way that he becomes exemplary himself, a demigod or god. 27

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According to Zilsel and Lange-Eichbaus, the ‘modern genius’ has four roots: 1. the genius or demon of the Ancient World 2. the poet’s inspiring demon 3. the innate talent of all people (ingenium) 4. the special, irrational talent of exceptional people. The word first received its contemporary meaning after 1650 and it was primarily elaborated on in the 18th century by Shaftesbury (1671-1713), for example. Such a view simplifies the problem, because here it is seen in relation to the whole attitude of thought of the new man, which is an expression of the bourgeoisie. Humanism is inextricably connected to the cult of the genius, the hero and fame. We have continually pointed this out and the crisis of humanism is also the crisis of the cult of the genius. Thus the rise of the masses is experienced by some, who live completely within the confines of this humanism, as ‘the deterioration of culture’: here lies the significance of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘decadence’, and also Martin Heidegger’s aversion for the ‘modern’, while the whole of his thought is the child of that same ‘modern’, although in a different sense.28 Heidegger himself returned to the Poet in the meaning given to the word by, for example, Scaliger.29 The whole of Heidegger’s view of the poet, who is a vates, breathes in the spirit of humanism, and perhaps he should be regarded as the last representative of that ‘humanism.’ It is then also understandable that he should want to attach himself to Nietzsche’s superman and simultaneously make a connection between the Poet and Nature, just as, furthermore, Nature has for him a feminine significance and the superman genius reverts back to the Renaissance and to humanism. The Renaissance does indeed conceive the genius as a superman and a force of nature, who is in the integral life of Nature. In the Renaissance the genius is related, on the one hand, to Prometheus, the self-made man, and freedom30, and on the other hand, to a creative and engendering Nature. Here we have two lines of the new way of thinking, one which gave birth to the socia1 sciences (Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften: psychology, sociology, history, linguistics), and the other, to the natural sciences (not only the theoretical but also the technical sciences).31

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Notes 1

Amsterdam/Antwerp: Wereldbibliotheek NV, 1964, p. 72.

2

L’air et les Songes, Paris, 1943, p. 87. Translated into English as Air and Dreams, Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1988, p. 1.

3

L. Flam, De moderne kunst-religie, in ‘Dialoog’, 5th year of issue, no. 3, Spring 1965, p. 129.

4

Idem, Verleden en Toekomst van de Filosofie, Wereldbibliotheek N.V., AmsterdamAntwerp, 1962, p. 86.

5

Idem, De moderne kunst-religie, in ‘Dialoog’, 5th year of issue, no. 3, pp.129 et sq.

6

Idem, Kunst en Maatschappij, in ‘Geschiedenis in het Onderwijs’, 10th year of issue, nrs. 94-5, 1964, p. 179.

7

Ibidem.

8

Idem, Ontbinding en Protest, De Sikkel, Antwerp, 1959, p. 39.

9

Idem, Unpublished notes on the image.

10

Idem, Unpublished reflections on the image.

11

Ibidem.

12

Ibidem

13

Idem, De moderne kunst-religie, ibidem, p. 133.

14

The citation is from a German translation, Gedichte, Leipzig, Reclam, 1960, p. 126.

15

L. Flam, Ontbinding en Protest. Art nonetheless starts out from the sensory and tries to conceive the concept of the sensorial in its concretion. ‘There is no beauty which goes beyond our understanding or our senses. Beauty falls within our reach and this is why one image or a particular sound evoke other images or sounds. The beautiful is related to the echo-phenomenon, which can also be visual.’

16

Desire is always connected to the organic: the smells, the senses of feeling and taste, the bodily functions which cease to exist when they are changed into form. Hence the artist regards the sensory as a gloss, a semblance, a surface, a garment, a veil. The whole problem of ugliness, which is rendered ‘beautiful’ in a painting, thus becomes understandable. The body loses its organic and functional character; it becomes idealized, reduced to a form which is the correct expression of the artist’s intentions, a sensory and radiant idea.

17

L. Flam, Kunst en Maatschappij, in ‘Geschiedenis in het Onderwijs’, 10th year of issue, nrs. 94-95.

18

Idem, De Kunstreligie, p. 134. 345

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19 20

Idem, ibidem. Cfr. Alessandro Strada, in E. Garin, Der italienische Humanismus, Basel, 1947, p. 109: ‘The poet is he who writes contrived things and who broadens the true, by guiding them to that completion of quality which suits the object to be revealed.’

21

J. Cahan, Zur Kritik des Geniebegriffs, Studien zur Philosophie ihrer Geschichte, vol. 73, Bern, 1911;



E. Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus, Tübingen, 1926;



H. Sommer, Genie-Beiträge zur Bedeutungsgeschichte des Wortes, Marburg, 1943;



G.W. Plekhanov, Le rôle de l’individu dans l’histoire, Moscow, 1945;



Lee van Dovski, Genie und Eros, Bern, 1948;



Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, N.Y., Pantheon Books, 1949;



Ernst Kretschmer, Geniale Menschen, Berlin, Springer, 19585, (first edition



W. Lange-Eichbaum and W. Kurth, Genie, Irsinn und Ruhm, Basel, 1956, (first

1929); edition 1927). 22

The nouveau roman in France with Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Samuel Beckett expresses it acutely. Cf. Robert Musil, ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.’

23

E. Zilsel, op. cit., p. 89.

24

Das Leben und die Werke des Mohammed, Berlin, 1861, I, p. 207.

25

Cfr. Fritz Taeger, Charisma. Studien zur Geschichte des antiken Herrscherkultus,

26

Cfr. Karl Jaspers, Schelling, Stuttgart, 1954.

27

According to J.G. Scaliger, Poeticas I, 1 (Lyon, 1561), the poet creates just like

Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1957-60.

God, they are both poietai. See also T. Tasso (4587), Vasari (1555), Telesio (1565) and J. Huarte (Examen de ingenios para las scienzas, Baeza, 1575). 28

Among others, Hendrik de Man, Massa und Kulturverfall, Bern, 1952.

29

Cfr. Holzwege, Frankfurt a/M, 1950; ‘Warum Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’; Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Frankfurt a/M, 1961.

30

Cfr. Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos, pp. 92-105, 124-26.

31

Cf. L. Flam, Verleden en Toekomst van de Filosofie, pp. 79-83 and De moderne kunst-religie, ibidem.

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—

Prejudices in the History of Philosophy of Photography from Benjamin to Barthes Willem Elias

—

Preface Philosophy and photography seem closely linked, until one checks out which philosophers have written an essay about photography. Apart from Barthes and Benjamin as big exceptions, one can quickly narrow the investigation.1 This is very astonishing and again it is not. Not, because philosophy re-flects, re-views, equals a reflection that looks back upon what has happened, and photography is too recent an event to have become part of the question about the essence of mankind.2 But astonishing because photography shows a similar ambiguity as philosophy. Both of them point out something and are therefore a knowing, but at the same time they ask a question and are therefore a not-knowing. In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, philosophy is a not-knowing knowing. The ambiguity is at the very centre of his philosophy. Philosophy is a whole of well-founded confirmations and sound negations that shows a certain coherence, which means a ‘knowledge.’ Philosophy is a whole of questions that question the formerly said, (the entirety of confirmations and negations), over and over again, which means a not-knowing. Photography is just as ambiguous as philosophy. It is showing something, a framed part of reality by camera or in the dark room, that in view of the objectivity of the process, can certainly lay claim to true knowledge. It is always a phrasing of a question too, namely: what is the reality value of an image? And how is the objective disobjectified by the subjectivity of

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the maker and the onlooker, increased by the contextual influences on both? This ambiguity was called the ‘paradox of photography.’3 Can it be more philosophical? Barthes especially offers resistance to the ‘doxa’ in his thinking.4 The ‘doxa’ is the opinion that borrows its strength from the power in the widest sense of the word: the public opinion, the view of the silent majority, the narrow-minded view, everything that is supposed to be ‘natural’, the violence of prejudice, that what one claims to be true, is true, just because it is. The figurative meaning of the word ‘para’ in Greek is ‘against.’ ‘Para tein doxan’ means ‘against the expectation.’ This last word brings in psychology which assumes that our perception is determined by our expectation.5 Through the paradox, however, we are urged to think in order to adapt our expectation to the real situation. Otherwise we are ‘dogmatical’, a word with the same stem as ‘doxa’, which refers to the unwillingness to change one’s opinion. Barthes pleads for thinking about paradoxa. Photography focuses the most on this paradoxicality. Every picture is a doxa: it is reality as it is, in many cases even admissible as evidence. Or as Berger puts it: ‘Within a mere thirty years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing (the wrongly named ‘candid camera’): aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.’6 Each picture is somehow also a paradox: it is an image of reality, in other words it is a view. And this should not be understood too simply, namely as a mere relativization by stressing that it is a ‘way’ of watching, attached to the conviction that it positively is reality. The fact that it is an image implies that it is not reality, that it is a way of depicting, that we have learnt to see this reality in our pan-photographic culture in such a way and that we can say nothing with certainty about the represented reality that we do not know from other information sources, like direct observation or verbal explanation. Without such outer-photographic data photography remains extremely silent. Is the picture an evidence of war or a picture on the set of a war film? This questioning, this not-knowing opens up a road, namely that of the interpretation that can only take place on the level of

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photographic singularity, in which the reality referred to is insignificant or can be seen as just ‘material’ next to other specific characteristics. This all sounds disrespectful if it concerns people, but for a picture made by a camera it does not matter who that working-class person exactly is, or who that down-and-outer is and from which Third World country he comes, or who that conceited civilian might be. After all, it is about the aspects of humankind itself. In that sense, as not-showing showing, photography stands close to philosophy as not-knowing knowing. That is, we do not know the reality shown by photography (not showing), and we interpret (showing). The philosophy of photography belongs to the philosophy of culture if photography is regarded as a phenomenon from the mass culture; and the philosophy of photography belongs to culture to art philosophy if it concerns ‘art photography.’ It would be wrong, I think, to make too significant a distinction, either starting from philosophy or from photography. Art philosophy can be seen as a part of the philosophy of culture. For photography one could ask oneself if the desire to be art is that important. Maybe photography just has to be photography. Besides, there is the post-modern phenomenon that the boundaries between art and mass culture are fading away. The latter becomes subject or inspiration for the first. And art becomes kitsch in its outmoded modernism: imagine a urinal by Duchamp in your drawing room! And please put that bottle-rack back in the cellar. That’s why a philosophy of photography comes down to the standard questions: What are the characteristics? How can they be interpreted? What is the value? How does it function within which systems? How is meaning generated? All of this to contribute to the fundamentally philosophical phrasing: what is photography? We no longer live in an era where we can simply check out these questions in Plato or Aristotle to acquire a more thorough insight. Neither will it be sufficient to weigh up a rationalistic versus an empirical vision, a method accepted for many centuries. Modern philosophy can be divided into four movements. Habermas phrases them as follows: ‘Besides all differences that we immediately perceive from close range, four complexes come

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forward from a flow of thoughts, each with its own physiognomy: analytical philosophy, phenomenology, western Marxism and structuralism. Hegel spoke of “forms of the Mind”. This expression obtrudes itself. Because as soon as a form of the Mind is recognized and nominated in its unmistakable individuality, it is also renounced and doomed to downfall.’7 Because of this, contemporary philosophy has gotten into a state of ‘neue Unübersichtlichkeit’, through which it is now called post-modern.8 Freud’s metapsychology was already entwined with the Marxism of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. But also with structuralism via Bachelard’s critics of science, Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. And via Sartre also with phenomenology which in its strive for praxis was even reinforced by Marxism. In post-modern philosophy these kinds of connections are rules rather than exceptions. Besides these four still ruling ‘forms of the Mind’ that, as Habermas states, are ‘doomed to downfall’, one also has to take into account the post-versions of these four movements: post-Marxism, postanalytical language philosophy, which highlights the link with history and context; and post-structuralism that is the breeding ground itself for postmodernism. There is not yet talk of a post-phenomenology but through the method of hermeneutics it is widely pulled open. Hermeneutics can be extended with the marxist ideology of critics. And post-modernist ideas can be used to complete hermeneutics. That’s why all of this should not directly be seen as an ‘Unübersichtlichkeit’, but rather from the concern to submit the thinking to overviews and the strict divisions that are connected with it. Then, comes the idea that the absence of one method makes place for the use of many ‘methods’, without losing sight of the ethymological meaning of the word, namely, the ‘roads one goes along to someplace.’ La chambre claire, one of the most examined philosophical texts about photography, is an example of this freedom of method. Roland Barthes, who can be rated among the founders of the application of semiology, thought the circumstances were appropriate to treat photography in a phenomenological way, which did not mean that semiotic insights were banished.

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This branching will not prevent us from putting a number of philosophical approaches to photography next to one another, divided according to the four cited movements: neo-Marxism; analytical philosophy; phenomenology; structuralism. In each of the four sections I will start with a brief outline of the mode of thought of the movement concerned. I have deliberately looked for a formulation, different from the one in my book, which provides a survey of the contemporary art theory.9 Nevertheless that book can be consulted as a wider frame, by which this contribution to the philosophy of photography can be better understood. I will regularly refer to the book. After the introductory outline, a few individuals will be discussed who have shown some attention to photography within the movement concerned. The oldest text is by Walter Benjamin (1931), the most recent one by Roland Barthes (1980). I believe that after Barthes a completely different kind of philosophy of photography has arisen, a more detailed one. That’s why I like to call him the last pioneer of philosophy of photography.

Neo-Marxism Situation One could strongly disagree about the crimes or benefits that have come about in the name of Marxism, in attempts to not only interpret the world but to change it as well. But one can not deny that Marxs’ range of ideas has been a rich breeding ground for formulating the cultural-critical thinking of the last century. The work of the Frankfurt School, whose approach was named Critical Theory, belongs to the interesting studies in this field. This theory links economical views to cultural phenomena and places them in a historical perspective. Man has to become aware of the fact that he creates his own history. The intention is to indicate that people within a political system live under a continuous and increasingly systematized dominance. In itself that is nothing new. In their studies the philosophers of the Frankfurt School point out that this dominance constantly takes on another form and is also analysable in cultural phenomena. It even seems that certain cultural

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traditions support political oppression. Their theory is the thinking about a resistance against such an oppression, that’s why it is called ‘critical.’ But it’s not that simple either. For they did not want to formulate an epistemology nor an aesthetical theory, where premises and conclusions construct a system. In their eyes every theory itself is ideological and can not lay claim to a certain truth. At present the ideology has become total and no point of view is possible in which production and exchange relations are not finally presented as natural. That is why one has to resist every theoretical truth as pretension. That is why they formulate antitheses that do not lead to reconciliation, as in Hegel’s dialectics. To art they attribute an ability to implement criticism of the ideology. Adorno, for example, ascribes to art a truth percentage of letting flicker what lies beyond our comprehension. It is a short-lived criticism, because once the work of art gets an identity, it loses its critical potential. Yet he considers art as an aesthetical model to his theory.

Walter Benjamin However it is not the music theoretist Adorno who should be discussed here, but Walter Benjamin, because he applied the Critical Theory to photography too. If one knows that criticism was often directed at mass culture, and the notion of ‘culture industry’ was introduced to lodge a complaint against the consumption of cultural overproduction, one might not expect to find in Benjamin a defender of photography. Still for Benjamin the notion of ‘criticism’ may not only be understood in a negative way, like shattering an ideology or exposing interests. The term also indicates the retrieval of a hidden truth in the positive sense, namely making alternatives visible, evoking a utopia. Also the utopian aspect is hidden in the work of art. Benjamin links it to a notion from religion, namely ‘aura’, the magical rays around a holy person or a sacred object. For him aura becomes a control term in his art philosophy. In order to distinguish works with aura from the others, he adds the term ‘authentic’, which happens often to indicate the good in a philosophy whereas the bad is called ‘alienation.’ To Benjamin good art must exude aura. In his own time – the twenties and thirties – he observes a ‘loss of aura’ in art. I will come back to this notion later, because a lot has

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been written about it because the author described the notion too vaguely. He mentions that photography can not arouse aura. A painting, on the other hand, can because it is characterized by something ‘more.’ More balanced is Benjamin’s vision in his Kleine Geschichte der Photographie.10 One often comes across quotes from this text which put photography in a bad light. Yet one can – subject to a faithful reading and a critical interpretation of his criticism – include a part of photography in auratical image production. The problem here is, amongst others, connected to the terminology itself. If one comes across the term ‘art’ by philosophers, then masterpieces are in their mind, or at least high quality work. The term ‘photography’ covers every product that is the consequence of fixing an image, taken by a camera. If one starts to philosophize about that diversity, there can be talk of considerable loss of aura. Let us follow Benjamin’s line of thought in his Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (1931). Philosophical questions about photography only recently begin to get through to consciousness. Because of the continuously fast development of the medium, a review was neglected. The prime of photography (Hill, Cameron, Nadar) dates from the first decade after its invention. This judgement is completely in line with the Critical Theory because this is the decade ‘that preceeded its industrialization.’ And straightaway one draws a bead on a first kind of photography, namely where profit comes into the matter. From the beginning there have been charlatans who mastered the new technique exactly for that reason. The industrialization only starts with the visiting card. Before that this profitable photography belonged to the fairground arts. Benjamin looks for the nature of these first pictures to explain their ‘charm.’ Because in their reproducibility through industrial development, he sees the doom of art, namely the loss of aura, but it was important to the author that dagguerrotypes were single copies.11 Yet he made a peculiar distinction with the art of painting. If one no longer recognizes the person in a painted portrait, the work remains to exist on the basis of its intrinsic value. In photography, however, one keeps on longing to have witnessed the moment of the shot. Benjamin is tempted by the erotic strength of the picture: ‘How did this mouth kiss…’, he asks himself when he sees it. Here Benjamin seems to be influenced by psychoanalysis. The photographer

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mainly works unconsciously, only after printing the picture can he give account of the optical-unconscious aspect. Another aspect of Benjamin’s statement about why Hill’s pictures had charm, is the reserved distance that is kept between the photographer and the photographed person, and between the latter and the spectator. As it will turn out later on, this ‘distance’ is important in Benjamin’s aesthetics. The long exposure time during which the model must not move increases the durability of this early photography, contrary to the fast pictures later on. ‘The procedure itself prompted the models not to move away from the moment, but to move into it; during the long shots the models grew into the picture…’ Benjamin has no trouble to attribute to this early portrait photography a quality he also ascribes to noble art: ‘There was an aura around them, a medium that by penetrating their look, granted it fulfilment and confidence.’ Technically speaking, this could be possible because ‘the light struggles from the darkness with difficulty.’ And somewhat further: ‘This halo is sometimes splendidly and significantly outlined through the nowadays old-fashioned oval shape in which the picture is cut out.’ In contrast with the ‘snapshots’, Benjamin calls this the ‘incunables of photography.’ The technique and the object to be photographed are here, according to Benjamin, accurately geared for one another. After 1880, the instruments allow one to conquer the dark completely and register the signs as clearly as a mirror. The disappeared aura reappeared through all sorts of retouching methods. Benjamin pardons only one later photographer: Atget (1857-1927). ‘He is the first to disinfect the stuffy atmosphere that the conventional portrait photography of the period of deterioration has spread. He purifies this atmosphere, even drives it away: he marks the liberation of the object from the aura, which is the indisputable merit of the youngest photographers’ school.’ By this exception, however, Benjamin introduces a rule, namely that every photograph that claims quality, should possess the potential of aura. Also, a single critic – in other words, the author himself – is too limited and too prejudiced to make the selection.

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Only here comes the moment in the text where Benjamin asks and answers the question: ‘What is in fact aura? A strange web of space and time: a nonrecurring appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be.’ One may not lose sight of the fact that Benjamin formulates his definition of ‘aura’ immediately after he had photographs, more specifically Atget’s, in his head. Moreover, the appearance of a distance that remains distant, no matter how close, is almost a description of photography itself, because the handiness of photography offers the possibility to realise nearness via the approach of hand and eye. But photography can also pulverize aura because it does not only produce; it also reproduces. The hastiness and repeatability of the reproduction technology is, to Benjamin, the ruin of the artistic image, which is characterized by uniqueness and duration. Here one also has to say that the term photography is interpreted too widely. A reproduction in the ‘illustrated newspaper and newsreel’ is not a photo, but a photo of a photo, or a printed cliché of it. The picture of a work of art is a ‘reduction technique' that enables man to ‘control works of art.’ These two aspects of photographic technology should not be treated in the same category. The picture as a reproduction in the media supposes an original. In advertising applications of photography, one can also speak of quality decreasing because of reproducibility. By the way, the loss of aura stands close to what Marcuse, another representative of the Critical Theory, has called the ‘repressive tolerance’, namely that a photographic or other message in the press, through its placement next to purely commercial announcements, loses its critical strength. Concerning art reproduction, it is clear that aura is missing. In art perception on a basis of reproductions, aura is excluded, simply because the effect of the subject is eliminated and the senses are actually deceived. The reproduction is only a handy resource in knowledge about art. For art education, in the sense of making a larger public acquainted with art, reproduction has to be limited to the cognitive aspect of this process.

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Apart from my remark that Benjamin looks for problems where they are not because he does not distinguish photography as technique from photography as artistic medium, one has to state that he spoke prophetic words when he wrote: ‘Everybody has been able to conclude how much easier it is to get hold of a painting, but especially a sculpture, not to mention architecture, by means of a picture in stead of reality.’ Through the photographic reproduction technique, the whole contemporary art world has become manipulatable, exactly on account of the ‘hastiness and repeatability’, criticized by Benjamin, namely the presence in bribable art magazines and pseudo-scientific art books. The ‘aura’ has been lost to the publication of reproductions as a part of market forces. In this connection, Benjamin would certainly speak of the aura’s ‘Zertrümmerung’ (zertrümmern: smash to pieces, destroy, ruin > smash to smithereens, to matchwood). In a review of the notion of ‘aura’, Michel Kuijpers points out rightly that aura has now been replaced by ‘image.’ Not ‘image’ as it was used by Benjamin, namely depths or visions that have an unnamable nucleus and therefore continue to generate meanings that are ambiguous, but ‘image’ in its management meaning, namely an image given by external means on a basis of extrinsic qualities. Kuijpers formulates the shift from ‘aura’ to ‘image’ as follows: ‘Now, well over fifty years later, the word “aura” turns up rather sporadically. I recently read it in an article about Jeff Koons’ piglet that was purchased by the City Museum. But as far as it played a role in Benjamin’s time, that role seems to be taken over by the notion “image”. And this is a meaningful shift. Both notions refer to “emanation”. But “aura” is inextricably bound up with the thing whereas the “image” of something leads a more independent existence. The “image” can float free as an air bubble. An unexisting thing can have an “image” but not an “aura”. Contrary to the “aura”, the “image” is completely dependent on the context; without the stories that surround a thing the “image” does not exist. “Aura” on the other hand depends on the observer’s susceptibility. The piglet by Koons does not bear the effect of an aura if you just sit in front of it, but on account of stories about it, discussions, articles it certainly has effect as “image”.’12

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Due to Benjamin’s critical review against three forms of photography, the one that can arouse a feeling of aura is limited even more. He finishes with the typical commercial portrait photography and denounces the unstoppable urge of people to pay attention to pictures of themselves and their friends. An urge that has remained actual. As he did for Atget, Benjamin describes a kind of portrait photography that does possess the strength of the aura, namely by August Sander. From this I may conclude for the second time that Benjamin highly appreciates the possibilities of the new technique to create artistic pictures that have quality. And in his opinion quality is always connected with, on the one hand, the author’s effort, meaning that one photographs as part of the construction of a life’s work in stead of for profit, and on the other hand, the created oeuvre should have a link with mankind. From there comes his appreciation for Sander’s work, whom he places on the same level as the Russian film maker Eisenstein. The human face is no longer a portrait, but a contribution to physiognomy, from the empiricism of perception. Sanders’ work is more an ‘exercise atlas’ than a book of photographs and therefore it has the scientific dimension that the ‘detail photographer’ does not have. An example of the latter is not given. Maybe Benjamin means the other form of reprehensible photography, namely the ‘more or less artistic style of a photography for which the experience becomes ‘camera prey.’ Benjamin pins down the photographer as a ‘snapshooter’: ‘Indeed the amateur who returns home with an enormous number of artistic shots is no prettier sight than a hunter who returns from the stand with large quantities of game that are worth only something to the merchant. And indeed the day is almost here that more illustrated magazines exist than poulterer’s.’ This last prediction has come true. The rest of Benjamin’s criticism goes into the known direction: hastiness, commercialism, consumption by reproduction, and the hunter/ prey relation as repression. Exactly in the opposite direction he sees the road that has led to avant-garde: ‘The photographers who switched from plastic art to photography, not for opportunistic reasons, nor by coincidence or out of laziness, are now the avant-garde amongst their colleagues, because through their background they are somewhat protected against the biggest danger of contemporary photography, the tendency to industrial art.’ He then thinks of people like Moholy-Nagy.

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There is a third form of photography that has to stand Benjamin’s criticism, namely the one of the photojournalist who wants to be ‘creative’ but who does not show any ‘physionomic, political or scientific’ interests. This ‘creative’ photography has the character of a fetish, with a liveliness it owes to the ‘whimsical exposure of the changing fashion. The creative aspect of photography is its surrender to fashion.’ Here Benjamin suddenly lets photojournalism overflow into advertising photography. From what is written above, it would be wrong to suppose that he is really opposed to documentary photography as it is used by many photographers in journalism. But he is set against the advertising world where photography has to improve the salability with the slogan that the world is beautiful, without adding to the understanding of this world: ‘a photography that can fix any tin can in the universe, but is not able to catch one of the human contexts in which it performs ….’ Benjamin gives the example of pictures of factories that hardly provide any information about these institutions and the fact that humans turn into objects there. In the spirit of Brecht, he states that a kind of ‘reproduction of reality’ exists that says little about reality itself. Contrary to the ‘creative’ photography of advertising, which calls up associations, Benjamin stands up for ‘constructive photography’, which unmasks and is out for experiment and tuition instead of charm. Benjamin thinks of surrealistic photography. Since constructive photography is possible, Benjamin disagrees with Baudelaire who fears that photography would reinforce the prevailing theory that art has to be true to nature and states in 1859 that photography should return to ‘its true duty, that is to serve sciences and arts.’ After all, for Benjamin, it is inherent to the authenticity of photography itself that it be instructive. Next to the photography that is cliché and that merely evokes language cliché’s, there is a photography that fixes secret images. But here, at the end of his essay, a strange turn occurs concerning the relation between image and word. The constructive photography has to be completed with a note through which ‘it is included in the in-crowd of all human relationships.’ The literator Benjamin goes quite far here because he wants to guide the sensory perceptions of the image by means of the text. He says that image and word can reinforce one another, but they never coincide. The image can be made clearer by the word, but language can not increase the power of the image, but the author can imply data

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that are invisible and are therefore irrelevant within the visual culture of photography. That doesn’t alter the fact into words can deepen the experience of the image, but even ‘without words’ an intense experience can arise. Apart from this negation of the individuality of the photographic image, there is still something to be said about Benjamin’s concluding remark. Compared to the idea of image illiteracy that apparently was already suggested in his time, he places the tutelage of the photographer himself: ‘Not he who can not read nor write, but he who knows nothing about photography will be the illiterate of the future.’ But does not the photographer who can not decipher his own pictures have to be considered as an illiterate just as much? Here lies an assignment for art education, namely to make sure that he who makes images can also explain them. Benjamin sets the photographers a great social task, by calling them the descendants of augury and haruspices. The augury are predictors, priests who in ancient Rome determined from the yelling or flight of birds and other omens if the gods approved or disapproved of a deed that was imposed by authority of the state; the haruspex does about the same but on the basis of intestines. Maybe such a task of interpretation is better left to the critics, the diviners of today. I have tried to underline how Benjamin demands a lot from photography when he reduces photography to a small category of images that that evoke the question of whether or not they are art, but that is an art theoretical problem, and not a dispute about the quality of those images. This reading is in contrast with some authors who feel they ought to derive from his essay a negative attitude of Benjamin with regard to photography.13 Of course, one may ask oneself about the value of notions such as ‘aura.’ In the literature about Benjamin this is often brought up for discussion. I have indicated the questionable interpretation of the notion of ‘reproduction’ in another essay by Benjamin, where it is central as a cause for the decline of the aura.14 This ‘school example of an armchair scholar who has spent 50% of his life on the benches of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris’ also liked technical terms, which, however, he used incorrectly. But what is the term ‘aura’ worth as an art philosophical notion? It is a typical example of what

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I would call ‘a kind of thinking that appeals to the concept of authenticity.’ It is a case of using one beautiful term for the ‘good’ and many nasty ones for the ‘bad.’ Here the good must be made subjective to the approving and disapproving judgments and the psychology linked to it. The value of distance, the dreamy quality that is connected to the distance and aura, can be understood from an autobiographical story. In ‘Berliner Jugend’, Benjamin writes that he used to be ill very often and maybe since then he feels inclined to see everything approach from a distance, like the hours in his sickbed.15 Eco too is critical of notions like ‘aura.’ He calls it a ‘fetish-notion.’16 In his judgment about the ‘mass culture’ that photography partly belongs to, he tries to take a middle position, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, to investigate what the situation is. He calls the optimists the ‘integrated ones’ who accept mass culture as a way to bring the cultural baggage within everyone’s reach and to gather information in a pleasant way. Opposed to them are the doom-mongers and apocalypticians who consider mass culture and the industrialization connected with it as a catastrophy, as the ruin of culture. Eco places Benjamin and his colleagues of Critical Theory in the last group. The description of aura in itself is vague and ambiguous. Marc Jimenez, the French expert of the Frankfurt School, points out that it is not clear whether it is the ‘appearance’ or the ‘distance’ that can be ‘near.’ In French, the translator has to make that decision. Is ‘Einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag’ to be translated as ‘si proche soit-il… le lointain!’ or as ‘si proche soit-elle… l’apparition?’17 Benjamin himself gives a hint. Since the notion usually indicates a value of a custom of worship, it is the distance that reamins remote even if it is near. The principal quality of a religious symbol is to be inapproachable and to seem far even in vicinity. An image creates the possibility for aura, but at the same time the process occurs within the spectator. The notion of ‘aura’ has to be connected with ‘experience’, yet another principal notion for Benjamin. The loss of aura of an image then becomes a trophy of the experience. To Benjamin the faster rhythm and increasing flow of information, linked to modernity, brings about a decline in experience, for which continuity is a basic condition.

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For the true experience is a matter of tradition, in collective as well as individual life. It does not so much exist of separate facts that are well embedded in the memory, but of streams of often unconscious data that merge in the mind. Benjamin distinguishes superficial perceptions from profound experiences. The first are more or less kept as impressions in a conscious recollection. The latter will become part of the unconscious memory and are strongly coloured by the senses. Gathering information is the opposite of gaining experience. Benjamin also discusses the connection between aura and experiences on the basis of narcotics.18 Even though Benjamin did not do so, it seems interesting to me to project this vision on experience, and the memory linked to it, on photography. A lot of photography aims at recording changing unique and sensational experiences for recollection. However there is also a photography that is made from experiencing the world and where throughout the oeuvre the memory becomes visible and its continuity recognizable as a photographic style. From this line of thought, it is easier to replace the poet with the photographer. Benjamin describes Baudelaire as a ‘flaneur’ who carefree by strolls about the streets of Paris to look around and feed his poetry with the necessary experience.19 This useless purposeful lingering while looking for traces that connect to the photographer’s experience generates artistic images, often out of homesickness for what will certainly pass, but is still kept. Finally, a remark that is illuminating to understand a difference in vision. One could say, like Rainer Rochlitz, that Roland Barthes has formulated an idea that stands close to the term ‘aura’, namely the ‘punctum’ that touches somebody for personal reasons, contrary to the general characteristics of an image.20 For Benjamin, this preference is connected to the qualities of a radiating totality with endurance. For Barthes, this is a tingling fragment with a limitation in time. The Latin ‘punctum’ means ‘sting’ (for instance by a mosquito), as well as ‘point’ or ‘dot’, but also a ‘moment, a point in time.’ This gives away a fundamentally different view on the world.

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Analytical philosophy Situation Contrary to the tradition of philosophy, analytical philosophy is unconcerned with speculations and prescriptions, in other words, it does not provide systematically coherent theories about the universe and does not prescribe rules to make life better. Philosophy should rather analyse the borders of meaningful linguistic usage in order to prevent metaphysical deviations. Language is used for various purposes. This diversity of the common usage has to be analysed in a descriptive way by philosophers in order to clear up traditional philosophical problems, because they are considered ‘nonsense’ by the new movement at the beginning of last the century. Traditional metaphysics (enquiry into the causes of reality) poses doubtful problems, because ordinary language is disconnected from its daily use and isolated to abstract, general problems. The word ‘to be’ is a fine example here. The indication ‘to be’ is usually followed by a certain characteristic, for instance, ‘this is beautiful.’ But the ‘this is’-character is quickly generalized to the character of being that pretends to be the essence, even with a strength that also implies a guarantee to exist. ‘This is’ soon becomes ‘the essence’, in this case the beauty, eventually with a capital letter if one lifts it to an outer sensory platonic category. Analytical philosophy offers opposition to the idealism of Plato (the world of Ideas exists as a higher reality), but especially against Hegel’s idealism (the idea is the foundation of reality and of knowledge). Analytical philosophy is an empiricism and according to this approach all knowledge is based on sensory experience. Except for mathematics and logic, all interpretations that can not be reduced to sensory observation are not knowledge according to empiricism. This does not mean that the whole content of a sensory observation also has to be considered as ‘objectively’ existing. Certain things we perceive are determined by the point of view we perceive from, in other words, by the conditions in which we perceive. From this relativization it follows that we never perceive the ‘things themselves.’ All knowledge that is offered to us by sensory observation is, in reality, knowledge of ‘representations’ or ‘impressions’ of things.

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This scepticism about the observation is underlined by some representatives of analytical philosophy under the name of ‘conventionalism’ by Nelson Goodman and others.21 To him the innocent eye is blind and the virgin mind empty. For him, perception is made possible only by a culturally defined frame of reference. Images always have to be read and the skill to do this has to be acquired. This is also the case for photography, no matter how realistic the images seem to be. Goodman quotes Alfred Knopf who in 1948 stated that more than one ethnographer have reported the experience of the reaction of people who lived in a culture without any knowledge of photography.22 When showing them a clear picture of a house or a person or a trusted landscape, they held the picture by all possible angles, or turned it around to look at the blank back. Thus the natives tried to come to an interpretation of this meaningless arrangement of changing grey shadows on a piece of paper. Even the clearest picture is only an interpretation of what the camera sees. This story proves to Goodman that every image presupposes a reading that is connected with certain conventions.23 In their attempt to analyse problems, rather than construing coherent philosophical ideas, linguistic analytical philosophers did formulate a number of concepts that can also help to clear up misunderstandings when thinking about photography. As nominalists they assume that only concrete individual things exist, and that the so-called universal qualities are merely names, designations, with which we sort things according to certain characteristics. This means that ‘the’ photography does not exist, for there are only pictures with changing features. What Wittgenstein says about language also applies to photography. Photography has no essence. It is a variety of images that serve many different purposes. If one wants to discover the meaning of pictures, one has to consider them within the moment and context they are used. For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems originate because one can not tell one linguistic game from another. The discussion about photography is victim to a similar confusion of tongues. This is especially the case for ‘open’ terms that cover a multiplicity of phenomenons. Wittgenstein himself gives the example of the word ‘game.’ Also the openness of the word ‘art’ makes the question ‘what is art?’ so difficult to answer.24 Instead of formulating

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an essentialist interpretation here (like: the only true nature of, is…), one can imitate Wittgenstein and examine in which linguistic game a word plays a part. A linguistic game refers to a context that creates a meaning for words within the consensus of a confined community. Rather than clearly defined delineations of the different kinds of photography, one would have to see how photography is used within different linguistic games. Certain coherences can become clear on the basis of ‘family resemblances’, a term Wittgenstein uses, in view of the impossibility of putting the essence of something into words. These kinds of resemblances would be a more interesting basis for classification than, for instance, the division into art and non-art photography.

Roger Scruton An analytical approach that wants to examine what photography actually is, without falling back into essences, does not always guarantee that meaningful things are told. Roger Scruton, for instance, puts all photography in the same box.25 He refuses to accept that it would be a form of representation. Between the lines one even learns that he considers the ‘being-representation-of-something’ as a condition to be classified as art. By the way, this presumption is reinforced by his statement that he agrees with James Joyce’s argumentation: photography is not art if Joyce means by ‘work of art’ the same as he does by ‘representation.’ For in his Paris notebooks in 1904, Joyce answered this question in the negative because, even though a picture as a sensory perceptible fact can be appropriate for an aesthetic purpose, it is not a ‘human disposition of sensible matter.’ The ‘non-human’ nature of photography then refers to the conviction that a representation has to be the result of a complex pattern of intentional activity, and the subject of highly differentiated reactions. According to Scruton, photography is incapable of this. Because photography can not represent, but can at best transform, it will inevitably be connected to the creation of illusions, namely lifelike resemblances of the things in the world. According to Scruton, photography is like the art of waxworks: it presupposes some phantasy and through this it annuls the requirements of artistic expression.

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Scruton’s opinion becomes abundantly clear when he discusses the relationship between a number of art forms. To him film is a picture of a dramatic performance. Its representative character does not depend upon the film medium, but it is the consequence of the dramatic action, as are the words and deeds in the film. A documentary shot is no more a representation of the event than a concert recording is a representation of the music. The above-mentioned text shows that Scruton’s complete argumentation is based on the fundamental individuality of photography. This is hardly questionable because initially photography is objectively connected with its technology (the device and the film) and its material (the print). About the subjectivity of photography one can formulate theories that are disputable. As far as I’m concerned, photography may be completely computer-controlled, so no photographer is needed anymore and subjectivistic-humanistic theories are unnecessary. But one can not contest the consequences of the objectivity of photography which are possibly to be interpreted in a semiotic way: in particular, on the one hand, the time-space definition, and on the other hand, the specific qualities of the registration on the sensitive bearer. The first determinant can be made more clear, as far as space is concerned, through the angle of incidence and framework, and as far as time is concerned, by the exciting moment of exposure. These mere objective aspects, connected to the reduction of three dimensions to two and the (possible) alteration of sizes (enlarging or reducing), turn the picture into a representation. Such is, after all, apart from the subjective aspects that consist of the fact that objective actions are performed by an individual who chose his image, always as one of thousands. This is what makes it all human, no matter what Joyce and Scruton claim. Of course, the degree of representation is higher in one kind of photography than in the other, but to claim that one has to deal with an exact simulacrum of reality itself, as Scruton does, seems to me a curious vision that is a consequence of an overaccentuated causal connection between the picture and the depicted object. In a completely analytical style, Scruton claims that there can be talk of ‘representation’ if < x is a depiction of y > is only true if x expresses something about y. If the relation is merely causal (this means unmarked

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in terms of thought, intention or mental activity), it is not sufficient to be a representation. For Scruton, this is the case in photography, in contrast to painting. He puts both media opposite one another. In the art of painting the medium’s features not only influence what is seen in the image, but also the way it is seen. Through this we become part of the artist’s vision. His intention is made visible in shape. Scruton has a somewhat simple vision here, when he reduces the understanding of a work of art to the perceptible ‘intention’ of the artist. Furthermore, he clearly is not talking about modern art. For he says that we can not deny that a painted representation initially interests us because of the visual link to the subject. Obviously the artist proposes to us not only a way of thinking but also a way of seeing; but twentieth century art did separate the pictorial system from the representation of the subject. The reversed paintings by Baselitz are an extreme example of this. So in contrast with the art of painting, photography can not, according to Scruton, achieve representation. For this he starts from what he calls the ‘ideal picture.’ It has a causal connection with the subject and is a copy of its appearance. For the ‘ideal picture’ it is not necessary, and not even possible, that the intentions of the photographer would be a serious factor in the determination of how the image can be seen. The picture coincides with reality itself. If there would be a representation at all, it does not originate from the medium of photography itself, but from the way the subject is depicted, for example by putting it on stage. The causal connection between the subject and its photographic reproduction results in the fact that, firstly, the subject must exist; secondly, in a broad outline it is similar to the way it is shown in the picture; and thirdly, it is an apearance of a certain moment of its existence. Contrary to the art of painting, Scruton postulates that the medium in photography has lost all significance: photography confronts us with ‘what’ there is to see, but can not tell us ‘how’ to see it. So photography is transparent to the subject. If it is interesting, then it is because photography is a substitute for what it shows. Scruton is not embarrassed to conclude from this, that if one finds a picture beautiful, it is because one descries something beautiful in the subject itself. The art of painting on the other hand can be beautiful even if it shows something ugly.

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The analytical philosopher has clearly become a bit too analytical here. By this I mean that he develops a number of concepts, and by doing so he also excludes some. He does not leave any room for ‘semiotic facts’, through which the formal aspects of the photo produce their own meaning, apart from the intention of the maker of the image.26 Neither does he allocate a part to the criticism of ideology, which connects the beautiful-ugly-judgment with the ideology of the spectator.27 Through this, in any case in the art of painting, the ugly theme is banished or exactly praised into the skies as commitment. This is also the case in photography. Of course here the danger of being misled by the reality of the subject is bigger, but that is exactly what makes photography and the evaluation of quality so fascinating. For as a spectator one is compelled to split up this reality into a subject and its photographic image. It is also typical of the untrained spectator to let both coincide, so that, as Scruton says, the photo is not so much the subject, but the subject is the photo. He also shows this in his remark that television is ‘the most “realistic” of all photographic media’, and thus it has the reality value of a mirror. He holds this even though media experts point out that television reality with which a larger number of people live, leans towards fiction, even in news reports. I could have agreed with Scruton if he had seen an important distinction between photography and painting as follows: if in a painting one sees an uninteresting representation due to lack of quality in the design, one has a completely uninteresting object, whereas a photo without ‘representation’ still remains an interesting document. A bad ‘Nude’ is a disaster for the eyes in painting. In photography the causal connection with the reality can be of comfort to the critic. This is for what concerns the aspect of beauty. Scruton, however, is also wrong about the ugly element, because he does not breathe a word about the aestheticizing aspect of the medium. How can one explain the phenomenon that ‘ugly’ situations in reality (sickness, poverty, atrocities of war, and alike) are possible to look at in a photo and can even be beautiful? This can only happen by assigning another specificity to this medium than a mere transparency for reality. One can not claim that Scruton does not know the characteristics of photography: the choice of the subject, the angle of incidence, the composition, the aesthetic intentions, the unique incidence of light and therefore the possibility of disclosing something we normally don’t perceive. This specific way to show the world is, for Scruton, still not

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enough to lend the ‘art of photography’ the status of representation. And all this because one can attribute to it the characteristics of a mirror. One should not interpret this statement in a metaphorical way like in the theory of the famous American photography curator and author John Szarkowski, who divides photography in mirrors and windows.28 Photos are mirrors if they offer an image of the artist who made the photo, and they are windows if we get to know the world better through them. In Scruton’s opinion photos are literally mirrors. This would mean that the technical aspects like framework, choice of the moment, light, depth of field, sensitivity of the paper, etc. have no influence at all. Here our analytical philosopher is going too far. The consistent logical pursuing of his theory, that the photo is a copy of reality, which can address itself directly to our phantasy, without intervention by the process of thinking (so there can be no talk of representation), drives Scruton to stating in his conclusion that ‘photography is unable to be an erotic art.’ For it confronts us with a sex object, not with a symbol of it. It satisfies the phantasy of desire, long before it succeeds in making the fact itself understandable or expressible. That’s why, Scruton states, photography is ‘inherent by pornographic.’ This conclusion is a hard nut for psychoanalysts to crack. If there would be one image in which ‘essence does not seem to exist’, then it positively is the difference between ‘what is erotic?’ and ‘what is pornographic?.’ Scruton’s answer is clear. Erotic art is the kind that expresses or makes one understand the eros (the attraction between two bodies). Pornography arouses lust. I quite understand this distinction, but not the statement that in photography this difference can not be made. Two definitions that, when they have to be filled in concretely, constantly vary on the basis of individual preferences and changing historical and culturally connected backgrounds. Pornography only exists in our heads, not in reality. Yet there are degrees of quality in erotic photography. In an editorial about this theme, erotic photography is described as images that evoke rather than show.29 Pornography is then the opposite, where everything is plainly shown. But this classic distinction is outrun: just think of Mapplethorpe. More interesting is the idea of the American feminist Abigail Solomon-Godeau, who states that the attempts to distinguish eroticism (the acceptable) from pornography (the unacceptable) constantly fail. Together with a few feminist theoreticians

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she points out that it is not a matter of content, but that the ‘ways of erotic and pornographic representation are intensely connected with the structures themselves of the phantasms…’30 Concerning Scruton, one could also give his words, namely that photography is inherent pornography, a twist. If the picture only presents and does not represent reality by means of a thought or expression, then it is not pornography but pure nature. At that moment the erotic art is ethically suspected and not the ‘pornography’, which then should change names, for instance, into ‘naturism.’ One could however also go the other way and agree with Scruton, but then on the basis of an altered argument. Photography is inherent pornography on the basis of being ‘-graphy.’ Etymologically ‘-graphy’ includes the ‘ability to describe’: describing the lewd situations (pornos) by means of light (foos, footos). Because of its descriptive character, photo-porno-graphy itself is placed outside of the moral category of lechery, and meta-ethical visual material becomes suitable to think about ‘vice’, and in this way a representation of it. Scruton commits a logical error in his far too consistent attempt to polarize the inability to represent as a characteristic of photography compared to painting. He puts the logical ‘ideal painting’ as antipole to the ‘ideal photography.’ The logical error in this comparison is that the ‘ideal painting’ is at the same time the actual painting. For both have the same characteristics, namely through the artist’s intention, of letting a subject exist as a representation that did not exist beforehand. The ‘ideal photography’, on the other hand, is exactly the one that the photographers who have artistic intentions want to deviate from as as possible, in order to be a copy of reality based on a mere causal connection. Scruton is right in arguing that ‘the actual photography is the result of the attempt of photographers to stain the ideal of their trade.’ I say ‘right’ because the ideal is a false construction. Whether this ‘stain’, as he writes, happens through painting methods is another matter. In any case, it is not correct to compare a medium, in which logical ideal and actuality coincide, with another medium, in which these two levels have different purposes. Of course one could say that a large number of photos only have a mere causal connection, though semioticians would disagree, even for a simple family souvenir.31 Besides this, one will also find in painting a similar attempt to

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a mere causal connection. For the rest it is good fortune that the empirical factuality of the actual photography refutes Roger Scruton’s logical ideal.

Ernst H. Gombrich One example of a photographer who possesses the strength of visual argumentation to substantiate the previous sentence is Henri CartierBresson. For those who would be blind to the quality of this great master’s visual material, I have a verbal testimony by Ernst H. Gombrich.32 This illustrious art historian (Vienna, 1909) was a trailblazer in the psychology of art and worked at the University of London. So he is not really a philosopher. Yet he does fit in this paragraph. For his thinking is based on Karl Popper’s critical rationalism that is part of analytical philosophy. Gombrichs’ vision is closely linked to Nelson Goodman’s conventionalism. He finds the question whether or not photography is ‘an art’ a waste of ink. The question one should ask is if it is ‘an art form, meaning actions or techniques that answer a diversity of questions and sometimes try to become loved and admired for the pleasure they can provide.’33 Gombrich emphasizes the word ‘can’, since no art can please everybody, and no one can be forced to be pleased. The art forms are just a source of possible pleasure, and a joy to those who have acquired a taste for it. This is also a good example of how one solves the what-is question starting from psychology. Nevertheless, it completely fits in the way of thinking of analytical philosophy. Logical positivism, which is a form of it and underlies Popper’s critical rationalism, is not only an attempt to see everything scientifically, is also a philosophy of life. There is an affinity to Epicurus, because of his earthly here-andnow philosophy, but not to Plato nor Pythagoras, who wrap the world in unsolvable mysteriousness. The answer to ‘what is photography?’ is indeed filled in by Gombrich in an epicurean way. Gombrich often uses photography in his studies about the appreciation of the visual image. He follows a different avenue than the idea that a picture is a transparency of reality. To him even a simple photo brings about an illusion.34 This is most noticeable if we want to estimate distances. Nor is the comprehensibility of a picture obvious. Interpreting pictures is an important skill that has to be learned by anybody who has to do with this means of communication.35 Moreover, the information one gets from a photographic

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image can be separate from the maker’s intention.36 A holiday group photo at the coast can mean a lot to a secret agent. Such separation from the intention indicates that any photograph can be meaningful for a spectator who does not see reality in it, but a view ‘on’ reality, a representation, and eventually his own projected view (thoughts or feelings), for which the picture’s elements act as metaphors, and not as reality data. It is Gombrich who, in his paper about Cartier-Bresson, pays unmistakable homage to the photographer as artist. The world around us transmits meanings that reflect in our minds. Of this we are rarely conscious. An artist is needed to draw our attention to the message of reality. CartierBresson is an example because he has produced numerous masterpieces. His technical mastery is beyond dispute. He lets things speak: their textures and shapes provide feelings. The great genre painters are his precursors. Gombrich even compares Cartier-Bresson’s work to Vermeer’s kitchen maid. We live in a flow of events and our impressions are never still. Everything has continuously changing aspects. Our eyes and our mind can only register a fraction of these possibilities, because our focus is very limited and attention requires concentration. Without these limitations we would not see anything. On the other hand, this movement can not be released from reality itself. This is what makes cinematography so realistic, why looking at a static image differs so radically from seeing the real world. Being locked in its frame, an image does not change and we have time to examine it in all its aspects, until the moment it fills our memory. Gombrich admits that this description of photography shows little difference from the characteristics of a painting. According to him, the photograph however, provides more information. All of this is the secret of the master: not the realism, but the selection. Cartier-Bresson himself has called this ‘the right moment.’ After a visit to an exhibition, Gombrich says, we are more susceptible to shades, as if our eyes were opened to aspects of the world they had been blind to until then. Besides increasing our sensitivity for the shades and textures of reality, Cartier-Bresson’s images do even more. They make us look differently at people, with an increased sense of sympathy or compassion. This is where Cartier-Bresson’s humanism lies.

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Conceptual art To conclude this section about analytical philosophy, it might be a good idea to be reminded that conceptual art is closely linked to this philosophical movement. Both are concerned with the dismantling of the essential character of the word ‘to be.’ Philosophy thus reveals what it calls the pseudoproblems of metaphysics. Conceptional art shows us the ambiguities of what is. A fine example of this is Joseph Kosuth’s well-known work, One and Three Chairs (1965): a real chair, a life-size photographed chair, and the enlarged dictionary definition of the term ‘chair’ placed next to each other. With this he opened unfathomable discussions about the nature, practice and perception of art. Language gets a formal status. It is there, as material and as subject. The theme is the question itself about the definition of art. Words and sentences are isolated, tested, analysed discursively. Kosuth presents us tautologies that exist separately. His three chairs, of which only one really ‘is’ chair, is called a development from the real to the ideal element that covers the basic possibilities of ‘chairness.’37 More important for our issue, it seems to me that this variation of the ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’-theme (in the meantime school example of Conceptual Art), not only asks about the relation between reality and representation as ideality, but together with the reflection about ‘what is art?’, also forces us to think about ‘what is photography?.’ At that moment Kosuth’s work becomes a mystic triptyque, in which the earthly, chair reality is flanked by a definition and a photo. If logic itself already has a mystic propensity in its quest for the Unity of its starting point, it surely is the case that conceptual art takes up logic as a model. In his manifesto Art after Philosophy, in which art is divided in art before and after Duchamp, Kosuth pleads for art as a kind of logic. Works of art would then be analytical propositions about the definition of art. Of course requires a metaphorical approach of logic, through which the tendency to mystically depict the One, as minimal as possible, is increased. This is most probably backed up by Wittgenstein’s idea that ethics and aesthetics are one, like two domains belonging to the mystique, meaning everything that is not covered by scientific description.38 Art as something presentable becomes a kind of paralogic, a logic-like showing of images that urge us to think. The mystic

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aspect for Kosuth has a similar philosophical dimension. Am I mistaken if I suddenly see in his triptyque the Crucified seated on the Chair, flanked by the Creator of the first Concept, God the Father (in the beginning there was the Word), and the engraved Light (foos, footos) of God, the Holy Spirit. One speaks about the holy Trinity as three being one, just like the title One and Three. However such theological interpretation is probably too far-fetched. Anyway, it seems interesting to me to see how in this triptyque the photo becomes (tautologically) equal to the word, like two ways to replace reality and confirm it at the same time, an absence that will be symbolically present, a ‘this is’ as an answer to ‘what is?.’ For photography it will be a ‘there was.’ The photo has a larger social security at the expense of its insurance of eternity. The definition is more timeless, but then at the expense of the guarantee for existence. The image and the word become equal, two ways to represent reality. Both surrealism and conceptualism have used the strong relation with reality that photography, willingly or unwillingly maintains with reality, to derealize reality. Surrealism has done so by visualizing unexpected connections between the elements, and conceptualism by emphasizing that reality is always thought reality, a factuality captured in concepts. Through this captivity facts are hardly factual, like in photography, the facts are derealized in prints. Most probably the trinity here is only the triangular relationship between image, word and reality. As already stated, conceptual art reveals the problem of the ‘what-is?’ question through an art that is an analysis of art. Hence the philosophical character of this art and of a photography that asks the same questions. The character of being that is often shown as an answer to this kind of question is immediately undermined in the image itself. Compared to the word, the image has the advantage that it can enclose thesis and antithesis in a single visual field in simultaneously. In spoken language the antithesis comes only after a few sentences. It is enough to show that these sentences are logically non-sensical, otherwise the antithesis would have a higher degree of truth than the thesis. By the way, one can verbally advance a thesis without an antithesis.

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In conceptual art and in the kind of photography that is treated here, an image that does not bear the antithesis in itself is usually uninteresting. The bad school example of this is propaganda art. As already stated, the image is fascinating precisely because thesis and antithesis are in the same field at the very same moment. This ambiguous view has become a basic principle of the past century’s art, and also of philosophy. Wittgenstein treats this ambiguity of the image in his Philosophische Untersuchungen when he discusses aesthetic perception and points out that seeing is always a ‘seeing as.’39 Here he starts from the example of the psychology of perception, in which a sketched animal head is seen either as a hare or a duck. Many conceptual works of art and many photos take notice of this rule that seeing is a ‘seeing as.’ Thesis and antithesis constantly switch in this way within the same focal plane. Of course, the word can do the same. Either it is a fragment of a whole, namely the pun within a sentence or the allusion within a text; or the simultaneity can not be maintained, because only by advancing in the text can the double layer be understood. That’s where the singularity of the image comes in.

Phenomenology Situation In the course of the nineteenth century, philosophy had lost its autonomy. In the eyes of the neo-Kantians, modern philosophy could not be anything more than a reflection, subsequent to the method of the empirical sciences. Others did not even see a place at all for philosophy after the ruin of dialectical thinking by German idealism. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) has given philosophy again its own method by designing phenomenology.40 Contrary to the conviction of scientific thinking, he considered things a being of things. Already in ancient times, Antisthenes, pupil of Socrates and founder of the Cynical School, had objected to Plato’s idealism, that he could see a horse, but not the ‘horseness.’ What can not be seen, can be ‘contemplated’ according to Husserl, and this kind of perceiving lays claim to evidence. The phenomenological method is based on the use of immediate intuition as a way to acquire knowledge, and also on the philosophical possibility of gaining an insight into the essence of the ‘things themselves.’ In order to come to this ‘contemplation of essence’, only one example is

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needed, according to Husserl, that one can invent oneself. This seems to me a task granted to the photographer, rather than to the inventor. Less essentialist is the phenomenology by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that is, it more oriented towards existence, the concrete man in the concrete world.41 For this French existential philosopher (1908-1961), the body determines the way we see the world. The body is the point of view we can not resign from and that forces us every time to take on new perspectives. This turns perception into a human matter. So man has not in the least a universal view on a world that became transparent, but perceptions that are very limited. Man perceives within horizons. The greek verb ‘horidzo’ means ‘to restrict’, with possible extension to ‘determining a border oneself.’ The philosophical notion ‘horizon’ goes along with an ambiguity. It is a limitation, the horizon of our humanity itself, but it is also its condition, the orientation in space. Through corporality man exists within a horizon, that opens as well as closes, through which an interpretation originates in a world of living. The ‘body for us’ is more than an instrument. The horizon incites to ‘setting off on a trip.’ And not only in the sense of a motor activity, but also a mental one. The entire person is involved. Perception is a combined deed of all our motor, affective and sensory functions. This collectivity is not an absoluteness, but it constantly goes through new cluttered situations due to the ambiguous relation between the ego, the body and the world. Because of the changing horizon, a ‘completed’ perception is out of the question. A fundamental point of view of phenomenology is, however, that all our actions, our conscience, our perception, are unthinkable without our ‘being in the world.’ From this essential connection with the world, phenomenology wants to let the phenomena speak for themselves. It wants to pronounce those things that are immediately given in observation.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty One could expect that from such a philosophy a great openness would exist towards photography. The reverse is true. In L’Œil et l’Esprit, a philosophical ode to seeing, Merleau-Ponty joins sculptor Rodin’s prejudice, that the artist gives truth and the photographer lies, because in reality time does not stand still.42 Merleau-Ponty finds that, in contrast with the painting, the photograph does not synthesize time.43 It is only

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an instantaneous exposure that registers a temporary moment. The painting, on the contrary, does not portray any moment faithfully, but gathers the interval of time. Photography, Merleau-Ponty also says, leaves those moments open that are immediately closed again by the propulsion of time. The photo destroys the progress, the gradual appropriation, the ‘metamorphosis’ (a word used by Rodin as well as Merleau-Ponty) of time, that is exactly visualized by the art of painting. In the presentation of a horse, ‘from here to there’ is very clear. The art of painting does not look for the eternality of the movement, but for its secret code. Merleau-Ponty clearly did not think of Eadweard Muybridge’s photos in which movement is really studied. Nor of that picture by Cartier-Bresson of a man who jumps at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris to keep his feet dry (1932). Opposite to the synthetic possibilities of painting stands precisely the representative angle of incidence, together with the principle of ‘the right moment’ of Cartier-Bresson. Both aspects can replace the synthesis, because only certain angles at certain moments can show the theme in what is essential to it, in the eyes of certain spectators, amongst whom is the maker. The theme, therefore, becomes an example of its kind. Goodman has called this ‘examplification.’44 This examplification possibility of photography is, in my opinion, equal to the synthetic strength of painting. Besides this one could ask oneself, like Merleau-Ponty does, why one has to sentence ‘the fact of leaving the moment open’ to untruthfulness. This openness stimulates imagination. It is an example of polar thinking, like one encounters more than once with existentially inspired phenomenologists, namely that two opposite symptoms are divided into a positive and negative characteristic. The possibility of synthesis of painting does not have to be seen as a limitation of photography, but only as a difference. For the distinctive feature of photography is the reverse of synthesis, namely, its ability to analyse. In this, painting is weaker. But it is of little use to consider the specific qualities of one medium as the shortages of the other. The analytical aspect of photography is that it visualizes things, by freeing the visual field from the context of moving time. It provides a status quo of the desired focal plane.

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It is surprising that Merleau-Ponty has let himself be guided by Rodin’s prejudice when he accuses photography of untruthfulness. In his L’Œil et l’Esprit he formulates a number of thoughts about the relation between seeing and painting that, in my opinion, are very applicable to photography. One sees only what one looks at, Merleau-Ponty states. And what else is photography than trying to show what one has seen by looking intensively by means of a focus? The same is true when Merleau-Ponty, starting from Cézanne’s statement that nature is on the inside, says that a painting equals the visible aspect to the second power. Can photography not also realize this involution of visibility? Can Cézanne’s Mont-Sainte-Victoire paintings, in which the ‘being a mountain’ is visualized, not be put next to Ansel Adam’s (1902-1984) landscape photos as a ‘system of equivalence’, using a term of the philosopher himself? Is the magical aspect of seeing, which is linked to the painter’s practice, thanks to which he, according to Merleau-Ponty, can grasp all aspects of the essence, not also be valid for the photographer? The statement ‘to see is to possess from a distance’, applies to the photographer rather than to the painter. There are blind painters, and I also know a blind artist, Marcel Van Maele, who sometimes makes photos. Technology makes this possession from a distance very actual, and even a condition of being a photo. Painting, on the contrary, can be the externalizing of a purely inner lack of distance. From this I may conclude that, even though Merleau-Ponty did not, photography fits into his philosophy of seeing: ‘our world is in principle and essentially visual.’45 Photography seems to me a testimony of his thought that the seeing subject essentially belongs to what is visible. The freedom of our look is a consequence of the fact that we can move our body and eyes. Fixing a photographic standstill of the view even increases that freedom, because the re-view is made possible. The way things appear visually is closely connected to the way we are situated in relation to them, for: ‘he who sees, can possess the visible only if he is obsessed by it, if he is part of it’; and who is more part of it than the photographer?46 The art photographer does not watch from a distance with a dominating view, but moves himself like a dancing body within the visible. His photos are a choreographic report of visibility. The thought of the look’s freedom, which results from the freedom of movement of the seeing body, corresponds with the photographer’s practice. Through his photochoreography he shows us the photogenic aspect of the world’s dance. 377

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Hopefully my attempts are persuasive enough to correct Merleau-Ponty’s vision about the untruthfulness of photography and the truthfulness of painting. However, it is not intended to attribute the adjective ‘truthful’ to photography. If this kind of adjective would be necessary, one better chooses ‘false’, for both photography and painting. Both nouns can miss kinds of adjectives (if one is positive and the other negative) because painting would show the ‘being’ throughout a synthetised time and photography only the momentaneous, the ‘appearance.’ This kind of polar good-and-bad-thinking is not very fertile. Of course one can pronounce that paintings and photos are truthful or false, but not that these are the characteristics of the media themselves. For here the spectator expresses his subjective experience that a representation yes or no corresponds with his vision of reality. Furthermore, a similar statement becomes more objective as it is intersubjective, in other words, as more spectators have the same experience.

Cesare Brandi The question about the essence of photography in relation to painting is treated in an interesting way by the aesthetician Cesare Brandi (19061988). Brandi was one of the most important representatives of the phenomenological approach in Italy. However, he did not avoid the encounter with the semiologic and structuralistic lines of thought that took more and more effect within the whole field of reflection about art since the sixties. Besides Argan, he is one of the thinkers who has contributed the most to the renewal of Italian art criticism, controlled by Croce’s philosophy until the thirties. His accomplishment is that he looked for theoretical answers to the avant-garde movements that purposely broke with the art of the past and questioned the concept of art itself. Keeping these changes in mind, it is no surprise that Brandi dedicates a chapter of his book Le due vie (1966) to the question of ‘how one should look at photography.’47 The title refers to a fundamental idea by Brandi, that there are ‘two ways’ of criticism that correspond with two attitudes the conscience can adopt towards reality. The first intends to bring to light the characteristic essence through the structure. The second way consists of questioning the messages that the work of art contains to bring them

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in connection with history. In the first case it comprises a presence, in the second it is a sign, something that refers to something else. This line of thoughts clarifies the fundamental difference between a phenomenological approach to the image and a semiotic one. The latter sees the image (and thus also the art) as a sign within a communication system. To the phenomenologist, the object to which someone is intentionally orientated, is in the first place a ‘presence.’ Brandi uses two terms to distinguish two types of presence. ‘Flagranza’ for the existing reality and ‘astanza’ for putting in evidence the ‘pure reality’ as it is constituted in the work of art. The sign, on the contrary, refers by definition to an absence. Phenomenology neutralizes within the image the reference to the existing reality. This is exactly what one calls the method of putting in brackets, the ‘épochè.’ Umberto Eco disagrees with Brandi that art would not be communicative. The ‘astanza’, as the non-existential presence, which refuses to communicate, does not fit into Eco’s thinking. As a communication theorist, he reduces every phenomenon to a transfer of signs. Brandi finds this of little interest, because everything is message, if one interprets it as a sign. This is a deed of understanding, not of perceiving. I think that Brandi has rightly stood up here for the importance of the standstill before the image with perception as a basis, in order to come to the artistic essence of the work of art in presence of mind. If one reduces the work of art to communication, one trivializes it to the large category to which the telephone belongs as well. Art is basically non-communicative, because it does everything possible to function formally as indirectly as possible. Once the code is elucidated, the message often has the length of a telegram. A lot of art does not even need to be understood, or can only be understood by lengthy study that is disconnected from the perception which is relatively limited in time. The ‘astanza’ puts in evidence the artistic image; and remains, however, an inevitable returning moment before a work of art that signals. I think this is also true for a major part of photography, namely the intersubjective part. By this I mean those photos that are worthy of being put into evidence for others who are unaware of the existing context. It is no surprise that Brandi examines this fully.

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Brandi cites photography as an example to substantiate his argument that the inability to see an image in a purely denotative way is the difference between the object and what is perceived. For there is no objective knowledge of the object beyond or above the observing subject. On the basis of their mechanical character, photos are sometimes presented as purely denotative. In this fallacy Brandi confirms that pure denotation does not exist, and therefore it is meaningless to talk about ‘realism’ in art. For this he appeals to Roland Barthes’ structuralist analysis.48 For Barthes, at a first look the photo is often a perfect analogy of existing reality, but afterwards it does not seem possible to look at it without seeing connotations. This is exactly what is called the ‘paradox of photography’, which Brandi phrases concisely as follows: ‘The paradox of photography lies in the fact that even though at first approach it poses as a message without a code, a continuous message with a permanent assignment, a message in code is appended to this message without a code, because every photo is read in a certain way. The connotation of the message in code is however not limited to the way the picture is represented, in other words to the text or title or caption, that could go with a reproduced photo. It is well-founded to encase this connotation in the visible structure of the analogon of reality that photography itself offers, namely: the adjustment, the photomontage, the posing and the aestheticism.’49 However, I do not examine Brandi because he now and then goes into dialogue with or uses structuralism, but because he dedicates a chapter to photography, in which he investigates the ‘nature of photography’ from a phenomenological view, disconnected from its double structured message. A phenomenological investigation has to make apparent the essence and the particular structure of photography. Thus it secures a correct position in relation to painting, without being assimilated into it. The danger of this last thing happening is not slight, according to Brandi. The dark room from where photography originated, was after all frequently used in the painting studio as a means to convey natural tableaus. Once the image could be fixed, the dark room still remained an aid to painters. But the relation does not always have to be seen as this subservient. There are enough examples of painters, with Degas the most famous, who to a great extent owe tribute to the photographic take which became a source of inspiration.50

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The parallelism that exists between both, since the invention of photography, lies in the striving of photography to become painting and the yearning of art for the immediate, instantaneous aspect of the representation of authenticity. Both can achieve, on the basis of the choice, the position and symbolic identification, ‘the constitution of an object’, as Brandi calls it. This delineation of what will be the object of creative activity is only the first phase of the process. The essential difference between both is that photography has to stick with this phase of styling, and that painting can go further than this first completion of the form in order to come to the ‘formulation of the image.’ This does not mean that photography is limited to an optical report. According to Brandi, one has to liberate photography from any crafty statute. The symbolic confirmation, linked to the choice and the position, however, is essential to the artist as well as the photographer. The image that has to be fixed flashes through the photographer’s consciousness, already before it passes the lens. This consciousness is radically different from the one that leads to the art of painting. Photography is, Brandi writes, ‘a way to bring the intended object to a standstill according to a certain way within the stream of the existence.’ Contrary to Merleau-Ponty, Brandi does not see this standstill as something static, because if the ‘existential flux’ moves visibly, then the photo is an ‘extract in motion.’ In spite of their long history together and the fact that photography keeps ogling for the artistic dignity of painting, it is important that they distinguish themselves from one another in a constitutional way, without having to hide the close affinities they have for each other. The substantial difference between both is, according to Brandi, that painting ‘formulates’ the object, meaning that reality is ‘disexistentialized’ by the painter’s intervention, by his way of formulating. And that the photographer, since he is not capable of this, always keeps, with regard to his model, the position of a spectator. Even though the means often is the same, (this is amongst other things also confirmed historically because the pioneers of photography were often painters), they each have their particular vision on the model; and one is no less than the other, just different. The photographer keeps the status of a spectator. The painter is looking for how he can ‘consume’ the model in order to come to his own formulation by which this inner aspect can be exteriorized again. That is what makes the fundamental difference. Opposite to the ‘formulating’ of

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the painter stands the photographer’s possibility to ‘interpret’ the made photo, which is irreversibly and irreplaceably fixed at the moment of the click. This time-linked characteristic of photography Brandi is talking about, could be nuanced – yet without refuting it – by relativizing the notions ‘irreversible’ and ‘irreplaceable’ in view of the achievements of serial photography. The once-only character of each shot is a bit restricted: a relation is created between the consecutive recordings, and the interpretation is set by the link of the sequence. The uniqueness of a photo is determined by its difference with another one. Besides the photo as a unity, the sequence in itself also obtains its own entity. This possibility, however, does not create confusion with painting, because in Brandi’s terminology, it does not bring about a ‘formulation.’ Repeatability is an important feature of photography. Introducing the issue of ‘the Same and the Other’ is, after all, an important aspect of the philosophical bias of photography.51 Even though the possibilities fundamentally vary, the photographer also has the necessary means to design his individuality. There is the ‘pose’, interpreted by Brandi in its most extensive meaning, namely the framing and shooting, in the exposure at a certain moment in time, in relation to the sensitivity of the material. Once in the dark room the chemical means are there to interpret the take, but a shot stays a shot. So the photo is an extension of this first moment of symbolic individuation. The painting brings about this particularization through a ‘formulation.’ It seems important to me here that Brandi emphasizes the difference between the two media, without letting this ‘being different’ result in a comparative appreciation to the detriment of photography. He here shows a great openness. This vision actually joins up with a recent trend in the old debate about whether or not photography is art, namely that it does not want to be art, but wants to emphasize and expand entirely its particularity of being photography. The history of the emancipation of photography runs parallel with the one of the feminist movement, where also, after a wave of struggle for equality, that there needs to be a difference.52 According to Brandi, the difference consists of the fact that the painter does not take a position as a spectator when constituting the object, but

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he withdraws the object from its daily existence by incorporating it into his inner world. The photographer, however, remains a spectator with regard to his model and does not want to ‘disexistentialize.’ By the latter, Brandi means the disposing of its actual existence in the stream of life as it passes beyond consciousness. The photographer wants to be the onlooker of reality without coming to its ‘formulation.’ Yet he considers the object intentionally and from a psychological point of view, (the link to his own way of life), as well as from a formal point of view (the specific nature of light, the division of a surface, the colour, the expression et cetera, which can be symbol of a certain state of mind). Brandi’s way of thinking clarifies the resemblance and the difference between photography and painting. Accentuating the individuality of photography seems important to me. The transfer to the reservoir of art does not make the discussion any clearer. Using ‘art’ as a quality label only creates more confusion. Still one can ask whether some forms of photography do not cross the line drawn by Brandi, namely in those cases where it becomes abstract. In the dark room one does not only dispose of means to place the individuality into evidence and to interpret the outside world as a spectator, one can go much further. This overstepping strongly moves in the direction of a ‘formulation’ of the image, that is, where objects are reduced to abstractions, or so deformed that they have no more relation with the observed object. This is all very close to what Brandi calls the ‘disexistentializing of the model.’ Since film can be replaced by a diskette, there are no more limits to manipulation. These considerations do no harm to Brandi’s larger notion of photographic production. All the same, one finds in his text a fine example of how art theoretical opinions can be overtaken by artistic evolution. In his comparison he states that neither painting nor photography are dead. The guarantee for them being alive is precisely their difference. The art of painting, Brandi claims, ‘dies if it attempts to approach photography to the point where it drops the border with the “non-existence”.’53 ‘Hyperrealism’, that is also called ‘photorealism’, has the crossing of that border as a target, yet it is the movement that kept the art of painting alive during the bloom of conceptual art in the seventies. Even if one agrees with Brandi that photography can not come to a formulation of the image, one has to establish that some manners

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of painting do not wish to achieve such formulation either, for example the photorealism. Brandi is aware of this issue in his theory. He discusses it in reply to Informal Art, that is said to be very remote from photography, and Pop Art that tried to approach it again. In a separate appendix he also takes notice of the relation with realisms in old art, like Flemish art of the 15th century and Dutch art of the 17th century.54 Also the ‘trompe-l'oeil’ replaces the constituent of the object by a copy that is no formulation. So the painter sometimes plays the part of a spectator too, without wanting to formulate the image through an inner processing. The contemporary artist often takes up the position of a spectator who creates images that urge the watcher to co-author them. Brandi sees two developmental themes in photography, one justified and the other an aberration. For Brandi authentic photography concentrates on the report. The relation of the photographer towards the object aims exactly at the objectivity of that object. He agrees with Paul Strand (1917) when he states that the repeated rediscovery of this objectivity ‘is the true essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its boundary.’55 Brandi finds the attempt to become a painting through the ‘flou artistique’ a clouding of photography. A typical example of this is the ‘subjective photography’ of Otto Steinert (1915-1983), who in order to visualize the creative impulse of the indiviual photographer, appealed to all photographic means, such as: negative prints, double prints, montages, collages and solarizations.56 In Brandi’s opinion, something goes wrong here from the beginning, because the stylistic marks of this kind of photography refer too much to the real world to be a painting. The essence of photography for Brandi remains ‘the disability to possess the formulation.’ Apart from my criticism of a thinking that tries to reduce everything to essences, I think that Brandi goes too far in rejecting a whole movement on account of a rule that applies to an important part of photography, but apparently not to another part. One can not just wipe off the map a photographer with a theoretical base such as Otto Steinert’s, who had a big influence on photography, without harming the actualization of a part of the history of photography.57 The image theory must not be a restriction on the image producing practice.

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Vilém Flusser The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser (Prague, 1920-1991) has also written about photography. He emigrated to Brazil in 1940 and lectured on philosophy of communication at the University of Sâo Paulo. From 1973 he did the same in France. Flusser proposed a philosophy of photography.58 He starts from the hypothesis that in the history of human culture there are two fundamental breaking points: firstly, ‘the invention of linear script’ (around the middle of the second millennium B.C.), and secondly, ‘the invention of technical images.’ The first ‘technical image’, according to Flusser, is photography, a very important part of writing: ‘The invention of photography is a historical event that is just as decisive as the invention of the script. With the script, history stricto sensu commences, in the shape of a struggle against idolatry. With photography, the post-history starts, in the shape of a struggle against textolatry.’59 According to Flusser, the need for a philosophy of photography lies in an existential solicitude, namely, a request to think about how much freedom is lost in a world which is strongly controlled by automated and programmed devices. Philosophy has to ask itself how man can give meaning to life. In Flusser’s opinion, being free is: ‘playing against the machines’, as if man were not conditioned. As the machine was a model for mechanistic thinking in the eighteenth century, photography should serve as a model for a post-industrial world view.60 This comes down to the fact that we don’t find ourselves any longer in a situation where we can explain everything by a straight-lined cause-consequence-relation, but by non-historical functional explanations. In the spirit of Nietzsche, Flusser states that an eternal recurrence of the same occurs. The photographic image does not show a linear context, but lets the look circulate. This indeed links up with Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Unfortunately, photographers are not aware of their role as a model. Exceptions to this are the ‘experimental’ photographers who produce ‘unforeseen’ information, by making images with their device, that are not in its programme; in other words an ‘experimental’ photographer is he who fulfills Flusser’s concept. Before amplifying this, it should be said

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that his philosophy of photography is based on a peculiar construction. At the end of his argument he comes up with the idea that the photographer is the saviour of freedom, whereas in the structure of his text he wanted to make him disappear behind his frame of concepts. In a paraphrase one could call this a ‘homo photographicus ex machina’-trick. This does not alter the fact, however, that he formulates some interesting thoughts about photography. Flusser tries to seize the essence of photography starting from four basic concepts: image – apparatus – programme – information. With help of these cornerstones of the philosophy of photography he comes to the following definition: ‘Photography is an image, produced and spread by apparatuses in accordance with programmes; and the supposed function of this image is to inform.’61 Since each concept used here implies other ones, Flusser formulates a more complex version of his definition that is no longer a definition but a statement of principles. In order to make his definition useful, we still need to go more deeply into the meaning he puts in his four cornerstones. To Flusser, images are surfaces that bear meaning. These abstractions of space and time mostly refer to something situated outside of the image that they are supposed to visualize. One can seize the meaning of the image in a glance, but one can also visually explore the surface. Meaning comes into being by the synthesis of the structure of the image and the intention of the spectator. This complex aspect of symbols is amenable to interpretation. The photos as technical images seem apparently not symbolic but objective. They give the impression of being windows, but this is an illusion. They are more symbolic than other images because they are metacodes of other texts, linked to concepts of the world. Flusser rather simply says that in traditional images, e.g. in the art of painting, the coding happens inside the painter’s head. In technical images, the coding happens within the ‘black box.’ He who has no insight in this inner part stays an ‘illiterate of the technical image’ and has no ability to formulate a criticism. It is here that Flusser made the contribution that the photographer disappear, as we mentioned above. Yet this does not mean that his attention for the production of meaning linked to the apparatus would be unjustified. Another important characteristic of the image is, in Flusser’s opinion, the

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‘magical fascination’ it radiates. It has a ‘post-historic magic’ that does not, like the prehistoric, want to change the outside world, but our concepts about the world, a ‘ritualizing of the programmes.’ For Flusser, the second cornerstone of the philosophy of photography is, the concept ‘apparatus.’ He sees the camera as the prototype of the kind of device that has become determining for us today and in the near future. In the spirit of the hermeneutic tradition, he refers to the Latin origin of the term. The word ‘apparatus’ means ‘making ready’ as well as the ‘instrument’ that helps to make the preparations. It combines the meaning of something that can immediately be taken in hand with the one of something that is prepared with patience. ‘Apparatus’ is linked to ‘preparation.’ The readyness of the device is rapacious. Once more, Flusser sidelines the photographer with the following figure of speech: ‘The camera lies in wait for photographing, to this it sharpens its teeth.’62 Flusser does not confine himself to an etymological definition, he also tries to give an ontological description of the device: ‘It is a complex toy, so complex that those who play with it can not fully fathom it. Playing with it consists of combining the symbols that are included in its programme. In addition this programme is registered by a metaprogramme and the result of the game also comes about through other programmes.’63 The apparatus really is a model for everything that is culture, namely that which is intentionally made to do something, in casu, making pictures. Within this opinion about culture the apparatus does not fall under the category of labour, the principle of the industrial society, but under the category of the game in its full ontological sense, with chess as a model. The camera is not a tool but a toy; the photographer not a ‘homo faber’, but a ‘homo ludens.’ The devices do not intend to transform the world, but to change the meaning of the world. Their intention is a symbolical analogue to numbers. He who is master of the apparatus is called the ‘functionary’ by Flusser; though he himself is overpowered by the apparatus, because it does not let its inner side be penetrated. The functionary plays with the symbols and combines them. Both start from two programmes that are closely linked to one another. One of them has as a consequence that the apparatus automatically produces images, the other allows the photographer to play.

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It is about time to check out what Flusser understands by ‘programme.’ His definition of this concept is: ‘it is a combinatorial game based on coincidence’, and dicing can serve as an example.64 Each photo realizes one of the possibilities that the device’s programme offers. This number is high, but finite, namely the sum of all possible shots of an apparatus.65 Flusser neglects time, and this number becomes infinite. In another place he himself indicates the inexhaustibility of that programme: ‘It is impossible to actually photograph everything that can be photographed. The imagination of the apparatus exceeds the one of every single photographer, and even the one of the whole of photographers; that’s exactly where the challenge is, which every photographer should take up.’66 Flusser here renders a peculiar example of Platonism. His concept of ‘programme’ fits Plato’s world of ideas. The photos made by photographers are then reflections of possibly ideal photos. The world is comprehensible by the collection of photographable units. Only God as the Great Photographer of the Universe is missing in this reasoning, but he is close in a Cartesian variant: ‘Every photo clearly and distinctly corresponds with an element of the programme of the apparatus. Thanks to this bi-unequivocal connection between the universe and the programme – a connection in which every point of the programme corresponds with a photo and with every photo a point of the programme - the devices are omniscient and almighty in the photographic universe.’67 In all of this photography would neutralize the old difference in philosophy between realism (general notions exist) and idealism (reality is reducible to ideas). Only the photo would be real as reality between two realizable possibilities, namely the world and the device’s programme. In itself, it is a beautiful suggestion for a solution to that old philosophical problem. In another philosophical difference, namely the one between idealism, (the idea determines the being), and materialism, (the being determines the thinking), Flusser creates some confusion. He is giving an idealistic interpretation to what is essentially a materialistic thought, namely, ascribing the influence on materiality of the apparatus (‘not the meaning is real, but the signifier’): the apparatus contains in se already all possible photos, apart from concretely made pictures by photographers that actually exist because of there deeds.68 The fourth cornerstone is his concept of ‘information.’ This we can discuss briefly, since Flusser does not add anything that was not already known

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from information theory. In his philosophy of photography, he has in mind images that produce information. Repetitions in the photos are ‘redundant’, because they do not provide any new information, in other words, there are no ‘improbable’ images. As a consequence that the major part of clichés fall outside his theory. These are quite a lot. The daily stream of photos in newspapers, magazines and publicity leaflets brings little information. The notion of information anyhow seems to us a better basis for the quality judgment of the photo. More objective than ‘good’ and ‘clean’, but not uncomplicated either, since information can not be separated from the knowledge of the spectator. Finally, we will deal with some interesting remarks by Flusser about photography brought into balance with some very dubious utterances. For instance, he points out the importance of black-and-white photography. Black and white are concepts that precisely allow such an analysis. Grey is the sole relation these two antipoles have. It is the colour of the theory: ‘The black-and-white photos are the magic of the theoretical thought, as far as they transform the linear theoretical discourse into fields.’69 Contrary to old images, Flusser claims that the notion of ‘original’ has no more meaning for photography. As a thing, the photo would practically have no value. It is at least to Flusser’s credit as a philosopher that he is unaware of the commercial value of original photos. The fact that he is blind to the aesthetic and informative value of a negative, printed by the photographer himself or under his supervision, is a plain misconception. Flusser disregards in his complete argument the role of the work in the dark room. A change in the print influences information value.70 His definition of the amateur photographer is amusing: ‘The amateur photographer distinguishes himself from the photographer by the joy the structural complexity of his toy provides him. Contrary to the photographer and the chess player he does not look for information, by making an unlikely ‘new’ deal.71 It fits in with our description that the amateur strives for delivering better work than the professional, or name him differently, because there is no unambiguous term to repersent the opposite of the amateur; for the amateur himself ran off with the nicest term. Moreover, he often succeeds in equalling and surpassing the professional. It is, however,

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a false (as can be the start in sports) victory, because it stays an imitation of the professional in a technical way. It stays a technical working ‘à la’ and brings nothing new. Flusser is very questionable in his utterances about the relation between text and image. At this point he falls back into over-simplified generalities, for instance: ‘In the course of history texts have explained images, nowadays photos illustrate the articles. The Romanesque ‘majuscules’ were at the service of biblical texts; newspaper articles are at the service of photos. The Bible took away the magical power of the capitals; the photo gives back a magical strength to the articles.’72 We think that image and text have coexisted in different times in different cultures in different ways and were related to each other (images illustrate texts and texts explain images). Flusser’s hypothesis that ‘throughout history texts have ruled and nowadays the images do’ does not hold true.73 One is right in speaking about a new illiteracy of the image, but the old has not disappeared and even increases if more difficult texts are concerned. Of course, we are flooded with images since reproducibility allows so in an increasing degree, but for the same reason we are overpowered by texts. A newspaper does not exist as a series of pictures, but of pictures that hardly mean anything without text. Maybe as a photo by itself, but not as a newspaper report. A photonovel needs balloons. Television especially is a rattling machine for text. Dutch television companies even provide received Flemish programmes with captions. As long as television is not made according to the principle of the silent movie – oh, glorious past of the image! – one can not speak of the hegemony of the image. Therefore, Flusser’s attempt to assume such a dominance of observation has the weakness of every marriage of minds that tries to explain the entire culture by means of one principle. I am inclined to support Barthes when he says: ‘…our civilization is, much more than before and to the regret of the invasion of images, a civilization of the written word.’74 Even though he handles notions from information theory, Flusser fully fits in the spirit of phenomenology. This is obvious in his volume about ‘Things and non-things.’75 In this book he detrivializes trivial things. By approaching them phenomenologically, it seems that his assumed tripartite distinction is not tenable, namely, between the things he does not trust (devices), because

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he does not know their functioning, and the non-things (gadgets), because he finds them useless, and thirdly, the things he values highly, because he has put energy in them. By watching things in his environment in their specific circumstances, he wants to shed light on things and discover the unexpected in the ordinary. This is also the attitude many photographers adopt. In his book, however, Flusser is not discussing photography, but as a phenomenologist he looks at daily things with a photographic eye, so that one can make the connection oneself. A photo precisely gets a meaning if through it the banal reality unexpectedly comes forward from the angle of incidence. Through this function any interpretation of photography being only a reproduction of reality disappears. There is a major similarity between the phenomenological and photographical way of looking. One could even go further and say that technology preceded philosophy. Taking a picture is a phenomenological conclusion. Through the lens one returns to the ‘things themselves’, and how different is the ‘putting in brackets’ in phenomenology from the framing in photography? Of course, the process has to be continued by a phenomenology of the photo itself, that is, however, already a sort of in between at the phenomenological perception of things, a preparation for intentionality.

Structuralism Situation Structuralism led to a crisis in phenomenology which was still the authoritative philosophy in France in 1960.76 Two out of three distinguishable structuralisms are linked to this crisis. Not the first, structural analysis, because it is older than French phenomenology.77 But the second, namely there where it merges with semiology and through this confronts phenomenology with a different opinion about ‘meaning.’ And surely the third, which includes exactly those thinkers who critized phenomenology in the 1960s, of whom some refused the name ‘structuralist.’ While phenomenology tries to describe signs, structuralism gives a ‘deconstruction’ of them, as Derrida called it. Phenomenology wanted to deduce the meaning from the experience with the being that is placed in brackets, and let the experience coincide with a certain experience of a

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subject. Such a description can also be seen as a prejudice. Deconstruction, on the other hand, wants to show how discourse is constructed. It is not a breaking down, but rather a marking out. Claude Lévi-Strauss was the first to adopt Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics to the social sciences.78 Since then, many variants came about, but it still suits to quote his description. In order to be worthy of the name ‘structure’, a model has to meet four conditions.79 Firstly, a structure shows the character of a system. It exists of elements that are such that an alteration of one of them produces a change of all the others. Secondly, every model belongs to a group of transformations and each belong to the same familiy, so that the whole of these transformations constitutes a group of models. By these features one can, thirdly, foresee how a model will react if one of the elements is changed. Finally, the model has to be constructed in a way that its activity can account for all observed facts. François Wahl rightly considers this formula to be too broad.80 Moreover, the rupture in epistemology is taken into account too little. In this context, on another page in the book, he sketches the debate of contemporary thinking that is respectively patronized by Plato and Nietzsche.81 Even though he is conscious of the danger of becoming cliché’ he places the following extreme terms opposite one another: the seriousness and the game, the fundament and its dismantlement, the centre and its absence, the origin and what still precedes, the complete and the supplementary, the one and the shortage or the surplus, what refers to the outside world and what is brought about by letters, the immanent meaning and the production of meaning, the figure and the trace, the connection and the incapacity of the bearer, the subjectobject being face to face and their mutual insertion in a chain process, the being and the difference, the presence and the distance. Wahl himself proposes to place the ‘sciences of the sign, of the sign systems’ under the name ‘structuralism.’ This can include the most diverse fields of reality, at least as far as they fit within a system of the type ‘signifiant / signifié’ (signifier / signified), within a communication chain through which the structure exactly originates. The new fact is not the signifié which gets the attention, but what is new is the link with the signifiant. Adopted to photography this is also clearly stated by Terry Barrett, when he writes:

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‘The signifier differs from the signified: the photo is different from what is photographed. Nature is only understandable through the structures we invent to understand her. A book, or a photo, is an object in the world that has to be deciphered. It is neither a product nor a masterpiece of a single mind, but it appears from a culture on a certain point in history. It is a part of a system of signs or of a language.’82 Structuralism holds the opinion that the reality of objects that have to be studied by life sciences is relational rather than substantial.83 Instead of looking for the ‘essence’, as phenomenology does, one tries to lay bare the relations between the elements. The used model is the language (‘langage’), in which one attaches a lot of importance to the difference between language as a system (‘langue’) and language as it is spoken by the individual (‘parole’). Concerning the interval of time, the discontinuity linked to ruptures is often emphasized. This is in contradiction to a theory of causality where continuity is always stressed. Except for the course of time (diachrony) there is also a lot of attention for simultaneity (synchrony). Both notions form two axes. This is also the case for two other control terms. The syntagmatic sequence reflects the relation between the present elements. An example of this is the order of the schoolmenu. However, it is important that structuralism also has an eye for the absent elements. This is the paradigmatic sequence. In the given example, this is the whole of non-chosen dishes. For describing something on the basis of the existing relations between the elements, one also appeals to data about what something is not, but could be. This connection with semiotics makes culture products considered as signs within a communication process. Everything is studied as if it were a text of which the code is to be found.

Roland Barthes It is clear that such a theory is well suited to photography. It goes without saying that photography plays a communicative role. Each photo raises questions about all pictures not taken. Contrary to the film, discontinuity is usually emphasized, unless a series is considered. Photos are also well codable. Umberto Eco treats the codes of an image in general and his attempt can count as an introduction for a theory about coding in film, even though it is very applicable to photography.84 But it is especially Roland

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Barthes who holds strong views about photography. In an article about Richard Avedon, he emphasizes the textual character of photography when he writes that Avedon’s oeuvre leads to the following theory of photography: ‘As a production photography is the prisoner of two intolerable alibis: either one sublimates it under “art photography”, which precisely denies photography as an art; or one virilizes it into a kind of reportage photos that get their prestige from the captured object. Photography however is neither a painting nor a photo; it is a Text, in other words an especially complex meditation about the visible meaning.’85 During an interview86 in about the same period he adds to this thought that photography is ‘epistemologically’ difficult to situate. The philosophy of photography lies somewhere in the middle: neither at the side of art, nor at the side of realistic ‘instrumentality’ (reportage). This presupposes a general aesthetics of the fascination: ‘the photography is what is fascinating….’ This last sentence is already a clear forerunner of his La chambre claire. Concerning textual character, Barthes had already much earlier initiated a semiotic approach to certain kinds of photography. In Le message photographique (1961) he analyses press photos and in Rhétorique de l’image (1964) publicity photos. I’m briefly presenting the line of thoughts of both pioneer articles about a specific branch in photography because they can reveal the general issue through similarity and difference.87

The Press Photo The communicative character of the semiological approach which undoubtedly has to be present in press photos is already shown in the title: Le message photographique. Within this process Barthes does not discuss the determinants of the message that are linked to the sender and receiver. This is a matter for sociology. Barthes also forgets about psychology here. He only speaks about the transmitting channel, namely the newspaper in which the photo is the centre. Except for being bearer of a message the photo is also an object with a structural autonomy that is closely connected with another structure, namely the text that accompanies every press photo. Barthes restricts himself to the structural analysis of the photographic message.

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At the transition of reality to the image a reduction takes place (for instance: proportions, perspective, colour), but in such a way that there can be talk of an ‘analogon.’ This implies that the photo transmits ‘a codeless message.’ In other words, there is no need to establish a new relation between the object and the image, there is a continuous transition. The photo is, according to Barthes, the only information structure that exclusively consists of a denoted message. The other copying arts immediately obtain by means of their ‘style’ an additional message that is a connotation, through which describing becomes possible. For the photo this is literally impossible. In numerous reviews of this text, the photo is too much emphasized as an analogon of reality, as a pure denotation. I think Barthes merely wants to stress a very important feature of photography, linked to the technical reproducibility of reality. In the introduction of his argument he retraces his steps. He states that photography is not connoted by a universal symbolism or dated rhetoric, and he introduces the following reduction: ‘…in any case for press photography, that is never an “artistic” photography.’ Moreover he points out that this purely denotative statute runs the risk of being experienced as ‘mythical.’ One has to see this statement, not developed any further by Barthes, in connection with his theory about contemporary mythologies.88 Here he says that semiology taught us that the ‘myth has the task to found a historical intention on nature, and an event on eternity.’ On all levels of human communication the myth sees to the reversal of anti-physis to pseudo-physis.89 This is what happens also to photography. Even though it places itself as a cultural product before natural reality, it is regarded as the ‘objective’ reality itself. The purely denotative presentation of photography is therefore only the first step in the Socratic way of reasoning of Barthes, that – how else can it be for a semiologist? – is present even in his ‘writing’ (‘écriture’).90 In his rhetorical question and answer, a Platonic dialogue is clenched and one imagines the ironic duo, Socrates / Barthes who lead a defender of the doxa up the garden path: ‘What is the content of a photographic message?91 What does the photo convey? By definition, the spectacle itself, the literal reality.’ One should have an eye for the turn in the text when Barthes accepts with a great probability the ‘working hypothesis’ that the photographic message is also connoted. This is not always equally visible. In the field

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of production, the press photo is selected and passed in layout according to certain aesthetical as well as ideological and professional standards, which are themselves connotative bearers. Concerning the reception, the photo is also more or less ‘read’ by a public that consumes it together with a stock of traditional signs. The connotation, linked to the structure itself, requires a real deciphering of what Barthes calls the ‘photographic paradox.’ It is ‘placing two messages next to each other, one without code (the photographic analogon), and the other with code (the “art”, or the manufacturing, or the “writing”, or the rhetorics of the photo).’ The coded message develops itself on the basis of a codeless message. This analysis of structure precisely shows Barthes’ appreciation of photography. He attaches an aesthetic value to it. It distinguishes itself from the other forms of mass communication because denotation and connotation do not clash. Barthes’ principle idea is to attribute a very high value to press photography because it reproduces reality. This is all the more apparent if one studies the connection between the uncoded analogon and the connoted message. His interest in the connotation becomes even more explicit when he drops a hint to empirically examine this by performing tests in which one checks out if transformations by the variation of elements also lead to changes in meaning. This is even emphasized by the further review of six connotation processes: the trickery, the pose, the place of objects, the photogenic aspect, the aesthetics and the syntax. It is an important feature of semiology that the image is studied in relation to the word. Either the comment to the image is analysed instead of the image elements themselves, or the changes in meaning which the structure of the text and the image exercise on one another are studied. Regarding the latter, Barthes makes three remarks about the relation between text and press photo. Firstly, it is a historical reversal that the image no longer illustrates the words, but now the words are structurally spoken, derived from the image. The image is no longer clarification of the text, but the text provides the image with a meaning. The analogy with the natural aspect is culturally indicated by the text. Barthes calls this the ‘naturalization of the cultural aspect.’ Barthes does not drop the word, but this formula too should be brought into connection with his theory about

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myth. Secondly, Barthes suspects that the connotative effect differs by the ways a text is presented. Finally, both structures are not duplicates of one another: two meanings arise. Sometimes a new meaning is projected into the image, for instance by the word, so it appears there in a denoted form. Also this remark should be linked to the mythical element. Via the word, a meaning in the image can be presented in a ‘natural’ way even though it practically can not even be there. One should read Barthes’ conclusion completely in the spirit of his theory of myth. Here he brings up ‘photographic insignificance.’ It is in agreement with the semiotic approach to locate the meaning not in the object but in the observer. The meaning that arises inside the observer is neither ‘naturally’ nor ‘eternally’, but ‘culturally’ and ‘historically’ determined. The photo does not bear a meaning in this case. As a sign it takes its meaning from a social practice. The reading of a photo depends on the ‘knowledge’ of the reader. One must first learn to see the signs. The photo is a kind of ideogram which is also a mixture of analogous and specifying units, only with the difference that the ideogram is experienced as a sign, whereas the ‘photographic “copy” passes for the pure and simple denotation of reality.’ This ‘passing for’ confirms my conviction that it is not so much Barthes who sees the photo as an analogon but rather that he judges that the public looks at the photo as such. Anyhow, it is clear that the reading strongly depends on the development and cultural knowledge of the reader. If one wants to see the photo, not only does the film have to be well developed, but also the viewer. Besides the cognitive and the perceptive connotation there is also the ideological one that adds value to the image. Barthes is very pessimistic about the educational role he attributes to press photography, when he states that: ‘the denotation or its appearance is uncapable of changing political views: no picture ever convinced somebody or refuted somebody’s opinion (however it can “confirm”)….’ The denotation finally is supported by the conviction that the scene ‘really’ happened, since ‘the photographer had to be present.’ This is exactly the mythical meaning of the denotation. This vision is also confirmed by Thierry Gontier, who states that for Barthes the photo preserves a mythical character, as he indicated in some of his articles in Mythologies.92 The myth has been hidden nowhere better than in

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the so-called ‘analogy’, which constitutes the individuality of photography. The criticism or critique must consist of showing the lie of this analogy. This means, according to Gontier, that one has to indicate that every photo aims at its object only through a mythically coded system. The exhibition The Family of Man is a fine example of such a mythological lie.93

The Publicity Photo Roland Barthes resumes the same issue in his article Rhetoric of the image. Here he starts from publicity, a different kind of utilitarian, non-artistic, implementation of photography. It is charged with a very explicit message. He distinguishes three sorts of messages: the linguistic ones, those of the denoted, and those of the connoted image. The second and third kind have the same iconic substance and are therefore difficult to distinguish from one another, unless operationally. The linguistic message fulfils two functions concerning the double iconic message, namely: anchoring and attachment. Every image is polysemic, which means that its signifiers form a ‘floating sequence’ of signifieds, from which the viewer can make a choice. This freedom of choice causes uncertainty. The linguistic message is a technique to bring this ‘floating sequence’ to a standstill. On the level of the denotative message the linguistic usage answers more or less the question: ‘what is it?.’ This is an anchoring that identifies. At the level of the ‘symbolic’ message, the anchoring works in an interpretative way. It prevents the connotative meanings from becoming too personal or from leading the reader too negatively towards the meaning chosen beforehand. This steering is obviously very ideological. The ‘attachment’ is less frequent in photography than in film. Here word and image have a complementary relation to one another. As was stated above, the difference between the literal and symbolical message is merely operational. The literal message is what is left in one’s mind if one takes away the connotative signs from the symbolical message. In the previous paper (1961) this link is nowhere presented so explicitly. It is the utopia of the total objectivity. In this utopian light one should consider the thought, returning in this text, that photography ‘appears to form a message without code.’ To Barthes, of all images only the photo

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has the ability to convey literal information without moulding it with help from discontinue signs and transformation rules. Such is the case for the drawing, which is also coded in its denotative state. On this level, the relation between the signifieds (signifiés) and the signifiers (signifiants) in the photo is a relation of ‘registration’, not of ‘transformation.’ Barthes quickly makes an adjustement, through which once more it becomes clear that the photo is not a codeless message, but is looked at as a message without a code, because in photography the code is less present than in other images. This paradox gives rise to the myth of photographic ‘naturalness.’ But this too is a revolution in the history of man. Photography does not bring about an awareness of ‘being there’ (l’être-là), but of the ‘having been there’ (l’avoir-été-là). Because of this, a new category of space and time arises, namely: the ‘here’ and ‘before.’ This is at the same time the photo’s ‘real unreality’: unreal, because it is a photo that is here and not reality itself; and real, because it is obvious that it has been so. This is the mythical aspect of the denoted message: it appears as a codeless being, which causes the symbolical message to obtain the appearance of nature. The signs of culture, linked to the connotative message, seem to be established in nature. The decipherment of the cultural code in itself differs from individual to individual. The same image (lexicon) mobilizes various lexica. A lexicon here stands for a ‘whole of practices and techniques, for instance tourism, household, art world.’ The individuality of a person, someone’s ‘idiolect’ is determined by the abundance and coincidence of these lexica.94 It is from a similar cultural knowledge that one interprets the ideology, connected with the signifiés of connotation. They come into being by connotative signifiants that differ depending on the chosen substance (image, gesture, sound…). Barthes calls these signifiants ‘connotators’ and the whole of these ‘connotators’ a rhetoric, which therefore appears as the meaningful side of ideology. His review of advertisement photography itself is also a good illustration of semiotics as a theory of the lie, as it is introduced by Umberto Eco.95 Semiotics is concerned with anything that can be interpreted as a sign. A sign is anything that can be interpreted as a meaningful substitute for something else. This ‘something else’ doesn’t necessarily have to exist

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or actually be there at the moment its place is taken by a sign. Therefore semiotics is, according to Eco, ‘in principle the discipline that studies everything that can be used to lie.’ If something can not be used to tell a lie, it can not be used to tell the truth either. In fact, it could not be used to tell at all. This is a fine reversal of the usual vision, namely not that the truth is the normal situation and the lie an aberration, but that the general rule of sign communication is the lie and the truth an exception. We have here the short review of the two articles by Roland Barthes through which one can build for oneself an idea about the task of semiotics in relation to the photo as a sign. After him, more profound and voluminous semiotic studies about photography have been published, but his were indeed pioneer texts.

La Chambre Claire The turning point of the philosophical reflection about photography seems to me to be also written by Barthes, namely his La chambre claire.96 This book, with which he concluded his oeuvre, is at the same time the end of the first generation of theorists about photography, in the sense that it has a very impressionistic approach. One could even say ‘amateurish’, but then in the double meaning of dilettante and especially devotee. It is at the same time a new start, because it is the first book about photography written by a philosopher. Gabriel Bauret notes that it might be Barthes’ most autobiographical book, and maybe also the most philosophical, because it continuously treats death and notions such as ‘time’ and ‘existence.’97 The importance of the work, which is a milestone in thinking about photography, is confirmed in an interview by the French author and photographer Denis Roche, who has published the ‘real’ autobiographical book Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, illustrated with numerous family portraits.98 At the moment Barthes wrote La chambre claire, the trial field of theoretical thought was as good as untrodden. Photographical milieus were isolated. In order to unblock this situation a great intellectual authority was needed. Only an individual like Barthes could allow himself to speak about the ‘sentimental’ side of photography and review just the point of view of the Spectator, detached from the one of the Operator. His discourse, with a

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theory that is constantly affective, was well received in the photographical milieu. In a nutshell, La chambre claire revolves around three notions that have made history in the meantime: the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ in the first part, where he wants to come to a theory, and the ‘ça-a-été’ in the second, where he starts from a photo of his deceased mother. Under ‘studium’ he understands the general interest from a moral and political culture.99 For photos he indicates with ‘studium’ he feels a well controlled but average affect. The ‘studium’ means that one ‘concentrates on something, feels attracted to somebody, a sort of general effort, anyway enthusiastic, but without special intensity’ and all of this from a general cultural interest. Opposite to this Barthes places a much more intense notion that has to ‘break’ or ‘chant’ the first. It appears that both notions are applicable to the same picture. Chanting is the accentuated rhythmical reading of verses, like it happened in ancient times. Without the verse there is no chanting, because here Barthes certainly does not mean yelling out political slogans at demonstrations. The notion treated here is the ‘punctum’, which indicates a reverse movement. While the ‘studium’ marks a movement from the body to the photo, the ‘punctum’ occurs if the body is hit by an element of the photo. The photo’s ‘punctum’ is ‘the surplus that touches me in it as a point (but even so hurts, punches).’ It needs to be mentioned informally that Barthes has moulded the interpretation of both notions somewhat to his will. In Latin ‘studium’ is more intense in meaning of, amongst others: ‘diligence, lust, desire, craving, urge, love, pleasure…’ These are notions he would rather bring in connection with his prefered notion ‘punctum’, which at its turn does not have the meaning of ‘coup des dés’, but of ‘the eye on the dice.’ It is, of course, tempting to include the chance factor of the ‘punctum’ in the image also in the word itself via the meaning of throwing a dice. It is, however, not my intention to improve Roland Barthes’ Latin. One must not forget that as a classical philologist he constantly makes vivid use of two ‘dead’ languages of Classical Antiquity in order to deepen his thinking. It is in this sense that one should consider his third central concept. 401

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The essence itself, the noèma of Photography, is the Reference. By ‘photographical reference’ Barthes does not understand ‘the possible real thing an image or sign refers to’, like the fictitious aspect in painting or literature, but ‘the necessary real thing that was put in front of the objective, without which there would not have been a photo.’100 By using the Greek word ‘noèma’, Barthes here summons reminiscence of the Platonic theory of ideas. The word ‘noèma’ means thought. The ending ‘-ma’ refers to a resultative aspect: ‘what has come into being by thinking.’ The result of the thinking (noeoo) is quite distinguishable from that other way of knowledge acquisition,101 namely the sensory way (the aisthesis). For Barthes, the relation between the photo and the photographed object can be considered as a parallel with the Platonic relation between sensory reality and the Idea, which for Plato is a condition for the existence of the first as a reflection. The photo (the mirror image) offers the certainty that the reality once was there. In opposition to imitations, one could never deny in Photography that the ‘thing was once there.’ The name of the noèma of Photography therefore is: ‘ça-a-été, ou encore: L’intraitable.’ This explanation is not immediately a clarification. In the dictionary one finds ‘intraitable’ translated as ‘indomitable.’ This could emphasize Barthes’ conviction that the object was there. Another translation gives ‘irreducible’, undoubtedly as an equivalent for the French ‘irréductible’, which is also one of the meanings. This option does not seem a good idea to me. Perhaps even here the Latin dictionary gives good advice too. ‘Intractibilis’ is derived from ‘tractare’ which means ‘to pull’, but also ‘to feel, to touch’ and from there metaphorically ‘to treat.’ ‘L’intraitable’ is then ‘intractable’, but with the double impact of the certainty of the existence of the being of what is photographed, and also the impossibility to treat it, to touch it, which could in every way be called a Barthesian concern. The ‘ça-a-été’ can best be translated as: ‘it once was’, so it can still be, which does not manifest itself in the perfectum ‘it has been there.’ This is all on the basis of a statement Barthes makes further on: ‘Not only the Photo is never, in essence, a souvenir (of which the grammatical expression would be the perfectum, while the tense of the Photo is rather aoristic), but it even blocks it and very quickly becomes a contra-souvenir.’102 The aoristic announces amongst other things a fact in a certain moment in the past. The Greek perfectum on the other hand describes the ordinary situation, the consequence of a completed act. 402

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In order to clarify the thought of ‘it once was’, one could best summon the classical philologist when Barthes writes: ‘In Latin one would undoubtedly say ‘interfuit’: what I see, has been there, in that space that is stretched between the infinite and the subject (operator and spectator); it once was there, and yet immediately separated again; it was absolutely there, irrefutably present, and yet already different. The verb ‘intersum’ means all of those things.’103 The infinitive of ‘intersum’ is ‘interesse’, which could provide some clearity. It means: 1) being somewhere in between (it can also indicate a time difference); 2) being present at something, taking part in something (interfuit: was present); 3) it is of importance, it matters. This word indeed contains its ‘ça-a-été’, namely, the being present with a time difference it participates in, with the concern for something close at heart. About the philosophical methodology, the book returns to phenomenology. This is inherent in the Barthesian way of philosophizing. Even though he himself starteda trend to study photography semiotically in his first papers, he is also the one who put a stop to the undermining of such an approach caused by the fact that it had become a fashion. In that sense the book is also neo-structuralistic and even post-modern, since a new theory in itself is not defended, but a synthesis of angles of incidence is aimed for. I agree with Steven Ungar when he says that calling upon phenomenology is not a regression, but a critical return to the perception issues via psychoanalysis and semiotics.104 In his last book Barthes did not ignore previous visions, namely the photo as a myth and the photo as a sign with a connotative next to a denotative message. This change of course is, according to Ungar, a last illustration of Barthes’ conviction that meaning is inevitably founded and situated in a specific time and place, and that unlimited semiosis is only possible in theoretical terms. Barthes himself writes in the book his uneasiness about having to choose for either an expressive or a critical language, and concerning the second one, having to decide for a discipline (sociology, semiology or psychoanalysis).105 He opposes reducing systems which soon lead their own life and then become reprimanding. As soon as he got that feeling, he sneaked off, looked elsewhere and began to speak differently. In La chambre claire he returns to a Nietzschean ‘sovereignty of the ego’ as a heuristic principle. In contrast with some philosophers who

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are desparately looking for a united science, he comes to what he calls the ‘bizarre idea’ of developing a new science per object, a ‘mathesis singularis’ in stead of ‘universalis.’ Anyway, his research is only based on a few pictures, namely those ‘of which he knew for sure that they existed “for him”.’ For Barthes, as a hedonist, this coincides with the photos that ‘interested him, gave him pleasure or emotion.’ Barthes refuses to categorize photography, yet he makes use of a discipline. In other words, he does not want to act in a scientific way. For Barthes this is not an unphilosophical attitude. On the contrary, it seems to me a proposition to avoid the unsolvable problem of the division into categories and its necessary standards, and at the same time to escape from endless discussions about appropriate methods and their foundation. By starting from a purely psychological point of view, he comes to a collection of photos that could have as a common characteristic that they ‘interest’ him. Etymologically one could translate this word as ‘being in between’, thus having something to do with it. To which category they belong, who made them, what there is to see, is of no importance, if they only exist for the viewer. The result of shown and discussed photos is very heteroclite. Yet Barthes does not really wish to cherish his own private little collection. For his anarchistic working method has to bring to light the essence of Photography, which is a Reference. This means there is no photo without something or somebody. Photography is, after all, the absolutely Special being ‘that’; it is a mechanical repetition of what exisitentially spoken could never repeat itself. Besides rejecting every objective category, Barthes also defines the scientific language which has to be used to speak about photography as a problem. As a practitioner of semiology Barthes has always attached great importance to the relation between word and image. There is the text that belongs to the image, that is actually written next to it. Yet there is always a language behind a system of signs. The discussion of the image requires words. This connection made Barthes suggest already in 1964 to switch the described relation, proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, between two common scientific languages, namely, linguistics and semiology. For de Saussure, linguistics, in the making since the beginning of last century, had to join in a larger science that at that time still had to be created, namely semiology.

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Barthes, however, prefers to regard semiology as a part of linguistics. He did this, according to Louis-Jean Calvet, because a meaning expressed in words always lies hidden behind the signifiant of a sign system like the Highway Code, dress code and photography.106 Barthes is facing a dilemma when he starts his book about photography in 1979: the necessity to provide the photographic semiology with words in order to understand it better, versus the dissatisfaction with the temporarily fashionable disciplines and their idiom. The kind of photos – if one is allowed to use the word ‘kind’ – that interests him in La chambre claire, do not seem to be a kind that is very susceptible to captions. The data, introduced by the photographer, were summarily mentioned. Instead, a short annotation was given by Barthes himself, which reflects mostly an emotional impression. Neither are they pictures that belong to the explicit public world, like the report or publicity. In both, the caption plays a fundamental part. Gisèle Freund tells a fine anecdote which proves very clearly the relation between image and caption.107 Robert Doisneau has made a lot of pictures of daily life in Paris. One day he photographs with permission an attractive young lady sipping of a glass of wine at the bar of a bistrot. Next to her a middle-aged gentleman clearly enjoys her female beauty as much as his own glass of wine. The photo is published without problems in the magazine Le point in an issue about ‘bistrots.’ Afterwards he places the same picture at the disposal of his agency. Later on it is used by the league against alcoholism to illustrate an article about the harmful consequences of alcohol abuse. This same picture is copied from Le Point in a scandal sheet with the following caption: Prostitution at the Champs-Elysées. In 1979, however, Barthes is not interested any longer in the kind of shifted meaning like this school example of semiotics. Can photography then not be discussed anymore? Barthes would not be Barthes if his answer itself would not deliver a text that is an authentic reply to the methodological deadlock of time: an escape from the stereotypical, a continuous breakage with the threatening doxa of each self-institutionalizing system. Besides dropping every categorization, he uses his own language that is an interesting synthesis of phenomenology with its existentialistic associations, and psychoanalysis. But it is a phenomenology of someone

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with an experienced semiological view; and a psychoanalysis that is not therapeutical, but restricted to the care for oneself, the question about the experience of the ego. The link is the existentialism, and semiology remains the aberration as a feeling for detail (the ‘punctum’). So the synthesis is very complex. In reply to the shrivelling of many semiotic studies, that especially concentrate on the components, Barthes introduces phenomenology again as an anti-quantitive search for ‘essence’, the ‘esse’ that to Barthes is ‘interesse’, an existential involvement in things themselves. This ‘interesse’ is determined by finding a detail (the ‘punctum’) that then determines the most fascinating meaning. Phenomenology is then ignored again in its claim on totality by a semiological look. The phenomenological approach has first resuscitated a possible rigidity of the semiological science. At its turn, the semiological look corrects outdated aspects of phenomenology. Positively applied, phenomenology forms a duo with the psychoanalytical approach. The latter attempts to create a bond between language and life. The text to favourite photos becomes a story that is interpreted by others (in principle the analyst). Consequently this text says something different than it initially did. The interpreter especially has an eye for the gaps where the unconscient meaning of the text is to be situated, and also for the photo since the text starts from there. This is possible if one, like Jacques Lacan, also takes for granted that the unconscious is structured like a language. Barthes here agrees with his colleague, who structurally rethought Freud. In this way psychoanalysis comes to a fine combination with phenomenology. Phenomenology looks outside, whereas psychoanalysis looks inside. Both looks create a story: a combination of the being outside (externality) and being within (internality). The photo is here a mediator, a meeting between denotation (the analogon, it once was) and the connotation (the interpretation, the associations and instinctive reactions). Phenomenology leads to an ontology, an answer to the question: what is photography? Psychoanalysis furnishes a psychology, an answer to the question: what does it mean to me? From here a text is produced that belongs to the image and contributes to its meaning from the experience of life itself. Or in the words of Barthes: ‘…from an emotion that belongs only to me.’108

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The alliance with existentialism, as a connector between both of them, is certainly not unfounded. For in the book a dedication is written: ‘In admiration for Sartre’s L’Imaginaire.’ Jacques Leenhardt points out in this context that not only the emphasis of being (‘ça-a-été’) is found in Sartre’s oeuvre: ‘the image gives itself as one block to intuition, it immediately gives what it is’, but also the notion of the adventure, that comes forth because the photo enlivens the viewer.109 In the spirit of the imaginary by Sartre one could say that if the expressive conscience builds the image, it is also true that at the same time this image arouses the conscience. Barthes wants to draw for photography all consequences from this double vector. In the light of this mutual encouraging between the text of the subject and the photographically chosen image, it may be a good idea to bring into memory a couple of statements that prove that Barthes considers art in the widest sense and that to him photography certainly belongs to it. This in contrast to his above-mentioned critique to the ‘art photography’ as a category. He asks about the relation between painting and language one inevitably needs to apply in order to read it. His answer is: ‘The painting, whoever describes it, only exists in the story I provide; or else: in the sum and organisation of lectures one could have about it: a painting is merely its own plural description.’110 In another place he describes art in a wide sense: ‘art, no matter which kind (from poetry to the animated cartoon or eroticism), only exists at the moment a certain look has the Signifiant as an object.’111 A third statement is about the level of perception that can be changed by art. In this way a shock originates that shakes the classified world which bears names, and which can release a hallucinatory energy. ‘Indeed, if art (let us use this comfortable word to point out any dysfunctional activity) had the sole purpose to make one see better, then it would be nothing else but a technique for analysing, an Ersatz for science (an idea suggested by realistic art). But by wanting to produce the other thing that is inside the thing, it undermines a complete epistemology: it is this unlimited labour that frees us of the accepted hierarchy: first the (“correct”) perception, then the nomenclature, and finally the association (the “noble”, “creative” part of the artist); …’112

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Photography, at least the one Barthes is talking about, can be easily incorporated in the above-mentioned statements about art. Also photography only exists as the sum of descriptions that can even take the shape of inner conversations. It can always be looked upon for its Signifiant aspect. One can even say that it is a dysfunctional activity. Photography, supposedly, has taken over the function of painting through which the latter has become dysfunctional as Modern Art. Barthes makes photography dysfunctional by limiting it to the heteroclite collection of images that touch somebody. Through this dysfunctional hedonistic or self-considered use, he turns photography into art. However, he also opens the gate to call everything art, because also family pictures potentially belong to the collection of interesting photos. As a philosopher, Barthes breaks through the borders that divide. This infinite making hazy of the transitions also has its advantage: by freeing photography from categories and breaking away from a compulsory research language, he frees it from his preference and his own speech. By doing so he makes photography an essentially philosophical image, namely one that poses the question about the self-being and the being, and even of what no longer is, but once has been. In order to understand Barthesian thought better, it is illuminating to situate ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ in a number of different terms filled in by him: le troisième sens, l’obvie et l’obtus, signification et signifiance, plaisir et jouissance. In his paper Le troisième sens (1970), Barthes examines some photograms by S.M. Eisenstein.113 While doing so he develops the vision that an image does not have two, but three levels of interpretation. The first is the informative level, the one of communication. The second is the symbolic level, the one of meaning (signification) which comes forth from the sciences of the symbol. The third level is a kind of supplement that is not quite susceptible, and at the same time stubborn and volatile. The first two levels of interpretation determine the produced meaning (la signification), the third produces meaning (la signifiance = bearing a meaning) in the sense of Julia Kristeva.114 The second level is called ‘le sens obvie’ by Barthes. It is the level of the closed evidence within a complete system of intention that comes towards the viewer. For the latter is the meaning of the Latin

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root word of ‘obvie’, namely ‘obvius: oncoming.’ The third he calls ‘le sens obtus.’ The Latin ‘obtusus’ means: ‘blunt’, like in French, but ‘avoir l’esprit obtus’ means ‘being slow on the uptake.’ Exactly here is the problem. It is the meaning that can only slowly seep through, a completion of too clear, too violent meanings, so that the reading drifts. The blunt meaning, in contrast to the sharp one, unfolds itself outside the established culture, the knowing and the information. ‘It has something arbitrary because it opens language until infinite. From the point of view of analytical reason it can seem narrow-minded. It is of the same race as puns, jokes, useless wasting; indifferent towards the moral and aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the postiche and pastiche), it chooses the side of carnival.’115 Finally, there is another duo that joins in here: the pleasure (plaisir) and the enjoyment (jouissance), two words that are difficult to separate as Barthes himself says, but that owe their distinction to him: ‘A text of pleasure: is a text that satisfies, fulfils, makes euphoric; that stems from culture, does not break off with it, that is linked to a comfortable reading practice.116 Text of enjoyment: that brings in a state of loss, that makes comfort awkward (because of a certain boredom), that shakes the historical, cultural and psychological foundations of the reader, and at the same time the coherence of his taste preferences, his values and his memories, that brings his attitude towards language in a crisis.’117 Barthes’ method is clear. He places two notions together that are opposite to each other. Not according to a manicheistic good-and-evil-antithesis, but according to a good-and-better, even best degree of comparison. As a hedonist he does not waste his breath on something that leaves him cold. So he names the pleasant and the interesting in the established culture with a series of words and then brings a term into use that exceeds this official aspect and breaks through to indicate an excessive perception. Then the ‘signification’, the first and second level of interpretation, the evidence (obvie) and pleasure belong to the ‘studium.’ To the ‘punctum’ belong the ‘signifiance’, the third level of interpretation, the blunt (obtus) and the enjoyment. This system of concepts sketches the theory about photography in La chambre claire in a wider Barthesian framework.

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Back to the art now. In La chambre claire, Barthes considers aesthetic interventions as harmful or at least as secondary compared to the essence of photography as the first image in history that gives us the certainty that a depicted thing has existed. Once it has become art, photography does not unchain a single disturbance in the polished world of signs, but adapts the registered reality according to valid codes. It is clear that Barthes is talking here about a special kind of ‘Art photography.’ Furthermore, it is typical for his aesthetics to look for it where it does not show itself too clearly, namely indirectly. This is typical for the dialectical aspect of Barthes’ thinking: the photography that presents itself as Art is sterile. One has to look for Art in the details of the essence of the photo itself. Barthes’ vision that the essence of the photographic image equals its affective existence applies to all photos. The question arises as to whether he makes a difference in the quality of photography. The use of the term ‘great photographer’ makes it likely that he positively distinguishes one genre from the other, like the work of an amateur and of most photographers, who content themselves with coding the image according to prevailing aesthetic norms.118 Having an eye for good photography is confirmed by his choice of published or other examples in his book. Most probably Barthes thinks about another aesthetics that should not coincide too quickly with the pictorial. By the way, he declares his indifference to pictorialness.119 The particularity of photographic aesthetics consists of the fact that the ‘great photographers’ build the possibility of a punctum by their angle of incidence. This is an implicit thought that results from the discussed and shown examples. Implicit, because Barthes says nowhere that the punctum would be the responsibility of the artist. On the contrary, he speaks about the accidental meaningless details or the psychological mood of the spectator. Between coincidence and subjectivity, however, the ‘great photographer’ appears, who besides the production of a presentation (the optics and chemistry) produces a work of art from an aesthetic practice. Philippe Ortel, who is also looking for the hidden art in the photo, states the following: ‘The reality in the image of the great photographer is at the same time an always-already-there-theme and an aesthetic effect. The relocations of the artist and the relations he brings about between the objects allow him to interfere in reality without touching it. Chemistry only gives us the existing things, whereas the art of the photographer delivers us

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to the existence of the object. The real aspect, mediated by the structure, is withdrawn from its immediate being; differentially speaking, it has become a value, yet without stopping to be there. The punctum might be this: not the things as such themselves, but the presence of things, mysteriously sensitive from the moment qualitative or symbolic affinities come to light between two or more elements. Only then an essence of photography is possible, which does not coincide with the immediate real thing, delivered by the chemistry, nor with a borrowed aesthetics, but which, active in the being itself, transforms the existence into a sign of the existence , without neglecting the real aspect of the image and without transforming it.’120 Implicitly, through his examples and from his known desire for striking visual images, Barthes introduces the ‘great photographer’ as a deus ex machina, as an unannounced genius with a camera in hand, who installs a not strictly demarcated field of objectivity between, on the one hand, the coincidence of a detail in the photo that catches the eye (the punctum), and on the other hand, the arbitrariness of the world of the spectator’s experience. Associative arbitrariness, because mostly in se the meaning of the photo does not depend on that world of experience. The artist-photographer appears as a demiurge, who has on the one hand the conditions for a functioning of punctum under control, and who on the other hand has an eye for the conditions of the construction of a world of experience where others can find themselves. One could speak of (Barthes does not) a second analogon. Barthes saw the first (mentioned above) as a denotation between reality and the photo. The second analogon could in some way be situated between the look of the operator, (the eye for the punctum), and the view of the spectator, but this time on the level of connotation. Barthes does not mention this. Most likely because this would soon lead to a system in which the pleasure of the spectator is too determined to be enjoyable. By involving the ‘great photographer’ only implicitly in the process, as an advisable but not necessary evil, (the familiy picture can also fulfil the same function and the spectator projects in the image whatever he wants), Barthes created the basis for photography’s own aesthetics. The latter is, contrary to the tenor of the book, not phenomenological: unveiling the veiled truth of the photographed object through the beauty of the art photo. But it is structuralistic, in the sense that photography can put a meaning on something by creating a relationship

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between a fragment of reality and the interpreting world of the spectator’s experience. Creating this link can be automatically done, (Kodak: ‘Push the button, we'll do the rest!’), for instance, in the family portrait, striking by chance and occasionally touching. But in making this bridge there is also art in achieving this situation that provides a meaning. Here the photographer is the bridge builder who controls coincidence and has the look of the other in the eye. The ‘great photographer’ links both shores in a fascinating way. At the same time he guarantees that the openness of the photo is not unlimited, but he tries to make the link.

Conclusion Before sketching – as a conclusion – in which direction the philosophy of photography evolved after the year 1980, I would like to point out that I did not forget three important theorists of photography, but I deliberately did not discuss them in this text. Even though they are figure-heads in the theory of photography, they are clearly to be situated in another discipline: the sociological study of Pierre Bourdieu, the Gestaltpsychological vision of Rudolf Arnheim, and the book On Photography by the critical American journalist Susan Sontag.121 Even though the latter is not calculated amongst philosophers, she is strongly inspired by Roland Barthes: ‘…I am convinced that amongst the intellectual notables who have passed in French review since World War II, Roland Barthes is the one whose oeuvre has the largest chance of continuing to exist.’122 It seems clear to me that Roland Barthes is a turning point in the philosophy of photography. In contrast with his predecessors and contemporaries he treated the question ‘What is photography?’ not in comparison to the art of painting, in which photography usually is inferior. The question whether or not photography is art is asked still today, indeed somewhat less polemically than before the eighties, but still sometimes very extremely. The fiercest attack on photography would, according to J.M. Peters, come from Marianne Kesting’s side, who even uses the word ‘dictatorship of photography.’123 Besides this, there is a trend from within the world of photography that states that photography must not want to be art.

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Barthes has studied photography in itself, linked to the specificity of its semiotic character situated within different stories (lexica), as a semiotic. After this pioneering work he broke with the objectifying niggling that semiotic research can be reduced to. In his La chambre claire he reacted against this and returned subjectivity to its rightful place – indeed, decentralized via the punctum. The photo was outlawed as an open space for a multiplicity of interpretations linked to different contexts, not of the maker, but of the spectator. In this sense he was a herald of postmodern photography and the theory linked. Barthes’ vision of photography keeps on getting attention.124 Both aspects, the semiotic and the deconstructive approach, were succeeded. Since 1980 remarkable semiotic studies about photography have been published. For instance, these written by Victor Burgin, Philippe Dubois, Umberto Eco, Rosalind Krauss, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Henri Van Lier. The relativizing approach of photography culminates with the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in the meantime a photographer himself, who is, against his will – that’s how it should be – introduced as the figure-head of postmodern thinking. Baudrillard goes further than Barthes in bringing down the reality value of the photo. For Baudrillard, the photo takes its originality from technique. Precisely through this technical character of the photo our world reveals itself as radically non-objective. Paradoxically enough, the objective reveals the non-objectivity of the world. This far-reaching form of anti-ontological thinking (the being has no foundation) fits into a basic thought of his philosophy, namely, that illusion does not conflict with reality. The illusion is a second more subtle reality that reveals the first by the sign of its disappearance. Through technique every photo is only a fraction of reality. Our direct outlook on reality is also fragmented. Any attempt to deduce essences from that is also an illusion because the photo or other text makes the reality disappear. Baudrillard therefore takes photography very seriously because he does not accept a contradiction between appearance and reality. According to him we live in a totally make-believe world. He expresses our fragmentary relation with reality, which is confirmed via the technique of photography, in the simplest way by stating that the photo is what resembles us most to the fly, to its compound eye and its flight in broken lines.125

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It is my intention to write a sequel to this text, From Benjamin to Barthes, in which we go more deeply into the philosophy of photography since 1980, which then could be titled From Barthes to Baudrillard. For in this period the interest in the philosophy of photography, together with the overwhelming interest in the medium of photography itself, has increased enormously. And how could one, regarding the evolution of the theoretical reflection on photography, end better than with a philosopher who himself laid his hands on the camera and looks at the world as a fly. The author wants to thank Terry Barrett for his editing work and suggestions.

Notes 1

This is confirmed by amongst others the French expert in photography JeanClaude Lemagny who – as a custodian – was responsible for the collection of contemporary photography of the print collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris up to some years ago. Cf. J.C. Lemagny, L’ombre et le temps, Essais sur la photographie comme art (Paris, Nathan, 1992), p. 36 and also by: Y. Michaud, ‘Formes du regard, Philosophie et photographie’, in M. Frizot (ed.), Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie (Paris, Bordas, 1994), pp. 731-8. Michaud also hands in two pronouncements about photography by philosophers before Benjamin, namely by Peirce (around 1900) and Bergson (1896).

2

Cf. H. Vanlier, ‘Philosophie de la photographie’, Les Cahiers de la Photographie, Hors série (1983), p.11.

3

Not for nothing has this barthesian idea became the title of Johan Swinnen’s photohistorical handbook: J. Swinnen, De paradox van de fotografie (Antwerpen-Baarn, Hadewijch-Cantecleer, 1992).

4

Cf. R. Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 51.

5

Applied to the image, see: E.H. Gombrich, Art and illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford, Phaidon Press, 1960).

6

J. Berger, About Looking (New York, Pantheon books, 1980), p. 48.

7

J. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1988)

8

J. Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1985). Habermas has made himself a figure-head of anti-postmodernism, in which he finds not exactly uncritical French thinkers such as Foucault

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and Derrida guilty of ‘neo-conservatism.’ See: J. Habermas, translated by F.G. Lawrence, The philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT, 1987). For him the ideals of modernism with their roots in the Age of Reason have to be continued. 9

W. Elias, Signs of the Time (Amsterdam / Atlanta, Rodopi, 1997).

10

W. Benjamin, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, in Gesammelte Schriften, II.1 (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1974-83), pp. 368-85. Translation: A Short History of Photography, Screen 13, 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 5-26. The exact pages of the quoted fragments will not be indicated anymore, because I systematically follow the course of the text.

11

See W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Epoch of Mechanical Reproduction, studies on the Left 1, 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 28-46.

12

M. Kuijpers, ‘De waarde van de verte’, Krisis, 35 (1989), pp. 32-6, p. 34.

13

Cf. R. Rochlitz, Le désenchantement de l’art, La philosophie de Walter Benjamin (Paris, Gallimard, 1992), p 174.

14

W. Elias, Signs, pp. 81-4.

15

Kuijpers, o.c., p 32.

16

U. Eco, Apocalittici e integrati (Milano, Bompani, 1964).

17

M. Jimenez, ‘Le retour de l’aura’, in Revue d'esthétique, Walter Benjamin, hors série (1990), pp. 181-6 and p. 181.

18

Cf. H. Schweppenhäuser, ‘Propaedeutics of Profane Illumination’, in G. Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin, Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge Massachusetts-London, MIT, 1988), pp. 33-50, pp. 42-5.

19

Cf. S. Buck-Morss, The dialects of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge Massachusetts-London, MIT, 1989), p. 304.

20

Rochlitz, o.c., pp. 228, 322.

21

N. Goodman, Languages of Art, An Approach of a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, Hacket, 1976). Elias, Signs, pp. 117-128.

22

Ibid., p. 15.

23

Gombrich and Arnheim have a similar opinion. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 48: ‘…primitive tribes that have never seen such images are not necessarily able to read them.’ To him this conventionality is limited, because from the moment one sees through the nature of it, one quickly learns to read the images correctly. R. Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London, University of California Press, 1969), p. 309: ‘There is much evidence that the comprehension of photographic pictures can not be taken for granted. Joan and Louis Forsdale have collected examples to show that Eskimos or

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African tribesmen were unable to perceive such pictures when first introduced to them.’ 24

Cf. Elias, Signs, pp. 98-110.

25

R. Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding, Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London – New York, Methuen, 1983), pp. 101-26.

26

Cf. J. Mukarovsky, Art as Semiotic Fact, in: Structure, Sign and Function, Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky (New Haven / London, Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 82-8. Elias, Signs, pp. 180-3.

27

Cf. N. Hadjinicolaou, Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes (Paris, Maspero, 1973). Elias, Signs, pp. 87-94.

28

J. Szarkowski, Mirrors and windows (New York, MoMa, 1978).

29

A. Rouillé, ‘Nu, érotisme et pornographie’, in La Recherche Photographique, L’érotisme, 5 (1988), pp. 3-5.

30

A. Solomon-Godeau, ‘Reconsidérer la photographie érotique’, Recherche, pp. 7-13, p. 11.

31

Roland Barthes as well emphasizes the causal connection that exists between the picture and the depicted object. But Barthes does not go so far as to claim that photography is no form of representation at all. See below where Barthes comes up.

32

See the catalogue text of the exhibition on the occasion of his seventieth birthday at the Victoria and Albert Museum: The Photographer as Artist: Henri Cartier-Bresson (London, 1978), later on re-entered in: E.H. Gombrich, Topics of our Times, Twentieth-century issues in learning and in art (London, Phaidon, 1991), pp. 198-210.

33

E.H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols, Essays on values in history and in art (Oxford, Phaidon, 1979), p. 150.

34

E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, Further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation (Oxford, Phaidon, 1982), p. 198.

35

Ibid., p. 146.

36

Ibid., p. 144.

37

N. Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art (London, Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 265. For an illustration, see print 115.

38

L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1969), p. 146. Cf. Elias, Signs, pp. 111-2.

39

L. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1953). Elias, Signs, pp. 116-7.

40

J. F. Lyotard, La phénoménologie (Paris, PUF, 1954), p. 7.

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41

M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris, Gallimard, 1976).

42

M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’Esprit (Paris, Gallimard, 1964), pp. 80-1.

43

For his vision of painting, see: G.A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Philosophy and Painting (Evanston, Northwestern UP, 1993). And: Elias, Signs, pp. 143-9.

44

Goodman, o.c.

45

M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et L’Invisible (Paris, Gallimard, 1964), p. 115.

46

Ibid., p. 178.

47

C. Brandi, Les deux voies de la critique (Paris, Marc Vokar, 1989), pp. 169-96.

48

Brandi, Deux Voies, pp. 70-1. See also below where Barthes’ vision is discussed.

49

Ibid., p. 71.

50

See also: P. Galassi, Before Photography, Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1981). M. Weaver, The Photographic Art, Pictorial Traditions in Britain and America (New York, Harper & Row, 1986).

51

Cf. V. Descombes, Le même et l’autre, Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1979).

52

Cf. H. Hein & C. Korsmeyer, ed., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 1993).

53

Brandi, Deux Voies, p. 175.

54

Ibid., pp. 189-95.

55

Ibid., p. 179.

56

Cf. G. Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, A Guide to Technical Terms (Malibu, Paul Getty Museum, 1991), p. 61: ‘Negative print: In this kind of print, the highlights and shadows are the reverse of their normal appearance: the shadows are light, the highlights are dark. Negative prints, made for artistic effect, can be achieved by a number of means, including placing photographic paper normally used for prints in the camera in lieu of film, photographing a negative, or printing from a positive transparency.’ and p. 77: ‘solarization: Although the term solarization has come to be used to describe the Sabattier effect, in fact the partial reversals of tone in photographic prints to which both terms refer are differently caused. True solarization occurs when an intense light source, like the sun, is visible in a photograph that has been extremely overexposed in the camera, usually accidentally. The overexposure causes the light source to appear dark in the print. The sun becomes a black disk, but the reversal of tones is limited to this area of the print.’

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57

N. Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York, Abbeville Press, 1984), p. 572.

58

V. Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, translated from German (1983) by J.Mouchard (Paris, Circé, 1996).

59

Ibid., p. 19. By ‘idolatry’ Flusser understands: ‘the inability to read off the representations from the elements of the image, because one does not have an eye for the parts; therefore: image worship’, and with the neologism ‘textolatry’ he means: ‘the inability to read concepts in the typographical signs of a text, at the expense of the possibility to read the latter; therefore text worship.’ (ibid., pp. 90-3).

60

The ‘mechanism’ is a monistic, and even materialistic theory, that wants to explain everything in nature by means of the principles of machine theory.

61

O.c., p. 83.

62

Ibid., p. 24.

63

Ibid., p. 33.

64

Ibid., p. 75.

65

Ibid., p. 28.

66

Ibid., p. 41.

67

Ibid., p. 74.

68

Ibid., p. 41.

69

Ibid., p. 47.

70

Ibid., p. 55. The following example refutes Flusser’s opinion that the photo as a thing has no value, and conflicts with his misjudgment of the printing process. Ansel Adams (San Francisco, 1902-84) photographed Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico on 31 October 1941 at 4.05 P.M. A print of this photo was sold in 1981 for 71,500 USD, a record amount for an artistic photo, moreover for a work by a photographer still alive. The Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco keeps about twenty different (different paper, dimensions, framing,…) prints of the same photo. Here the difference in meaning becomes visible.

71

O.c., p. 64.

72

Ibid., p. 67.

73

Idem.

74

R. Barthes, ‘Eléments de sémiologie’, Oeuvre Complètes, Tome 1 (Paris, Seuil, 1993) pp. 1466-1522.

75

V.

Flusser,

Dinge

und

Undinge

/

Choses

et

non-choses,

Esquisses

phénoménologiques, translated from German by Jean Mouchard (Nîmes, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1996). The translator points out rightly that

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the translation of the title is a problem. Neither ‘non-choses’ in French nor ‘non-things’ in English include the connotation we find back in the German ‘Unding’ or Dutch ‘onding’, a word in which the negation does not so much indicate a not-being, but rather the exclusion from social order. 76

Descombes, Le même, pp. 96-111.

77

P. Caws, Structuralism, The Art of the Intelligible (New Jersey – London, Humanities Press International, 1988), p. 11: ‘structuralism as a recognizable trend dates from 1916, or 1928-29, or 1944-45, or 1949, depending on one’s taste in historiography and one’s bias in the human sciences.’

78

E. Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss to Foucault (New York, Columbia UP, 1980), p. 1.

79

C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris, Plon, 1974), p. 306.

80

F. Wahl, Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? 5. Philosophie (Paris, du Seuil, 1973), pp. 5-11.

81

Ibid., p. 127.

82

T. Barrett, Criticizing photographs, An Introduction to Understanding Images (Mountain View, Mayfield, 1990), p. 137.

83

Caws, Structuralism, p. 1.

84

U. Eco, ‘Critique of the Image’, in V. Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (London, Macmillan, 1982), pp. 32-8.

85

R. Barthes, ‘Tels’, Photo, 112 (1977), copied in J. Serri, Roland Barthes, Le texte et l’image (Paris, Les musées de la ville de Paris, 1986), pp. 81-7, p. 84.

86

J.M. Benoist, ‘Entretien avec Roland Barthes, Le plaisir de l’image’, copied in La Recherche Photographique, 12 (1992), p. 21.

87

Both are taken down in R. Barthes, L’obvie et l’obtus, Essais critiques III (Paris, du Seuil, 1982), pp. 9-24; 25-42.

88

R. Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, du Seuil, 1957). Used edition: collection de poche ‘Points’ (1970), pp. 191-247.

89

The Greek term ‘physis’ stands for ‘nature’, the outstanding subject that is studied by philosophers. By the way, the first philosophers are called ‘physikoi.’ The ‘anti-physis’ can thus be understood as culture, the historically processed nature. The ‘pseudo-physis’ then is the culture, developed throughout history, that in speech is represented as obviously as natural facts.

90

Cf. R. Barthes, ‘Le degré zéro de l’écriture’ (1953), copied in idem, Œuvres complètes, tome 1, 1942-1965 (Paris, du Seuil, 1993), pp. 137-87, p. 147: ‘Or toute Forme est aussi Valeur; c’est pourquoi entre la langue et le style, il y a place pour une autre réalité formelle: l’écriture. Dans n'importe quelle forme

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littéraire, il y a le choix général d’un ton, d’un éthos, si l’on veut, et c’est ici précisément que l’écrivain s’individualise clairement parce que c’est ici qu’il s’engage.’ As translation for ‘écriture’ we took ‘writing.’ 91

Idem footnote 6.

92

T. Gontier, ‘L’image blanche’, Les Cahiers de la Photographie, ‘Roland Barthes et la photo: le pire des signes’, 25 (1990), pp. 23-9.

93

This exhibition by Edward Steichen is since 1994 permanently shown at the ‘Château de Clervaux’ in Luxembourg; see J. Back & G. Bauret, éd., The Family of Man, Témoignages et Documents (Luxembourg, Artevents, 1994).

94

The term ‘idiolect’ coincides for Barthes to a great extent with the term ‘writing.’ See R. Barthes, Eléments de sémiologie (Paris, du Seuil, 1965); idem, Œuvres I, p. 1475. It is a term that refers to the need for something between speech and language.

95

U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1979), pp. 6-7, p. 58, 179.

96

R. Barthes, La chambre claire, Note sur la photographie, Cahiers du cinéma (Paris, Gallimard – Le Seuil, 1980).

97

G. Bauret, ‘De l’esquisse d’une théorie à la dernière aventure d’une pensée’, Cahiers, pp. 7-13, p. 12.

98

B. Comment, ‘Un discours affectif sur l’image’, Magazine Littéraire, Roland Barthes, 314 (1993), pp. 65-7.

99

Barthes, Chambre, pp. 48-9.

100 Ibid., p. 120. 101 See the related concept ‘noèsis’ in: F.E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, A historical lexicon (New York, University Press, University of London Press, 1967), pp. 121-8. 102 Barthes, Chambre, p. 142. 103 Ibid., pp. 120-1. 104 S. Ungar, ‘Persistence of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to film’, in: idem & B.R.Mc Graw, Signs in Culture, Roland Barthes Today (IOWA, University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 139-56, pp. 152-3. 105 Barthes, Chambre, pp. 20-2. See also F. Wahl, ‘Le singulier à l’épreuve’, Cahiers, pp. 14-21. 106 L.J. Calvet, ‘Les mots sous la photographie’, Recherche, pp. 23-5. 107 G. Freund, Photographie et société (Paris, du Seuil, 1974), pp. 173-4. 108 Barthes, Chambre, p. 119. 109 J. Leenhardt, ‘Présence du sujet dans la photographie’, Recherche, pp. 27-9.

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110 R. Barthes, ‘La peinture est-elle un langage?’, La Quinzaine littéraire (1969), copied in idem, L’obvie, pp. 139-41, p. 140. 111 Idem, ‘Cette vieille chose, l’art…’, Catalogue Pop Art (Venise, 1980), taken ibid., pp. 181-8, p. 187. 112 Idem, ‘Réquichot et son corps’ (1973), taken ibid., pp. 189-214, pp. 203-4. 113 Idem, ‘Le troisième sens’, Cahiers du cinéma (1970), taken ibid., pp. 43-61. 114 Cf. J.B. Fages, Comprendre Roland Barthes (Toulouse, Privat, 1979), p. 195. 115 Barthes, L’obvie, p. 46. 116 R. Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris, du Seuil, 1973), p. 10. 117 Ibid., p. 25-6. 118 Barthes, Chambre, amongst others pp. 23 and 59. 119 Ibid., p. 180. 120 P. Ortel, ‘La chambre claire ou le refus de l’art’, Cahiers, pp. 32-9, pp. 37-8. 121 P. Bourdieu, Un art moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1965). R. Arnheim, ‘On the nature of photography’ (originally 1974) and ‘splendor and misery of the photographer’ (originally 1979), in idem, New Essays on the Psychology of Art (London, University of California Press, 1986), pp. 102-14 and pp. 115-22. S. Sontag, On Photography (New York, Farrar Strauss, 1973). 122 S. Sontag, L’écriture même: à propos de Barthes (Paris, Christian Bourgeois, 1982), p. 9. 123 M. Kesting, Die Diktatur der Photographie (München, Piper, 1980). 124 See a.o. S. Tisseron, Le mystère de la chambre claire (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1996) and N. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1997). 125 J. Baudrillard, Photographie. Car l’illusion ne s’oppose pas à la réalité (Paris, Descartes & Cie, Paris, 1998.

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—

The Digital Imprint. The Theory and Practice of Photography in the Digital Age André Gunthert —

On 1 September 2007, Marie, full of enthusiasm after the second screening on France 2 of the Nils Tavernier documentary, L’Odyssée de la vie1, commented in her blog: ‘I think this documentary is brilliantly done! I’ve provided a few photos I have found on the Net… So here are the photos, from ovulation through to birth.’2 There followed fourteen videos, copied from the film’s website, presenting the different phases in the development of an embryo. In her electronic journal, Marie, a mother with two young children who had recently become pregnant with her third, shared portraits of her little ones and copies of her first ultrasound scans. Did she realise that the images from the film, to which her own pregnancy had made her particularly sensitive, were not of the same kind as her own images, but were in fact computer-generated? When she used the same term for them as for the photos of her children, was this merely a matter of linguistic convenience, or the symptom of a blurred perception? Though visually similar to the famous photographs of Lennart Nilsson3 which are one of their sources of inspiration, the 3D animations of L’Odyssée de la vie belong to the latest generation of computer-generated images, made impressively realistic by sophisticated effects of texture and light. Even if we play down the degree of confusion implied by Marie’s choice of words, we may at least conclude that she expresses great confidence in the new images.

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A catastrophe foretold That confidence is highly unexpected. In the early 1990s, at a time when image-processing software was starting to be used outside the specialised confines of publishing or graphic design, the theoreticians of the visual image were explicit. In The reconfigured eye, William J. Mitchell argued that these digital images were ushering in the post-photographic age: ‘Although a digital image may look just like a photograph when it is published in a newspaper, it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as does a photograph from a painting.’4 Invoking in his support Paul Strand, who defined photography’s raison d'être as ‘a complete uniqueness of means’,5 Mitchell held that the digital image, consisting of a grid of pixels, was not the same as the old silver print of conventional photography. ‘The digital encoding which characterises it is symbolic and destroys any indexical trace’,6 explained Pierre Barboza, while André Rouillé went a step further: ‘It is this breaking of the physical and energy-based link that fundamentally differentiates digital photography from conventional photography and causes the truth system which it underpinned to collapse.’7 The same conclusion seemed inescapable to all the experts: the digital image was inaugurating an ‘age of suspicion’ and bringing to a close a ‘long period of belief in the truth of images.’ But the catastrophe did not occur. Although all our images are now made up of pixels, we continue to open our newspapers, switch on our televisions and trust the information they provide us. We continue to photograph our children or our holidays, and although we now look through our family albums on a computer screen, we do not doubt these pictures any more than we did those that the local photographer took in times past. Cases do arise now and then, exposed by the experts, when a picture is found to have been retouched or tampered with – but in point of fact they occur no more or less often than they used to. So what has happened? How is it that such a unanimous prognosis, such a grim scenario has not been followed by the predicted collapse?

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The modernist ontology of photography To understand why these predictions turned out to be false, we need to examine their theoretical basis: the thesis of photographic indexicality, first set out in 1977 by Rosalind Krauss. In an article which has remained famous, while seeking to describe the new artistic practices of the 1970s, the art critic offered the following definition in passing: ‘Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.’8 Since the invention of the first visual recording technology, there have been many attempts to identify its specific traits. From Elisabeth Eastlake to Roland Barthes via Walter Benjamin, André Bazin and Susan Sontag, philosophers have invariably postulated the existence of some specific quality associated with photography, some particular ‘nature’ of photography. Despite their apparent similarity, these approaches have drawn on various forms of support: Benjamin attempts to define photography in terms of a certain quality of presence, Bazin defines it in more psychological terms, while Barthes conceptualises its transhistoric dimension. Although it belongs to the tradition of ontological characterisation, Krauss’s position associates two factors in a novel fashion by elevating the use of the physico-chemical recording process to the rank of a semiotic category. Whereas Roland Barthes states that ‘In a photograph, I can never deny that the thing was there’,9 a logico-deductive type of argument, Rosalind Krauss bases the picture’s referential guarantee on a physical connection between the object and the medium through the interposition of the photon. This definition is both more precise and more powerful, as it is seemingly founded on the technical reality of photography. In the history of the medium, such an approach is usually the preserve of equipment specialists.10 Why did an intellectual, without any particular knowledge of the photographic process, decide to employ such reasoning?

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The context of American modernism offers a valuable clue here. According to the seminal article by Clement Greenberg, published in 1960, ‘Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself.’11 While seeking to oppose the pictorial hegemony of the formalist discourse by importing the photographic model into the field of art,12 Krauss remained faithful to the modernist strategy of characterisation in terms of the medium’s specific means. By sealing this approach with the concept of the index, borrowed from Peirce, she gave the formalist approach with which she re-evaluated the history of American art the status of a semiotic theory, at a time when semiotic theory was highly fashionable. Photography had never had such an elaborate or persuasive concept at its disposal – one which would be discussed and repeated in numerous works for some twenty years.13

The truth of the record Yet despite its beauty, this theory is wrong. Its supposed technical foundation does not stand up to detailed examination. Although Krauss uses the concept of the index to bring out the idea of a ‘physical relationship’14 between the sign and its source, this schema turns out to be closer to the traditional conception of simulacra held by Lucretius15 than to the actual behaviour of light fluxes. In suggesting that the ray makes direct contact with the medium, she overlooks the decisive role of the optical device. As Jean-Marc Levy-Blond indicates, ‘A medium’s transparency or opacity (...) results from a highly complex mechanism: the incident photons are absorbed by the medium’s electrical charges (…) and set them in motion; the charges then re-emit new photons, and so on. Thus it is only from the overall effect of these repeated processes of absorption and re-emission that we can say if and how the object lets light pass through it or blocks it.’ In other words: ‘The photons which enter a pane of glass are not the same as those that leave it. (…) These constituents of light have in fact undergone a complete renewal within the material.’16 This observation is sufficient to undermine the fetishistic notion of the ‘material continuity between objects and images’17 on which conventional

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photography is supposedly based. Even in the case of an analogue signal, neither the optical device nor the recording medium is a neutral intermediary of a flux emanating from the object. On the contrary, photographers are well aware that changing the lens or film gives them considerable room for manœuvre at the point when they take the photo, enabling them to modify the appearance, shape or colours of a view. A camera cannot be described as a transparent mediator of reality: rather, it should be conceived of as a machine for selecting interpretations, according to a set of parameters with complex interactions, requiring precise choices. It is more like a set of railway points than a mirror. It is hard to see what argument could be used to deny digital photography the character of an imprint. That character is not deduced from any spatial or semiotic contiguity. It is established by the protocol of recording, defined as the storage of information in controllable conditions. The reliability of the device’s products results from adherence to the protocol’s conditions, which subsequently enable it to be properly interpreted. This ‘truth’ is thus fragile and can easily be counterfeited or tampered with. But if the protocol’s conditions are adhered to, it is also very powerful, as it is beyond dispute. Far from being unique to photography, this feature is shared by all forms of recording, from the fossil to the groove on a vinyl record via the police notebook.

A theory invalidated by practice There was no need to await the advent of digital photography to identify the shortcomings of the indexical approach. However, it escaped criticism until that point.18 It was in fact the practice of digital photography which exposed the theory’s main weakness: its ontological characterisation of photography. Although they relied on fallacious premises, the Cassandras of the digital image quoted earlier were drawing the logical consequences of the Kraussian approach: the transition to digital should have put an end to the photographic truth contract. If this did not happen, it was because it was realised that the process by which the image was produced was not the whole story.

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This was what happened with Abu Ghraib. In spring 2004, the leaking of a set of photographs showing Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American guards shocked the entire world. The pictures were digital ones which had been taken by the soldiers themselves using high-street cameras. The newspapers displayed full-page reproductions of the multicoloured pixels of digital noise. Yet, ‘despite all the adverse hype, these photographs were immediately accepted as credible testimonials.’19 The point is all the more striking given that another group of pictures, published by the Daily Mirror, quickly turned out to be fakes, even though they were conventional shots in black and white taken by photojournalists. This was at a time when digital photography was taking off among the general public in the developed countries. So as not to unsettle their customers, the manufacturers came up with a reassuring commercial strategy: cameras kept the basic design which had been necessitated by silver technology, printers reproduced the formats and appearance of commercially developed prints. Everyone was able to experience for themselves how, at three million pixels or more, the pictures produced by the digital camera are comparable in accuracy to the traditional 10 x 15 cm photo. It is also clear that the fall in the unit cost of photographs led to a considerable increase in the number of pictures. In the light of problems of storage and archiving, amateurs did not waste any time retouching their work, preferring to look for tools which would give them the best instant result. These pragmatic observations explain the general public’s confidence in digital photography. Although the process by which picture is produced has become harder to understand, the obvious conclusion is that there has been a remarkable continuity of form and practice, despite a considerable technological leap. There has been no catastrophe of the visual image. On the contrary, a number of incidents, such as the Adnan Hajj affair in August 2006, suggest that the norms of photojournalism have not changed: the agency Reuters reacted to a crude attempt to fake a digital photo by firing the photographer, and announced that ‘zero tolerance’ was still the rule regarding retouched photos.20

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More than any theoretical argument, the acceptance of digital photography has demonstrated that the truth of the image is unrelated to its ontogenesis.21 Although photography has its own ‘nature’, this cannot be reduced to the mechanism by which the image is produced. These points, which have become increasingly obvious, have led to the development of elaborate critiques of the indexical thesis.22 Leaving aside specialist controversies, it is also worth pointing out that, thanks to digital photography, the invalidation of theory by practice, a common phenomenon in the history of science, has made its appearance in the field of cultural history.

Shifts of credibility So is all for the best in the best of all possible visual worlds? It would be wrong to think so. Although the general public’s use of the digital tool remains consistent with the history of the medium, there are signs of alarming abuses in some professional fields. The practice of retouching, which was widespread in photographic illustration in the first half of the 20th century, became considerably rarer with the advent of colour photography. Today, it is making a major comeback in the magazine press, where content has become increasingly celebrity-focused. Although denied by magazine editors, who maintain, come what may, the fiction of the sanctity of the photographic image, such practices now have a very good chance of eluding notice. More alarming still is the growing role played by the computer-generated image in the imaginative world. The formal similarity between computer animations and digitally recorded images has never been so great. In 1993, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park caused a sensation through their realism. Since then, from palaeontological reconstructions to adventure films, images of these creatures have become commonplace, to the point where, to 21st century children, they are more familiar than cows or pigs. For dinosaurs to rub shoulders with humans in a fiction film is one thing, but for two species who never met to find themselves cheek-by-jowl in a series of a documentary nature may cause puzzlement.23 The extent of the confusion can be gauged when an educational film, in order to

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demonstrate that historic images of dragons are inspired by dinosaur fossils, draws on existing animations for documentary material.24 In the mid-1990s, the very idea of digital photography, at a time when examples of this technology were not yet widespread, met with suspicion based on a comparison with the computer-generated image. That pattern has now been reversed, with 3D animations benefiting from the credibility gained by the practice of digital photography. This shift of trust – illustrated by responses such as Marie’s to L’Odyssée de la vie – leads the sometimes highly fantastical nature of these reconstructions to be overlooked. But it offers further proof that the appraisal of the images’ authenticity is based not on theoretical or ontological foundations, but on experience and on contemporary visual culture. Although it seemed to define the characteristics of an ontology of photography, the indexical thesis can now be seen as merely a stage in its theoretical development. Put to the test of an unexpected practice, the thesis met with the strange fate of being contradicted by the very thing it had denied. But the new world of the image is more complex than it looks. Marked by an abyss between the professional world and amateur practice, it only conforms to the medium’s tradition at a superficial level, and is moving in directions which remain unclear. What is clear, though, is that familiarity with the practice of photography will remain the best guide for vigilant observation of that world.

Notes 1

L’Odyssée de la vie, a Nils Tavernier film, produced by France 2 (first screened:

2

Cf. Marie, ‘L’Odyssée de la vie, un doc incroyable’, 1 September 2007, online:

Jan. 2006). http://petiteange1977.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!E6EA462CC9BAE327!4671. entry. 3

Cf. Lennart Nilsson, Lars Hamberger, A Child is born (1965), 4th ed., New York, Delacorte Press, 2003.

4

William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, London, MIT Press, 1992, p. 4.

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5

Paul Strand, ‘Photography’ (1917), cit. in William J. Mitchell, ibid., p. 7.

6

Pierre Barboza, Du photographique au numérique. La parenthèse indicielle dans l’histoire des images, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 19.

7

André Rouillé, La Photographie. Entre document et art contemporain, Paris, Gallimard, 2005, p. 615.

8

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index. Seventies Art in America (1)’, October, n° 3, 1977, p. 75.

9

Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1980, p. 120.

10

For example Léon Vidal: ‘It is the rays reflected by the very surface of the object which leave their imprint on the sensitive plate, so that the copy obtained automatically in this fashion, without any element of interpretation, cannot be suspected of the slightest inaccuracy’, Projet d’organisation en France d’un service d'archives documentaires, Paris, AFAS, 1894, p. 1-2.

11

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (John O’Brian ed.), vol. iv, 1957-1969, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, p. 86.

12

Cf. Johanne Lamoureux, ‘La critique postmoderne et le modèle photographique’, Études photographiques, no. 1, November 1996, p. 109-115.

13

See especially Philippe Dubois, L’Acte photographique et autres essais, Paris, Nathan, 1990; Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’image précaire. Du dispositif photographique, Paris, Le Seuil, 1987. For a discussion of the reception in France of Krauss’s article, see Katia Schneller, ‘La diffusion de la pensée de Rosalind Krauss sur la photographie en France’, Études photographiques, no. 21, November 2007.

14

‘As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify’, Rosalind Krauss, art. cit., p. 70. Specialists in the writings of Peirce point out that the concept of the index is more complex, but Krauss’s relationship with the work of the philosopher, who is quoted just once in a footnote in the original article, is highly tenuous.

15

‘Come now, in what swift and easy ways those idols are begotten, and flow unceasingly from things and fall off and part from them, [I will set forth…]. For ever the outermost surface is streaming away from things, that so they may cast it off. (...) And just as the sun must needs shoot out many rays of light in a short moment, so that the whole world may unceasingly be filled, so too in like

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manner from things it must needs be that many idols of things are borne off in an instant of time in many ways in all directions on every side; inasmuch as to whatever side we turn the mirror to meet the surface of things, things in the mirror answer back alike in form and colour.’ Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book IV, 142-167 (translated by Cyril Bailey, Oxford University Press, 1910). 16

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, La Vitesse et l’ombre. Aux limites de la science, Paris, Seuil, 2006. p. 28-29

17

Cf. André Rouillé, op. cit., p. 615.

18

For my part, by 1997 I was writing: ‘Far from constituting the medium’s ‘essence’, its indexical character is merely one of the faces of the use of photography – one of its major fantasies’, ‘Au doigt ou à l’œil’, Études photographiques, no. 3, November 1997, p. 5.

19

André Gunthert, ‘L’image numérique s’en va-t’en guerre. Les photographies d’Abou Ghraib’, Études photographiques, no. 15, November 2004, p. 124-134.

20

Cf. Christian Delage, André Gunthert, Vincent Guigueno, La Fabrique des images contemporaines, Paris, éditions du Cercle d’art, 2007, p. 138-141.

21

We may note in passing, by way of a counter-example, that it is entirely possible to guarantee the accuracy of digital images by means of ontogenesis, as I have shown with the procedure used for the photographs of the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), where the download speed, which is related to the number of images, made any post-processing intervention a material impossibility (cf. André Gunthert, ‘Les photographies de l’EHESS et le “journalisme citoyen”’, Études photographiques, no. 18, May 2006, p. 120-137).

22

See especially Tom Gunning, ‘La retouche numérique à l’index. Pour une phénoménologie de la photographie’ (translated from English by Marc Phéline), Études photographiques, no. 19, December 2006, p. 96-119.

23

Prehistoric Park, a documentary television series produced by Impossible Pictures, broadcast on ITV in 2006.

24

‘A la recherche du dragon’, a Carl Hall film produced by France 5/Parthenon Entertainment Ltd., 2004 (broadcast on France 5, 15 August 2007).

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Of Bodies and other Things German Photography from the Weimar to the Berlin Republic Klaus Honnef —

History’s Blue Box Deep-rooted social and cultural upheavals are commonly perceived as crises. They bring about social uncertainties which many fall victim to and have most others fear they, too might have to face inevitable changes. Anxieties spread and the willingness to take up risks dwindles. Having said that, one must keep in mind that it is of only minor importance what particular causes – for instance, either promising or disastrous economic figures – have actually brought about these upheavals, it is the changes themselves which evoke reactions of utter distress, especially if people feel overcome by them without any warning. Boom or slump – it is the sudden and unexpected changes of the stock market that cause suicide figures to soar in either case, as French sociologists found out over a hundred years ago already. Periods of social and cultural upheaval, looming large and massively so at the present turn of the second into the third millennium, also shake the very foundations of individual identities which are felt to be but brittle and fragile when confronted with these changes. The question of the meaning of life makes itself heard louder and louder. Once again, the quest for the status and place of one’s personality begins. Who am I?

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Where do I come from? Where do I belong? Such questions, which reach deep into an individual’s most private sphere and do not leave its social existence untouched, usually replace the esoteric trips into the core of the psyche and the vain and futile self-reflections of the ego which, during more tranquil periods of time, generally have the upper hand. The public discourse is once again focused on a more serious outlook on life. As has been the case so often before, the most significant signals of a general change of mood can be received from the cultural scene – provided one knows how to read them. With the fading away of the modern age, there is probably no other visual medium than photography, which, being the unique product of combined scientific and aesthetic exploration, could shed a brighter light on the now emerging questions concerning the individual as well as the collective condition humaine, shaped by almost two hundred years of revolutionary scientific discoveries. It brings to life a distant recollection of the former unity of the various scientific disciplines, if one still defines the word ‘aesthetics’ according to its original meaning as a term denoting sensual perception and is aware of the fact that it was camera-made pictures, not only the pictures of the well-known camera obscura, but even more so, the pictures made with the help of its successor, the modern camera, which did not only serve scientific research as a means but also as a model. Although photography as a method of presenting visible objects in a graphic way has by now become a technically outdated process, it is still popular with artists, namely those who grew up with TV, this paragon of distracted perception. Coincidence or symptom? Contrary to the perfunctory images created by TV, film and natural perception alike, the photographic image is a static one and therefore allows a more exact view, which can be re-examined and read, almost like a text. Apart from that, it does not create the impression of being as artificial as paintings or drawings, which are the common product of a human being’s head and hand and therefore more susceptible to seemingly arbitrary and entirely subjective decisions made by the respective artist. What it visualizes is a ‘How it was’, rather than an ‘As if.’ Due to its technical characteristics, one is ready to concede objectivity to the photographic image and,

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because photography is capable of preserving traits of what has occurred in front of the lens, it has increasingly been entrusted with the function of a storehouse for moments of visible history, moments of an irrevocable past which are brought back to life by and through its images. In these difficult times of widespread loss of orientation, it at least promises reassurance in retrospect. Twice in the course of the last century German photography managed to play a beacon role within the context of photographic history: After the end of World War I, when, following the demise of the role model of bourgeois culture and the disaster of unexpected military defeat, it was able to visualize in a convincing manner the damaged self-esteem of the German people and the hidden frictions resulting from it, and, for a second time, when the post- World War II young generation revolted against the then political and social establishment, i.e.1 when the Cold War was drawing to a close and the sense of a new era about to dawn was beginning to be felt, an era that was to last until, again, in the wake of the collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, years of turbulence and upheaval set in. In its predominantly artistic approach to reality, photography demonstrated the intricate competition among rivalling images of reality within the spectre of possible perceptions. The catchwords ‘New Realism’ and ‘New Vision’ were but poor labels for these new impulses, yet, they became household words not only in Germany, but beyond its borders as well. Whatever might have separated these two trends in German photography, not least the chronological gap marked and made unbridgeable by the cultural devastation brought about by the National Socialists, aesthetic interests always formed the core of the intentions which artists and photographers pursued with their pictures. At the same time as artists and photographers from the Soviet Union, the U.S.A., France and Czechoslovakia, the photographs in Germany discovered photography not only as a legitimate artistic means to depict and express reality, but also as a medium with an aesthetic quality of its own. Neither the fact that, following Nazi-Germany’s unconditional surrender, a third trend, the so-called ‘subjective Photography’, managed to win

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temporary public acclaim across Europe, nor that the Nazis themselves created a memorable, catching and highly seductive imagery should be left entirely unmentioned. Still a subject of heated controversy, it must nevertheless be stated that the number of their international admirers increased with every year the brown terror regime receded further into historical oblivion. Quote Georg Seeßlen in the german weekly Die Zeit: ‘Historic fascism was itself a gigantic image-producing machine, it created an iconography that covered everything from the uniformed mass demonstrations to fascist semiotics and the seemingly innocuous ufa-films.’2 In the years following the defeat of the German Empire led by the Prussian Kaiser and before the Weimar Republic drowned in the whirlpool of the Great Depression and political and social antagonisms due to a sinister mix of a lack of republican spirit, reactionary arrogance, and the political failure and ideological stubbornness of the left-wing parties originating in irreconcilable rivalry, Berlin, this seething metropolis in this thoroughly vanquished and deeply torn country, was the centre of the German photographic avant-garde, the heart of all kinds of cultural movements and a bridgehead at that. Here, avant-garde Russians and Hungarian exiles bent on experimenting, who had fled from a counterrevolution which followed a short-lived communist intermezzo, found a fertile soil and a powerful echo to their bold concepts. The cities of the still Prussian Rhineland Province and Munich, the capital of Bavaria, were sailing in the slipstream of Berlin. It was not until after the end of the Nazi terror that the Rhineland cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf, which were largely destroyed as well, did actually attempt to become the now divided capital’s heirs in matters cultural and acquired profiles of their own which, at times, reached beyond their provincial horizon. This third version of a large cycle of exhibitions and publications on the subject of 20th century ‘German Photography’, which started in Prague, primarily addresses, different from the other two cycles that have so far been completed – Bonn, 1997 and Erfurt, 1998 - the artistic and aesthetic as well as – at least partially – the socio-linguistic dimensions of photography as a technical and mechanical medium.3 It acknowledges the complex correlations and correspondences between

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photography and the artistic avant-garde and the dramatically new view of the traditional methods of presenting reality within the framework of the graphic arts, brought about by the latter. The aspect of photography as a mass medium, i.e. photographic journalism, as well as fashion and advertising photography, will not be covered this time, unless it overlaps into the artistic sphere.4 It is for this reason in particular, that, as far as sociological reliability is concerned, this endeavour can only claim a certain and limited degree of general validity for its statements. And yet, even when restricted to this selection, photography seems to be a decisive means of production when it comes to assessing the quality of perspective of various ways of presenting reality. A basic understanding of the nature of photographic art seems to unite the specific presentations of the human body in various phases of the photographic development of the years in question. What first used to be the ‘cold individual’, the epitome of the ‘industrial aesthetics’ of the aesthetically radical photography of the Weimar Republic, turns into the ‘heroism’ and the ‘hypostasis’ of sheer physical force and its integration into the marching columns of the national-socialist body popular (Volkskörper), and still later, into the ‘diversification’ and ‘psychological view’ of the individual body in the last half of the 20th century, the latter including radical attempts to demonstrate an entirely new view of the human body through both, portraits and, above all, self-portraits. Increasingly, the artist’s own body becomes the object of extensive exploration within the framework of either scientific or pseudo-scientific programmes, or in pursuit of physical ideals transported by the mass media. The urge to eliminate physiognomic peculiarities from one’s physical appearance because they run counter to popular beauty ideals and the desire of a number of younger artists in particular, to establish identities by way of emphasizing physical differences, show a more or less balanced result. Both, the disappearance of the physical and its turning into a fetish, are obviously two sides of the same coin. The architectonic and factual manifestation of the modern age in the presentation of photographic images serves as both, a foil and an adversary, to the various presentations of the human body.

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Modernistic architecture in particular is reputed to have created autonomous aesthetic massings rather than buildings serving the needs of their inhabitants. Just like in the arts in general, form triumphs over function in modernistic architecture as well, despite all its verbose claims to functionality. And what’s more, in photography it has found a powerful ally, an adequate means of expressing itself and, at the same time, an effective instrument of propaganda, and it is beyond dispute that both, avant-garde photography and modern architecture, share an affinity between their respective concepts of ‘creation.’ On top of that, and for a number of reasons, architectonic design began to be aided by a variety of photographic means in the years following World War I. Quote Rolf Sachsse: ‘Not only was photography available and had the photocopy technique been greatly improved; not only did the quality and the perspective of the pictures change, it was, above all, the context in which they were embedded that changed – the medium had become the sizeable foundation of visible, yet fathomless images and buildings.’5 – an analysis which might just as well be applied to the post-modern view of the human body. Acting on the stage of an industrial, work-sharing and strongly urban society, architecture and body enter into an unconnected, almost arbitrary relation of mutual alienation, however quite ambivalent. On the one hand, modern buildings often radiate a cold and impersonal aura, questionable as such, if only for the relation between their outsized proportions and the tiny human body, on the other hand, they seem to offer shelter from the demands of the outside world to the isolated individual and thus serve as some sort of shell and substitute clothing, even as a second layer of skin. The attempt to counterbalance the cheerless ‘living-boxes’ so characteristic of rational and cost-effective architecture with an overabundance of ‘warming’ kitsch shows the full scope of the paradox. An additional indication of the unease about the loss of life’s natural context manifests itself in the detached state of the world of concrete objects as shown in the mirror of avant-garde photography. Its specifically matter-of-fact view, typical of the scientific method of rational explanation and understanding of the world and cultivated in

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the neo-realistic photographic settings, levels any differences between objects of organic nature and those of industrial origin, and in doing so, allows them to emancipate themselves and to acquire a value of their own. What’s more, photographic images, especially those created in advertising, divest objects of their former symbolical powers and present them as self-sufficient aesthetic objects whose practical value is altogether irrelevant. The characteristic changes in the avant-garde photographic view of the human body from the Weimar to the Berlin Republic cast a surprisingly bright light on the course of recent German history, its contradictions and continuities across the abysses of its darkest periods, and elevate subliminal collective notions to the level of perception. The different stages of history provide the key words of the drama. Political, social and economic events, whenever they occur, can, however, only be focused and reflected within the limits of artistic and photographic approaches to empirical reality, which, in turn, are, to an increasing degree, influenced by the immense and steadily rising flood of electronically generated images. Thus, the world of photographic images, together with those created by film, TV and the digital media, has turned into a sort of Blue Box, in which fiction and non-fiction – and let us, in the face of the superiority of the image as such, forget about such things as truth, authenticity and factual precision – are indissolubly interwoven and, at times, condensed into a highly complex experience of reality. The images of the Blue Box presented here, however, do not, as usual, show only the male view of things, but also an equally representative female one. The almost parity selection of exhibits is, however, owed entirely to the sovereign decision of the curators and not to one of the usual committee decisions so immensely popular in Germany. It underlines the fact that the new view and the new awareness of the human body in the arts and in photography is largely due to initiatives originating in the midst of feminist research. Nevertheless, against the backdrop of history, it is surprising to see the disproportionate distribution of female and mal contributors. While the first half of the chronology is clearly dominated by male authors, the second sees the female comrades-in-arms almost pushing aside their male fellow combatants, which, to my mind, only

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reflects an apparent change of paradigms in the arts at the outset of the 21st century. Qoute Volker Ullrich in Die Zeit: ‘(...) at the centre of attention one often finds the artist’s personality, biography or sexual orientation, and it cannot be ignored that psychology is encroaching upon the arts.’6 It is a paradox that the new awareness of body has been articulated in a quite body less medium, that is: in a medium which represent the body as a shadow.

Notes: 1

Georg Sesslen: ‘Die Seele im System. Roman Polanskis “Der Pianist” oder: Wie schön darf ein Film über den Holocaust sein?’, Die Zeit, Nr. 44, 24. Oktober 2002, p. 56.

2

Deutsche Fotografie. Macht eines Mediums 1870-­1970 in der Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1997, Kuratoren Klaus Honnef und Rolf Sachsse, und die Ausstellung Und sie haben Deutschland verlassen ...müssen – Fotografen und ihre Bilder im Rheinischen Landesmuseum Bonn 1997, Kuratoren Klaus Honnef und Frank Weyers. (Catalogues with the same title were published at both exhebitions) Signaturen des Sichtbaren – Ein Jahrhundert der Fotografie in Deutschland, in der Galerie am Fischmarkt Erfurt 1998, Kuratoren Klaus Honnef und Kai Uwe Schierz – (Catalogue with the same title)

3

Rolf Sachsse: Fotografie als NS-Staatsdesign. Ein Medium und sein Mißbrauch durch Macht, in: Deutsche Fotografie. Macht eines Mediums 1870-­1970, Köln 1997, p. 118-134.

4

Wolfgang Ullrich: Glückliche Selbstfindung. Warum viele Kunst studieren, ohne Künstler sein zu wollen: Die Akademie als Vorschule der Esoterik, in: Die Zeit, Nr. 44, 24. Oktober 2002, p. 54.

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Beings Between: Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine as Hauntological Practice Louis Kaplan —

‘It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires, then, what we call... hauntology. We will take this category to be irreducible...’ Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

1. Inbox In the fall of 2000, Tony Oursler celebrated the Halloween season by staging a haunting video installation and environment in two public park spaces – Madison Square Park in New York City organized by the Public Art Fund and Soho Square in London, England organized by Artangel. (Figure 1) Entitled The Influence Machine, Oursler’s production utilized four hand operated video projectors on custom mounts, surround sound, and a host of special effects. This spectacle reflected upon the strange interconnections of technology and the occult (including the attempts to use technology to communicate with the dead) and entertained the resurrective capacities of mimetic communications media in general (whether photography, television, or new media). Oursler discusses the haunting dimensions of the televisual medium in a passage that conjures technological media in terms of the ‘living dead’ and that provides a clue to the title of the work in

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1. Tony Oursler [The Influence Machine] 2000 Video and sound installation at Madison Square Park, New York, October 19-31, 2000. A Target Art in the Park exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York.

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question. ‘Television archives store millions of images of the dead, which wait to be broadcast... to the living... at this point, the dead come back to life to have an influence ... on the living... Television is, then, truly the spirit world of our age. It preserves images of the dead, which then can continue to haunt us.’1 Given this set of concerns, The Influence Machine serves as an appropriate case study for a symposium convened to consider the question and the questioning of the boundary lines that constitute conventional binary oppositions such as the living and the dead. In other words, it is the technological media (and its influencing machines) that step into the space between to generate the ghostly domain of a ‘being haunted.’ With this phrasing, I am applying Jacques Derrida’s construct of ‘hauntology’ (the logic of haunting) to speculate on media technology as the haunting or influencing of being by its other.2 As the Chorus in The Influence Machine inquires: ‘How many are alive? How many are dead? The dead? The living? How do you separate the two?’3 This shadowy line of questioning can be viewed as a self-reflexive commentary on the unstable existence of media images as they hover ‘undead’ somewhere between life and death, between absence and presence. It is my goal in this essay to review the conception, dramaturgy, and stagecraft of The Influence Machine in the terms of a ‘hauntological practice’ as well as to provide the phantom genealogy of its photographic and media technological precedents and influences. All in all, Oursler’s The Influence Machine offers a fantastic and phantasmatic case study to demonstrate Derrida’s assertion that ‘the modern technology of images enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us.’4

2. Haunting Influences In a text found on his web site and in the book, Oursler registers the historical influences that inform The Influence Machine. These case studies demarcate the strange relations of the history of media technology to the occult. Telecommunication systems have provoked a connection to spiritual presences. Here you see three historic characters evoked in this installation... 1) the phantasmagoria, and demonic evocations, of the great pioneer, Gaspar Robertson (who founded the first moving image theater,

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in a crypt in Paris... 2) the adolescent, Kate Fox’s telegraphic contact with spirit world by mysterious, Morse code, knocking, sounds (Hydesville, New York in 31 March 1848)... 3) John Baird, the British inventor of the mechanical television ... using ventriloquist dummies in the 1920s for his first broadcast experiments.5 Oursler uses video projection to conjure these personages as the various mediums performing in The Influence Machine channel their spirits and speak to the audience through them. First and foremost, Oursler’s multimedia performance brings EtienneGaspard Robertson’s spooky Phantasmagoria, the sound and light show staged via magic lantern illusionism into the present age of video projection and the internet. (figure 2) In his flow chart that maps the intersections of media technological innovation and spiritualism called ‘Timestream: I Hate the Dark. I Love the Light’, Oursler pays homage to the Belgian native with a long entry. Oursler is fascinated by Robertson’s Faustian desire to conjure the Devil and how this invocation of the demonic was displaced from the occult to ‘the science of optics’ through the invention of the Phantasmagoria and its ghosts in the machines.6 Oursler also sees a kindred spirit in Robertson’s ability to project his images as free-floating signs. ‘In the area of slide projection, he introduces the idea of painting images on an opaque black background rather than on clear glass – so the images seem to float free in the air.’7 Oursler culls a passage from Robertson’s diary through the voice of the Medium. The dense script and faltering communication begins to channel the voice of Robertson by way of the doubling and duping devil. By entering into the crypt in order to see the light, this stream of consciousness channeling becomes a boxed invitation to the Robertson’s theater of apparitions. ‘I’m getting something... R R R its not a name that I can say ... speak of the devil R R R R Robertson trying to speak to you... Terror inspired shadow characters occult lost in the immensity of space celestial light go into it the crypt see the light: Sad, severe, comical, kind, weird scenes major apparitions... are you lost in the dark?’8 The second case history that taps into the strange relations of telecommunication systems and spirit influences is offered by the contested Spiritualist story of Katie Fox and her supposed telegraphic

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2. Depiction of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in a disused cloister of an old Capucine chapel in Rue des Champs, Paris, 1797.

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contact with the spirit world in the mid-nineteenth century. Oursler visualizes this historic precedent in part by means of the video projection onto a house of an anonymous fist that is shown to be repeatedly knocking as a personification of the invisible spirit raps of the ghost that haunted the home of the Fox Family in 1848 and that Katie interpreted through a mysterious Morse-like code. This being-haunted by an invisible specter is summoned in the following playful manner. ‘Knock Invisible Knock Invisible Knock: Who’s there?’9 The first two scripts of the Chorus attend to the case history of Katie Fox and her conversations with the spirit that she referred to with all its demonic connotations as Mr. Splitfoot. Again, Oursler cites and intersperses primary sources to reenact the haunting and to review this spooked signification system and its cryptic codes. ‘Rules of Order when Communicating with the Dead: Question Spirit. Spirit answers two raps signifying Yes one rap signifying No. Three neither Yes nor No, not now, not yet. Don’t know.’10 But the channeling of Katie Fox leaves out another important historical precedent that comes in the guise of spirit photography – a phenomenon that arose in the mid-nineteenth century in conjunction with Spiritualism and in the same circles as the Fox Sisters and their spiritual telegraphy. We might think of spirit photography as the visualization of the more sonically inclined occult phenomena of table rapping and the telegraphic messages delivered by Mr. Splitfoot. While the installation does not invoke the founding spirits of spirit photography, this shadowy history does appear in an interview with the artist where he sketches the genealogy of hauntology in the history of communications media. The media archeologist Oursler puts spirit photography at the head of the list of the living dead. ‘During my research, I discovered a different narrative lurking in the shadows. It started with spirit photography and had to do with using technology to communicate with the dead. (...) This relation between psychic communication and telecommunications runs through each successive invention – the radio, the television, and finally, the computer.’11 Here, Oursler locates an example of ‘paroxysm’ in the spirit photographic desire to communicate with the dead and to surpass the mutually exclusive pairing of life and death. This impulse is already apparent in the ‘discovery’ of this borderline practice by William Mumler of Boston in the 1860’s during the heyday of Spiritualism. It should be recalled that Mumler envisioned spirit photography as offering the visual proofs of the existence of an afterlife

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and the ‘evidences of a future existence.’12 Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph is the ghost of the slain United States President Abraham Lincoln who is conjured from the grave in order to console his grieving widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Meanwhile, Moses Dow who as the literary publisher of the Waverly Magazine was another one of Mumler’s satisfied customers as the spirit of his dearly departed friend Mabel Warren appeared to him in this rather cheeky pose in 1871. (Figure 3) While believers held that Mumler’s activities were wondrous occult phenomena and visual evidence of the truths of Spiritualism, doubting skeptics brought Mumler to trial challenging these images as fraudulent tricks of double exposure and a swindle perpetrated upon a gullible public.13 However, it is important to point out that Oursler’s animated apparitions and video projections both continue and break with this earlier photographic practice of conjuring images. For instance and most obviously, Oursler – in contrast to the miraculous claims that were made by Mumler and the Spiritualists of the nineteenth century – does not expect the media-savvy viewer or consumer of these video projections in the twenty-first century to believe in any supernatural source. As he remarks, ‘With The Influence Machine, I wanted people to have this experience in the park so that the information would reach them in a state of active deconstruction, so that the technological “miracle” would be rendered transparent.’14 But even while exposing the artifice of the apparatus and self-aware in regards to the fetish-like character of these apparitions, Oursler’s stagecraft still re/ produces the phantasmatic qualities that adhere to the apparatus itself in its ghost-generating effects and in its ability to haunt us. Therefore I take some issue with T.J. Clark’s treatment of The Influence Machine under the rubric of ‘post-modern irony.’ Clark writes: ‘The Oursler knows it is playing at terrorizing us. It is proud to display its terror apparatus. Steam and video are its media. It is a machine – Oursler’s title insists on the fact. And the machine is not meant to convince us. We shall never wipe the postmodern smile off our faces.’15 But just because the demystifying postmodernist might smile at the ability to see the Wizard behind the curtain and at the control panel, Oursler’s ‘active deconstruction’ (to re-cite his own terms) does not efface the eerie, haunting, and perhaps even terrifying feeling and fact that this machine is engaged in the process of transforming being into a being-haunted, into beings between. From this perspective, the serious play of Oursler’s The Influence Machine is meant to convince

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3. William H. Mumler [Moses A. Dow with Spirit of Mabel Warren] 1871 Spirit photograph from James Coates, Photographing the Invisible (London; L.N. Fowler, 1911).

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us that video’s haunting opens onto a deconstruction of the boundary lines that separate smiles and grimaces. The final historical character invoked by the second Medium of The Influence Machine is the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird who, along with Philo T. Farnsworth, pioneered in the invention of television. Oursler chose the venue of Soho Square in London for its site-specificity. This location placed his video installation directly across the street from Baird’s original laboratory on Frith Street. The medium picks up these signals: ‘coming through 1920 Scottish invented mechanical TV BBBB BAIRD coming through not connecting clearly... hot, smoking, light burning, actor out, use dummy, off comes the head... away sweet body broadcast dummy jump for joy Life coming through the sky Life coming apart.’16 The dense verbiage of this Beckett-like monologue recalls Baird’s use of a ventriloquist’s dummy as the first ‘talking (or silent) head’ in his first successful decipherable television transmission on October 30, 1925. The animation of the dummy coming to life (‘Life coming through’) plays out yet another variant on the theme of the ‘living dead’ that haunts the birth and resurrection of the telecommunications media. (Figure 4) Before taking leave of these influences and precedents, there is one more point of reference in the realm of technological invention and fantasy that deserves mention especially as it bears the same name as Oursler’s video installation. That is Francis Hauksbee’s Influencing Machine that he invented in 1706. Radiating a luminous glow when a static electrical charge is introduced into this vacuum, its very operation offers something that parallels the ghosts in the machine. Oursler describes it as ‘a machine that produces the glow of life at will. Hauksbee’s Influencing Machine consists of a hand-cranked device spinning a glass vacuum globe, half full of air. The mysterious luminosity can be produced by touching the surface of the glass as it spins.’17 For Oursler, the cathode ray tube of television is prefigured in Hauksbee’s invention (which he calls ‘the first television set’). The conjuring of the glow of life via a hand-cranked device offers parallels to simulating images of/from life via the hand-held video projector.

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4. John Logie Baird with his mechanical television apparatus, 1925

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3. Hauntological Stagecraft Having reviewed some of the historical media precedents that are invoked by Oursler’s ‘psycho-landscape’, it is important to investigate the technological and dramaturgical elements comprising this environment in both its New York and London performances. This involves not only a description of the elements that were necessary for the staging of The Influence Machine but how these theatrical elements contribute to the overall effect of the event as a ‘public haunting’ and to the practice of hauntology in Jacques Derrida’s sense. The technological key to Oursler’s project of projection lies in the use of High Definition Volumetric Display (HDVD). This is a newly-patented image technology that allows for three-dimensional projections to appear in free space. While created for medical, military, and aviation uses, Oursler appropriates this technology in order to produce new media art. Moving beyond the screen, the projected images of HDVD float in midair where they appear to have no earthly anchor. It is this free-floating aspect that makes these video apparitions appear so eerie, as if they have assumed an independent life of their own. It also allows Oursler to project these three-dimensional ghosts onto water vapor and into the trees. More special effects are achieved in response to variable weather conditions. As reporter Clare Henry writes of the New York performance using rhetorical flourishes that are seasoned with the Halloween spirit. ‘The whole phantasmagorical installation is influenced by the weather and seasonal gusts of wind sometimes disturb the smoke and the trees distorting the faces into ominously frightening ghouls.’18 (Figure 5) The performance features the projection of the two channeling mediums – one male (Sidney Lawrence) and one female (Tracy Leopold) – into billowing white clouds of water vapor through the use of a smoke gun. Here, Oursler again acknowledges his new media debt to Robertson’s Phantasmagoria. ‘He heated smoke to fog a room. I use a smoke gun. It’s part of the time-line I’m researching – echoing back and forth from magic lanterns to hi-tech.’19 Meanwhile, a second large-scale video projection beams three billboard size faces in sequence into a tree. These characters constitute the Chorus of voices (one male and two female) reciting their open-ended Beckettian monologues that seem to hover in a nether region somewhere between

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5. Tony Oursler [The Influence Machine] 2000 Video and sound installation at Madison Square Park, New York, October 19-31, 2000. A Target Art in the Park exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York.

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rants aimed at the audience and communications with the dead. The monologue of the second figure in the Chorus played by Constance DeJong offers much for hauntological analysis. She speaks of the impossibility of absolute death when faced with electronic mediation and the resurrection of playback and systems that allow these technological ghosts to come back. ‘Here we go again go fear of death there is no death. Body death? I am your perfect match no death.’20 The same hauntological insistence permeates the third Choral figure with the name of William who seems to split himself into a dialogue with a Dr. Nick. Again, this video spirit (whether named Bill or Nick) speaks in the name of the living dead digitally generated by the televisual technological apparatus. ‘NNNOOOOOO! I’m not dead! I have some words and pictures information not buzzers and lamps smoke and mirrors electromagnetic ocean translation of life into 0 1 TV Site Program. Show I’m still alive.’21 In both projections, the tele-technological apparatus broadcasts these video images as spirits speaking from beyond the grave. In the New York City installation, another component featured a LCD data stream on some fencing. This scrolling text with letters five feet high spat out a series of unrelated statements and questions. Oursler called this element ‘The Technician.’ Its first two questions are: ‘WHO EXACTLY ARE YOU?’ and ‘ARE U THERE?’22 The addressee of these hauntological questions shifts – shuttling between the sender and the receiver of the message. The first one (Who exactly are you?) expresses uncertainty and inexactitude as to whether these video spirits – or any being-haunted by video – belongs to the realm of being and the metaphysics of presence. The second one (Are U There?) spells out the uncertainty of locatedness (between here and there, between absence and presence) for the ghosts in the machine. Continuing the theme of technological communication with the dead into the age of the ethernet connection, Oursler claims that this text was based on a typed conversation I found between a person on a computer and a spirit which was typing back from the ‘spirit side.’23 Another component of the installation is a Talking Street Lamp (in New York) or a Talking Light in a gingerbread house (in London) that flickers as it recites its messages in a computer voice simulation. These messages were culled from the interactive website that Oursler set up on the internet. When they encountered its front page, visitors were asked to type in messages that would be relayed to the site. Some of these messages

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appear to be Oursler’s own reflections on aspects of the piece, others are anonymous contributions taken from the public. In calling upon the World Wide Web, Oursler incorporated the latest telecommunications technology with ghostly overtones into The Influence Machine. It is the computer voice simulator that functions as the latest spirit medium to channel these transmissions. But Oursler does not stop here in terms of his desire to link contemporary computer technology with the occult desire to communicate with the dead. For he includes static-filled recordings that purport to be filled with ‘found spirit voices from various ghost-hunting sites on the Internet.’24 In the New York performance, this soundtrack accompanied the banging fist or video spirit rapper on the Metropolitan Life Building while in London the target was the Twentieth Century Fox building. In addition, the banging fist is complemented by another video projection of a head knocking on/in a tree trunk in a repetitive manner. Oursler called this part of his performance ‘Knocking/Spirit Voices.’

4. Outbox While insisting upon this hauntological approach to Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine, it is also important to warn against any lapses into a transcendental or supernatural reading of this new media installation work. To return to the ‘boxed’ metaphor, it is necessary to guard against those who would transport Oursler’s work ‘out of the box’ and, in this way, into a purely etherealized or dematerialized realm. This overblown rhetoric is endemic to both new media studies and public relations hyperbole. It is how the publicity machine feeds The Influence Machine. For instance, the promotional copy on the back cover of the book expresses the transcendental desire to get outside the box as follows: ‘Oursler has gradually liberated video from the constraints of the box – with projections onto figures and effigies and with The Influence Machine into the urban environment.’ The claim is being made here that Oursler’s projections onto figures or trees are liberated from a ‘being boxed’ whether the boxed still of photography or the boxed moving image of the television set. The same liberating metaphor informs Susan K. Freedman, Tom Eccles, and James Lingwood’s ‘Intro – Out of the Box.’ This introductory text asserts the

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rhetoric of liberation and the ‘move to the outside’ in both a figurative and a literal manner. ‘Thinking outside of the box can be both a liberating and demanding proposition. For Tony Oursler, an artist who has consistently pushed the medium of video beyond the constraints of the television screen or simple wall projection, the proposal to expand into the urban environment proved particularly pertinent – to step out of the box and into the dark.’25 Now it is clear that ghosts move about in the dark, but the question is: have Oursler’s ghosts stepped ‘outside of the box’ when they roam about and when they haunt? Have they somehow managed to become ‘free spirits’? The claim at liberation is a rather utopian and idealist one and it is closely aligned to the rhetoric of dematerialization and disembodiment that pervades many discussions of cyberspace and new media. At moments, this leap also creeps into Oursler’s own thinking as when he speaks of the ‘dis-corporative impulse, the shedding of the physical body for the ethereal utopian virtual presence and the promises of ultimate interconnectivity.’26 But if the subject here is the medium of video and its projection, then the transcendental rhetoric of leaving the physical body behind deserves questioning. For one, while ‘becoming digital’ may not involve a direct emanation of the referent as in the case of the indexical photograph, there is still a conversion process of physical properties in digital video in which the source of the projection is a corporeal being whose specter is invested by the spectator as the ‘being haunted.’ Furthermore, the transcendental move to ‘ethereal utopian virtual presence’ forgets to acknowledge what we might call ‘the machine in the ghost’ or the materialist question of the apparatus. In other words, as long as we are dealing with technological media and mediation, there will always be another box – in terms of that which frames the image and sets a limit, or that which delimits the limit in terms of its conditions and possibilities. In Oursler’s case, the move from the television screen to video projection brings another set of new media operational constraints. (Figure 6) In approaching The Influence Machine and its uncanny (unheimlich) effects, it has been necessary to think (as far as this is possible) about the relations of ghosts and boxes, about the relations of ghosts and houses – the boxes by and through which we are domiciled. And the time-honored way to express the ghost’s relation to the house is through the image of ‘haunting.’ The logic of being- haunted is uncanny and un-homely (unheimlich) because

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6. Tony Oursler [The Influence Machine] 2000 Video and sound installation at Madison Square Park, New York, October 19-31, 2000. A Target Art in the Park exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York.

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it brings with it the difficulty of locating the ghost – a figure that is never completely inside or outside of the house. This means that to come under the influence of The Influence Machine and the paradoxes that it manifests is to acknowledge it as a ‘hauntological’ practice – wherein every move out of the box is boxed still. If there is a mystery to The Influence Machine, it is not to be located in any transcendentalism that goes outside or beyond the box. Instead, the mystery lies in the encounter with these video spirits between presence and absence and in the space of the living dead. In this way, The Influence Machine reminds us that photography and video’s very being in the world can only be formulated as a being-haunted and that a ghostly production marks their reproduction. The mystery of The Influence Machine lies in the (phantom) recognition of the hauntological as the cryptic site of ‘beings between.’

Notes 1

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues,’ in Gerrie van Noord, ed., The Influence Machine

2

Jacques Derrida, ‘Injunctions of Marx,’ Specters of Marx:The State of the Debt, the

3

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues,’ The Influence Machine, p. 39.

4

Jacques Derrida makes this statement in the character of the philosopher

(London and New York: Artangel and Public Art Fund, 2002) p. 47. Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1996) p. 10.

Jacques D. in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance (1983) where he defines cinema as ‘the art of allowing ghosts to come back.’ 5 6

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues,’ The Influence Machine, p. 45. Tony Oursler, ‘Timestream: I Hate the Dark. I Love the Light,’ The Influence Machine, p. 87.

7

Ibid.

8

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues,’ The Influence Machine, p. 36.

9

Ibid., 38. In his reading of ‘spiritual telegraphy,’ Oursler draws upon the first chapter (‘Mediums and Media’) of Jeffrey Sconce excellent and allied account Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

10

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues,’ The Influence Machine, p. 38.

11

‘Smoke and Mirrors: Tony Oursler’s Influence Machine. A Conversation between Tony Oursler and Louise Neri’ in The Influence Machine, p. 58.

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12

William Mumler, The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in SpiritPhotography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1875) p. 3.

13

For my own investigations into the story of William Mumler and the contested terrain of spirit photography, see ‘Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography’ in Art Journal Vol. 62, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 1827 as well as my edited source book (with essays) Ghostly Developments: The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographer that is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press.

14

‘A Conversation Between Tony Oursler and Louise Neri’, p. 62.

15

T.J. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmoderism, and Steam’ October 100 (Spring 2002) p.156.

16

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues’ The Influence Machine, p. 36.

17

Tony Oursler, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ The Influence Machine, p. 59.

18

Clare Henry, ‘Signals in Smoke’ The Scotsman (Edinburgh, UK), October 25, 2000, p. 11.

19

Ibid.

20

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues’ The Influence Machine, p. 40.

21

Ibid., p. 41.

22

Ibid., p. 42.

23

Ibid., p. 62.

24

Ibid., p. 61.

25

Susan K. Freedman, Tom Eccles, and James Lingwood, ‘Intro – Out of the Box’ in The Influence Machine, pp. 53-54.

26

Tony Oursler, ‘Monologues’ The Influence Machine, p. 43.

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—

‘Perceive the City’ Brussels’ Photographic Memory in Phases. The Relationship between the City and Photography Danielle Leenaerts —

The modern city and photography are inseparably linked and are both deeply rooted in the same faith in progress and aspiration to innovation. In the 19th century it was the city that provided the conditions for the further development of budding photography; while the success of portrait ateliers led to the establishment of a genuine photographic industry in the middle of the century. Photography records the transformations of the urban landscape, thus creating a catalogue of the architectural achievement of a city: it documents, on the one hand, its preservation and revalorization, and, on the other, its destruction and disappearance from the face of the earth. Images of urban infrastructure are accompanied by images of everyday life, though it is worth mentioning that while capturing street spectacle, photography simultaneously distorts it by freezing its elements. A frequently cited example illustrating this ambiguous aspect of photography is one of the first daguerreotypes of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris: the boulevard is entirely empty, since due to the long exposure time, all the people have disappeared from the image. The popularisation of the short exposure technique in the last two decades of the 19th century gradually introduced animation to photographs – the active dimension of the street space. In the course of

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time, this space offered photographers a large quantity of subjects, which considerably enlarged the range of elements regarded as the ‘events’ that together create a city. ‘Urbanness’, a category perceived both in environmental and social dimensions, became the prin­cipal area of photographic exploration in the 20th century, since the city, as a set of characteristic landscapes which undergoes a constant evolution and simultaneously preserves the traces of its past, offered such a rich opportunity. Hence, Anglo‑Saxon culture draws a distinction between landscape and cityscape, which does not derive from the necessity to mark the difference between the natural landscape and cultural landscape (or ‘cityscape’, consisting of man‑made buildings), but from the necessity to emphasize the uniqueness of this landscape category, i.e. the city. Its uniqueness results not only from its characteristic topography or archi­ tecture, but above all from the constant spectacle it provides. This spectacle, as Alain Guiheux remarked, is the source of the theatrical nature of all that takes place on the urban stage; ‘A city creates a spectacle for its residents: a performance which shows the history and the present of civilization. The street surface is a mirror that reflects our actions. Since a city is a creation based on a collection and a condensation of var­ious elements, it constitutes a miniature society and reflects its entire achievement.’1 As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, photography, as ‘a mirror with a memory’ creates a visual archive of a city by documenting the process of its constant transformations. ‘Urbanness’ is also a favourite theme of contemporary photography, since the city stimulates the imagination: photographers took possession of this treasure and have expanded it persistently. As Patrick Baudry and Thierry Paquot put it, ‘a city is something more than just an accumulation of buildings and people. And it is this something that the imagination begins to subvert, sublimate, distort and transfer.’2 The view of documentation as photography’s primary value that prevailed in the 19th century gradually yielded ground to the values of subjective creativity and experimentation. Naturally, these phenomena were not absent from urban photography, but they constituted a side‑note to the documentary content. The beginning of the 20th century brings about the first attempts to shift the documentary

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approach to the background, while the fore­ground is eventually overtaken by the documentary style or the purely expressive quality of the image. Pictorialism initiated the aesthetic tendency in photography. Influenced by the art of painting, advocates of aestheticism saw the city solely as an excuse to create photographic tableaux. Not until the interwar period did the city become a genuine subject for photographers; it itself began suggesting motifs for artistic creation: buildings of an imposing height provided an opportunity to take photographs from a bird’s‑eye view; electrical lighting created an extraordinary image of the city by night; advertisement posters transformed the public space into a medium of communication of all sorts of messages. Thus, the elements constituting the cityscape provided the artistic avant‑garde of photography with a vast array of forms, and even became a foundation for the introduction of new photographic techniques. As a result of these artistic experiments, the city began to be perceived from a totally different angle. The range of photographic means, considerably enriched in this period, was further expanded with new methods of photograph production and new darkroom techniques. This enabled the transformation of known objects into subjects of exploration, and the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. After the Second World War the city became one of the most important subjects in photography, to such an extent that a new trend called ‘Street Photography’ emerged in the 1960s. ‘Street photographs’ mirrored society as reflected against the background of the city, and at the same time expressed the pho­tographers’ worldview. The documentary tendency of contemporary photography is a continuation of this trend, which embraced forms of visual discourse in which the artist’s sensitivity receded to the background for the sake of the most direct depiction of observed social reality. It is at present one of the most significant aspects of the city‑photography relationship, which takes into account not only the urban architectural envi­ronment, but also those who create the phenomenon of a city, i.e. those who live there. These trends interact in contemporary photography, which empowers photographers to sketch the outlines of the city as a pheno­menon through a variety of creative paths.

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The Relationship between Photographers and Brussels in particular A collusive relationship between the city and photography is particularly evident in the case of Brussels, which in 1830 was named the capital of independent Belgium. Only nine years later, in 1839, the public first learned of the invention of photography. The fact that both events took place almost simultaneously may shed some light on the support offered this new medium by the Belgian state. In 1850, one year before the commencement of the ‘Mission héliographique’ project in France (Heliographic Mission), a Brussels photographer, Guillaume Claine, received subsidies from city authorities for a photographic series on buildings and famous historic monuments in the capital and in many other Belgian cities. Two years later, the authorities commis­sioned the photographer to create a collection of images devoted exclusively to Brussels. This form of pro­motion of photography, and at the same time, of the city’s architecture, did not last long. It was referred to, mutatis mutandis, just one century later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in two projects organized by the Espace Photographique Contretype photography centre. This tradition was continued in the form of artistic workshops organized by the centre a few years later. Contretype is an intermediary between the authorities that provide subsidies and the artists. The centre encourages the creation of contemporary pho­tographic documentation of the city through its workshops and through support offered to photographers. Between the two above‑mentioned projects – Guillaume Claine’s work of 1850‑1852 and its most recent contemporary counterpart – one can trace an entire series of milestones that outline the city’s transformation from a photographic and historical perspective. An examination of these stages reflects the trans­formation and development of both Brussels and of photography in the period of time throughout which both matured. Recently, the capital of Belgium, Brussels, has also received the honour of being declared the capital of the European Union. Its area expanded considerably in the 19th century, as a result of the large scale urbanization of the city. Nowadays, a part of Brussels has been adapted for European Union institutions. In the course of time, the capital underwent many other transformations, often very violent, which left their marks on the cityscape,

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revealing the contradictory character of the diverse administrative strategies it was subjected to. The photographic documentation of the capital of Belgium reflects all these transformations, depicting the appearance of the buildings, the living urban flesh, and the residents. Through this photo­ graphic documentation, it becomes apparent how subjective the perception of ‘urbanness’ is and to what extent the portrait of a city is co‑composed by the portraits of its residents. The art of photography has, like Brussels, evolved considerably since its inception: from its status as craft, appreciated only from a purely technical viewpoint (at the beginning of its history), it has been elevated to the status of a significant field of contemporary art. An account of the evolution of photography is a history of the achievement of an entirely independent form of artistic expression. Historians of this field of art consider photography an expression of ‘urbanness’, capable of various visions of the city, not only of generic, stereotypical depictions of it. Symbolically, photography precludes unambiguous interpretation: photographs always say more than they show. As city cannot be limited to only one definition, so photography stimulates multiple interpretations.3 The ambiguity of the city corresponds to the polysemy of the photographic image: it is a constant, mutually enriching dialogue.

1839‑1870: Pioneer Times The dominating genre in the photography of this period was definitely the portrait; therefore the photographers’ lenses turned to Brussels as a city only in the 1850s. Guillaume Claine, whose photographic career lasted only five years, pioneered this enterprise. His first work was a photograph album with images of the most famous architectural monuments of Bruges, Ghent and Brussels. The album consisted of calotypes that were closer to etchings than to photographs. They revealed the artist’s clear preference for a diagonal perspective, which, together with the presence of human figures, animated the photographic composition. This photo­ graph collection, known as ‘the Royal Album’ (presented in 1850 to King

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Leopold I) brought the photographer great renown. Undoubtedly, it was thanks to this album that in that same year Claine obtained a subsidy from the minister of interior affairs, Charles Rogier. The state commissioned a collection of images of the most significant historic monuments of Belgium – in other words, a photographic documentation of the national heritage.4 Among the photographs taken by Claine as part of the first commission, four depicted Brussels. Their style, different from the preceding collection, resulted from a technical change: the use of glass nega­tives. In comparison to the first collection, the images were sharper and their details more precisely rendered. As for photographic composition, there was still an apparent desire to animate the image, to combine architecture with real life. Later on, Claine’s works began to lose these qualities. His documentary style might have been enforced by the limitations of the national cultural heritage presentation required by the second photography commission, which he undertook in 1852. These photographs, commissioned by the Mayor of Brussels, Charles De Brouckère, consisted exclusively of images of the capital: the objective was to create a mini‑archive of its historic monuments on the basis of a list of about twelve sites and buildings. The collec­tion, consisting of forty‑four images, became the foundation of an 1854 photography album that contained a selection of the Brussels photographs. Bruxelles photographique (Brussels in Photographs) was published by the Louis‑Désiré Blanquart‑Evrard printing house in Lille.5 Contemporaneously with Claine, another photographer with entirely different aspirations worked in the Belgian capital. Louis Dubois de Nehaut, a French rentier, immigrated to Belgium and began dabbling in photography. He specialized in portraits, but he also immortalized the city in images, which he published in a photograph album in 1854, entitled Promenade aux environs de la place de Cologne à Bruxelles: délassements d’un ami de Monsieur Gihoul (A Walk in the Vicinity of Place de Cologne in Brussels: expeditions of Mr Gihoul’s Friend). In this work, the photographer styled himself a Baudlerian flâneur, a town‑idler, a symbolic figure later described by Walter Benjamin.6 Dubois de Nehaut, who lived at the Place de Cologne (now Place Rogier), photographed his immediate environment, sometimes without even leaving his apartment. This consciously personal

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point of view is related to the purely autobiographical approach. It distinguishes itself from other photographic production of that time, which preferred precise details to the subjective view of the photographer, and a depiction of the overall character of the site to the photographer’s personal perception. The fact that Dubois de Nehaut was an amateur photographer most likely facilitated his liberal approach to the photograph subject, which, however, does nothing to diminish its uniqueness. Louis Ghémar’s oeuvre can be situated between Claine’s patriotic‑catalogue approach and Louis Dubois de Nehaut’s personal interpretation of the urban world. In the late 1860s, this renowned photographer, who specialized in portraits professionally, was hired by the Belgian Public Works Company, an English com­pany charged with a canal construction project at the Zenne River of Brussels. These large‑scale works aimed at improving living conditions in the suburbs along the river radically transformed the vicinity’s landscape: the Zenne River was redirected to the underground canal, and boulevards were created on the surface in the centre of the city.7 By commissioning Ghémar to produce a collection of photographs before the commencement of the modernization, the private company most likely wished to justify the necessity for modernization: the photographs were to present the poor condition of the Zenne riverbanks. However, Ghémar’s works had the opposite effect. Making the river the central subject of the photographs, the photographer emphasized its historic and symbolic significance. The Zenne, an axis along which Brussels expanded, appeared as a tragic heroine, who was doomed to disappear from the surface of the earth in the near future. The river’s presence was intensified by retouching techniques often employed by Ghémar, which illuminated the surface of the river with patches of light. This collection can be considered a genuine work of interpretation, achieved by the subjective perception of the photographer – to this day it constitutes one of the best photographic documentations of this part of Brussels. A consciously subjective and intentionally interpretive‑approach to photographic subjects gained significance in this field of art only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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The 1880s till the First World War: The Development of Art Photography While the pioneers regarded photography as their profession, the following period of development in the field brought a wave of amateurs who became advocates of art photography. The image preserved in the photograph, initially valued for its precision and faithful rendition of reality, gradually became appreciated for its artistic qualities as well, as in painting. The late 19th century brought an increased appreciation for the activity of amateur photographers due to the assumption that their disinterest in photography as a livelihood was conducive to creative freedom. This position was defended by the Belgian Photographic Association (Association Belge de Photographie, the A.B.P.), established in 1874, which originally promoted photography in general, and subsequently concentrated on supporting art photography. The A.B.P. consisted of many local branches and operated until the beginning of the Second World War: it issued a bulletin and, most importantly, organized national and international photography salons and exhibitions. Aesthetic concepts impelled the Photographic Association to join the Pictorialist trend in the late 1880s. This international trend encouraged the appreciation of the artistic character of photography, proclaiming the primacy of individual expression that used all possible means both during the process of a photograph’s creation and its development. Emphasizing the individual photograph’s uniqueness rather than photographic reproducibility, Pictorialism chose the art of painting as its ideal, referring to its principles in retouching and development techniques. From the art of painting, Pictorialism drew on a few classical genres of the presentation of reality – primarily portrait and landscape – while disregarding urban representations. Although there are few photographs of Brussels from this period, one can find a few examples in the work of such photographers as Adolphe Lacomblé, a lawyer in Court of Appeal in Brussels, who passionately devoted his spare time to photography. The works of this A.B.P. member consisted mainly of portraits and landscapes: images of Campine, Arden

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or the Brussels vicinity – Tervuren, the Forest of Soignes, etc. Among them one can find some images of the capital, and also of the inland port docks, which are no longer there. The poetic quality of his amateur photography was based on the interplay of reflections on the surface of the water and the rhythm of the sails of the ships moored to the shore: influenced by paintings, these images transformed the port docks into genuine marinas. A similar influence of Pictorialist aestheticism characterized the works of Alfred Cumont, another A.B.P. member. His photographic rendition of the Vieux Marché (The Old Market), which he presented at the salon organized by A.B.P. in 1902, was particularly remarkable. Produced with the gum bichromate technique, it was so successful that a reproduction was included in the association’s bulletin. This photograph was exceptional in the context of the dominant Pictorialist movement. A handful of photographs taken in the Brussels region included in the salon depicted the Rouge Cloître. This revealed the distance between urban motifs and the Pictorialists, and their frequent references to the world of art painting; it is widely known that the Rouge Cloître and its vicinity were a favourite subject of the Brussels plein‑air painters. .

Bruxelles l’hiver (Brussels in Winter) by Leon Bovier, taken at the same time as Cumont’s photograph, showed that Pictorialist tendencies in art photography drew from various sources. Bovier, who was associated with the Brussels photographic circle L’Effort, presented an urban landscape transformed by snow.8 However, the snow was not treated as a filter, as was often the case in Pictorialist urban images which used a screen of rain, fog or twilight – on the contrary, here the snow was not the main subject of the image. The photograph, clearly brightened, showed details with great precision, in keeping with the principles of the L’Effort circle members. Opposing retouching techniques that concealed the photographic subject, the circle members aspired to use only the means offered by a pure photographic technique, which explains the unusual brightness of this image. Brussels in Winter can be considered a turning point that initiated a transition towards purity, that is, an acceptance of the realistic photographic presentation and its particular characteristics, which gained popularity in the art photography in the interwar period.

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Photographer Pierre Dubreuil’s work was a precursor of this trend. Originally from Lille, a member of the Paris Photo‑Club, Dubreuil visited Brussels a number of times and eventually settled there in the 1920s. An amateur photographer who attentively followed the activity of the artistic avant‑garde, he gradually turned away from Pictorialist ‘prescriptions’ and began exploring new, fully modernist tendencies, inspired by, among others, the formal experiments of the Cubists and the Futurists. This brought him closer to con­temporary developments in American photography. Another movement developed across the Atlantic, generally referred to as ‘straight Photography’, was characterized by a trend towards ‘pure’ and ‘direct’ photography that returned to the use of the characteristic properties of the photographic technique in artistic expression. The trend, established in the United States in the 1910s, found many followers among European photographers who wanted to break with the strictures of Pictorialism. The oeuvre of Pierre Dubreuil quickly freed itself from the influence of pictorialism, as shown in his image of Grand’Place from 1908. Without the photograph’s title, it would be hard to associate this image with the famous Brussels square. The image was entirely filtered by a subjective perception of the site. The architectural background disappeared and was replaced by an accumulation of forms in space. The repetitiveness of the bright motif of umbrellas contrasted with the dark shapes of the shops and silhouettes of the passers‑by. The main part of the image was hidden in the shadow of the Town Hall, and the intense brightness of the only two illuminated parts made objects literally disappear from the photograph. This purely artistic vision of the most significant architectural symbol of Brussels showed Pierre Dubreuil’s radical perspective. It was smoothed only by a slight blur of the details, a remnant of Pictorialism, which this vision clearly surpassed. A great deal of time passed before Modernism overcame all obstacles and prevailed in Belgium – this photograph was a harbinger of the revitalisation of art photography.

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The Interwar Period: between Tradition and Modernist Attacks It can be said that in the interwar period the condition of urban Brussels was the opposite of the condition of its contemporary photography. The city underwent an enthusiastic modernization at the price of large‑scale demolition of old buildings, while an opposite tendency could be observed in photography, which resisted and opposed innovative trends with its deep attachment to the pictorialist heritage. As early as in the late 19th century, modernization held sway in large public works: the construction of the underground canal for the Zenne River, the boulevards in the city centre, and the reconstruction of the Notre‑Dame aux Neiges district, also conducted under false pretences of improving hygienic conditions. Massive demolition, begun after 1910 as part of the construction of the railway junction between the Nord and Midi railway stations, transformed the centre of the city into an enormous, open‑air construction site for several decades until the project’s completion in the 1950s. Meanwhile, photography was still dominated by the aesthetics of Pictorialism. Fidelity to this slightly passé style became one of the most characteristic features of Belgian photography in the interwar period. Outside Belgium, experimental techniques, later referred to as the ‘New Vision (‘Nouvelle Vision’), became more and more popular; avant‑garde techniques appeared first in Germany and France, and eventually spread all over Europe. In Belgium Pictorialism remained popular mainly among amateur photographers. Innovative tendencies gradually came to the fore among professional photographers, who devoted themselves to art in the margins of their professional activity. Among the photographers of the late Pictorialist period, Léonard Misonne gained particular renown on an international scale. He photographed the landscape in the vicinity of Charleroi almost exclusively, thus calling for a return to nature, even though the region was already slightly industrialized. In an attempt to capture the timelessness of places, he drew attention to the picturesqueness, not the documentary quality, of images of the countryside.

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It was only in the 1930s that he became interested in urban themes, which resulted in a photographic collection of images of Brussels. Faithful to pictorialist principles, Misonne most often presented the city through a natural filter. One example is a photograph entitled Trottoir mouillé (Wet Pavement), in which the place’s transformation by the rain gave him an opportunity to present the interplay of reflections on the stone pavement. Apart from his specific approach to light, another constant feature of this photographer’s works was his use of the oil technique, which reinforced softening effects in photography. Modernist photographers condemned the oil technique used by the Pictorialists, which consisted of the use of thick printing ink, as well as other effects that did not have a connection with directly capturing reality, and all effects that did not result directly from photographic technology. The specific properties of photographic techniques were used and explored mainly by professional photographers. Among the most significant contributors to this new stage of the development of photography is Georges Champroux, who was active in Brussels from the mid 1920s till the Second World War. Champroux ran the Actualit, a commercial photography agency in Brussels, and a press agency operating under the same signboard, which collected and sold not only photographs of current events taken by Champroux, but also the work of photographers from other countries. Aside from his commercial activity, the photographer published an original photograph album devoted to Brussels, entitled Bruxelles la nuit (Brussels by Night).9 The photographs in this undated album were a ‘negative’ portrait of the city. Artificial lighting substituted for daylight, illuminating interiors or spreading from the whitish glow of street lanterns. The city transformed by night revealed its unknown face, rendered in the language of photographic contrasts of light and shade, which created an atmosphere poignant with the extraordinary. Champroux’s preference for the ambiguous character of the night over the clarity of the day invited the viewer to regard Brussels from a different perspective, in the form of a reversed, negative portrait. Thanks to this technique, he was fully embraced

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by the Modernist school of photography that valued the presentation of contemporary social reality through innovative perspectives that remained in accordance with the nature of photographic technique. Novel tendencies in interwar photography were associated with a famous professional photographer, Willy Kessels, active in the fields of advertisement, industry and architecture. His very personal works exemplified the new standards of photography in the interwar period. He experimented with lighting and with the fragmentary image, cropping in his atelier. He explored the possibilities of solarisation and perfected the photogram technique in the darkroom. He took whole series of photographs from a bird’s‑eye and the frog perspective in plein‑air. Kessels’ collaboration with the enemy and offering his talent to the service of the radical right is a shameful side of his biography. Nonetheless, his works are excellent examples of the art of the New Vision movement. Among Kessels’ photographs of Brussels, the photographs which illustrate two works by Albert Guislain, published by a socialist printing house, L’Eglantine, were the most remarkable. The first volume of the album, published in 1930, Découverte de Bruxelles (Discovering Brussels), brought Kessels to a wide audience. His entirely Modernist vision that transformed the cityscape through the use of unusual perspec­tives and his innovative use of photomontage and collage made him one of the most significant personalities of contemporary avant‑garde photography. Two years later, another volume was published Bruxelles atmo­sphère l0‑32 (Brussels Atmosphere 10‑32). The first volume suggested – in the style of a tourist guidebook – a walk around the city following the route of the sites perceived and presented so subjectively through the lens of the photographer. The second volume presented the theme of the city in a more analytical manner: it showed sites in which the process of modernizing of the city was visible, tracing the progress of Brussels since 1910. Kessels’ photographs illustrated this theme both in terms of form and content. The photomontages of architecture were the best examples of his original approach: the choice of the photomontage technique alone revealed his preference for dynamic forms, capable of depicting a variety of elements, architectural in this case, in the manner of a kaleidoscope.

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The 1950s‑1970s: From Subjective Photography to Social Documentation Creative freedom, so tangible in Willy Kessels’ works, led to an intense development of creative photography, which in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s resulted in a deluge of various works and styles. A few major trends can be distinguished in this abundance. Primarily, the influence of the ‘subjektive Fotografie’ trend on many photographers in the 1950s must be emphasized, in particular on the members of the Photo‑Ciné‑Club in Boistfort, including photographer Gilbert De Keyser. A considerable part of his work was devoted to images of Brussels. The subjective photography movement was based on the assumption that an artist – in order to express his creative vision – should have access to all possible media available in photography, and should be able to employ them for non‑figurative aims. Traces of this tendency towards abstraction can be found in De Keyser’s Brussels photographs, which often used a technique of obscuring background objects with foreground elements which obstructed the free perception of the image. Even though this photographer’s oeuvre distanced itself from subjective photography in the course of time, the city remained its leitmotif, if not obsession, displaying both the cultural heritage of Brussels and its transformations. Therefore, Gilbert De Keyser can certainly be considered the photographer of Brussels of this period. Moreover, he played a key part in the promotion of art photography, primarily through his activity in the “Photo‑Graphie” group, of which De Keyser was a secretary, established in 1965 by Yves Auquier. Yves Auquier – the founder of another group called ‘Images’ (1974) – a year later made a series of twenty‑four images of Brussels. This collection, a sort of walk through the city, appeared to be an image‑story, written in the first person, sometimes even showing the photographer’s figure in the reflection. Preferring shade over light and favouring the superimposition of planes, Auquier presented the capital as a complex entity that moved, and, above all, transformed in relation to the observer.

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Despite all the changes in the work of many photographers of this period, there was a distinct tendency to focus on not only the urban surrounding, but also the residents. The strongest manifestation of this trend was the album entitled Bruxelles, les gens (Brussels People) that presented 37 photographs taken in the years 1969‑1972 with captions bearing street names, when the city residents became active in committees that were later replaced by associations. One may recall the success of the ‘la Marolle’ residents, who opposed the Palace of Justice expansion programme. It was in this district that Evrard took most of the photographs in his album; photographs that placed people in the foreground – literally and figuratively – emphasizing that the cityscape is also an inhabited landscape: the experienced landscape. Christian Carez and Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt had similar objectives, as shown by their photography series published in 1978, entitled The Immigrant Chronicles (Chroniques immigrées). These artists addressed the urban territory as residential area for the immigrants who made up the workforce. It was a sort of tribute paid by the photographers to the immigrant workers, shown at work or at meetings of the immigrant community. Previously, the city offered photographers a set of creative motifs most often associated with architecture or the city atmosphere; however, a new kind of photography subsequently placed the centre of interest in the urban environment in the residents of the city. Simultaneously with aesthetic photography, there developed a trend of photography engagé, committed to social discourse. Many problematic issues of the time encouraged the creation of photographs that took a stand in reference to the photographed object. A number of urban and construction projects of the time threatened to distort the character of Brussels and to disregard its population. For instance, the urban management works of Mont des Arts, discontinued at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, were completed only in the 1960s. Admittedly, the construction site, adjacent to the works on the railway junction north‑south since 1953, constituted a real ‘no‑man’s land’ in the

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very centre of the city. Similarly, the construction of the administration district – Cité de l’Etat – lasted from the late 1950s till the mid 1960s. The district was erected in order to bring together on one ­site all the most important state institutions. However, it was constructed at the price of the destruction of another district, called ‘des Bas Fonds’, whose residents were expropriated. The residents of the Nord district shared the same fate, as a result of the ‘Manhattan Centre’ construction. The misplaced idealism of this project to construct a futuristic complex of skyscrapers intersected by a motorway led to its failure: eventually, in the 1980s and 1990s, the district was reconstructed based on its original appearance. Urban change in Brussels for years followed this principle: institutions were the top priority, above other city functions. This was particularly visible at the time when the capital of Belgium became the location for European Union institutions. The ‘Berlaymont’ construction in the late 1970s initiated the ceaseless construction of new buildings meant to house various administrative organs. Resident committees launched a campaign against this phenomenon, demanding that the construction of these facilities for European integration proceed only with a simultaneous respect for the existing resident milieu in Brussels. Committees which had been established since the mid‑1950s, often encountering insufficient response from the authorities, multiplied more intensely in this period.10

From the 1980s to the Present: to Perceive the City through Images The transformation of Brussels into a ‘European’ city was not the only factor contributing to its multi‑layered identity. Its institutional complexity justifies the varied levels of perception of it as an object. Since 1989, Brussels is no longer merely an agglomeration of 19 municipalities – under the new Belgian federalist regime, it became, in effect, an independent region. However, this does not undermine its status as the capital of a state comprised of three linguistic communities: French, Dutch and German.

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Brussels’ diverse identity corresponds to a multitude of photographic approaches of the past twenty years, demonstrating the vitality of this field of art so long considered marginal. The 1980s witnessed such a flowering of photography that to this day that period is referred to as the golden age of contemporary photography. Its artistic value was at last established, which resulted in the founding of museums of photography in Antwerp, Charleroi and Brussels and in the support the Belgian French Community has given to Contretype, a centre for contemporary photography. The flourishing of photography in this period also led to the establishment of the market and of industry publications. The Clichés magazine, published in the years 1983‑1990, contributed to popular knowledge about Belgian and non‑Belgian photography. Alain D’Hooghe, the magazine’s editor‑in‑chief, considered the co‑existence of various genres the principal characteristic of the time, ‘Both in Belgium and abroad this decade was marked by great trends, and some photography practitioners did not refrain from creating works on the verge of many ‘genres’, making use of: re‑enactment, surface manipulation, the utiliza­tion of photography for artistic means (accompanied by an appropriate text), the rediscovery of old techniques, references to the past, a new approach to architecture and landscape, and multiple experiments with the same technique.’11 At the same time, the multitude of new photographic genres is nowadays used not only by photographers, but also by artists in general who reach for photography as a medium. The types of photographic presentation have also been diversified: traditional exhibitions of photographs displayed on walls are now challenged by installations and projections.

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Notes 1

Alain Guiheux, ‘Tract pour une ville contemporaine somptueuse’ in: Jean Dethier, Alain Guiheux (ed.), La Ville. Art et architecture en Europe, 1870‑1993, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994, p. 19.

2

Patrick Baudry, Thierry Paquot, L’urbain et ses imaginaires, Pessac, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2003, p. 6.

3

Posing the question about a list of the most significant criteria that define the phenomenon of a city, Andre Joris constantly points out their limita­tions: the five selected criteria (statistical, historical, legal, economic and terminological) cannot lead to a fully satisfactory definition of a city. Therefore, he claims that ‘Any absolute definition, regardless of whether it is based on numbers, history, or terminology always ends up in an impasse: The definition of a city may reflect its character provided that it retains an element of contradiction and something unspecified’ (Andre Joris, ‘La notion de ville’ in: Chaïm Perelman (ed.), Les catégories en histoire, Brussels, Institut de Sociologie de l’U.L.B., 1969, p. 94).

4

It is worth emphasising that it was Claine who requested the financial support from the authorities. Later, public photographic commissions followed an entirely different principle: it was the institutions that commissioned a photographic collection on a given subject from a photographer. Although the Heliographic Mission in France was commissioned a year after Claine’s contract, it became the model for such commissions. The project, organized by the French Institute for the Preservation of Historic Monuments and Sites, commissioned a documentation of the contemporary condition of the historic monuments which was to become the foundation for their later restoration. See: Anne De Mondenard, La Mission héliographique: Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851, Paris, Editions du Patrimoine, 2002.

5

Claine’s photographic career was extremely short: he had to leave the field after only five years for financial reasons. See more in: Steven E Joseph, Tristan Schwilden, A l’aube de la photographie en Belgique: Guillaume Claine (1811‑1869) et son cercle, Brussels, Crédit Communal, 1991.

6

The idler strolling around the city labyrinth was, according to Walter Benjamin, symbolic of a manner of observation, both distanced and penetrating, of the city on the verge of modernity, ‘It is the gaze of the flaneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises... The flaneur remains on the verge of both the large city and the bourgeoisie. Neither of these two has yet conquered him. He has not settled in

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either of them.’ (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, transl. by H. Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, on the basis of the German volume ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 23). 7

The scope and nature of this modernization can be compared to the works undertaken in Paris at the initiative of Prefect Haussmann. More on this subject can be found in the following article: Anne Van Loo, ‘L’haussmannisation de Bruxelles: la construction des boulevards du centre,1865‑1880’ in: Revue de l’Art, No. 106, 1994, p. 41.

8

In imitation of the foreign Pictorialist clubs, so revered by the Brussels circle due to their aspirations to artistic perfection, an Art Photography Salon was organized once a year along with regular conferences and social meetings for circle members. Their Bulletin, published annually, was more of a luxurious album than an information periodical. Devoted to the idea of a dialogue between the arts, the Bulletin expressed this not only through the content of its articles, but also by using fonts inspired by Art Nouveau. See more in: Claire Leblanc, ‘L’Effort’: Cercle d’art photographique belge (1901‑1910), Brussels, La Lettre volée (Col. ‘Palimpsestes’), 2001.

9

The Champroux album was unfortunately undated: therefore, a detailed comparison with the album Paris la nuit (Paris by Nigh) by Brassaï which may have been its model is not possible. The latter album, published in 1932 with an introduction by Paul Morand, was widely discussed in the press, thanks to which it became widely known. Apart from the clear influence of Surrealistic aestheticism, the photographs in the album revealed Brassaï’s mastery of nocturnal photographs. The artist himself wrote many articles on night photography. This technical information undoubtedly inspired other photographers to experiment with nocturnal photographs. Georges Champroux, for example, was most likely influenced by his articles. For more information, see the reprint of the album: Brassaï, Paris de nuit, Paris, Flammarion, 1987.

10

Noteworthy examples include the Mont des Arts Defence Committee, the Quartier des Arts Association and the resident committees of the Nord and ‘la Marolle’ districts. Apart from various spontaneously established associations, two official institutions were founded in the late 1960s and the early 1970s which played a key role in debates on urban issues: Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaines (A.R.A.U.) and Inter‑Environnement.

11

Alain D’Hooghe, Images fabriquées et fragments du réel. Quelques aspects de la photographie depuis les années 1980, in: Georges Vercheval (ed.), Pour une histoire de la photographie en Belgique, Charleroi, Musée de la Photographie, 1993, p. 137. 477

1. Chev. L.P.T. Dubois De Neuhaut [Fêtes du 25e Anniversaire de Léopold 1ier, Bruxelles] 1856 La Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, vue du côté du Café Bosquet

2. Louis Ghémar [La Senne avant son voûtement] 1867 Collection Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi

3. Pierre Dubreuil [La Grand'Place de Bruxelles] 1908 Collection Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi

4. Gilbert De Keyser [Bruxelles, Place de la Monnaie] 19 juin 1970 Collection Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi

5. Bernard Plossu [Extrait de la série ‘En ville’] 1997-1998 Résidences d’artistes à Bruxelles, Galerie Contretype, Bruxelles

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Questioning the Document: The Art of Alfredo Jaar Jan-Erik Lundström —

Before I turn directly to the work of Alfredo Jaar, let us briefly consider a context or backdrop to a reflection upon contemporary documentary imagery. At a certain historical point, I would identify it as the late 80’s to early 90’s, there was a widespread concern over the fate of the straight photograph. It was one of those death tolls that those of us who have followed art or photography discourse for some time have become accustomed to. The reasons for this particular bellringing might, in hindsight, have been threefold: the arrival of the digital, the general ascension of the staged image, and the appropriation of the moving image within the museum space and exhibition practices (yes, I am compressing time but it is not my intention to give a complete historical narrative here). Of course, photographic discourse has been apocalyptic, as well as melodramatic, from the start. I do not have to rehearse the various pronouncements aimed at the medium from its beginning – both regarding its disastrous or sensational effects upon just about everything, as well as the calls for its demise. However, every death toll is followed by a supporter rally. (Remember the debates around black and white and colour for example, and the various round-ups they orchestrated; or various calls for the death of photography, issued throughout the last decades of 20th century). And, consequently, lots of rallying took place around the straight photograph.

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For straight photography, as you know, returned with a vengeance. The 1990’s celebrated such diverse ventures as, for example, Nan Goldin’s continued intensive and excessive portrayal of her extended family, the innumerable re-editions of the work of Robert Frank, upstarts such as Richard Billingham, the frenzy of Boris Michailov, the exoticism of Esko Männikkö, not to mention Araki, and so forth… in its embrace of the straight photograph. It was even received with open arms on the art world stage where comfort was engaged from basking in the imagined light of the real emanating from these straight photography projects. A certain fetishism of the real, assuming various forms, remains up to today part of a diagnosis of the present. As such, rhetorics of the document and realisms link to any analysis of the straight photograph. The present is of course a moment of crisis. Contemporary visual culture is both a culture of scarcity as well as one of abundance, of lack as well as redundancy and repetition. Doubly undermined, language – verbal or visual – looses ground daily, as words and images, emotions and thought, are continously corrupted and eroded, in the imprecise authority of mass media. To somehow unravel this crisis, it is clear that the idea of contemporary culture as media-saturated, as overwhelmingly filled with information and imagery, needs to be supplemented or modified. Why do we so frequently and carelessly pronounce our time as one of image surplus, of visual over-saturation? We usually agree on such a description or characterization of the present, but, even if true, is it really a central fact of our culture? It might even be more relevant to describe our time as one characterized by escalated censorship and information control, by lack of information and lack of images, by scarcity in all aspects and senses of that word. And, perhaps, this also would also apply to the conditions of photographic practice, in particular documentary photography. If you allow me to sidestep somewhat, in order to make my point clearer. I would like to see a history produced on the wars having taken place over the last decades. It seems from a brief overview that for each consecutive war, information in general and press-photography in particular has been more and more controlled, limited, circumscribed, censored, self-censored, contained. Certainly, censorship, control of

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information, propaganda has been an integral element of every war scaled by mankind, but, in fact, the horror of war is now no longer represented or visualized. In for example the first Gulf War, the maimed or injured or mutilated or dead body, was almost completely absent. In Afghanistan, the image of the Al Qaida men hiding in huge complexes of caves, was heavily promoted, lending an idea of all the fighting in the dark and somehow underground, whereas most of the bombing was carried out towards residential centres – villages or cities – in daylight. In Iraq, the images of actual combat are non-existent, while imagery that can be re-cast as sectarian fighting are publicized. John Taylor, author of War Photography and Body Horror, the two most authoritative texts available on the subject of photojournalism and war, said that it was a mistake to have a picture from the first Gulf War on the cover of one of his books, Body Horror, a badly burned body in the sand, since, he pointed out, it was an invisible war, where suffering was unseen and unpictured. To put it a bit differently, I would like to steer away from that almost unbearably powerful consensus around images – and thus photographs – that they are in abundance, that they overwhelm us, that they flood our present and invade our minds; the idea of an image-saturated world where we eventually loose contact with the images themselves, their plenitude undermining their power and authority. Being overexposed to images, we loose our ability to differentiate among them, to engage with them, to analyze them. Or even to feel and respond; that we no longer connect with the display of human plight, feel compassion or empathy in response to the conditions of human life we are made to see. Or so the argument goes. You recognize it; it has been with us at least since Susan Sontag and On Photography). But just as quantity, says nothing of quality, or just as the individual’s encounter with a particular image is not a fixed and predetermined relation but a negotiation, an unpredictable and always unfinished encounter; the story of images can not be levelled as a collective amnesia. My proposal is to replace abundance with scarcity. Losses and absences are what determine our day. We lack images and we lack photographs. There is not – and can not – be enough of them. I propose

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that photographs are necessary and crucial narratives of the world. And, furthermore, that they expand the visible – and thus the real. Instead of lamenting the flow of images, we need to look to the untaken pictures, the unmade photographs, the unseen situations, the gazes and visions not yet translated into photographs. What are then the tools and possibilities of the documentary image in navigating and accessing contemporary culture and its layered realities? Speaking beyond the divide of fact and fiction, news media and art worlds, of globalisation and local circumstance, how might images begin to address the white areas on the map in the contemporary world image? And how might documentary practices unlock entrenched habits and muted zones of contemporary visual cultures? The Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, resident of New York since the early 1980’s, has in a long series of projects provided us with a sustained reflection upon the powers, limitations and possibilities of the still photograph, in particular the documentary image. Indeed, there is a sequence of projects within his vast oeuvre that initiate and expand an in-depth and multifaceted meditation on the nature and power of photographic representation. Most of Alfredo Jaar’s installations – his preferred mode of operation – focus on a particular concern emergent in issues of political geography. The starting point of a work is, in other words, topical, engaged in issues of the day. In seductive, dramatic installations, often photographically based and architecturally orchestrated, these topics are visualized, confronted, represented. The dumping of oil waste in Nigeria and the subsequent poisoning of drinking water, Vietnamese boat refugees having crossed The Chinese Sea on their way to Hong Kong, contemporary rightwing extremism in Germany, refugee and immigration policies in Finland, the homeless of Montreal, the Mexican-American border, gold mining in Brazil and concurrent labour conditions, the genocide in Rwanda, to mention but a few. While the topic at hand is the focal point of these works, the concern is not always primarily to inform as such. Rather, most of Jaar’s works are

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engaged in a critique of ways of knowing or not knowing, ways in which Western media address (or do not address) topics as those mentioned above; the methods through which certain issues are denied access to media, are stereotyped, or kept outside the horizon of attention. Yet parallel to such investigations into particular topics and their media pathways, Jaar has also pursued a kind of ontological path, towards an investigation of the very communicative power and competence of images, especially the photograph’s cognitive and/or emotive reach. In fact, one might claim that a sequence of works even explores something like the very nature of images and the very essence of photographs. Political topicality links with an ontological investigation into the medium of photography. In this pursuit, Jaar’s work also tends to cast its net both towards viewer and image-maker. It concerns the production of images as well as the consumption of images. As system critique, Jaar’s works aim at countering and transforming the conventions of photojournalism, as well as to re-educate or, rather, uneducate its viewers. His work probes and uncovers the habits of photographers and viewers alike, prompting one’s participation in and awareness of the act of image making as well as in the act of looking and interpreting. I would now like to turn to a certain sequence of installations which finds their platform in a language of refusal and denial, repetition and redundancy, loss and absence, in their attempt to uproot our most engrained responses to images, uncovering and undressing our habits of attention and consumption. 1+1+1 is an early work from 1987 which tested the ethics of official visual culture and how images tend to strengthen stereotypical conceptions. From a number of photo agencies, Alfredo Jaar simply acquired a small number of photographs. The search criteria which yielded the purchased photographs were ‘the third world’ and ‘poverty.’ The results were amazingly conform. Almost all the photographs were of groups of anonymous children, barefooted, swollen stomachs, loosely grouped in front of the camera, red soil, a village in the background. In the installation that Jaar produced based upon these purchased photographs, three images were presented tightly cropped so that only feet and legs were

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seen, but all three framed differently – a golden frame, a mirror, and an empty frame containing nothing. The questions provoked by this work are complex and precise: What does context mean for the interpretation of images? Why such homogeneity in picturing the Third World? How are such stereotypes created, promoted and sustained? From photographs taken while visiting refugees from Vietnam harboured at transition camps in Hong Kong grew the work Nguyen, 4 times (reworked also as a book: Nguyen, 100 times). This piece is consists of 4 lightboxes, identical in size, hung flush next to each other in a row on the wall. Each lightbox contains a portrait of the young Vietnamese girl Nguyen, face and shoulders only. She confronts the camera, looks us in the eye. But each photograph is slightly different, her facial expression changes slightly, the position of her head, eyes, shifts. The four photos represent a sequence of images taken over perhaps one second or less as the photographer, Alfredo Jaar, encountered Nguyen as refugee at one of the transition camps mentioned. But this is incdeed a dramatic portrait. Or anti-portrait. Nguyen evades portrayal. She escapes the act of representation. Through repetition, the image of her is not captured but destabilized. Even though clearly caught in an unequal exchange – a refugee, a girl meeting a man with a camera – she is the victor in this representational contest. And, in fact, the work points to the impossibility of portraiture. No other human being can be captured, held, stopped, through the act of representing. Dialogue can only be continuous. Inferno & Paradiso is the title of an exhibition by Alfredo Jaar. The artist, in this project turned curator, has defined the exhibition as ‘an exercise in faith.’ His question is: Can we today believe in images? Can photographs any longer touch us? Can they move us, affect us? Crystallized from a personal disenchantment with the ability of contemporary media to mediate crucial events and experiences of mankind, the pursuit of this question has led to an invitation to eighteen active documentary photographers from across the globe. Each photographer has then been asked to submit two photographs to the exhibition. One Infernophotograph, one Paradiso-photograph. The Inferno-photograph is to be chosen as being the most painful and difficult photograph the particular

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photographer has ever taken (the idea is supposedly less content, more the very act taking the photograph). The Paradiso-photograph is to be the opposite: the most euphoric and joyous photographic experience ever. In the final exhibition, the two times eighteen photographs were presented in a suggestive and powerful installation. All the images were projected as slides on the wall. Eighteen projections; two universes in photographs, first Inferno, then Paradiso, then Inferno, and so on, in an ongoing cycle – where the viewer was required to spend one minute per photograph (an exceptional amount of time, at least in comparison with our culture’s image viewing habits), i.e. eighteen minutes per Inferno or Paradiso viewing. Could then a photograph capture or assess the extremes of human existence – death, birth, grief, joy, wrath, peace, fear, love? What, indeed, might take place in terms of viewing photographs when we are given the opportunity to spend such time – one minute – with them? The reference to Dante’s Divina Commedia is not accidental. One might say that Dante was a documentary photographer of his time. The grand allegorical narrative of Divina, Virgil’s long journey to Paradiso, through Inferno and Purgatorio, to find and meet his beloved Beatrice, is all the while a magnificent and many-sided documentary fresco over late 13th and early 14th century Florence, Tuscany and Venice. Throughout Virgil’s descent and ascent testimonies are given, witnesses step forward, persons tell of their convictions, points of view, destinies, to the listener, writer, photographer Virgil. Virgil is the witness to all this, putting forth his material to the reader: ‘so bitter it is, death is little more; / but of the good to treat, which there I found, / Speak will I of the other things I saw there.’ Alfredo Jaar has claimed that his rhetorical exercise in Inferno & Paradiso was successful. His question was, with the support of eighteen accomplished photographers, answered positively. We have not lost our ability to be moved by photographs and photographs have not lost their capacity to move us. We are not lost in a sea of images. The images speak to us, they tell us about the world: we should promise to stay with them and take care of them.

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While Inferno & Paradiso took a didactic approach towards an inquiry into the contemporary power of images and reigning practices in and of those images, Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda project, produced between 1994 and 1999, continued a radical inquiry into the nature of the photographic image, its position in contemporary media, and, again, the possibility of stories at the extremes of human existence. Still sceptical to photography’s power to elicit a sincere emotional response from a viewer in a culture used to conventionalized scenes of horror and brutality promulgated by the mass media, The Rwanda project has attempted to find other methods of representation when confronted with such atrocities. ? How to represent misery and tragedy without exploitation? How to image or photograph genocide (when even the very idea of such a representation is obscene)? How to shine light on the Western indifference and lack of response and concern regarding the genocide in Rwanda? Alfredo Jaar travelled to Rwanda in September 1994, in the aftermath of the genocide. He took thousands of photographs, as he tried to comprehend the scope of the slaughter, including the lack of response from Western media. Yet, in the installation Real Pictures he shows not a single one of these images – as in fact in the entire Rwanda project (consisting of over twenty major installations altogether). Again rejecting the traditional news photograph, brought back from the scenes of slaughter; Alfredo Jaar chooses to present Rwanda almost entirely without photographs: Waiting, the only photograph from Rwanda including humans, living or dead, is taken by Jaar as he is standing in Uganda, right on the Rwandan border, looking at thirty-nine – all identified and named – persons, refugees, standing in Rwanda, facing the camera, waiting to cross the border on their escape from their home country. In Real Pictures, the installation consists of a large number of black boxes, piled and arranged, as if they were coffins, monoliths, monuments,… Each box, resembling a portfolio box, contains a photograph. But the box is sealed. The photographs are not available to the viewer. Inaccessible photographs, images taken out of sight, censored, hindered to enter the world of diffusion and dissemination. On view, in the gallery, the piles of boxes were funereal, a ‘cemetery of images’ (Alfredo Jaar’s own description), buried photographs that refuse to tell us the reality of the

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Rwandan massacre. Or not? On the top of each box, just legible in the half-light of the installation, a short text transmits a brief encounter with the particular image in the box: Ntarama Church, Nyamata, Rwanda, 40 kilometres south of Kigali, Monday, August 29, 1994. This photograph shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out in the daylight. Four hundred Tutsi men, women and children, who had come here seeking refuge, were slaughtered during Sunday mass. Benjamin looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove that the atrocities were real and that he had seen the aftermath. Or Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of the church. Dressed in modest, worn clothing, her hair is hidden in a faded pink cotton kerchief. She was attending mass in the church when the massacre began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes were her husband Tito Kahinamura (40), and her two sons Muhoza (10) and Matirigari (7). Somehow she managed to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise (12), and hid in a swamp for 3 weeks, only coming out at night for food. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the sun. In this installation, Alfredo Jaar seems to suggest that we cannot represent the incomprehensible, that genocide is beyond the limits of representation. Thus it is better to refuse visual representation altogether. But this act of refusal, disavowal and negation is incomplete; with the text, imagination – and thus knowledge – is again set ablaze. The text, which simultaneously guards and refuses access to and gives a glance of the photograph, as well as functioning as the photograph’s stand-in, relays grief, laying the dead to rest as it were. The work is a rebuttal of the media coverage of Rwanda, refusing images – blinded we stutter and stumble when asked to see death in the eye – in order to be able to begin again.

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The genocide in Rwanda brings us to the limits of representation. Not necessarily the limits of comprehension; the genocide according to current research was only much too comprehensible and predictable: ‘race’-antagonisms had been fuelled by media and government and was originally created by the Belgian colonial power. But the limits of representation, especially the limits of the journalistic or documentary image, as conceived for mass media circulation. The aesthetic strategy chosen by Jaar is dramatically different than Adorno’s famous lament that poetry is no longer possible after Auschwitz. If Adorno implied that poetry is no longer possible after the Holocaust, then Jaar proposes that it is only poetry which is possible. Not the simulated presence of the document, but the associative presence of the poetic image. It is absence which enables presence. Rwanda can only be represented as loss, absence, negation. In fact, Jaar’s practice in the Rwanda project serves as a kind of a symbolic funeral for aspects of contemporary visual culture; a rhetorical – and empathic – gesture in the face of carelessly mediated and redundant media imagery. And it suggests an alternative strategy: Reduce, simplify, find the zero degree, start all over. Real Pictures distances itself from the standard mimetic pratices of documentary photography and photojournalism, instead forwarding the void between representation and reality. Only through focussing the void is it possible to acknowledge the desires of imaging, the quest for both content and reconciliation, seek and find the shape of and the path towards knowledge of the world. Reduction is a method for recharging the image, for eliminating dead genres and overcoming reified practices; and, indeed, for absence to confirm presence, the act of refusal may, in contradistinction, begin to, again, bridge the gap – impossible and unbridgeable – between representation and reality. Perhaps such reduction and negation might have a cleansing affect on visual culture, an aesthetic strategy with which we might be able to reconsider and revive an ethics of images? Shuddering between absence and presence, loss and actuality, desire and death, facing the emptiness of destruction, looking straight into the void, our humanity is recovered.

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1. / 2. Alfredo Jaar [The Rwanda Project] The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 1996

3. Alfredo Jaar [The Rwanda Project] Real Pictures 1995

4. Alfredo Jaar [The Rwanda Project] Real Pictures 1995

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The World in Light Cartier-Bresson’s Time Signatures Michel Onfray —

One of the commonplaces taken on board by art history is that the advent of photography meant death for a certain way of painting: Nadar was Ingres’ nemesis and expedited the obsolescence of all those artists who, in the tradition of Zeuxis, sought to render reality with the utmost fidelity. The Impressionists responded and overcame the perceived problem by painting the light instead of the subject. The play of light on the world. The cathedrals, haystacks and scrubland were just a pretext for the all-important elements that were energy and the power of luminosity. This was the road tot abstraction. Oddly enough, no one ever looked at things the other way round and asked about the implications of this aesthetic upheaval for photography itself. Okay, the bromide print meant curtains for figurative pictures, but what came next? When a new way of painting took over, how then were people supposed to go about taking photographs? What was to be done with the apparatus with its tripod and its plates, and then with those cameras that, having become portable, handy and fast, revolutionized the way we think about images? Etymology has an answer. To photograph is to write in light. In other words: to aim at a luminous approach tot the world. Luminous in every sense of the word, that is: in the mastery of light, of course, but also by making the world more brilliant, more visible. The artist’s duty now was to produce an epiphany of the world, to create a reality, to pick up and capture not its essence but its existence. Few arts are as un-Platonic as photography. Rather than re-enacting the allegory of the cavern, the

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camera obscura revived the cynical nominalism for which reality is one with its mode of appearance. Good photography is like a demiurge that triumphs over this superimposition. Bergson’s philosophy was not some revealed truth that appeared out of nowhere, but a symptom of a period obsessed by a number of essential themes. Duration, intuition, memory, simultaneity and consciousness, but also the élan vital, the mirage of the present in the past, or even the past in the present, abstraction and metaphor, thought and movement, the creation of the possible through the real, the image as mediator of the intuition, the elimination of duration, truth and reality, the retrograde movement of the true, the soul stiffening into a body, the person into an object and attentiveness to life-all these are key concepts for reading through to the other side of images. Deleuze diverted the flow of the Bergsonian river in order to put forward a theory of cinema, but no such work has been done for photography. Insofar as they make use of such materials, photographers philosophize. Agreed, they do not create concepts or invent conceptual personae, but then it would be wrong to reduce philosophy to the classical, professional and even corporatist vision that these caveats imply. There are times when thinking overflows concepts, a fact of which poets, artist, musicians and architects all offer living proof. For Bergson, again, to philosophize is to say the same thing all one’s life, to attempt to formulate one’s original intuition and, in the end, to create a world that might enable this difficult maieutic process to take place. The definition of photography is the same: it means accumulating thousands of shots in order to express a world – our world. Henri Cartier-Bresson illustrates these notions very nicely. Nearly half a century of working the shutter, opening en closing, letting in more light or less, framing, cutting, carving out a closed perspective in the open real, marking out a rectangle in the profusion of the world, enclosing the rebellious, dynamic and fluctuating matter of what befalls within a space with four right angles – there’s an ethics for you. And from it there springs an aesthetics which underpins an ontology that is Heraclitean when it comes to the action concerned and Parmenidean regarding its result. The world as river, the world as sphere.

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The Struggle against Time What an artist leaves us, and especially a photographer, is the fight with the angel of time, with Chronos. Framing, triggering, cropping, printingall are operations that bring into play a certain quantity of time. And here, time is light. The corpuscles of light are the sign of duration. To photograph implies mastery of energy, capturing a force and playing with an unpredictable wave mechanics. At the focal point of the photographic action lies time. The unbreakable kernel, the point of convergence of all the artist’s tensions, efforts, preoccupations and work from day tot day. A tiny hole, a conceptual needle’s eye. At the epicenter we find an orifice through which there flows an interrupted flux. Clearly, this time does not exist as a pure form, like a disembodied idea, like the mobile image of the immobile eternity touted by the Platonists. The time of the nominalists implies metaphors and incidents, alternative means of access. The photograph reveals or (as in the laboratory) develops these multiple occurences. Consequently, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs all revolve around this question of the struggle with time, the combat against Chronos. And, in a process that remains inaccessible tot the lover of thematic books and exhibitions, we can see the emerging lines of force out of which the artist’s monument defines its architecture. From this profusion of images, I would suggest a possible division into seven series. True, the procedure does not comprehensively cover the oeuvre, but it does show the forms and forces at work in the edifice. The world of Henri Cartier-Bresson implies the time frame of the realists, who are the enemies of the universalists. It therefore calls for variations, which are as follows: the kairos; the instant of time; the trace: its imprint; place: its geography; the immaterial: its suspension; abolition: its loss; action: its energy; the eternal return: its reiteration. All his photographs belong to one or another of these categories. Sometimes underpinned by three or four of them, the work seems denser, stronger, more charged with signs and meaning. Time rustles and buzzes through all the photographs, electric and superb in its magnificent durations. Wrested from the world, from journeys and epochs, from the events of Cartier-Bresson’s own life but also from those of the 20th century that he has lived through, these photographs embody an iconological passion.

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From the old silhouettes, the old ghosts eternalized in the postures of the year 1932 on the avenues of Marseille’s Prado, to the likely elf-portrait as a shadow puppet from the final year of the recently defunct century, in Provence, the photographer’s trajectory through all his photographs comes down to a ridiculous handful of minutes. Ridiculous, certainly, but essential too because, as samplings of time, they stake a claim to eternity. And as the decades go by, some of them are already living their life on the other side of the mirror, in the presence of images that define our centuries and eras by drawing on these aide-mémories crystallized into diamonds of black and white.

The Right Moment Clearly, the (good) photographer flourishes as a musician of the kairos, the right moment. There is no comparably powerful and condensed equivalent for this Greek concept which was used commonly in the Hellenistic world. The suitable occasion, the ideal moment, the proper opportunity, Baltasar Gracian’s Baroque ‘point’ or Bartes’ punctum, which dissappears at the slightest approach from Jankélévitch’s ‘almost nothing.’ Too early before, too late afterwards, it forces the here and now, on pain of dissepearing in the discreetest evanescense. It is the photograph that vouches for the photographer’s success in squaring up against time. A child walking on its hands, lanky body turned over, on a dusty road in Greece; a cyclist in a stony scene with a double bass on his back, his body partially hidden by the instrument placed there like a carapace or a Surrealist collage – or maybe a violin has been thrown and is flying toward him, straining to hit back. A man erect, his face disappearing behind the knot in the drapery. An Indian gesture of prayer, with the hands apparently holding up a cloud. All these fleeting moments are there to convey the specifically poietic dimension of the real. When the moment disappears, all too swiftly absorbed by the flight of time, there nevertheless remain traces. These function as the proof that it occurred. For the trace speaks of the past event as it continues to produce effects. It shows its passing, present, movement and activity, but also its aftermath. When the actors reappear elsewhere, we can still read the signs and the icons. Tire marks after lots of maneuvering, on a work site

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maybe, juxtaposing, crossing and confounding the notched and regular forms that hollow the earth Others showing chevrons printed into the ground by the wheel of a tractor, and then shadows playing on the combed matter after the harrow has passed over it; the highly worked landscape, forged by the plowing and the furrows crowning the undulating surface; arabesques dug into the snow, with no sign of the stroke that produced them; and then, in a cultural quintessence of this play on traces, the Zen garden, hyper-coded by years of spirituality. Every trace s marked in a place, a geography that is itself the prisoner of its material. The time of space, landscape offers millions of opportunities take its photograph. A favorite subject, it can superimposed over the world with great exactness. A face is also a landscape, but Cartier-Bresson’s work does not really privilege that modality: the portrait, still less the self-portret. There are none of these close-ups on lives condensed in a face, written with wrinkles, lines and volumes constructed by life. Bodies, forms and looks, but not beyond. Carnal, subjective and particular geographies are less important than geographies in the classic sense of the term. So many towns and places – Europe, of course, its capitals laden with history (Paris, Istanbul, London, Dublin, etc.), but also other continents, other spiritualities and politics (India, China, Mexico). Here the genius loci is captured in a detail shown in an unaccustomed way, be it the prow of a gondola rising up against the sky like the tip of a scythe, the eyes of the gargoyles of Notre-Dame overlooking the Seine or the Breughellike punctuations of fisherman on a frozen Russian lake. Such subjects take us to the other side of the real, where it ceases to be visible and where we must deduce its nature from what is shown. Ways of access to the immaterial. Many of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs interest us less by the subject, the occasion, than by the eternal nature of what they express: not so much the Zen garden as its calm and serenity; not so much two men face tot face in a Neapolitan street, one of the other’s lap, as the amorous entente of friendship; not so much the piazza in Siena as the crushing summer heat. Here is lesson in how to photograph silence, happiness, warmth and peace.

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A Place in History Sometimes this immateriality has to do with a Bygone age and implies the capture of what is gone. When the artist presses the button, he picks up a present whose value is evident in its potential wealth, its capacity for testimony and memory. As time accelerates, the lived moment is quickly cast into the vaults of history, into the box rooms full of old things, old situations, old places and old habits. The cars of those days, the buildings in the process of demolition, the vacant lots, the shanty towns – all those ruins to be, nothingness foretold. Lost words, too: the provinces and their specificities, Old Europe and its clichés: the Breton coiffe, the Norman plowman and his horses, Romanian folklore – but also the omnipresence of Christianity, the processions of Irish curates, the roadside crosses, the Austrian nuns, the decrepit monseigneurs of the Italian church, Spanish seminarians on an outing, mass ordinations of Polish priests, costly exhibitions of the Holy Sacrament in Madrid, the intimacy of a confessional in Lisbon – snapshots of an old world now in the shadow of nihilism. The end of memory and the end of meaning. This work on lost time subsequently acquires a political dimension. With presentness gone, there remains the place in history and the scenography of the action. Henri Cartier-Bresson has grown up and grown old with the 20th century and photographed it along the way: the Front Populaire in France and the introduction of paid holidays; the mythically resonant working class of the day; work, naps and leisure in working families, but also the liberation (of Paris, the death camps), Eastern and Central Europe, the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, China and its military. Then May 1958 and its pendant, May 68. Traces of Gaullist France, tear gas, one Old France and then another. All these different levels of time therefore churn together moments and memories, places and formulae, the visible and the invisible, lost time sublimated as time regained. The ensemble is written out under the sign of eternal return and repetition. For Christians wrongly think of time in terms of an arrow, whereas Orientals rightly say that it is circular. Everything is endlessly repeated. The same and the other permanently

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replace one another. Difference and repetition, said Deleuze. The photographer catches the singular, the particular, but excels when at the same time he is able to hold up the universal, the general. The ephemeral situation leads to its eternal truth. Cartier-Bresson is thus particularly attached to the natural expression of movement: the seasons. Flood water, overflowing rivers drowning the lineaments of catastrophe; Siberian cold with the petrifaction of detail in the stillness of cold and ice; the play of light and shadow in keeping with the movement of the sun across the sky; Greek mornings, Spanish noons, Russian afternoons, Irish evenings, Parisian nights and all the variations of light. And then there all the human labors dictated by that cosmic truth (plowing, sowing, harvesting, transhumance, pasturing). He casts a kind of Virgilian gaze cast over nature’s eternal return. And on and on. Having leafed through all the books that assemble Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, you start to ask yourself which single photo could say all this, summing up his style, his temperament and his work, offering quintessential expression of his approach to the world. In fact, there are two that seem particularly suitable. One of them, M, (1967) shows a sublime pair of woman’s legs surrounded by the floral plumage of a sofa. There is a book resting on her thigh and a hand turning the pages. The framing leaves out the bust and the face, and the legs form a perfect diagonal across the square. The second, En Tramway, Zurich (1966), shows us the back of man in a hat sitting on the tram, this being empty apart from another figure holding a cross on which we can read the name and dates of a deceased person. Destiny at its most basic. Eros and Thanatos. The rest, as we say, is literature.

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The Identity of Photography Michel Onfray

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The philosopher Zeno of Elea, as is well known, had his own special way of calculating. He held that tortoises could run as fast as human runners, since the twofaced athletes could never overtake them. He also liked to consider the noise made by a falling measure of millet, two groups of men rapidly running in each other’s direction who would never do more than cross paths, and arrows that would never reach their target, no matter how skillful the archer. How can that be?! We cry impatiently. Zeno was right in arguing, in his famous and impeccable syllogism, that if movement is made up of discreet immobile moments, then motion is impossible. The arrow would never hit home. And nothing exists except for the sum of immobile moments. For material proof and experimental verification of the validity of Zeno of Elea’s arguments, one need look no further than Nicéphore Niepce and Félix Tournachan (or Nadar), photography’s two founding fathers. We don’t need to consult the explanations of a distinguished Collège de France professor (namely Henri Bergson) on the relationship between thought and motion, time and movement, the mobile moment and immobile eternity, before we conclude that Zeno had it wrong. But photographers prove the opposite every day – Zeno was right in dissecting motion as other did matter, and in isolating the instant as its essential component just as others declared the atom tot be indivisible. The instant is to movement as the atom is to matter; an irreducible essence, the hard core of reality as we conceive it.

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The photographer is in constant search of this epicenter. With every shot, he seeks to fox one of the thousands of instants that make up time, in order to extract from it the matter of sense, shape and perception, if not emotion. The embodiment of Zeno’s arguments lie at the very heart of the act of photography; all that moves contains nestled within it a congealed stillness, which must be tracked down and captured so that it can be shown off like a trophy. Those who undertake this act are operating at the interstices of the demiurgic and metaphysics, of phenomenology and dialectics, of ethics and esthetics. By sculpting time, freezing memory and working consciousness as another might work metal, the photographer embodies a truly philosophical quest. The demiurge is the creator of images, the maker of icons who seeks to stop time, become its master and posses it in the proposition that he makes of an instance captured in its essence. His prey is what the Greeks called ‘kairos’, the right moment, the moment before or after which nothing is possible of conceivable, either because its interest resides in a particular instant of motion bracketed by unimportant vicissitudes, or because it represents the persistence of a configuration that he seeks to make last forever, in a variation on the them of the still life. Every time he photographs a moment of a movement or the eternity of a life that seems still, what he seeks in his viewfinder is the immobility that resides within motion or time. Muybridge and Marey experimented with the forms of time, succession and duration, decomposing and deconstructing the diverse and multiple into images between which there is room for still more images. Both of them were obsesses with time and strove to demonstrate what Zeno taught, that motion can be reduced to the sum of the fixed instants that make it up, that the dynamics of life are made up of static elements. These two men alone developed and deployed that which was to constitute the substance of every photographer’s search: a quest for the fixity that motion is made of, so that the everlasting can be isolated and exhibited. In playing with time, in seeking to discover what it is made of, or at least its modes of appearance, the photographer is like a philosopher who strives to reduce and gather into the ambit of a unity that which

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is manifest exclusively in multiplicity. Both seek a single snapshot or concept that can represent a manifold reality. This predilection for unity is what makes the photographer an adept of Parmenides, as opposed to the filmmaker, who is a disciple of Heraclitus. Parmenides, a Pre-Socratic who like Zeno was also from Elea, was the philosopher who taught that reality is a unity that is self-contained, perfect, without beginning or end, because it arises from itself, absolute and everlasting. That unity could be a photo. Heraclitus, a Pre-Socratic from Ephesus, is the man who wrote that time is like an eternal river where one cannot bathe in the same waters twice. This fluidity, this flowing away, seems more characteristic of movies. The photographer and the filmmaker do not share the same notion of ideal time. For the photographer, it is fixed, frozen, stopped. For the filmmaker, it is reconstructed and reconsidered but the point lies in its unfolding and development. In a way, Plato reconciled these two schools of thought by making time the moving image of an immobile eternity, so that the photographer appears to be concerned only with searching for and obtaining the proof of this capture of that immobile eternity in a single image. The purpose of the demiurge is to carry out this magical operation, to concentrate in a snapshot the essence of that which structures motion. In the middle of the river, to express it: a sphere.

Stop-Time In the process of his work, the photographer/demiurge also becomes a metaphysician insofar as he is the creator of signs that take on meaning over time, and this despite, against and with him. The images he creates are the descendants of those our ancestors used to adorn cave walls long ago. There is a Brassaï photo of graffiti, for example, that is a marvelous example and expression of this. Scratches, hands in negative, geometric figures, traces, nicks – everything affirms the power of what Malraux called anti-destiny. The same geographies that can be read in cave paintings can also be read in Brassaï’s silverprints. This is the opposite of a palimpsest. In prehistoric times, despite the time to come and against it, but relying on it the better to overcome it, the artists at both ends of

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this human chain constantly renew the quest for signs that make sense in opposition to the world’s nothingness. As entropy does its dirty works, in the face of looming destruction and ruin, in the face of a death foretold, the death of an individual as well as that of entire civilizations, the caveman and the camera-man declare their sublime revolt, their desire for eternity. Their work constitutes as act of resistance, a flight in the face of time and its ravages. This game of freezing an instant for all eternity paradoxically implies corollary the beginning of death. The pose that is required of the subject is that of petrifaction, a state of rigidity, the immobility of death. That is why the subject is asked to smile, to avoid the seriousness usually propaedeutic to nothingness. Memory and remembrance, these two modalities of cruel time, are imprinted equally well on shrouds and photographs. To photograph is to freeze time, to immortalize the hapax degemena that structure an existence, a landscape, an era, a situation, a person. When we look at a photographic print we partake of a limitless repetition of a instant that was once captured. A photo where the frozen moment lies contains something that can confer on any instant the warmth of our gaze and the demiurge of a new time, giving new access to old moments. In this way long ago and formerly become here and now. The photographer effects an operation on time so that his prints constitute a memory, a mnemonic device that provides our will to recall with fixed reference points. The sculpting of time is a postulate for the organization of memory. In a milky way where any astronomer would get lost, these stolen moments are shining dots of light that serve as cardinal points. Photos are selected morsels of reality meant, though their conciseness, their freightedness, their power, their strength, their originality, their uniqueness, to say in a lighting flash what would otherwise require a long essay. From the caves at Lascaux to the instant photo, what is being said amounts to the same effort to grasp the quintessence of the world, to reduce it into two or three images that would express as much or more than infinite modulations of unfolded time. Photos are lights shining through the jumble of the world. Along the road that leads from time to memory, every sort of distortion that is possible or imaginable in fact has its day. Photography has an odd relationship with truth. The photographer, while he is conscious of

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wanting to freeze something, and thus show it and tell us about it, is also an ethicist, in the sense that Kierkegaard defined, someone who struggles in favor of a certain value system. Where is the truth in a photo that merely shows? A war photographer (Cecil Beaton) shows us a corpse or a soldier collapsing under fire-friend or foe? Executioner victim? Is that a real dead man lying there or the lie of an actor? Pretty or true? Right or false? Information or propaganda? The raw brutality of the situation itself or a cynically staged scene? What about the intervention represented by the framing and the printing? What about photos faked through retouching or montage, not to mention the image made possible by digitization which, by a strange paradox, puts photography today in the same situation of rivalry with painting as it was at its birth. The Pointillists would have loved pixels. Photography is a fragment of reality that can be read in the same way that archaeologists read the scattered pieces they discover and use them to reconstitute the complete shape and configuration of the object from which they came. Neither true nor false, it is a symptom of that which, in order to make sense, needs to be read, seen in perspective and understood. It is not the same as immediately accessible data and instead requires a whole cultural context to be decoded. The metaphysics and ethics of photography are similar to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. He posited a world, a reading, a world outlook, but uttered nothing that could be taken for the truth. An ontological instant – in this case, a photo – cannot recapitulate the metaphysical movement of the world until we have learned what links these two instances. During which war, by which photographer, on which side, in what circumstances, was this or that photo taken? Only after finding our answers can we make out the photo’s meaning, after absorbing the initial emotional impact caused by the presence of the image itself.

The Antithesis of Plato’s Cave Every photo that claims to be nothing more than what it is, and that this is its meaning, may be hiding the basic point of its project, and this in turn could be threatened by the data added by any informed reading. A photo

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can also be a falsification, a lie, in the service of political or ideological propaganda. We could cite the hunting down of the survivors of the Paris Commune (Appert), Bertillon’s anthropometric facies, Riefenstahl’s notorious photo’s of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Cartier-Bresson’s photos of China, or perhaps shots of the most emblematic products of consumer society, or the commercial use of erotic or sensual images of women made by someone like Helmut Newton. All these photos will tell us at least two things, one about appearances and the other about reality. The former is immediately apparent; the latter becomes so only when the viewer is initiated into the metaphysics that preside over every shutter movement. And here, our era is one of complete illiteracy compounded by limitless nihilism. If a photographer is to achieve time as sculpted by the demiurge, memory as it is constellated by a metaphysician, the truth or falsification of the ethicist, then with every shot he adopts the practice of a phenomenologist. To stand behind a camera and lens, placing them between oneself and the world, to look around, aim, chose a subject and frame it, to allow the entrance of a particular chosen part of the world while excluding all that is not that, to work the dialectic between being and nothingness on reality itself – all of this unquestionably means practicing, realizing and embodying a phenomenology of perception. The terminology employed by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, if not in Critique of Dialectical Reason, is marvelously suited to photography: reification, the ontology and dimensions of temporality, ontological proof, the theory of the other as structuring one’s identity, the modes of being-for-others, being-outsidefor-others, the dialectic of in-itself and for-itself, the reversal of passive practice and situation, the concept of the gaze as temporalizing and other categories could all be used in a proposed reading of photography as a phenomenological act. The pointing of the camera and framing of the shot are operations that are consistent with the theory that holds that it is our gaze that gives rise to the being of a situation. What I choose in the viewfinder is a specific piece cut out of the reality of a configuration that comes into being at the same time as the ensemble from which this piece has been cut out is being consigned to nothingness. That which comes into being does

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so as the result of a project, an act of will. The eye, the finger and the shutter release allow consciousness to be projected and to play its part in a logic of the advent of event: the choosing of an instant, the isolation of a moment, the fixing of a photographic fact as attainment and capture of a quintessence. In celebrating the wedding of consciousness and the object that makes it honest, photographic phenomenology proclaims the radicalism of the materialism it presupposes. This is why photography provoked the wrath of Baudelaire, who detested the fact that an industrial activity whose only talent lay in the exactitude of its pure and simple reproductions could prevail by claiming inspiration from classical painting with its concern for amplifying the imagination, for dreams, the impalpable and the poetic. Photography’s objective is sensory reality, that and only that. It is not designed to carry out idealist or spiritualist options of the Neoplatonic variety. You do not take pictures of the world as a paean to another, higher but invisible realm. Painting, in contrast, is conceived, perceived and practiced as the occasion for a constant intercession in favor of a celestial world. What photos show is the visible. Which is why the Church, never at a loss for reactionary idiocy, naturally condemned the emerging new art as an impious invention guilty of looking further than the things of this world.

A Revolution Yet To Come The development of a photo on light-sensitive paper is always a pagan icon, proof that the world is the only is possible matrix f being, that is a causa sui, and that photography alone is its reflection, its sensory image, its participative shadow. Photography is the opposite of the allegory of Plato’s cave, with its idealist play of light and shadows which structured Western aesthetics from ancient Greece until the collapse bought about by Modernism. Of course, this Modernism itself owes something to the invention of photography, which, like all the arts, played a role in the dialectic of living aesthetics. This is what confers upon the photographer the ultimate quality of the aesthetician. At the beginning, certainly, photography was more a technique than an art form. As an industrial activity for the

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mechanical and primitive reproduction of a part of full-color, threedimensional reality in the form of a flat, bichrome image, photography served to assist travellers and ethnologists, scientists, prosecutors, journalists, historians, publicists, geographers, military officers and paterfamilias. Only through use would a given photo enter the world of art. And the photo in question could just as likely have been taken by a criminologist, a tourist or a soldier. Museums, galleries and arbiters of taste would all play their role in determining which photos would be admitted to the pantheon of art and which be left abandoned in the loneliness of cardboard boxes, there to await a higher destiny than some closet or attic. Nadar’s is the glory, Prudhomme or Pooter’s oblivion. But in both instances, it is clear that photography is endowed with a certain artistic power, and, just as much as any painting or sculpture, its status depends on the caprices of history and the arbitrary criteria of judgment. The photographer/demiurge, while simultaneously a metaphysician, phenomenologist, ethicist and aesthetician, is also an artist: his work is philosophy in action, which, to me, is the very definition of the artistic function. And so the categories that apply to the painter, the sculptor, the musician and the poet apply to him as well. Within the context of an aesthetics that announces the obsolescence of those formulated by Kant and Hegel, there is a special place for photography, alongside other disciplines that modernity’s malcontents still find too suspect. The first chapter of the history of this new art would begin with an account of what the other arts owe it, namely the main thrust of their development over the last century and a half. When it took up its rightful place, photography made the painting of that era obsolete. With merciless Darwinian logic, it demanded that painting adapt to the new conditions dictated by itself and abandon anything that the new art could do better. Faithful representation of reality, aiming for maximum objectivity, the highest degree of coincidence between reality and its representation – all that became a dead letter. Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes had good cause to be so ferociously opposed to photography: how else could they go on painting scenes that Nadar could have composed and reproduced mechanically with the same degree of fidelity?

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With realism dead – and this Baudelaire should have understood better than anyone else – there remained another royal road for the powers of the imagination and of dream so cherished by the poet. Therein lay the germ of the modern aesthetic. After the abandonment of the classical canon, a new reality into account: no longer was there any obligation to respect the categories that had formerly been sacrosanct, i.e.; subject, theme, objectivity. Spiritualist, Platonic idealist ideology had been knocked down. Instead, there was the dawn of a liberated imagination, a radical subjectivity, a thoroughgoing perspectivism. At the same time that photography began to present clear outlines, precise renditions and worked-out composition, painting was proceeding to the triumph of the impression, of Divisionism and Pointillism: the progress of subjectivity through Turner, Monet and Cézanne, demolishing classicism and constructing modernism. We all know what happened next. Later Duchamp would come along, calling for a yet newer art that would make contemporary art what the fine arts were after the invention of photography: an old world. That revolution is yet to come.

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—

The Modern Condition of Photography in the Twentieth Century Michel Poivert —

‘The mystery of value is the fundamental mythical content of modernity.’1 Jeff Wall The narratisation of the recent past of photography opens onto an extremely diverse set of interpretations. The historian of culture tends to emphasise the impact on mentalities of the media and, more particularly, of the illustrated press. His responsibility makes him inclined to analyse the social practices of the image. The historian of technologies – or rather, of ‘technicity’ – insists on the successive ‘revolutions’ and on an epistemology of knowledge, in which the advent of digital photography would seem to indicate that historiography has witnessed the end of an era – that of silver-based photography. As for the historian of art, he is fascinated by the increasingly general use of the photographic medium by artists working in every tendency. He acts as the exegete of a poetical form. As for a global history, it would boil down to the production of a fragmented narrative, of a ‘story in bits’ for which it would be useful to substitute the visions of the different territories of knowledge. The truth is that, in the century of historical development, there has been nothing to unite the divergent sensibilities. And even if the current aestheticisation of photojournalism – now an established aspect of the heritage, celebrated in museums, and bridging the twin markets of information and collecting – suggests that photography is being recast within the Great Whole of culture,

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technicians are still attracted to technology, reporters to information and art critics to artistic photographs. The position of art history, with which we are particularly concerned, is no less prone than the others to the uncertainties of judgement – unless, that is, it contents itself with classifying styles and masterpieces, long after art history itself moved away from this trompe-l’œil vision of artistic value. Indeed, it is because historians of contemporary art constantly have to deal with this question of value – by virtue of the fact that it is central to the discourses and attitudes of the avant-gardes (from Dada to Situationism, from Surrealism to postmodernism, etc.) – that all these questions raised by the status of photography seem so familiar to them. It is as if, in this question of value, we can glimpse the foundations of a common history of art and photography. Does photography inform us about reality or, on the contrary, is it a privileged vehicle of subjective expression? Can a photographic work lay claim to the same autonomy as a work of art? These questions, which have been the source of unceasing debate throughout the history of the medium, reflect the fluctuating value of photography – not only its commercial value, as readers will have understood, but also its intellectual, ethical and artistic value and indeed all the criteria of value attaching to it. This fluctuation in value has taken on the appearance of a history as a result of the repeated and conflicting attempts to neutralise the ambiguity of the image, in order to attribute to it, on occasions, the status of a work of art and, on others, that of a simple document. Now the appearance of all-powerful truth, now the trickiness of a manipulative fiction. There is no point in trying to choose between them, since these permanent contradictions are precisely what constitute photography’s historical identity. This is what I shall call the modern condition of photography: a permanently deferred definition of its value. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the necessarily dialectical history of the modern condition of photography proposed a major contradiction with its past. For, having been included by the nineteenth century in the history of progress, did not photography now experience a second modernity, as revealed to it by the artistic avant-gardes? This second modernity apparently consisted in abandoning the conception of photography as something wholly defined by its utility value. The latter

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began with the utopia outlined by François Arago when the invention was first divulged in 1839, the correlative of which, half a century later, was the long list of ‘applications’ of photography listed by Albert Londe in his book La Photographie moderne.2 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pictorialism – an international movement that sought to establish photography as an art form – set out to overturn this first modernity by celebrating only aesthetic value, in accordance with the fine arts model. To their great credit, the avant-gardes called this judgement into question by focusing on utilitarian imagery, but at the same time diverting it from its objective function in order to reveal its aesthetic potential. By virtue of their analytic function, as instruments of classification or for ordering images into narrative, these scientific, administrative or journalistic photographs offered the advantage of embodying a kind of provocative indifference to artistic values, while at the same time holding out the promise of fresh inspiration. For these workaday images constituted a huge reservoir of visual procedures which artistic strategies could use in all kinds of ways, as indeed was the case at the beginning of the twentieth century with Dada and Constructivism, but also in the sixties and seventies with conceptual art. This was the beginning of photography’s second modernity: in its simultaneous emergence from utility value and from artistic neutralisation. Or, to put it another way, in the operation that consisted in identifying the photograph as a cultural object, looking beyond its positivist status as ‘applied photography’, or, conversely, beyond its detours into aestheticism. The history of photography in the twentieth century thus moved away from the pattern of seeking either scientific or artistic legitimacy and drew instead on the fertile contradiction between art and culture.

Documentary: an aesthetic derivative In the twentieth century, the seemingly banal notion of ‘the document’ acquired an imaginary dimension that endowed it with the prestige of a full-fledged concept. What predominated here was not so much the instrumental and illustrative dimension of the document as its attestative value. The documentary function is overlaid by the historian’s fetishisation of source, origin and truth – the imaginary notion of an

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accessible reality whose power of revelation would thus be embodied by the photographic image by virtue of its ‘natural’ character (as a physicochemical imprint). Why do I say ‘imaginary’? To a large extent because this attestative capacity was analysed by Roland Barthes – who first defined it as an analogon (a stratagem of discourse), then later by the formula of the having-been-there (a phenomenological consciousness) – on the basis of ‘common sense.’3 The common belief in the truth value of the photographic image has to do with the history of mentalities (our changing culture of the real) or with social history (covering that of information). It also connects to a component of the history of the modern condition of photography. For it is precisely because this belief exists that the document retains its value well beyond the end of any utility. Its virtue is entirely bound up with its latent power of attestation. It is because the strong truth quotient in the photographic image continues to make itself felt, come what may, that photographers have been able to turn this excess of truth into a raw material (a documentary substance) from which they extract a form, elaborate a ‘style’, or on the basis of which they forge an attitude. The result is ethical confusion: by treating the belief in photographic truth in a rhetorical mode, the photographer establishes description as an autonomous exercise. The common responsiveness to the photographic appearance of truth perpetuates the utility value of photography in the most exemplary way in journalistic imagery. However, well before it became generalised at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the photographic document still had the activist character and message function of applied photography. The first social reformers, foremost among whom were Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in the United States, used the photographic document quite explicitly to convince. In spite of the difficulties of shooting in the street, in foyers for immigrants or in factories where illegal child labour was commonplace, these investigators combined technical prowess with the tricks of staging in order to draw attention to unacceptable social realities through their projections and posters. This rhetoric of persuasion, in which the gazes of the children and the postures of the immigrants appeal to the viewer’s conscience is a form of propaganda in which image and discourse work in unison. And the technical obstacles which made it impossible to achieve a perfectly

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rendered image ultimately help to produce the raw effect of direct visual testimony. The utility value of the document is at one with its mode of utterance. Technical negligence ensures that pathos has an efficacy that for us is redoubled by the archival status of these images. Round about 1910, the iconographic tradition of the social reform movement encountered the avant-gardist strategies of the New York Photo-Secession. Lewis Hine, a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York, started taking his students round galleries of contemporary art. The young Paul Strand thus discovered the 291 Gallery where Stieglitz exhibited pictorialist photography but also Picasso and Picabia. It was a frontal clash. The will to constitute a photographic avantgarde now looked to the unlikely marriage of the iconography of social misery and the pared-down geometry of Cubism. This ethical and aesthetical disjunction gave rise to a wager: to construct the principles of a modernist photography that was resolutely indifferent to the charms of genre subjects and to atmospheric haziness, and that was deeply rooted in the affirmation of the specificity of the photographic medium. Cultivating a documentary look became a deliberate act of opposition to pictorialist taste, and the precision of the rendition now served to clarify the structural lines of the image. Here, photography was thought through by the work of Stieglitz and Strand. The document served to institute a modernist idea of photography that pictorialism had dreamed of without realizing that, to attain it, it would have been necessary to maintain at least something of photography’s utility value. This indeed is what was achieved by the advocates of ‘straight Photography’, whose style and approach were reflected in a chosen name that linked them to the history of photographic sensibility while also holding out the promise of a new reading of the world. Taking social subjects that can now be seen as a simple pretext, the documentary aesthetic may at first seem to have devalued content in favour of form. Still the affirmation of the values of autonomy with regard to the photographic image, as made in and around the artistic avant-gardes, should not be taken as pure gesturing. At stake here was the legitimation also shared by the experiments under way at the time in abstraction: the affirmation of the expressive independence of forms

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and of the specificities of each medium, the political capacity to subvert mores and the embracing of ‘inner’ experience. In a word, by becoming direct, precise and optical, to the point that seeing sometimes became the occasion of a vision, photography, by its documentary formalism, partook fully of the nascent orthodoxy of American artistic modernism. While the tradition of social documentary was perpetuated by the PhotoLeague which, at the end of the 1940s, under the influence of Beaumont Newhall, turned towards creative photography, the modernist vision was applied to documentary as of the late 1920s. In Europe, Henri CartierBresson, who had been trained in modern painting by André Lhote, and was receptive to the Surrealist rhetoric of chance, photographed with his Leica as if composing on the focusing screen of the view camera. Making a dialectic out of rules and spontaneity, like Stieglitz, he carried forward the twin heritage of photography and modern art. Historically, this new stylistic authority was founded on the reception accorded to the photographs of Eugène Atget in the art-historical context. This marked a key moment in the fluctuation of value. Throughout his career, Atget had worked as a documentary photographer. Although he himself had a sense that he was building an authentic body of work, between 1890 and 1920 his photographs of the buildings of Paris and its outskirts did not elicit the slightest aesthetic reading. However, the new reception of his work saw the utility value of these photographs shift towards the affirmation of a style. The history of the ‘documentary style’4 puts particular emphasis on the ‘Americanisation’ of Atget, and on the promotion of his work by the photographer Berenice Abbott who, having acquired the contents of his Parisian studio, revealed the aesthetic significance of Atget’s work to a whole generation of Americans, in the forefront of whom was Walker Evans. The characteristics of the documentary style that was coming to prominence in the United States and Germany, where Albert RengerPatzsch and August Sander represented the photographic version of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), seemed already to be fully present in the work of Atget: programme, series, project, self-defined assignment – photographic practice was no longer subject to the demon of circumstance, but partook of a vision of the world. Formally, precision, clarity and frontality came together to form the documentary language. But what was it meant to say? While the biggest commission undertaken

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at the time, the one instigated by the Farm Security Administration in the United States, in which Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were both involved, seemed not to renounce anything of the utopia of utility, this language was no longer as activist as it had been in the days of Riis and Hine. Certainly, the exodus of farmers driven out by the Depression was a moving subject and recording it served the purpose of consolidating Roosevelt’s policies, but the political engagement of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939), in which documentary photography is united with the social sciences, or the poetic engagement of Walker Evans and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), in which the oneiric precision of the literary description contrasts with the plainness of the images, go beyond the message-bearing function with an indirect, free, discourse. ‘Documentary style’: this term, which was fashionable in the 1930s, clearly expresses the institution of a form that was probably never more satisfying than when matched with social subjects or architectural typologies. But one that, by converting the codes of utility (precision-description) into a lexicon freed of assigned meaning, also attained the possibility, through documentary, of speaking a language that was alien to it. Here we need to consider the ‘other’, essentially posthumous reception of Atget. For the promotion of his work in the United States on the wave of the rising documentary style needs to be set against the Surrealist rereading. If, very much in spite of himself, Atget became a Surrealist – if he was seen as a Douanier Rousseau or a Giorgio De Chirico of photography – this was precisely because the objectivity of his images was read in a strictly poetical and nostalgic mode. Walter Benjamin’s famous interpretation, considering Atget’s images through the prism of a sensibility shaped by Baudelaire,5 conferred upon them an old-fashioned and mysterious quality. What remains of the documentary here serves as a phantomatic past in which signs begin to circulate freely, eliciting interpretative fantasies and thus lending themselves to a multiplicity of poetical readings. This surrealising reading of Atget distanced the documentary from formalism and caused the contents – places, reflections, the occasional face, street vistas, etc. – to re-emerge. The magic of the documentary was thus constituted by the description of spaces inhabited by time

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whose emptiness was interpreted as the sign of past crimes or dramas and of a still-present uncanniness. This ancient language, which Atget’s photographs seemed to speak, endowed the photographic document with that ‘aura’ whose power, according to Benjamin, photography had expunged by making works of art reproducible, thus leading to the disappearance of the original and the cultual value from which it arose. Here was another paradox: the prosaic quality of the document seemed to recapture the magic of the primitive use of artworks. The finest example of this is provided by Brassaï’s work on graffiti. Begun in the early 1930s, this exploration of the ‘caverns’ of modern cities, whose progress he communicated to his friends and colleagues (and notably to Picasso, who often asked him about this project when Brassaï was photographing his sculptures) was not exhibited until the 1960s. Thus the triviality and secrets of these anonymous practices, treated as ancient rites, were, via the process of reproduction – the first degree of the documentary function – brought within the frame of art. This union of the trivial and the magical is neatly summed up in that fine, Surrealist oxymoron, ‘poetic document’ – the counterpart to ‘documentary style.’ This reveals one of the main modalities of Surrealism’s photographic strategy: interpretative displacement and distortion. For the Surrealists reinvented the uses of photography, constantly reusing the images that they cut out here and there (these were often very old), using the press as a great reservoir of images for their illustrated journals. And, as they had done with Atget’s photographs, so they totally changed the meaning of these decontextualised images by giving them new captions. Whether scientific, technical or social, documents now began to move to the rhythms of Surrealist metaphor. The close-up and the snapshot thus became the icons of psychic automatism. Presented as of 1921 as a ‘photography of thought’, automatic writing seemed to put the seal on this metaphorical union of photography and an ‘inner model.’ But the documentary substance that we find in the world of Surrealism is not of interest solely because of the oneiric tendencies of the scopic drive at work here; there was also an element of critical crudeness. The documents presented to readers of Georges Bataille’s review, which went, precisely, by the name Documents, explored this angle as of the late 1920s. Eli Lotar, Jacques‑André Boiffard and the scientific filmmaker Jean Painlevé

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were but some of the proponents of this ‘documentarism of cruelty’ that Bataille was so good at putting on the page. To get a full idea of the power of raw images such as these, we must add the work done by the painter and photographer Wols a few years later. Here, the document seems the perfect embodiment of Bataille’s ‘formlessness.’ The disruptive power of the document goes hand in hand with its ease of circulation. This free use of photography invented by Surrealism was given a political impact by the new post-war generation. After Breton’s metaphorical play of transpositions, and the exaltation of the real in Bataille’s base materialism, came the critique of the spectacle by the Situationists. From the late 1950s to the events of 1968, photography played an important role in the hyper-critique disseminated by the journal Internationale Situationniste. As part of a general attack on social alienation, the catalogue of cultural stereotypes and the workings of the manipulation of information were mobilised with unprecedented power as part of the strategy of exposure. Surrealist displacement led on to the Situationist strategy of détournement (appropriation, subversion). Documents from the press were summoned to partake of a vast textual exegesis in which ‘serious parody’ attempted to respond to the major theme of the degradation of values. The critique of signs became an artistic attitude and, on the basis of the recycling of documentary images, established the founding principles of a counterculture. The same period witnessed the effective institutionalisation of a certain documentary genre in the United States, essentially under the aegis of John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His exhibition there, New Documents (1967), brought together Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. A historical and aesthetic notion, the document now moved away from any kind of political outlook and towards an assertion of the idea of the author. But while Szarkowski’s modernist outlook did effectively break with the ‘humanist’ vision embodied by the project of Edward Steichen and his Family of Man exhibition (1955), it was not in tune with the work of the new generation on the West Coast, which bore the imprint of conceptual art. An exponent of this New Social Documentary, Allan Sekula began his analysis of the historical and social conditions of photography at the turn of the 1970s. Far from keeping the aesthetic aspects of the document at a distance in the name of ideology, he strives to define the mechanics of documentary beauty. As he stated

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recently, ‘A descriptive and therefore a modest medium, photography brings with it the aesthetic conditions that are already present in a world that it does no more than describe.’6 Sekula made his mark in the 1990s with Fish Story, a work both of art and investigation exploring the maritime imagination in the age of globalisation. Going well beyond the simple media critique that, in the postmodernist years of 1980-2000, became more of a ‘mania’ than a genuine aesthetic, the work of this artist gives documentary photography a singular position, between art and information. In Europe, the terrain established by the development of the documentary aesthetic appears to be fairly continuous, going from the pioneers of the New Objectivity to work marked by the context of conceptual art, foremost among which is the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher in Germany. Initiated in the late 1950s-early 1960s, when August Sander, in his final years, was returning to his unfinished project, Citizens of the 20th Century, the Bechers’ typological and archival programme ignored the fashion for subjective photography and set about surveying the forms of industrial architecture. By opting for austerity, in their taste for the assemblage of forms, by their systematic approach and with their talent for bringing out the monumentality of infrastructures worthy of the age of cathedrals, these genuine archaeologists made their never-ending task into a kind of collection or repository of man’s industrial genius. Objective in its form (the inventory) yet open to the most complex readings, the Bechers’ work makes the documentary a privileged site of conceptualism. However, their unfailing rule of non-expressiveness, which had such an influence on their students at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the 1980s and 90s, including Thomas Ruff, should not be allowed to mask a documentary approach in which the presentation of social issues manage to reinstate an imaginary dimension, as it does in the work of the French artist Valérie Jouve, where the human subject poses in relation to an architectural environment. Since the 1990s, the notion of the documentary has been extended through a practice of photography that is close to contemporary art. Paradoxically, this may be because it can stand in opposition to any purported academicism in art and open up a perspective that is both less authoritarian and more openly speculative. This dynamism has moved some distance from the idea of objectivity and precision associated with

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the historical ‘documentary style’, preferring instead the heritage of conceptualist experimentation, combined with the poetical resources of prosaicism.

Experimental photography The great merit of the 1960s and 1970s, when phenomenology and language sciences were highly influential, was that they revealed the assumptions behind a good many practices and attitudes. The category of ‘the photographic’ was thus added to that of photography itself as the medium was instituted as an instrument for decoding art and culture. But what lay behind this term which, by converting an adjective into a noun, gave photography a power independent of its actual practice? If the work of Rosalind Krauss defined the photographic as a mode of questioning those arts based on traces or imprints (indexicality),7 Philippe Dubois widened our understanding of the term by defining the photographic as an ‘absolutely singular category of thought which opens onto a specific relation to signs, to time, to space, to the real, to the subject, to being and to doing.’8 More recently, André Gunthert and I suggested that it represents ‘the construction, within history, of a model’ arising from the originality of photography.9 The photographic would thus form a kind of theoretical and cultural model uniting all the different notions embodied by photography throughout its history: recording, truth, reproducibility, etc, thus constituting the notional field within which there developed, notably, a critique of the values of representation. Our indirect relation to the world, founded on an image constructed from subjects, mechanisms and regulatory principles, has thus become disrupted in the play of new experiments with the visible. The codes of perspective inherited from the Renaissance are twisted by optical effects, the ordering of planes is shattered by the dynamism of montage and collage, the singularity of a genre switches suddenly as a result of the attention accorded to other subjects. These innovations, reactions or revolutions effected by photographers show how acutely the photographic is revealed when it is observed through the magnifying glass that is the history of experimental photography. This notion of the ‘experimental’, which is well known in the field of cinema, has yet to

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be given due weight in the historiography of photography. And yet its history is very real; it is the history of a conception of photography as the instrument of subjectivity and as the critical operator of the order of representation. But what value should we attribute to these sometimes scattered experiments, which hardly seem to have been guided, as such attempts were in the early days of modernity, by the progress of a future application? The value of the experimental is not that of experimentation carried out in scientific laboratories. Still, nor does experimental photography belong to a history of the playful or the aleatory, but more to a history of the misuses of photography. Experimental photography derives from a general operation to overturn photographic practice. Anti-professional, scorning documentary value, experimental productions are generally made without a camera, and therefore do not bear any relation to ‘shooting’: they do not record but, rather, form the place of a projection. In such cases, it is often less a matter of ‘vision’ than of ‘radiance.’ Generally speaking, we do not find there any information about the real but, rather, the image of a mental activity and the revelation of an ‘inner model’: substance more than forms, the world within rather than a sampling of the real. Experimental photography is not objective but it is nonetheless a laboratory where research is carried out into the essence of photography. By basing their work on the photographic fundamentals that are rays of light and photosensitive products, the exponents of experimental photography elaborated a photographic metalanguage that no other pictorial or graphic practice could engender. This ‘backwards’ photography, to borrow Tristan Tzara’s expression for Man Ray’s photograms, forms the laboratory of the visible and the agent of transformation of our visual culture. And yet its origins lie far from the artistic avant-gardes. They are to be found in the applications derived from science and in the popular attractions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of photographic culture have begun to take an interest in the productions of mediums, magi and other practitioners of the occult arts, which until recently had been considered highly marginal. In fact, they enjoyed considerable success around 1900, when all kinds of publications disseminated the results of ‘transcendental photography’ – also known as ‘the photography of thought.’ Sometimes

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derived from radiographic photography – the popular success of X rays, invented by Wilhem Conrad Röntgen in 1895, is well known – this occultist photography produced fluidic, ectoplasmic images constituting a sometimes highly theatrical iconography of apparitions formed by the montage of negatives, but also many abstract images with drips and colours, faint lines and unlikely forms.10 Trickery? The truth is that it’s not very important. The only thing that matters to historians is the scale of a phenomenon which spread the awareness of a new approach to the image, one wholly founded on its reception in the imagination – here, the shape of some nightmare monster, there, the image of a fervently invoked and lost loved one. With its images of inner life and fantasy, this photography of the mind was compounded by the liberties taken by the first amateurs, who were indifferent to the codes of the profession and wanted to have a bit of family fun. This ‘recreational’ photography appeared with the birth of amateurism in the 1890s, and continued into the middle of the twentieth century.11 Even today, looking through the albums of our grandparents, it is not unusual to find amusing photomontages in which the heads of friends and family are swapped around, or where they enact grotesque charades, or where elegant light patterns were made using a few twigs or autumn leaves. Precisely because of its remoteness from aesthetic categories, because of the liberties it took with regard to the ‘proper usage’ of photography, this vernacular photography was one of the elements that avant-garde artists liked to displace towards their own questioning of the principles of representation. Here we may recall at least two mythical accounts concerning the ‘inventions’, respectively, of photomontage and the photogram: for Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch, the revelation of photomontage was provoked by the sight of a popular collage when they were staying on an island in the Baltic in August 1918.12 Man Ray’s evocation of the way in which ferns are reproduced by the mark of light on sensitive paper locates the origin of the photogram in a childhood memory.13 Like the infancy of an artform, as a kind ‘raw’ photography, experimental photography thus stands at the intersection of two historical regimes, that of a cultural history of images (which forms its background), and that of the aesthetic avant-gardes, which determines a new value. But the appearance of experimental photography in the artistic field of the avant-

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gardes took at least one more form, the one put forward by Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1917. Up until then, he had remained faithful to the pictorialism of the Photo-Secession, but now he began to develop an iconography in which geometical motifs were increasingly prominent, eventually producing the first abstact photographs on an English avant-garde scene eager to assets its own variant of Cubo-Futurism: Vorticism. These ‘vortographs’, which were obtained by shooting through a prism, are even bolder than the Futurist work of the Bragaglia brothers in Italy. The latter, who sought to develop a ‘photodynamic’ iconography equivalent to the pictorial experiments of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, extended the exposure time in order to record the spectral traces of gestures made in front of the lens. Influenced by, but determined to distinguish themselves from, the chronophotography of Étienne‑Jules Marey, Arturo and Anton Giulio Bragaglia preferred to assert their taste for occultist photography, whose tricks they exploited. But the most radical experiments at this time were made by the Dadaist Christian Schad. In 1918-19, his abstract xylographs, combining collages of objects and bits of paper, provided the basis for photograms to which Tristan Tzara gave the name ‘schadographs’, thus giving a brainwave the status of a fully-fledged invention. The advocates of experimental photography certainly subscribed to the common myth of the blank slate, and these early works should perhaps be understood, metaphorically, as an attempt to revisit and deconstruct all the principles of the photographic image. These misuses scorned all the rules and measurements then governing photographic practice, forgetting these in favour of a free practice along the lines of what Futurist and Dadaist poetry was doing with language. Just as this fragmented syntax, going back to the single word, the syllable, the sound itself as the primary element of language, so experimental photography looked to the ray of light, the trace or the reflection as the primary elements of photography. There can be no better illustration of this poetic language used by experimental photography than the work of Raoul Hausmann. But his contribution was based on yet another way of deconstructing the autonomy of the photographic image: he broke it down into fragments, cut out from existing images portions of a future image which would finally come together in the photocollage. This practice of photocollage, which was so much in keeping with the Dadaist principles of, say, Kurt Schwitters, also fitted in with the synaesthetic project of German Expressionism, of which

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Hausmann was an heir. Like the poets of the journal Der Sturm, he aimed for a subtle play of correspondences between image and sound, a poetic equivalence between the sense of sight and that of hearing. The goal of Hausmann’s photocollages was to help create that ‘optophonetics’ of which we are constantly reminded by the open mouths and stuck-on letters in his compositions. In the 1940s, the overtly revolutionary Lettrisme founded by Isidore Isou in France used photography as a medium to be colonised by poetic logic, in the same way as film and poetry itself. However, in an age of National Socialist danger, the photographic image with sound initiated by Hausmann, which he would advocate in more abstract forms after the war, required the articulation of a language. And it was in this Dadaist context that photocollage – which, by becoming involved in the play of reprography evoked the generic notion of photomontage (unified assemblages of heterogeneous elements) – became the heterodox medium for revolutionary messages. Hannah Höch was one of the first to formulate social critique and overtly antifascist messages, but the most skilled ‘photomontagist’ was certainly John Heartfield, who is rightly famed for his covers for the journal AIZ (Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung). In the 1930s Dadaist experimental photography, which was predicated on the chaos of photography’s elementary particles, finally yielded to the Constructivist tendency and its penchant for a new order. The ‘New Vision’ rediscovered the taste for taking photographs: instead of questioning the physico-chemical medium and dissecting images, it preferred to challenge visual habits with radical changes of viewpoint that expressed a world battling it out with a new ideology. In the USSR, photomontage itself, represented notably by El Lissitzky and the historic figure of Aleksandr Rodchenko, was increasingly oriented towards an art of propaganda in the service of productivist theories. Here, no doubt, we touch on the limits of the very notion of experimental photography, the point where the reform, or even revolution, of a practice ends up with a new language, but one that is just as normative as what preceded it. The utopia of the democratisation of art, which marked the 1930s, drew on the advances made by experimental photography. The best example of this is the work and thought of László Moholy-Nagy. While he did not teach photography at the Bauhaus, he and his wife Lucia did elaborate a philosophy of the medium outside the institution. Founded on a philosophy that one could describe as

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experimental and messianic, Moholy-Nagy’s photographic practice, which sustained, among others, the New Vision with its altered viewpoints, also accorded a central role to the photogram. For if the experiments with viewpoints were in the end only another way of extracting fragments from reality, the photogram itself constitutes an image that is added to the world, because it is obtained from the marks made by elements ordered in accordance with the artist’s desires. The maker of photomontages is a visual artist who works with specific elements from photography that have their own intrinsic validity, and are not conditioned by the articulation of a language: ‘Photograms must be created from their own, primary resources: their composition brings forth and signifies nothing except thesmelves.’14 Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Photoplastics’, like the new typography spawned by Dada, nevertheless came across as a new visual lexicon liable to bring the new formal configurations to the masses. In some respects, experimental photography oscillates here between a new utopia of use and the desire for an autonomous visual art. In the second edition of his treatise Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting, Photography Film, 1927), Moholy-Nagy adds a choice of images which sheds yet more light on the cultural baggage of experimental photography. The parallels he establishes here may seem surprising: an X-ray, an aerial photograph and a scientific micro-photography are openly invoked as being related to avant-garde creations. Eased out of their context of utterance, scientific and informative documents are considered in terms of their formal prowess, one which avant-garde experiments will seek to emulate while remaining free of any functionalist concern. Quoted more than displaced or appropriated, these references have the merit of designating a nonartistic source which not only points back to non-academic models, but also attests an awareness of a photographic culture. ‘Experimental’ is thus a more meaningful term than ‘avant-garde’, for the latter category tends to suggest that these artists created with their eyes to the future of art, when in fact their practices and theories showed them to be expressly concerned both with the adjoining fields and the past of the photographic medium. In this sense, being ‘avant-garde’, in photography or elsewhere, is not about the idea of progress but means being aware of the complex relation to the present, past and future – having an acute consciousness of history.

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The photogram expresses this ambiguous relation to history better than any other procedure of experimental photography. As we have seen, Man Ray, compared it to children’s games. He might equally well have recalled the very origins of photography and referred to the work on light traces done by William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Hippolyte Bayard in France in the 1840s. But Man Ray evokes the ‘originary’ character of the photogram, that which constitutes it as pure experiment, more tellingly when he mentions the role played by chance in ‘his’ discovery. In his memoirs, he contributes to the mythology of experimental photography by stating that his first photogram was made accidentally, by lab instruments left negligently on photosensitive paper when the light was switched on. Thus, in his various accounts, Man Ray brings together chance, childhood, the origins of photography and the promise of a new art. However, in Man Ray’s case, working as he was in the context of Surrealism, this tangle of time lines, which sometimes seems to govern the experimental sensibility, was overarched by a model that was even more critical of the order of representations: the subversion of reason itself. If documents borrowed from scientific imagery, such as the spark of electricity in the article by André Breton entitled Beauty Will Be Convulsive (1934) were displaced by the Surrealists in order to constitute metaphors of automatism, the use of experimental photography enabled an artist like Man Ray to take on the appearance of a magus. This photographic practice, in which the human hand no longer intervenes in making the image, in which the camera itself disappears, is close to psychic automatism. We should remember that in the 1920s and up until the beginning of 1930, the great Surrealist model for the overthrow of reason was mediumism and, more generally, occultist popular culture. We are now aware of the importance of photography in this culture and of its impact on imagination at the turn of the twentieth century. This was the base on which Surrealism founded its discourse and its iconography. Militant Surrealist literature was constantly invoking clairvoyants and mediums, and Man Ray’s manipulation of light beams made him one of the representatives of this mediumism. Électricité, the collection of photograms published in 1931, took this imaginary construction shared by science and faith a step further.15 The text written by Pierre Bost to accompany the images sets out an allegory of magic combining photography and electricity, and compares Man Ray to a ‘wizard [who]

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using the apparatus that renders the concrete more faithfully than any other human invention, [has] succeeded in giving images that are not lifelike but real of the most abstract thing in the world […] Man Ray has captured the invisible.’16 The photogram is perfectly in keeping with the Surrealist theory of objectification: the transition from the abstract to the concrete. In the early 1930s, the political engagement of Surrealism swept away its occultist references in favour of scientific metaphors, which were deemed more concrete. The time of experimentation seemed to give way to the urgency of political combat – that is, when it was not simply a matter, even more concretely, of fleeing National Socialism. In Germany, after teaching at the Bauhaus and a period working in advertising in Berlin, Moholy-Nagy was forced by the political situation to go into exile in Great Britain. In 1937 he moved to the United States at the suggestion of Walter Gropius, then director of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He became director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. His experimental photography, and the resonance of Surrealist work in America, combined to put a key question to photography in general: the question of abstraction. We need to grasp the contrast between MoholyNagy’s idea of experimental photography and the kind of work that had acquired legitimacy in the US in 1930-40, when the art of photography was founded on the notion of objectivity. The heritage of Straight Photography and its aesthetic of precision, as embodied by Edward Weston, the historical consecration of the documentary style with the publication of books by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor and Walker Evans with James Agee, plus the development of social documentary at the Photo League, whose members included Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan – there was nothing here to pave the way for a kind of photography based on light rays and bearing no relation to the real, social universe. However, in the great history of intellectual exchanges, there was another point of reference for experimental photography: the abstract painting of the School of New York. Having been considered a marginal phenomenon by the abstract movement in Europe, it would now make a central contribution to the abstract art of America. Around Moholy-Nagy, figures from Europe such as his fellow Hungarian György Kepes, to whom he entrusted the department of colour and light, formed

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teams and trained young American photographers such as Arthur Siegel, who in turn became a teacher at the Chicago Institute of Design, as the New Bauhaus was now called. At the turn of the 1950s, experimental photography was at the centre of the debate, as can be seen from the seminar organised at that other prime site of American avant-garde creation, the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg (who chose to study photography) all trained under that historic Bauhaus figure Joseph Albers. During the summer of 1951, Frieda Larsen, who had been in charge of teaching photography there since 1949, organised a photography seminar at Black Mountain with Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel and Aaron Siskind among the guests.17 The debate – very lively – centred on the rupture between the tradition of the documentary style, which Callahan and Siskind had embodied by partaking in the social and documentary project of the Photo League, and a creative mode now based on abstraction. Aaron Siskind, whose work over the previous few years had been oriented towards abstraction, now made a clean break with the documentary aesthetic. Invited by Callahan, he became one of the most prominent teachers of the Chicago Institute of Design, where he was director of the photography department in 1971. In Germany, the success of Otto Steinert, who set up the photography course at the art school in Sarrebruck in 1948 before becoming director of the institution, and who founded the Fotoform group in 1950, took experimental photography in the direction of abstraction. The exhibitions that he organised also set out to establish the historical links between Surrealism and Constructivism, and the psychologising orientation gave this tendency which had a broad following in Europe the generic name of ‘subjective photography.’ This allowed room for the most radical experiments, such as the chimigramme (chemigram), invented by Pierre Cordier in 1956, which was based solely on the photographic agency of chemicals, leaving aside not only the camera but also the action of light. In the United States, the success of experimental photography shifted it towards a photographic abstraction that was celebrated by museums. Just like documentary photography, which had become a historical standard, abstract photography was elevated to the pantheon of art by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1951 with the exhibition Abstraction in Photography, then in 1960 with The Sense of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.

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The heritage of a critique of representation embodied by experimental photography – precisely when it seemed to have taken up the mantle of the modernist values of Abstract Expressionism (with that absolute condition laid down by Clement Greenberg, that art should be defined by the specificity of its medium) – was adopted by artists who did not belong to the milieu of post-war photography. In fact, the whole of this 1950s generation integrated photographic experimentation into their work. Throughout the century, the open field of possibilities afforded by the medium – from collage to brûlage (burning), from montage to the photogram, and all kinds of unlikely manipulations of light and chemistry, and not forgetting the whole cortege of notions that fed into or interpreted these misuses of photography – affirmed the aesthetic value of photographic experiment outside any autonomous practice of the medium. The best example that comes to mind here may well be the photo work of Sigmar Polke, which is informed equally by popular occultist culture (in the age of UFOs), the effects produced by psychotropes, the use of radioactive materials, use of photocopying, the ‘magical’ expertise of X-ray imaging, etc. This extremely troubling body of work, in which the experimental is the condition of a revelation and not the product of a quest to represent the real, also signifies, implicitly, that artists’ constant recourse to photography is no longer related to experimental photography but to the plastic resources of photography. Experimental photography, like experimental film, is a form of fundamental research, an alternative to a culture of the image founded on representation. Ultimately, it is an attempt to offer a direct relation to the world in the mode of an iconography of interiority and the prophecy of a new language.

The performed image: photography and theatricality The most archaic part of nineteenth-century photography was projected into the century that followed in the form of a mise-en-scène or, to use another term, posed photography. Refusing to offer the appearance of truth because of its overt lack of naturalness, and traditionalist when compared to any practice of photography seeking to overturn the conventions of representation, this posed photography may seem to be a kind of aesthetic heresy – all the more so because it belongs to the tradition

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of divertissement represented by tableaux vivants and society charades and has a guilty link with the world of farce and comedy. But the reality is quite different. For if we consider carefully the aesthetic and historical conditions of this posed photography, running from the Surrealists and, before them, popular entertainments, to the photo conceptualists and to contemporary artists, we will see that it offers a space of representation that is resolutely oriented toward the spectator and has thus helped bring about a revision of modernist aesthetic criteria. The constructed image seems, first of all, to contradict the essential principles of photography and, in the first place, the spontaneity authorised by the modern cameras that began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century. More fundamentally, however, it opposes the myth of the natural image evoked with regard to the documentary and attestative value. Everything we see in the posed image goes against the habits of our gaze, shaped as it is by the effects of instantaneity and, moreover, by the fluidity of movie images. In this sense, constructed photography is a cultural contradiction, a challenge to the idea of progress, but that is also its strength and the source of its aesthetic interest: a slow-down in the passing order of images. However, these ‘untimely’ images do not raise any major issues, the only real issue having more to do with the confusion between the posed photograph and the pictorial model that has existed throughout the twentieth century. The organisation of figures on a photographic stage suggests an analogy with the figures that a painter lays out in his composition. The reference to the pictorial is still marked by the stigmata of pictorialism, and even when there are no effects from the printing process or optical aberrations strengthening the mise-en-scène and thus evoking the surface of a painted canvas, any posed photograph based on the pictorial model refers in a greater or lesser degree to a pictorialist heritage that is something of a burden. But in fact that is not the real problem. We can understand the real issue better if we think of the extent to which, as of the late 1970s, artists, and, in the 1980s, critics emphasised the notion of the tableau in an attempt to characterise an autonomous form, which they thus dissociated from the specific practice of painting. It is curious that, at the time, relatively little was made of the fact that the notion of tableau made it possible to establish an even clearer distinction between posed photography

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and painting, in that it clearly indexed the former on theatre. While the organisation of theatrical presentation in accordance with the model of the tableau, founded on Diderot’s reforming theories, did certainly refer to the pictorial model in the eighteenth century, throughout modernity it was was instituted as a specifically theatrical convention. When, in the 1970s, Roland Barthes reflected on the notion of representation, this was the tradition where he found it: going from theatre to cinema, Diderot, Brecht and Eisenstein constitute the major reference points in a system of representation defined as the order established between the stage and the place of the spectator.18 If we follow the history of the idea of the tableau at this time, then the photographic tableau belongs to that dioptric art of the theatre and embodies the aesthetic principle of representation. At the end of the 1970s, to choose the tableau as a model for photography was, consciously or unconsciously, to do rather more than add value to photography by borrowing from the formal lexicon of painting; it was to assert the position of photography in the regime of representation. This idea comes up against a number of opposing ‘myths’, chief among which is CartierBresson’s idea of the ‘decisive moment’, which contains the idea of an encounter in which felicitous chance comes together with an intuition nourished by modern art. There is nothing here of an indirect relation to the world, indeed, everything partakes of another mythology, that of the natural image. Conversely, what is the meaning of the instant for the staged image? Its value here is certainly different, being that of Diderot’s ‘perfect’ instant: the reasoning choice of the moment immobilised by a plenitude of meaning, a moment that is just as decisive but that is programmed and regulated by a static system. This changes everything: the action captured by this decisive moment has a before and an after, an out-of-frame element that defines it as a cross-section of space and time, whereas the acted and recorded pose came into being only for the image: it has no before, except its preparation; no after, excepts its disappearance; no out-of-frame reality except discontinuity. In the natural image of the decisive moment, the individual and the situation are both interrupted; in the staged image they are immobilised. In the former case, the referent has a history, in the second, only the history of its preparation. Photography that proposes a pose performs an image. Nothing in its referent refers us to the real; everything is contained in its project of becoming-an-image. 536

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The performed image relates to an aesthetic that does not belong to a precise historical moment, or to a school of thought, but has more to do with a ‘way of doing things’ with photography. Photography as a practice (know-how, style, etc.) is not at stake here. In fact, the way of doing things is, roughly speaking, nearly always identical: an action is programmed and executed (and an expressive posture is taken up) within the visual field of a camera and then recorded. The ‘scenes’ acted out can be highly diverse, and it is they that make the image interesting, not the originality of the way they are recorded. The image here is not so much framed as put in a frame, in that the definition of the frame functions as a perimeter (a constraint) rather than appearing as an effect. The actor, or actors, thus take up position in a frame formed by the optical limits of the apparatus, just as they would in the determinate space of a theatre stage. The performed image can be conceived in terms of the encounter between the actor’s and the beholder’s viewpoints, and not as the relation between a thing seen by a photographer and presented (related) to a beholder as the result of that vision. It is the photographer as author of the operation-gaze who disappears into the performed image. This is a photograph backwards, conceived, acted out and recorded by the person who, in most cases, is found in the field of the image – the displaced camera-operator, acting by means of a remote release mechanism, or ordering a collaborator to press the button, embodying an absent gaze. In this situation, recording is a function. If the gaze is not totally absent, it is a controlling gaze as opposed to subject-creative one. The image therefore retains the privileged relation between the actor and spectator because it is precisely the latter, for whom ‘things as they are observed’19 (Barthes) are calculated, who is important. The performed image would thus be a kind of glazed-over theatre, close to that image played out in vitro, to borrow the expression used by André Bazin to characterise a theatre scene, which is, precisely, a piece of life that has been ‘cut away’ and ‘still partially partakes of nature, but is already profoundly altered by the conditions of observation.’20 Writing in the early 1950s, Bazin was trying to differentiate between ‘good’ filmed theatre and the old art films of the 1900s and their successors, in which the devices of theatre are converted into cinematographic language. In his analysis of ‘filmed theatre’, Bazin identifies in the work of Jean Cocteau what we also find in the performed image. He calls it ‘the option of exteriority.’

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This entails structuring shots in relation to ‘the viewpoint of the spectator and only the spectator […] a spectator who is extraordinarily perceptive and empowered to see everything […]. The camera at last is the spectator and only the spectator.’21 It is in this sense that, in the performed image, nobody is doing the looking for us. We will look later at this question of the place of the spectator, which has been such a big theme in recent modernist criticism. In the meantime, we must come back to my introductory remark, which touches on the guiding thread of the history of the performed image, concerning the ‘added theatricality’ of performed photography involving laughter. The grotesque character of photographed mises-en-scène is not only a recurrent historical feature, but also a structural element of the performed image. The many visual gags found in the amateur photography of the early twentieth century, which continue in those fairground staples that are the painted backdrop, painted figures with a hole for the punter’s head, photographic shooting, etc., were a big favourite with the Surrealist artists. In the same way, the Dadaists needed merely the slightest opportunity to strike some irreverent pose for the camera. For Duchamp photography was not only central to the questioning of the heritage of classical space, it also allowed him to play with disguises and faces and to divert family albums. Magritte’s photos evince a similar inclination, inherited from family parties and the capers of the beaux-arts students but, on top of that, punning titles or plays on the absurdity of the situation. But the most singular example here is that of the poses struck by Breton’s friends in a Parisian photo-booth. The dozens of photos taken in this way (possibly all during a single session, with a view to composing the famous photomontage that closes the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste in December 1929), amply illustrate the importance of the grotesque in these miniature mises-en-scène. Here is Yves Tanguy pulling all kinds of faces, Max Ernst and his irresistible mimicry, the fake seriousness of Breton and Paul Éluard, and the hilarious poses of the gang’s female members. They had all been photographed at the fairground by Valentine Hugo not long ago, and here they were again, staged with equal drollery. In those days, automatic photo booths were not like the ones we have now. Introduced into Paris in 1927, they were staffed by a hostess who provided change. These Surrealist antics in the booth were a real act of appropriation

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but, more fundamentally than that, they proposed a new form of the comic. Whereas cinema and snapshot photography were always playing out the same old situations, with the figure of absent-mindedness and its inevitable motif, the fall – provoking the laughter that Bergson had explained as a reaction to the imposition of the mechanical on the living22 – these faces made at the blind lens of the Photomaton were active and not absent-minded, posed and not taken by surprise. They induce in the beholder a very distinctive comic sensation. Writing about the grotesque (monstrosities) that gave the viewer the feeling, not of being superior to the absent-minded figure, but superior to nature itself, Baudelaire spoke of ‘absolute comedy.’23 But this notion is broadened even more by what we find in these Surrealist stagings. We are laughing here at the machine and at the photographer that it has replaced. The Surrealists do not make us laugh with their grotesque faces, rather, it is their action in relation to the lens – the performance of the image – that gives the viewer the feeling of being superior to the machine, which has itself become absent-minded. In this way, the Surrealists constituted photographic mise-en-scène as a critical space. And, leading on from this, it would seem that the comedy of photographic mise-en-scène relates less to the amateur or society pranks of the nineteenth century than to the opening-up of a space in which parody, self-mockery and many other feelings derived from the comic, turn the pretentiousness of the staging into a platform and also a speculative arena. With the Surrealists, the performed image takes on the appearance of a constructed image that immediately admits to its tricks and demotes the figure of the photographer. More importantly, by making it a point of honour to keep reminding us of this artificiality with its pranks and face-pulling, which thereby become the metaphors of that artificiality, the performed image uses all the levers of classical and illusionist representation, exaggerating the artifices to such an extent that it is never suspected of trying to deceive. Looking now to the theatre of the early 1930s, both in the post-symbolist heritage and in avant-gardist experiments, Antonin Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty (1932) convey the importance at this time of the idea of reducing the role of text and of the notion of the author in favour of gesture. Developing an ‘enslavement of the attention’, enjoining spectators to see and feel, ‘direct communication’ between the actor and

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the spectators – the tenets of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty all make it clear that theatricality here is in no way the pacification or the renunciation of action, but more than ever a renewal of a dynamics of representation, one in which ‘the public will believe in the theatre’s dreams providing that it really takes them for dreams and not for a copy of reality.’24 This is theatricality as consciousness – precisely what Barthes found in Brecht. In those days, the writer and photographer Claude Cahun, whose theatrical experiments alongside Pierre Albert‑Birot were close to Artaud’s principles, was probably the central figure in the history of photography and its dealings with the performed image. With metamorphoses that are a plea for social liberty, she made poetic, playful use of the critical space afforded by the photographic stage. Made up, masked, parodying the attributes of femininity, Claude Cahun played out the comedy of gender in her photography and, using collage with her companion Moore (Aveux non-avenus, 1929-30), freely mixed experimental and theatrical practice, creating a hybrid that echoed the confusion of gender. Even today, those who watch Cahun’s theatre are troubled by her androgyny, which goes much further than Duchamp’s prank of dressing up as Rrose Sélavy, or, much earlier, the photographs of Toulouse-Lautrec as a transvestite. The strangeness of a physique, in which the confession of difference combines with the arbitrariness of a theatrical space, far outclassing voyeurism – even if it does retain part of the fetishism of a tableau produced by the photographic stage. After the war, when Cahun, who joined the Resistance, had a good part of her work destroyed by the Nazis, a painter and photographer in Southwest France, Pierre Molinier, also made use of photographic theatricality in order to elaborate a danse macabre of sexuality making copious use of masks and grimaces. Working in a tiny space in his room in front of a screen hung with toile de Jouy (fabric printed with figure scenes), Molinier pushed the acted pose to its ultimate limits. Through the sexual act of self-penetration, he found a true action in the midst of a mise-en-scène. If for a moment we accept a little historical disorder, then we can say that there is little difference between Molinier’s grotesque and pornographic imagery and the iconography that emerged in the 1960s with the Viennese Actionists. The will to transgress is the same, driven in the former case by the inner demon, flaunted in the face of Austrian society in the latter. Also similar is the recourse to action. In Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s case it is the image that is performed as much, if not more, than the action itself. 540

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Still, because of the echoes produced by the very term ‘performed’, we need to distinguish between the kind of image we are concerned with here and the aesthetic principles of the happening, which have remained in force in performance art. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Allan Kaprow established the rules that made it possible to define the happening as an event that could not be compared with the idea of the work of art.25 This called for the presence of the public in a single place (or sometimes several places, so as to avoid the static model of theatre), and a programmed but, because of the chance factor, unique (non reproducible) action taking placed in real, lived time. As we can see, the performed image and the happening coincide on only one point: the programmed nature of the action. Apart from that, everything about them is different. The performed image claims that it should be seen alongside the work of art, is reproducible, does not require an audience (the relation to the spectator is deferred) and, rather than ‘avoiding’ the link to theatre, actively seeks it out. As for ‘performance’, a term that acquired generic value in the 1970s, it does of course suggest an analogy with the idea of the performed image, in the idea of ‘enacting something.’ But if a work of performance art occurs as an event, the pose in the performed image makes no such claims. In this sense, we can say that the performed image is equidistant from the mythology of the ‘decisive moment’ in photography and from art as action. We can see clearly what distinguishes the performed image from the image-action if we consider the way in which most of these conceptual artists choose scenes that are utterly prosaic, or even hilariously absurd, and use language (often in the work’s title) to generate speculation (metaphor, play on words…). In the scenes staged in his studio by the American artist William Wegman, starting in the late 1960s, humour is often produced by the coincidence of the literal and the theatrical. By superimposing the meaning of the caption over the action – by combining action and word – he produces an absurd result that highlights the disjunction between art and reality. The performed image is constantly establishing connections between the performance of language and role-playing. The body of work built up by Cindy Sherman since the mid-1970s is based on the theatricality of the performed pose. Much has been made of the political significance of her work, its denunciation of the female stereotypes disseminated by culture (from art to TV series, from fashion to porn mags), as if, by constantly

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putting the artist figure in the position of the actress, representation had cut the link with the tradition of the self-portrait and its concomitant introspection. Since the Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) – set-ups based on studio shots in which the point is to theatricalise cinema – the artist has explored the register of the grotesque, all the way to the most incredible horror movies. However, we should not overlook the fact that this overtly critical work is also constantly posing the question of the artist’s role. Not only because Sherman herself nearly always plays the main role, but also because this guising has nothing to do with acting out ‘characters’, and that what we have here is never character comedy in Bergson’s sense (that is to say, an iconography of absent-mindedness). When it comes to performed images, no one has more tellingly raised the question of the definition of the ‘true artist’ than Bruce Nauman in his series of studies for the holograms Making Faces, made in the late 1960s. At the time, the dominant figure was that of the demiurge instituted by Abstract Expressionism. In the series of Eleven Color Photographs (196667) we find the famous Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966), which is one of a number of drawings and photographs that physically and metaphorically liken The True Artist to a spouting fountain. Photographed nude, artificially lit, pushing out a jet of water, Nauman creates a troubling conflation of the two parts of Duchamp’s Étant donnés (Given), The Waterfall and The Illuminating Gas (the nude lying exposed to the voyeur’s gaze), a work made in secret and only shown to the public in 1968, shortly after the death of this artist who exhibited a urinal as a Fountain (1917). Is it true, as Nauman’s 1967 title puts it, that The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths? In the 1970s, the questioning of the artist’s role involved an intimate linkage of photography and performance, as if it were now impossible to envisage the presentation of the artist outside a redefinition of the notions of stage and public. In one of Dan Graham’s most famous actions, Performer/Audience Mirror (1977), the artist stood facing the public with his back to a large mirror, then faced the mirror, while describing the audience out loud. While this set-up seems to be totally open to chance, the phenomenological experiment in the relation between artist and public was in fact prepared down to the slightest detail. According to Graham, to reject spontaneity is also to reject theatricality: As Graham asserted in the early 1980s, ‘We must abandon the idea of a performance as a theatrical effect, or

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even as a series of theatrical effects […]. It is also a strategy that enables artists to be themselves.’26 But this rejection of theatricality goes hand in hand with an affirmation of modernism, which was at the heart of performance from the 1960s onwards. Graham emphasises the way in which the idea of the present, of the immediacy of action, exists ‘as pure consciousness, phenomenology, uncontaminated by the historical.’27 This ‘pure presence, which is self-sufficient and without memory’, which he applies in his video installations using delay effects (Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974), makes the viewer conscious of the process of perception and, in the same space, produces a critique of it. The process asserts the values of modernist art: the work constitutes its autonomy only by referring back to itself. The rehabilitation of modernism, after it had been critiqued by the Pop artists and, above all, the Minimalists, involved a new idea of the performed image, one which not only articulated the image of the artist, but also instituted a relation to the public by assigning a role to the spectator. The work of Nan Goldin has rarely been analysed in this light; most commentators have looked no further than her transgressive iconography and the ‘ennobled’ set-up of the slide projection. And yet, at the end of the 1970s, what else could this have been about if not instituting the figure of the artist (in self-portraits, but above all via the intimacy with the people she photographs) in a relation in which the public itself if included in the work? Because for Goldin the public is as much a part of the work as her friends are. Neither the post-modern reading of Goldin’s installations as quoting the amateur slide show (the simple rhetoric of devaluation, akin to the false magazine articles of Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 1966) nor, conversely, the naturalist reading which focuses on the voyeurism of these images (but forgets the role of the slide projection), can account for the link between Goldin’s success and the instutionalisation of conceptual art. The impact on contemporary photography (contemporary meaning that it belongs to a still unfinished historical moment) of this new staging of the principles of the autonomous artwork, one using devices based on a symmetry between artist and public, began to be apparent as of the late 1970s, in the abundance of performed images in which the iconography of representation itself (actor/stage/audience) occupies a central position.

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These tableaux – to use the term evoked above – may now seem very academic, but they still evoke a curious paradox: the refusal to admit their theatricality. For if the theatricality of the photographic can be seen as the repressed of modernism, this is to a large extent because the new modernist orthodoxy, as elaborated on the basis of Michael Fried’s famous essay, Art and Objecthood (1966), uses this very notion of theatricality to discredit works of art that are dependent on their public: for how, indeed, could such works attain their requisite and absolute autonomy? This conception of the artwork, laid down by Fried’s work in art history throughout the 1980s and 90s,28 had such an impact that theatricality still constitutes a kind of modernist taboo. The artistic and theoretical work of Jeff Wall, a figure close to Dan Graham, is exemplary in this respect. By the late 1970s Wall had acquired a degree of pictorial experience and historical and aesthetic awareness that enabled him to inaugurate a new kind of performed image, one that satisfied all the criteria of autonomy. Going beyond the conceptualist model of performance by introducing the use of the light box, he nevertheless maintained a degree of theatricality on his photographic stage that took the form of continual references to the history of painting and the model of cinema. Wall’s photography thus seems to take painting or cinema as its own object. Over the last few years, it has also striven to do this with photography as well by, as Wall himself puts it, ‘monumentalising street photography’ and through the use of black and white.29 Attentive observers will notice that the scenes in Wall’s work are frequently constructed around figures who are themselves watching an event, contemplating an object – who are, in one way or another, absorbed, and thus, to refer to Michael Fried’s thesis, which Wall himself overtly cites, indifferent to the viewer, in a relation that allows the work to affirm its own autonomy. Since the 1930s, the utopia of modernist theory has founded the values of the artwork on their imperviousness to the contingencies of history. However, since the revision of modernism at the end of the twentieth century, artists and theoreticians have taken modernity itself (and its history) as their object. We have seen this in the register of the documentary aesthetic, but also in experimental photography and the

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performed image: the modern condition of photography means that it has at times been close to an abstract dream of artistic purity, but this dream fades in the very accomplishment of the utopia of an art that looks only to modernity for its value. As a metaphor of the history of fluctuation of the value of photography, the questioning of the status of the work of art shows how central photography has been to the fundamental questions of art throughout the twentieth century. These can never be reduced to the simple adventure of photography’s artistic legitimisation. A history of the value of photography does not consist of a set of measuring devices designed to reflect changes over time. In a value system – to parody what Benveniste said of signs – we will find only differences. As a temporal and social dynamic, the fluctuation of value is a historical agent of the modern condition of photography, not a normative system. Documentary, experimental and performed photography emerged as the three main regimes of this modern condition, revealing – more clearly perhaps than is the case elsewhere – the amplitude of this fluctuation of values. The ethical value of the documentary, the aesthetic value of experiment and the artistic value of the performed – these three main lines highlighted by the history of photography’s modern condition point to a reading that is always dialectic. The value of images is a matter of reception and of the context determining the criteria of judgement, but photographs are also the fruit of intention; the photographer projects an ambition in his image via the medium of his formal choices. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the great return of photojournalism to the forefront of aesthetic issues in photography is probably the sign of a major fluctuation in the value of photography. After a period when it was governed by the elites, the definition of the value of photography now seems to be coming back to the ‘public’ – a new name for what Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu called ‘common sense’ – as a result of the return of the authority of the ‘referent.’ The generation of commentators who had worked to ‘deconstruct’ the myths and stereotypes of the news image have not weakened the economy of the image in the slightest. Recognised artists working in photography over the last twenty years are supported by an art market that is incapable of competing with the media. The news image provided photography with a kind of back-up for the idea of nature, a permanent stock of images. The break with the utility value

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of the nineteenth century was a major aspect of the position adopted by artistic photography in the twentieth century, but that utility value – the great emblem of which is no doubt war reportage – has continued to govern both economic history and ethical debate. It would now appear that, quite consciously, it is masking many of the aesthetic issues whose value it had hitherto not registered. And yet theses on representation, and the speculative work of twentieth-century photography, have sufficiently enriched our visual culture for there to be, once again, a thoroughgoing debate in the field of images.

Notes 1.

Jeff Wall; Els Barents, ‘Typology, Luminescence, Freedom: Selections from a conversation with Jeff Wall’ in Jeff Wall: Transparencies Rizzoli (New York, 1986) p. 103.

2.

For a history of ‘the idea of photography’ in the nineteenth century, see François Brunet, La Naissance de l’idée de photographie Presses Universitaires de France, (Paris, 2000).

3.

Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’ (1961), Image Music Text, ed. and tr. Stephen Heath, Fontana (London, 1977) p. 17.



Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography Vintage (London, 1993).

4.

Olivier Lugon, Le Style documentaire, d’August Sander à Walker Evans 19201945 Macula (Paris, 2001).

5.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934 Belknap Press (Cambridge,1999) pp. 507-530.



‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935-1938 Belknap Press, (London, 2002) pp. 101-133.

6.

Interview with Camille Waintrop, Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, nr. 14, July 2002, pp. 3-7.

7.

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Arts in America’ October, nrs. 3 and 4, 1977.

8.

Philippe Dubois, ‘Histoires d’ombre et mythologies aux miroirs. L’index dans l’histoire de l’art’ L’Acte photographique Nathan, (Paris, 1994) pp. 109-150.

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9.

André Gunthert and Michel Poivert, ‘Laboratoire du photographique’ Études photographiques, nr. 10, November 2001, p. 6.

10. Im Reich der Phantome – Fotografie des Unsichtbaren, exhibition catalogue, Mönchengladbach/Krems, 1998. 11. Clément Chéroux, ‘Les récréations photographiques, Un répertoire de formes pour les avant-gardes’ Études photographiques, nr. 5, pp. 72-96. 12. Clément Chéroux, ‘Les discours de l’origine. À propos du photogramme et du photomontage’ Études photographiques, nr. 14, January 2004, pp. 34-61. 13. Man Ray, Self-portrait, Bulfinch, 1999. 14. László Moholy-Nagy, Peinture Photographie Film et autres écrits sur la photographie, translated by Catherine Wermester,1993. 15. Man Ray, Électricité, dix rayogrammes de Man Ray et un texte de Pierre Bost Compagnie Générale d’Électricité, (Paris, 1931). 16. Ibidem. 17. Black Mountain College. Una aventura Americana Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, (Madrid, 2002) p. 158. (My thanks to Julie Delmas for having brought this episode to my attention.) 18. Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ (1973), Image Music Text, ed. and tr. Stephen Heath, Fontana (London, 1977) pp. 69-78. 19. Ibidem, p. 69. 20. André Bazin, ‘Théâtre et cinéma’ (1951) in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Les Éditions du Cerf (Paris, 1985) pp. 129-178. 21. Ibidem, p. 146. 22. Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1899) Presses universitaires de France, ‘Quadrige’ reprint, (Paris, 1997) p. 44. 23. Charles Baudelaire, ‘De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques’ (1855), Baudelaire Critique d’art followed by Critique musical, Gallimard (Paris, 1992) pp. 185-203. 24. Antonin Artaud, ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté’ (1932), Le Théâtre et son double Gallimard, (Paris, 1964) p. 129-194. 25. Allan Kaprow, ‘Assemblages, Environments and Happenings’ (1965), excerpt in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.) Art in Theory 1900-1990 Blackwell, (Oxford, 1992) pp. 703-709. 26. Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power MIT Press (Cambridge, 1999) 27. Ibidem. 28. See in particular: Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot University of California Press, (Berkeley,1980) 29. ‘Entretien entre Jeff Wall et Jean-François Chevrier’ Essais et Entretiens 19842001, (Paris, 2001) p. 17. 547

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—

Visual Memory as Mental Inscription on the Formation of Contexts Rolf Sachsse —

Long before he was able to sift through the legendary suitcase with private keepsake photographs in Auschwitz,1 Hanno Loewy had already provided an exemplary investigation of a single image in terms of its historical significance, using a photgraph from his own family history.2 With this description, he follows in the steps of a no less legendary yet invisible model: the photograph of Roland Barthes’ mother that this author finds while sorting out her estate, a photograph that Barthes takes as a starting point for his last great essay.3 But the visibility of the image in Hanno Loewy’s essay is just as rhetorically well-buffered as Quintillian’s description of familial misfortune as a preface to his instruction in the use of emotion while perorating before court where he all the same refuses the use of images, stating that this would be all too horrible.4 With no link between such a picture and persons at least distantly known to the observer – even if only through their presentation in technological media – the use of private keepsake photographs is mere voyeurism, and in moral terms dubious at best. In the framework of a larger complex of works on the historical treatment and processing of the Shoah, the artists Simone Bader and Jo Schmeiser who publish their work under the name Klub Zwei produced a video presentation entitled Black on White, roughly five minutes in length.5 Based on a general critique of the exhibition practise commonly applied to pictures of the Shoah, they compile quotations and paraphrases from catalogue texts of a travelling exhibition showing exactly these images.

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Presented in the neutral font family of the Akzidence Grotesque, these quotations are shown as text fragments in the language of the place where the installation is exhibited; these fragments are interspersed with white screen projections. The difference between the title of the work and its appearance allows us an ini­tial point of entry to the intention of the artists: if we see the lettering as black and white, the texts are punched out, that is, themselves negations of writing, stencils. This makes a clear reference to the futility of producing meaning from the brief sentences: as statements they are too general, as metaphors they have no reference. As media icons, they are, as Joseph Koerner has shown with his findings from the art history of the 16th century, themselves iconoclastic.6 But at issue is probably not even the truth content of such sentences; they simply stand for all other similar statements about the use of photographs, and they are just as preexistent as the images themselves. The negative stenciling of the text fragments is part of a simple technical transfer of media: intertitles in film and television are white on black, which is precisely not like ink or printing on paper. The method applied is so simple that it is useless to reproduce these works in photographs or catalogues – all you can see is a fragment of white text on a black screen in standard writing. In the concept of a video documentation, the conclusion could be drawn that the genuine part of the work should be the white, empty screens without image, or it should be what is not shown, because a correct use of it cannot be presumed, never mind guaranteed. The afterimage that emerges on the human retina after an intensive gazing at these white surfaces – techni­cally only possible by using very bright monitors – is then actually a gray (black) field on white. If such an observation verges towards overinterpretation, one can at least confirm that in this work Klub Zwei are taking up a multiply refracted game like from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: passing through the looking glass, the question of what is behind the mirror that photography holds up to the world. This question cannot be posed in the medium itself, it requires a double trans­fer. The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson, who was so interested in taking photos of young girls, not only had to pack his story in the more or less banal framework of the fairy tale genre, but also publish under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The statements of Black on white require the reference to the Shoah and its contem­ porary visualization, together with the contextualization necessary for a

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histo­rically correct, that is, humanistic understanding. In a video work that mirrors this one, this time using documentary forms, Things. Places. Years, Klub Zwei carried out this demand just as ideally as successfully by taking actual women, places, and objects as the foundation of memory. And still, there is a remainder left behind, perhaps a tiny doubt that is to be traced out here, one that by no means refers to the work of the artists, but to a fundamental problem that drives them as well as others. The contextualization of the historically determined misuse of images begins already in the labeling of their origins. The concept of the Shoah has established itself as the complete negation of the name Israel, which itself has made the long rood from patriarchal name, through the political goal of the foundation of the state, to a religious ideology.7 The term was introduced in modern times by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in his film of the same name: the documentary quality of this work is maintained by an extremely formalized structure, from the panoramas from the train through interviews over a total length of eight hours, and distinguishes it from all fictional predecessors.8 This attempt itself refers in turn to the horror at the success of a predecessor in processing of the event, the US television series Holocaust.9 Shoah is a Modern Hebrew adaptation of the Greek-Latin holocaustum, which by ecological and cynical standards in linguistics can be translated with ‘(wholly) burned sacrifice.’ The concept is nothing less than a metaphor for the uniqueness of the German genocide of the European Jews: nothing was to remain of them, not even a memory. Realizing and acknowledging this point has two consequences for the use of history and politics, as addressed in my first line’s reference to the suitcases of Auschwitz. By taking the last remaining images away from the people in the concentration camps, the victims were confronted still during their lifetime with the finality of their annihilation, or Vernichtung, a monstrous pleo­nasm only present in the German language that surpasses mere extermination with the added prefix, and annuls the status of a plague in pest control. It is this more than inhuman attitude of the German perpetrators and those who looked away that defines only one of the many genocides of the twentieth century as the one and only Holocaust.10 The reverse of this uniqueness flows into the consideration of the work of Klub Zwei as well. Since the religious re-politicization of the state founding and the name Israel are so closely and uniquely related to

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the Holocaust and Shoah, all critique of the existence of the state itself is nature-like forbidden, and all critique of its cur­rent politics become extremely difficult if not impossible. A historical re-contexutalization of this set of concepts needs to take place before many problems of the Middle East will seem soluble. By taking up the extreme formality of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and pushing it further towards the complete negation of any visual metaphors, it uncovers the deeper underlying structures of meaning, a great achievement for this little work. At the same, it flows into the radical deconstruction of the visual material of Shoah and a new level of meaning that itself seems metaphoric: the techniques and technologies used in the work, in particular its digital generation. It has become something of a platitude of cultural history that the dissolution of a dual world structure around 1990 was accompanied by narrowly linked to the transition from physical-chemical image production in photography and film to digitally generated images.11 The introduction of computerized photo­graphic technologies and the distribution of media images by fleeting networks of images that were just as fleetingly collected as they were perceived was fol­lowed by a euphoria of uninhibited image distribution that promised the ubiqui­tous presence of all the images in this world – but with the loss of the material existence and the necessary believability of what is seen on the images. Thus, the American curator Grant B. Romer may be quoted quite rightly on digital imagery: ‘Name it anything but – never name it photography.’12 Mimesis has slipped into the software, and there it is functionalized even for the constitution of memory. Falsification no longer has to take place before the camera lens or on the paper, but instead is part of depiction and its processing from the very beginning. In light of these developments, anyone who still wanted to believe in political blocks with opposing notions of reality had simply fallen out of the course of history. The relationship of image to reality was changed once again by the terrorist act of September 11, 2001 in New York City. Here, the only reliable visuals came from surveillance cameras and were obtained from the running material with a mid to long-term time lapse. For photography and its notion of time, treated so bril­liantly by Roland Barthes in his essay, this new definition of the pictorial conven­tion had serious consequences: it had irrevocably been drawn into the circle of artistic disciplines with a claim to autonomy, and by and large lost its

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claim to creating world images.13 Up to now, little attention has been paid to another consequence of this development: since digital photography has neither nega­tives nor truly positive print in paper form, the printout is in principal more provisional than the photographic print. Its long term effect of memory storage is no longer tied to material existence but to the respective forms of media transfer. With this, the use of images has been transformed far beyond any ideological connotations. For around 200 years, or six to seven generations, photography, as a derivation of a feudal visual memory in painting and drawing, had taken on the function of the eternal self-perpetuation of individual existence and the con­ ceivable visual handing down of this existence to later generations. The mon­strousness of the image theft in the Shoah consisted precisely in the separation of these handed-down images from the individuals whose life they represented: despite all the detective work, it was barely possible to use the minimal indica­tions on the backsides of the images to identify their owners. Where there is nothing to remember, it does not help to look into a mirror, of whatever kind. By choosing the iconoclastic technique of replacing images with words, then adding another step of self-distancing through the theoretical metalevel of the object, Klub Zwei have – beyond their genuine purpose – raised still another, more uncomfortable notion: their reference is only understood when both images are used for members of a given society, and when this use is reflected in language. Both forms of the use of narratives and history have clearly passed their zenith. The persistence of shock in media traffic has become very brief. What is not experienced, as a trauma on one’s own body can only be perceived in the distance of an interest that is as vague as it is short-lived. In such times and with the media that we use to achieve awareness, quick forgetting is surely a necessary form of drive and sound hygenics. But it can also turn against its creator: in forgetting, culture is not annihilated, but exhausted. No one will look behind the mirror, making Alice’s pleasures obso­lete. Are there other pleasures to take their place, pleasures not directed against the body or its mental integrity, but that promise new knowledge? The text is based on an essay previously published in the exh.cat. Nine Points of the Law, Neue Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kuenste, (Berlin 2004), unpag. I am personally indebted to the interpreter of this first version, Brian Currid. 553

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Notes 1

Kersten Brandt, Hanno Loewy, Krystyna Oleksy (ed.), Vor der Ausloeschung. Fotografien gefunden in Auschwitz, Munich 2001. On the history of this discovery, see Hanno Loewy, ‘2400 Fotografien, gefunden in Birkenau’, in: Fotogeschichte Vol.15 (1995), No.55, pp. 10-18.

2

Hanno Loewy, ‘Ein Spaziergang...’, in: Diethart Kerbs (ed.), Bilder fuer Timm, Eine Festgabe fuer Timm Starl zu seinem 50. Geburtstag am 13.9.1989, (Marburg 1989), pp. 22-23.

3

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York 1982).

4

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, On the Education of an Orator, (New York 1995) (1988), Book 6, Preface, Chapter 1, p. 32. [http://www.ukans.edu/history/ index/europe/ancient_rome/E/texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/home. htm](2007-30-01).

5

Karin Gludovatz, ‘Grauwerte – Ein Projekt von Klub Zwei zum Gebrauch historischer Dokumentarfotografie’, in: Texte zur Kunst, Vol.13 (2003), No.51, pp.58-67. Since 2005, the installation Black and White is in the collection of the Museum Ludwig at Vienna, see Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (ed.), Ausst.Kat. Why Pictures Now. Fotografie, Film, Video heute, Vienna (Nurnberg 2006), pp. 148-149.

6

Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘The Icon as Iconoclash,’ in: Bruno LaTour, Peter Weibel (ed.), exh.cat. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, (Karlsruhe Cambridge MA 2002), pp. 164-213.

7

Eduard Sachsse, Die Bedeutung des Namens Israel. Eine quellen-kritische Untersuchung, Phil. (Diss. Bonn, 1910).

8

Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, (Paris 1986).

9

Judith E. Doneson, TheHolocaustinAmericanFilm, (Philadelphia 1987). On the production of this tele­vision series, see (2007).

10

Rolf Sachsse, Die Erziehung zum Wegsehen, Fotografie im NS-Staat, o.O. (Dresden, 2003).

11

Susanne Regener, ‘Fotografie / Geschichte. Theoretische Überlegungen zu einer unbe­dingten Konjunktion’, Lecture at the conference Die DDR im Bild: Zur Ikonographie des zweiten deutschen Staates, Erfurt, May 2003 http://www.

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susanne-regener.de/texte.html; printed in: Karin Hartewig, Alf Luedtke (ed.), Die DDR im Bild. Zum Gebrauch der Fotografie im anderen deutschen Staat, (Goettingen, 2004), pp. 13-26. 12

Grant B. Romer, ‘Warum Fotografien erhalten?’, in: Rundbrief Fotografie. Analoge und digitale Bildmedien in Archiven und Sammlungen, Vol. 12 (2005) No. NF45(1), pp. 10-12. The given is the original quote which I noted in presence of his lecture.

13

Rolf Sachsse, ‘Fotografie als Prozeß. Von der Verflüssigung des RaumZeit-Kontinuums’, in: Jean-Huber Martin (ed.), exh.cat. Heute bis jetzt. Zeitgenoessische Fotografie aus Duesseldorf part II, (Munich 2003), pp. 34-40.

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—

Weightless Photography Jan Simons

—

Only thirty years ago, Susan Sontag (1977: 3) depicted the photographic image as ‘an object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, and store.’ Today, photographic images have become even cheaper to produce and easier to carry about, accumulate, and store, but they have also become like the ‘movie and television programs’ that ‘light up walls, flicker, and go out’, from which Sontag sought to distinghuish them. In the contemporary digital age, photographic images are no longer primarily printed objects but have also increasingly become images that light up walls, screens, and all sorts of displays. As the traditionally screen-based film and television images, they too ‘flicker, and go out.’ Photographic images are no longer light-weight objects, but weightless sequences of ones and naughts. Like movies and television images, they have become virtual images (see Friedberg 2006). In less than the quarter of a century since Susan Sontag wrote her influential essay on photography, the technological basis and with it the art and craft of photography have radically changed. In 1992 William J. Mitchell already called the age opened by the arrival of digital image processing technologies ‘the post-photographic era.’ The postphotographic era did not bring a new, stable form of photography, but instead introduced a period of constant and increasingly rapid change. The Internet – itself already in its ‘Web 2.0’ stage – brought a new medium for the storage, distribution and display of photographic images. In the first years of the twenty-first century digital cameras became an integral component of the mobile phone which made the digital camera another

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electronic gadget that follows their users wherever and whenever they go and allows them to take pictures on the spot and, maybe even more importantly, to send them instantaneously as MMS messages or email attachments to anyone who is online or to upload them to Internet sites such as YouTube.com, Flickr.com, Skoeps.nl, MySpace.com, Moblog. co.uk, or name your favorite. The least one can say is that in contemporary ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006), brought about by the almost universal digitization of all sorts of data and information, photography, along with other media, has lost its much vaunted specificity. Cameras become miniaturized and integrated into portable multimedia devices such as mobile phones, pda’s, laptops, mp3 players (which in turn become integrated in gadgets like Apple’s iPhone which is no longer ‘just a phone’). Like movies and television images photographs are nowadays mostly watched on the small or large screens of mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers, billboards, video walls and other sorts of ‘urban screens’ and are distributed through digital wireless or cable networks. They have lost their dedicated physical and chemical support and along with that the specialized tools and skills for handling those materials have gone as well. Photographs now share technological infrastructure and binary codes with other digitized media. Photographs are no longer – if they ever were – ‘stand-alone’ objects,1 but get more and more routinely integrated into interfaces (as screen savers, icons, wall paper, etc), web pages, blogs, e-mail and MMS-messages, PowerPoint presentations, mobile phone communications or even faceto-face conversations when for instance friends show each other pictures, often immediately after having taken them, on the displays of their mobile phones (see Kato a.o. 2006). Moreover, photographs are nowadays just as easily erased and deleted as they are joyfully distributed and shared among numerous, often unknown and anonymous members of networks and users of Internet sites. Along with its specificity, photography also has lost the special status it still enjoyed when Susan Sontag wrote her essays on photography. The main casualty of the digital revolution in image production, processing, and publishing was the presumed privileged relationship of photography with the reel. For William J. Mitchell (1992), the main problem of digital technologies was the fate of ‘visual truth in the postphotographic era.’ Digital technologies, Mitchell argues, had severed

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the image from its real world referent, to which the procedures and techniques of traditional analogue photography had causally tied it. Because a photographic image could be said to have been ‘caused’ by the real world object it depicted, the meaning of a photograph could be understood as: ‘Look, here’s a house’ (Voici une maison – Metz 1983: 118), or, as in Roland Barthes’ (1980: 120) famous phrasing of photography’s noumenon: ‘Ça-a-été.’ Because it was caused by the light reflected from the photographed object, a photograph not only depicts the object that was in front of the camera at the moment the picture was taken, but it also demonstrates that the object had really been there at that very moment. According to Barthes, a photograph doesn’t just show a picture of an object, but rather it points a finger to ‘un certain vis-à-vis’: the beholder doesn’t perceive the photograph, but its referent (id.: 16). Barthes characterization of photography as inextricably linked with its referent echoes André Bazin’s famous 1945 essay on the ‘ontology of the photographic image’ in which he claimed that photography benefits from a particular transfer of ‘the reality of the thing to its reproduction’: ‘The image may be fuzzy, distorted, without colors, without any documentary value, but it originates from the ontology of the model: it is the model.’ (Bazin 1975: 14). The specificity of photography, then, was seen as relying in its indexicality: as an ‘index’ it ‘pointed towards’ its referent (Barthes, Bazin), and as a ‘trace’ of the light reflected by its referent it was also an ‘indexical’ sign in the Peircean sense because the photographic sign maintained a real connection to its referent (see Dubois 1983: 60 ff.). Digital technologies have severed photography’s indexical tie to its referent. A photograph is no longer the straightforward result of the imprint of light on the sensitive surface of a filmstrip (and its subsequent development and printing), but the highly mediated end product of sampling, encoding, compiling, processing and rendering through electronic circuits, layers of software and several sorts of hardware (hard disks, networks, monitors, printers, etc.). Even more importantly, ‘digital information (...) can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer’, and ‘since captured, ‘painted’, and synthesized pixel values can be combined seamlessly, the digital image blurs the customary distinctions between painting and photography and between mechanical and handmade pictures.’ (Mitchell 1992: 7). Like cinema, photography

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seems to have become again a a ‘particular branch of painting’ (Manovich 2001: 308; 309). With its indexical bound to the real, photography also seems to have lost its objectivity and veridicality, in short, it’s ‘visual truth.’ But has it? Or rather, did its analogue technology really guarantee photography a privileged relationship to the real? And if not, what does it owe its special status to?

Windows, words, and ways of speaking about pictures According to many theorists, photography’s privileged relationship to the real is based on its technology. Making a photograph is a purely mechanical and automated process entirely governed by the laws of optics, physics, and chemistry. As André Bazin, one of the most eloquent and ardent champions of realism in the cinema, pointed out: ‘For the first time, an image of the exterior world is automatically formed without the creative intervention of man, according to a rigid determinism. (...) All arts are based on the presence of man; only in photography we enjoy his absence.’ (Bazin 1975: 13). Because of this absence of human creativity the originality of photography consists of its ‘essential objectivity.’ (id) Other theorists followed suit. Roland Barthes (1980: 16), for instance, wrote: ‘Photography is literally an emanation from the referent.’ (id.: 126). This realist theory of photography, which deduces a visual similarity and even an ontological identity of the photographic image with its referent from photography’s technological basis is best summarized by Noël Carroll (1988: 127): ‘For any photographic image x and its model y, x represents y if and only if (1) x is identical to y (in terms of pertinent patterns of light) and (2) y is a causal factor in the production of x.’ According to analytical philosopher Gregory Currie (1995: 53) this causal relationship between the photographic image and its referent is one of counterfactual dependence, which means that ‘under certain conditions – ‘normal conditions’ as I shall call them – we can expect a photograph of X to display the visible properties of X in such a way that if X’s properties were different, the photographic image would be correspondingly different.’

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According to this realist approach of photography (and film), computer technologies have severed the mechanical and causal connection between the digitally processed image and its model, because, as William J. Mitchell (1992: 7) writes, digital photography is no longer ‘a matter of capture and printing’ because ‘intermediate processing of images plays a central role. Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments are to a painter.’ Digital technologies re-introduce the human ‘creative intervention’ which analogue photography seemed to have so successfully banned, and transform photography from a pure recording medium into an expressive art the content of which is the particular vision of the digital artist rather than a neutral and objective reproduction of a part of the real. In this view, digital technologies have deprived photography from its unique capacity to convey ‘visual truth’, its evidentiary status. However, in more than one respect technology is only part of the story of photography’s presumed realist recording and rendering of the real. For one thing, realist theorists tend to take into account only the process of ‘taking a picture’, the act of registering a part of the real, and to ignore the process of development, selection, enlargement, cropping, blending, and printing of photographs. As Philippe Dubois (1983: 47) pointed out, even the realist account of taking a picture is itself very partial, because it tends to focus on the very moment of ‘the “natural” inscription of the world onto the sensitive surface’ and ignores the ‘cultural gestures which entirely depend on human choices and decisions’, such as ‘the choice of camera, film, exposure time, angle, etc. (...)’ For another thing, in spite of having gone digital, photography and film still perform documentary functions in areas as widely divergent as professional journalism and amateur photography and of course, all possible mixtures and convergences between these two, as can be seen on websites from Flickr. com to MrPapparazi.com. Although taken by amateur photographers with digital cameras and distributed through email and the Internet, nobody questioned the veridicality of the pictures of the prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison or the videos and pictures taken with mobile phones in the tunnels of the London subway during the bombings in July 2005. On the other hand the doctoring of a photograph of burning buildings in

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Beirut after an overnight Israeli air raid with the Photoshop ‘clone tool’ to add smoke to the image, was soon exposed by bloggers and led to the forced resignation of photographer. Fake photography was of course not invented with digital technologies, but are as old as the medium itself. Martin Jay (1994: 146) observes that the soon widespread dissemination of new visual experiences due to the introduction of photography and other social and technological changes ‘introduced uncertainties about the truths and illusions conveyed by the eyes.’ Photography fed this skepticism, precisely because it did not always represent the world as it ‘really’ was and was used for deception as well as revelation. The realists’ reliance on photography as a veridical, objective, and truthful medium cannot be justified by an appeal to its technology, which can be used for many other purposes than producing an exact reproduction of reality as art photography or publicity and fashion photography amply demonstrate. It is rather based on a perceived analogy between the camera and the human eye. Bazin (1975: 13) explicitly draws this analogy when he writes: ‘As well, the group of lenses that constitute the photographic eye which substitutes for the human eye, is called precisely ‘the objective.’ Barthes’ (1980: 18) claim that a photograph ‘literally is an emanation of its referent’ (id.: 126) goes in the same direction: the ‘eye’ of the camera is a substitute of the eye of the beholder, and the beholder of a photograph visually apprehends exactly the same scene as he or she would have seen if he or she would have been at the exact place where the camera was when the picture was taken. This is the basis of the counterfactual logic implied by Gregory Currie: the picture X of referent Y would have been correspondingly different if referent Y would have had different properties, because the camera would have registered those differences just as the beholder would have noticed those differences if he or she would have visually perceived Y from the same place as the camera at the moment it registered Y. In this logic, the camera’s lens is a substitute for the lens of the human eye, the interior of the eye a substitute for the interior of the camera, and the sensitive emulsion on the filmstrip a substitute for the retina. With the analogies between the human eye and the camera where the latter is as much used to explain the former as vice versa, one is no longer in the realm of science and technology, but one has entered that of language and metaphor. The realist theory of photography, that is, does

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not derive from an analytical account of the apparatus and technology of photography, but is the result of a metaphorical projection of human visual perception onto the technology and uses of photography. The realist theory of photography understands, reasons, and speaks about the domain of photography metaphorically in terms of human vision. This is not to say that the realist theory of photography and film is necessarily mistaken or led astray by habits of language. Metaphors are, as cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 4) argue, not just poetic embellishments, aesthetic devices of the literary imagination, and not even mere linguistic constructs, but concepts that ‘that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.’ Metaphors typically conceptualize one domain in terms, patterns and structures of another domain, and according to Lakoff and Johnson most, if not all concepts used in understanding and reasoning about even abstract domains like mathematics and philosophy, can be ultimately understood as metaphorical projections from basic bodily, social and cultural experience (see Lakoff 1987: 112 ff; Johnson 1987: 72 ff; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Realist theories of photography and film are good examples of this largely unconscious mechanism. According to George Lakoff (1987: 125 ff.), vision is understood in terms of what he calls the ‘Idealized Cognitive Model of seeing.’ Idealized cognitive models (ICMs) are ‘characterized relative to experiential aspects of human psychology.’ An ICM ‘provides a conventionalized way of comprehending experience in an oversimplified manner.’ (id, 126). They capture the recurring patterns and characteristics of typical instantiations of bodily experiences, perceptual interactions and cognitive operations (see Johnson 1987: 79). The ICM of seeing accounts for the experience of visual perception with a folk theory of seeing which says: 1. You seen things as they are; 2. You are aware of what you see; 3. You see what is in front of your eyes. The objectivity and veridicality are quite straightforward consequences from this ICM, since it follows from the first maxim that if you seen an event, it really happened, you see what you regardless of how it is described, and if you see something, then there is something real that you’ve seen. Moreover, it follows from 3 that if there is something in front of your eyes, you see it, and anyone looking at a certain situation from the same viewpoint at a given place and time will see the same things. (Lakoff 1987: 128-129).

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This ICM of seeing underlies the veridicality and objectivity realist theories ascribe to photography and film. For both Bazin and Barthes, the most important aspect of photography is the causal connection between the photograph and the photographed object – ‘the necessarily real thing that was placed in front of the lens, without which there would not have been a photograph’ (Barthes 1980: 120). For Barthes, the substitutability of the view of the beholder of a photograph and the view of the camera was particularly important. As he wrote in one of his early essays on photography: ‘in photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene “really” happened: the photographer had to be there (...).’ (Barthes 1977: 30). Deictic theories of photography, then, which derive photography’s veridicality and objectivity from its technology, metaphorically transfer a commonsense, folk theoretical account of human perception, as captured in the ICM of seeing, onto photography. Though not necessarily wrong or mistaken, it is important to note first of all that ICMs and folk theoretical accounts are far fromt scientific theories. They are ‘quick and dirty’ ways of reasoning that work in most typical and representative cases of the experiential domains they cover, but they certainly do not fit all real experiences (see Lakoff 1987: 129). Watching a film, for instance, is a typical example that does not fit the ICM of seeing: one ‘sees’ a continuous stream of moving images, but in front of the eyes of the film spectator there ‘really’ are intermittent projections of still photographs. And ‘what’ and ‘how’ people see situations depends as much on how they categorize and describe those situations as on what ‘is in front of their eyes.’ In the case of photography, the view of the beholder is often as much oriented by the caption that accompanies the photograph as by its content. Moreover, when used to account for photography, the ICM of seeing gets transferred from its ‘source domain’, human visual perception, to another ‘target domain’, photography, which is some respects similar or analogous to the source domain, but in other respects very different from it. Metaphors generally highlight some aspects of their target domain, and hide others: they only provide a partial understanding of the target domain (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 12). Realist theories of photography, for instance, only highlight a single moment of the ‘photographic act’ (Dubois 1983), and ignore the whole process between capturing and the finished photograph. Just as the ICM of seeing does not fit all real experiences

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of seeing, the deictic approach of photography doesn’t fit all existing practices of photography, such as publicity and fashion photography. However, in the case of photography, the ICM of seeing not only functions as a cognitive tool for understanding ‘what photography is’, but it also provides a normative basis for the assessment of what counts as photography and what doesn’t. Realist (deictic) theories of photography explain the objectivity they uniquely ascribe to photographic images from the ‘absence of man’ (Bazin 1975: 13). This is based on a passive interpretation of the ICM of seeing: you see what is in front of your eyes regardless of what it is or how it got there, and you don’t have control over what comes in front of your eyes: you visually take in whatever emerges in your field of vision as it comes. This interpretation of human vision as a passive registration of what comes in the field of vision has been elevated to an ideal norm in the case of photography. As Susan Sontag (1977: 11) writes, ‘Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporaneous photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.’ But of course, in many cases photographers do take control over the scene in front of their lenses and do make conscious choices of frame, angle, exposure time, lighting conditions, etc. Realist theories of photography do not deny that pictures that have been staged, composed, arranged, or ‘doctored with’ in any other way are technically speaking photographs, but they tend to remove such pictures from the realm of ‘true photography’ to the realms of arts and communication. The aesthetics of portrait photography has always been described in terms of painting. Publicity photographs have always been a privileged object of semiotic analysis because they are so obviously intended to communicate a message (see Barthes 1977c). Photographs that too obviously witness of the intentions or skills of the photographer are often quickly discarded as witnessing of nothing else. As Sontag (2003: 26) writes: ‘For the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance.’

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Moreover, the ICM of seeing as formulated by Lakoff (1987) provides only one way of perceiving, conceptualizing, reasoning, and talking about the experiential domain of vision. The maxims of the ICM of seeing can give rise to quite different ways of thinking and talking about visual perceptions as well. As Lakoff (1987: 129) hints at, a consequence of the maxim ‘You see what’s in front of your eyes’ is also: ‘You can’t see what is not in front of your eyes. You can’t see everything.’ In other words: what you see depends on the borders of your field of vision and on the viewpoint from which you visually apprehend a situation. With the point of view from and the limitations of the field of vision, the viewing subject enters the scene. The subjective elaboration of the ICM of seeing could be summarized as: 1. You only see things as they appear to you; 2.You are only aware of what you see; and 3. You can only see what is in front of you from your particular point of view. (Simons 1999: 114). This elaboration of the ICM of seeing has quite different consequences: someone who views the situation from a different viewpoint might see the situation differently, and if you would be able to see more or apprehend the situation from a different angle, it might appear to be different from how it appears from your point of view. With the entrance of the ‘subjectivity’ of the viewer, the objectivity and veridicality of seeing disappear: seeing becomes partial and subjective. This might be called the ICM of pointof-view, and this seems to be appealed on when photographs signal the artistry, intentionality or ‘vision’ of the photographer. Both these elaborations of the ICM of seeing are not contradictory or incompatible. Both are specifications of a common underlying image schema that captures the recurrent structures of viewing situations in a diagram that organizes mental representations of viewing situations at a very general and abstract level (Johnson 1987: 22-23). This image schema has both viewer and perceived object as its parts, and it defines the relation between the visual perception of the latter by the former. Both ICMs of seeing each highlight different aspects of this image schema. The first ICM conceptualizes it as what the cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker (1991: 209-210) calls ‘the stage model’ or the ‘optimal’ or ‘canonical viewing arrangement’ because ‘it finds the observer focusing his attention on some external region where actions unfold as upon a stage.’ In the optimal viewing arrangement the perceiver is totally absorbed in the perceptual experience and external to the perceived

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action: ‘the object perceived is well-delimited, wholly distinct from the perceiver, and located in a region of high perceptual acuity.’ (id.: 316). In the optimal viewing arrangement the perceiving subject remains ‘offstage’, but in ‘the egocentric viewing arrangement’ the viewing subject herself comes ‘on stage’, sometimes even to the extent of becoming herself the focus of attention (Langacker 1991: 317). In the egocentric viewing arrangement, the perceiving subject becomes an on-stage participant, and the subjective, partial, and possibly even delusive nature of the visual perception becomes foregrounded. As soon as the perceiving subject signals her presence in photographic pictures, for realist theorists the photographic image looses its veridical and objective innocence and becomes subject to the suspicion of ‘insincerity or mere contrivance’ (Sontag 2003: 26). The ICMs of seeing and point-of-view do not represent objective characteristics of the viewing situations, but structure and orient the way perceivers of situations or photographs conceptualize, reason and talk about the perceived or photographed situations and their own relationship to that situation. A visually apprehended or photographed scene is never inherently an optimal viewing situation or an egocentric viewing situation, but always perceived, conceptualized, thought and talked about in one way or the other. The ICMs and their underlying image schematic viewing arrangement are cognitive tools that structure ways of thinking and speaking about situations and, in the case of photography, photographic pictures. The ‘objectivity’ or ‘subjectivity’ of a photographic picture is not dependent on the technology of photography, but is in a very fundamental way ‘in the eye of the beholder.’ Objectivity and veridicality of photographic pictures are not inherent properties of the mechanical, optical and chemical nature of photography’s technology but are ways of perceiving, thinking and speaking about photographs. This explains why, in spite of the radical changes brought about in the technology of photography by the ‘digital revolution’, there is as much aesthetic and discursive continuity as there is technological discontinuity. What is generally taken to be ‘the essence’ of photographic and digital imaging technology are two traditions of visual culture. Both existed before photography, and both span different visual technologies and mediums. Just as its counterpart, the realistic tradition extends beyond photography per se and at the same time accounts for just one of many photographic

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practices.’ (Manovich 1995: 6). And, one might add, photorealism, the achievement of realistic simulations of real or imaginary objects with computer technology that can not be distinguished from photographic images, has always been the ‘holy grail’ of computer engineers and programmers. Moreover, as Manovich (1995: 7) points out, ‘there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continues to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred.’ Indeed, the same photograph can be conceptualized in terms of either the optimal viewing arrangement or the egocentric viewing arrangement (and every position on the scale in between these extremities), depending on the interests, the purposes, and the intentions of the perceiver. Situations and photographs do not contain some inherent, objective meaning waiting to be ‘decoded’ or ‘deciphered’ by a spectator but they only get their meaning in an ‘act’ of perception, conceptualization, and interpretation and relative to a pragmatic context in which they obtain – or loose – a certain relevance (see Sperber & Wilson 1995). That is why the famous dictum, ‘A picture tells more than a thousand words’ is true and false at the same time: no verbal account can ever yield an exhaustive description of all possible ‘meanings’ of a situation or a picture, but a particular meaning of a situation or picture only emerges relative to a particular pragmatic context. Hence the importance of captions: they anchor the floating semantics of a picture for the viewer and help to orient its interpretation. A recent exhibition in Amsterdam, Crime Scene Amsterdam (Plaats Delict 2006), displayed forensic photographs that were taken at various crime scenes in Amsterdam between 1965 and 1985. In the context of the police investigations to the murders, suicides, accidents, sudden deaths, fights, and abuses, these pictures were conceived, executed, and used in terms of the optimal viewing arrangement: attention was entirely focused on the scene and its objects. However, once adorning the walls of the exhibition rooms of the Amsterdam photo museum FOAM these photographs solicited quite different readings. In the catalogue of the exhibition the following comment is given on a picture of a dead woman lying beneath a typical Amsterdam steep stair case: ‘It’s one of these pictures you can’t take your eyes from. The photographer really made a beautiful

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composition and applied the basic rules of photography: straight horizon and the center of attention slightly out of center. Neatly flashed. All is there to see.’ The critic immediately continues: ‘The trained eye of the forensic immediately notices that this picture from 1970 does not show a crime scene: Loose staircase rod. Accident. (Buurman 2006: 28) The forensic sees and interprets the picture in terms of the optimal viewing arrangement, whereas the critic discusses the same picture in terms of the egocentric viewing arrangement. Moreover, when taken out of context – or rather, inserted into a new museum context – pictures like these forensic photographs acquire a strange, almost surrealistic effect. The pictures may provide detailed information about the particularities of the crime scene, but they don’t disclose any information about what happened there, or about the results of the investigation. Instead, they solicit the imagination and the fantasy of the spectator. This is the other side of the proverbial eloquence of pictures: they give rise to endless streams of ‘words’ or stories, because although they show they usually don’t ‘tell’ very much. As Sontag (1977: 23) wrote: ‘Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.’ Photographs, whether analogue or digital, amateur of professional, family pictures or war photographs, need memories, stories, captions, and other narrative devices and anchors to assume a more than general and what Barthes once called ‘blunt’ meaning for the spectator. Even forensic pictures, once produced as evidentiary documents, become of interest to the museum visitor’s studium (how did things look again in the sixties and seventies?). For the museum spectator they are evidence of quite other things than were of interest to the detectives, judges, and lawyers who used them to document their cases. Pictures, analogue or digital, might tell more than a thousand words, but they certainly do need a few words to tell anything at all beyond the obvious and the banal.

Photography on the run A major effect of the digital revolution seems to be that photography itself has become banal. For a long time, taking pictures tended to be reserved for special occasions. As Pierre Bourdieu (1965: 57) wrote: ‘You don’t

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make a photograph of what is before your eyes every day.’ Vacations provided the ideal justification for taking pictures, because on a holiday trip, one could celebrate ‘the unique encounter of a exceptional moment in life with an exceptional place for its high symbolic payoff’ (id.: 60). Those were the days one had to take a deliberate decision to pick the camera out of its box or cupboard, buy films, and take it with you to a wedding, a birthday party, or a holiday excursion. These photographs certainly served evidentiary goals because they ‘proved’ that the subject had ‘really’ been at that exotic or famous place, but they also functioned in social and family rites (to show off, for instance, that one could afford not only a trip to the depicted site, but also had the luxury, the leisure time and the means to take that picture – see Bourdieu 1965:60). Nowadays the camera has become an integral part of the device that most people always carry with them without thinking: their mobile phone. This has made their owners less delicate in their choice of photo-worthy subjects, and has, according to some, led to an ‘explosion of banality’ (Koskinen 2003). Since the camera nowadays ‘follows’ its user everywhere, and since digital pictures are as easily and cheaply deleted as they are taken, owners of mobile phone cameras tend to take pictures of anything they encounter in their everyday lives and deem useful, interesting or entertaining enough to record. Moreover, MMStechnology allows them to send pictures taken with their mobile phone cameras instantaneously to family, friends, colleagues or other peers. The going mobile of photography has inaugurated new and sometimes unexpected uses of photography. Sometimes mobile phone camera owners take pictures as notes: instead of writing down the title of a book or a CD one might want to purchase later on a notepad, mobile phone users make a ‘visual note’ of those items. Mobile phone cameras are also used to visually archive one’s everyday life and to create a kind of a visual diary (see Okabe 2004), to ask peers for advice when shopping, or to give visual instructions to colleagues or employers who are at work in remote places. Sometimes groups of friends take pictures of each other to send them to peers who are not present, or to invite them to come over. Spouses send each other pictures of the children when, for instance, one of the parents is on a business trip. More often than not these pictures are accompanied with text-messages commenting on or clarifying the image on the picture, and sometimes the ambiguity of the image is exploited

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to tease or puzzle the receiver (see Koskinen 2004). Most interestingly, digital pictures literally become ‘conversation pieces’, because taking, sending and exchanging pictures becomes an integral part of an ongoing ‘real time’ conversation. In such exchanges, pictures may call for a visual response: as in a virtual gift economy, one ‘prospective visual’ (Koskinen 2004: 17) provokes a visual response from the receiver as either an answer to a riddle, an elaboration of the theme of the first image, or simply as an attempt to exceed the wittiness, nastiness or inventiveness of the sender. This practice of capturing and exchanging pictures in real time creates a sense of ‘distributed co-presence’, of ‘sharing ambient awareness with close friends, family and loved ones who are not physically copresent’ (Okabe 2004). In almost all of these cases, pictures are taken from the mundane, and often intimate everyday life experiences of the mobile photographers, which induced some commentators to regret an ‘explosion of banality’ (see Koskinen 2003; Rivière 2006). This, however, seems to be just another instantiation of the conventional response to media that Marshall McLuhan (1999: 18) already some forty years ago characterized as ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot’, because the concern about the banality of most mobile phone photographs focuses on their content, ‘the juicy peace of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’ (ibid). Treating the content of mobile phone photography as if it were of the same kind as ‘photography-as-we-knew’ it, is forgetting McLuhan’s lesson that the content of a new medium is always an old medium, but that the real message is always the medium itself. Unlike traditional photographs, for instance, mobile phone pictures, whether taken as visual notes or functioning in the context of a distributed co-presence, are usually not stored and archived, but deleted immediately after use. They are not permanent documents that fix important or exceptional moments of an individual or collective history, but ephemeral and short-lived parts of an ordinary and mundane ‘lived present.’ Most importantly, their function in mobile phone exchanges is not as much to document an event at a particular place or time, but to make and keep contact with other ‘virtually co-present’ conversation partners. They do not function as veridical and objective documents, but rather they serve social and communicative goals. Their main function

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often is not denotative or ‘referential’, but ‘phatic’: they serve ‘to establish, prolong or interrupt communication, to check whether the channel functions (....), to draw the attention of the conversational partner or to make sure he doesn’t withdraw’ (Jakobson 1963: 217). The message sent with most mobile phone photographs is not as much what the picture shows, but that the sender is in and with her thoughts with the receiver: ‘Hey, it’s me, and I’m thinking of you!’ It is not the depicted situation that counts, but the sharing of the picture (which sometimes even depicts situations, objects, or locations that are in themselves quite unconnected to the motives for making contact or the topic of the communicational exchange). These weightless digital pictures no longer carry the burden of veridical representation: they no longer refer to ‘absent’ situations that are situated in a spatial and temporal ‘elsewhere’, as is the classical semiotic function of the sign, but instead they are used to simulate a co-presence in a virtual ‘here-andnow.’ Barthes’ Ça-à-été has been replaced by ‘Hey, here I am!’ Since this message seems to override most, if not all pictures communicated over digital networks, the objective viewing arrangement which provided the most typical interpretative framework for ‘photography-as-we-knew-it’ seems to have been overruled by the egocentric viewing arrangement, if that distinction still makes any sense today. Finally, in contemporary convergence culture, photography has together with text, voice, video, and music, become part of multimedia communication tools. ‘Pictures’ and ‘words’ are no longer opposites vying for the attention of the addressee and competing over the completeness or accuracy of information. They are becoming, more than ever, each other complements in an ongoing conversation. But, of course, convergence comes with divergence as well: mobile phone photography is just one of the many possible and actually performed practices of photography, all of which may require different cognitive and pragmatic tools for their understanding, interpretation, and discussion.

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Notes 1

Apart from museums, that is. However, the celebration of photography as ‘art’ in museums of modern art or the increasing number of dedicated photography museums is a sure sign of nostalgia for a genre that actually no longer exists.

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Jakobson, Roman, Essais de Linguistique Générale Éditions de Minuit (Paris, 1963) Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes:The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought University of California Press (Berkeley, 1994) Jenkins, Henri, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide New York University Press (New York-London, 2006) Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1987) Kato, Fumitoshi, Daisuke Okabe, Mizuko Ito & Ryuhei Uemoto, ‘Uses and Possibilities of the Keitai Camera’ in: Ito a.o. 2006: pp. 300-310 Koskinen, Ilpo, ‘The First Steps of Multimedia: Towards an Explosion of Banality?’ Paper presented at the The First Asia-Europe Conference on Computer Mediated Interactive Communications Technology, Tagaylay City, the Philippines, 20-23 October 2003 Koskinen, Ilpo, ‘seeing with Mobile Images: Towards Perpetual Visual Contact’ http://www.fil.hu/mobil/2004 (2004) Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1980) Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought Basic Books (New York, 1999). Lakoff, George, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1987) Langacker, Ronald, Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin-New York, 1991) Manovich, Lev, ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,’ http://www. manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html 1995 Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media The MIT Press (Cambridge, 2001) Metz, Christian, Essais sur la Signification au Cinéma. (Tome 1) Paris: Klincksieck (Paris, 1983) Mitchell, William J., The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era The MIT Press (Cambridge, 1992)

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Okabe, Daisuke, ‘Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through Everyday Camera Phone Use.’ Paper presented at ‘Mobile Communication and Social Change’, International Conference on Mobile Communication, Seoul, October 18-19, 2004 Plaats Delict Amsterdam New Adam (Amsterdam, 2006) Rivière, Carole Anne, ‘Téléphone Mobile et Photographie: Les Nouvelles Formes de Sociabilités Visuelles au Quotidien’ In: Sociétés. No. 91, 2006/1, pp. 119-134 Simons, Jan. 1999, ‘What’s a Digital Image?’ in: Spielmann & Winter 1999, pp. 107-122 Sontag, Susan, On Photography Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, 1977) Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others Picador (New York, 2003) Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson Relevance: Communication and Cognition Blackwell (Oxford, 1995) Spielmann, Yvonne & Gundolf Winter (eds.), Bild – Medium – Kunst. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag (Munich, 1999)

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The Hybrid Photograph Johan Swinnen

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For decades Jan Fabre has been exhibiting photographs that are expressive in a way that is usually associated with the fine arts, works in which emotions and experiences form the basis for composition full of rich evocative physical symbols. They are reflections of beauty, dealing with the balance of power, or self-portraits. Jan Fabre mocks the image and puts power to the test like a tightrope-walker balancing along a fine line between the true and the imaginary, the real and the surreal, in search of the Utopian. Throughout his oeuvre we can witness his artistic struggle to arrive at a Gesamtkunstwerk. In his photographic work Jan Fabre expresses a world of the imagination all his own, in which humanist views are given free rein. He composes his photographic works if caught in a dream, using a combination of shades of black-and-white, colour gradations and controlled alterations like scratching and collage techniques in such a natural way that one image spontaneously conjures up another.

Paroxysm From 1970 onwards the relationship between the visual arts and photography received a major boost, which led to conceptual arts. Within this tendency, photography was originally given an anonymous role, in that its remit was to act as a facilitator and help in shaping the artist’s idea. Gradually, however, photography became independent

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and the subject was often staged so that the medium was adopted as a definitive form of art in its own right. Think of the work of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschnberg, Christian Boltanski, Robert Smithson, Jan Dibbets, John Hiliard and Michael Snow. The use of photography, in which the photographer dissociates himself from realistic photo-aesthetics, has played a significant role in the development of photographic style. It was staged photography that distanced itself farthest from objective reality and played a defining role in the emancipation of photography within the territory of the fine arts. The visual power of staged photography and the explicit contribution of the artist Jan Fabre, who uses techniques typical of the fine arts, have led to this unpredictable photographic work. Jan Fabre’s photographic work developed into expressive photography, which, by disclosing unfamiliar aspects of the universe, greatly changed realistic photo-aesthetics. His photographs bring to light a provocative, idiosyncratic reality. The philosopher Georges Bataille attached a great deal of importance to the anguish of the inner experience (expérience intérieure) as an irreducible element, as something that is essentially other, as something that is THE other. If we look at Jan Fabre’s work we can state that this experience, whose distinguishing feature is that it is immediate, is characteristic for his work. For him experiences are memories, signs, symbols, translated into playful forms. Not until the moment that experiences have solidified can he transpose them and convert them into a usable code-system. Jan Fabre’s world is a gigantic complex of meanings of which we, as spectators, are not always aware. In his work he finds it a challenge to explore the boundaries of the code-system and to ensure that enough remains for the viewer that is recognizable. These are the parameters within which Jan Fabre works: the marginal space between elementary order, timeless structure and chaos. This ties in with the philosophical concept of paroxysm, which is the leitmotiv in his photographic oeuvre. The term paroxysm means, according to the Oxford Dictionary: an uncontrollable outburst; a sudden attack or recurrence of a disease; any fit or convulsion. It is not a word that is easily forgotten. However, in the philosophy of culture this concept has been adapted to denote both certain extreme individual experiences and certain social phenomena. On the basis of this definition it seems unlikely that paroxysm could be

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linked to the symbol system used in the Highway Code, although this may not after all be such a crazy idea. Take, for instance, the case of the phantom driver, consciously driving as fast as possible down the wrong side of the road: this could be considered a perfect example of paroxysm, namely a sudden attack of extreme disregard for the traffic code, with the likelihood of ending up dead. And – if this fairly neutral example is taken a step further – we shall find the ambiguity of the phenomenon revealed, because if we consult reliable statistics, there is just as much chance of being involved in a lethal accident in everyday traffic. Thus paroxysm relates to questioning the boundaries between concepts such as life and death, man and animal, but also love and hate, pain and pleasure, war and peace, science and myth, medicine and magic. Philosophers whose names have become associated with thinking about boundaries of this kind are Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard (who is himself a photographer). Since the philosophy of culture has laid down that such opposing categories are entirely relative, in that they are a function of their culture and time, thinking about their boundaries ha become very popular. The medium of photography has made this issue visible. The principle of the paradox – that it is fictitious but appears to be real – makes photography by its very nature an outstanding medium for making forms of paroxysm visible. The term paroxysm can only really be used if behavior can no longer be directly classified as falling within the prevailing norms of social and individual behavior, since we know that in reality (thus not normatively) anti-social behavior is part of society and that a person’s deviant behavior is particular to the individual. If there is a distinguishing feature in the development of Jan Fabre’s photographic style, from the first snapshots right up today, it is most certainly the paroxysmal character of his work. His hybrid oeuvre is so much at home in the state of paroxysm that he has been able to express it in an increasingly sophisticated way. One can identify paroxysm in Fabre’s work when he is looking for the boundaries and, having found them, pushes them back or oversteps them and moves them in such a way that there is never a shift to an altogether opposed category. In the self-portraits there are numerous examples to be found of the artist’s metamorphoses: Fabre as a sorcerer in Will doctor Fabre cure you? (1980), Fabre as an Arab in De prins-arabier uit

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de sprookjes van duizend-en-één-nachten (1979), Fabre’s hybrid figure balancing between man and animal and man and angel in Vaak voel ik me verraden door mijn eigen lichaam (Often I feel betrayed by my own body, 1987).

The theme of equivalents The fusion of photograph and moving images is a theme that is very much a part of Fabre’s oeuvre. In his photographs he produces short fictional stories. The photographs unfold a narrative logic based on the principles of eventuality and causality. Jan Fabre adds hand-drawn creations to these, thus duplicating the narrative dimension that was originally strictly photographic. For him the photographic image is not just a luminous print, nor is it a print that is made in one radical gesture, as a whole and with a powerful impact. He shows us the visual power of the photographic image as an action that interrupts, cuts short, freezes, suspends, breaks off, acts or is unified in a moment of time caught in only a second. Jan Fabre re-injects existing photographs to give them new meanings, and in so doing, has certainly opened the discussion about the way photographs should be used, or rather not used, the discussion as to whether or not you should interfere with a photograph’s authenticity. In the light of what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard has to say, we can state that Fabre’s photographic work is dramatic in the linguistic sense of the word, for instance in its stillness, which gives it an air of tranquility. After all, what makes us daydream is not movement but motionlessness. Baudrillard thinks that the power of the motionless image is more intense than the power of mythical opera. He points to the medium film, which uses the myth of slow motion and considers a freeze-frame to be the climax of dramatic art. Jan Fabre’s photographic work is full of references – probably unconscious but none the less present – to a quest for sources and the symbolism linked to signs as well as the experimental study of the body. Thus he proceeds as a master of the art of metamorphosis.

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Metamorphosis In Jan Fabre’s oeuvre we are confronted with the game of photographic paradoxes, which we can judge by their purity and their natural variations. In fine arts, from the time of the Renaissance to the Romantic movement, artists mainly endeavored to imitate reality (mimesis) and hand-made images were used both for the illustration of stories and for recording scientific observations. However, even if they tried to achieve a high level of objectivity, they discovered that such images were always subjective, because they show the hand and the mind of their maker. The eye cannot observe the act of motion. How a galloping horse runs was a mystery for centuries. With the invention of the medium photography, the old-age dream of artists to represent the rhythm of life became reality. It is no coincidence that the medium of photography is such a popular form of art. By means of photographic suggestion, one can show an almost complete representation of reality and make anything fictional as authentic as possible. A strategy that we come across in Fabre’s oeuvre is the photographic selfportrait, he staging of his own body. He uses his camera as a writing mirror, a flat or distorting mirror, a rear view mirror or a telescopic mirror, an enlarging or reducing mirror. The photographic triptych Will doctor Fabre cure you? (1980) was included in an exhibition on the subject Oog, oor, mond – arts (Eye, ear, mouth – doctor). The word arts (doctor) acquired a double meaning: doctor and art. The triptych was made up of large photographs that he used as backgrounds for lectures and performances. In Galerie Workshop 77, in the Antwerp Ommeganckstraat, he gave a speech from a balcony dressed in a doctor’s white coat, during which he threw artificial eyes, ears and mouths at his audience. He set out to improve the world and delivered tub-thumping speeches. He believed that the world could be healed through art. This photographic triptych is similar to a series of black-and-white photographs based on a shopping mall (1978). The series show a sequence of scenes with Fabre in a bowler hat gradually getting closer and closer and thus becoming larger. Fabre drew on these selfportraits in pencil and stuck various materials onto them: a cigarette-butt, a condom and a tram-ticket. He wrote on it in paint the text ‘Art Love.’ For him, the ultimate significance of photography is a suggestion made visible, a way to exorcize (white magic) reality.

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The self-portrait he made at the time of the performance Ilad of the Bic-Art, The Bic-Art Room (1981) endorses a dynamic image that clearly visualizes the dramatic aspect of his stage productions. He keeps a firm grip on life in order to keep death at bay. The Bic-Art zelfportret (Bic-Art self-portait, 1981) announces the way in which he plays with personifications, titles and ideas. To this, he uses the most democratic medium of communication: the blue Bic ballpoint pen. For the performance, he shut himself in the artistic space Salon Odessa in Leiden for three days and nights. Working like a dynamic drawing machine, he covered his body and the room with blue Bic drawings and texts. A film of this event shows how he drew time during his self-imposed imprisonment. The claustrophobic photograph Ik in een wetpot (Me in a preserving jar, 1979 - figure 1) belongs to the series of preserving jars, which also includes De wetkamer (Preserving room) and De wetkelder (Preserving cellar), two of his earliest installations. He obtained these original preserving jars after buying a freezer. In the installation De wetkamer he made use of these glass jars and filled them with insects, toenails, onions, potatoes, pubic hair, skin and liquids as a form of cataloguing or indexing. He saw this installation, which was partly made of perishable materials and which therefore started to get moldy, as a chemical process on a medium of earth. Another visual staged self-portrait is Vaak voel ik me verraden door mijn eigen lichaam (1987). This consists of a series of five large Cibachromes showing the movements of an owl. This mystical creature, with whom Fabre often identifies, is used here as a symbol – the owl being the messenger of death. Identification with the owl is also a way for him to avoid the risk of developing an inflated ego. The serial photographic images demonstrate Fabre’s propensity for dramatic representation. This dramatic potential is also demonstrated in the series of scratched photographs Lichamen in lichamen (Bodies in bodies, 1990). The dolls, which have been torn to shreds, daubed and soiled with blood, are a symbol of metaphorical duality. The act of scratching the photographs gives an energy that enhances the dramatic aspect of his staged work even further. The children’s bodies on photographic paper serve as a vehicle for him to carry out his obviously free adaptations. The distinction between photograph and drawing becomes blurred, and the images run into one another. In the series De prins-arabier uit de sprookjes van duizend-en-

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één-nachten (1979) Fabre undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes an Arab prince. It is a photo-performance in which eroticism, imagination and fairy-tale become a single concept. This series of photographs directly confronts the spectator, who can fill in the background story independently. The installation Het graf van de onbekende computer (The grave of the unknown computer, 1994-95) is a cemetery – six hundred crosses in blue Bic-colour – which Fabre inserted in a plot in Diepenheim from summer 1994 to spring 1995. The four-part photographic series of the same title and date shows the graveyard at four different points in time, the four seasons. It pays homage to the insects who, according to him, embody the oldest computer in the world. They are the main memory of human existence and function like radar. The cemetery for the insects is perfectly structured on the cemetery for the unknown soldiers of World War I in Ypres. An insect name has been engraved onto each cross, not the Latin name but the name they are commonly known by, like grondboorder (groundborer) and schrijvertje (whirligig beetle). Jan Fabre manipulates the photographic medium like a (demonic) artist who writes with light by scratching, drawing or Bic-ing images that penetrate through the top layer. His photographic work from the series De Vervalsing van het Geheime Feest (The Forgery of the Secret Feast, 1985) illustrate how he adapted black-and-white photographs of violent, politically charged scenes with blue Bic. For this purpose he made use of photographs from magazines and newspapers or photographs of his own. He cut them out, stuck them down and then worked on them in blue Bic, so heavily that you could no longer tell the difference between photograph and drawing. Manipulated photographs from the Hitler and Stalin eras were a source of inspiration for his work. The themes of death, danger and violence were expressed by the violent manipulation of the material used. In this way, drawing with light became similar to drawing with a pen. In 2005 he made a new series in the same style, La Falsificazione Della Festa Segreta (Fumo e Fuoce) (2005) on the themes of powerful people, danger and violence, smoke and fire. This includes scenes of terrorism, bombings, men lying bleeding on the street, the Pope with his hair on fire and the trade-union leader Lech Walecha smoking a pipe. Subversive scenes implying danger and violence are presented in a classic gilt frame with a red velvet passe-partout, by which these

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subversive scenes regain their bourgeois nature. The effect is intensified because the work hangs between classical paintings with portraits of religious leaders and aristocrats in the historic surroundings of an Italian castle. Photographs refer to power relations in this way they are often described in international photo jargon as having Photographic Power. Scrawling over photographic paper with a Bic-pen and then photographing it again afterwards brings the essence of authenticity to the artworks in the Tivoli series (1991). Fabre damages the paper in order to dredge as deeply as possible into the medium of photography. The Tivoli series is made up of two sets. Kasteel Tivoli (Castle Tivoli, 1990), the first set, consists of five large Cibachromes that show the castle drawn over in blue Bic at five different moments of the day and night. The reflection of reality and actual reality are played off against one another. The second set (1991), with the same title, shows two photographs of the castle drawn over in blue Bic, which were executed in the following way: the artist starts off with colour photographs, which he draws over in blue Bic, then he photographs them again, and finally he goes over them in blue Bic again. In this way he shows us the time sequence and puts into consideration the whole principle of photography. The rhetorical question he is actually asking is: What is drawing with light? His work on the Tivoli project, which he did with assistants, allowed him to abandon the idea of a personal signature, emancipating his studies by making them independent, autonomous work. He gives meaning to the myth of beauty and makes a clear reference to the story of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in the pool of water. The fairy-tale element is never far away. Photography for Jan Fabre is a freeze-frame memory of fantastic, brilliant or melancholy visions or experiences.

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Multiple photography A photograph isolates a piece of reality, but it remains tied to the context we do not actually see in the picture. However, behind every photograph by Jan Fabre, if not in it, lies a story with meanings that relate to the picture itself. A photograph gives an overview and insight into matters that in reality may be too large, too far away, too complicated or too dangerous to incorporate. It is due in part to photography’s convenience and imitative character that it makes great claims to truth. Jan Fabre’s photo-work can be defined as images that tend to pose as portrayals or portraits but allow the imagination a free rein. With his photographic work Jan Fabre is making a clear artistic statement in the spirit of the closing section of La chambre claire by Roland Barthes, about the medium of photography: ‘society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it.’ (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard. London (Jonathan Cape) 1982, p. 117)

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1. Jan Fabre [Ik in een wetpot] 1979

2. Jan Fabre [Thee-kater] 1980

3. Jan Fabre [Will doctor Fabre cure you? III] 1980

4. Jan Fabre [Will doctor Fabre cure you? I] 1980

5. Jan fabre [Mount Everest, Nuptse & Lhotse, Himalaya] 1989

6. Jan Fabre [Winter] 1994

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The Image Revealed: Roger Kockaerts The Paradox of Photography or the Nonknowledge of Photography Johan Swinnen —

Roger Kockaerts (a Belgian artist who was born 1931 and lives and works in Brussels), who in a former life was once bold enough to call himself Cocqart, often surprises us with his artistic work. He is the Belgian specialist in the wondrous world of conservation and restoration of anything that has to do with photography. Give him a Leonard Misonne, Alexandre, René Magritte or Dirk Braeckman and he identifies and determines the print and explains how he restored them and how you should keep them. Now, during a guest lecture at the University of Brussels, he showed us some bewitching anonymous portraits printed on platinum-palladium. They are prints of glass plates which he recently found on a sunny morning when he saw them glittering among other pieces of broken glass in a little wooden chest on a pile of rubbish that had been dumped illegally in Brussels. Initially he was attracted by their state of deterioration and the possibility of being able to study this at leisure. But then later he had the idea of recycling them. He was stuck by their aesthetic value and over the last few months he has taken the initiative to print them using the platinum process to place the emphasis on the paradoxical connection between denunciation and sublimation.

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Defacing A narrative conceptual recycling project A collection of historical glass plates of anonymous origin, rejected by their original creators or owners because of their state of deterioration, is recycled by means of the plates being printed on a high-quality paper using the platinum-palladium process. According to Umberto Eco a message contains an aesthetic function when ambiguity and self-reflectivity are involved. This function is applicable to the conceptually oriented photography of Roger Kockaerts. This also embraces various levels of experience with a message that is at once ambiguously structured and on the other hand appears to refer to itself. His work is more easily approached from a romantic viewpoint. The fact that he puts concepts into perspective in an unusual way is surprising. He opts for a visualistic photography based on a deeper perception of things. Roger Kockaerts works as a plastic communicator, a photographer who conveys statements about the reality he has created. The aesthetic of his imagery is conditioned by the essential properties of the medium. The thoughts he has could draw their inspiration from a well-known book on philosophy – Histoire de l’œil by Georges Bataille. The photos in Détournement arose out of nothing and, following on naturally from Bataille, explore the bounds of human existence. That’s not easy if you are constantly coming into contact with photography, first as a photographer, but also as a specialist in photographic heritage. If his work could be said to have a leitmotif running through it, then it could be that of timelessness. His work is also characterised by the deliberate inadmissibility of coincidences. It soon appears as though he wanted to take the surrealistic path with this series. Experiencing this is very much a surprise to himself, since as a photographer he has scarcely, if ever, been connected with humour or visual amusement. It is only later, after more images have been made, that surrealism proves not to be the only thing he wanted to focus on; the concept of ‘mummification’ is also covered. However, the more the series grew, the clearer it became that the reflection was oriented towards a universality of portraits of the ‘painter/photographer.’ The result is a collection of breathtakingly interesting work. The leitmotif running through his work is perhaps

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diversity itself. Here we have an unusual photographer who manifests himself in a style of poignant folly that has become unseemly in our time: with photographic pleasure. The aim of the artistic concept is to divert the objects in question from their original meaning and, combined with a sophisticated representation, to give these a new existence as an objet d’art. The glass plates with different dimensions, sometimes cracked or broken, are severely damaged by deterioration phenomena such as excessive humidity and heat or various forms of mechanical or chemical deterioration of unknown nature. In spite of their condition, which rules out the possibility of genuine restoration measures being taken, the plates nevertheless remain important study objects in the field of photographic conservation/restoration. The images depicted are chiefly of anonymous people or groups of anonymous people and this enables the subjects portrayed to be disassociated from their representation in the final print. The chosen printing medium, the platinum-palladium process, which is recognised as one of the most prestigious processes in the history of photography thanks to its tonal richness and exemplary stability, is diametrically opposed to the advanced state of deterioration of the plates. This in turn makes it possible to obtain a relationship that differs completely from the original context of the elements in question and which draws all its meaning from the new context. In fact it could be said that in its artistic concept, the ‘defacing’ we perform is, in the final analysis, not far removed from a sublimated restoration of the imagery of the rejected plates. With this photographic love at first sight, Kockaerts again proves that the description of the photographic medium as frottage reveals itself in the theory that photography – precisely on account of its realism – is the most intrinsically surrealist medium of all the arts. Photography is unique as a medium because it has succeeded in flirting with reality-

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bound emotions. These objets trouvés have now become a raw material for the master printer Kockaerts. His action is a whitewashing of photos that are no longer accepted by the original photographer or owner. This diabolical activity in the purgatory of the darkroom has seen him now bring rejected photographs into the realm of the seventh heaven of the arts in velvety image tones with this wonderful process on luxury paper. And yet the platinum-palladium process is one of the most highly praised processes in the history of photography, when you think that captivating photographers such as Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe used this for their most significant images.

An objective medium? On studying Roger Kockaerts’ oeuvre, we felt we could apply to it the term ‘Belgitude’, which was coined at the beginning of the 1970s to describe Belgian literature. Indeed, in his conceptual montages, we have discovered a regional aroma, something belonging to Belgium: a mixture of influences. Chance, eroticism, humour, irony and humanism are the key words of his work. These notions remind us of the characteristics of a pictorial movement that grew up in particular in our country: surrealism. In his desire not to take himself seriously and to adopt an ironic and poetic view of our society, Roger Kockaerts can claim to have something in common with Ensor, Storck, Spilliaert and Alechinsky. We think that, by paying homage to the heirs of Belgian Surrealism, Roger Kockaerts is thus expressing his regional identity. It is also a way of recognising that artists are influenced by the context in which they create. We believe that Roger thus created an oeuvre that could only have seen the light of day in this way in Belgium in the nineteen seventies and up until today. This process is particularly original and stands out from international production as a whole. Furthermore, as early as his first works on the straightforward and the coincidental, Roger Kockaerts links in with the artistic concerns of the avant-garde of the early nineteen seventies, which reacted against the passivity of the onlooker and wanted the latter’s active participation. The

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permutability thus invites the onlooker to take part in the creative process by combining the forms resulting from a programme as he sees fit. On the one hand, this game implies a physical participation on the part of the onlooker, who touches the various elements by putting them next to each other in the case of paintings or on top of each other in the case of collages. But it also leads to the onlooker participating psychologically, and thereby exploring the scope of his perception and his sensibility to the forms and colours. The montages of a poetic/conceptual nature are the most hermetic. These mixed-technique creations which combine photographic snapshots and computer graphics require the onlooker to take part on a more intellectual level. At best the onlooker manages to establish semantic connections between images and signs.

The authority of photography Here, therefore, are a few aspects of Roger Kockaerts’ photography, and some explanations about it, which we feel are worth focusing on. Photography as a set of forms and subjects. In the continual dialogue between photography and painting, the phenomenon of abstraction, in the broad sense, could not but play an important part. Photography can thus become the trail left by the light reflected by objects. Dreams and the inner worlds of the imagination. Here we are faced with the second apparent major paradox of creative photography. The first was that of abstraction: how do you photograph the abstract? And we have seen that photography had its own resources for that. The second is: how do you photograph the imaginative world, the fantasies of our mind – that which only exists on the screen of our imagination? For this the photographic oeuvre of Roger Kockaerts uses three strategies: the subjective view, manipulated reality and reconstruction of the dream. Since Kockaerts’ images no longer suffice to recount all the developments of an inner view, the sequence introduces a discontinuous narration which can serve to bring about a reflection on the relativity of the photographic reality but also a poetic and metaphysical evocation.

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Ad infinitum In this way the theory of the profound affinity between photography and Surrealism (something that Susan Sontag held dear) is justified. According to this theory, even the simplest and most spontaneous photography is surrealist, since it is an intensification of reality - a surreality. The normal course of things is frozen, and fixed in a fascinating image that is both precise and impossible. And the surrealist desire to remove the boundaries between art and life, the conscious and the unconscious, the professional and the amateur, and the intentional and the involuntary, is wholly fulfilled in the practice of photography. But then if every photo is surrealist, we are thrown back to a general theory on the nature of photography. For Kockaerts it is no longer a question of ‘what does reality look like, but what I feel as regards reality.’ His oeuvre is also a theory on photography: he explores the medium’s possibilities and its limits. Long live the radical and poetically moving originality of Roger Kockaerts’ photography!

Bibliographical information The dissertation by Michèle Minne, Deux pionniers de l’art informatique en Belgique: Peter Beyls et Roger Kockaerts (ULB, Brussels, 1985) has been useful in the preparation of this text, along with: Elkins, James (ed.), Theory of Photography, Signs that Trigger a Philosophical Response by Johan Swinnen, Publ. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, New York, USA, 2006 La Grange, Ashley, Basic Critical Theory for Photographers, Focal Press, Oxford, 2005 Lemagny, Jean-Claude, La photographie, tendances récentes, CNDP, 1981 Poivert, Michel, La photographie contemporaine, Flammarion, Paris, 2002.

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1. Roger Kockaerts [Détournement] 2005

2. Roger Kockaerts [Détournement] 2005

3. Roger Kockaerts [Détournement] 2005

4. Roger Kockaerts [Détournement] 2005

5. Roger Kockaerts [Détournement] 2005

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Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Majority World Photography Johan Swinnen —

Intro Images shape our perceptions. The manufacture of consent has rarely been more engineered. With everything form wars to presidential campaigns being stage-managed and with mainstream news increasingly fed by official sources, reliance on usual sources of news images has become gradually more dangerous. The majority of countries around the world suffer, particularly from stereotypical representations. With Getty and Corbis controlling the stock market, and Reuters, AP, AFP, BBC and EPA dominating the wires, communities in the west are looking for new ways to challenge established media, especially through citizen journalism. The only way in which this can be challenged is through alternative sources that are independent of western and corporate media.

Anthology of photography of Bangladesh: Southern Exposure DRIKNews, international news photo agency and in there footsteps Pathshala, The South Asian Media Academy and Institute of Photography in Dhaka, Bangladesh are designed to fill this void. Both established in Dhaka in 1998 to fulfil the long felt need for providing institutional education and policy in photography in the region. In drawing up the

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programme, emphasis has been placed on inculcating professional rigour without compromising on creativity or passion. Recognising that a vibrant and responsible media is crucial to a country’s development, the school places particular emphasis on photojournalism. It is a leading institute in the region in research and programs about photo theory, criticism and policy that address critical issues relevant to the public and private sectors and dissemination of research findings. Students have won major international awards such as World Press Photo and taken on assignments for the most prestigious international publications such as Newsweek. There is an open mind mentality for visual culture. Within a short period, Pathshala has established itself as a regional centre for excellence in photography with contacts in Nepal, India, Bhutan and Miramar. There is however a lack of capacity to archive the collection of these historical photographs, with the danger that the collection will be destroyed due to bad conservation. The conservation of the collection is necessary since it is a valuable source to track the history of the country. There is almost no methodology, only very poorly equipped libraries and a lack of researchers and teachers. This lack of human capacity has always been compensated by inviting specialists (Salgado, Parr, Raghu Rai, …) from abroad instead of investing in training of potential trainers.

Project: The Majority World looks back I could develop, from my academic workplaces, a study concerning research programmes on the history, the reception and the theory of photography within a broad social, political and cultural framework that leads to the PALIC-methodology: Photography-Anthology-LearningMethodology and International Conflict The PALIC-methodology was developed as a new research and educational tool in which the arts and social inquiry merge. This method is aimed at building a dialogue between culturally diverse groups and at examining individuals’ perceptions of their own social reality. It is, based on the principles of participatory research, the counterpart of the ‘Western eye visits the Majority World.’ The concept ‘Majority World’ is used in countries like Bangladesh on an academic level to describe populations in Asia and Africa, belonging to non-Western countries, that have a quantitative majority in total

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world population. It is with this vision that the dept intends to develop diverse training and research, especially now with the introduction of the Internet and digital photography in cellular phones even in a country like Bangladesh. In our description of the context we see that the development problems of a country should be seen in the specific context of Bangladesh, a country that only officially became independent and recognized as it is today in 1971 (it was a British colony till 1947, but was part of Pakistan till 1971), to become a democracy with Islam as a state religion in 1991. The country is ranked amongst the ten most populous countries in the world and also one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world. Frequent natural disasters, widespread poverty combined with bureaucratic corruption disrupts most government plans to get the poverty rate down. The democracy is to a certain degree considered endangered by the Military: they assist in the drive against corruption but demand a share in the control of the country.

Mission To collect oral histories from those people who have photographed it since independence. There is a documentary heritage of the territory that goes back a few decades before 1971. This heritage should be identified, nominated and made available to the general population to show past, present and future images. This could have many concrete applications like using photography to highlight the need for birth control and the prevention of illnesses such as AIDS. Topics would include frontier and pioneer life. The war of Liberation, The war of Language, Women’s Movement and various ethic groups. It could collect, archive, and make available to the public oral histories on historical and contemporary photographers on all aspects of daily life. The target is to preserve the testimonies of the Bangladeshis who were unjustly incarcerated during the war of Liberation. These firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, explore the principles of democracy, human rights and equal justice. Providing an informative and entertaining publication will help promote the country and educate people worldwide on the richness of the nation’s culture and heritage.

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Goals Bangladesh is a new country and the information generated by this research will effectively become a visual history of the nation and a segment of its art work. Creating the first ever published anthology of photography: despite Bangladesh’s remarkable achievements in the field of photography, there are no comprehensive publications on the subject. The existing publications are largely monographs presenting the work of individual artists, or state sponsored collections that do not reflect the breadth and diversity within the medium. Develop the visual history: the publication will also feed into the global literature on photography, as the established literature has glossed over or overlooked photographic practice in this region. Also one or more of the following topics will be researched: • The role of new technologies and technological convergence in depicting conflict • The visual economies that translate and regulate the value of images of conflict and suffering • The role of news organizations and NGOs in the global distribution of images • The effects of imagery on government policy and NGO activity • The visual construction of humanism • The difficult relationship between image and Islam • The histories and genres of photographic depictions of conflict • The ethical and legal function of images as evidentiary representations of human suffering • Writing a new photo history of world photography. • The role of humanitarian and cosmopolitan frameworks in ‘Western’ genres of documentary photography

Challenges: Provide an authenticated research resource: the problems faced in formulating the photography section in Banglapedia (the encyclopedia of Bangladesh), reflects the absence of an authoritative description of

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the medium. Give recognition to the practitioners: the publication will recognize and value the significant contributions made by an important group of people, who at times have taken considerable risks in the pursuit of their craft and whose efforts have never been officially acknowledged or valued. This project is helping Pathshala become a key international centre for the study of visual culture, by enhancing research on the history and uses of photography through collaboration and training programs, with ties to universities and institutions of higher learning throughout the region.

Artistic relevance Art and critical commitment is difficult. Yet I see it as a big challenge It is not only through research within the framework of this project in Bangladesh but also in Palestine, Nepal and Surinam that I attempt to infuse new life into a reality experienced as dead and flattened-out (poverty, tsunami, illiteracy, conflict…). It is my ‘task’ to investigate what an individual can posit vis-à-vis of greatness. I wish to be second to none in investigating how mass culture’s endless stream of artificial sensations connected with the so-called Third World issues relates to my own experience. This is, for me, the relevance of my new commitment. Human consciousness and human experience constitute the artist’s domain. Now that this domain is at risk of being swept away by a worldwide movement aiming at insignificant and mediocre averagingout and over-generalized experience, the artist can play a new part in the world. That part, I’m playing as I have always done: through the strength of my imagination with camera and pen. The future is not to (individual) commitment but to the (possibility of) community, of possible new collective coherences of meaning, lifestyles and forms of collaboration. My commitment crosses the borders and problematic aspects of feasibility, both collectively and individually. It is tied to searching for the right to everyday and present-day happiness, without sacrificing the destiny of the collective to the individual’s set of demands. This project wishes to contribute to a humane society and a meaningful existence for

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every person. The artistic relevance consists of realizing photographic and image essays, introducing young photographers from the South and writing texts which are meant to enliven discourse.

The empire of photography In a nation where a large segment of the population cannot read or write, it is important to recognize other means of communication. Visual media is also becoming increasingly important in the dissemination and propagation of ideas. Photographic works stand as signs of the time – they mirror or reflect the time. So-called ‘contemporary photography’ reflects society’s fragmentation by being fragmented itself. Artworks then, as signs, are to be viewed as broken mirrors of (fragmented) society. Thanks to my visits to Bangladesh I identified the nature of photography as selectivity, instantaneity and credibility. The basic characteristics that distinguish photography from other media and photographs from other pictures and that can lead us to re-writing the history of worldphotography. Photographs are segments excised from large, real-word situations and because photographs are instantly frozen from a realworld temporal flow, we ought to attempt to replace a pictured segment back into the unpictured whole. We need to do this to understand what a photographer has done to an original real-world situation in order to posit what a photograph is about. Words like ‘inter-’ and ‘multi-disciplinarily’ are rampant. Appreciation presupposes nuances, it requires judgment and implies rejection and acknowledgment. Appreciation cannot be without a critical attitude, which one ought to develop. Exercises in multiculturalism with their messages, and meanings?

Exit I sincerely hope that the total PALIC methodology project contributes to collective commitment. Thinking about art quite often emphasizes ‘connecting’ but it is sometimes equally important to think in terms of ‘tearing.’ Art needs to cause tears to appear in the fabric of societies where consensus is imposed by force. We had better realize that

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commitment does not owe its existence to radical individual choice with its concomitant act of resistance, but depends on the enthusiasm of the observer. Commitment is not an individual choice but the expression of a collective engagement to a crucial movement or development. In short, PALIC methodology is about the changing media users, thinking about images, onlooker profiles, history writing and archiving and a new formulation of photo sciences. It is the story behind the curtains of photo culture in conflict-ridden countries and of media ethics wishing to stimulate within scientific discourse the analysis and production of visual representations in the South.

Notes 1

A very remarkable event was the show (and catalogue): Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in Whitechapel Gallery in London (january - april 2010). This landmark exhibition gave an inside view of how modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been shaped through the lens of their photographers. From the days when the first Indian-run photographic studios were established in the 19th century, this exhibition told the story of photography's development in the subcontinent with over 400 works that have been brought together for the first time. It encompassed social realism and reportage of key political moments in the 1940s, amateur snaps from the 1960s and street photography from the 1970s. Contemporary photographs revealed the reality of everyday life, while the recent digitalisation of image making accelerates its crossover with fashion and film. Over 70 photographers including Pushpamala N., Rashid Rana, Dayanita Singh, Raghubir Singh, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Rashid Talukder, Ayesha Vellani and Munem Wasif were presented in the show, with works drawn from important collections of historic photography, including the influential Alkazi Collection, Delhi and the Drik Archive, Dhaka. They joined many previously unseen images from private family archives, galleries, individuals and works by leading contemporary artists.

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1. Johan Swinnen [Amanul Huq (°1927, Shahazadpur, present day Bangladesh). Lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Portrait in his house in Dhaka] 2010 Senior photographer Amanul Huq is recognized for his work with filmmaker Satyajit Ray and for the only photograph of language activist and martyr Rafiq taken during the 1952 Language Movement. He worked freelance for numerous daily newspapers in the 1960s, photographing the mass uprising of 1969 and liberation war of 1971, among others.

2. Johan Swinnen [Rashid Talukder (°1939, Kalkini, present day Bangladesh). Lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Portrait in the garden of the Press Club, Dhaka, Bangladesh] 2010 Senior photographer Rashid Talukder has worked as a press photographer for 46 years. He worked with The Daily Ittefaq for 29 years, prior to working with the Press Information Department and The Daily Sangbad. Talukder is a member of the advisory council of several photographic societies, including the Bangladesh Photographic Society and is also the founder of the Bangladesh Photojournalist Association.

3. Johan Swinnen [Shahidul Alam (°1955, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Portrait in his apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh] 2010 A photographer, writer, curator and activist, Shahidul Alam obtained a PhD in chemistry at London University before switching to photography. He returned to Dhaka in 1984, where he photographed the democratic struggle to remove General Ershad. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the award winning Drik agency, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography. Director of the Chobi Mela festival and chairman of Majority World agency. Alam’s work has been exhibited at the MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He is currently setting up a media academy in Bangladesh.

4. Johan Swinnen [Sayeeda Khanom (°1937, Pabna, present day Bangladesh). Lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Portrait of her in classroom Pathshala] 2010 Senior photographer Sayeeda Khanom began her photographic career at the age of twelve and since then she has continued to be a prolific photographer documenting many of the key events in Bangladesh’s history. She received international recognition in 1956 after taking part in the International Photo and Cinema Exhibition, Cologne. Her works were displayed in the International Photography Exhibition held in Dhaka in 1956 and later exhibited in international competitions. Two more exhibitions on Mother Teresa and Konika Bandopadhaya, a singer of Rabindra Sangeet (a form of music composed by Rabindranath Tagore), were also organized in Dhaka in 1997 and 2000. Her close relationship with the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray provided her with the opportunity to take exclusive photographs of him and his works.

31 | Jian-Xing Too

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Pictures of Pictures: Interview with Lynne Cohen Jian-Xing Too —

This conversation with Lynne Cohen was taken up in September 2006 to complete and complement the many other interviews that she has done and to provide an update on the new directions her work is taking. It was conducted after I had the opportunity to catch a glimpse firsthand of her way of working on the artist’s book Camouflage. Lynne Cohen is an artist whose work speaks for itself. Yet she also has interesting things to say about her subjects and art in general. She is sometimes elusive, perhaps because she does not want to force a reading onto her work. When answering questions, however, she speaks with insight and has no need to inflate her words with borrowed discourse. In the year and a half that has lapsed since this conversation, she has produced an astonishing volume of new pieces exploring still other themes, ones that remain unmistakably hers. The full force of the body of her work has yet to be recognized and made known to a wider public. — Jian-Xing Too – J-XT: In an interview with Mona Hakim in early 2004, you emphasize that critical intent is only one of a number of things going on in your work. You speak of humour as a counterbalance to critique, whereas I see the humour in your work as driving your critique; I’m inclined to think the humour is central to it. Are you suggesting that critical thought is insufficient for a work of art?

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LC: For me it’s a matter of how to use humour to frame the critique. I’ve never felt my pictures could make arguments but I very much like your suggestion that the humour in the work drives the critique rather than the other way around. And I should certainly like to think it does get to the heart of the matter. I see humour as conspiring with other elements to help the viewer get closer to what I’m driving at. With or without the humour critical thought is an important layer in my work but it seems to me to function for better or worse more as a pointer than as an argument. – J-XT: I was intrigued by a comment you made on French radio last spring about people having an urge to decorate everything, even places like laboratories. A persistent decorative theme in your work seems to be the representation of nature (figure 1). Do you think that’s a North American phenomenon or is it more widespread? LC: I haven’t done a scientific study but when I look around it strikes me that people, in North America and elsewhere, have an urge to commandeer nature, dead or alive. In a photograph I made years ago of an operating room in a veterinary school, with interrogation lighting, ominous instruments, clinical surfaces and such like, there is a small window covered with a mesh curtain (figure 2). This doesn’t make sense except as evidence of an urge to decorate or camouflage what is happening in the room. The curtain is shabby and seems a natural place for germs to congregate. So what’s it doing in an operating room? It would be more appropriate in someone’s basement or in a summer cottage. – J-XT: People writing about your work have pointed out that your work is rich with unexpected references to art. They must mean that most have in some measure assimilated Classicism, Impressionism, and even some de Stijl and Bauhaus. Which seems right. But when they say that an everyday place in one of your photographs contains a Judd, don’t they mean the reverse? Judd, Flavin, Artschwager, McCracken, and many others who emerged in the 1960s were clear about their use of materials from the

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world around them. Meanwhile run-of-the-mill furnishings continued to churn out with little or no influence from these artists. Would you say that in place of applying manufactured materials and forms to sculpture as these artists did, you have been continually extracting them and transforming them through photography? Does your work from over the years show how much the materials that make up our world have changed or not changed? LC: I agree that Judd, Flavin, Artschwager and others borrowed materials from the everyday world and not the other way around. And I think you are right about what I had in mind. When someone photographs these materials – they are very photographic – he or she transforms them. I’d only add that the way photography transforms them is similar to the way Judd and Flavin transformed them into sculpture (figure 3). The materials seem as seductive (taken out of context) to me as I imagine they were to Judd and Flavin. I’m still drawn to (and from time to time repelled by) Formica, linoleum, stainless steel, polyethylene, plastic and such like. While it is true that over the years the surface patterns of some of these materials have changed, many have remained the same. Actually, come to think of it, I am mainly repelled by the materials that have changed or disappeared, the fake wood of television cabinets and the painted plaster lamps of the early seventies above all. I never liked them and am glad they have dropped out of the world as well as out of my repertoire. This is one reason, not the only one of course, that I don’t photograph living rooms or other domestic spaces any more. Perhaps if I were to go back to them I might be unpleasantly surprised that they hadn’t disappeared after all. – J-XT: On more than one occasion, you’ve made mention of your background in sculpture and the way you see your work as being pictures of readymade installations. But you also photograph pictures – pictures that have little connection with the work of contemporary artists of the time. I’m thinking of the rows of stiff photographic portraits and the many ludicrous murals, be they photographic, naturalistic, cartoon-like, stylized or schematized. I tend to link the wall drawings, which somehow impose a frame of mind (figure 4), to the literal signs that appear in your work.

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Through both the actual words and the style of the lettering, these signs are like rules for how to think and behave in a given space. Perhaps they relate to the absurd diagrams and words that you’ve caught on university blackboards? How do you see this dimension of your work? LC: I am intrigued by how pictures of pictures or photographs of photographs often seem more real than the real thing. Pictures of men in the corridor of a medical school look more real than if they were present (figure 5). This occurs in many of my pictures and in much early art for that matter. A double often is more plausible than the real thing. I can’t explain it. It is the same with diagrams and schematized drawings. They have an aura of authority (they seem to be shouting) but it’s true that they often look just ridiculous. They poke holes at the very things they allude to. In the photograph of the Classroom with I AM and I WILL written on cards perched on a desktop (figure 6), it is as if stating these words was good enough to make it happen. I think of self-help columns in newspapers or voodoo. There is a Men’s Club picture that works the same way (figure 7). It is hard to argue with the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love, Fidelity, which are written in big fluorescent letters on the wall. But it is equally hard to believe that anyone in the room (or anyone listening to the news or looking out the window) gives much thought to them. Looking at the photograph one gets the feeling that the place stinks of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. – J-XT: And the diagrams? LC: Yes, they appear in my pictures of blackboards. In one picture – it is the last one in both Occupied Territory and Lost and Found – there is a blackboard with a diagram on it that gives the impression that it has a special connection with the truth (figure 8). When you take a closer look at the diagram, however, you see there is no chance of this. It is absurd despite its aura of authority, indeed in large part it is absurd because of this. What it suggests makes no sense. Arrows on one side of the blackboard aim out while arrows on the other side aim in. What is that supposed to mean? Presumably both parts of the diagram must be true but that can’t be

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right. I am sceptical of these sorts of diagrams and the pretension and the silliness of them is one of the things I want to point out. – J-XT: Thinking about your photographs as photographs of found art installations, what occurs to me is how much your approach contrasts with the way many artists think about installation views of their own work. With Photoshop, many are tempted to erase electrical outlets and cords from the exhibition spaces depicted in photographic documentation. In your photographs, by contrast, they are everywhere. When they fall at the edges, there is no attempt to hide or crop them out and, in some pictures, they are the central subject. Can we read something about a place into its electrical cords and outlets? LC: I never considered what the electric cords and outlets show about the sort of establishment I photograph. Mainly I am interested in what they contribute to the look of the places. While I’m drawn to them, they don’t mean much to me as social comment, not even the crooked ones. What really strikes me is how little sense they make. One could construe them as symbols of control but visually they seem to me more like symbols of doom and gloom, of how easily things can go wrong (figures 9 and 10). What you say about Photoshop brings up an interesting point. I’d consider using it to make things messier but not to clean them up. That would involve interfering with the world in a way that doesn’t interest me. And I’m sure it would be a losing battle. Another reason I’m not much interested in using Photoshop is that it tends to flatten things out, to homogenize them. That is a trap I’ve tried to avoid. The problem is similar to the problem of making constructions to photograph. It tends to make things look too clean, too real, too good. – J-XT: In 2005 you published the artist’s book Camouflage and showed a series of black and white exhibition prints with Formica frames, most of which are much smaller than the work you are best known for but still slightly bigger than your early contact prints. Can you talk about this

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shift in size as well as the relationship between the book and the pieces exhibited? LC: My aim in the Camouflage exhibition was to present work differently. I decided to make smaller prints because I wanted them to appear as pieces in a puzzle or parts of a sentence, and I liked the fact that when shown as a group, they take on the additional aura of decor. The reason I chose to make them slightly bigger than contact prints was that I wanted the details to be more apparent and the pieces to seem less precious. From the beginning I’ve shied away from making pictures that take the viewer’s breath away, and obviously smaller pictures are less likely to do this. But I’d agree about the design of these smaller prints being different from my other work. The pieces are squarer in format. Indeed the mats and frames are almost equal in size and give the impression that they are equal in weight. That was something I thought about a lot. Perhaps I am returning to my sculpture roots and making work that appears more like a minimalist object than other work I’ve shown. I was interested too in seeing whether – after all the German big picture photography – the act of looking at small pictures had been lost. It seems that it hasn’t. People viewing the exhibition were still willing to get close to the work. Finally I should mention that I didn’t only show small pictures in this exhibition. I presented the last three pictures from Camouflage on a large scale (they were the most recent) because they worked better big and brought the show to a striking end after a long string of little pictures. The large scale also made them more seductive, more spatial and more unstable though perhaps somewhat less conceptual (figures 11 and 12). And I wanted to avoid making a statement about small pictures versus big ones. – J-XT: I understood that you first selected the photographs with the book in mind, then reduced that book-specific selection again to make a group of works to be exhibited. This strikes me as an interesting reversal. It usually happens the other way around. Do I understand your way of working correctly?

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LC: You are right. The choice of photographs and their sequences in the book were foremost in my mind first of all. It was only when there was talk of an exhibition to accompany the book that I started thinking about how to show them in a gallery space. I decided to print between 30 and 40 exhibition pictures and the sequencing happened only when I came to hang the shows. The pairing and progression in the book was crucial to building up a kind of dialectic involving meaning, humour and critique (figure 13). The sequencing in the exhibition was important but was more open and fluid. – J-XT: The book consists of some 170 photographs, which you took between 1971 and 2004. Stored in your archives, almost none of them were previously shown and a good many were negatives that had never even been printed. I know this project involved much selection and editing, but would you say that this is the first time that your work makes explicit reference to the notion of archive? LC: The notion of archive was part of my intent from early on but the Camouflage project brings it into sharper focus. From my first photographs I felt that I was working on a collection of sorts. I’ve never thought of myself, however, as producing photographs in series (even if that is how some critics have seen it). I think of pictures as having similar subjects, not as forming a series, such as the Spa series or the Men’s Clubs series or whatever. I take photographs of the same sorts of places over a long period and am always photographing different sorts of places at any one time. That is one reason I have not numbered the Spa pictures or even made reference to them as a series. I don’t see them that way at all. – J-XT: So how exactly do you see them? LC: After photographing one men’s clubs, I remember thinking it wouldn’t really make sense unless there were others. One of a kind suggested something special whereas I felt I was recording something widespread,

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something other than a one of a kind anomaly. It is the same with other subjects. One spa, one laboratory, one classroom doesn’t make sense in terms of what I’m trying to get at. At one point, however, I did think I might stick with one category and focus all my efforts on it. My thought was that the subjects or typologies are deceptive if one thinks of them entirely as a type. In the end I thought this was too limiting. Now I would say I see the subject or type as a deceptive first layer, as an excuse to enter a kind of space and uncover something about it other than what the category suggests. That is partly why the Japanese filmmaker Ozu has been a great influence and inspiration. He once spoke of himself as a tofu director since he made many things out of the same ingredients. I like to think of myself as doing something along the same lines. So I would say I’m not so much an archivist or collector as someone interested in what happens when there is an accumulation of examples of the same subject. I’m interested in the small differences and flaws. These tend to creep up on one and to take on heightened importance when one focuses on types of places. But in the end, of course, each image has to speak for itself. That’s very important to me. – J-XT: What are you working on now? LC: I am working on a number of ideas connected with my concern with the boundaries between the found and constructed, the absurd and the serious, the animate and inert. In October I shall be photographing in Cherbourg in France on a public commission. The project focuses on the Arsenal there. For a long time I have been interested in areas in transition and this is a site that has gone through big changes. It comprises buildings from the nineteenth century to today and is composed of diverse spaces – old and modern offices, empty warehouses, assembly hangars, bunkers and the like. It was once a highly specialized facility and it is historically linked to the Communist Party. What will be fabricated there in the future and by and for whom is up in the air. The site seems to me to ask more questions than it answers, which is something else that interests me. My hope is to consolidate some themes I have been exploring during the last few years and pursue some new ideas.

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J-XT: What kinds of new ideas? I am interested in how close I can get to my subject without its dissolving into abstraction or its becoming merely an illustration of a ready-made. I recently photographed a simulated interrogation room at a police school with this in mind (figure 14). This photograph is unsettling because of how non-specific it is. The room could be a construction, and the bench in the corner looks as though it is made out of foam core. Also the scale is confusing and it is far from obvious what we are looking at. There is something about the details being ambiguous and overly aesthetic that is disorienting, more so than in a lot of my earlier work, which is much more specific. It is not clear whether you are looking at a miniature mock-up or a life size human factors laboratory. That adds to a sense of unease. And the whole place being so ‘Bauhaus beautiful’ heightens the effect even more. Actually the subject matter of the picture and the fact that it is photographed from close up makes one feel queasy, like one is standing on the edge of a cliff. This gets at what I’m now trying to do – make photographs in which the subjects are less identifiable, more generalized, more generic. I should like the stories being told to be harder to unravel and there to be very little, perhaps nothing, to hold onto.

All photos by Lynne Cohen except fig. 13: © Lynne Cohen, photo of book: Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié.

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1. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Lobby with Mural)] 1970s Gelatin Silver Print

2. Lynne Cohen [Classroom] 1991 Gelatin Silver Print

3. Lynne Cohen [Lobby] c.1980 Gelatin Silver Print

4. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Family of Shoppers)] 1990s Gelatin Silver Print

5. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Men’s Club)] 1990s Gelatin Silver Print

6. Lynne Cohen [Classroom] Early 1980s Gelatin Silver Print

7. Lynne Cohen [Men’s Club] Late 1970s Gelatin Silver Print

8. Lynne Cohen [Classroom] early 1980s Gelatin Silver print

9. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Map, Numbers, Toy Airplanes)] 1990s Gelatin Silver Print

10. Lynne Cohen [Laboratory] 2001 Chromogenic Print

11. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Black Doors)] 2004 Gelatin Silver Print

12. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (White Screen)] 2004 Gelatin Silver Print

13. Lynne Cohen [Camouflage pp. 158-159] Photograph of Camouflage: Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié

14. Lynne Cohen [Untitled (Corner Stool)] 2007 Gelatin Silver Print

32 | Henri Van Lier

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Photography and Anthropogeny From Granular Images to Indexed Indices Henri Van Lier —

Drawn-traced images. Granular images. Until about 1850, all detailed images produced by a human being had been drawn, that is to say, they resulted from a stroke or from a point stroke. The Chinese painter and the Arab calligrapher agreed with regard to this: the image commences by a point which one hopes will spawn a line, which, in its turn, follows its trace, draws itself. The spot/ patch, usually coloured, would then be a modality of the stroke-point. It is with this very tradition that the photographic image makes a clean break, the cinematographic and afterwards the videorecorded image will follow. In this case, a detailed image is obtained by means of grains, by means of an amount of impacts of photons on a chemically prepared support.The image has become granular instead of drawn. It is one of the most radical disruptions within anthropogeny, that is to say: the continuous, ongoing process of the constitution of ‘Homo’ (Mankind) as a moment/state of the Universe. For this new process will not only make the multiplication of images possible to the point that they have become a major element of domestic environments and urban surroundings, but much more so, it will bestow a structure, a texture and a faculty of expansion upon them which will break with everything ever conceived by the image-makers thitherto; while, at the same time, contributing to a new ontology and epistemology. 641

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From the cosmos-world to the universe The typically Greek word ‘kosmos’ denoted order (whence the English word ‘cosmetic’), and presupposed that things were organised as wholes composed of constituent parts. The macrocosm, in this view, was the all integrating whole and ‘Homo’, the exemplary integrated one ‘par excellence’ was the microcosm. This also presupposed a perception of things from the ‘right’ distance, being the ‘middle’-distance, the very one that permitted the spectator to totalise the actor and his actions on the ‘skènè’ (scene/stage) of the Greek ‘theatron’ (theatre). The Romans translated ‘kosmos’ literally into ‘mundus’, the well-ordered world, the non-hideous world. However, the Roman political genius also used another, totally different word: the universe. The ‘universum’ which Cicero speaks about is neither the unified one, nor the order, but merely the – etymologically – ‘turned-towards-the one’, the ‘versus unum.’ Nothing warranted that this universe be composed of constituent parts, like a sculpture, a painting, a poem or a theory from Greece or from the Renaissance. It can just as well be discontinuous as it can be continuous. Additionally, this is something which is much better suited with regard to photography’s production, which, in its turn, has contributed to establishing the concept of the Universe.

Homo (Man) as switchman and as perilous activator The strokes-points were produced and superseded each other one after another. In the civilisations before and around Greece – which we will enceforth and for reasons of convenience call the WORLD 1 – they produced aggregate images, in keeping with the principle of the ‘close continuum.’ In Greece and subsequently in the West – in what we will call the WORLD 2 –, they spawned totalitarian images, marked by a composition of wholes composed of constituent parts, according to the ‘distant continuum’ of the theatre stage.

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On photographic film, on the contrary, photons arrive by myriads. The photographer would not be able to exert any control over them, not even to conduct any particular single one of them. He can only shunt and steer them.Instead of reigning and being in a position of sovereignty ‘in front of’ a model whose image he will transpose to a support, he now occupies a modest place ‘in between’ the (expected) spectacle and the chemical receptor. Switchman. Activator. Thus, rather than producing or conceiving of definite substantial objects which can be denominated and conceptualised, like Vermeer and his Spinozean pearls, he is gathering packages of disparate information surfacing as a field of floating indices. The only thing he is able to do with the latter is to index them, that is to say, to apply matrices, indices and indexation to them, which are essentially his framing, his focuses, lenses and the effects of photographic sensitivity which are at his disposal. What a change of status! The traditional image-maker was more or less divine, or a shaman, summoning forth and marshalling aggregate orders in WORLD 1 and totalitarian orders in WORLD 2. The situation of the photographer in his new capacity of switchman and activator is totally different, as he encounters momentary states of the Universe. This we shall call WORLD 3, our world. It started about 1850 with the mathematics of Riemann and in the granular image of the photograph; about 1900 in painting and music with the breakthrough of cubism and dodecaphony respectively, and around 1950 in biochemistry with the understanding of amino-acids.

The mobile framing-fenestration There were no frames in the caves of the Palaeolithic, even if there were some rectangles; only the line of a spine, the spine of Bos (the Bovine) or of Equus (the Horse) as some sort of ‘pre-frame’ or ‘post frame.’ It was the revolution of the Neolithic, in Catal Hüyük and in other places, that introduced the ‘frame’, as much in the images as in the constructions. The primaeval empires of Sumer, of Egypt and of Mohenjo Daro invented the ‘under-frames’ for the alignment of sphinxes, of soldiers and of lined-

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up pottery. By inaugurating WORLD 2, Greece will instate the dissociated ‘quadrature’ to the greater benefit of its wholes composed of constituent parts, until the Renaissance will invent the ‘synopsis’ (‘sinopia’, as Ucello called it) of linear perspective. This lasted until Delacroix. About 1850, the photographic processus introduced this novel event, namely mobile framing-fenestration. While it is wandering over a certain environment, the rectangular mouth of the photographic device causes this environment to give birth to what is no longer an infinity of objects (jectum-ob, Gegen-stand, voor-werp, priedmiet), but rather to an infinity of continuously changing ‘aspects’, in keeping with every move of the aperture. Thus, it summons up new spots and patches of uncharted and unidentifiable connections and relations everywhere. It lifts up and calls forth the indices and matrices which, with the slightest of movements index and dis-index themselves. The neighbour’s dog ? Its tail or rather its belly? A tuft of hair ? Is it a shadow maybe ? Or the shadow of a shadow? At any event, we are dealing with events about whom we cannot state: it is ‘this’, not even whether ‘it is’ at all, and less even whether ‘it has been.’ The only certainty being that there are and that there have been spots and patches, the very ones produces by chemical alterations on the photographic film as a result of the photons reflected by the spectacles after being focalised through the camera’s lenses.

Non-plastic formations The granular image is a chemical thing, ‘a controlled chemical catastrophe’, as René Thom put it in a vigorous manner. Its development, which had remained a mystery for a century and a half, finally ended up by giving away that ‘mass quantum effects’ were involved (La Recherche, January 1990), which bestows more sense upon the notion of grains, of granularity. This turns topsyturvy the entire notion of ‘formation’ and of the ‘form’, as it had been conceived by the Greek philosophers in keeping with the logic of the stroke-point. The Hebrew Yahweh, Plato’s ‘dèmiourgos’ and the Christian Creator were all plasticians, modelers (from the Greek

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‘pladzein’: to model). Because of its chemical nature, the photograph eludes and frustrates the plastic effect, even in the works by Stieglitz. The forms it shows to us stand closer to the non-plastic excrescences and sprawling of amino-acids than to the textures, let alone to the structures, that govern drawings. By doing so, it pushes us even more from the ‘Cosmos-World’ into the Universe.

'Universal’ subjects for an oeuvre Notwithstanding the above, the photographer continues the tradition of the artist. Art has always been a ‘compatibilisation’ of things that could not be amalgamated-coordinated, more specifically by means of rhythm. ‘Everyday’ art’s presence and ‘raison d’être’ is the consolidation of social codes. ‘Extreme’ art is there to shake them up and to make the Real well up from beneath Reality (the real which is already recuperated in signs). Photography most certainly has made contemporary art swarm all over. But insofar as it consists of indexed indices, it contributed in a remarkable manner to ‘extreme’ art by its ability to show how Reality was pierced like a sieve by the gaping holes within the real, and more specifically in the relation between presence and absence. Just like there have been ‘great’ painters, there were also ‘great’ photographers, those who have in a radical manner made use of the specificities of the medium. And they have developed a genuine ‘subject’ for photography – which is not to be confused with their ‘themes’ and their ‘motifs’, – just like others had developed a ‘subject’ for the art of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, arts based on language and choreography. Consequently, merely by their exploitation of the possibilities inherent in the encounters of spectacles-photons photographic film, they have incarnated and embodied novel and thitherto uncommon ways-destinations of existence. Destinations-ways of existence more ‘universal’ than they are ‘cosmic’ because of the medium. The writer of this contribution has collected about fifty writings on subjects pertaining to photography like the present one in ‘Histoire photographique de la photographie’ (Photographic history of photography), Cahiers de la photographie, Paris, 1992.

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Photographs are the most philosophical of subjects because of their granular nature which they oblige us to acknowledge: immobile and thin under our scrutinising gaze – something that cinema and television fail to accomplish, as they dissimulate and conceal the grain in their rapid movements or in the light they emit. Since they do not produce concepts, objects or clearly defined actions, but indexed indices instead, which are quite unfamiliar and uncongenial to old philosophical approaches, photographs – at least, if looked at in the essence of their being – have managed to make Homo (Mankind) understand that he himself, a tranversalising, ortogonalising primate standing upright, is, in the first place, an organism which lifts up and moves a field of indices and indexation around him, before he produces words and ideas. Consequently, the entire edifice we call culture depends on encounters between indexation and indexalities.

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—

.art - A Place for Internet Art in the Museum of Contemporary Art Adapting the art institution to the artistic proceedings of a 21st century networked society

Karen Verschooren —

The Internet has influenced our society in innumerous ways and to a greater extent than was most probably imagined in 1994. As the unruly object it is, the Internet is both subject to the appropriation of thousands of individual internet users and grass root movements, while at the same time being utilized and subject to the controlling attempts from centralized industries and institutions. It is both appreciated and feared for its democratic potentials, while at the same time being condemned and loved for its economic opportunities. It is everywhere and its pervasion is bound to become only bigger in the future, for better or worse. Besides creating opportunities, the power of the networks is greatly feared by a large number of industries and centralized institutions. Music industries today have struggled for years with grassroots music sites evading the middleman, printed press has been forced to come to terms with blogger’s activities and also television industries are being challenged by user-generated content, often channeled into the popular video sharing site YouTube (think LonelyGirl15)1 and Independent TV Producers using the Web as a distribution model.2 This text will focus on one particular product emerging from the Internet era; Internet art, and the challenges it lays upon one particular institution; the art museum.

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The essay discusses how museums – mainly North American museums – have reacted to and engaged with the art form arising out of the WWW. In looking at its history, a number of barriers and hurdles surface. In addressing these issues, Internet art supporters (curators, critics, and artists) have attempted to pave the way for Internet art’s inclusion in the traditional art museum and its acceptance as a contemporary art form for the public at large.3 Before we start, let’s briefly clarify how we will, for the purpose of this text, define Internet art. Often grouped with or used indistinctly for terms such as new media art, digital art, software art, networked art and/or net. art, the term Internet art refers to that set of artworks which uses Internet technology for its creation and presentation, and is characterized by a play with protocols, be they technical, economic, social or cultural. As such, for an artwork to be considered Internet art, it needs to make use of Internet technologies, ranging from data transfer technologies (standardized in tcp-ip and udp-ip protocols for instance) to data representation technologies (standardized in protocols such as http, html and ascii).4 However, this is not sufficient. The work can only be considered Internet art in his definition if it presents a certain way of relating to the medium, a way we have chosen to call play. This playful interaction between the artist/viewer/participant and the Internet as a medium can focus on the different sets of standards that rule our interaction with the Internet; the technological, economic, social and cultural protocols. Each Internet artwork of course can play on one particular or multiple protocols. As such, the category of Internet art is one part of the category of new media art, which besides Internet art also encompasses art forms making use of computer video games, surveillance cameras, mobile telephony handheld computers and GPS systems. Internet art neatly fits into the category of digital art, which encompasses any art form making use of the 0 and 1s of the digital language and it is a part of networked art, which also incorporates any art form making use of analogue networks (such as the postal service) besides the digital networks the Internet uses. It must be clear that a lot of Internet art, new media art, digital art and networked art make use of software. Software art, in return however, lacks the networked component of Internet art. Indeed, whereas code is software art’s material and process its context, Internet art’s material is the

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protocol and its context is connectivity.5 Finally, all net.art is Internet art, but all Internet art is not net.art. Indeed, net.art can be understood as the subset of Internet art that played with the specific technological protocols and peculiarities of the Internet in the first few years of the WWW, when low bandwidth limited the artists and encouraged creativity. Internet art

Digital art

Net.art

New media art

Software art

Networked art

That said, let’s briefly look at how the relation between Internet art and the museum institution has developed over the past 13 years.

Taking the plunge and sobering up When the WWW came about in 1994, the medium was immediately taken on by artists, who wanted to become part of the development of the medium, the creation of its vocabulary and its uses. Artists such as Vuc Cosic, Heath Bunting, Michael Samyn, jodi and Olia Lialina created their first pieces, mailing lists were founded to gather the works and instigate discussion, festivals were organized and a community was built. Over the course of the next ten years, this community of people would only expand; more artists expressed their artistic endeavors in the medium, more internet art aficionados participated in or lurked on the mailing lists, which in turn expanded to become large-scale archives. More conferences and festivals

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were organized, more online exhibitions were curated, more alternative galleries turned their head and finally, by the turn of the century, a couple of large brick and mortar institutions on the North American Continent felt they needed to infiltrate and participate in what had become an Internet art world. Brave curators such as Steve Dietz (Walker Art Center), Jon Ippolito (the Solomon R. Guggenheim Center), Barbara London (MoMA), Benjamin Weil (SFMoMA), Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Lynn Cooke and Sarah Tucker (Dia Center for the Arts) felt their institution had an obligation to consider Internet art, not just because of the mission of the institution, but also and importantly to acknowledge Internet art as part of art history and to broaden public interest and awareness of the art form. Working under the radar, and mostly outside of the responsibility of the departments they were assigned to, these curators – not always under that title and most of the time without any human resources – tried to gather enough financial support to ‘take the plunge’ and initiate their engagement with what they considered to be an important art form of the future. Starting out with some conferences, lectures and symposia, most of the institutions mentioned above rapidly ventured into a commissioning cycle, for which a number of artists – Internet artists or artists with a name made in other media – were contacted and presented with commissioning contracts which differed significantly between institutions, indicating the ad hoc method applied. Attempts to broaden the fan base for Internet art within the institution resulted in a number of collaborations and institutional structures by the time this first wave of institutional interest for the art form peaked around 2000-2001. During those two years exhibitions featuring Internet art were organized at TATE Modern (Art Now: Art and Money Online), SFMoMA (010101: Art in Technological Times), the Whitney Museum of American art (Internet art made its entrance as a separate category in the 2000 Biennial and a year later DataDynamics was organized in conjunction with Bitstreams) and the Walker Art Center (Art Entertainment Network and Telematic Connections: The virtual embrace).

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However, the dot.com crash had an undeniable effect on museum’s engagement and its effect played out in a more indirect way than one would expect. Yes, North American museums had approached the tech industry for support and sponsorship of Internet art productions and exhibitions, but contrary to the expectations, interest stayed out.7 As such, the dot.com bust did not dry out the tap of financial support because resources had never come from that corner. Rather, the dot.com bust played out on a much more psychological level. The impact of the Internet all of a sudden seemed immensely reduced, it was not going to change the world as drastically as thought before, it was not going to be the new photography, the new video, the new medium. Any art form relying on the medium was bound to disappear, or become unimportant. As such, what the dot.com bust brought about in the museums was a fundamental doubt about the validity of an art form within that medium. In addition, one must note that the dot.com crash could have only had this impact on curatorial activities within new media art, because the latter were at the time still largely one-man or onewoman shows, without an infrastructure supporting them. It was the voice of this one man or one woman within the institution, against the worldwide collapse ‘proving’ that after all, the Internet was just a fluke. As such, it was not just the external macro-economic factor, but rather the former in combination with the psychological impact and the internal political situation that can illuminate much of the decline in institutional attention for Internet art as an art form. Looking back on those first few adventurous years, Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media art at the Whitney Museum of American Art reflects: Retrospectively I think it was a mistake that museums jumped on new media art (including Internet art) so quickly around the turn of the century, because they were not prepared for the challenges. Organizing a show such as DataDynamics, which I curated in 2001 would have been almost impossible a few years later because, at that point, museum had already had their first encounters with new media art and better understood what was entailed, how difficult it was, what all the problems with presentation and reception were, etc. Retrospectively I think it might have been better for museums to take it slower, but then to sustain the support of the art, because as you can see, a lot of efforts in that area have collapsed.8 651

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Indeed, they had no idea, and during the years after the dot.com bust in which the Internet itself recuperated rather quickly and Internet art production flourished as never before, institutions – a bit burned on the art form – and new media art curators within – still convinced of Internet art’s value – took the time to ponder over the challenges Internet art really lays upon the museum institution, and the barriers impeding inclusion. The challenges were, and still are numerous. Steve Dietz indicates issues related to infrastructure and the lack of a general policy concerning questions of ownership, copyright, leasing of Internet art on the one hand and responsibility for what is on display on the other.9 Sarah Cook points towards the lack of a shared language or vocabulary of new media art and its categories and the changing role of the curator.10 Natalie Bookchin adds the problems related to economic value of Internet art, as it is always available and accessible anywhere with a net connection and in addition, cannot be depleted.11 Finally, unanswered questions related to conservation and display add to the problematic position of Internet art in the physical gallery space. Let us in this second part of the essay regard three important barriers which deal with Internet art’s obscure aesthetics, its economic value and its challenges for the existing exhibition methodologies.

Challenges One of the main difficulties members of the new media art world, be they artists or curators, experience is the lack of understanding of the art form from the public at large, in which public refers to the average man in the street, but also museum and gallery directors and the traditional art world at large. This is not surprising, nor is it a hopeless situation. Art history is bound with examples of art forms struggling to establish their aesthetic worth and communicating it to the public. Illustrative and interesting in its comparison to the Internet is the history of photography’s inclusion in the museum.

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When photographs entered the museum space, as soon as its inception in 1835, it was ‘either through the back door of documentation or into science museums.’12 This had everything to do with the way people understood photography. Indeed, the photograph was in first instance considered the product of an ever-improving technology and as such belonged in a science museum. In addition, it proved, in its potential for meticulous recording, extremely useful for documentation purposes – especially in the late 1850s, when the process became instantaneous. As such, it found its place in archives, libraries and conservatories. With the exception of the South Kensington Museum (now known under the name of the Victoria and Albert Museum) and Sir Henry Cole’s interest in the aesthetic qualities of the new medium, the art-ness of photography was doubted and strongly debated, as Alan Trachtenberg suggests in his 1989 prologue of Reading American Photographs: ‘The automatic, unflinching, and remorselessly unselective mirror-like character of the camera image seemed to sever the link to art, to set photography free from traditional practices of picturing – fatally so, it seemed to many skeptics and denigrators.’13 Indeed, the perceived objectiveness of the mechanical process involved in snapping a picture excluded any artistic engagement out of the process and thus any possibility of being considered a creative practice. Only few disagreed: ‘the common suffix “type” signified that photographs were pictures impressed upon a surface, as in printing. Their difference is a difference of means, not substance – not an ontological but an instrumental difference.’14 Photography kept its status as a scientific object and primarily documentary material until the 1890s, when the success of the art photography movement fore-fronted the idea that photographs can reflect the personal vision of a creator. From then on photographs modestly began to gain access to the museum as an autonomous artistic medium. This history of inclusion of a new medium seemed to repeat itself in the late 20th century when computers became widely available and affordable. Just as photography had been understood to facilitate tasks of documentation and archiving for years, computers were at first deployed for their database functionalities. The Internet is the most recent example in this regard; widely welcomed for its capacity to present the museum to a growing public, but shunned as a medium for artistic expression. Today, photography as an art form has been fully incorporated within the mainstream museum spaces, and credit goes not only to the photography movement of the 1890s, but also to numerous pioneers and

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outstanding curators who have taken the effort to explicate the aesthetic value of the photographic medium.15 As such, history indicates that indeed, defining and promulgating the ‘art part’ of a new practice is crucial for a successful inclusion in the art world at large. A number of actors and institutions – mainly within the new media art world – have in the past attempted to explicate and disseminate the aesthetic at play within Internet art, using both the alternative as well as the conventional venues at their disposal. They have recognized the potential of an explicit aesthetic system to gain institutional support, to facilitate the consistent passing of judgment, the creation of reputation, and thus the creation of seminal artists, and finally, to instruct a public at large to appreciate the emerging art form with its own criteria. Even the artists, traditionally silent ‘to let the artwork speak for itself,’ are slowly realizing the value of explicating their aesthetic, as they let their artist voice blend together with their curator, critic and writer voices. In the end, as Jon Ippolito says: ‘the perversion of code (a common strategy within Internet art) is ineffectual as an artistic strategy if such misuse is concealed to all but the technological cognoscenti.’16 Without the space to elaborately engage in an explication of the Internet art aesthetic and the different forms it might take, it is important to understand that, as in any other art form, the aesthetic qualities of Internet art are played out on two levels; an immediate sensory level and an indirect protocological level, in which the latter informs the former. Responding to the sensory stimuli an Internet artwork brings to one (and might I say these stimuli often go beyond the realm of the visual) can offer some aesthetic pleasure. However, an understanding of the material with which Internet art is created, the protocols, no doubt increases the participant’s consciousness of the heuristic richness of the work. The degree of increase in aesthetic pleasure largely depends on the degree to which the Internet artwork reflects upon its materiality; its protocols. This classic avant-garde strategy is very apparent when looking at Internet art’s early days or the so-called net.art period. As such a given work of jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), will be less aesthetically pleasing to those without any programming knowledge, since its visuals, although compelling, are not what the artwork is about.

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The Internet art aesthetic, often emerging out of collaborations, foregrounds a set of characteristics, radically opposed to more traditional art aesthetics, which have in the past been interpreted through line, form, function, colour, etc. pertaining to a certain object. The Internet aesthetic, informed by the play with technological, economic, social and cultural protocols, and working through low bit aesthetics, flash, etc. presents a primary concern with connectivity and context creation rather than objecthood. These differences in aesthetics have far reaching consequences for the demands that Internet art places on preservation techniques, which in turn influence the acquisition policies of collectors (be they private, corporate or public).17 This leads us to a second axis on which the traditional art world finds itself challenged by Internet art: the axis of economics and the balance attained between the art market – the auction houses and commercial galleries, the private and corporate collectors – and the museums. Museums have for their collection always depended more on donations from individual collectors than on acquisitions through auction houses. One can as such understand the colloquial saying that museums collect collectors, rather than art works. With museum’s power to buy directly on the art market decreasing, this is not likely to change. As such, if one argues that the art market and the institution go hand in hand, it seems that the solution for inclusion of Internet artworks in the museum’s collection and exhibitions lies in warming up collector’s hearts for Internet art and its artists. But what will the Internet art collector collect? Can we still talk in terms of ‘collecting’ and ‘owning’ when referring to something as intangible and ubiquitous as an Internet artwork? I would argue we can, and moreover, artists and collectors have already indicated several ways. For one, artists have started their attempts to play within the rules set out by the art market and look for inspiration in art history. Two, artists are aware of the difficulties their preferred medium entails for collectors and dealers, and moreover, have in some cases made it the subject of their artwork. Three, Internet art is being collected by private collectors who are reconsidering the concepts of ‘owning’ and ‘collecting’ and is as such making its way on the art market, be it on a small scale. Let’s take a brief look at the way Internet artists and collectors have attempted to find each other in the past. 655

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Internet artists, in their attempt to play within the rules set out by the art market needn’t reinvent the wheel. In the past, numerous artists working with media, now fully incorporated into the art world and valued for aesthetic as well as monetary worth, faced the conundrum of creating economic worth for their own practice. Photography, for example, struggled for a long time to merely establish its aesthetic worth (cf. supra) and even then, the possibility of infinitely reproducing the image without quality loss, made it difficult to assign the art form great economic value. Video art faced the same questions and also performance art and the happenings of the 1960s were confronted with the need to create a financial worth to their practice. Although inclusion in the traditional art world today still varies for the above art forms, one must say that they did all find a path to economic validation. Documentation materials from performances and happenings were elevated to an art status and – as an object – were subject to the demand and supply mechanisms of the art market. The virtual ubiquitousness of the ‘old’ new media art forms of photography and video art were over the years solved through the creation of limited editions, certificates of authenticity, and installations, making it suitable to the collector’s cycles. Internet artists, clearly conscious of their art history, have appropriated some of these strategies in the past. Indeed, artists like Cory Arcangel have made their internet artworks tangible through, for instance, the creation of derivatives of the artwork in the form of a poster or by artificially limiting the number of ‘authentic’ and signed DVD versions containing the archives of the internet artwork. Also the creation of an installation piece has been an appropriated strategy for Internet artists, although in its early days in a rather unsuccessful way, largely due to ideological arguments. As Internet art pioneer Natalie Bookchin clarifies: Following video art, some net artists began making sculptural installations more suited to a traditional art environment, but in doing so, ideas of sitespecificity that helped to shape and define much of the best net art had to be discarded.18 Today, the creation of Internet art installations is becoming more and more frequent, and one might say successful. The early utopian anti-institutional period has largely passed, at least for the majority of the internet artists, and on another level, computer and network technology have become

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more and more ubiquitous, allowing for internet access through a variety of smaller hardware. However, not all artists went to their predecessors in search for guidance. Contemplating the same issues, Carlo Zanni, for instance, has attempted to create a portable server-sculpture containing a network based artwork that can be sold. Altarboy – Cyrille and Altarboy – Oriana, created in 2003 and 2004, indeed present a sculpture containing a laptop running as a web server. The sculpture creates a physical location for the code to reside in, which allows collectors and or institutions to perceive it as ‘any other more classic artwork’ as Zanni puts it. The ubiquitousness of any Internet artwork is rerouted, by granting authority to the owner of Altarboy, to plug it into the web or not, and as such, to monitor a general public’s access to see and interact with the website. If the collector chooses to keep the artwork private, the server can simply be turned off, and the work can be seen privately using the data stored in its database.19

– Carlo Zanni – Altarboy - Oriana (2004) - courtesy of the artist1 1 http://www.zanni.org 657

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Explicitly referring to Altarboy’s implications for collectors, dealers and galleries, Zanni states that: With Altarboy, the net artist’s need to sell their work (as any other artist) merges with the collectors and dealer’s need: to buy net art works (as they usually do with more classic medium based works). In this way the typical ephemeral nature of netart works is preserved and at the same time AltarBoy offers a base for an upcoming new art market. Collectors will be able to decide when and where (even if ‘where’ is a floating concept in this case) to open the network, allowing people to see and above all to join the net art project. AltarBoy allows concepts such as Property and Sharing to merge without compromises.21 He adds: ‘Even if the Net will not exist anymore in a few years the work will still work in an OFF-line mode, witnessing its ON-line life. Altarboy is projected to run also offline, cycling the sessions stored in a database derived from its online life.’ 22 Although perceived as a solution functional to his mode of practices, Zanni believes it to be a flexible idea that can be applied to support and manage many different net projects. Zanni’s method proved successful; Cyrille Polla, director of the Analix Forever Gallery in Switzerland, acquired the piece, expressing his belief in a new market for Internet art. Currently, Oriana.us is off line, indicating its unplugged status. The above discussed examples all reflect attempts to play within the rules set out by the exchange economy, in which economic value directly relates to the creation of scarcity. However, not all Internet artworks benefit from these attempts and indeed all include some form of compromise. The artist is forced to create works in other media, for which his Internet artworks work as marketing campaigns, or needs to artificially limit access, be it through storage of an Internet artworks archives on a DVD or restraining its online presence over time. The constructions, set up time and time again, to adapt artistic practice to the customs of the art world, in the end feel rather limiting. It might therefore be more interesting to reconsider the concept of ‘collecting’ and ‘owning’ vis-à-vis Internet art, rather than to reconsider Internet art in itself. As Christiane Paul explains:

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‘It’s more of a mental switch that needs to be made. Why couldn’t one, wouldn’t one own and collect the art? A decade ago, the fact that many net art pieces were HTML-based certainly was an issue for collectors: everyone could just download the artwork to their machines and “collect” it there forever; there was no distinction between copy and original. (Of course many artists were attracted to precisely this feature of the medium and the way it challenges traditional notions of art.) Today many net art pieces are written in Java or Flash or Processing and have server-side components that are not simply downloadable anymore. Hosting the source code of a work on one’s server in my opinion constitutes a form of ownership. (…) Does the fact that the work is visible to the world really make a difference? There are many collectors who own, let’s say, a Picasso that is never hanging in their living room because it is traveling from show to show. In this case ownership is also about prestige, the work has a label next to it that identifies it as part of its owner’s collection, but the piece is not necessarily displayed in the owner’s home. A work of net art would reside on its owner’s server. Does the fact that the world can see it at any given time affect its status as collected work?’23 This reconsideration of the concept of ‘owning’ and ‘collecting’ is not as radical as it might seem at first. Conceptual artists in the 1960s have spoken much to the same ideas. Paul asks us: ‘Is owning a set of instructions (in reference to Sol LeWitt) so different from owning an Internet art piece’s source-code on your server?’24 Although one could argue that in the case of Sol LeWitt’s instructions, there is still a tangible object, whereas the source code lives on a server, I would respond that in both cases, the art is not to be found in the instructions – be they written down on a piece of paper, or typed in as a program – but in the idea and the possible realization of what is conceived. In the end, the question must be answered negatively: with an open mind as to what constitutes ‘ownership’, one must admit that whether the instructions are on a piece of paper or your server space make no great difference. Although few have made this mental shift, there are some collectors who have been attracted by the medium and its artistic practices. The Schwartz family, probably one of the very first collectors owning an Internet art

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piece, acquired Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, in 1995 and donated it to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Already then, ownership did not imply the impossibility of others to enjoy the work as it was meant to exist. Quite the contrary, the Schwartz received a signed disk that recorded the first days of the site, including the earliest contributions, as a token of gratitude towards their generosity. From the Schwartz family to Doron Golan, we move from an incidental case of private collecting of an Internet artwork’s derivative to the world’s largest private collection of Internet art. As one of the early collectors of Internet art Golan has, over the course of the past 6 years, collected over 150 projects from more than 80 internet artists, ranging from MTAA, to Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Mark Amerika, Natalie Bookchin, Heath Bunting, Mark Daggett, Andy Deck, Lisa Jevbratt, Jon Klima, Tina Laporta, Golan Levin, Mark Lichty, Mouchette, Mark Napier, Andy Packer, Thomsom & Craighead and Martin Wattenberg. Another 50 artists are set to join the collection. Responsible collecting of Internet artworks also means preserving them for future uses.25 The Schwartz family’s Douglas Davis work was maintained and further developed on the New York Lehman College Art Gallery website from 1994-2005 and afterwards within the Whitney Museum of American art. Doron Golan’s collection is presented and maintained on http://www.computerfinearts. com since 2001. Since 2003 an archiving agreement with The Cornell University Library ensures the cataloguing and preservation of the works as a permanent repository. That said however, the art market for Internet art – like the art market for conceptual art - will most likely stay small. However, it does exist, and we must conclude that Internet art can function within the exchange economy – if concepts of ‘owning’ and ‘collecting’ are slightly rethought outside the realm of ‘scarcity.’ In the past, and the present however, with an Internet art market in its infancy and private and corporate collectors still hesitant, it is rather the entrepreneur-sponsor than the entrepreneur-collector that has provided the necessary support for the individual artist to create and the museum to exhibit.

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With this note we arrive at a third museum custom in need for adaptation, the exhibition methodologies. And again, also here the Internet artist was not the first to challenge the white cube aesthetic, still dominant in the majority of today’s art museums. For one, the dadaist and surrealist movements of the 1930s were not that pleased with the way artworks were traditionally presented in isolation, drained from any context, ready for pure object focused aesthetic contemplation. They reacted, for instance, rather fiercely against the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and – under the direction of Marcel Duchamp – mounted an alternative exhibition in the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1960s, another moment of uproar by Art Workers Coalition who reacted against the drain of social relevance of artworks within the museum, shook up the art world and questioned the ideology of exhibition methodologies. Another challenge the white-cube aesthetics had to deal with in the past couple of decades, which – contrary to previous challenges – fundamentally changed the interior design of today’s museums for contemporary art with the introduction of the black box, was video art. Indeed, in video art’s final turn towards the museum space, the main question to be solved did not relate to the ontology of the medium and the justification of its artistic and aesthetic qualities (as was the case with photography), but rather to questions of exhibition methodologies. As Samuel R. Delany wrote in his Introduction to Video Spaces, Eight Installations, a show organized by the MoMA in 1995: Beginning as an accommodation for art that erupted beyond the physical confines ordinarily associated with the picture frame and the pedestal, the video installation collapses the distinction between painting (images presented along a wall) and sculpture (images standing free of those walls and commanding space and air). Between interior and exterior, present and future.26 The statement clearly illustrates that attempts to describe or understand a new art form often refer to previous art forms. In consequence, it is also presented as such. As Robert Steams, director of The Kitchen center for Video and Music put it in the 1970s:

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Video as art, video as used by artists, is presented in formats reminiscent of painting and sculpture; it is offered in large-screen format with schedules similar to film showings; it is produced in multiples and marketed like objects as many of its early adherents thought, and hoped, it never would be. It is treated by some artists as a replacement for live performance.27 Speaking to his own circle he ads: Those of us who present it must look for ways to allow video to make its own qualities clear and clearly felt.28 As such, doubts about how to exhibit certain art forms have proven not only to delay the full inclusion of an art form within the museum space, but also when included, to limit the variations of that art form to those understandable in terms of existing and already established art forms. In the past, the art institution has presented Internet art to its public in three ways: as an online exhibition on a page, linked to the institution’s site, as an online exhibition in a medialounge, or as part of an on-site exhibition, in the gallery spaces of the museum integrated with artworks making use of more traditional media. Note that in first instance, these models do not aim to add a value statement to the different types of inclusion. In other words, Internet art integrated in the gallery space is not necessarily ‘better’ than Internet art presented solely online through the institution’s or museum’s website. Rather, every Internet artwork must be understood individually to account for which form of presence within the institution is most appropriate. Each model of inclusion has advantages and disadvantages and will as such, be more appropriate to one or another Internet art work. As with all new media art works, decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis and should ultimately depend on the conceptual requirements of the artwork itself. The inclusion of Internet art on the websites of the museum or institution has been so far the most commonly used strategy to present Internet art within the context of an institution. Advantages of this strategy can be found primarily in the preservation of the original context of how the art – especially a lot of earlier Internet art – is supposed to be seen. In addition, it doesn’t require the visitor to come to the museum space, to pay an entrance fee or to make a suggested donation. The web tourist can, in the comfort of

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his/her home, office, library, wherever he or she finds access to the web, enjoy the pleasures (and pains) of Internet art. However, it is also in this ephemeral, but existent connection with the institution or museum that we can find the first disadvantage of this strategy: the institution, although adding its name to the Internet artwork, has only limited control over the conditions in which the viewer experiences the artwork. Christiane Paul explains: Net art projects have numerous requirements, ranging from browser versions to plug-ins, minimum resolution, window size, etc. Some of these requirements can be accommodated on the museum’s side, but most of them have to be fulfilled at the viewer’s end. (…). Viewers may perceive their inability to view a work (because their computer, monitor, or connection does not support its technical requirements) as more annoying if they took the time to ‘visit’ an exhibition organized by a museum or arts organization, which they hold responsible for providing a certain quality of the experience of art.29 In addition, one can question what the public is for these online art repositories on the museum’s website. Does it really succeed in attracting a broad public or does it stay limited to those already informed about this latest new media art practice? We might wonder – with more and more traditional institutions for contemporary art opening their web space and/ or commissioning net art – what this involvement entails. Can we cheer victory for the incorporation of Internet art into the museum space, be it on their website and in the more elaborate models of the Walker Art Center (Gallery 9) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport)? Or are these still forms of ‘marginalized inclusion’, as Prof. Charlie Gere has stated?30 I would argue that, even the most extensive online sites, curated within the institution, can be called marginal in the number and broadness of the public it attracts and the institution’s commitment to the art form it communicates. Even though some Internet artworks require and thus benefit from a single screen, single participant encounter, I believe its inclusion in the gallery space, if necessary in a separate medialounge, is desired.

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This second model, in which Internet artworks are featured within a medialounge, allows first and foremost a broader audience for Internet art related projects. A broader audience, that – in coming to the museum – has prepared itself for aesthetic contemplation and intake. In other words, an audience that has time and is willing to ‘experience things.’ In addition, the institution and museum has, through incorporation of the Internet artworks in the museum space, more control over the conditions and circumstances in which the art work is seen, both on the level of hardware and software requirements for each Internet artwork, as well as the environmental components of the aesthetic experience. The presence of Internet artworks in the museum space, even if it is ‘just’ on the museum’s website in a designated mediatheque or medialounge also communicates a more serious engagement with the art form and its acceptance as a valuable aesthetic practice. The critique on this strategy has been inspired by the critique usually formulated towards new media art centers: It is understood as ‘contributing to the separation of the art form from more traditional media and epitomizing the uneasy relationship that institutions tend to have with the medium at this point in time.’31 While I understand that presenting Internet art in a room, separated from art forms working with other media entails some problems, I do think this critique is more justified vis-à-vis new media art centers, in which overall no ‘traditional’ artworks are to be found and for which the separation includes many more miles than the few feet it involves in the museum space. What is more disturbing in my opinion is the juxtaposition of artists’ web projects and the digital resources about artists, exhibitions, etc. The combination allows for the confusion of what constitutes an artwork and what is ‘mere’ documentation. Note that this was the primary reason for Benjamin Weil, at the time SFMoMA’s curator for media art, to not include internet art projects on-site in the 010101 Art in Technological Times exhibit, as ‘an internet station on-site would inevitably be appropriated by the education department, the publications department, the marketing department, etc.’32 However, a solution for this problem might be as simple as splitting up the medialounge into, let’s say, an Internet art lounge and a digital resources lounge – be it in the same space, or preferably in two rooms. It would not only separate the documentation from the art, but also leverage the Internet artworks to the same level as video art, which is still often presented in black boxes spread throughout the museum. However, the reservation of a

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space for Internet artworks solely would require a continued engagement of the museum vis-à-vis Internet art, in terms of continuous programming. Maybe today, this is still too much to ask from the traditional museums and institutions. Not all Internet artworks, however, require an isolated setting with an emphasis on their ‘netness’33, allowing for an intimate relation between viewer/participant and computerscreen/artist. Indeed, some Internet artworks require multiple viewers/participants, address notions of space or ‘beg to break out of the browser window’34, as Christiane Paul puts it. These artworks would benefit from presentation through the ‘integration’ model, referring to all instances in which Internet artworks are found, between and betwixt art pieces working with different media. It is in this inclusion model that one surpasses the limits the medium has posed upon the practicalities of exhibition design and works can be joined or separated based on their content, theme, historical connections or any other curatorial intent behind an exhibition. However it is also within this model that the uncertainty in terms of exhibition methodologies is highest. Should the artwork be presented as a small or large-scale projection, or rather as an installation? Should the access be limited to the Internet art piece solely or opened to the Internet as a whole? In answering these and related questions, the needs of the artists and the possibilities of the museum are in constant negotiation. Overall, we can say though, following Christiane Paul, that the demands Internet art lays upon museums in terms of their exhibition methodologies, mostly arise from the possible characteristics of the artwork. An Internet artwork, because of the medium it works with, is context-oriented, time-based, dynamic and can, but not necessarily has to be, interactive, participatory and variable. Each of these characteristics imposes its own requirements on the presentation of the artwork. One of the primary concerns for the institution or museum space in presenting Internet art is to be found in the provision of context information. And this should not surprise: If we can understand Internet art as one of the creative products of a – to most people – ‘foreign’ culture, not geographically separated, but found within Western societies, this demand

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for context information is as self-evident as the request to show an African mask not isolated in a glass case, but together with the costume it belongs to and the ritual it is made for. To allow for each artwork to be appreciated with its own criteria, the possibility of listening to an explicitation of the aesthetic at play seems needed (cf. supra). In addition, the visitor who wishes so should be able to receive information about the cultural context out of which the art object sprouted, especially if that context is not part of the public’s commonsense. Even though the network society has been incredibly pervasive in the society at large, not everyone might be as up to date about its technicalities and consequences to readily understand any process based artwork and Internet artworks in particular. At the same time though, visitors who do have this baggage, should not be bothered by instruction manuals, wall labels or anything that could divert their attention from the artwork itself. Context information should thus ideally be provided via a pull-medium rather than a push-medium, granting full decision right to the visitor. In this sense, audiotapes or customized (video) I-pods seem a better fit than object labels or wall labels. Another issue institutions need to account for in presenting Internet art is its time-based nature. Also this characteristic is not new, indeed video art and performance introduced a number of difficulties related to time. However, Christiane Paul argues that: ‘the time-based nature of new media art (and thus of Internet artworks alike) is far more problematic than that of film or video due to the inherently non-linear qualities of the digital medium.’ Indeed, whereas film or video lay an existing time-notion upon the viewer, as well as a required viewing time (which obviously the viewer can ignore), Internet art lays possibly multiple time-frames upon the viewer, depending on the media incorporated, while at the same time continuously being disrupted by the participant, who with a mouse click can disrupt presented time. Julian Stallabras puts it as follows: ‘With Internet art, time comes in first and starts. It imposes time on the user, while the user imposes time on the work in a discontinuous rhythm.’35 This interdependence of the participant and the Internet artwork in terms of time requires meticulous consideration with regard to the choice of presentation as well as the artwork’s position in the gallery space, as to allow for optimal engagement without giving up the museum visitor’s roaming behavior.

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Although not required as a characteristic to classify an artwork as Internet art (data visualization can often be Internet artworks as well for example), most Internet artworks do present to a greater or lesser extent interactive or participatory features, beyond the interactive mental event of experiencing it, which of course is potentially present within every artwork. Interactivity as such poses one of the greatest challenges for the exhibition methodology at play. Not only does it go against the traditional ‘please do not touch the art’-customs, it also requires a design which for one avoids long lines if the experience is meant to be an individual one, or on the contrary, allows for a collective experience if that is meant to happen. In addition, interactive artworks (Internet art based or not) require knowledge on the side of the participant about the interfaces and navigation systems and here again a call for context information is appropriate. Lastly, the variability and modularity of digital arts in general and Internet artworks in particular allow for an ever-changing constellation of its presentation, often dependent upon the exhibition space. Indeed, the same work can be presented with installation components, as a projection, on a screen or within a kiosk set-up. The example traditionally raised to illustrate this feature is Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak’s Apartment and credit in this case must go to the artists themselves, who have meticulously documented the various ways of installing the work in the gallery in numerous sketches. The work was shown as a single-user workstation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2001 Data Dynamics exhibition, as a two input station, two projections and an ‘archive’ station at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria and as a projection at the Electrohype Festival in Sweden. Another example is Wisniewski’s Netomat ™, which was exhibited both at Data Dynamics as well as Net_ Condition and Telematic Connections. In addition, any Internet artwork can be presented simultaneously on-site and on-line. If the latter is the case, a connection between virtual and physical space needs to be made. No matter which of the three exhibition strategies chosen, the main requirements Internet art put upon the museum or institution deal with ‘the facilitation of audience engagement and the need for continuing educational programs in order to make the public more familiar with the still emerging art form.’36

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A careful prediction for the future With the need for a clear aesthetic system explicated, the fact that Internet art can find ways to play within the art market as well as adhere to corporate support, and guidelines for exhibition methodologies in the making, we might with caution begin to speculate about a more profound resurgence of museum’s commitment to Internet art in the midst of the first decade of the 21st century. Indeed, Internet art commissions are increasing again. TATE Modern and the WHITNEY Museum of Modern art commissioned four works in 2006. MoMA recently restructured its curatorial departments, adding a media department which will deal with works that use a wide range of modern technology, from video and digital imagery to Internet-based art and sound-only pieces, according to Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of the new department.37 In addition, a growing number of galleries are turning their attention to Internet art, collectors seem to be jumping on the bandwagon… and more and more artists are indulging in working with this new medium, that has not only become much more familiar to them, but also to the public at large. Lauren Cornell, director of the online platform for the global new media art community, Rhizome.org, confirms the idea of a resurgence of interest and the underlying explanatory factors: I do think that there is a resurgence. I think it has to do with the fact that the Internet is a mass medium now. Online culture and new media culture are so much more prevalent and part of people’s life, so art around now seems more relevant, more intimate, more urgent.38 Indeed, the more prevalent these technologies and their uses in everyday life become, the better the understanding of art working within these technologies and in addition, the greater the demand for critical voices about these very pervasive technologies that characterize those networked societies of the 21st century.

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Epilogue This carefully predicted integration of Internet art in the traditional institution is not an integration without conditions, nor must it entail the death of alternative venues’ involvement that have allowed Internet art to grow. The trade-offs faced by past art forms upon inclusion in the museum and the rhetoric of the museum as a mausoleum, might not be as permanent as museum critics wish to believe. If we believe in the ability of the institution to respond to the challenges new art forms place upon its practices and customs, starting with the incorporation of some components of networked culture (decentralization of authority, strong and committed relations to a network of supportive institutions, etc), the inclusion of Internet art might present the art world with true change. While it might feel good to vent one’s frustration with museum practices, depicting the institutions as ‘lazy’ and ‘inert’ and turning one’s back in dismay, a more challenging and potentially successful strategy lies in attempting to change the institution from the inside out, starting by addressing the necessity of change and the challenges contemporary art practices entail. Vis-à-vis Internet art, I believe these challenges have currently become questions to which answers are being sought within the institutions. The future for Internet art’s development as an art form in its relation to the traditional institution for contemporary art seems bright.39

Notes 1

http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2006/09/astroturf_humbugs_ and_lonely_g.php

2

http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2006/12/internet_television_a_ reserve.php

3

Note that Internet art and its community in all its aspects of course go beyond the institutional walls of the art museum. However, investigating its relation to the art institution seems necessary if we wish to prospect Internet art’s future as a widely accepted art form. The system of values that art museum institutions present are still prevalent to a public at large, and its core functions on the level of public outreach, culture filtering, art form authorization and care-taking (in terms of documentation and preservation) are crucial for the establishment of any art form in the art world and in art history. 669

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4

A full range of internet technology terms can be found on http://whatis. techtarget.com/definitionsCategory/0,289915,sid9_tax1670,00.html.

5

Arikan, B. (May 2006). Conversations. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

6

The collage visualizes the highs and lows of North American museum’s commitment to Internet art. Every image represents an Internet art piece that museums under scrutiny have supported in one way or another – through commissioning, incorporation into their collections, or exhibiting. (I have tried to be as complete as possible in representing Internet art pieces in the collage, but cannot guarantee this collage to be all-inclusive).

7

There were a number of incidences in which companies would ask artists to provide content for their software architectures, but apart from these few incidences, no major sponsorship of new media art by the new media industry took place, as Christiane Paul recalls. Verschooren, K. (February 26, 2007). Interview with Christiane Paul. Telephone conversation.

8

Verschooren, K. (February 26, 2007). Interview with Christiane Paul. Telephone conversation.

9

Dietz, S. (2003). Interfacing the digital. Museums and the Web03 Papers. Retrieved November 17, 2005, from http://www.archimuse.com/mw2003/ papers/dietz/dietz.html

10

Cook, S. (2006). Context-specific curating on the web (CSCW). In T.Corby (Ed.) Network Art: Practices and Positions (Innovations in Art and Design). New York: Routledge.

11

Bookchin, N. (2006). Grave digging and net art: a proposal for the future. In T. Corby (Ed.) Network Art: Practices and Positions (Innovations in Art and Design). New York: Routledge.

12

Lenman, R. [Ed.] (2005). The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. New York:

13

Trachtenberg, A. (1989). “Prologue” in Reading American Photographs: Images

Oxford University Press, p. 429 as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, pp.14-15. 14

Trachtenberg, A. (1989). “Prologue” in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, pp.14-15.

15

Remark that photography’s inclusion as an art form has not taken away its initial function of documentation. On the contrary, photographs are even more widely used to document the museum’s collection, to perform research into the authenticity of art objects, to gloss up exhibition catalogues, to present the museum’s activities and its collections within the space of the world wide web and – not to be forgotten – to contribute to the corporate identity of museums as postcards or printed on t-shirts, napkins, cups, etc. 670

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16

Blais, J. & Ippolito, J. (2006). At the edge of art. Thames & Hudson, p. 25.

17

Although Internet art preservation is an important hurdle alongside issues of aesthetics, economics and exhibition methodologies, this essay will – due to space-constraints - not explicitly elaborate on it. Valuable research initiatives and resources in this regard are The Variable Media Initiative (http://www.variablemedia.net), Electronic Arts Intermix online resource (http://resourceguide.eai.org) - which heavily draws upon the VMI, and Media Matters (http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/ mediamatters/)

18

Bookchin, N. (2005). Grave digging and net art: a proposal for the future. IN Network Art: Practices and Positions (Innovations in Art and Design). Routledge, p.70.

19

Zanni, C. (2006). Oriana (altarboy) – 2004. Retrieved February 20, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.zanni.org/html/works/altarboy-oriana/ altarboyoriana.htm

20

http://www.zanni.org

21

Zanni, C. (2004). Altarboy tech specs and docs. Retrieved February 21, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.zanni.org/html/altarboyallinfo.htm

22

Zanni, C. (2004). Altarboy tech specs and docs. Retrieved February 21, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.zanni.org/html/altarboyallinfo.htm

23

Verschooren, K. (February 26, 2007). Interview with Christiane Paul. Telephone conversation.

24

Verschooren, K. (February 26, 2007). Interview with Christiane Paul. Telephone conversation.

25

It is in this primarily that artwork commissions differ from artwork acquisitions into a collection. It is also this which explains why Internet artworks are rarely incorporated in art institution’s collection, even when this institution has started a commissioning cycle.

26

London, B. (1995). Video Spaces. Eight Installations. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p.11

27

Schneider, I. & Korot, B. (1976). Video art: an anthology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.161

28

Schneider, I. & Korot, B. (1976). Video art: an anthology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.161

29

Paul, C. (2005). Flexible contexts, democratic filtering and computer-aided curating: models for online curatorial practice. Retrieved November 2006 from the World Wide Web: http://www.anti-thesis.net/texts/DB/DB03/Paul.pdf, p.93

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30

Verschooren, K. (May 31st, 2006). Interview with Charlie Gere. London.

31

Paul, C. (2007). The myth of immateriality – presenting & preserving new media. IN O. Grau (Ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge: MIT Press.

32

Verschooren, K. (February 17, 2007). Interview with Benjamin Weil New York.

33

Paul, C. (2007). The myth of immateriality – presenting & preserving new media. IN O. Grau (Ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge: MIT Press.

34

Paul, C. (2007). The myth of immateriality – presenting & preserving new media. IN O. Grau (Ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge: MIT Press.

35

Stallabrass, J. (2003). Internet art: the online clash of culture and commerce. London: Tate Publishers, pp. 40-41

36

Paul, C. (2007). The myth of immateriality – presenting & preserving new media. IN O. Grau (Ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge: MIT Press.

37

MoMA (October 3, 2006). The Museum of Modern Art creates new curatorial department. Retrieved October 2006, from the World Wide Web: http:// www.moma.org/about_moma/press/2006/Klaus%20Media%20Dept.%20 ReleaeMAINSITEpdf.pdf

38

Verschooren, K. (October 26, 2006). Interview with Lauren Cornell. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

39

A more extensive text on the topic from the same author can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/KarenVerschooren2007.pdf

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—

Reproduction and the Revenant Derrida and Genet Hubertus v. Amelunxen —

The Imitation became her constant reading companion, the daily bread, bitter and black, of her thoughts (...) She listened to it, all the time, hearing in it the knell of creation, of nature and of humanity. She lived bent over her desolate breviary whose pages repeat: die for what is, die for others, die for oneself, die for this body, die, die, perpetually! Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais CARMEN: I wanted to ring but the apparatus is not working. Please forgive me. I would like to speak to you. Jean Genet, The Balcony. Not one! Why did the metaphor of family or genealogy force itself on me yesterday? For I know that it lacks pertinence, and the word reproduction too. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting. In his fragmentary novel Ma mère, Georges Bataille describes a reproduction cycle. In his deceased father’s office, Pierre discovers several bundles of dust-covered photographs on a glass-fronted book shelf. The photographs are obscene, ‘revolting’ images. In thrall to the photographed scenes, he decides to dispose of the pictures before his mother’s return, to gather them up into a heap and burn them. He piles up the pictures into veritable towers that finally topple, strewing

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the photographs all over the floor. ‘Could I have battled against that rising flood?’1 It is the rising tide, not fire and ashes,2 that signals the inevitable return of what was once cast out, repulsed. The tide sets the tempo. Distraught and overwhelmed by a desire for the tremor to last, Pierre scrutinises this ‘quagmire of obscenity.’ Surrounded by depictions of nakedness, photographs which he ‘hastily gathers together’, in a gesture of powerlessness he causes the still remaining piles of images to collapse. Enveloped in dust and encircled by photographs of mute physical surrender, he exposes himself so as to experience through his own body what he sees in the gaze of a woman photographed during the sexual act: ‘the beauty of death.’3 Later he will recall a sentence by La Rochefoucauld: ‘Neither the sun nor death allow themselves be captured by a gaze.’ In photography, light and death fall at the same time, a becoming in a fall. Photography is essentially a turning away, it literally puts the incident light up for discussion, though itself remaining wrapped in blindness. In Bataille’s novel, photography takes on the allegorical meaning of physical paroxysm: it is death’s double, and like a double in a film replaces the actor in moments of real danger. But the substitute also doubles itself – the photograph takes the place of the image of death, both exposing and representing it. The duplication characterises and doubles the singularity in the differentiation of the reproduction. The phallically towering layers of obscene images, the naked mother exposed to the desirous gaze of the son, form a genealogical circle: ‘The photographs brought me enlightenment.’4 Pierre exposes himself to reproduction. 'Pour qui ce don qui ne devient jamais présent?’5 Who is the gift for, who is worthy of it, and in what time? The gift does not give itself as a present, a small wrapped gesture. Nor is it, or will it be, present; once given, it is past. For whom is the gift? Can a gift be given back? Will what was once given be offered anew if it does not reach the addressee and does not act as a medium? A thought not put into any medium, a call to which there is no reply, which is answered by the engaged tones, like ellipses in writing, ‘wrinkles on the forehead of the texts’, or an electromagnetically simulated voice in stereo tone (the gift is not a promise), a letter sent to an addressee who has moved or is deceased?6 7 How can a gift ever be repeated, a submission ever be taken back and saved up for another time, which even in the future will already have been past? Preserving the gift

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would mean being sure of its destination, its goal. As long as that is not in sight, the gift would be kept safe in expectation. What place would the gift take, or from which place would it depart, and where to? It could only be found and repeated in an undivided space, a undivided place. Yet if we understand the gift as indivisible, singular and isolated, we not only exclude it from any spatial migration, from references to place, we also determine it as its own placelessness, its own dislocation. Does the gift mean an eternally postponed reception, does it, stop its own movement, its own delivery? How might the gift branch out, when merely conceiving of its breaking in two is to annihilate it. The gift is only continuous in itself, and is postponed in a completely transferred sense; it knows of no arrival, therefore, there will never be, or have been, a giving back (or giving in). Only an atopic and utopic madness, perhaps (a certain perhaps or maybe will be both the modality and the modality to be modified or our meditation), could thus give rise to the gift that can give only on the condition of not taking place, taking up residence or domicile: the gift may be, if there is any (le don peut etre, s’il y en a).8 The gift withdraws from being cultivated or domesticated. There are only questions: How is the gift to be conceded?9 Within what boundaries does it show itself? As a confession, an addition which makes itself known, reveals itself, and at the same time supplements itself? To put it another way: How can one catch up with the gift, be with it, and yet grasp this impossible, inconceivable movement as one that is still deferred? Reproduction is related to the event (of the gesture, the tone, the artwork in its ‘uniqueness’, the deferral, or the extinguished light in photography; what took place in photography was light), reproduction is related to the take and to its presentation in different dimensions (via a carrier and technical equipment). Benjamin’s technical reproducibility must be thought of as something other than duplication and the loss of cultic uniqueness. ‘The moment of the unique, the singular, that is lost in every reproduction or repetition, in every mimesis, only emerges as that very loss.’10 That is to say, reproduction is a double movement: singularity is not just withdrawn from what is reproduced, from the moment, it is

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established in that withdrawal. Reproduction presents us with the loss, preserving in it the singularity of what was withdrawn. It would seem that reproduction links the moment of the singularity of the gift with that of repetition. It excludes what it repeats, and carries it into another time as a loss. This loss might be closely linked with the gift. The gift finds (and flees) its allegorical ‘representation’ in this loss, driven to an ‘impossible, inconceivable closure.’11 It is in the ‘logic’ of photography to portray even its own temporal distance from the moment of its temporal – chronoscopic – representation. Photography is confronted with the desire to reproduce a time, to restore a time. Yet as a reproduction, the photographic image shows the loss of something that never attained itself as present. This displacement of what is presumed to be present (there would be no photography without this presumption) resembles the ‘postponement’, the endless prolongation of the loss. ‘In every exposition it (the différance) would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.’12 In photography everything has already happened, will always have already happened. In his Camera Lucida, Barthes writes that the ‘continuous catastrophe’ of photography puts death in the future perfect. Thus reproduction might also be conceived of as the gift of death. But who perceives this gift? How is one to perceive one’s own death as an act (se donner la mort)? What duplication strategies are required in order to be able to have already experienced that already at a given moment, to be able to divide the moment? In an early text by the French author and photographer Hervé Guibert, La mort propagande (1976), we read of the longing for the ultimate, forever incomprehensible reproduction, the reproduction of the ecstatic body onto death, ‘the most extreme transposition, the most extreme disguise.’ There is a tendency to suffocate death, censor it, drown it in disinfectant, asphyxiate it in ice (glace). I would like death to raise its powerful voice and sing, diva, through my body. Not to let this source of direct visceral spectacles dry up. To take my life on stage, in front of cameras. To give this extreme, excessive performance of my body in my death.13

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In all the classical texts on photography – from Töpffer to Baudelaire, from Villiers de l’Isle Adam to Proust, from Kracauer to Benjamin, and even including those closer to us in time and about to be taken up into the canon, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Craig Owens and Jacques Derrida (to mention just a few, though not arbitrarily selected names) – one is repeatedly confronted with the motif of the revenant, the spirit, the doppelgänger, the double, used to designate the uncanny, the dream-like or traumatic presence of a present that is either long-since or only recently past. Suddenly our longing meets gazes that are ‘carried in front of the faces of the images, where birds in flight formed an arc above the emptiness, into the surviving morrow’, as Gadda once formulated it.14 Our gazes may then betray perplexity, restlessness, at the fact that like wandering spirits these people are granted no rest, that their fate is to have to endure in our gaze and lament in an undying echo. That moment of photographic closing that separates the pose from any future, opens up the moment of inexhaustible alterity, with no prospect of an end or of salvation. ‘Imaginer un suspense sans attente particulière.’15 Herein lies the allegorical capacity of photography. In the temporal seclusion of the exposition, in its finiteness, it literally ruins any thought of a present, establishing every moment in difference. Derrida speaks of a ‘memory of the present’ that inscribes difference into the ‘presence of the present’: ‘Thus, by the same token, the possibility of being repeated in representation.’16 Here, just as in the ‘impossible’ performative, the ‘énonciation foreclose’ which Roland Barthes analysed in E. A. Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. The statement ‘I am dead’ contains the metaphorical significance of photography as a present that is past but continually emanating from out of death: ‘I am dead’ is not really an incredible statement, it is much more radical, it is the impossible statement.’17 As Barthes puts it, it is a ‘paroxysm of transgression’, the ‘blind spot in language.’ Derrida has devoted his attentions to the ‘blind spot in the image’ in numerous texts, among others, his study on Artaud, the essays in The Truth of Painting, the catalogue Mémoires d’aveugle, and in his monumental work on Hegel and Genet, Glas, which was published in 1974 and paints a picture of the blind spot.

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I am already (dead) signifies that I am behind. Absolutely behind, the derrière that will have never been seen from the front, the déja that nothing will have preceded, which therefore conceived and gave birth to itself, but as a cadaver or glorious body.18 In Pompes funèbres, the narrator Jean Genet searches for the place where Jean was shot by a collaborator. He can only see and refer to the place ‘designated by the here’, and asks whether it is true ‘that the philosophers doubt the existence of things that are behind them?’ What speed is required so as to see the behind in the here? The revolution of an aeroplane propeller? ‘Then you would notice that the things have disappeared, and oneself with them.’19 ‘This work of mourning is called – glas.’20 A book, an ‘anti-book’, two book blocks in a single, indescribable book. And when an attempt is made to describe it, this is what it sounds like: ‘Hegel and Genet are brought face to face in a kind of perverse interlinear gloss which exposes philosophic reason to the lures and obsessions of a homosexual thiefturned-writer.’21 A book about perversion, an obsessional text that grew out of criminality? Face to face? Eye to eye? No, surface to surface perhaps, and that very surface is removable, ‘détachable’ (cf. 113b). What is more, Glas is not written in a ‘perverse’ script (not even in the sense of its being wrong, though a reversal), and in no way is anything seen in the light of something else. Nor is Hegel’s dialectics of mores, morality, the family and reproduction exposed to the bait and the obsessions of a homosexual thief-turned-writer. Neither Hegel, who occupies the lefthand text block, nor Genet, who is quoted and commented on in the right block, after a wide central margin and in smaller type, are exposed to one another, nor are they exposed as light to shadow, wealth to dearth, reason to obsession, nor is a promise exposed as a crime; the two ‘colossi’, clearly separated from one another in justified blocks (though repeatedly ‘perforated’, ‘punctured’), neither interfere with one another, nor do they jointly contribute to an abundance. Nor is it possible to think of a mediation between opposites in Hegel’s sense. Rather a space is set (with Kierkegaard); nothing mediates between the text blocks, they are spaced. Glas is a book that reflects opposites in the similarity of varied type-setting, a picture book about striding, in which sentences

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grow into stilts and – cinematographically speaking – fall into the next image on turning the page, that is to say, on changing the image. And fall back. The exposition to Glas circumscribes the succession; it ‘begins’ and ‘ends’ with the remainder. The book lays a trail from imitation to dissemination. Nothing is lost. The disseminating work on the text ‘denotes an irreducible and generative multiplicity.’22 Glas is a book about the fall and about falling (about attack, idea, decline, collapse), a case study, a book that is the dream of any philologist who would like to open up spaces in writing, and in what is written, and assign new columns (and new divisions) to the set text. Though incomparable, in spirit it is related to Roland Barthes’ ‘galactic’ lexematic study S/Z. In Writing Degree Zero Barthes had already described the new writing of Flaubert and Mallarmé as a departure from linearity in favour of the ‘upright sign.’

Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris 1974 The word is drawn up into the vertical ‘like a block, a pillar that extends down into an entirety of meanings, reflections and remainders (remanences): it is an upright sign.’23 Glas is a work of monumental philology, a study that indents death to the width of a column, a thanatographic work that in the anguished gesture of writing never ceases to ring in death. The French word ‘glas’ means the monotonous bell ringing whose resounding tone announces agony, death, or burial. 24 Derrida allows himself to be led on by the etymological resonances of the word, the ‘panglossie’, the morphological, lexical, semantic and anagrammatical reflections in the letters G L A S. Having read about the ‘migrations’ and etymological branches of the phonemes gl, listed by Wartburg and referred to by Derrida, one feels haunted by the resonance of the gladiolus flower, the first class classicus citizen, the classis or department, the noise or classum, the ‘class struggle’ between these signs. As if by chance, Saussure had recourse to the term ‘glas’ as proof for the arbitrariness of the sign.

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In German, ‘Glasen’ still means a measure of time kept for the watch on ships; the four-hour nightwatch is divided or scanned into eight ‘Glasen’, with one ring of the bell for each. And although the etymology of the 19th century verb ‘glasen’ – to insert or fit windows into a building – is different, one tends to think of the transparency, the mediacy, and of the pictorial aspect of Glas. Derrida opens windows in his columns, makes typographic inserts that penetrate the text (French word play fenêtre/ penêtre) and allow texts to fit in to other texts. Texts, letters, are carried from place to place and fixed. (References abound in Genet to fixing with a gaze in the sense of holding fast, preserving, or becoming fossilised, but also understood as a prolongation and a division of the moment.)25 Hegel to the left and Genet to the right, the phenomenology of mind and the configurations of death, or the resonating colossus Memnon and the fixing, space-discovering gaze in Lacan’s mirror stage, two texts ‘mis en regard l’un de l’autre’, keeping an eye on one another while keeping their distance. More than two decades after Sartre’s major study Saint Genet (1952), and the first volume of Genet’s collected works, Derrida begins a work with the sentences: ‘quoi du reste aujourd’hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d’un Hegel?’, and ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes se divise en deux. Comme le reste.’26 The book Glas begins with the remainder, with the question of what remains behind, what has remained in the place of the Other. How can death’s absolutely unrepresentable aspect, its ‘absolute singularity’ be grasped if not by irrevocably announcing it to be a remainder. When Derrida adds ‘se devise en deux’ to the opening quotation, as a motto at the top of the right-hand column, it signifies not just the fundamental, speculative and infinite division of the text, not just the dissociation of eye and gaze, but also the splitting in two of Genet’s two Rembrandt studies. ‘Comme le reste’, that is to say, it is divided, just as the remainder, the rest will be divided. What is divided, divides itself anew. Glas links up with Of Grammatology and pursues the interplay of graphy and phony: ‘The reflection, the image, the double will split what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference.’27 What

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remains of a Rembrandt cut into regular little bits (régulier also means adhering to the measure, the rule) and thrown into the toilet? Moments. ‘But whoever says moment, says fateful moment: the moment is the mutual and contradictory inclusion of the before by the after (...) one lives one’s death, one dies one’s life; one feels like oneself and like somebody else (...)’28 In his Rembrandt text – how many texts of his, how many of Derrida’s? – Genet divides the moment (Augenblick) into eye (Auge) and gaze (Blick). In the right-hand column the gaze rests on Rembrandt images and imagines the eyes wrapped in the paintings, inhaled by the exhalation. Genet’s gaze imagines and occupies Rembrandt’s gaze – ‘he spends his time in front of the mirror (...) gazing at himself over a long period’ – his eye disarmed, like Baudelaire’s after his visit to the Louvre (two bloody lotto balls), seeking depth and only finding surface: ‘at the same time as it recognises the object, the eye also recognises painting as such.’ Genet’s gaze meets Rembrandt’s, which Georg Simmel once described as spaceless and physically withdrawn from seeing.29 In the left-hand column, Genet describes another pair of eyes. His gaze meets that of a traveller sitting opposite him in a train, yet without seeing him – our eyes did not cross, meet (...), were only vaguely directed. And Genet realises despondently how in his isolation and self-oblivion, he turns the other’s gaze into his own, turns it inside out, and is veiled by it.30 ‘I can only translate what I experienced in the following way: I flowed out of my body and into that of the traveller via our eyes, at the same moment as the traveller flowed into my body.’ The traumatic experience or insight that one’s own particular gaze ‘pours’ into the other and that therefore the particularity of the self lies in the Other as an already divided particularity, is an extreme experience to which Genet’s work bears witness: ‘There is and will always be only one single human being in the world (...) Each one is the Other and the Others.’31 This is not only a dominant feature of Genet’s work (on which he looked back in 1967), this shift, this translation of identity (with which Derrida too is concerned in his left-hand Hegel column, i.e., the presentation of the identical) turns the abandoned / given particularity into an unnameable, infinite divisibility of that ‘unique human being.’ This gaze ‘seems to shatter him (that being) both in appearance and form, and alienates each of the fragments from us.’32 Rembrandt, as a name and a signature, is torn to bits and in Genet’s iconoclastic ‘(onomatoclastic)’ texts resounds

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as a remembrance, a memory, a dismembering, and a piling up of the divided.33 Genet does not unite but divides images. This may well be a feature of his work which, in the radicality of its expression, sets it off from modernism, for which the fragment, the ruin, still preserves the absence, the self suppurating abscess, in the trace. Sartre spoke of how sparing Genet (like Mallarmé) was with verbal imagery, so as to avoid writing anything that might depict ‘exteriority as an expansive force’ and instead let the verbal erection protrude inwards.34 Glas constantly allows the end to resound like something that becomes as it ends. An echo would never fully eradicate the traces but, like the myth of the nymph Echo in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, divide the name into syllables and by repeating them, take what is said into the depths of space: the name acts as the lingering echo, is itself the sign of distance. If in Derrida’s right-hand column the colossal infertile phallus only acts as a figure – ‘a sign, a steadfast figure whose final content is death!’35 – that points to sterility and decline, then the phallus pillar in the lefthand column acts as an exemplary civilised reproductive force – ‘erect like massive towers’ – although itself only a resonating remainder. 36 The Memnon statue was destroyed by an earthquake. The respective saga says that the Memnon statue emitted sounds in the light of the rising sun, the mutilated body responding to the greeting of Mother Eos in the rosy dawn. The voice of the mother makes death discernible in the origin. Her call echoes in the already deferred greeting which reaches Memnon as a farewell. From the Indian ‘solid phallic pillars’, ‘which only later were divided into shell and kernel and became pagodas’, to the obelisks, the ‘sun rays in stone, so to speak, (Creuzer)’ and fixed light-images, to the Egyptian temples: Hegel describes enclosures (Einräumungen) which we find again in Glas: As for the Egyptian temple sites, the main feature of this great architecture is that the constructions are open, with no roofing, gates, passageways between walls, preferably between columned halls and whole forests of columns, works of enormous size and inner diversity, which in their colossal dimensions and volume astonish in themselves, without serving

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as a dwelling or surround for a god or the worshipping community, much as the individual shapes and forms in themselves fully occupy our interest, erected as they are as symbols for general meanings, or replacing books, to the extent that they make known the meanings not through their own design but through script and illustrations engraved into the surfaces. One can look upon them as pages in a book which, thanks to this spatial enclosure, vaguely arouse, like peals of bells, mind and soul to wonder, contemplation, and thought.37 The bell toll in Glas resounds with a vague articulation. As a spoken echo, the voice signifies the deferment of immediacy (and incommunicability) that can never be redressed. The work of mourning in Glas continues to resound in a delayed tonality, a promise which confronts Genet’s ‘Ici, ici, ici (...) Ici on l’a tué’ with the void of a mediation between here and there, in front and behind, fort and da. Derrida’s writing underscores a deferred / horrifying sound that overflows the typeface. In his Enzyklopädie, Hegel determines the three physical aspects of material; softness, hardness, and elasticity: If an impression is then made on the material, i.e., if the body receives an external negation which touches its inner determination, then a reaction is set off inside the body according to its specific form, and with it the sublation of the mediated impression.38 The body is touched in its innermost form, set off, and made to oscillate and vibrate, bringing about the formally changed reproduction of the outward impression. According to Hegel, this ‘innermost form becomes free in negating the per se existence of this its being apart (Außereinandersein).’ The determinacy of the form acts through the outward impression in space. ‘This is the transition from material spatiality to material temporality.’ This translation of space into time unmasks the longing for simultaneity and puts it in its place.39 The sound is only effective later, in the lingering echo, where its ‘mechanical soulfulness appears.’ Or as Derrida puts it: ‘In Hegelian logic, the Klingen of the Klang (German in the original) plays the role of the mute or mad sound, a kind of mechanical automaton that triggers itself and acts without wanting to mean anything. The fall of language, in this logos.

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What we are concerned with is this fall, this continued lingering sound, the ringing in of the already faded, silent sound, the gift of outstanding death. German grammar calls it a futurum exactum - it will have already sounded. ‘The illustrated columns are now corpses (...)’40 In his own many-voiced, organographic work, Derrida lets Genet’s work of masking, doubling, splitting and dividing appear in an interplay that contrapuntally confronts the uniqueness, the absolute singularity of death with the mechanical automaton (Genet’s apparat), reproduction. Both figures are entangled in their split singularity, far removed from that ‘unassailable singularity’ which Genet grants the image and the observer in their irreconcilability.41 Reproduction means departing, leaving the room, departing from one’s rightful place, which is perhaps appropriately in the ‘now’ (corresponding to the measure), reproduction means ubiquitous, as it were, ethereal, eidetic flight. The scar that remains behind is loneliness, the remainder is anamorphotic growth and mutation. What is the relationship between the gift (which ought not correspond to any measure) and the photographic take? Genet refers to photography at numerous points in his work, never understanding it as an art but as a medium of reproduction, and always as the image of completion, of the end. In Genet, photography crops up as the true image of the false spectacle, which, as a play, cannot conceal a truth. In his play Le Balcon three photographers take a photograph of the wrong judge, the wrong archbishop and the wrong general. According to the text ‘the good photographer’ would be the one who put forward the ‘de-fin-it-ive picture’, the perfect, outstanding image (‘Le bon photographe c’est celui qui propose l’image dé-fi-ni-ti-ve. Parfait.’)42 In Genet’s play Elle, before the photographer gets the pope to pose, the latter says: ‘so, I am a nothing. Which is a strange state of expectation, awaiting conception. I am a nothing as yet.’43 I am a nothing as yet. Genet’s play Elle, written at the same time as Le Balcon, was published posthumously in 1989 by Marc Barbézat. The feminine ‘Elle’ stands for Your Holiness, the mother, and for the image (French image). In this one-act play a photographer is commissioned to photograph the pope. The photographer’s wish is to show what is concealed, to unmask the whole ceremonial swindle. The medium of photography is to uncover

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and display the deceptive presentation of spiritual presence: the pope is to bear witness to his purely graphic character in the photographic reproduction; the photograph is to effect and bear witness to the disappearance of the papal spectrum, in the sense of the eidetic image. However, in conversation with the papal valet, and later when bowing to the (almost naked) cardinal, the photographer comes under the spell of the ceremonial. I suddenly feel relieved at having completed a gesture that reintroduces me to the ceremonial, that is to say, the only legitimate custom. For I completed it ceremoniously. For a moment I was let loose from time. There was something like a small death.44 The pope’s arrival is announced by the scarcely audible ring of a bell, the bleating of his personal lamb and, finally, a fanfare by the papal guard. He rolls in silently on skates and adopts a pose. However, once a suitable pose is finally found, the pope waits in vain for his conception in the image.45 Genet’s one-act play deals with forms of reproduction and with the displacements of what can only be regarded as original in the reproduction. Of importance is not similarity or even the positing of identity in the course of a photographic reproduction, but the withdrawal of an original positing (posing). The reproduction devours what is reproduced and this act marks the depiction of death in life. The reproduction does not continue anything. It is at the origin of what it reproduces and at the same time destroys. In Genet’s Le Balcon Carmen says: ‘The truth: that you are dead, or rather, that you never stop dying and that your image and your name reverberate from eternity.'46 What is reflected by the mirrors in the brothel is the (long-since decided) undecidability in the movement from the image of life to the image of death. While in Genet’s work children are murdered and survival through sexual reproduction is excluded, metonymically, photographic reproduction takes the place of homosexual infertility, of ‘fateful’ singularity. The First Hymn (The Pope’s Sobbing) in the one-act play is a recitation of the pope’s metamorphoses from shepherd to pope and from pope to image, a litany of withdrawal:

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I have always oriented myself towards an image with which I tried to identify (...) Alas, gradually I lost my inner density, and I saw how an image danced outside my self. Friends, my whole life long I have merely chased after this new image, which for a long time taunted my longing by offering and withdrawing itself. In order, if you so please, to slip into it, to occupy it (...) This is me as Pope! I had arrived at the final image. Where to now? There is no other image? What’s that you say, my friends? I’m listening. All that is left to do is destroy the image, to tumble down the steps I climbed with such great effort despite by hip trouble, and to return to the hoar-frost and the wolves.47 Do you follow me, all you who are listening to me, do you follow me? To destroy the image by refusing to immortalise it, – first in myself, and then by reproducing it outside myself. Not easy. Not in the bag yet. It was decided to present the image to the world. Who decided? The conclave? The longing of the IMAGE itself. Millions of them. Could they prevent me from destroying it? I resorted to tricks. On one plate I replaced my foot by someone else’s, then my leg. Later the hand was someone else’s. That was worse, because the gesture of blessing was carried out by someone other than me. It was the hand of a prelate, of course, from Belgium, but that was not the point. Later I only gave my face, and in the end, tired, and believing it would be enough, one of my ears, then the hairs in one ear, just to authenticate the image. And so bit by bit I stopped having myself depicted. I disappeared completely. I was absent from all the portraits, while at the same time images of the pope were being reproduced without end, in the castles, in the huts, in the convents, in the churches, on the farms, in the hospices, in the prisons, in the bush, in the barracks (...). But what became of him then, of me, me here, whom you see this morning crying his miserable tears? Tell me, what became of him? He had no more images. And the mirrors in the Vatican, you may ask, where are the mirrors?48 The image of death is present in the papal compound. Death stands in front and behind it, in the proliferation of the images and in their withdrawal. To withdraw from one’s image means to allow someone else to take your place. Genet’s oeuvre is haunted by revenants. The ballet Adam Miroir choreographs the mirror play of duplication, division and splitting in two; death, personified in Domino, kills the sailor and leaves behind the image in the undivided solitude, until that image again enters

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into another game of duplication with death and is finally redeemed by the returning sailor. In The Thief’s Journal Genet’s friend Lucian Sénémaud, ‘whom, by the way, I have designated as my ambassador on earth’ forms a ‘link with the mortals.’49 In Pompes funèbres, Jean (Décarnin) and Jean (Genet) each seem to be the other’s revenant. Genet’s friend Jean Décarnin, a communist resistance fighter, was shot in August 1944 by an unknown collaborator. Stored at several narrative levels, the characters are telescoped like signifier and signified: ‘I am his grave. The earth is nothing. Death’ and ‘From Jean’s death another death split off, became visible (...) To me, death seemed doubly senseless (...)50 Where are the mirrors? Or, where is the remainder, what remains of all the images that are thrown back, that perish in the va-et-vient? Perhaps the blinded mirror, incapable of reflecting an image, provides an approximation of Derrida’s initial question. Here too, lies the great affinity between Genet and Mallarmé, referred to by Sartre when he spoke of Genet’s intention of writing ‘a treatise on the beautiful.’ According to Sartre, in one single work Genet would succeed in creating a blend of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, T. E. Lawarence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Valéry’s dialogue Eupalinos ou l’architecte. ‘Should the work ever be written, it will be the highpoint of his art: not a revolution but a going-to-the-limit.’51 From 1866 onwards, Mallarmé worked on the outer and inner form of his Le Livre. In 1954 Genet published a text called Fragments. It represents a draft of his final, major work, which he wanted to call La Mort and which alluded to Mallarmé’s project to such an extent that Genet too wanted to divide La Mort into two parts, two blocks.52 Fragments illustrates Genet’s intention of typographically blowing the work apart by using different sized typefaces, inserted commentaries and footnotes.53 In these Fragments, Genet writes about homosexuality, which is experienced as a guilt that brands every project, every intentional writing, with the mark of infertility, as a result of which the word produces its statement, its ‘enonciation foreclose’, as a cadaver, a ‘glorious cadaver.’ Genet speaks of the sterile principle ‘fertilising’ every act, every gesture ‘with emptiness.’ Reproduction aims at inner division, every act is conceived and carried out in order to mirror itself in itself ‘to the point of its own annihilation.’

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In a letter to Sartre, probably written in 1952, Genet tried to describe his homosexual ‘creative infertility’ 54. Traumatised in his childhood, he understands that shock as a refusal of life. The rational incomprehensibility of death is turned, symbolically, into a refusal ‘to continue the world.’ Meaning of paederastic love: possessing an object (the loved one), whose fate is no different to that of the lover. The loved one becomes an object that is determined to ‘represent’ death (the lover) in life. Therefore I want him to be beautiful. He has the visible attributes (I have) when I will be dead. I commission him to live in my stead, visibly. Not only does the loved one love me, he ‘reproduces’ me. Yet in this way I make him infertile, I cut him off from his fate.55 What remains in the reproduction is that cut, chiasmus, dismembering, doubling, disjunction and remembrance, the ‘POTENCY (of the gallows) of the text’, whose show-place and scene-of-the-crime will continue to be disputed by Genet Derrida in Glas.56

Notes 1

Georges Bataille, Ma mère, Paris 1966, p. 29.

2

Cf. Jacques Derrida on the title of his book Feu la cendre: ‘There is ash, which, all in all, was like the book’s fragile and crumbling title. Spread discreetly in this way, the dissemination brings into the five word idiom that which is determined to be scattered without return by fire, the pyrification of that which does not remain and returns to nobody.’

3

George Bataille, Das obszöne Werk, p. 94.

4

Op. cit., p. 113. Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard who, with an eye to the sublime, writes of photography: ‘Photography does not appeal to what is beautiful about feeling, but to what is beautifull about reason and conceptuality. It possesses the infallibility of something that is totally planned; its beauty is that of the second gaze.’ Lyotard, ‘Vorstellung, Darstellung, Undarstellbarkeit’ in Immaterialität und Postmoderne, Berlin 1985, p. 94.

5

Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris 1974, p. 94b. How do you quote what goes beyond pagination? I follow Geoffrey Hartman who in his study of Glas, Saving the Text. Literature/Derrida/Philosophy, Baltimore-London 1981, refers to the

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columns with page number plus a (left), b (right) and i (inter). On the ‘don’ cf. Michael Wetzel and Jean-Michel Rabaté (eds.), Ethik der Gabe. Denken nach Jacques Derrida, Berlin 1993. 6

Cf. Avita Ronell, ‘Call me ma bell’ in Armaturen der Sinne, Literarische und technische Medien 1870 bis 1920, Jochen Hörisch, Michael Wetzel (eds.), Munich 1990, pp. 75-83.

7

Th. W. Adorno, ‘Satzzeichen’ in Noten zur Literatur I, Frankfurt/Main 1958, p. 167.

8

Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1 Counterfeit Money, transl. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago and London 1992, p. 35.

9

Heidegger traverses building and domicile through language: ‘It is language that tells us about the essence of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own essence. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages around the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Basic Writings, London 1993, pp. 343-363

10

Samuel Weber, ‘Der posthume Zwischenfall’ in Zeit-Zeichen. Aufschübe und Interferenzen zwischen Endzeit und Echtzeit, Georg Christoph Tholen und Michael O. Scholl (eds.), Weinheim 1990, p. 189.

11

Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, ‘On Paul de Man’ in Diacritics 19/1989, p. 47.

12

Jacques Derrida ‘The différence’ in Margins of Philosophy, transl. Alan Bass, Brighton Sussex, 1982, p. 6.

13

Hervé Guibert, La Mort propagande, Paris 1991, p. 184.

14

Carlo Emilio Gadda, Die Erkenntnis des Schmerzes, Frankfurt/Main 1975, p. 154.

15

Jean-Francois Lyotard, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture. Monory, Paris 1984, p. 33.

16

Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man. transl. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf, New York 1989, p. 60.

17

Roland Barthes, ‘Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe’ in L’Aventure sémiologique, Paris 1985, p. 354, quoted by Jacques Derrida in La Mord de Roland Barthes. On the ‘absurdity’ in the reversal cf. Jacques Derrida La voix et le phénomène, Paris 1967, p. 61. Cf also Bernard Stiegler ‘Verkehrte Aufzeichnungen und photographische Wiedergabe’ in Ethik der Gabe, Wetzel und Rabaté (eds.), pp. 193-210.

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18

Jacques Derrida, Glas, transl. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln 1986, p. 97b.

19

Jean Genet, ‘Pompes funèbres’, Œuvres complètes, vol. III, Gallimard, Paris 1953, p. 35, 36 and 37.

20

Derrida, Glas, p. 100b.

21

Christopher Noris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, London, New York 1982, p. 145.

22

Jacques Derrida, Positions, Editions de Minuit, Paris 1972, p. 93.

23

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Frankfurt/Main, 1982, p. 57.

24

Trésor de la Langue Francaise. Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XX siècle (1789-1960), vol. 9, Paris 1981, p. 271.

25

For example, in Pompes funèbres, p. 94: ‘It’s going to be a long day. Several times perhaps, the sun set and rose again, but the people, the animals, the plants and the things kept watch, totally alert, in a kind of paralysis, particularly evident in their gaze. Each thing preserved within it an unmoved time from which sleep was banned. The day did not prolongue itself by going beyond the twentyfour hours: it stretches the moments, and each thing observes them with such attention that you feel how time almost stands still.’ Adami’s drawings after Glas show tools for affixing things, staples, clips, etc. Cf. also Derrida’s ‘supplementary’ explanations on Glas ‘Entre crochets’ and ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’ in Points de suspension. Entretiens, choisis et présentés par Elisabeth Weber, Paris 1992.

26

Derrida quotes the title of Genet’s two Rembrandt studies. The texts had been published in Italian in the International Review, and in 1967 in Tel Quel at Paule Thévenin’s suggestion. Genet wanted to have both texts printed alongside one another and not in linear sequence. In order to justify the unequal lengths of the texts, the right column of the shorts text was set correspondingly narrow and in italics. Cf. Edmund White, Jean Genet. Biographie, Munich 1993, pp. 684f.

27

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, Maryland, 1976, p. 36. Geoffrey Hartman writes in his Saving the Text: ‘Glas approaches a theory of writing purged of all phony perspectives.’ (p. 44).

28

Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet - Kömödiant und Märtyrer, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1982, p. 11.

29

Cf. Georg Simmel, Rembrandt. Ein kunstphilosophischer Versuch, Leipzig 1916, pp. 125ff.

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30

Jean Genet ‘Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt dechire en petits carres bien reguliers, et foutu aux chiottes’, Tel Quel, no. 29, Spring 1967, p. 4a, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, Paris 1968, pp. 22f.

31

Op. cit, p. 26a.

32

In the hall of mirrors in the bordel in Le Balcon the head of police says: ‘Non, le cent millième reflet d’un miroir qui de répète, je serai l’Unique, en qui cent mille veulent se confondre.’ Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, Paris 1968, p. 119.

33

Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text, p. 16.

34

Sartre, Saint Genet, pp. 721ff.

35

Jean Genet, ‘Fragments ...’ in Fragments ... et autres écrits, with a preface by Edmund White, Paris 1990, p. 71.

36

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik II, Werke, Frankfurt/ Main 1970, p. 280; Derrida, Glas, p. 9a.

37

Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, p. 283 and 284.

38

Georg

Friedrich

Wilhelm

Hegel,

Enzyklopädie

der

philosophischen

Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830, part two, Werke, vol. 9, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, p. 170. 39

Op. cit.; p. 171; cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference, London 1995.

40

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke, vol. 3, Frankfurt/Main 1970, p. 547.

41

Jean Genet, l’Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti (1958-1963), Saint-Just-La-Pendue 1992, no page numbers.

42

Jean Genet, Œuvres Complètes, vol. IV, Paris 1968, p. 112.

43

Jean Genet, Elle, Saint-Just-La-Pendue, 1989, p. 46 .

44

Op. Cit., p. 40f.

45

The Photographer: For a moment Your face was veiled in such solitude, such a gentle light brightened it ...



The Pope: Fool!



The Photographer: My Lord!



The Pope: Fool! Such solitude! Such a gentle light! And you don’t even press the button, so 15 million savages miss absolution by a hair’s breath! Get on with it, boy.



The Photographer: Pardon, Holy Father. The flash! I myself was under the coup de grace. I had the revelation of the Only One. Could you adopt that pose and that inwardness again? (op. cit., p. 57)

46

Genet, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, Paris 1968, p. 131.

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47

Eos, the goddess of dawn and mother of Memnon, cried on the death of her son and her tears fell to the earth as hoar-frost.

48

Op. cit, pp. 60-62.

49

Genet, Journal d’un voleur quoted in White, Jean Genet. Biographie, p. 482.

50

Genet, Pompes funèbres, p. 14 and 23.

51

Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Reinbek, 1982, p. 896.

52

According to Edmund White, Marc Barbezat owns ‘about four hundred’ manuscript pages of this work. Cf. White, Jean Genet. Biographie. Cf. also White’s introduction to the collected texts by Genet he edited, Fragments ... et autres écrits, Paris 1990, pp. 11-29. Apart from the idea of dividing the book into equal parts, Mallarmé also intended dividing the pages into equal amounts of black and white, printed and blank parts. The sum of the black and white parts would double the book: ‘est-ce en échange de ce qu’il y a moitié de blanc ... que je montre double sujet fourni par cet écrit.’ (quoted by Jacques Scherer, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé. Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, Paris 1977, p. 52.).

53

In 1956 Genet spoke about his project: ‘I am going to write a large book about death. Someone like me sees death everywhere, lives constantly with it. It will be a surprising book, printed on large pages, in the middle of which will be small pages containing a commentary on the text, to be read simultaneously with the text. At the end there will be a lyrical explosion which will also be called Death.’

54

This letter is in the archives of the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de L’Edition Contemporaine) and was published for the first time by White. Cf. White, Jean Genet. Biographie, p. 474.

55

Op. cit., p. 476.

56

The references to Adami’s drawings nach Glas and to the ‘ghost-story’ about the pair of shoes, Van Gogh’s ‘Shoe Blocks’ suggest that this text is to be continued. Derrida’s book The Truth in Painting takes Glas into that painting by Van Gogh which depicts the division.

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—

The Crypt of the Gaze Hubertus v. Amelunxen —

Between 1929 and 1932 Walter Benjamin gave a series of radio lectures for children in which he addressed not only his chosen theme but also the fact that the time horizon of the lectures was determined by the medium of radio itself. Benjamin explained that just as a chemist puts gram after gram on the scales when making up a prescription, so in the case of his lecture minutes would be weighed so that they would be precisely distributed to achieve the right narrative in the given time of the broadcast. His last lectures, in 1931 and 1932, were devoted to past catastrophes: the Lisbon earthquake, the Firth of Tay railway bridge disaster, and the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii. On 18 September 1931, on Berlin Radio, Walter Benjamin could be heard saying this about the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD: ‘To the same extent as it was, for the people then, the annihilation of a blossoming city, for people today it was its preservation.’1 To see an event of preservation in an event of destruction sounds like an uncanny inversion. Benjamin’s attention was drawn to the impressions and imprints left behind by people in the rain of ash, as their decay left hollows which would form the basis for a future memorial by allowing plaster casts to reconstruct, two millennia later, the agonal departure of a whole city. That burying alive of life brought to light ‘completely sharp and true-to-life images of people who lived more than 2000 years ago.’ Since the first excavations in the 18th century (Goethe described his visit to Pompeii on 11 March 1787 as a ‘strange, partly unpleasant impression of this mummified city’) and then in the course of the 19th century, after the invention of photography,

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this ‘uncanny’ proximity to life of what had been removed provided material for many Pompeian idylls, the best known of which are surely Théophile Gautier’s Arria Marcella, souvenir de Pompei (1852) and the novel by Wilhelm Jensen Gradiva. Ein pompejianisches Phantasiestück (1903), which gained fame mainly because of Freud’s interpretation of it. Artists and photographers have also visited Pompeii; the latter have filled albums with images of the excavations, and have provided a mise en abyme with each and every photograph of destruction and preservation, including that form of preservation generated by their own medium. In Roberto Rossellini’s film Viaggio in Italia (1953) the camera shows how the alienated married couple, Katherine and Alexander Joyce, witness the excavation of two Pompeian bodies lying close together. Victor Burgin alludes to this scene, which he combines with fragments of dialogue from the opening sequence of Rossellini’s film, in his voiceover script for his video work Voyage to Italy. Victor Burgin’s first encounter with Pompeii was literary. His reading of Freud’s essay on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva resulted in 1982 in a work of the same name: seven photographs each with a subscriptio, together forming Burgin’s laconic retelling of the story told in the novel. In Jensen’s story, a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, falls in love with a Roman relief, a ‘tomb memorial’ of a young woman with an unusual gait. Back in Germany, Hanold acquires a plaster cast of the relief and hangs it on the wall between his book shelves, ‘in just the right light.’ He calls the woman ‘Gradiva’, the ‘moving’ or ‘striding one.’ ‘In her’, Jensen writes, ‘something humanly commonplace, though not in any low sense, something “contemporary”, as it were, was physically reproduced. It is as if the artist had captured her swiftly in a clay model after life as she passed on the street, and not in a pencil sketch on a sheet of paper as in our day.’2 In Voyage to Italy, through movement almost at a standstill, through the standstill in the movement, through transitions between fragmented Corinthian columns (like a detached film image) and through the lengthenings of synchronisms to the point of the peripetia of non-experienceable temporality, through the overlapping of physical and psychical space in the uncovering and exposing of a crossing of gazes, cut and panoramically seamed, through all this, Burgin creates a photographic, panoramic and acoustic space that layers impressions

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and invites us, as in a psychoanalytical transference, to isolate our phantasmatic projections, to capture them in their disjointed fragmentary forms so as to see ‘the retrospective chimera’ rise again. 3 In his work Gradiva Burgin had directed the gazes of the deluded archaeologist and the wistful ‘Gradiva’, or Ms Bertgang, past one another in opposite directions, ‘as if the narrative, as it progresses beyond the mid-point, “meets itself coming back” in the opposite direction.’4 Burgin puts time in the gaze, in the female and the male gaze, taking the gaze out of the coordinates of Euclidian space and into psychical space. We know from Freud that time does not count in psychical space; Freud speaks of the ‘timelessness of the unconscious’ and of the fact that if the linear model of time gives way to any model at all, then it gives way to a cyclical model. In Freud’s view, the compulsion to repeat replaces the impulse to remember, and remembering represents ‘the reproduction of psychological realms.’5 Burgin’s treatment of the photographic and the filmic image is in this ‘shifted’ temporality of reproduction. His photography is the crypt of cast gazes. It assimilates traces of space and releases the gaze into the time of a lasting future, as an uncovering of what has been buried. Moreover, it does this on the threshold that it itself constitutes, since in the panorama what is now perishes hopelessly in what is to come and yet repeatedly approximates to the origin. The filmic panoramas in Burgin’s work Nietzsche’s Paris (1999-2000, on the esplanade of Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France), in Elective Affinities (2000-2001, in the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion), The Little House (2005, in Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House), and now in Voyage to Italy (2006, at Pompeii) are, so to speak, ‘sewn’ together from images, joints in the filmic sequence, made with a digital still camera, the resulting curvilinear perspectives corrected and animated in software. While in Elective Affinities the constant converging reference point of the gaze is the statue (by Georg Kolbe) of a woman with her arms raised to shield her face from the sun, in Voyage to Italy Burgin places a woman in absentia at the origin of both the photographic and the photographed gaze. In an album entitled Principales Vues de Pompeii by the Neapolitan photographer Carlo Frattaci dated 1864, found in the archives of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal,

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there is a picture of a woman whose clothes give her the appearance of a modernist cone, in contrast to the Corinthian columns beside her: the skirt of her dress is greatly inflated by the crinoline; over it she is clasping a pelerine tightly to her breast so that her arms and legs are concealed; her head seems small, as if representing only the tip of the cone, half of it concealed by her wide-brimmed sunhat. Resembling a geometric figure, her appearance serves merely to illustrate the spatial proportions of the forum of the basilica, skirted on both sides by twelve fragmentary Corinthian columns, and yet she embodies – as does the photograph – the fundamental question raised by the archaeologist Norbert Hanold: the question ‘of the nature of the physical appearance of a being who is both dead and alive, although the latter only in the witching hour of midday.’ The woman stood here ‘as the only living being alone in the hot midday stillness amidst the remains of the past… to see, not with physical eyes, and to hear, not with corporeal ears.’6 One panorama glides through the 180 degrees of the woman’s field of view, a second through that of the field of vision of the photographer, it is these fields of vision that are photographed by Burgin in Pompeii almost one and a half centuries later. ‘Wherever the eye roams, it finds nothing but walls and sky’, says Walter Benjamin, with reference to Pompeii as ‘the largest labyrinth, the largest maze in the world.’ Burgin literally turns the scene photographed by Carlo Fratacci, the ruins of the forum, into a scenario for what is for us an invisible game between desires and encounters, contacts and hallucinations. In his article, The Ruin, of 1907, the year in which Freud wrote his Gradiva essay, Georg Simmel wrote that architecture was the ‘most sublime victory of spirit over nature’, whereas the ruin, by contrast, ‘a sad nihilism’, embodied the failure of the spirit against nature. The ruin however is the site of the origin. It is not the past character of the ruin that gives it meaning, but rather the origin, recognisable in the ruin and gathered in a becoming, that distinguishes the real meaning of the ruin. Certainly ‘it is a site of life from which life has departed’, but above all the ruin creates ‘the current form of a past life, not on the basis of its contents or remains, but on the basis of its past as such.’ Only in the manifest demise of a building can one interpret the future for which it was determined and into which it has now obviously fallen. According

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to Simmel, the ruin must be seen as ‘the realisation of a direction laid down in the deepest layer of the existence of what is destroyed.’7 The first of Burgin’s two series (Basilica I), comprising two rows of twelve frontal photographs, show the columns both before and behind the absent woman, the ‘midday ghost’ (Jensen), in the incident dark and bright light, a filmic ‘shot/reverse shot’, so as to inscribe a secret into what is looked at, something seen into what is invisible. It is in the tension of this opposition within the insignia of a present that the end of a becoming was accomplished and tarries until now as a becoming end. In Burgin’s finite-infinite mirrorings, the photographic itself also befalls us. In its continuous movement towards lasting decline, photography, as the only promise that has ever given birth to a nihilism, draws us into the constellation of the past and the coming as past. And in the apparent stillness of the image even what is most concealed is whirled up into an event – photography as disaster, and ‘the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.’8 If the panoramas give the impression of an extended synchronism – it was Genet who, when asked what speed was required to see what was behind in the here, recommended the rotation of an airplane propeller: ‘Then you would realize that things have disappeared, and we ourselves with them’ – then the individual photographs mark distinct sections of time and fracture the stone horizon. It is as if Burgin had also assumed the attitude of Norbert Hanold so as to repeatedly focus on ‘what he had already seen or imagined’ and to avoid the disappointment that she, Gradiva, was ‘only a silent image in front of him, a silhouette that was denied language.’ The second of Burgin’s series (Basilica II), with two rows of nine photographs, revisits the perspectival hovering between seeing and being seen in the field of vision of the photographer and the photographed person. Every next image is a ‘seam piece’ in the film, always at the origin of the coming image and always in anticipation of what has been. Voyage to Italy is really ‘dialectics at a standstill’, not continuous time, not ‘sequence but image, spasmodic.’ In an analogy to the work of repression and the return of the repressed, Burgin puts the spasmodic coincidence of past and present in the place of continuous time, each gaze is seconded by another. Freud wrote that there was no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at

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once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell victim and from which it could emerge once more through the working of the space.9 Gradiva in Voyage to Italy is a revenant, a Rediviva: she strides between the images and also jumps from still to moving image, from moving to still image, in the direction of the origin. Needless to say, as a search for traces Voyage to Italy is also an allegory of the archive and takes into account the dual meaning of the word ‘impression’ in the sense of imprint and impression. Jacques Derrida dedicated his lecture ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ to this ambiguity between concealing and conserving, and the last part of that essay deals with the delusion of the archaeologist Norbert Hanold. ‘Hanold suffers from archive fever.’10 In the intertextuality of the works, Burgin’s Voyage to Italy considers the iterative becoming of the imprint as impression, the non-reproducible uniqueness of that moment when the imprint, the image with the print, is not yet separate from the impression, when no archival decision has been made. The indexical nature of photography to itself, as an undecided witness to an immediate inscription, the striding of Gradiva whose traces in the ash the archaeologist Norbert Hanold searched for in Pompeii, and the hallucination of a present that at no point in time made an impression, that is ‘false at the level of perception, true at the level of time’, to cite Roland Barthes, these constitute the individual moments in Burgin’s work. They are linked by the ‘structuring absence’ of a woman photographed around 1860 by Carlo Fratacci, found in an archive of more than 50,000 photographs at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. The story told in voiceover, off screen, in Burgin’s video is based on two scenes from Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, it links movement (a car drive to Naples) and separation (two people part, two people are uncovered in Pompeii and the ash is separated from the plaster-like bodies). We know nothing about the lady who posed for Fratacci at the scene around 1860, but of the fictions concerning Norbert Hanold and Zoe-Gradiva Bertgang and Kathy and Alex Joyce, we know that they have a happy ending. I will end with the question which Jacques Derrida formulated at the close of his essay ‘Mal d’archive’ ‘at the edge of Vesuvius’ between the 22

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and 28 May 1994: ‘Who better than Gradiva, … the Gradiva of Jensen and of Freud, could illustrate this outbidding in the mal d’archive?’

Notes 1

Walter Benjamin, ‘Rundfunkgeschichten für Kinder’, in idem, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Vol. II.1, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 220.

2

Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva. Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück, in Sigmund Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens ‘Gradiva, ed. and with an introduction by Bern Urban, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 128. Cf. also my essay ‘Tomorrow For Ever – Photographie als Ruine’, in C. Aigner, H. v. Amelunxen, W. Smerling (ed.), Tomorrow For Ever. Architektur/ Zeit/Photographie, exh. cat., DuMont, Cologne 1999, pp. 15-25.

3

Théophile Gautier, ‘Arria Marcella’, in idem, La Morte amoureuse, Avatar et autres récits fantastiques, Gallimard, Paris 1981, p. 195; cf. Anthony Vidler, ‘Buried Alive’, in idem, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in der Modern Unhomely, MIT Press, Cambridge, London 1992, pp. 45-57. Also Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books, London 2006, in particular pp. 54-67 and 104-123.

4

Victor Burgin, Between, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1986, p. 124.

5

Sigmund Freud, ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1975, p. 213. Cf. also Victor Burgin, ‘Paranoiac Space’, in idem, In/Different Spaces. Place and Memory in Visual Culture, University of Californai Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, pp. 117-139.

6

Jensen, op. cit., p. 161.

7

Georg Simmel, ‘Die Ruine’, in idem, Philosophische Kultur, Wagenbach, Berlin 1986, p. 124 and p. 118.

8

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, transl. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 1.

9

Sigmund Freud, op.cit, p. 98.

10

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, A Freudian Impression, transl. Eric Prenowitz, The University of Chigago Press, 1995, p. 97.

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—

Photography After Photography The Terror of the Body in Digital Space Hubertus v. Amelunxen —

The subject under discussion here is neither the end of photography nor a post-photography. In the face of epoch-making technological changes, photography’s artistic translation and its social utilisation require that both the medium and the concept be re-considered. The whole thinking behind and the practice of photography ask for other possibilities of translation. A century ago the Secessionists began to seek a new use for the medium of photography, independently of the fine arts. Far from having any canon of its own, photography had already gained access to all social realms where the image held sway. Photographic pictorialism united the most varied fields of application of the medium, often in a genre-like manner, underlining in particular the subjective gesture – the signature – in the creation of images. But it could only appropriate this subjective gesture through a kind of mimicking of the other arts. Out of this desire for similarity with what already existed, namely the canon of the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, up to and including the naturalistically glorified studies of genre painting, what was gained was an insight into the capacity of this new medium for abstraction.

I When Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand undertook a survey into the importance of photography as an aesthetic medium three quarters of a century ago, Marcel Duchamp was not short of a reply: 701

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New York, May 22, 1922 Dear Stieglitz, Just a few words, which I do not really even want to write. You know well what I think of photography. I would like it to make people despise painting, that is, until something else makes photography unbearable. That’s how far we have come.1 And how far have we come in photography 75 years after Duchamp’s almost apodictical attempt to instrumentalise the medium of photography for the artistic armoury of the avant-garde(s)? Have we come that far? Has the growing attention paid by the art market to photography over the past 20 years, the apparently successful inclusion of photography in the canon of museum culture, finally brought its ‘unbearableness’ to light? Has photographic activity (Douglas Crimp) subjected itself to the bonds of a ruling style from which it can no longer extricate itself? Must it bow down before the splendour of curatorial arbitrariness? Has photography left its privileged place – its true non-place in the configuration of the arts – and allowed its eye to be blurred by what has long since been visible, by what has long since happened to the sound, the colours, the movement of other media? Has the signal been given for it to beat an imitative retreat? Is the yearning of photography now to perish in the dusty archives and air-conditioned rooms of museums? ‘After philosophy comes philosophy. But it is altered by the after.’ Jean-François Lyotard ‘After the coveting of an absolute and pure language that speaks of the world comes the deceptive discovery of the plurality of tongues entangled in the world.’ Jean-François Lyotard

II Is photography no longer the great occurrence to which painting and sculpture, literature and music are indebted for their exhilarating departure into the modern era? Must photography now sacrifice its allegorical – Hegel would say ‘frosty’ – contour to the desire for a new

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symbolic unity in the realm of data? Will it be in a position to assert itself at all as different from the other media? And – in the event of Duchamp’s prognosis being correct – what is that ‘Other’ that could or ought to take the place of photography today as a ‘counter-art’, as an alternative draft? What status has authenticity or the presence of the Other in the current artistic practice of photography?

III The exhibition Photography after Photography is devoted to the social and artistic position of photography in our time. From the historical point of view, the exhibition understands the first photograph, the first technically generated image, as being in conflict with the ‘new media.’ The scene of that conflict takes place in the confrontation between the analogical and the digital, that is, in the analogo-numerical image.2 The digitisation of the photographic image offered great new possibilities for montage – for ‘extensions of the momentary’, as Eisenstein called his montages – for manipulations such as have been known in the relatively short history of photography since Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, Henry Peach Robinson’s ‘naturalistic’ negative montages, Francis Galton’s composite images, or Alphonse Bertillon’s photographic identikit images. The history of photography is the history of forged testimonies. Digital image production invites us to view the history of photography in the light of the here and now. Images are created anew in the surreal simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. They are not analogical, not after nature, not after painting, not after photography. They are created in accordance with the technical and process possibilities of computability. As once Baudelaire’s allegory of the artist – the rag-picker – so too artists such as Victor Burgin or Jochen Gerz make lucky finds, collect them, save them in a storage medium, and merge them into new contextual relationships on screen – released from their spatio-temporal origins. Burgin sees an analogy between the computer screen and psychic space. In the computer, the residues – the precipitate expressions – of daily perception are collected and linked by the individual with the aid of the rhetorical strategies of sublimation or transfer. Thus the shocks of the everyday are absorbed into the medium and their repetition on screen

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– in Freud’s sense the ‘mystic writing pad’ free of any writing – becomes a process of continual analytical transference work. Jochen Gerz, whose art like that of Burgin’s has always been able to assert itself against the assumption of a monolithic character and against a mono-media form, uses the computer as he uses photography, in order to atomise and fragment ‘similarities’ and patterns of identity. ‘The similarity which links me with images which are not images, is the prerequisite for the controversial act of representing them – only to realise yet again that this is not possible.’3

IV Confronted with the new digital imaging techniques some people are quite outraged (German: entrüstet suggesting disarmed) by the veiled deception which lies concealed in these images. Outraged and thus disarmed, because they have no device at their disposal which might aid them in their observation, help them to trace back the image to a reality that is common to us all and in compliance with our social consensus. This deception cannot be penalised. In our ‘photological’ (Adorno/ Horkheimer) credulousness, we are no longer able to even suspect it. Instead we quickly avail ourselves of those handy linguistic scraps, those bits and pieces from a vocabulary nourished on media theory and imbued with the style of the feuilleton, a vocabulary which thinks that by the use of terms such as simulation, simularcrum, virtual reality, cyberspace etc., it is naming something that actually no longer exists, something that requires a new grammar, a new syntax, ultimately, a new logic the elements of which we are only gradually beginning to discern. The digital imaging techniques have literally put on hold, turned off, eliminated the photographic model of representation – that spatio-temporal link between a light sensitive medium and a spatio-temporal constellation / configuration in front of the camera. The ontology of the photographic image as formulated in the 1920s from Kracauer to Benjamin and later from Bazin to Barthes, has been shaken to its very foundations. Even the index theory based on the writings of Charles S. Peirce now seems obsolete in the face of the binary coding of photographic contingency.4

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V The preposition after refers both to the temporal and spatial difference in photographic representation, and thus to the space and time of the referential which is so fundamental to the photographic image.5 The historically established belief in the authenticity of the photographic image has its roots in the assumption that a physical-chemical apparatus can (re)produce the displaced analogue image of an optically perceivable phenomenon. We believe in photography just as we believe in our shadow. From the inventor of the negative process, William Henry Fox Talbot, to the ‘revolution in seeing’, an agenda formulated in the first third of this century, the basis for the social, artistic and theoretical treatment of photography has always been an implicit linking of the technically generated photographic image to a referential outside that image. Whether as a ‘faithful imitation’, an anamorphous, distorted ‘re-creation’ or as a subjective design, right up until the 70s the photographic image had still to withstand comparison with an ‘ideal’ (German: vor-bildliche, pre-image) reality of which it was held to be the artistic but binding indexical representation. Photography was understood in its relationship to the co-ordinates of space and time in which it originated and which left their mark on it. That is to say, it was understood to the extent that it was able to correspond to, or contradict our traditional view of things. Photography is the image of our history. It has been regarded by some as a source of historical records, by others as the ruin of a historical continuum. It took the progressive digitisation of the pictorial and lexical worlds, both grounded in analogy, to show us just how far we had evolved down the road towards becoming ‘homo photographicus.’6 ‘The good photographer is the one who offers the de-fi-ni-ti-ve image. Perfect.’ Jean Genet

VI In the 1930s Walter Benjamin lamented that photography was emancipating itself more and more from any ‘physiognomic, political, scientific interest’ and was now aspiring to be ‘creative.’ According to

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Benjamin, this aspiration to creativity betrays a photographic attitude ‘which can mount any tin can in space but cannot grasp a human context.’ How does today’s artistic practice react to the almost unlimited digital possibilities for ‘montage’? Are we to expect – in a historical return – a post-aestheticisation of photography determined by soft- and hardware? Or will it be possible not just to continue the history of representation in the analogo-numerical translation but also to actually think it anew? Once atomised into pixels (picture elements), digital imaging techniques are able to modify each and every pictorial representation of reality at will, to erase it or to supplement it. Politically and aesthetically different from the classical montage techniques of the ‘historical’ avant-garde (from Dadaism to Fluxus), digital imaging techniques are clearly involved in the work of arbitrating between differences (binary substitutes are only discernible arithmetically, not visually). Digital pictorial montage may be compared to a puzzle: its individual parts are now being allocated to each ‘player’ to be formed as he or she wishes, whereby the target image too is affected by a technical process determinism.

VII Photography after Photography sees the traditional light-image in a critical relationship with the new image potential which has been given to photography through the algorithm. Whereas digital image processing has dominated professional image processing in telecommunications and press agencies since the beginning of the 1980s and at the moment these latter have at their disposal worldwide the most advanced electronic ‘dark rooms’ (a nice contradiction) in the public, that is to say, non-military, domain, the art world could only begin to come to terms with digital image processing with the advent of personal computers (one exception being Nancy Burson’s early composite images).There is no doubt that digital image processing is as unlikely to replace traditional photography as the latter was able to replace painting, or film replace photography, or video replace the film etc. The digitisation of photography simply means its translation into a numerically coded – and therefore nonvisual – legibility, a translation which it shares with the other media of

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sound, writing or film. It can now join these media in the digital pool. An appropriately equipped computer encodes writing, sound, photograph or film, irrespective of the medium, and burdens the user with the semantic differentiation of a basic algorithm. Multimedia designates not a wealth of different media but the media correspondences implicit in the computer. Thus digitisation offers us new kinds of image spaces in which the possibilities of modulation are limited by arithmetic alone and in which the links with reality can be shifted arbitrarily. Image and space, representation, the historical archive and the human archive (memory with its elementary contiguity) are destined to be subjected to an as yet inconceivable ‘revision.’ The exhibition Photography after Photography shows the challenges to which the psychic apparatus is to be exposed. If, as Derrida writes in his book Mal d’Archive, these technological changes should also intervene in the structures of the psychic apparatus, ‘for example, in its spatial architecture and its economy of speed, in its arrangement of space and time, then what we are dealing with is no longer a simple linear advance within representation, within the representative value of the model, but with a whole new logic.’7

VIII How will western culture, whose pictorial tradition is essentially based on analogue / analogical pictorial worlds, be able to refer in future to a primarily numerical presence set down in images and writing, in sounds and forms? One of the myths of the origins of painting contains the idea of a technically analogical image. According to Pliny the Elder, Dibutades, daughter of the potter of the same name, draws the outline of the shadow of her departing lover which had been cast onto the wall by the candlelight. This act of turning to the future memory is undertaken at the price of a turning away from the sight of the present: Dibutades turns her gaze away from her lover and bends over to draw the outline of his shadow on the wall. Sciagraphy, a form of drawing based on the negative, divides the moment up into the moment of its loss and the moment projected into the future when it will be recalled.

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Sciagraphy turns the vision of light into the fixing emanation of darkness, ‘this shadow writing introduces an art of blinding.’8 In the blackening of the silver bromide (as an impression of the present, the present time) light become the shadow of time. The shadow writing signifies a turning away from the light in favour of the recollection of its appearances: ‘une ombre est une mémoire simultanée’ – it is in the shadow that what is past achieves the simultaneity of its original image.9 Thus darkness is not just a turning away from a presence but also the ‘simultaneous’ recollection of the light. The myth of the origin of painting was also drawn on when naming the invention of reproducible photographs. William Henry Fox Talbot used this term already in 1834 to name the process of transforming his photographic process from the positive to the negative. Photography is the first medium to raise the subsequency of the immediate to the status of an image by means of a technical, i.e. physical-chemical process. Photographs administer estates. Their historicity lies in the spaces they have left. And today, every gaze at the photographs undeniably inherits what is past. In this translation, which goes far beyond a mere iconography, lies the time-bound artistic potential of the photographic: there is always an ancestor involved, there is always a demand for a translation. Herein too lies the allegorical wealth of photography. In the temporal completeness of the exposition, in its finitude, it literally ruins all thought of a present, establishes each moment in its difference. Derrida speaks of a memory of the present which inscribes the difference into the ‘presence of the present and thus by the same token the possibility of being repeated in representation.’10

IX Talbot wrote a text announcing the publication of his Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), his ‘philosophy of photography’ published on subscription in six instalments and the first book to contain photographic illustrations. In that text he writes: ‘Needless to say, the plates in the book … are themselves the photographs as produced by the effect of the light, and not engravings after their model.’11 With this remark Talbot distanced himself

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from Lerebours’ work Excursions Daguerriennes which appeared in 1841 and in which there were, as Talbot put it, ‘carefully executed engraving after photographic models.’ This temporal and modal preposition after is important. It signifies not only the temporal but also the local, spatial difference in the photographic representation, i.e. the dislocation of the referential, fundamental to photography, accompanied by the différance (Derrida), the temporal deferring of a moment which has occurred, that is to say, the division of the moment into the mindfulness of what it left behind, its estate. ‘One ought to destroy the lens, smash the gramophone, and ask oneself whether this worldly space is really available to us free of charge, and who is paying for the light in it? In other words, who advances us the costs for this badly constructed space in which the old puzzles get the best of us, in which we find all that silly nonsense about time and space, which is so worn out, so patched, and in which no one believes anymore!’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

X Photograph after nature is how it is always put in historical lists of plates so as to underline the unquestionable character of the authenticity of the image. But there is also the photograph after nature in the non-mimetic sense, as the construction of a simulacrum. Works of arts, argues Plato in his Politeia, are ‘the third kind of bringing-forth reckoned in terms of the pure emergence of the idea which is first’ (the god, the craftsman, the copier).12 The gradations from the original to the mimetic imitation descend from the idea (eidos) to the copy (eidolon) and finally to the copy of the copy (phantasma). Later in his Sophist Plato distinguishes between two kinds of imitation within mimesis: Firstly, the image (eikon) or ‘likeness-making’ … ‘when an artist produces a copy that follows the proportions of the original in length, breadth and depth and gives each part of it its proper colour.’13 Secondly, the semblance, which is illusory because it is viewed at a deceptive angle, but which to a man whose vision was fully adapted to so large an object would not even resemble the original of which it claims to be a copy. Whereas the eikon allows

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at least a truthful copy to appear, the simulacrum is an illusion which deforms and distorts the perspective. The latter does not stand up to close examination. Were there an appropriate place from which to observe it, the simulacrum would betray itself as dissimilar in relation to its model. ‘so all we have to do is wait for those “seeing machines” which can see and perceive in our stead.’ Paul Virilio

XI The concept of the simulacrum derived from the Platonic theory of ideas differs from that frequently used by Jean Baudrillard. In his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard, whose concept of simulation has been much quoted over the past two decades even in the theory of art, conceives the simulacrum(s) of the third order as different both from imitation of the original and from the serial reproduction of advanced capitalism. In the third order the simulacrum is defined in relation to models ‘from which all forms emerge through a slight modulation of differences.’ This means that ‘the only thing that confers meaning is belonging to the model, nothing proceeds anymore in accordance with a goal, everything emerges from the model, the referent-signified to which everything is referred, which has a kind of anticipated finality and the only probability.’14 Thus the copy (German: Nachbild, afterimage) would seem to be caught up in a circular movement within which the model is both the original and final image. In this sense the after is also the before. In the early 1980s Baudrillard’s thesis was that the aesthetic could not have a place in hyperreality anymore because it can no longer have a differential relationship to reality ‘which is merged with its own image.’ The artificial is at the centre of reality. Reality is ‘a schizophrenic intoxication of serial signs which know no imitation, no sublimation, which are locked up in their repetition – who could say where the reality of that which they simulate is?’15 In Baudrillard’s ‘schizophrenic intoxication’ the artist becomes a psychotic who tries to compensate for his loss by making a fetish of the Other. Baudrillard’s simulation theory means the obliteration of the difference between the copy (German: Nachbild) and the original model (German: Vorbild), between a trace

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preceding the representation, and the referential restoration of the reproduction to a world outside the image.

XII In his books Difference and repetition (Engl. 1969) and The Logic of Sense (Engl. 1969), Gilles Deleuze presents a reading of Plato in which simulation and difference are grasped as difference. Deleuze writes: ‘When we say of the illusion (i.e. simulacrum) that it is a copy of a copy, an eternally graduated icon, an eternally shattered similarity, we miss the most essential thing: the essential difference between illusion and copy, the aspect through which they form the two halves of a division. The copy is an image equipped with similarity, the illusion an image without similarity.’ (italics H. v. A.)16 Although the simulacrum possesses a general ‘similarity effect’ it is still essentially constructed on difference. ‘It interiorises a dissimilarity’ which results in us being unable to find in it either a trace of the presence of an original or of a copy. What we can trace is, so to speak, its radical separateness from both. It is in this very difference that the simulacrum finds its shape. The ‘similarity effect’ – not to be confused with Barthes’ ‘effet du réel’ – is based on stereotype givens against which the simulacrum stands out, while at the same time citing them. The simulacrum as a phantasm cannot be traced back to something original or to a referential contained within it. Thus it represents nothing which could substantiate a temporal after. Pierre Klossowski writes: ‘In the imitative sense, the simulacrum is the actualisation of something which in itself cannot be communicated or represented: the phantasm in its obsessive compulsion.’17 Accordingly, for us the simulacrum would be the phantasmical construction of the real. ‘If we set ourselves down on the bank of the moments so as to observe them as they flow by, all we are able to recognise in them in the end is a meaningless succession, time which has lost its substance, abstract time, a transformation of our inner void. One step further, and from abstraction to abstraction it becomes more and more threadbare through our fault, it dissolves into temporality, it become a shadow of itself. Our task now is to give it back life, and to adopt a clear and unambiguous attitude towards it.’ E. M. Cioran 711

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XIII Analogo-numerical photography imposes a new grammatical direction on our seeing. Our habitualised power of visual perception is destined to be directly effected not only by the manipulation of the image, which cannot be traced back to a material origin, but above all by the general availability of images as sets of data capable of being managed and interchanged endlessly. Even if the analogo-numerical image can still be recognised via its representative values, the photographic image will no longer be able to qualify as a translation of a spatio-temporal moment. The analogo-numerical image is separated from its origin, its negative. It is without a shadow. Seeing is impeded in its elementary process of recognition and is unable to achieve a translation of what it recognises into memory, which is grounded in representation. For photography after photography, therefore, one central issue is: how are we to look upon the photographic image, once historically established as a medium of traces, in its separateness from the world? The works on show in this exhibition all take into account this rift which is of fundamental importance for the history of representation in the west. The image may be able to draft alternative worlds, but these are grounded in a concept of similarity which has been decisively influenced by photography itself since the middle of the last century. Walter Benjamin once described the atmosphere in a photographer’s studio at the turn of the century; he found himself ‘distorted through a similarity with everything that is here around me.’ A human being becomes a prop which like any other object can be moulded and technically generated. The design Human being will be circulated around the schools as a new draft. The shaping of the human being, the intervention into the anthropological constants of the sexual difference, the composition of the body from heterogeneous sources, the deformation of corporeal integrity – these are elementary interventions into the very fabric of the subject’s similarity and identity. Organic medicine designates these procedures as transplants. Neurobiology, neurophysiology and research into artificial intelligence have long since been preoccupied with this organ-related or genetic bricolage – in Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological sense of the term. The human being becomes a project, drawn in, as it were, like a plaything into the projection of alternative worlds. 712

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XIV A few years ago Vilém Flusser wrote: ‘digital appearance is the light which illuminates for us the night of the gaping void around us and in us. We ourselves are then the floodlights which beam the alternative worlds against the nothing and into the nothing.’18 Flusser recommends relativising the term ‘real’ in accordance with its resolution into dot elements: ‘thus something is more real according as the dot distribution is denser, and more potential the more sparse this is.’ This digital view of the world could be summarised as follows: Identity is in the process of dissolution.

The artists Aziz and Cucher, both living in California, allow the people in their portraits to become submerged in sense-lessness. Keith Cottingham generates twins by creating in the computer a confluence of classical drawing techniques, a moulded mask and photographs. Nancy Burson’s composite works atomise individuals so as to visualise their percentage share of power as a calculable entity or to present them proportional to the familiarity of the general public with their image. Alba D’Urbano allows the computer to design sewing-patterns of her body and makes a suit of her skin to clothe the emptiness. All these works – however much their aesthetic character may differ – achieve a joint translation: they lead the image of the human being out of an iconographic tradition and into the uncertainty of its presentability.

XV The bodies are distorted and terrified; if the shadow was once the guarantor of human historicity – the shadow bearing witness to the presence of the person, placing him in the light of time – it is now being digitally deranged and relieved of its capacity to be handed down. The handling of digital media technology is accompanied not only by an often astonishing euphoria, a technophilia, an intoxication on the part of the net surfers, but also and ultimately by a fear intensified to the point of paroxysm, the fear of not being able to find a way back to a

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place anymore, once that place has been abandoned, that is to say, the fear of not being able to be present in any place anymore at a distance from the here and now. And just as photography removes the moment from its time, gives it a ‘posthumous chock’ (Benjamin), so too analogonumerical photography frees that moment from its essential link with the temporal before and after.

XVI But of course we continue to make an indexical link between the image and the real, the actual ‘has been there’ of the body in front of the camera. But a doubt, a concern, a fear has crept into our understanding of these images. And this fear intrudes on our self-evident notion of representation and recollection. According to Barthes, this ‘has been there’ constitutes the noema of the photograph. Therein lies the fascination of the photographic medium, that which is so captivating about it, which distinguishes it from all other reproduction media. The suspicion that ‘perhaps it was not there’, that there could be parts on the pictorial surface – the material medium – that were never blackened by photons, this existential doubt leads on to an impression of terror. It is not what is represented that gives rise to that terror but the possibility of the presentation, the potentiality of a digital world which would no longer permit a distinction – if ever one actually existed – between the real impression (how the light ‘impresses’ itself into the surface and also marks the mental image in the translation) and a ‘representation’ generated in the darkness of the computer. ‘Perhaps numerical thinking is not concerned with knowledge of the world but with projecting the numerical code outwards and finally recuperating what was projected. Numerical knowledge, therefore, is a theoretical problem.’ Vilém Flusser

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XVII ‘The terrifying’, writes Heidegger, ‘is unsettling; it places everything outside its own nature. What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distances, the nearness of things remains absent.’19 This unsettled state signifies the human condition of fear, of disarming distress, even about an encounter: when un-settled or dis-armed we are exposed, dislocated. ‘All distances in time and space are shrinking… Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness.’ But terror also means that something is removed from the ‘trough of its disposition’ and is concealed without trace. In the realm of digital data on the other hand, concealedness is a purely calculable entity which is neither ‘close to the skin’ nor perceptible. Perhaps in future, analogo-numerical photography will turn physical space into psychic space and transform our locally fixed body into the non-local, the uncanny (German: Unheimliche, suggesting homeless) – a-topic.

XVIII After photography comes photography, but it is altered by the after.

Notes 1

Part of this survey is reproduced in: Wolfgang Kemp (ed.) Theorie der Fotografie II, 1912–1945, Munich 1979, pp. 39–44.

2

In order to avoid the ambiguous formulation ‘digital photography’ I have opted for Bernard Stiegler’s term analogo-numerical, ‘Rémanence et discrétion des image’, in: Art/Photographie numérique. L’Image réinventée, CYPRES, École d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Aix-en-Provence 1995, pp. 220–252.

3

‘Die künsterlische Produktion von Bildern in einer Gesellschaft des Spektakels. Ein Gespräch von Sarah Rogenhofer und Florian Rötzer mit Jochen Gerz’, in: Florian Rötzer (ed.), Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, Frankfurt/Main, 1991, p. 535.

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4

Cf. Jean Marie Schaeffer, L’Image précaire. Du dispositif photographique, Paris 1987, p. 32.

5

It is one of the characteristics of contemporary art that it scarcely allows a differentiation between reference and referential. Whereas reference, as a process, is left to observation, the referential is inherent in the work. I use the word ‘referential’ in Derrida’s sense (le réferentiel). German translations use ‘das Referentielle’ which, however, ignores the link with the ‘différentiel’, the differential, although, as in the realm of mechanics, it concerns the transmission of what is different but yet geared to each other. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Deaths of Roland Barthes in: Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman, Routledge, London & New York, 1988.

6

Cf. Abraham M. Moles, ‘Alors … mais pourquoi photographier?’, in: Les Cahiers de la Photographie, no. 8, Paris 1982, pp. 151–160.

7

Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive. Une impression freudienne, Paris 1995, p. 32.

8

Cf. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, University of Chicago Press 1993. The original calls it “un art d’aveuglement” suggesting an art of blindness or blinding.

9

Ibid.

10

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man, Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 60.

11

Cf. Hubertus v. Amelunxen, .Die aufgehobene Zeit. Die Erfindung der Photographie durch William Henry Fox Talbot, Berlin 1987, pp. 42 and H. v. Amelunxen ‘Nach der Fotografie’, lecture held in Braunschweig 1992, published in: Zugänge zu einer Oberfläche. Vorträge zur Fotografie an der HBK Braunschweig, Braunschweig 1995, pp. 60–71.

12

Plato (515 c) quoted in Heidegger’s Nietzsche, Vol. 1, Engl. transl. David Farrell Krell, Harper & Row, New York 1979, p. 184.

13

The quotation here is from Plato, Parmenides, Theaitetos, Sophist, Statesman, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London 1961, folio number 236, p. 180.

14

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Sage Publications, London 1993.

15

Ibid.

16

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Columbia University Press, 1993; cf. Deleuze Difference and Repetition, The Athlone Press, London 1994.

17

Pierre Klossowski, La Ressemblance, Marseilles 1984, p. 76.

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18

Vilém Flusser, ‘Der digitale Schein’ in: Florian Rötzer (ed.), Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, Frankfurt/Main, 1991, p. 159.

19

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in: Poetry, Language, Thought, Engl. transl Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, London, 1971, pp. 166.

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—

Space-in between: on Women and Landscape Photography in Britain Liz Wells —

In her series Connoisseurs, Karen Knorr pictures a man in an art gallery viewing a landscape painting.1 He stands centrally, stem glass in hand, with his back to us, enjoying the muted hues of the trees, sky and distant mountains, perhaps identifying with the horseman in the middle distance. The image is titled ‘Pleasures of the Imagination.’ This sums up much of what is associated with ‘landscape’ as a set of conventions. Typically British landscape painting depicts land, constructed as a vista painted in perspective from a central overview position. This pictorial organization offers the spectator an ego-centric position from which land is metaphorically rendered subject to his controlling gaze. As John Berger remarked, landscape pictures operate to reassure the land owner of his status.2 Historically in Britain, men, not women, were land owners. This paper considers contemporary British women photographers, land and landscape. It asks what happens when women look? If traditionally women have been the object of the gaze, the viewed rather than the viewer, the represented rather than the author of representation, what happens when she takes a more active role? It is suggested that women photographers operate in an in-between, fluid space complexly positioned in relation to a network of axes: male/female, nature/culture, observer/ observed, location/identity. She looks from a de-centred position within patriarchal culture.

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A number of instances of work by women are considered. This allows for exploration of varying themes and pictorial approaches. Due to restricted space, and limited illustrations, the range of examples is necessarily selective (and, given that colour reproduction is not possible, the illustrations only include monochrome imagery).3 As will become clear, the bodies of work discussed have been chosen to demonstrate a variety of articulations of ideas and discourses associated with land, water and our relation to space. The history of ‘landscape’ as a genre and set of concepts in British culture is complex, and cannot be rehearsed here. Suffice it to note that, by the nineteenth century in Britain ‘landscape’ had come to stand as an antidote for the visual and social consequences of industrialization, offering a view of nature as therapeutic, a pastoral release from commerce and industry. Aesthetic principles in play were not only evident in the emergence of landscape as a genre in painting but also in the taste for landscape gardening, which dated from the eighteenth century, within which views from drawing rooms or terraces were shaped in accordance with pre-conceived idealized landscapes. Arcadian rhapsodies abounded. But philosophy, poetics and aesthetics inevitably reflected patriarchal attitudes which not only positioned intellectual women as somehow eccentric but also limited women’s artistic freedoms. Even in early twentieth century British art, a number of paintings by women, including Vanessa Bell or Winifred Nicholson, indicate that they were looking out through windows, or from domestic exterior spaces. Rather than working en plein air in remoter rural places, we imagine easels in corners of courtyards electric with the intensity of concentration as she painted from within the limits of the domestic. Many women photographers, from Anna Atkins onwards, have focussed on photographing flora and fauna; this may be partly because the theme allows for work within immediate surroundings. 19th century topographic (survey) photography would hardly have been considered appropriate employment or pastime for women – although some redoubtable travelers did scale mountains and moorlands in full Victorian dress! But on the whole, when 19th century women photographers such as Lady Hawarden made landscape work, it was on their own estates – or rather, strictly speaking, those of their husbands.4

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Distinctions between work made by men and work made by women are not categorical. Many thematic concerns are shared, for instance, nowadays, in relation to the ecological. Besides which, we are all influenced by Western aesthetics and broader cultural currencies. Furthermore, as Freud suggested, masculinity and femininity are not categorically mapped onto maleness and femaleness. Photographic projects always articulate a number of concerns, within which questions of gender, the gaze and patriarchal relations may figure with various degrees of intensity and significance. Women artists are, precisely, women and artists. Both involve complex sets of formative influences and parameters which may be more-or-less fluid. As Luce Irigaray has argued (in relation to writing) we inevitably make work from, and informed by, our cultural positioning, including gender.5 Gender resonates complexly in relation to other formative influences including particular auto-biographical experiences as well as social class, region and ethnicity. In 1994 I curated Viewfindings and edited the accompanying book, Viewfindings, Women Photographers, Landscape and Environment. In 2000 I co-curated Shifting Horizons and guest edited the related publication, Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now.6 Both exhibitions focussed on work by British or British-based photographers, most of which dated from the 1990s. The objective of the first was to showcase landscape work by women. The second specifically drew on the membership of the IRIS women’s photography project (Staffordshire University). Although their gestation differed, both offered opportunities to reflect upon concerns and approaches to landscape which typified work by women photographers based in Britain now. As I shall suggest, imagery by a number of women photographers indicates a tendency for women to be interested in relations between people and place, rather than in the open environment, ostensibly unmarked by human presence. Many are particularly interested in the sea and in the movement of water, reminding us of associations of the feminine with the twenty-eight day cycle of moon and tides. But no one theme or aesthetic strategy marks women’s work; rather we find a diverse range of themes, questions and artistic methodologies.

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For instance, Ingrid Hesling explored marks and legacies of human presence in the woods (figure 1). Living in deepest Somerset, this is her local environment, but one perhaps with deeper intonations – if we go down in the woods today, as bears, as babes, following Hansel and Gretel, or Goldilocks or wearing our red riding hoods, we’re in for a great surprise! The work is interesting as it sits on an uneasy edge between literal document and a more ambiguous ‘counter-pastoral.’ The actual rural is messy. It is not easily reconciled with the romantic illusionary. Hesling’s work thus questions popular imagery. The series title, Anarchy in Arcady, clearly points to the observational and investigative dimensions of the work, commenting on her contemporary surroundings. But for the artist it also relates to difficult childhood memories, and to her concerns as the mother of a daughter, then a young teenager. If Arcady is an illusion, then the security of the idealized integrated community is also up for question. Picture titles are literal, yet evocative: ‘Creek’, ‘Elder Brake’ or ‘Woodland Glade’; the mode is documentary, but other echoes resonate. Likewise exploring environments very familiar to her, Gina Glover quite explicitly accounts for much of her work in terms of Pathways to Memory, which is the title of one series, made in the grounds of her family home.7 First created for a group exhibition, significantly titled ‘Obsessions’, in this work she reconstructed the space of the garden within which she played as a child. In the gallery the series of pictures are installed on podiums and encircle us, enfolding – or constraining – us in an enclosed space. She references Bruno Bettelheim’s critical discussion of fairy tales and their implications in order to locate her work in terms of unconscious processes whereby early impressions and the animistic thinking of childhood continue to resonate.8 Individual pictures show statues either side of the gap which forms a gateway in an apparently very tall hedge, or the shadow of a tree trunk on a lawn, or a small girl almost catching a tennis ball. The images are constructed from a child’s eye height. Welltrodden paths and worn stonework evoke the many people who have played or rested there over the years. Both Hesling and Glover work in black and white in these particular series, thereby enhancing reference to dreams and memories.

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1. Ingrid Hesling [‘Woodland Glade’ from Anarchy in Arcady] 1994 originally published in Viewfindings Courtesy of the artist

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Sian Bonnell’s work is likewise founded in domestic experience. Her images derive from photographing everyday objects in the landscape. Groundings (1996/7) jokingly remarked on the extent to which the rural is incorporated into the home: pastry cutters, jelly moulds, children’s toys all reference the pastoral. When her sons were young she used to drop them to nursery school in the village in Dorset where they then lived, then take a 2 mile walk back to home and kitchen, closely observing changes in the local countryside. The sort of work she could do was both influenced by and constrained by parenting responsibilities, but taking objects out of doors to photograph was certainly possible. Her next series, Undercurrents (1997), reached further into questions of culture and memory, using a form of parody to emphasize the kitschness of holiday souvenirs and, again, the oddity of the pastoral references so common in kitchen utensils. A fish shaped jelly mould lies at the edge of the tide; a tiny lighthouse, with blue and white horizontal stripes, stands on a rock overlooking the sea; a toy green and yellow plastic dinosaur sits by actual fossil marks on the Jurassec Coast World Heritage Site, near where she lives. More recent work extends the surreal dimension of her imagery; for instance, in 2001 a residency in the Netherlands led to Putting Hills in Holland using jelly moulds to contour otherwise flat fields, and adding emblems of Dutchness, such as tulips. The strategy is Dada-esque; cultural absurdities are made evident. The above examples inter-relate the domestic and the environment and also emerge from some sense of constraint, being sheltered within a garden as a child or relatively confined to local space as a mother. But what happens when women look more generally? In Island (1997), Kate Mellor leads us round the coast of Britain, exploring boundaries between land and sea; sea and sky.9 Colour tones are muted; little distracts from the image as document. She is interested in the horizon and the way in which the closer you come to it the more it retreats. The horizon can be seen, but it doesn’t exist. She photographs from terra firma. Her pictures appear strictly topographic, and her method was systematic: she used the ordinance survey map to determine locations. Her grid nonetheless allowed her to find many places which are evidently peopled or visited. Of course, she determined exactly where to situate the camera. For instance, Start Point (off the South-West coast) is not framed from a rocky

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promontory from which one might see the lighthouse in stark solitude. Instead, the picture is of Lanacombe near Start Point; her camera is set back from the beach and her chosen panorama encompasses the dwellings set back from the beach. This is not the aestheticized beach and seascape of formalism; geometry, tone and texture are aesthetic elements but not the purpose of her work. Nor is this a poetic view out to sea wherein a diluted waterscape might embrace the soft skies of the distant horizon. Rather, the implication of standing on the coast, secure from the sea, yet looking out beyond, comes into question, especially as Mellor repeatedly records marks of human presence, even in remoter areas. We wonder at the histories of particular places, lands just behind the shore. The ordinance survey map is, of course, itself a human construct; cartography is logical, but not absolute. Perhaps the desire for order and method implied by acts of mapping are also in question? Lynn Silverman (figure 2) specifically invites us to consider the act of looking through more abstract image construction.10 In Horizons she pictured space in a way that unsettles, as no single panoptic viewing position is offered. She pairs pictures, one above another. We see the sky, and the foreground beneath her feet. The middle ground is absent. Where normally the gradient of depth of field contributes to orienting the picture in relation to the viewer, here the picture plane is disrupted. Loss of perspective disorients; generalized ‘space’ breaks up; and we lose any clear sense of self-location. This series was made in the Australian outback where the middle ground disappears into endless horizon. We get caught simultaneously in two ways of seeing. As Meaghan Morris has remarked that there is a tension between the seeming anonymity, universality and timelessness of the images of landstrip, horizon and sky, in the upper pictures, and the specificity of the ground shots which include boots, shadows or animal tracks. Morris comments: What remains is a set of tracks. Not the single broken line of the traveller marking a progress; but a double line, an exploration of reversibility, the trace of a movement on a strange, still space in which everybody looks at elsewhere, and somebody looked at here.11

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2. Lynn Silverman [from the series Horizons] 1979/81 Courtesy of the artist

37 | Liz Wells

Individual pictures are 16 x 20 inches (circa 40 x 50 cm). That they are classically fine prints adds to the sense of disorientation as the traditional aesthetic pleasure of the perfect surface is disrupted by the refusal of Albertian pictorial composition. Horizons was made when Silverman was living and working in Australia. Back in Britain she produced Imaginary Landscapes wherein she continued to explore our sense of location through the elimination of all but the most minimal silhouetting or reflection of, for instance, clouds or waters. These matt and glass-less prints are human-scale in terms of height, and hang precisely a few inches off the ground so that, as spectators, from a viewing distance of a couple of meters, we feel enveloped by the smoothness of the picture plane. There is no easy point of reference; indeed, the work might be defined as highly academic in its preoccupation with space as vacuum. One example focuses on the surface of the water behind a boat. The vessel itself does not appear, although speeding through water is clearly connoted. Only the wash of the wake interrupts the density of the image. Consider the difference of impact between this, or an image within which the stern of the boat was also included, thereby offering a sense of safe location for the viewer. Yet, the density and the relatively uncluttered nature of the picture does invite reverie. Silverman entices us into a void. She not only refuses landscape pictorial, but invites us to think about how ways of framing and representing space relate to security of location, literally and metaphorically. Silverman’s work is unusually elliptical in its reference to human presence. More generally, women photographers pay specific attention to the inter-relation of people and place. As I remarked, Mellor’s work, even when looking out to sea, always includes marks of human intervention around the shoreline. One concern which has marked recent British landscape photography has been conservation and use of countryside and the politics of access to land. Britain’s best known woman landscape photographer, Fay Godwin, repeatedly tackled drew attention to rural degradation and decay, to public rights of access, to the effects and responsibilities of land ownership and control.12 She campaigned on behalf of walkers, challenging instances when designated public

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footpaths were ignored of fenced off by farmers or by large institutions such as the Ministry of Defence. Her concerns encompassed the shaping of land, sometime photographed in quite formalist mode, and the commodification of heritage sites. For example, one photograph pictures advertising hoardings on fencing along the side of the road leading to Stonehenge. The posters exhorted travelers to visit the site, England’s best known pre-historic stone circle. (The Stonehenge as ‘theme park’ approach has now been discontinued, although whether her photography had any influence on this we cannot know.) Aesthetically her imagery is conventional; but the content is pointed. Landscape. as focus for more critical investigations, is explicitly evident in the work of Ingrid Pollard and of Roshini Kempadoo, both of whom are concerned with questions of history, heritage and identity. Political debates about nationality and ethnic lineage post-colonially have been extensive. This is not simply a matter of legality: passports and citizenship – although, of course, these are crucial. Our sense of identity and homeland articulates the actual and the imaginary. Interrogation of ideological operations relating to heritage and identity is also central. To some extent debates have focused on questions of representation, stereotyping and role models on offer. Identity is, of course, multi-faceted. We think of ourselves in terms of an accumulation of identities – gender, age, nationality, profession, family position, class, ethnicity, region, and so on. Such categories contribute to our sense of self-definition as well as, of course, to the perceptions of others. But the psychological implications of marginalization or exclusion also have to be taken into account. Reassurance as where we belong fundamentally contributes to constituting subjective identity. The etymology is indicative: be/longing. Ingrid Pollard’s earlier concerns are well summarized in her series of postcards on Wordsworth Heritage based on The Lake District, in which she questioned associations between the idealized British landscape and ethnicity. The ‘postcard’, originally commissioned in 1993 as billboard art, depicted ‘Miss Pollard’s Party’ of black people rambling or relaxing amongst the green grassy hills of this national park area. In what remains her best-known series, Pastoral Interlude (1987) she depicted individuals in the fields and streams of The Lake District, noting that this

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was a place ‘where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white.’13 Here the reference to the English poet, Wordsworth, who lived in The Lake District, is echoed in the parallel with his spring poem, ‘Daffodils’ wherein he ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’ until he came upon a ‘sea of daffodils.’ So being British is not in itself sufficient for belonging! Her approach is archeological in a Foucauldian manner; she investigates ways in which social and economic histories of land usage remain marked in the present. Hidden Histories Heritage Stories emerged from a 1994 residency in Lee Valley Park which stretches from East London up to Essex and involved tracking land workers, noting their tools and their environment. Her installation opened with panoramas in glass frames within which she also included specimens of plants and soil from the park, thereby referencing that which lies below the surface. In drawing attention to samples and sedimentation she references the layering of land through time and, metaphorically, legacies of shifting cultural attitudes. The interest continued through Bursting Stone, (1997), which resulted from a second residency in The Lake District. She photographed above and below the surface of what is one of Britain’s national parks, reminding us of the industrial legacy of mining for coal and slate. This area is also home to Sellafield, a massive nuclear power complex about which there has been much dispute. The nearest town, Whitehaven, was originally a small commercial port (white ‘haven’); its economy now centres on nuclear fuel. The exhibition installation included a wall of thick slabs of slates, photographic images printed onto their surfaces, set forbiddingly across the gallery. (figure 3) For her this recalls the sense of exclusion that, as a black woman, she and others experience in parts of rural Britain. Her practice is critical in constantly returning to interrogate English heritage in terms of ethnicity and national identity. The image on one of the slates is of a walker climbing a style into a field. The implication is, perhaps, that not everyone finds it easy to cross the style? ‘The Head People’ by Roshini Kempadoo is part of a larger series, Sweetness and Light, which explores colonialism through the example of sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the fifteenth century. (figure 4) Her accompanying text quotes Aimé Césaire’s 1955 Discourse on Colonialism: ‘The decisive actors...are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale

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3. Ingrid Pollard installation

[Bursting Stone] 1997 Courtesy of the artist

4. Roshini Kempadoo [from ‘The Head People’, part of the series Sweetness and Light] 2000 originally published in Shifting Horizons. Courtesy of the artist

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grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant; appetite and force.’14 ‘The Head People’, with its muted browns reminding us of sepia toning, not only references the past but also acknowledges cyberspace as a new arena for venture capital with its power hierarchies and systems of exploitation. The tryptech builds from an empty terrace evidently from a country house, via the same terrace with shadows of those who worked on the colonial plantations which became a key source of British wealth, to the terrace and the shadowy figures as background to the young woman holding up the computer. The terrace is actually in Windsor Great Park (one of the homes of the British Royal family), although we do not need to recognise the specific location to get the symbolic point. Perhaps the ‘still’ on the screen is from a history lesson, but the white man with black followers, mobilised globally – now through virtual space – persists as an image. That the all-important computer is supported by the young woman, the uniform indicating school or service. Women as waitresses at the banquet of life! Like Pollard, Kempadoo articulates questions of past and present, of formative influences and legacies, of gender and of ethnic relations. She always places herself somewhere within the image (in this case, the woman supporting the computer). It doesn’t matter if you don’t recognize her, but it adds resonance if you do. Economic formations are drawn into play as she questions the histories and heritage shaping ownership and control of land in Britain and, of course, in its erstwhile overseas satellites. Such histories are subjectively formative, with particularly implications for those of Afro-Caribbean heritage born and living in Britain now. Perhaps because of women’s more ambiguous relation to culture within which, if we follow Freud, the feminine is construed as ‘other’, women’s work often explores ‘in-between’ spaces within which ideas are not clearly defined or intended to be fixed. Being a woman within a patriarchal system is a key formative element within this. Women are located in an ambiguous relation to dominant culture. Furthermore, the feminine is associated with the elliptic, the contemplative, the poetic. As Julia Kristeva has noted, the feminine may be viewed as that which has become repressed with patriarchal order and threatens to disrupts masculine logic.15 For Kristeva the poetic imagination stands in opposition to language viewed semiotically in terms of inter-relational system of

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codes and conventions. Conceptualizing women’s work in terms of space in-between thus is intended to imply fluidity (not containment); it also allows exploration of what can be said visually, and how. Åsa Andersson is concerned with the relation between philosophy and fine art out of which emerge, for instance, issues of spatiality and temporality which may be explored through the making of work. Writing Water in its Absence, uses glass to create layers: The camera helps me to frame ‘miniature-worlds’ within the world and the process of layering creates yet another unexpected aspect and perspective from which to view the world.16 Her work is small scale and the poetics of communication is also evident through her use of graphic traces, suggestions of writing, rather than actual words. The colours are muted, and objects depicted, such as a paper boat or a safety pin stuck into the remains of a coil of ribbon, seem on the verge of dissolving. Nothing is secure; nothing is quite as it might first appear. She works quite intuitively. She added that ‘it’s not like I’m driven by an idea which I’m consciously exploring... everything can’t be described and determined.’ Liz Nicol’s series of large black and white pictures of female Figureheads merged within landscapes, bereft of the ships on which they once stood offer a further example of complexly layered work.17 (figure 5) She accumulates objects and images which eventually come into play within pictures; like Andersson she views her process of making as spontaneous and intuitive. These layered images condense and double reference the melancholia of ruins; the ship’s figureheads have long since traveled their final journey coming to rest in museums, but here sinking into bleak landscapes likewise marked by the ravages of time. A poetics of decay! We think of the sea, of fluidity, of flux and change, of voyages past, of the strength of the waves lashing the figures. Figureheads are usually female; women without feet, ungrounded. Yet once they were Amazons of the sea, symbols of working ships, designed to contain, nurture and protect sailors. Ambiguity resounds, the figureheads led ships of men – superstition traditionally dictated that women were not allowed on board.

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5. Liz Nicol Maritime Museum, Paris, 1994 [Landscape, Derbyshire, 1976/7’ from the series Figureheads] 1970s/2006 Courtesy of the artist

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For a number of photographers, male and female, it is history and myth which most centrally characterize land. Rocks come to stand for eternity; water symbolizes survival, cleansing, renewal, flow, flexibility (the river shifts to take account of obstacles), fluidity. In Christianity, baptism by water represents purification and renewal. Water also links with sexuality. Patricia Townsend drew upon such imagery in re-reading Christian and Greek myth, in effect challenging dominant ideological currencies through re-telling stories from a female point of view. As she notes, ‘since Freud appropriated the story of Oedipus, we have become used to the idea that myths have a more or less universal psychological significance. However, the mythic characters who find their way into the psychoanalytic literature are almost always male.’18 Townsend’s installations – and poems – invite empathy with female characters, who all do appear within Ovid’s account of Greek myth, but are generally less well-known than their male counterparts. For instance, in the myth of Scylla, Glaucus the fisherman became a sea-god and fell in love with Scylla, the water-nymph, who spurned his approach, so he consulted the enchantress, Circe, herself in love with him. Circe transformed Scylla’s lower body into sea monsters; Scylla later turned into a rock on which several ships were destroyed. Scylla was thus twice punished, first, for refusing Glaucus’ advances and then, for causing shipwrecks. In Townsend’s contemporary re-rendering, informed both by feminist and psychoanalytic perceptions, Glaucus awakens Scylla’s pleasurable yet forbidden sexual feelings, experienced by her as monsters which cannot be acknowledged. The sea represents the unconscious; also dreamlike states. Femininity is blended with the ebb and flow of the tide; sexuality remains to be unlocked. Likewise, here it is Echo who calls Narcissus: Can you hear, hear me calling? Don’t turn away. but who can blame you when I’ve nothing new to offer, only broken bits of words stolen from you...19 This plea not only recounts the story from the point of view of the young woman, always marginalized, looking on, destined only ever to repeat that which has been already heard. (figure 6)

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6. Patricia Townsend [‘Echo’ from the series Transforming Myth.] 2000 Courtesy of the artist

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Landscape photography involves a sort of nomadic spirit, and, often, a Zen like patience waiting for light, shadow play and narrative content to come together, which, for men and women, is incompatible with parenting or other regimented commitments. In practical terms, exploring the countryside involves long walks, lots of time, much trudging about, not always in good weather, possibly with equipment which is too heavy to carry or valuable thereby enhancing feelings of vulnerability. Personal safety, risk, or perceptions of risk, remain pertinent. The rural is threatening as well as beautiful. Such practical considerations are taken into account by photographers alongside many other questions relating to ways of exploring space and investigating ideas about sight and place. A number of women photographers have remarked that they feel no need to make heroic journeys to vantage points from which territories can be captured pictorially, brought under (symbolic) control. Typically, the endeavour is less assertive, although it does not follow from that it is critically modest. On the contrary, in exploring land and environment women’s sense of location is also at issue. Positions from which she speaks, methods of working through which she finds a ‘voice’, and the search for an autonomous space within the complexity of cultural relations and discourses, together render a complex and often circuitous journey of interrogation. Women photographers, working in relation to land and landscape explore a range of issues, intuitively and academically, often concentrating on relations between people and places, on subjective experience and cultural memory. Whatever the subject-matter and aesthetic strategy, relatively fluid starting points and methods are often implicated; this further reflects the de-centred space from which she en-visions. With grateful thanks to the artists for permission to publish their work; also to the many friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed some of these ideas over the years.

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Notes 1

Knorr, K. (1991) Marks of Distinction. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 105.

2

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. p.83ff.

3

A longer discussion will appear in Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book, Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, date of publication tbc.

4

See Swingler, S. (2000) ‘Ladies and the Landscape’ in Wells, L. Newton, K and Fehily, C. (2000) Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now. London: I B Tauris.

5

Irigaray, L. (1993) ‘Writing as a Woman’ in je, tu,nous. London: Routledge. Originally published in French, 1993, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle.

6

Wells, L. ed. (1994) Viewfindings, Women Photographers, ‘Landscape’ and Environment. Tiverton: Available Light. Exhibition tour 1994/5: Newlyn Art Gallery; Watershed Media Centre, Bristol; National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford; Zone Gallery, Newcastle. Wells, L., Newton, K. & Fehily, C., (2000) Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now. London: I B Tauris. Exhibition tour organised by IRIS Women’s Photography Project, 2000/1, Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham; Derby Museum and Q Gallery; Museum, Stoke on Trent.

7

Pathways to Memory is published in Wells, L. et al., Shifting Horizons, op cit.

8

Bettelheim, B. (1978) The Uses of Enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

9

Mellor, K. (1997) Island. Stockport: Dewi Lewis.

10

Strictly speaking Lynn Silvermann is American, but she lived and worked in Britain in the 1980s/90s.

11

Morris, M. (1988) ‘Two types of Photography Criticism Located in Relation to Lynn Silverman’s Series’ in The Pirate’s Fiancee. London: Verso. p. 148/9.

12

Godwin, F. (1985) Land. London: Heinemann; Godwin, F. (1990) Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape; Godwin, F (2001) Landmarks. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing.

13

Pollard, I. (2004) Postcards Home. London: Autograph.

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14

Her reference it to Ce’saire, A. (1972) Discourses on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, originally published in 1955.

15

Kristeva, J. (1973) ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, T.L.S 12th Oct. pp1249-52; (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. NY: Columbia University Press, trans. M Waller. Originally published in French in 1974.

16

Author’s interview with the artist, 2000. Examples from the series are included in Wells, L. et al. (2000) op cit.

17

Nicol, L. (2006) Figureheads. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press.

18

Townsend, P. (2000) Transforming Myth. Exhibition leaflet (unpublished) p. 5.

19

loc cit.

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—

Exit: Madly or not at all: from Stiegler to Swinnen Luc Deneulin —

Amateur and participation According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, art has become a consumer product like any other product: marketing, quick consumption, and speculation on immediate sales with high profit margins have intruded into the world of art just as in any other sales/services.1 Stiegler studied the time people spent on a painting in important museums in Paris: it was about forty seconds. Was this passion for, or even interest in art? Stiegler looked back with nostalgia to the bygone passion of real art lovers, a passion that had long escaped the rules of the capitalist system. To illustrate his theory, he recounted the story of his father with whom he lived as a child, in a poor neighborhood in France. After having worked for many years, his father was able to buy a car, like a few others living in the same street. The car was an object that was loved. Through this ‘love’ his father became a real specialist in car mechanics. On Sunday, he would clean his car, check all the parts, mend it when necessary, talk about it with neighbors and exchange information. For Stiegler, the passion, including wanting to know all about the car, and sharing it with others, leads to what he calls ‘participatory attitude.’ When one is passionate, one wants to talk about it and exchange information. One is no longer a consumer but becomes an ‘amateur’, understood in its original meaning derived from Latin, a person who loves, and is near to being obsessed with his love. Bernard Stiegler’s example points out that such a situation could not occur

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nowadays as even car salesmen do not have the necessary insight into the mechanics of cars and their many accessories. To be an ‘amateur’ of art entails, but is not limited to, a desire to know as much as possible of a given work of art, of an artist or a discipline; to spend a lot of time analyzing it and to exchange information about it, which involves no money, but which is only induced by passion. For Bernard Stiegler this is how the art lover ‘participates.’ His aim was to change the art lover’s consumer attitude into an attitude of amateurism and participation. Theory and practice would then no longer be separated, but united in a relationship resulting from a passionate attitude.

The Mad Photographer – Photographs about Photography In 1992, Johan Swinnen wrote a reference work about the history of photography, De paradox van de fotografie (The Paradox of Photography), introducing new insights into the history as well as new concepts in the theory of photography. He became a pioneer in Belgium by putting photography on the academic curriculum at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (University of Brussels), where he further devised courses in the history and theory of photography within the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. He continued his research, creating innovative concepts as well as methods, like his ‘PALIC-method’ (Photography Anthology Learning – Method), which he developed through his experiences as a guest professor in Palestine, Surinam, Bangladesh and Nepal.2 It is in this context that I met him and that I had the privilege to work with him on different projects. Some years after our first meeting, I discovered that Johan Swinnen’s talent was not confined to working in an academic world only: he was in fact very active as a photographer himself, with his own darkroom, and his own equipment.He began to collect and shoot when he was about twenty years old. The passion with which he could talk about other people’s photographs as well as his own, led me to the conclusion that he too was an ‘amateur’ with a ‘participatory attitude in Stiegler’s sense. The passion came with the ‘madly or not at all’ attitude, a precondition for the love of art as Bernard Stiegler described it. This was confirmed when I saw Swinnen’s photo essay on Walter Benjamin, who is often called the pioneer of photo theory: Johan Swinnen took photographs on the site where Walter Benjamin committed suicide, making the circle ‘practice-theory’ round once again. 742

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As I was allowed to have a look in his archive, I found a lot of interesting material, but a text which he wrote when he was about thirty years old, has since remained on my mind. It was called ‘The Mad Photographer Photographs about Photography’ and contained a practical exercise on shooting photography as well as a personal theory of photography. In both his theory and his images Swinnen tried to analyze the photographic image. He wanted to give shape to photography, but he realized that he could only come to a reflection of reality and not reality itself, concluding that he gave form to his own reality only. According to Swinnen, irony was essential and necessary to come to a good result in photographs. I’m happy to reproduce his series ‘The Mad Photographer – Photographs about Photography’ here, albeit in a black and white version of the original color photographs. They illustrate in part the essence of his thinking about photography. They are portraits of ‘thought’ and ‘ideas’ by the artist as a young man, in search of his ideals in photography. As he wrote: ‘It’s not about creating beauty, but about stimulating creativity. It’s about being inspired by thoughts about mankind as well as the critical-historical aspects that have made the history of photography since its very beginning. It’s about keeping in mind the influence of the medium on humans; its influence in the whole world by the means of all possible communication techniques, the star cult of photographers (and, sometimes, of the people photographed), the power and sexual aspirations as Susan Sontag described them. Photography is a means of expression that enables someone to be in contact with reality and to show this contact, but it is not an instrument to represent reality. Photography has so many faces and its possibilities are infinite that I am passionate about working with this medium, especially because of its convincing introvert nature as well as its subversive aspects.’ Judging from Swinnen’s writings about the paradox of photography, which refer to the reality value of a photograph and the subjective, situated position of the photographer, not much has changed since his series. Recently he wrote: ‘The photography of yesterday creates the image of today’, and it is this image of today that is depicted in the series ‘The Mad Photographer Photographs about Photography.’

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Notes 1

Interview Bernard Stiegler, September 2008.

2

http://www.fotozuid.be/

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1. Johan Swinnen [I have a vision of life] The breath of life And I sometimes try to find equivalents in photography] 1984 Courtesy of the artist

2. Johan Swinnen [The sign of a wave] Cortazar, Antonioni and Sontag met Bailey very early in 1948 They frequented the same café’s 1984 Courtesy of the artist

3. Johan Swinnen [The critic smiles] The essential catastrophic relationship between photography and its involvement in modern art 1984 Courtesy of the artist

4. Johan Swinnen [Vietnam seventies] Playboy eighties Vision of death Including pre-existent elements A post-apocalyptic aesthetic for the survivors

5. Johan Swinnen [The mad photographer] A private jargon A language of feelings Art and conspiracy

6. Johan Swinnen [Legendary photography] ‘Art never starts from nothing’ (Nicéphore Niépce 1765-1833)

7. Johan Swinnen [(personalized) installation]

8. Johan Swinnen [(P)reserved spaces] The transformation from a playing-cart-world to another world in which photographs suddenly start playing with us and in which peculiar dangers lie low

Formerly Published

—

Formerly published —

Jean Baudrillard, ‘Violence inflicted on images’ was formerly published in French: ‘La violence faite aux images’ in Le Pacte de lucidité, Galilee (Paris, 2004), pp. 77-87 Jean Baudrillard, ‘For illusion is not in conflict with reality’was formerly published in Attack! (English supplement to Attack! Fotografie op het scherpst van de snede), Houtekiet (Antwerpen-Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 40-47 Danielle Leenaerts, ‘Perceive the City. Brussels Photographic Memory in Phases. The relationship between the City and Photography’ was formerly published in Bruxelles à l’infini, Exhibition Catalogue, Centrum Kultury (Krakow, 2006) Michel Onfray, ‘The World in Light. Cartier Bresson’s Time Signatures’ was formerly published in French: ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson, L’usage lumineux du monde’ in Art Press, nr 289 (Paris, april 2003), pp 24-29 Michel Onfray, ‘The Identity of Photography’ was formerly published in French: ‘Identité de la photographie’ in Art Press, nr 218 (Paris, november 1996), pp 27-33 Michel Poivert, ‘The Modern Condition Of Photography in the Twentieth Century’was formerly published in French:‘La condition moderne de la photographie’in L’ombre du temps, Editions du Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2004). English translation by Charles Penwarden

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Johan Swinnen, ‘The Hybrid Photograph’ was formerly published in Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (ed.), Homo Faber, Mercatorfonds (Brussels, 2006), pp. 192-223 Hubertus v. Amelunxen contributions were formerly published: - ‘Photography after Photography. The Terror of the Body in Digital Space’, in v. Amelunxen, Iglhaut, Rötzer (eds.), Photography after Photography. Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, G+B Arts (New York, 1996), pp. 115-126 - ‘Wieder-Gabe und Wiedergang. Zu Derrida und Genet’, in Michael Wetzel, Herta Wolf (Hgg.), Der Entzug der Bilder. Visuelle Realitäten, Fink Verlag (München, 1992), pp. 287-314. English: ‘Reproduction and the Revenant. Derrida and Genet’, in Symbolic Imprints – Essays on Photography and Visual Culture, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Rune Gade and Mette Sandbye (Hrsg.), Aarhus University Press (Copenhagen, 1999), pp. 162-179 - ‘The Crypt of the Gaze’, in v. Amelunxen, Zander (Hrsg.), Victor Burgin – Voyage to Italy, Hatje Cantz (Ostfildern, 2006), pp. 97-101

754

Personalia

—

Personalia —

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photographer, writer and activist. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the award winning Drik Picture Library, the South Asian Institute of Photography, Pathshala and the Chobi Mela festival. Alam has chaired the World Press Photo jury and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Michaël Amy is an Associate Professor of Art History in the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. His articles have appeared in e.g. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (New York, 1999), Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral and its Sculpture (Fiesole, 2001). His book One to One: Conversation avec Tony Oursler was published in Brussels in 2006. Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Once Upon A Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin and Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, winner of the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography.

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Annette W. Balkema is theory lecturer Spatial Design at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU). Publications include The Photographic Paradigm in L&B Series, editor (together with Henk Slager); Leaving the Island for the Generic City in Busan Biennial of Korea 2000; Desire for Detail (2002) in Haunted by Detail, Amsterdam: de Appel; Connecting Worlds (2004) in Artistic Research - L&B Series. She is currently working on Modes of Analyses (FBKVB Research Grant). Terry Barrett, Professor Emeritus of The Ohio State University teaches courses in photography criticism, art criticism, and the teaching of criticism and aesthetics at the University of North Texas. He is especially concerned with interpretation and multiple meanings, social and personal. His books include Criticizing Photographs (4th ed, McGrawHill, 2006), Criticizing Art (2nd ed, McGraw-Hill, 2000), Interpreting Art (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Talking About Student Art (Davis, 1997), and most recently, Why Is That Art?(Oxford, 2008). Ben Baruch Blich (Ph.D.) is at present a senior lecturer in Bezalel – Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. His interests and publications are in the fields history of Western civilization, visual representation, culture and information, art, photography, media studies, and the cinema. In 1989 he was a visiting scholar to the Warburg Institute in London University and worked together with Roger Scruton and Sir E. Gombrich. In 2002 he was a guest Professor to the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Antwerp. His papers were presented in various conferences. Blich is the chief editor of the e-journal History and Theory: Protocols, issued by the History and Theory Dept. in Bezalel. Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Photography, Writing, History (MIT Press, 2001); and Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). His book on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot was published by Phaidon in 2008.

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Personalia

Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism. Tamara Berghmans teaches history and theory of photography at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). She wrote her PhD on Belgian artistic photography. Her publications include articles on Ed van der Elsken in the FotoMuseum Magazine (Antwerp, 2004) and Henri Storck memoreren (Brussels, 2007). She is currently doing research on Dutch photobooks and more specifically on the ‘stream of consciousness’ that is present in these books. Xavier Canonne is an art historian who wrote his PhD in Paris, at the Sorbonne, about surrealism in Belgium. This thesis was published in 2007. He is the director of the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium. He teaches at the ESAPV in Mons. His publications include many works about surrealism and photography. Lynne Cohen was born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1944 and resides in Montreal. Since 1973 she has had numerous one-person shows and participated in many group exhibitions. Her work has been the subject of four books: Occupied Territory, 1988; L’endroit du décor / Lost and Found, 1992; No Man’s Land, 2001 and Camouflage, 2005. A university professor in Canada for many years, she has also taught and conducted workshops in the USA and Europe. A.D. Coleman is a critic, historian, and curator of photography. His books include The Grotesque in Photography (1977), Tarnished Silver (New York, 1996), and The Digital Evolution (Tucson, 1998). He also directs the Photography Criticism CyberArchive (photocriticism.com). A Getty Museum Guest Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Foundation, Coleman received the Cultural Prize of the German Photographic Society (DGPh Kulturpreis) in 2002.

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Tom De Mette teaches at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (Department of Adult Education Sciences) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He is currently working on a doctoral dissertation (PhD) on Digital Media and New Literacy. He publishes on topics like Cultural Policy, E-Culture, IT and Arts and Adult Education. Luc Deneulin is an art historian and teaches ‘Filmstudies’ at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He has made a great many valuable contributions to the fields of film history and criticism. He is a well regarded lecturer, organizer, and writer. With Prof. David Willinger (City College, New York) he published Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus (New York, 1990) and Theatrical Gestures of Belgian Modernism (New York, 2002). He published on directors, like Leni Riefenstahl, Henri Storck, Raoul Servais, Yilmaz Güney and Chris Marker. In 2005 he worked on a critical edition of Leni Riefenstahl’s films on DVD for Pathfinder Ent. (U.S.A.) He was also a counselor for a historical reconstruction of Riefenstahl’s Olympia for the IOC. Later this year his book entitled Leni Riefenstahl’s Films will be published. His research focuses on narrative aspects of the documentary film and on the border between film and photography. Hubert Dethier is Professor Emeritus of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He has published different books and articles on philosophy, but also on film. He is still doing research on Jewish, Christian an Muslim philosophy of the Middle Ages. Willem Elias is dean of the Faculty of Psychology and Education at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He has a PhD in Philosophy and he is president of the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts). His publications include Signs of the Time (Amsterdam ,1997); ‘Profiles of paroxysm’ in Attack, edited by Johan Swinnen (Amsterdam, 1999), Aspects of Belgian Art after 1945 (Ghent, 2005 and 2008). He has mostly written on art theory, cultural studies, art education and art criticism.

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Jan Fabre. As a visual artist, Jan Fabre has built up an exceptional oeuvre, which has earned him extensive international renown. He has been part of several important international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial (1984, 1990 and 2003), Documenta in Kassel (1987 and 1992), the Sao Paolo Biennial (1991), the Lyon Biennial (2000), the Valencia Biennial (2001) and the Istanbul Biennial (1992 and 2001). Fabre is to date the only contemporary artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Parisian Louvre (2008, Angel of Metamorphosis). Jan Fabre’s literary work at the same time illustrates his thinking on theatre: theatre as an all-embracing work of art in which the word is given a well-considered functional place next to such parameters as dance, music, opera, performance elements and improvisation. The austerity with which Fabre uses the medium of the word forces him to make theatre in an innovative way. André Gunthert is a researcher on visual history. He teaches at the l’Ecole des hautes études et sciences sociales (EHESS). He is the president of the Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine (Lhivic), the very first institution in France of visual studies. In 1996 he founded the first French magazine – Etudes photographiques – dedicated completely to the history of photography. At present he focuses his research on digital images and how they are used. Klaus Honnef studied sociology and history in Germany. He is especially known as a curator of innumerable exhibitions. He teaches theory of photography in Hannover. He has written numerous books and was the editor of more than 70 exhibition catalogues. He writes on a regular basis for magazines like Eikon. Internationale Zeitschrift für Photographie & Medienkunst, Photonews – Zeitung für Fotografie and Künstler – Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst. Louis Kaplan is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and Director of the Institute of Communication and Culture at the Mississauga campus. He is the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Duke, 1995), American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2005), and The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minnesota, 2008). He serves on the Editorial Board of Photography and Culture. 759

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Roger Kockaerts has been working as a photographic conservator since the 1970s. He has a prestigious private and institutional clientele both nationally and internationally, and has built up an enviable reputation in his field of expertise. As a means of sharing his knowledge and skills he has taught and lectured on his work extensively. Since 1973 he consecrates himself to the study of growth structures of geometric elements which are generated with the use of the digital computer. Since 1983 he also combines photography and computer structures in diptychs of a conceptual-poetic scope. In 2009 he published an academic handbook on conservation and restoration of photography (co-writer Johan Swinnen): De kunst van het Fotoarchief (The Art of the Photo Archive), University Press Antwerp. Danielle Leenaerts teaches History of Photography at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Institut national de radioélectricité et de cinématographie (INRACI) in Brussels, where she also teaches History of Contemporary Art. Author of numerous articles on photography in collective publications (Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography, edited by Routledge (New York, 2005); From Art Nouveau to Surrealism. Belgian Modernity in the Making, edited by Nathalie Aubert (et alii)(London, 2007). She is currently working on the publication of her PHD thesis dedicated to the magazine Vu, and a historical study of the photographic images of Brussels. Jan-Erik Lundström is the director of BildMuseet, Umeå university (Sweden). Among his latest curatorial projects are Peoples of the North, Politics of Place, Transfer, Society Must Be Defended (for the 1st Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art), Carlos Capelan: Only you, Socialisms and Same, Same, but Different. He was the chief curator of Berlin Photography Festival, 2005, where he curated the exhibition After the Fact, a major survey of documentary practices in contemporary art, and he will be the chief curator of the upcoming Helsinki Photography Festival in 2009. He is the author of several books, including Nordic Landscapes, Tankar om fotografi (Thoughts on Photography) and Irving Penn. And has contributed to major publications such as Horizons: Towards a Global Africa, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph and Photo Art. He has been a guest professor at HISK (Higher Institute

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for Fine Arts), Antwerp, Belgium, the Kunstakademie, Oslo and Malmö Art Academy. Lundström is a prolific international lecturer and writer, contributor to international symposia and to cultural magazines such as Glänta, European Photography, Paletten and tema celeste. Michel Onfray (born January 1, 1959 in Argentan, Orne) is a contemporary French philosopher who adheres to hedonism, atheism, and anarchism. He is a highly prolific author on philosophy and published more than fifty books. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d’un nietzchéen de gauche, Politique du rebelle : traité de résistance et d’insoumission, Traité d’athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique, and La puissance d’exister. Michel Poivert teaches history of photography at the University Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. He made his PhD on pictorialism in photography. In 1995 he became president of the Société française de photographie. His publications include La Photographie pictorialiste en France (Bibliothèque nationale-Hoëbeke, Paris, 1992), La photographie contemporaine, (Flammarion, Paris, 2002) and L’Image au service de la révolution (Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg, 2006). Rolf Sachsse holds the seat in design history and design theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Saarbruecken (HBKsaar) and has written largely on photography, architecture, design, and new music. Among his recent publications there are Aluminium Material der Moderne (Vienna, 2007), Wilhelm Ostwald. Farbsysteme, Das Gehirn der Welt (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004), Fotografie. Vom technischen Bildmittel zur Krise der Repraesentation (Cologne, 2003). Full bibliography: www.hbksaar.de Jan Simons is Associate Professor in New Media at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interests are the relationships, cross-overs and mutual influences between old and new media, in particular film, photography and digital media. His latest book is Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

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Johan Swinnen. Trained photographer. Studied art history, cultural science, photo conservation, communication, museum management and curatorship. PhD on the History of the Philosophy of Photography in museal context. He is Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), at the Artesis University College (Antwerp) and at the Sorbonne (Paris). Also lecturer at Pathshala in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and the Anton de Kom University (Suriname). He is president of the Photo History Research Group Gaze (Brussels) and member of the Photo-Lexic Research Team (Tel Aviv). He has written extensively for numerous books, catalogues and magazines as Eikon, European Photography and Photoq on the central role of historical theory in contemporary world photography. He also did several curatorial projects. Jian-Xing Too was born in Swansea, Wales in 1970 and raised in Canada. She has been living in Paris since 1997. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Paris, Montreal, Taipei, Rio, and Los Angeles. Alongside her artistic practice, since 2005, she has written reviews and articles for ArtReview, Afterall, and Artforum. Jean Paul Van Bendegem teaches logics and philosophy of science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) as well as at the University of Ghent. He’s the head of several research organizations, like the Centre National de recherché en Logique. He is the editor in chief of the magazine Logique et Analyse. Henri Van Lier’s contribution to the field of photography is comparable in its scope and achievements to the work of those thinkers who have been most useful to our understanding of the art form: Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, André Malraux, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes. In his profoundly original and innovative reflection on the medium, Van Lier takes note of photography’s formal peculiarities and its position and function in human and social life. He founded a discipline he calls anthropogeny, which is the historical study of the gradual emergence of what makes us human; in his view, photography has a large role to play in the process.

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Karen Verschooren is a contemporary art and new media art researcher, writer and curator. She currently works for Z33, a centre for contemporary art and design in Hasselt, Belgium. Besides this, she is also heading the Flemish committee for audiovisual arts, advising the Flemish minister of culture. After a six months stay in Madrid and a four-year stay in Boston, she is now based in Brussels and occasionally London. Hubertus v. Amelunxen is an art historian. He co-curated with Timm Starl, in 1989, the first large European exhibition on William Henry Fox Talbot. He was professor of Cultural Studies and the Founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the Muthesius Academy of Architecture, Design and Fine Arts in Kiel and visiting professor in Art History at the Universität Basel, in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California. In May 2005 he was appointed by the French Minister of Culture the General Director of the European School of Visual Arts in Angoulême and Poitiers. He is the author of numerous books, like The Ultimatum of the Image. Rumania in December 1989, (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1991) and Allegorie und Photographie (Mannheim: Universität Mannheim, 1992) He has edited books on media theory and post-structuralism, and curated several international exhibitions and catalogues, among them Photography after Photography, an exhibition which traveled in Europe and North America (G+B Arts, Munich, 1995). Liz Wells writes and lectures on photographic practices. She is editor of The Photography Reader, 2003 and of Photography: A Critical Introduction, 2009, 4th ed.; also co-editor of photographies, Routledge journals. Exhibitions as curator include Uneasy Spaces, an exhibition of work by 19 British-based artists working in photography and photo-video (New York, Sept - Nov. 2006) and Facing East, Contemporary Landscape Photography from Baltic Areas (UK tour 2004 - 2007). Her book, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, is due publication 2010. Other publications on landscape include Liz Wells, Kate Newton and Catherine Fehily, eds., Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now, 2000. She is Professor in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, UK, and convenes the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts. www.landwater-research.co.uk

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Cover photo: Lynne Cohen, Untitled (Magritte Easel) Cover design: Johan Duyck Book design: Stipontwerpt, Brussels (Belgium) Printed in Belgium – © 2010 Academic and Scientific Publishers nv and Fotozuid Comm. V. Ravensteingalerij 28 B-1000 Brussels Tel. 0032 (0)2 289 26 50 Fax 0032 (0)2 289 26 59 e-mail: [email protected] www.aspeditions.be – ISBN 978 90 5487 704 2 NUR 652 Legal Deposit D/2010/11.161/021 – Third printing – All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.