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Abstract
When we look at a photograph, we read it. We take on board what it shows us, the viewer, and we decipher it. The photographic image, through it years of usage in media and news, family albums and visuals records, has become a teller of truth. Indeed the term ‘the photograph never lies’ alludes to the veracity of the photographic image as a document of no repudiation.
However, is this still the case? Do we still trust the photographic image as a document of truth, both in its indexical and its contextual nature.
Has the availability of manipulation software shifted our relationship with the photographic image to such as degree that what was once certain is no longer so? And what role, if any, has the internet come to play in the usage off, and our understanding off the Photograph?
My research paper will be an investigation into our understanding of the photograph as we enter the second decade of the new digital millennium. I will be looking primarily at how the photograph has shifted, with the times, in relation to available technologies and how its uses and understanding have also shifted with those technologies. I will look at how the pace of the digital era has changed the role of the photograph and how the internet has given rise to the ubiquitous image.
Through the study of classic theorists from Barthes, Benjamin, Berger Mitchell, Sekula, Tagg, Burgin, Sontag amongst others I will hopefully establish a ‘blue print’ for an understanding of the image, that can then be applied on to more recent thinkers such as Kember, Lister, Manovich, to examine the issues mentioned above. And finally I hope to suggest the photograph to be in a state of flux. It has become all things: Art, Document, Information, Truth and Lie.
Key Words
Photography: Individual: Veracity: Digital: Manipulation:
Introduction
The conventional notion of a photograph is that it accurately represents events that have taken place in front of a lens. Photographs depict scenes that show us, the viewer, how things appeared at given periods in time. As Roland Barthes suggested, the photographic image is dependent on the ‘necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens.’(Barthes, 2000b p.76) The photograph is, on the whole, perceived as a representation of reality, instantly negating the mediating presence both of the man and the machine. As John Tagg (2007 p.1) states quite bluntly, ‘The Camera is an instrument of evidence’. However both Tagg and Barthes, are also aware that the camera, and photography its self, is much more than evidential. Victor Burgin explains:
The intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; Photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse’, but this discourses, like any other, engages discourses beyond its self, the ‘photographic text’, like any other, is the site of a complex intertexuality, an overlapping series of previous texts, ‘taken for granted’ at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture. (Burgin, 1983, p.144)
When we look at photographs, we do not just take them for granted. Their meaning, on every level, is dependent on many possible variants, in relation to the image, the viewer and where and when the image is viewed. It would in fact be truer to say that we ‘read’ a photograph, rather than simply look (as to ‘look’ suggests an almost passive act: simply that of recognition). For the reading of a photo ‘involves a series of problematic, ambiguous and often contradictory ’(Clarke,1997, p.27) set of relationships between a variety of viewers and the image.
In this text I will be looking at how we understand photographic images. But more than this I wish to push this understanding further. In the body of the text I wish to question if, and how, the advent of the digitisation of photography has changed our relationship with the photograph.
Chapter 1
Reading an Image
Connotation.
In order to attach meaning to a photograph one must first be able to understand it. In order to understand the photographs I will be discussing in this paper I will be using an analytical model of comprehension as proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure suggested that the fundamental building block of any language was what he called the ‘sign’. The sign consists of two integrated parts, which rely on the cultural comprehension of a language in order for it to be understood. These two elements are the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sound or image that language attaches to the signified, the signified being a tangible object or concept.
For example, the word ‘cow’ is the signifier for a four-legged, bovine animal. The animal itself is the object or concept signified by the word ‘cow’. However, as Saussure points out, this understanding is dependent on pre-learned knowledge of the language. For instance, the signifier in French for the same object or concept is ‘váche’, yet, in the English language system, ‘váche’ as a signifier has no signified, although both are referring to the same animal. In essence, Saussure is explaining how language works. The signifier depends then, not upon its relation to the signified – in this case the cow – but upon its difference to other signs such as cat, dog, horse and so on.
This analysis of meaning is a building block off semiotics. Semiotics or semiology as it is also known, is the study of signs. As a process, it offers ‘a very full box of analytical tools for taking apart an image and tracing how it works in relation to a broader system of meanings’(Rose, 2001,p.75), whilst being ‘centrally concerned with the social effects of meaning.’ (Rose, 2001,p.70) Saussure’s model of the signifier, the signified and the sign is what is known as, in Barthian visual semiotics, a first order semiological system.
A key element in Roland Barthes’ concept of visual semiotics, is the idea of layers of meaning. ‘The first layer is the layer of Denotation, of what, or who is being depicted here. The second layer is the layer of Connotation, of what ideas and values are expressed through what is being represented.’ (vanLeewen, et al 2004, p.94) For Barthes, the sign that is produced by the signifier and the signified is the first unit in a second order semiological system. It is the ‘language object’ and as such becomes almost elementary, for there is no need to understand the linguistic schema behind its production. It is in the second level of signification, which Barthes refers to ‘metalanguage, because it is a second language, which speaks about the first’ (2000a, p.115) where one can find meaning. The ‘cow’ can be read as more than a farm yard animal. It can now take on a second level connotative meanings associated with the animal, such as stupidity, laziness, rurality. However, these attributes of the word ‘cow’ are constructed within a social or cultural framework that are then applied to the object, in this case the cow, and are not inherent within the word.
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Fig 1.1 First order semiological system
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Fig 1.2 Second order semiological system
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Context and effect upon meaning
No photograph can exist outside of a context. The context in which a photograph is viewed can play a major part in the understanding of photographic meaning. Take, for example, the use of a passport photograph. Placed in different contexts, this image can be ‘read’ in different ways. If encountered in large scale – hung on a gallery wall – we may read the image as an ‘art’ piece, with all the cultural baggage that entails; if the same image was encountered in the wallet of a friend or colleague, it would be read as their reminder or souvenir of a loved one; if encountered in a magazine, it can be read as a descriptive tool to give anchorage to a story; and if it is encountered in a passport, it can be read as evidence of someone’s appearance. As John A. Walker explains (1997, p.56):
In the majority of cases, the result of a context shift is a change in the photographs depicted content; different parts or characteristics of the image appear more important in different display contexts.
Or, as Allan Sekula put it, (1982, p.1) ‘the meaning of a photograph, like any other entity, is inevitably subject to cultural definition’.
In order to understand the shifts in meaning that take place from one context to the next, we must, as Roland Barthes has shown, understand the cultural ideological framework in which these shifts take place. In order to comprehend the difference in expectations, where the same image is encountered across a range of situations, we must already have a cultural understanding of the different expectations of each individual situation; for example, we must understand the gallery exhibitions are, ‘for the most part, considered to be art, and as such have meaning’. (Walker, 1997, p.56) In a passport, however, photographs are used only as a tool to confirm the identity of the holder, and as such have no such weighty expectations.
When an image is placed beside, or is accompanied by text, the recontextualisation of the image takes on another dimension. Rather than the image being read for the accumulative affect of what is seen within the frame, the text works to appropriate the image for its own ends. Barthes refers to this process when he suggests that ‘text constitutes a parasitic message designed to connote the image, to quicken it’.(1977, p.25) By this he means the words do not illustrate or expand the photographic meaning; instead the image is used to realise the text, ‘burdening it with a culture’ that serves only to reinforce the text’.(Barthes, 1977, p.26) Text forces an indexical outcome upon an image, controlling the way in which it is viewed, and thus ‘produces (invents) an entirely new signified which is retrospectively projected onto the image, so much so as to appear denoted there’.(Barthes, 1977, p.27) The image and text combination then becomes ‘the voice of anonymous authority and precludes the possibility of anything but affirmation’. (Sekula, 1982, p.86)
Contextual Currency
Context refers not only to where and how an image is viewed, but also to the ideological time frame within which it is understood. John A. Walker attached the terms ‘circulation’ and ‘currency’ to photographs, to explain changing relevance of the image in different periods. The circulation is the distribution of an image through the social strata and institutions, while the currency is understood as the image’s value, usage and meaning within these socio-political spheres. A simple illustration of this concept might be: a photograph, unaccompanied by text or anchorage, of the World Trade Centers before 11th September 2001, illustrating a simple cityscape of New York. The image viewed after 11th September takes on ‘currency’. As Marita Sturken (2004, p.311) suggests of images of the towers before and after the attacks:
their absence spoke more profoundly than their presence ever could. To look at the skyline now is to experience the shock of absence: all images of the towers have now taken on a poignancy that was, before September 11th, unimaginable
The ideological framework of viewing has changed. An image pre 9/11 of the Towers is no longer a banal cityscape. The polysemic nature of the photograph has grown because of the events – both at the time and since – that the image now represents. Thus over time the context of the image has changed dramatically. John A. Walker appropriates Ernst Gombrichs term ‘the beholders share’ to elucidate the point, stating:
A viewer approaches an image not with a blank mind but with a mind already primed with memories, knowledge, prejudices; there is a mental set or context to be taken into account. (Walker, 1997, p.59)
Idio-ocular
As we have seen the photograph is the site of a rich intertextual mix of signs and referents. However the viewer too, as suggested by Walker in the previous quote, is as varied as the possible readings of the image. He too changes, dependent on the era in which he was born; the social class to which he belongs; the prevailing politics of the time; the beliefs with which he was instilled. With each shift in conditions the understanding of the image also shifts. All the previous sub headings are variants that affect how the image is read by the viewer; what, where, when, context, currency, place, age, gender, race, education, sex, political persuasion, religion, what is signified and how, what the image connotes, etc. should all be understood as important elements that shape how we read a photograph.
For the purposes of this paper we cannot refer specifically to each variant when discussing images. There fore I will refer to these variants, as idio-ocular (idio – from Greek idios ‘own, distinct.’: ocular from Latin ocularis, or oculus ‘eye.’) Idio-ocularism is a set of conditions that refer to the sociopolitical, cultural and historical sympathies of the viewer.
Idio-ocularism is not to be misunderstood as an individualist ideology. Individualism would suggest that every viewer of a photograph could in fact have an idiosyncratic reaction to an image, leading to millions of ‘readings’ or interpretations that ultimately renders an image worthless.
As John A.Walker explains:
‘Every one interrupts an image differently, therefore one cannot speak about the meaning of an image; there are as many meanings as there are human beings’. Taken to an extreme example, this [individualist] argument seemed to imply that every photo had, potentially, billions of meanings. But if an image had so many meanings, did this not render it meaningless? (Walker, 1997, p.52)
Idio-ocularism is more connected with what Maurice Halbwachs, Barbie Zelizer and Marita Sturken amongst others have refered to as ‘collective memory’. That people of similar social conditions, shared histories and background – nationality, race, gender, political persuasion, religion, family etc – will tend to read an image form a similar view point, whilst people from a contrasting set of social conditions will approach the photo from a different cultural angle. So whilst there may indeed be a variety of understandings of an image, they are not infinite.
For example, as a white European, living between Britain and Ireland, I can read images in the variety of situations in which I encounter them. Advertising, newspaper, magazine etc. But I do so from a position of power; the power being knowledge. My exposure to the culture in which I live has taught me what task a photograph is performing depending upon the situation in which I find it. I know the large images at the tube stations are advertisements; I know the scantly clad lady shot with a zoom lens in the magazine belonging to the passenger opposite, is a celebrity ,of sorts; I am aware that the man with his arms in the air on the back page on the newspaper, is an England cricketer celebrating victory over Australia. I know all these things without ever having to consciously recognise it because of my exposure to indigenous culture. If I have the same experience in somewhere as culturally similar as the United States, my power/knowledge still works, but is not as image specific. I may recognize a sport, Baseball or Basketball, but I will not know the player, or the significance of the game; I may recognize the aesthetic of the ‘Celeb’ magazine, but I may or may not recognize the celebrity; in the newspaper I will be familiar with the image of some U.S. politicians, but not all. For while my culture may share certain similarities (language, media, history) with the that of North Americans, there are still subtle differences that keep me more removed from the same level of knowledge that I posses in my home culture.
What must be remembered with reference to the notion of the idio-ocular, is that certain groups have more in common with one another than they have not. For as John A. Walker suggests:
…What millions of individuals have in common (e.g. a language), how much experience is shared, especially the fact that individuals belong to social groupings – above all social classes – describe responses to images which are similar for large numbers of the populace. The mass media would simply find communication impossible if there were not common desires, experiences and values to appeal to and to work upon. Pictorial stereotypes do not merely exist externally in the world of the mass media, the inhabit us. (Walker, 1997, p.60)
Further more; while we may share some cultural experiences or histories with closely connected peoples or social classes, crucially, on different occasions we may also share divided histories with the same people. This redefines our social or cultural grouping for individual photographic representations as well as reflecting the values of the same groupings in image specific events. For example, if both I and a British Army officer see an image of British Soldier in World War II, our cultural memory and shared history, is inclined to view him in a positive light, as he was fighting against what we would both agree, was the evil of Nazism. If however, we both see a British soldier photographed during Bloody Sunday in 1972, a more defined social memory or idio-ocularism works to push us apart. Our cultural memories and indoctrinations change completely how we view the image. We may become diametrically opposed with regard to how we read the photograph. Despite the fact that the image shows both of us the same depicted content, we read the image, we understand it, via our own idio-ocular vista and conclude that it represents and documents two very different points of view. But both of these points of view are already established not via the individual, but the collective memory and shared experience of a social political grouping to which either party belongs. As French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs suggested memory is accomplished ‘not in ones own grey matter but via a shared consciousness that is modeled by the agenda of those invoking the present’ (Zeilizer, 1998, p.3)
Chapter 2
The New Photography
Photography and the Digital Debate
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested of photography:
The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. (1973, p.382)
Whilst John Tagg in his seminal work The Buren of Representation explains of the photograph:
What lies ‘behind’ the paper or ‘behind’ the image is not reality – the referent – but reference: a subtle web of discourse through which realism in enmeshed in a complex fabric of notions, representations, images, attitudes, gestures, and modes of action which function as everyday know-how, ‘piratical ideology’, norms within and through which people live their relation to the world. It is by the routes it opens to this complex sphere that the realistic text trades with that generally received picture of what may be regarded as ‘real’ or ‘realistic’ – a picture which is not recognised as such but rather presents its self as, precisely, the Reality. (2007 p.100)
How do we regard these weighty expectations of the photographic image as we enter the 21st century? Can we apply such a fundamental expectation of the photograph, that it delivers the truth and represents reality? When Nietzsche was writing about photography as quoted here, between 1883 and 1886, we may assume his daily exposure to photographic images would have been much less common than our modern day experience of image saturation. As such his understanding of the uses of the ‘photograph’ would have been much less ubiquitous than our own. John Tagg was writing, primarily, with regard to the photograph as a form of surveillance in the early 1900s. Yet taken out of these historical contexts, we can see how the photograph was viewed as a tool of documentary evidence that, to paraphrase Tagg, even became the reality. For some the veracity that was delivered via the camera has been smashed by the advent of digital technologies involvement with photographic practice.
As Liz Wells, amongst others has correctly suggested, there are two main areas of debate concerning the role of the digital in photography. Firstly, the loss of a sense of originality in the physical object, that we called the photograph. If ‘the decisive moment’, as Bresson described it, no longer exists as a photographic print, or, ‘written in light’, in the form of the tangible negative, so too, for some, has vanished the notion of the photographic. As William J. Mitchell rather dramatically puts it:
Photographs appeared to be reliably manufactured commodities, readily distinguishable from other types of images. They were comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world… The visual discourses of recorded fact and imaginative construction were conveniently segregated. But the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties, forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance… An interlude of false innocence has passed. (Mitchell, 1994, p.225)
Mitchell’s’ worry about the ‘reliably manufactured commodities’ calls into question certain legal ramifications with regards to the digital image – ownership, copyright etc. but also frets about the value of a digital image, which has no material ‘original’ (the negative).
The second apparent concern is a loss of connection with the ‘real’ in relation to the actual depicted content of the image. For, as we are all well aware, what we see in photographs can be very easily manipulated, and indeed created from scratch. As Martha Rosler (1991) suggests:
The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph had been under attack for a couple of decades?
Before we can attempt to address and these fears, and input into the debate, we first need to set the parameters on what we mean, for the purposes of this paper, by photography. As complex as our reading of an image is, as laid out in Chapter 1, so too is our relationship with the very notion of the photographic. Perhaps the greatest issue with regards to the photograph is what we expect from it. As we have seen our own idio-ocular perspective shapes how we view the image, but there is also an expectation, as to the ‘Task’ the image performs, separate from the context in which it is viewed.
The Objective and the Subjective
John Tagg argues, (2007, p.14)‘The History of photography stands in relation to the history of Art as the history of writing would stand to the history of Literature.’ By this Tagg is suggesting the conventional history of photography has been written like a history of art, but it is more useful to understand photography, as a set of different mediums, than it is ‘to think of a singular medium with a singular viewpoint, [and a] grand and sweeping history.’ (Lister, 2003, p.220)In other words photography is, like writing, a ‘technique which is employed in many different kinds of work’ (Ibid), photojournalism; documentary; forensic science; holiday snap; sports; advertising, architectural; contemporary art etc., and as such is evasive of generalisations with regard to purpose. Therefore in order to address the role of the digital in the photographic we must first define the history (to use Taggs’ terminology) or purpose for the image.
I will use the terms Objective and Subjective to quickly separate photography into two digestible sections. With these two terms we can swiftly place a purpose, or task, on the photograph in order to comprehend its purpose value.
Objective: An objective photograph should be understood as a photo that claims to show events or represent likenesses of persons. It is photography that is evidential in nature and as such would be generally expected to be unmanipulated in depicted content.
Subjective: A subjective photograph on the other hand would be removed from the evidential constraints of the objective photograph. It would be viewed for its atheistic content, political message, and reflective, perhaps even humanistic, nature. (Indeed we may even suggest it is between these two arenas that we may also be able to draw a distinction between the Photograph {objective} and the Image {Subjective}.)
We must be careful here to understand that these terms are flexible dependent on our own expectation of the image. As Martin Lister explains: (2003, p.223)
That I take the photograph to give me ‘the facts’ of a situation is ‘guaranteed’ by the extent to which I consciously accept the principles of empirical scientific method. That I read a photograph as the ‘subjective expression’ of an artist’s idiosyncratic way of seeing the world depends upon my having the idea that this is what art and artists do (and that its appropriate to see a photograph in this way).
In the New York Times Magazine, July 5th, photographer Edgar Martin published his picture essay in the Times Architecture Issue, titled Ruins of a Second Gilded Age (figs 2.1 to 2.6). The images were accompanied by an article criticising of overzealous developers who designed towns with no infrastructural concerns other than a dependency on the use of cars, whilst also alluding to the speculative greed of the developers. The images, beautiful as they are, were as Barthes suggested, used to realize the text, rather than standing on their own. The photographs, and consequently the article, have now been discredited due to the fact that the photos have been manipulated digitally. Although the manipulation was merely aesthetic enhancement, they did also ‘not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show’ (New York Times website, July 8th 2009). What we see here then is a conscious decision by the New York Times to draw a distinction; when we should view something as Objective, and when we should view it as Subjective.
For the Times, the objectivity of the photo essay should not and cannot be called into question, as they were being used to support the article, or else the integrity of the institution is called into question. The photographers subjectivity, or artistic approach to the image was for him more important than any perceived objective realism. Martins suggests of his work, ‘My work explores the concept of landscape as an idea and a form and summons a disquieting conjunction of reality, hyper-reality, fantasy and fiction.’ (Martins, ‚Landscapes Beyond: The Burden of Proof‚ http://www.edgarmartins.com/)
The images seem more akin with Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson than our standard expectations of editorial photo-realism as such do seem to read more as art than editorial. There fore, it is easily argued that in this context the images should indeed be objective, and as such free from manipulation.
Perhaps a more dramatic and obvious case concerning the misuse of digital technology was Adnan Hajj’s manipulation of an Israeli attack on Beirut in 2006. (figs 2.7 & 2.8) The photographs which were bluntly photoshoped had a political agenda, manifested in the crude cloning of smoke to enhance the scene of destruction depicted. The photographer in question was dropped by Reuters and all 920 images submitted by Hajj to the agency were also withdrawn. Hajj, unlike Martins, was trying to pass off as reality, that which was clearly not. There were no subjective concerns here, rather there was a deliberate attempt to alter the content of the photograph for dramatic, hence, political benefit.
Although both Martin’s and Hajj’s images have been with drawn, it would be very wrong to place both on an equal level on manipulation, or forgery. The Martins pictures, whilst never overtly stating their subjective nature, were misused, in the incorrect context; the Hajj images however were designed to misrepresent. Indeed, had it not been for the seriousness of the matter, the lack of sophistacation with the Photoshop program would almost have seen comical.
The Tangible versus The Digital
Photography, as we have known it, is both ending and enlarging, with an evolving medium hidden inside it as in a Trojan horse, camouflaged, for the moment, as if it were nearly identical: its doppelganger, only better. (Richin, 2009, p.15)
This rather apocalyptic and sarcastic view of photography’s future from Fred Ritchin alludes to a sinister motive behind the development of digital technologies in the photographic world. His fear is based on the ideas of the death of the film based ‘mechanical arrangement of the photographic camera’ that allows real objects to physically ‘print their image by means of optical and chemical light action’. (Lister, 2003, p.219)And, as such, representing truth and object through a combination of scientific and chemical practice.
In Sarah Kember’s essay, The Shadow of the Object, the author is primarily concerned with exploring photography’s ‘paradox’ of ‘apparently fading but always mythical realism’ (1998, p.18) with regard to the notion of film based photography as ‘truth’ of Object. In other words she seeks to understand why some, such as Ritchin, have argued that the veracity of the photograph is under fire, due to the digital process, when in truth, its position has not changed.
Kember locates one of the reasons for this perceived sense of truth loss in our historical investment in the notion of the analogue/film based methodology. By placing film based Objective/Realist photographic practice firmly in the traditions of Modernist Photography (Paul Strand, Edward Weston et al.), Kember argues that a fetishistic relationship between notions of the ‘real’, as represented by the photographic negative, and the physical material of photography (light film chemicals etc), should be understood as an inherent anti digital bias and a reactionary defense of social investment. She explains:
What happens in the transition from analogue to digital photography is that this reminder is underlined, the constructedness of the real becomes far more visible. Our response to this increased awareness is a re-fetishization of the photographic image – object as evidence. (1998, p.28)
In short the author suggests that the Realist argument is nourished by the scientific connection between the photographed ‘object’ and the photographic print. The print becomes the ‘real’ image of the object; it is it (the object) which has left its trace on the negative. The photographic then becomes the objects ‘certificate of presence’. (Barthes, 2000b, p.87)
However any connection we attach to the ‘real’ and analogue practice is purely based in our own belief that this is the case. If we look, for example, at a very early form of manipulation we can see that film based photography could be as loose with the truth as it wished to be. In the mid nineteenth-century Oscar Rejlander ‘concocted photographic montages’ [and ] ‘simulations’,(Rosler 1991) that may not have been intended to be understood as Objective photography, did cause a stir by acquainting a trusting world to the flexible nature of photographic possibilities (fig 2.9). In more recent times Alison Jackson’s (fig 2.10.) simulations have also caused a stir, (if indeed a more jovial manner) but her manipulation has be done in frame. Neither the film nor the camera have ‘lied’, yet the image is for all intents and purposes fake.
Slightly more complex was the February 1982 National Geographic front cover depicting the Pyramids at Giza (fig 2.11). Shot on film, the photograph shows two pyramids side by side at dusk. The viewpoint is horizontal, to fit in with the National Geographic’s format. However the pyramid in the background has been moved closer to the one on the right so the drama of the image could fit into the National Geographic’s printing shape. The circumstances of this particular image are interesting, as it is here, where film and digital meet, and where the Objective and Subjective, again, clash.
If I had to pick a date when the digital era came into photography, it would be 1982. It was then that the National Geographic’s staff modified a horizontal photograph of the pyramids at Giza and made it vertical, suitable for the magazine’s February cover. (Ritchin, 2009, p.27)
What we see with the pyramid photograph is a jump, both in the technology and in the arena in which it performs. In truth National Geographic had retouched many photographs in the past. Cutting film and double exposure has always been common practice, especially at a magazine that is as famous for its imagery as it is its words. However, with this particular image, the use of a computer to perform the task of splicing and regenerating rather than cutting and sticking seems to have signaled the arrival of digital possibilities that for some became to much of a leap. Whilst to others it was merely the use of a new tool to perform an old job.
As Martha Rosler points out
To move a pyramid with the use of a computer seems to some more innocent than moving it, say, by stripping negatives or making photomontages, where the brute act of combination requires the handling of materials and their physical separation by cutting, not just the rearrangement of “information”. To others it seems, for that very reason, more suspect and dangerous. (Rosler 1991)
What we have here, as far back as 1982, is a discussion about the role of digitization in photographic practice.
As discussed earlier the notions of Objective and Subjective can be used to help us understand a photographs task. The debate on this photograph however, not unlike the Martins images, falls between the two. What are we looking at; subjective, aesthetic imagery, or, objective photojournalism? The answer in this case is down to the viewer. Do you naively expect everything you see in the National Geographic to be ‘as shot’ or do you expect a certain amount of retouching. If so, the question then becomes, when is there too much retouching. Or how much is can be done before the image loses its ‘truth’. Is puching and pulling film too much, is the colour balancing with an enlarger acceptable, but not if done on a computer?
The Negative as Aura
When Walter Benjamin wrote his seminal text, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he argued that when considering the artifact, ‘The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of originality’. (2003,p.43) By this Benjamin suggests that our sense of originality exists in our own perceived uniqueness of an object, and it is this, ‘perceived uniqueness’, Benjamin referred to as, the ‘aura’. For Benjamin the aura was not in the object its self but rather in its external attributes, such as its history, its authenticity, its monetary value, its fame or cultural significance at a given time. Benjamin was, broadly speaking, concerned with ‘art’, (paintings that were produced by a painter/author etc.) but with very little reshaping of this notion of aura we can almost apply the same concept onto the photographic object as explained by Kember. Rather than the aura being the values associated with the original painting due to its uniqueness, the photographic aura is the ‘perceived’ Truth of the image because it was shot on film and produced through chemical/scientific process that delivered a one off negative.
It’s this notion of uniqueness, or fetishisation (Kember), that we project on to the object that results in a perception of truth via the object.
For example, a sentiment like this would be very commonplace of a famous Eddie Adams photograph, (fig 3.1)‘…this photograph was taken at the exact moment the shot was fired and clearly shows the moment of execution of the Vietcong guerrilla. The image is original, and unchanged, and the negative proves it’. (Indeed of the Adam’s photo we could just as easily say ‘…it clearly shows the precise moment of the cold blooded murder of a Vietcong prisoner of war’, dependent on idio-ocular stand of the viewer.)
Yet, what makes this photograph read as Objective truth and proof, is our investment in the idea of the negative as representation of the real. The image could have been staged, but we have come to collectively regard it as truth not because it was shot on film, but because of the history and culture of the image, its content, its context and currency (Tagg), and the role it has gone on to play in our collective consciousness. (Interestingly, this killing was also captured on film, but it is the still image which has become our snap shot memory of the event.)
Could we apply an equally similar affirmative statement as the one we have just read to Robert Cappa’s Falling Soldier or Joe Rosenthal’s raising of the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi? These war images were also shot of film, but are more open to debate with regard to ‘truth’, because of their histories and our idio-ocluar interpretations. We know that both the later examples have been called into question with regards to what they represent, and these questions persist, regardless of the perceived neutrality of the medium.
Conversely, does the recent publication of Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard’s final moments cease to be ‘true’ due to the fact the photograph was taken via CMOS chip rather than on film (fig 3.2 ). In a long tradition of ‘moment of death’ war photography, Julie Jacobson’s photograph shows Lance Corporal Bernard last moments, after being hit by a rocket propelled grenade in Helmand province, Afghanistan. The debate surrounding the issues of publication will no doubt continue long after this image has faded from our social consciousness; however its place in the history of photography will not be defined by the medium with which the photograph was produced, but rather the social history which it photograph takes on over the course of time.
Photography’s ability to record; to represent; to advance epistemology; to inspire debate; and to be instructor for social or cultural referents is based on the qualities and complexities of the photograph not in the mechanics of the medium.
If we wish to understand how we have come to place a belief in the physical photograph as an ‘evidential force’ we must consider the photo in ‘more historical and sociological ways.’ (Lister, 2003, p.220-221) In order to do this we must, as Lister suggests:
…question the view that there is a fundamental cultural break between the photographic and the digital. Instead of focusing attention upon the photograph as the product of a specific mechanical and chemical technology, we need to consider technological, semiotic, and social hybridness; the way in which meanings and power are the result of a mixture and compound of forces and not a singular, essential inherent quality. (2003, p.221)
Digital is Real
…two images the administration tried to suppress may come to symbolise America in Iraq: coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, and a grinning Private Lynndie England, pointing mockingly at the genitals of Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison. (Hilsum, 2004)
In early 2004 the Bush Administration was rocked by the release of the now infamous images of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison and photographs of dead US service personnel arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. These photographs, Abu Ghraib in particular, have become icons for an unjust war in Iraq. Their status was earned not by the means of their production, but how we came to understand them. The digitally produced images transcended the argument regarding the veracity of the digital image. These were real, and we all knew it.
Joanna Bourke writing at the time telling suggested of the Abu Ghraib images:
The perpetrators of this sexual violence are clearly enjoying themselves. The cliche “war is hell” takes on a chilling new vigour in these images. After all, these photographs are not “about” the horrors of war. Many, if not most, are part of a glorification of violence. There is no question that many of these snapshots were taken by people who were pleased by what they were seeing. Or what they had done. They are trophies, memorialising agreeable actions. (Burke, 2004)
The term ‘snap shots’ is probably very apt and reveling for these photos. These digital images (which were passed to the Producer of U.S. current affairs show 60minuets on CD) are not open for debate. Burke, and many many others, have commented on the horrendous nature of the photographs and what they depict, but never has any accusation been leveled as to the evidential quality of the images due to their production. The candid, amateurish ‘snapshot’, quality of the imagery alludes to their authenticity. And it this aesthetic, the grainy, at times blurry, high flash, low quality instant digital photograph, with which we are so personally familiar, that has now come to represent the ‘real’ rather than our traditional expectations of the high quality finish of the photo journalist.
Since the availability and relative accessibility of the digital camera, there has been a mass proliferation of images. Not only is the digital camera the recorder of our family events and cherished moments, but, its ease of use and size has made it an ever recording eye, one that is present at all major historical events. From the attack on the World Trade Centers, to the London attacks of July 7th the camera phone and compact camera has given us a first hand eye witness account of events at a pace not seen before.
After the July 7th tube bombings in London 2005 Newsweek Online published an article titled, History’s New First Draft, drawing attention to the instantaneous availability of images from the bomb sites.
…the most instantly iconic photo to emerge from the bombings: a hazy picture of a man in a crowded, eerily lit subway tunnel, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. That picture was taken on a camera phone by Adam Stacey, by no means a professional photographer, who happened to be on the subway train that was hit in a tunnel outside the Kings Cross tube station. (Braiker, 2005, Newsweek Online)
Adam Stacey and Alexander Chadwick (fig 4.1 & 4.2 )had managed to post images form Kings Cross tube station on moblog within 15 minuets of the bombing, before even the emergency services had arrived on the scene. As Rob O’Neil from website, theage.com.au elaborates:(2005)
From deep underground, or while leaving the scene, victims and witnesses were taking pictures, posting them, sending texts, emailing and phoning in eyewitness accounts to mainstream media organisations and to friends and bloggers around the world. This had happened before, but never on the scale or with the effectiveness achieved in London last week. Until then, “citizen journalism” was an idea. It was the future, some people said. After London, it had arrived.
What was happening in London underground with the availability of technology in the form of the digital camera was a democratisation of photojournalism: a democratisation that negated the concerns of theoretical discourse with regards to the role of the digital as a means of evidential documentation.
The digital photograph then has been pushed to the forefront of out cultural understanding of photography. Children born after 2002 will probably always expect to see the image displayed on the camera seconds after it was shot. The very notion of having to wait to see if you exposed correctly will be as alien to them as the opposite would have been to Fox Talbot.
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Fig 2.1 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.2 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.3 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.4 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.5 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.6 Edgar Martin, ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’, New York Times Magazine, July 5th 2009.
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Fig 2.7 Adnan Hajj Israeli attack on Beirut 2006 after manipulation
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Fig 2.8 Adnan Hajj Israeli attack on Beirut 2006 pre-manipulation
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Fig 2.9 Oscar Rejlander, The Head of John the Baptist on a Charger (1857-58). Courtesy of the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, UK
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Fig 2.10 Alison Jackson, Diana and family (Mental images series), 1999
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Fig 2.11 National Geographic Vol.161 No.2 February 1982, Cover.
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Fig 3.1 Eddie Adams, Nguy‑en Ng‑Õc Loan executing Nguy‑en Van LÈm, February 1, 1968.
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Fig 3.2 Julie Jacobson, the Death of Joshua Bernard, taken from The Observer, September 6th 2009.
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Fig 4.1 Adam Stacey, Camera phone image, Piccadilly Line, July 7th 2005
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Fig 4.2 Alexander Chadwick, Kings Cross, July 7th 2005.
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Conclusion
Our connection with the photograph has always been a spurious one. We invent sayings, and truisms, such as the camera adds 10 pounds, or the camera never lies, to explain away, or, to justify what we see in the photographic image. We declare the photo a representation of truth, whilst also seeking from it aesthetic pleasure. Our connection then with the photo can be as varied as our mood, yet it uses, despite being flexible, we seek to confine and pigeon-hole into and certainties.
In the body of this paper I have sought to show a connection between the photographs history with regards to our understanding, but also how we have come to share what, at times, is an agreed expectation of an photograph.
I have also sought to show how the use of technologies has shaped our cultural understanding of how, why and when a photograph can be used in a particular context. However, I have also shown how digital technologies have changed our own connection with the notion of the photographic, yet still managed to keep, and, indeed perhaps reinvent, the medium for the new digital era in which we now find our selves.
With regard to my own practice the notion of digital, idio-ocularism, and objective and subjective play a great part. Fig 5.1 and 5.2 are images I have shot for my on going work on the redevelopment of Northern Ireland. Taken in the Maze prison shortly before its destruction, the images were shot on film. The negatives were then digitally scanned into a computer and the colour and contrast, amongst other things, were affected until I was happy with the aesthetic values of the photograph. In short the images were processed through Photoshop and digitally (for want of a better term )‘enhanced’. The question I must answer is: are these photographs still representations of reality? Or have they become aestheticised images that can no longer truly represent what they show? Does this aestheticisation remove the truth value of the images?
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Fig 5.1 Kevin Fox. Inside The Maze: Nissan Hut Area.
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Fig 5.2 Kevin Fox. Inside The Maze: Admin Gate
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For me the answer is very simple. Regardless of their means of production, the images are both real and, like earlier examples, also subjective. Their composition and display may place them in the terms of ‘art’, but their historical functionality, as records of a now razed structure, cannot be called into question simply because of the means used in image processing.
As I have sought to explain through out the body of this paper, the digitisation of photography, is like the digitization of any other process, simply the replacement of tools. Since the advent of the digital era there digital technologies have replaced many things: computers replaced type writers: ATM cards replaced balance books: hard drives replaced filing cabinets: MP3 replaced tape: and SatNav’s replaced maps: etc. Photography, like many other aspects of our daily lives, has embraced the uses of digital technologies to speed up and democratise its self. Theorists and practitioners have been debating the affect and importance of the digital process on the photographic world, but in truth, as is the tradition with this still modern medium, digital is just another step in its progression. If, as Lev Manovich (2003) explains, we focus:
…on the abstract principles of digital imaging, then the difference between a digital and a photographic image seems enormous. But if we consider the concrete digital technologies and their uses, the difference disappears. Digital Photography simply does not exist.
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