A variety of theories to explain the meaning of the photographic image have developed, especially since the 1970s, in association with critiques of realism as an unproblematic reflection of reality, and of the concept of the photograph as an unmediated copy of the world. On the whole, they treat photography as a language, acquiring meaning through cultural and social conventions, and conscious and unconscious processes, which cannot be reduced to subject matter, visual style, and authorial intentions, as modernist writers on the medium have tended to do. They are part of a more general academic tendency, defined as postmodern, rupturing or rejecting modernism. (Postmodernity is characterized by the collapse of overarching narratives, in favour of interdisciplinary approaches concerned with analysing meaning- producing processes which are not necessarily medium specific.)
Thinking Photography (1982), edited by Victor Burgin, argues for a variety of critical methodologies based on a plurality of practices— advertising, documentary, artistic, amateur, and so forth. The book reflects many of the interests of postmodern theory, for example the visual semiotics of Umberto Eco (b.1932) and Roland Barthes, or Jacques Lacan's (1901-81) post-structuralist rereadings of Sigmund Freud, used to analyse how images mobilize desires, and enable and control visual pleasures. Lacan's theorization of the unconscious as being structured like a language is a point of contact between earlier semiotics and the more open approach of semiology, which includes psychoanalytical theories to interpret images as symptoms of the unconscious workings and disturbances of a culture. The collection includes ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) by Walter Benjamin, attesting to the important contemporary influence of his writings on photography and visual culture. It is also part of a renewed interest in the political engagement of early avant-garde groups, which had been downplayed by post-war modernism. Overall, the book emphasizes how photographic meaning is not natural, universal, or intrinsic to the image, but socially produced. It argues for the need to focus on the ideological, cultural, and economic contexts in which meanings are created, not only at the point of production, but also of reception. In his contribution, Allan Sekula argues that all photographic meanings are the result of traffic between subjectivism: the photograph as a magical, emotional, or aesthetic experience; and objectivism: the photograph as science, document, or information. Photographs cannot be separated from the representational tasks assigned to them by the institutions producing, circulating, and using them. His call for a historical investigation of the production of photographic meaning has remained too often unheard, and Thinking Photography can also be considered symptomatic of the dangers of overemphasizing theory. Images can become ‘theorized’ in the abstract, rather than investigated as part of a historically and geographically specific material culture. The book's attempt to differentiate photographic theories from criticism is problematic; singling out images for discussion is in itself a critical judgement, even if this is unacknowledged. Moreover, while it is important to investigate how all images signify, it must be acknowledged that some do so more elegantly than others, in ways that are sensually or intellectually more satisfying, even if there is no final interpretation or consensus about them. The book has also been criticized for its lack of feminist perspectives.
It is important to remember that photography has been theorized about since its inception. As a new technology, its uses, status, and values were open to debate. A recurrent theme in 19th-century writings was the radical difference between photography and previous methods for obtaining images: at no stage is the quality of the result connected to the ability of the image maker to draw or otherwise make marks by hand. For most of the 19th century, this militated against the acceptance of photography as a form of art.
In his 1843 Edinburgh Review article on ‘Photogenic Drawing, or Drawing by the Agency of Light’ David Brewster was the first to make explicit how the nature of photography, an image directly caused by the light reflected off historical actions, and the features of important people or loved ones, gave it a special value. ‘The image is connected with its prototype by sensibilities peculiarly touching. It was the very light which radiated from his brow … that pencilled the cherished image, and fixed [itself] for ever there.’ This relationship between a photograph and its object was further theorized by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his writings on logic and semiotics. Peirce divided the relationships between signs and their meaning into three fundamental types: the index, a sign that, like a footprint or a shadow, denotes an object by being physically caused by that object; the icon, a sign which looks the same as the object signified, for example a portrait; and the symbol, a sign related to its meaning only by social conventions, as in language. In the photograph, iconic and indexical features often come together. Its indexicality seems to guarantee its iconic content, its realism, but the two are not the same. Moreover, iconic or indexical signs also acquire or are given symbolic significance. In the 20th century this quality of photography has had its most enduring formulation in Camera Lucida (1980) by Barthes. His reflections are framed as a search for the source of his, and by extension his culture's, fascination with photography, its punctum. He finds it in its power as an ‘emanation’ of the referent: ‘from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.’ This becomes apparent to him only when he looks at a photograph of his own mother: she was there, and the light reflected off her beloved body has been captured and immortalized into precious silver by the photographic process, creating an image that is a relic of both the presence and the absence of the mother.
In the early 20th century, the development of illustrated magazines gave photographs a new importance as instruments of mass communication. The photographic image, seen as a code-free visual language because of its indexicality, was considered at once able to express the individuality of the photographer, and to give documentary authority to humanist values constructed as universal. In artistic circles, debates shifted from photography's pictorial qualities to more modernist concerns. As Benjamin wrote in his seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), ‘photography freed the hand of the most important artistic function which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into the lens’. Photographers and artists debated whether this mechanized vision was best exploited through straight photography, or experimental and abstract images.
John Tagg, in The Burden of Representation (1988), argues that the indexical nature of the photograph does not explain its meanings. ‘What makes the link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign is a discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in which particular optical and chemical devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and produce a new reality—the paper image which, through further processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.’ Rather than being a guarantor of realism, the camera is itself an ideological construct, producing an all-seeing spectator and effacing the means of its production. Analyses of who has possessed the means to represent and who has been represented reveal that photography has been profoundly implicated in issues of political, cultural, and sexual domination. This area of investigation has especially drawn upon Michel Foucault's (1926-84) reflections on the emergence of forms of knowledge; on the modern notion of the subject; and on practices of power which produce subjects actively participating in the dominant disciplinary order. Particularly influential have been his rejection of the notion of a pre-given self or human nature, and his insistence that every system of power and knowledge also creates possibilities of resistance. The role of critics then becomes the deconstruction of dominant assumptions within and about representations, to identify works embodying the possibility of resistance.
Feminist analyses have emphasized the active role of representation in the construction of gender differences, in themselves a matter of representation, of the meaning given by culture to biological differences. They have used psychoanalytical theory as a patriarchal tool with which to deconstruct patriarchy itself. In a 1973 essay, Laura Mulvey argued that the misogynistic images of women as sex objects so common in popular culture were not actually representing women, but male anxieties about castration, allayed by fetishizing the female body. In her essays on classical Hollywood cinema (1975, 1981) Mulvey endeavoured to show how the active gaze of the spectator is masculinized by the cinematic apparatus, while the female protagonist is constructed as its seductive object. The pleasures of the gaze are, in psychoanalytical terms, related to unconscious fantasies of control and power, and its active and passive forms, voyeurism and exhibitionism, are connected. The desire to look always implies, at least unconsciously, a desire to be looked at. Dominant cultural forms, however, have traditionally arranged the pleasures of looking in an asymmetrical gender balance. Voyeurism, as an active form, is associated with masculinity; exhibitionism with passivity and femininity: ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’. Her work on the gaze has generated wide debate, but, however criticized or modified, it remains an important landmark in understanding the gendered implications of the pleasures and anxieties of looking. Part of the attraction of photographs derives from their capacity to allow the viewer to disavow distinctions between reality and representation from the safe position of the hidden voyeur.
The hold of the index on our culture has been analysed symptomatically by Christian Metz (b. 1931) in ‘Photography and Fetish’ (1985), combining Freud's concept of ‘fetishism’ with the processes identified in his study of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Metz discusses the fetishistic qualities of photographs: they are small and can be touched and kept in private containers; make the spectator master of the gaze, allowing the possibility of a lingering look; are closer to the pure index, stubbornly pointing to the traces left by what was but no longer is. His concept of fetishism is less gender specific than that used by Mulvey. What is being disavowed by looking at and emoting over photographs, whatever their subject, is the trauma of loss and separation, and the fundamental gap between an unobtainable unmediated experience, and the means to represent it.
More recently, feminist critics have used concepts of masquerade and abjection to understand the multi-layered plays of and with identity permitted by the photographic medium. Julia Kristeva's (b. 1941) notion of the abject, that which must be expelled to establish the clean and proper self, yet can never be totally expelled as it is part of being alive (saliva, faeces, menstrual blood), has been used to analyse our cultural fascination with images of bodily horrors, made at once disturbingly close and pleasurably contained by the photographic process.
As photography's indexicality has been undermined by digital techniques, and by convergence between still and moving images, theories of photographic meaning face dispersion into the expanded field of digital culture, or further self-definition through a reappraisal of the material specificities of photographs, in particular historical instances.
— Patrizia di Bello
Bibliography
- Connor, S., Postmodernist Culture (1989).
- Mulvey, L., Visual and Other Pleasures (1989).
- Squires, C. (ed.), The Critical Image (1990).
- Solomon-Godeau, A., Photography at the Dock (1991).
- Wells, L. (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction (3rd edn. 2004)
