Just as the meaning of the past is the prerogative of the present to invent and choose, the meaning of an image does not come intact and whole.
Quotes in this post are taken from the Preface to the book, Reading American Photographs: Images as History; Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, by Alan Trachtenberg (1989):
… while the camera has undeniably altered our sense of the past by showing us the actual look of things and persons (within the limits, of course, of adjustments of lens, light, and perspective imposed by the photographer), there is still the question of how we make sense of what we see. The historical value of photographs includes depiction but goes beyond it. Siegfried Kracauer helps us formulate a deeper connection between photography and history by emphasizing the role of interpretation. Photographers and historians face in common an “opaque mass of facts.” While [Paul] Valéry sees photographs as supplemental and corrective to history, Kracauer, in History: the Last Things Before the Last (1969), explores the tension between facts and meanings, between visual details in themselves and the significance discovered in and through them. To serve as history, facts must be made intelligible, must be given an order and a meaning which does not crush their autonomy as facts. The historian’s task resembles the photographer’s: how to make the random, fragmentary, and accidental details of everyday existence meaningful without loss of the details themselves, without sacrifice of concrete particulars on the altar of abstraction.
The historian employs words, narrative, and analysis. The photographer’s solution is in the viewfinder: where to place the edge of the picture, what to exclude, from what point of view to show the relations among the included details. Both seek a balance between “reproduction and construction,” between passive surrender to the facts and active reshaping of them into a coherent picture or story. Ordering facts into meaning, data into history, moreover, is not an idle exercise but a political act, a matter of judgment and choice about the emerging shape of the present and future. It may be less obvious in the making of a photograph than in the writing of history, but it is equally true: the viewfinder is a political instrument, a tool for making a past suitable for the future.
Kracauer’s analogy between photography and history can be extended even further. Photographers have another resource in addition to the viewfinder for making sense of the pulsating life in front of the lens. They can order the photographs themselves, arrange them in sequences, compose them in certain ways, perhaps accompanied by a written text, to express a particular meaning. In some cases the meaning seems imposed by the text, by juxtaposed captions or narratives; in others, it seems to arise from the images themselves, from the dialogue among them, and between them and the viewer’s own experience. In all cases, as Kracauer observes, the relation between images and imputed meanings is fraught with uncertainties, for, like opaque facts, images cannot be trapped readily within a simple explanation or interpretation. They have a life of their own which often resists the efforts of photographers and viewers (or readers) to hold them down as fixed meanings.
… For the reader of photographs there is always the danger of over-reading, of too facile a conversion of images into words. Speaking of “the camera’s affinity for the indeterminate,” Kracauer remarks that, “however selective,” photographs are still “bound to record nature in the raw. Like the natural objects themselves they will therefore be surrounded by a fringe of indistinct multiple meanings.” All photographs have the effect of making their subjects seem at least momentarily strange, capable of meaning several things at once, or nothing at all. Estrangement allows us to see the subject in new and unexpected ways. Photographs entice viewers by their silence, the mysterious beckoning of another world. It is as enigmas, opaque and inexplicable as the living world itself, that they most resemble the data upon which history is based. Just as the meaning of the past is the prerogative of the present to invent and choose, the meaning of an image does not come intact and whole. Indeed, what empowers an image to represent history is not just what it shows but the struggle for meaning we undergo before it, a struggle analogous to the historian’s effort to shape an intelligible and usable past. Representing the past, photographs serve the present’s need to understand itself and measure its future. Their history lies finally in the political visions they may help us realize.
Two phrases to think about: ”a tool for making a past suitable for the future,” and “the meaning of the past is the prerogative of the present to invent and choose.”
Invent and choose. Can you deny it?
-Julie
“They can order the photographs themselves, arrange them in sequences, compose them in certain ways, perhaps accompanied by a written text, to express a particular meaning.”
Or course!
One underlying assumption appears to be that photographs present to the brain for interpretation the same thing that an eye would see if it was there. It can be argued that this is seldome the case. For instance, when I am talking to a person I look at that person’s face for subtle nuances of mood and response. A photograph of that person, on the other hand, would be a poor substitute. In the first place, such a photograph would almost never be the same size and dimensions of said person. Secondly, photographs of people present us with the whole person in an unfiltered manner. My visual interaction with a person rarely presents me with this view but, instead, a concentration on a single focus point in the same way that I am not really “seeing” the computer screen on which I type this but just the word that I am typing.
Perhaps it is the difference between reading about the Orioles getting smashed, once again, seeing pictures of said smashing, seeing it on T.V., or seeing it in person.
My point is, that the physical process and setting of assimilating images may be as important, if not more important, than the mental status of the observer. Just think how little we are moved by the multiple pictures of children experiencing intolerable suffering in Iraq, Gaza, Dafur and elsewhere. Maybe Agassiz (in the next post) et al were able to look on slaves in the same way we are able to tolerate these images of shattered childhood.
Comment by Dr. C. — July 12, 2009 @ 11:56 am
Exactly, exactly, exactly … yet you would be amazed at the stubborn persistence of people posting to the forums at Photo.net (and elsewhere) who absolutely believe that an unmanipulated photograph is “the truth.”
I have a somewhat (but not entirely) facetious post on one of the things missed by a photograph (made last March): Blame It On Your Nose
As to why or how people can be unmoved by what, by any measure, surely should move them, my cynical self thinks that they simply find it inconvenient to be moved. It interferes with something that they don’t want to interfere with.
Comment by unrealnature — July 12, 2009 @ 2:52 pm