The Cruel Radiance

 This is an “on the other hand … ” response to Felix Grant’s post, Pilate Asked What Is Truth? I don’t think this post disagrees with his. It’s just an elaboration of the problem.

It’s an extract from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers For the US Government 1935-44 by Andrea Fisher (1987). (The part I’m quoting is not specifically about women photographers.)

… It was not the photographs alone which convinced the urban populace of a crisis calling for action in the countryside. They might equally have been understood as artistic expressions of inner vision, as they were soon afterwards. Their truth-effect consisted in the complex intersection of the image with both pervasive claims for the honesty of the instrument and the social reforming arguments which accompanied them in newspapers, journals and exhibitions.

The meaning of the image thus became inseparable from these converging rhetorics. And the prerogative to persuade with such a rhetoric lies with power. Only with power may rhetoric be convincingly presented, not as persuasion, but as objective report.

The Depression was a crisis in an entire regime of truth. As such, it was also a crisis in authority. Newspaper, radio and government officials, the established mediators of social information, had systematically downplayed or ignored the extent of the crisis. In the wake of the 1929 crash, mass unemployment and evictions in the city, and drought, foreclosures and destitute migrations in the countryside were met with only minor monetary reforms from President Hoover. There was neither relief provided for the unemployed, sick or homeless, nor protection for the rights to organize.

The press was no longer believed by the people; it had fallen out of step with its audience. the crucial event in this repudiation was the 1936 election. More than 80% of the press opposed Roosevelt, yet he won by the highest percentage ever. And that repudiation was not just passive cynicism, but an actively expressed hostility. When Roosevelt motored through Chicago after his election the crowd was cheering not only in support of him, but jeering and shouting slogans against the press. In electing him, they clearly felt that what had been defeated was not only his opponent, but an entire informational network.

Irreparable rifts had opened between people’s desperate experience and fragmentary word-of-mouth knowledge of the crisis, and the anodyne view offered by those in whom they had invested their trust. The collapse in their credibility was, as a result, not simply a demand for better information from the existing authorities. Acquiescence in having ‘reality’ mediated by those on high erupted into a call to have reality speak for itself. The established ‘reality’ had been predigested for the common man as its silent and invisible object. A democratization was now demanded through the representation of the common man, by the common man.

It was in response to this pressing demand that the rhetoric of documentary emerged. It became a rhetoric in which the photograph, as re-presentation, was elided in the hope that its subjects could speak for themselves unimpeded. Claims of particular types of image to achieve this transparency were vehemently debated in a wide range of popular journals, symposia, radio discussions, and social and political groups.

Far from its present seclusion within a ‘profession,’ the rhetoric of documentary was an insistent and pervasive speech. It was a speech impelled by a crisis in power, and one which was consequently invested with multiple attempts to supplant that power. Everywhere, the nature of reality, and therefore the means of its transformation were open to contest.

… Everywhere ‘reality’ lay open to contest; and everywhere the camera emerged as paradigm for truth. Even James Agee, searching for a literary language that would confront reality in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, refers to the camera as metaphor for the truth:

all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what it is . . . This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time . . . If I could do it I’d do no writing here at all. It would be photographs and the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speeches, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. A piece of body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

That quest which Agee so voraciously pursued overflowed the bounds of the political to permeate every pore of the social body. His urgency to ’see’ went far beyond the correction of prior misguided myths. Its focus widened to aspects of existence never before visible as sites of passionate intensity. And this imperative to poetically catalog every mundane detail of the Depression’s effects signalled the penetration of crisis into the unspeakably intimate.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/