Susan Sontag. The Heroism Of Vision
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those situation in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beautiful.) Nobody exclaims, “Isn’t that ugly! I must take a photograph of it.” Even of someone did so that, all it would mean is: “I find that ugly thing . . . beautiful.”
It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. House-proud hosts may pull out photographs of the place to show visitors how really splendid it is. We learn to see ourselves photographically, to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph. Photographs create the beautiful and - over generations of picture-taking - use it up. Certain glories of nature, for example, have been all but abandoned to the indefatigable attentions of amateur camera buffs. The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs.
Many people are anxious when they’re about to be photographed: not because they fear, as primitives do, being violated but because they fear the camera’s disapproval. People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their best. They feel rebuked then the camera doesn’t return an image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. But few are lucky enough to be “photogenic” - that is, to look better in photographs (even when not made up or flattered by the lighting) than in real life. That photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid. A decade after Fox Talbot’s negative-positive process had begun replacing the daguerreotype (the first practicable photographic process) in the mid-1840s, a German photographer invented the first technique for retouching the negative. His two versions of the same portrait - one retouched, the other not - astounded crowds at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855 (the second world fair, and the first with a photography exhibit). The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.
The consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes form the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy form the science, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted form nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance. This was a task which painting was too slow and cumbersome a procedure to take in, no mater how many nineteenth-century painters shared Millet’s belief that le beau c’est le vrai. Astute observers noticed that there was something naked about the truth a photograph conveyed, even when its maker did not mean to pry. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne has the young photographer, Holgrave, remark about the daguerreotype portrait that “while we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that not painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.”
Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers make seeing into a new kind of project: as of seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful. Once an object of wonder because of its capacity to render reality faithfully as well as despised at first for its base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous promotion of the value of appearances. Appearances as the camera records them. Photographs do not simple render reality - realistically. It is reality which is scrutinized, and evaluated, for its fidelity to photographs. “In my view,” the foremost ideologue of literary realism, Zola, declared in 1901 after fifteen years of amateur picture-taking, “you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.” Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing he very idea of reality, and of realism.
The earliest photographers talked as if the camera were a copying machine; as if, while people operate cameras, it is the camera that sees. The invention of photography was welcomed as a means of easing the burden of ever accumulating information and sense impressions. In his book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) Fox Talbot relates that the idea of photography came to him in 1833, on the Italian Journey that had become obligatory for Englishmen of inherited wealth like himself, while making some sketches of the landscape at Lake Como. Drawing with the help of a camera obscure, a device which projected the image but did not fix it, he was led to reflect, he says, “on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the camera throws upon the paper” and to wonder “is it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably.” The camera suggested itself to Fox Talbot as a new form of notation whose allure was precisely that it was impersonal - because it recorded a “natural” image; that is, an image which comes into being “by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever form the artist’s pencil.”
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer - a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, sided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.
A Frenchman with a daguerreotype camera was already roaming the Pacific in 1841, the same year that the first volume of Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe was published in Paris. The 1850s was the great age of photographic Orientalism: Maxime Du Camp, making a Grand Tour of the Middle East with Flaubert between 1849 and 1851, centered his picture-taking activity on attractions like the Colossus of Aby Simbel and the Temple of Baalbek, not the daily life of fellahin. Soon, however, travellers with cameras annexed a wider subject matter than famous sites and works of art. Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in that everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions.
There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity - allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, “awaiting the proper moment” to take his celebrated picture, “Fifth Avenue, Winter.” The proper moment is when one can see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way. The quest became the photographer’s trademark in the popular imagination. By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist - without necessarily having to leave home. Readers of the popular press were invited to join “our photographer” on a “journey of discovery,” visiting such new realms as “the world from above,” “the world under the magnifying glass,” “the beauties of every day,” “the unseen universe,” “the miracle of light,” “the beauty of machines,” the picture that can be “found in the street.”
Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals - a corner of material reality that the eye doesn’t see at all or can’t normally isolate; or the overview, as from a plane - these are the main targets of the photographer’s conquest. For a while the close-up seemed to be photography’s most original method of seeing. Photographers found that as they more narrowly cropped reality, magnificent forms appeared. In the early 1840s the versatile, ingenious Fox Talbot not only composed photographs in the genres taken over from painting - portrait, domestic scene, townscape, landscape, still life - but also trained his camera on a seashell, on the wings of a butterfly (enlarged with the aid of a solar microscope), on a portion of two rows of books in his study. But his subjects are still recobnizably a shell, butterfly wings, books. When ordinary seeing was further violated - and the object isolated form its surroundings, rendering it abstract - new conventions about what was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful become just what the eye can’t (or doesn’t) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.
In 1915 Paul Strand took a photograph which he titled “Abstract Patterns Made by Bowls.” In 1917 Strand turned to close-ups of machine forms, and throughout the twenties did close-up nature studies. The new procedure - its heyday was between 1920 and 1935 - seemed to promise unlimited visual delights. It worked with equally stunning effect on homely objects, in the nude (a subject one might have supposed to be virtually exhausted by painters), on the tiny cosmologies of nature. Photography seemed to have found its grandiose role, as the bridge between art and science; and painters were admonished to learn form the beauties of microphotographs and aerial views in Moholy-Nagy’s book Von Material zur Architektur, published by the Bauhaus in 1928 and translated into English as The New Vision. It was the same year as the appearance of one of the first photographic best-sellers, a book by Albert Renger-Patzsch entitled Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful), which consisted of one hundred photographs, mostly close-ups, whose subjects range from a colocasia leaf to a potter’s hands. Painting never made so shameless a promise to prove the world beautiful.
The abstracting eye - represented with particular brilliance on the period between the two world wars by some of the work of Strand, as well as of Edward Weston and Minor White - seems to have been possible only after the discoveries made by modernist painters and sculptors. Strand and Wexton, who both acknowledge a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz’s images. But it is just as true that the influence flowed the other way. In 1909, in his magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz notes the undeniable influence of photography in painting, although he cites only the Impressionists - whose style of “blurred definition” inspired his own. And Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision correctly points out that “the technique and spirit of photography directly or indirectly influenced Cubism.” But for all the ways in which, from the 1840s on, painters and photographers have mutually influenced and pillaged each other, their procedures are fundamentally opposed. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates our perception of it - as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. The subject of Weston’s “Cabbage Leaf,” taken in 1931, looks like a fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the image makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it is (surprise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth, it wouldn’t be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, form the fine arts. Hence the formal qualities of style - the central issue in painting - are, at most, of secondary importance in photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don’t know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know what piece of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet - famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936 - becomes far more interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.
Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things. When Thoreau said, “You can’t say more than you see,” he took for granted that sight had pride of place among the senses. But when, several generation later, Thoreau’s dictum is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake. Thoreau still lived in a polysensual world, though one in which observation had already begun to acquire the stature of a moral duty. He was talking about a seeing not cut off from the other senses, and about seeing in context (the context he called Nature), that is, a seeing linked to certain presuppositions about what he thought was worth seeing. When Strand quotes Thoreau, he assumes another attitude toward the sensorium: the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts.
The most influential version of this attitude is to be found in painting, the art which photography encroached on remorselessly and plagiarized from enthusiastically from its beginnings, and with which it still coexists in febrile rivalry. According to the usual account, what photography did was to usurp the painter’s task of providing images hat accurately transcribe reality. For this “the painter should be deeply grateful,” insists Weston, viewing this usurpation, as have many photographers before and since, as in fact a liberation. By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation - abstraction. But photography’s impact on painting was not as clear-cut as that. For, as photography was entering the scene, painting was already, on its own, beginning its long retreat form realistic representation - Turner was born in 1775, Fox Talbot in 1800 - and the territory photography came to occupy with such rapid and complete success would probably have been depopulated anyway. (The instability of nineteenth-century painting’s strictly representational achievements is most clearly demonstrated by the fate of portraiture, which came more and more to be about painting itself rather than about sitters - eventually ceased to interest most ambitious painters, with such notably recent exceptions as Francis Bacon and Warhol, who borrow lavishly form photographic imagery.)
The other important aspect of the relation between painting and photography omitted in the standard account is that the frontiers of the new territory acquired by photography immediately started expanding, as some photographers refused to be confined to turning out those ultra-realistic triumphs with which painters could not compete. Thus, of the two famous inventors of photography Daguerre never conceived of going beyond the naturalist painter’s range of representation, while Fox Talbot immediately grasped the camera’s ability to isolate forms which normally escape the naked eye and which painting had never recorded. Gradually photographers joined in the pursuit of more abstract images, professing scruples reminiscent of the modernist painters’ dismissal of the mimetic as mere picturing. Painting’s revenge, if you will. The claim made by many professional photographers to do something quite different form recording reality is the clearest index of the immense counter-influence that painting has had on photography. But however much photographers have come to share some of the same attitudes about the inherent value of perception exercised for perception’s sake and the (relative) unimportance of subject matter which have dominated advanced painting for more than a century, their applications of these attitudes cannot duplicate those of painting. For it is in the nature of a photograph that it can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can. Nor can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself, which is in some sense the ultimate aim of modernist painting.
The version of the modernist attitude most relevant to photography is not to be found in painting - even as it was then (at the time of its conquest, or liberation, by photography), certainly as it is now. Except for such marginal phenomena as Super Realism, a revival of Photo-Ralism which is not content with merely imitating photographs but aims to show that painting can achieve an even greater illusion of verisimilitude, painting is still largely ruled by a suspicion of what Duchamp called the merely retinal. The ethos of photography - that of schooling us (in Moholy-Nagy’s phrase) in “intensive seeing” - seems closer to that of modernist poetry than that of painting. As painting has become more and more conceptual, poetry (since Apollinaire, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams) has more and more defined itself as concerned with the visual. (“No truth but in things,” as Williams declared.) Poetry’s commitment to concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem’s language parallels photography’s commitment to pure seeing. Both imply discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity: wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity.
While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer’s venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to by performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, “revealing to others the living world around them,” as Weston described his own work, “showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed.”
Although Weston (like Strand) also claimed to be indifferent to the question of whether photography is an art, his demands on photography still contained all the romantic assumptions about the photographer as Artist. By the century’s second decade, certain photographers had confidently appropriated the rhetoric of a vanguard art: armed with cameras, they were doing rude battle with conformist sensibilities, busy fulfilling Pound’s summons to Make It New. Photography, not “soft, gutless painting,” says Weston with virile disdain, is best equipped to “bore into the spirit of today.” Between 1930 and 1932 Weston’s diaries or Day-books are full of effusive premonitions of impending change and declaration of the importance of the visual shock therapy that photographers were administering. “Old ideas are crashing on all sides, and the precise uncompromising camera vision is, and will be more so, a world force in the revaluation of life.”
Weston’s notion of the photographer’s agon shares many themes with the heroic vitalism of the 1920s popularized my D.H. Lawrence: affirmation of the sensual life, rage at bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, self-righteous defence of egotism in the service of one’s spiritual vocation, manly appeals for a union with nature. (Weston calls photography “a way of self-development, a means to discover and identify oneself with all the manifestations of basic forms - with nature, the source.”) But while Lawrence wanted to restore the wholeness of sensory appreciation, the photographer - even one whose passions seem so reminiscent of Lawrence’s - necessarily insists on the preeminence of one sense: sight. And, contrary to what Weston asserts, the habit of photographic seeing - of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs - creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.
Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. These discrepancies were much remarked by the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to think photographically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it was called. (Now, as William Ivins, Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt for that distortion.) Thus, one of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings onto things, things onto living beings. The peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous in a way that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the pepper are photographed for the play of forms - but the body is characteristically shown bent over upon itself, all the extremities cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal lighting and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening the abstractness of the body’s form; the pepper is viewed close-up but in its entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a heightening of its seeming palpability.
It was the beauty of forms in industrial and scientific photography that dazzled the Bauhaus designers, and, indeed, the camera has recorded few images more interesting formally than those taken by metallurgists and crystallographers. But the Bauhaus approach to photography has not prevailed. No one now considers the beauty revealed in photographs to be epitomised by scientific microphotography. In the main tradition of the beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human decision: that this would make a good photograph, and that the good picture would make some comment. It proved more important to reveal the elegant form of a toilet bowl, the subject of a series of pictures Weston did in Mexico in 1925, than the poetic magnitude of a snowflake or a coal fossil.
For Weston, beauty itself was subversive - as seemed confirmed when some people were scandalized by his ambitious nudes. (In fact, it was Weston - followed by André Kertész and Bill Brandt - who made nude photography respectable.) Now photographers are more likely to emphasize the ordinary humanity of their revelations. Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough. Ambitious modernists, Like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing. Weston’s assertion that “photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision” seems typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts during he first third of the century - hopes since abandoned. Although the camera did make a psychic revolution, it was hardly in the positive, romantic sense that Weston envisaged.
Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to by constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision. For, challenged by the revelations of photographers, seeing tends to accommodate to photographs. The avant-garde vision of Strand in the twenties, of Weston in the late twenties and early thirties, was quickly assimilated. Their rigorous close-up studies of plants, shells, leaves, time-withered trees, kelp, driftwood, eroded rocks, pelicans’ wings, gnarled workers’ hands have become clichés of a merely photographic way of seeing. What it once took a very intelligent eye to see, anyone can see now. Instructed by photographs, everyone is able to visualize that once purely literary conceit, the geography of the body: for example, photographing a pregnant woman so that her body looks like a hillock, a hillock so that it looks like the body of a pregnant woman.
Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists - as Weston did - on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always “tried to improve nature by self-imposition,” the photographer has “proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect ‘compositions,’ - order everywhere.” Behind the modernist’s belligerent stance of aesthetic purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world. For Weston, who spent most of his photographic life on the California coast near Carmel, the Walden of the 1920s, it was relatively easy to find beauty and order, while for Aaron Siskind, a photographer of the generation after Strand and a New Yorker, who began his career by taking architectural photographs and genre photographs of city people, the question is one of creating order. “When I make a photograph,” Siskind writes, “I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.” For Cartier-Bresson, to take photographs is “to find the structure of the world - to revel in the pure pleasure of form,” to disclose that “in all this chaos, there is order.” (It may well be impossible to talk about the perfection of the world without sounding unctuous.) But displaying the perfection of the world was too sentimental, too ahistorical a notion of beauty to sustain photography. It seems inevitable that Weston, more committed than Strand ever was to abstraction, to the discovery of forms, produced a much narrower body of work than Strand did. Thus Weston never felt moved to do socially conscious photography and, except for the period between 1923 and 1927 that he spent in Mexico, shunned cities. Strand, like Cartier-Bresson, was attracted to the picturesque desolations and damages of urban life. But even far from nature, both Strand and Cartier-Bresson (one could also cite Walker Evans) still photograph with the same fastidious eye that discerns order everywhere.
The view of Stieglitz and Strand and Weston - that photographs should be, first of all, beautiful (that is, beautifully composed) - seems thin now, too obtuse to the truth of disorder: even as the optimism about science and technology which lay behind the Bauhaus view of photography seems almost pernicious. Weston’s images, however admirable, however beautiful, have become less interesting to many people, while those taken by the mid-nineteenth-century English and French primitive photographers and by Atget, for example, enthrall more than ever. The judgment of Atget as “not a fine technician” that Weston entered in his Daybooks perfectly reflects the coherence of Weston’s view and his distance from contemporary taste. “Halation destroyed much, and the color correction not good,” Weston notes; “his instinct for subject matter was keen, but his recording weak, - his construction inexcusable . . . so often one feels he missed the real thing.” Contemporary taste faults Weston, with his devotion to the perfect print, rather than Atget and the other masters of photography’s demotic tradition. Imperfect technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks the sedate equation of Nature and Beauty. Nature has become more a subject for nostalgia and indignation than an object of contemplation as marked by the distance of taste which separates both the majestic landscapes of Ansel Adams (Weston’s best-known disciple) and the last important body of photographs in the Bauhaus tradition, Andreas Feininger’s The Anatomy of Nature (1965), form current photographic imagery of nature defiled.
As these formalist ideals of beauty seem, in retrospect, linked to a certain historical mood, optimism about the modern age (the new vision, the new era), so the decline of the standards of photographic purity represented by both Weston and the Bauhaus school has accompanied the moral letdown experienced in recent decades. In the present historical mood of disenchantment one can make less and less sense out of the formalist’s notion of timeless beauty. Darker, time-bound models of beauty have become prominent, inspiring a reevaluation of the photography of the past; and, in an apparent revulsion against the Beautiful, recent generations of photographers prefer to show disorder, prefer to distill an anecdote, more often than not a disturbing one, rather than isolate an ultimately reassuring “simplified form” (Weston’s phrase). But notwithstanding the declared aims of indiscreet, unposed, often harsh photography to reveal truth, not beauty, photography still beautifies. Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is - beauty. (The beauty of the poor, for example.)
Weston’s celebrated photograph of one of his fiercely loved sons, “Torso of Neil,” 1925, seems beautiful because of the shapeliness of its subject and because of its bold composition and subtle lighting - a beauty that is the result of skill and taste. Jacob Riis’s crude flashlit photographs taken between 1887 and 1890 seem beautiful because of the force of their subject, grimy shapeless New York slum-dwellers of indeterminate age, and because of the rightness of their “wrong” framing and the blunt contrasts produced by the lack of control over tonal values - a beauty that is the result of amateurism or inadvertence. The evaluation of photographs is always shot through with such aesthetic double standards. Initially judged by the norms of painting, which assume conscious design and the elimination of nonessentials, the distinctive achievements of photographic seeing were until quite recently thought to be identical with the work of that relatively small number of photographers who, through reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera’s mechanical nature to meet the standards of art. But it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naїve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography’s democratizing of the notion of beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere. Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
For photographers there is, finally, no difference - no greater aesthetic advantage - between the effort to embellish the world and the counter-effort to rip off its mask. Even those photographers who disdained retouching their portraits - a mark of honor for ambitious portrait photographers from Nadar on - tended to protect the sitter in certain ways form the camera’s too revealing gaze. And one of the typical endeavors of portrait photographers, professionally protective toward famous faces (like Garbo’s) which really are ideal, is the search for “real” faces, generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially defenseless, the aged, the insane - people indifferent to (or powerless to protest) the camera’a aggressions. Two portraits that Strand did in 1916 of urban casualties, “Blind Woman” and “Man,” are among the first results of this search conducted in close-up. In the worst years of the German depression Helmar Lerski made a whole compendium of distressing faces, published under the title Kopfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces) in 1931. The paid models for what Lerski called his “objective character studies” - with their rude revelations of over-enlarged pores, wrinkles, skin blemishes - were out-of-work servants procured form an employment exchange, beggars, street sweepers, vendors, and washerwomen.
The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity between Avedon’s fashion photography, which flatters, and the work in which he comes on as the One Who Refuses to Flatter - for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has a much more limited career in photography considered as an art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.
As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing, over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. (“Beauty will be convulsive,” Breton wrote, “or it will not be at all.”) Even the most compassionate photojournalism is under pressure to satisfy simultaneously two sorts of expectations, those arising form our largely surrealist way of looking at all photographs, and those created by our belief that some photographs give real and important information about the world. The photographs that W. Eugene Smith took in the late 1960s in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata, most of whose inhabitants are crippled and slowly dying of mercury poisoning, move us because they document a suffering which arouses our indignation - and distance us because they are superb photographs of Agony, conforming to surrealist standards of beauty. Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his mother’s lap is a Pietà for the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy; indeed, the whole series of photographs are possible images for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, in a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use - so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.
Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning can reveal truth. But partly because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context, which shapes whatever immediate - in particular, political - uses the photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant. One of the central characteristics of photograph is that process by which original uses are modified, eventually supplanted by subsequent uses - most notably, by the discourse of art into which any photograph can be absorbed. And, being images themselves, some photographs right form the start refer us to other images as well as to life. The photograph that the Bolivian authorities transmitted to the world press in October 1967 of Che Guevara’s body, laid out in a stable on a stretcher on top of a cement trough, surrounded by a Bolivian colonel, a U.S. intelligence agent, and several journalists and soldiers, not one summed up the bitter realities of contemporary Latin American history but had some inadvertent resemblance, as John Berger has pointed out, to Mantegna’s “The Dead Christ” and Rembrandt’s “the Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp.” What is compelling about the photograph partly derives form what it shares, as a compelling about the photograph partly derives form what it shares, as a composition, with these paintings. Indeed, the very extent to which that photograph is unforgettable indicates its potential for being depoliticized, for becoming a timeless image.
The best writing on photography has been by moralists - Marxists or would-be Marxists - hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photograph inexorably beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address delivered in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the camera
is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful,’ . . . It has succeeded in turning object poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment.
Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture. (The opposite approach to that of the museum curator who, in order to turn a photojournalist’s work into art, shows the photographs without their original captions.) Thus, Benjamin thought that the right caption beneath a picture could “rescue it form the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.” He urged that writers start taking photographs, to show the way.
Socially concerned writers have not taken to cameras, but they are often enlisted, or volunteer, to spell out the truth to which photographs testify - as James Agee did in the texts he wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or as John Berger did in his assay on the photograph of the dead Che Guevera, this assay being in effect an extended caption, one that attempts to firm up the political associations and moral meaning of a photograph that Berger found too satisfying aesthetically, too suggestive iconographically. Godard and Gorin’s short form A Letter to Jane (1972) amounts to a kind of counter-caption to a photograph - a mordant criticism of a photograph of Jane Fonda taken during a visit to North Vietnam. (The film is also a model lesson on how to read any photograph, how to decipher the un-innocent nature of a photograph’s framing, angle, focus.) What the photograph - it shows Fonda listening with an expression of distress and compassion as an unidentified Vietnamese describes the ravages of American bombing - meant when it was published in the French picture magazine L’Express in some ways reverses the meaning it had for the north Vietnamese, who released it. But even more decisive than how the photograph was changed by its new setting is how its revolutionary use-value to the North Vietnamese was sabotaged by what L’Express furnished as a caption. “This photograph, like any photograph,” Godard and Gorin point out, “is physically mute. It talks through the mouth of the text written beneath it.” In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture’s meaning.
What the moralists are demanding form a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do - speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support form being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries, or from being qualified by the acquisitive mentality implicit in all picture-taking - and picture-collecting - and by the aesthetic relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose. Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful. The photograph of Che Guevara is finally . . . beautiful, as was the man. So are the people of Minamata. So is the small Jewish boy photographed in 1943 during a round-up in the Warsaw Ghetto, his arms raised, solemn with terror - whose picture the mute heroine of Bergman’s Persona has brought with her to the mental hospital to meditate on, as a photo-souvenir of the essence of tragedy.
In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery of beauty. The lovely composition and elegant perspective of Lewis Hine’s photographs of exploited children in turn-of-the-century American mills and mines easily outlast the relevance of their subject matter. Protected middle-class inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world - those regions where most photographs are taken and consumed - learn about the world’s horrors mainly through the camera: photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography’s realism creates a confusion about the real which is (in the long run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short run) sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the fresh vision everyone has been talking about.
Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality - or Raélités, as the name of the French photo-magazine suggests, for reality is understood as plural, fascination, and up for grabs. Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand’s pictures form the last period of his life - when he turned form the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-antologizing tasks of photography - consists in the fact that “his people, whether Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality - humanity.” What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.
The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera. But this quality of being interesting, like that of manifesting humanity. Is in empty one. The photographic purchase in the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes everything homologous. Photography is no less reductive when it is being reportorial than when it reveals beautiful forms. By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest when he declared that “to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.” If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” as Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time - the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph - has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives form its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth. The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers - displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty - is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic enterprise.
It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. House-proud hosts may pull out photographs of the place to show visitors how really splendid it is. We learn to see ourselves photographically, to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph. Photographs create the beautiful and - over generations of picture-taking - use it up. Certain glories of nature, for example, have been all but abandoned to the indefatigable attentions of amateur camera buffs. The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs.
Many people are anxious when they’re about to be photographed: not because they fear, as primitives do, being violated but because they fear the camera’s disapproval. People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their best. They feel rebuked then the camera doesn’t return an image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. But few are lucky enough to be “photogenic” - that is, to look better in photographs (even when not made up or flattered by the lighting) than in real life. That photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid. A decade after Fox Talbot’s negative-positive process had begun replacing the daguerreotype (the first practicable photographic process) in the mid-1840s, a German photographer invented the first technique for retouching the negative. His two versions of the same portrait - one retouched, the other not - astounded crowds at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855 (the second world fair, and the first with a photography exhibit). The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.
The consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes form the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy form the science, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted form nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance. This was a task which painting was too slow and cumbersome a procedure to take in, no mater how many nineteenth-century painters shared Millet’s belief that le beau c’est le vrai. Astute observers noticed that there was something naked about the truth a photograph conveyed, even when its maker did not mean to pry. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne has the young photographer, Holgrave, remark about the daguerreotype portrait that “while we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that not painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.”
Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers make seeing into a new kind of project: as of seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful. Once an object of wonder because of its capacity to render reality faithfully as well as despised at first for its base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous promotion of the value of appearances. Appearances as the camera records them. Photographs do not simple render reality - realistically. It is reality which is scrutinized, and evaluated, for its fidelity to photographs. “In my view,” the foremost ideologue of literary realism, Zola, declared in 1901 after fifteen years of amateur picture-taking, “you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.” Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing he very idea of reality, and of realism.
The earliest photographers talked as if the camera were a copying machine; as if, while people operate cameras, it is the camera that sees. The invention of photography was welcomed as a means of easing the burden of ever accumulating information and sense impressions. In his book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) Fox Talbot relates that the idea of photography came to him in 1833, on the Italian Journey that had become obligatory for Englishmen of inherited wealth like himself, while making some sketches of the landscape at Lake Como. Drawing with the help of a camera obscure, a device which projected the image but did not fix it, he was led to reflect, he says, “on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the camera throws upon the paper” and to wonder “is it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably.” The camera suggested itself to Fox Talbot as a new form of notation whose allure was precisely that it was impersonal - because it recorded a “natural” image; that is, an image which comes into being “by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever form the artist’s pencil.”
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer - a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, sided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.
A Frenchman with a daguerreotype camera was already roaming the Pacific in 1841, the same year that the first volume of Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe was published in Paris. The 1850s was the great age of photographic Orientalism: Maxime Du Camp, making a Grand Tour of the Middle East with Flaubert between 1849 and 1851, centered his picture-taking activity on attractions like the Colossus of Aby Simbel and the Temple of Baalbek, not the daily life of fellahin. Soon, however, travellers with cameras annexed a wider subject matter than famous sites and works of art. Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in that everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions.
There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity - allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, “awaiting the proper moment” to take his celebrated picture, “Fifth Avenue, Winter.” The proper moment is when one can see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way. The quest became the photographer’s trademark in the popular imagination. By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist - without necessarily having to leave home. Readers of the popular press were invited to join “our photographer” on a “journey of discovery,” visiting such new realms as “the world from above,” “the world under the magnifying glass,” “the beauties of every day,” “the unseen universe,” “the miracle of light,” “the beauty of machines,” the picture that can be “found in the street.”
Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals - a corner of material reality that the eye doesn’t see at all or can’t normally isolate; or the overview, as from a plane - these are the main targets of the photographer’s conquest. For a while the close-up seemed to be photography’s most original method of seeing. Photographers found that as they more narrowly cropped reality, magnificent forms appeared. In the early 1840s the versatile, ingenious Fox Talbot not only composed photographs in the genres taken over from painting - portrait, domestic scene, townscape, landscape, still life - but also trained his camera on a seashell, on the wings of a butterfly (enlarged with the aid of a solar microscope), on a portion of two rows of books in his study. But his subjects are still recobnizably a shell, butterfly wings, books. When ordinary seeing was further violated - and the object isolated form its surroundings, rendering it abstract - new conventions about what was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful become just what the eye can’t (or doesn’t) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.
In 1915 Paul Strand took a photograph which he titled “Abstract Patterns Made by Bowls.” In 1917 Strand turned to close-ups of machine forms, and throughout the twenties did close-up nature studies. The new procedure - its heyday was between 1920 and 1935 - seemed to promise unlimited visual delights. It worked with equally stunning effect on homely objects, in the nude (a subject one might have supposed to be virtually exhausted by painters), on the tiny cosmologies of nature. Photography seemed to have found its grandiose role, as the bridge between art and science; and painters were admonished to learn form the beauties of microphotographs and aerial views in Moholy-Nagy’s book Von Material zur Architektur, published by the Bauhaus in 1928 and translated into English as The New Vision. It was the same year as the appearance of one of the first photographic best-sellers, a book by Albert Renger-Patzsch entitled Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful), which consisted of one hundred photographs, mostly close-ups, whose subjects range from a colocasia leaf to a potter’s hands. Painting never made so shameless a promise to prove the world beautiful.
The abstracting eye - represented with particular brilliance on the period between the two world wars by some of the work of Strand, as well as of Edward Weston and Minor White - seems to have been possible only after the discoveries made by modernist painters and sculptors. Strand and Wexton, who both acknowledge a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz’s images. But it is just as true that the influence flowed the other way. In 1909, in his magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz notes the undeniable influence of photography in painting, although he cites only the Impressionists - whose style of “blurred definition” inspired his own. And Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision correctly points out that “the technique and spirit of photography directly or indirectly influenced Cubism.” But for all the ways in which, from the 1840s on, painters and photographers have mutually influenced and pillaged each other, their procedures are fundamentally opposed. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates our perception of it - as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. The subject of Weston’s “Cabbage Leaf,” taken in 1931, looks like a fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the image makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it is (surprise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth, it wouldn’t be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, form the fine arts. Hence the formal qualities of style - the central issue in painting - are, at most, of secondary importance in photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don’t know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know what piece of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet - famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936 - becomes far more interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.
Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things. When Thoreau said, “You can’t say more than you see,” he took for granted that sight had pride of place among the senses. But when, several generation later, Thoreau’s dictum is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake. Thoreau still lived in a polysensual world, though one in which observation had already begun to acquire the stature of a moral duty. He was talking about a seeing not cut off from the other senses, and about seeing in context (the context he called Nature), that is, a seeing linked to certain presuppositions about what he thought was worth seeing. When Strand quotes Thoreau, he assumes another attitude toward the sensorium: the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts.
The most influential version of this attitude is to be found in painting, the art which photography encroached on remorselessly and plagiarized from enthusiastically from its beginnings, and with which it still coexists in febrile rivalry. According to the usual account, what photography did was to usurp the painter’s task of providing images hat accurately transcribe reality. For this “the painter should be deeply grateful,” insists Weston, viewing this usurpation, as have many photographers before and since, as in fact a liberation. By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation - abstraction. But photography’s impact on painting was not as clear-cut as that. For, as photography was entering the scene, painting was already, on its own, beginning its long retreat form realistic representation - Turner was born in 1775, Fox Talbot in 1800 - and the territory photography came to occupy with such rapid and complete success would probably have been depopulated anyway. (The instability of nineteenth-century painting’s strictly representational achievements is most clearly demonstrated by the fate of portraiture, which came more and more to be about painting itself rather than about sitters - eventually ceased to interest most ambitious painters, with such notably recent exceptions as Francis Bacon and Warhol, who borrow lavishly form photographic imagery.)
The other important aspect of the relation between painting and photography omitted in the standard account is that the frontiers of the new territory acquired by photography immediately started expanding, as some photographers refused to be confined to turning out those ultra-realistic triumphs with which painters could not compete. Thus, of the two famous inventors of photography Daguerre never conceived of going beyond the naturalist painter’s range of representation, while Fox Talbot immediately grasped the camera’s ability to isolate forms which normally escape the naked eye and which painting had never recorded. Gradually photographers joined in the pursuit of more abstract images, professing scruples reminiscent of the modernist painters’ dismissal of the mimetic as mere picturing. Painting’s revenge, if you will. The claim made by many professional photographers to do something quite different form recording reality is the clearest index of the immense counter-influence that painting has had on photography. But however much photographers have come to share some of the same attitudes about the inherent value of perception exercised for perception’s sake and the (relative) unimportance of subject matter which have dominated advanced painting for more than a century, their applications of these attitudes cannot duplicate those of painting. For it is in the nature of a photograph that it can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can. Nor can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself, which is in some sense the ultimate aim of modernist painting.
The version of the modernist attitude most relevant to photography is not to be found in painting - even as it was then (at the time of its conquest, or liberation, by photography), certainly as it is now. Except for such marginal phenomena as Super Realism, a revival of Photo-Ralism which is not content with merely imitating photographs but aims to show that painting can achieve an even greater illusion of verisimilitude, painting is still largely ruled by a suspicion of what Duchamp called the merely retinal. The ethos of photography - that of schooling us (in Moholy-Nagy’s phrase) in “intensive seeing” - seems closer to that of modernist poetry than that of painting. As painting has become more and more conceptual, poetry (since Apollinaire, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams) has more and more defined itself as concerned with the visual. (“No truth but in things,” as Williams declared.) Poetry’s commitment to concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem’s language parallels photography’s commitment to pure seeing. Both imply discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity: wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity.
While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer’s venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to by performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, “revealing to others the living world around them,” as Weston described his own work, “showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed.”
Although Weston (like Strand) also claimed to be indifferent to the question of whether photography is an art, his demands on photography still contained all the romantic assumptions about the photographer as Artist. By the century’s second decade, certain photographers had confidently appropriated the rhetoric of a vanguard art: armed with cameras, they were doing rude battle with conformist sensibilities, busy fulfilling Pound’s summons to Make It New. Photography, not “soft, gutless painting,” says Weston with virile disdain, is best equipped to “bore into the spirit of today.” Between 1930 and 1932 Weston’s diaries or Day-books are full of effusive premonitions of impending change and declaration of the importance of the visual shock therapy that photographers were administering. “Old ideas are crashing on all sides, and the precise uncompromising camera vision is, and will be more so, a world force in the revaluation of life.”
Weston’s notion of the photographer’s agon shares many themes with the heroic vitalism of the 1920s popularized my D.H. Lawrence: affirmation of the sensual life, rage at bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, self-righteous defence of egotism in the service of one’s spiritual vocation, manly appeals for a union with nature. (Weston calls photography “a way of self-development, a means to discover and identify oneself with all the manifestations of basic forms - with nature, the source.”) But while Lawrence wanted to restore the wholeness of sensory appreciation, the photographer - even one whose passions seem so reminiscent of Lawrence’s - necessarily insists on the preeminence of one sense: sight. And, contrary to what Weston asserts, the habit of photographic seeing - of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs - creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.
Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. These discrepancies were much remarked by the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to think photographically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it was called. (Now, as William Ivins, Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt for that distortion.) Thus, one of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings onto things, things onto living beings. The peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous in a way that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the pepper are photographed for the play of forms - but the body is characteristically shown bent over upon itself, all the extremities cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal lighting and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening the abstractness of the body’s form; the pepper is viewed close-up but in its entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a heightening of its seeming palpability.
It was the beauty of forms in industrial and scientific photography that dazzled the Bauhaus designers, and, indeed, the camera has recorded few images more interesting formally than those taken by metallurgists and crystallographers. But the Bauhaus approach to photography has not prevailed. No one now considers the beauty revealed in photographs to be epitomised by scientific microphotography. In the main tradition of the beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human decision: that this would make a good photograph, and that the good picture would make some comment. It proved more important to reveal the elegant form of a toilet bowl, the subject of a series of pictures Weston did in Mexico in 1925, than the poetic magnitude of a snowflake or a coal fossil.
For Weston, beauty itself was subversive - as seemed confirmed when some people were scandalized by his ambitious nudes. (In fact, it was Weston - followed by André Kertész and Bill Brandt - who made nude photography respectable.) Now photographers are more likely to emphasize the ordinary humanity of their revelations. Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough. Ambitious modernists, Like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing. Weston’s assertion that “photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision” seems typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts during he first third of the century - hopes since abandoned. Although the camera did make a psychic revolution, it was hardly in the positive, romantic sense that Weston envisaged.
Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to by constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision. For, challenged by the revelations of photographers, seeing tends to accommodate to photographs. The avant-garde vision of Strand in the twenties, of Weston in the late twenties and early thirties, was quickly assimilated. Their rigorous close-up studies of plants, shells, leaves, time-withered trees, kelp, driftwood, eroded rocks, pelicans’ wings, gnarled workers’ hands have become clichés of a merely photographic way of seeing. What it once took a very intelligent eye to see, anyone can see now. Instructed by photographs, everyone is able to visualize that once purely literary conceit, the geography of the body: for example, photographing a pregnant woman so that her body looks like a hillock, a hillock so that it looks like the body of a pregnant woman.
Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists - as Weston did - on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always “tried to improve nature by self-imposition,” the photographer has “proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect ‘compositions,’ - order everywhere.” Behind the modernist’s belligerent stance of aesthetic purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world. For Weston, who spent most of his photographic life on the California coast near Carmel, the Walden of the 1920s, it was relatively easy to find beauty and order, while for Aaron Siskind, a photographer of the generation after Strand and a New Yorker, who began his career by taking architectural photographs and genre photographs of city people, the question is one of creating order. “When I make a photograph,” Siskind writes, “I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.” For Cartier-Bresson, to take photographs is “to find the structure of the world - to revel in the pure pleasure of form,” to disclose that “in all this chaos, there is order.” (It may well be impossible to talk about the perfection of the world without sounding unctuous.) But displaying the perfection of the world was too sentimental, too ahistorical a notion of beauty to sustain photography. It seems inevitable that Weston, more committed than Strand ever was to abstraction, to the discovery of forms, produced a much narrower body of work than Strand did. Thus Weston never felt moved to do socially conscious photography and, except for the period between 1923 and 1927 that he spent in Mexico, shunned cities. Strand, like Cartier-Bresson, was attracted to the picturesque desolations and damages of urban life. But even far from nature, both Strand and Cartier-Bresson (one could also cite Walker Evans) still photograph with the same fastidious eye that discerns order everywhere.
The view of Stieglitz and Strand and Weston - that photographs should be, first of all, beautiful (that is, beautifully composed) - seems thin now, too obtuse to the truth of disorder: even as the optimism about science and technology which lay behind the Bauhaus view of photography seems almost pernicious. Weston’s images, however admirable, however beautiful, have become less interesting to many people, while those taken by the mid-nineteenth-century English and French primitive photographers and by Atget, for example, enthrall more than ever. The judgment of Atget as “not a fine technician” that Weston entered in his Daybooks perfectly reflects the coherence of Weston’s view and his distance from contemporary taste. “Halation destroyed much, and the color correction not good,” Weston notes; “his instinct for subject matter was keen, but his recording weak, - his construction inexcusable . . . so often one feels he missed the real thing.” Contemporary taste faults Weston, with his devotion to the perfect print, rather than Atget and the other masters of photography’s demotic tradition. Imperfect technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks the sedate equation of Nature and Beauty. Nature has become more a subject for nostalgia and indignation than an object of contemplation as marked by the distance of taste which separates both the majestic landscapes of Ansel Adams (Weston’s best-known disciple) and the last important body of photographs in the Bauhaus tradition, Andreas Feininger’s The Anatomy of Nature (1965), form current photographic imagery of nature defiled.
As these formalist ideals of beauty seem, in retrospect, linked to a certain historical mood, optimism about the modern age (the new vision, the new era), so the decline of the standards of photographic purity represented by both Weston and the Bauhaus school has accompanied the moral letdown experienced in recent decades. In the present historical mood of disenchantment one can make less and less sense out of the formalist’s notion of timeless beauty. Darker, time-bound models of beauty have become prominent, inspiring a reevaluation of the photography of the past; and, in an apparent revulsion against the Beautiful, recent generations of photographers prefer to show disorder, prefer to distill an anecdote, more often than not a disturbing one, rather than isolate an ultimately reassuring “simplified form” (Weston’s phrase). But notwithstanding the declared aims of indiscreet, unposed, often harsh photography to reveal truth, not beauty, photography still beautifies. Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is - beauty. (The beauty of the poor, for example.)
Weston’s celebrated photograph of one of his fiercely loved sons, “Torso of Neil,” 1925, seems beautiful because of the shapeliness of its subject and because of its bold composition and subtle lighting - a beauty that is the result of skill and taste. Jacob Riis’s crude flashlit photographs taken between 1887 and 1890 seem beautiful because of the force of their subject, grimy shapeless New York slum-dwellers of indeterminate age, and because of the rightness of their “wrong” framing and the blunt contrasts produced by the lack of control over tonal values - a beauty that is the result of amateurism or inadvertence. The evaluation of photographs is always shot through with such aesthetic double standards. Initially judged by the norms of painting, which assume conscious design and the elimination of nonessentials, the distinctive achievements of photographic seeing were until quite recently thought to be identical with the work of that relatively small number of photographers who, through reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera’s mechanical nature to meet the standards of art. But it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naїve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography’s democratizing of the notion of beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere. Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
For photographers there is, finally, no difference - no greater aesthetic advantage - between the effort to embellish the world and the counter-effort to rip off its mask. Even those photographers who disdained retouching their portraits - a mark of honor for ambitious portrait photographers from Nadar on - tended to protect the sitter in certain ways form the camera’s too revealing gaze. And one of the typical endeavors of portrait photographers, professionally protective toward famous faces (like Garbo’s) which really are ideal, is the search for “real” faces, generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially defenseless, the aged, the insane - people indifferent to (or powerless to protest) the camera’a aggressions. Two portraits that Strand did in 1916 of urban casualties, “Blind Woman” and “Man,” are among the first results of this search conducted in close-up. In the worst years of the German depression Helmar Lerski made a whole compendium of distressing faces, published under the title Kopfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces) in 1931. The paid models for what Lerski called his “objective character studies” - with their rude revelations of over-enlarged pores, wrinkles, skin blemishes - were out-of-work servants procured form an employment exchange, beggars, street sweepers, vendors, and washerwomen.
The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity between Avedon’s fashion photography, which flatters, and the work in which he comes on as the One Who Refuses to Flatter - for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has a much more limited career in photography considered as an art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.
As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing, over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. (“Beauty will be convulsive,” Breton wrote, “or it will not be at all.”) Even the most compassionate photojournalism is under pressure to satisfy simultaneously two sorts of expectations, those arising form our largely surrealist way of looking at all photographs, and those created by our belief that some photographs give real and important information about the world. The photographs that W. Eugene Smith took in the late 1960s in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata, most of whose inhabitants are crippled and slowly dying of mercury poisoning, move us because they document a suffering which arouses our indignation - and distance us because they are superb photographs of Agony, conforming to surrealist standards of beauty. Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his mother’s lap is a Pietà for the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy; indeed, the whole series of photographs are possible images for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, in a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use - so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.
Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning can reveal truth. But partly because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context, which shapes whatever immediate - in particular, political - uses the photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant. One of the central characteristics of photograph is that process by which original uses are modified, eventually supplanted by subsequent uses - most notably, by the discourse of art into which any photograph can be absorbed. And, being images themselves, some photographs right form the start refer us to other images as well as to life. The photograph that the Bolivian authorities transmitted to the world press in October 1967 of Che Guevara’s body, laid out in a stable on a stretcher on top of a cement trough, surrounded by a Bolivian colonel, a U.S. intelligence agent, and several journalists and soldiers, not one summed up the bitter realities of contemporary Latin American history but had some inadvertent resemblance, as John Berger has pointed out, to Mantegna’s “The Dead Christ” and Rembrandt’s “the Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp.” What is compelling about the photograph partly derives form what it shares, as a compelling about the photograph partly derives form what it shares, as a composition, with these paintings. Indeed, the very extent to which that photograph is unforgettable indicates its potential for being depoliticized, for becoming a timeless image.
The best writing on photography has been by moralists - Marxists or would-be Marxists - hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photograph inexorably beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address delivered in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the camera
is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful,’ . . . It has succeeded in turning object poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment.
Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture. (The opposite approach to that of the museum curator who, in order to turn a photojournalist’s work into art, shows the photographs without their original captions.) Thus, Benjamin thought that the right caption beneath a picture could “rescue it form the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.” He urged that writers start taking photographs, to show the way.
Socially concerned writers have not taken to cameras, but they are often enlisted, or volunteer, to spell out the truth to which photographs testify - as James Agee did in the texts he wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or as John Berger did in his assay on the photograph of the dead Che Guevera, this assay being in effect an extended caption, one that attempts to firm up the political associations and moral meaning of a photograph that Berger found too satisfying aesthetically, too suggestive iconographically. Godard and Gorin’s short form A Letter to Jane (1972) amounts to a kind of counter-caption to a photograph - a mordant criticism of a photograph of Jane Fonda taken during a visit to North Vietnam. (The film is also a model lesson on how to read any photograph, how to decipher the un-innocent nature of a photograph’s framing, angle, focus.) What the photograph - it shows Fonda listening with an expression of distress and compassion as an unidentified Vietnamese describes the ravages of American bombing - meant when it was published in the French picture magazine L’Express in some ways reverses the meaning it had for the north Vietnamese, who released it. But even more decisive than how the photograph was changed by its new setting is how its revolutionary use-value to the North Vietnamese was sabotaged by what L’Express furnished as a caption. “This photograph, like any photograph,” Godard and Gorin point out, “is physically mute. It talks through the mouth of the text written beneath it.” In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture’s meaning.
What the moralists are demanding form a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do - speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support form being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries, or from being qualified by the acquisitive mentality implicit in all picture-taking - and picture-collecting - and by the aesthetic relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose. Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful. The photograph of Che Guevara is finally . . . beautiful, as was the man. So are the people of Minamata. So is the small Jewish boy photographed in 1943 during a round-up in the Warsaw Ghetto, his arms raised, solemn with terror - whose picture the mute heroine of Bergman’s Persona has brought with her to the mental hospital to meditate on, as a photo-souvenir of the essence of tragedy.
In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery of beauty. The lovely composition and elegant perspective of Lewis Hine’s photographs of exploited children in turn-of-the-century American mills and mines easily outlast the relevance of their subject matter. Protected middle-class inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world - those regions where most photographs are taken and consumed - learn about the world’s horrors mainly through the camera: photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography’s realism creates a confusion about the real which is (in the long run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short run) sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the fresh vision everyone has been talking about.
Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality - or Raélités, as the name of the French photo-magazine suggests, for reality is understood as plural, fascination, and up for grabs. Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand’s pictures form the last period of his life - when he turned form the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-antologizing tasks of photography - consists in the fact that “his people, whether Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality - humanity.” What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.
The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera. But this quality of being interesting, like that of manifesting humanity. Is in empty one. The photographic purchase in the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes everything homologous. Photography is no less reductive when it is being reportorial than when it reveals beautiful forms. By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest when he declared that “to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.” If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” as Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time - the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph - has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives form its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth. The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers - displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty - is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic enterprise.