assignment five understanding visual culture what is reality? · assignment five understanding...

FINAL EDITED ESSAY

Assignment Five

Understanding Visual Culture

What is reality?

‘Reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real’ (Debord, 1999:96)

Thus Debord, writing in 1967, predicted our image-saturated modern-day society where

representations dominate our culture and the lines between the virtual and the real are becoming

ever increasingly blurred.

For this assignment we are asked to explore the issues surrounding the real in contemporary

society, looking at the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. I have chosen to discuss

these issues with regard to the photographic portrait, examining both the concept of reality within

portraiture as well as looking at some photographers who push their boundaries of their portrait

work firmly away from the real and into the virtual.

Photography is a medium that historically was accepted as reflecting reality, its indexical nature

insisting that the photographic referent be in front of the camera lens when the shutter is

pressed. Barthes, a firm believer in the idea of a photograph portraying the truth, posited that

this photographic referent is

‘not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real

thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph

… Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been

there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and the past.’ (Barthes, 1982;76)

Due to its indexicality, photography was considered in the early part of the 19th century to be

more realistic than painting in its representation, with Brik writing in 1926 that it was

photography, not painting, which was the way forward for the true and accurate recording of life

and of reality, arguing that ’Even the most gifted painter cannot achieve the degree of faithful

reproduction of which the camera is capable’ (Brik, 2003:471). Photography was lauded for its

supposed ability to record in an non-selective, non-judgemental manner, with this belief resulting

Carol Street 511096 1 UVC: Assignment 5

in photographic portraiture being applied as a tool to aid social control, being used to identify and

document certain ‘types’ of people such as prisoners and mental patients. The knowledge /power

relationship of photography in the late nineteenth century and how this was linked to social

identity was a topic discussed often by the professor and author John Tagg, with Tagg (1988)

suggesting that ‘The portrait is … a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual

and the inscription of social identity.’ (Clarke, 1997:102)

August Sander was a photographer who looked to represent society through ‘types’. In his

project People of the 20th Century (Menschen des 20 Jahrhundert) Sander’s aim was to record a

cross-section of German society with the intention of categorising them by social type and

occupation, being quoted as saying ‘[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by

their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or

does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled’ (Stockdale, 2010).

Carol Street 511096 2 UVC: Assignment 5

Fig. 1. Young Farmers (1914)

Sander divided his portraits into seven categories, one of which was farmers. Figure 1 above

interestingly shows how Sander portrays an German agricultural society in flux; whilst the young

men are dressed in city wear (this image is also known as ‘Young Farmers on Way to a

Dance’ (Hacking, 2012)) their agrarian roots are made apparent by their dirty shoes and their

walking canes anchoring them to the land. Typological studies such as Sander’s assisted the

photographic portrait in developing a reputation as being objective, ‘a form of empirical truth or

evidence of the real’ (Green, 2005:128) even though one could argue now that posed images

such as ‘Young Farmers’ cannot be seen as accurately portraying the truth. Sekula (1992)

observed that ‘the potential for a new juridicial photographic realism was widely recognised in the

1840s.’ and portrait photographs are still used today for identification and control purposes in

official documents such as passports and driving licences where appearance and identity are

relied upon to be realistic and accurate respectively.

The reputation of photography as ‘realistic’ has however led to it being used as a medium by

some portrait sitters in order to portray themselves in the manner they wished to be seen, rather

than as a true reflection of their appearance.

Carol Street 511096 ! UVC: Assignment 53

Fig. 2. Georgina Elizabeth Ward (née Moncreiffe), Countess of Dudley (1880s)

Even early photographic portraits would often flatter the subject in terms of pose and lighting and

the sitter would most likely be depicted with carefully chosen clothing and surroundings that

reflected their social standing. 'To "have one's portrait done" was one of the symbolic acts by

which individuals from the rising social classes made their ascent visible to themselves and

others, and classed themselves among those who enjoyed social status. The portrait was, above

all, a public affirmation of significance’ (Tagg 1988, cited in Clarke, 1992:84).

With the onset of digital manipulation, the majority of photographic portraits used for non-official

purposes cannot be automatically considered nowadays to be ‘truthful’ and indeed one just has to

look at so-called ‘celebrity’ magazines to encounter portrait images that have been digitally

enhanced or ‘improved’ in order to present the subject in what is believed by society to be a

perfect light. A whole topic in itself, a full discussion on the rise in the use of digital manipulation

in photography is outside the remit of this essay’s word-count although it is certainly relevant as it

does serve to underline the point that a photographic portrait can no longer be held to

automatically carry a faithful representation of its referent, if indeed it ever could.

As an example of how photographs are manipulated to enhance the appearance of celebrities, the

pop star Britney Spears allowed ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of herself to be published in order to

show her imperfections and to highlight the pressure in today’s society for celebrities to look

perfect (Daily Mail, 2010).


As postmodern society moves towards Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (many may argue that

we are already entrapped within it) it is becoming increasingly complicated to understand what

exactly is ‘real’ and what is not. Debord used the term ‘spectacle’ to define what he saw as ‘the


Fig. 3. Before (2010) Fig. 4. After (2010)

Fig. 5. Before (2010) Fig. 6. After (2010)

everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena: advertising, television, film, and celebrity’

(Morgan and Purje, 2016), arguing that ‘reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is

real’ (Debord, 2009:96) and positing that ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into

a representation’ (Debord, 2009:95) whilst Baudrillard proposed that the concepts of

referentiality, objectivity and truth have been replaced by simulacra, simulation and the hyperreal

(Howells and Negreiros, 2012). We now mainly accept at face value what we see, read and hear

in the media however far from the original truth it may be, a concept explored in depth by

Baudrillard in his collection of essays entitled ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ (Baudrillard,

1995).

Unlike modernist thinking, where one of the intentions was to reflect reality as closely as possible,

postmodernism considered photography from a different point of view, with Cotton (2014:191)

writing that it ‘examined the medium in terms of its production, dissemination and reception, and

engaged with its inherent reproducibility, mimicry and falsity’. The structuralist and post-

structuralist theories of Barthes and Foucault posit that the meaning of an image is not the one

necessarily proposed by the author but that which is read by the viewer, thus opening the

photograph and its authorial intentions up to an array of interpretations and questioning.

However it could be argued that both the structuralist and post-structuralist ways of thinking are

too simplistic, not taking into account the additional layers of meaning created by the viewer

through their own knowledge and life experiences.

A number of post-modernist photographers have deliberately used the photographic portrait to

test and cross the boundaries of both the truthfulness of identity and also to pose the question of

what is ‘real’. Cindy Sherman creates fictional portraits of herself, critiquing the modernist

viewpoint and working around the idea of the photographic representation of the real versus the

unreal. In her seminal body of work Untitled Film Stills (Sherman, 1977-80) she creates feminine

archetypes, shaping her portrayed identity to examine such topics as gender, the male gaze and

the objectification of the female body. She is unrepentant of the move away from the real,

stating that ‘through a photograph you make people believe anything’ (Black, 2010).


As author, director and model, Sherman pays a dual role in her self-portraits, both imposing and

receiving her own gaze. Deliberately confronting the idea of the female passive gaze, she

consciously divides her ‘self’ and, following a concept put forward by the theorist Lacan, turns

herself as photographer/viewer into a picture: ‘I, too, turn myself into a picture under the gaze …

I am looked at, that is to say I am a picture’ (Lacan, 1978:104-105).

Gillian Wearing is another photographer who deliberately subverts the concept of reality in her

photographic portraiture, challenging the traditional notion of the truth of the photographic

referent. In her Albums series (Wearing, 2003), Wearing restaged portraits of family members,

adopting their visual identities through the wearing of wigs and custom-made prosthetic masks.

The elaborate disguise and photographic realism of each portrait at first indicates nothing

untoward, however Wearing provides a clue that she is literally ‘trying on’ an identity by leaving

the edges of the eye holes in the mask visible (Cotton, 2014).


Fig.7. Untitled Film Still #17 (1978)

Similar to Sherman, albeit in a much more literal manner, Wearing’s images propose that our

postmodern society wears masks of culturally imposed stereotypes as a matter of course, thus

interrogating and questioning the truthfulness, the reality of the photographic portrait and

supporting Baudrillard’s theory that reality has been replaced by the hyperreal, by fabricated

constructs.

Trish Morrissey too challenges the notion that a photographic portrait is bound to depict the real.

In her series Front (Morrissey, 2005-2007) she adopts a different identity by impersonating a

member of a family group, as demonstrated in Figure 9 below, swapping both her identity and

often her role as photographer with one of the women in the group and seamlessly fitting into the

family photograph. The concept of reality within portraiture is thus moved by Morrissey into one

of performance.


Fig. 8. Self Portrait as my Father Brian Wearing (2003)

In her various bodies of work that she entitles Projects (Lee, 2001-), Nikki S. Lee studies certain

social groups and subcultures and then transforms herself in appearance and behaviour in order

that she can become a member, blending in and appearing to be a genuine part of the group that

she has infiltrated (Cotton, 2014). Another photographer who deliberately challenges the

modernist view of the photographic medium, Lee asserts through her role-playing that the

photographic portrait does not necessarily capture the true depiction of the subject and probes

into the question as to whether a photographer can ever reliably capture the true character, the

true nature of the sitter. In Figure 10 below, Lee has integrated with a group of young people

who are part of the art movement hip-hop subculture.


Fig. 9. Sylvia Westbrook, August 2nd, 2005 (2005)

Whilst in the early days of photography, the indexicality of a photographic portrait was perceived

by many to present reality, the move into the twenty first century has made the notion of such

‘reality’ be thoroughly questioned. The writings of various philosophers and the change in our

society towards Debord’s ‘spectacle’, together with the rise in digital manipulation has led to a

growing lack of trust in how ‘real’ a photographic portrait, or indeed any photograph, is.

The growth of technology and an excess of images in a world where reality and fiction often seem

to merge into Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ means that we are saturated by visual media more than

ever before. ‘Image fatigue’ means we are in danger of absorbing what we see at face value and

without question. Within postmodern photography we are now presented with various ‘realities’

and certainly the photographers whose work I have examined in the latter part of this essay

deliberately challenge the ‘real’, the truthfulness of photographic portraits, in the pursuit of

different outcomes. Postmodernism has brought about a different way of seeing; surface illusion

no longer hides the real, it has become the real. Yet despite the growing evidence that a

photographic portrait does not portray the ‘real’, many people still choose to believe in the

truthfulness and honesty of a photograph, particularly if it depicts someone they know, such as a


Fig. 10. The Hip Hop Project (1) (2001)

friend or family member, or of someone they are familiar with as a representation, for example a

politician or celebrity. Maybe this is wishful thinking in our currently rather complex media-driven

society, a desire to return to a safer, more simplistic world, to move away from the media-driven

hype that is Debord’s ‘spectacle’ and to take comfort in trying to believe in the old, yet now

proved to be sadly mistaken, adage that ‘the camera never lies’.


List of illustrations

Figure 1. Sanders, A. (1914) Young Farmers. [photograph] At: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sander-young-farmers-al00014 (accessed on 15 August 2017)

Figure 2. Bassano, A (1880s) Georgina Elizabeth Ward (née Moncreiffe), Countess of Dudley [photograph] At http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw55092/Georgina-Elizabeth-Ward-ne-Moncreiffe-Countess-of-Dudley (accessed on 15 August 2017)

Figure 3. Candie’s (2010) Before [photograph] At: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html (accessed on 17 August 2017]

Figure 4. Splash (2010) After [photograph] At: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html (accessed on 17 August 2017]

Figure 5. Candie’s (2010) Before [photograph] At: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html (accessed on 17 August 2017]

Figure 6. Splash (2010) After [photograph] At: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html (accessed on 17 August 2017]

Figure 7. Sherman, C. (1978) Untitled Film Still #17 [photograph] At: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-film-still-17-p11516 (accessed on 30 August 2017)

Figure 8. Wearing, G. (2003) Self Portrait as my Father Brian Wearing [photograph]. At: http://www.maureenpaley.com/artists/gillian-wearing?image=9 (accessed on 30 August 2017)

Figure 9. Morrissey, T. (2005) Sylvia Westbrook, August 2nd, 2005 [photograph] At: http://www.trishmorrissey.com/works_pages/work-front/workpg-01.html (accessed on 30 August 2017)

Figure 10. Lee, N. (2001) The Hip Hop Project (1) [photograph] At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/12992 (accessed on 30 August 2017)


Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1982) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Cape

Baudrillard, J. (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Black, E. (2010) American photographer Cindy Sherman: 'selfies bug the s... out of me’ At: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/86281446/American-photographer-Cindy-Sherman-selfies-bug-the-s-out-of-me (accessed on XX)

Brik, O. (2003) ‘Photography versus Painting’. In: Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds.) Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp.470-473

Clarke, G. (ed.) (1992) The Portrait in Photography. London: Reaktion Books Ltd

Clarke, G. (1997) The Photograph. New York: Oxford University Press

Cotton, C. (2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art (3rd ed.). London: Thames & Hudson

Daily Mail (2010) ’Britney Spears bravely agrees to release un-airbrushed images of herself next to the digitally-altered versions’ In: Mail Online At: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html (accessed on 17 August 2017)

Debord, G. (1970) The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red

Debord, G. (1999) ’Separation perfected’ In: Evans, J. and Hall, S (eds.) Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage Publications Ltd. pp.95-98

Green, D. (1997) ‘On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography’ In: Evans, J. (ed.) The Camera Work Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography. New York: New York University Press pp.119–31. At: http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/oca-content/key-resources/res-files/onfoucault.pdf (accessed on 08 August 2017)

Hacking, J. (ed.) (2012) Photography: The Whole Story. London: Thames & Hudson

Howells, R. & Negreiros, J. (2012) Visual Culture (2nd ed.) Cambridge: Polity Press

Morgan, T. and Purje, L. (2016) An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’. At: https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/ (Accessed on 15 August 2017)

Morrissey, T. (2005–07) Front [photographs]. At: http://www.trishmorrissey.com/works_pages/work-front/workpg-01.html (accessed on 28 August 2017)

Sekula, A. (1992) ‘The Body As Archive’ In: Bolton, R. (ed.) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press pp.343-390

Sherman, C. (1977-80) Untitled Film Stills [photographs]. At: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-film-still-48-p11518 (accessed on 30 August 2017)

Stockdale, D. (2010) August Sander - Face of Our Time. At: https://thephotobook.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/august-sander-face-of-our-time/ (accessed on 20 August 2017)

Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. (2009) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2nd ed.) New York: Oxford University Press

Wearing, G. (2003) Album. [photographs] At: http://www.maureenpaley.com/artists/gillian-wearing/biography (accessed on 28 August 2017)


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