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Photography, Reality, and Representation.

Photography as Representational Art.

An influential philosophical view, albeit expressed 30 years ago, was that

photography is incapable of representing anything.1 And as recently as

2006 it was said that UK art institutions had a significant problem with

photography.2

Nevertheless, the attention paid to the medium by art

historians and art critics in recent years, together with many exhibitions of

work by photographers in major art galleries, emphasise the importance of

photography as an art form and signal its liberation from the photographic

ghetto. But is photography an art form just like any other? The inherent

features of photography: the perception of a physical connection with an

object photographed, mass reproducibility of its products, and the insistent

semiotics of content question photography’s kinship with other forms of

art. A conundrum which remains unresolved is that of “transference of

reality from the thing (photographed) to its reproduction” 3.

We do not live in reality but in our perceptions and constructions of it.

Photography is a medium delivering imagery that the human mind

interprets as most consistent with this unknowable external world. But the

reassurance, comfort, and certainty to be had from photographs are as

illusory as the photograph itself. The properties of the photograph and how

images are perceived and processed are determinants still needing

understanding even 150 years or more after the invention of photography.

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The Imprint of the Real.

Because light emanating from an object can be physically traced as waves

of electrons (at least for analogue photography), an “imprint of the real”

can be physically linked at the quantum level to that object.4 This could

support the idea that the object and its photographic image share common

matter. This is a view that has been argued by many including Bazin and

Metz, and remains vexatious. 5,6

Bazin has said that “the photographic

image is the object itself freed from the conditions of time and space that

govern it”.7 This conflation of object and image robs the photograph of

aesthetics in that it becomes only mimetic and loses the ability of

representation. These mimetic properties of photographs while raising

doubts about their status, also endow them with an appeal to human

psychology unlike that of other forms of visual art including painting. It

is not by mistake that the look of work of some contemporary portrait

painters has become realistic to the point of being difficult to distinguish

from photographs.8

If there is any material connection between an object and image, it is not

confined to photography alone. However realistically or not the subject in

a painting is represented it too has an imprint of the real; that is, paintings

are accomplished by means of quantum events initiated by light passing

from the subject to the artist’s eye, followed by molecular and

biochemical events in the retina, brain, and subsequently nerves and

muscles which result in the application of paint to a canvas.9 It could be

argued that the molecular pathways of the human body that enable

painting might be more complex than those producing photographs.

Nevertheless these events must exist for all visual arts: if they did not,

artwork would have to appear by means of some incorporeal mechanism.

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If this idea is sustainable it has implications for an understanding of

representation. Because the trace of the object imprints directly by

chemical means Krauss says that photographs are indexical and not

iconic. 10

Thanks to this, Krauss defines photographs as “independent of

imaginative manipulation” and associates them taxonomically with the

readymade, thus reinforcing arguments about the conflation of

photographic image and object. 11

These interpretations depend for

validity on a type of photograph which is mimetic and produced without

recourse to manipulation of the image at the time of taking the image (or

later). It simplistically discounts any intention of the photographer. It has

always been possible to manipulate the photograph by simple technical

means of exposure, shutter speed, and so on, and by doing this modify the

indexicality of the image even at its inception. This is one of the problems

with photography theory: there are obvious photographic genres, but the

extent of differences among individual photographs even within one type

is enormous. Some will be mimetic, but many others will not, and these

differences are often ignored for the purposes of theoretical analysis.

Either that, or authors select what they call an ideal type.12

Magritte said that his paintings: “show nothing except what I have

thought”. 13

This is where paintings and photographs seemingly are

capable of substantive differentiation. But the perceptions that enable

paintings to be representations are derived from thoughts and memories

and hence, often, from things that have previously been seen; although in

the case of some artists, for example Magritte the images are highly

imaginative juxtapositions of fragments of things seen. (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Arguing against the indexicality of photographs, David Bate says that

realism in the majority of photographs is iconic: “visual memesis is a

form of iconic logic caught up in a play of resemblance within the field of

perspectival vision more than it is indexical”.14

Commodity Fetish.

On the 11th of November 2011 a limited edition print of Andreas

Gursky’s photograph Rhein II sold at auction for £2.7 million, the highest

amount ever paid for a photograph.15

(Figure 2). Because of the

taxonomical nature of art analysis and history, photography’s enigma is

part of its allure as well as of its vulnerability. A need to fully understand

an artistic medium reflects a need to demonstrate power within an elite

establishment. In classifying work of any kind as art, there are many

considerations including aesthetics, and one is commodity fetish, a major

determinant of the price of sale of a work of art.16

Photographs almost

from the outset have been mass produced, mitigating against their

fetishisation as commodities. Mass production and commodity fetish are

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in opposition, and reproducibility of art is a challenge to an acquisitive

elite. At one and the same time photography has the potential to be a most

democratic and an elitist form of art. This is reflected in autopoietic

subsystems: artistic photography as opposed to the abundance of

photographs characteristic of so-called snapshots.17,18

Despite Gursky’s acclaim and the rich catalogue of artistic photography

which has many contemporary as well as historical entries the photograph

remains enigmatic, and some in the art establishment remain suspicious

of it. This implies that there is something peculiar about the means of

making photographs or the status of the photographer as artist. One

reason for this may be the mechanicalism of photography; this is one of

its imponderables, despite decades of investigation through photography

theory. While optimistic about the place of photography in art, saying that

the photograph is displacing painting as the singular object of art, some

authors are dismayed by the lack of theoretical discourse concerning

contemporary photography and “complete lack of any significant

development in photography theory” (in the decade to 2006).19

Figure 2.

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Sarah James says that photography “still occupies a strange temporality

in relation to the present”.20

This is because a photograph from the

instant after its creation is a record of an historic event. Because of the

psychological effects of photographs, history and the photograph have a

special relationship which is problematic. Emotive feelings for the dead,

for example, are very readily evoked by photographs, whereas a painting

does not have precisely the same effect.

The Digital Image.

The vast majority of photographs are now captured with digital cameras

and are intended to be mementos. This is a valuable cultural practice, but

it is not a form of art. (Although in the billions of digital images produced

annually there must be many with a semblance of art). What may not be

readily accepted by those who produce these images is that (as with any

photograph), their images are not depictions of reality. Barthes wrote:

“Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes. I

instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in

advance into an image”.21

Later Sontag wrote: “There is something on

people’s faces when they don’t know they are being photographed that

never appears when they do”.22

Theatricality apart, the depiction of

events in a photograph despite the imprint of the real, does not represent

reality. That they are unquestioningly regarded in this way makes the

photograph a dangerous object.

What the Mind and Memory Make of Photographs.

A photograph, like any image, has the capacity to become a component

of the memory of those who have seen it. And a photograph can be

experienced again and again to refresh and perhaps to modify the

memory. If the memory of an event is derived by real-life experience and

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then later, sometimes much later, by seeing a photograph of that event,

which of these memories is the more cogent? The danger is that the

perceived reality in a photograph confuses the distinction between object

and image, signified and signifier.23

The nature of photographs and the

way in which the mind perceives and interprets them are complex and

elusive. An understanding of these issues does not at this time seem to be

entirely within our grasp, and it may be that a much better understanding

of the psychology of human perception and other aspects of neuroscience

are needed before photography can be fully understood.

The memory of an event which exists in the mind is (if it can be reified) is

a fragile entity, prone to distortion and misconception, and an awareness of

this is needed to guard against the falsehood of the photograph, or rather its

faulty interpretation. Original memory is in danger of being supplanted by

the memory of the transformed photographic self. The photograph

refreshes the original memory, but at the cost of its alteration. The

photograph can also create an entirely false memory where there is no

experience or no recall of a past event.24,25,26

This is analogous to the way

in which our perceptions of paintings are altered when they are reproduced

in photographs.27

In photographs of paintings we are in danger of losing the

original colours and textures. The poster and the colour plate replace the

original painting, sometimes to its detriment and sometimes to its

enhancement. Exploiting work by Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, and Jo

Spence some authors more optimistically suggests that photographic

technologies can be construed as extensions of the physical body and be

instrumental in constructing identity and a narrative of self.28

Language was at one time thought to be the agency which sustains

human reality.29

The photograph is as strong a contender for that function

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as is language, and equally poor in the role. The manipulation of time in

the act of creating a photographic image and the ability of the photograph

to modify the mind can be regarded as surreal or uncanny events. Perhaps

every photograph is surreal.30

Capturing the uncanny, and in so doing

revealing the strangeness and complexity of the world and its inhabitants,

sentient or not, is a valuable role for photography.

Craft Skills.

The processes of photography, especially analogue media, require

considerable craft skills and technical expertise, but they do not usually

leave their visible mark on the image in the same way as manipulation of

materials does in other media. Indeed, when they do leave a tangible

imprint this is taken as evidence of a lack of technical competence by the

uninformed. This is something that contemporary photographers must

work to overcome to avoid a sanitisation of their medium. This is not

only a problem for photography. Some portrait painters have begun to

produce work which closely resembles photographs (in reproduction

these paintings are almost indistinguishable from photographs).31

(Figure

3). There seems to be a convergence of media here: some photographers

are making images which have the features of paintings; landscape

photographers like Beate Gutschow produce composite images based on

classical structures of 18th century landscape paintings.

32 (Figure 4).

In

creating paintings, Gerhard Richter makes extensive use of photographs

to “draw out something which takes the place of representation”.33

(Figure 5).

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Figure 3.

Figure 4.

10

Figure 5.

Thinkers and Artists.

Historically there has been a societal divide between those people who

are artists and those who are scientists. In a formal introduction for Roger

Sperry, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 1981 for his work on brain

function, David Ottoson recalled the suggestion from Pavlov, the eminent

Russian physiologist that “mankind can be divided into thinkers and

artists”.34

To endorse Pavlov’s gratuitous comments Ottoson cited

Sperry’s work which was at the time interpreted as showing that the left

hemisphere of the brain is cool and logical in its thinking while the right

hemisphere is the imaginative and artistically creative half of the brain.35

This neat cerebral dichotomy is a metaphor for a cultural divide between

science and art. Today we know that Sperry’s research does not provide a

complete solution, and that the brain’s hemispheres are highly interactive

and necessary for a huge range of different human functions and

activities.36

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There is a need for artists to be aware of recent findings in neuroscience.

Writing in Visual Literacy, on the role of sensory knowledge in the age of

the self-organizing brain, Stafford makes a case for the need to know about

the physical interiority of the human self. 37

This is akin to the much earlier

ideas of the Surrealists who, enabled by Freudian theories, attempted to use

the power of the subconscious to produce significant art and literature.38

Photographic Art, Science, Surrealism.

James Elkins has proposed that contemporary photography should be

positioned not only with reference to art but also to diverse scientific,

technological, and utilitarian activities.39

He argues for experimentation

with photography’s basic materials. The collaborations between scientists

and artists and the incorporation of science and scientific artefacts in the

work of artists like Christine Borland and Helen Chadwick dispel any

science and art divide.40,41

(Interestingly, the scientist Sperry’s activities

outwith brain research included sculpture, ceramics and figure

drawing).42

Chadwick was an exemplary figure with regard to using the

interiority of the self to produce art. Some of Chadwick’s images are of

human eggs or early embryos, blood cells in environmental landscape

photomontages, human organs, and mutant and deformed animals and

human foetuses; they are often microscopic, sometimes pseudo-medical,

usually poignant, and almost always surreal (Figures 6 & 7). This is what

was said of her for an exhibition of some of her work in 1996: “She spent

the short time she was allowed to pass through this world in examining in

every way she could how consciousness translates into matter and can be

made visible”. 43

12

Figure 6

Figure 7.

13

Surrealism offers the antidote to perceived realism of the photograph by

picturing the uncanny, and an alternative reality. 44

In surrealist photography

the mimetic functions of photographs are manipulated by the mind of the

photographer to produce a representation of the world which is uncanny

(Figure 8). In doing this the human mind is made capable of glimpsing the

nature of the real world.

Figure 8.

Coda.

The photograph in modifying consciousness has the potential to reshape

the external world, and the nature and quality of the perceived

information is important in this process. There is a danger to a wider

society in the lack of understanding of how we as individuals subsume

photographs when so many are of our own making. This is a long-

standing problem acknowledged by Walter Benjamin: “It is not the

person who cannot read or write but the person who cannot interpret a

photograph (someone has said) who will be the illiterate of the future.

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However, surely equally illiterate is the photographer who cannot read

his own images” 45

Sadly even now the nature of photographs and the way in which the mind

perceives them and might be materially affected by them are areas

requiring much better understanding both for art and for society.

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Notes.

1.Roger Scruton, Photography and Representation, Critical

Inquiry, 7,(1981), 577-603.

2. Sarah James,The Truth About Photography. Art Monthly, Dec-Jan

(2005-06), 7-10.

3.André Bazin and Hugh Gray, The Ontology of the Photographic

Image, Film Quarterly, 13, 1960, 6.

4. Laura U. Marks, How Electrons Remember, Millenium Film

Journal,34, 1999. http://mfj-

online.org/journalPages/MFJ34/LMarks.html

5. André Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, In: What Is

Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray,(University of California Press, Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1967), p.14.

6. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans.

Michael Taylor (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974), p.43.

7. André Bazin and Hugh Gray, The Ontology of the Photographic

Image, Film Quarterly, 13, 1960, 4-9.

8. Sarah Dunant, Painting Beneath the Skin, In: BP Portrait Award

2009, (National Portrait Gallery, 2009), pp.8-14

9. Lauralee Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems.

(Thomson, Australia and UK, 2004), 5th

Ed., pp.195-212, 236-301.

10. Rosalind E. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, (MIT Press

Cambridge MA, 1986), p.210.

11. Ibid.

12. Roger Scruton.

13. Rene Magritte, Ecrits Complets, (Flammarion, Paris, 1979),

p.518.

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14. David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism

and Social Dissent, (Taurus, London and New York, 2004), p.24.

15. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15689652

16. Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford

University Press, Oxford, 1980), p.68.

17. Erkki Sevänen, Art as an Autopoietic Subsystem of Modern

Society: A Critical Analysis of the Concepts of Art and Autopoietic

Systems in Luhmann’s Late Production, Theory, Culture, Society.

2001, 18, 75-103.

18. http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/what-does-24-hours-worth-of-

flickr-pics-look-like

19. Sarah James.

20. Ibid.

21. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (Vintage, London,2000), p.10.

22. Susan Sontag, On Photography, (Penguin Books London, 1979),

p.37.

23. Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, (Routledge, London and

New York, 2007), pp.13-57.

24. Julie Espinosa, The Advent of Myself as Other: Photography,

Memory and Identity Creation.

http://gnovisjournal.org/2010/04/27/advent-myself-other-

photography-memory-and-identity-creation/

25. Maryanne Garry and Matthew P. Gerrie, When Photographs

Create False Memories, Current Directions in Psychological Science,

14 (2005), 321-325.

26. Wilma Koutstaal, Daniel L. Schater, Marcia K. Johnson and Lissa

Galluccio, Facilitation and Impairment of Event Memory Produced by

Photographic Review, Memory & Cognition, 27 (1999), 478-493.

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27. Barbara E. Savedoff, Looking at Photographs, The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993), 455-462.

28. Julie Espinosa.

29. Daniel Chandler. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html

30. Keith Guy, Photography and Surrealism, Dissertation for BA

(Hons) Photography & Film, Edinburgh Napier University, 2010-

2011.

31. Sarah Dunant.

32. Beate Gϋtschow, (Aperture/Thames & Hudson, London and New

York, 1977), 82 pp. http://www.beateguetschow.net/

33. Gerhard Richter, 100 Pictures, (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-

Ruit, 2002), 152 pp.

34.http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1981/p

resentation-speech.html

35. Ibid.

36. Lauralee Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems.

(Thomson, Australia and UK,2004), 5th

Ed. pp. 132-180.

37. Barbara Maria Stafford, The Remaining 10 Percent: The Role of

Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain, In:

Visual Literacy, Ed. James Elkins, pp.31-57, (Routledge, New York &

Oxford, 2008).

38. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography

and Surrealism, (Abbeville Press, New York & London, 1985).

39. James Elkins, Critical Response: What Do We Want Photography

to Be? A Response to Michael Fried, Critical

Inquiry, 31, 938-956.

40. Helen Chadwick. Stilled Lives, Essays by Marina Warner,

Louisa Buck, and David Alan Mellor. (Edinburgh, Portfolio

Gallery, 1996).

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41. Christine Borland, Preserves, Catalogue of an exhibition held at

the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Dec. 2, 2006-Jan. 28, 2007, and at

the Collection, Lincoln, Feb. 7-May 7, 2007. 160p.

42.http://www.rogersperry.info/

43. Helen Chadwick.

44. Rosalind, E. Krauss, and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou:

Photography and Surrealism, (New York and London: Abbeville

Press, 1985).

45. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings:

Brief History of Photography.p192. (Penguin, London,

2008).

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Bibliography.

Bate, David, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and

Social Dissent, (London: I.B.Taurus, 2004).

Benjamin, Walter, One Way Street and Other Writings, (London: Penguin

Books Ltd., 2008).

Chandler, Daniel, Semiotics:The Basics, (London and New

York: Routledge, 2002).

Didier-Huberman, Georges, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the

Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, (Cambridge MA and

London: MIT Press, 2003).

Elkins, James, ed., Visual Literacy, (Abingdon and New

York: Routledge, 2008).

Fried, Michael, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes, (London: University of California Press,

1994).

Krauss, Rosalind, E., and Livingston, Jane, L’Amour Fou: Photography

and Surrealism, (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1985).

Ray, Man, Man Ray, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

Sontag, Susan, On Photography, (London: Penguin Books, 1979).

Wells, Liz, ed., The Photography Reader, (Abingdon and New York:

Routledge, 2003).

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List of Figures.

1. René Magritte. The Rape.

2. Andreas Gursky. Rhein II.

3. Michael Gaskell. Tom.

4. Beate Gutschow. LS#3

5. Gerhard Richter. Lesende.

6. Helen Chadwick. Self Portrait.

7. Helen Chadwick. Viral Landscapes no.3 (detail).

8. Man Ray. Untitled.

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Photography, Reality, Representation.

Reification of language.

Every discourse responding to an artwork is an object in itself. In this

way many new existential works are created, although different one from

another and from the original. Like their progenitors, some of these

reifications of language are more beautiful than others.

This is an essay produced during the first year of a Master of Fine

Art degree at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh University, and

remade as an art object on 20 November 2012. With no pretensions

of beauty.

This essay is part of the required publication project: pdf available

on keithguy.wordpress.com

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