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The Treacherous Medium: Why photography critics hate photographs
October 11, 2006 12:49 PM
Copyright - The Boston Review
8 In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion … raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”
By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful—hell, most alive—when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness … All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.”
The great exception to all this is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love or passion or terrible nakedness. There, critics view emotional responses—if they, or their readers, have any—not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment. When we enter the world of photography criticism we travel far from Baudelaire’s exploration of his pleasure; for there is little pleasure to be had, and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.
* * *
Susan Sontag’s On Photography was published in 1977, and it remains astonishingly incisive. It has been, rightly, immensely influential on other photography critics. And immensely influential, too, in setting the particularly reproachful tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag’s description of photography in the first chapter of the book, which establishes a voice, an attitude, an approach that is maintained throughout. Sontag describes photography as, among other things, “grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” “reductive,” and “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” A typical sentence reads, “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” Metaphor indeed! On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic.
So, too, was Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, first published in France in 1980. Delicate and playful, this book is a love letter to the photograph. Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire—or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: “ A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, for Barthes describes photographers as “agents of Death” and the photograph as a “catastrophe”; also as “flat,” “platitudinous,” “stupid,” “without culture,” and—most unkind—‚ “undialectical.” The photograph “teaches me nothing,” Barthes insists: it “completely de-realizes the world of human conflicts and desires.”
Continuing this classic-modern tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most urgent, morally cogent critic that photography has produced. “My first interest in photography was passionate,” Berger has written (as a young man, he wanted to compose a book of love poems illustrated with photos), and when you read him, you believe him. Berger has frequently worked with photographs, producing, among other works, four books with the Swiss documentarian Jean Mohr. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an “opposition to history” by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: “And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.”
And yet in Berger’s canonical photography essays he took a decidedly dark view of the practice. Photographs of political violence, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer not to enlightenment, outrage, or revolution but instead to a sense of “his own personal moral inadequacy.” (In Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she softened her stance toward photography, but she too concluded that photographs of war do nothing to bridge the chasm between victims and voyeurs: “We don’t get it… . Can’t understand, can’t imagine.”) More generally, Berger described the photograph—all photographs—as a form of “violence” and, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atom bomb, as a “fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.” Berger allowed that photography is a “god,” but he called it the most “cynical” one—and one that, he believed, made amnesiacs rather than critical thinkers of us all.
In the 1980s, the postmodern children of Sontag, Berger, and company transformed this skepticism into outright antipathy. Indeed, for the postmoderns, suspicion of the photograph was an ethical stance, though I see it as closer to a pathological one. For these critics, the photograph was simply a tool of late capitalism, exploiting its subject and duping its viewer. Thus, Abigail Solomon-Godeau charged, the documentary photo—or what she grandly called “the regime of the image”‚ commits a “double act of subjugation” in which the hapless subject is victimized first by social forces, then by the photographer and viewer. John Tagg went further: photography, he wrote, is “ultimately a function of the state,” deeply implicated in the ruling class’s “apparatus of ideological control” and its “reproduction of … submissive labour power.” (In an interview, Tagg explained that he drew on the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to formulate his ideas, though it is not clear why these two theorists were the best guides to understanding a photograph.) And it was not fashion or art photographers who incited the wrath of these critics but, rather, socially conscious photojournalists, with their foolish belief in such old-fashioned fictions as progress, truth, and justice. “The liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch,” Martha Rosler scoffed in a seminal, oft-quoted piece. “Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.”
Most important, these critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy—for either photographer or viewer—was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph. To think otherwise was to partake in a sham: “The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,” Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it was impossible to ever see the world anew, for the gaze of both the photographer and his audience was predetermined, and irreparably infected, by reactionary ideological forces beyond our control; in their scheme, we are all simply helpless spiders caught in capitalism’s web, which is spun, apparently, not of silk but of iron. (As Berger would tartly note, “Unlike their late master, some of Barthes’ structuralist followers love closed systems.”) Indeed, Burgin condemned the actual activity of looking—an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: “Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking,” he insisted. In short, these critics regarded the photograph as a prison and the gift of vision as a crime. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” might well have been the epigraph to their books, which are no fun at all to read.
Compare all this—this obsession with victimization and predetermination, this utter refusal of freedom, this insistent moroseness—to the opening pages of Pauline Kael’s essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and for numerous other critics. Here it is:
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can … make you care, make you believe in possibilities again… . The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy of just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
Kael continued, “Because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions”‚ that is, the reactions of the moviegoer sitting in front of the screen—‚ can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.” “ Trash, Art, and the Movies” was written by a brilliant lover.
Kael had two great insights in this piece. One is that trash, far from blinding viewers to art, actually prepared them for it; or, rather, that through understanding one’s visceral enjoyment of trash, a viewer could begin to formulate her own, independent aesthetic that could lead to an equally visceral enjoyment of art. Kael’s second truth was that the only capacious and intelligent way to experience movies was to combine one’s deepest emotional reactions—which should never be disowned—with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such unthinking ways “does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.” But this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had come to when he wrote of seeking “the why of his pleasure”; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he wrote that the good critic combines the “sense of fact” with the “personal truth”; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he wrote that “the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic’s intelligence.” It is this quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling—and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it implies—that photography critics reject. The question is: why?
* * *
Photography is a modern invention—one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.
What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories—which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?
One thing was clear, early on: photography was, and perhaps still is, the great democratic medium. Baudelaire, who launched his famous diatribe against photography in 1859, hated the new form for many things, one of which was certainly its populist character. “In these deplorable times,” Baudelaire warned, “a new industry has developed,” one supported by what he called the “stupidity of the masses.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he railed,
An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah… . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers.
Almost from the beginning, it was clear that every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker—at least in developed countries such as England, Germany, France and the United States—would be able to purchase photographic reproductions. But with the introduction of lighter, cheaper cameras, which began in the late 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, it became clear that the butcher and baker could not only purchase photos but could make them, too. Even more startling: they could make good photos. This is one of several things that sets photography apart from the other arts. Most people, after all, can’t paint a wonderful painting or compose a wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people—with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge—have taken wonderful photos: better, sometimes, than those of the great artists. Yet this, too—and the leveling tendencies it implies—is troubling. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the “disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.”) For where such egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire an activity—much less an art—that so many people can do so damn well? Photography’s democratic promise has always been photography’s populist threat.
Then, too, photography stirs up our anxieties about, our love–hate relationship to, technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling, photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less than 200 years ago with compromised, modern man; and unlike those other arts, it is dependent on a machine. It is, therefore, an impure and highly contingent art, and we have approached it with that trepidatious mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious hope and tremendous gloom, with which we approach the machine age itself.
Yet beyond all this, there is something else at the heart of photography criticism’s peculiarities. Most photography critics—Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and certainly the postmoderns—were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School critics: especially Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was Benjamin’s friend and comrade. In fact, none of these men wrote mainly about photography, but what they did write has been treated with biblical respect—and undergone hermeneutical scrutiny—by late-20th-century critics.
It would be false to say that Benjamin and Kraucauer hated photographs. On the contrary: as great dialecticians, they (and especially Benjamin) believed the photograph held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his now enormously influential essay “Little History of Photography,” originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that photography had created a “new way of seeing” and would enable people “to achieve control over works of art.” Several years later he wrote of the ways that film and photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual… . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.”
Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph, its spooky ability to make us want to enter into the world and even, sometimes, change it. For Benjamin, the photo wasn’t a dead thing; on the contrary, it could embrace not just the past but the future. Looking at one photograph—a 19th-century portrait of a man and his fiancée (she would later commit suicide)—he mused.
Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us… . The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.
At the same time, these critics were highly suspicious of photography and the passive, aestheticized society they feared it would help create. Benjamin wrote that mass events—including “monster [political] rallies, … sports events, and … war”‚ were all “intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography.” He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it “can endow any soup can”‚ did he foresee the age of Warhol?—‚ with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.” And he charged—somewhat bizarrely—that with the rise of photography “a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions.” (Instead, “One appeals to the lens.”) Both he and Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of diminution: “The photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her,” Kracauer wrote. “The photograph annihilates the person.” And while many artists and journalists working in Weimar Berlin’s cacophonous, newly uncensored press—notable for its plethora of heavily illustrated publications—viewed the photograph as a harbinger of modernity, Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. “The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” he charged. “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding… . The ‘image-idea’ drives away the idea.”
Most of all, though, I believe it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography criticism. Brecht, it’s fair to say, really did dislike photographs, or at best deeply distrust them; in 1931 he described them as “a terrible weapon against the truth.” In “Little History,” Benjamin quotes Brecht: “Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG” the massive German armaments and electric companies, respectively— tells us next to nothing about these institutions.”
These two sentences have been quoted ad infinitum and launched a million Ph.D. theses. And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs don’t explain the way the world works; they don’t offer reasons or causes; they don’t tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs live on the surface: they can’t burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events. And though it’s true that photographs document the specific, they tend, also, to blur—dangerously blur—political and historic distinctions: a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Berlin, circa 1945, looks much like a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Hanoi, circa 1969, which looks awfully similar to a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Baghdad from last week. Yet only a vulgar reductionist—or a complete pacifist—would say that these three cities, which is to say these three wars, are fundamentally the same cities or the same wars. Still, the photos look the same: there’s a very real sense in which if you’ve seen one bombed-out building you have indeed seen them all. (“War is a horrible repetition,” Martha Gellhorn wrote, and this is even truer of photographs than of words.) It is this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic quality of the photograph—what Barthes called its stupidity—that critics have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.
But the problem with photographs is not only that they fail to explain the world. A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of monopoly capitalism or the reasons for the genocide in Rwanda. They—we—turn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or suffering, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs, also, to find out what our intuitive reactions to such otherness might be. (This curiosity is not, as the postmoderns have charged, an expression of “imperialism,” racism,” or “orientalism”: the peasant in Kenya and the worker in Cairo are as fascinated—if not more so—by a picture of New Yorkers as we are by an image of them.) None of us is a creature solely of feeling, and yet there is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, on an emotional level.
For Brecht, of course, this was the worst possible approach to anything. Brecht’s entire oeuvre is an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment itself; indeed, for Brecht, the two were synonymous. Brecht regarded all feeling—any feeling—as dishonest and dangerous; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism. As George Grosz once remarked, Brecht “clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric computer instead of a heart.” And George Grosz was a friend.
There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about Brecht’s emotional astringency. Who can not admire a man who, in one of his very first poems, announces to the women in his life, “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely.” What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht—like Moses—was a particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular things. Brecht’s time and place was Weimar Germany, and he saw—correctly—that his compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their defeat in World War I, of ressentiment against Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht saw—correctly—that this poisonous mix of increasingly hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism.
Like Brecht, we live in dark times, which is to say times of confusion, violence, and injustice. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brecht’s. We do not—unlike Brecht—live in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of Treblinka and Sobibor. Brecht’s relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and facing a very different set of challenges.
For the entire article, please see the link below.
Susie Linfield is the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University.
http://bostonreview.net/BR31.5/linfield.html
Posted at 12:49 PM