lecture 01 - photography as picture or document

7/29/2019 Lecture 01 - Photography as Picture or Document

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PhotographyasPictureorDocument:

Victorian photography asparadigm


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A question

What defines a photograph?


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A question


A technology or a way of making an image?


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A question



Proof or a picture?


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A question



Proof or a picture?


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A question



Proof or a picture?


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Photography:

Proof or Picture?

or

Recording or Production

(of the world?)


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WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT

Photography and Taxonomy:An Approach to its Functions Through Classification

The Pencil of Nature

produced in six instalments 1844-1846


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The inventory, the archive, the exact document!


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The landscape, architecture!(the surface touched by light)!


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The portrait, the different point of view!


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The still life, the painting!(the exotic)!


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The photocopy, photography and exact reproducibility!


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The cultural object reproduced (a new cultural economy)!


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The real and representation (photography as anartof representation!that can draw on other traditions of image making i.e. Dutch painting)!


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The pencil of nature

A claim for the images authenticity written by nature itself (a claim

for lack of artifice, for lack of the artists hand)

As a published document: less a definition of what photography is as a

medium, more an exploration for the possible uses to which photographycan be put Photography has no identity but rather a plurality of uses:

different genres, different social functions

Put crudely: it sits between proof and picture, between art and

document


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Two paradigms to explore:

The identity or character of a face (art)

The evidential and analytical image, given over to the work of comparison(science)


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The picture

*The problem of definingart photography from

pictorialism to street photography to conceptual art and

photography the contemporary artist as photographer*The tension between using language oftradition for a new

media

*The notion that the artist takes the picture

*An emphasis on pictorial codes and composition, on ideasand narrative

*linked to a history of photography as produced by named

subject

*A mode that examines cultural values and expectations


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The document

*The power of photography to capture a scene exactly

*neutral, style-less, objective

*The notion that the camera takes the picture

*An emphasis on the mechanics of the camera not the style

of picture construction*linked to a history of photography around discourses more

than authors: legal documents, anthropology, mug-shots,

topographic views

*An

open

image that is available to

use


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VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PICTURE

CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

OSCAR REJLANDER

HENRY PEACH ROBINSON


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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, (or Oscar Rejlander)!The Dream,!c.1860

!


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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,!Reginald Southeby and Skeletons,!1857!


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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,!St George and the Dragon,!1875!


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Julia Margaret Cameron,!Prayer and Praise!1865!!!!A combination of visual languages:!!1. Realist, indexical!(lack of costume, little directednarrative, fleshy, somatic

corporeality [Carol Armstrong])!!2. Allegorical, devotional!(clear iconographic grouping and!title - real people standing assymbols)!


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Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson with Book also called The Dirty Monk, 1865!Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin, 1868-9!


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Julia Margaret Cameron, !I Wait, !1872!


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Different modes:

the fantasy or narrative set-up / the truthful portrait


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Julia Margaret Cameron!My Grandchild, aged 2yrs 3m!1865 (image of Mary Hillier and Archibald Cameron)!


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Julia Margaret Cameron!My Grandchild, aged 2yrs 3m!1865 (image of Mary Hillier and Archibald Cameron)!


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1.Reality - my grandchild, right there - looking likethat, absolutely real

2.Representation - an interlocking web of visuallanguages and identifications, i.e. Hillier as Cameron,Archibald as Christ, a scene at home, a scene of

eternal devotion

Allegorical of photography itself


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Some otherfantasical photography, old and new

Oscar RejlanderHenry Peach Robinson

Jeff Wall

Gregory Crewdson

Anna Gaskell

Defining features:

the image as planned, not a spontaneous scene captured

the image as composite notwhole

- made out of many parts stitched together

an emphasis on cultural codes, an exploration of already known stories, myths, symbols orimages


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Oscar Gustav Rejlander,The Two Ways of Life

, 1857!


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Henry Peach Robinson, Sleep, 1867!


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Henry Peach Robinson, Preparing Spring Flowers for Market, 1873!


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Jeff Walls interpretation of Ralph Ellisons book The Invisible Man, 1999-2000!


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Henry Peach Robinson, The Lady of Shalott, 1860-1!


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Gregory Crewdson from series Twilight, 2002!(see also various paintings of drowned Ophelia from Hamlet)!


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John Everett Millain

Ophelia

1852


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Tom Hunter

The Way Home

2000


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Tom Hunter

The Way Home

2000


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Anna Gaskell!From Wonder series, 1996!


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The photograph, then, as a construction. Not a recording of the world,but the production of a scene

Not an issue of the capturing of a spontaneous moment, but the

production of an imaginary moment


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EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY AND THEDOCUMENT

MODES OF PHOTOGRAPHY:

- CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY

- CRIMINOLOGY


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In the emergence of photography some of the earliest use of

photography to produceproof

was not in the service of

documentary [a term that emerges in the 1920s] but was

used for science

Photographys identity in the late 1800s is caught between

art and science in terms of its uses

As such it is bound up with the Victorian beliefs of

classification, ordering and mapping

Photography does not have an identity, but it is used to

produce identities ofothers


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John Lamprey, Anthropometric Study, Malayan Man, c.1868Unknown Photographer, Anthropological Study of a South Australian Aboriginal

Female (Ellen aged 22), c.1870


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THE OTHER BODY OF PHOTOGRAPHY?

Allan Sekula; every proper portrait has itslurking objectifying inverse in the files of thepolice

The Body and the Archive


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Two kinds of photographTwo modes (the portraitist, the policeman)

Two uses (celebrity, the police-file)

Whilst these are of the same face, one is nearer the ideal Picture whereas theother serves as a form of evidence, more akin to Proof"

Who am I (celebrity object of love / attention)? = Portrait as celebratory


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Who am I (celebrity, object of love / attention)? = Portrait as celebratoryWhat do I look like (how can I be visually mapped)? = Portrait as evidential"


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Eadweard Muybridge, Indian Village, Tangass, Alaska, c.1868

Eadweard Muybridge,

Woodward

sGardens, San Francisco

, c.1869-72


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Eadweard Muybridge, Morning Call, 16th June, 1878


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Eadweard Muybridge, Walking, carrying a 75lb stone on left shoulder, 1887, frombookAnimal Locomotion


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Eadweard Muybridge, Running and jumping with skipping rope, c.1887

Between science and cinema


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tienne-Jules Marey, High Jump, 1890-1tienne-Jules Marey, Pole-Vaulting, 1890-1!


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tienne-Jules Marey, Long Jump, 1883!


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tienne-Jules Marey, High Jump Preceded by Run, 1883!


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Two modes of comparison:

The grid / The composite

Both emphasise photography not as a technology of a single image: they achieve

their effects through repetition and accumulation

Not a one but a many


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Francis Galton and the composite:

The composite as the promise of theability to induce knowledge from thepurely visual, to find the truth throughcommon or shared traits that the

camera could uncover

Examples:The consumptivelookThe familiallookThe Engineerlook

The criminallook

Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human

Faculties 1883, Frontispiece plate


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Examples:The consumptivelookThe familiallook!


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Two different way tocomposite !The use of multiple layers / negatives for differentdestinations ofphotography!


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Photography asvisual evidence

-linked to specialist knowledge as used by the expert

-belief that photographs could give access, via the visual, to

showing common traits; such as family likeness or universal

signs of degeneracy; linked to colonialism / eugenics


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Benign family resemblancea portrait of genetic inheritancerather than individuals.

Generalresemblance, notparticular features.

Attempting to use a combinedevidence of the camera to seebeyond the features of theindividual

Francis Galton, Composites of Members of a Family, n/d!


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The collapsing of the archive into one image:the ultimate criminal? Thereduction of the particular individual to a generaltypeFrancis Galton, Composites of Criminals, c.1882!


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Allan Sekula:the Galtonian composite can be seen as the collapsed version of thearchive. In this blurred configuration, the archive attempts to exist as apotent single image, and the single image attempts to achieve the authorityof the archive, of the general, abstract proposition

from The Body and the Archive, October no.39, p.54

Photographs as documents used to build an argument (rather than paint apicture)!


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Theultimate document photography and the police!Alphonse Bertillon, display stand in Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889; precision equipment

for the recording of data at crime scene!


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The Bertillonage method (derived from physiognomy and phrenology): Theexactitude of measurement of the body: each combined set ofmeasurements (head, arm, leg etc.) is different - the particular generatesits own archive (a body + imagefingerprint)


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Bertillonage at Police headquarters, Paris, 1893

The scene of photography and the document


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The subject as an object for the institutions gaze The

use of photography to produce a standard model of identity

(one that can be compared and analysed)


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A portrait parle orspeaking likeness - a proof of identity - it verifieswho you are


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Two models:

Galton generalised abstraction the type

Bertillon material specificity the specific individual


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Two modes:


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the picture as generating a person, emphasis on

subjectivity / the document operates in relation toknowledge and data (available to the specialist)

the picture as coded, as utilising style and the work of the

imaginary (fantasy) / the document attempts to lay out

reality for us in a naked state; removed from style


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lecture 01 - photography as picture or document

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