Photography and Representation
Photography and Identity
According to Roland Barthes, photography brings about "the advent of myself as other." He posits that in front of the lens, an individual embodies multiple identities: what they believe themselves to be, what they want others to perceive them as, the photographer's perception, and the photographer's artistic expression. (\text{Barthes' quote}) Barthes describes this as a "bizarre action" where one constantly imitates oneself, leading to a sense of inauthenticity. He argues that photography captures a moment where one is neither subject nor object, but rather a "micro-experience of death," becoming a specter.
However, Barthes also offers a less negative view, suggesting that photography can capture not just physical resemblance but a deep correspondence with one's subjectivity. While not all photographs achieve this due to the medium's limitations and the photographer's skill, the successful ones capture the person's "air"—a luminous shadow accompanying the body. This "air" is not intellectual but something inexpressible, transmitted from body to soul, representing the untreatable supplement of identity.
The Paradoxical Status of Photography
Allan Sekula discusses the paradoxical status of photography in 19th-century bourgeois culture. He argues that photographic portraits had a dual function: honorific for heroes, leaders, and celebrities, and repressive for the poor, non-whites, the sick, and criminals. The honorific and repressive functions operated together, embedding each portrait within a moral and social hierarchy. Private sentimental appreciation was overshadowed by public judgments, looking up to superiors and down on inferiors.
Early Police Photography
Between 1849 and 1852, Swiss police conducted operations to identify and register migrants and stateless persons. In 1852, Carl Durheim was commissioned to photograph stateless detainees in Bern prisons, marking an early use of photography for social control.
The Sociological Debate and the Body Criminal
Adolphe Quételet defined the social norm as a "center of gravity" and the "average man" as the epitome of beauty and goodness. Crime, in this view, was a perturbing force against social health and stability. Efforts were made to transform societal multiplicity into a singular image, distinguishing a criminal body to protect the broader social body. Foucault studied the forms of social discipline in his work (Survegliare e punire (1975)).
Pseudo-Sciences: Physiognomy and Phrenology
Physiognomy and phrenology were pseudo-sciences that sought connections between physical features and inner character. Physiognomy, influenced by Johann Caspar Lavater, analyzed facial features to assign character traits. Phrenology, pioneered by Franz Josef Gall, linked cranial topography to mental faculties.
The Limits of Photography and the Rise of Bureaucratic Systems
By the 1880s, the limitations of photography alone became evident, as the resulting image archive was too massive and chaotic. To address classification, an "apparatus of truth" emerged, integrating photography into bureaucratic, clerical, and statistical systems for information management, with the index card system becoming central.
Alphonse Bertillon and Criminal Identification
Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian police official, created the first modern criminal identification system. Motivated by the burning of city registers during the Commune, which allowed Parisians to fabricate identities, and the prevalence of false documents, Bertillon focused on recidivism—a significant social issue in the 1880s due to several factors:
- The growing urban underclass, prone to criminal behavior.
- The agricultural crisis driving rural masses to cities.
- The resurgence of labor militancy after a decade of peace bought with the massacre of the Communards.
The Bertillon System
The Bertillon system was a bipartite system combining a "microscopic" individual card within a "macroscopic" aggregate. It combined photographic portraits, anthropometric descriptions, and standardized written annotations on a single card, organized into a global archiving system based on statistics. This system allowed a small team of police officers to measure numerous arrestees each morning.
Bertillon's Objective Photography and the Portrait Parlé
Bertillon emphasized standardized focal lengths, stable lighting, and fixed distances in photography. Initially using only frontal photos, he later adopted profile shots to eliminate expressive contingencies, complementing them with frontal photos for identifying suspects on the street. He also developed the "portrait parlé," integrating verbal descriptions to overcome the limitations of visual empiricism, using partial photos to create taxonomic grids of male head features and reinventing physiognomy with non-metaphysical, ethnographic methods.
Bertillon as a Social Engineer
Bertillon was not just a criminologist but a social engineer, aiming to expedite bureaucratic criminal processing using minimally trained staff, akin to his contemporary F. W. Taylor, the inventor of scientific management. Both were pioneers of rationalization, linking criminal identification to the assembly line.
The Panopticon and Asymmetric Vision
Photography helped introduce the panoptic principle into daily life, inspired by Jeremy Bentham's model prison design from 1791. In Bentham's Panopticon, prisoners could not see each other or the guard in the central tower, but the guard had complete control over their lives. Bentham proposed applying this structure to public buildings, though it was primarily used in prisons and asylums. Foucault studied the Panopticon as a model for the surveillance society, influencing dystopian narratives like George Orwell's 1984 and reality shows like Big Brother.
Francis Galton and Composite Portraits
Francis Galton developed statistical methods for studying heredity and invented composite portraiture. He overlaid images of individuals from the same socio-professional category to capture their essential physiognomic characteristics. Each image was exposed for a fraction of time based on the inverse of the total number of images in the sample.
The Aims of Galton
While Bertillon sought order over social disorder, Galton aimed to reinforce the dominance of the established elite against social leveling. Introduced in 1877, Galton's composite images were widespread in the following decades, appearing in criminal anthropology albums. Galton's perspectives were linked to the Italian School of Criminal Anthropology, advocating biological determinism, and contrasting with the French School, which emphasized environmental factors.
Eugenics and Racial 'Improvement'
Galton also created composites of Greek and Roman portraits from coins to find the lost physiognomy of a superior race. He admitted that criminal types were harder to define, as individual faces were villainous in diverse ways, and combining them only revealed a lower type of common humanity. Galton's interest in heredity and racial improvement led him to converge on the search for a biologically determined criminal type, making him a founder of eugenics—the practice of preventing procreation among lower social classes to preserve the superior race.
The 'Jewish Type' and Stereotypes
In 1883, Galton created a composite portrait of the "Jewish type," considered his most successful experiment. Commissioned by Joseph Jacobs, an anthropologist of Jewish descent, the experiment sought to demonstrate a relatively pure racial type of the modern Jew, intact despite the diaspora. Galton's account of photographing Jewish students in London revealed his stereotypical view of Jews as embodiments of unscrupulous greed, highlighting the influence of Anglo-Saxon eugenics on National Socialist Rassentheorie.
Historical and Cultural Importance of Photography
Bertillon aimed to place photography in the archive, while Galton sought to place the archive in photography. Despite their specific projects, these pioneers of scientific policing and eugenics established the general parameters for the bureaucratic management of visual documents. This has been largely overlooked in histories of photography due to bourgeois scholars' discretion regarding the "dirty" dimension of modernization and the status of photography as a fine art.
Photography and progressive movements
Despite the reacionary reasons for which some photographic proccesses were invented, composite portraits were also used for progressive purposes like the denouncement of child labor.
Photography and Slavery
Images commissioned by white supremacist Louis Agassiz in 1850, taken by J.T. Zealy, now serve to tell a different story, reversing their original intent.
Augustus Washington
Augustus Washington, an African-American photographer and abolitionist, photographed the ruling class of Liberia, composed of freed slaves and their descendants.
Photography and Mental Illness
Hugh Welch Diamond used photography as a therapeutic tool for patients at the Surrey County Medical Asylum, promoting self-perception. Guillaume Duchenne commissioned Adrien Tournachon to photograph patients, studying facial details and using electricity to isolate and analyze individual muscle movements, seeking a perfect correspondence between inner feelings and external expressions.
Jean-Martin Charcot and Hysteria
Dr. Charcot used photography extensively in the 1870s and 1880s at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, documenting women with hysteria—a condition characteristic of 19th-century medical conceptions of female subjectivity. His public lessons, where he exhibited, questioned, and hypnotized patients, attracted a wide audience but also accusations of charlatanism. Influenced by Duchenne, Charcot documented epileptic and hysterical attacks with the help of Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard. Their images were published in the Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière starting in 1875, influencing Sigmund Freud. Charcot's most famous patient, Augustine (Louise Augustine Gleizes), was a young woman with a history of abuse who later escaped the hospital.
Hysteria as Performance
Georges Didi-Huberman argues that there's a performative dimension to hysteria, recognizing a dynamic between the directing physician and the patient-star in Charcot's photographs. Since the late 20th century, hysteria has been replaced by other mental health issues and theoretical paradigms, and it is now seen as a manifestation of depression or existential crisis, expressed through a more or less conscious codification.
Photography and Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The House of Seven Gables, features a daguerreotypist whose images capture subjects' true character, while Walter Benjamin sees photography as revealing an "optical unconscious," distinct from human perception, akin to psychoanalysis revealing the pulsional unconscious.
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll was a relevant photographer in the 1850s.
The Metropolis and the Flâneur
Paris became the archetype of the modern metropolis in the mid-19th century, influencing Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. They focused on the flâneur, who wanders the city to experience its anonymity, freedom, and disorientation.
The Société Héliographique and Early Urban Photography
Early urban photographers, commissioned by the French government’s Commission Monument to document Paris and France’s historical monuments for preservation of their memory did not act as flâneurs. Gustave LeGray photographed landscapes and Palermo after the Expedition of the Thousand. Charles Nègre aimed to capture the sensation of movement in fixed images, portraying all phenomena of urban life.
Charles Marville and the Modernization of Paris
Charles Marville, the "Photographe de la ville de Paris," documented the old districts of Paris before their destruction and reconstruction by Baron Haussmann. He captured both the architectural transformation and the human element, making his architectural photography less clinical. Marville conveyed a sense of a mysterious world through depth and detail, showing the claustrophobic nature of the medieval city about to be replaced by modern urban planning.
Photography, Temporality, and Nostalgia
Like Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag reflects on the relationship between photography, time, past, and death, emphasizing that every photograph is a memento mori. Sontag connects this to a historical-cultural context, noting our era’s nostalgia and the role of photographers as active promoters. Photography, for her, is an elegiac and crepuscular art, capturing the world as it changes rapidly.
Eugène Atget and Surrealism
Eugène Atget, a flâneur armed with a camera, is celebrated for documenting the architecture and urban layout of old Paris. Discovered by the surrealist movement, Atget's photography objectively captured the mysterious dimensions of the world. His framing, architectural emphasis, management of light and shadow, and subtle inclusion of human details revealed the hidden, unexpected elements beneath reality's surface. Suggesting the elusiveness of the world, which would call into perspective the assumption that capturing it is even possible.
Photography and Vision
The illusion that our vision, enhanced by the camera, can capture external reality gives way to an awareness of its elusive and disturbing character. Photography is seen as both an objective documentation and a surreal doubling of the world, akin to dreaming.
Marville and the Photographic look
The capacity of using the shadows to creates new forms is present in both Atget's and Marville work's. However, it is used to produce perturbing atmospheres in Atget, something that isn't present in Charles Marville.
Atget, Reality, and Aura
Described by Walter Benjamin as an actor who removed his mask and began to undress reality, Atget had an incomparable ability to abandon himself to the object. He introduced the liberation of the object from the aura, cleaning the staid atmosphere of portraiture. This involves the destruction of aura, transforming, so to speak, the world and bringing them closer to the masses.
Aura and its Re-creation in Photography
According to Benjamin, photographers in the second half of the 19th century tried to reproduce aura through pedantic imitation of the painting, resulting in contrived, kitsch images, which Benjamin contrasts with Atget's pursuit of humble, vanished elements, revolting against the exotic in what has since been denoted as the pittorialist photography traditions.
Surrealism and Manipulation of the photograph
According to Sontag surrealist photography gives everything the character of a mystery, which transforms the image in an aesthetic of fascination. However the photographs of the surrealist movement are useless due to the way the paintings are manipulated in a superficial way, while the creation of world duplicated by a camera is more dramatic than our natural eye vision.
(Beyond) the Surface
The photograph highest quality is that its truth is the surface itself and not a hidden element. Photographs aren't capable of explaining our world and it's complexity but serve as the starting line for speculations about our own world. Their attraction spawns from the fact that the photograph is perceived as something that was found rather than thought through.
Tranches de vie
Urban photography is seen as the true reflection of modern life by Sontag because the images that get through the author contain the reality of that time period. That's what makes them a surreal photograph instead of manipulated techniques such as superposition.
Approaching What Is Distant
What makes a photo look surreal is it's incontestable pathos. Which means that, as messager of the past, with its concrete meaning about social class, that are brutally pathetic, irrational and mysterious at the same time.
Disaffection and the Flâneur
According to Sontag the sense for scandal of surrealist aesthetics, was primarily due to mysteries being held secret by the bourgeois social order like s*x and poverty. As such the photographer is attracted to the city's darkness and bad reputation which capture criminal's as their own.
New York
As one of the greatest populated city's in the 19th century the urban development of New York changed drastically, influencing other major metropolis. With a total of up to 3.437.000 people only one fifth of the current population was native born American. Therefore the demographic skyline was set between the years of 1901 and 1931.
Jacob A. Riis
Jacob A. Riis, a Danish immigrant turned journalist and social reformer, documented the living conditions in New York's slums. His work, including the 1890 book of photography How the Other Half Lives, aimed to improve housing standards and sanitation. A photographer as a reporter? Riis speaks of photography as a means with which all can enjoy the bas fonds without having to be close to it, which ultimately add's nothing.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer
Van Rensselaer found a sense of pleasure from the Italian residents she stumbled upon which felt like home.
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, an art theorist, highlighted the formal value of squalor and dirtiness in slum images, defining dirtiness as a great harmonizer.
The Bourgeoisie and Photography
Due to the surrealist element that lives within photography as it's nature, according to Sontag, a true socio-historical understanding is lost. Claiming that all photographers do is collecting data instead of understanding our world.
The Photographer and the Night
Riis' interest in the slums stemmed from his late-night walks home, where he witnessed the city with its defenses down. This contrasted with the loss of dignity caused by modern urban life, symbolized by the flâneur losing his aureole in Baudelaire's poem.
The Flash
The innovation of flash photography in 1888 led to a dramatic struggle between darkness and light in Riis's work. His investigation into the city's heart was balanced between a Manichean vision and the possibility of a complex view on social and aesthetic forces. The shock that the pictures cause is a positive element in his job.
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz, born in a German Jewish family that immigrated in 1848, saw how New York had change when his family went back to Europe to stay there for a while. In 1897 he developed the project: Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies", in which he wanted to picture every day in the city so that photography occupied a place within the sphere of plastic expression.
Detachment and the City's Charm
Due to his sensitive nature and the fact that he had spent his early childhood in Europe, Alfred felt detached from the city as he hated its dirty street while still being charmes by it. In fact he thought that people living there where better than him cause they where experiencing something real.
The Fifth Avenue's Winter
Stieglitz would spent hours outside during snowstorms for the perfect shot. The photos where all about the atmospheric elements in the scenes and how they looked on pictures.
The Photo-Secession
Around 1910, there was a revolutionary shift in that photography that began in American culture for its artistic value. The new expression was "straight photography"
An Art of Contemplation and Atmospheric Vision
Stieglitz sought atmospheric and auratic photography, observing the city through contemplative distance. His later work, like cloud studies which would give as a consequence the intangibility of nature.
Photography's Impact on Perception
Susan Sontag relates photography to Plato's Cave, portraying unregenerate humanity captivated by images, and argues that photography allows people to carry the world in their heads, likening it to collecting the world.
The miniature pictures
Photography follows a process that started from the printing press which alienates the subject from our world by turning it into a mental object. In contrast it's even more violent and radical because it also captures the subject.
Knowledge, Control, Power
Seeing how much of the world photography has to offer, Sontag emphasizes that the machine is an instrument to create a connection in which through the feeling of having this knowgledge one can feel powerful.
The turism
In todays worlds photography goes hand in hand with tourism to the point that, according to Sontag, it seems almost impossible to experience something new in the outside world with a camera.
Living/Refusing an Experience
While one is taking a photo, they're also denying that experience to themselves by reducing it to a search of what is called fotogenico. This also stems from not completely committing to an experience which is ultimately solved via the form that is photography.
Romanticism and the Present
Photography enables us to aestheticize mundane lives, framing the present with a seductive aura, transforming it into a nostalgically enchanting past, giving us a romantic angle of said present.
Alice Elizabeth Austen
Alice Elizabeth Austen captured domestic spaces and social circles, later documenting New York's urban types and demonstrating strong empathy, showing us how photography at the end of 1800's was becoming more natural.
Berenice Abott
Abbott's interest developed while being the assistant to the DADA surrealist Man Ray. Once it developed to a popular point for here she openner her first studio in 1926 with the style of portraying subjects as portraits. She would get acquainted to Eugene Atget in 1925 and would also collaborate with him.
New Deal and New York City Transformation
She came back to New York with the purpose in mind that whatever has done by Atget for Paris, Berenice should do equal to it for Manhattan. This was the catalyst project that would lead her to her project named: Changing New York in 1939 to witch Elizabeth Mccaussland would join.
Photography, Cartography, and History
She was born in the Greenwich and also was a major player for transforming and developing photography through collective works.
Precison
Abbott aimed for precision while respecting a certain moment and space as each photos where accompanied by the date and the location where the photo has been taken.
Berenice straight photography?
Abbott's straight photography has nothing to do with superficial effects but had the vision of Stieglitz's fathers and of Mathew Brady.
The primacy of the object
She wanted the focus' to be on her inspiration for the documents she was about to show and also giving the object the focus based of its own form and life.
Photography and Science
For Abbott photography could go together with scientific exactitude to form a base from witch art could develop once more.
Objectivity and Subjectivity
The job of the photography is that of the selection and he must know what and what not to take a picture of. To make the world understand what is happening one must possess an artistic quality to enphasize its drama.
The baroque photo
Abbott's visions where ones full of luminosity that can trigger any point of view such has that of the surrealism.
The Shop's of Manhattan
The show windows create new dimensions in the photos especially trough the objects the people and the lights the make up the photos which allow for the person's or the merchants to see himself and their own products in said photography.