Photography, Vision, and Representation
Author(s): Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 143-169
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Photography, Vision, and Representation
Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen
I
Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography
-something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures?
If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs?
Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique
methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions
may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing.
But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and
photographers but by laymen. Furthermore, for most of this century the
majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions
in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important
way and require different methods in interpretation precisely
because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways.
These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted
classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common
by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each
other-by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings
and people who think they are (in some ways, at least) superior; by
people who believe that photographs ought to be "objective" and those
who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is
impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who
believe that they should at least try.
Our purpose here is not to show that these answers are always, in
every case, wrong, or that there is never anything to be gained by differentiating
between photography and other visual arts, or that questions
about how photographs come into being are never appropriate to
any investigation. But we do want to suggest that they are a very small
143
144 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
part of the story and that they have been supported by definitions of the
"nature" of photography and the way it works which are misleading at
the very least, and are more often quite simply wrong. But to appreciate
just what it is that modern critics and laymen believe about photography,
it might be instructive to go back a step and take a look at a different
notion of what photography is all about.
In 1889, Peter Henry Emerson, a physician and one of the finest
photographers of his time, set down his prescriptions for photographers
in a pamphlet entitled, Naturalistic Photographyfor Students of the Art.'
Emerson assumes that photographs are first and foremost pictures, and
that like other pictures they may serve to provide information (the
"scientific division") or to provide aesthetic pleasure (the "art division").
The aim of the artistic photographer is not different from the aim of the
artist in other media such as oil painting or charcoal; for Emerson, this
aim is "naturalistic" representation. By naturalism, Emerson meant the
representation of a scene in such a way as to be, as much as possible,
identical with the visual impression an observer would get at the actual
spot from which the photograph was made. Thus, much of his argument
is devoted to a discussion of the characteristics of human vision, based on
the research of Von Helmholtz, and the application of this knowledge to
the selection and use of a lens so that its "drawing power" would render
a scene with "natural" perspective and with the correct amount of detail,
suitably distributed throughout the various planes of the scene. The
"students of the art" are warned against an excess amount of definition,
which is both untrue to our senses and "artistically false" even though it
may be "scientifically true." In addition, one must expose, develop, and
print photographs so as to have a "natural" relation among the tones
-the student is cautioned to avoid the commercially successful heresy of
"pluckiness" or "snap"(contrast), the enemy of artistic truth. These strictures
on practice are useless unless the photographer is familiar with the
principles of naturalistic art; therefore, Emerson includes a sort of walking
tour of the British Museum in one chapter, telling students which
exhibits are to be admired and why.
Although Emerson's program of "naturalism" was not universally accepted,
the basic notion that photographs were representations, and
should be understood and judged as were other kinds of representations,
was quite widespread. Thus, in 1907, the critic Charles Caffin
1. Peter Henry Emerson, NaturalisticPhotographyfor Studentsof theArt (London, 1889;
facsimile ed. of 1890 ed., New York, 1972).
Joel Snyder teaches criticismand history of photography at the
University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own
photographs.Neil Walsh Allen produceseducationalaudio-visualmaterials
and has designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and
applicationsof photography for the SmithsonianInstitution.
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 145
writes, "This group of 'advanced photographers' is striving to secure in
their prints the same qualities that contribute to the beauty of a picture
in any other medium, and ask that their work be judged by the same
standard."2
But critical opinion was shifting even as Caffin wrote. The consensus
of modern critics is that photographs differ from other sorts of
representations in a fundamental way and that special theoretical principles
and critical standards are necessary to account for them. The
philosopher Stanley Cavell expresses this difference in the following
way: "So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not
confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying since the Reformation,
to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation-a wish for the
power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to
manifest fidelity to another .... Photography overcame subjectivity in a
way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the
act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism,by removing the
human agent from the act of reproduction."3 Photographs are not simply
different from other kinds of pictorial representation in certain detailed
respects; on the contrary, photographs are not really representations
at all. They are the practical realization of the general artistic ideals
of objectivity and detachment. The use of a machine to lay down lines
and the reliance on the natural laws of refraction and chemical change to
create pictures are viewed as the decisive differences leading the critic
Andre Bazin to proclaim, "... the essential factor in the transition from
the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process
... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying
our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making
of which man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result
achieved but in the way of achieving it."4 Stated in the most general
terms, the modern position is that in photography there are certain
necessary connections between a photograph and its "real life" original
which simply do not (and perhaps cannot) exist in the "traditional" arts.
But just what are these guarantees, and how important are they for our
understanding of photographs?
We will examine the way one modern theorist, Rudolf Arnheim, has
recently formulated answers to these questions. Arnheim's exposition is
interesting for two reasons: First, it is more complete and covers more
ground than many other treatments of the subject; second, it is to some
extent a recantation of his earlier work, FilmasArt.s This book contained
2. Charles H. Caffin, Photography as a Fine Art (New York, 1901; facsimile ed.,
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1971), p. vii.
3. Stanley Cavell, The WorldViewed(New York, 1971), pp. 21, 23.
4. Andre Bazin, WhatIs Cinema? (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1967), p. 12.
5. Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst (Berlin, 1932); Film as Art (Los Angeles and
Berkeley, 1957).
146 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
a lengthy discussion of how photography could escape from being "a
mere mechanical copy of nature" and thus, in Arnheim's view, claim the
stature of a true art:
The strategy was therefore to describe the differences between the
images we obtain when we look at the physical world and the images
perceived on the motion picture screen. These differences
could then be shown to be a source of artistic expression. In a sense
it was a negative approach because it defended the new medium by
measuring it according to the standards of the traditional ones. ...
Only secondarily was I concerned with the positive virtues that
photography derives precisely from the mechanical quality of its
images."
In his recent article, Arnheim bases his argument squarely on the
"mechanical" origin of photographic images. "All I have said derives
ultimately from the fundamental peculiarity of the photographic
medium: the physical objects themselves print their image by means of
the optical and chemical action of light" (p. 155). Because of this fundamental
peculiarity, photographs have "an authenticity from which painting
is barred by birth" (p. 154). In looking at photographs, "we are on
vacation from artifice" (p. 157). We expect to find a certain "documentary"
value in photographs, and toward this end we ask certain
"documentary questions": "Is it authentic?" "Is it correct?" and "Is it
true?" (p. 157).
Certain ethical and stylistic consequences follow from the close connection
between photography and "physical reality" or "the facts of the
moment." The picture taker is on slippery ethical ground since "the
photographer is part of the situation he depicts" and his picture, like the
photon in atomic physics "upsets the facts on which it reports" (pp. 152,
151).
Old-time photographers benefited from the slowness of the early
photographic processes since they could portray people with an "enviable
timelessness" that "transcended the momentary presence of the
portrayed objects" (pp. 150, 154).
More modern processes are capable of preserving "the spontaneity
of action," although they may exhibit "the incompleteness of the fraction
of a second lifted from the context of time" (p. 151). To portray the
anxiety of man "in need of apersona,concerned with his image," all that
the modern documentarian needs is "persons acknowledging the presence
of the photographer" (p. 155). Finally, should a photographer
develop a hankering for surrealistic effects, he need only pose some
naked people in a forest, a living room, or an abandoned cottage: "Here
was indubitably real human flesh, but since appearances of nude figures
6. Rudolf Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," CriticalInquiry 1 (September
1974): 155. Hereafter, page numbers in the text refer to this article.
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 147
were known only from the visions of painters, the reality of the scene was
transfigured into a dream" (p. 154).
Of course, compared with painting, photographs suffer from the
same deficiencies that "physical reality" or "the world" itself does. They
lack the "formal precision" and "expressive freedom" which the "private
visions" of the painter possess. Photographs are tied to the world which
is "irrational" and "incompletely defined." By its very nature, photography
"limits the creations of the mind by powerful material constraints"
(p. 160). But regrettable as these constraints may be "from the point of
view of the painter, the composer, or the poet," they are "an enviable
privilege" when we consider photography's "function in human society"
(p. 160).
Arnheim shies away from what he takes to be the most extreme
modern doctrine that the "photographic image is nothing but a faithful
copy of the object." He insists that the process of photography injects its
own "visual peculiarities" into the final picture, and that the picture must
somehow "acquire form at its primary level" in order to communicate
"its message" (pp. 155-56). But, oddly enough, the "visual peculiarities"
of photographs serve as a sort of rhetorical reassurance; they make their
audience aware that it is indeed a photograph they are looking at and
not some sort of trompel'oeil painting. In regard to form, a photograph is
a compromise between nature and the "formative power" of man, a
"compromise" or "coproduction" (pp. 156, 157, 159-60). Just as in
Arnheim's theory, human visual perception "organizes and structures
the shapes offered by the optical projections in the eye . .. in a photograph,
the shapes are selected, partially transformed, and treated by the
picture taker and his optical and chemical equipment" (p. 159). Unlike
other kinds of pictures, photographs are not entirely "made and controlled
by man" but are "mechanical deposits of light" which reflect, as
no other kind of imagery can, the "visual accidents of a world that has not
been created for the convenience of the photographer" (p. 158). The
very shortcoming of photography-its inability to attain the formal perfection
of the other visual arts-is simply the obverse of photography's
cardinal virtue-its ability to embody "the manifest presence of authentic
physical reality" (p. 159).
Before examining these doctrines closely, it should be emphasized
that Arnheim is not advancing anything very new or different here.
Siegfried Kracauer and Andre Bazin, two critics whom Arnheim cites
with approval, have advanced rather similar positions, and writers as
diverse as Etienne Gilson, R. G. Collingwood, Stanley Cavell, William
Ivins, and E. H. Gombrich7 have all used photography as a benchmark
7. Etienne Gilson, Painting and Reality (London, 1957), pp. 242-46; R. G. Collingwood,
The Principles of Art (New York, 1958), pp. 53-55; Cavell, pp. 16-25; William M.
Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication(Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 121-22, 177-78;
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York, 1960; 2d ed., Princeton, N.J., 1969), pp.
67-73.
148 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
of "pictorial fact" against which to measure more traditional pictorial
media.8 Nor are Arnheim's views confined to a small circle of specialists.
Most people, if asked, would no doubt say that, whereas the painter can
paint whatever he wants, the photographer must depict "what is there."
The painter creates, the photographer "finds"or "captures" or "selects"
or "organizes" or "records" his pictures. Needless to say, many photographers
would agree with Arnheim as well. Of course, some people
think that an intimate connection with physical reality is a very fine thing
indeed, and others do not; some believe that photographers should
accentuate "visual peculiarities" such as film grain and wide-angle lens
distortion, while others are more conservative; some believe that photographers
should try to "interpret" the world, and others believe that any
"interpretation" is heretical. But these disagreements are minor when
one considers the broad areas of agreement within which they arise. For
example, even when the director of the Department of Photography at
the Museum of Modern Art attempts to show that photographers can
produce the kind of "private visions" that Arnheim assigns to the traditional
artist, he insists that photography is a "different kind of art,"
unrelated to traditional types but closely related to perception.9
Arnheim describes himself as a "media analyst," not a critic, but
despite this disclaimer, we must point out that he makes criticism of
photographs difficult if not impossible. And since his views are held by
critics and their audience as well, it is not surprising that there is very
little intelligent criticism of photography. We are told that when we look
at a photograph we are on "a vacation from artifice"-but should we be
on vacation? We are told that a photograph is a "coproduction of nature
and man"-but is this coproduction along the lines of Michelangelo
and a piece of marble, or a geneticist and breeds of corn, or some other
sort of coproduction altogether? We are told that it is wrong to look at a
photograph as though it were "made and controlled by man"-but what
might we discover if we did look at photographs in just that way? In
addition, we might ask whether Arnheim's "acknowledged fact" that
"the physical objects themselves print their image" is really a fact at all,
and whether the photographic process itself really guarantees much of
anything about the relation between image and imaged.
It is odd that modern critics who believe that the photographic
process should be the starting point for criticism have had very little to
say about what the process is, how it works, and what it does and doesn't
guarantee. Aside from the simple notion of automatism, two models of
8. However, Gilson's opposition is between "picturing" and painting; Collingwood
says that by using "tricks"the photographer can escape from "literal representation"; Ivins
is more concerned with reproducing pictures than with making originals. But only Gombrich
entertains real doubts about the usual reference to photography to settle questions of
pictorial fact (pp. 34, 36).
9. John Szarkowski, "Photography-a Different Kind of Art," New York Times
Magazine (April 13, 1975).
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 149
how photography works have been used, or at least assumed. One of
these, which we will call the "visual"model, stresses the supposed similarity
between the camera and the eye as optical systems, and posits that a
photograph shows us (or ought to show us) "what we would have seen if
we had been there ourselves." The other version of how photography
works we will call the "mechanical" model. It stresses the necessary and
mechanical connections which exist between what we see in a photograph
and what was in front of the camera. According to this model, a
photograph may not show us a scene as we ourselves would have seen it,
but it is a reliable index of what was. Writers on photography have often
treated these models as though they were identical, or as though one
were contained within the other, but this is not the case, and such assumptions
gloss over the basic challenge to any theory which attempts to
find the meaning of photographic images by referring to their origins
-the challenge of extracting pictorial meaning from the operation of
natural laws.
The photographic process consists of the more-or-less permanent
recording of an image made by a camera. The use of cameras with lenses
for making pictures was first described by Giovanni Battista della Porta
in the second edition of his book Magica Naturalis, published in 1589.
Cameras were used by draughtsmen and painters, including Canaletto
and probably Vermeer as an aid in rendering perspective and detail. By
the time Niepce, Daguerre, and Fox Talbot began to try to fix the camera
image, cameras had been used by artists for more than 200 years,
and the requirements of "traditional" art had already influenced their
design; whereas a round lens "naturally" creates a circular image (fig. 1)
which shades off into obscurity around its circumference, the portable
cameraobscuraof the early nineteenth century was fitted with a square or
rectangular ground glass which showed only the central part of the
image made by the lens.
A camera image, especially one seen on the ground glass of a largeformat
camera, is almost magically lifelike: colors seem "natural" yet
intense and every motion in front of the camera is seen in the image as
well. It is difficult to find a term describing the relation between what
was in front of the camera and the image which does not predetermine
the results of any investigation into that relation. We will use the words
"characterization" and "characterize" to describe both individual steps
and aspects of the photographic process (a given lens characterizes
things in greater or lesser detail than another lens) and also the end
result of the process (a photograph is a characterization of something). A
characterization may be accurate or inaccurate, may refer to something
150 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
FIG. .--Complete image area of photographic lens
real or that is conjured up; it may be valuable because it refers to something
else or have value as a thing in itself; and, finally, certain kinds of
characterizations, such as maps, may be valuable for the most part in
only one way, for their accuracy, whereas other kinds of characterizations,
such as drawings, may be valuable in many different ways-for
their factual content, or as souvenirs, or as art.
A photographer-even a Sunday snapshooter-makes a number of
characterizations by his choice of equipment and how he uses it. He may
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 151
not consider each one in detail on every occasion, and in a simple snapshot
camera (and subsequently, in drug-store processing) these characterizations
are "built in"-but they are still there. Some of these characterizations
determine the amount of detail that will appear in the picture.
A lens may be able to resolve very fine detail, or it may be inherently
"soft." The lens must be focused on a single plane in front of the
camera. Sharp focus will extend behind and in front of this plane to
varying degrees, depending on the focal length of the lens, the size of
the image area and extent of enlargement in printing, and the size of the
lens opening-a phenomenon called "depth of field." The camera must
also be placed in a definite position, which will establish a point of view
for the image.
The position of the camera effects further characterizations; once
again, this holds true whether the position of the camera is carefully
planned by the photographer, or whether the camera goes off by accident
when dropped, or whether the camera is built into a booth and goes
off automatically when people feed coins into a slot. The camera position
will determine whether one of two objects within the camera's field
of view will be to the right or the left, in front of or behind, another
object. Together with the choice of lens, the camera position will determine
the size and location of individual objects both in relation to the
total image area and to each other. Thus, given a man standing in a
room, the photographer can characterize the scene so that the man
appears to dominate his environment or to be dominated by it.
With these kinds of characterizations in mind, Arnheim's notion
that "the physical objects themselves print their image" seems more like
a fanciful metaphor than an "acknowledged fact." It is the light reflected
by the objects and refracted by the lens which is the agent in the process,
not "the physical objects themselves." These "physical objects" do not
have a single "image"-"their image"-but, rather, the camera can manipulate
the reflected light to create an infinite number of images. An
image is simply not a property which things naturally possess in addition
to possessing size and weight. The image is a crafted, not a natural,
thing. It is created out of natural material (light), and it is crafted in
accordance with, or at least not in contravention of, "natural" laws. This
is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that something in the camera's field
will be represented in the image; but how it will be represented is neither
natural nor necessary.
What we have called the "visual"model of the photographic process
is another way of trying to flesh out the bare bones of photography's
alleged "intimate involvement" with "physical reality." No doubt this
model originated in, and retains its plausibility because of, the supposed
resemblance of the human eye with its lens and retina to the camera with
its lens and film. But once this resemblance has been stated, the model
fails to establish anything further. The notion that a photograph shows
152 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
us "what we would have seen had we been there ourselves" has to be
qualified to the point of absurdity. A photograph shows us "what we
would have seen" at a certain moment in time, from a certain vantage
point if we kept our head immobile and closed one eye and if we saw with
the equivalent of a 150-mm or 24-mm lens and if we saw things in
Agfacolor or in Tri-X developed in D-76 and printed on Kodabromide
#3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up, the original
position has been reversed: instead of saying that the camera shows us
what our eyes would see, we are now positing the rather unilluminating
proposition that, if our vision worked like photography, then we would
see things the way a camera does.
The camera-eye analogy is no more helpful for people investigating
human vision than it is for the investigator of photographs. The more
the supposed analogy is investigated, the more convincing becomes the
conclusion that we do not possess, receive, or even "make" an image of
things when we see-that there is nothing corresponding to a photographic
image formed in one place which is then inspected or interpreted.
Images are indeed formed on the retina of the eye, but they do
not answer functionally to the image at the film plane of a camera. In the
living, active eye, there is nothing that can be identified as the retinal
image, meaning by that a persisting image that is resolved on one
definite topographical portion of the retina. Rather, the image is kept in
constant involuntary motion: the eyeball moves, the image drifts away
from the fovea and is "flicked" back, while the drifting movement itself
vibrates at up to 150 cycles per second.10 Amidst all this motion, is there
one privileged image to set beside a photograph for comparison? At the
material level (the level at which arguments about photography are usually
pitched), the two processes are simply incommensurate. We might,
of course, identify the end result of vision-"what we see"-as theimage.
But unless the camera-eye analogy works at some simpler level, why
should we call what we see an "image" at all?1
For these reasons, there are great difficulties, not only with theories
which equate photography with vision, but also those which equate it
with half-digested vision.12 Similarly, there is little choice between
theories which find the artistic merit or value of photographs in their
closeness to human perception13 or in their departure from it.14 The
10. Roy M. Pritchard, "Stabilized Images on the Retina," ScientificAmerican (June
1961); reprinted in Perception:Mechanismsand Models, ed. Richard Held and Whitman
Richards (San Francisco, 1972).
11. "Images" may be thought necessary to explain the difference between what I see
and what my cat sees. But is such a noun absolutely necessary even in this case? I hear
differently from my cat; I also eat differently and walk differently. Must there be entities in
these cases also, which take no human or feline form, or are endowed with human or feline
properties?
12. Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," p. 159.
13. Emerson, p. 114.
14. Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 127; Szarkowski, p. 65.
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 153
problem is that all such theories presuppose some standard or baseline
of retinal correctness from which "artistic" or "good" photography
either ought or ought not to depart-but that standard or baseline does
not exist.
If anything, Emerson's conscientious attempt to duplicate characteristics
of human vision strikes us today as "impressionistic" or even
"arty"rather than as "natural" in any definitive sense of that word (figs.
2, 3). We are just as likely or even more likely to accept as "natural" a
photograph that renders much more detail throughout than Emerson's
procedure allows. This variety of standards of optical "truth" is not
unique to photography; neither is the difficulty of guaranteeing
"natural" relationships between a picture and its real-life original. E. H.
Gombrich has dealt with the problems at length.15 He states that illusionistic
images are not those derived from nature but, instead, are
those which have been so made that under certain conditions they will
confirm certain hypotheses which one would formulate, and find
confirmed, when looking at the original scene. Thus, given our immobile,
one-eyed viewer, it may be possible to construct some sort of
representation (by photography, painting, or tracing on a pane of glass)
which will show him some of the same shapes, or the same relative
brightness values or relative color values that he would perceive "directly"
from nature, without representation. But representations suggest
to us fewer hypotheses capable of confirmation or refutation. The celebrated
rabbit-duck figure always remains ambiguous. There are no additional
hypotheses to formulate and test (as we might do when confronted
by ambiguous-looking things in real life). We do not, as we
might in "real-life" cases, say at the end of careful scrutiny: "Aha-it
really is a duck after all, though I can see why I thought at first that it
might be a rabbit." Furthermore, representations can be made so as to
confirm certain hypotheses (about meaning, relationships, and so on)
which we would never think of formulating about their real-life counterparts.
Perhaps all this is what Arnheim means when he says that in
photography, unlike vision, "the shapes have been selected, partially
transformed and treated . . ."1--but it's hard to find anything
specifically "photographic" about that interpretation.
The visual model of the photographic process is of only limited
value as a way of describing how we react to photographs (as opposed to
"traditional" works of art) as well. Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph
of Alice Liddell (fig. 4) was made by placing the camera considerably
below Miss Liddell's eye level. In looking at the photograph, do we really
duplicate the camera position in our imagination--do we believe that we
are shorter than Miss Liddell, or that we are stooping down or squatting
in front of her? Only in a vague and metaphorical sense. The experience
is much more like looking at a painting in many respects. When we look
15. Gombrich, pp. 33-62, 87-90.
16. Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," p. 159.
154 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
FIG. 2.--"Gathering Water Lilies" by P. H. Emerson. Courtesy of Art Institute of
Chicago.
FIG. 3.-Actual size detail of
"Gathering Water Lilies."
at a painting of a figure that dominates the canvas, depicted from the
point of view that Mrs. Cameron used, we do not mentally reconstruct
the actual scene in the artist's studio and the peculiarities of the artist's
cornea, retina, and optic nerve which allowed him, or forced him, to
depict the figure as he did. Instead, our immediate reaction is that we
are looking at a proud, haughty person, and on analysis we conclude
that the artist used a certain manner of depiction in order to give us that
impression. It seems silly not to make the same assumption about Mrs.
Cameron.
FIG.4.--"Pomona"(AliceLiddell)byJuliaMargaretCameron.Courtesyof the Permanent
Collectionof Photography,ExchangeNationalBankof Chicago.
156 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
The problems of photographing "what we see" are substantial, and
the solutions only partial, when "what we see" consists of stationary dry
goods. When we turn to the problems of photographing things that
move or even might move, the visual model breaks down completely.
Let's consider how we might photograph horses running a race. We can
keep the camera stationary and use a slow shutter speed: the horses will
appear as blurs against a stationary background. We can "pan"the camera
with the horses and use a somewhat faster shutter speed: the horses
will be somewhat sharper and the background blurred. We can use an
extremely fast shutter speed and "freeze" the horses against a stationary
background. All these methods are commonly used and accepted ways
of photographing moving things. But we don't see motion in any of
these ways; we see things move. When Eadweard Muybridge succeeded
in "freezing" rapid motion-to settle a bet as to how horses galloped
-his results were met with dismay by artists, photographers, and the
general public alike as being "unnatural" and "untrue." This was not an
expression of doubt in the veracity of Muybridge's results but, instead, a
perception that the results lay outside of common visual experience, and
outside of the conventions of representation that obtained at the time.
People believed that horses might indeed gallop as Muybridge had
photographed them, but the proposition could only be confirmed by
other photographs, not by direct observation.
If photographic characterizations of motion display a unique
character trait of the medium, as Arnheim says,17 then this trait is that a
photograph is a still picture. It is a peculiarity shared with other, traditional
media, but not with normal vision. Like other media, photography
must resort to conventions to represent motion. Since conventions are
multiple, it is no surprise that there are several different ways of representing
motion with photography, or that photographers have developed
conventions of representation that depart from the prephotographic
norms. And these conventions do not necessarily operate
in total isolation from our practical, day-to-day experience with things. It
is our practical knowledge which helps us interpret a fuzzy patch in a
photograph as representing motion, rather than something rendered
out-of-focus or even something "naturally" fuzzy (such as fog or lint)
rendered in sharp focus. If a photographer wishes to capture (or avoid)
the "incompleteness of a fraction of a second," he must do more than use
(or eschew) a fast shutter speed. He must also analyze his subject and be
aware of the expectations of his audience. Conversely, the slowness of
early photographic materials was insufficient by itself to produce an
"enviable timelessness" or to depict "the abiding nature of motion." All
too often early photographs showed instead the restless nature of enforced
immobility, and "natural"-looking portraits were attributed to the
17. Ibid., p. 151.
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 157
photographer's artistry, technical virtuosity, or sometimes to his hypnotic
powers over his subjects.
It can be asserted, of course, that while photographs do not always
show us a scene as we would have seen it, they are, because of their
mechanical origin, an accurate record of the scene as it actually was.
Thus, although we did not see blurred horses or a blurred background
or horses frozen in midstride as we watched the horserace, there is a
causal explanation for all of these-they are the inevitable outcome of
the facts of the situation. The horses actually did assume a certain posture
at a certain time; the motion of the horses or the camera or both
bear a causal relation to the blurs we see in the photograph. This sort of
approach would certainly allow us to say that certain photographs are
"natural" or "objective" even though it was obvious that they showed
things which we never had seen and never were likely to see.
To the extent that the mechanical model holds that a camera is a
certain sort of extension or expansion of our normal visual experience
along certain lines, it seems quite plausible. For instance, when we see a
horse "frozen" in mid-gallop in a photograph, we have no reason to
doubt that, at a certain moment, the horse "really"assumed that posture.
Here we are simply extending and modifying the notion that the camera
is an eye. We are assuming that, if we could see a horse in full detail in a
thousandth of a second, he would look like this. But the blurred horse
we see in a time exposure is another matter. Here we do not assume that
the galloping horse ever "really" became a blur at all. We assume, instead,
that the horse "really" galloped and that this galloping plus
perhaps the movement of the camera and the peculiarities of the film
resulted in the horse being characterized as an equine blur. Thus the
photograph is not a substitute for vision, not even a modified or extended
form of vision, but simply the inevitable outcome of a certain
series of events. No doubt it is this sense of inevitability, this feeling that
a photograph is the end result of a series of cause-and-effect operations
performed upon "physical reality," that inclines us to impute a special
sort of veracity to photographs-an "authenticity from which painting is
barred by birth," to use Arnheim's phrase. After all, a photograph can
be used to settle matters of fact and establish scientific truth. No matter
how great the photographer's range of controls, no matter how labyrinthine
the path from scene to image, one can always find mechanical
connections between the two. The question is whether these mechanical
connections are really important to us when we look at and try to understand
the final picture.
Let us consider another equestrian example, one which is universally
agreed to be an impartial record of the finish of a horserace (fig. 5).
As the horses near the finish line, the operator of the photofinish camera
flicks a switch which starts a motor. The motor pulls film smoothly past a
razor-thin vertical slit in a metal plate near the film plane of the camera.
158 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
FIG.5.-Photofinish. Courtesyof Sportsman'sParkand Eye-in-the-Sky
No shutterinterruptsthe lighton itswayto the filmwhile the camerais
running, so the final result will be a single still picture. As long as
nothing moves past the finish line, all that is recorded on the moving
streakis a verticallypatternedblur.But as the nose of the winninghorse
crosses the finish line, it is recorded, and the process continues as the
horse'sneck and legs cross, and as all the other horses cross.
This single picture showsthe exact order of finishof all the horses
in the race. It would be impossibleto show this in a conventional,"instantaneous"photograph,
since although it might be clear which horse
got to the finish line first,the photographwould not show whichof two
close contenders actuallyfinishedsecond or third. Withthe photofinish
camera, it's all very easy: whatever horse is seen to be to the right of
another horse was recorded on the film firstand therefore reachedthe
finish line before the other horse. Of course in makingthe printsto be
shownto the crowd,the cameraoperatorhasto putin an artificial"finish
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 159
line" on the nose of whatever horse is in contention, but there is no great
deception here, since every point in the photograph is the finish line.
Furthermore, the speed with which the film moves past the slit is usually
set to correspond roughly with the speed with which the images of the
horses will move past the slit: otherwise, the horses might appear greatly
elongated or greatly compressed in the final print. Neither compression
nor elongation would make much difference in determining which
horse finished when, but it might upset the crowd.
Of course, once we know how a photofinish picture is made, it
upsets us. We are accustomed, when we see five horses occupying five
different positions in a photograph to think that we are looking at a
picture of five horses that were all in different places at the same time. In
a photofinish, we see five horses that were at the same place at different
times. When we look at the nose and tail of a single horse in the picture,
we are still looking at things which were recorded as they occupied the
same place at different times. As we move from left to right across the
picture, we are not looking at distance, but at time. We do not know how
far the winning horse was ahead of the place horse at the time he crossed
the finish line-all we know is that it took a certain amount of time for
the place horse to cross the finish line after the winner.
There is no doubt that the photofinish is an accurate characterization
of the finishing order of horses in a race and no doubt that this
accuracy derives from the mechanisms of the camera, laws of optics and
chemistry, and so on. But the way in which the picture is made has little
to do with the way we normally interpret it. The photofinish looks like a
snapshot taken at the end of a race, and no amount of knowledge about
photofinish cameras can supplant this interpretation with another one.
The picture seems "realistic" or "natural" or to display "the manifest
presence of authentic physical reality" in spite of the way in which it was
made, in spite of the fact that what the photograph actually manifests is
far from what we normally take "physical reality" to be. The mechanical
relations which guarantee the validity of the photograph as an index of a
certain kind of truth have been almost completely severed from the
creation of visual likeness.
It might be objected that the photofinish is a special case, or a "trick"
photograph. This invites the question why people who bet on horseraces
should consent to have their bets settled by trickery. Nor is the
photofinish a special case; many kinds of "scientific" photographs display
a similar divorce of pictorial content and "the facts of the moment."
In infra-red and ultra-violet color photography, visible colors
are arbitrarily assigned to invisible bands of the spectrum. In color
Schlieren photography used to analyze motions in gases and liquids,
colors are arbitrarily assigned to directions, and no surgeon expects to
find anything resembling an X-ray when he opens up a body. In all these
cases, the picture is valuable as an index of truth only to the extent that
FIG.6.--Correct exposure for sunlit face
160
FIG.7.-Correct exposure for shaded face
161
162 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
the process by which it was made is stated explicitly, and the pictures can
be interpreted accurately only by people who have learned how to interpret
them. To the uninstructed viewer, red and purple potato plants
look equally bizarre; only the expert interpreter, who knows how color
infra-red film works, who knows what filter was placed over the lens, and
who knows something about potato plants can confidently equate red
with health and purple with disease. Even when a scientist uses "conventional"
kinds of photography, he is likely to rely on the inclusion of
stopwatches or yardsticks or reference patches in the image, rather than
on the photographic process pure and simple, to produce pictures which
are a reliable guide to the truth.18 Needless to say, the explicitness that
provides guarantees to the scientist is rarely demanded of most photographs
we see, and if demanded couldn't be provided, and if provided
wouldn't explain much anyway.19
Let's consider, for example, two photographs taken with a "normal"
lens, given "normal" development, and so on (figs. 6, 7). They differ
only in that one (fig. 6) was given the "normal" exposure for the figure in
sunlight, the other the "normal" exposure for the figure in shade. As
indexes of "what was there," they are equally informative; as "mechanical
deposits of light," one is as good as the other. Indeed, as "mechanical
deposits of light," overexposure and underexposure so extreme as to be
utterly featureless would be just as acceptable as the exposures used
here. The mechanical model, by explaining everything, ends up explaining
nothing. In practice, the mechanical workings of the photographic
process must constantly be regulated by a set of rules for making "acceptable"
pictures, and simple mechanical procedures must be augmented
by additional processes to produce a number of different degrees
and kinds of acceptability. By following the rule of thumb "better
underexposure than over,"20 a photographer would produce figure 6
rather than figure 7, and by employing any one or a combination of
techniques (most of them "nonmanipulative"), a photographer could
greatly compress the "natural"brightness range of the scene into acceptable,
or even pleasing, limits.
18. Similarly, professional photographers include the standard Kodak Colorguide in
their pictures to aid printers in reproducing color. In the absence of such a referent,
photofinishers printing amateur color negatives program their printing machines on the
assumption that every picture will "average out" to about 18 percent gray. When the
assumption is wrong and the results go awry, photofinishers refer to it as "subject failure."
19. Even in criminal proceedings, the police photographer is not questioned about
optics or chemistry. He is asked instead whether his photographs give an accurate indication
of what the scene looked like-a question that could be asked, and answered, of many
"handmade" pictures as well. See also Eastman Kodak Company, Basic Police Photography
(Rochester, N.Y., 1974).
20. This is a simple modern rule for color reversal film. A more complex modern rule
for black and white would be to expose for highlights and develop for shadows. The
opposites of these rules have prevailed in other areas.
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 163
III
If "automatism" and both the visual and mechanical models of
photography explain so little of how photography works, why are they
advanced? At least one reason seems to be that they are not intended as
serious descriptions of the photographic process in the first place and
are only put forward as "negative" definitions in order to establish what
is peculiarly photographic about photography by way of contrast with
what is peculiarly "artistic"about art. Thus what is truly significant about
a photograph of a horse is not really that the horse himself printed his
image, or that the photograph shows us the horse as we ourselves would
(or wouldn't) have seen him, or that it establishes something in the way
of scientific truth about this horse. What is significant (it seems to be
alleged) is that this horse wasn't invented by some artist: this is a picture
of a real horse. This sort of thing is usually more hinted at than stated
explicitly, and it seems to encompass a number of different beliefs, some
about photography and some about art, some mainly ontological and
some mainly aesthetic.
At a simple, literal level, the ontological distinction seems rather
unpromising. Certainly Holbein mighthave painted the portrait of some
imaginary being and called the result "Erasmus"-but we are fairly sure
that Erasmus was not a phantasm of Holbein's imagination. Certainly
"imaginary" scenes can be created by traditional art, but this does not
mean that every painting, or even every good painting, is by definition
totally divorced from "physical reality." Nor is it a fact that every photograph
is inextricably mired in "the facts of the moment." At the literal
level once again, one must first exclude by fiat all sorts of photographic
practices in order to make the distinction begin to work. There must be
no retouching, no staging, no distortion, no combining of negatives in a
single print. "Photography" must be understood to exclude such (purely
"photographic") printing methods as gum-bichromate (which allowed
the addition of brush strokes to the emulsion) and bromoil (a classic
book on this method includes an illustration with the caption "excess
sheep removed").
Of course once a theorist has defined photography as being nonmanipulative,
nonimaginative, and noninventive (in a literal sense), and
has defined "art"as being manipulative, inventive, and imaginative, the
distinction between the two becomes relatively clear.
As far as principles of aesthetics go, John Szarkowski has gone
further than many other writers by stating explicitly the theory of art
that separates photography from "handmade" representations: "most of
the literature of art history is based on the assumption that the subject
exists independent of, and prior to, the picture. This notion suggests
that the artist begins with his subject and then does something to it
-deforms it somehow, according to some personal sense of style."21In
21. Szarkowski, p. 65.
164 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
the very next sentence, Szarkowski adds that this theory probably
doesn't account for the work of any artist in any medium, which makes
his assertion that "it is especially irrelevant in the case of photography"
somewhat less than definitive. Now it is certainly true that many artists
have drawn or painted Crucifixions, Last Suppers, and Horatios and
Bridges, and that it is instructive to see how representations of these set
subjects have varied from era to era, and among different artists of the
same era. It is, however, equally instructive to compare the ways that
William Henry Jackson and Ansel Adams photographed Old Faithful,
or the ways Edward Steichen and Walker Evans photographed the
Brooklyn Bridge. Of course these are not "preexistent" subjects in quite
the way Szarkowski means. But neither were the subjects of Constable's
WivenhoePark or Turner's Burial at Sea, or Seurat's SundayAfternoonon
GrandeJatte Island. Furthermore, when one does compare two "traditional"
renditions of ostensibly the same subject, one is often forced to
the same conclusion that Szarkowski takes to be unique to photography:
that much of the creative task of the artist lies in defining just what the
subject is. When Szarkowski says of a photograph by Harry Callahan that
the subject "is not the figure, or the room, or the shape and graphic
weight of the light window against the dark ground, but every element
within the frame, and their precisely just relationship,"22 he is hardly
revolutionizing the aesthetics of the visual arts.
Now it would be quite correct to point out, 'ala Gombrich, that there
is nothing in photography that corresponds exactly with the schemata
used by many artists of other eras as aids in making representations of
individual objects. The photographer who knows how to make acceptable
pictures of horses might be thrown for a loop if a rhinoceros,
instead of Old Dobbin, were to come trotting out of the barn, but it
would not be for lack of means of representing rhinos as opposed to
horses. However, formulas and standardized procedures of representation
are certainly not lacking in photography, especially in those kinds of
photography often thought to be simple, straightforward "documents."
The passport photograph and the police "mug shot" are each produced
by formulas regulating choice of lens, framing, and lighting. The Kodak
manual ClinicalPhotography23contains 118 pages describing a wide variety
of methods of photographing the human body, each method appropriate
for the characterization of a separate set of conditions or
symptoms. Similar manuals exist to instruct commercial photographers
in the methods appropriate for architecture, family groups, silverware,
and glassware. In addition, there are the "built-in"formulas of the snapshot
camera, designed for "typical"snapshot subjects and to compensate
for the amateur's problems with focus, exposure, framing, and holding
still. Some methods of photography and some pieces of photographic
22. Ibid.
23. Eastman Kodak Company, Clinical Photography(Rochester, N.Y., 1974).
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 165
equipment are more versatile than others, but there is no single method
that will produce acceptable results every time-because the standard of
what is "acceptable" varies with the subject to be represented and the
audience and purpose for which it is to be represented.
Even in the realm of serious and inventive photography there is no
clear-cut break with older traditions of representation. Genres such as
portraiture and landscape have been appropriated, expanded, and
redefined, and new genres and subgenres have been created. Furthermore,
photographers have relied upon conventions and habits of pictorial
interpretation (both by confirming conventional expectations and by
deliberately frustrating them), have created new conventions of their
own, and have borrowed other conventions from the nonvisual arts.
Thus to formulate a set of critical principles for photography based on
what is purely or uniquely or essentially photographic is as absurd and
unprofitable as would be the adoption in its place of standards taken
from a mummified canon of nineteenth-century painting.
"Traditional" analyses of photographs may not be theoretically impossible,
but are they worthwhile and workable? We will attempt to show
that they might be by performing a rather stodgy analysis of a photograph
made by a living photographer with a 35-mm camera, first published
in Life magazine. The picture (fig. 8) is by Dennis Stock and shows
James Dean at the grave of Cal Dean. We will not try to show that this is a
great or even a very good photograph, much less to establish that it is
better than, or at least as good as, some comparable painting or drawing.
But we will try to show that it is capable of being analyzed as a picture
"made and controlled by man." In addition, we will attempt to determine
how the fact that James Dean really existed, and really stood next
to Cal's grave, is important to our understanding of the picture. Finally,
we will attempt to show that this photograph, and other photographs,
lend themselves to a wide varietyof critical approaches.
Clearly our interest in this picture does not lie strictly in the objects
that it portrays but in the relation between those objects which have been
characterized by the photographer's choice of lens and point of view.
These relations are complex. The two people are carefully balanced in
opposition to the tombstone. Dean's younger brother is looking at the
tombstone; Dean himself is glancing away. The surroundings are extremely
simple, and help to concentrate our attention on the two figures
and the grave. Dean himself seems to be a study in ambiguities: he is
both consoling his younger brother and being comforted by him; he
cannot "face up" to death, yet sees it all around him. We feel that Dean
has ceased to view death as an incomprehensible tragedy which happens
to other people and sees it instead as a constant threat to himself. Although
the scene was recorded instantaneously, there doesn't seem to be
anything "fragmentary" about it: it seems quite typical of the contrasting
attitudes of a boy and a sensitive young man toward death.
~:4
E Ai
.4
........
NOWxI~? f
FIG.8.-"James Dean at the grave of Cal Dean"by Dennis Stock.Courtesyof Art
Instituteof Chicago.
We could reconstructthe "actual"scene that took place-the visitto
the grave, the five or ten minutes that Dean and his brother spent
there-and we can easilysee that thousandsof photographsmighthave
been taken which would not affect us as this one does. For example,
instead of this photograph, Stockmight have made an exposure at the
same moment from a similarpoint of viewwhichshowed much more of
the cemetery. This alternateview would present substantiallythe same
"facts"but would considerablyweaken the contrastsbetween Dean and
his younger brother.Dean'sactionat CalDean'sgravewould no longer
seem to be a more matureyet alsomore self-centeredreactionthan that
of his younger brother: he might appear to be more philosophicalin
relatinghis great-grandfather'sdeath to the general lot of humanity,or
he might simplyappear to be a person who gets edgy in graveyards.
There is no doubt that Stock made a number of choices in the
courseof producingthis photograph,butit isdifficultto imaginethathe
calmlyevaluatedevery possiblephotograph thatmighthave been taken
and chose this one as the best. Nor is it likelythat he hopped about the
cemetery, viewfinderglued to his eye, until he "found"this pictureand
pressedthe shutterrelease,nor even thathe wasstandingaround in the
cemetery when suddenly James Dean started looking odd and Stock,
with lightning reflexes, vaulted onto the tombstoneand "captured"the
scene. It seems much more likely to suppose that Stock began with a
notion that he would like to photographDean in a waywhichexpressed
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 167
what Stock believed to be Dean's attitude toward death and that he
proceeded to set up a situation and choose a point of view and a lens
which would create the photograph.
More to the point, we should notice that the kind of visual experience
we have when looking at Stock's photograph is never (or very
rarely) available to us as we walk about. The reason it is unavailable is not
that we rarely happen upon sensitive young men standing in family
plots. (This is the complaint of many would-be photographers.) Rather,
the sort of experience we have in looking at the photograph is available
only through representations, not directly from nature. In other words,
if we were to state that Stock's work in making this picture consisted of
selecting-of including and excluding-that selection does not operate
directly on the scene in front of him. Instead, the principles of inclusion
and exclusion are to be found in the final print that Stock has already
decided upon as his goal.
Of course Stock did not create his notion of the final print out of
thin air, or intuit it from some other-worldly realm. He knew James
Dean and knew what sort of objects one was likely to find in cemeteries.
He knew what kind of picture he was after: one that would show something
of Dean's character from his reaction to his surroundings. He
knew how his audience might react to various arrangements of figures
with one another, with other objects, and within the space of the overall
picture. He also knew what his camera, lens, and film would do under all
sorts of circumstances. To this must be added Stock's own sensibility, his
ideas of what sorts of pictures were worth making. Considerations of this
sort are available to every photographer, although how they are employed
in creating photographs seems to vary greatly. Some photographers
"previsualize" every detail of the negative and print before tripping
the shutter. Others may have a number of nebulous possibilities in
mind which take on more specific form as they shoot a number of exposures,
and their expectations may take on final form only when they
"discover" their picture on a contact sheet.
Perhaps it is this sort of procedure that prompts critics to talk of
photography as an "encounter with physical reality" or as a "compromise"
or "coproduction." But certainly there is nothing new here:
artists have long sought out favorite bits of countryside, hired favorite
models, returned time and again to congenial themes or restricted themselves
to one or two genres. The limitations on visual artists, including
photographers, are usually self-imposed or imposed by a lack of invention
or a lack of representational schemes and programs for translating
ideas into pictures. So if we find some fault with Stock's picture, we
needn't let him off the hook by saying that Nature hasn't done hershare,
or trying to see things as mechanical deposits of light, or reminding
ourselves that, after all, it's only a photograph. We are fully justified in
saying that the work itself is flawed, or poorly made, or trivial. If we do
168 Snyderand Allen Photography,Vision,and Representation
find such faults, we might try to show how Stock could have done better,
or, if this was the best he could do, we might suggest that he file this
picture away with his other unsuccessful efforts.
Does this picture have any special status by virtue of the fact that it
was made by a camera rather than by hand? One is tempted to say that it
does, that it establishes certain facts about James Dean-that, at the very
least, he once stood next to the grave of Cal Dean. But even this minimal
statement is not incorrigible. We might be challenged to prove that it was
indeed James Dean, not a look-alike, or that this is a real grave, not a
stage set, or that Cal and James Dean were related. If we were to establish
that everyone and everything is what it seems from external evidence,
what new facts does the photograph establish? It would seem then
to establish the same things about James Dean that would be established
about the subject of this picture even if he weren'tJames Dean, or in fact
had never existed at all. Of course our knowledge about the real James
Dean-that he died young or that he played a character named Cal in
East of Eden-may add a good deal of poignancy to this photograph.
This sort of thing happens all the time, regardless of medium and even
regardless of "the facts." Our recognition that it is Christ on the cross, or
Marat in the bathtub adds to, or may even transform, our appreciation
of pictures and of their subjects-even when we suspect or know that the
death scenes in question "didn't really look like that."
The method of analysis we have sketched out here is by no means
the only one that might be applied to this picture. We might instead have
tried to assign Stock's picture to a genre-say a certain sort of portraiture
which we might call "environmental portraiture," that differs both
from simple portraiture and from simple depiction of people engaged in
daily activities. Or, having noted that some of the effect produced by
Stock's picture is due to an interplay between human figures and their
environment, we might ask how another photographer, Henri CartierBresson,
handles these two elements in ostensibly similar pictures. Here
we might conclude that whereas in Cartier-Bresson's work the relation
of people to their environment is usually incongruous or in the broad
sense humorous, in Stock's photograph the environment serves as an
appropriate setting and occasion for human action. In this respect,
Stock's photograph seems to be akin to certain kinds of motion pictures
in which similar arrangements of people within an environment are
found. We might ask why this picture was published in a masscirculation
periodical, how that possible use might have influenced Stock
in creating this picture, and what the picture might reveal about the
readership of Life magazine.
In sum, we may consider the photograph either as something in
itself or in its relationship to other things-to its subject matter, or the
the formal qualities it shares with other pictures, or to the psychological
make-up of its creator, or to the conventional expectations of its audi-
CriticalInquiry Autumn 1975 169
"ence.
We may ask specifically photographic questions of it (pertaining,
for example, to the use of wide-angle lenses) or we may ask questions
that are extremely broad (pertaining, for example, to the representation
of "serious" action by agents who are neither better nor worse than
average). The ability to investigate this photograph and others in these
various ways does not, in and of itself, establish that this is a great or
significant photograph or that photography is "as good as" easel painting.
Instead, the variety of critical approaches (of which we may think
some to be valuable and others to be wrong-headed) provides us with a
variety of ways to assess the merit or lack of merit of this and other
photographs. Just as important, this variety provides us with a number
of ways of defining just what this photograph is, both in itself, and as the
cause of a variety of effects and as the effect of a variety of causes.
Even if we are interested in photographs as "documents" rather
than as "art,"the naive belief that photography lies outside the sphere of
other representations can lead to a basic misunderstanding of the
"documentary" questions we ought to ask. The documentary value of a
photograph is not determined solely by Arnheim's questions of "authenticity,"
"correctness," and "truth." We can also ask what it means, who
made it, for whom was it made, and why it was made in the way it was
made. These questions arerasked of other "documents," ranging from
Minoan warehouse receipts to great works of art. They should be asked
of "documentary" photographs and photographs-considered-asdocuments
as well.
The poverty of photographic criticism is well known. It stands out
against the richness of photographic production and invention, the
widespread use and enjoyment of photographs, and even the popularity
of photography as a hobby. To end this poverty we do not need more
philosophizing about photographs and reality, or yet another (this time
definitive)definition of "photographic seeing," or yet another distillation
of photography's essence or nature. The tools for making sense of
photographs lie at hand, and we can invent more if and when we really
need them.