Framing the Interpreter

Towards a visual perspective

Anxo Fernandez-Ocampo, Michaela Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415712736
• eBook ISBN: 9781317598251
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Situations of conflict offer special insights into the history of the interpreter figure, and specifically the part played in that history by photographic representations of interpreters.

This book analyses photo postcards, snapshots and press photos from several historical periods of conflict, associated with different photographic technologies and habits of image consumption: the colonial period, the First and Second World War, and the Cold War. The book's methodological approach to the "framing" of the interpreter uses tools taken primarily from visual anthropology, sociology and visual syntax to analyse the imagery of the modern era of interpreting. By means of these interpretative frames, the contributions suggest that each culture, subculture or social group constructed its own representation of the interpreter figure through photography.

The volume breaks new ground for image-based research in translation studies by examining photographic representations that reveal the interpreter as a socially constructed category. It locates the interpreter's mediating efforts at the core of the human sciences.

This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in translation and interpreting studies, as well as to those working in visual studies, photography, anthropology and military/conflict studies.

Part I Methodological Approaches

DOI: 10.4324/9781315746418-2

1 Interpreting Photographs

Some thoughts on method

Elizabeth Edwards

DOI: 10.4324/9781315746418-3

How do we approach the various and sometimes fugitive photographs of interpreters? How do we interpret interpretations of interpreters? In an attempt to unpick at least some of this nested analytic, which is possibly one of infinite regression, I want to take a critical look at some of the commonplaces of photographic analysis, but also to consider some of the ways, beyond classic models of visual interpretation, which might help us here. This chapter is not, however, a “how-to manual” – how to interpret or translate photographs. There is a massive range of methods and opinions, descriptive, prescriptive and discursive, on questions of image interpretation – semiotics, iconology, psychoanalysis, content analysis, discourse analysis, social biography, phenomenology – and many good texts analyse their advantages and disadvantages. It is not possible or necessary to summarize them here (see, for instance, Prosser, 1998; Banks, 2001; Elkins, 2008; Jordanova, 2012; Rose, 2012; Tinkler, 2013; and, for a productive overview and critique, Rose, 2013). Rather, what follows is a contemplation on the tensions, and the possibilities, of method and approach which weave their way through the chapters in this volume.

The ontological force of photographs is their insistent relationship with “that which has been”. Photographs give it immediacy, the look of the real; they hold experience in a suspended time and space as the past is made present. But simultaneously they are carefully constructed social objects, made to communicate a set of experiences to a given audience at a given time. They constitute a visual discourse which is profoundly culturally and ideologically imbricated. Yet, by their very nature, photographs outlive that intentionality to perform in other contexts, in other places and in other times, translating time, space and experience. This is their interpretative challenge.

Photographs are images and objects redolent with signifiers, the carriers of cultural meaning. Drawing on Peircian semiotics and linguistic models of analysis, many approaches to photographs have sought to decode and explain the way in which they make meaning through a quasi-lexical exploration of the signifying processes of content and form, and the cultural processes that produce and sustain those meanings. However, signifying strategies of photographs are deeply embedded within a broader visual discourse. This is constituted in a mutually sustaining process, as understandings of the world are negotiated and maintained through a series of signs which reproduce and reinforce the clusters of values making up an ideological complex.

Signification is entwined with iconographical styles. Images have formal qualities; they are iconographically shaped in ways that themselves carry meanings. A detailed formalist analysis might tell us something about the appeal or cultural accessibility of an image. The frame sets up sets of relationships – here, the styles of interpreters’ proximity to major political figures. Meanings are thus produced through association with a multitude of stylistic connotations, cultural markers and recognizable tropes within the image, created through framing or camera angle, style and the arrangement of subject matter. All these are constituted through, and constitutive of, cultural and ideological values; hence, for instance, the power of the stereotype. But many other processes also come into play. Degrees of formal self-consciousness – of “compositionality” (Rose, 2001 p. 19) – vary with the intentional role of the image. Thus, an advertising image has greater compositionality than a snapshot, for instance, yet both carry meanings attributed to those categories.

Signification and beyond

While photographs can communicate through a range of signifying strategies, as icons or as symbols, it is as an index that they have been most widely discussed. This is because, as I have noted, the nature of the photograph, its trace of the real, points to the prior existence of “that which was”, its referent. The reality effect of photographs, as signifiers of the real, and their signifying (content) and signified (meaning) properties are, as Roland Barthes famously argued, inseparably laminated together (Barthes, 1984, p. 6). “It was there” is possibly the primal scream of photography. However, this claim has been widely problematized, with photographs positioned on the one hand as hollow simulacra, on the other as ideologically compromised. This has perhaps resulted in a distrust of photographs as historical and cultural sources. As Georges Didi-Huberman has commented, we expect both too much and too little of photographs: ask the whole truth and we will be disappointed, for photographs are messy, inexact, inadequate to the task; ask too little and we “immediately relegat[e] them to the sphere of the simulacrum”. The net result is the same: an inattention to photographs, because they are found somehow inadequate to the evidential task (Didi-Huberman, 2008, p. 33).

However, in most images, signifiers are fluid and recodable, dependent on the contexts of presentation and apprehension. This is a position which challenges readings premised on photographic intention. Many poststructuralist critiques, most famously Roland Barthes’s (1977), renegotiate the relationship between author and reader, so that meaning does not reside necessarily in origination and intention but in the performance and reception of a statement. Thus it is readers, on whom the multiplicity of possibilities is inscribed, that make meanings through the cultural knowledge or ideological discourses they bring to the reception of photographs. Meanings are “disentangled” rather than simply “deciphered” (Barthes, 1977, pp. 147–48). For instance, with their interest in interpreters, the contributors to this volume could be said to bring a particular way of disentangling a wide variety of images. They privilege the presence and work of the interpreter in images and the signifying processes in which these are enmeshed, in order to extract certain kinds of meanings. Other readers of these photographs – perhaps someone interested in Cold War politics – would not see the interpreters as the significance of the images, but premise their reading on a different set of signifiers within the photograph. Indeed, the presence of interpreters in such a reading would arguably not be “as interpreters”, but as signifying compositional elements which indicate the importance of the occasion and the political and photographic protagonists and as accoutrements to power and process. Thus, if the interpreters frame the way the photograph works, they are naturalized within these workings. Often interpreters literally frame the assumed protagonists by being inscribed at the edge of the image, visually pushing against the frame. In other cases, conversely, they are centred, integral to a group, yet surrounded by the assumed protagonists, rendered visible only on the latters’ terms. Whilst they may shape the photograph visually, they are not its intentional subject.

However, there is always an energy at the edge of the frame that spills out beyond the image itself in suggestive ways. Indeed, meaning is often dependent on what is not, in forensic terms, in the image. A detailed forensic analysis can powerfully suggest what is beyond the frame, be it in the framing and thus exclusions of the image itself, the wider contexts of cultural visibility and invisibility, or the frames of interpretation brought to a photograph.

This brings us to a key site of the recodable potential of photographs. The instability of photographic meaning is located in the random excess of photographic inscription inherent in the medium_ the camera inscribes more than was intended as “the subject” of a photograph. The layers of signification and internationality can be disrupted by this excess, which is neither selective nor hierarchical, but takes the shape of forensic detail spread across the plane of the image. Excess operates at two interrelated levels, the excess in inscription itself and the excess of meaning that exceeds the intention of the photographer. Both offer potential sites of fracture in the image. Walter Benjamin famously called the first form of excess the unconscious optics that forms the substrata of photographs; Barthes gave it a viscerally subjective quality in his concept of punctum. This is not merely a description of forensic detail in the image. Rather, it constitutes the destabilizing potential of that random inscription to disturb the social surface of the image.

Many of the essays in this volume engage with this first formulation of excess, but they are also premised on the second. There is a sense, as I have noted, in which the interpreters discussed in this volume were themselves often outside the intention of the image. Their presence, and indeed the act of transfer which translation implies, is assumed, opaque, and only partially visible (D’hulst, 2012, p. 142), yet it is inscribed, awaiting disentanglement, in the random excess of the images. The recodability of the photographs intersects with the excess of inscription and intention, content and meaning, that opens them to historical interrogation and enables them to be brought into analytical focus here. It is worth noting that this process points to some of the problems of quantitative “content analysis” approaches to photographs, because, although such an approach can indicate overall patterns of inclusion around, for instance, gender, it does not discriminate between different weights of significance or shifting intentional entanglements. In the essays in this book the interpreters are the major significance, but at the moment of inscription they were not. Many of the actions around photographs discussed in the essays here – the use of captions, image cropping and archiving, for instance – are attempts to control the semiotic energy of images and establish preferred readings that allow the photograph to communicate in specific visual discourses within a triangulated relationship between subject, producer and viewer.

While the semiological approaches to reading images remain important, thinking about photographic meanings has expanded from linguistically derived models of the decoded “text” to more “ethnographic” approaches that consider the effects of images over a wide range of encounters and modes of apprehension. Such approaches see the classic triangulation as inflected with a series of key modalities: technology, composition and especially the social (Rose, 2001, pp. 16–17). If the photograph remains a culturally coded product of visual discourse, practices of seeing, embodied viewing and a sense of the material encounter have become increasingly important in analysis, whether of the photograph album, the newspaper image or the digital screen.

Integral to this approach is the idea that images themselves “do” something other than simply “signify” in a lexical sense – that they elicit responses. This implies an active agency of the photographs. W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous question, “What do pictures want?” thus aimed to account for “the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity or other symptoms that make pictures into ‘vital signs’” (Mitchell, 2005a, p. 6).

While this links back at one level to modes and patterns of representation, such effects cannot be reduced to these. The signifying role of the photograph here is extended beyond the visual into a whole range of social practices. According to this argument, photographs are “bundled signifiers” and their meaning-making work is constituted through co-presences of the semiotic qualities of an object such as a photograph, which is part of the tangible and sensual aspect of an engagement with the world (Keane, 2005). Similarly, Mitchell has argued that there are no “visual media” as such, but that images are “braided”, in that “one sensory channel or semiotic function is woven together with another more or less seamlessly” (Mitchell, 2005b, p. 262; see also Bal, 2003). Here, signifying properties of content and iconography remain important, but extend beyond the image itself to include its material apprehension and forms of reproduction. Whether a photograph is seen and used in an archive, a newspaper or an art gallery, whether it is held in the hands or viewed on a screen – all these embodied relations with the photograph shape the viewer’s response and give meaning to that image (Edwards, 2009; Rose, 2009). In turn, formal changes in those material relations,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Permissions
• Framing the interpreter
• Part I Methodological approaches
• Part II Colonial exposures
• Part III First World War: Messengers of victory
• Part IV Second World War: Power in many guises
• Part V Cold War: The field, the table and the booth
• Index