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Introduction: Photographyâs Publics
Melissa Miles
The liquid language of photography in the public sphere, which has us âdrowningâ in a âflood of photographsâ and caught in an âimage-saturatedâ environment, suggests a photography culture so vast and overwhelming that the public can neither grasp nor contain it.1 Whether encountered online, on smartphones, in the news media, in galleries, on billboards or in advertising, photographs seemingly surround us, submerge us and seep into our pores. Photography and Its Publics approaches the extraordinary number and variety of photographs in the public sphere not as a cause for alarm but as a call for critical understanding. The book shows that, far from being an uncontrollable deluge that has swamped an unprepared public, photographs have long been an important means through which we define who and what constitutes the public sphere. Here publics are conceived as dynamic realms of visibility, discussion, reflection and contestation amongst strangers of different race, age, gender, social and economic status. Publics involve yet exceed the limits of families, interest groups, identities and communities. The book brings together leading experts and emerging thinkers who consider how photography has changed the way we understand, represent, address and locate these publics. Through analyses of the referential and imaginative qualities of photography, the transnational circulation of photographs, protest, violence, emotion and the ethics of spectatorship, the authors provide new insights into photographyâs productive role in the public sphere.
Photography and Its Publics contributes to a growing body of photography history and theory that seeks to propose new approaches to the mediumâs social and political implications. These approaches have emerged in response to decades of seemingly relentless criticism of the supposed failings of photographs and the fraught politics of their production and consumption. Photographs, we have been told, objectify their subjects. They fail to motivate meaningful social change, cannot be trusted to tell the truth, are tools for exploitation, are a form of representational violence, and in their sheer number and fetishization of suffering have created an epidemic of compassion fatigue.2 Susie Linfield is amongst a growing group of contemporary scholars who have come to recognize that such âantipathy to the photograph now takes us only so farâ.3 Rejecting this negative theoretical bind, many photography theorists today consider the more constructive qualities of photographs and photography practices, particularly in relation to civil society and human rights. Contemporary scholars are assessing how the ideas, practices and products of photography give form to civil society, defined by Ariella Azoulay as the âinterest that citizens display in themselves, in others and in their shared forms of coexistenceâ.4 Photography and Its Publics advances such agendas by arguing that the public realm is not just a space in which photographs are shared, circulated and viewed amongst strangers.5 Rather, it maintains that the circulation and reception of photographs have significant implications for how the public is defined, how its boundaries are demarcated and how its composition and operation may be rethought.
Defining the public sphere
Definitions of the public sphere have historically been characterized by a certain idealism, which emphasizes civility, egalitarianism and democratic participation. JĂźrgen Habermasâs influential book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in German in 1962 with its English translation following in 1989, famously framed the public sphere as a realm for debate, the exchange of ideas, open participation and engagement.6 It is understood as the fundamental forum within modern liberal democracies for communicative interaction, contestation and the formation of public opinion. Thinking about the public sphere in this way helps us to grasp how it is constituted by flows of communication, as well as how it contributes to a normative political theory of democracy.7 The public sphere is accordingly conceived by Nancy Fraser as a âvehicle for marshalling public opinion as a political forceâ, for holding governments accountable and ensuring that its actions reflect the will of the citizenry.8 The public also involves a collection of institutions, traditionally linked to the state but not necessarily so, that structure possibilities for communicative access. James Bonham consequently describes the public as a âspace âin-betweenâ the formal political institutions and civil societyâ.9 The democratic public sphere must âmanifest commitments to freedom and equality in the communicative interaction in the forumâ.10 This involves speakers treating each other with equal respect, and people recognizing their common status as members of a public.
In the years since Habermasâs book was published, several aspects of his approach to the public sphere have been challenged and adapted. A number of theorists and commentators, including Fraser and Bohman, have pointed out that while claiming to represent universal interests, Habermasâs model of the public sphere was underpinned by the values of the bourgeoisie and is fundamentally exclusive. The public sphere involves a large number of realms of interaction, and these realms are not equal in terms of the access or impact that they afford. Rational deliberation and debate are individualistic social practices, and classes other than the bourgeoisie are traditionally less comfortable with these practices, giving them a disadvantage in the public sphere and making them less likely to be heard and to participate.11 Thus, despite its historical association with ideals like the common good and shared interests, the public sphere may be formed in a way that delimits participation around gender, sexuality, race or religion.12
An awareness of these social issues also underscores how it is impossible to maintain a clear distinction between the public and the private domain. Feminists and queer theorists have stressed how the private is fundamentally political, and therefore informs the public in key ways. While there may be physical thresholds that articulate the distinction between public and private domains (such as the threshold separating the home from the street), âprivateâ thoughts, identities and subjectivities have important consequences for how public spheres are formed and function.13 In turn, public discourse is also integral to identity formation.14 Identities and the structures that support them at once inform the types of public communication that are produced, amongst which are photographs, and affect access to public communication, its interpretation and response. Understanding the porosity between the public and the private is critical for photography. Images consumed in private may help to constitute publics by communicating values and ideas about how society should operate, informing identities and fostering a sense of belonging.
Crucially, then, the public sphere is neither homogenous nor unitary. A collection of strangers together constitutes a public by expressing a plurality of perspectives and interacting with one another. âThe point isâ, according to Andrea Brighenti, that âjust as the public does not belong to the state or any formal institution, it does not belong to any specific social group, eitherâ.15 Debate and contestation ensure that the public sphere is dynamic and changeable. Fraser and Chantal Mouffe are amongst those who consider the implications of contestation, diversity and the fluid boundaries of the public sphere.16 âCounterpublicsâ may form to challenge the norms and assumptions of the public sphere, and may encourage alternative ways of mobilizing public opinion. Fraser notes that counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces for an âengaged withdrawalâ and regroupment. On the other, they operate as bases from which to develop activities directed towards the wider public, with the aim of provoking change.17 When they are effective, counterpublics may work to influence government decision-making.
Photography and/in the public sphere
Although Habermas did not address photography directly in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he was very critical of the mass media for supporting private interests, undermining the possibility of reasoned public discourse and transforming a âculture-debatingâ public into one of passive cultural consumption. To Habermas, the mass media draws âthe eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time ⌠[deprives] it of the opportunity to say something and to disagreeâ.18 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue in this volume that a similar analysis, warning of the demotivating, anaesthetizing potential of photographs, became something of an orthodoxy in photography criticism between the 1970s and the 1990s. Just one example is Susan Sontagâs critique of photographs of suffering by SebastiĂŁo Salgado. For Sontag, their mass circulation leads viewers to feel that human suffering is so vast and overwhelming that political intervention would be a waste of time.19 Shifting the locus of this much-repeated critique, John Taylor insists that indifference to photographs of suffering is not an effect of the photographs themselves, but a precondition of viewing them in modern industrialized societies.20
More idealistic approaches to the public sphere, such as those that privilege the common good, risk keeping us in an inverse theoretical bind that holds photography to impossible standards. Richard Butsch describes twentieth-century liberal political theoryâs three main claims about the function of the media in a democracy: âto act as watchdog over the state as an independent fourth estate; to act as an agency of information and debate for citizens to participate in their democracy; and to act as the voice of the people to the stateâ.21 The idea that photographs and photography practices should similarly function in the public sphere inevitably leads to much disappointment. Photographs have ultimately failed to hold states responsible for their crimes, are not independent of power and cannot always claim to be the voice of the people. Moreover, these high hopes fail to acknowledge how photography operates as a mode of cultural communication and a medium of visibility in the public sphere.
In order to understand more fully photographyâs contribution to the public sphere, it is critical to further extend approaches to the public grounded in literary cultural formation, reason, public opinion, democratic institutions and face-to-face communication.22 Photographyâs status as a visual medium and the ease with which photographs circulate in print and online make them ideal means for establishing relations between strangers and constructing the public sphere as a realm of visibility, discourse and debate. In their book No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites argue that iconic photographs accordingly âprovide the public audience with âequipment for livingâ as a publicâ.23 Photography and Its Publics reveals how other types of photographs, including news photographs, selfies shared on social media, stock images, activist, government and art photographs, provide audiences with other forms of âequipment for livingâ as a public. The case studies it explores offer a range of empirical, historical, sociological and cultural perspectives on photographyâs contribution to the public. While there is much diversity in the photographic practices discussed and the publics that they help to create, they share a number of important commonalities which allow us to grasp more clearly the value of photography in constituting and understanding the public sphere. Not the least of these is photographyâs role in shaping the conditions and parameters of visibility within the public sphere.
Visibility, recognition and emotion
Issues of visibility have become increasingly prominent in contemporary studies of the public sphere.24 Like other modes of publicity, visibility is contextual and underpinned by a range of social, political, economic and material factors. Drawing on conceptions of the public as a realm where people can be seen, heard and recognized by others, Brighenti argues that the public should be âimagined as a register of interaction, a regime of visibilityâ.25 Regimes of visibility a...
