Photographs Objects Histories

On the Materiality of Images

Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart, Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134523566
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Soziologie

This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them.
The book's contributions are drawn from disciplines including the history of photography, visual anthropology and art history, with case studies from a range of countries such as the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images.

1
INTRODUCTION

Photographs as objects
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart

The photograph was very old, the corners were blunted from having been pasted in an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days.

(Barthes 1984:67)

In one of the most famous and influential descriptions in the whole literature of photography, what Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida describes first is not the image of the two children but a material object. It is a photograph that carries on it the marks of its own history, of its chemical deterioration (‘the sepia print had faded’), and the fact that it once belonged to a broader visual narrative, pasted in an album, the pages of which were, we can conjecture, repeatedly handled as they were turned, re-enacting its narrative in many different contexts.

The central rationale of Photographs Objects Histories is that a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image. As such, photographs exist materially in the world, as chemical deposits on paper, as images mounted on a multitude of different sized, shaped, coloured and decorated cards, as subject to additions to their surface or as drawing their meanings from presentational forms such as frames and albums. Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience. They have ‘volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world’ (Batchen 1997:2) and are thus enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions. These characteristics cannot be reduced to an abstract status as a commodity, nor to a set of meanings or ideologies that take the image as their pretext. Instead, they occupy spaces, move into different spaces, following lines of passage and usage that project them through the world (Straw 1998:2). As all the chapters here demonstrate in their different ways, thinking materially about photography encompasses processes of intention, making, distributing, consuming, using, discarding and recycling (Attfield 2000:3), all of which impact on the way in which photographs as images are understood.

For many decades writing on photography has resonated with references to the photograph as object. These references have made tantalizing and fleeting appearances, never to be pursued fully or systematically (a point to which we shall return). Frequently photography’s materiality is engaged with only in relation to the coinnosseurial ‘fine print’ on the one hand and conservation concerns on the other. Despite the clear realisation of this physical presence, the way in which material and presentational forms of photographs project the image into the viewer’s space is overlooked in many analyses. ¹ The transparency of the medium is such that ‘in order to see what the photograph is “of” we must first suppress our consciousness of what the photograph “is” in material terms’ (Batchen 1997:2). The prevailing tendency is that photographs are apprehended in one visual act, absorbing image and object together, yet privileging the former. Photographs thus become detached from their physical properties and consequently from the functional context of a materiality that is glossed merely as a neutral support for images. As Maynard (1997:24) has argued, ‘Perhaps what has …most obdurately stood in the way of our understanding of photography is the assumption that photography is essentially a depictive device and that its other uses are marginal.’

Image content is, of course, fundamental to all the photographs that are discussed in this book. There are several reasons why this is so. Image content is our familiar way of thinking about photographs at the simplest level. Image content is usually why photographs were purchased, collected, exchanged or given as gifts in the first place, for the indexical appeal (that brief moment of exposure of the real world in front of the camera) is one of the photograph’s defining qualities. However, the chapters in this volume also argue that there is a need to break, conceptually, the dominance of image content and look at the physical attributes of the photograph that influence content in the arrangement and projection of visual information. Consequently, while the chapters cannot hope to address all the multitude of material forms and performances with which photographic images are entangled, they none the less seek to redress this balance and, as a heuristic device, privilege the materiality of photographs whether in albums, in the museum gallery or in people’s daily lives. This is intended not to attempt the impossible—to divorce the materiality of the photographic image from the image itself— but rather to consider in what ways the material influences contain or perform the image itself. Just as Barthes argues that the image and referent are laminated together, two leaves that cannot be separated (landscape and the window pane for instance) (Barthes 1984:6), photographs have inextricably linked meanings as images and meanings as objects; an indissoluble, yet ambiguous, melding of image and form, both of which are direct products of intention.

While all the chapters discuss images, the arguments are critically focused on the role of the material in understanding those images. In shifting the methodological focus away from content alone, it can be seen that it is not merely the image qua image that is the site of meaning, but that its material and presentational forms and the uses to which they are put are central to the function of a photograph as a socially salient object. It can also be observed that these material forms exist in dialogue with the image itself to create the associative values placed on them.

Materiality translates the abstract and representational ‘photography’ into ‘photographs’ as objects that exist in time and space. The possibility of thinking about photographs in this way in part rests on the elemental fact that they are things: ‘they are made, used, kept, and stored for specific reasons which do not necessarily co-incide… they can be transported, relocated, dispersed or damaged, torn and cropped and because viewing implies one or several physical interactions’ (Porto 2001:38). These material characteristics have a profound impact on the way images are ‘read’, as different material forms both signal and determine different expectations and use patterns. For instance, as Sassoon argues in Chapter 12, the experience of looking at a historical image on a computer screen is profoundly different in the understandings it might generate from the experience of, say, looking at the same image as an albumen print pasted in an album or a modern copy print in an archive file, for the ‘grammar’ of both images and things is complex and shifting. Consequently, throughout the volume is the cohering idea that experience of the image component alone is not to be confounded with the experience of the meaningful object (Gaskell 2000:176), just as experience of the material cannot be confounded with or reduced to experience of the image.

Why materiality matters

The chapters draw their methodologies from art history, the history of photography, social and cultural history, museology and anthropology. While the arguments here could have taken a number of theoretical turns—for instance, in a phenomenological direction—the aim of this volume is to keep theory close to the ground and consider the materiality of specific kinds of object/image relationship, rather than develop a theorised vision that might simply reproduce an abstract photographic discourse. This close up viewpoint allows us to grasp what might elude the broader perspective and demonstrates ways in which detailed empirical studies can advance theoretical understandings (Ginzburg 1993:26–7). Materiality can be said here to have a positivistic character, in that it is concerned with real physical objects in a world that is physically apprehendable not only through vision but through embodied relations of smell, taste, touch and hearing. However, as the chapters demonstrate, we are dealing not with a reductive fetishism, but with a complex and fluid relationship between people, images and things.

The materiality of photographs takes two broad and interrelated forms. First, it is the plasticity of the image itself, its chemistry, the paper it is printed on, the toning, the resulting surface variations. Such technical and physical choices in making photographs are seldom random. For instance, as Schwartz (1995:58) has argued, ‘the choice of ambrotype over paper print implies a desire for uniqueness, the use of platinum over silver gelatin intimates an awareness of status, the use of gold toning a desire for permanence’. Second are the presentational forms, such as cartes de visite, cabinet cards, albums, mounts and frames, with which photographs are inseparably enmeshed and which have constituted a major consumer market since the nineteenth century, especially after the Kodak revolution of the late 1880s (Slater 1995:129). Both these forms of materiality carry another key element, the physical traces of usage and time.

A formative methodological influence has been the ‘material turn’ in anthropology, and indeed cultural studies, which in recent years has increasingly stressed the centrality and complexity of social meaning in relation to objects and the sociability of objects. Simultaneously there are methodologies emerging from what might be termed the ‘social turn’ that has dominated art history for the past couple of decades, itself inflected through a range of theoretical positions that have emerged from history, philosophy and critical theory. These approaches concentrated on the mundane social existence of objects rather than on a fetishised object-other (Miller 1998:3, 5, 10).

In anthropology, Miller, drawing on Langer’s work on discursive and presentational forms, has argued for discussions of artefacts to be explicitly separated from linguistic models, which he sees as too clumsy and restrictive. Instead, material culture analysis, proceeding from an anthropological position of direct observation, allows us to question ingrained assumptions concerning the superiority of language over other forms of expression, such as visual/material forms, and constitutes objects as important bridges between mental and physical worlds (Miller 1987:96–9). Recent developments in visual anthropology, as identified by Banks and Morphy (1997:14), also point in this direction, arguing that there is a shared methodology and theoretical framework between the visual, its analysis and material culture, all being concerned with material forms and social action, a position echoed by art historians such as Baxandall (1988), Holly (1996) and Gaskell (2000).

Although contemporary arts practice is beyond the scope of this volume, it none the less is an influence as part of this ‘material turn’, as exemplified in the work of artists such as Christian Boltanski, Joachim Schmid and Mohini Chandra, which has engaged with the material nature of photographs. Cindy Sherman too has, in a piece entitled Madame de Pompadour, used the material form as critical to her photo-constructions. As part of the wider concern for materiality it should at least be noted here, for it belongs to the wider discourse that changed the landscape of thinking about the depiction of the object and about art as object. Moreover, there is now a theoretical base for practice of this kind, which highlights the importance of concepts such as sentience and point of view.

Objects, including photographs, are therefore not just stage settings for human actions and meanings, but integral to them. Indeed, Gell (1998) has argued that objects themselves can be seen as social actors, in that it is not the meanings of things per se that are important but their social effects as they construct and influence the field of social action in ways that would not have occurred if they did not exist, or, in the case of photographs, if they did not exist in this or that specific format. This is especially evident in Chalfen and Murui’s chapter on the purikura photographic prints in Japan (Chapter 11), the small size of which made them so collectable and created social groups around this particular image form.

Materiality is closely related to social biography. This view, which has emerged from the material turn in anthropology over recent years, argues that an object cannot be fully understood at any single point in its existence but should be understood as belonging in a continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning. As such, objects are enmeshed in, and active in, social relations, not merely passive entities in these processes (for example, Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987, 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Edwards 2001).

This methodological approach provides a recurring theme in Photographs Objects Histories as the authors explore the trajectory of a photograph, or groups of photographs, and reveal histories often marked by dramatic changes of ownership, physical location or material changes that testify to the way in which complex patterns of values and relationships ascribed to photographs are momentarily fixed only to change again. In some cases, photographs have led predominantly institutional lives (such as those discussed in Chapter 4), entering an institution shortly after their production. In other cases, photographs were personal or domestic objects from their inception but have subsequently been invested with very different values, as Willumson’s chapter on the making of the art object suggests. In many cases, once-active signifiers of meaning are now dormant and obscure or radically altered. It is the traces of these former material lives that cling to photographs that provide the focus for Photographs Objects Histories, for they are vital clues for understanding the historical potency of the image. Many of these material trajectories intersect with discourses of knowledge and power, such as museum classification systems or the entanglements of photographs in the micro-politics of colonialism.

Resonating throughout these essays are two forms of social biography, relating to the forms of materiality we have just outlined. First, as is explored in Porto’s chapter, is the social biography of image content, such as different prints, publication formats, lantern slides and so forth, all of which involve changes of material form. Second is the social biography of a specific photographic object, which may or may not be physically modified as it moves through space and time, as is demonstrated in Schwartz’s chapter on the intended gift of a daguerreotype. Some of these biographies are institutionally imposed, as the practices of museums or galleries create specific forms of material object to accord with their specific economies of truth, as demonstrated in our chapter ‘Mixed box’ and in Willumson’s discussion of the way in which histories of photography suppressed certain forms of materiality while privileging others.

The model is strongly linked to that of visual economy as developed by Deborah Poole (1997). This model moves the analysis beyond ‘representations’ to focus instead on the image’s ‘exchange values’. This extends John Tagg’s model of ‘visual currency’, in which ‘items produced by a certain elaborate mode of production…[were] distributed, circulated and consumed within a given set of social relations: pieces of paper [that is, material objects] that change hands, found use, a meaning and a value in certain social rituals’ (Tagg 1988:164). While clearly representational content is a key element in this model, material forms and their use value have, argues Poole, equal weight as integral to the way in which groups of images were exchanged, accumulated and thus given social value, the power of the image being related to their status as accumulated objects (Poole 1997:11–12). Willumson’s chapter, for example, demonstrates how the shift in categories of photographs as material objects from commodity form to the inalienable object of the art gallery constitutes a radical shift in the understanding of the photographs through their performance as material objects in very different spaces.

Throughout the history of photography, of course, the visual properties of the surface of the image have depended on the material—for instance, the daguerreotype could be viewed only through physical manipulation in the hand to establish the correct viewing angle (see Schwartz, Chapter 2 in this volume). These material forms have exceeded a direct indexical visual use, and created, literally and metaphorically, another dimension to the image. The arrival of a succession of new photographic techniques, formats and material forms demanded different poses and different spatial arrangements, both compositionally within the frame ² and, importantly, in the act of viewing the material object. This latter is another key methodological consideration that resonates through many of the chapters. The eye as a bodily organ functions within a larger somatic context. This implies specific relations with an embodied viewer, which in turn determines responses to photographs. Material forms create very different embodied experiences of images and very different affective tones or theatres of consumption. For instance, framing devices distinguish relations between photographic space and the viewer’s space, sometimes like the photographic frame accentuating the space, with other forms, like a stereographic card in a viewer, eliding the relations.

Thus choices matter. Choices are affective decisions that construct and respond to the significances and consequences of things and the human relations with which they are associated. They are made in relation to certain objectives and represent not the objectives themselves but the means to an end (Douglas and Isherwood 1978:71), namely a specifically articulated use and function of the photographic image. In this context Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ is useful, for it allows individual discretionary action within a structured set of dynamic dispositions (Bourdieu 1977:81). It is, Miller argues, often when objects are assumed to be trivial and not to matter that they are most powerful and effective as social forces. However, it is only in relation to materiality that we can address the actual contexts in which objects are made to mean. Through dwelling upon the more mundane sensual and material qualities of the object, we are able to unpack the more subtle connotations with cultural lives and values that are objectified through these forms, in part because of the qualities they possess’ (Miller 1998:9–12). For these reasons, we are concerned with photographs that operate within everyday life and, as Michel de Certeau has argued in relation to other kinds of objects, draw their cultural currency from such placement (de Certeau 1984). Even the most pragmatically engendered materialities, such as photograph frames and albums, come to have meaning through the habitual reiterations of engagement with them (Pelligram 1998:109). While such choices, however, cannot be reduced to a single purposeful expression, they are redolent with latent and incidental meanings, forming bridges between...