Stephen Gill 'Buried'

fortyfoot 30th april 2011

twelve images over twelve minutes
this was the mistake

image/text: musings

What can we say in plain terms about the relationship between the photographic image and it textual content, be it its title, introduction to the work or the very text we find within the image. I just wanted here to kind of go through what I know and think about this relationship. Obviously a text like Barthes ‘Image Music Text’ is by far more interesting than anything i could have to say, I’m just going to give it a shot, why not?

Ok, so what is the relationship between imagery and text, what power does one exert over the other, and is it just as simple as that the textual content merely lays out the reading intended by the image maker, does the text lead us to the perceived meaning in the photograph? Can we say that we image is prey to the text that we place alongside, drawing meanings otherwise completely inaccessible to the viewer. But should the image not just be of itself? It is what is, or it is what it makes me remember, not it is what it tells me it is.

If i think about the history of photography and the relationship between image and text the first thing that comes to mind is the work of Alphonse Bertillion. His anthropometric system of classification. The profile of the villain (assumed) along with the details of height, weight distinguishable features etc. Tagg might have something to say about the physiognomic, the relationship between these criminal portraits and other taken at the same time. But these images of Bertillon’s represent this: a harmony between the image and the text, one does not disrupt reading of the other, simply the combine to produce what we can see as a document of this individual, his feature, his history. An admirable image perhaps, as in it does achieve it goal.

But then later you look at the imagery of the Dadaist where the textual and the photography are merely found objects with which we can disrupt the processes and the mechanics of the image consumption. They leave us confused, their imagery fragmented and all asunder. Excuse me if I’m being rather straight in my reading here i not so interested in the individual merits and reason for the various form of image text forms im talking about here but about the reading of them, how the work, what they achieve. So we have Bertillion's textual image protecting us from the masses of criminal, well thank you Alphonse i feel safer all ready, (he is dead by the way, almost a 100 years). The Dadaists corrupting the relationship, splitting it and fragmenting it in to disorder, thank you also. Then i couldn’t go any further without introducing my old pal August Sander. I have written a thesis on this dude and i can tell you know i know next to nothing about who he was and what his motivations were. As he was German we can assume he intended no harm what so ever.
Sanders photographs document an imagined or perceived social stratum of German society pre ww2. His images are placed along with a caption, telling the occupation of each set of individuals. This to me has to be the most boring totally rubbish set of image. I know i should open my mind and read the deep social codes, the dress, the posture, the face of these individual that know not what lies ahead of them, but i can’t get past this guy, Sanders. His motivation seems only to archive a certain imaging of society and then present it as a document of truth, a sociological document. His image s along with his titling corner a group of individual towards the end of the book (Antlitz der Zeit) commonly referred to as the ‘other’. He forces the reading through his titling, disallowing the image to speak without first tieing it up with not their name but their occupation. This is a text that fixes the meaning of the image, whatever reading we may make, we will always have to understand it in terms of these people’s occupations. No other reading is available.

There is much more here that is better and more self deprecating than this sander shit. Martha Roslers ‘The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems’ is just a pleasure. The image text relationship is laid bare for us to probe and question, to ask, to find the truth, to seek meaning. The image is split between the photograph and a series of words, both failing to grasp what is meant, what is imagined, the true experience is unavailable in these two.

What can i say about such a huge and involved relationship? I know what i see in a photograph, i see what was , the memory of something that i believe was, text is a layer that is either disruptive or refracts the meaning into a coded system, where text and image overlap and we are playing between the conflictions of words and language and the visual imagery that we have amassed. That sounds wanky, what i want to say is that the text image relationship can further reveal meaning, but should that meaning not in some way already be present in the image, and if not hen is the text the primary part to understanding and unpacking the image. The words alone reveal, but he image will remain ‘that was’, it meaning, the main focus of our attention, not what we feel in it perception.
Barthes says in ‘Image, Music Text’ that in the interaction between text and image ‘image illustrates the text’ and that ‘the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination’

the electronic print?

Is the physical object that is the photograph, to be replaced by the photograph as an image purely consumed through electronic sources. Does the print have a future?

I believe that print will always remain, but more and more as an object in a niche market, as far as the general population goes, imagery i believe will be consumed in the most direct and appropriate manner, and that will always be through electronic means... the photograph as object, its important isn't it? That tangible thing that we can inspect for ourselves, verify it authenticity with our own eyes. Would it matter tomorrow if all the imagery we consumed was purely through electronic means, if the print ceased to exist, is there reason for it to continue?

Even photography in the print media is being digested through sources such as the iPad et al. Those images within it exist only as long as some one is looking. Does that make sense maybe not, I think that the advent of this portable technology will bring about a shift in the way we consume and reproduce imagery, it is happening at the moment. It has been happening for the last few years, imagery, the photograph has transcended its original form, it has grow into form where the images we produce balloon in number, and the effect of reproductions add the ever staggering amount of imagery circulating in the world today.
Will the photograph remain, the photograph as tangible object, the photograph that ages, the photograph that is torn and only one half remains, the photograph that is incomplete, the photograph that stands as the only evidence for the fact that this was. The importance of a thing is tied up with how unique we imagine it to be, an image reproduced innumerable times pitted against the only photograph left of a distant relative. Of course we have our archive that we seek to hold precious, to pass on. But what happens when that archive becomes integrated into the vast web of images, it becomes detached from its original meaning, its importance, its significance shifts and floats in and out of understanding, it may become a historicised image, men at work in the early 21st century or something like that. This will probably happen even in terms of the print, it becomes a historical object, cut off form it s original context.

In a situation where all the imagery is consumed and distributed electronically, do we enter into a situation where imagery is edited and dropped out of history simply because they are seen as no longer relevant? It may be far fetched to suggest this, but as I see it, the imagery of the world is chronicled and moulded into nice neat packets of history as ‘the unity of the archive is imposed by it ownership’ we can see that imagery is selected for its adherence to what is perceived as fact, what fits.

I’m getting away from the point, it the object that is the photograph even important as a physical object and are we entering a point in history where the photography is consumed primarily electronically, and the print becomes an Objets d′art. A symbol of our importance, of our status. I don’t know, but I believe in the importance of touch, the ability to turn the thing over in your hand and see the surface of the print, its flaws and it failings. I know there is lot more that is involved here but this is just my slice of the pie. I don’t assume to know much, but ‘The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.’*


*Frank Herbert
US science fiction novelist (1920 - 1986)

paul graham equivalents

an alternative to the idea (thanks to daniel) that photographer's are adding to a stock of cliches surrounding the northern troubles, be they past or present. I may seem pedantic but they seem somewhat similar to alfred steiglitz's equivalents.. and as for going beyound the cliche of the imagery of the troubles, i can't say that they even direrctly reference the troubles, albeit but in their title, ceasefire. it seems like something that isn't fully formed..but in general i can't honestly say if clouds are evrn fully formed, with all that wind and stuff up there, but as images i don't know what they make me feel, grey, irish skies, don't know?

for 'against interpretation'

Susan Sontags essay ‘Against Interpretation’ is a meditation on the division in the visual arts between form and content. Form being the surface qualities of the image, by content we mean the rationalisation we place on the image (Sontag’s essay is primary concerned with art... here I am just interested in the implications her ideas have towards the photographic). What Sontag’s tells us is that the images form has been over ridden by its content. That the content has overtaken form in emphasis and importance.

The idea of the image spit between not only form and content, but we could say between it mimetic qualities and it as a statement. Photography unlike the other visual arts is primarily concerned with the indexical, it referent, what object or series of objects we place in front of the camera. The photographic can never escape it own nature, and why would we want it to do anything else. Abstractions aside, even here we are dealing with the idea of ‘what is it’, we understand photographs as essentially reflecting something that either is or was. But photography as an art form has always fought against the indexical (in most cases, this is a generalisation, but I’m human so you’ll have to forgive me) nature of the photographic. Photographic movements have each in heir turn change the image into something that suits them... I’m thinking here of Margret Cameron, Steichen and other early art photographers. They tried to develop the other qualities of the photographic, symbolism, metaphor. As we moved along we see more movement interrupting the photograph, disrupting its power, dada etc. And we end up here the image have moved beyond the indexical... our stock of images is near complete, if you can’t get the image you want you can make the image you want. I’m not interested in the idea 0f the truth of the image just our faith in it, the faith that this was.

We’ll come back to this in a minute, firstly the importance of Sontag’s essay. Sontag tells us that:

‘Interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that. One tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.’

Sontag goes on to advocate anew vocabulary for talking about the image, one that emphasises form over the content. The notion of transparance , experiencing the ‘luminousness of the thing in itself’. That it radiates meaning from it surface, but not meaning, meaning is content, it radiates light. It traps light through a series of optic, and then it radiate that light back off the photographic surface. An everlasting single moment.

So what do I care? Photography and the photographic image are the strongest most directly involved aspects in this argument of Sontag’s with out her knowledge. The surface of the photographic, its form, is all there is, its form is its content. We can codify, we can unpack the image, and we can manipulate and make an argument for within the image. All we can do is reflect the light through a series of lens. We communicate through words and text better than images why want to tell some one something through a limiting medium as photography when you could just tell them what you think? We want to make image to communicate with each other, we're social being that why we do anything we do, but photography does something much more magical than that. It talks to us through its own surface, auteur or not, it speaks for it self and it ‘I was’. We should celebrate its inability to break free of its own indexicality; it is the one defining part that sets it apart from any preceding visual art form. Again it own form out ways any reading or notion of a statement that we place upon it, we can argue with it but we cannot disempower it. Any one who doesn’t believe this only has to see the importance of the role of the family album in any family, to see that we as people embrace the photograph as an affirmation of where we come from, who we were and how we will be remembered. We don't look for meaning in it, it makes us feel, it can make us mourn, it serves as a memory. These are the images that are unreadable to those outside of the family unit, those who see content in the images were there is only form.

Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
Evergreen Review, 1964