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’
