Authenticity and Exploitation
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes in Photography: A Middle-Brow Art how the photo album conveys a narrative of historical unity to the present generation by illuminating the “highest common denominator of the past” (31). Informal photographs of children, often on special occasions or holidays, serve as an authorized “social memory” of family members and good times (31). Family portraits also allow ancestors to be paid due reverence while, and—as often can be the case—by, erasing the accompanying, unpleasant details of their lives. Barthes observes in his treatise on photography, Camera Lucida, that in private photography both photographer and subject are aware of the artificiality of their joint activity: “I lend myself to the social game,” he muses. “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing” (11). Moreover, while the image is “motionless, stubborn,” the subject is “divided, dispersed” (12). Bourdieu, like Barthes, speaks of the artificiality of the pose, which allows the photographer to impose a concealed gaze on subjects, forcing them into stiff and contrived positions. Subjects, in turn, may respond by attempting to gather dignity through a conventional frontal pose. Bourdieu explains that “frontality is a means of effecting one’s own objectification” because it offers “a way of imposing the rules of one’s own perception” (83). On the other hand, hopes for creating impressions on our viewers are often unrealistic. In his essay “The Photograph,” N. Scott Momaday describes the disgust an American Indian expressed upon viewing a likeness of herself. Her reaction led Momaday to wonder if “perhaps she saw, in a way that we could not, that the photograph misrepresented her in some crucial respect, that in its dim, mechanical eye it had failed to see into her real being” (McQuade and McQuade 291). Figure 1 reproduces an image of and a text by Anh Thuy (Cindy) Dang, a student in one of our classes whose reflections on a photograph taken of her at Georgia’s Red Top Mountain during a family outing alludes to the dilemmas attending personal photography.
Although other postmodern critics have tended to study the problematics of photographic representation (e.g., John Tagg, who takes the commonly held position that no photograph mirrors reality), Barthes considers photographs the quintessential evidence that “the thing has been there” (76). He argues in Camera Lucida that, in photographic portraits with personal connections to the reader, authentication of existence is a primary outcome. Susan Sontag, writing before him in On Photography, agrees that photography confirms existence—to a point. But, crucially for Sontag, an image is not a transparent copy of reality but a distortion. Sontag is featured in a New York Times Magazine article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. In this debate, she returns to Barthes’s emphasis on the importance of the photograph in affirming that an event did occur. However, the use of a photograph can drastically change its effect. Sontag concludes that “[w]e make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can be said, any purpose served” (On Photography 175). New York Times reviewer Michael Kimmelmann describes an art exhibition of the prison photographs held just five months after their publication on the Internet. He expresses surprise at both the multifarious purposes of photography and its potential for almost immediate reinterpretation. However, in her study of cartoon images appearing on the occasion of the death of JFK Jr. and alluding to the historic photograph of the young boy saluting his father’s coffin, Janis Edwards asserts that “It is not unusual for iconic images to be appropriated to new contexts, creating analogies that recall past moments and suggest future possibilities” (179).
One of the many purposes to which photography can be put is illustrated by David Perlmutter’s Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis, which describes the process whereby journalistic photographs at times exert so intense a pressure on public opinion that history is altered significantly. Since its inception, documentary photography, which evolved from photo journalism, has featured a series of artistic images that serve as powerful rhetorical instruments for social change. For example, in the early twentieth century, sociologist and photographer Lewis W. Hine created a series of pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island. He illustrated in further photos their miserable living and working conditions, including the exploitation of their children working in factories, documentary images that led to sweeping changes in child labor laws (Newhall 235).
Like the general public, students typically are unaware of the rhetorical strategies that photographers adopt when constructing, for example, angle, lighting, and background. James Curtis reveals in Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth that in the 1930s the Farm Security Administration (FSA) hired established photographers to create an image of the rural crisis of the Great Depression that organizers wished to use in convincing the public of the need for their program. FSA photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others posed families in their poverty-stricken surroundings to create images of nobility and courage. “Migrant Mother,” a portrait by Lange that has become an icon of the era, features a grouping of small children leaning against the shoulders of a soulful mother, who is holding her youngest baby. The tableau recalls paintings of the Madonna, Christ child, and angels, and not surprisingly, this photograph and many like it in the FSA accounts were posed carefully. For example, four of the older children of the family were excluded from the final portrait for fear of upsetting the cultural norms of the intended audience, who likely would have disapproved of such a large family among the poor (Curtis 53–55). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the much-loved chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers by James Agee and Evans, also was staged to emphasize its subjects’ courage and steadfast character. Evans and Agee, who lived among the sharecroppers, produced conflicting visual and verbal accounts. Whereas Agee wrote of a certain bed as “stale, and moist, and [. . .] morbid with bed bugs, with fleas and, I believe, with lice” (qtd. in Curtis 37), Evans photographed the spare geometric shape of the bed and the contrast of a white bedspread against the dark walls of the room, producing the clean and cared-for interior of poverty that constituted one of his many art photographs in the book.
Recent analysis by John Tagg in The Burden of Representation reveals that weighty political and social injustices have been committed by means of what is labeled blandly “documentary photography” when its products are used in institutional recordkeeping. The poor, the weak, and the powerless have, throughout the history of photography, been victimized by prison, institutional, and other bureaucratic photographers. An example of how documentary photography can disempower its subjects is provided by the work of Edward Curtis, who, with the backing of financier John Pierpont Morgan, photographed American Indians in contrived settings and costumes (Newhall 136). More recently, Richard Billingham’s photography documents in livid detail the life of his chronically alcoholic father. These images, which have appeared in major art venues including the Royal Academy, by virtue of representing an inebriated subject who likely was not able to give informed consent to having his photographs taken, exhibited, and mass marketed, may also be exploitative. We might add to this list the photography of Abu Ghraib prison torture and ask to what extent the mainstream media, in reproducing the photographs, have further exploited their subjects.
Gender and Women’s Studies
Many poststructuralist accounts of women and the visual are available. Berger discusses in his chapter on the female nude the central questions of who looks and who is looked at. Laura Mulvey’s useful article on “the gaze” addresses both portraits and film. Carol David offers in “Investitures of Power: Portraits of Women Executives” an account of the representations of women that traces painting styles through the last three centuries. She describes how representations of beautiful women traditionally were objects desired and possessed by men, with the exception of those of a few powerful sitters who demanded they be the subject rather than the object of a viewer’s gaze. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, was careful to be painted in imperial settings. Likewise, certain suffragists,