Theme Issue 48
Photography and Historical Interpretation
Edited by Jennifer Tucker
Cover image: photograph of Ken Domon (June 2, 1948), in アサヒグラフ (Asahi Graph).
INTRODUCTION
+ JENNIFER TUCKER, in collaboration with TINA CAMPT, “Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Inquiry,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 1-8.
The status of photographs as keystones of historical explanation has become a topic of urgent intellectual and cultural interest around the world, at the same time as methods of shaping historical narratives are also changing in ways that compel attention to the employment of photographs in historiography. By exposing the questions we ought to raise about all historical evidence, photographs reveal not simply the potential and limits of photography as a historical source, but the potential and limits of all historical sources and historical inquiry as an intellectual project. As the papers in this issue make apparent, this is precisely the promise and ultimate potential of the historical study of photographs—that it pushes their interpreters to the limits of historical analysis. This essay, which serves as an introduction to the Theme Issue, contextualizes issues raised by the articles and offers a critical synthesis of their impact on future scholarship about photography in historical analysis.
DIALOGUES
+ MARIANNE HIRSCH and LEO SPITZER, “Incongruous Images: 'Before, During, and After' the Holocaust,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 9-25.
When historians, archivists, and museologists turn to Eastern European photos from family albums or collections—for example, photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of the Second World War—they seek visual evidence or illustrations of the past. But photographs may refuse to fit expected narratives and interpretations, revealing both more and less than we expect. Focusing on photos of Jews taken on the main avenues of Cerna˘u?i, Romania, before the Second World War and during the city’s occupation by Fascist Romanians and their Nazi-German allies, this essay shows how a close reading of these vernacular images, both for what they show and what they are unable to show, can challenge the “before, during, and after” timeline that, in Holocaust historiography, we have come to accept as a given.
+ GEOFFREY BATCHEN, “Seeing and Saying: A Response to ‘Incongruous Images,’” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 26-33.
In responding to an essay by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer about photographs taken in the streets of Chernivitsi (Czernowitz) in the 1940s, and thus in the midst of the Holocaust, this paper seeks to link their concerns to a broader consideration of photography as a modern phenomenon. In the process, the paper provides a brief history of street photography, a genre virtually ignored in standard histories of the photographic medium. The author suggests that Hirsch and Spitzer’s paper bravely reminds us that our fascination with photographs is based not on truth, but on a combination of desire (our own desire to transcend death) and faith (in photography’s ability to deliver this end, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary). Their account of street photography in Czernowitz thereby amounts to an interpretation of photographs as dynamic modes of apprehension rather than as static objects from the past that veridically represent it. It is precisely this aspect of photographs that makes them such unusually complicated, ambiguous, and incongruous historical objects.
+ PATRICIA HAYES, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘The Violence is in the Knowing,’” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 34-51.
Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in exposé and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor “fictions” that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng’s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in post-apartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng’s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed.
+ DAVID CAMPBELL, “’Black Skin and Blood’: Documentary Photography and Santu Mofokeng’s Critique of the Visualization of Apartheid South Africa,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 52-58.
This paper responds to Patricia Hayes’s insightful readings of Santu Mofokeng’s photographic work in South Africa. The paper operates from the premise that photography is a technology of visualization that both draws on and establishes a visual economy through which events and issues are materialized in particular ways. This allows the paper to pose questions and develop understandings about Mofokeng’s work in terms of the way certain factors coalesced to enable a particular representation of black South Africans in the global image economy. Central to this is the role of assumptions about exposure and visibility in relation to violence, assumptions that Mofokeng’s work, as a critique of conventional documentary work, explicitly contests. In exploring the invisibility of everyday life, Mofokeng expands notions of documentary photography and photojournalism. This paper demonstrates this point by connecting Mofokeng’s work to a contemporary controversy in European photojournalism to highlight how a more complex understanding of documentary photography is necessary.
+ ROBIN KELSEY, “Of Fish, Birds, Cats, Mice, Spiders, Flies, Pigs, and Chimpanzees: How Chance Casts the Historic Action Photograph into Doubt,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 59-76.
The role of chance in producing a picture by snapping a shutter release before a complex and quickly changing scene weakens the bond between the historic action photograph and the meanings it is routinely asked to bear. To appreciate this problem and to understand the array of popular notions that have been marshaled to finesse or suppress the role of chance in photographic production, I consider the case of Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph of American servicemen raising a flag on Iwo Jima. The analysis pushes the production of this famous photograph through a series of zoological analogies: Is it like a fisherman reeling in a trophy catch? Like a cat pouncing on a mouse or a spider setting a trap for a fly? Like a pig pushing its snout through the dirt? Like chimpanzees banging at typewriters? These analogies are playful but also serious. We need new models for understanding the production of the historic action photograph because the predominant modern and postmodern approaches to that production have suppressed the role of chance. Whereas the modern regime tends to understand the historic action photograph as an inspired flash of history, the postmodern regime tends to understand it as a discursive effect. Entertaining the notion that such a photograph is instead a stochastic result leads to a new conception of photography and its relationship to history. Chance emerges as a third kind of photographic madness, alongside the industrial madness decried by Charles Baudelaire and the indexical madness that moved Roland Barthes.
+ JOHN TAGG, “Neither Fish nor Flesh,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 77-81.
Against the notion of chance that Robin Kelsey proposes as the opening to a new conception of photography and its relationship to history, this response argues for attention to the apparatuses that strive to “cope with chance” and guarantee meaning—apparatuses whose effective purpose is precisely not to be undone by chance and not to be reminded of their contingent and arbitrary nature—in other words, of their historicity. This opens another kind of encounter with the historicity of the photographic image, as sliding from frame to frame, never quite fitting any of them, the photograph shows itself as an elusive opening, the ground of irreducibly heterogeneous and radically incommensurable stakes––never just one definitive and well-flagged stake driven into the ground at some singular moment in the past.
ESSAYS
+ MICHAEL S. ROTH, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 82-94.
This essay focuses on three topics that arose at the Photography and Historical Interpretation conference: photography’s incapacity to conceive duration; photography and the “rim of ontological uncertainty;” photography’s “anthropological revolution.” In the late nineteenth century, blindness to duration was conceptualized as the cost of photographic precision. Since the late twentieth century, blindness to our own desires, or inauthenticity, has been underlined as the price of photographic ubiquity. These forms of blindness, however, are not so much disabilities to be overcome as they are aspects of modern consciousness to be acknowledged. The engagement with photography’s impact on historical consciousness gives rise to reconsiderations of temporal extension and to the difficulties of acknowledging one’s desires in an increasingly open and fractured social field. Photography’s indexicality combined with its reproducibility gives rise to photographic ambivalence. As with other forms of ambivalence, we should be less concerned with diluting its constitutive tensions than with learning to live with its conflicted possibilities.
+ STEPHEN BANN, “’When I Was a Photographer’: Nadar and History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 95-111.
This paper takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s proposition in La Chambre Claire that the nineteenth century “invented History and Photography,” that the era of photography is one of revolutions, and that the photograph’s “testimony” has diminished our capacity to think in terms of “duration.” Barthes also asserts that the French photographer Nadar is “the greatest photographer in the world,” but takes no account of Nadar’s acute receptivity to the history of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that, though he fully recognized (and indeed documented) the unique properties of the new medium, Nadar himself was overridingly preoccupied with assessing photography’s role in a period when war and revolution were compromising the onward march of social and economic progress. Throughout his life, he was committed to the progressive ideas that he assimilated while growing up in Paris and Lyon in the 1830s. He wrote of the emergence of a Bohemian culture in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and remained keenly aware of the visual impressions that he had received in his youth from the popular lithographs of the pre-photographic era. He became a supporter of the artistic avant-garde, which led him to purchase important work by the landscape painter Daubigny. In his art criticism, he excoriated the later portraits of Ingres, which might have competed with his own reputation as a photographic portraitist. Yet, in his admiration for Delacroix, he emphasized the lengthy initiation necessary for the appreciation of the master’s paintings, implying a direct contrast with the “instantaneity” of the photographic process. By common consent, the period of Nadar’s great success as a portraitist, which secured his posthumous fame, occupied a short phase in his career as a whole. But his writings show that it was his lively intuition of the wider ramifications of photography that impelled him to move on—experimenting successfully with the first aerial photographs and documenting the catacombs of Paris with the aid of magnesium lighting. Though he could never experience television, he left a narrative in which the feasibility of transmitting images over a distance was presented as being startlingly realistic. In short, Nadar’s published work can be viewed as a sustained meditation on the interaction of historical experience and the media, which not only records but anticipates photography’s impact within the wider framework of visual culture.
+ LEIGH RAIFORD, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 112-129.
Not too long after photography’s grand debut in 1839, physician and inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes described the new technology as a “mirror with a memory.” What might this phrase mean for the question of African Americans and their relationship to the vicissitudes of photography and the vagaries of memory in particular? Through readings of works of art and social activism that make use of lynching photographs, this essay considers ways in which photography has functioned as a technology of memory for African Americans, what the essay calls critical black memory, and proffers a mode of historical interpretation that both plays upon and questions photography’s documentary capacity. The essay makes two claims specifically. First, the mechanical reproduction of lynching by way of the photograph has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of black political cultures throughout the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era. From the usage of lynching photography in pamphlets by early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists, to posters created by mid-century civil rights organizations, to their deployment in contemporary art and popular culture, this archive has been a constitutive element of black visuality more broadly. Second, African American engagements with photography as a “site of memory” suggest a mode of historical interpretation in which African Americans simultaneously critique the “truth-claims” of photography while they mobilize the medium’s documentary capacity to intervene in the classification and subjugation of black life.
+ ELIZABETH EDWARDS, “Photography and the Material Performance of the Past,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 130-150.
This article explores the significance of the material practices of photography and its archiving in interpretive approaches to the relationship between photographs and history. Drawing on work in material culture studies in anthropology and on the concept of “material hermeneutic,” it argues that photographs should not be understood only through forensic and semiotic analysis of content, but as objects that constitute material performances of a complex range of historiographical desires in the negotiation of the relations among past, present, and future. The analysis is grounded in an exploration of the material practices of the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918. This loosely cohered group of amateur photographers recorded a historical topography of ancient churches, cottages, passing events, and folk customs in order to create a photographic record for the benefit of future generations. As such it was a self-conscious statement of “popular historicism.” The members’ concern for key values of permanence and accuracy, expressed through the detail of photographic and archival processes, reveals the ways in which cultural loss and photographic loss become mutually sustaining metaphors for each other, and in which the photographs themselves are material markers of both evidential value and of an affective historical imagination.
+ JULIA ADENEY THOMAS, “The Evidence of Sight,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 151-168.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault focuses on excavating discursive formations, but he acknowledges that a pre-discursive reality, “the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse,” also exists. This divide between the pre-discursive and the discursive is straddled, I argue, by photographs as historians use them. The reason for photography’s dual capacity lies with the complex nature of sight, which is both precognitive (primarily so, as neuroscience demonstrates), and also culturally encoded. Historians most commonly rely on mute sensuality; they place photographs in books with little comment, implying that some form of unmediated recognition is possible. Used in this way, photographs cannot serve as the basis for new analyses but may underscore the affective stance of historians toward their topics. Less commonly, historians interrogate photographs much like texts, locating them within the discourses through which they emerged. This strategy treats the experience of sight, in Joan Scott’s words, as “an interpretation that needs to be interpreted.” Photographs seen as discursive objects may provide understanding of past political and social relations, but we lose any assurance that we can recognize and intuitively understand their subjects. In short, we risk blindness. I explore these two fundamentally different strategies for approaching photographs, using the concepts of recognition and excavation to examine an image made in 1946 by Japanese photographer Hayashi Tadahiko. Photographs, I argue, expose our dual relationship with the past, both visceral and cultural.