When a Picture Writes
Linda Marchant
Modern Languages and Cultures
You’ve heard it said many times, haven’t you? That a picture is worth a thousand words? Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But today, I’m finally giving myself the chance to test out the theory. Usually, I am totally wordless. Still. Just there, looking at you while you look at me. This time I am going to be the picture that writes, and I will try to tell you things that I normally hold silent, maybe things I cannot tell you visually. You may get the chance to think about the world from my perspective.
You might ask why I want to respond after all these years of people staring at me (and my kind of course – I haven’t personally been around since Daguerre and the dawn of photographic time). I suppose it’s because although I am always being stared at, I am so often overlooked. That sounds a little contradictory, I know, but I will try to explain with these clunky words instead of my smooth visual lines. What intrigues me is always the question of who wants to look at me – what purpose might I, or others like me, serve to those who use me? I want to tell you not just about me as an individual photograph, a single object preserved with just a few creases, but me as a small part of the fascination of photography.
Formal Introductions
First of all I should introduce myself; particularly important as at this moment you cannot see me. I was made in 1948, born from a large 10 by 8 inch negative, made in Denham Film Studios in England. I was created on behalf of the film makers to be enjoyed by the many fans of my subject, who I understand to be an international movie star. I’ll tell you more about that when the time is right. Be patient – I can’t do it as quickly with words as I can in images… My photographer is immensely proud of me. He says that I am the picture that gave him “the key to the door” of his photographic career which has spanned many, many years. He is very talented, a craftsman who fixes the shadow of the image first to the ground glass of the camera, then to the negative, then to the paper and finally (and maybe most magically and intangibly) to the memories of those who see his work. Trouble is, his importance in this process is often overlooked too. Maybe he is overshadowed by me and the way people look at me. And believe me, there are many people who look or who have looked admiringly at me. At my age, it is fair to say that I am looked at less often, but with age comes status and there are many scholars who try to learn from me, studying me, poring over me. Perhaps that would be a good place for me to start. Yes, I’ll tell you all about those who question and investigate my silent secrets.
Truth and History
One of the best things about being a photograph is that people believe me – that I tell a truth about the world. Susan Sontag said I am special because I am “stencilled from the real” (Sontag, 1979); the photograph is a representation of what was before the camera and the two are indexically linked. Barthes calls it a “certificate of presence” and André Bazin says it is like “a transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction” (Bazin in Trachtenberg,241). Given all this, along with my age of course, those historians from all walks of life absolutely love me. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says that “History is hysterical; it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.” (Barthes, 1993, 65) The photograph both includes and excludes us; when you look at me it is like you were there, but of course you weren’t.
Some historians call me a “text” and look at me to see what they can gain from studying me. I try my best to show how things were, how things looked. Photographs quite similar to me, for example (should I call them my colleagues, my brothers?), were used in a talk for part of LGBT history month at the University of Nottingham to show what my subject looked like in the 1940s. Different types of historians are looking for different stories and truths.
Film historians have come across me many times. They use me and the set of images to which I belong, to tell them about the truth of making films back then. They most often look past me as a photograph and just want to see me as part of the contexts in which I appeared. I am pretty versatile, and can be put to many uses, and this was the case by the studios who commissioned me. I was used to make posters and advertisements for cinemas showing the films of my subject. I was also printed in magazines for film goers and fans as well as newspaper articles, and for posters to be pinned onto walls. As film ephemera, the objects I was turned into can be studied and reveal information about films and audiences and how they interact with one another. I get a little offended when they use me as show-and-tell: “this is the set of Dark Angel” for example. I am a representation, a stand in, not the thing itself. I am overlooked again, but hungrily studied. Academics like Sarah Street use documents like me to build up a picture around the film being studied. I’m confident that I’m good at that; building pictures…
If they don’t look past me, they peer into me. They are looking for evidence of how my subject was depicted or what equipment or props were used in the making of the film, not the photograph. In my case, the pile of leather valises appear pin sharp, to the point where you can read the labels (I know they don’t make sense; why would you carry so much glass? and my subject’s spirit was un-crushable - the “Don’t Crush” label reaffirms that, I’m sure). Historians interested in fashion like Christine Geraghty are also big fans of mine in this way. They have only me to look at, well, me and the films themselves to think about what they see and consider their positions. They can see the mink cape with attached rose petals that my subject is wearing, which my photographer says was made in Paris and at the time cost $40,000! Being part of me though, you can see the cape’s drape and detail, the fur of the matching hat and the shine on the toe cap of the shoes as clearly as if they were worn today. The same is true with the ‘look’, the ‘image’ of my subject. Her deep red lipstick (even in monochrome) gives contrast in the image and draws attention and clarity to her mouth. Her signature arched eyebrows might well have become so fashionable because so many people looked at her; images like me of stars like her, circulated so widely.
Of course, there are also the photographic historians. I suppose I am biased, but they are my favourites. They pay more attention to me, as an object. Of course they will look at my subject. This is what I present and represent, and it can help to date me. But they often try to work out how I was made. They look for clues and photographic secrets; the sharpness and size of the image, the plane of focus and colouration, the style of lighting. The large studio camera that created me is not really mobile – it needs the model to be still, composed, poised. In those days they didn’t have those new fangled 35mm cameras which let the photographer dance around the subject and produce detail coupled with speed and compactness. Nor did they have those digital machines which let the photographer take thousands of images until he gets the right one. The considered pose of my subject gives the clue to my time and my making. Look carefully at the cigarette in its elegant holder (oh, I’m so sorry. I forgot that we are tied to words and you can’t see so clearly). A subject caught by the camera in the act of smoking just isn’t the done thing any more. And the ash on the cigarette pointed skywards is roughly an inch long. This proves that my subject had to remain still, that the photographer had just one chance to get the right image without any blur or movement; it proves my age and my technology. Photography historians also like to look at where I’ve been. How I have been circulated in the world and how I have been presented and seen by so many people over time.
Classification
Those historians have a lot to do with me, it’s true. But they often work together with my keepers, the archivists. “Motionless, the Photograph flows back from presentation to retention” (Barthes, 1993, 90). This is difficult nowadays, as I am no longer just an object, just a negative or a print. I have one true original, but many manifestations. Many prints, many files, one negative. The archivists in whatever form keep me safe and stop me from fading away. I know that I exist in my photographer’s own archive – a small collection from his huge body of work. And that if you want to see me, you can do so on the internet. Am I sensing your frustration in my un-visual form? I am also in the archive at the National Portrait Gallery, made large and framed, as part of an exhibition I appeared in some years ago. It is possible that I am also held in the British Film Institute archive for I show an important figure in film history, and also in the Ronald Grant Archive maybe in a file relating to a particular film or star. There may be many images similar to me in other collections such as the Kobal collection, or the Picture Desk collection, or Getty Images collections. Similar in composition, or in presentation, or in format, or in time, or in subject matter or in maker – that’s the trouble with archives; they can bring things together but they can also separate things out. How do you classify me, and how do you store me? And am I worth storing? I think I might be problematic for the archivists as I am both unique and infinitely reproducible. I am sure that I and those like me exist in many forms, in many files, in many drawers in many archives. I am truly a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Now, there’s a phrase! Someone rather special, Walter Benjamin, said that about me once. To think that I might be classified as a work of art now, when I was produced as a piece of commerce, is satisfying. But here, I shall have to skip over the argument that “art” has had with “photography” since its very beginnings. I am thinking beyond the specifics of my signified content and looking now at a wider approach to the photographic. So, I turn to other ways of thinking; perspectives that are beyond the boundaries of my specific frame.
Ontologies
Many different academic disciplines, I understand, turn their minds to thinking about what a photograph is and what it does. I am clearly a complex thing. Benjamin, philosopher and critic, privileges the fragment; he is a careful thinker about my importance. He welcomes my reproducibility as a democratizing force. Philosophers, anthropologists, critics. They seem to have a lot to say, not about me as an individual image but about the nature of my being. There is a whole ‘Tradition of Critique’ that can be used to think about me. Saussure’s thinking can be applied to the language of the photograph, Levi-Strauss’ to my positioning as part of the diachronic sequence of time and the synchronic abstraction from time. I can be thought of in Marxist terms as a commodity, with a strange use- and exchange- value and the abstracted labour of my photographer. Heideggerians could use me to analyse the everyday as a way to access the ‘dazein’, or in my case maybe its opposite or its reflection.
More contemporary theorists are fascinated by seeing, the image, and the photograph: Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard all provide food for photographic thought which I’m not sure I will ever fully understand. The addressee, the addressor, the referent and the meaning. Langue and parole. The symbolic and the real. Structures and signs. All can relate to the photograph. There are thinkers who consider art and the photograph too, and think more about the nature and results of my being rather than being itself. Barthes considers how “In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal it decrees notable whatever it photographs.” (Barthes, 1993, 34) I can think about this in terms of the subject I represent within my frame as well as thinking philosophically about my being.
Other Spectators
Thinking about photography crosses many more academic boundaries. I can name some of them here, but the list can go on. Sociology has an interest in making use of the photograph as a tool and a means of communication. They make and collect images both of and by their subjects. They use images to communicate how they understand the world, or study visual media made by others, analysing them “with techniques developed in diverse fields of literary criticism, art theory and criticism, content analysis, semiotics, deconstructionism, or the more mundane tools of ethnography.” (www.visualsociology.org.uk) Science has different uses and considerations about photography. Linked to evidence and proof, yes, but also to optics and chemistry. A whole chemical process created me – it is not visible in my surface, but fixed my being with chemical and light reactions. Medicine allies itself with the photographic too. The iris and the retina function like the camera and the lens, and medicine uses photography to diagnose, to inform and to study, just like many disciplines. It investigates methods of photographing; scanning microscopy and x-rays to name a few.
Law has its own take on the photograph. As an object it is now seen as an ‘original, artistic work’, intellectual property, worthy of copyright protection. This wasn’t quite the case when I was made, but then we go back to history. All of these disciplines and more have some interest or use for me. Even with my specific subject matter, I can be studied in terms of all of these disciplines. My chemistry, my optics, my way of representing the body of my subject, my commercial value all connect to my being as a photograph.
Communication
And so. Philosophers, lawyers, scientists, doctors, sociologists, historians, cultural critics, archivists and artists all have their own ways of thinking about the photograph. Some of these are quite distant from me and what I represent, but I hope that I have shown you just how important, influential, informative and intense a photograph can be. I am just one small example. A little dog-eared at the corners, but still resplendent in my sepia tones. Now, let’s turn me over. No one but the truly dedicated ever look at my back, but for those that do, they may be rewarded by a maker’s mark as clear as on any silver salver or piece of porcelain. “Still. By Cornel Lucas”. But that’s only for those who are able to hold a physical version of me in their hands, not a mere reproduction of a reproduction. I ask that you treat me with care; handle me gently. I am getting older now, made more than half a century ago and yet what I show you is as fresh and clear as the day I was made. And this is really what makes me so special. I can always show you both the present and the past, and of course, with care will always do so in the future. “By bringing the past and the present together in one viewing experience, Daguerre showed that photography could fold back time on itself.” (Batchen, 2002:132) This was as true when photography was invented as it is today.
After my perspective, do you still believe that a picture is worth a thousand words? Have I been able to show you in words the equivalent to ‘Marlene on the Wall’? I have given you all the words I have; far more than one thousand. And yet they still do not, cannot, say nor do everything that I would wish. Nor do they give you the freedom to make me your own; to interpret me in your own way, to bring your knowledge, curiosity and experience to what I present before you. Miss Dietrich is frozen in time, but through me and those like me, she is able to be seen. I think I work better in images: still, strong and silent.
Image 7
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, London: Vintage 1993
Batchen, Geoffrey, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Reprint Edition, Cambridge, Mass, London: MIT Press 2002
Bazin, Andre‚ ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, Conn: Leete’s Island Books 1980
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, London: Penguin 1979
Visual Sociology Study Group of the British Sociological Association. What is Visual Sociology? Published on http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/whatis/index.php. Accessed 10 March 2010.
I would also like to acknowledge the food for thought provided for this piece by the Arts Faculty Research Programmes Traditions of Critique Lecture Series in 2009/10.
