This book is part of a series designed for students from Berg Press covering key concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including volumes on Media, Technoculture, Food, Globalization, The Body, and Film. Regarding the author, I pulled the following from his page at the University of Westminster, London:
David Bate [is] a practicing photo-artist. He studied Photography and Film, art history and cultural theory. He received a Doctorate in the Fine Art Department at the University of Leeds in 1999. Currently Professor of Photography, he leads the MA Photographic Studies programme at the University and is also director of its Photography Research Group. He teaches practice and theory mainly to postgraduate students and supervises doctoral student work. He was co-founder of Accident and Five Years Gallery in London, and is co-editor and co-founder of the academic journal photographies since 2008.
As described in the Introduction, Bate organizes the text around the concept of genre, a concept he finds underrepresented in photographic studies. He defines genre as an expectation generating process, in the case of photography a kind of visual schemata, each with different functions that are often likely to overlap. In other words, it’s a system for categorization with fuzzy boundaries. No surprise here. What is of more interest is apart from documentary, photographic genres have been borrowed from painting. The text is thereafter organized into eight chapters, the first two covering history and theory, followed by documentary, portraiture, landscape, still life, art, and world photography.
Ch 1: History
Bate opens his account of history with Freud, who saw the camera as extension not of sight, but of memory, as a tool for helping recover the past. What makes photographs unique as memory is that they can be shared long after the creator is dead or otherwise unavailable and adds to knowledge of things we cannot see for ourselves. In this sense, every photo becomes a document of something seen, whether or not the photo was intended as a document.
Photographic history has been largely a history of great artists and aesthetics [as well as technology]. In reaction, alternative histories have been composed to highlight neglected aspects, such as the contributions of females or those outside Europe and North America. John Tagg’s case studies are seen as perhaps the most revealing work on photographic history for demonstrating the various discourses inherent in image making and consumption, concluding that “Photography as such has no identity.” History thus becomes the process of uncovering and understanding the interrelationships of processes, and turing the history of photography into a number of histories.
Ch 2: Theory
Defines theory to include principles of science underlying camera technology, as well as techniques for exploiting the same. Claims theory is unavoidable and indispensable, that there is no untheoretical way to explain photography. Claims further that even those arguing against theory do so on theoretical grounds. Skeptical here of how he has drawn theory so widely, as well as the idea that theory is needed to describe practice.
Identifies three key periods (in Europe and NA):
1830s and the invention of photography: Does the camera accurately re-present reality? Is so, is it art or science?
1920s and 30s and mass reproduction: Cites “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin as crucial for first pointing out how photography changed the very nature of art. His core argument is that reproduction separates the art object from its original context, presenting in various contexts which modify its meaning.
1960s and 70s and social upheaval: Academics began investigating the social uses and practices of photography. Attention to race and gender are reflected in photography practice and theory. Artists begin to use the medium to challenge ideas of fine art, while social and literary theorists begin the project of deconstruction.
The ensuing discussion of representation turns on then example of language, of how semiotics is the study of the grammar of signs. Bate begins questionably by identifying the alphabet as the defining structure of language, when in fact spoken systems always precede written. In truth the phoneme is the most fundamental unit, the atom, of language.
He goes on to look at some of the basic codes in photographic language, including focus (to indicate relevance), focus-to-out-of-focus (loss of consciousness, dreaming), blur (movement), and lighting (below, sinister; above, omnipotence). Rhetoric is then how these codes are organized into a type of discourse, or argument.
The emergence of semiotics in the 60s-70s challenged the prevailing view of realism, that the photo was in essence a copy of reality. Semiotics sought to bring attention to the difference between the manufactured product - the rectangular piece of paper with markings on it - and the “reality” it depicted. These include: monocular vs binocular vision; monochrome vs color; a 360-degree plenum vs a 2D rectangle; reduce size; inaccessible sensory input of smell, sound, temperature.
The discussion proceeds to the cultural significance of the visual elements, a literary reading in search of meaning. In Count de Montizon's 1855 image from the Regent Park Zoo, Bate offer the the example of people being imprisoned by the bars of culture.
Semiotics, he concludes, does not refute the existence of reality, but provides instead a way to discuss how photographs represent it. In some ways the argument feels forced. I don’t think anyone has ever seriously argued that reality and a photo of a part of that reality are the same thing. The differences are striking and obvious to anyone. What can be said is that photos capture slices of the plenum we call reality and represent those slices on paper or on screen. That they correspond to our perception of reality is seen in how photos are often treated. Bate himself provides the example of how the govt controls photos from war fronts as a means of manipulating public sentiment for the war effort.
Bate concludes with the observation that human use of language is influenced by language itself, and so in order to come to a deeper understanding of photographs, their creation and use, we need to deploy psychoanalysis in the identification and explication of motive.
Ch 3: Documentary and Story-Telling
Modern notion of documentary is a product of 20th century media processes, its aim educational, its product the lives of ordinary people. Grew out of 19th century journalism and social research, with an emphasis on truth embodied in seeing, the photo as evidence. By the 1930s, two general modes or tendencies. Objective assumed a neutral camera view, often shot on tripod straight ahead into the subject, and stressed the presentation of information (through depth of field, lack of movement, and high precision lenses to capture detail). Subjective, on the other hand, worked hand-held, relied on stylistic techniques (tilted frame, motion blur, shallow dof), and accepted less precision for greater freedom of movement and the ability to capture in the moment.
I’ve read numerous accounts of the decisive moment, but Bate is the first I have come across to cite a possible predecessor, the pregnant moment (or peripateia), a theory of historical painting in which the artist sought to depict that moment when past became future. Bate presents no evidence to make the point but suggests CB must have been aware of this. Bate goes on to point out that photos held out as examples of pregnant moments are in fact not reflections of reality, but one “instant that will come to signify it.” I suppose what he means here is that reality is more than an instant, that in fact cameras cannot possibly re-present reality. The question is whether anyone ever has ever had such an expectation.
Insofar as every photo depends on an operator deciding from where to shoot, at what to shoot, and when to shoot, all documentary is by definition partial, or staged.
The viewer is usually not equipped to make assessments, to adequately judge veracity apart from the information presented. In fact despite the image maker’s desire to present “reality,” what the viewer sees, or chooses to see, may not always accord with the image maker’s intention.
On the introduction of color in the 1980s, he notes the irony of it being thought of as fake, superficial, and associated with advertising, but made palatable and even desirous after it became widely used in vernacular photography, which was seen as possessing a kind of naive realism, an authentic, unmediated glimpse of reality.
Ch 4: Looking at Portraits
Most people give importance to “looking right” when being photographed, suggesting a degree of concern with visual representation and the power of imagery to influence perception. The portrait, Bate says, is “a semiotic event for social identity.”
In the early days of photography, the studio was a theater for shaping identity, for creating a means for presenting oneself as one wished to be seen. Portraits, Tagg suggests, were no longer the privilege of the rich, but something of a burden - how was one to present oneself? Bate sees two streams in early mass portraiture, with the relatively cheap carte-de-viste representing the sitter’s social aspiration, and the more expensive, full-plate portrait the sitter’s personality.
Bate identifies four elements of the portrait: face, pose, clothing, and location. The rhetoric of the portrait is in how these elements are arranged. The face, it will be noted, is intended to stand in, as it were, for the feeling or the character of the person. Close-ups were not standard fare for painted portraits but thanks to cinema became a way to commodify the desire to look at faces and bodies. The smile, as well, he notes, was uncommon among painted portraits and may infer the sitter’s willingness to participate in the event of being portrayed (though I suspect may have more to do with how the sitter wishes to be seen).
Sfumato was a painting technique employed to blur or make lines indistinct, thus requiring the viewer to mentally fill-in the missing detail. The word is derived from the word for smoke. The technique could sometimes lead to contradictory readings of the image, such as Mona Lisa’s smile/frown. A similar technique was deployed in photography called fuzzogrpahy by Victorian critics. The same type of effect can also be achieved by an excess of detail such that the viewer is forced to decide which details are most relevant to a reading.
Ch 5: In the Landscape
Bate begins by noting the wide variety of images called landscape and offers the following definition:
... the geometry of a space, the organization of a point of view towards a town/garden/city/country/ suburb/park or industrial wasteland/wilderness/public space, or architecture, land and nature. In all these spaces, the point of view of the camera, whatever time of day or night, organizes what is there into a cultural artefact: a landscape view. p89
What is represented in landscape is the environment, that how that material is pictured is critical to understanding the genre, and that the goal has always been more than _just_ showing a scene. He then traces some of the historical background in aesthetics and the development of landscape, notably the concept of picturesque and the romanticization of an idealized rural life.
...‘landscape’ is the taking shape in symbolic form of a space for the projection of psychical thoughts on culture, identification and ‘civilization’ under the name of nature, as much as a treatise on any actual nature or question of environment itself. p93
Leads into a discussion of beauty and sublime as contrasting states of mind painters sought to evoke through landscape. While particular tropes were associated more commonly with one or the other,
...the same elements, whether of nature (fields, trees, etc.) or culture (wars, cities, farms, etc.) can be used to signify either a picturesque or sublime. ‘Nature’ can be shown as ‘gentle’ (picturesque) or full of brooding ‘anger’ (sublime). A sky is picturesque when blue with nice clouds, ‘a beautiful day’, while the same place is sublime when the sky is heavy with threatening clouds, overcast with thunder and lightening. The sea can be picturesque when it is calm and tranquil, or sublime when wild and stormy. Such images of violent scenes or calm depictions are used to signify different human feelings or states of mind. Trees can be healthy, showing ‘vitality’, and ‘full of life’ or twisted, ‘weak’ and poorly nourished. The meaning of the environment is organized as a series of differences. Photographers and painters choose to represent elements – consciously or not – to make the meanings they wish to create. Even the earth can be made to signify opposite states: rich or barren, natural or contaminated, tended and cared for or wild and neglected, and fresh or worn out. p96
With the introduction of the camera, it now became possible to speak of a photographic vision apart from that of painting. It was, in short, intended to be a value-free point of view, a representation without aesthetics, a scientific way of viewing. Despite their best efforts, photographers were still forced to choose a point of view and deal with framing, or composition. Assuming they were able to avoid all other aesthetic entanglements, Bate asks, did their photos depict what the land “really” looked like?
Returning to the idea of beauty, Bate observes that despite the efforts of artists and critics to deconstruct our preconceptions, despite the picturesque being discussed almost always in negative terms, as a facile or easy pleasure, humans remain fascinated with beautiful images. He then goes to make a rather exaggerated claim:
The pleasure derived from the composition of picturesque beauty is a pleasure in the recognition of order, precisely what the ego wants: a unity and organization of the (imaginary) coherent ‘self ’. It is as if someone says to themselves: ‘This order and harmony that I see in the picture is the order and harmony that I wish in myself.’ The organization of the picture is identified with a corresponding internalized sense of satisfaction of the ego in the human subject: ‘I have finally organized everything into a unity, it is all in the right place.’ p103
Notes the association of landscape with ethnic, social and national groups in which space is associated with identity.
Finally, he reflects on the panoramic landscape as a hybrid that produces tension between the picturesque and the sublime scale, producing a sense of the disembodied.
Ch 6: The Rhetoric of Still Life
Quite an interesting chapter as Bate discusses advertising as the modern still-life. Opens by noting stil-life is an oft neglected gener typically spoken of with scorn or derision. On the other hand, many of the most highly praised paintings in art history are in fact still-lifes.
Defines still life as depiction of objects in space. Historically this has been objects on a table top, though since the 20th century it has been objects in empty space.
In 1968, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard argued that the discourse of
advertising ‘constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe’.
The cultural critic Raymond Williams described advertising as the ‘official art
of modern capitalist society’.
While the practice and function of advertising has been roundly and thoroughly criticised, there is no doubt photographic techniques developed in its service have been immensely effective in driving consumer demand, as well perhaps as for the intensity of the criticism.
Persuasion is rhetoric combined with pleasure in an art of commerce.
Argues still-life is in many ways like portraiture, in which camera angle and position, lighting, and background are arranged in ways to best present the subject.
While Bate notes that objects have more power when visually isolated, he goes on to make a rather exaggerated claims about anxiety producing blank backgrounds:
...the picture threatens us with emptiness if we do not take up the offer of the product.
He then offer an even more unusual reading of fast food imagery:
...images of hamburgers are depicted with beautifully lit sesame seeds on the top of the buns, which compensate for or complement the insular singularity of the object with the sign of a multiplicity.
Ch 7: Art Photography
Presentation centers around questions of the nature of art, and the relationship of art and photography.
Begins by noting that the concept of art, as something separate from craft and characterized by the autonomy and imagination of the producer, is fairly recent in human history. Cites 1960s critic Clement Greenberg as important for expressing a key tenet of Western formalism, art as separated from culture, as a practice shunning the social, a different kind of autonomy for art in which art is practiced entirely for the sake of art, and not what it reveals about society or culture.
While art in contemporary liberal democracies is provided the opportunity to engage in social critique, it is in many cases not entirely autonomous but dependent on institutions that provide funding, such as govt or corporations, and that provide the means to distribute work, such as publishers and museums. In a free market economy, artists come and go (as in the music business), and therein art becomes a process of continual reevaluation and a means for social identification.
With the widespread dissemination of photographic images and its dominance of everyday visual field, art history became a more specialized pursuit dealing with non-photographic art.
The common view is that with the introduction of photography art was freed from pictorial realism, from the need to reproduce reality, or as Lyotard puts it, “to preserve various consciousness from doubt.” p133
Now Bate sees photography as having displaced painting as the primary medium through which art is theorized. Ironically, photography has been accepted for being able to achieve what modern painting rejected: pictorial realism. Cites Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before as a work from an important critic positioning or linking contemporary photography to pre-photographic concerns and 18th century tableau paintings. Bate makes the following table from arguments in Fried’s text:
‘History painting’, regarded as the highest genre, takes the form of a tableau painting in a pictorial realism that invokes narrative. The task of telling narratives of social importance was inherited by photojournalism and social documentary photography.... It was revived within art, as most clearly seen in the thinking and practice of Jeff Wall, the Canadian photographer whose works are highly constructed versions of scenes from ‘everyday life’. Here the aims of an earlier realist art, that is, the attempt to address ‘contemporary life’, are returned to via photography.13 As the slogan of the realists put it, to be contemporary: ‘Il faut être de son temps’ [One must be of one’s own time]! pp138-39
How did this happen? Bates suggests three coalescing currents: conceptual art, street photography, and fine art photography. Conceptual art raised issues about the nature of art and ended up as a process for documenting events, happenings, and objects. This overlapped with street photography's pseudo-documentary approach, which offered a form of social engagement free from specific journalistic assignments [or commercial concerns]. More recently, street photography has taken to strict neutral points of view in which the gaze is fixed via tripod. This feeds back into fine art traditions in which the techniques of pictorialism were eschewed in order to direct focus to the subject.
Now, it is possible to see these three strands of photography as having ‘coalesced’ in contemporary art photography. Certainly the space of the street and everyday life as content is central, as are the technical concerns (of fine art photography)for technical virtuosity, albeit on an industrial scale (the production values of art photography now are hardly arte povera), along with the use of conventions of performance, seriality, repetition, installation and construction of sets, etc., from conceptual art. Yet none of these explains the return to pictorial realism as the canonic form in art, through photography. This is because there are other factors, outside of the historical discourse of art that impinge on its practices. p144
Bate cites the influx of female photographers and the globalization of the art world, suggesting unsophisticated newcomers may be the cause of this return to pictorial realism.
Posted to FB: I’ve just finished Bate on Art Photography (Ch 7) and wonder if anyone has anything to say on the following. Bate sees photography as having displaced painting as the primary medium through which art is theorized. Ironically, photography has been accepted for being able to achieve what modern painting rejected: pictorial realism. He sees this as a coalescence of three currents: conceptual art, street photography, and fine art photography. He feels none of these adequately explain the return of pictorial realism as “there are other factors, outside of the historical discourse of art that impinge on its practices.” He then goes on to discuss the growth in the number of female photographers and the globalization of the art world, and though he doesn’t say this directly, it seems this could be read to suggest newcomers as the cause of this return to pictorial realism.
Ch 8: Global Photography
Begins by asserting that while globalization has been addressed in cinema, media, and cultural studies, it has not yet been taken up in photographic studies. Notes that globalization is not yet a clearly defined concept, but marks it as a spatial rather than chronological process. Important to distinguish between
- photographic representations of globalization
- globalization of photographic representation
Bate’s subsequent discussion relates to the latter.
He claims the process of globalization has been uneven, suggesting two things: 1) it is in fact a chronological process, and 2) that it appears uneven only from this point in time. 100 years out it is likely to appear far more even.
Identifies three key stages in historical development:
- Pre-photographic conditions: perspective as a convention for image making and the development of the camera obscura
- Globalization of photographs: dissemination of photographic technology and its adoption as a standard for visual representation
- The reconfiguration of photographic values in the the computer: potential for all images to be consumed globally
Photography is now part of a meta-system which Bate identifies as the computer, but might be more accurately thought of as the internet, in which computers (like tvs or radios) are simply access nodes.
Photographs within computer systems has led to the idea of “post-photography,” but the reality is that conventional lenses representing three dimensional space remain the standard means of production and representation. Despite the dominance of the computer/internet, media have maintained distinctive boundaries: we still have books, magazines, films, photos, and music in electronic form. And despite common knowledge of how images can be manipulated, the truth power of photos is still widespread. The sense of anxiety about the role of the computer and digital technologies, Bate believes, relates to new aesthetic values (such as hyper-saturation andcasual framing).
Notes three trends related to photographic use on the internet:
- local accumulation for global dissemination
Centralization of image libraries within a handful of commercial concerns; growth of the stock images, generic images that can be encoded by user; may result in a homogenization of style as companies seek styles that appeal to the widest possible audience; disincentive for photographers to produce in unique styles
- global network for local dissemination
Sees global networks such as Flickr being used to enhance local contacts
- distraction
WWW encourages or stimulates a kind of half-aware state of consciousness in which imagery plays a large part
Finally, the issue of ethics and ownership of images.
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