The Burden of Representation
Essays on photographies and Histories
-John Tagg
published 1993 University of Minnesota Press
published in GB by Macmillan press ltd
ISBN 0-8166-2405-4
printed in china
INTRODUCTION - I
realist position, Roland Barthes - 'The camera is an instrument of evidence'
there is an existential connection between 'the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens' and the photographic image: 'every photograph is somehow co-natural with its referrent'.
What the photograph asserts is the overwhelming truth that 'the thing has been there': there was a reality which once existed, though it is a reality one can no longer touch.' roland barthes, camera lucida
The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. - ibid 88-89
New idea of authentication vs representation, and perhaps in my dissertation this authentication is not possible only via the context given by a coherentism style approach
p2 I need to point out, of course, that the existence of a photograph is no guarantee of a corresponding pre-photographic existent.
I need to clarify in my work, yes representation but perhaps identity is a good topic to focus on, the self-portraiture in which I am focusing the body of this work is that which suggests a sense of identity, so the face would tend to give that uniqueness and capture that because we tend to all be different in this way.
p3 The indexical nature of the photograph - the causative link between the pre-photographic referrent and the sign - is therefore highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning.
Things happen inside the camera, distorted so we can see it... these have meanings
requires a history
This is not the inflection of a prior (though irretrievable) reality, as Barthes would have us believe, but the production of a new and specific reality, the photograph, which becomes meaningful in certain transactions and has real effects, but cannot refer or be referred to a pre-photographic reality as to a truth. p3
to make present what is absent
Barthes mother...
what is real is what makes it meaningful
p4 ' for this however, we must look not to some 'magic' of the medium, but to the conscious and unconsious processes, the practices and instituitions through which the photograph can incite a phaantasy, take on meaning, and exercise an effect.'
'That a photograph can come to stand as evidence, for example, rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process, though this is not to suggest that evidential value is embedded in the print, in an abstract apparatus, or in particular signifying strategy'
evidential force for barthes - complex historical outcome
Ask yourself the question, under what conditions a picture of the Loch ness monster (of which there are many) be acceptable?
Important here, shows us to a degree of what may be truthful and may open up an avenue of discourse... everythin can be doubted and falsified and may open up an infinite regress situation.
INTRODUCTION - II
Foucault reference, power
Power and meaning have a reciprocal relation described in the coupled concepts of the regime of power and the regime of sense. p6
photography's status as evidence had to be produced, negotiated to be established
Foucaults metaphor of Panopticism
+ his concept of a new technology of power/knowledge to the photographic domain
INTRODUCTION - III
Documentary
appropriated photographic technology to a central and privledged place within its rhetoric of immediacy and truth. - william stott
claiming to only 'put the facts' directly of vicariously, through the report of 'first hand experience'
INTRODUCTION - IV
INTRODUCTION - V
INTRODUCTION VI
power is essentially the issue here
SKIP TO FIRST ESSAY, IRRELEVANT
Chapter 1
A democracy of the image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production
Surrounded by photographs, special photographs, images of ourselves, family etc
'portraits whose meaning and value lie in countless social exchanges and rituals which would now seem incomplete without photography' Moments are sealed with the exchanging of a photograph a portrait.
What uses do these pictures have, especially when taken out of context and put into a family album style
For most people photography has become primarily a means of obtaining pictures of faces they know? p35
Each image belongs to a distinct moment
'look at the plates reproduced in this chapter. Notice how repititious they are. Heads and shoulders, as if those parts of our bodies were our truth' p35
almost all 3/4 poses
II
The portrait is therefore a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity.
commodity, luxury
multiple reproduction, claims to offer a mechanically transcribed truth
III
The idealogical conception of the photograph as a direct and 'natural' cast of reality was present from the very begininng...
Leipzig city advertiser denounced the process as sacriligious, especially where it involved the representation of the human face:
To try and catch transient relfected images is not merely something that is impossible but, as a thorough German investigation has shown, the desire to do so is blasphemy. Man is created in the image of God and God's image cannot be captured by any human machine. Only the divine artist, divinely inspired, may be allowed, in a moment of solemnity, at the higher call of his genius, to dare to reproduce the divine-human features, but never by means of a mechanical aid. -quoted in w. benjamin small history of photography 1979 p241 in one-way street and other writings
Daguerreotype didn't first fulfill the demand for the public domain for portraits
However could capture unimaginable detail
by 1842 exposure times reduced to 20-40seconds, portrait studios open up everywhere
IV
William Henry fox talbot, allowed for reproductions to be made
V
Method of being represented may be of worth to talk about... in the past they came in the form of the daguerreotype which was OOAK and took a long time to produce, then reproductions came easier... and to the typical styles that are available today... Available in print, in a book, online on the web... these things change how one is represented surely?
VI
Was no longer a privilege to be pictured but the burden of a new class of the surveilled.
new kind of power on the social body, generating new kinds of knowledge and newly refined means of control. p59
Chapter 2
Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State
extracting and evaluating 'truth' in discource
micro-physics of power - michel foucault
camera is never neautral,its produces are highly coded, power it wields is never its own
'Photographs are never evidence of history, they are themselves historical' p65
The British worker must appear not only incoherent but entirely misleading in their purpose, eliding as they do the complex differences between the images they assemble - between their contrasting purposes and uses.
Chapter 3
A means of Surveillance:
The photograph as evidence in Law
I
photographs for art would be different than photographs for law
Representation can represent a truth of visual information, an idea or a feeling
Chapter 7
Contacts/Worksheets:
Notes on Photography, History and Representation
Representation is perhaps then, two-fold... the intention and the interpretation
Understanding a Photograph - John Berger 1968
photographs are a record of things seen
p187 umberto eco, that if photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a 'natural' process but because the latter is also coded.
learned schemas
meaning of a photograph is built up by an interaction of such schemas or code
p188 stressing the absolutely continuity of the photograph's ideological existence
Power to bestow authority and privilege on photographic representations is not given to other apparatuses within the same social formation - such as amateur photography or 'art photography' - and it is only partially held by photojournalism
what conditions would a picture of a UFO or Loch Ness Monster be acceptable as proof of their existence? 'natural' rhetoric of documentary images
Foucault argues that each society establishes what he calls its 'regime of truth': its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse it harbours and causes its function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements.... p189
very different from a world historical conciousness which John Berger has called for
Design of chapter 1---------------------
clarifying the question, need to describe what we actually mean by a representation, what makes a good representation? What qualifies as one? What degrees of measure can we use...
Go on to talk strictly about identity
With photography in general a photograph is proof of something being infront of the camera
Talk about the portrait in general, but when talking about the self-portrait is there not a lot more that is going on
How we are with passports and driving liscences the pictures are of our face, the disntinctive thing about us which show us to be who we are, of course things can be falsified but this is a starting point is it not.
Mention of truth, should I use this word? What connotations does this word bring with it
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13vii
Tim Clark argues is that the question of a realist representation concerns not only the confluence of crucial and necessary conditions and codes of the realist work, but also the outlawing, the refusal of signification
may have to research the exact meaning of this..
Clark, image of people p12
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Representation
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