Unfixing the photographic image: Photography, indexicality, fidelity and normativity

Abstract

Normative conceptions of embodiment can operate only by fixing or essentialising the body's necessarily processural (or existential) ontology. Given that traditional film-based photography and cinema are reliant on the arrestation of a process, a process of fixing analogous to that seen in the constitution of normative bodies, this paper suggests that it is not surprising that photography has long been considered a privileged realm for the presentation of idealised bodies. Some critics have of course problematised this primarily indexical role of the photographic image by showing how this is disrupted in avant-grade practices in both photography and the cinema. In this paper, what is suggested instead is that the rupture of indexicality in traditional cinema and photography was always already inscribed in the technological apparatus or medium itself, and that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium. To this end, this paper presents case studies of the work of (amongst others) Edward Weston and Bill Henson, paying particular attention to their conceptualisation of the material ontology of the medium in which they work to show how they, respectively, reinforce or disrupt normative modes of embodiment.

Notes

 1. Barthes states, ‘The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. … the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents’ (1981, 85). See also Perice (1955, 99–119) for his notion of indexical signs and their difference from icons and symbols.

 2. For a discussion of Barthes' supposition of the indexicality of photography and the reasons for this misplaced faith, see Tagg (1988, 1–4).

 3. My view here is somewhat different to Mitchell's, because although the latter suggests that it is the arrival of digital technology that allows us to ‘expose the aporias in photography's construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic tradition’ (Mitchell 1992, 8), the implication here is that this deconstruction of the visual field of photography can be enacted from within an analysis of traditional photography without its digital other.

 4. This split and these terms are used by Mitchell (1992, 7), for whom ‘straight’ photography constitutes ‘normal’ photographic practice and that which is automatically attributed to a photograph by a viewer in the absence of supplementary information.

 5. And let us note, contra critics such as Mitchell (1992) but in accordance with Manovich (1995) and Lister (1995), that to suggest this is to assert continuity rather than rupture between analogue and digital technology.

 6. John Tagg's approach is slightly different from the others here in this regard, as will be seen.

 7. It is perhaps somewhat surprising that critics such as Sterne have to argue so forcefully against apparently commonsense perceptions of technology, because Walter Benjamin (1992 [1936]) argued something not dissimilar to Sterne's point in his Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, stating essentially that, in an age of mechanical reproduction, the very reproducibility of works of art has had a major impact on their traditional form.

 8. This can be maintained even in the face Tagg's contention that what he is trying to stress is ‘the absolute continuity of the photograph's ideological existence – its coalescence and codification of value-filled meanings – with its existence as a material object whose “currency” and “value” arise in certain distinct and historically specific social practices’ (1988, 188) because, as can be seen here, for Tagg the photograph as a material object is inseparable from its ideological function in its reception or utility, which is to say from its meaning.

 9. Interestingly, what Weston may be said to argue, then, contra Benjamin, is that photography does transmit an aura, but an aura that is specifically photographic.

10. Susanne Holschbach (2004) notes how ‘In early proto-photographic experiments, the search for a simplified process for duplicating existing masters was equally as important as the goal of fixing the camera obscura's images’.

11. Roberta McGrath comments on the fact that Weston was part of the West Coast photographic group f/64, who took their name from the aperture setting that achieves maximum depth of field. Although McGrath notes how this technique heightens visual qualities, she suggests that these qualities ‘excite and invoke (without allowing) the sense of touch’ (1987, 333). However, I would contend that the depth of field of Weston's photographs do not even invoke the sense of touch because the maintenance of focus across the depth field of the photographic is peculiar to the very constructed nature of the photographic image and the very opposite of the always localized and discretely focused nature of haptics.z

12. John Berger, although problematizing the notion of authenticity in photography because of the removal of an event from existential time, nonetheless states that ‘If the photograph isn't “tricked” in one way or another, it is authentic like a trace of an event’ (Berger and Mohr 1979/1980, 166).

13. It should be remembered that for Bois and Krauss, one of the most revolutionary aspects of Pollock's work came from his act of laying his canvas flat and thus subverting the dominant verticality of art (Bois and Krauss 1997, 93–103).

14. Note that this is the case in Dupain and Riefenstahl also, and particularly so with many contemporary photographers such as Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber and Helmut Newton (to name but a few).

15. Henson himself says, ‘Photography to me is about finding that intensely intimate element without any presumption of familiarity. That really is about distance or, if you like, the gap between yourself and the subject; and how you charge and electrify that gap. I suppose it has to be at once an unbridgeable gulf and, at the same time, something which has such a tender, proximate breathing presence, that it almost feels as though it's not separate from oneself’ (Sidhu 2005).