Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the realism of abstraction

Abstract

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed “narration” and “description” as these are traced throughout Sekula’s project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky. The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism’s social world that means that all photographic “realism” is intrinsically “haunted” by a certain spectre of that “self-moving substance in the “shape of money”, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 One limitation of Stimson’s own focus on serial form is, however, the ways in which its “vision of photography as a medium of sociality”, and a “new form of political subjectivity”, is ultimately restricted to a now lost mode of collectivity: that is, the Nation (169; see Roberts 33‒35). Although Stimson recognises the crucial sense in which “nationalism” itself is a “form of abstraction” (169), as well as, for example, in his account of Riis (and defence of the latter’s “bourgeois abstraction”), referring to serialism’s capacity to give expression to “the underlying essential economic relations in the form of class conflict, whether it wanted to or not”, this is not extended to any detailed consideration of the social relations constituted through real abstraction (in the value form) as themselves constituting a certain mode of collectivity, if a profoundly “inhuman” one. As I will suggest, this is key to understanding what would make the serial forms of, say, Sekula (or, in another fashion, Andreas Gursky) different perhaps from those covered in Stimson’s book.

2 If one historical manifestation of the “renunciation of the single image” has, then, been centred on the specific sequential form of the photo-book, and thus (as Sekula often suggests) to the novel (particularly in its more “epic” dimensions), this, of course, raises the question of its relation to not only literature but cinema also. “I have found that I have looked more to cinema for models”, suggests Sekula (“The Traffic” 156), while in “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary” he argues that “the most developed critiques of the illusory facticity of photographic media have been cinematic, stemming from outside the tradition of still photography” (869). (By contrast, and significantly, Barthes described his motivation for writing Camera Lucida as one directed against film.) Indeed, as Roberts notes in Photography and its Violations, arguably the formation of a radical conception of photographic realism in the twentieth century emerged in some sense through its very subordination to cinema, and thus “its need to transform its functions into a filmic or protofilmic language”. As he concludes: “There is no realism of the contingent and no sequential photo practice in Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, Walker Evans and James Agee, without Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov” (41). Some of the complexities contained in this relationship between photography and cinema are identifiable in comparing this with Stimson’s celebration, by contrast, of photographic serialism over film, which, he argues, collapses “the analytical, atemporal space opened up the abstraction of serial photography back into a false synthetic naturalism of time” (37; emphasis added). I leave such specific complexities of this relationship aside here for another occasion however.

3 Benjamin’s reference is to Renger-Patzsch’s anthology The World is Beautiful published in 1928.

4 This famous passage from Brecht reappears across Sekula’s oeuvre, including in the early “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary”, where, for example, he criticizes Lewis Baltz’s new topographic “photographs of enigmatic factories” precisely because they “fail to tell us anything about them, to recall Brecht’s remarks about a hypothetical photograph of the Krupp works” (870).

5 The same point is made elsewhere in a more theoretical register, drawing on Marx’s Grundrisse: “Reified social relations are in a sense invisible … [and] can only be understood through recourse to abstraction, or … through the movement upwards from the concrete to the abstract, and back down to the concrete” (Sekula “On Fish Story” 49).

6 In the latter case, a specifically “artistic abstraction” can certainly be conceived, in J.M. Bernstein’s words, as combating a “societal abstraction” (or the “scientistic”) by asserting an affective and sensuous particularity to be found precisely within the materiality of the aesthetic object itself (Bernstein 151‒52; see also Cunningham “Floating”), just as, from a rather different direction, it is, one might say, the snapshot’s very particular connection to specific biographies and everyday lives — its “concreteness” of reference — that has, in a contrary fashion, made it exemplary of a specifically anti-aestheticist resistance to the abstractions of an interchangeability of images characteristic of mass media.

7 Sekula here prefigures the more extended discussion in his essay “The Body and the Archive” of the systematizing impulse in the uses of photography by the likes of Bertillon and Francis Galton that links early social uses of the photograph to criminology and eugenics, as well as pseudo-sciences like phrenology. Crucial to this is the ways in which, on Sekula’s partly Foucaultian account, the apparently democratic and egalitarian dimensions of photography were, more or less from its beginnings, tied up with systems of “classification” that in fact constructed new modes of class, gender or racial distinction.

8 See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4 [Accessed May 19th 2016]

9 One could compare here the broadly Lukácsian distinction implied, for example, against photography’s reduction to the descriptive mode, in Dyer’s critical contrast of Garry Winogrand with Dorothea Lange: “Lange was faithful to George Steiner’s comment on Balzac: that if he ‘describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing’. The photographers of the new generation will describe a hat just because it happens to be somewhere” (Dyer 148).

10 Conversely, Emerson, for example, writing in the 1840s, identifies the danger in literary language that “a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults”, demanding of the poet that he (or she) “pierce these rotten dictions and fasten words again to visible things… [to become] a commanding certificate, or fully underwritten currency” (cited in Armstrong 291).

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Notes on contributors

David Cunningham

David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on modernism, aesthetic theory and capitalist culture, including the co-edited collection Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005). He is a longstanding member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.