Mirzoeff,

Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge,

1999.

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS VISUAL CULTURE?

1. Modern life takes place onscreen…In this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than
believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life.

2. the 1991 Gulf War…‘smart’ bombs as they homed in on their targets during the Gulf War.
The film seemed to show what Paul Virilio has called the ‘automation of perception’,
machines that could ‘see’ their way to their destinations.

3. The gap between the wealth of visual experience in postmodern culture and the ability to
analyze that observation marks both the opportunity and the need for visual culture as a
field of study…Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information,
meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology. By
visual technology, I mean any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to
enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet. Postmodernism has
often been defined as the crisis of modernism….the postmodern is the crisis caused by
modernism and modern culture confronting the failure of its own strategy of visualizing…it
is the visual crisis of culture that creates postmodernity…the fascination with the visual and
its effects that marked modernism has engendered a postmodern culture that is most
postmodern when it is visual. This proliferation of visuality has made film and television
entertainment the United States’ second largest export after aerospace…Postmodernism is
not, of course, simply a visual experience. In what Arjun Appadurai has called the ‘complex,
overlapping, disjunctive order’ of postmodernism, tidiness is not to be expected…visual
culture is a tactic with which to study the genealogy, definition and functions of postmodern
everyday life from the point of view of the consumer…postmodernism is best imagined and
(4) understood visually…

4. [but there is no] simple dividing line…between the past (modern) and the present
(postmodern)…visual culture has a genealogy that needs exploring and defining in the
modern as well as postmodern period…[it’s not] simply ‘the history of images’ handled with
a semiotic notion of representation…[but also] a means of creating a sociology of visual
culture that will establish a ‘social theory of visuality’…visual culture [here is seen as
belonging to] the wider culture…a history of visual culture would highlight those moments
where the visual is contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of
social interaction and definition in terms of class, gender, sexual and racialized
identities…Roland Barthes: ‘IN order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a
‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study
consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one’.

Visualizing

5. …the new visual culture…the growing tendency to visualize things that are not in
themselves visual…the growing technology capacity to make visible things that our eyes
could not see unaided….X‐ray in 1895…Martin Heidegger…‘a world picture…does not mean
a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture…The world picture
does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the
world becomes picture at all is what distinguished the essence of the modern age’…[today
we have the] ability to absorb and interpret visual information…in the information
age…[this is] a relatively new learned skill…According to oen recent estimate, the retina
contains 100 million nerve cells capable of about 10 billion processing operations per
second…
In other words, visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern
tendency to picture or visualize existence…

6. This history might be said to bein with the visualizing of the economy in the eighteenth
century by François Quesnay…Visualizing has had its most dramatic effects in medicine,
where everything from the activity of the brain to the heartbeat is now transformed into a
visual pattern by complex technology. Most recently the visualizing of computer
environments…Visual culture is new precisely because of its focus on the visual as a place
where meanings are created and contested. Western culture has consistently privileged the
spoken word…W.J.T. Mitchell…‘picture theory’, the sense that some aspects of Western
philosophy and science have come to adopt a pictorial, rather than textual, view of the
world. It this is so, it marks a significant challenge to the notion of the world as a written
text.

7. In Mitchell’s view, picture theory stems from ‘the realization that spectatorship (the look,
the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be
as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation,
etc.) and that ‘visual experience’ or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable in the
model of textuality’…visual culture prioritize the everyday experience of the visual, from
the snapshot to the VCR and even the blockbuster art exhibition…
The first move towards visual culture studies is a recognition that the visual image is not
stable but changes its relationship to exterior reality at particular moments of modernity.
As philosopher Jean‐François Lyotard has argued: ‘Modernity, wherever it appears, does
not occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality –
a discovery linked to the invention of other realities’.
…the first section of this book…the formal logic of the ancien regime image (1650‐1820)
first gave to a dialectical logic of (8) the image in the modern period (1820‐1975). This
dialectical image has in turn been challenged by the paradoxical or virtual image in the last
twenty years.

8. As perspective’s claim to be reality lost ground, film and photography created a new,
direct relationship to reality such that we accept the ‘actuality’ of what we see in the image.
A photograph necessarily shows us something that was at a certain point actually before
the camera’s lens. This image is dialectical because it sets up a relationship between the
viewer in the present and the past moment of space or time that it represents. However, it
was not dialectical in the Hegelian sense of the term…Photographs offered a far more
democratic visual map of the world. Not the filmed or photographic image no longer
indexes reality because everyone knows they can be undetectably manipulated by
computers. As the example of the ‘smart’ bomsb shows, the paradoxical virtual image
‘emerges when the real‐time image dominates the thing represented, real time
subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the
concept of reality on its head’ (Virilio).
Visual culture…is the crisis of information and visual overload in everyday life. It seeks to
find ways to work within this new (virtual) reality. To adapt Michel de Certeau’s description
of everyday life, visual culture is a tactic, for ‘the place of the tactic belongs to the other’. A
tactic is carried out in full view of the enemy, the society of control in which we live.

Visual power, visual pleasure

9. Most theorists of the postmodern agree that one of its distinctive features is the
dominance of the image….The peculiar dimension to such theory is, however, that it
automatically assumes that a culture dominated by the visual must be second‐rate…Plato
believed that the objects encountered in everyday life, including people, are simply bad
copies of the perfect ideal of those objects. He compared this reproduction as being like the
shadows cast by a fire on a cave wall…everything we see in the ‘real’ world is already a
copy. For an artist to make a representation of what is seen would be to make a copy of a
copy, increasing the chance of distortion…there was no place for the visual arts in his
[Plato’s] Republic…This hostility to the image has had a lasting influence on Western
thought to the present day. Some images have been deemed too dangerous to exist, leading
iconoclasts to seek their destruction…

10. …there is still a strong suspicion of visual pleasure in intellectual circles…Even Michel
de Certeau spoke of ‘a cancerous growth of vision’. Fredric Jameson gives vent to his
hostility at greater length: ‘The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say it has its
end in rapt, mindless fascination…the attempt to repress their own excess’.

11. The oddity of this position is that it renders America’s leading Marxist critic a diehard
defender of the bourgeois subject, as classically expressed through the novel…Viewing
visual images is, by contrast, very often a collective experience, as it is in a
cinema…Jameson…His position is derived from the film theory of Christian Metz and other
film theorists of the 1970s, who saw the cinema as an apparatus for the dissemination of
ideology, in which the spectator was reduced to a wholly passive consumer. However,
Jameson goes beyond duch intellectual theorizing by presenting cinema audiences as
lowlier beings, more comparable to animals than serious intellectuals like himself. The no
doubt unintentional echoes of racist thought in this depiction are distasteful but necessarily
implied by his colonial need to master the visual by writing…In the eighteenth century, this
hostility was directed at theater. It is now focused on film, television and increasingly the
Internet. In each case, the source of hostility is the mass, popular audience, not the medium
in itself. From this perspective, the medium is not the message.

12. [Pierre Bourdieu] social class determined how an individual might respond to cultural
production. Rather than taste being a highly individual attribute, Bourdieu saw it as a by‐
product of education and access, generating a ‘cultural capital’ that reinforced and
enhanced the economic distinctions of class…Museum‐going was almost excluseively the
province of the middle and upper classes…Bourdieu’s research was carried out before the
advent of the ‘blockbuster’ museum exhibition and before the shift in grant and donor
attention to diversifying museum audiences….When a million people visit a Monet
exhibition in Chicago and five million visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum annually, art
and museums are in some sense a part of mass culture…
Visual culture seeks to blend the historical perspective of art history and film studies with
the case‐specific, intellectually engaged (13) approach characteristic of cultural
studies…visual culture has to proceed by defining both the genealogy of the visual that it
seeks to use and its interpretation of the loaded term ‘culture’.

Visuality

13. Michel Foucault…a genealogy of visual culture, marking out a broad trajectory for the
emergence of contemporary visuality, without pretending to exhaust the richness of the
field…a strategic reinterpretation of the history of modern visual media understood
collectively, rather than fragmented into disciplinary units such as film, television, art and
video…The constituent parts of visual culture are, then, not defined by medium so much as
by the interaction between viewer and viewed, which may be termed the visual event…By
visual event, I mean an interaction of the visual sign, the technology that enables and
sustains that sigh, and the viewer…Semiotics – or the science of sights – is a system devised
by linguists to analyze the spoken and written word. It divides the sign into two halve, the
signifier – that which is seen – and the signified – that which is meant. This binary system
seemed to offer great potential for explaining wider cultural phenomena. Semiotics gained
its strength from its denial of any necessary or causal relationship between the two halves
of the sign. A drawing of a tree is taken to signify a tree not because it really is in some way
tree‐like but because the viewing audience accepts it as representing a tree. It is thus
possible for moders of representation to change over time or to be challenged by other
means of representation. In short, seeing is not believing but interpreting. Visual images
succeed or fail according to the extent that we can interpret them successfully.

14. Structuralism was in the end unproductive. It may be possible to reduce all texts to a
series of formulae but in so doing the crucial differences between and within texts were
elided. Visual culture, like any other means of sign analysis, must engage with historical
research. In the visual field, the constructed nature of the image was central to the
radicaltechnique of montage in film and photography in the 1920s and 1930s…Sergei
Eisenstein…Battleship Potemkin…German photographers John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch
took the (15) technique of montage into the single frame by combining elements from
different photographs into one new image. (=collage)

15. Whether in film or photography, montage was created in the editing suite or dark room
rather than on location. The artificiality of the technique…In the 1990s, montage is a visual
experience of everyday life in a world with fifty ‘basic’ cable television stations in the United
States.
…visual criticism…Mike Bal…this practice ‘reading art’. Her method shares with reading
texts that ‘the outcome is meaning, that it functions by the way of discrete visible elements
called signs to which meanings are attributed; that such attributions of meaning, or
interpretations, are regulated by rules, named codes; and that the subject or agent of this
attribution, the reaeder or viewer, is a decisive element in the process’. Yet in discussing
specific works, this approach fails to convince. For in concentrating solely on linguistic
meaning, such readings deny the very element that makes visual imagery of all kinds
distinct from texts, that is to say, its sensual immediacy…

16. …surplus of experience that moves the different components of the visual sign or
semiotic circuit into a relation with each other. Such moments of intense and surprising
visual power evoke, in David Freedberg’s phrase, ‘admiration, awe, terror and desire’. This
dimension to visual culture is at the heart of all visual events. Let us give this feeling a
name: the sublime. The sublime is the pleasurable experience in representation of that
which would be painful or terrifying in reality, leading to a realization of the limits of the
human and of the powers of nature.
The sublime was given renewed importance by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant
who called it ‘a satisfaction mixed with horror’. Kant contrasted the sublime with the
beautiful, seeing the former as a more complex and profound emotion leading a person with
a taste for the sublime to ‘detest all chains, from the gilded variety worn at court to the
irons weighing down the galley slave’. This preference for the ethical over the simply
aesthetic has led Lyotard to revive the sublime as a key term for postmodern criticism. He
sees it as ‘a combination of pleasure and pain? Pleasure in reason exceeding all
presentation, pain in the imagination or sensibility proving inadequate to the concept’
(Lyotard). The task of the sublime is then to ‘present the unpresentable’, an appropriate
role for the relentless visualizing of the postmodern era. Furthermore, because the sublime
is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world –
for example, peace, equality, freedom – ‘the experience of the sublime feeling demands a
sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture’ (Lyotard). Unlike the
beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of
culture and is therefore central to visual culture.

17. [But what is going on with this sublime today?] When the great works of abstraction sit
comfortably in the corporate boardroom, can it really continue to be a means to challenge
what Lyotard rightly calls the ‘victory of capitalist technoscience’? When Philip
Morris…enjoys sponsoring modern art retrospectives, like those of Picasso and Robert
Rauschenberg in New York, under the slogan ‘The Spirit of Innovation’…then the history of
modernism has come to be repeated as farce.
The (post)modern destruction of reality is accomplished in everyday life, not in the studios
of the avant‐garde…In he early 1980s, postmodern photographers like Sherrie Levine and
Richard Prince sought to question the authenticity of photography by appropriating
photographs taken by other people. This dismissal of photography’s claim to represent the
truth is now a staple of popular culture. The cover story on the Weekly World News for
February 25, 1997 was a follow‐up to their 1992 ‘story’ of the discovery of the skeletons of
Adam and Even in Denver, Colorado. Further analysis of the photograph now showed the
sekelton of a baby girl, disclosing that the first couple had a hitherto unknown daughter.
The subhead reads? ‘Puzzled Bible experts ask: Did Cain and Abel have a little
sister?’…parody…[of] such beliefs in the power of photography to reveal hidden truths.

18. …television series…a convincing sense of the experience of everyday life. Soap
operas…the conventions of realistic drama…open, serial form. A soap should ideally run for
years on end in numerous episodes, like the daytime classic All My Children which has
feature five times a week on ABC for over twenty years…key
characters…grow…conversation in which both parties are standing facing the camera. In
order to facilitate these scenes, all the actresses are a head shorter than the actors…

19. soap is essentially structured around talk, especially the spread of information as gossip
or rumor…a true soap opera viewer is formed in years, not weeks…the experience of soap
opera is in fact more realistic than the average ‘serious’ drama which neatly wraps up all its
loose ends in an hour…the complex narrative structure of the serials allow viewers a
similarly complex viewing experience…it is experienced in the present…In this conflation of
soap reality and the viewer’s reality…now soaps are watched by both sexes…[but] it is still
seen as a ‘feminine’, trivial medium because of its very popularity.

20. Soap is perhaps the most international visual format…creates its own reality to such an
extent that Mexican telenovelas are the most watched shows on Russian television…Soap is
not simply idle pleasure but can have significant political importance. It became part of the
solution to the Bosnian crisis in 1998. after the ousting of the extremist government loyal to
indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, Serbian
television responded by cutting off pirated copies of the immensely popular Venezuelan
soap ‘Kassandra’. The United States government intervened to obtain legal copies of the
show…(21) to prevent disaffection with the new regime.

21. Reality is being reconfigured daily in hour‐long slots across the globe. Popular visual
culture can also address the most serious topics…the Nazi Holocaust…In his remarkable
comic book Maus, Art Spiegelman…addressed [this]…Jews as mice and the Germans and
Poles as dogs or pigs…a remarkable narrative sophistication using a flashback format…his
complex relationship with his father…

At this point, many readers will be tempted to use the ‘common sense’ retort. That is to say,
common sense tells us that there is no need (22) to over‐intellectualize the moment of
looking…However, some reflection might lead to conclude that looking is not as
straightforward an activity as might be supposed… [What is] ‘indecent’ [and]
‘obscene’…while everyone understands the concept of pornography, it is hard to get any
substantial number of people to agree what becomes obscene and therefore should be
banned…Neither truth nor obscenity are plain to see any longer. Milos Forman made his
film The People vs. Larry Flynt as a celebration of the First Amendment, but many feminists
saw it instead as glorifying the degradation of women in Hustler. This crisis of truth, reality
and visualizing in everyday life is the ground on which visual culture studies seeks to act.

Culture

22. For many critics, the problem with visual culture lies not in its emphasis on the
importance of visuality but in its use of a cultural framework to explain the history of the
visual…a widespread nervousness amongst art historians that the cultural turn would lead
to the relativizing of all critical judgment.

23. …to distinguish between the products of culture and those of art…a false opposition. Art
is culture both in the sense of high culture and in the anthropological sense of human
artifact. There is no outside to culture…Culture brings with it difficult legacies of race and
racism…as Raymond Williams famously observed, culture is ‘one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language’. The term acquired two meaning in the
nineteenth century…In 1869…Matthew Arnold…define[d] culture as the product of
elites…this sense of culture as high culture…Clement Greenberg…‘Avant‐Garde and
Kitsch’…defended the avant‐garde project of modernist high art against the mass‐produced
vulgarities of kitsch. However, culture was also used in a different sense as being the entire
social network of a particular society…(24) to understand how human society came to
construct an artificial, non‐natural and hence cultural way of life. E.B. Tylor…‘Culture or
Civilization…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society’…[However] Tylor was a firm believer in race science…[for him] different human
societies manifested different stages of human evolution…The anthropological sense of
culture came to rely on a contrast between the modern present time of the (white, Western)
anthropologist and the pre‐modern past of his or her (non‐white, non‐Western) subject.
This linear model of evolution…

24. In finding a way out of the culture labyrinth, visual culture develops the idea of culture
as expressed by Stuart Hall: ‘Cultural practice then becomes a realm where one engages
with and elaborates a politics’…culture is where people define their identity…In the global
diaspora of the post‐modern world, transcultural approaches will be a key tool. Both the
anthropological and artistic models of culture of one ethnicity, nation, or people an
another…Gayatri Spivak called a ‘strategic essentialism’ in oder to validate the study of non‐
white and non‐Western visual culture in its own right…an understanding of the (25) plural
realisties that coexist and are in conflict with each other both in the present and in the
past…

25. Visual culture…must describe what Martin J. Powers has called ‘a fractal network,
permeated with patterns from all over the globe’…visual culture [is] fractal, rather than
linear…fractals may always be extended. Second, a fractal network has key points of
interface and interaction…[in this, there are] power differentials across the network…visual
culture remains a discocusrse of the West about the West but in that framework ‘the issue’,
as David Morley reminds us, ‘is how to think of modernity, not so much as specifically or
necessarily European…but only contingently so’.
Western culture has sought to naturalize these histories of power…the 1984 exhibition
‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’ at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. Here works by leading European modernists such as Picasso and
Giacometti were exhibited alongside works of art from African and Oceanian cultures as if
the only function of these objects waws to be appropriated as a formal influence by Western
artists. [So the West can borrow from other cultures, but the opposite is called imitation by
virtue of the dominance and advancement of the West!].

26. [this takes us back to the issue of identity as a double‐edged sword] The Peruvian‐born
artist Kukuli Verlade Barrioneuvo…‘I am a Westernized individual. I do not say I am a
Western individual, because I did not create this culture – I am the product of
colonization…mixed race…I have a new identity: the identity of a colonized
individual’…This experience of two or more heritages…[is] transculture…The ‘culture’ in
visual culture will seek to be this constantly changing dynamic of trasnculture, rather than
the static edifice of anthropological culture.

Everyday Life

26. The transcultural experience of the visual in everyday life is, then, the territory of visual
culture…Henri Lefebvre…Introduction to Everyday Life…[everyday life] is a key site of the
interaction between the everyday and the modern: ‘two connected, correlated phenomena
that are neither absolutes nor entities: everyday life and modernity, the one crowning and
concealing the other, revealing it and veiling it’…In his analysis of The Practice of Everyday
Life, Michel de Certeau celebrated patterns of ‘dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading,
shopping and cooking’ that (27) seemed to offer a range of tactics to the consumer…

27. The consumer is the key agent in postmodern capitalist society…Capital has
commodified all aspects of everyday life, including the human body and even the process of
looking itself. In 1967 the Situationist critic Guy Debord named what he called the ‘society
of the spectacle’, that is to say, a culture entirely in sway to a spectacular consumer culture
‘whose function is to make history forgotten within culture’…The rise of an image
dominated culture is due to the fact that ‘the spectacle is capital to such a degree of
accumulation that it becomes an image’…[e.g.] autonomous life of certain corporate loges,
like the Nike swoosh or McDonalds’ Golden Arches…In the spectacular society we are sold
the sizzle rather than the steak, the image rather than the object…Jonathan L. Beller has
termed this development the ‘attention theory of value’. Media seek to attract our attention
and in so doing create a profit. Thus the modern film [blockbuster] costs a spectacular
amount of money…Cinema is in fact archetypal of the capitalist enterprise…

28. …philosopher Jean Baudrillard announced the end of the society of the spectacle in
1983. Instead, he declared the age of the ‘simulacrum’, that is to say, a copy with no original.
The simulacrum was the final stage of the history of the image, moving from a state in
which ‘it masks the absence of a basic reality’ to a new epoch in which ‘it bears no relation
to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’…the theme park
Disneyland…existing ‘to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America,
which is Disneyland’. Behind this simulacrum lay ‘the murderous capacity of images,
murderers of the real’.

In his analysis of the global culture of postmodernism, Arjun Appadurai has highlighted
several new components of contemporary life…Firstly, a consistent tension between the
local and the global…it no longer makes sense to locate cultural activity solely within
national or geographic boundaries…the global cultural economy…[for] Appadurai…is
dominated by ‘a new role for the imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need
to bring together: the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images; the idea
of the imagined community; and the French idea of the imaginary, as a constructed
landscape of collective aspirations…The image, the imagined and the imaginary…(29) the
imagination as a social practice’.

29. For many, the difficulty of imaging and imagining this constantly changing situation is
experienced as a crisis…[it is no longer to ‘imagine’ and ‘image’ (visualize) nations]
Appadurai asserts that ‘The work of imagination…is neither purely emancipatory nor
entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to
annex the global into their own practices of the modern…Ordinary people have begun to
deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives’…As Irit Rogoff observes,
individuals create unexpected visual narratives in everyday life…Such everyday visual
experience, from the Internet to the Met, is still beyond the reach of the spin doctors
(image‐maker, press secretary), pollsters and other demons of the contemporary
imagination.

30. In this moment, it is becoming clear that a new pixilated mode of global intervisuality is
being formed that is distinct from the cinematic assembly line image and from the
simulacrum of 1980s postmodern culture. In the nineteenth century, photography
transformed the human memory into a visual archive…The pixilated image has made
photography unbearable, both literally as Princess Diana’s relationship to the paparazzi
attests, but also metaphorically…The pixelated image is perhaps too contested and
contradictory a medium to be sublime…the pixelated screen is created of both electronic
signals and empty space. A pixel, a term derived from the phrase ‘picture element’,
composes the electronic image of the television or computer monitor. Pixels are not just
points of light but are also memory units…Unlike photography and film which attested to
the necessary presence of some exterior reality, the pixelated image reminds us of its
necessary artificiality and absence. It is here and not here at once. It is interactive but along
lines clearly set by the global corporations that manufacture the necessary computer and
television equipment. The global freedoms of the Internet are only possible because of the
Cold War need to create an indestructible communications network. Life in the pixel zonen
is necessarily ambivalent, creating what might be called ‘intervisuality’.

31. [your browser, your DVD or WebTV] In this complex interface of reality and virtuality
that comprises intervisuality, there is nothing everyday about everyday life any more.
Visual culture used to be seen as a distraction from the serious business of text and history.
It is now the locus of cultural and historical change.

CHAPTER I
PICTURE REDEFINITION

Line, Color, Vision

Why do pictures look real?

37. Three Constitutive modes of representing reality in the West: the picture, the
photograph, and virtual reality.

Images are representations, not real in themselves…We shall consider how the key
components of color and line come to constitute an image by resemblance or
representation, looking at certain critical moments in the early modern period (1650‐
1850)…For the conventions used to make an image intelligible are not necessarily true in
the scientific sense and vary according to time and place. Pictures are defined not by some
magical affinity to the real but by their ability to create what…Barthes called the ‘reality
effect’. Pictures use certain modes of representation that convince us that the picture is
sufficiently life‐like for us to suspend our disbelief…the primary function of visual culture is
to try and make sense of the infinite range of exterior reality by selecting, interpreting and
reeepresenting that reality.

Perspectives

38. Visual culture…a hybrid…The key to creating visual culture is
intelligibility…[perspective] the system of converging lines used to convey depth in a two‐
dimensional visual image…an early modern scientific way of representing
vision…superceded both by Einstein’s theory of relativity and by…the Cubist techniques of
Pablo Picasso…Unfortunately,, this neat parallel between scientific knowledge and visual
representation does not hold up under closer analysis. Perspective was not one agreed
system but a complex of representational strategies ranging from popular entertainments
to geometric displays and means of social organization.

EX. Alhazen’s visual pyramid

39. …medieval scholars…how to account for the human ability to see very distant or very
large objects, given the smallness of the eye. Alhazen responded by defining the existence of
what he called a ‘visual pyramid’, whose point was in the eye and whose base at the object
viewed…[this became] a staple of medieval and early modern notions of vision….Italian
painting from the thirteenth centure onwards was based on an attempt to represent this
visual pyramid in art…
Perspective has classically been defined as a picture of the view seen from a window. This
framing shapes and defines what can be seen and what is out of view…in the words of
Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Perspective is a rational demonstration whereby experience confirms
that all objects transmit their similitudes to the eye by a pyramid of lines’…Alhazen’s notion
of the visual pyramid was not a theory but the product of rational experiment, which
corresponds to reality. He then combined it with the Greek notion of similitudes – copies
descending the pyramid into the eye in order to produce the decisive theory that the eye is
a ‘universal judge’.

EX. Leonardo

40. [Later] Leonardo even came to reject the perspectival thesis altogether…In John White’s
analysis ‘The advent of a focused perspective system makes no material alteration to a
decorative pattern well established in [the thirteenth century] and itself unchanged from
the time when spatial realism was of no concern to the viewer’…Perspective was not
important because it shows how we ‘really see, a question that physiologists continue to
grapple with, but because it wallows us to order and control what we see…Visual culture,
then, does not ‘reflect’ the outside world and nor does it simply follow ideas created
elsewhere. It is a means of interpreting the world visually. Perspective created a new means
of representing visual power from already available materials…The difference of Western
perspective was not its ability to represent space but the fact that it was held to do so from
one particular viewpoint.

P41. Perspective was one device by which artists sought to capture and represent visual
power. Thus the first written description of perspective by Leon Battista Alberti, On
Painting (1435), describes the line which runs directly from the eye to thte object as the
‘prince’ of rays. The prince was the ruler of the Renaissance city states who commissioned
the art of the period. His authority was celebrated by the fifteenth‐century Florentine
political theorist Niccolo Macchiavelli, whose name has come to describe ruthless use of
power.

EX. Alberti

The notion of resemblance was thus at the heart of Renaissance perspective theory, from
Leonardo’s belief in similitudes to the equivalence of the ideal viewer and Absolute
monarch in the perspective system. Resemblance was at the heart of all‐embracing system
of natural magic, sharply distinguished from sorcery, or black magic. In the words of
Giovanni Batista della Porta, whose Natural Magic (1558) remained influential until the late
seventeenth century, magic was ‘a consummation of natural Philosophy and a supreme
science’…Porta provided the first description of the camera obscura, a darkened room into
which light was admitted through a small opening, often containing a lens, causing an
inverted image of the outside world to be cast onto the back wall…Perspective was then an
effect, rather than reality, a device that enables the artist or magician to impress the viewer
with their skill in creating something that resembled reality rather than representing it.

42. The Dutch scholar Thomas Kepler was the first to argue that the lens of the eye presents
an inverted image on the retina…For Kepler, the process of vision was still one that could
only be described in terms of legal authority…even Dutch artists of his day who were
extremely interested in perspective do not seem to have taken account of Kepler’s
theories…Artists and visual theorists alike were concerned with establishing a place from
which to see, and thus create the effect of perspective, rather than fully understanding the
physiology of perception which they took to be unknowable.

43. René Descartes…Discourse on Method (1637), marked a clear break with the concepts of
vision…by considering light to be a material substance with concrete being, as the historian
A. I. Sabra notes: ‘The Cartesian theory was the first to assert clearly that light itself was
nothing but a mechanical property of the luminous object and of the transmitting medium’.
Rather than consider light a manifestation of the divine, [for Descartes]…light touches the
object under consideration directly…Crucially, he displaced perception itself from the
surface of the retina to the brain. Thus the image formed on the retina was not exactly the
same as what is perceived…he believed that ‘perception, or the action by which we
perceive, is not a vision…but is solely an inspection by the mind’…Descartes insisted on the
conventional nature of representation, arguing that ‘it often happens that in order to be
more perfect as an image and to represent an object better, an engraving ought not to
resemble it’. It was then up to the judgment to discern the image for what it was supposed
to represent…[However] he continued to rely on Kepler’s model of the sould as the
interpreting judge of sensory perception…In the Cartesian system of vision, representation
replaced resemblance. (44) From this point on, the modern picturing of the world as
representation became possible.

44. Perspective now took on a key role as the boundary between resemblance and
representation. For Descartes noted that resemblance did play a limited role in his
representational system, insofar as it recalls the shape of the seen object…the rules of
perspective…represent circles by ovals better than by other circles…the same process took
place in the brain, which interpreted the sensory data presented to it. In descartes’ view,
perspective is thus a natural law, which can be observed in the images formed by the
camera obscura, but also a representation. Thus photography, which was immediately able
to give a recognizably accurate depiction of the shape of objects represented in one‐point
perspective displaced painting…This fusion of resemblance and representation in
perspective accounts for its centrality in all accounts of the Cartesian legacy.
Some…think of Cartesianism as the ‘ancien scopic regime’…the dominant theory of vision in
early modern Europe from the mid‐seventeenth century until the outbreak of the French
revolution in 1789…From here, it is possible to generalize that ‘there is a singular and
determining ‘way of seeing’ within modern Western culture’ at any given moment (Chris
Jenks). I shall argue by contrast that visual culture is always contested and that no one way
of seeing is ever wholly accepted in a particular historical moment.
Cartesianism was accepted by scientists and philosophers, often working outside the
network of royal patronage…In 1648, Louis XIV established the French Academy of Painting
to decorate his palaces and towns and prvided drawings for the important royal tapestry
manufactures. The Academy was granted a monopoly over art education and trained such
artists as Boucher, Fragnonard, Watteau, and David. However, the Academicians were
vehemently opposed to Cartesian theories of vision (45) based in part on politics, in part on
optics. At first, they tried to insist on using Michelanglo’s method of organizing space
around a multiple pyramid…

45. But their own professor of perspective, Abraham Bosse, insisted on teaching a
geometric theory of perspective…Bosse’s belief…vision took place because the eye emitted
rays to perceive objects, as proposed by Democritus and long since falsified by Alhazen. The
Academy quickly fired Bosse but had to elaborate their own theory of perspective. They
argued correctly that perspective could only reproduce the perception of one eye at a
time…These objections to the new optics permitted the Royal Academy to pursue political
necessity. For its very existence depended on glorifying the King and presenting His Majesty
as above all his subjects…Strict application of perspective could have meant that the King
might appear smaller than one of his subjects, a politically impossible result. The Academic
sense of seeing the King was best embodied in the Hall of Mirrors built for Luois XIV by the
director of the Academy, Charles Le Brun.

EX. Hall of Mirrors. Figure 1.1.
[The King is dominant; everything is orderly; no badly proportioned bodies]

In the Platonic tradition, the French monarchy believed that representations could produce
physical disturbances, leading to political disobedience. The Academy thus evolved a
compromise. Buildings and background space were to be rendered in a perspectival
fashion, conveying a sense of depth (46) recession. This led to the creation of painted
perspectival scenes to enhance the grandeur of a garden view, also known as a perspective.
Figures, on the other hand, were to be depicted according to the classical scale of
proportion.

EX. La Perspective Pratique. Figure 1.2.

46. The advantage of this method was that it relied on the artist’s own judgment to create
visual space…the Academy [saw] ‘perspective with regard to the arrangement of figures
and of the source of light’ (Duro), rather than the control of space.

EX. Jacques‐Louis David. Oath of the Horatii (1785).

The pictorial space creates an approximately persepectival viewpoint. The pavement
recedes in appropriate perspectival (48) fashion…The figures are not treated in
perspective…The male figures are all the same size, while the women are ‘correctly’
proportioned as three‐quarters of male size…[no] mathematical exactitude…Instead, his
goal was what the eighteenth century called vraisemblance, verisimilitude, or the ‘reality
effect’.

48. A popular alternative use of perspective was anamorphosis. This is a system in which
the vanishing point is not constructed in ‘front’ of the image but in the same plane as the
picture surface to one side or the other…[so] place [your] eyes level with the picture and to
the side in order to interpret the image…(49) It was at first part of perspective theory at
elite levels.

EX. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1519)

49. …for all the worldly power of the ambassadors, they will die and face judgment like
everyone else. Similarly, Jesuit missionaries in Chine used the device to prove their
contention that worldly appearances were illusory…in the late nineteenth century…illicit
subjects, ranging from mildly titillating erotic scenes to scatological images. These
anamorphic drawings were certainly not great art. They do show a popular
alternative…Their scandalous subject‐matter was an index of this resistance to the elite
modes of representing sight.

50. There was, then, no single scopic regime in the early modern period. Geometric
perspective was used by mathematicians and engineers…Architects and artists used
perspective as a key tool to creating an illusion of reality…popular visual culture…as a form
of entertainment, satirizing the pretensions of the upper classes.
…one point perspective was avoided for figures except where it was clearly the King that
was to be the viewer, as in the royal theater. However, in late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, a new system of social organization came into being that centered
around the control of the generalized body through visibility from a single point. With this
new system of discipline in place, it becomes possible to think of the perspectival viewpoint
as becoming truly all‐powerful.

EX. Jeremy Bentham… The Panopticon (1791)

Michel Foucault…The panopticon – literally, the place where everything is seen – was
Bentham’s device for a model prison…outer ring of cells…a central control tower…each
prisoner could neither see his fellows nor the supervisors…but was fully visible to anyone
watching from the tower. The vanishing point that organized perspective had now become
a point of social control…As Foucault put it, in the panopticon ‘visibilitiy is a trap’. The
panopticon sought to control prisoners and keep discipline through a system of visibility…‘a
faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception’.

51. A key difference from the early modern system of visibility…[no longer] who was
watching…[but being] visible. Whereas the Hall of Mirrors displayed the body politic
itself…the symbolic power of the King…in the panopticon it did not matter who was
looking…anyone could be substituted…because the prisoners could not see who was
looking. They knew only that they were being watched. Perspective ordered the visual field
and created a place from which to see.
The panopticon created a social system around that possibility of seeing others.the
panopticon became the ideal model of modern social organization for what Foucault called
the ‘disciplinary society’ centered around schools, military barracks, factories and prisons.
In the twentieth century, the factory was adopted by the influential Bauhaus school of
architecture…leading to the functional style of so much modern architecture. The key to this
visualized system was that those who could be observed could be controlled.

EX. Bauhaus’s Factory designs.

Discipline and Color

51. Color presents an interesting complementary case to that of perspective…Throughout
the early modern period, color was an alternative method of pictorial construction…Unlike
perspective, it has been possible to describe color in exact scientific terms as a property of
light, but the perception of color varies from person to person….color’s seemingly infinite
variations of hue, tint and shade provide stubborn resistance to such classification.

52. Many accounts of modern art history hold that the predominance of perspective and
line as the official system of visual representation in Academic art and modern society led
avant‐garde artists to turn to color….This history rests on two incorrect assumptions – that
perspective was unpopular and that color was a daring alternative. On the contrary,
perspective effects were among the most popular art forms in the early nineteenth‐
century…

EX. The British artist John Martin’s painting Belchassar’s Feast (1820)

Louis Daguerre’s Diorama, invented in 1822, similarly presented dramatic sights from
history and world travel to an immobile spectator.

Nor was the use of color in visual representation rebellious….Matisse and Monet, remain
the most popular…and are usually presented as radical innovators….For French art theorist
Roger de Piles, color was ‘the difference of painting’, that which distinguished it from
drawing….The picture had to attract the attention of the spectator by causing her or him to
feel enthusiasm for the work….‘In short, it seems to me that enthusiasm seizes us and we
seize the sublime’. In order for this (53) interaction to work, a mutual process of
recognition was required….If it is a measure of the work, then a failure to experience the
sublime is simply a failure of artistic attainment. De Piles’…aesthetic system…implied…a
new form of social distinction between those who did and did not ‘appreciate’ art.

53. Opticks (1704), Isaac Newton showed that light was composed of seven prismatic
colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet….the German scientist and
philosopher Helmholtz [mid‐19th c.]…show that there was a fundamental difference
between additive and subtractive means of making color. Colored light relies on adding
light together, based on the primary colors red, green and blue. Paint ant other forms of
pigment absorb certain forms of light…and thus, used blue, red and yellow as primaries.

Normalizing Color: Color Blindness

The normalization of vision…The British scientist John Dalton had recognized his own
inability to perceive red in the 1790s, naming the condition ‘Daltonism’….(54) industrial
revolution…safety…a red and green railway signal.

54. After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859)…the notion of evolution…color
vision had evolved in humanity within historical time…the misuse of evolution…social
Darwinism…rational explanations for the irrationality of racial prejudice….Anthropologists
combined old anti‐Semitic and racist prejudices with the new ‘science’ of race.

In 1877, the German philologist Hans Magnus…a very restricted number of Homeric terms
for color, most of which appeared to distinguish light from dark….(55) William
Gladstone…study of ten books of the Odyssey and found only ‘thirty‐one cases in nearly five
thousand lines’….concluded that the Greeks’ perception of color was like a photograph, that
is to say black and white…uncivilized races…loud color.

Light Over Color

56. In the 1830s, French art was polarized between neo‐classical and Romantic
factions….Delacroix…devised a blue, red and yellow color triangle and attributed his
‘discovery’ to the exotic environment….the Romantic artists held color to be a natural
counterpoint to the stolid official culture represented by linear drawing….Ironically,
therefore, some art labeled ‘colorist’ is in fact less brightly colored….In his Theory of Colors,
the Romantic poet Goethe explained that ‘savage nat’ons, uneducated people, and children
have a great predilection for vivid colors’….Here avant‐garde and official art in fact
agreed…Charles Blanc, the director of the elite École des Beaux‐Arts, held that ‘drawing is
the masculine sex of art; color is its feminine sex’…the Impressionist use of color: ‘Color, like
Algeria, had to be colonized, mastered by the authority of line….Like color, woman was a
desert waiting to be mapped by the male text’ (Anthea Callen)…. color thus involved a
complex interaction of race, gender and colonial politics.

57. What is at stake, just as with perspective and the panopticon, is the control of vision and
visual representation through a seemingly exact system of knowledge that can overcome
the ambiguities of representation…the poet and art critic Jules
Laforgue…racialized….[1883] ‘The Impressionist eye is, in short, the most advanced eye in
human evolution….the great melodic resulting from the symphony of consciousnessnes of
races and individuals. Such is the principle of the plein air Impressionist school. And the eye
of the master will be the one capable of distinguishing and recording the most sensitive
gradations and decompositions, and that on a simple flat canvas’.
Laforgue’s endorsement of the Modernist aesthetic of flatness….Impressionism was the
product of a Darwinian struggle for cultural existence.

White

58. This one color alone will take us from Ancient Greece to the Spanish conquest of South
America and the rise of fascism…in the nineteenth century, the beauty of these sculptures
was epitomized by their pure white marble. It is then inconvenient for such theories, to say
the least, that the ancient Greeks themselves colored their statues with bright primary color
paint, a fact (59) known to classical scholars since the 1770s. But in the nineteenth century,
Greek statues were held to be white…taste of the Greeks…their ‘Aryan’ racial origins…the
British Museum had the Elgin Marbles…vigorously scrubbed in the 1930s because they
appeared insuffieciently white. Whiteness came to convey an intense physical beauty in
itself. In Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1892), the aesthete and aristocrat
Lord Henry Wotton compares Gray to a Classical sculpture….’the white purity of boyhood
and beauty, such as old Green marbles kept for us’….the Victorian painter Frederic Lord
Leighton: ‘In the Art of the Periclean Age we find a new ideal of balanced form, wholly
Aryan’….Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1936), a lengthy opening sequence dwells on
Greek sculptures that (60) then come to life and carry the Olympic torch from Athens to
Berlin.

60. J.J. Winckelmann…History of Ancient Art (1764)….‘for many worldly Europeans ‘Rome’,
as well as ‘Greek art’, already signified sexual freedom and available
boys….Winckelmann…stressed the importance for the art historian of understanding male
beauty.

How could the same color give rise to notions of racial supremacy and of homosexuality…

61. the Victorian cult of Greece…positioned male flesh and muscle as the indicative
instances of ‘the’ body….a consistent justification of the European colonization of America
that it would prevent the sodomy of the indigenous peoples….1519…the Spanish
conquistador Cortés reported home: ‘They are all sodomites’….Yet at the same time,
Europeans forcibly sodomized those they defeated as a mark of absolute domination….1851
novel Moby Dick…Captain Ahab…pursuit of the white whale…Melville speculated…why
white induced…‘a certain nameless terror’….Unlike many of his fellows, Melville saw
whiteness as terror….(62) ‘a colorless, all‐color of atheism from which we shrink’.

Coda

62. Color was at first beyond the technical means of photographers, meaning that their
work was also clearly a representation….Photographers quickly resorted to hand‐coloring
their images….The firm of A. and G. Taylor advertised themselves as ‘Photographers to the
Queen’, offering ‘cartes enlarged to life‐size and finished in oil or water’. Was the resulting
colored photograph to be called a photograph or a portrait? Was it a resemblance or a
representation?....Even today, artistic photography is far more likely to be in black‐and‐
white than color even though everyday photography is almost exclusively in color. In this
view, the intrusion of color into the photographic image disrupted its claim to be accurate
by distracting the eye. Its mechanical exactitude nonetheless prohibited its being
considered art.

63. Resemblance now belonged to the camera, not to perspective or color. Visual culture
had entered the age of photography.

CHAPTER 2
THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY (1839‐1982)

65. Photography eluded the traditional classifications of arts and crafts precisely because of
its modernity. If visual culture is the product of the encounter of modernity with everyday
life, then photography is the classic example of that process…The invention of photography
[is preceded by] experimentation with visual media in an effort to find a quicker and more
exact means of representation that those offered by the traditional visual arts…various
means of ‘writing light’…were invented in Europe from the 1820s on…photography
democratized the visual image and created a new relationship to past space and
time…record…life…personal archives for future generations. With the rise of computer
imaging and the creation of digital means to manipulate the photograph, we can in turn say
that photography is dead…[i.e.,] its claim to mirror reality can no longer be upheld. The
claim of photography to represent the real has gone.

The Death of Painting

65. In 1839 the French painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype…and famously
exclaimed (66) ‘From today, painting is dead!’…his remark did not imply that painting was
no longer possible but that it was no longer necessary as a means of recording exterior
reality.

[to shoot = to attempt to kill; painting used to kill life = still life, naturemort; but this time
photography took over that task => there is a continual move toward complete realism]

66. Delaroche…[was speaking of a] particular style of painting that he practiced and which
had been dominant in France for fifty years. This neo‐classical academic style produced
painting so finely finished that no trace of the brush could be seen. It offered figures in crisp
outline and with precise, historically‐researched detail…The camera obscura was a
darkened space into which light entered through a lens, producing an inverted image of the
outside world on the rear wall. In the seventeenth century, Descartes had used the camera
obscura as an analogy to explain his materialistic concept of vision. By the eighteenth
century, it had become a popular fairground entertainment…

EX. Carle Van Loo…Portrait of the Dauphin, 1762
The prince playing with a camera obscura

…the tensions inherent in French visual culture…The heir to the throne…is seen being
amused by the same sideshow toy that any child might have enjoyed. Although oil painting
was still the most elite genre of the arts, the circular canvas imitated the camera obscura
image produced by the lens. By the late eighteenth century, official painting aspired to be
photographic and was thus immediately sidelined.

Photography did not come to such results by accident…Nicephore Niepce first exposed a
plate to light in 1826, he and Louis Daguerre worked together for nearly a decade to befect
what was to become know as (67) daguerreotype…a copper plate was covered in light‐
sensitive chemicals and then exposed to light, producing a positive image on the
plate…[but] it could not be reproduced. The true photograph…a negative…was first
produced in France by Hippolyte Bayard and in England by Fox Talbot…the refinements to
the process made by the French photographer Nadar in the 1850s but people continued to
take daguerreotypes until the late nineteenth century.

67. Photography’s ambivalent status as both scientific record and a new art form generated
an uncertainty as to what constituted ‘legitimate photography’…

EX. Jean Van Eyck… The Arnolfini Wedding…
EX. Antoine Samuel Adam‐Salomon…the portrait of the writer Alphonse Karr…

…painted portraits…seemed to contradict the very nature of photography as the record of a
particular instant…a double‐bind: if their work achieved remarkable results then they were
accused of fraud, but if not its was dismissed as an illusionist’s trick.

EX. Maurisset’s print…daguerreotypomania
68. …a vast crowd flocking to have their photo taken in an anonymous landscape filled with
the signifiers of modernity.

69. The newness and importance of photography…its rendering of a precise moment in
time…that is immediately past…[but still giving] a knowledge of the present. The experience
of modernity is contained in this paradox. When Virilio describes the logic of the modern
image as dialectical, he is referring to this tension between time past and the present, as
expressed by the German critic Walter Benjamin: ‘An image is that in which the then and
the now come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other wards: an image
is dialectics at a standstill. For while the realation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical: not of a
temporal, but of an imagistic nature’.
This dialectic – the productive conflict of opposites – was most clearly visualized in the
photograph. For while a painting might depict the past, it was necessarily created over an
extended period of time, whereas even the photographic prototypes of the 1830s
completed their exposures in minutes. By the 1880s, exposure times were measured in
fractions of a second…photography created a new relationship to the experience of time
that was thoroughly modern.
Time became modern in three central aspects. First, the development of railways and other
mass communications led to the adoption of standardized time zones and national
time…[Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu, standardized national time] Second, the destruction of
the old world and its replacement by a new, modern society…the rebuilding of Paris in the
1850s and 1860s by Baron Haussmann…destroyed many working‐class districts of the
city…created the cityscape that was to be celebrated by the Impressionists. Finally, the West
saw itself as modern in relation to its colonies in Africa, Asia, and Australisia…(70)
indigenous peoples…‘living fossils’, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase…For nineteenth‐century
Europeans time moved in a straight line, parallel to progress, and both were moving at
every‐increasing speed.
70. …photography…capturing a specific moment in time…was a key tool in recording and
describing the time differential between viewer and object.

EX. Charles Marville… photographs of Old Paris…
…record areas of the city that were about to be demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding

…in 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes…[noted] ‘Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In
fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer…Matter in large masses must
always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable’. Photography, in this scheme, is
to form as art to is matter.

71. The capturing of time past in the photograph changed the very nature of human
perception and made possible the creation of what Benjamin called the ‘optical
unconscious’. Experience became understood as an image because photography could
capture decisively the individual moment in a way that seemed unquestionable.
Further, photography made possible ways of seeing that were previously unimaginable.

EX. Etienne‐Jules Marey and Eadward Muybridge…

To satisfy a bet for his patron…Muybridge…proved that o horse’s feet do not point forwards
and backward in a gallop…demonstrated that centuries of equine painting were completely
inaccurate…a ‘camera‐rifle’, Marey set up a photographic station in Paris where the
movement of humans and animals was shot…Marey…believed the camera would now
replace [the unaided human perception]…Dziga Vertov…claimed: ‘I am the cinema‐eye. I am
a mechanical eye. I, a machine, can show you the world as only I can see it’. Visuality was
now photographic.

The Birth of the Democratic Image

71. …photography was quickly claimed as the people’s medium…In 1991, 41 million
photographs were taken every day in the United States alone…

72. With the invention of the collodion‐glass negative process in 1852, prints became
affordable to all…Yet we can distinguish between the different types of
photography…[chich] travel from class to class, taking a different form at each level of the
social ladder…Quality of photography thus mirrored social quality…reflected by price.
[Ernest Lacan] even sub‐divided photographers into four classes, corresponding to social
class: the basic photographer (working class or artisan); the artist‐photographer
(bourgeois); the amateur, in the sense of connoisseur, hence aristocrat; and the
distinguished photographer‐savant who claimed the classless status of the artist.

73. But in a time of dramatic social change, photography seemed to offer a chance to make
class positions transparent [by recording the instantaneous reality]…In this sense,
photography did not reflect class, it was class…Rosalind Krauss [called this]
‘singularity’…[that] cut across…[the photograph’s] mass reproducibility. In his famous
essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin argued
that the reproducibility of photography undercut the aura of art. For while a painting is
unique, many identical prints can be made from one negative. On the other hand, Benjamin
say that this new availability of the image would help popularize the arts: ‘Mechanical
reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude
toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction towards a Chaplin movie’. In
fact, by the time Benjamin wrote his essay in 1936, photography had long since been
coopted into the museum system along the lines suggested by Ernest Lacan…As early as
1855, there was a photography exhibition at the World’s Fair of that year. In 1859,
photography was admitted to the Salon, the annual exhibition of the fine arts in Paris, and
by 1863 French law recognized that some photography could be recognized as art for legal
and copyright purposes.

Death and Photography

73. Sontag: ‘All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in
another person (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing this
moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Barthes: photography…as ‘the impossible science of the unique being’…photography seeks to
record with the highest degree of realism the (74) individuality of its subject, but that this
sense of an individual is exactly what cannot be photographed…it shows that something
was definitely there when the shutter was opened…As a result, photography is a past‐tense
medium. It says ‘that was there’ not what is there. It emphasizes the distance between the
viewer of the photograph and the time in which the photograph was taken…Barthes: ‘With
the Photograph, we enter into flat death’…Jean Cocteau, the camera ‘filmed death at work’.

74. In Barthes’ analysis, the specificity of time and place sought by early photographers was
attainable only insofar as it evokes a response in the viewer. Barthes named this response
the punctum, the point, contrasting it to the studium, or general knowledge that is available
to every viewer. He seems to offer two versions of the punctum. One is the casual, everyday
notion of irrational preference for a particular detain in a photograph. It may be that this
detail calls to mind something similar in the viewer’s own experience of simply that it
appeals for an unknown reason, [that is unnamable and indescribable]…At the punctum, we
are dealing with that ineffable difference in pose that causes us to select one portrait
photograph over another…On the other hand, there is also the sense in which the punctum
is a wound…the photograph evokes something very powerful and unbidden in the viewer.
Barthes found this punctum in a photograph of his mother taken when she was a little
girl…he discovers after her death…his mother ‘as she was’: ‘this photograph collected all the
possible predicates from which my mother’s being was constituted’…No photographer
could set out to create an image with such multiple meanings. They are brought to the
image by the viewer for whom the punctum creates the means to connect memory with the
subconscious drives for pleasure and death. Through the unknowable punctum,
photography becomes sublime. The most important and yet most unknowable (75)
singularity of photography is this power to open a punctum to the realm of the dead.

75. Photography came into being at a time of profound social change in attitudes to the
dead and to death…a new means of configuring death…an everyday reminder of death. The
experience of mass industrial society led to a desacralization of death and its experience
from a public religious ceremony…into the private, medicalized case history of
modernity…so the cult of the dead, the respect for the dead, diminishes. The dead person is
no longer revered as a living being who has entered into the unknown…In modern societies,
the dead person is simply a zero, a non‐value.

EX. Gustave Courbet’s A Burial At Ornans (1849)
…at the Salon of 1851, it caused a scandal. Ten years later...photography [was prevailing]

Death was a part of nineteenth century everyday life…Death took place in the home, rathen
than the hospital, and was often a public spectacle, attended by friends and family. With
very high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy, no family was unfamiliar with
loss…photography came to be the prime means of capturing the image of the
departed…Nadar claimed a coup in 1861 with his photographs of the Paris catacombs…Ten
years later, the photography of death took a center stage in French politics. Following the
defeat of France in the Franco‐Prussian war, the citizens of Paris staged a revold against the
soncervative government…declaring…an independent Commune in March 1871…
The Commune was repressed (76) by force in May 1871, leaving at least 25,000 dead. In its
wake, a flood of photographs of the events were published…. Eugène Appert published a
series of sensational photographs depicting the outrages of the Commune.
76. In fact, the picture was produced by montage, involving a staged recreation of the
execution at the actual site with hired director…. The scene was completed by montaging
portraits of the generals onto the space left empty for them. Although it was recognized as a
fake, this photograph was nonetheless widely reproduced as evidence of the savagery of the
Commune.
On the other side, a photograph of the bodies of the dead Communards… the Père Lachaise
cemetery… like many documentary photographs, it could be read more than one way. For
the government party, the same picture could provide evidence of the degenerate criminal
types…. In short, photography could provide evidence but did not in and of itself convict.

Eugène Atget… record Old Paris… both French museums and Surrealist artists like Man Ray
bought his work. He called these photographs documents…

Ex. Eugène Atget, Au Tambour, 63 quai de la Tournelle, 1908
…two men standing in the doorway of the restaurant as well as the reflection of the banks of
the Seine and Atget’s photographic apparatus. The old and the new literally merge.

77. Benjamin: ‘the comparable significance of Atget who, around 1900, took photographs of
deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like
scenes of a crime. The scene of a crime too, is deserted; it is photographed for the (78)
purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for
historical occurrences and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific
kind of approach; free‐floating contemplation is not appropriate to them.

Ex. Robert Capa, Near Cerro Muriano (Córdoba Front), September 5, 1936
78. …a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War at the moment in which he has been
shot…. [Some claimed] that there had been no action on the Córdpna front that day…. it was
announced in 1996 that a historian had discovered that there was one death that day on the
Republican side. The victim’s sister was still alive and claimed Capa’s photo did indeed
show her brother.

From Photo Noir to Post‐Photography

78. the work of two American‐Jewish photographers, Weegee and Nan Goldin… the
underside of East Coast city life in their work, from (79) violence to sexual transgression.

79. photo‐essay books – his Naked City (1945), hers The Ballad of Sexual Dependencey
(1986) – and went on to success in the art and fashion worlds…. While Weegee adopted the
camera as the weapon of the voyeur, Goldin turned the camera back on herself.

Weegee (1899‐1968) was born Arthur Fellig in Zlothev, Austria and grew up in New York…
took an unconventional route to photography, mixing photography with being a busboy,
living rough, selling candy on the streets and even being a violin player accompanying silent
films.

80. In 1938 he acqueired a police radio in his car… photography’s obsession with death and
evidence by capturing murder victims at the scene of the crime. Weegee used an intense
flash that flattened the scene, saturated the blacks and often provided what he called a
‘Rembrandt light’, evoking the rich chiaroscuro of the Dutch painter.
This cultivated hard‐boiled personality came straight out of the film noir with which it was
contemporary. Film noir set aside the established realistic conventions of Hollywood
cinema in favor of dramatic lighting with deep shadows, unusual camera angles and a
jaundiced view of humanity…. He modeled himself on the detective character Nick Carter
and was later to work as an actor in a number of Hollywood movies…. The cinema was also
the scene of some of his most unusual work, using infra‐red film, with the result that he
could take pictures without a falsh and hence be unobserved.

Ex. Weegee Goldin. Lovers at the movies.

81. Here the voyeurism of Weegee’s photography, its desire to see what ordinarily cannot
be seen, and its very masculine sexual politics all seem strongly apparent.

81. The photography of Nan Goldin (b. 1953), by contrast, is marked by a unique degree of
personal intimacy. No one in her photographs is unknown to her and, more important, all
are aware of being photographed…. The nature of photography itself from the act of a
voyeur to that of a witness. A witness physically participates in a scene and later reports on
it, whereas the voyeur tries to see without being seen.

82. Goldin can be seen as perhaps the first post‐photographer. Post‐ photography is
photography for the electronic age, no longer claiming to picture the world but turning on
itself to explore the possibilities of a medium freed from the responsibility of indexing
reality.
Goldin traces her need to photograph to the suicide of her sister Barbara Holly Goldin in
1965, a young woman who could find no place for her sexual identity in the suburban
America of that time. Just as Roland Barthes located a key image of his mother as being one
taken before his own birth, so in her 1996 exhibition Children, GOldin showed a reprinted
family snapshot of her mother, taken when she was pregnant with her older sister. In a
seemingly prophetic moment, her mother is holding a large, red balloon that is inflated but
not tied. The balloon was no doubt intended to predict the dimensions of a heavily pregnant
woman but it also seems to foretell the explosive short life of the unborn Barbara.
Immediately following this trauma, Goldin was ‘seduced by an older man’… she was only 11
years old… she ran away from home aged fourteen. At 18, she began to take pictures…
Photography became her prosthetic memory, literally a defense against death and
symbolically a resistance to the loss of memory.
Goldin’s work records the lives of a group of young people… [from] the early 1970s [to the
1980s]… these young aspiring artists, mostly white, but open to all varieties of narcotic and
sexual experimentation…

83. GOldin’s work uses popular snapshot photography… the radicalism of her project…
making love, injecting drugs, on the toilet, cross‐dressing, masturbating or bleaching their
eyebrows… In her portrait of Ivy with Marilyn, Boston (1973), Goldin captures one of her
friends from the cross‐dressing scene… beneath a reproduction of Andy Warhol’s silk‐
screened portrait of Marilyn Monroe…
Since 1973, much of her work has been in color. Memory needs color in order to be vivid….
finding the intense colors in everyday lives… Vivienne in the green dress, New York, 1980,
[or] Siobhan with a cigarette, Berlin 1994,… photography’s stylistic roots in the neo‐classical
portrait.

84. These pictures have achieved a far wider audience than any snapshot and Goldin’s style
has become iconic for life in postmodern plague‐ridden America.

85. [Luc Sante:] ‘we were living a movie of youth in black‐and‐white’… At this distance,
however, her photographs seem more televisual than filmic. Her cast of characters – David,
Suzanne, Siobhan, Cookie – recur and return over a 20 year span… [Could this be a soap
opera? All My Children]

The key photograph in Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the traumatic Self‐Portrait
One Month after being Battered (1984)… the key event in her sexual dependency… the
bruises and cuts caused by her attack… Her left eye is still filled with blood even at one
month’s distance… Her bright red lips offer a seemingly iconic contrast.

86. she should never forget… Photography becomes a prosthetic memory…
87. While Weegee allows himself… the detached observation of the voyeur and the
anthropologist, Goldin becomes a witness… Witnessing provides a means for the artist to
take a personal moment and invest it with a wider significance.
The onset of the AIDS epidemic… challenged her belief in the power of the image. Many of
her friends… fell prey to the virus… Tragically, this road led not to liberation, as so many
ahd hoped, but to death…. When her close friend Cookie fell ill, she documented the passage
of her disease…
Cookie Being X‐Rayed, October 1989… Cookie in Tin Pan Alley (1983)… Goldin was one of the
artists involved in an exhibition protesting the toll caused by AIDS in the artistic
community.
Goldin reflected: ‘photography does not preserve memory as effectively as I had thought it
would. A lot of the people in the book are dead now, mostly from AIDS…. I (88) always
thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I
would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how
much I have lost. AIDS changed everything.’

88. The self‐confidence of Goldin’s circle in the 1970s was at once Romantic and modernist.
That is to say, Goldin had a belief in progress and the power of art to change life.

The Death of Photography

After a century and a half of recording and memorializing death, photography met its own
death some time in the 1980s at the hands of computer imaging…. As early as 1982, the
special effects company Lucasfilms declared that their wrok implied ‘the end of
photography as evidence for anything’… each pixel (picture element) in a digitized image
can be manipulated for color, brightness and focus… the O.J. Simpson criminal trial… Time
magazine altered Simpson’s photograph to make him appear darker‐skinned and thereby,
presumably, more threatening to Time’s white readership…
the photograph is no longer an index of (89) reality. It is virtual, like its fellow postmodern
visual media, from the television to the computer.

89. when Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1990, the event was recorded by
amateur cameraman George Halliday. With such evidence in hand, a conviction seemed a
matter of course. The defense turned to that very evidence to undermine the prosecution.
By slowing down the tape and analyzing it second by second, the lawyers managed to make
a case that King had presented a threat to the police. The argument was sufficiently credible
for an all‐white jury… frame analysis was first developed in film studies by critics seeking to
define the specificity of film techniques.

Kodak and other film companies now sell digital cameras… For decades Kodak relied on
selling film as prosthetic memory… ‘It is a Kodak moment’. Now their executives argue that
‘photographs are not just memories any more. They are information’…. The 1996 American
elections… Senator John Warner of Virginia… against a Democratic opponent, Mark
Warner… a photograph showing Mark Warner shaking hands with the unpopular former
(black) Governor Douglas Wilder… the ‘photograph’ was a digital fake, morphing Mark
Warner’s head onto another Democrat’s body. Ten years ago an election might have been
lost on such grounds. Senator Warner won re‐election comfortably.