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Photography is between ‘documents’ and ‘pictures’, or, to put it another way, between ‘documentary’ and ‘art-photography’.
All of these terms are problematic, but the distinction is real and has generated much of the photography we routinely encounter. The photographic document, like other kinds of document, is typically perceived to be a neutral, styleless, and objective record of information. The document is usually thought to be devoid of subjective intention, even of human will – it is frequently claimed that the camera produces images automatically, as if unaided by an operator. For instance, a French caricature from 1840 makes fun of a photographer dozing while his apparatus does all the work. Photographic art, in contrast, lays claim to intention, subjective expression, spiritual uplift, and aesthetic effect. Rather than snooze, photographic artists must be alert.
Marcelin, ‘Portraits of Yesterday and Today’, from Journal Amusant, 6 September 1856
The language of art was available to photography’s first viewers; it shaped what could be imagined and what could be done. The effects of these initial musings have had long-term consequences for our understanding of photographs. Secondly – and this follows on from the previous point – the document and the art-photograph are locked together: these are mutually determining categories that draw a great deal of their meanings from their antithetical relation.
In the history of images, one category of representation has typically been set against the high-flown practices of art and cast in the role of lowly carrier of information. To take just a couple of random examples: during the 16th century, the art of northern Europe was seen as descriptive and realistic, in contrast to the learned painting practised in Italy; in the 18th century, the topographic view (supposedly a literal description of place) was cast against the sublime or picturesque landscape. In recent times, photography (truth or record) has been opposed to painting (emotion or expression). This distinction is reiterated within photography itself: documents are set against pictures. In all of these oppositions, the representational underling is viewed as descriptive and ‘matter-of-fact’.
Most of these oppositions have their roots in the distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘mechanical arts’, which was enshrined during the Renaissance of the 15th century. Renaissance artists engaged in a protracted struggle to raise the status of their work and their social standing. That is to say, painters sought to distinguish themselves from wheelwrights, barrel-makers, and others with whom they were frequently classed. To do this they insisted that their work was a liberal art and not a lowly artisanal (or mechanical) trade. Artisanal labour was viewed by the elite as demeaning. Those who worked with their hands – displaying ‘mere’ skill, facility, or imitation – were said to be ‘servile’, because they followed a plan established by others rather than demonstrating their own ingenuity. In contrast to the artisan, the liberal gentleman, who wrote poetry or engaged in geometry, was thought to display learning and intellect and, as such, was said to be untouched by the stain of work. Artists responded to this argument by attempting to infuse their work with the explicit signs of mental effort: this involved appeals to classical learning, the creation of idealized figures that were not copies of imperfect nature, and characterizing line and drawing as more foundational than mere colouristic effects.
Objectivity
Photographic documents are central to our culture and we all have a sense of what they look like and what they do. We use pictures like this all the time. As I noted in the preceding chapter, a great deal of our information about our world comes from these images, and all manner of specialist professions employ photographic documents in their work. Despite the evident importance of the document, however, there has been remarkably little critical attention paid to it. The exception is Molly Nesbit’s account of the photographs made by Eugène Atget at the turn of the 20th century.
Eugène Atget, Balcon, 17 rue du Petit Point, 1912–13
Atget was not an artist, he made images of Paris for others to use, particularly some of those engaged in the skilled Parisian trades: theatrical designers, metal workers, illustrators, and those who worked off nostalgia for ‘old Paris’. He didn’t claim anything special for these images. When the Surrealists wanted to publish one of his pictures in their magazine, he declined any credit, adding ‘These are simply documents I make’. Nesbit describes Atget’s document as a ‘nonaesthetic’, workaday form, with two key features: firstly, it is a practical, utilitarian image; secondly, it is built on ‘openness’. The document is always defined by its viewer, who brings his or her specialist requirements to it. For those who employed Atget’s images, aesthetic significance was of little or no relevance. Information, content, detail, and use are what count in documents. According to Nesbit, ‘an architectural photograph would be called a document, as would a chronophotograph, a police i.d., or an X ray’. The document, then, had no absolute form: the same image might be used by different specialists, and so it had to be open to interpretation. Atget was skilled in creating images that served several constituencies.
Self/Other
The document was plain and artless; it was designed to be transparent so the viewer could look through its surface and concentrate on the things depicted. In the production of documents the camera is usually located in a frontal, straight-on position, providing as much detail as possible; the subject frequently fills the frame. Honoré Daumier’s Parisian Sketch of 1853 presents an anatomy of this form.
Honoré Daumier, ‘Croques Dramatiques’, from Le Charivari, 1853
Daumier depicts two different Parisians and the way they comport themselves for the camera. The ‘natural man’ faces squarely up and stares into the lens – the resulting image will be direct and unadorned. ‘Civilized man’, in contrast, adopts an artfully contorted position and gazes thoughtfully into space; his stance requires the support of the draped table. The image – all fancy pose and deep shadow – is designed to convey dreamy reflection and sensitivity. It is, of course, a good joke about Parisian types – the no-nonsense, brutish bourgeois and his affected, artistic cousin – but it is also an excellent rendering of the difference between documents and pictures. Once again, these images assume their characteristic meanings through their contrast.
References:
- Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: from the
Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1969 Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, London: Penguin,
1939 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (5th edition) New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982
Michel Frizot ed., A New History of Photography, Cologne: Könemann,
1994 Jean-Clause Lamagny & André Rouillé eds, A History of Photography,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 Mary Warner Marion, Photography: A Cultural History, London:
Laurnce King, 2002
Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society, London: Gordon Fraser, 1980. (This book was based on, what is said to be, the first PhD on photography, which Freund presented at the Sorbonne in 1936)
See also:
Val Williams, The Other Observers, Women Photographers, 1900 to the
Present, London: Virago, 1991 Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, New York:
Abbeville Press, 1994
Vicki Goldberg ed., Photography in Print, Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico, 1981 Liz Heron & Val Williams eds, Illuminations: Women Writing on
Photography from the 1850s to the Present, Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996 Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper eds, Dialogue with Photography, New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979 Nathan Lyons ed., Photographers on Photography: A Critical
Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966 David Mellor ed., Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, London:
Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979 Beaumont Newhall ed., Photography: Essays & Images, London:
Secker & Warburg, 1980 Reninah R. Petruck ed., The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2 Vols.), New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979 Christopher Phillips ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989
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