Mirror images

At the heart of any criticism of photographic realism is the idea that the apparatus embodies conventions and assumptions about picturing. While the consequences of the staged, manipulated, or mocked-up image are readily apparent, recognizing the deep conventions underpinning the apparatus can be less straightforward. However, these conventions are no less important for a serious understanding of photographs; if anything, the relative invisibility of these determining assumptions makes them more worthy of attention and more insidious in their effects.

It might help to begin with the mirror ‘image’: not least because this analogy runs throughout the history of photography, which is often discussed as a ‘reflection’ of reality. In 1859, Oliver Wendall Holmes went further and described photography as ‘a mirror with a memory’: his metaphor implies that the photograph is a reflection, but one that has been fixed or frozen in time. In some ways, this is a strong analogy: photographs do seem similar to reflections in mirrors – faithful duplications of reality set beyond a glassy surface. However, the comparison is, ultimately, misleading. One problem is that we need to consider: in what sense is the thing we see in the mirror an image at all? (Here, the word ‘image’ is used to suggest a depiction that resembles, or otherwise represents, things that we know or imagine. It is difficult to define an image, but one key characteristic entails a distinction between actual and virtual phenomena.) Assuming a good, flat mirror with a clean surface, there are three factors that enable a beholder to determine that what they see is an image, and not reality itself. Firstly, the bounding edge or ‘limit frame’ marks the reflection off from the surrounding area. When looking at a mirror, we are aware of its position in a field; its edge produces a disjunction between the reflection and the actual space that surrounds it. Secondly, viewers know from their spatial position that the things reflected (including the self looking) are located on this side of its surface; sometimes this takes a moment to grasp and the effect can be quite disconcerting. Nevertheless, the viewer sees that he or she cannot be here and there. Thirdly, mirrors invert the objects they reflect. In all other respects – principally, because they gather light across their surface – mirrors reproduce the things in front of them in a way that conforms to the characteristics of natural vision. Camera images are of a different order.

The principal difference between camera images and the image in the mirror is that the former – with or without a lens – focuses light at one point. In so doing, the camera produces an image that departs, in significant ways, from natural vision. As we have seen, in its essentials, the camera is just an aperture in a dark box: more or less anything that restricts light will do (the artist Lindsay Seers makes photographs using the inside of her mouth as a camera). The application of a lens to this dark box is not fundamental to the process, but it serves two purposes: firstly, because a curved lens gathers light and focuses it at a point, it maximizes the available light and speeds up the exposure; secondly, the lens decreases the required focal length of the camera (the distance between the aperture or surface of the lens and the film plane), enabling the size of the camera to be significantly reduced.

We will need to return to lenses and their effects, but the basic point here is that the architecture of the camera casts the photograph within a particular history of images. Joel Snyder, who, I think, has provided the most thoughtful account of the camera, suggests we tend to see the history of this instrument from the wrong end. The camera is frequently viewed as providing a confirmation of the principles of Western painting. Snyder suggests that the problem is the exact opposite: the camera evolved (over a protracted period) to reproduce the characteristic features of Western art. Pinhole phenomena and the camera obscura had both been familiar to optical experimenters for a long time, particularly in Arab civilization, but it was not until the 16th century that they began to be discussed in conjunction with pictures. The pictorial use of the camera obscura belongs to a point after the basic conventions of Renaissance painting had been consolidated. As Neil Walsh Allen and Snyder have pointed out, the camera lens gives a circular image, becoming more diffuse at its edges, but, very early on, photographic cameras were fitted with a square or rectangular viewing screen. In conformity with paintings, drawings, and prints, this screen only makes visible the central portion of this image. In trying to account for this new type of image, photography’s experimentalists fitted it into the existing account of pictures.

The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once described photographs as the ‘meeting of an instant and geometry’. His point is poetically put, but it captures something of photography’s position at the juncture between contingent events and the rational order of linear perspective. Part of the fascination of photographic pictures is that they appear lifelike, but, somehow, much more so. Looking at pictures is, in this sense, akin to dreaming or the drifting consciousness experienced in moments of reverie. Advertising and pornography clearly play off this odd condition somewhere
between waking reality and dream or fantasy. Photographs – their glossy surface and high key colour only adds to this – can seem more real than reality: uncannily like the world we know, yet more perfect, ordered, and coherent. One reason for this is that the system of perspective, by encompassing the viewer into the visual field, makes him or her appear to be the singular recipient of the information presented. Perspective images address each viewer in exactly the same way and yet, at the moment we look into them, everything appears designed ‘especially for you’ (this has been characterized as an ‘individual effect’). The image seems to address us as unique individuals, but it does this for every single viewer. It is a space that seems particularly amenable to fantasy or ideology. The proviso is that no one ideology – not even ‘individualism’ – spans the period of the Western picture. It may be, for instance, that perspective is conducive to historical thinking, or to grasping the value-laden character of points of view. A perspective or point of view suggests (if only negatively) the possibility of other places from which to look, or the difference between here and there.

The idea of a ‘reality effect’ was developed to describe the ideological effect of a system of representation (film) that is sometimes confused with a literal copy of reality. In one sense, the reality effect corresponds to Alberti’s window. Documentary photography particularly trades on this effect, as do photography’s fantasy forms. What we see is a highly conventionalized image, but one that seems to copy reality: either because it shares some characteristics with the objects or events depicted, or because it has been naturalized over time. At the end of the 18th century, one treatise on perspective suggested: ‘a Picture drawn in the utmost Degree of Perfection, and placed in a proper Position, ought to appear to the spectator, that he should not be able to distinguish what is there represented, from the real original Objects actually placed where they are represented to be . . . ’.

The frame plays a central role in photography, perhaps even more than it does in painting. It may be helpful at this point to distinguish between the ‘object-frame’ and the ‘limit-frame’. The ‘object-frame’ might be ornately carved and covered with gold leaf, or a plain metal or wooden construction. In photography the masked white edge of a print is also a frame of this kind. The object-frame calls attention to the picture, isolates it from the wall, and offers some protection against bumps and bangs, smudges and fingermarks. In contrast, the ‘limit-frame’ demarcates the compositional edge of the picture. Limit-frames are compositional devices separating inside from outside; picture from pro-filmic event. As Szarkowski put it, ‘[t]he central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge – the line that separates in from out – and on the shapes that are created by it’. Whereas the painter fits his or her compositions into the selected canvas (often working with the edge or limit-frame as a key point in the overall organization), photographers work somewhat differently. The limit-frame in photography is initially constituted by the edges of the film plane as it appears in viewfinder or glass screen. There is subsequently scope to change this in the darkroom, by printing only a section from a negative. In either case, the final limit-frame coincides with the edges of the photographic print.

So far we have assumed that photographs produce meanings independently of language; this is an abiding assumption (associated with modernism), but it is seldom, if ever, the case. Photographs invariably come coupled with headlines, captions, titles, or descriptions. The half-tone screen, which enabled the easy combination of photographs and words, entrenched this relation and made the symbiosis of image-text a powerful cultural force. Even when photographs are not provided with accompanying text (sometimes on gallery walls or the odd advertisement), the viewer brings experiences and beliefs with them; we fit the image into narrative contexts.

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