When I recently visited the Diane Arbus exhibition in Paris (to be shown at Fotomuseum Winterthur from March 3 till May 28, 2012), I realized to a greater extent than ever before that Arbus in effect stages a photographic order of the world in a highly ostentatious manner. She uses photography to define, critique, and ultimately subvert the order of the world, which, in and of itself, is only first perceived and shown through photography. If one were to create a list of her criteria for this order, it would be long: fat – thin, young – old, person – doll, alive – dead, original – copy, black – white, face – mask, naked – clothed, idyll – horror, war – peace, inside – outside, singular – double, observed – observing, human – animal, friend – foe, original – copy, tragedy – comedy, private – public, dwarf – giant. These are just some of the numerous categories that she more or less plays out through manifold examples. Each image has its counterpart within her oeuvre. Every single image needs this referent to be appropriately describable. To me, the decisive factor does not seem to be that Arbus subverts supposed existing orders (that would be too predictable and, beyond post-colonial and post-modern theory, ultimately banal), but instead that the aim of photography apparently seems to be a claim of alliance to certain orders, for better or for worse.
To formulate this more pointedly, Arbus’ photographs are, in the best sense, exemplary of photography as such. Her works manifest something that is generally less noticeable but nevertheless present. So then, one might further ask, is not one of the essential characteristics of photography the fact that it addresses visual orders? Are not all important photographic oeuvres also or perhaps primarily manifestations of different orders? Does photography not represent an attempt to uncover and invent orders that lie beyond familiar formal categories? And is this not an element of photographic realism. In keeping with this thesis, photography would be a mode of visually addressing a certain order—even including, as in the case of Arbus, destabilizing it.
The list of possible examples would be long: Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful) by Renger-Patzsch, the serial works of the Becher School, Gursky’s “global images”, the models of Demand and others, the countless explorations of the faraway close to home and the familiar in the foreign, the Parisian universe of Atget and the Russian cosmos of Mikhailov, Sander’s Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) and the “Pilgrimages” of Leibovitz, and Sugimoto, Boltanski and Sherman’s series. Is an order a manifestation of the “real” in photography? This is both the question that I would like to ask and the thesis I would like to propose.
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Thanks for another suggestive post, Bernd.
The internally organized, or ordered, body of work has been central to the development of photography in all its manifestations, in art and out (this despite the facts that extraordinary single images have been produced along the way, and that a small but significant minority of photographers have deployed the medium in very conscious pursuit of the single, sovereign image). But there are as many impulses to organize as there are bodies of work. Yes, in some instances it has been a path to constructing the real through reinforcement, repetition and so forth (what Foucault called a reigning ‘regime of truth’). At other moments the aim has been quite the opposite: a resistance to any such claim or presumption.
Nevertheless in art there does seem to have been some caution regarding the singular image. Bodies of work have dominated from the beginning: sets, suites, series, typologies, narratives, albums, archives, grids, juxtapositions and so forth. The dominance cannot be reduced to the influence of the journalistic photo-essay, Pop, Conceptualism or Postmodernism, all of which hinged in different ways on multiplicity; nor to the demands of curators, editors, audiences and collectors looking to offset their anxieties about the merits of the single image and how to concentrate on it. Although these have played their part.
The recent renaissance of interest in, and production of, photographic books signals an acceptance of the idea that the architecture of the book has lent itself so well and so flexibly to the internally organised body of work (perhaps better than the gallery wall or the screen). But again, beyond that basic commonality there can be no consensus around how or to what end images are to be organized or about what they might disclose. This is the teeming chaos that has led the word ‘photobook’ to be taken up as a handy catch-all in this renaissance. It’s barely a category.
A quick thought about Diane Arbus’s photography. On the rare occasions I have encountered an Arbus image in isolation, away from other examples by her, invariably it has been more striking, more unsettling. Assembled as they usually are, as they were at the Jeu De Paume recently, one is encouraged to displace any difficult response onto another image and another, and the effect is a kind of dissipation into a generalized ‘Arbusness’ (the endless accompanying texts about her troubled life also serve to deflect the viewer away from really confronting what THEIR OWN response to this or that image might be, consigning it to a mere symptom of the life, and death, of the photographer). Bernd, I sense that in your not referring to any Arbus image in particular you are feeling something similar.
That said, I think that the Aperture monograph of Arbus’s work (which I believe is still the best-selling photographic monograph ever) is quite a remarkable sequence. It is, as we all know, a book of portraits, but there are three images very carefully placed at intervals that are not. A fake facade of a house on a Hollywood back lot; an office wall covered in a photo-mural of a forest; and Cinderalla’s Disneyland castle. Three overt attempts to signal the risk of seeing photographs as anything other than deceptive surfaces. (The book was posthumous and sequenced, I think, by her friend and former art director at Harper’s Bazaar, Marvin Israel). But of course this itself signals the central disavowal of photography: we know very well photographs are only surfaces, nevertheless it is close to impossible to respond to them as such, portraits least of all in the re-presentation of faces. Humans simply would not have evolved – physiologically and culturally – had faces been mere surfaces. I think this is why the portrait is so central to our understanding of photography but so destabilizing of that understanding too. And it might say something about why it is that so many of the key works of the medium have been assembled, organized bodies of portraits.
Dear David,
thank you very much again for your rich comment.
My idea is not particularly based on Diane Arbus’ work which is a starting point for a more or less general approach to photography in its various forms of presentation. Photo-books are indeed an important way to do so, but exhibitions are another one. For example, just to name one of the most important ones, the Steichen-exhibition “Family of man” is another way of presenting photography as a particular “order” of the world – with all the problematic conseqences. Every single image is not presented as an irreducible singularity but as a part of an organized “order” which determines the way we perceive every single image. Orders may be flexible in their presentation but don’t change in substance at all: “Family of man” has changed its presentation in nearly all of the places where the exhibition was presented. Already Roland Barthes (in “Mythologies”) wrote a great essay on this topic.
Some more examples: If you consider photo-films (just to name a few of them: “Letters from Iwo Jima”, “One Hour Photo”, “L’important c’est aimer”, “The Rear Window”, “Memento” and even “Blow Up”) photography is presented as a specific “order” of the real. “Order” my be a fragile category but it is still an important one to organize quite arbitrary visual phenomena in order to give them a sense, a meaning and to present them as an extraordinary way of interpretation.
And to give another classic example: Talbot’s “The Pencil of Nature” should be read as a photographic order of the world trying to accomplish and to fullfill the promises of the various applications of photography. And to finish with another less known one: Ernst Jünger’s book “Die veränderte Welt” is trying to show (and every reader of the book should see it and should be convinced) a new order of world using photographs to illustrate this idea. Or to put it in other terms: even the most “destabilizing” images may be if they are presented in a determined series another “order”. Arbus is a good example for this approach.
Dear Bernd
Questions of order, figure so prominently in photography since photography always involves collecting (of images, that is) and editing. Questions of order can enter into this process at various points.
a.) A photographer may decide at the outset that he is interested in certain type of order that he would like to document or illustrate by means of photography. This idea of order will shape the photographer’s engagement with the real.
b.) A photographer may discover a certain type of order in the process of taking pictures for a project. Since it is based on observation, its reference is clearly the real.
c.) A photographer may decide upon a certain type of order when editing and assembling photographs for a project (a book, an exhibition, etc.). Here, it seems to me, the role of and relation to the real is not so clear-cut anymore, since the photographer is now working with images whose relation to the real may be modified, or even cut, by the order they are integrated in. Order here may serve to create a fiction, or may be driven by formalist criteria that are exclusively concerned with image properties. An image may even assume a meaning in a sequence of images that is generated entirely by the context. The editing process may be undertaken with view to the real, but it may as well serve to undercut this relation, to liberate the image from the real.
Dear Martin,
thank you for your “structuralistic” definition which is, in fact, a real problem. One image/photo may get a completely different meaning if it is presented in a different context. A “mask”-portrait of Arbus, for example, may have different meanings in the context of an Arbus exhibition and another one with “mask”-portraits of other photographers. But it’s still – and that’s the point which is important for my theory – a part of an order. The images may remain identical but the order is changing. So we have to think “order” beyond the categories of “author” or “photographer”.
An alternative reading of Diane Arbus was the highly suggestive show at Moderna Museet in Malmö, 2010, by French artist Pierre Leguillon, who featured Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective, 1960-1971 only with source material. See samples here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pd32wHb3e0 and http://www.modernamuseet.se/en/Malmo/Exhibitions/2010/Pierre-Leguillon-features-/ . You might end up with Jeff Wall’s practice of an open field of interest, even though Arbus published extensively with grouped images in magazines during her life time. Yet the later order of her oeuvre seems to be defined and canonized mainly through monographic shows and publications. Leguillon´s exhibition is a proposition to revisit her original works.
To give some order to the various photographic orders, I’ve ordered some quotations on the matter:
The picture editor is the voyeurs’ voyeur, the person who sees what the photographers themselves have seen but in the bloodless realm of the contact sheet… and now pixels on the screen. Picture editors find the representative picture, the image that will be seen by others perhaps around the world. They are unwitting (or witting, as the case may be) tastemakers, the unappointed guardians of morality, the talent brokers, the accomplices to celebrity. Most important – or disturbing – they are the fixers of ‘reality’ and of ‘history.’
John G. Morris, 2002
I don’t like editing so I always try to fob it off on to someone else, whether it’s a picture editor or someone in my office. You’ll be surprised what other people can bring to your pictures.
Rankin, 2007
The essence is done very quickly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take you have to do the editing.
Walker Evans, 1971
A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography… Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.
August Sander, 1951
August Sander’s ‘The Face of Our Time: 60 Photos of German People’ is more than a book of “type studies”; a case of the camera looking in the right direction among people […] It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process.
Walker Evans, 1931
Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.
Walter Benjamin, 1931
The series is no longer a “picture”, and none of the canons of pictorial aesthetics can be applied to it. Here the picture loses its identity as such and becomes a detail of assembly, as essential structural element of the whole which is the thing itself. In this concatenation of its separate but inseparable parts a photographic series inspired by a definite purpose can become at once the most potent weapon and the tenderest lyric.
László Moholy-Nagy, 1932
The mingling of real life and imaginary life, of present and past, of probability and improbability, could only be expressed hitherto in surrealist poetry and by the technique of cinema. To-day it is one of the most powerful devices of the art of layout.
Alfred Tolmer, 1932
The photographic essay was born of the promise of another kind of truth from that given by the individual photograph or image on its own, a truth available only in the interstices between pictures, in the movement from one picture to the next.
Blake Stimson, 2006
…the quick nervousness of pictures is a new language.
Daniel Longwell, 1936
Take photo after photo! Record man not with a solitary synthesized portrait but with a mass of snapshots taken at different times and in different conditions.
Alexander Rodchenko, 1928
Rodchenko’s entire floor was covered with piles of illustrated German and French periodicals: Junge Welt. Moderne Illustrierte Zeitschrift, Kolnische Illustrierte, die Woche, Die Frau, L’illustration .[..]. With scissors in hand he was jumping about the room like a circus gymnast, cutting out various figures, pages and headings, then placing them in piles according to themes such as animals, fashion, technology.
Zakhar Bykov, 1995
Lying on the floor trying to find likenesses from the hundreds of photos spread out in front of me…whenever I see an interesting photo of a personality, an animal, or whatever it may be, I put it in a box. Once a month when the printer is becoming urgent about material for the next issue I go into seclusion. I shut myself in a room and go over the pictures in the box. The pictures I like best I throw on the floor, then I go through the other boxes. I have got four of them. One is full of personalities, another of animals. The third is filled with women and children, and the fourth with landscapes and funny photographs. One by one I go through them – if I find a photo that would match one of the pictures on the floor, I put the pair aside [...] I think there is always somewhere a photo which fits…believe me, the whole business is much easier than one thinks. …One only needs an eye to see the possibilities in a photograph, and one must have a good optical memory.
Stefan Lorant, 1940
The dream of a universal archive is the belief that a photographic translation of the unruly contingency of the world can result in a rational-organised-industrialised system (equivalent to money currency), which may function as a perfect means of exchange and commodification within capitalist social relations. Thus it facilitates processes of rationalisation, industrialisation and exploitation; as well as fostering the legitimation of the modern romantic-colonial nation-state system.
Jorge Ribalta, 2009
…diffusion is furthered by an ever subtler and more comprehensive outlook, whose effect is often to substitute for the masterpiece the significant work, and for the mere pleasure of the eye the surer one of knowledge.
André Malraux, 1949
…we should ask ourselves who would be truly richer- the one who possessed photographs of every surviving building of the classical age, or Sir John Soane, who had measured every stone of the orders of the Coloseum and could quote its intercolumination even in his old age.
Reyner Banham, 1953
In Godard’s ‘Les Carabiniers’ (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag, writer, 1977
Every edit is a lie.
Jean-Luc Godard, filmmaker, 1971
Thirty are Better than One
Andy Warhol, artist, 1963
‘To look at a photograph beyond a certain period of time is to become frustrated: the image which on first looking gave pleasure by degrees becomes a veil behind which we now desire to see. To remain too long with a single photograph is to lose the imaginary command of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right: the camera. The image now no longer receives our look, reassuring us of our founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze. In photography one image does not succeed another in the manner of cinema. As alienation intrudes into our captation by the still image, we can only regain the imaginary, and reinvest our looking with authority, by averting our gaze, redirecting it to another image elsewhere. It is therefore not an arbitrary fact that photographs are deployed so that, almost invariably, another photograph is always already in position to receive the displaced look.’
Victor Burgin, 1980
…presenting groups or series of pictures.[..]. is a very well established way of imagining photography, a practice of photography — so established it is almost unnoticed. I notice it because I really cannot do it that way. I want each picture to stand on its own, with no sequential or thematic relationship to any other. At least, not any specific or organized thematic relationship.
Jeff Wall, 2008
What is the one picture I can take that will say ‘Vermont’?
Jack Delano, 1936
Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.
Italo Calvino, 1958
…in a world in which we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue … may be the key to both psychic and political health.
Colin McCabe, 2004
(it’s ongoing…)
Thank you, David. Brilliant!
Dear David,
that’s really fantastic! A real encyclopedia and a lot of historical as well as theoretical options to go on.
Just to add one more idea:
Even the classical text of Cartier-Bresson on the “decisive moment” is operating with a concept of “order”. In his eyes it’s related to a particular rhythm of the flow of images. The finally chosen one should be a sort of concentration of the whole “story” and is, in this perspective, an expression of the order of things. Here again the internal visual organization of the elements of the picture, the perspective as well as the composition, is corresponding with a particular order. And this theory opens the theoretical field of an analysis of “photo-stories” published in newspapers and magazines.
Yes, I agree about the formal / internal order of Cartier-Bresson being a kind of ordering (so often a kind of snatched rescue of the world from the jaws of chaos). But it’s striking that he was such a lousy editor. Even the 1952 book ‘The Decisive Moment’ was left substantially to his publisher Tériade.
While H C-B was interested in order it was largely in resistance to the dialectic in photography between the one image and the many.