Photographic Practice and Art Theory

Burgin starts with Benjamin quoting Brecht; the question is can “a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality” … “a photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions” (Burgin, 1982:39).

Burgin explores this through signs and conceptual art, collapsing the distinction between photography and painting, citing Benjamin’s idea that painting would be severed from its cult value if it can be reproduced. While the reputation of painting is (incorrectly) the target here, Burgin notes that photography also suffered a reputation as a mechanical means of production.

Digging beyond this reputation to question how photography works, Burgin uses the work of Arbus to illustrate how the photographic genius is not in revealing the hidden but allowing us to read a scene according to “our knowledge of the way objects transmit and transform ideology, and the way in which photographs in turn transform those. To appreciate such operations we must first lose any illusions about the neutrality of objects before the camera” (Burgin, 1982:41).

“Man ascribes a use-value to things about him … he intervenes in the environment, re-forming through his labour the substances give in nature” (Burgin, 1982:45).

Language is seen as a tool used to perform a certain class of operations in the environment:

• socialising all instrumental operations
• constructing abstractions that locate these operations within a culture (Burgin, 1982, 45).

Hence we place objects within an ideology when we perceive them. This is related to ideas in Greider & Garkovich – we may also perceive them through an ideological filter.

“Ideology takes an infinite variety of forms; what is essential about it is that it is contingent and that within it the fact of its contingency is suppressed” (Burgin, 1982:46). The italics are Burgin’s – this is particularly true for photographs but there is also overlap with post-structural critiques – the difficulty of questioning the system from within the system.

The author makes the point that the “taking for granted as natural and immutable when it is historic and contingent” is an ideology, encountered in Marxist theory – he gives the example of the relationship between the factory owner and worker where fair wages are assumed when in fact the owner is appropriating some of the wages of the worker as profit. Of course this is extremely problematic and in practice it is in itself an ideology that has rarely worked. If there was no value to the mechanism of the factory then factories would not exist. The workers can form co-operatives but this rarely occurs successfully. Actually a more practical model has been one of worker ownership via shares, which returns to a capitalist approach. This is not in any way to promote the latter, more of an observation that, historically at least, it has been a flawed but less damaging approach. A counter to this might be to ask who has written this history or gauged this success?

Returning to the matter at hand, “even the natural landscape is appropriated by ideology, being rendered, in anthropocentric perception, “beautiful” or “hostile” or “picturesque” (Burgin, 1982:47).

“All that constitutes reality for us is, then, impregnated with meanings” (Burgin, 1982:47). Or the reverse, that a meaningful set of symbols can become a reality – indeed reality cannot be comprehended without meaning?

Bugin works his way back to what seems to be his main point – that there is a pre-photographic process going on, and hence it is not the camera that creates meaning. “The naturalness of the world ostensibly open before the camera is a deceit” (Burgin, 1982:47) since the world is already full of signs that operate with meaning. This is something that Baudrillard also discusses. The separate and neutral reality which Husserl defines as “natural attitude” is highly elusive as in practice meaning is always ascribed through a cultural filter. In fact the camera helps conceal how this meaning is created, since it is regarded as mechanical, and other transformational decisions such as frame, viewpoint and indeed filters – Ansel Adams using a red filter to promote a National Park for its natural beauty – all combine to further create meaning. Yet even before this the National Park has been created by humans – in a way it is an example of Land Art.

This natural attitude is explored by Barthes as literal meaning – a purely factual description of the image that can be laid over the forms that appear in the frame. Barthes describes how this literal meaning is stripped away, leaving the vacant form, which is then free to take ideological meaning and creating myth. The literal meaning serves as alibi for the myth.

For our purposes this is complicated further by the concept of natural – since if we accept this is also a social construct then it is harder still to pin down the literal facts about the form. This might seem to be straightforward but it proves to be difficult to see around the cultural filter.

Burgin now explores, following Barthes, linguistics in some depth. There are of course parallels between these ideas and that of a sign being the signifier and the signified. Barthes concludes that the photograph is a “message without a code”(Burgin, 1982:60) where in fact “the image is in a sense caused by its referent” (Burgin, 1982:61). Burkin interrogates this by considering how a photograph mediates the actual (it could be a photograph of a photograph). Our understanding of such images led Umberto Eco to reject the notion that a photograph is not coded.

Hence we have the useful idea that photographic perception is analogous to every day perception since they share some codes. However Burgin derives an important difference in the fixation (as he sees it) of still photography with individual images as opposed to a stream as in film or perhaps a montage approach where multiple meanings are present. However I note that the single image can also have multiple meanings, which are then fixed by, for example, captioning. Nevertheless what Burgin describes as a repression is perhaps just another way of looking at how a photographer frames an image.

And we can go beyond the visual codes of an image (e.g. a picture of a saxophone), so that, quoting Metz, “the notion of visual … is a fantasy or ideology” (Burgin, 1982:83). Here we also brush up against the expansion of the natural beyond the (generally flat) visual, incorporating the third dimension of engagement in a place and beyond to the sounds and smells and so forth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Burgin, V. (1982) Photographic Practice and Art Theory. In: Burgin, V. (ed.) Thinking Photography. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.