Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 38, November 2002
R. J. Warren Zanes
Photography Into Motion
_Fugitive Images: From
Photography to Video_ Edited by Patrice
Petro Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press,
1995 ISBN
0-253-20890-4 314 pp. The processes through
which the many-voiced character of academic conferences
finally become published volumes of essays are many.
Generally speaking, however, editors often choose either to
foreground that intrinsic polyvocality, or instead
distinguish certain recurring themes from among a
conference's multiple fields of inquiry, using those themes
to frame the proceedings in hindsight, to confer a degree of
order that was perhaps not conspicuous at the time of the
event itself. _Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video_
is a volume belonging to the former category. The range of
the collection's essays, at times verging on disjuncture,
both betrays the roving spirit that marks academic
gatherings and reflects the character of the photographic
medium itself, a medium that could also, and appropriately
so, be described as roving. Indeed, photography goes
everywhere. Among the diverse essays
gathered in _Fugitive Images_ are those that consider
specific histories of photography, a few of which describe
the absorption of photography into discourses preexisting
the birth of the medium, essays that go more directly to the
matter of photography's ontological status, and essays that
elaborate and explore the theoretical legacies that seem to
offer the most to contemporary critical studies of
photography. What sets the volume apart from comparable
edited collections, however -- I think, for instance, of
Victor Burgin's _Thinking Photography_, Richard Bolton's
_The Contest of Meaning_, Carol Squiers's _The Critical
Image_, and even Alan Trachtenberg's more historically
comprehensive collection _Classic Essays on Photography_ --
is the fact that the majority of the writers involved in
_Fugitive Images_ are first and foremost film
theorists. While a few among the
authors collected are known primarily for their critical
interest in the photographic image, most notably John Tagg,
they are the exceptions. What this film theory association
finally means, however, is that, more than the topics
mentioned above, the matter of the relation between the
still image and the moving image emerges as the issue of
particular critical interest. But as that issue is not
pressed into service as the structuring center around which
the volume coheres, there are essays in the volume, Tagg's
included, that do not touch upon the subject, even
indirectly, and there are several essays that go between
discussions of photography and film without addressing
explicitly the consequences and questions that emerge in the
process. Nonetheless, the porous border between the still
and the moving image is the matter that haunts the volume in
various ways. Edward Buscombe's essay
'Inventing Monument Valley' considers the inheritance by
Hollywood Westerns of certain landscape traditions,
traditions associated with Romantic painting and filtered
through the various geographic survey photographies that
were a part of the exploration of the American West.
Buscombe focuses on the making of an iconic landscape,
giving particular attention to John Ford's part in
constructing Monument Valley as one such place/symbol.
Suggesting that Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon were
made to signify not simply the Western but 'America itself',
Buscombe makes the point that these were places that, in
some sense, could not be seen until they were constructed as
seeable through various cultural channels. In the process of
making such an argument, Buscombe enumerates some of those
cultural channels, including those of art, of science, of
industry, and of tourism, demonstrating how these many
discursive strands contributed to the making of a cinematic
icon. Buscombe's essay offers a
rather straightforward discussion of the relation between
particular genre conventions, in this case pertaining to the
Western, and the pictorial legacies (whether still
photography or, earlier yet, Romantic painting) that precede
and, finally, inform those conventions. Embedded in this
discussion is the simultaneous argument that still images,
for instance the *scientific* images of geographic surveys,
are always already polysemic, open to resignification. Both
of these main points are, in many ways, not difficult to
digest. In fact, in consideration of the probable target
audience of _Fugitive Images_, Buscombe's essay seems one
that will likely find the fewest to argue against its main
theoretical premises. Equally well-crafted, but
more individual as a scholarly contribution, is Tom
Gunning's 'Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations', being
among the collection's most satisfying pieces. Gunning makes
the valuable point that photography has multiple histories,
histories that are often overshadowed by that more
monolithic history of photography as index. Referring to
Freud's theory of the uncanny, Gunning argues that
photography's capacity to produce a double is an aspect of
its ontology that, particularly in the 19th century, made
photography a perfect if unlikely tool for those seeking to
look beyond this world into its uncanny other, the spirit
world. At a profound remove from a history of photography
that emphasizes the camera's visual truth as it is related
to a Cartesian tradition, this study of, among other things,
Spiritualist photography uncovers a modern conception of
evidence quite apart from that associated with photography's
documentary legacy. Here, the notion of photography as a
*medium* is given new resonance. Sharing some obvious
ground with her well-known study of pornography, _Hardcore:
Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible_, Linda Williams's
contribution is not unlike Gunning's in that she attempts to
complicate those histories of photography that forge too
strong, or at least too definitive a link between
photography's origins in the camera obscura and a relation
of the observer to the observed that is founded upon
distance and mastery. Leaning quite heavily on ideas
formulated by Jonathan Crary in his _Techniques of the
Observer_, William's argument demands a reconsideration of
photographic modernity's visual legacy, finally claiming
that it was not photography's realist capacity alone that
has governed the medium's pornographic uses -- if by
*realist* one suggests a phallocentric conception of
visuality that separates the seeing (and unseen) subject
(typically male) from the seen object, which in Williams's
study is the female body. What Williams is
redressing is film theory that has, she insists, perpetuated
the notion of 'mind/body dualism by privileging the
disembodied, centered gaze at an absent object over the
embodied, decentered sensations of present observers' (15).
She thus attempts to demonstrate, first, the manner in which
the wall between viewer and object is a theoretical
construct that limits our understanding of visual modernity,
second, that visual modernity involves a particular
corporealization of the viewer that is conspicuous in
pornographic viewing practices, and, third, that the
complexities of pornography, as she has argued on several
occasions, are little understood because certain
intellectual and cultural biases against it serve to impede
any sophisticated critical analysis. Her argument involves
an extended discussion of the ways in which the purportedly
distanced, disembodied viewer is actually implicated in the
scene/seen of pornography, an argument made, following
Crary, with reference to the various technological
innovations (for instance, the stereoscope and the
mutoscope) that cannot simply be made synonymous with the
camera obscura, that symbol of Cartesian dualism. To
reinforce her point, Williams also remarks on ways in which
cross-cutting sutures the viewer into the pornographic
narrative as *object*, observer becoming observed. Then, to
further challenge the theoretical model of seeing she
describes as the 'ahistorical, Mulveyan male gaze' (5),
Williams posits the possibility of a female viewer, basing
this possibility on the sheer range of pornographies
evidenced in the archives and her 'guess' that 'some of the
vast numbers of such photos were bound to find their way
into the hands of women' (25). While this last moment marks
the rhetorical low-point in her argument, it nonetheless
reveals her eagerness to challenge the purported dominance
of a particular film theoretical model from within her
discussion of photographic and cinematic
pornography. If the above-mentioned
essays deal with both the photograph and the moving image,
none of them take the relation between the two as their
explicit subject. Authors Regis Durand and Philippe Dubois,
however, approach the matter more directly. Durand, for
instance, challenges Roland Barthes's famous understanding
of photographic temporality as a 'having-been-there' by
first considering Barthes's distinction between the
cinematic image flow (which informs even the reception of
the film still) and the photograph's allowance for a
viewer's 'pensiveness' (144). Such a distinction
established, Durand then argues that the significant matter
of Time as it relates to the photograph has less to do with
the temporality of the represented object than it does the
thinking process that is a part of photographic viewing. He
thus distinguishes between the moving image and the
photograph not in terms of the photograph's ontological
status but, instead, the particularities of this
photographic viewing. Ambitious, Durand nonetheless
recognizes the magnitude of his reversal, this call to shift
the study of photography from the discrete photographic
object to the particularities of photographic viewing,
ending his essay by suggesting that photography's 'theater
of signs and memory . . . remains to be studied in detail'
(151). Philippe Dubois, echoing
some of Durand's suggestions, presents himself as an example
of a critic who has wrongly given himself to the search for
photography's essential ontology. The viability of such a
quest, he insists, 'is no longer possible in today's
audiovisual and theoretical landscape' (152). If Durand
shifts the focus from the object to the viewer, Dubois
remains focused on the object, calling for the 'oblique'
view of any one medium from the perspective of another. 'The
best lens on photography', he suggests, 'will be found
outside photography' (152). Risking overstatement to make
his point, he suggests that Antonioni's _Blow Up_, more than
any other text, has taught us the most about the
'photographic imaginary' (153). This approach to
understanding the specificity of any one medium, by
processing it through another, finally serves to complicate
the kind of ontological essentialism through which
photography is to be understood in radical isolation.
Looking at case studies of filmmakers who are also
photographers, Dubois manages to put forward some insights
regarding the particularities of photography that are among
the collection's most theoretically provocative. Among all of the essays,
Eduardo Cadava offers the most successful example of one
that, as described above, 'elaborates and explores the
theoretical legacies that seem to offer the most to
contemporary critical studies of photography'. Discussing
the place of photography in Walter Benjamin's vision of
modernity, Cadava, in a kind of formal allusion, borrows the
very structure of Benjamin's 'Theses on the Concept of
History' to suggest that his agenda is to work *with*
Benjamin in order to demonstrate Benjamin's immediate
relevance. The Benjaminian form, as this allusion suggests
and Cadava insists, is enduring. Cadava's admirable
explication thus carries with it the tone of reverence. If
Durand makes the point that Barthes's photographic
'having-been-there' suggests that the temporality of the
photographic belongs to the referent, here it is Benjamin
who is presented as the theorist who recognizes that 'the
image emerges in the now-time of reading' (233). This
reverberation of Durand's suggestive argument, discussed
above, thus brings to light another theme that recurs in
_Fugitive Images_. Among the other essays in
the volume is Aine O'Brien's photo-essay on an Irish penal
jail, Kilmainham Gaol, an institution that has been
repackaged as a tourist destination. The essay acts as a
kind of middle-section in the book. Demonstrating the
difficulty of bringing theory into art, O'Brien's piece is,
in and of itself, opaque. In an unfortunate editorial
choice, O'Brien's photo-essay follows Buscombe's carefully
executed study of the Western and landscape construction.
Cumbersome footnotes, meant to diminish the opacity of
O'Brien's piece, overreach themselves and emerge as somewhat
desperate efforts to buoy a project that simply does not
translate (in part because of poor reproductions) into book
form. While quite different, Herbert Blau's essay suffers
from related issues. Powerful as a diffuse, aphoristic
piece, Blau's essay fails to bring its many points into
conjunction with one another. The brilliance of certain of
its facets leaves one feeling that the essay is in the
process of becoming, finally proving a disappointment.
Likewise, Patricia Mellencamp's contribution seems not to
have reached its culmination -- seems not, in Mellencamp's
case, to have made its mind up whether to be personal
criticism, post-feminist theory, or a study of hybridity as
it informs both the makers of film and their
mediums. The paucity of theoretical
studies of photography alone makes one grateful for the
arrival of _Fugitive Images_. The disappointments with which
the collection leaves one, however, are perhaps related to
the editor's decision to do less rather than more as regards
structuring the volume in relation to specific issues. The
recurring matter of the photograph's relation to cinema is
present enough as an issue to have served more conclusively
as an overarching theme. Indeed, this might have brought to
the collection the very thing that could have served to
mitigate its disarray. The interesting effort to bring the
matter of photography to a group comprised primarily of film
theorists proves not, in and of itself, to be enough of an
organizing principle. One can well imagine that _Fugitive
Images_ could have been a very different collection had
certain participants in the conference been able to
contribute to the book -- I think of Sally Stein and Allan
Sekula, in particular. Photography is, of course,
the ultimate interdisciplinary object, which, curiously
enough, has received only a muted response in this the age
of interdisciplinary studies. Perhaps only the written word
has the ubiquity of the photograph and its imagistic
progeny. But the medium's contexts being profoundly
multiple, the photograph is not easily cornered. Thus the
impasse is one in which a few names, notably Barthes and
Benjamin, emerge again and again as those which can be
associated with a rigorous theoretical consideration.
Unfortunately, rather than *following* Barthes's and
Benjamin's examples, one sees scholars merely *citing* their
example. _Fugitive Images_ is an encouraging sign. But, like
Goethe on his deathbed, one finds oneself calling for 'More
Light!' It is, to be sure, time to get photography into
motion. University
of Rochester, New
York, USA Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 R. J. Warren Zanes,
'Photography Into Motion', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 38,
November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n38zanes>.
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
