Photography as Picture or Document:

Victorian photography as paradigm

A question What denes a photograph?

A question What denes a photograph? A technology or a way of making an image?

A question What denes a photograph? A technology or a way of making an image? Proof or a picture?

A question What denes a photograph? A technology or a way of making an image? Proof or a picture?

A question What denes a photograph? A technology or a way of making an image? Proof or a picture?

Photography: Proof or Picture? or Recording or Production (of the world?)

WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT

Photography and Taxonomy: An Approach to its Functions Through Classication

The Pencil of Nature produced in six instalments 1844-1846

The inventory, the archive, the exact document!

The landscape, architecture! (the surface touched by light)!

The portrait, the different point of view!

The still life, the painting! (the exotic)!

The photocopy, photography and exact reproducibility!

The cultural object reproduced (a new cultural economy)!

The real and representation (photography as an art of representation ! that can draw on other traditions of image making i.e. Dutch painting)!

The pencil of nature A claim for the images authenticity written by nature itself (a claim for lack of artice, for lack of the artists hand) As a published document: less a denition of what photography is as a medium, more an exploration for the possible uses to which photography can be put Photography has no identity but rather a plurality of uses: different genres, different social functions Put crudely: it sits between proof and picture, between art and document

Two paradigms to explore: The identity or character of a face (art) The evidential and analytical image, given over to the work of comparison (science)

The picture *The problem of dening art photography from pictorialism to street photography to conceptual art and photography the contemporary artist as photographer *The tension between using language of tradition for a new media *The notion that the artist takes the picture *An emphasis on pictorial codes and composition, on ideas and narrative *linked to a history of photography as produced by named subject *A mode that examines cultural values and expectations

The document *The power of photography to capture a scene exactly *neutral, style-less, objective *The notion that the camera takes the picture *An emphasis on the mechanics of the camera not the style of picture construction *linked to a history of photography around discourses more than authors: legal documents, anthropology, mug-shots, topographic views *An open image that is available to use

VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PICTURE CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON JULIA MARGARET CAMERON OSCAR REJLANDER HENRY PEACH ROBINSON

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, (or Oscar Rejlander)! The Dream,! c.1860!

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,! Reginald Southeby and Skeletons,! 1857!

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,! St George and the Dragon,! 1875!

Julia Margaret Cameron,! Prayer and Praise! 1865! ! ! ! A combination of visual languages:! ! 1. Realist, indexical ! (lack of costume, little directed narrative, eshy, somatic corporeality [Carol Armstrong])! ! 2. Allegorical, devotional! (clear iconographic grouping and! title - real people standing as symbols)!

Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson with Book also called The Dirty Monk, 1865! Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin, 1868-9!

Julia Margaret Cameron, ! I Wait, ! 1872!

Different modes: the fantasy or narrative set-up / the truthful portrait

Julia Margaret Cameron ! My Grandchild, aged 2yrs 3m ! 1865 (image of Mary Hillier and Archibald Cameron)!

Julia Margaret Cameron ! My Grandchild, aged 2yrs 3m ! 1865 (image of Mary Hillier and Archibald Cameron)!

1. Reality - my grandchild, right there - looking like that, absolutely real 2. Representation - an interlocking web of visual languages and identications, i.e. Hillier as Cameron, Archibald as Christ, a scene at home, a scene of eternal devotion Allegorical of photography itself

Some other fantasical photography, old and new Oscar Rejlander Henry Peach Robinson Jeff Wall Gregory Crewdson Anna Gaskell Dening features: the image as planned, not a spontaneous scene captured the image as composite not whole - made out of many parts stitched together an emphasis on cultural codes, an exploration of already known stories, myths, symbols or images

Oscar Gustav Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857!

Henry Peach Robinson, Sleep, 1867!

Henry Peach Robinson, Preparing Spring Flowers for Market, 1873!

Jeff Walls interpretation of Ralph Ellisons book The Invisible Man, 1999-2000!

Henry Peach Robinson, The Lady of Shalott, 1860-1!

Gregory Crewdson from series Twilight, 2002! (see also various paintings of drowned Ophelia from Hamlet)!

John Everett Millain Ophelia 1852

Tom Hunter The Way Home 2000

Tom Hunter The Way Home 2000

Anna Gaskell! From Wonder series, 1996!

The photograph, then, as a construction. Not a recording of the world, but the production of a scene Not an issue of the capturing of a spontaneous moment, but the production of an imaginary moment

EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE DOCUMENT

MODES OF PHOTOGRAPHY: - CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY - CRIMINOLOGY

In the emergence of photography some of the earliest use of photography to produce proof was not in the service of documentary [a term that emerges in the 1920s] but was used for science Photographys identity in the late 1800s is caught between art and science in terms of its uses As such it is bound up with the Victorian beliefs of classication, ordering and mapping Photography does not have an identity, but it is used to produce identities of others

John Lamprey, Anthropometric Study, Malayan Man, c.1868 Unknown Photographer, Anthropological Study of a South Australian Aboriginal Female (Ellen aged 22), c.1870

THE OTHER BODY OF PHOTOGRAPHY? Allan Sekula; every proper portrait has its lurking objectifying inverse in the les of the police The Body and the Archive

Two kinds of photograph Two modes (the portraitist, the policeman) Two uses (celebrity, the police-le) Whilst these are of the same face, one is nearer the ideal Picture whereas the other serves as a form of evidence, more akin to Proof"

Who am I (celebrity, object of love / attention)? = Portrait as celebratory What do I look like (how can I be visually mapped)? = Portrait as evidential"

Eadweard Muybridge, Indian Village, Tangass, Alaska, c.1868 Eadweard Muybridge, WoodwardsGardens, San Francisco, c.1869-72

Eadweard Muybridge, Morning Call, 16th June, 1878

Eadweard Muybridge, Walking, carrying a 75lb stone on left shoulder, 1887, from book Animal Locomotion

Eadweard Muybridge, Running and jumping with skipping rope, c.1887 Between science and cinema

tienne-Jules Marey, High Jump, 1890-1 tienne-Jules Marey, Pole-Vaulting, 1890-1!

tienne-Jules Marey, Long Jump, 1883!

tienne-Jules Marey, High Jump Preceded by Run, 1883!

Two modes of comparison: The grid / The composite Both emphasise photography not as a technology of a single image: they achieve their effects through repetition and accumulation Not a one but a many

Francis Galton and the composite: The composite as the promise of the ability to induce knowledge from the purely visual, to nd the truth through common or shared traits that the camera could uncover Examples: The consumptive look The familial look The Engineer look The criminal look
Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculties 1883, Frontispiece plate

Examples: The consumptive look The familial look !

Two different way to composite ! The use of multiple layers / negatives for different destinations of photography!

Photography as visual evidence -linked to specialist knowledge as used by the expert -belief that photographs could give access, via the visual, to showing common traits; such as family likeness or universal signs of degeneracy; linked to colonialism / eugenics

Benign family resemblance a portrait of genetic inheritance rather than individuals. General resemblance, not particular features. Attempting to use a combined evidence of the camera to see beyond the features of the individual

Francis Galton, Composites of Members of a Family, n/d!

The collapsing of the archive into one image: the ultimate criminal? The reduction of the particular individual to a general type
Francis Galton, Composites of Criminals, c.1882!

Allan Sekula: the Galtonian composite can be seen as the collapsed version of the archive. In this blurred conguration, the archive attempts to exist as a potent single image, and the single image attempts to achieve the authority of the archive, of the general, abstract proposition from The Body and the Archive, October no.39, p.54 Photographs as documents used to build an argument (rather than paint a picture)

The ultimate document photography and the police! Alphonse Bertillon, display stand in Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889; precision equipment ! for the recording of data at crime scene!

The Bertillonage method (derived from physiognomy and phrenology): The exactitude of measurement of the body: each combined set of measurements (head, arm, leg etc.) is different - the particular generates its own archive (a body + image ngerprint)

Bertillonage at Police headquarters, Paris, 1893

The scene of photography and the document The subject as an object for the institutions gaze The use of photography to produce a standard model of identity (one that can be compared and analysed)

A portrait parle or speaking likeness - a proof of identity - it veries who you are

Two models: Galton generalised abstraction the type Bertillon material specicity the specic individual

Two modes: the picture as generating a person, emphasis on subjectivity / the document operates in relation to knowledge and data (available to the specialist) the picture as coded, as utilising style and the work of the imaginary (fantasy) / the document attempts to lay out reality for us in a naked state; removed from style