Lewis Mumford
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (17)
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
When I read Vicki Goldberg’s excerpt of Lewis Mumford’s thoughts on the economy of images emphasizing the curmudgeonly proclamation that the proliferation of images had placed us all in hades, my gut feeling was that his view must be more complex than that. Three quarters of the way through his lecture series published in Art and Techics there is indeed polemic. But he sneaks up on it, making his way through photography on the way as a democratic process:
Now, by perfecting a mechanical method, the “taking of pictures” by a mere registration of the sensations was democratized. Anyone could use a camera. Anyone could develop a picture. Indeed, as early as the 1890s the Eastman Company went a step further in the direction of automatism and mass production, by saying to the amateur photographer—this was their earliest advertising slogan—you press the button we do the rest. What had been in the seventeenth century a slow handicraft process, requiring well trained eyes and extremely skilled hands, with all the rewards that accompany such highly organized bodily activities, now became an all-but-automatic gesture. Not an entirely automatic gesture, I hasten to add, lest any photographers in this audience squirm in agonized silence or break forth into a loud shout of protest. For after all it turns out that even in the making of the most mechanically contrived image, something more than machines and chemicals is involved. The eye, which means taste. The interest in the subject and an insight into the moment when it—it or he or she—is ready. An understanding of just what esthetic values can be further brought out in the manipulation of the instrument and materials. (92)
Mumford equivocates photography with “registration of the sensations,” masking his overwhelming bias toward photography as monosensual: visual to the exclusion of all other sense records. I suspect this is because it allows him to paint photography as gestural, contingent on a button press. Lately I have been thinking that the athletic edge to photography (street photography, as a prime example) invites examination of the invocation of multiple sense modalities. Taste, in its broadest sense, can be stretched to the appreciation of the spatial qualities of representation (beyond trompe l’oeil)— and thus be forced to confront the problems of bodies in space and their relations. The impact of scale, for example, as explored by many contemporary photographers can create special types of comfort, discomfort, and sensual response that are not, strictly speaking, visual. Esthetic values involve more than just the eyes.
The effort to understand the visual often tries to leapfrog over the body to get to the eye stalk. Nonetheless, it is admirable that Mumford does recognize the human qualities of photographs, and has a sense of photography’s history/pleasures
All these human contributions are essential. As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject that contrives the exclusion [emphasis mine]. All this must be freely granted. But this is only to say that in photography another machine art like printing was born; and that the standards of esthetic success in this art are not dissimilar than those in printing. If we consider those standards for a moment we shall have a clue to one of the most essential problems connected with automatism and reproduction.
As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended on the photographer’s respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before the eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice—which sometimes occurred when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints— the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit. (92-93)
What this passage makes clear is that Mumford is concerned with the improper use of symbols and the clear role of human choice in art as opposed to technics, his word for technology deployed without the human element. That’s the primary reason for his coinage of techics— it is neither techné nor technology, though it is derived from them— it is the deployment of mindless or inhuman means of reproduction. It’s a shame that Goldberg neatly skips this part (quite photographer friendly) in her anthology.
It is this human element that interests me most in all this; to center photography on one sense (vision) tends to render it mechanistic. The sensual/bodily side of it is difficult to address without resort to subjectivity or spirituality. I think there are objectively verifiable, physical elements involved in perception that are ignored in discussions of reproductive technologies due to a tendency to compartmentalize the sense modalities. That’s why I can’t seem to stop jumping between audio/music reproduction, photographic and sculptural reproduction, textual production and reproduction, etc. It seems like it should all fit together as furniture for living.
