I met a seer,
Passing the hues and objects of the world,
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
To gleen eidólons.
Put in thy chants said he,
No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in
Put first before the rest as light for all an entrance-song of all,
That of eidólons.
Ever the dim beginning,
Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,
Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)
Eidólons! eidólons!
Ever the mutable,
Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
Issuing eidólons
Lo, I or you,
Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidólons.
Walt Whitman, “Eidólons” (1-20) from Leaves of Grass
Synthesis seems to be concerned about photographs produced by bloggers. It’s funny how these things come together, because as he suspected, I connect the dots in a different way.
I was motivated to read Whitman after I first read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. It was because of a one word connection: eidolons. The dictionary provides a wonderful clue why the word eidolons was used by both of them. The word has two meanings, and both fit.
- A phantom; an apparition.
- An image of an ideal.
The primary connection between all photographs is that they are indeed, eidolons. Whitman wrote of the mutablity of all human creations, like Shelley before him. The word he chose to describe those creations has great resonance for photography, and it was used by Roland Barthes to great advantage. The root, eidos, means things which can be seen, but the implication of eidolons is that they are outside the real. Barthes teases out distinctions between the experience of the photographer, the photographed, and the spectator, applying postmodern thought to the perception of images:
The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs— in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which there is in any photograph: the return of the dead.
Whether taken by trained or untrained people, all photographs convey a spectrum, an eidolon, of the object photographed. It’s a frozen resurrection of the thing itself, but not quite, because unlike its original moment, it is frozen dead in all its imperfection. Barthes was right to connect it with death, in my opinion, and each time we view an image it represents a reconstitution, tied deeply to the act of viewing. An individual viewer fleshes out their own interpretation of its spectrum.
The essay cited by Synthesis is a clever one, but in my opinion the summation of William J. Mitchell’s How to Do Things with Pictures is a hollow muckraking assertion that has not come to pass in the eight years since it was written:
The growing circulation of the new graphic currency that digital imaging technology mints is relentlessly destabilizing the old photographic orthodoxy, denaturing the established rules of graphic communication, and disrupting the familiar practices of image production and exchange. This condition demands, with increasing urgency, a fundamental critical reappraisal of the uses to which we put graphic artifacts, the values we therefore assign to them, and the ethical principles that guide our transactions with them.
I read the book that Mitchell’s essay originally appeared in when it was new, and I didn’t believe it then either. I looked around for the book, but I think I sold it. I was quite hostile to postmodernism at the time, but now that I understand it better, I realize that postmodernism doesn’t have to try to rewrite the nature of photographs, just how we look at them. They have never been facts, but they have always presented evidence of a very etherial sort. The nature of eidolons has not changed since the time when Whitman wrote: “Ever the mutable, / Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering” But even through change, photographs do follow conventions, orthodoxies neatly ordered in Mitchell’s essay:
Thus the rules that societies have evolved for acceptable and effective usage of photographs in acts of communication are both clear (if not always explicit) and widely understood. These rules valorize photographs as uniquely reliable and transparent conveyors of visual information and concomitantly structure familiar practices of graphic production and exchange–among them the practices of photojournalism, feature illustration, advertising photography, photo-illustrated fiction, the legal use of photographic evidence, the family snapshot, photographic portraiture, photo identification, medical imaging, and art photography. Photography has established a powerful orthodoxy of graphic communication.
I have yet to see anything in digital photography, photographs on blogs, or picture-people trading cards that goes outside these conventions. If the postmodern revolution predicted by Mitchell is here, I fail to see any evidence. There has been no disruption of the familiar practices of photographers: selecting a point of view and manipulating images were common a hundred years before postmodernism questioned their ethics. There has been an acceleration of production, yes, but no respite from orthodoxy. In my opinion, photographers on the web are just as orthodox as photographers who aren’t on the web.
There’s a good reason for this orthodoxy. People learn a language by hearing and internalizing it, and these schemas have been with us for a long time. Photographs on blogs have a sense of immediacy missing from other forms, the same quality shared by blog writing, but they do not operate outside orthodoxy. Photographers, especially new ones, imitate conventions which are often stale, and largely stolen from photo-illustration, snapshots, and “art”.
Same tune, different means of tr
ansmission. The medium may massage, but it really isn’t sending any new messages. The only real difference is accessability; now rather than just family and friends’ snaps, we can see the efforts of millions.
Revisiting Mitchell’s essay, I can now recognize how much of it is taken from literary criticism. Doing Things With Texts is the name of a book by MH Abrams, and the mirror analogy in the first paragraph is also taken from Abrams, whose landmark book was The Mirror and The Lamp. When I was just a photographer, I never noticed this. I have always questioned the postmodern approach to use, value, and ethics regarding photographs. Critical approaches are useful for the interpretation of language artifacts, including visual ones, but they do not reduce or change the fundamental utility of them.
Are blog photographs different? No more different than the difference between doing it for money (professional) and doing it for love (amateur). That distinction has been around since Whitman too, and blogging certainly hasn’t changed it. Attributing the difference between blog photojournalism and professional photojournalism to anything more than the difference between pro and amateur is just chasing an eidolon.
