Where am I?

Sometimes I get really confused by the research that I’m doing. Each day, new evidence enters in that makes me push aside things that must be dealt with, inevitably, before I can be able to shape these fragments into something coherent. The accelerating progress is complicated, and other things just want to push their way in. The last few days I’ve really been missing my father. There is a sequence of images by Marion Post Wolcott in Michael Lesy’s new book on the FSA, Long Time Coming that is hard for me to bear. I might blog a few of them later, but for now I really must do something of a brain-dump.

Lesy’s book is outstanding, really, except for a blazingly irritating editing failure in one of the essays—it consistently misspells Wolcott as Walcott. It is the first work I’ve read that not only gives a large amount of space to Edwin Rosskam, but gives him his due as a serious intellectual rather than a second rate imitator of Life Magazine.

Also just arrived on my bookshelf is City Gorged With Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris by Ian Walker. This book is a formidable reassessment of the relationship between realistic images and surrealist praxis. Great Stuff. I’m waiting for Roman Jacobsen’s 1921 essay on realism before I attempt to tackle a working definition of the multiple varieties of realism that proliferated in the Victorian age.

Here is the short list of topics I need to write out:

• Defining Documentary

• Photography and Fetish

• Narrative and Images: Eighteenth Century Printmaking

• Romanticism and the Rejection of the Visual

• Lithography and the Devaluation of the Image in Nineteenth Century America

• Houdon, the Caption, and the Eighteenth Century Gaze

There is a lot more than that beating me up constantly in my head; but this weekend is the PMLA SCMLA conference and a documentary film festival, so I’ll be forced to take at least a short break. Before I totally lost where I was, I figured I had better write it down.

Shock and Aura

In the 1939 essay “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Walter Benjamin is deeply concerned with Kantian questions regarding Baudelaire’s lyric poetry. Benjamin begins with the introductory address to the reader in Fleurs du mal, which closes “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable,–mon frére!” [Hypocrite reader—my coequal— my brother!]. What are the conditions which would cause Baudelaire to write a book with no hope of an audience, and to consider such a reader his brother? Lyric poetry was largely dead by this time. Benjamin remarks: “the lyric poet has ceased to represent the poet per se. . . . he has become the representative of a genre” (156).

Benjamin suggests that the lower status afforded lyric poetry in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century is the result of its failure to achieve rapport with the experience of its readers, brought about by “a change in the structure of experience” (156). The enjoyment of lyric poetry, then, would mean that a reader was out of step with society. Benjamin then turns to philosophical developments to establish conditions for such a change:

Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made an attempt to lay hold of the “true” experience as opposed to the kind which manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. . . . Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in society. What they invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and most recently, the age of myths. (156)

“Towering above” these attempts, according to Benjamin, was the work of Bergson. Matiére et mémoire [Matter and Memory] proposes that establishing structure of memory is important to the establishment of “true” experience. Experience, in Bergson’s theory is not historical, but rather “a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data” (157). Through Bergson, Baudelaire, and Proust Benjamin modifys his assertion in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the work of art was defined by historical duration and links to tradition. Benjamin offers the insight that history might be better explained by its afterimage. Benjamin approves of Bergson’s ahistorical stance:

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The Caption in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin extends his reflections on the caption and of the nature of the “aura” in artistic works. He utilizes Atget as a sort of fulcrum, a moment of discontinuity in the reception of the photograph:

With Atget, photographs become the standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at the pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones. (226)

A fundamental distinction pursued by Benjamin in this essay is the shift in the social valuation of art from ritual to exhibition. However, in this brief digression Benjamin alludes to the difference in character between myth and art. The emphasis on schema, or sequence, of images in magazines and films matches the distinction later drawn by Claude Levi-Strauss:

In the case of works of art, the starting point is a set of one or more objects and one or more events which aesthetic creation unifies by revealing a common structure. Myths travel the same road but they start from the other end. They use a structure to produce what is itself an object consisting of a set of events (for all myths tell a story). Art thus proceeds from a set (object + event) to the discovery of its structure. Myth starts from a structure by means of which it constructs a set (object + event). (The Savage Mind 26)

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Technology and Representation

The tension between metaphoric and metonymic modes of knowledge (humanist vs. scientific, linguistic vs. iconographic, similitude vs. resemblance) persists across centuries. The ultimate conclusion of these recurrent debates is usually to declare these modes “separate but equal.” However, the impasse seldom stands—separate cannot be equal— neglect or atrophy of either mode results in aphasia. Accounts of the construction of knowledge are always linguistic in nature, subsuming the visual underneath an avalanche of commentary that reasserts the power of the word.

In “Facts of Fragments? Visual Histories in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Art History 25:4 September 2002), Dana Arnold paints an alternative view of the proliferation of knowledge in the eighteenth century:

By the opening years of the eighteenth century the proliferation of the printed image ran ahead of the increased production of the printed word. The printed image became an essential component of the international currency of intellectual ideas that transcended spoken language boundaries. These images facilitated the transference of ideas about architecture, antiquity and aesthetics in the pan-European arena of artistic and scholarly exchange. There is no doubt that prints were essential to the formulation of a visual repertoire of studies of antique art, architecture and artifacts. (450)

By the end of the eighteenth century, few artists in England (including William Blake) had really seen much in the way of classical or continental art except through mechanical reproductions—sometimes finely executed engravings, more often, inexpensive and shoddy woodcuts. However, even lacking the “aura” of an original work, these reproductions had a profound impact on the way that artists and the public perceived art. Neoclassicism was largely founded on mechanical copies, copies that held great currency when dispersed largely without intelligible textual description. The explosion of “print culture” meant much more than the proliferation of the book.

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Two Documentaries

In his seminal 1973 book Documentary Expression and Thirties America, William Stott offers a traditional humanist rationale, and a genre approach meant to join several media. In adopting this approach, Stott treats images as text.

As literary analysis, this book seeks to prove that documentary—whether in film, photograph, writing, broadcast, or art—is a genre as distinct as tragedy, epic, or satire, but a genre unlike these traditional ones in that its content is, or is assumed to be, actually true.

As a cultural history, this book surveys the documentary expression of the 1930s and early 1940s, and suggests that not only that a documentary movement existed then but that recoginiton of it is essential to an understanding of American life at that time.

. . . Though critics and historians who treat the culture of thirties have remarked on “the ‘documentary’ techniques characteristic of the period,” they haven’t examined the literature the techniques brought into being. Here this literature is studied in detail. (ix-x)

The “literature” studied by Stott is broad in both context and use, and overriding any institutional boundaries is the assumption that these works are human documents— “A document, when human, is the opposite of the official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal” (7).

Fifteen years later, John Tagg approached a narrow subset of this material and declared:

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Metaphor and Metonymy

Across the last forty years, an almost fetishistic amount of attention has been paid to metaphor. As Jonathon Culler cleverly quipped in The Pursuit of Signs, “Why not organize a symposium on simile or synecdoche, on metalepsis or meiosis, or on such complex figures as anadiplosis, alloiosis, or antapodosis?” (188). Culler’s explanation of the privilege allotted to metaphor in the discourse of the human sciences is convincing—the ascendancy of metaphor is the key to the survival of the mode of knowledge promoted by these disciplines.

I am suggesting, in other words, that today metaphor is no longer one figure among others but the figure of figures, a figure for figurality; and I mean this not figuratively but quite literally: the reason why we devote journals and conferences to metaphor is that metaphor is not just the literal or proper name for a trope based on resemblance but also and especially a figure for figurality in general. Thus the term metaphor in discussions of “the nature of metaphor” or “the problem of metaphor” already poses some of the central questions at issue: Is it literal or figurative? How can we tell the difference? What is the status of that difference? (189)

Culler does not draw the careful distinction between resemblance and similitude which Foucault does, but rather uses them as synonyms. The key separation Culler makes is between metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is “based on the perception of an essential similarity; and metonymy, based on a merely accidental or contingent connexion” (190). Essential similarity is better labeled as similitude; resemblance is, in Foucault’s writing, merely a contingent connection.

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The Modern Public and Photography

Baudelaire’s “The Salon of 1859” is comprised of four letters to Jean Morel, editor of the Revue Francaise. In the first letter, Baudelaire remarks on his dissatisfaction with the salon: “The thoughts suggested by the sight of this Salon are of so simple, so traditional, so classic an order, that a few pages will doubtless be sufficient to develop them.” The observation is used to frame a disclaimer: “Do not be surprised, then, if banality in the painter should have given rise to the commonplace in your writer” (225). Baudelaire characterizes the modern painter as a “spoiled child.” In his second letter, Baudelaire argues that the primary reason why the modern painter is spoiled is the modern public.

Baudelaire’s first outburst is toward the captioning practice of the painters of the Salon: “To seek to astonish by means which are alien to the art in question is the great standby of those who are not natural painters” (226). He enumerates several types of caption addressed to these paintings:

• The Comic Title

• The Sentimental Title

• The Punning Title

• The Philosophical Title

• The False or Trick Title

To this, he adds descriptions of title formed by irreconcilable conflations and crusading titles which easily fall prey to caricature. Baudelaire’s conclusion is that all titles are folly: “Let us simply say that this is a false and sterile method of striking wonder” (227).

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Spatial Captions

In In/Different Spaces Victor Burgin applies the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre to the problems of representation. Lefebvre’s concepts of mental space as opposed to social space are applied to the comparison of “images of reality” and reality itself. It is common sense to accept that the intangible world of images is not reality; yet, when we blame the problems of real societies on media generated images we encounter the great divide between mental space and social space. Fantasy is taken to be the opposite of reality. In mental space, things are individuated, private, and internal. Social space is public, physical, and ultimately political. Burgin postulates that transactions between these two spheres can only be explained through psychoanalytic theory. The interaction can be approached through theories of the unconscious—the scene between “perception and consciousness”

Burgin notes that the surrealists conceded that their work be best worked out in psychological terms. However Burgin does not address the question of how such “transactions” between mental and social space actually occur. Lefebvre describes the theoretical project of the surrealists in this way:

The leading surrealists sought to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of the transaction from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life. (Production of Space)

Rather than examining the “nature of the transaction,” psychoanalytic criticism actually is at its best describing the motive or result of the transaction. Central to the surrealist approach to images is the caption or title of the work. It is in the interaction between text and image that the real work occurs.

Surrealist captioning of otherwise realistic images works to decenter the work as a whole—to create a sort of engine for thought brought about by incongruity. Walter Benjamin comments on this effect in “A Short History of Photography,” noting that the effect of captioning fragmented or counter-intuitive photographs with names of the cities they were taken in acts to undercut the otherwise stable notion of those real locations. For Benjamin, the presence of a caption was essential:

But isn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures worth less than an illiterate? Will not captions become the essential components of pictures? Those are the questions in which the gap of 90 years that separates today from the age of the daguerreotypes discharges its historical tension.

Daguerreotypes were normally produced without captions. The historical tension of these now anonymous images is the same sort of tension between the mental space of a person reconstructing a reality without concrete linguistic reference and the social space of images which carry with them the accretion of specific identifications, intents and purposes, defined through the caption. It is a tension between the private history of a viewer who contemplates the image of a loved or hated one as a likeness without social mediation, and the viewer who views an image thrust into a social context and is expected to interpret it in a culturally specific way. Captioned images become public histories rather than private ones.

The “aura” of an unfamiliar image, an artifact of a time long past, can only be an intensely personal moment. The image of public history, the captioned image, is subject more intensely to the constraints of social space.

Illustration and Social Change

Illustrated magazines began just after the invention of photography, but photography was not used in the first decade of these publications. First on the scene was the Illustrated London News in 1842, quickly followed by Paris’ L’Illustration, and Leipzig’s Illustrirte Zeitung in 1843. The success of the Illustrated London News was phenomenal; the first issue reportedly sold 26,000 copies. Frank Leslie, the manager of the engraving department at the Illustrated London News, came to America in 1848. He founded Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1855.

Between 1855 and 1856, the Illustrated London News featured pictorial reportage of the Crimean War engraved from original photographs by Roger Fenton and others. The use of images in America, however, relied primarily on sketch artists sent out to cover the scene. In 1858, Frank Leslie sent his chief artist, Alan Berghaus, and staff artists Thomas Nast and Sol Eytinge to investigate a social wrong—“the swill milk trade” in New York City.

New York City milk customers had been told that their milk was provided by farms outside the city limits where cows were well cared for. However, the was not the case; the dairy cows were kept in filthy stables inside the heart of the city and fed with wastes from nearby distilleries, often causing illnesses when people consumed the milk. Written reports and exposés had been attempted before. In 1850, the Sunday Dispatch had printed a series of articles designed to drive the corrupt dairy owners out of business. They were unsuccessful. Leslie’s approach was different. He used pictures to place the artist, as witness, directly at the scene to increase believability.

Leslie published eight portraits of Berghaus working in the field. In one “Scene at the Offal Dock,” Berghaus is represented as sketching a veterinarian dissecting a cow. Showing the artist in the process of representing the scene of the crime lent an entirely new sense of “truth” to the scene, even if it was not entirely truthful. The names of the artists were kept secret, and the artists received threats of physical violence, which were duly depicted in imaginative drawings. Leslie attached the commentary to one, “There could be no reason for. . . [a] vicious assault [against the artist] other than the disinclination to have [the milk producers] low lazar-houses truly depicted by the unerring pencil.” This is perhaps the origin of the myth of the “on the spot” reporter who risks life and limb to reveal the “truth” (Pearson 86-87).

Leslie’s campaign was effective at shutting down and cleaning up the dairies. The accuracy of pictorial reporting began to be accepted as early as 1860. In contrast, Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, begun in 1857, used illustration primarily to supplement weekly novellas, perhaps following the examples set by book illustration which was increasing in popularity across this time. The profound impact of illustrated publishing, however, began to gather momentum at the advent of the civil war in 1861, the same year that New York state Senate passed a bill to prohibit the sale of swill milk.

Why?

* Just another scattered attempt to focus and write an introduction to my research project.

Examining the genealogy of captioning practice crosses many genre and institutional boundaries. The most important of these is the divide between aesthetic and practical praxis. Captions involve both accreditation and interpretive strategies in the collision of the popular and institutional spheres. The fundamental assumption I have made is that these captioning practices arise from motives. These motives reflect both an ontology and an ethics of communicative practice. Understanding the strategic and tactical functioning of captioning necessitates close study of intersection of the production of both aesthetic and evidentiary imagery, and the economic systems in which they are consumed.

However, I choose not to assume that there is an intrinsic quality to images which is either diluted or enhanced by the presence or absence of the caption. The combination of words and images is superadditive, and their content is not divisible. The emergence of graphic design and typography as a specialized field in the early twentieth century demonstrates that the play between type/text and image was of central importance in transmitting a message in an image-infused culture. This synergy did not arrive fully formed in the 1930s without history or precedent. Breaking the barrier between text and image was a complex negotiation of the relative function of each, and considerations of each media separately does not address the tension encountered when text and image are combined.

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