Can I Get a Witness?

There is something positively modern about the increasing reliance on the witness. Reflecting on some of my research, I’ve come to some conclusions I want to jot down. A framework that I don’t have the time to justify, and yet, I don’t want to let slip away.

From the birth of journalism in eighteenth century England, there has been an emphasis on the “true account” provided either by a participant or a supposed close confidant of one of the principles. One of the guiding tropes for veracity in this period is the fact that such an account should be spectacular or unbelievable. The more far-fetched the tale, the more likely it was to be true. But underneath, the usually anonymous witness of supposed credibility gave credence to the claim.

From the onset of the modern period, the artist increasingly appears within his own frame—as a witness to the scene which he depicts. The ability of art to universalize experience begins to rest on the skill of its practitioners to reduce the inessential, and present only the spectacular to the viewers gaze. The birth of the heroic, individualized, artist is reflected in the role of the artist as reporter on the human condition. The artist does not only transcribe reality, but he makes it communicate a story which might inform and educate, provided that he is a reliable witness.

Captioning practice of the time reflects this primacy of the artist, and places in dubious stature the copyist (engraver) who makes possible the multiplication of the image. Removal of the intermediary stage of interpretation became increasingly important in the technologically focused nineteenth century. There was a belief in the transparency of nature, of its ability to give up its secrets. If every reader were able to see directly the connections between humanity and nature, then the world would have access to nature’s harmony. The spectator would become witness.

But there was no such belief in transparency regarding the public’s ability to interpret the evidence presented in images. The nineteenth century is at once the age of the image, as well as the age of the well-meaning interpreter who extrapolates what is thought to be “obvious” in such images. Captioning is aggregate; the image is the jewel which requires just the right setting to display its brilliance.

As images proliferated in every form of publication in the nineteenth century, the attribution of the images to a trustworthy artist was displaced. The captioning of mechanically produced images in the nineteenth century (particularly photographs) becomes less a matter of attributing them to a reliable witness, and more a matter of creating just the right context to deliver the message. The transparency of the images themselves is not suspect. The witness becomes not the creator behind the page, but the spectator in front of it.

Bewick’s Thumbprint

The first mechanical process used for illustration was the woodcut, developed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, however, copper or steel plate engraving became the norm. The drawback was that they required a different press to print compared to conventional type. Illustrations were printed separately from the primary text, often by a completely different printer. Sometimes these illustrations were hand colored after printing.

The example above comes from the 1811 edition of Thomas Aikenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination. It provides a good illustration of captioning practice at the turn of the eighteenth century. The dominant convention was to list the artist (del.) in the lower left corner. In this case, initial design was by Thomas Stothard. Following the normal western eye-path (left-to-right) the next information you encounter is the name of the engraver, I. Neagle (sculp.). Underneath both of these bits of authorizing information is an interpretive caption that states what the viewer should see in the illustration: “The Village Matron, round the blazing hearth, Suspends the infant-audience with her Tales, Breathing astonishment!”

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Evidence

Documentary photography traded on the status of the official document as proof and inscribed relations of power in representation that were structured like those earlier practices of photo documentation: both speaking to those with relative power about those who were positioned as lacking, as the “feminized” Other, as passive and pathetic objects capable only of offering themselves up to a benevolent, transcendent gaze—the gaze of the camera and the gaze of the paternal state. But in its mode of address, documentary transformed the flat rhetoric of evidence into an emotionalized drama of experience that worked to effect an imaginary identification of viewer and image, reader and representation, which would suppress difference and seal them into paternalistic relations of domination and subordination on which documentary’s truth effects depended. (12)

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation

Tagg’s comment is typical of the postmodern response to 1930s documentary. The focus of study has been on the institutions that fostered a mode or style of representation thought to be oppressive. The practitioners themselves, unfortunately, lived to hear it. In a sense, the problem lies in the use of representation as a mode of communication. Communication requires motive, and the motives (from the point of view of most contemporary theory) were hidden and insidious. Only aesthetically focused photographers like Walker Evans have remained safe from attack. The “imaginary identification of viewer and image, reader and representation” are sanctioned when that identification is aesthetic or poetic, and suspect when it is political or rhetorical.

However, the boundary between the poetic and the rhetorical is notoriously indistinct, subject to the vagaries of taste. Overtly political aesthetics such as that of Leni Riefenstahl are hailed as transcending their political beginnings, whereas the work of the New Deal photographers is seen as promoting a paternalistic view of government, which has little redeeming aesthetic value. Such considerations become quickly heated matters of discussion, which avoids a deeper issue—how do visual works act to facilitate communication? Why do pictures have such a sustained appeal as evidence that seems true, compared to the prose which appears around them?

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Doctrines of Use

Who knew I could use Emanuel Swedenborg and Karl Marx in the same essay? I wrote this bit yesterday as a part of a proposal, and thought it would be a fun little piece to throw on the blog-pile. I’ve been knee-deep in Roland Barthes for a while, and though he isn’t referenced in this section, I’m getting there.

There are profound differences between photographic theorist John Tagg and Roland Barthes. Tagg’s writing on New Deal photography represents the sort of collapse of difference that has long troubled me about Marxist analysis. There are people involved any time a photograph is made—not institutions, not ideologies, but people. Barthes is unique among most photographic theorists because his response is so individual. Though I don’t agree with Barthes about everything, I am closer to his side than Tagg’s.

However, it was interesting to write this and discover, through writing, that I think there is an odd point of convergence between the fans of transcendental aesthetics and Marxists—the idea that real meaning is hidden.

Even thinking of this in the light of the media barrage that I still can’t turn off (though I did avoid turning on the news for at least one full day), I begin to realize that evaluating the war for either side—the humanists or the pragmatic materialists who insist that it is about oil— share the same thing. They share a common ground in the assertion— It can’t be what it is, it just can’t.

I promised myself I’d quit writing about war crap. So here it is.

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