Gavin Pherson

Professor Nelson Hancock

Art/Work: Documenting Cultural Production

10.06.10.

You See What I Mean: The Image as a Coercive Object

It is the invisible shape of all man’s growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and
of his civilization at its most sophisticated state. Form is the many faces of legend- bardic, epic,
sculptural, musical, pictorial, architectural; it is the infinite images of religion,; it is the expression and
the remnant of self. Form is the very shape of content. - Ben Shahn, 1957.

History does not arrive by way of immaculate conception. Within a globalized

intellectual culture where multifarious historical narratives are laid bare to perusal and

consumption as brands on a shelf, such naiveté is a decadent, if dangerous luxury. Rather,

history is a dynamic organism: it is subject to changes in mechanical and philosophical

technology, political attitudes, and artistic efforts, all which argue for historical supremacy in a

shambolic upheaval of written and visual information. In this essay I will explore the role of

photography as it relates to the campaign for historical fact, specifically through its role in

anthropologic and ethnographic study. I will argue that the Western supremacy of the visual

fact over the textual fact places the image in a privileged position on the field of historical

debate, and how this privilege may be employed to the reciprocal benefit of both visual and

textual ethnography.
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The Illusion of Closure.

The power of the photograph lies as much in what it denies the viewer as in what

information the image allows. This power is reinforced by photography’s unmatched

credential as a mechanized and thus necessarily objective medium, yet one which scope may

be delimited by a sensitive human hand; at once a warm personal testimony and a transparent

window of truth. It is precisely in the frame’s delimitation of possible information that

coherence is generated, and through this the possibility for the illusory purification of a messy

subject, slicing through history’s “seamless web”1 to create a compartmentalized, manageable

subuniverse. Through the method of limitation, the subject becomes capable of being

satisfied.

It is here that Shahn’s idea of form creates its own content, much in the same way that

the wording of a question suggests its answer. This is also where photography can be seen

using the same methods of truth-manufacturing as does ethnographic writing. As Robert

Thornton notes, “it is at the level of rhetoric rather than the level of descriptive detail that the

peculiarly ethnographic view and knowledge emerge”.2 Further simplified: style dictates

information.

The Real Thing.

1Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, "The History of English Law before the Time of
Edward I", The American Historical Review 1.1 (1895).
2 Robert J. Thornton,"The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism." Cultural Anthropology 3.3 (1988), 288.
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If we are to believe that photography and ethnography contain parallel methods of

manufacturing historical fact, then it is reasonable to suggest that the commonality of their

methods is derived from a commonality of objective. Indeed, both mediums center around the

mystic ideal of a singular truth, “the real thing”, and within this notion, the similarly religious

notions of a realizable purity, as well as a closed system of reference from which to view it.

Geoff Dyer highlights this notion of purity in the work of Walker Evans, whose use of

an elaborate “hidden camera” contraption attached to his person was the result of a dogged

pursuit of the real.3 Further, Szarkowski obsesses over the “artless honesty” in Russell Lee’s

careful works - careful, we may infer, to retain their everyday effortlessness while in the hands

of a calculating mind.4

Similarly, in ethnographic writing, the author obscures the “polluting effect of his

presence”5 by eliminating himself from the work entirely, in a gesture that can be easily

compared to post-production photo editing. Though, as with the photograph, the author’s

presence remains obvious by the work’s mere existence - the unavoidably self-referential

quality of the work being a failure common to both mediums. The picture or the narrative, of

course, has its origins in a subjective human mind. In applying the morality of the pure, what

3 Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 19.
4John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs; 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art,
(New York: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 134.
5Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography”, Anthropology and
Photography 1860-1920, (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1992), 76.
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“really is”, 6 both the photographer and the ethnographer push themselves into a futile game

where the only possibility of producing truth lies in the ability to deceive.

Dressing the Corpse.

In an effort to subvert this basic impossibility of total effacement of the artist from her

own work, both mediums employ the indexical tropes of the pictorial and“linguistic grid”7,

statistical evidence, and sub-classification through numbered order in hopes of disciplining

their subjects into the inarguable order of logic. Ample evidence exists towards locating the

shared disciplinary feature which invades photographic and ethnographic pursuit in their

attempts to control their wild subject. For photography, the mugshot presents a visual index

through which context may be destroyed, partitioning physical elements into manageable

segments.8 The ability to divide and conquer is the ability to control, and thus photography

demonstrates its punitive capacity. So too, the form of the ethnographic narrative employs a

method of partitioning various elements of a culture into autonomous categories (gender,

food, environment, etc.)9, and in so doing claims ownership over the study’s particular brand

of, for instance “Argentinian Agriculture”. It is ownership precisely because it is denatured

6 Thornton, 289.
7 Pinney, 90.
8 Pinney, 77.
9 Thornton, 300.
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from its natural whole, and hence made into a new object, branded, and canonized. “The text,

rather than the society, becomes the object of knowledge”.10

Structuring Certainty.

It is when photography an ethnography are employed to the same ends within a

specific project, however, that new possibilities begin to take shape beyond the above-stated

limitations. This lies greatly in the power of the word to command the viewer’s experience of

the photograph, which can then in turn impart its stronger resumé of inbuilt subjectivity to

the compliment of the ethnographic text. As Sontag explains, “the photographer’s intentions

do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the

whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it”.11 In this way, the

photographic image is pliable, and submits to the authority of accompanying text when

offered.

As with war photography, an image of horrific violence may simultaneously represent

to different viewers a necessary evil, a tragedy, a righteous punishment, or the meaningless

failure of violence. Janet Malcolm singles-out one such photograph by Don McCullin, where

the photographer’s flagrantly carnographic composition lifts the image into the realm of the

unreal, “[failing] utterly to convince” even amidst the most pungently clear iconography. It is

only with the inclusion of McCullin’s text, “the room was warm with the smell of blood. I was

10 Thornton, 300.
11 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador Press, 2003), 39.
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really scared and I tried not to look at their faces. I tried not to tread in the blood”, that the

image is restrained enough by specificity to become “real”.12

Situated within the context of an ethnographic archive, the photograph is capable of

achieving a more certain meaning through textual mediation, thereby bringing the photograph

closer into the realm of what is. Language, “erases the undecidable nature of the image”,13

which allows for the preservation of its meaning within a given context. Instead of being read

eternally anew in the present, the photograph’s meaning is strengthened within the

ethnographic study, and the ethnographic study is strengthened by photography’s capacity to

expand its microcosmic “whole” without the ability to betray it.

Conclusion.

The interlacing of photographic and textual images within the sphere of ethnographic

study provides for the possibility of a more powerful composite piece. Proof of this notion can

be found in the ever-narrowing gap between the two mediums as ethnography absorbs the

visual language of photography as the anthropologist prepares herself as a negative upon

which information might be passively recorded, processed, and re-presented as a positive

outcome.14 Likewise, photography regurgitates ethnographic dialectic techniques in, for

instance, the photo essay. It is the two medium’s shared desire to transform the fleeting

12 . Janet Malcolm, “The View from Plato's Cave,” The New Yorker (October 18, 1976), 84.
13 Pinney, 90.
14 Pinney, 82.
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everyday into the historically permanent that enmeshes this relationship so tightly. Lee’s work

is particularly direct in this regard, his frugal hand attempting to align eternal truth (the

grooming, bathroom scene) with the historically specific (Depression-era Middle America).

Robert Frank’s photos work exquisitely within the tropes of ethnographic dialectics,

transforming small, fragmented morsels of truth (tailfins, jukeboxes) into “a coherent

iconography for our time”, a language.15 Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein

submit to history an irrefutable directory of stark, decontextualized images which neatly

catalog a woman’s terminal illness, becoming experts in the geography of her body.16

It is clear that photography and ethnography are not simply working independently

towards mutual goals, but are seeking friendship, stealing ideas, and continuously negotiating

in and out of homogeneity.

15 Szarkowski, 134-176.
16 Malcomn, 75-77.