The analysis of the function of press photographs is, more often than not, approached via a back entrance, the image-caption relation, somewhat as though the photo itself, prior to receiving a caption, does not yet pose a problem, or does not yet 'make sense'.
This has all the appearances of a strategy of evasion. The main entrance, it seems, is a little intimidating, and as a result the study of photography is rarely tackled head on: although photography was invented well over 150 years ago, no theory of photography has developed, unless in very embryonic form, and, at any rate, incomparable in detail and rigour to the theory of the cinema, which, nevertheless, is a much younger art.
This anomaly in the history of theoretical research shows that photography, that familiar and disturbing, fascinating and elusive object, somehow resists theory, or, at any rate, those forms of theory which aim to confront it head on, and rigorously. For this reason I will, in what follows, attempt to speak about the press photograph itself, about its effect on the viewer, and about what is systematic in it prior to its relation with a written text, with the news report or the caption.
Working on a relatively large corpus of press photographs, one soon begins to sense that there is a true 'system' of the press photograph, a system sufficiently compressed and coherent to fit nearly the majority of images in the corpus. One cannot apprehend the press photograph naively, relegate it to 'reality', consider it a document, testimony, the capturing of an event which can neither be foreseen nor repeated. One must see it as belonging to the realm of the coded, of the sign system, the language, of what is repeatable and predictable. It constitutes a fairly rigorously coded representation of an event, of actuality, of history.
The system of photography is complex, at once well-defined (it leaves little room for mistakes) and unconsciously manipulated by its agents (photographers, their distribution agencies, picture editors, etc.). It is situated on the crossroads between the economic (distribution of the photos through agencies, circulation of the papers, the pseudo demand of the public) and the ideological (the selection of photos is always also determined by their potential to become vectors of ideology). Hence any research which aims at specific and concrete divisions of the responsibility for the final product is, ultimately, pointless and naive.
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Of this system we will isolate here, somewhat arbitrarily, and mainly by way of example, a few segments, some of the most visible cogwheels in the machinery.
The imaginary reporter
Even before it is linked to words, the press photograph produces meaning, constitutes a text, a discourse about the event is represents.
The photographic act (in the widest sense of the word: all the choices which play a role in this act) is already, in itself, productive of sense, constitutive of a 'speech act', even when no manipulation of specific photographic techniques can be discerned. However, the text (the written text) is, in the press, for reasons of ideological economy, the dominant and major channel of enunciation, the legitimate space of discourse, of opinion, of enunciatory power, and the task allocated to photography is, therefore, to simulate an anchorage of this written discourse in reality, as though to validate and legitimate it, to give it a foundation in Nature. The dominant function of press photography, then, is not to inform, but to simulate the connection between this chain of discourse and reality.
It follows that, in order to fulfil this function in a credible way, press photographs should never give rise to the suspicion that they are themselves a source of enunciation, should refrain from revealing too much of their own capacity to sustain an autonomous discourse. The intervention of the photographer should not be recognized for what it necessarily (which does not imply consciously) is, an act of enunciation.
From the necessity of this denial stems the imaginary figure of the reporter-photographer, a mythical figure carefully nurtured by the press and expressed in the well known formula 'our reporter was there'. This formula reduces the role of the photographer (and his ideological responsibilities) to the simple fact of being there, as the event unfolds, in the middle of actuality, or, better still, of danger. The photographer is neither the maker nor the master of the effect of sense produced by his images, he is simply the man who had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right moment, and his pressing the trigger of his camera at that moment is the only intervention for which he is given credit - an act of intuition and 'good reflexes' (the photographer is the man with 'good reflexes').
In this way the photographer is part of the transformation from event to image only as another kind of photosensitive emulsion, as a neutral medium. He is doubly absent - absent as participant in the real event (the myth of the neutrality and objectivity of the image) and absent as producer of the discourse of the image.
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All the misfortunes of this world
The obsession of press photographers with machine-gunning, in their turn, the victims of this world, and with choosing, wherever possible, anonymous and innocent victims, has often been noted. The press photograph, it seems, does not need to choose its field, it knows in advance where to find it - on the side of pity and good conscience, of a somewhat tearful humanism, on the side of the pathetic victim. In this way a semblance of consensus can be maintained, at little cost and without running any risks, around certain universal propositions, around those litanies, repeated endlessly and in total indifference to the uniqueness of each event: 'history makes its victims among the innocent; all conflict is criminal and absurd, all violence blind; war is an absolute evil; the fate of misfortune tenaciously pursues the innocent, etc. etc'
The press photograph, then, rallies behind the status quo and the established order, all in the name of humanism and commonsense, and it does so unanimously and with great determination. At the same time (but by omission, by never dealing with it) it pushes into the background the ordinary, invisible, and much less photogenic violence of the more permanent social relations.
But this perhaps somewhat blunt ideological interpretation still does not explain why photography has such an ineradicable preference for the victims, the rejects, the outcasts of society, and for corpses-a fascination which undoubtedly betrays a quasi-ontological affinity between photography and the pariah, the corpse, the obscene. Georges Bataille already sensed this when, in 1930, he wrote this about a photograph of a corpse: '...It seems that the desire to look at things leads, in the end, to disgust or dread...' It is as if the photographic gesture itself is profoundly attracted to morbidity and obscenity, as if, in order to account for reality, it must carve up reality, and enclose the fragments in a frame, thus delivering them to an eternity of frozen fixity, nailing them down under the look of the other for an interminable and inexhaustible contemplation.
The photograph, then, inclines towards the obscene insofar as it fixes, under our very eyes, and with all the irreducible and hallucinatory powers of its realism, what can only be endured as long as it will not last, as long as it can still be healed by time, forgotten again. Castration, suffering, the moment of death: these moments can not be stretched indefinitely without a transgression taking place, without resulting in stupor.
The wide angle lens
The photographic imaginary of the past few years has been transformed by the wide angle lens. The use of this lens now dominates press photography, and what might have been little more than a
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passing phase is now a well-established part of the deontological code of the reporter-photographer's profession. The telephoto lens, which had its hours of glory in press photography, is, today, barely acceptable: the flat space it constructs betrays that the image is stolen, that the reporter was hidden. The only role still left for the telephoto lens is in a certain sector of the press which deliberately plays on the voyeurism involved in its use, and for the few cases in which the photographer's prey is rare or unapproachable: Jackie Kennedy swimming in the nude, or de Gaulle in his park in Colombey. The wide angle lens, on the other hand, reinforces the myth of the reporter we described above, testifies to his physical presence in the space of the event, his being 'on the scene', along with the participants, and exposed to the same dangers.
The photographers themselves have developed an explicitly technical discourse to legitimate the use of the wide angle lens. This discourse is ideologically innocent: the wide angle lens is privileged because of its marvellous instrumentality in the difficult working conditions of the press photographer, more precisely, because of the great depth of field it affords (no need to fear imperfect focussing when shots have to be taken in the heat of action) and because of the wide field of vision it covers (one can take photos without looking through the viewfinder and later use only part of the shot). The wide angle lens, in this view, is simply the most operational lens available because it requires the least amount of adjustment: one should not be surprised, perhaps, that it so constantly produces the same image, regardless of the uniqueness of each event and each situation.
However plausible all this may seem, one must not lose from sight the fact that the wide angle lens, at the same time, takes charge of the representation, produces something which is already a discourse, and that it does so by virtue of its technical characteristics, an aspect on which the photographers' discourse of justification does not touch. The wide angle lens transforms the space of representation by creating an all-embracing, all-enveloping space, a space in which the viewer finds himself encircled, trapped, imprisoned. This is no longer the framed space, the segment of reality, relatively arbitrarily selected and then pinned down under the look of the viewer. This is a destabilizing space, strongly centripetal, luring the viewer into its centre by the spiralling of its forced perspective, drawing him into a rather vertiginous imaginary experience in relation to the photo.
At the same time the wide angle lens also imposes on the image a very marked effect of being 'more real than reality'. The impression of reality, a quasi-ontological aspect of all photographic representation, is intensified here, endowed with an effect of hyper-realism which allows the photo to 'give us more': more depth, more definition, more detail. The strange fascination of the wide angle photo is to quite some extent due to the fetishism of detail, and of a plenitude of representa-
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tion which is without discontinuity and without lack of clarity. But fetishes, one should not forget, are artefacts, surrogates, denials of reality.
The wide angle lens, then, exercises a formidable rhetorical power, and the press, always prepared to accommodate the demands of rhetoric, willingly becomes the accomplice of this power. It transforms space by rendering it more dynamic and so recasts the representation in a rhetorical mould. It deepens the space of the scene and so adds a dramatic perspective even before a motive is imposed on it. It accentuates and amplifies in advance any potential reading which might be imposed on it, biasing such readings towards the side of opposition, antithesis and pathos before they even exist. And as well as making space more emphatic and artificially dramatic, it also isolates and propels into the foreground of the image one or more of the participants of the event it represents, thus disengaging and desolidarizing them from history, in which they nevertheless took part, and turning them, instead, into symbols of a universal ‘human condition'.
The imaginary referent
The press photograph, then, removes us a considerable distance from reality, and its principal task, in the contemporary press, is not to inform. The true referent of the press image is not reality, which, by nature, differs from event to event, but the coded, the order of the imaginary. In a sense photographers admit this when they speak of the 'good' picture. It nevertheless remains remarkable that press photographs are so often and so systematically poor in informative value: their essential task is to administer the signs of the dominant (perhaps one should say ambient) iconic imaginary - signs which are already codified by the media culture of which they are part.
Press photographs rarely testify to the historical (and visual) uniqueness of events as they happen, irreducible to the past and the deja-vu: what the photographer calls a 'good picture' is in fact, even before the shot is taken, the superimposition of an imaginary figure on an actual scene, the expectation that reality will conform, even if only for 1/250th of a second, to the iconic imaginary already coded by the culture of the media, the hope that reality will turn out to be a 'good picture', that is, a picture which can be coded and decoded in advance, and which lacks the opacity that would require from the reader a different relation to the photo, beyond the mere effect of recognition.
Perhaps it is good to remember that for the mass of those who will not have direct experience of the event represented, the press photo functions as the only referent of this event, as a guarantee of its reality, despite the fact that the true referent of the photo belongs to the order of the imaginary. This paradox is at the very heart of the logic of simulation which rules the practice of press photography, a practice in
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which, at the same time, signs from the real are accumulated and reality is caused to become lost from view.
The press photograph, then, occupies a vacant place, that of the memory of the event, in a way which recalls Freud's description of the screen memory. It plays a game of hide and seek with that memory, occupying its space and so preventing it from coming to the surface. But the analogy is perhaps too simple: is it possible to imagine a photograph, even a very different one, which would be able to take charge of the real memory of the event?
'La photo et son discours' was first published in La Revue de Vintage, Dossier no.1-9, 1978-9. This translation is printed with acknowledgements to Service Audiovisual, Paris, and to Alain Bergala.
Theo van Leeuwin lectures in the School of English and Linguistics at Macquarie University.
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