Read Alan Sekula’s essay ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’ in Evans & Hall (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader.
Note down your response to this essay – and your thoughts on the discussion of globalisation
Wikipedia [accessed 23/12/19] defines the term globalization becoming popular in the area of social science in the 1990s. It is derived from the word globalize, which refers to the emergence of an international network of economic systems. ‘Globalization or globalisation is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. As a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalization is considered by some as a form of capitalist expansion which entails the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. Globalization has grown due to advances in transportation and communication technology. With the increased global interactions comes the growth of international trade, ideas, and culture’.
According to David Bates (2016) ‘The Key Concepts of Photography’ and the chapter entitled ‘Global Photography’ p189-210 ‘the globalization of photographic images and the locations in which they are displayed are now an even more fundamental issue in the way we see our own lives and those of others’. Bates then poses two fundamental questions:
- What role does photography play in globalization? and
- How, what and why does the circulations of photographic images around the world contribute to globalization and what are its implications?
In order to address these questions Bates starts with the three stages of globalization of photography:
- Pre – photographic conditions: the use of perspective in painting and the development of optics and the camera obscura
- The globalization of photography – the spread of photography, increase in technology and industrialization.
- The reconfiguration of photographic values in the computer – Use of internet (WWW) to store and send images around the world. Mass circulation of data.
Bates highlights a number of issues with globalization one of which is the possibility of stereotypes and how images can be used for political means. He goes on to highlight that there are a number of important questions to be asked when viewing images that represent people and their cultures, these include the ‘how, where, why and in what circumstances things are represented?’
Bates cites three problems with globalization of photography:
- Hierarchies of differences;
- Global Sameness;
- Homogeneity of the world.
It is these problems that Bates considers leads to, ‘ the destruction of local meanings, practices, culture and local space.’ There is the potential danger in the free movement of images according to Bates with him asking, ‘How far does a message addressed to global masses have to strip away recognition of diversity for a simplified unity.’ According to Bates there is a clear lack of quality control, a position I agree with. He goes on to write: ‘The sheer quantity of digital photographic pictures in circulation, have changed the popular consensus of photographic aesthetic values.’
If we continue this theme and look at the work by Susan Sontag (1977) in ‘On Photography’ she states that when we view an image of a particular place or situation it takes away from the experience/impact of seeing it for the first time. She claims that when we eventually see it, we are not as impressed or shocked as we might have been if we hadn’t seen the photograph, we have become desensitised.
‘Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world; and the two uses are complementary. Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much further away. It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others – allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation.’
Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ remains one of the cornerstones of photography criticism, as does Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’ (1980). Both books, along with Sontag’s later work ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, question the idea that graphic photographs of horror, atrocity or suffering can provoke the viewer into political action in a possible global sense.
Sontag claims, that photography depersonalizes ‘our relation to the world’. The problems that certain communities are protected from are the very problems they are fascinated by in photographs. Sontag contrasts the desire to know all things in American photography with the limits placed on photography in China, where parts of objects are not photographed and only one direct presentation style is acceptable. Sontag describes how images are necessary in a capitalist society to make people buy more, the images themselves becoming the consumable object. As people consume the images, they expect, want, and demand more images in an attempt to fill in reality that has been “depleted.” Sontag concludes that less photography, not more, would make images more inherently valuable to people.
Contemporary photojournalism seems to be problematic, both in the increasingly explicit nature of its images of suffering and degradation and its role in a world where, as Susie Linfield (2010) (The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence) puts it, ‘we no longer have the same kind of moral and political framework’ that governed our responses to the war photography of the past.
Linfield’s critical review ranges wide, from images of the Holocaust to photographs from Abu Ghraib. She covers a number of emotional issues, ‘the onslaught of images from the Muslim world that celebrate suicide bombings, beheadings and other forms of barbarism’. She also writes passionately about Robert Capa, one of the most influential and admired war photographers, of the last century – though she cites Capa’s most famous photograph, ‘The Falling Soldier’, as the “classic war image, as well as the classic anti-war image, of the twentieth century without alluding to its contested context. Capa biographer Richard Whelan refuted the suggestion it had been staged, as many suspected, but concluded he was snapping soldiers ‘fooling around’ for the camera when a sniper’s bullet killed Federico Borrell García, who ‘stood up for what was intended to be a heroic photograph’.
Alan Sekula’s essay ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’ in Evans & Hall (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader.
The Sekula essay is based on his analysis of a book of photographs of the mining region of Cape Breton between the 1948 and 1968) by Leslie Sheddon, a professional commercial photographer. It is claimed that Sheddon took images for both private and commercial use. As Sekula states “in his range of commissions we discover the limits of economic relations in a coal town”, (p.181). Suggesting that the archive of images has both a historic and social importance.
‘The aim of the essay is to try to understand something of the relationship between the photographic culture and economic life.’ (p.181). In terms of the economic impact of the archive Sekulla asks, ‘How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships?’ (p.183). Sekula is interested in the power images and archives. He explores what is a photographic archive and how it should be interpreted when used in a book for example. There are many forms of archive; the family holiday snaps to a formal collection within a museum. Archives, he states are the property of an individual or institution and ‘their ownership may not coincide with authorship… and/or control and ownership of the archive may not reside in the same individual’
An archive can be sold for example, at auction and collectors often buy bundles of images but as Sekula explains ‘..pictures in archives are often literally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs. New owners are invited, new interpretations are promised’ (p.183). Therefore ‘the possibility of meaning is liberated from the actual contingencies of use.’ Any one purchasing or using an archive image not restrained to the original meaning. Images from different periods, collections, purposes can be compiled into a new “series” and then presented to “new” audiences, the original visual meanings can be ‘homogenised out of existence’ (p.184).
Sekula highlights that ‘conventional wisdom would have that photographs transmit immutable truth’ and that ‘meaning is always directed by layout, captions, text as well as site and mode of presentation’. (p. 184). An archive therefore has ‘both residual and potential use’. An archive has a use that the current owner has determined but it can also take on a new and different meaning either determined by the current owner or someone who might take over or purchased the right to that archive. Sekula goes on to concludes, that ‘archives are not neutral; they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of a language.’
When an archive is removed from any historical context they can become aesthetic objects. This puts the archive in the realm of art and this seems to concern Sekulla. He lists the two ways that the archives of the coalminers might be used for artistic purposes:
- Romanticism or subjectivism; and
- Post-romantic.
In one the author photographer of the image is considered to be of some importance and in the other is not taken into consideration. In one the photographer retains creative control over the archive, in the other the collector, connoisseur or viewer has creative control over the image.
In the case of post – romantic; any archive that is discovered is known as a ‘found object’. Photographs such as these can become what Sekulla describes as ‘objects of secondary voyeurism, which preys upon, and claims superiority to, a more naïve primary act of looking.’
Sekulla claims “The hidden imperatives of photographic culture drag us in two contradictory directions.”
- ‘Science’ and a ‘myth’ of objective truths; and
- ‘Art’ and a cult of subjective experience on the other.
Sekulla believes that photography is both scientific and artistic, depending on the discourse is based on. He notes because institutions have accepted photography as fine art, they have used technology as a medium of art. This impacts creativity in a way that Sekulla details as ‘the survival and deformation of human creative energies under the impact of mechanization.’ Sekulla writes: ‘Photography has served as a tool of industrial and bureaucratic power.’
Sekulla believes that it is time to move away from the biased ‘art-historicist’ and look at how photography impacts society. He wrote ‘the problem is one of materialist culturalism history rather than art history.”
Bibliography
Research
Books
Bates, David (2009) Photography: The Key Concepts: London: Bloomsbury
Linfield, Susie (2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press
Sontag, Susan (2010) On Photography. London, Penguin Group.
Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
Websites accessed 23/12/2019
https://photolangelle.org/2014/09/globalization-issues/
https://www.thenation.com/article/thin-artifact-photography-and-suffering/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war?verso=true
Michele Usher 