'The Image', And Internet Photography Thursday June 15, 2006
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together
Tim Berners-Lee
The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario’. Essentially this is a question of ‘amnesia’. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives have become a function of their images; imagination has turned into hallucination (Willem Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10)
Photography has become a model for our consciousness (Sontag in Wells 2003: 64)
The internet we know today was initially a decentralised network for military intelligence, designed to withstand localised attacks. Computer-based information was stored across many locations, and was not jeopardised if one or more of those locations were destroyed. In its second evolutionary stage it became an agora for genteel academia to exchange ideas, messages and research. Then finally, British academic Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML and was arguably the founder of the World-Wide Web, the internet medium popularised in the 1990s. Photography has been implicated in the digital revolution firstly by the rapid development and deployment of digital equipment, and secondly in relation to its deployment and dissemination on the internet. The major stock agencies, Getty and Corbis in particular, have within a few years established themselves as a domineering influence within commercial photography. They are a demonstrative embodiment of Berners-Lee’s ‘universal sharing of information’ and a primary example of contemporary media practice, within commercial parameters. This is not, however, an illustration of a visionary ‘dream’ so much as a problematic situation with cultural, psychological and photographic implications.
Submitting photographs to Getty is, I suggest, worthy of analysis and consideration in philosophical, psychological and sociological terms; as a situation for critical cultural theory, in addition to its practical and professional ramifications. In that respect, I am more interested in a top-down analysis consistent with the level of intellectual observation of Barthes, Sontag, Benjamin and others, rather than a bottom-up consideration of working practice and photographic issues. I concur with Wells that “theory needs to take into account specificities of purpose and context but also to transcend this” (Wells 2003: 8). There is, I suggest, a dialectic between the capacity and practice of thought and the configurations and routines of photographic work, and it is vital to separate the two.
In the 1930s, the photographer Kertesz had work rejected by Life magazine on the basis that it was too eloquent. His accomplished photographs were not suitable for what was, in effect, a medium or a platform with either a restricted or an inferior intellectual level. This has two ramifications.
Firstly, it poses questions about censorship although those photographic issues have been debated repeatedly and investigated for many decades, notably and recently with images of human suffering and atrocity: thus in the 1990s Gulf War, the world witnessed a green computer-screen campaign depicting the technological operations of the US military, like a 1980s VDU game. This was accompanied with similarly technical terms like ‘collateral damage’ testifying not to death, mutilation and misery, but to chess-like manoeuvres against an abstract and anonymous enemy. With few exceptions, press photography was similarly limited; when The Observer featured their image of the dead and cadaverous Iraqi solider in a tank, it provoked outrage:
Secondly – and this is my primary interest which fits into an academic rather than a professional discourse – there are wider considerations in the relationship between reality, comprehension and ‘consciousness’ and how photography is implicated in this, with Getty Images as a central concern. Censorship is relevant here but only describes part of the situation, not its wider psychological implications. The dialectic between thinking and photography is unbalanced in the sense that photographic practice has to fit into accepted parameters, while your concepts, ideas and objectives may not.
If photography expresses ideas and perceptions, the hegemonic centralisation of the industry is likely to be psychologically deterministic, defining what is said and how it is said. Getty and Corbis offer a substantial quantity of images previously obtained from commissioned photographers enjoying considerable freedom. It’s easier to minimise Quark Express and find the image you need from the internet, than recruit and pay someone to visit a location according to a brief. This industrialisation exemplifies Berners-Lee’s idealism, but may damage photographic culture making it a capitalist enterprise divorced from creative individual expression. It is, admittedly, ameliorated by the scale of the agencies – the large quantity of images available, increasing every day, makes it increasingly likely you will find an interesting and relevant image as required. However, the other part of this equation is the experience of the Getty or Corbis photographer, and the implications of supplying images to the agencies: a relationship predicated on arbitrary cultural and psychological factors. As a photographer you have to decode their aims, objectives and style, and then adopt or imitate it. This is sociologically problematic as a means of production amenable to Marxist criticism, and is likely to be psychologically deterministic which I will examine shortly.
Getty and Corbis were founded on business acquisition and development rather than photographic passion, purchasing stock and existing companies that a) were competition and b) possessed valuable knowledge and skills, and Getty in particular has a business model that does not recognise the intrinsic value of a photograph:
It was not about the value of photography and image assets, but simply the cash they threw off. Getty is firm that this philosophy has been the key to the whole business: “We do not value an image, we value the business. Images do not have any intrinsic value, or rather very few images do. Maybe the great image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt up in the air probably has an intrinsic value. The images that you and I see every day are only valuable in so far as they get into magazines…or into newspapers or into advertising. We value the business based on the cash that they generate.” Klein and Getty found stock photography to be not only a good business but a great business, and could not believe the margins it generated. Getty says: “It is a fabulous business. I am still kind of amazed at what sort of business it is. This is a business with 75 per cent gross margins and a business that is worldwide in its applications. It is a business in which we are the leaders by some distance and have a very important position in the industry.” Getty Images now has annual sales approaching US$500 million.
The opposite of this is the photographic culture demonstrated at photoblogs. The internet thus facilitates both photographic capitalism and personal expression and in that respect, Berners-Lee was right: it mirrors all aspects of society. However, photoblogs have an almost non-existent presence in commercial photography, although www.flickr.com is a possible exception by accommodating individual creative expression, the photoblog ‘stream’, within its corporate environment conceivably useful for the mainstream media: see the Online Journalism Review at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051115glaser/ produced by the Centre for Communication at the University of Southern California, and editorial here for examples. These articles describe the media use of Flickr. With thousands of people updating their streams from around the world using ‘tags’ to enable fast and efficient searches, it’s likely some of the images will be newsworthy.
The conflict between corporate-media control and the auteur photographer is not a new situation; part of the inspiration for Magnum was to maintain production and editorial control over photographic images. However with the arrival of the internet, and Getty and Corbis in particular, the conflict between auteur and editor-market is changed and amplified. As “the article”: http://corporate.gettyimages.com/en-us/media/highlightfiles/EuroBusiness_08-02.pdf notes, Getty wanted “something from nothing” and was unconcerned with the photographic image per se: the epitome of capitalist industrialisation, the opposite of photographic integrity.
Sontag argued that “photography has become a model for our consciousness” (lecture reproduced in Wells 2003: 64) and the truth it expresses has “a very narrow relation to the needs of human understanding” (Sontag 1979: 112). The latter remark achieves two things. Firstly, despite Sontag’s appreciation of photography she nonetheless articulates a critical viewpoint locating it as a questionable intellectual practise. David Bate (Wells 2003: 442) echoes and supports this position, whereby photographic education should instil and retain a “critical distance”. Secondly, and in amplification of this relevant to my own analysis, Sontag delineates how photography is separate from thinking, that it’s a dialectic rather than a unified process, where “understanding” and photography are differentiated. The link between an image and what you say about it is unstable. Sontag enjoyed photography, but had no illusions about its ultimate value and simultaneously developed a robust critique of its characteristic limitations. If we locate these remarks alongside the visionary comments of Tim Berners-Lee, Getty Images can be deconstructed here in critical theory terms beyond their significance within professional practise. On May 16 2006 searching for Getty in Google here calls up the following information – the search engine tells you that “Getty Images is the leading provider of imagery and film to communications professionals around the world. Our visual content appears each day in newspapers”. This description indicates not only their prominence in the market place but also, on a related matter, their importance in terms of creating and defining how we perceive the world. In the Editorial section, they delineate seven sub-categories of News, Sport, Entertainment, Archival, Features, Portrait and Publicity. Within Portrait, Publicity and Entertainment, nearly half of their Editorial section, you find many examples of what Daniel Boorstin (see below) described as a pseudo-event. We are told for example:
Pop sensation, Rihanna relaxes while playing some of her fans as part of the latest Xbox Live Game with Fame. During the game, Rihanna chatted with countless fans via Xbox Live prior to celebrating the release of her sophomore album A Girl Like Me at her official album release party on April 22, 2006 at the Hilton, Barbados. (Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images for Xbox)
For Boorstin, a pseudo-event is a “synthetic novelty” (1961: 21) where for example, “the Grand Canyon itself (is) a disappointing reproduction of the Kodachrome original” (ibid: 25). It’s generated within the media, has no meaning or validity outside it, and this “power to make a reportable event is thus the power to make experience (ibid: 10). His book begins:
ADMIRING FRIEND: “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there”
MOTHER: “Oh, that’s nothing – you should see his photograph!” (ibid: 7).
A photograph of Rihanna playing a computer game exemplifies not only a pseudo-event, a pretty young lady manufactured into a “pop sensation” and her banal activity further manufactured into a significant moment (not a decisive moment), but also, I suggest, the fundamental ethos of Getty concerned as they are with the market value of images and nothing else. This is similar to paparazzi photography, satisfying and appealing to a popular interest in the same way MacDonalds satisfies and appeals to our need for food. Their photographers may not stalk and prowl around the celebrities but they produce images with the same intellectual level, titillating interest but providing very little nourishment: the pseudo-event, photographing something to thereby manufacture it, with cultural implications:
We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there always be more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image (Boorstin 1961: 6).
With their powerful commercial presence it’s likely that Getty is not only a “realistic mirror” of society as Berners-Lee envisioned, but also a determining factor in the future of photography and a determining source for the manipulation and generation of pseudo-event culture. I suggest Jean Baudrillard deserves robust criticism rather than fashionable acceptance, because he employs a totalising pessimism implying that the ‘simulation’ is all we can know. Thus Sontag says about him:
Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people like to feel they can anticipate their own experience…Jean Baudrillard…claims to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now; it seems to be something of a French speciality (Sontag 2003: 98).
His failure, I suggest, lies in presenting his thesis in the form of a descriptive this-is-how-it-is rhetoric, as opposed to the discerning earlier critique of Boorstin. However, he does present some apposite ideas where the ‘simulation’ is central:
Everyday, political, social, historical, economic, etc., reality has already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so that we are now living entirely within the aesthetic hallucination of reality (Baudrillard 1993: 74).
The meaning of the image, he said, has developed through the following stages:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (Poster 1998: 168).
The final stage is characteristic of our contemporary world.
Cartier-Bresson used to say photography was a form of language, where you “place the head, the eye and the heart in the same line of sight” (Montier 1996: 206). Conceived and practised as such photography has an integrity that, arguably, his accomplished collection represents. The generation, dissemination and promulgation of the pseudo-event at Getty arguably shows a lack of this integrity, whereby some part of the equation is missing. Why are these photographs taken, why are they valued, and why are they published? Pretty young ladies appeal to the eye, but there is little heart or head in that kind of image, and the ‘line of sight’ presumably points straight towards tabloid pages or gossip magazines. In one sense this reflects innocuous market demands, but in another sense it exemplifies pseudo-event culture and the generative role photography plays within it.
Photography has been evaluated in terms of realism and expressive aesthetics, and if where and how the two categories merge. The pioneers in the 1800s initially copied the painterly style, then later photographers realised this was not necessary and possibly undesirable. Famous remarks like “from today, painting is dead” and “the camera never lies” underlie this unstable and variable relationship to either representational depiction, or artistic interpretation. I suggest the idea I’ve delineated here in relation to Getty is a third factor worthy of equal consideration: how photography is implicated in the maintenance and generation of a cultural pseudo-reality. As Barthes notes, with photography “the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” (Barthes 1993: 24), and the photographer’s intentions concern myths aimed at “reconciling the photograph with society” (1993: 28).
The photographic image is embedded within wider parameters than the merely professional, as part of a semantic field amenable to cultural analysis. It can express a pseudo-idea, i.e. generate aspects of thinking and consciousness that fails to exist without the medium. Internet photo agencies are especially prone to this, when they are concerned purely with market and monetary value. They are not intelligent institutions, expressing what photography theorist Willem Flusser describes as reflective thinking:
Thought is, therefore, the process of grasping which expands into the world of bodies in order to devour them. The methods of this devouring process are science and technology. But there is another direction in which thought can move, namely the opposite direction. In this motion thought turns against itself in order to devour itself, i.e. to understand itself and modify itself. The term “reflection” shows where this kind of thought moves to, namely into the direction opposite to advancing thought. The German term “Nachdenken”, (which means “to think behind or after”) shows how this kind of thought works, namely as a check on thinking. And finally the Czech term “rozmysleni”, (which means “analytical thinking”) shows the result of this kind of thought, namely thought dismembered. Reflection is therefore the inverse motion of thought, wherein thought is being controlled and decomposed into its elements. The method of reflection, which is the devouring of thought by itself, is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore exactly the contrary of science and technology
Photography, as a science-technology based art, can manifest as a devouring devoid of intelligence whereby the photographer is not asked to think, he is asked to reproduce, both illustrating prevailing themes and generating them, regardless of their value. For a working photographer the challenge is to articulate a private intellectual resistance, while professionally engaging with whatever needs and expectations the market place has. I would have happily taken shots of super pop-star Rihanna, if they were worth a few thousand or a few hundred pounds. However I maintain that photography has a dialectical relationship with thinking, and is not an adequate or even a suitable container for it, and in that respect it’s both possible and desirable to clarify for oneself what functions and tendencies photography has in the contemporary world.
BibliographyBarthes, Roland 1993: Camera Lucida, Vintage
Baudrillard, Jean 1993: Simulations London:Semiotext{e}
Poster, Mark 1998: Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Stanford University Press
Boorstin, Daniel 1961: The Image, Atheneum
Flusser, Willem 2000: Towards a Philosophy of Photography Reaktion Books
Montier, Jean-Pierre 1996: Henri Cartier-Bresson And The Artless Art, Thames & Hudson
Sontag, Susan 1979: On Photography, Penguin
Sontag, Susan 2003: Regarding The Pain of Others, Penguin
Wells, Liz 2003 (ed.): The Photography Reader, Routledge
www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html
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