Meta Photographic Themes: Sex, Tragedy, And The Other · Monday December 18, 2006
Take a simple but powerful technology, enabling you to make a 2D visual record of anything and everything. Make it affordable and widely available, and what do you get? I’m curious about what I call the meta-themes of photography, the common and ubiquitous subjects that people pursue.
Traditionally, we have such classical photography genres as portrait, landscape, art, travel and documentary. And yet, as Charlotte Cotton suggests in The Photograph As Contemporary Art (2004), these are arbitrary and may have an alternate form. These are the genre categories she proposes:
·If this is art
·Once upon a time
·Deadpan
·Something and nothing
·Intimate life
·Moments in history
But this itself remains at a similar semantic level as the traditional categories, whereas the meta-themes penetrate to a deeper level encompassing a critique and a philosophy of both photography and human nature.
First, and both easily dealt with and easily dismissed, we have the meta theme of sex photography. Sociologists have noted a constant and predictable link between technology and pornography/erotica; whenever the former enables the latter, it inevitably will. Victorian photographers discovered this, and there’s an under-documented history of ‘gentleman’s entertainment’ that includes the depiction of naked African women supposedly of anthropological value, which doesn’t fool our 2006 sensibility for a moment. Indeed, there’s a worrying link between colonialism and sexual exploitation, consistent with Sontag’s remark that “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (On Photography 1977: 7). Some years ago, while studying, I used to earn part time money doing garden maintenance. My main employer lived in a delightful centuries-old cottage directly below the South Downs, and it was pleasant to mow, weed, and trim the hedges in Sussex summer-time. I even enjoyed it in winter, although there was less to do. He was a retired Foreign Office civil servant, who’d spent his life ruling over Malaysian people in the dying days of the Empire. Some of his attitudes were very unpleasant; I remember his support for the Tianammen Square murders, and his support for whom he called “our Prime Minister”, spoken with a voice dripping with arrogant imperious attitude. And you will remember who was in office in 1989. On one occasion, and I’d rather he hadn’t, he confided in me that after the rigours of government service, what one needed was “sexual relief”. I wondered exactly what form that took, and wonder now if it fitted the subject I’m considering: colonial exploitation.
In addition to the explicit forms we find further evidence of the sex theme in fashion, music and entertainment photography, eg with celebrities, where accompanying themes – commerce and fun – are arguably subordinate to the more primal interest. In his 1923 book Crystallising Public Opinion Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmud Freud, described the manipulation of mass consciousness by appealing to unconscious psychology. He called this “the engineering of consent” where you appeal to inner desires and link them to products, ideologies or personalities. A photograph may thus ostensibly refer to music or clothes or a so-called celebrity person, but trace it back psychologically and what you find is the sex instinct. To whatever extent Freud’s observations were correct, this will necessarily apply as the cultural layer of his personal psychology model.
Second, and at a similarly primal level, we have the meta theme of tragic photography most exemplified in the imagery of war. This subject was a substantial component of my recent Photography MA, not without reason. There was a 2005 conference on photographing atrocity at Leeds University, and Sontag’s Regarding The Pain Of Others was a key text. It’s a troubling subject, motivated primarily by humanitarian concern when we see human beings subjected to appalling abuse and death in the most heinous circumstances, but where its pursuit raises concerns about voyeurism. When is it appropriate, and when it is it not, to photograph atrocity?
Finally – although I may reflect on this some more and expand my ideas further – we have the meta-theme of the Other. It’s a core idea within sociology, the fascination for what and whom is radically different from oneself; it’s a meta photographic theme that encompasses others – sexual interest, humanitarian interest in suffering and more – but is itself more abstract and fundamental. David Bailey and others did it with glamorous fashion and exotic locations; Bill Brandt did it with depictions of British class, and Hine, Lange, and many others since have portrayed people and circumstances we don’t normally see which may have political implications. Diane Arbus, in particular, made it her speciality: portraying strange people on the sociological, psychological and sometimes the physical borderline.
All of this is what sociologists call the Other. One of my first introductions to this theme, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was the Brassai work Paris At Night (1933). It concerns the “secret, suspicious world, closed to the uninitiated (where)….you may not be served, you may even be asked to leave, especially if you try to take pictures…(full of) the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths” (Brassai in Photography Speaks 2004: 146). Brassai “was eager to penetrate this other world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts” (ibid). All of which is the Other; probably the most encompassing meta-theme of all, inherently related to the general propensities and psycho-technological characteristics of photography. Photography serves a psychological purpose, acting as a container for thoughts and feelings in a similar way to extreme cinema. When we see violence and evil, we both recoil from it and are simultaneously fascinated: hence the substantial and deserved acclaim for The Godfather, The Sopranos, and the work of Martin Scorcese. It has a reliable sheen of glamour; an attraction with no real life parallel, where its low-life real people deserve incarceration for their crime and cruelty. But put it on the silver screen, represent it with charismatic and good-looking actors, and we are seduced. Mikey in the Godfather, bad-boy Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Tony Soprano: we enjoy watching them, identify with them, in some ways like and admire them.
Film, like the tragic play Aristotle accounted for with his notion of catharsis, is a container for experiencing thoughts, feelings and behaviour both traumatic and problematic in real life. Entering a cinema is a pleasurable suspension of disbelief, an immersion in a hypnotic dream-like darkness with distinct Freudian significance. We scrutinise photography, conversely, as a medium with a questionable veracity and well-known ability to lie, but nonetheless with a more direct, recognised, and trusted correspondence to reality. In that respect it’s substantially different from film, much like the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in literature. And yet the psychology of the Other, and the dynamic and effect it has in the medium of film, has a parallel in and is arguably the pre-eminent meta theme of photography.
