feed capitalism.
Berger credits Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in l936, as the source of many ideas appearing in Ways of Seeing. Benjamin, a Jewish art critic and philosopher writing in Germany in the days leading up to the Second World War, decries mass-produced art for losing the “aura” of the original and for detaching the art object “from the domain of tradition” (223).1
Critical Approaches
Berger presents an analysis directed to a broad audience, but images also can be analyzed on the basis of semiotics, which derives from the philosophy of C. S. Peirce and whose concepts icon, index, and symbol, among others, have been appropriated by visual theorists. Loosely, icon refers to a sign bearing a resemblance, real or imaginary, to what it is meant to signify (e.g., images of a smiley face or of two hands shaking). Index refers to a physical indication that another thing exists (e.g., a jet stream or the howl of a coyote). Symbol refers to a sign whose connection to an object is culturally determined (e.g., most verbal language). Peirce, an American pragmatist, did not reject outright the assumption of a correspondence between material world and language, as many postmodernists have.
An alternative to Peirce’s semiotics can be found in the structuralist approach of Ferdinand de Saussure, which, as Stuart Hall explains, consists of a system of signs including images, words, and sounds (30). The signifier is the form itself, and the signified the idea or concept that accompanies it; the relation between them, the representation, is created through codes, or culturally agreed upon meanings and judgments (31). Because meaning is never fixed and always in flux, analysis is a requirement for understanding interpretation, and “[t]he reader is as important as the writer in the production of meaning” (33). Hall is a poststructuralist who uses structuralism in a modified and flexible way to highlight the power system of cultural signs (35).
Image-Music-Text, one of French critic Roland Barthes’s many works, elaborates a semiological theory to critique a variety of artifacts, both verbal and visual. Barthes argues in this book and in Mythologies that, whether in advertising or in other media, representations repeated over time become cultural myths that the public immediately recognizes and responds to in predictable ways. Without either means or motivation to understand their responses, viewers do not consciously notice the strategic character of the message they encounter and so react as its designers have anticipated—positively. To illustrate, Image-Music-Text describes a Panzini spaghetti ad incorporating a photograph of packaged pasta, spice mixture, and canned liquid surrounded by fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, and mushrooms spilling from a string bag, as if just brought from the market. According to Barthes, the greens, reds, and yellows and the name of the product all suggest “Italianicity.” The arrangement, which echoes a still-life painting, signifies that the packaged ingredients are both authentically Italian and fresh (33–36). The myth created through the confluence of signs evoking an Italian dinner within the ambiance of a Mediterranean patio Barthes describes as “purified” and “simplified,” offered “without contradictions” (Image 143).
Authenticity and Exploitation
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes in Photography: A Middle-Brow Art how the photo album conveys a narrative of historical unity to the present generation by illuminating the “highest common denominator of the past” (31). Informal photographs of children, often on special occasions or holidays, serve as an authorized “social memory” of family members and good times (31). Family portraits also allow ancestors to be paid due reverence while, and—as often can be the case—by, erasing the accompanying, unpleasant details of their lives. Barthes observes in his treatise on photography, Camera Lucida, that in private photography both photographer and subject are aware of the artificiality of their joint activity: “I lend myself to the social game,” he muses. “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing” (11). Moreover, while the image is “motionless, stubborn,” the subject is “divided, dispersed” (12). Bourdieu, like Barthes, speaks of the artificiality of the pose, which allows the photographer to impose a concealed gaze on subjects, forcing them into stiff and contrived positions. Subjects, in turn, may respond by attempting to gather dignity through a conventional frontal pose. Bourdieu explains that “frontality is a means of effecting one’s own objectification” because it offers “a way of imposing the rules of one’s own perception” (83). On the other hand, hopes for creating impressions on our viewers are often unrealistic. In his essay “The Photograph,” N. Scott Momaday describes the disgust an American Indian expressed upon viewing a likeness of herself. Her reaction led Momaday to wonder if “perhaps she saw, in a way that we could not, that the photograph misrepresented her in some crucial respect, that in its dim, mechanical eye it had failed to see into her real being” (McQuade and McQuade 291). Figure 1 reproduces an image of and a text by Anh Thuy (Cindy) Dang, a student in one of our classes whose reflections on a photograph taken of her at Georgia’s Red Top Mountain during a family outing alludes to the dilemmas attending personal photography.
Although other postmodern critics have tended to study the problematics of photographic representation (e.g., John Tagg, who takes the commonly held position that no photograph mirrors reality), Barthes considers photographs the quintessential evidence that “the thing has been there” (76). He argues in Camera Lucida that, in photographic portraits with personal connections to the reader, authentication of existence is a primary outcome. Susan Sontag, writing before him in On Photography, agrees that photography confirms existence—to a point. But, crucially for Sontag, an image is not a transparent copy of reality but a distortion. Sontag is featured in a New York Times Magazine article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. In this debate, she returns to Barthes’s emphasis on the importance of the photograph in affirming that an event did occur. However, the use of a photograph can drastically change its effect. Sontag concludes that “[w]e make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can be said, any purpose served” (On Photography 175). New York Times reviewer Michael Kimmelmann describes an art exhibition of the prison photographs held just five months after their publication on the Internet. He expresses surprise at both the multifarious purposes of photography and its potential for almost immediate reinterpretation. However, in her study of cartoon images appearing on the occasion of the death of JFK Jr. and alluding to the historic photograph of the young boy saluting his father’s coffin, Janis Edwards asserts that “It is not unusual for iconic images to be appropriated to new contexts, creating analogies that recall past moments and suggest future possibilities” (179).
One of the many purposes to which photography can be put is illustrated by David Perlmutter’s Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis, which describes the process whereby journalistic photographs at times exert so intense a pressure on public opinion that history is altered significantly. Since its inception, documentary photography, which evolved from photo journalism, has featured a series of artistic images that serve as powerful rhetorical instruments for social change. For example, in the early twentieth century, sociologist and photographer Lewis W. Hine created a series of pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island. He illustrated in further photos their miserable living and working conditions, including the exploitation of their children working in factories, documentary images that led to sweeping changes in child labor laws (Newhall 235).
Like the general public, students typically are unaware of the rhetorical strategies that photographers adopt when constructing, for example, angle, lighting, and background. James Curtis reveals in Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth that in the 1930s the Farm Security Administration (FSA) hired established photographers to create an image of the rural crisis of the Great Depression that organizers wished to use in convincing the public of the need for their program. FSA photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others posed families in their poverty-stricken surroundings to create images of nobility and courage. “Migrant Mother,” a portrait by Lange that has become an icon of the era, features a grouping of small children leaning against the shoulders of a soulful mother, who is holding her
