"Tracing the Individual Body" - Lauren Iacobucci

Beginning to understand the various early applications of photography (and cinema) is quite interesting, especially its use in detection and criminology, such as is described in Tom Gunning’s article “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema. We know that photography was used for record-keeping purposes, which Charles Baudelaire states should be its only purpose, but understanding its use for identifying criminals is rather astonishing, especially considering how this application pre-dated the digital era and how it affected the entertainment world.

There are two main points of Gunning’s article that I find particularly intriguing. The first is his poetic explanation of how a photograph denies a man control over his own identity, similarly to how Walter Benjamin describes how the film camera removes the aura of the actor. His second interesting point is about the reaction of the entertainment world (be it fiction novels, film, plays, etc.) to these progresses in the use of photography for criminal identification.

Throughout his article, Gunning repeatedly brings up how “the system” is able to exert “power over the criminal’s body and image” through the process of photographing criminals and keeping an elaborately organized archive of these photographs (p 30 of article). This point is rather interesting because it brings up knowledge of the myth that a photograph steals a part of one’s soul. Even if disfiguration of one’s own face doesn’t allow a criminal to outrun the authorities because they have his identity on record, we begin to realize that we have no power over the outcome of our own identity and thus, the actions of our pasts. This is especially alarming today when one considers how widely used surveillance is and, according to movies about the modern urban future, how powerful surveillance can become for “the system”.

Gunning’s other point, about detection in the entertainment world, is fascinating more so in regards to how humans reacted to this new technological phenomenon of photography. There are two quotes pertaining to this matter in “Tracing the Individual Body” that I find particularly intriguing. The first is about the publics’ reaction to the use of photography for the identification of criminals: “The public display of portraits of professional criminals… became one of the most popular forms of photographic galleries, with tourists flocking to them as an urban sight….” (24) The second occurs in Gunning’s discussion of the emergence of surveillance: “The camera recording the very act of malefaction appears in drama, literature, and early film before it was really an important process of criminal detection.” (35) Not only is it ironic that the entertainment world came up with this application of the camera before the police system did, but it is also ironic that this fascination with the photograph as a witness was portrayed in the cinema, the latter actually following photography chronologically.

"Tracing the Individual Body" -Maya Swanson

Tom Gunning’s article “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema” was really interesting to me because I love detective stories! It was neat to see how photography could be applied to life situations, such as detective work, because none of the other articles we have read actually applied photography to new situations.
In the article, Gunning gives many quotes from Sherlock Holmes novels, one of them concerning a duke’s affair; “Holmes makes it clear that the Grand Duke’s indiscretion lies in having been photographed with his mistress, rather than in having had a love affair…As a mode of evidence that cannot be denied, photography is indeed indiscreet, capturing information that could otherwise be hushed up or explained away.” A photograph, according to Gunnings and as proved by Holmes, is a permanent public record. It is very hard to dispute a photograph, which is known for recording accuracy. Without the photograph to provide indisputable evidence, it would have been easy for the Duke’s affair to be denied. If for example only one person had seen the two together, it would have been one person’s word against the Dukes. But the photograph allowed the entire world to see them together. The photograph would have the final word in a situation because of its complete objectivity; “(The Photograph) is an objective mechanical means of making an image with only minimal human intervention.”
Another important contribution photography gave to detective work was its ability to identify people. A photograph serves as a record of someone’s image, which can later be matched to the real person. “The photograph could be used as a guarantor of identity and as a means of establishing guilt or innocence…The body reemerges as something to grab hold of, and the photograph supplies one means of gaining a purchase on a fugitive physicality.” The photograph marks the individual, allowing police to keep tract of people. It is essential for identification.
As Gunnings says, “Photography became the ideal tool of the process of detection, the ultimate modern clue.”

The debate continues! This week’s readings continue to delve into the ontology of photography; asking one to consider if, at the very essence, photographs are unbiased reflections of nature or the artistic representation of the natural world. Bazin describes this as the “two ambitions” of art--“One, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside” (239). As we have followed the history of the debate and discussed its implications in class, I can not help to ask why there is such a desire to dichotomize photography into two distinct and opposing ontologies. I cannot make an absolute argument either way. And I would have to agree with Kracauer that “Perhaps it would be more fruitful to use the term ‘art’ in a looser way” in order to accept photographs as“…neither works of art in the traditional sense nor aesthetically indifferent products” (268). The attempt to categorize photography as purely scientific or exclusively artistic is allusive. Bazin says, “The great artists, of course, have always been able to combine the two tendencies. They have allotted to each its proper place in the hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and molding it at will into the fabric of their art” (239). I consider a good photo to be one that portrays something that I have seen before with my own eyes, but because of the artistic ability of the photographer and the situation of the photo at a specific place and time, I see the image with a new and unique appreciation. Both authors seem to at least concede to the multiple ontologies of photography. It is hard to imagine why people were so worried about what photography was and if it should be recognized as an art form because it has become so widespread in our day and age that we are like “What’s the big deal? Photography is its own thing!” But the best way that I can understand the debate is relating it to the emergence of rap music. My dad and I still argue if rap is its own genre of music. He would say no, it is just a fad in hip hop that has no artistic merit. I, on the other hand, argue that creating a catchy beat requires musical talent and rap is a distinct art form. Perhaps it is natural for people to want to understand new inventions by categorizing them based on what is established and what they are used to. My dad and I are doing the same things with rap music as the art critics were doing to photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Realism and the Abstract

I enjoyed reading Bazin’s essay as it offered interesting analysis regarding the psychoanalytic basis of photography. He states that the purpose of photography, much like mummification practiced in ancient Egypt, served to preserve one’s likeness as a response to a primal fear of death. This reminded me of Benjamin’s concept of the cult value of art. In both, photographic portraits can be seen as connections between the viewers who are present and the subject that are preserved. As time progressed, Bazin proposes that the nature of art shifted from preserving the memories of loved ones to creating “an ideal world in the likeness of the real.” However, this artistic preoccupation with realism was redefined with the advent of photography. He argued that photography is superior to art in capturing realistic representations of the world; thus, freeing art from its preoccupation with realism. In contrast, Kracauer, in his essay offers up a different view on the relationship between painting and photography. In Kracauer’s essay, he cites Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase as an example in which painting has benefitted from photography. To him, the experimentation with strobe photography and cinematic film did not force art away from the realistic into the abstract but instead contributed to its transformation. This transformation was aided by the photographic medium’s ability to help artist perceive an optical unconscious that not only provided the artist with a different view of “reality” but also transformed the boundaries art itself. In this context, the realism of photography and Bazin’s concept of photography’s role in freeing paintings from its preoccupation with realism becomes more complicated. As Kracauer pointed out, while photography might be a better representation of reality compared to paintings, it still reduces our colorful three-dimensional reality into a monochrome two-dimensional image. As a result, I believe that rather than simply freeing paintings from realism, the relationship between photography and art is more complex and synergetic than that proposed by Bazin in his essay.

Response to "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" and "Photography"

Before photography, Bazin talks about how painting was the only way we could reproduce nature—it gave us a “likeness” of reality, but of course it wasn’t accurate, or at least not as accurate as the photograph. He emphasizes that, “Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, or obsession with realism”(240). Because the photograph is the most objective form of art we know, and it is a purely mechanical reproduction of what’s in front of us, it makes it okay for painting or other “plastic art forms” to be “illusionary.” I found this point very interesting. For me, painting is great because it does have the eye and subjectivity of the artist, and it isn’t meant to be a perfect representation of reality. But perhaps this is because I have always lived in a very photographic age. Before photos, people depended on paintings and although we like illusion, we also want the truth. Which is an important point that Bazin makes as well.
“All arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence”(241). For one thing, photography is still dependent on man, because without him, no pictures would or could be taken. I realize this may seem petty, but I really believe that photographs are very much formed from the eye of the photographer. For example, before I went and saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I thought it was in a beautiful Italian city. Green grass surrounding, quaint houses, etc. Then I saw it myself, and it was surrounded by a pretty dirty city, and only the area directly surrounding the tower was clean and even idyllic. It made me think about how all the photographs I’d seen had planted the idea in my head of what the surroundings would be like. They weren’t photographed because they obviously took away from the majesty of the tower, which is, I suppose, understandable. But I think every photographer photographs what he or she wants to be seen, and I do it too. I crop things out of the photo as I take them, and it changes the mood as well as the actual seen that I want to portray. So although it is as objective as an art can be, it still has its subjectivities to be dealt with, and in the short piece “Photography,” by Siegfried Kracauer, he talks about the “formative” tendency. This is “…their urge freely to compose beautiful pictures rather than capture nature in the raw” (248). The composition of a photograph readily changes the photo, and two glimpses of the same thing can come out very differently depending on the photographer.
So on the one hand photography has allowed us to be okay with painting as an illusory art form, but it too has its own deceptions.

Photography by Siegfried Kracauer ~ Dustin Muhn

I am really intrigued by the comparison and contrasting of photography and paintings as art forms. We have talked about it a little bit in class, but Siegfried brings it up a couple times in his entry. He mentions that "when viewed under a magnifying glass, photographs show minutiae which the naked eye would never have discovered". He talks about how this new capturing of nature left out no details and only held truth. The outcome of the image at first did not depend on the imagination and creativity of the creator. Rather, it was dependent upon the subject material itself. While a lot of people were hesitant to accept this at first, photography eventually found its way next to painting as a form of aesthetic work.

Later in his piece, Siegfried talks about how modern photography branches out to become abstract. The very thing that set it apart from painting in the beginning was now the goal of some artists. They are now making a new kind of art based on the experiments of photography. "It sounds paradoxical that, of all media, realistic photography should thus have contributed to the rise of abstract art." This one fact is reason enough to justify photography as an art form. Even though the justification came 100 years into its history, the direct contribution photography has given to art over the past few decades is payment enough for its acceptance into the art community. The competition alone for painters to survive has increased the quality and creativity of their work. Siegfried notes that we should look at Duchamp's 1912 Nude Descending the Staircase. This is a prime example of art inspired by the advances of photography in the beginning of the 20th century. The closeness of photography and traditional painting has become quite close despite the even further technological advances made over the past century. Two rival art forms, both primitive in form have come to bounce ideas off of one another and advance each other further than would be possible without each other. Competition has bread success, making the line between reality and abstraction in the two fields non-existant.

"The Ontology of the Photographic Image"

"The Ontology of the Photographic Image" by Andre Bazin followed by personal train of thought very closely. Bazin looks back on the invention of the reproducible photograph and comments on its impact on the common style of art. The term "plastic arts" was used frequently to describe the arts that could be molded. However, I found it interesting that by the end of the essay, when the story of photography was almost over, Bazin included photography in the scope of the plastic arts. "So, photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts." (page 243). Bazin is not directly includin photography into the plastic arts, but recognizing the key role that it played in influencing the plastic arts. Photography "liberated" the previous art forms because it achieved the perfect replica of nature. Before photographs, the purpose of art was to document or tell a story through realism. Each artist strove to paint what the eye actually saw. Since perfection was finally reached, to the point where photographs could capture details even the naked eye left out, the plastic arts could move on to portray their subjects in different manners. "Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obession with likeness." Photography impacted the art world on a comparable level to oil paint. Oil paint dried slower, so greater detail could be displayed through meticulous work. The camera allowed a single moment of time to be frozen with exact detail. With each new invention, the art world was drastically altered.
With each work of art, there was a battle between psychological realism and aesthetic realism. Each work of art portrayed some scene, with care in likeness to reality; however, each scene also held an emotion, or aura, as we talked about with Benjamin's essay. The plastic arts constantly had to balance both types of realism. The photograph, however, could capture emotion and physical likeness, demolishing the conflict between the two.
The "mummy complex" described at the beginning of the essay is very interesting, but quite accurate. The ancient Egyptians held that preserving through the representation of life preserved the life of the departed. With the evolution of art, portraits replaced embalming, and much later, photos replaced portraits. "Images help us preserve te subjects from a second spiritual death." The subjects are better preserved by a more accurate representation, hence the photograph.
With the new freedom from realism in the plastic arts, artists were able to focus on the dreamworld. New movements like Surrealism, Dada, and Abstract art began to emerge simply because they could. The art world no longer called for realistic pieces, and artists were free to paint their emotions. The plastic arts became much more subjective.
"Photography taught us to admire both nature and painting, but takes away from neither." This statement would have been very controversial at the beginnings of photography because society was unsure about its affects. But now, society can look back and see what great changes have arisen through the invention of photography and can appreciate both photography and pianting, but not be afraid of the loss of either.