technical images and linear text

“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.” – Susan Sontag (6)

“The very ‘truthfulness’ of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photographic propaganda.” – John Berger (49)

Until the rise of the photograph, ‘realism’ was the dominant mode of art. Why did the photograph change this? Because it underlined the contingency of ‘the real.’ No longer were the laws of perspective and the basic rules of isometric projection considered to be accurate tracings of the real; why fiddle with vanishing points and figure-ground relations when the work of the artist can be done directly by photons? With the rendering of images graven by light, the enlightenment ideal of the absolute vitrification of reality in art could finally be obtained. If light itself cannot accurately and truthfully depict the images off which it reflects, then perhaps we ought to question more closely the nature of this enlightenment ideal.

Which is, of course, what Sontag, Jay, and Berger are all doing this week. The camera is a pure, instrumental, and empirical device. A crude automaton of the human eye, a motionless cyclopean monument to the values of the enlightenment. If there is truth to be found in images, then it is to be found in the photograph. And yet it seems that the problem toward which our erstwhile theorists are gesturing is that the ‘commerce between art and truth,’ insofar as it may exist, is a particularly troublesome commerce. In the realm of the photograph (and perhaps elsewhere), Truth is Art’s banana republic or its maquiladora.

Photography in particular could not survive without its illusions of verisimilitude. And yet truth enters into the photograph only, as Sontag rightly states, in the most rudimentary, documentary sense: “something exists, or did exist, which was like what’s in the picture” (5, and with digital photography, even this is not the case). Apart from the simple documentary nature of the image, it makes no claim to truth. The denotational content of a photograph is a minuscule element of the composition as a whole, even in the case of documentary photography. Otherwise, why is a James Nachtwey photograph of a young boy amidst the rubble of Mogadishu any more compelling than the camera-phone shot taken by the child’s brother? Why are some shots of poverty, famine, and the like, more compelling than others? The answer can only lie in the connotational qualities of the photograph; these qualities are the subject of photographic criticism, and these qualities are what prevent the artistic (or propagandistic) photograph from having any claim to veracity. I will be exploring the shady commerce of art and truth through a series of photographs of that German dictator whom the National Portrait Gallery named as one of the ‘world’s most photographed‘ people.

Consider this photo, or the opening photograph a few paragraphs above. Their pure denotational content is almost certainly true. Adolf Hitler, at one point, visited a troop of smiling and happy Hitler-Jugend, and, at one point, left a church. Of these facts, we can be as certain as we can ever be in the age of Photoshop. And yet can we really believe that these simple facts constitute the entire content of these photographs, as though they were snapshots from spring break? Certainly not. They are propaganda photographs. As for the first, its evident connotations are that Hitler is a caring and thoughful leader like any other, that the National-Socialists care for their (Aryan) children, and support all the same decent values as other decent people. Indeed, when we carry it even further, one cannot help but associate the uniform of the Hitler-Jugend with that fine bastion of social discipline, the Boy Scouts; by juxtaposing Hitler with the scoutlike HJ, one might reasonably assume that the photographer hoped to play on some of the positive associations with that quintessentially American institution (which was, of course, British, and had been banned with the rise to power of the Nazis). As for the second image, its religious connotations are so evident as almost not to bear mentioning: “Hitler, like you, goes to church! So Fascism isn’t ‘godless’ after all!”

Are any of those connotations ‘true’? Of course not. But can we with any confidence assert them to be ‘false’? This is a particularly troubling philosophical issue which is brought to the fore by the perfect realism of photography. How can a connotation be false? Indeed, on what grounds can we decry any image as ‘false.’ The truth-claim implicit to the graven image proclaims simply (to paraphrase Debord), ‘what is, is there, and what is there, is.’ With painting, this assertion can often be disproven. As Berger proposed, a painting of a horse does not have to be ‘particular horse;’ if we can show that there was never such a horse as was painted, then perhaps that makes the painting ‘false.’ But this potential falsity is so wrapped up in the nature of manual reproduction itself, that it seems almost superfluous to proclaim a painting as untrue. With photography, unless an image is retouched, the photograph’s actual content is necessarily a selective capturing of reality. And yet the process of selection involves any number of rhetorical processes that create a connotational weight. This connotational meaning is neither true nor false; indeed, it has no commerce whatsoever with truth or falsehood. One cannot agree or disagree with an effect of imagery or a photographic connotation, because there is no actual claim being made. When it comes to the connotations of a photograph, one can simply accept them, deny them, or (more likely) have them go altogether unnoticed. This is the treachery of the photographic image: the absolute veracity of its denotative content obscures the pure fiction of its connotative meaning.

Even when an image is retouched, we cannot always specifically place its falsehood. The image on the left circulated through a number of newspapers in the early 1930s, and was widely proclaimed to be a photograph of the infant Adolf Hitler. The hoax persisted despite the protestations of the German embassy in the United States, until, as is often the case, the owner of the original photograph (the one on the right) recognized the similarities between the two images. By darkening the shadows on the baby’s face and removing the bonnet, the retoucher was able to give just the right look of menace to the infant on the left; one assumes, of course, that Hitler was menacing even as an infant. The presentation of the image, we can say with certainty, was false. The ‘Hitler Baby’ was not the infant dictator, and thus the captions that ran with the image were incorrect. But is there anything truly ‘false’ about the image, even in the strictest denotative sense? Certainly, the shadows have been darkened somewhat, and the child’s bonnet cropped out. Yet the child itself ‘was there,’ and thus the documentary evidence of the photo is in some sense correct. Even the connotational weight of the image (the darkened shadows) has no real effect by itself. Indeed, captions were the only real reason that readers of the era had to think that the image on the left was Hitler, further underlining the contingent nature of photographic ‘truth.’

If one is still looking for reasons to question whether painting and photography are truly such different media, one has only to consider the above image in comparison with the next.

In the painting, we see an idealized Hitler, carrying the standard of the swastika, framed by the Sun and a Roman eagle, and surrounded by SA delivering the fascist salute. In this photograph, immediately following his Sept. 1, 1939 declaration of war in the Reichstag, we see a realized depiction of an almost identical indoor scene, Hitler standing at the speaker’s desk, below the Nazi standard, being saluted by the entire Reichstag. Both images have extremely similar denotative and connotative meanings, and yet we are likely more apt to disregard the first as propaganda, and the second as an accurate depiction of the scene. Why? To be sure, the denotative meaning of the photograph is likely more accurate. Certainly, all of those men of the Reichstag did deliver their fascist salute following Adolf’s stirring address, whereas the scene of the painting likely never happened.

When we examine the connotations of the two images, however, it becomes clear that the two are equally propagandistic, and perhaps equally distant from ‘the real.’ Both images bear all the hallmark connotations of fascist propaganda. They emphasize the unity and strength of a homogeneous community, the ’symbolic restatement’ (Sontag 9) of ancient images to establish historical continuity (with Rome, the Aryans), and they seek to convey the illusion of a populace marching in lock-step with the dictates of a powerful leader. This sort of propaganda is perhaps most problematic, because neither side has any reason to discredit it. The Nazis benefited from seeming like an all-powerful, absolutely unified society, while their enemies deployed this sort of propagandistic imagery as a tool to build military support. While it served the Allies no real purpose to reproduce the humanized propaganda images of Hitler with boy scouts or at church, it most definitely served their purposes to depict the uncanny order and frightening devotion of Nazi rallies. Will we ever know exactly how far the society of the Third Reich corresponded to the monolithic totalitarian society depicted by fascist art? It seems to me doubtful. The excesses and illusions of Nazi imagery will always corrupt any real understanding of the true nature of Nazism. As when we adopt the Nazis’ own term, ‘Third Reich,’ when we think of these propaganda photos as documentary evidence, we are in effect taking the fascists at their word — or at their image.

As the first true innovators of photographic propaganda, the Nazis were perhaps the first to really recognize the connotative potential of imagery. By selectively manipulating the framing, composition, and context of photographs, Goebbels and other propagandists were able to manipulate the connotative power of the photograph in order to create a false impression without ever lying. Sontag proposes, in a statement which sounds somewhat archaic today, that ‘the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event’ (19). Perhaps this is still the case to a certain degree, but it seems rather that in our ‘image-choked’ (Sontag 15) culture, the distinction between the photographic image and its context is being collapsed. Sontag herself recognizes this when she states that ‘an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing’ (19). The photographic image is always an interpretation rather than a transcription of the captured reality. This is a simple truism. However, as our culture moves increasingly away from things and towards imagery, the captured reality is supplanted by the image of reality. Criticisms of photographs as inaccurate depictions of reality miss the point that our contemporary Western reality is a photographic one.

And as the progression continues, even the most despicable of images can be resurrected as pure symbolism, as imagery without referent, as in the case of this unfortunately (but, it must be said, purposefully) named Mumbai restaurant….

“from small bites to mega Joys!”

Indeed.