“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out:: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. . . With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If we were to follow the method of Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Paintings,” and survey Canadians to determine what their ‘most wanted’ painting might be — not that the Canadian art market would ever merit such close and particular scrutiny — we might come up with something fairly similar to the Bruegel reproduced above. After all, we are so little different from the United States in terms of our ‘masses,’ we might even be able to use the American ‘most wanted’ painting. As Komar & Melamid state of the general public in the United States: “To a surprising extent, the public tends to agree on what it like to see in a work of art. Americans generally tend to prefer, for instance, traditional styles over more modern designs; they also express a strong preference for paintings that depict landscapes or similar outdoor scenes. In addition, most Americans tend to favor artists known for a realistic style over those whose artworks are more abstract or modernistic.” None of the paintings that they develop on the basis of their survey data are really particularly unique, varying only in size, season, and ambiguous ‘national’ signifiers; thus, Denmark’s painting features a Danish flag and is the size of a ‘refrigerator door,’ while Kenya’s is identical but for its size (’small filing cabinet’) and the inclusion of a hippopotamus. Thus the natural setting of the Bruegel, with the addition of snow, to suit our masochistic Canadian taste for winter, is made ‘national’ by the inclusion of some skaters, perhaps playing hockey, that great national Canadian game, incidentally invented by the Dutch. The ravens add just the necessary touch of allegorical morbidity, representing our conflicted relationship to the landscape and its harshness, while the traditional ‘realist’ style ensures that the painting induces no problematic thoughts in those who live their lives in avoidance of such.
And so, we have another bland work of traditionalist art, differentiated from the others on a purely surface level. Why is this the ‘art we want?’ Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives us, as always, the tools to comprehend the forces implicated in this grand homogenization of the world. As he states, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the artwork is no longer premised on its use value for ritual, but on its exhibition value to the greatest number of people. No longer was the function of the artwork to communicate with the Divine or to regulate social conduct, but instead the artwork became an ‘object’ of looking, and insofar as that object was looked at by the greatest number of people, it was ’successful.’ This is the ‘qualitative transformation’ of the nature of the artwork described in the quote above: for Benjamin, ‘art’ was a certain historically specific notion of cultural production, with a balance between these two poles of signification, the ‘cult value’ and the ‘exhibition value.’ For the earliest artists, the work of art was purely an instrument of magic, and thus was not a ‘work of art’ as such, but rather a ritual object par excellence; today, the ritual value has been almost entirely excluded from the function of art, and thus the art is a commodity, or more specifically a public spectacle like any other. The artistic function, the equivalence between the poles of ritual value and exhibition, is discarded, in favour of the primacy of the commodity function.

This is of course problematic, and most of us would instinctively agree. However, we ought to unpack more carefully exactly that which is problematic about this absolute emphasis on the exhibition value of the artwork. Komar & Melamid’s piece is incredibly significant for just this reason; it implicitly deconstructs some of the central assumptions of modern corporate-administered capitalism, namely, the primacy of ‘public opinion,’ the homogenization of the world through polls, and the depredation of individuality in favour of the supposedly omniscient body politic. ‘Opinion polls’ have to some extent taken the place of truth in the contemporary discourse: as Michael Govan states in the introduction to Komar & Melamid’s project, “we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.” Govan’s own orientation toward the ‘truth’ of numbers is ambiguous, but he does recognize that this faith in numbers is not solely a contemporary phenomenon: “In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that’s how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created.” Yet Plato’s mode of relating to the world is not our own. Numbers have always been the primary mode of relating to ‘the masses,’ and as such essential in a democratic society ostensibly governed by those ‘masses.’ However, we have a contemporary faith in numbers which I think seems fundamentally different from that of Plato.

There were a vast array of characteristics which separated Athenian democracy from our own. The ownership of slaves, for instance, made the leisurely existence of the intellectual class possible, and made the engagement of the citizenry with the political system practical. The size of the city-state and the homogeneous ethnic and gender group that was the ‘polis‘ ensured that the citizens could remain involved with the life of the state, and the state with the lives of the citizens. The ‘public interest’ was simply taken to be the interest of a small group of Greek landowning men, and the issue of ‘public opinion’ was thereby bracketed, worked out in public discourse: agourein. In our contemporary technologically-mediated democracy, we have taken the enlightened steps of including previously-marginalized groupings in our polis, and extending the geographical boundaries of the democratic state across the entire widths of continents. No longer could the question of ‘public interest’ in fact be discursively determined by all the individual members of the public, but instead, the public would have to be allegorized: allos agourein, an ‘other’ discourse, a discourse which speaks for the ‘other,’ in this case being the idealized ‘public.’ And so this ideological necessity, of knowing the ‘public opinion,’ begat our contemporary obsession with the cataloguing and quantification of the ‘masses,’ that takes its most egregious form in the guise of the opinion poll.

There is certainly a great deal to be said for the opinion poll, and for the extension of the franchise, and for democracy. These are all things which are said constantly, at great volume, across the various media systems that constitute our simulated public discourse, and they are not ‘incorrect’ per se. Rather, they are merely a veiling the true nature of democracy, which, like art, should ideally balance the interests of the individual and the polis. Athenian democracy, in spite of its self-evident flaws, balanced the interests of rational individuals in public discourse, and then determined the general course of society according to this aggregated interest of individuals. Contemporary democracy produces ‘opinion polls’ which demand only the most reactionary, simplistic responses, and then passes those off as indicative of the ‘public opinion.’ These opinion polls have an evident function, as a gauge of the public’s opinion. This is unproblematic. The issue arises when opinion polls are taken to be normative, and the data presented in polls is presented as truth. When the actual opinion of the public, and the course of society as a whole, is informed only by the mediated ‘public opinion,’ there is no means by which the individual or the society can develop. As Benjamin states, in this society founded on mechanical reproduction, “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” The end result is a lack of anything new.

Opinion polls are, it must be said, a privileging of the opinions of the wise and the stupid alike. The opinion poll gives equal weight to truth and fallacy, to true belief and blind faith, to mass conformity as to individual genius. This is something which always ought to be recognized: the public opinion is not ‘the truth,’ but is rather a syncretic blend of the truth and lies. They can be taken as a guide to the opinion of the masses, but never as a guide to action. Komar and Melamid’s project, were it instigated by a government for the purpose of determining what art was positive and what was ‘degenerate,’ might seem like a fascistic or communistic endeavour, and yet when we truly consider the matter, it would be the pinnacle of ‘true democracy.’ And thus we ought to be led to question the nature of ‘true democracy.’ After all, ‘rule’ by the demos is nothing more than mob rule: the nature of contemporary democracy stems from the constitutional strictures we apply to the will of the masses. This is something which should be recognized in culture as in politics: ‘the public’ as a quantified and egalitarian mass should never make any real ‘decisions.’ This is why we don’t live in a society governed directly by mobs, but one governed by representatives. The ‘public interest’ should be determined as the aggregate interest of individuals: and so, the ‘public,’ that bizarre construction of opinion polls and administrative research should have no say in determining ‘what is art.’ Art is a question for individuals. The beauty of the market system — itself of course not without its own problems — is that it offers a niche for the public and a niche for the individual. Those individuals whose tastes have been so thoroughly monotonized by a relentless stream of mass culture and public opinion that they crave the sort of sappy medium represented by Komar & Melamid’s paintings have a ‘public’ forum in which they can indulge their specious tastes, in the guise of those Holiday-Inn art sales; those who have constructed for themselves an identity so oppositional that they crave pure individuality can spend millions at Sotheby’s on a work of the Abstract Expressionists. The rest of us will go on, as always, balancing our appreciation of ‘pop’ universality with individual genius and carving out our own artistic convictions, bearing little resemblance to the opinions of this mathematic fiction of “the public.” And some of us can thereby continue to adore the pure abstraction, the almost Lettrist brilliance of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, which I think we can indisputably state represents the Canadian public’s “least wanted” painting. The power and beauty of Lettrist hyper-abstraction is almost wholly lost on the general public, and yet no less valid for it. 100 million people, as the aphorism goes, can and often have been woefully, unbelievably wrong, especially about art., for artistic genius is the mark of the individual, not of the ‘public.’ This cultivation of the balance between individual taste and shared cultural practice is thereby of utmost importance in the realm of art, wherein homogenization and governance by opinion poll could only mark the end of art altogether. Art is the expression of the individual genius par excellence; though it functions in a communitarian system of signification, the individual spirit must always be of prime importance to the work of art, else our culture will ultimately be left with nothing but one infinitely-reproduceable lithograph of a cat hanging from a tree, and a 50 Cent CD.

Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and artistic photography are not two discrete modes of expression which coincidentally make use of the same apparatus, but rather, along the lines described by Flusser, the apparatus in effect produces both modalities of its use. “The freedom of the photographer is a programmed freedom;” thus, the program of the camera implies the contemporary artistic and penal programs alike. Following Flusser’s philosophy of photography even further into Sekula’s piece, we might state that the production of the categories of the ‘criminal’ and ‘ethnic’ other were only the beginning. Existence is defined by difference, and thus it would make sense that society should devote itself first to cataloguing its ‘others,’ by way of the photography of the criminal, the ethnic, and those other subaltern groups in opposition to which ‘respectable’ society forms its identity. And yet, with the world of ‘otherness’ thoroughly catalogued, it seems that Western society is now led inexorably on to the cataloguing of itself.

This is perhaps part of Flusser’s objection to amateur photography; the cataloguing of the other is certainly problematic, as Sekula’s piece outlines. This is not a new development, however. As Sekula states, “‘the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s, in the general context of systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes’” (3). The desire to regulate the other has been a human impulse for all of recorded history. It is only with the rise of modernity, however, that the instigators of social regulation realized that regulation could be far more efficiently implemented not through spectacular manifestations of power, but through surveying, cataloguing, and disciplinary institutions, as described by Foucault. The medieval was a time of myths, of symbols, and of men; modernity is a time of maps, of signs, and of subject-positions. This is why Sekula argues that ‘photography is modernity run riot’ (3). Photography is neither cause nor symptom of modernity, but rather the cultural practice which is most symbolic of the character of the modern age.

I am not referring to ’symbolic’ here in the conventional sense, so derided by Walter Benjamin is his ‘Origin of German Tragic Drama,’ by which one calls anything which represents another thing a ’symbol.’ For Benjamin, the ’symbolic’ mode of expression is one in which the ’symbolized’ object is immanent within the symbolic object; this sense of the ’symbolic’ is derived from a theological sense, and thus demands representation immanence along the lines of the immanence of the divine within the profane. Of course, with our growing uncertainty towards the divine, and the notion of divinity in general, this particular form of symbolism is in decline, supplanted by allegory. Allegory, by contrast to the symbolic, is a form of representation signification in which the ’symbolic’ objects only symbolize by way of their position within an ordered construction. As such, this would cover nearly any instance of ’symbolism’ as we moderns tend to use the term, since, lacking a belief in divine immanence, one only has the structure of language to appeal to for representational purposes.

I will return to the concept of the allegorical in a second. First, however, I should like to unpack why I propose, rather anachronistically, that photography is symbolic of modernity, and perhaps in the process make the distinction between these two modes more clear. The camera is a ’symbol’ of modernity in the conventional sense, that is, we can interpret the rise of photography as an allegorical representation for the character of modernity: as a modern technological apparatus, and one whose usage determined much of the character of modernity, photography is an allegory for modernity. However, modernity is also in some sense immanent within the camera. The rise of modernity would not have been what it was without photography, while photography would not have developed as it did in any context but the modern. Photography neither ‘represents’ modernity, nor ‘constitutes’ it, but rather, modernity is immanent to the program of photography, and vice versa.

This symbolic anachronism is paradoxically responsible for turning the world into allegory. When Sekula states that “‘for Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing” (28), he is in fact describing the allegorization of the human body. In the classical mode of thought, as evinced by discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, the human body was taken to be symbolic of the human character: one’s character was not determined by the slope of one’s forehead or the bumps on the skull, nor vice versa, but rather the criminal character was taken to be immanent within the cranial geography. With Bertillon’s allegorization of the criminal body, however, the body was no longer a symbol of the character: the character was in no way necessarily ‘present’ in the structure of the body. Rather, the body was merely a sign which, by way of its position within the structure of society and history, could point to any particular character type. No longer was there a general theory of the criminal physiognomy: on the contrary, the key to the criminal psyche took up residence in the particular. The only way to gain control of the criminal element within society was therefore to catalogue its position within the larger structure. Just as a dictionary catalogues the linguistic sign, so did Bertillon’s photography of deviance catalogue the ‘criminal sign,’ that is, the criminal body.

It is impossible, however, to catalogue one pole of an opposition. The attempts of penal reformers like Bertillon or Bentham were ‘flawed’ in that they restricted themselves to the criminal. The problem with this approach is that one can only catalogue deviance by simultaneously cataloguing that which is deviated from. In Sekula’s terms, “”for Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive campaign of inscription, a transformation of the body’s signs into a text” (31): note that the mastery of the criminal body necessitates a transformation of the body’s signs. In order to catalogue criminality, one must catalogue corporeality in general.

And thus, in perhaps the most telling proof of Foucault’s theories with regard to the ‘internalized gaze,’ we see in modernity a simultaneous explosion of photography for artistic and disciplinary purposes. As Sekula argues, photography constitutes “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (4); few other cultural phenomena fit this description. One does not go to a prison for recreation, or create art with an MRI machine: why, then, do we catalogue ourselves for fun? It seems this must necessarily be a consequence of the allegorization of the body. The categories which we create for the Other have a tendency of reproducing themselves in unwanted contexts: if the criminal body could no longer be symbolic of ‘evil,’ no longer could the law-abiding body be symbolic of ‘good.’ Allegory gives us a way to make sense of the world without recourse to divine organizing principles: we can interpret the allegory according to the laws of its own structure, rather than any externally-imposed order, and thus the objects within the allegorical constellation are elevated. The signification of the allegorical object lends it a certain secular sanctity, as in the “look up at one’s betters” Sekula describes (8); it also implicitly devalues the individual object, since it only signifies with reference to a larger whole. And thus we have the obsessive impulse towards systematization, cataloguing, categorizing. The only means by which the allegorical body can interpret itself is for it to perceive the structure of which it forms a part, and thus it travels around ripping fragments from reality to perceive the construction of the whole. The ‘public looks’ (Sekula of the photographic serve to situate our own subjectivity with regard to the subjectivity of others: we interpret our positions within the public sphere by determining who we stand above, and who stands above us. By cataloguing our reality with photographs, we can create for ourselves a hierarchy from these panoptic fragments, and thereby seize some provisional meaning from the absurd system that is the modern world.

“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74).

In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him as gifts, this shall be a sparsely cited essay on the nature of the human condition. My goal is not to respond to Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, but rather to undertake a certain sort of exegetical expansion, whereby I shall be using some snippets of his work to trace the framework for my own thoughts. Flusser’s notions of the system and the apparatus are incredibly useful ones, and yet their implementation in this work might make these very concrete and analytically distinct categories seem quixotic and ambiguous. And so, in the tradition of Flusser’s own philosophical investigations, as well as Deleuze’s philosophical technique of ‘buggery,’ I will be employing Flusser’s concepts in a more analytically specific fashion that is at once implicit in Flusser’s text and altogether my own.

When Flusser states that the photographic ‘universe’ functions as a “feedback mechanism for the reprogramming of society,” it becomes immediately clear that his interest in photography extends well beyond the basic issues of artistry and mimesis spoken to by theorists of the photographic content like Sontag, Barthes, or most others. His text is one which, rather tellingly, contains no images; the ‘content’ of the image is entirely bracked in Philosophy of Photography. This is in part a McLuhanesque move, in that Flusser is seeking to ‘bracket’ the question of content in order to interrogate more thoroughly the nature of the photographic form and its social context; to consider the place of photography at what McLuhan, following Bernard Lonergan, called the ‘empirical level of perception.’ This is necessary because of the same classic opposition of form and material to which Flusser speaks in The Shape of Things. As creating beings, humans are necessarily posed to ignore form in favour of content; the particular table simultaneously obscures the tableness of the table, and its table-function — it becomes a wooden platform for putting things on, and the change in patterns of human existence marked by this form, ‘table,’ are obscured as somehow ‘natural.’ But the table is the furthest thing from natural, indeed, as opposite to nature as a ‘thing’ can be. And this leads us to the implicit question of Philosophy of Photography, which is the relation of the human being to the apparatus.

The table is no apparatus, however, but instead a structure. And the system, it seems, is something of an entirely different character. And so before we can begin to consider the relation of the human to the apparatus, we must situate these disparate but similar concepts in a more coherent framework.

The first premise of that framework is this: that the condition of humanity is a condition of precarious balance between Nature and the System, two poles which (like all binary oppositions) are not in fact opposite. This is to say, that the distinct nature of human Being, rather than Being-as-such, comes from the fact that our Being is not entirely reducible to Nature. Rather, human history is the story of naked apes carving out an Other to Nature, that first and totalizing system which accepts no such Otherness. The structure and the apparatus are both distinct subsets of the larger set of systems.

First, though, the system itself requires definition. The system is simply put, a human strategy which overlays nature and regiments an organic chaos according to the functions and positions of its component parts. The human in a biological sense is merely a complex of systems, with the endocrine and central nervous systems being themselves merely the functions of the system of evolution, itself dependent on a position within the solar system, and ultimately the system of the universe itself. The system is a natural order; one must recognize first, however, that the system as such is not the product of Nature, but the product of the human encounter with Nature. Nature itself has no systems, or types of being, but merely is; all order which is supposedly seen ‘in’ nature comes from a human systematization of the precession of natural states. The significance of the system is that humankind is compelled to impose meaning on nature; we cannot relate to nature qua nature, but must regiment it according to our own notions of order. The system is therefore an organic development, the primary instantiation of which was language, or more specifically parole or speech, whereby humanity ‘naturally’ regimented an array of utterances into a system of intersubjective signification, which is the foundation for all future systematization.

If parole is the primary instance of the system, however, then langue is the primary instance of the structure. The system is an organic human construct overlaid upon a natural state of affairs, and although the system of language provides the foundation for both system and structure (the system of parole represents the metaprogram by which all systems are programmed), structure has its own distinct character. Structure is a synthetic human construct with no relation of equivalence to any natural state, exemplified of course by writing — graphein. Parole is an organic system which is nevertheless too chaotic for the needs of a centralized and regimented society, and which thereby needs to be supplemented by the inorganic rigidity of the structure of writing. And so, as the system of speech underpins the systematization of the natural world, so too does the structure of writing underpin the structuration of the human world (to borrow Giddens’ useful term). The structural equivalents to the nervous system and solar system are the structures of medicine and commodities, respectively. Of course, this does not imply that the two worlds are in any sense hermetically sealed; indeed, as I will be going on to show, cross-pollination between these two realms is in fact the problem.

The last concept at issue is that of the apparatus, the definition of which is quite simple: an apparatus is a functional structure. So whereas structures like language, commodities, or medicine are generalized structures which we as human subjects effectively inhabit (to paraphrase Le Corbusier) and which enable a wide array of activities, apparatuses are specific structures to which we relate in a capacity of use, or equipment (Zeug). The apparatus is a teleological structure, one which serves to make ready some object in the world. This of course begs the question — to ‘make ready’ for what? This is the problem which Flusser seeks to address in Philosophy of Photography.

The answer, it seems, is that the apparatus serves to make the world ready for further structuration; “as they extend they reach further into the natural world and tear objects from it more powerfully and quickly than the body could do on its own.” (23) There is at once something tremendously underwhelming and tremendously problematic about this discovery. The underwhelming part is that this ‘tearing-from-nature’ is what defines the human condition; our very ‘unnaturalness’ is our natural place within the world. To be human is to systematize and construct meanings from the chaos of the natural world, and to propose that we should somehow allow ourselves to be determined by ‘our nature’ is in this sense delusional. And yet to propose the opposite is perhaps even worse.

This is why I say that the human condition is one of a precarious balance. The anxieties expressed in our postmodern parables about robot uprisings and the like stem from a realization that in a world governed by the logic of the structure, the robot is the ideal. And so while none of us pine for the days of swinging from trees and picking lice from our acquaintances, and thus ought not to argue for a regression to a natural system, we must recognize that human conduct is increasingly governed by structural logic. As Flusser states, “previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant” (24).

The image which opens this piece is Matthew Barney’s Field Emblem, a symbol which he uses throughout his work. The oval bisected by a straight line represents the culmination of Barney’s almost Lettrist drive toward symbolic purity; the line in effect represents the imposition of a human conception of order onto a natural state of affairs. I use the symbol here for its profound evocation of the overall human condition as described by Flusser. That is, the human condition is one in which we must walk the middle path between the monkey and the robot, a condition of balance between our organic nature and the Other to nature we have carved out for ourselves. The structure is a subordinate form of system, constructed by humans for instrumental purposes; when the contingent structures of human organization are elevated above the organic systems from whence they came, we run the risk of making the entire system of human beings subordinate to its own structures.

I will get into photography stuff more specifically in my paper, using these preliminary definitions as my starting point.

The simple answer to Martha Rosler’s question of “which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else” (307) is every one. That is to say, in the political sphere, there is no individual action. This is a structural necessity, insofar as the ‘political sphere’ is the realm of the polis, not of the individual subject. And so, every political movement is necessarily one driven by a committed vanguard, behind whom the masses can rally, but without whom the movement would cease to exist.

And so, dramatic though Martin Luther King’s quarter-million-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom may have been, it represented only a minuscule fraction of the African-American population of the United States. Simply because the 30 million black Americans who didn’t march that day shared a skin colour with those who did does not imply that they were fighting ‘their own’ political battle. Instead, the civil rights won for American blacks by Dr. King’s movement were ‘won’ by a small vanguard of intellectuals and revolutionaries, for the entire black polis.

Those political movements which we the bourgeois and enfranchised often idolize as indicative of an organic push for self-determination nearly always have an externally-determined character. Indeed, we live in a society founded upon the delegation of one’s political battling. The system of democratic representation is nothing more than a complicated arrangement whereby the privileged can get someone else to fight their political battles for them.

Which, of course, raises the question: who fights the political battles of those without privilege? This is the central issue of Rosler’s piece, in which she bemoans that “the exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting – and careerism” (306). This lament comes even as she recognizes that the lost ‘meliorism’ (304) of a Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine meant that their photographs were taken within the explicit framework of a certain ideal of ‘social-work propagandizing,’ which according to Rosler, “presented an argument within a class about the need to give a little in order to mollify the dangerous classes below” (304).

The central problem of Rosler’s text is the issue of agency. To put it bluntly: Is it ‘Okay’ for a bunch of wealthy Caucasian progressives to congratulate themselves for having taken pictures of the poor, beige masses of the world? Rosler seems to be arguing, on the whole, that it is not. Though her piece maintains the veneer of objectivity, the latent vitriol in places is self-evident. She implicitly decries Edward Murrow’s House of Shame, for instance, noting with a disgusted tone that Murrow exhorted his viewers to “write to their congressmen to help the migrant farm workers, whose pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood has been amply demonstrated for an hour… because these people can do nothing to help themselves” (306-307).

This is certainly a troubling undertone in any instance of documentary production by the privileged. It is often difficult even to analytically separate the noble impulse – that those with power should be using it to help those without – from the vicarious, ‘trophy-hunting’ element derided by Rosler. The issue of agency is still more problematic, however, in that it seems almost implicit within the documentary form – produced by and for privileged whites – to deny the agency of those being photographed. After all, if they were able to help themselves, then the documentarian’s function would be considerably diminished. Particularly in our digital context, however it becomes difficult to understand why we need a privileged white man like James Nachtwey to ‘bring back’ photographs of global poverty. When the instruments of photography and dissemination have become widespread and cheap enough that indigenous documentary production is possible, the attitudes of documentary photographers toward the significance of their own products seems vastly overinflated. In the most egregious examples raised by Rosler (the VISA ad and the version with the Guadeloupian boy, for instance – 312), documentary photography even seems to have been at times inhabited by the spirit of colonialism.

This is the problem that Rosler describes when she states that “documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful” (306). This claim is at once more troublesome and less troublesome than it may seem. It is first less troublesome, because this seems like the only conceivable way by which the politically powerless could ever obtain political power. The political sphere functions as a system of inclusion and exclusion; there are those actors within the polis who determine its politics, where there are those outside who are subject to the political authority without having any say in its governance. The extent of the polis is historically variable, of course, and contingent upon social norms. And yet, without delving too deeply into its structure, it should be immediately apparent that the system of politics offers no way for the powerless to obtain power. Those outside the polis are powerless: the only ones with power are those within the polis. Therefore, the only means by which the powerless will ever obtain power is if the powerful can be convinced of the necessity of granting it them. This is the traditional function of documentary: to induce the powerful to sympathize with the powerless, to the point of perhaps granting them (some limited form of) power. This is also an impulse clear in the work of Riis; though ostensibly included within the polis, the homeless are perhaps the most politically disenfranchised individuals within the modern system.

The implications of Rosler’s statement are also more troublesome than it may first appear, however. This is because by perpetuating this particular mode of documentary production, documentarians are in some sense also perpetuating the status quo with regard to the nature and distribution of power. Rosler herself even seems to be tied to a certain understanding of power which is to some extent archaic and reductive, in that neither her piece, nor the instances of documentary production she cites, ever questions the equivalence of power and political power. I mentioned at the beginning of my piece that every political battle was fought and won by ‘someone else.’ This stems from the nature of political power as described in the previous system: without political rights, one has no voice within the polis to demand such rights (and the power which accompanies them). Consequently, the system of political power seems like a universal absolutism – which is certainly what all systems of power hope to become. But the example of César Chavez, which Rosler lauds as an example of an organic effort toward self determination (in contrast to the Murrow example, 306), gives the lie to this reductive understanding of ‘power.’

César Chavez’ Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee was not successful because its members realized they were powerless, and decided to use documentary production to demand the power they lacked. Rather, they obtained political power by using the power of documentary production to emphasize the power they already had. The same is true of any mass movement for self-determination. The only way to obtain political power without the voluntary intervention of those who already have such power, is to leverage another form of power against the political establishment and demand such power. Before AFL-CIO, farm workers were politically powerless; to claim, like Murrow’s documentary, that they themselves were powerless, is nevertheless a distortion. Agriculture feeds nations; farm labourers are thereby an exceedingly powerful group when mobilized appropriately. Power exists in manifold configurations, and functions within a discursive system of exchange. Perhaps the only group that is after all, truly ‘powerless’ are the homeless, since they have neither labour, reputation, nor property to leverage as power.

In sum, then, the problem with traditional ‘social-work propagandizing’ is that in seeking to aid the powerless by informing the powerful, it replicates the very same categories of power that are responsible for the seeming ‘powerlessness’ of marginalized groups. In closing, however, it is intriguing to note that the ‘problems’ described by Rosler with regard to contemporary ‘trophy-hunting’ documentary work can perhaps be traced to the same issues of discursive power. Insofar as the ‘social-work’ style of documentary is intended to provide information about the powerless to the powerful, it seems as though the decline in that style of documentary is traceable to the fact that postmodern subjects no longer consider themselves ‘powerful.’ Where a certain modernist, neo-Enlightenment notion of power could accept that we bourgeois whites were ‘powerful’ simply by virtue of our participation in a political system, the subject in postmodernity sees itself only as a functionary, a prisoner of that very same system of power. And so, instead of presenting images of poverty and decay according to the trope of ‘informing the powerful,’ postmodern documentary simply asks its powerless viewer to identify with its powerless subject.

How is digital imagery like the plastic arts? The simplest, and perhaps most flippant response, is that with digital imagery, the characteristic ‘look’ of the plastic arts has been reduced to a set of simple and effective algorithms. The ’styles’ cultivated by so many of history’s great artists are reduced by Adobe Systems Inc. into a simple and electronically-reproducible set of image filters. Thus, we have perhaps the truest and clearest expression of the convergence between photography and the painted image in the digital realm: the ‘watercolour filter.’ But to assume that this glib and self-evident response plumbs the depths of this relation would be absurd. As such, rather than giving my slapdash digital image-painting more critical attention than it deserves, I would like to explore the problematic contemporary relation between truth and the digitized image by way of a number of other intriguing examples of this inter-media cross-pollination.

How are digital images like photographs, and how are they like paintings? In the simplest sense, a digital photograph remains a photograph. Right? The digital image remains, as Sontag would have us believe, in some sense a ‘piece of the real,’ (4) the traces of light captured from reality and re-expressed elsewhere. And yet, when we consider it, even on the most basic physical level, the digital image is nothing like the photographic print. Light is less ‘captured’ or ‘traced’ than it is simply ‘sensed‘ and translated into electronic signals. And when we view the digital image, we are not viewing a secondary reflection from a trace of reality fixed to paper, but rather, we are viewing an entirely new pattern of light, transmitted over time, space, and universal serial bus, and reformed ex nihilo for our gaze. These simple physical disparities translate into a vast phenomenological gap between these two media which share the name photography. In classical photography, the light is the law: it is captured by film, and fixed into permanence. As Sontag aptly notes, even in this older and more autocratic form of photography, images are “reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (4). And yet she nevertheless adheres to the by-now archaic position that a photograph is ’stenciled directly off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (154).

Why archaic? Because in the era of the digital image, light has ceased to be the law of the image, and has become only its origin. The digital image (usually – but we’ll return to this later) begins as light, just like the filmed image. But where the image on film remains a form of congealed light, always dependent on the control and manipulation of light for its development, post-production, and ultimate exhibition. And that which is dependent on natural light is thus subject to its vagaries: the traced reality of the image-on-film can be manipulated, to be sure, but nothing new can be plausibly created. For we can almost always tell when a negative has been sliced, or an image painted over the negative. We have little trouble distinguishing the Cottingley Fairies as fakes, for instance — though it is perhaps telling that its contemporary audiences were by no means as discriminating.

With digital imagery, the photographer is freed from the tyranny of the photon. We know little about manipulating the ephemeral particles that make up our universe, and what we do know is used for ends predominantly descriptive and destructive. We know a great deal about the systems we have created for ourselves, however, and by translating light into the binary vernacular, we are able to remake reality creatively. This, like most developments of the twentieth century, was driven by pornography. No longer was it necessary for one’s preferred object of desire to actually appear unclothed in public view in order to match one’s fantasies to an image. Indeed, no longer were consumers of pornophotography required to ‘collect photographs of anonymous examples of the desirable as an aid to masturbation’ (16). Instead, the face of a recognized celebrity could be digitally grafted upon the body of such an anonymous sex-object: digital-erotic chimerism. The ‘celebrity fake’ is perhaps the most prominent instance of digital photography’s increasingly shady commerce with truth. The levels of absurdity can be peeled away like an infinite onion. By pasting a celebrity’s face – herself really only desirable anonymity, named and photographed – onto the body of an anonymous model, one only compounds the anonymity of the composition and the celebrity system as a whole. The celebrity, as anonymous sex-object, is so generic, that any old pair of breasts will do.

And yet, the technology and ideology of digital imagery are developing quickly beyond the prurient, and indeed are starting to take on some of the best elements of the plastic arts. I have always found that one of the most questionable tenets of photography theory is the notion that photography somehow creates a more ‘realistic’ image than painting. Merleau-Ponty submitted this notion to a certain form of critique in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ drawing from the psychology and phenomenology of human perception to critique the notions of ‘photorealism.’ The photograph does indeed trace directly from ‘the real,’ but to proclaim that the photographic image is universally more realistic than the painting is extremely problematic. I recall the quote that Mitchell draws from Aaron Scharf, who asserts that Eadweard Muybridge’s horse photography meant that ‘the meaning of the term ‘truth to nature’ lost its force: what was true could not always be seen, and what could be seen was not always true’ (25). There is certainly a grain of truth to this statement: often, in isolating a moment from the progression of time, we can see what is obscured by temporal isomorphism. But to assert that the photograph is more ‘true’ than the human gaze is to remove all humanity from the notion of truth, and to judge human experience by the standard of a machine.

It is certainly not always the case that a photograph is more ‘real’ or ‘true’ than the human experience of reality. This is self-evident in the case of a doctored photograph, but perhaps more difficult to pick out in the case of an unretouched original. The origin of this discrepancy lies in the fact that vision, like reality and truth, is a temporal process. When we observe a scene, we do not observe it in undifferentiated clarity, or as a static whole. Rather, our eyes jump from place to place, adjusting to the light in each corner, picking out each salient aspect, and constructing a mental image — this mental image is what the painter paints. By contrast, the image of the camera is a product of a single cyclopean and static eye, capturing a (relatively) instantaneous and uniformly exposed pattern of light. This scientific uniformity of exposure might represent a coherent and elegant definition of ‘reality’ to those of a particular Enlightenment ideology, and yet it has little to do with our actual perception of the world. The image of an instant is useful, fascinating, even; but it remains a supplement to human vision, not the standard by which it is to be judged. This is fundamentally tied to the ‘reality effect’ that Mitchell gestures towards, in that photographs have acquired such a profound connotation of realism, that reality itself has unfortunately come to be judged with reference to the photograph.

Consider, for instance, even a work of great power, like Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes: this is an image which could never be conventionally photographed. The same goes for nearly anything by Monet, Cézanne, and practically all other artwork that came after the advent of photography. The problem with photography is that it matches a scientific and institutional notion of reality, but often corresponds little with our actual perception of the world. Shadows are too dark, bright spots too bright; the vagaries of film exposure have long been the bugbear of the amateur photographer. Painting after photography sought to respond to this by replicating those quirks and ‘inadequacies’ of human perception on canvas.

Digital imagery, however, has to some extent addressed these issues. Consider a beautiful, arresting image like this (click for large size):

This is evidently a photograph, and yet any photographer looking at it would know that there is something almost ‘unnatural’ about it. Even an amateur photographer can tell that ’something’ isn’t right about this photo. Everything is too well exposed: there is an eerie, painting-like quality about it. Flickr user Trey Ratcliff made this image using his digital camera, and a recently developed imaging technology called ‘High Dynamic Range’, which uses a number of exposures of the same image to obtain a range of contrast unattainable with one aperture and exposure setting. HDR imaging effectively replicates the human gaze far better than conventional photography, by allowing the photographer to replicate the entire range of contrast and saturation that we perceive in our mental image of a scene.

Interestingly enough, the digital convergences between photography and the plastic arts are being initiated from both sides. While many in academia have proposed that realism as a virtue in art all but died off with the advent of photography, there is an intriguing subculture of those who aspire to photorealism in their hand-created digital images. These efforts toward photorealism have gone to sometimes-absurd lengths. Consider, for instance, this blog posting in which the author uses a series of image layers in photoshop to make it appear as though he hand-drew the photorealistic image in question; it was later revealed in his comments that it was in fact a photograph, to which the erstwhile poster had applied a series of transformations in order to decompose the photograph into progressively less detailed images.

And finally, perhaps the most interesting example of convergence between the plastic and photographic arts, however, is ‘Ray tracing,’ a form of computer graphics which generates the image by effectively simulating a photograph. This image (note: huge file) is almost indistinguishable from a photograph, even at full resolution. It was created using a ray tracing program, which creates a static image of a constructed scene by selecting the perspective of the ‘camera’ and then mathematically working backwards, modeling the trajectory of each individual ray of light that would arrive at the camera. Thus, the plastic arts have become like photography, in that the only acceptable ‘realism’ is one based on scientific calculation and instrumental ‘tracing’ from a mathematical model. Ray tracing is simply the tracing of a reality that just happens not to be real.

For the contemporary Western audience, this is a photograph steeped in otherness. We are presented with all the conventional signifiers that have long since melded together into an indistinct and diaphanous notion of the ‘oriental,’ or, more particularly, the moyen-oriental – the Middle East. The tight, concentric rings of the man’s turban; his dense, wiry beard; his ornate robe and archaic blade; all of these signify a specific (albeit unreliable and frustratingly reductive) notion of a certain ethnic, racialized Other. His complexion and bone structure seem likely Turkic, perhaps Persian or Mongolian, although such ethnic distinctions are likely beyond the grasp of the average North American interpreter of today, overshadowed as they are by the man’s evidently foreign accoutrements. With his right hand posed over his genitals, and his left hand clasped about that troubling second phallus, those of a Freudian bent might propose that the Other in this photo is overtly threatening to colonialist notions of masculinity.

Those of a Freudian bent would have had to wait for many years following the creation of this photo to bend in such a fashion, however, as our dear Sigmund was but fifteen years of age when it was taken. In this lies the most striking Otherness of the photo, the temporal otherness which lays bare the contingent and constructed nature of the ethnic other. This photograph, now encountered in a perverse digital medium, was taken by one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (above) in 1911. Prokudin-Gorskii was granted a special dispensation by Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, to travel around the entire Russian Empire, documenting what Nicholas evidently hoped would be his legacy. Of course, the true historical fascination with these photographs is expressly because Gorskii’s photographs were greatly overshadowed by that other notable event in the reign of Tsar Nicholas: its end. Only six years after this photograph was taken, the Bolshevik Revolution would sweep the Russian Empire and forever reshape Western notions of the great Asiatic empire and its people. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs thus constitute some of our only surviving visual contact with a pre-Communist Russia, all the more incredible for their vivid colour and absurdly high resolution (to speak in an anachronistic digital vernacular). Indeed, the subject of the photo in question, one Mohammed Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, and last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a nation, would find his tiny emirate overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1920, a brief nine years after the creation of this photograph. A great deal of my fascination with Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from my awareness of what was to come, which, given my historical distance, constitutes almost a sense of dramatic irony. I know what’s going to have happened — and the Emir didn’t.

Thus, the allure of this photo comes from a trinitarian juxtaposition of ethnicity, history, and ephemerality, speaking through a discourse of saturation and hue which has come to signify the modern. The discourse through which the photograph speaks, however, is of preeminent importance in this case. I am oddly reminded of an old story arc in Calvin and Hobbes wherein Calvin’s father successfully convinces Calvin that the world prior to 1960 was in fact only black and white; the story is likely a familiar one to many, from any number of different sources. The phenomenological truth in such comedic little anecdotes is that our relation to history is necessarily a technologically-mediated one, and one which is also necessarily mediated by a number of archaic historical technologies. The entire notion of colour as expressed in ‘grayscale’ is the product of technology. Saturation and lightness have always been easier to capture than hue, but prior to the technological harvesting of photons, these abstractions of ‘colour space’ were simply inconceivable. The gray scale was the product of technological inadequacy, and yet it is no longer encountered as such. Why would there still be productions in black and white, but for the fact that the gray scale has become a signifier in itself, a connotative framing of the entire image as historical, archival material? The grayscale thus also breeds an implicit distance between the viewer and the subject of the photograph, almost a reassurance that history is indeed well and truly past. Thus, this image, when we know its age, becomes utterly compelling: the (relatively, in postmodern terms) ancient world speaks in the dialect of the modern. This is especially so when viewing the image on a computer screen: we can even see its digital resolution in the top of our browser window, and know that Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographic method has resolution equivalent to nearly ten megapixels.

When considered in its historical context, what might otherwise have been simply a nondescript picture of a Middle Eastern man takes on a number of new levels of signification, all of which operate simultaneously. The emir’s cocked eye might lead one to question whether he was already thinking of the future of his realm, for instance, which might lead us to certain other questions concerning his attitude towards the Russian photographer of the piece. Did he regard Gorskii’s expedition as a noxious colonialism, or was he pleased at the prospect of having his picture set down for posterity? What of his medals? In which battles were they won, and for what? Indeed, his entire costume raises interesting questions, not simply regarding its utility (what might that braid be for?), but also the position of ethnic groups vis-à-vis certain styles of dress. Like Rosler’s photographs of the native family, historical photographs of subjugated ethnicities recall a time when traditional dress was merely tradition, rather than reified and saleable Otherness. There is therefore a certain orientalist fascination with the Khan’s garb in the photograph, in that we can appreciate it in itself, without that nagging liberal self-consciousness that is endlessly questioning authenticity.

The other principal interaction of the photograph is between the everydayness of the colour snapshot, and the foreign, posed construction of Gorskii’s colour plates. Black and white photography not only signifies historicity, but it also signifies and generally accompanies a certain staid, constructed, and formal quality which is common to almost all photos of a certain era. Most historical photos to which we are exposed are black and white portraits, which largely adhere to the conventions of artistic portraiture, while most modern photos are ’snapshots’ or candid moments, which adhere to their own banal documentary logic. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs took as long, and perhaps longer to create than other greyscale photographic processes of the era. And yet, the ‘in the world’ setting and vivid colour of the image means that it seems to follow the documentary conventions of modern photography more than most other photography of the early twentieth century. The effect is difficult to shake, even when one is fully aware that the photograph is necessarily a posed image which nonetheless speaks in the dialect of its era. Something about this image makes me feel somehow phenomenologically ‘closer’ to the subject than I feel when encountering black and white photographs of my own ancestors. Posed as they are according to archaic notions of elegant portraiture, something always rings false when I examine them.

And thus we see the true power of this photograph. When colour comes to signify the present, a history in colour underlines the ever-present presence of the historical. Black and white photographs present us with history as history, since the absence of hue has itself taken on a layer of signification. Since the absence of hue must signify the historical, its presence must signify the contemporary: and so, the immediate visceral impact of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from the fact that it presents us with history, without any intervening time having passed. The history of the present is accomplished through the presence of history: a history in colour.

See ‘the image in question’ here.

“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.