Chapter 7: Contacts/worksheets: notes on photography, history, and
representation
In this chapter, John
Tagg talks about several issues in representation through photography. He
starts off by discussing the importance of text in representation. He starts
off the chapter with an analysis of a picture by Lewis Hine of a young couple
in their living room, in 1936. They seem to be reasonably well off, sat in what
is apparently their own living room with decorated furniture, dressed in casual
clothing and reading the newspaper. This image is interesting because a lot of
American imagery from this time, and especially year, is from the FSA and of
apparently poor and struggling people in a time of depressihttps://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1762388788136398997#editor/target=post;postID=6817054879194327046on (pg186). Perhaps
an accompanying text or even a suitable caption would affirm what it is exactly
that has been documented. Instead, it is only titled “young couple, 1936”
“a direct
transcription of the real... encoding and decoding in photographs is the
product of work by concrete historical individuals who are themselves
reciprocally constituted as the subjects of ideology in the unfolding unfolding
historical process. Moreover, this work takes place within specific social and
institutional contexts. Photographs are not ideas. They are material items
produced by a certain elaborate mode of production and distributed, circulated
and consumed within a given set of social relations: images made meaningful and
understood within the very relations of their production and sited within a
wider ideological complex which must, in turn, be related to the practical and
social problems which sustain and shape it” (pg188)
A direct transcript
of the real. That’s a nice notion. I could create a bank of small sentences
like this that talk about photography’s ability to capture what is real.
Tagg talks about Encoding
and decoding of images often done by analysers of history, but states that these
people exist and work in a context which has some bias in its own ideology. Im
still not 100% on what this means. Perhaps people who analyse work bring some
bias to a reading of an image, so we shouldn’t rely on their reading. Although
everyone brings some bias to a reading in some form.
He also mentions that
the photograph is a material item; Produced mechanically, distributed physically,
circulated and consumed by viewers for a purpose.Perhaps he could also
be saying how an image exists in a variety of bias factors, and they all need
to be understood at every level of the image to understand the image. Why it
was taken, how it was taken, who it is off, who took the image, where is it
presented, how is it presented; are all factors that need to be considered to truly
understand what is being represented.
“We are now in a position to displace the
question about photographs privileged status as a guaranteed witness of the
actuality of the objects or events it represents.... the power to bestow
authority and privilege on photograph representations, is not given to other
apparatuses within the same social formation – such as amateur photography or
‘art photography’ – and it is only partially held by photojournalism. Ask
yourself, under what conditions would a photograph of the loch ness monster or
a UFO become acceptable as a proof of their existence? Not is they were ‘frontal and clear’, to use
barthes term, that is, if they deployed the allegedly ‘natural’ rhetoric of
documentary images.” (pg189)
If photographs
represent what is real, and we start to use photographs as evidence, how can we
disregard certain imagery as being evidential? Why is amateur photography not
apparently accurate as evidence? And he makes a very good point about images of
UFO’s and the Loch Ness monster. This could be extended to the Bigfoot
phenomenon, and even many other conspiracy theories which have imagery
surrounding them (9/11 theories). There are a fair amount of images in the
public realm depicting these items, but does that make them evidential? Are the
things depicted even real? What do they depict? A monster, a shadow, a
misinterpretation.
For a tool which
replicates reality, it can still be very inaccurate, and this is often informed
by factors outside the frame.
References
- Tagg, J. (1988). Contacts/worksheets: notes on Photography, History, and Representation. In: The Burden of Representation. Hampshire: MacMillan Education LTD. pg 184-211.
- Pg 186 : “1936: severn years after the Wall Street Crash and a year before the ‘Roosevelt Depression’” John Tagg
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