This is a text-only version of Chapter Nine of William J. Mitchell's The
Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994): 190-223. It is used here with the permission of the author
and MIT Press.
The central metaphor of André Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs suggests that, just as economies are destabilized by counterfeit coinage, so the practices of textual production and exchange through which subjects construct their understandings of the world are subverted by the surreptitious interjection of signifying tokens of uncertain value. Gide's character Strouvilhou remarks of "those promissory notes which go by the name of words":
I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most.... We live upon nothing but feelings which have been taken for granted once for all and which the reader imagines he experiences, because he believes everything he sees in print.... And as everyone knows that "bad money drives out good," a man who should offer the public real coins would seem to be defrauding us. In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan. [1]
Similarly, the photographic falsifier holds up not a mirror to the world but a looking glass through which the observing subject is slyly invited to step, like Alice, into a place where things are different--where facts seem indistinguishable from falsehoods and fictions and where immanent paradox continually threatens to undermine established certainties (figure 9.1). To grasp precisely how this can be so, we must consider not only how photographs and pseudo-photographs are made, but also how they are used--how their potential uses are established, how they are appropriated and exchanged, how they are combined with words and other pictures and made to play roles in narratives, and how they may have the effect of creating beliefs and desires. This strategy finds some precedent among the high modernists in Clement Greenberg's well-known insistence that photographs must be considered essentially in terms of their narrative uses. In 1964 Greenberg argued:
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else; its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial. The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. And it is in choosing and accosting his story, or subject, that the artist-photographer makes the decisions crucial to his art. [2]
It also draws from the legacy of structuralism--on Roland Barthes's
influential suggestion that the press photograph should not be regarded
as "an isolated structure." It is always, Barthes noted, "in
communication with at least one other structure, namely the text--title,
caption or article--accompanying every press photograph." [3]
This is essentially an expansion and reworking of some earlier remarks
by Walter Benjamin, who had suggested that, without captions "all
photographic construction must remain bound in coincidences" and who
had gone on to ask, "Will not captions become the essential component
of pictures?" [4]
Philosophers of a more analytical disposition have sometimes made the
similar point that pictures, when combined with labels, can be used like
declarative sentences to make assertions which are either true or false.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein no doubt encouraged this by insisting, in Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, that "A picture is a fact." [5])
John G. Bennett, for example, has written:
Consider a picture postcard. It has on one side a picture of a sunny beach with a large modern hotel in the background. On the face of the postcard there is the written phrase, 'Diddle Beach.' I get the impression that Diddle Beach is a sunny place with a fancy modern hotel and a pleasant beach. Later, when I go out of my way to visit it, I find nothing of the sort; Diddle Beach consists entirely of sharp rocks, the largest building within twenty miles is a rundown gas station, and the sun hasn't shown there in the memory of anyone living. I have been misled....
The picture by itself would not have misled me.... The label 'Diddle Beach' was necessary. On the other hand, the label without the picture could not have given me the false belief.... It was the combination of the label and the picture which led me to have false beliefs. [6]
This example leads Bennett to conclude that the label is analogous to
a name, that the picture is analogous to a predicate, and that combining
the label and the predicate gives something which can be true or false,
like a sentence. According to this account, it seems, you can perjure yourself
by proffering a picture with a false label (the place pictured is not really
called Diddle Beach) or a label with a false picture (the actual Diddle
Beach does not really have the attributes shown in the picture). Photographs
with false labels are nothing new: they have been used to mislead since
the earliest days of photography--as, for example, when Hippolyte Bayard
photographically portrayed himself as a drowned man in 1839 (figure 9.2).
But labels with pseudo-photographic false pictures have become much easier
to produce in the era of digital imaging.
The most useful place to start, however, is with the traditional distinction
between facts and evidence. [7] A
piece of evidence is a fact with significance in some context, a fact that
has been pressed into service, used to support some claim or argument.
It serves to tell us about something that happened in the past or is happening
somewhere else or will happen in the future or is just too small to see
or otherwise takes place in a setting to which we have no direct access.
Photographs, then, present facts but are frequently used
as evidence. Any photograph might be used as evidence of many things,
but it only becomes evidence when somebody finds a way to put it
to work. In The High Window Raymond Chandler shows us Philip Marlowe
as a not-too-bright would-be exegete performing this task--picking out
a relationship as significant, finding a way to use it as evidence, then
embedding it in a reconstructed chain of events:
There I was holding the photograph and looking at it. And so far as I could see it didn't mean a thing. I knew it had to. I just didn't know why. But I kept on looking at it. And in a little while something was wrong. It was a very small thing, but it was vital. The position of the man's hands, lined against the corner of the wall where it was cut out to make the window frame. The hands were not holding anything, they were not touching anything. It was the inside of the wrists that lined against the angle of the bricks. The hands were in air.
The man was not leaning. He was falling.
This narrative turned the mute facts of the photograph into the telling
evidence that Marlowe needed to crack the case.
In much the same fashion, a famous snapshot of Lee Harvey Oswald holding
the rifle used at Dealey Plaza has often been seized upon as evidence demonstrating
that Oswald was, indeed, John Kennedy's assassin. But Oliver Stone's film
JFK shows this photograph being doctored--suggesting that production
of this picture was part of a conspiracy. Here, one aspect of what the
picture shows--Oswald's possession of the rifle--is picked out and tellingly
embedded in alternative narratives.
Let us begin, then, by considering how photographs and pseudo-photographs
may be pressed into service as evidence--how they may be employed within
larger signifying structures to report the significant facts (or "facts")
about states of affairs that are claimed to have existed and events that
are claimed to have taken place, and how such reports are used to convince,
to create belief, and to command assent. Let us note, in particular, how
the potential uses and misuses of images are modified by various types
of interventions in image-production processes. This by no means exhausts
the possibilities: the issue might usefully be examined from any of the
alternative perspectives opened up by the recent fecundity of literary
theory--from before Bakhtin to beyond Barthes. But it's a start.
The photographer is more of a pointer than a painter. Just as the pointing
finger indicates something real out there, so does the pointing camera.
Above all else, a photograph denotes objects, persons, or scenes about
which something may then be said. (To "denote"--literally from
the Latin root--is to "mark out.") But we should not be misled
into assuming, therefore, that a photograph works just like the referring
expression of a sentence: we can easily write, "The present king of
France is bald," but it is beyond the powers of the most intrepid
paparazzi to frame such an individual in their viewfinders. As we have
seen, a photograph can denote only something that exists at definite
spatial and temporal coordinates in the physical world, so a photograph
always tells us--as the footprint on the beach told Robinson Crusoe--that
something was actually out there. Vicki Goldberg has noted that "bearing
witness is what photographs do best; the fact that what is represented
on paper undeniably existed, if only for a moment, is the ultimate source
of the medium's extraordinary powers of persuasion." [8]
Conversely, if a photograph of a bald individual is captioned "The
present king of France," the label of a nonexistent thing is being
falsely applied to a real person.
This presumptive anchorage of the photograph to the real provides an opportunity
for photographic fakers to take advantage of us. They can subvert ontology
by assembling available image fragments into pseudo-photographs that convincingly
match accepted conceptions of what some nonexistent thing would
be like--much as sixteenth-century entrepreneurs manufactured specimens
of mermen and mermaids, furry fish, sea bishops, unicorn horns, and griffin
claws and their nineteenth-century counterparts produced grotesque "medieval"
torture devices and sinister-looking chastity belts to satisfy expectations
aroused by gothic tales. [9] (Conversely,
when a specimen of the unlikely looking platypus was first carried back
to Europe, it was widely suspected of being an assembled fake. Nobody thought
that anything would look like that!) The assemblage--depicting,
say, a UFO, a Loch Ness monster, or a street in Atlantis--is proffered
as evidence that the thing denoted by the label was witnessed by the photographer.
If we can be fooled into thinking that the assemblage is a photograph,
then the presumption that photographs can show only things that exist will
do the rest. These sorts of images function as pseudo-acheiropoietoi--ersatz
relics used to create belief that something existed on earth. [10]
A variant of this game is use of photographic evidence--claimed to be of
recent date--to create the belief that something still exists. In
the long and bitter aftermath of America's defeat in the Vietnam War, for
example, fake photographs were used by those with a propaganda or blackmail
interest in the situation to perpetuate the pathetic myth of the continued
existence of American prisoners in the jungles of Southeast Asia--prisoners
waiting to be rescued and returned to their loved ones by the likes of
Rambo. [11] There was a sadly symmetrical
trade in doubtful relics: photographs with fake provenances were produced
to demonstrate that prisoners still remained, and bones--sometimes of animals
if sufficient human ones were not available--were proffered by the Vietnamese
to show that there were indeed no prisoners left.
It matters little whether the image fragments are deceptively assembled
before or after the moment of exposure. A particularly famous example of
assembly before exposure was used to hoodwink sir Arthur Conan Doyle--the
creator of Sherlock Holmes, masterly interpreter of physical evidence--in
1917. [12] Conan Doyle was a convinced
spiritualist, had faith in the existence of fairies, and thought he knew
what they would be like. Two girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths,
produced a doctored photograph showing a group of fairies buzzing like
big blowflies around the head of a child (figure 9.3). Even though the
fake was quite crude, Conan Doyle welcomed it as confirming evidence. He
wanted to believe, and the Wright girls had the right stuff to convince
him. In fact, the girls used cutout fairy figures from a children's book,
held in place by hatpins.
There is, then, a symmetry of uses. Straightforward photographs can be
used legitimately and effectively to show that things exist. But mislabeled
or manipulated photographs can be used to create illusions of existence.
Walt Whitman, it seems, perpetrated a deception similar to that of the
Wright girls. [13] A studio portrait
of 1883, which was later used as a frontispiece to Leaves of Grass,
shows a butterfly dramatically perched on his index finger (figure 9.4).
He was not, of course, attempting to demonstrate that butterflies exist,
but making a self-serving point about his own nature. "I've always
had the knack of attracting birds and butterflies and other wild critters,"
Whitman told the historian William Roscoe Thayer. Skeptically, Thayer later
commented: "How it happened that a butterfly should have been waiting
in the studio on the chance that Walt might drop in to be photographed,
or why Walt should be clad in a thick cardigan jacket on any day when butterflies
would have been disporting themselves in the fields, I have never been
able to explain." A later biographer, Esther Shephard, reported that
Whitman's memorabilia contained "a small cardboard butterfly with
a loop of fine wire attached, by means of which it could be fastened to
a finger." This famous photograph is certainly not worthless as evidence:
it told the truth--at least about some things--but it did not restrict
itself to nothing but the truth.
The spirit photographers who flourished in the early decades of the twentieth
century employed a different insertion technique. [14]
Their strategy was to preexpose parts of a negative plate with images of
a client's deceased loved ones, then to use that same plate in a portrait
sitting. When the plate was developed, the picture showed ghostly spirit
images (figure 9.5). The spirits had been invisibly there, it seemed, but
the eye of the camera had revealed them.
Digital dissemblers, of course, need have no recourse to cardboard fairies
or butterflies or to double exposures: they can scan the images that they
want to insert and fix these apocrypha in place without the use of hatpins
or wire loops. On October 27, 1989, for example, Newsday's cover
photo showed eighteen Grumman F-14 fighter jets taking off in formation;
but it never occurred: the photograph was manufactured by copying one of
a single jet landing, rotating it to point the nose upward, and repeatedly
pasting it into the scene (figure 9.6). [15]
A similar technique can be applied to "complete" unfinished or
ruined buildings--to produce electronic Potemkin villages by cutting and
pasting repetitive facade elements.
Accompanying text can put these sorts of images to use in several different
ways. It can falsely assert, or encourage the natural assumption, that
the depicted event took place or that the depicted state of affairs did
exist. It can enframe the content as that construction dear to philosophers,
a counterfactual conditional, such as "If a butterfly had landed on
my finger, then this is how I would have looked." [16]
Or it can make a prediction, such as "When the building is completed
it will look like this." In other words, it can present a possible
world rather than the actual one. Photographs can present only the actual
world, but constructed pseudo-photographs can--like naturalistic novels
or carefully staged film scenes--present possible worlds as if they
were actual.
The converse way to fake the photographic evidence is to efface something.
The result is an image that tells the truth up to a point, but not the
whole truth. For example, one of the most notorious photographs of the
twentieth century exists in two versions (figure 9.7). The first, taken
on May 5, 1920, shows a dramatically posed Lenin addressing a meeting with
the conspicuous figure of Trotsky at his side. In the second, Trotsky is
absent--deleted from the image as he was in general from Stalinist history.
[17] Those who want to rewrite political
narratives know such strategies well--hence also the removal of Alexander
Dubcek from a 1968 photograph of Czech leaders outside Saint Vitus Church
in Prague, and the removal of the Gang of Four from a photograph of Chinese
leaders at Mao's funeral in Tiananmen Square in 1976. [18]
(Similar effects can be achieved by selectively excising portions of audio
tapes, as in the notorious Nixon Watergate tapes.) The photograph's metonymic
power-- its capacity to stand for a larger world outside the frame and
to suggest a larger narrative that embraces the moment of exposure--is
being exploited here. Modifying what the photograph explicitly shows has
the more important effect of changing what it implicitly constructs.
On another famous occasion, the wife of a British newspaper proprietor
was offended by a photograph of a prize bull and caused its testicles to
be erased prior to publication. The owner of the bull, furious at this
misrepresentation of his animal's capacities, sued. (Presumably, if the
photograph had been labeled with the name of some other bull, he would
not have found reason to complain.) For not dissimilar reasons (and perhaps
to similar indignation), Rolling Stone magazine electronically deleted
a shoulder holster and pistol from the portrait of a macho television actor
for its March 28, 1985, cover. The holster could just as easily been removed
before the moment of exposure to produce an image with exactly the
same content, so the difference between directorial and electronic manipulation
seems theoretically insignificant in this case. (Of course it is significant
to the bull.)
Aesthetically inconvenient elements have frequently been excised from architectural
photographs. Some of the most influential plates in Le Corbusier's 1923
modernist tract Vers une architecture, for example, portrayed the
dramatically pure, unadorned, geometric forms of North American grain elevators:
they compellingly illustrated Corbusier's definition of architecture as
"the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together
in light." [19] But earlier
versions of these photographs, published by Walter Gropius in the Jahrbuch
des Deutschen Werkbundes of 1913, had shown something quite different.
Corbusier removed prominent classical pediments from atop some Canadian
silos to leave simple cylinders and in another instance dropped out a splendid
classical dome so that what remained was a pure composition of rectangular
boxes and square pyramids (figure 9.8). "So much the worse,"
he insouciantly wrote, "for those who lack imagination!"
Traditionally, photographers have tendentiously effaced and elided, when
they wished to do so, through carefully selective framing and cropping
and through use of camera angles in which foreground objects occlude unwanted
background objects. (For example, Time magazine was accused of digitally
altering its striking December 16, 1988, cover image of Reagan, Gorbachev,
and Bush to remove the surrounding crowd. [20]
In fact, the photographer had succeeded in getting an unusual angle that
excluded the crowd.) This is a game of layering and sightlines, much like
that played by stage designers. Digital image processing simply extends
the game by allowing easy insertion of new foreground layers after
exposure to obscure objects that do not fit the narrative purposes to which
the image is being put and that were not or could not be obscured by more
conventional means.
Logically, any photograph can be used to show the absence of indefinitely
many things-- that Elvis Presley did not accompany Lenin in May 1920, that
there was no UFO fly-by at Mao's funeral, and that the posturing actor
did not sport a sequined handbag. Absence only becomes interesting as evidence
when it conflicts with our presuppositions--that Trotsky was an important
Bolshevik who would naturally have accompanied Lenin, that buildings would
normally have classical details, or that a stud bull would typically have
testicles. When such absences can be made to seem sufficiently plausible,
they can change our beliefs.
Just as a declarative sentence has a referring expression and a predicate,
so many photographs that we regard as informative have components which
uniquely identify individuals and other components that assign certain
attributes to those individuals. Conversely, as in traditional pictures
of saints, certain attributes--uniforms, tools of trade, characteristic
haircuts, and so on--may be displayed so that we can identify an individual
who might otherwise be anybody. (The problem with saints is that we usually
have no idea of what their faces were actually like, so we have to rely
on stereotyped attributes for visual identification.) In either of these
cases, a photographic manipulator can change the meaning and potential
uses of an image as evidence by adding, deleting, or interchanging identifying
elements. Thus, for example, a nineteenth-century scandal was created by
a photograph manipulated to show the pope improbably wearing the insignia
of a freemason. [21]
Since people are most readily identified by their facial features, such
shifts can effectively be accomplished by substituting well-known heads
onto whatever available bodies have the appropriate attributes--a practice
which reduces those bodies to signifying commodities. (It is not too much
different from inserting a portrait photograph into a false passport.)
There is a well-known precedent for this from Roman antiquity: the emperor
Hadrian removed the head of Nero from an imperially garbed statue and replaced
it with another more to his liking. Similarly, Pierre Lombart's famous
Headless Horseman prints of an equestrian figure exist in three
states--one with no head (which we may read as a kind of visual aposiopesis),
one with the head of Oliver Cromwell, and one with the head of Charles
I (figure 9.9). [22] Political power
is a passing thing, but statues and printing plates endure.
In the prewar and Civil War era in the United States, which coincided with
the first decades of photography, images of various politicians were recycled
with the highly recognizable head of Abraham Lincoln. At different times,
Lincoln's likeness assumed the engraved bodies of Alexander Hamilton, Martin
Van Buren, and the Southern politician John C. Calhoun (figure 9.10). [23]
Henry S. Sadd's elaborate 1852 mezzotint engraving Union showed
Calhoun in a prominent central position, but a later version (ca. 1861),
replaced his face with that of an unbearded Lincoln and introduced the
portraits of half a dozen lesser pro-Union figures as well (figure 9.11)--a
shrewd marketing move under the circumstances. [24]
After Lincoln was assassinated, new pictures of the dead president were
created by pasting his head, from a famous Mathew Brady photograph (the
one engraved on the five-dollar bill), onto an appropriately statesmanlike
full-length portrait of Calhoun (figure 9.12). (A new text is also substituted
on the papers under the figure's hand: "Strict Constitution"
becomes "Constitution," "Free Trade" becomes "Union,"
and "The Sovereignty of the States" becomes "Proclamation
of Freedom.") Lincoln's head had to be mirrored in order to make it
fit; the deception was discovered when somebody noticed that the late president's
highly recognizable mole was on the wrong side.
In our own era, interchangeable heads have mostly been used pornographically
rather than politically--to present women as desirable boy toys rather
than to incorporate men in the emblematic raiments of political power.
The integral female subject is reconstructed as stereotyped sexual object.
The magazine TV Guide, for example, was caught embodying the not-so-svelte
talk show host Oprah Winfrey as the more lithe actress Ann-Margret to produce
a cover picture (figure 9.13). Use of a body double in this way is quicker
than a diet and cheaper than a health club membership, but a smitten fan
would certainly be disappointed if he sought out this alluring composite.
(This deception was discovered when Ann-Margret's husband noticed a familiar
ring on one of the reallocated fingers.) The distributors of the film Pretty
Woman put together a similarly rebuilt fantasy figure for a publicity
poster by supplanting the body of the film's star, Julia Roberts, with
that of an anonymous, seductively clad and posed model. This game can,
of course, be recast as one of ambiguity, androgyny, and scrambled sexual
difference; in 1991, in response to a Vanity Fair cover photograph
of the unmistakably pregnant actress Demi Moore, Spy magazine sniggeringly
substituted the face of the father, actor Bruce Willis. The composite became
a rhetorical figure--an oxymoron.
There is an old but still-robust tradition of maliciously recapitating
photographed bodies to show public personages compromised, naked, in bad
company, or just having too good a time. In 1861 an attempt was made to
discredit the exiled Queen of Naples by producing a composite showing her
cavorting naked with the pope and cardinals. [25]
More recently, the head of the photogenic Princess Di has been grafted
onto nude bodies to produce the pictures that tabloid magazines wanted
to get but couldn't. At the time of the Third French Republic, a photographer
named Eugene Appert fanned anti-Communard feeling by posing models in dramatic
tableaux and then substituting heads of Communards and their victims. [26]
A more subtle and increasingly common form of transfiguration by attribute
substitution is alteration of eye, hair, or skin color. The color of a
model's eyes can be changed by fitting tinted contact lenses before a shot
is taken or by color correction afterward. Similarly, hair color and style
can be changed by a prephotographic visit to the hairdresser or by postexposure
manipulation of the digital image: in 1991 the Japanese weekly Shukan
Bunshun published manipulated photographs of the unmarried Crown Prince
Naruhito with ten alternative hairstyles, together with an article entitled
"Hairstyle Remodeling Plan," in which a hundred young women were
asked which style they preferred (figure 9.14). [27]
(It is reported that the Imperial Household Agency was not amused.) And
a pale-faced model can get a tan on the beach or in the digital darkroom.
When images substitute for bodily presence, digital makeovers may serve
just as well as visits to hairdressers and makeup artists.
Props and scenery can also be recolored for cosmetic effect: the Orange
County Register once color corrected an implausibly colored swimming
pool to a more normal shade of blue: unfortunately, the accompanying story
was about how vandals had dyed the pool red. Rather less trivially, in
a 1970 budget request to Congress, NASA presented a colorized version of
black-and-white film footage from the Apollo moon mission: it showed not
the recorded colors of the scene of this historic event, but somebody's
reconstruction of those colors. [28]
Sometimes digital disguises are put on to feign the fit of a photograph
to a story. In 1989 the Washington producers of ABC News photographed a
staged scene of one man passing a briefcase to another, then electronically
manipulated the image so that one of the anonymous protagonists appeared
to be Felix Bloch, a diplomat who had been accused of espionage. [29]
An ABC News spokesperson embarrassed by the revelation of this deception--later
said that the image had been intended as a "simulation" and that
failure to identify it as such had been an oversight.
The converse process, of disguising recognizable facial features for the
sake of anonymity-- like a movie star putting on dark glasses--has also
surfaced from time to time. A former photographer for Hearst's New York
Journal, for example, has described how file photographs were adapted
to serve new narrative purposes in this way. Photographers would "dig
up a real photograph of, say, John L. Sullivan, remove his ferocious moustache,
paint a General Grant beard across his massive chin, and send it to the
engravers as a legitimate picture of an unidentified body in a foul murder."
[30] The result is an image that
passes for a photograph of somebody--but not anybody that we know.
Another informative type of photograph (one that we might regard as
newsworthy) shows an event--a meeting, a tryst, or a murder perhaps--taking
place. Such a photograph locates certain individuals at a specific location
at some particular moment. We presume that photographed events--unlike
drawn or painted ones--must really have happened, and we value photographs
showing significant events as part of the historical record. Alfred Hitchcock's
Rear Window is grounded on this premise: Jimmy Stewart, the immobilized
photographer, takes pictures that add up to evidence of a murder and is
stalked by the sinister Raymond Burr--the killer who realizes that the
testimony of photographs can put him away. And Antonioni's photographer
in Blow-Up is convinced by the evidence of his enlargements that
somebody was killed--until both the photographs and the body disappear.
News photographs showing us young women perched illicitly on middle-aged
presidential candidates' knees and amateur snapshots of family gatherings
and posing vacationers have the same power to demonstrate that significant
events indeed transpired. Photofinish pictures provide evidence acceptable
to punters and bookmakers of the order in which horses crossed the line.
Videotapes of politicians taking bribes in motel rooms have been used to
put these malefactors in jail. Terrorists and kidnappers provide photographs
of hostages to demonstrate that they really do have them. And the effectiveness
of blackmail photographs depends entirely on the victim's concession that
they are undeniable. (Blackmail drawings, however, are easily deniable
and would not work.)
This effect of displaced witnessing of being confronted with real events
in the lives of real people--can make photographs disturbing in a way that
the most horrific drawings can never be. Eddie Adams's famous 1968 photograph
of General Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect through the head created such
outrage because we knew that we were not seeing allegory or agitprop but
the actual slaughter of a helpless human being. Weegee's flashlit pictures
of murder victims at the scenes of the crimes are numbing in their matter-of-fact
inscriptions of squalid death. Brassai's photographs of prostitutes turn
us into voyeurs. Execution photographs and snuff films (the privatized
equivalent of this traditional state product) have the uniquely malevolent
power to transform their viewers into complicitous witnesses. A 1991 videotape
of white Los Angeles police officers brutally beating black motorist Rodney
King provided such irrefutable evidence of what really happened that, when
a jury with no blacks failed to convict the officers on criminal charges,
Los Angeles exploded into days of violent rioting; most people believed
their eyes, not what the legal system tried to tell them. [31]
But events that never occurred can also be shown--sometimes to similarly
telling effect-- by bringing together, within a frame, photographic images
taken at different times in different places. The early pictorialist photographers--notably
Oscar G. Reijlander and Henry Peach Robinson--exploited this possibility
to produce wannabe-paintings in the traditional modes of allegory, sentimental
narratives, and history pieces. Reijlander's The Two Ways of Life
convoked posed figures from thirty different negatives to produce an action-packed
Victorian crowd scene that today makes a life of gambling, liquor, and
lust seem a good more interesting than the proffered alternative of religion,
charity, and industry. And in 1890 a photograph of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec--somehow
anticipating poststructuralist fetishization of reproducibility and reflexivity--pictured
Toulouse-Lautrec portraying Toulouse-Lautrec (figure 9.15).
Visual misrepresentations of what happened have obvious political uses.
During the McCarthy era a crude cut-and-paste fake photograph showing US
Senator Millard Tydings in a meeting with the communist leader Earl Browder
(the one with the Joe Stalin moustache) probably cost the senator his seat
(figure 9.16). [32] (Stalin's propagandists
found it useful to take a widely known communist out of a picture,
and McCarthy's found that it served their purposes to put one in.)
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, caricature communists
have become much less effective as emblems of unreliability; male politicians
are now more easily discredited through juxtaposition with stereotypical
bimbo figures.
One of John Heartfield's most compelling political collages--Like Brother,
Like Murderer (1933)--simply conjoins a portrait of brownshirt leader
Julius Streicher with a picture of a bloodied murder victim from the Stuttgart
police archives and an Italian officer holding a dagger (figure 9.17).
An alternative version, without the Italian officer, was published under
the title A Pan-German. Within this directorial mode, it is actually
of only minor technical interest whether genuine image fragments are recombined
or impersonators are posed for a real photograph. And it makes little difference
whether a backdrop is painted on canvas in the photographer's studio before
the exposure is made or electronically matted in afterward.
Convincing assemblages of this sort are easy to produce by digital image
manipulation. For a 1989 article on the film Rain Man, for example,
the picture editors of Newsweek separately photographed actors Dustin
Hoffman and Tom Cruise one in New York and the other in Hawaii--then produced
a composite showing them beaming together, as if sharing a joke. [33]
Similarly, in 1990 The New York Times demonstrated this principle
by showing a composite in which Rambo and Groucho Marx appear at the Yalta
Conference (refer back to figure 9.1). [34]
And in 1991 the Times illustrated the steps involved in combining
a photograph of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein taken in Baghdad on July
8 with a photograph of US Secretary of State James Baker taken in Kuala
Lumpur on July 23 to produce the appearance of a cordial meeting. [35]
More prosaically, formal group pictures of boards of directors for annual
reports, groups of political candidates for magazine covers, and the like
are now fairly routinely put together with image-processing systems from
photographs taken on different occasions. (In much the same fashion, record
producers tape musicians on separate tracks and assemble musical performances
that never took place. The practice is so prevalent that recordings of
actual performances have to be labeled "live" or "in concert."
Recorded sounds can also be combined with recorded images, as when videos
of performers--such as the pop group Milli Vanilli--who look better than
they sing are lip-synched with audio tracks from others who sing better
than they look. Rap music goes even further, with its practice of "sampling"--freely
appropriating and recombining fragments of existing recordings. [36])
Similar techniques can be used to produce anachronistic assemblages of
filmed characters. In the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig, for example,
Allen's character convincingly interacts with historical figures from 1920s
black-and-white newsreels. And in 1991 a Diet Coke television commercial
seamlessly combined colorized old film footage of Humphrey Bogart, James
Cagney, and Louis Armstrong with modern footage to yield a spectacular
nightclub scene in which these long-dead characters mingle and converse
with the living (figure 8.1). [37]
Of course it does not suffice merely to surround characters by the
same frame: their actions or attitudes must be connected visually in a
way that serves some narrative purpose. The picture must have a point.
Thus, for example, Heartfield's Like Brother, Like Murderer achieves
its barbed clarity by fitting the three characters into an easily understood
stereotypical pattern of standing victors and fallen, bloodied victim--one
that is found both in Greek vase paintings and in boxing pictures on the
sports pages of newspapers. Just as Vladimir Propp [38]
analyzed folk tales as embeddings of characters in stereotyped action sequences--
contracts, seductions, betrayals, and so on--we might analyze successful
news pictures in terms of the stereotypical (and therefore recognizable)
frozen-action patterns that they instantiate. They are iterated enactments
of basic narrative functions, and we might well develop a systematic and
quite exhaustive narratology of them.
An interpretation may be suggested or contested by proposing that an image
shows enactment of some familiar action sequence. Many people who saw the
notorious videotape of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers
immediately and confidently assimilated it to the ancient narrative of
the helpless victim--the powerless member of an underclass being ill-used
by his oppressors. But the defense in the criminal trial of those officers
successfully constructed it in the minds of the jury as the well-worn racist
narrative (long familiar from such instantiations as Birth of a Nation
and King Kong) of the big, threatening, irrational black male who
had to be brought under control by the forces of law and order.
Digital cut-and-paste rearrangements of the elements of a photograph can
transform one action pattern into another, and in so doing dramatically
alter the image's meaning--our understanding of what the protagonists are
doing. Figure 9.18 illustrates this. In the original photograph Margaret
Thatcher and George Bush have their heads inclined toward each other as
they engage in what clearly appears to be an amicable chat. But, in the
manipulated version, Thatcher's figure has been mirrored, so that the two
now turn away from each other and seem to be quarrelling. Conversely, simply
moving them closer together makes their conversation seem more intimate.
Sometimes a narrative connection can be established without even placing
the protagonists within the same pictorial frame. Textual enframing of
separate images may work almost as well. Consider the supermarket tabloid
story "5-Ton Rhino Rams Train--and Knocks It OFF the Tracks."
[39] To illustrate this story, it
suffices to juxtapose a stock photo of an angry rhinoceros captioned "Tourist
captured this head-on shot of charging rhino on film" with another
one of a train wreck presented as "Rhinoceros 1, train 0! Shocking
aftermath of passenger train derailment."
Thus images suitable for appropriation by narratives can be produced in
several different ways. The procedure of a traditional photojournalist
is to watch for the emergence of significant patterns out of the flux of
continuous action and to expose precisely at the decisive moment. That
of the directorial photographer-- such as Edward Curtis in producing some
of his ennobled scenes of Native American life-- is to marshall characters,
props, and scenery into the desired relationships. [40]
And that of the electronic collagist is to assemble such patterns from
available image fragments: disparate found objects may encounter each other
on the digital dissecting table.
In all these cases of image manipulation we feel that somebody is not
quite playing by the rules, that we are somehow being cheated, that invalid
reports are being given. [41] But
precisely how? Speech-act theorists have thrown some light on the matter
by pointing out that the transaction of valid reporting, stating, or asserting
(like other speech acts and analogous nonverbal or partially verbal acts
of communication) is defined by constitutive rules. [42]
Most obviously, the maker of the report must be committed to the truth
of the expressed proposition and cannot simultaneously hold some contradictory
proposition to be true. Then there is the preparatory rule: the maker of
the report must be authorized by an ability to provide evidence or arguments
for the truth of the expressed proposition. (Thus responsible historians
and newspaper reporters check sources and do not just guess at what happened
or make things up.) Next, there is the informativeness rule: the expressed
proposition must not, in the relevant context, be obviously true to both
the speaker and the hearer. And finally, there is the sincerity rule: the
maker of the report must believe in the truth of the expressed proposition
or else be open to charges of lying, prevarication, or perjury.
A successful act of reporting conveys information that the reporter appropriately
believes to be true and the addressee accepts as credible. But there are
various cases of failure due to violation of the constitutive rules: makers
of reports may not sincerely believe what they say or be committed to its
truth, their beliefs may not be firmly grounded in evidence, or they may
not be conveying anything that is not already obvious to the addressee.
Invalid reporting conveys inaccuracies or untruths or does not make coherent
sense. It may not be believed or it may create false beliefs or it may
have no effect whatsoever on the addressee's beliefs.
Under normal circumstances, presentation of an unmanipulated photograph
to show that something was there, that some state of affairs existed, or
that some event took place is playing by the rules of valid reporting.
But presentation of photorealistic synthesized images or pseudo-photographic
assemblages (photographs with additions, deletions, substitutions, or rearrangements)
as straightforward photographs usually is not, and the resulting
transaction then becomes something other than valid reporting--either falsehood
or fiction. (There are some exceptions: a combination print carefully made
from two negatives to retain details of a cloudy sky might reasonably be
regarded as truer to nature than a conventional print made from a single
negative in which the sky is completely bleached out by overexposure.)
In the simplest case, photographic forgers and manipulators violate the
sincerity rule by using their productions in the context of enframing narratives
to convey knowingly false information--lies: the propagandists who removed
Trotsky from Lenin's podium or who juxtaposed Senator Tydings and Earl
Browder surely did not believe that what they were showing really happened,
but they wanted us to. Successful use of pseudo-photographs in this way
has the effect of producing or confirming false beliefs--as when the Wright
girls convinced Conan Doyle of the existence of fairies.
Heartfield's AIZ cover image Like Brother, Like Murderer,
though, is subtly and importantly different. Julius Streicher may or may
not actually have stood over a bloodied corpse in a Stuttgart street, but
(we may reasonably presume) Heartfield was not committed to the belief
that Streicher did, and he was not prepared to produce any evidence that
such an event took place. However, we cannot accuse Heartfield of insincerity:
he was not reporting anything at all, he was not (unlike the National
Geographic editors who shifted the pyramids for their cover) being
cavalier with the truth, and he was certainly not trying to take anybody
in. This powerful picture is fiction: Heartfield pretends to show
us something that took place, and we recognize that it is a pretense. [43]
We understand that the artist is projecting a possible world, not reporting
on the actual one. Like Sir Philip Sydney's poet, "he nothing affirms,
and therefore never lieth." We take his work as a realization of the
imaginary rather than an image of the real. It succeeds in its purpose
not by creating false belief about a particular event in a Stuttgart street,
but by engaging us and by compellingly suggesting a general way of understanding
Streicher's character and political role.
To take a work as fiction in this way, we must somehow understand that
what we are seeing is just a picture, that it is not being used
to report on an actual scene or event--even though it may look as if it
could be. We must, in other words, appreciate that the constitutive rules
governing valid reporting are suspended. If this suspension of the rules
is not signaled with sufficient clarity, or if it is deliberately fudged,
then we may justifiably feel deceived-- that fiction has slipped into falsehood.
Oliver Stone's 1991 film on the Kennedy assassination, JFK, for
example, was vigorously attacked by many press critics because it combined
actual newsreel footage with simulated footage and therefore, they claimed,
did not play fair. A typically apoplectic response was that of Richard
Christiansen, who complained in the Chicago Tribune that the film
tries to "persuade its audience that because certain incidents are
shot in grainy black-and-white newsreel style, these incidents did, in
fact, happen." He concluded that JFK "tries to make its
viewers believe that speculation is truth and that fiction is verity."
[44] The basic point is that if
we do not know when the rules of reporting are in effect, we cannot know
what to believe.
There are many ways to intimate that the rules of reporting are not in
effect. A framing narrative may simply tell us that this is the case by
specifying that an image is a "simulation" or "reenactment."
Or the context may signal it: according to widely accepted ethical conventions,
we can expect to see visual fictions when we go to the movies and to find
them on the covers of magazines or in art galleries, but not to encounter
them in the pages of respectable newspapers. (Oliver Stone could reasonably
claim that JFK--made with actors and shown in movie theaters--was
using realistic fiction to make a valid political point in much the same
fashion as Heartfield.) Even the image itself may signal that it is not
actually a straightforward photographic report, for example by incorporating
obviously hand-drawn lines or by displaying conspicuous inconsistencies
of perspective or shading.
Sometimes just the same image can be used, in different contexts, to make
valid reports, to deceive, and to project fictions. Consider the photograph
of Walt Whitman and the butterfly. Historians can legitimately use this
picture to report on Whitman's appearance at a particular date--to show
the length of his beard and the style of his attire. Whitman himself apparently
used it, on at least some occasions, to create the false belief that a
live butterfly had spontaneously settled on his finger. But Whitman's readers
might most reasonably take it as a posed fiction; it is, after all, the
frontispiece of a book in which the poet repeatedly constructs and contemplates
images of his own psyche's transmutation and resurrection. Why should not
the photograph be read as a visual allegory on the same theme? Whatever
the photographer's (or Whitman's) original intentions, the image can be
appropriated and used for a variety of purposes.
Even completely straightforward photographs can sometimes be used to dissimulate
or project fictions. Imagine a photograph of a bloody dictator smilingly
dandling an infant on his knee- a work in a propaganda genre that has been
popular from Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The photograph may well be unposed
and unmanipulated; there is no reason to doubt that dictators are capable
of sentimentality about grandchildren. But if the photograph is used as
evidence of the dictator's generally benevolent nature, then it is used
to create a false belief.
Thus we can begin to see that the truth, falsehood, or fictionality of
an image is not simply a congenital property--one conferred at birth by
a particular capture or construction process. It is, at best, only partially
determined by the maker of the image. It is a matter, as well, of how that
image is being used--perhaps by somebody other than the maker--in some
particular context.
So far, though, we have taken a rather narrow view of the uses of pictures.
They can actually be used to do many more things than report on events
and states of affairs, tell lies, and project fictions. In a sushi restaurant
with a pictorial menu, for example, you can use pictures to order. (Point,
and say "Bring me one of these." You do not need to know the
word for it.) Architects use pictures to specify work that is to be done,
then to create contracts for execution of that work. Gruesome pictures
can be used to warn or threaten, and pornographic pictures can be used
to elicit sexual response. Photographs in mail-order catalogues are used
to promise goods in return for money. Passport photographs are used to
identify, and photographs of birds in the Audubon Society Field Guide
are used to classify. In the terminology of speech-act theorists, the use
of a picture in a particular act of communication gives that picture a
certain illocutionary force, and the illocutionary force given to a particular
picture may vary from context to context. [45]
But there are constraints: pictures--like other types of physical artifacts--must
be fit for the particular uses to which they are put. They must have properties
that assure their functional adequacy. In this they differ from spoken
sounds: language, as Saussurean semiotics long ago taught us, puts available
speech sounds to arbitrary and conventionally maintained rather than causally
constrained uses.
Firstly, image-production processes make certain representational commitments:
they record certain kinds of things and not others, and they record some
kinds of things more completely and accurately than others. These representational
commitments determine in a very obvious way the limits of a resulting image's
potential uses in acts of communication. A color photograph or drawing
can be used, for example, to report on the hue of an object, to specify
that an object should have a certain hue, or to promise that an object
will have a certain hue; but a black-and-white drawing or photograph clearly
cannot. Photographs and mathematically constructed perspectives are committed
to absolute spatial consistency and can be used to report the existence
of, specify, or promise precise spatial relationships; but hand sketches
are not committed in this way and so cannot be used to show anything more
than approximate relationships--except, perhaps, when they are appropriately
annotated with dimensions and comments. [46]
Instantaneous photographs are committed to temporal unity, but collages
are not. A photofinish picture can be used to report that horses crossed
the line in a certain order and at a certain spacing, but not (since it
is the trace produced by the horses crossing in front of a slit aperture
rather than an instantaneous snapshot) to report that that a particular
configuration of horses existed at a specific moment. One-point perspective
drawings or photographs of buildings are committed to representing certain
elevation planes without foreshortening, but two-point and three-point
views are not. Different medical-imaging techniques--CT, ultrasound, PET,
MRI, and so on--are committed to acquiring different types of data about
bony and soft tissue diseases and physiological activities, and so are
used for different diagnostic purposes.
Secondly, a picture used in an act of communication must have the correct
type of intentional relationship to its subject matter. (In other words,
it must be about the right sort of thing.) A photographic or identikit
portrait of Abu Nidal can be used by an immigration officer to identify
that individual but not to classify somebody else as a terrorist, and a
drawing of a fictional character such as Sherlock Holmes is of no use to
an immigration officer at all. Conversely, an ornithologist's generic drawing
of a grackle in a field guide can be used by a birdwatcher to classify
a particular specimen as a member of that species, but not to identify
that bird as the individual Tweety. A sushi-menu photograph is used appropriately
to order fresh pieces of the depicted sushi types--certainly not the particular
sushi instances that were actually photographed some time ago! A news photograph
can be used effectively by a journalist or a historian to make a precise
report about an event or a state of affairs at some definite moment in
the past, but a handmade drawing works less well in this role. And a synthesized
perspective view can be used by an architect to project a possible future
world, but a photograph can only show an anterior state of the actual material
world.
In general, then, an attempted pictorial act of communication--making a
report, carrying out an identification, giving an order, or whatever--will
fail if the image used does not have the requisite sort of graphic content
or if its intentional positioning is not appropriate. This is misuse of
a physical artifact--like attempting to drive nails with a marshmallow.
The act will misfire or it will succeed only in some hollow or fraudulent
way: your report may be greeted with disbelief, you may wrongly identify
somebody (who happens to resemble a fictional illustration) as Sherlock
Holmes, or your sushi order may produce an unappetizing surprise. [47]
Just as you must understand the different uses afforded by marshmallows
and hammers if you want to perform physical tasks successfully, so you
must distinguish between the varying functional capabilities of paintings
and drawings, photographs, and digital images produced under various different
circumstances in order to use these different types of images felicitously.
Now, the process of photographic image construction is highly standardized,
its representational commitments are well known, and the intentional relationships
of standard photographs to their subject matter are relatively straightforward
and unambiguous. Furthermore, if one accepts the Foucaultian thesis that
modern science reversed the scholastic view of an assertion's authority
as something derived from its author and substituted the notion that matters
of fact are impersonal things, then it becomes obvious that the impersonal
process of photography answered to a dominant conception of what the coinage
of communication should be. Thus the rules that societies have evolved
for acceptable and effective usage of photographs in acts of communication
are both clear (if not always explicit) and widely understood. These rules
valorize photographs as uniquely reliable and transparent conveyors of
visual information and concomitantly structure familiar practices of graphic
production and exchange--among them the practices of photojournalism, feature
illustration, advertising photography, photo-illustrated fiction, the legal
use of photographic evidence, the family snapshot, photographic portraiture,
photo identification, medical imaging, and art photography. Photography
has established a powerful orthodoxy of graphic communication.
But digital images--as we have seen--have much less standardized production
processes than photographs. These processes are less subject to institutional
policing of uniformity, offer more opportunities for human intervention,
and are far more complex and varied in their range of possible representational
commitments. Furthermore, digital images can stand in a wider variety of
intentional relationships to the objects that they depict. And, because
they are so easily distributed, copied, transformed, and recombined, they
can readily be appropriated (or misappropriated) and put to uses for which
they were not originally intended. Thus they can be used to yield new forms
of understanding, but they can also disturb and disorient by blurring comfortable
boundaries and by encouraging transgression of rules on which we have come
to rely. Digital imaging technology can provide openings for principled
resistance to established social and cultural practices, and at the same
time it can create possibilities for cynical subversion of those practices.
The growing circulation of the new graphic currency that digital imaging
technology mints is relentlessly destabilizing the old photographic orthodoxy,
denaturing the established rules of graphic communication, and disrupting
the familiar practices of image production and exchange. This condition
demands, with increasing urgency, a fundamental critical reappraisal of
the uses to which we put graphic artifacts, the values we therefore assign
to them, and the ethical principles that guide our transactions with them.