Mitchell's "The photographic essay" and other thoughts

In Picture Theory, I read the second section (Textual Pictures, which has three chapters ― Visible Language: Blake’s Art of Writing, Ekphrasis and the Other, and Narrative, Memory, and Slavery), and it provided some intriguing analyses of poetry, engravings, and fiction. But I’d like to focus this post on a chapter in the next section called “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies.”  This chapter was of particular interest to me because I have some ideas for my thesis that deal with apocalyptic photos and “visual essays.”  As the title of the chapter suggests, Mitchell looks at four cultural productions that exemplify a photographic essay.  First though, he discusses what constitutes a photographic essay, which typically consists of a literal conjunction of photographs and text, a form that enables viewers/readers to consider a cause or political issue (Mitchell notes that photo and text are “usually united by a documentary purpose, often political, journalistic, sometimes scientific”) (287).  In other words, those who produce, circulate, and consume the photographic essay often have the photo and text function simply as a medium.  

The photographic essay is labeled as such for three reasons: 1. “the presumption of a common referential reality,” created with the photograph, is able to connect to engender a non-fiction   2.  the personal and subjective dimensions of a written essay connect to personalization of the photo  3. partiality: essays and photographs are never complete, always including parts while also neglecting parts (often rhetorically)  (289). 

In the four case studies, Mitchell posits the photographic essay has various forms: classic collaboration with two or more people (Agee and Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and each produces either photo or text that clearly associates with the other; photography has “independence” and “co-equality” or what I would say “can speak for itself” (Barthes’ contention that photographs have “punctum” and not “stadium,” which I’ll discuss in a moment); seriousness: explicit confrontation (versus Barthes “implicit” confrontation with the picture of his “mother” as the centerpiece of a collection) with the “un-beautiful, the impoverished, the ephemeral”; and dialogical collaboration (exemplified in Said and Mohr’s After the Last Sky), in which photo and text are present, but situated differently than a classic collaboration, because of the seemingly disparate connection between photo and text (often addressing the context, both historical and present, as we see in Said’s exploration of exile).  What these four studies offer is an understanding of the relationship, or rather collaboration, between photos and text, producers and (sometimes) consumers (often a consumer will become a producer, as is the case with Barthes’ Camera Lucida), as well as the ambiguous genre of the photographic essay.

What I’d like to discuss briefly is when Mitchell discusses Barthes’ punctum and stadium (something that my friend Jake brought up in a comment in another post).  I have not read Camera Lucida, but I’m going to see if I better understand what these two terms mean.  Barthes suggests that stadium, as a rhetorical device, enables “the photographs to be “read” or that would allow a scientific theory of the photograph to emerge.” But what interests Barthes more is the punctum, a “stray, pointed detail that ‘pricks’ or ‘wounds’” a beholder. These ‘pricks’ are caused by “accidental, uncoded, nameless features,” such as “a necklace, bad teeth, folded arms, dirt streets.” The punctum “open[s] the photograph metonymically onto a contingent realm of memory and subjectivity . . . [something that] is often remembered about a photograph than what is seen in its actual presence” (Picture Theory 303).  In Mitchell’s summary, and what I presume is in Barthes’ articulation (as Jake had mentioned too), is that something innate in the photograph enables a particular…emotion? sensation? idea? belief? for the beholder.  Yet, Barthes also suggests his self-reflexivity in engaging in as a beholder, an engagement that “adds” to the photographic.  What does Barthes mean here?  What exactly constitutes punctum?  Barthes does say that he cannot find a language to describe such a phenomenon, but does this mean that he suggests a reality outside of (written) language?  One may find echoes of Jacques Lacan here and the Real (and possibly the object petit a?  A Wikipedia entry notes, “objet petit a is defined as the leftover, the remnant left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real.”  Yet, the objet petit a is the desire within the Other, or at least what we hope is within the Other).  But Lacan is dealing with the psyche, not with an intrinsic nature of “things.”  I see the struggles Barthes has in identifying certain dimensions of photographs and pictures, but from an academic position, this uncertainty (to use the word “uncertainty” is problematic as we are dealing with language here).  I am interested in Camera Lucida and the ideas of punctum and stadium, so I may need to add the book to my reading list. 

I would also like briefly to discuss my other post and Jake’s comment (see Barthes' The Photographic Message post).  I had postulated, or rather offered, an idea about the nexus of objects, memory, and consciousness.  In other words, I was curious as to if/how objects absorb or develop consciousness (or have something innate in them that enables consciousness) and  what that consciousness would look like.  I had briefly described an example in which I was given a painting by my friend Sandy and developed ideologies (friendship, gratitude, value of listening) that induced a memory(ies). I suggested that I actually did not have the memory(ies), but that the painting held the memory(ies) more than I did (when I saw the painting, the memory(ies) flourished, or at least were much more prevalent to reality than if I thought about the exchange of the painting without the painting around).  Of course, we see here Barthes stadium where the context produced particular ideas and memory(ies).  And I further suggested that when the painting saw an unforeseeable accident that required me to dispose of the painting, it still retained this memory(ies) even outside my possession (even if someone else “rescued” and re-possessed the painting). If punctum were to be a “theory” (being that theory always needs articulation, and hence part of Barthes' issue) that we could work with, I would need to identify particularities in the painting (let’s say, the words “Las Tres Preguntas del Diablo Enamorado” painted or the positioning of the nine figures marching) that communicate certain transcendental ideas.  But wouldn’t this suggest that particular ideas are essential, leading us to a dualistic paradigm of culture? 

I realize that this painting is different than what Mitchell discusses in this chapter.  It is a painting, not a photograph, so (presumably) the brush strokes, coloring, lines, the written text, etc. are intentional by Sandy.  But, are there certain ideas in these brush strokes, coloring, etc. that are not signifiers?  Could we remark that beauty can transcend time, space, culture, politics?  Could we ever look at a rotted corpse and see beauty (something I’ve been working on is reconfiguring definitions of the beautiful and ugly, trying to deconstruct the beautiful/ugly binary, identifying the ugly as access to truths)? Barthes’ punctum looks more and more like an aesthetics, something that I’m skeptical about (I typically position myself in the New Historicism camp as I see decontextualizing a cultural production neglects identifying how power functions). 

Shitty picture of the painting, but I figured I'd have it available for you.