Finding meaning.

THE MEANING OF PHOTOGRAPHY

STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE 

WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS 

NOVEMBER 19, 2005

Since the 1844 publication of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, photography and writing on photography have been intertwined, as subject and object. Through process, photographs exist as both latent and fixed images, while artists, authors, and audiences define what is absent, what is present, and whether either can be considered a truthful record. Equally, and from an historical perspective, the photographs that we make are inextricably linked to the technology that "fixed" these images. The question as to which images are developed, and preserved, as well as which ones are (effectively) erased, is a continuing leitmotif inherent to the medium.

On November 19, 2005, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a panel of esteemed scholars including Geoffrey Batchen, Benjamin Buchloh, Jonathan Crary, Mary Ann Doane, Robin Kelsey, Doug Nickel, Sally Stein, and Blake Stimson, with John Tagg in the role of moderator, convened for a one-day symposium on "The Meaning of Photography." Of specific concern were the following questions: How can we write the histories of photography? How should art history and visual studies integrate the special technical and aesthetic challenges posed by the medium and respond to the intense interest it has provoked in the museum and the academy in recent years?

However, in a day devoted to an inquiry into the meaning of photography, it was the photo historians who were conspicuously absent. Perhaps the pertinent question to contend with is, how secure is photography's hold as a separate discipline or as an object collected by unique institutions, such as the International Center of Photography or the George Eastman House, as opposed to a medium pertaining to the avant-garde and thus more comfortable within the archives of the Museum of Modern Art? Have we reached a critical juncture in which photography is construed as historically significant in terms of process, but is merely another tool in the contemporary artist's palette?

Each of the speakers were acutely aware of the significance of writing a history, but also acknowledged that our collective histories are fragile and constantly in a state of revision. Indeed, as a site of origin, Crary, of Columbia University, began by calling for a re-recognition of Richard Bolton's seminal 1989 compilation of essays, The Contest of Meaning, but questioned whether in 2005 the original contest was ongoing or if other issues had become more pressing. Throughout the day, panelists sought to address photography's identity in an age of increasing digital, as well as theoretical, concerns, namely: the role of the viewer (and by default Roland Barthes's "death of the author"), the potential for accident and chance, the index, and the archive.

In his talk entitled "Peter Henry Emerson: The Mechanics of Seeing," photo historian Nickel, director of the Center for Creative Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, considered the new histories of photography and who is writing them, specifically as related to the history of production and reception. How is meaning an effect of viewership, rather than imbued by the artist? Kelsey, of Harvard University, picked up on this theme in his paper, "The Problem of Luck," as he spoke on the historical relationship of the photograph and chance, and how the notion of randomness is a precondition of modernity. Kelsey noted the difference between what he named the "arrangement," the photograph as a complete picture, versus the "interruptent," defined as the accidental detail in the arrangement. While preproduction belongs to the artist, postproduction and the discovery of the "interruptent" belong to the viewer.

Batchen, of the City University of New York, spoke eloquently on Barthes's 1981 volume Camera Lucida, and its significance as a form of writing a type of history of photography. Indeed, Batchen's paper was particularly refreshing as he picked up on the topic of many of the earlier lecturers--all of whom seemed to be in the throes of a Barthesian dance in which they could honor his significance, but dare not speak his name. By all accounts, if Beaumont Newhall's authoritative history of photography was and continues to remain significant, its third person narration thoroughly points to one version of photographic history. By comparison, Batchen argues, Camera Lucida wrenches power from the author (as well as the artist) thereby transferring it to the reader and acknowledging a different approach to writing in which Barthes himself is neither subject or object, but subject becoming an object.

Doane, of Brown University, was the only speaker to devote her paper entirely to the realm of the digital and time-based media. Doane began with a discussion of the Shroud of Turin, the emergent figuration from the stained cloth and the lure of the index, as a means to question whether digital work did away with such medium specificity. What remains as the object--the film, the projection? If the digital medium is such that the encoded information that comprises the work has the potential to outlast its physical support, will we lose the imprint of time or the recognition of the faded photograph as something that once was?

At the end of the day, conference participants were no doubt left with more questions than definitive answers as the field of photography, and those who write on photography, must question the encroachment of the digital and its challenges to our notion of the image as ephemeral. How will photographs continue to exist as objects, as documents, in various states of decay or preservation compared with the digital potential of the pristine? What was certain was that photography, as a unique history, must continue this self-reflexive journey into the making of meaning if it does not wish to be claimed and usurped by other disciplines.

SARAH WEBB is an artist and the coeditor of Singular Women: Writing the Artist (2003).

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The papers presented at The Meaning of Photography symposium will be published by Yale University Press as part of the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series.