Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Photograph (Introduction to Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers by Robert Flynn Johnson)

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” WALLACE STEVENS

We go to photography for images of reality, but images that are more immediately real than the more contingently intimate, adroit and nuanced versions that other art forms provide. This is both photography’s blessing and its curse: it appears to bear irrefutable witness to the nature and content of our world yet it is achieved mechanically. In theory, anyone with a camera can do it: hence its ambiguously freighted appellation — the “artless art.”

The first photographic image I purchased was in 1967 when I was fifteen. I bought — for £5 (a vast sum to me then) — one sheet from the 1965 Pirelli calendar (the month was November) owned by a boy at my school. It was only the exorbitant price I offered that made him part with it and the picture was pinned for many months on the wall above my desk until it was lost in some end-of-term packing fiasco. Doubtless there was some now-forgotten adolescent sexual fascination that drove my determination to buy this picture but this does not explain why, over the thirty-seven years since I first saw it, I have been able to summon this image to mind effortlessly. A young blonde sunglassed woman, in a white T-shirt embroidered with a small anchor, sits at a cafe table in some seaside location. She has a cigarette in her mouth and is caught by the photographer in the very act of lighting it (from a book of matches), her lips are slightly pursed to hold the cigarette steady, the match is flaring at the cigarette’s tip. I had no idea who this woman was and I had no interest in the name of the photographer. But something about that image made me covet it and urged me to spend so much money to make it mine. Even though I lost it some months later its place is secure in the small but select image-bank in my memory. For the first time in my life a photograph had worked on me. Why? What happens on these occasions? How can a seemingly run-of-the-mill image stir one so?

That photograph was to all intents and purposes anonymous and, the more you come to think about it, in photography anonymity is the norm. When you consider the thousands — perhaps the tens of thousands — of photographic images each one of us encounters in a given year the vast majority—99 percent I would venture — is anonymous. In newspapers, magazines, colour supplements, advertisements, in-store promotions, posters, manuals, part works, CD covers, mailshots, travel brochures, textbooks, knitting catalogues, and so on, the photographer’s byline — if by chance there is one — is irrelevant. When it comes to the way we consume photographs we are like sperm whales, jaws wide, cruising through an ocean of swarming images, unreflectingly scooping up those that our eyes alight on.

The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographer’s monograph or exhibition. The signed image — the appropriated, the owned image — is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures.

Therefore to isolate and pointedly categorize the anonymous, as Anonymous does here, is to postulate something both unusual and intriguing. In our twenty-first-century world of millions upon millions of anonymous images what does the selection of a couple of hundred or so, enshrined in a beautifully produced book, say both about our response to the photograph and the practice of photography and, perhaps more importantly, to its status as an art?

The anonymous photograph, thus selected and presented, makes us ask, with new concentration, what it is about a photograph that elevates it above the casual and banal. What criteria do we bring to our evaluation of a photograph, what makes one memorable, another not? What, in short, makes a photograph good? We have become so accustomed to not seeing photographs, through their omnipresence, that now here is a chance to try and determine (without the bubble reputation) why some images move and enthral and remain in our memories — like paintings, like pieces of music.

It’s for this reason that I’ve appropriated the title of Wallace Stevens’s famous poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Looking at anonymous photographs and trying to analyse them, without a famous name attached, has the effect of sifting out a variety of responses to the photographic image. It seems to me that we look at photographs in ways that are far more varied and multifarious than the ways we look at other works of art. Sometimes these different responses complement each other, sometimes they cancel each other out, but when the photographer’s name is absent (and thus the photo’s historical-cultural-biographical context) we can, with better precision, more exactly investigate what assumptions and prejudices we bring to the photograph and how the photograph works on us.

Therefore I’ve tried to isolate, for harmonic poetic neatness, thirteen different ways we look at photographs. Perhaps there are more: perhaps some of my categories overlap somewhat, but I think the exercise — the thought-experiment — is valid because at the end of the process, if I am right, then what conclusions we draw about the anonymous photograph will bear intriguingly on the so-called “artless art” of photography itself.

Aide-memoire

Is this not why most of us take photographs? We use a camera to provide a visual analogue of a potential memory. We take photographs of places, people, pets, cars, houses, and so on, to store away. How many photographs are kept in boxes and not displayed in frames or mounted in albums (or, in this digital age, on hard disks)? Many of the anonymous photographs in this book inevitably fall into this category: here a little boy is snapped in front of a car; there, a housewife on a lounger looks up from her newspaper. Photographs of pets are of interest only to the owner (and possibly win the prize for the most boring photographs ever). The memory referent in these and other examples is lost to us now but in so many cases this must have been the motivation: the photograph functions simply as a way of recalling, a way of summoning up the past.

Reportage

This is the public face of the previous private category, in a sense. Often these images — of wars, of natural disasters, of historic events, of famous people, of gathered crowds — provide some of the most memorable images in the history of photography. Here the photograph is testimony, often of a shocking and harrowing order. Occasionally the horror gives way to more disturbing responses. The picture of the decapitated head moves beyond the initial shock of the image to something more surreal and unsettling. The juxtaposition of crashed car, empty country road and the victim’s head, seemingly carefully placed fifteen feet away from the body, looks like a scene from a Buñuel film. The camera is fortuitously present — or else, especially in combat zones, the photographer chooses to go where most of us would dare not. The great war photographers — Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Larry Burrows — come to mind

Work of Art

Sometimes the photograph tries to replicate the classic images of painting or sculpture. Think of the nude, the still life, the portrait. Here the photograph presents itself as a quasi-painting, a pseudo-canvas — with mixed results, in my opinion. Photos such as these — a corn cob or a vase of roses — seem vaguely ashamed of their mechanical reproductive nature and, by copying a genre, try to buy some aesthetic respectability. What’s the point of these images, one wonders (pace Mapplethorpe)? Only rarely can they outshine their equivalents in the plastic arts.

Topography

This category is related to the former, where the photograph tries to reproduce the effect of painted landscape, or a refulgent sunset. Or else the photograph is taken to register some natural phenomenon — mountain ranges, canyons, gorges, cataracts. As a means of recording a topographical situation the precision of photography is unrivalled. But is anyone as moved by the image of a photographed landscape as they are of a painted one?

Erotica and Pornography

This is perhaps a field that photography can claim as its own, having vanquished all rivals except, perhaps, the cartoon. The massive proliferation of sexual images (soft and hard) in our world exhibits something of the sheer range of photography’s power and effect — the gamut is extensive, the nuances of erotica are manifold. The naked women flourishing their suspender belts and baring their plump buttocks is frank titillation. The before-and-after images of three women, clothed and unclothed, make, perhaps guilelessly, a more intriguing social point. But the picture of a man and a prostitute in a darkened room with the shadow of a blind fanning over the cut-out pinups on the wall is interested purely in creating a fine photograph. Any erotic subtext is subliminal.

Advertisement

Subjects of erotic or pornographic images are selling their sexual frisson, such as it may be. But this category of photograph — the advertisement — is as ubiquitous as porn. These are photos that are programmed to function wholly as a form of allurement, as bait, as temptation. It is something photography does extremely well — better than any other form of image, conceivably. The whole huge world of fashion photography, for example, can be subsumed in this category.

Abstract Image

Here is another subclass that links with painting but in which photography has carved out a niche for itself. Something photographed in extreme close-up, for example, loses its quiddity and becomes near or wholly abstract. Two pairs of spectacles or the pistons and driving wheels of a locomotive are presented arrangements of shape and mass. A strange angle or extreme cropping can produce the same effect. The photograph functions simply and purely, being judged, like an abstract painting, in terms of form, pattern, texture and composition.

Literature

Again and again we are tempted to “read” a photograph, as if it were part of a narrative or a short story. This is particularly the case in anonymous photographs as we have so little to go on. Who are these masked women in their identical dresses? Or the odd trio in the bar (almost like a Brassai) — the two card-playing women and the young man with the glass and bottle. Is he with them? Perhaps he’s the true subject of the photograph. Does he know the photographer? (He’s looking into the lens.) We want to supply a “story” to the image, we want to find a narrative frame — or a series of frames — into which we can slot this image, and, as we bring our deduced or inferred narrative to the picture, attempt to understand it. This is a potent impulse in all photography and again it comes to the foreground when the image is anonymous. Walker Evans said: “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”

Text

Why are there so many photographs of signs? There is a whole subdivision, throughout the history of photography, that concerns itself with the photography of writing or printed signs, running from an image like the photograph of a diner where its signs are what attracts—“Bohemian Lunch Café”—to the sophisticated work of someone such as Lee Fried-lander. I find it hard fully to comprehend this impulse but it is clearly near-universal and one the anonymous photographer is equally prone to adopt. The entrance to a town, the hand-painted advertisement, the comic misspelling or the absent letter — something about words seems to provoke the desire to photograph them, as if the verbal joke needs to be visibly enshrined.

Autobiography

Every photograph, if we knew enough about the circumstances of its taking, will contain some biographical information about the photographer. A photograph such as that of the little black boy with the dummy in his mouth and the toy rifle in his hand is a form of biographical signifier of the man or woman who took the picture. This is a wonderful photograph (very Diane Arbus in its calm eeriness) but is the juxtaposition of symbols deliberate or a result of chance? Is this child the photographer’s son? What’s trying to be conveyed here about the photographer’s attitude to innocence and experience? Can we move on from there to ask if every photograph, therefore, is an unconscious fragment of the photographer’s autobiography? Will all the photographs a person takes in his or her life be as much a record of that individual as anything written down?

Composition

One could argue this is a subclass of the “work of art” category but I feel that the traditional fine-art concept and rules of composition particularly apply to photography. Many of the most memorable photographs, in my opinion, are also beautifully composed. The picture of two Nazi storm troopers hand in hand with their identically uniformed toddlers is, apart from anything else, a perfect composition: it could almost be a Cartier-Bresson. The photograph of two boys fishing works precisely because of the inadvertent mirror-imaging of their pose. Of course the classical elements of composition — balance or asymmetry, grouping of forms, the placing of light and dark etc., etc. — apply to a photograph as well. But I find in a well-composed black-and-white photograph — and perhaps this is something to do with a combination of depth of field and the photo’s monochrome nature — an element that is absent from painting. One is more intensely aware of composition in black-and-white photographs. I think, for example, that this idea of composition is behind the unanalysable appeal of some of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. Why are they so tenaciously memorable? It’s not simply a question of subject matter: the ones I remember best also tend to be the best composed.

A Means to an End/Tool

Photography cannot be separated from its pragmatic advantages. The huge subclass of anonymous photography as pedagogical illustration (in text books and encyclopaedias, for instance) bears this out. There are interesting ramifications, however: a photograph, for example, of James Dean’s wrecked Porsche will fall under the category of “reportage.” A similar photograph, but taken by the insurance loss adjuster investigating the accident, will have an entirely different import. Crime scene photographs also vacillate between these two designations, at once helping to solve the crime but also with their own curious aesthetic effect. Or, to put it another way, once the pragmatic task of the photograph has been satisfied it may transmogrify into something else. The professional photographer’s Polaroid is an exemplary instance. As someone who has been photographed many times by professional photographers, I often find the most pleasing image is the one they discard after the shoot. Professional accessory eliding into serendipitous portrait.

Snapshot

The photographer Nan Goldin has gone on record claiming that the snapshot is one of the highest forms of photography. I would like to go one step further and say that in the snapshot we distil the very essence of photography and find in this concept an explanation of this artless art’s idiosyncratic and enduring power. All photographs and all the types of photographs that are outlined above borrow from or share in the nature of the snapshot to a greater or lesser degree. For what distinguishes photography from all the other visual arts is its particularly intense relation to time. That mechanically retrieved image is the record of a split second of the world’s history. A photograph is a stop-time device and this is what makes every photograph, however sophisticated, however humdrum, unique. And because our mortality and our lives are so bound up with the sense of our time passing — or with the sense of our lives heading on remorselessly to their end — then the artificial ability to stop time yourself with your own photographs, or to witness time stopped in the photographs of others, is profoundly, atavistically appealing. I would argue that it is this feature of photography (and not, for example, Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum, the “detail”) that explains the individual response to the strange enticement of an individual photograph. One of the great images in this collection (it could have been taken by Henri Lartigue) is a photo of a group of wealthy, well-dressed people, holding umbrellas high against the rain, dashing across a wet road through advancing traffic. The women’s feet are blurred in their hurry, defying the speed of the camera shutter. The ambience is all energy and momentary alarm. The composition of the group is near-perfect: the diagonal swerve of the tyre track imprinted on the glossy tarmac (and how it draws us back into the picture); the vertical shafts of the umbrellas beginning to cant forward in the direction of the rush. Yet what, finally, “makes” this photograph — why it works, I would claim — is the women’s feet frozen in the air in mid dash. This is the pure element of snapshot (our rosebud, our blackbird): we see it plain — time is halted, time stands still.

I think this same notion underscores the allure of the November image in the 1965 Pirelli calendar for my fifteen-year-old self (and thereafter: I have it now — again — in a Pirelli album). There are agreeable associations in the picture — of sea, of sun, of summer — and the girl is pretty enough, in a very 1960s way, but — crucially — the image is un-posed, candid, snapped. Time has stopped: that match will for ever flare, her lips will be for ever slightly pursed.

This crucial, elemental aspect of photography could not be better enshrined than in the image on the title page of this book. In the middle distance a man, silhouetted against the sky, leaps from one towering column of rock to another. The unknown photographer captures him in mid-air, in mid-leap, poised above the significant abyss. This is a great and memorable photograph. All sorts of potential readings and interpretations crowd around it — was it a dare? What was the man trying to prove? Who was this leap designed to impress? How dangerous was it? We will never know, the facts of the photograph are lost to us: and because we can never know therefore all explanations are equally valid. But that moment of time has been recorded and held and the symbolic resonance around the split-second happenstance of its taking is rich. It could stand as a synecdoche for all photography. The great photographs — anonymous or otherwise, the photographs we love and remember — must have a snapshot of the human enterprise, of our human condition, about them, somewhere.

2004