The Gaze and the Truth

The Gaze and the Truth Manipulated Stories Told by Photographs Written Assignment in the seminar „Media Production“ Södertörns Högskola School of Culture and Education Media Production: Text and Images Submitted by Marcel Weigel Stockholm, 11th of September 2014 1 The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel Introduction In the modern digital age, there has been established a new public sphere. Whereas in the past only magazines, newspapers and TV stations spread photographs, film clips or pictures, nowadays everyone is able to do so. On internet platforms like YouTube or twitter, oppositional coalitions, war parties or terror organisations are able to published photographs and clips and therefore create a counter propaganda. As today nearly everyone can take photographs or films with his/her smartphone and edit the material afterwards at the notebook or PC, it is more important than ever to realise that photographs probably never tell the whole story or even the truth. This point should be clarified in the following essay using primarily the texts of Price 2009 and Lutz/Collins 2003 as sources. Question 1: The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences, to find new ways to look at familiar subjects – to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. (Sontag in Lutz/Collins 2003) In this quote by Susan Sontag embedded into the discussion of the Western gaze in Lutz/ Collins 2003, the late ‘70s and mid ‘80s post-colonial view gets distinct. She characterises photographers who function in her eyes as ‚extension of the anthropologist‘ – and hence also anthropologists themselves - as colonialists and thus contextualises (western) anthropology inherently as something negative. These researchers and photographers are – according to her quote – merely instruments for serving westerners’ voracity for ‘exoticization’ (Saunders 2011: 56), a component which is frequently to be found in different manifestations within the (popular) arts. (e.g. tales like Ali Baba, films like James Bond (Saunders 2011: 53) and Disney movies (Petschow 2014) or music styles like world music). Thereby, Sontag ignores principles of anthropology already written down by Bronislaw Malinowski about 80 years ago: Proper conditions for ethnographic work. These, as said, consist mainly in cutting oneself off from the company of other white men, and remaining in as close contact with the natives as possible, which really can only be achieved by camping right in their villages (Malinowski 1932: 6) Moreover, he demands from proper field work that researchers must write down literally everything and not only particular ‘strange’ or exotic events – a task which also has to be postulated for documentary photographers. Although Sontag’s quote has to be questioned and criticised due to its generalisation, it has more than a germ of truth and fits perfect into the western (colonial) gaze discussion by Lutz/Collins 2009 which has to be discussed in combination with their category of the editor’s gaze in my eyes. As foundation for their analysis, they note that all “photographs tell stories about looking” (354). This assumption contains two important key facts: First, photographs pretend to be the reality but in fact they are not. They tell a story not the reality. Second, they assume, these stories are mainly about looking and thus different possible gazes (editor, viewer, photograph, subject and the more) must be analysed for proper understanding of photographs as “cultural artifacts” (354). Taking gazes as primary analytical tool, the western gaze combined with the magazine’s and the reader’s gaze is useful for understanding the storytelling behind the pictures in Rania Abouzeid’s article about Iraqi Christians. (2014) The magazine’s gaze - probably the most obvious - is developing the final story with choosing a number of photographs, embedding them into the written documentary part and ’explain’ them with captions. Here, a preferred reading is created which consists of a mix of the photographer’s gaze (who The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel 2 provides the raw material meaning the photographs) and the editor’s gaze who creates a superordinate story out of the subordinate stories inherent in each photograph itself. In the chosen example, the preferred reading could be seen as the message that Iraqi Christians are unarmed victims of the terror group IS. The only forces who are shown as armed and helping striking against the IS are Kurdish warriors. In the first and the last picture the crucifix is shown prominently and the captions explain that a mother is kissing her child “After an Islamic State (IS) advance into Kurdish-controlled territory” and that “On August 14, Christians and refugees from Mosul enjoyed a morale-boosting concert organized by the Kurdistan Regional Government”. Additionally, in this last photograph, the crucifix is shining in the night. The message gets clear: Iraqi Christians are victims of IS but supported by Kurdish forces that get armed by western governments. Moreover, the western policy is subliminal supported and justified since the Peshmerga – the military wing of the Kurdish parties PDKI, PUK and KDP which is armed by the USA and the EU and had supported the USA during their Iraq invasion 2003 - is mentioned 12 times in the whole article (3 times within the captions) whereas the also protective acting PKK is not mentioned. This circumstance could be seen as ideological driven since the PKK is still listed as terrorist and underground organisation by the West. Interestingly, Kurdish soldiers are illustrated in an impersonal way being hooded looking out of the frame (photograph 2 and 6), targeting long-distance targets (photograph 4) or are even purely shown from the back (photograph 5) refusing Christians the entry into the camp as the caption tells us. On the contrary, the viewer can see the desperate face expressions of the Christian refugees (photograph 5) or the face of the mother kissing her child (photograph 1). 1 This focus on Christians - although other ethnicities like Yazidis are affected, too - for creating a preferred reading by the editor affiliates with the westerner’s gaze. This gets obvious in photograph 5, in which three almost identical looking people are to be seen. The pure picture probably creates a feeling of discomfort since the people faced to the camera seems desperate. But it is not until reading the caption that a relationship is created as the caption explains that the desperate people are Christians and the entry into the humanity camp is denied by a Kurdish soldier. Since national geographic readers are mostly white, western and probably Christian, the magazine tries to catch them with this caption. Here, it is easy to identify the reader’s gaze in addition since the reader must fit into this pattern for being solicited. I, as a white, western but atheist person, am probably not touched that much like a Christian reader. Although the gaze discussion by Lutz/ Collins - whether it is outdated or not - has its raison d’être, it ignores other important facts which on the one hand are important for understanding why some pictures are published and others not and why they fascinate the viewers and on the other hand how photographs are made and preferred readings are created. Especially in the modern digital era, there are other aspects which have to be mentioned explaining (documentary) photography. These aspects are: 1. exposure, postproduction, filter, effects and the more 2. image composition (golden ration, storytelling, background/foreground ratio and the more; here also the discussed gazes are to be mentioned) 3. Coincidence and snapshots Whilst the first two categories are evident in nearly every type of photography, the last aspect is most notably to be found in the documentary genre where photographs often are taken during an event and not planned or staged long-time before. The idea of coincidence as determining component of documentary photographs, however, is not really new. As far back as 1980 the French philosopher Roland Barthes identified in his book camera lucida two aspects which distinguish good photographs from excellent ones; namely punctum and studium. He defines studium as an “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (Barthes 1993: 26) and punctum as “That accident which pricks me” 1 I counted just the photographs, so the information graphic is excluded in counting 3 The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel (Barthes 1993: 27) on the contrary. The last category should be the fact which makes photographs able to touch the viewer. These sometimes hidden categories can be applied to nearly all kinds of arts like music, photography or film since they are all about representation (as illustrated in Weigel 2014), but Barthes worked them out especially for photography. When Roland Barthes ideas of punctum and studium are even older than Lutz/Collins ideas about ‘the photograph as intersection of gazes’, it could be questioned why they should be of greater importance in the modern digital era. First of all, today it is very simple to take photographs compared to the situation some decades ago. Nowadays, photographs are mostly taken using digital technology, hence can be stored on small memory cards and copied in the evening onto the notebook. Therefore, photographers can take enormously more pictures of one and the same event since there is literally unlimited space for storing these pictures. When numerous photographs of one and the same event are taken – from different angles, with different lens settings and often several with the same setting – the possibility of having something very special within the photograph is automatically rising. Secondly, the first two aspects mentioned above can nowadays easily be accessed via image editing programs like Photoshop. Therefore, you can never be sure how close to reality photographs are - independent of the gazes inherent. Question 2: The ‘analytical’ approach sees conventional documentary as problematic in the sense that the medium itself is a complex signifying process. Photographic images are presented as constructs and the viewer is forced to read the system of signs and to become aware of being actively involved in the process of the creation of meaning. This approach stands in opposition to the notion of the photograph as a transparent ‘window on the world’. (Kelly in Price 2009). Kelly expresses in this quote that there are two extreme positions for analysing and understanding meaning creation in documentary photography. It has to be seen that this quote is from 1979 and perhaps at this time, both positions were accepted since researcher positions change from time to time – what had been highly recognisable in the media studies’ shift from effect studies (since the 1930s) over uses-andgratifications (since the 1970s) to reception research (since the 1980s) (Jakobsson 2013). Nowadays, most researchers would probably take a stand on a middle position between both ideologies. Perhaps no modern researcher would claim that there is a truth purely inherent within a photograph itself, although there is some which I would call ‘photographer’s truth’. Even though the photographer pretends to have a connection to reality (“We speak of taking photographs rather than making” (Price 2009: 106)). With his/her choice of angle, gazes and picture’s composition but also his/her selections of postproduction mentioned above, the photograph is presented in a certain light. Thus, photographs should never be taken as “neutral, disinterested or innocence” (Price 2009: 106). Nevertheless, the ‘photographer’s truth’ is alienated by the editor’s influence as I have discussed before. Both aspects can be found in Price’s depiction of the 1970’s semiological approach which analysed “photographs as texts in order to investigate the components of sign systems through which meaning is structured and encoded within a work.” (2009: 106). This approach ascribes more importance into the structural meaning making by the photographer and editor than in any pre-existing story analysis. At the latest with the emergence of the cultural studies in the late ‘70s/ beginning ‘80s, the idea of truth lying entirely within the photograph which functions as a ‘transparent window on the world’ - as Kelly mentioned - got obsolete. Although Stuart Hall puts also a light on the producer in the meaning creation process since “the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event” (1980: 93) and hence, the communicated object is the story created by the ‘photographer’s truth’ combined with the editor’s gaze, he characterises the whole communication process more complex with different stages of meaning creation as illustrated by Gurevitch/ Scannel: 4 The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel source -> encoder -> message -> decoder -> destination (2002: 238) When the communication process is understood in this way, it gets obvious why there is not only one meaning or one truth lying in a photograph. There is the encoded story created by the photographer’s truth and the editor’s gaze, there is the message itself transmitted via distinct communication channels (which also can have an influence on the meaning creation) and there is the recipient who has to decode the message for receiving the meaning. During this process there can be a shift within the meaning or truth so that the preferred reading (the encoded message) can alter from the received reading (the decoded message) since the decoding process is biased through social components like socialisation, ideology and knowledge. The code of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of symmetry […] depend on the degrees of symmetry/asymmetry […] established between the positions (Hall 1980: 93-94) This is what Kelly outlines when saying that “the viewer is forced to read the system of signs”. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that there is a power asymmetry in this communication process which supports the truth claim inherent in the preferred reading since “power resides in all aspects of a knowledge system including the construction of archives the codification of information and the communication chains through which it is disseminated.” Moreover, “each society has constructed its own ‘regime of truth’” (both quotes Price 2009: 107) Another aspect which questions the idea of the photograph as ’a transparent window on the world’ is the modern possibility of postproduction. Although there had always been some possibilities, modern digital opportunities shortly illustrated in part I made it impossible to know if the photograph is really showing what the camera has caught or if the photograph is digitally altered. A famous example clarifies this problem. Terje Hellesø was rewarded as ‘Nature Photographer of the Year 2010’, an award driven by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. He won this award with a photograph showing a lynx lying in snow – shot out of a bush. Four months after winning the award he was convicted of putting a stock photo lynx via photoshop into his photographs. “The manipulations came to light when conservationist Gunnar Gloerson noticed that one of Helleso’s photographs of a lynx showed the cat with winter fur, even though the photo was supposedly taken around July. He was also suspicious of Helleso’s claim that he had seen 150 lynx in just 9 months, since Gloerson himself had only seen 15 of them in 52 years of his studies.” (Zhang 2011) When even experts participating in a jury are not able to distinguish perfect manipulated photographs from pure ones, how should ordinary viewers which take documentary photographs as information source and confirmation of written texts’ authenticity (Price 2009) do so? Although documentary photography should have the demanding on itself not to mutate photographs during the postproduction, you cannot assume any longer that photographs show a reality which happened in one single moment but a reality which is created by elaborated decisions like staging or caption writing. Furthermore, even when there is no digital alienation happening, photographs just show snapshots within a biasing frame. As I already wrote elsewhere: The viewer only sees what the camera shows but nothing behind, left or right of the picture’s frame. Therefore, the audience will never see the whole truth but only what the camera wants to show them. (Weigel 2014: 4) There is merely one context in which Kelly’s notion of the photograph as ’transparent window on the world’ is – with reservations - justifiable: The everyday life documentation. Price (2009) argues that “the 5 The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel archetypical documentary project was concerned to draw the attention of an audience to particular subjects […] [for] changing the existing social or political situation” (102). In the course of years, the core or focus of documentary changed from being political and socio-critical into a mere documentation of “new cultural spaces, in particular those that were encountered in everyday life” (103). In this respect, documentary photography can be seen as pure ‘window on the world’ since it offers typical scenes happening every day in a particular society or region of the world although there might be the problem that some photographed subjects will intentionally or unintentionally stage themselves when being photographed. Therefore, it highly depends on the type of picture. Is there a large group of more or less anonymous people photographed or is it a portrait of just one single person? Is the subject photographed knowingly and willingly or was the photographer hidden and unperceived? However, even in this context it is questionable if this window is transparent since “photographers were concerned to offer more personal versions of the nature of social existence” (106). 6 The Gaze and the Truth – by Marcel Weigel Sources: Abouzeid, Rania (2014): Iraqi Christians Weigh Taking Up Arms Against the Islamic State. Published on: 14/27/08. Published in: National Geographic. News. Available at: http://news. nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140827-iraq-dahuk-islamic-state-assyrian-christianspeshmerga-nineveh-kurdistan/. Accessed at: 14/09/06. Barthes, Roland (1993): Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. New edition. London: Vintage Gurevitch, Michael/ Scannel, Paddy (2002): Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding”. In: Katz, Eilhu et. al (2003): Canonic texts in media research: are there any? Should there be? How about these?. Cambrige: Polity Press. pp. 231-247 Hall, Stuart (1980): Encoding, decoding. In: Simon During (red) (1993): The Cultural Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. pp. 90-103 Jakobsson, Peter (2013): Introduction Lecture for the course Media and Everday Life. Lutz, Catherine/ Collins, Jane (2003): The photograph as an intersection of gazes. In: Wells, Liz: The photography reader. London: Routhledge. Pp 354-374. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922/1932): Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Second Impression. London: Routledge. Petschow, Ariane (2014): Cultural representation of ‘the other’ in Disney’s classical animated movies. Illustrated with the example of Pocahontas. Published at: 14/01/20. Available at: https:// www.academia.edu/6326020/Cultural_representation_of_the_other_in_Disneys_classical_ animated_movies. Accessed at: 14/09/07. Price, Derrick (2009): Documentary: new cultures, new spaces. In: Wells, Liz: Photography - a critical introduction. London: Routhledge. Pp 102-115. Saunders, Robert A. (2011): Brand Interrupted. The Impact of Alternative Narrators on Nation Branding in the Former Second World. In: Kaneva, Nadia (ed.) (2011): Branding Post-Communist Nations. Marketizing National Identities in the ‘New’ Europe. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 49-71 Weigel, Marcel (2013): Representation of representation’s representation. Different levels of representation in Tim Burton’s ‘Sweeney Todd’. Published at: 14/01/20. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/6325833/Representation_of_representations_representation_ Different_levels_of_representation_in_Tim_Burtons_Sweeney_Todd. Accessed at: 14/09/10. Weigel, Marcel (2014): Watching TV collectively. Germany 2006 – The FIFA World Cup as social event. Published at: 13/09/26. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/5328273/Watching_TV_ collectively_Germany_2006_-_The_FIFA_World_Cup_as_social_event. Accessed at: 14/09/10. Zhang, Michael (2011): Swedish Wildlife Photographer of the Year Admits to Faking Photos. Published on: 11/09/05. Available at: http://petapixel.com/2011/09/05/swedish-wildlifephotographer-of-the-year-admits-to-faking-photos/. Accessed at: 10/09/14.