art and allusion

Appearances - Notes from Session 3 - Tate Modern

The theme of this week's session of Appearances was Ethics: specifically some of the ethical issues that arise when taking photographs of people in the street. Ethics is largely a matter of how we treat other people (and, to a certain extent, the kind of person that each of us chooses to become). The point of this session was to raise questions rather than to give a definitive answer to those questions.

Ethical issues arise in the act of taking a photograph of someone who doesn't want to be photographed. Although in many parts of the world it is legal to photograph someone in these circumstances, it clearly causes some people distress. In extreme cases, it can be tantamount to stalking someone (the paparazzi syndrome). A photographer might argue that no one is seriously harmed in the process and that if people are in a public place they are fair game (and even that there is tacit consent to be photographed by entering the public space of the street). In Street and Studio in Tate Modern the sequence of images in Room 2, taken on the street in Hong Kong by Ed van der Elsken seems to border on harassment if we are to believe the caption saying that the photographer just followed a 'babe' around for a bit photographing her even though she didn't want him to.

The subsequent use of an image is also important. If I walk down Oxford Street and someone tracks my progress on a surveillance camera, that is very different from a photographer takes my photograph (perhaps in an unflattering way) and puts my image in an exhibition or prints it in a magazine or newspaper. In Tate Modern, the Philip-Lorca diCorcia images from the 'Heads' (review) series taken using a telephoto lens in Times Square from 1999 - 2001 are of people who did not know what was happening. They had no idea that they had been photographed. Their images have then appeared in public places (including a book and now Tate Modern) and at least one of the subjects has tried (and failed) to mount a legal case about this use on grounds of privacy. diCorcia's defence was based on the First Amendment right to free expression (the case was dismissed on the grounds that there was too long a gap between the act of taking the photograph and the complaint : read a New York Times article about the case and another in the American Journalism Review).

In these two examples above, a Kantian approach to ethics might suggest that the photographer's actions were immoral. For Immanuel Kant, the Categorical Imperative, the basic rule of ethics is that you should treat people as ends in themselves, respect their autonomy, rather than treat them as means to an end. Ed van der Elsken treated the woman as a simple means to get a photograph rather than acknowledged her as someone with her own desires and wishes; diCorcia seems not to be unduly concerned with the individuals' feelings about how their images are to be used - for him his right to free expression as an artist/photographer is the issue.

A consequentialist might point out that any harm done in these cases is minimal (though in the Van E case, they experience of being pursued could be psychologically traumatic) and the benefit in terms of producing interesting street photographs, large. So cost/benefit analysis would suggest that the photographer was justified in his approach in each case.

Less straightforward is the example of Boris Mikhailov.[read an interesting piece from the Guardian about him, and also an interview with him]  His photographs of people on the margins of Ukrainian society are disturbing documentary images. In some cases he has observed and photographed, and his actions are justified by the way in which he makes visible something that many people would rather not see. In this respect he is completely within the mainstream tradition of photojournalism. But at the point where he pays subjects to expose themselves for his camera he enters another domain. Here he is deliberately challenging our views about morality. These people are so destitute that very little sense of dignity is left to them, and Mikhailov demonstrates this by showing how readily they will further humiliate themselves for money. At first glance this appears a highly immoral act of exploitation of the vulnerable for the sake of a shocking image. A response to this view, though, is that there is a kind of  'tu quoque' move going on here, because in his commercial interaction and humiliation of his subjects he is simply mirroring economic relations that all of us are implicated in. He is perhaps saying 'You are no better than me'. Yet, even on this interpretation, it could be argued that as he has genuinely and knowingly further humiliated the downtrodden, he has done something seriously immoral to make a moral point, and that is not acceptable.

The neutral presentation of his highly challenging style of documentary photography in Tate Modern is unfortunate: most viewers need some background information about the circumstances in which these images were made to get a grip of what the moral issues might be here, and why they are actually an aspect of his approach to photography.

If you are interested in getting an overview of three distinct approaches to ethics, listen to these podcasts:

On Aristotle's Ethics

On Kant's Ethics

On John Stuart Mill's Ethics
Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism

Appearances - Notes from Session Two, Tate Modern Course

The main theme of this week's session of the Tate Modern course Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self, was the way in which our imagination plays a significant role in interpreting and appreciating street photography.

When I look at a photograph of someone I know, my mind is taken beyond the photograph to that actual person and what I know about them. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about this in his book called The Imaginary. In his example, he sees first of all a photo; then he sees it is a photo of a man on the some steps; then he appreciates it is a photo of his friend Pierre. At this point his mind is taken beyond the photograph. His thoughts are about the man he knows: Pierre.

In contrast, when I look at a photograph of a complete stranger, as is often the case with street photography, all I have to go on is the appearance of that stranger, and the minimal information contained in a caption if there is one. The rest is down to my imagination. Not that my imagination is completely free and unconstrained here, rather it is tied to what I can plausibly see within the image. This is a like the duck-rabbit case that Wittgenstein used to introduce his concept of seeing-as. I can choose to interpret the picture in a particular way, provided that the interpretation is consistent with the highly ambiguous information contained in the picture.

Whilst it is true that photographs carry  factual information about their causes, this is rarely legible and highly open to manipulation by the photographer and other users of the image. Even with a straight photograph of a street scene, such as David Goldblatt's On Elof Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 1966-7, in Room 8 of the Street and Studio exhibition, the legible documentary information cannot be the source of our main interest in it since it is so minimal. We can recognize that there are children, adults, that some are black and some are white, and that they appear to be going somewhere, but little more. The caption tells us that we are in South Africa and the date that this is the era of apartheid. But even the facial expressions of those depicted may not be accurate about how they would have appeared over a period of a few seconds. The frozen instant can radically misinform us about what would have been easily legible had we witnessed the scene ourselves.

This is not to say that the photographs can never provide evidence about the past. A photo-finish image is fairly reliable evidence about which horse won the race. But that is in part because of knowledge about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken, but also because the information carried by the image is of a relatively simple and unambiguous type.

It is true that in ordinary life we frequently judge a person's character on the basis of a fleeting glimpse of their face. But in such cases we usually have a great deal of information about the context and location of what is going on. And it is rare for a fleeting glimpse to be as brief as 1/250 of the second. So we glean information about someone from changes taking place over time. With a single still image, particularly if it is in black and white, we have very little to go on. Consequently we use our imaginations to take us beyond the marks on the surface of the photographic paper. Street photography can be fascinating not principally because of what it shows us about reality so much as of a what it forces us to contribute as viewers of the images, what it suggests rather than demonstrates. This is not untethered fantasy about the lives of others, but rather a matter of filling in thoughts about what seems to be implied by the image, but yet might not be accurate about what was in front of the lens when the photograph was taken.

In other words, we are not simply passive interpreters of images whose meanings have been fixed by the moment of exposure, but rather active creators of their meanings to some extent. This differs considerably from our experience of images of, for example, famous people. When I look at a photograph of Mick Jagger, even though I've never seen him in the flesh, I recognized him instantly. My thoughts are taken far beyond the image to a man whose music I have heard, whom I have seen interviewed on television, and in Robert Frank's film. Although what I believe about Mick Jagger and his life may be misleading about the real man, I am not the one who is inventing the character that I believe to have been photographed. Whereas with a photograph of a complete stranger in the street I have to base my thoughts about who this person is and what they were doing and why almost entirely on non-specific quite general experience. The contrast is even more extreme if you think about a photograph of your child or lover. Here, although you see the photograph, I think Sartre is right when he suggests that we are typically transported in our thoughts to the person him or herself. In the language of philosophy, the phenomenology of looking at photographs of those we know, of those we recognize, and of those who are complete strangers to us, is very different.

Appearances - Notes from Session One

Appearances

Read course aims

Most street photography is of strangers. What viewers of the images see are the equivalent of glimpses. We rely on swift reading of appearances - and as social animals we are very good at reading such glimpses. We don't know whether the impression the appearances give is accurate about the real person who is the subject of the image.

Appearance and Reality
Philosophers have traditionally been suspicious of appearances. Many of them have argued that reality lies behind appearances and that appearances cn be very misleading. Appearances aren't to be trusted.

Plato, for example, in The Republic, told the story of a cave where prisoners are chained facing a wall. Behind them is a fire, and in front of the fire people carry shapes that cast shadows on the wall. The prisonners believe they are having direct experience of reality; in fact they are looking at shadows. One day one of the prisonners breaks free and sees the fire. Eventually he is able to get outside and see the sun. When he returns, the prisonners in the cave won't believe the story he tells them.

The prisoner who escapes is like a philosopher: he is capable of perceiving reality. The rest of the people only believe they perceive reality. (For Plato, reality is beyond the world of appearances and consists of The Forms - such as the perfect Form of a circle - far superior to any actual circles).

Listen to Nigel Warburton on Plato (from Philosophy: The Classics)
Listen to an interview with Simon Blackburn on Plato's Cave (from Philosophy Bites)

Another major philosopher who questioned the reliability of appearances was the sixteenth century René Descartes who in his Meditations called just about every belief he had ever had in to doubt. He doubted his senses, whether he was awake, whether the real world was a fabrication created by an evil demon. But he couldn't doubt his own existence. Even if he was being deceived, there must be something that was being deceived: he expressed this as 'Cogito Ergo Sum' I think therefore I am. The result: he was more certain of his own existence as a thinking thing than of his existence as a body...

Listen to Nigel Warburton on Descartes (from Philosophy: The Classics)
Listen to a podcast interview with A.C. Grayling on Descartes' Cogito (from Philosophy Bites)

What's this got to do with portrait photography?

Photography is to a significant degree an art of appearances. It struggles to deal with complex ideas. A photographic portrait of a stranger can be compelling perhaps because of the human interest in faces and our interest in other people, reading their faces. But ultimately, according to some thinkers, it is condemned to deal in surface appearances. If reality does lie beyond appearances, however, then photography is unlikely to reveal truth. It may even be condemned to triviality.

A thinker who was particularly interested in appearances, who believed that social reality is based on appearances, and who explored what this reveals about social interaction was Erving Goffman whose 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand photographs of people. He gave what he labelled a dramaturgical analysis of social interactions, which is another way of saying that he took seriously Shakespeare's idea that all the world is a stage.

People give performances. They act roles to each other, idealized roles that in part embody how they think others want them to behave. We read non-verbal cues very quickly and accurately. We look for symptoms, the impressions people give off. This is what allows us to predict how people will behave.

In the gallery we looked at work in Room 6 of the Street and Studio exhibition by Model, Arbus, Halsman, Weegee, Madame Levonde and Serrano considering the ways in which non-verbal cues affect our reading of people in the images.

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self - Tate Modern - Aims of the Course

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self
led by Nigel Warburton

Mondays 2nd June – 23rd June,  6.45 p.m. – 8.15 p.m. followed by  optional drinks till about 9 p.m. (4 Sessions) Tate Modern (booking required - course sold out)

Course Description

Aims of the Course

•    To explore a range of philosophical ideas about the self and photography
•    To think about and discuss these ideas in relation to photographs in the Street and Studio exhibition
•    To gain new insights into particular photographs in this exhibition

No prior knowledge of philosophy or the history of photography assumed.

The main themes of the course are:

Appearance and Reality
The Self
Photography’s relation to reality, truth and the imagination
The Ethics of Photographing People
The Power of Photographic Portraiture

Notes, ideas for further reading etc.
I will provide a brief summary with links and ideas for reading after each session and will post it on this weblog.

Booking open for Appearances Course at Tate Modern

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self ...Booking for this course at Tate Modern in June  is now open. Booking is via the Tate Modern website or by telephone on 020 7887 8888.

Forthcoming Course on Photography at Tate Modern

Coming soon...

Appearances: philosophy, photography and the self

A 4-session course at Tate Modern

Led by Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open University
2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd  June 2008
6.45 p.m. - 8.15 p.m. followed by drinks.

What is the self? Is this something that photographs can reveal? Or is photographic portraiture merely an art of appearances? To what extent does the alleged documentary nature of photography affect our understanding of what we see?

In this 4-session course, led by philosopher and writer Nigel Warburton, participants will explore philosophical ideas about photography and the self. Sessions will include discussion of thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. There will be opportunities for critical engagement with specific works as well as discussion of more general theoretical approaches.

Booking from early May on the Tate Modern website. These courses are usually oversubscribed, so book early if you want to come. The course will coincide with the Street and Studio exhibition.

(Read a review of Max Kozloff's new book on photographic portraiture, The Theatre of the Face)

Update on Street Photography in the UK

I've just received the following explanation from the Government about the suggestion that street photography might be outlawed in Britain (apparently some 60,000 people put their names to the petition against this):

'The Government appreciates that millions of people in this country enjoy photography. So we have checked carefully to see if any Government department was considering any proposal that might possibly lead to the sort of restrictions suggested by this petition. We have been assured this is not the case.

There may be cases where individual schools or other bodies believe it is necessary to have some restrictions on photography, for instance to protect children, but that would be a matter for local decisions.

In fact, Simon Taylor, who started the petition, has since made clear that he was not really referring to Government action or legislation. His main concern appears to be that photographic societies and other organisations may introduce voluntary ID cards for members to help them explain why they are taking photographs. Again, any such scheme would not involve the Government.We hope this re-assures you and clears up the confusion.'

Is this the End of Street Photography in Britain?

Tony Blair and co are allegedly poised to bring in legislation that will force photographers to register for ID cards if they want to take photographs in public places...so are we about to wave goodbye to British street photography? UPDATE HERE, 29.3.07.

There is an official petition against this which already has over 27,000 signatories, deadline for signing is 14th August 2007. More on this from the person who started the petition. This may be a false alarm: Sophie Howarth explains why here (and gives some useful links too).