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.
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