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Feeling Photography
By Elspeth H. Brown, Thy Phu Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7731-3
CHAPTER 1
Photography between Desire and Grief
Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day
SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH
ROLAND BARTHES FELT PHOTOGRAPHY. In fact, feeling photography was one of his central concerns. In Camera Lucida, his unconventional, personal attempt to grasp the essence of photography, he declares, "Affect was what I didn't want to reduce. As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for 'sentimental' reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."
For Barthes, a critical contemplation of photography—noticing, observing, thinking—begins only after feeling. Seeing produces an emotional response, which in turn encourages reflection. Barthes seeks to forestall the scholarly leap from perception to observation, to linger in the in-between moment of feeling, and to make his critical work account for his emotional response. He does not have a language for such reactions, nor for what elicits them, and in fact, he proclaims: "What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance." Nevertheless, Camera Lucida is his provocative, inchoate attempt to describe photography's affective power.
Refusing to give up feeling, to reduce affect, Barthes challenges himself as observer: "Being irreducible, it was thereby what I wanted, what I ought to reduce the Photograph to; but could I retain an affective intentionality, a view of the object which was immediately steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria?" "Affective intentionality" suggests an active and deliberate method of regarding a photograph. It is not simply an affective response that Barthes proposes to retain, but an affective mode of approaching the photograph. In other words, he hopes to do more than passively record the emotional effects images have on him (although he does, in fact, record such effects throughout Camera Lucida). Instead, he seeks to use affect as one of the lenses through which he sees and grasps an image. Ultimately, it is a view of the photograph seen in and through emotion that he takes as his object of analysis.
Camera Lucida thus encourages one to attend to feeling when studying photographs, and in this way to more fully account for the power of photographic images. This is an intriguing critical challenge, and one that several scholars, notably Carol Mavor, have answered very successfully. But it is also a critical mode with potential shortcomings, for it is hard to attend to emotion without overly attending to one's self in the process; it is easy to lose sight of the ends to which one is "putting one's self in the picture" (to borrow a phrase from Jo Spence). Elsewhere I have questioned Barthes's method for subsuming the histories of photographic subjects beneath his own personal reflections. Here, however, instead of returning to what Barthes's mode obscures, I would like to consider what Barthes's affective approach to photography might uniquely enable one to see.
In this essay I both take up and shift Barthes's affective intent by attempting to see feeling in photographs. Rather than revealing how photographs make me feel, I'm interested in how others have forecast feeling in their propositions about and practice of photography. In this essay I take feeling itself as a question and a theme, attending to the ways in which desire, repulsion, nostalgia, and euphoria are represented and revealed in photographs. I do so primarily with regard to a photographer who was keenly devoted to his own "affective intentionality," namely, F. Holland Day.
I read Barthes's propositions in relation to Day's photographs, and view Day's photographs as theoretical instantiations in themselves. I don't mean to suggest that Day's images illustrate Barthes's theses, but instead to show the ways in which both struggle to make visible a photography alive to feeling. Barthes as spectator and Day as photographer uniquely rendered desire and grief in their work, and they called upon others to feel photography with them. Through different means they ultimately came to the same understanding of photography, one in which feeling intervenes in the relationship between photographic signifier and signified. Barthes and Day propose a queer theory of photography in which feeling opens the index onto other worlds, collapses disparate times, and conjoins the material and the spiritual.
F. HOLLAND DAY: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL NOTE
Day's place in the history of photography has been, until recently, a disruptive presence or an ignored absence. He was an American Pictorialist photographer and, at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most influential advocates of photography as an art form. A wealthy publisher from Norwood, Massachusetts, Day was colleague and friend to Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White, mentor to Edward Steichen as well as Alvin Langdon Coburn (his cousin), and colleague and ultimately competitor of Alfred Stieglitz. Day promoted the art of photography nationally through the Boston Camera Club, and internationally through his exhibitions of the New School of American Photography in London (1900) and Paris (1901). As early as 1895, he was elected to the prestigious British photography salon the Linked Ring.
The now much-rehearsed tension between Day and Stieglitz emerged over Day's European exhibitions, and the two men largely parted ways at that time. With his influential journal Camera Work, Stieglitz shaped much of the debate about fine art photography in the United States from New York, and eventually changed the direction of artistic photographic practice, celebrating the unmanipulated, sharp focus, "straight" image in the early twentieth century. In the art historical record, Stieglitz has greatly overshadowed Day, despite their comparable influence at the turn of the century. According to an established scholarly discourse, Stieglitz with his "straight" photography of American urbanism and industrialism heralded the advent of modernism, triumphing over Day and other Pictorialists with their "soft" photography rooted in nature and the past.
The general rejection of Pictorialism, and the historical neglect of Day's work, has been undeniably gendered. Pictorial photographs were literally deemed fuzzy by their contemporary critics, and they were decidedly not straight. Day's photographs are allegorical and symbolic—hazy, misty, amorphous. They strive to transport viewers out of their present times and places, to transform photographic denotation into connotation, to use the medium's indexicality paradoxically to evoke other realms. And Pictorial photographs, especially Day's, are flush with emotion, saturated with photographic feeling.
DESIRE AND GRIEF
Barthes was mourning the death of his mother when he wrote Camera Lucida, and his search for the essence of photography is inextricably bound with his search for the essence of his mother, in a photograph. Thus it comes as no surprise that the feelings Barthes refuses to surrender in his investigation of photography are desire and grief. He explains, "Instead of following the path of a formal ontology (of a Logic), I stopped, keeping with me, like a treasure, my desire or my grief."
Desire and grief suffuse much of F. Holland Day's work, and they might be taken as the central themes of his striking Orpheus photographs. Day made these images in the summer of 1907, at Stone House Hill near Brockton, Massachusetts, and they feature as model Day's apprentice, Nicola Giancola, a young Italian immigrant. The Orpheus photographs are among the most interesting of a large number of images Day made in the early twentieth century that pose nude male youths in costumes and settings that evoke ancient Greece. Made with a special, "uncorrected" lens lacking a sharp focal point, and showcasing Day's increasing expertise in platinum printing, these photographs are dense with a misty atmosphere that heightens their mythical aura.
In one image from the Orpheus series, Giancola poses at the mouth of a cave (figure 1.1). Arm stretched upward, he twists his body in a long arc, legs pointed toward the cave, torso turned toward the open air. His body is fully extended, head thrown back. Light reflects off his open chest and the bright lyre he holds at his side. The features of the youth's upturned face blend into the atmosphere. The soft hazy thickness of the image, in which details of feature and forest are obscured, lends the image an otherworldly quality, and helps the viewer to imagine a Massachusetts woods as on the brink of the netherworld.
The portion of the Orpheus myth that Day elects to represent is one of longing and despair—one of desire and grief. The great singer has just lost his beloved Eurydice to Hades forever. His fateful look back to ensure her safety in crossing into the world of the living has condemned his lover to the realm of shades. Desire and grief are overt themes in this photograph, but desire also figures covertly here. Or rather, a husband's desire for his lost wife is not the only desire the image evokes. As Orpheus emerges from the underworld, he also enters a new phase in his life: according to Ovid's version of the myth, after losing his wife, Orpheus forswears women and begins to take young male lovers. Thus, Orpheus's return to earth is also the moment of his birth into homoerotics. Out of desire and grief, another desire is born.
And out of that new desire also springs another grief, for Orpheus comes to a terrible end. Enraged by his rejection of women, Dionysian bacchantes attack him and tear him to pieces. They throw his head into the river, where it floats, still singing, to the island of Lesbos. While not depicted by Day, this gruesome torture haunts his Orpheus series. The desire represented in the photographs is shrouded in traumatic loss. The beautiful youth is not only longing and mourning; he is also longed for and mourned. Desire is caught between grief and grief.
WOUND
Barthes's most salient discussions of photographic feeling involve what he calls the "wound" or punctum. Defined in distinction to the studium, or the cultural knowledge that informs one's reading of a photograph, the punctum is an unanticipated personal response to certain details in an image that emotionally pierce the viewer, breaking through the trained reading of the studium. The punctum is a surprising element, which "rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me." It is a "wound," a "prick," a "sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me ...)."
Barthes conveys his affective response in a notably haptic language of feeling. The images that move him "touch" him violently, "prick" and "pierce," and "bruise" him. Deeming the punctum a wound, Barthes reminds one that desire and grief register powerfully in the body. Feelings have physical effects. Indeed, Barthes's entire understanding of photography is remarkably tactile; his experience of viewing is one of being touched. Describing the photograph as "an emanation of the referent," he declares, "From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; ... light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed." All attentive viewing is an exchange of touching for Barthes; the punctum is an extreme form of contact, in which something in an image surprises him, catches him off guard, and cuts him.
The unpredictable wound of the punctum disrupts the scripted meaning of the studium. It opens the photograph to deeply personal significance. It is the trigger that meets the viewer's "affective intentionality" and transports her down a unique path of associations. The details of the image become springboards that send one in unexpected directions. Although dependent on the contingency of the photograph, and on its indexicality, the punctum unsettles the site of photographic meaning, opening it up to the viewer's affect. As Barthes says, "The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond—as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see."
A photographer could never intentionally inscribe a punctum in an image. The mystery and power of the punctum lie in its unpredictability; a viewer never knows what, if anything, will strike her. Day couldn't plan punctums, but his negotiation of photographic indexicality does propel desire beyond what the images permit us to see. Day's images, like Barthes's musings on the punctum, trouble dominant assumptions about the photographic sign, destabilizing the relationship between signifier and signified; through performance, symbolism, and soft focus, Day's photographs represent scenarios beyond their material referents. In an unpublished manuscript written around 1900, titled "Is Photography an Art?," Day proposes that photographic "artists have sought no longer detail, but ensemble, not an accumulation of facts, but simplification of the idea.... They have found that the indefinite is the road to the infinite." The particular bodies of his models are not Day's actual subjects, but rather relay points for larger mythological scenes. The photographs depend on the tension David Deitcher describes between what a photograph depicts and what it might be said to represent. Day photographs a young man in the forest, but his image evokes a saga in Greek mythology. His work requires viewers to see beyond the limits of the index, but nevertheless uses indexicality to hinge this world to another.
Like Barthes, Day also had some thoughts about piercing arrows and wounds. Indeed, his Saint Sebastian images might be said to take the wound as their explicit subject. But in these images the wound of pain seems to function as a sign for the more profound wound of desire. The piercing wound is an allegory and an alibi. A close-up from the Saint Sebastian series circa 1906 shows a glistening wound at the base of Nicola Giancola's neck, but Giancola's expression is surprisingly placid; his face is focused and intent, but not anguished. In an alternate image, Saint Sebastian, circa 1906, the wound begets ecstasy (figure 1.2). Thin arrows are just barely discernible at Giancola's waist and chest, but the image much more directly highlights the unmarred surfaces of his exposed chest and shoulders and neck. His bound arms and waist throw his shoulders forward, drawing attention to his strained muscles. His head is tossed back in a swoon, eyes closed, lips parted, curls falling back from his face. His neck and profile are touched with light, offset by a dark background. The swoon seems one of abandon.
By the turn of the century, Saint Sebastian had become a kind of covert gay icon. As a figure, the saint was transformed in the Italian Renaissance from a bearded Roman soldier to a beautiful ephebe transfixed by the ecstasy of penetration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Saint Sebastian increasingly was understood to represent not only an object of homoerotic desire, but also a homosexual subject. According to the history of the saint, Sebastian was tortured and left for dead after he revealed his "true" and "hidden" Christian identity. As Richard Kaye suggests, in the late nineteenth century, "Sebastian thus could stand for homosexual self-revelation as opposed to homosexual affection, and, as such, he was a splendid vehicle for a new conception of same-sex desire, which, as numerous historians of sexuality have suggested, encompassed a shift from a stress on homosexual acts to an emphasis on homosexual identity." In Day's Saint Sebastian photographs, then, one might find not only an object of erotic desire, but also a symbol of Day's self-revelation.
The Saint Sebastian images make the idea of the wound utterly explicit— indeed, much too explicit for a discussion of the punctum, which, as I've noted, is a response that cannot be scripted or solicited. Given the theatrics and staging of so many of the images that feature Giancola, Day's portrait of the young man of 1906, posed without elaborate trappings, feels all the more intimate and immediate. In figure 1.3, a tightly framed image, focused on head and neck and white-robed shoulder, Giancola tilts his head, looking aslant but nevertheless directly at the photographer, out of the corners of his eyes. Darkness partially obscures his face, its near side falling into shadow. A light from the side softly highlights his forehead, nose, and the corner of his curved lips. Giancola's expression is sullen, both tentative and startlingly aggressive at the same time. The look is piercing—wounding. It gives one a sense of an incalculable desire, beyond what it permits one to see.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feeling Photography by Elspeth H. Brown, Thy Phu. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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