Steve Harjula + Matthew Muñoz | 09/06/07
Looking at Photographs in Thinking Photography
Ed. Victor Burgin By Victor Burgin
Keywords:
power
discourse
photography
meaning
subject
psychology
semiotics
Hidden beneath its aesthetic veneer, photography wields more power than history gives it credit. It’s often viewed as purely formal, yet Burgin asserts that photography is a signifying language with the power to produce and spread ideology. The photographic image is a space where the viewer’s cultural and historical knowledge engages in a formal and conceptual discourse. If the viewer is not aware of this conversation, then connotation is free to parade as well-dressed denotation.
Photos are distinguished from paintings or films by their implanted presence in daily life. As such, it is not unusual to overlook their importance. Their representations seems so simple to understand, yet their ease of comprehension masks the myth-building riptides that rush through them. Burgin explains that during the reading of an image, the viewer gazes, incorporating their fantasies and desire into it, simultaneously co-opting the image and creating ideology. The power of the image to direct the gaze is important to understand photography's influence in constructing culture.
Burgin bases his description of photography on the image’s performative nature, stating that their meaning is not fixed and will change depending on cultural context.
The camera partially determines the context through composition, which dictates the viewer’s point-of-view. The frame of the photographic representation also plays a structural part. As a result, this confined world becomes a coherent narrative, open to accepting the gaze of the viewer. Through this gaze, the viewer inscribes, or projects their true fantasies into this false, imaginary world. The wholeness and history captured by the camera is fractured and regresses so as to passively receive the subject’s gaze. At this point, the viewer has power over the image, concealing the photograph’s text under their fantasies.
Upon the viewer laying his eyes on the photograph, he pours the preferred fantasy into the image’s carcass. Alternatively, he could have recognized the image’s false reality but the desire to see himself signified is too overpowering. Ideology resides here, where the viewer feels innocent to the history of the image. The viewer is implicated by ignoring it, and is recruited into the discourse of the actors portrayed.
Photographic composition and desire for ‘the real’ provide the conditions for the viewer to see their own fantasies. This sense of power is fleeting however, and the viewer will eventually realize the photograph only masks what he can never have. Burgin concludes that good composition is most likely determined by the photograph’s ability to maintain our imaginary command of the point-of-view, a startling revelation and compelling reason to better understand the affects to visual culture.