Where the Stress Falls (25 page)
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Authors: Susan Sontag
ITALY: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
announces a double narrative: a century of Italy as well as a century of photography.
announces a double narrative: a century of Italy as well as a century of photography.
The earliest photograph in the book, taken in 1884, of the large conservatory of the Italian Horticultural Society, shows us a place frequented by well-off people of a century ago, some of whom probably owned cameras and practiced photography at a very expert level as a hobby; a picture like this could have been taken by one of the Society’s members. The most recent photograph, taken in 1984, shows us not a real place (not an Italian interior, not even something in Italy) but a portion of the world (Europe) of which Italy is a part; an aerial view, it’s a picture not so much taken as arranged, by professionals, aided by computers.
There is nothing distinctively Italian about either photograph, though both photographs bespeak their period. In the first one we see a lush example of the glass-and-iron shape given to new exhibition halls, markets, and railway stations all over Europe in the mid- and late nineteenth century. The aerial photograph is also an example of a subject that could have been photographed elsewhere in the same way; what dates it, though, is not
what
we see but
that
we can see it. It is an
example of something that can be seen only in the form of a photograph, and could only be photographed (thanks to the existence of other, allied technologies) now.
what
we see but
that
we can see it. It is an
example of something that can be seen only in the form of a photograph, and could only be photographed (thanks to the existence of other, allied technologies) now.
The subjects of both photographs have an obtrusive geometry; neither includes people. But the conservatory is a site that appears to be just temporarily vacated of people, to get this picture of the overbearing architecture and the valiant plants. It is very much a human, historically specific world. One easily imagines people reinserted in this place, milling about in it. The world of the aerial photograph is a world of things beyond the human scale from which people are necessarily absent. Here the human, historical fact has no place.
But history—time—is the unifying topic of this seemingly random collection of subjects. How striking, then, that the anthologist, Cesare Colombo, has selected as the most recent photograph one in which history is annihilated in favor of geography; in which the accents of time are made irrelevant by the scale of this uniformly marked distribution of space.
Are we to read this as a history-minded comment on the part of the anthologist: an acknowledgment of the Euro-destiny of Italy, its demise as a distinctive culture and absorption into the homogenizing system of greeds created by multi-national capitalism? Or is it simply a formal device: the anthologist’s perhaps overemphatic way of decreeing a closure for the collection? If only the latter, the device is, of necessity, arbitrary. For it defies the very nature of photography, and of collections of photographs, which is that they are open-ended; that they cannot conclude. There can be no definitive or summative or terminal photograph, or collection of photographs. Only more photographs. More collections …
A COLLECTION OF IMAGES
of the Italian past published by Alinari—though most of the photographs aren’t from the Alinari archives—reminds us that a photograph is rarely a work of individual seeing but almost inevitably a (potential) unit in an archive. The archive can be that of the Alinari enterprise, which appears less as the very successful business it was than as a cultural operation, a vast collective
endeavor for documenting Italian society that extended over many decades, in which the names of individual photographers have been suppressed, like those of the artisans who worked on the Gothic cathedrals. More often, the archive is that of single photographers—prolific professionals with studios from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and also contemporary photographers whose manipulations of their subjects, in the service of fashion and other kinds of advertising, produce results that are most unlike the innocently scrupulous documentation practiced by older forms of commercial photography. Avowed proponents of bad taste such as Carlo Mollino and celebrants of celebrity such as Elio Luxardo are now museum-worthy, no less than such illustrious proponents of the serious and beautiful in photography as Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The most eccentric, partial view could constitute an archive of invaluable images of (from, about) the past. Even the soft-focus superimpositions of the self-styled Futurist Anton Bragaglia which are located nowhere and the staged
al fresco
fantasies of the erotomane Baron von Gloeden located in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Taormina have their period charm, their status as documents.
of the Italian past published by Alinari—though most of the photographs aren’t from the Alinari archives—reminds us that a photograph is rarely a work of individual seeing but almost inevitably a (potential) unit in an archive. The archive can be that of the Alinari enterprise, which appears less as the very successful business it was than as a cultural operation, a vast collective
endeavor for documenting Italian society that extended over many decades, in which the names of individual photographers have been suppressed, like those of the artisans who worked on the Gothic cathedrals. More often, the archive is that of single photographers—prolific professionals with studios from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and also contemporary photographers whose manipulations of their subjects, in the service of fashion and other kinds of advertising, produce results that are most unlike the innocently scrupulous documentation practiced by older forms of commercial photography. Avowed proponents of bad taste such as Carlo Mollino and celebrants of celebrity such as Elio Luxardo are now museum-worthy, no less than such illustrious proponents of the serious and beautiful in photography as Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The most eccentric, partial view could constitute an archive of invaluable images of (from, about) the past. Even the soft-focus superimpositions of the self-styled Futurist Anton Bragaglia which are located nowhere and the staged
al fresco
fantasies of the erotomane Baron von Gloeden located in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Taormina have their period charm, their status as documents.
(Though the destiny of all photographs is to end up in an archive housed in a museum, they can still lead, singly, a life outside the museum—the extramural life of a document being that of a souvenir; here, too, time effects its droll mutations. In a journal entry of 1952 Jean Cocteau relates the story of a forty-year-old fisherman in Taormina, furious because one of the shops in the main street was exhibiting von Gloeden’s photographs of his grandfather completely naked with a crown of roses. Surely it was just a few years later that, in all shops in town catering to tourists, von Gloeden’s daintily erotic photographs of naked local youths of yesteryear were to be found as postcards.)
Italian photography is exceptionally rich in superb photographs which have a primary status as documents. One thinks, first of all, of the best images from the Alinari holdings and of the work of Giuseppe Primoli, the most fascinating figure in the history of Italian photography, who was himself something of a one-person Alinari enterprise. (A photograph by Primoli—of someone taking a photograph—begins this
book.) If the collective activities of the Alinari firm and the ultraindividual enterprise practiced by the dilettante aristocrat Primoli were both supremely archive-creating ventures, it should be noted that the word “archive,” with its implicit claim of disinterested curiosity, conceals much of the complex ideological agenda behind this glorious burst of picture-taking.
book.) If the collective activities of the Alinari firm and the ultraindividual enterprise practiced by the dilettante aristocrat Primoli were both supremely archive-creating ventures, it should be noted that the word “archive,” with its implicit claim of disinterested curiosity, conceals much of the complex ideological agenda behind this glorious burst of picture-taking.
Consider the Alinari collection, more than a hundred thousand pictures. It seems like a nineteenth-century updating of the eighteenth-century
Wunderkammer,
or cabinet of curiosities, which was less an instrument of learning than an expression of collecting mania, the appetite for accumulation and classification; wonder, a favorite sentiment of that era, and one unburdened by historical understanding, depends on ignorance as much as on knowledge. But it also seems an example of a distinctively nineteenth-century ideological project, shared by some of the century’s greatest novelists, which was to provide an encyclopedic understanding of social reality, from the highest to the lowest levels, as something that unfolds historically. Last, and perhaps most decisively, it seems like a proto-twentieth-century project: a mode of advertising, of creating needs and boosting consumption.
Wunderkammer,
or cabinet of curiosities, which was less an instrument of learning than an expression of collecting mania, the appetite for accumulation and classification; wonder, a favorite sentiment of that era, and one unburdened by historical understanding, depends on ignorance as much as on knowledge. But it also seems an example of a distinctively nineteenth-century ideological project, shared by some of the century’s greatest novelists, which was to provide an encyclopedic understanding of social reality, from the highest to the lowest levels, as something that unfolds historically. Last, and perhaps most decisively, it seems like a proto-twentieth-century project: a mode of advertising, of creating needs and boosting consumption.
The Alinari photographers started by specializing in the great works of art of their native city, Florence. For a small, wealthy class of travelers on their Grand Tour, Italy had long been the country where one came to look at the art, and the art in Florence more than in any other Italian city. Collectible photographic documentation played an essential role in the democratizing of this construction of Italy by the happy few, which has made the country into the world’s single most desired, most prestigious target for the instant appreciations of mass tourism.
The dissemination of art in the form of photographs—a first version of what André Malraux, who lifted the idea from Walter Benjamin, described as the museum without walls—was soon extended to the whole physical environment, which could be collected as pictures. Exhaustive documentation meant, in fact, a preference for the strongly
contrasting:
feats of urban renewal (as that was understood in the last century) juxtaposed with ancient sites and monuments, the vitality of the swarthy poor as well as the glamour and remoteness of the rich and
powerful. Photographs disseminated not just art (the art of the past) but all of the past—and the present, inexorably on its way to becoming the past (that is, art). The notion of art is extended to include the past as such: we look at the past, any part of it, aesthetically.
contrasting:
feats of urban renewal (as that was understood in the last century) juxtaposed with ancient sites and monuments, the vitality of the swarthy poor as well as the glamour and remoteness of the rich and
powerful. Photographs disseminated not just art (the art of the past) but all of the past—and the present, inexorably on its way to becoming the past (that is, art). The notion of art is extended to include the past as such: we look at the past, any part of it, aesthetically.
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE NOT
windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence—often spurious, always incomplete—in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.
windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence—often spurious, always incomplete—in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.
How? By making statements about what is in the world, what we should look at. Photographs tell us how things ought to look, what their subjects should reveal about themselves.
Photographs taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely fail to make visible the markers of status. We associate this with posing. The process itself took time: one couldn’t take photographs on the run. With posing, whether in a studio portrait or in pictures of people taken on the sites of work and recreation, there can be a conscious construction of what is seemly, appropriate, attractive. The way most old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this cannot only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. Modern taste judges the way workers in the old photographs of building sites and factories were stiffly posed to be a kind of lie—concealing, for instance, the reality of their physical exertion. We prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking shots in which people are caught in a movement—that is what looks truthful (if not always beautiful) to us. We feel more comfortable with what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the realities of control (self-control, control by others), of power—revelations we now judge, oddly enough, to be “artificial.”
Two contrasts, a century apart.
On the front endpaper, a celebrated image. It is the ordered, heavily signifying decor and spaciousness of the bourgeois photography
studio (in fact, the Alinari salon). Deep space: everyone is seen full figure, remotely, discreetly. Someone (seated, weighty) is being photographed. People seem becalmed. Everyone is taking his or her time.
studio (in fact, the Alinari salon). Deep space: everyone is seen full figure, remotely, discreetly. Someone (seated, weighty) is being photographed. People seem becalmed. Everyone is taking his or her time.
On the endpaper at the back, a familiar kind of image. A pack of journalists,
paparazzi,
standing, densely crowded together, straining, shoving, taking their images by force. (Is there any justice in the fact that the international word for predatory photographers who jump their celebrity targets is Italian?) Shallow space: everyone is seen partially, close up, indiscreetly. Not enough of the room to identify it, no decor—this is a placeless space. And everyone is in a big hurry.
paparazzi,
standing, densely crowded together, straining, shoving, taking their images by force. (Is there any justice in the fact that the international word for predatory photographers who jump their celebrity targets is Italian?) Shallow space: everyone is seen partially, close up, indiscreetly. Not enough of the room to identify it, no decor—this is a placeless space. And everyone is in a big hurry.
THE FUNCTION OF
an anthology is to represent a world. This anthology, this token chronicle of a century, represents a world as it submits to the imperatives of time.
an anthology is to represent a world. This anthology, this token chronicle of a century, represents a world as it submits to the imperatives of time.
Most of the pictures are records of a highly distinctive society that is profoundly used (in several senses of the word), the Italy mourned by Pasolini in
Uccellacci e
uccellini,
the Italy that no longer exists, or is dying, in the throes of being replaced, since the 1950s, by the trans-Italian Italy of the consumer society. The difference between the two Italys is enormous, visceral, shocking.
Uccellacci e
uccellini,
the Italy that no longer exists, or is dying, in the throes of being replaced, since the 1950s, by the trans-Italian Italy of the consumer society. The difference between the two Italys is enormous, visceral, shocking.
The distinctive Italy was a society in which the photographer’s practice was an incursion: the photographer could be only an observer. In the new Italy the photograph and photographic activities (TV, video, monitoring, playback) are central. It seems a new version of the way that photography has participated in the past not only in the commercialization of reality but in its unification. The Alinari enterprise, founded in the early 1850s, could be regarded as itself an instrument of the subsequent political unification of Italy, as the scope of the firm’s activities, which first had only Florence as its subject, broadened to include the countryside and other cities—the whole country. Now, for several decades, Italian photography—photographic endeavors by many hands—has participated mightily in the project of unifying Italy culturally (which also means politically) with Europe, with the Atlantic world. Photographic images play a large role in making Italy (be? or only look?) more and more like … everywhere else.
All of Europe is in mourning for its past. Bookstores are stocked with albums of photographs offering up the vanished past for our delectation and reflex nostalgia. But the past has deeper roots in Italy than anywhere else in Europe, which makes its destruction more defining. And the elegiac note was sounded earlier and more plangently in Italy, as was the note of rancor—think of the Futurist tantrums about the past: the calls to burn the museums, fill in the Grand Canal and make it a highway, and so on. Comparable anthologies of photographs of, say, premodern France or Germany do not move in quite this way.
The depth possessed by these images of an older Italy is not just the depth of the past. It is the depth of a whole culture, a culture of incomparable dignity and flavor and bulk, that has been thinned out, effaced, confiscated. To be replaced by a culture in which the notion of depth is meaningless. That is not meant to be sauntered through. That becomes an abstraction. To be seen as an image. To be seen from the air …
[1987]
F
IRST
OF
ALL
. the pictures are unforgettable—photography’s ultimate standard of value. And it’s not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives by a hitherto unknown photographer working in New Orleans in the early years of this century became one of the most admired recoveries in photography’s widening, ever incomplete history. Eighty-nine glass plates in varying states of corrosion, shatter, and defacement were the treasure that Lee Friedlander came across in New Orleans in the late 1950s and eventually purchased. When, in 1970, a selection of the ingeniously developed, superb prints Friedlander had made was published by the Museum of Modern Art, the book became, deservedly, an instant classic. So much about these pictures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near-mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as
objets trouvés,
and a gift from the past. Add to this what is decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility and friendliness of their version of the photographer’s troubling, highly conventional subject. And because the subject is so conventional, the photographer’s relaxed way of looking seems that much more distinctive. If there had once been more than eighty-nine glass negatives and one day a few others turned up, no one would fail to recognize a Bellocq.
IRST
OF
ALL
. the pictures are unforgettable—photography’s ultimate standard of value. And it’s not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives by a hitherto unknown photographer working in New Orleans in the early years of this century became one of the most admired recoveries in photography’s widening, ever incomplete history. Eighty-nine glass plates in varying states of corrosion, shatter, and defacement were the treasure that Lee Friedlander came across in New Orleans in the late 1950s and eventually purchased. When, in 1970, a selection of the ingeniously developed, superb prints Friedlander had made was published by the Museum of Modern Art, the book became, deservedly, an instant classic. So much about these pictures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near-mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as
objets trouvés,
and a gift from the past. Add to this what is decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility and friendliness of their version of the photographer’s troubling, highly conventional subject. And because the subject is so conventional, the photographer’s relaxed way of looking seems that much more distinctive. If there had once been more than eighty-nine glass negatives and one day a few others turned up, no one would fail to recognize a Bellocq.
The year is 1912, but we would not be surprised to be told that the pictures were taken in 1901, when Theodore Dreiser began writing
Jen
nie
Gerhardt,
or in 1899, when Kate Chopin published
The Awakening
, or in 1889, the year Dreiser set the start of his first novel,
Sister Carrie
the ballooning clothes and plump bodies could be dated anywhere from 1880 to the beginning of World War I. The charges of indecency that greeted Chopin’s second novel and Dreiser’s first were so unrelenting that Chopin retreated from literature and Dreiser faltered. (Anticipating more such attacks, Dreiser, after beginning his great second novel in 1901, put it aside for a decade.) Bellocq’s photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for “fallen” women, though in his case we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy. Until recently we knew nothing about the author of these pictures except what some old cronies of Bellocq’s told Friedlander: that he had no other interests except photography; that “he always behaved polite” (this from one of his Storyville sitters); that he spoke with a “terrific” French accent; and that he was—shades of Toulouse-Lautrec—hydrocephalic and dwarf-like. It turns out that he was an entirely normal-looking scion of the New Orleans middle class (his grandparents were born in France), who also photographed quite conventional subjects as well as other low-life ones—for example, the opium dens of New Orleans’s Chinatown. The Chinatown series, alas, has never been recovered.
Jen
nie
Gerhardt,
or in 1899, when Kate Chopin published
The Awakening
, or in 1889, the year Dreiser set the start of his first novel,
Sister Carrie
the ballooning clothes and plump bodies could be dated anywhere from 1880 to the beginning of World War I. The charges of indecency that greeted Chopin’s second novel and Dreiser’s first were so unrelenting that Chopin retreated from literature and Dreiser faltered. (Anticipating more such attacks, Dreiser, after beginning his great second novel in 1901, put it aside for a decade.) Bellocq’s photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for “fallen” women, though in his case we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy. Until recently we knew nothing about the author of these pictures except what some old cronies of Bellocq’s told Friedlander: that he had no other interests except photography; that “he always behaved polite” (this from one of his Storyville sitters); that he spoke with a “terrific” French accent; and that he was—shades of Toulouse-Lautrec—hydrocephalic and dwarf-like. It turns out that he was an entirely normal-looking scion of the New Orleans middle class (his grandparents were born in France), who also photographed quite conventional subjects as well as other low-life ones—for example, the opium dens of New Orleans’s Chinatown. The Chinatown series, alas, has never been recovered.
The Storyville series includes two pictures of parlor decor. The interest for Bellocq must have been that, above a fireplace in one picture and a rolltop desk in the other, the walls are covered with photographs surrounding a central painting, photographs with the same contrasts as the ones he was taking: all are of women, some dressed to the nines, some erotically naked. The rest of Bellocq’s photographs are individual portraits. That is, there is a single subject per picture, except for a shot of two champagne drinkers on the floor absorbed in a card game (there is a similar off-duty moment in Buñuel’s unconvincing, notional portrait of a brothel in
Belle de Jour
) and another of a demure girl posing in her Sunday best, long white dress and jacket and hat, beside an iron bed in which someone is sleeping. Typically—an exception is this picture, which shows only the sleeping woman’s head and right arm—Bellocq
photographs his subjects in full figure, though sometimes a seated figure will be cut off at the knees; in only one picture-a naked woman reclining on some embroidered pillows—does one have the impression that Bellocq has chosen to come in close. Central to the impression the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.
Belle de Jour
) and another of a demure girl posing in her Sunday best, long white dress and jacket and hat, beside an iron bed in which someone is sleeping. Typically—an exception is this picture, which shows only the sleeping woman’s head and right arm—Bellocq
photographs his subjects in full figure, though sometimes a seated figure will be cut off at the knees; in only one picture-a naked woman reclining on some embroidered pillows—does one have the impression that Bellocq has chosen to come in close. Central to the impression the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.
Most obviously, it could not be detected from at least a third of the pictures that the women are inmates of a brothel. Some are fully clothed: in one picture a woman in a large feathered hat, long-sleeved white blouse adorned with brooch and locket, and black skirt sits in the yard in front of a low black backdrop, just beyond which frayed towels are drying on a laundry line. Others are in their underwear or something like it: one poses on a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, wearing a comical-looking body stocking. Many are photographed naked—with unpretentious candor about, mostly, unpretentious bodies. Some just stand there, as if they didn’t know what to do once they had taken off their clothes for the camera. Only a few offer a voluptuous pose, like the long-tressed adolescent odalisque on a wicker divan—probably Bellocq’s best-known picture. Two photographs show women wearing masks. One is a come-hither picture: an exceptionally pretty woman with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings. The other picture, the opposite of a pin-up, is of a large-bellied, entirely naked woman whose mask sits as awkwardly on her face as she is awkwardly posed on the edge of a wooden chair; the mask (it appears to be a full mask minus its lower half) seems too big for her face. The first woman seems happy to pose (as, given her charms, well she might); the second seems diminished, even foiled, by her nudity. In some pictures, in which the sitters adopt a genteelly pensive look, the emotion is harder to read. But in others there is little doubt that posing is a game, and fun: the woman in the shawl and vivid striped stockings sitting beside her bottle of “Raleigh Rye,” appreciatively
eyeing her raised glass; the woman in ample undergarments and black stockings stretched out on her stomach over an ironing board set up in the backyard, beaming at a tiny dog. Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn’t have dictated to them how they should pose—whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.
eyeing her raised glass; the woman in ample undergarments and black stockings stretched out on her stomach over an ironing board set up in the backyard, beaming at a tiny dog. Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn’t have dictated to them how they should pose—whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.
We are far, in Bellocq’s company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute’s life—are those on which the faces have been scratched out. (In one, the vandal—could it have been Bellocq himself?—missed the face.) These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these photographs, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world. How touching and good-natured the pictures are.
[1996]
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