September 26, 2006
Susie Linfield on "why photography critics hate photography"
In the September/October issue of Boston Review, Susie Linfield, a longtime contributor to the magazine and the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at NYU, has published a provocative essay on “why photography critics hate photographs.” If you’re willing to accept her central conceit—that Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht influenced late-twentieth-century photography critics’ understanding of the medium and its effects—it is an elegantly turned exposure of the limitations of writings on photography by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger as well as a humane call for a more syncretic approach to picture interpretation, one that allows for warmth and emotion. A few quotes:
[Contemporary photography] critics view emotional responses . . . not as something to be experienced and understood, but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment.[ . . . ]
These critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy—for either photographer or viewer—was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph.
[ . . . ]
A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of [the world].
[ . . . ]
[Contemporary photography critics] don’t need to spend such ferocious energy distancing us from images. In doing so, they have made it easy for us to deconstruct photographs but difficult to see them.
My only quibble, interestingly, is with the one passage in which she analyzes specific photographs. In discussing images reprinted in Witness Iraq: A War Journal February–April 2003, Linfield, perhaps somewhat bravely, admits to the frustration caused by an image of “helpless” women, in chadors, grieving for a son apparently killed when a bomb was dropped on an outdoor market in Baghdad in late March 2003. Linfield instead praises two Iraq War photographs that, perhaps by coincidence, feature children; one in which a Marine coddles a young girl whose arm is bleeding, and one that depicts a hooded detainee cradling his young son behind barbed wire. She praises the contradictory interpretations that naturally arise from these atypical war images; their irresolvable nature—Who is helping whom? Who is guilty? What forces put these children in these situations?—necessitates an open-ended (and open-minded) search for meaning.
It seems problematic that Linfield should offer commentary on the political situation of the women depicted in the first photograph at the same time that she praises a very different type of picture as being better able to evoke complex responses, both thoughtful and emotional. However admirable it is for Linfield to admit a controversial reaction to the image in question, hazarding commentary on the women’s political situation—“I doubt that such sorrows can even begin to abate until the women in the cemetery take off their veils . . . and enter into the modern world to begin making modern politics”—is compromised by her very own analysis of the flaws that thread through the picture’s aesthetic elegance and stark portrayal of grief.
The reason I bring this up is because there is a small hurdle that I wish Linfield had surpassed in the essay. She goes on to call for more images that “suggest—though do not explain—the strange incongruities of the Iraq war,” but neglects to account for the fact that these pictures are necessarily few and far between, and that to be properly equipped to respond to the floodtide of photographs in the world (or even those coming from this particular conflict) one must engage many of the “compromised” (my word, not hers) images, one of which caused such dubitable reactions even in someone with so keen an intelligence as Linfield obviously possesses. Is coming “to the photograph as full human beings” possible when the photograph in question is, by the standard expressed in her essay, somehow incomplete?
Related: Linfield on photographing cruelty, which I have not read, and on Sebald et al., which I read and enjoyed.