© Annie Leibovitz | Advertisement for Louis Vuitton with Mikhail S. Gorbachev
The Pencil of Nature
With the advent of digital photography and social media, our culture has become a visual culture par excellence. Millions of photos are shared every day via Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, which means that billions of people around the world now communicate with each other through images. Everyone who looks at his Facebook account on his smartphone every day lives a kind of double life: one in the physical reality and one in the virtual world of images. The environment that people experience becomes more and more visual.
However, the question is whether all users of photography actually understand the language of the photographic image. We are supposed to be able to analyze countless images, not only based on the information that the images provide, but also based on the context of these images. Who sends these images into the world and what interests play a role in this? Some images might look innocent, but on closer inspection they appear to serve major commercial interests. The popular television personality Kim Kardashian, for example, has more than 155 million followers on Instagram. She posts seemingly non-posed, spontaneous, attractive and slightly sexy photos of herself. On her account you will find a link to the iTunes store, where you can purchase an app to follow even more of her. On clicking you will see advertisements from Giorgio Armani and Saint Laurent. The innocent Instagram photos appear to be part of a sophisticated commercial strategy.
Social media appears to be disguised commercial media. It is now clear to everyone that after you've googled on a flight, you immediately see all kinds of advertisements about traveling on Facebook. "Promoted tweets" from TripAdvisor also appear on Twitter immediately afterwards. Images appear on all these digital media, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to trace the origin and unravel the intentions of these images. While photography initially had an unambiguous context that made it easy to interpret photos, it is now part of a rapidly and continuously changing context.
Too often it is assumed that photography is a universal language that everyone understands. The worn-out slogan that a photo tells more than a thousand words sounds like an echo from the past in which the naive belief in the truth of the photo prevailed. The English inventor of photography Fox Talbot made one of the first photo books in the history of photography, The Pencil of Nature, in which he wrote that his images were created by the hand of nature itself, only through the effect of light on paper. Underneath the photograph The Haystack (plate X) he writes hopefully and with conviction: “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.” (Talbot, 1844, 2014)
Truth and Reality
Even though we are almost two centuries later, there is still the often-unconscious belief that the photographic image is a direct and truthful account of reality. We still witness many discussions among photographers, technicians and curators about supposed manipulation of submitted photos for the World Press Photo, in which the veracity of photography is often treated by realists like the holy grail.
Does photography represent reality and could the photograph actually be called an image of the reality? Many discussions clearly show that we are still stumbling over the old concepts of truth and reality, even without any consensus about them.
Journalistic news photos, according to common opinions, should not be manipulated through interventions with Photoshop, because that will affect the truth of the image. The truth? Philosopher Roland Barthes would say that we have created a myth which a certain social class believes. Sociologist Stuart Hall would say that all who believe in photojournalism are engaged in a dominant reading of the news photo.
It is clear that a critical philosophy of our visual culture is urgently needed and that it must be taught on all photography courses. We are taught to read and write starting in primary school, but we are never confronted with a proper analysis of images through which we communicate on a daily basis.
To fully understand the value of photography in terms of communication, we should consider photos as text, just as complicated, equally subject to grammar rules and style figures and full of layers of meanings. Howels and Negreiros write in their book Visual Culture (Richard Negreiros & Howells Joaquim, 2018) that photos should be regarded as visual texts. Images must be read with the same discipline as texts. We need a literacy of the image. “Visual literacy should not be limited to people with a creative or professional interest in visual culture. On the contrary, this should be widely distributed.”
We often view visual "texts" superficially, namely as images. Images seem unambiguous, but viewed and analyzed as visual texts, embedded with hidden layers, images appear ambiguous. We have to learn to analyze images, and in particular photos, and unravel the cultural codes that have been hidden in them.
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy. But this is just one part of the analysis. A photograph always appears in a certain context and comes to the spectator
by a particular communication channel. This urges us to investigate the political or commercial interests of the distributor of the image. We cannot separate the meaning of images from the underlying interests, because the images are produced in a culture in which images are part of merchandise. Visual culture has become a part of capitalism. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in An introduction to Visual Culture: "Capital has made all aspects of daily life a commodity, including the human body and even the process of looking." And visual culture - by assuming that the image is universal - has become an integral part of globalization: images are produced and consumed worldwide. (Mirzoeff, 2009)
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy
Semiology and Marxist aesthetics
To understand both aspects, two methods of research have been historically important: semiology and Marxist aesthetics. They represent the analytical and ideological way of looking at images. Roland Barthes has been the forerunner of the semiology of photography, but in his critical reflections on culture, he also appears to have incorporated ideological aspects. Susan Sontag and John Berger have explained and criticized the ideological backgrounds of the production and distribution of images, inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin. Both were strongly opposed to consider photography as art, because that would ignore the political and social context of photography. In addition, art has often been analyzed from the point of view of iconography, which often ignored the underlying interests. The theories of Roland Barthes were undermined by himself in his poetic reflections in Camera Lucida. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1993) Susan Sontag later corrected herself in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, 2004) and John Berger mainly analyzed painting and the relationship to possession.
Jean Baudrillard is a philosopher who went beyond the criticism and analysis of the single image. In his book Simulacra and Simulation, he observed that the enormous quantity of images made them meaningless. (Baudrillard, 1981, 1994) According to Baudrillard we live in a kind of Disneyland of images. They no longer have a direct relationship with the reality that is assumed behind the image, but they are fantasy images: simulacra. His position seems exaggerated, but when one realizes that by now a quarter of the photos that are made for Ikea are made on the computer using the so-called CGI method without the use of a camera, the notion of fantasy images comes very close. With CGI photography, the reality behind the image appears to have disappeared completely. This means that the original credibility of the photographic image has lost its physical basis, and the digital manipulation, if that word still applies, has taken over the photographic domain.
This completely debunks the myth of photographic truth; which Barthes already did in his collection of essays Mythologies. (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957). According to him, our culture believes in many myths, just as primitive people did. One of the myths is the truth in the photographic image. He calls the myth a semiological system, a way of speaking, a language. But, and this has often been underexposed, Barthes also called the myth an ideology. Because, according to him, the photographic language is also a mythical language, there is always an ideology in the photographic image.
According to Barthes, we experience myths as natural. "Here we come to the ultimate principle of myth: it transforms history into something natural." If applied to photography, it follows that the natural truth we attribute to photographic images always turns out to be determined by social motives. Meaning, there is no truth behind the image, but there are opposing social, political and commercial interests. Barthes appears to be more politically oriented and more a Marxist in his Mythologies than in his writings on photography. He continues to say that capitalism and its masquerade, the bourgeoisie as the underlying political and social system, is mythologized. The myth is, according to him, a depoliticized speech: it makes speech innocent.
If we apply this to the truthfulness of photography believed by many since Fox Talbot, photographic images represent an interest which is obscured by the natural connection with reality.
Mass media and manipulation
The sociologist Stuart Hall takes a step further than semiology. He studies the way that mass media work. Through which media do we receive information and what interests are at stake? Because each photographic image is coded by the person who created and distributed the image, the photo must be decoded again by the viewer. The viewer can therefore only understand a photo if he knows the code behind the image, if he is part of the same visual culture. If you are part of the same cultural group, you take the photo as truth - this is the dominant reading. You share the code in the image. If you disagree in advance with the medium in which the photo appears, you can read the image as manipulation or as propaganda. You reject the underlying cultural code. Both ways of assessing images are not critical. Only if you strive for a so-called critical reading of the image, do you investigate the underlying code for the underlying interests. The interesting thing about this theory is that you, as an audience, always have to evaluate which underlying code is sent with the image. Even a press photo that is not digitally manipulated and accepted as true according to the rules of a competition can carry a cultural code that requires a critical assessment. The analysis of photography is not about a microscopic study of Raw files but about the codes that we accept as true in our, according to Barthes, bourgeois and capitalist culture.
The bag of Gorbachev
But how can we, if we do not want to give up the positive belief in the communication of photography, produce and consume images in a jungle of interests and in a swamp of doubts about the authenticity of photography? The key word of the present time is the story. The story becomes the replacement of the truth, it becomes a surrogate for reality and that is why it is broadly and universally applicable as a concept. The concept of the story in photography clears the road for photographers to create personal images that get a social context through metaphorical references.
The concept of visual storytelling has turned out to be a charming solution to bypass the cliffs of truth and beauty that Susan Sontag has marked off in her book On Photography. (Sontag, On Photography, 1980, 2008) The ‘story’ as a concept is charming, but at the same time theoretically vague. Nowadays almost all photography, both autonomous or documentary, is labeled as storytelling. The first cliff, the truth, is bypassed by assuming that the story is essentially personal and subjective. A subjective story does not have to be true. Robert Frank was hailed because he made a personal and subversive story about America, absolutely not "true", but with an important message. The cliff of beauty is bypassed because a visual story is not a collection of beautiful photos that must be experienced as individual art objects, but as a series of photos in the context of the story.
However, the problematic concept of narrative photography lacks persuasiveness, since photos tell a story that you can either believe or not. Can we see war photos as a story? Where is the boundary between documentary and autonomous photography if everything is called storytelling? A philosophical solution could be the assumption that there has never been a real distinction and that the space between the two forms of photography, one claiming reality and the other depicting personal, subjective emotions, has finally been filled theoretically. Another answer could be that all forms of storytelling are essentially myths, believed by representatives of a certain culture. Leslie Mullen writes in her Truth in Photography: “In other words, journalists, as participants in a certain culture, are bound by the 'cultural grammar' that defines the rules of the narrative construction, an awareness that the notion of the 'objective' translation of reality changes.” (Mullen, 1998)
One could conclude that both documentary photography and art photography are both a form of storytelling in different ways, and as such form myths of truth and beauty. And as myths, the underlying interests can remain concealed.
The hidden structure of photographic myths becomes more apparent since the concept of storytelling has been adopted by commerce. Advertisers no longer praise their products with photos that have to prove their quality, but with photos that tell a story. A brand has become a story. A Car is not a car, but the story about the Car that always remains a loyal friend in the rough nature and strengthens your identity. Any brand consists almost exclusively of storytelling. With the story, a brand creates a myth in which the customer wants to believe, because he needs to distinguish himself by becoming part of that myth. A Louis Vuitton bag is not a bag, but the story about prestige, money and above all, success. For an advertising campaign, the stories of astronauts, movie stars, and Gorbachev (who drives along the last remains of the Berlin wall in the back of a car) were all photographed by Anna Leibovitz. If the visual story is the central benchmark of all photography, then credibility does not get any clearer. A critical, evaluative attitude when consuming photographic images is needed to investigate the context and origin of the image. As a viewer, we cannot and do not have to believe every story, whether a photo is "real" or "manipulated."
The power of the media
Different theories about visual culture do not stop at the image itself, they also take the position of the viewer into consideration. Who is the viewer? Is he a New Yorker who watches commercials on Times Square? Or a Moroccan Berber who sees a billboard along the road in Ouarzazate? Or a inhabitant of the capital of Ghana?
In their sturdy book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that the position of the viewer determines to a large extent the final reading of the image. Even more, images determine the reader himself. (Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, 2008) According to them, the viewer creates an identity of himself by looking at images. “The image or visual appearance is not simply a representation or a way of information. It is one of the elements in the broad network in which the subject was created at a given historical and cultural moment.”
The New Yorker will easily identify with an advertising image for an iPhone, while the Berber woman might experience alienation. But we can no longer speak of ‘audience’ in the traditional sense of the word. In the digital world, the audience is fragmented into numerous subgroups, into individualized cells. That is why there is less discussion about mass media and more about social media. The power of the medium is becoming more diffuse. The mass media could easily distinguish a leftist from a rightist newspaper and create the underlying codes of images, the hidden power behind Facebook's algorithms is not easy to detect. Traditionally, the Marxist theorists have dealt with the power of the media. According to the theorists of the Frankfurter Schule such as Theodor Adorno, the power of the media is created by the disguised propaganda for the capitalist system. The many Instagram accounts that work for major brands prove that once again.
The Pencil of Nature
With the advent of digital photography and social media, our culture has become a visual culture par excellence. Millions of photos are shared every day via Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, which means that billions of people around the world now communicate with each other through images. Everyone who looks at his Facebook account on his smartphone every day lives a kind of double life: one in the physical reality and one in the virtual world of images. The environment that people experience becomes more and more visual.
However, the question is whether all users of photography actually understand the language of the photographic image. We are supposed to be able to analyze countless images, not only based on the information that the images provide, but also based on the context of these images. Who sends these images into the world and what interests play a role in this? Some images might look innocent, but on closer inspection they appear to serve major commercial interests. The popular television personality Kim Kardashian, for example, has more than 155 million followers on Instagram. She posts seemingly non-posed, spontaneous, attractive and slightly sexy photos of herself. On her account you will find a link to the iTunes store, where you can purchase an app to follow even more of her. On clicking you will see advertisements from Giorgio Armani and Saint Laurent. The innocent Instagram photos appear to be part of a sophisticated commercial strategy.
Social media appears to be disguised commercial media. It is now clear to everyone that after you've googled on a flight, you immediately see all kinds of advertisements about traveling on Facebook. "Promoted tweets" from TripAdvisor also appear on Twitter immediately afterwards. Images appear on all these digital media, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to trace the origin and unravel the intentions of these images. While photography initially had an unambiguous context that made it easy to interpret photos, it is now part of a rapidly and continuously changing context.
Too often it is assumed that photography is a universal language that everyone understands. The worn-out slogan that a photo tells more than a thousand words sounds like an echo from the past in which the naive belief in the truth of the photo prevailed. The English inventor of photography Fox Talbot made one of the first photo books in the history of photography, The Pencil of Nature, in which he wrote that his images were created by the hand of nature itself, only through the effect of light on paper. Underneath the photograph The Haystack (plate X) he writes hopefully and with conviction: “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.” (Talbot, 1844, 2014)
Truth and Reality
Even though we are almost two centuries later, there is still the often-unconscious belief that the photographic image is a direct and truthful account of reality. We still witness many discussions among photographers, technicians and curators about supposed manipulation of submitted photos for the World Press Photo, in which the veracity of photography is often treated by realists like the holy grail.
Does photography represent reality and could the photograph actually be called an image of the reality? Many discussions clearly show that we are still stumbling over the old concepts of truth and reality, even without any consensus about them.
Journalistic news photos, according to common opinions, should not be manipulated through interventions with Photoshop, because that will affect the truth of the image. The truth? Philosopher Roland Barthes would say that we have created a myth which a certain social class believes. Sociologist Stuart Hall would say that all who believe in photojournalism are engaged in a dominant reading of the news photo.
It is clear that a critical philosophy of our visual culture is urgently needed and that it must be taught on all photography courses. We are taught to read and write starting in primary school, but we are never confronted with a proper analysis of images through which we communicate on a daily basis.
To fully understand the value of photography in terms of communication, we should consider photos as text, just as complicated, equally subject to grammar rules and style figures and full of layers of meanings. Howels and Negreiros write in their book Visual Culture (Richard Negreiros & Howells Joaquim, 2018) that photos should be regarded as visual texts. Images must be read with the same discipline as texts. We need a literacy of the image. “Visual literacy should not be limited to people with a creative or professional interest in visual culture. On the contrary, this should be widely distributed.”
We often view visual "texts" superficially, namely as images. Images seem unambiguous, but viewed and analyzed as visual texts, embedded with hidden layers, images appear ambiguous. We have to learn to analyze images, and in particular photos, and unravel the cultural codes that have been hidden in them.
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy. But this is just one part of the analysis. A photograph always appears in a certain context and comes to the spectator
by a particular communication channel. This urges us to investigate the political or commercial interests of the distributor of the image. We cannot separate the meaning of images from the underlying interests, because the images are produced in a culture in which images are part of merchandise. Visual culture has become a part of capitalism. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in An introduction to Visual Culture: "Capital has made all aspects of daily life a commodity, including the human body and even the process of looking." And visual culture - by assuming that the image is universal - has become an integral part of globalization: images are produced and consumed worldwide. (Mirzoeff, 2009)
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy
Semiology and Marxist aesthetics
To understand both aspects, two methods of research have been historically important: semiology and Marxist aesthetics. They represent the analytical and ideological way of looking at images. Roland Barthes has been the forerunner of the semiology of photography, but in his critical reflections on culture, he also appears to have incorporated ideological aspects. Susan Sontag and John Berger have explained and criticized the ideological backgrounds of the production and distribution of images, inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin. Both were strongly opposed to consider photography as art, because that would ignore the political and social context of photography. In addition, art has often been analyzed from the point of view of iconography, which often ignored the underlying interests. The theories of Roland Barthes were undermined by himself in his poetic reflections in Camera Lucida. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1993) Susan Sontag later corrected herself in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, 2004) and John Berger mainly analyzed painting and the relationship to possession.
Jean Baudrillard is a philosopher who went beyond the criticism and analysis of the single image. In his book Simulacra and Simulation, he observed that the enormous quantity of images made them meaningless. (Baudrillard, 1981, 1994) According to Baudrillard we live in a kind of Disneyland of images. They no longer have a direct relationship with the reality that is assumed behind the image, but they are fantasy images: simulacra. His position seems exaggerated, but when one realizes that by now a quarter of the photos that are made for Ikea are made on the computer using the so-called CGI method without the use of a camera, the notion of fantasy images comes very close. With CGI photography, the reality behind the image appears to have disappeared completely. This means that the original credibility of the photographic image has lost its physical basis, and the digital manipulation, if that word still applies, has taken over the photographic domain.
This completely debunks the myth of photographic truth; which Barthes already did in his collection of essays Mythologies. (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957). According to him, our culture believes in many myths, just as primitive people did. One of the myths is the truth in the photographic image. He calls the myth a semiological system, a way of speaking, a language. But, and this has often been underexposed, Barthes also called the myth an ideology. Because, according to him, the photographic language is also a mythical language, there is always an ideology in the photographic image.
According to Barthes, we experience myths as natural. "Here we come to the ultimate principle of myth: it transforms history into something natural." If applied to photography, it follows that the natural truth we attribute to photographic images always turns out to be determined by social motives. Meaning, there is no truth behind the image, but there are opposing social, political and commercial interests. Barthes appears to be more politically oriented and more a Marxist in his Mythologies than in his writings on photography. He continues to say that capitalism and its masquerade, the bourgeoisie as the underlying political and social system, is mythologized. The myth is, according to him, a depoliticized speech: it makes speech innocent.
If we apply this to the truthfulness of photography believed by many since Fox Talbot, photographic images represent an interest which is obscured by the natural connection with reality.
Mass media and manipulation
The sociologist Stuart Hall takes a step further than semiology. He studies the way that mass media work. Through which media do we receive information and what interests are at stake? Because each photographic image is coded by the person who created and distributed the image, the photo must be decoded again by the viewer. The viewer can therefore only understand a photo if he knows the code behind the image, if he is part of the same visual culture. If you are part of the same cultural group, you take the photo as truth - this is the dominant reading. You share the code in the image. If you disagree in advance with the medium in which the photo appears, you can read the image as manipulation or as propaganda. You reject the underlying cultural code. Both ways of assessing images are not critical. Only if you strive for a so-called critical reading of the image, do you investigate the underlying code for the underlying interests. The interesting thing about this theory is that you, as an audience, always have to evaluate which underlying code is sent with the image. Even a press photo that is not digitally manipulated and accepted as true according to the rules of a competition can carry a cultural code that requires a critical assessment. The analysis of photography is not about a microscopic study of Raw files but about the codes that we accept as true in our, according to Barthes, bourgeois and capitalist culture.
The bag of Gorbachev
But how can we, if we do not want to give up the positive belief in the communication of photography, produce and consume images in a jungle of interests and in a swamp of doubts about the authenticity of photography? The key word of the present time is the story. The story becomes the replacement of the truth, it becomes a surrogate for reality and that is why it is broadly and universally applicable as a concept. The concept of the story in photography clears the road for photographers to create personal images that get a social context through metaphorical references.
The concept of visual storytelling has turned out to be a charming solution to bypass the cliffs of truth and beauty that Susan Sontag has marked off in her book On Photography. (Sontag, On Photography, 1980, 2008) The ‘story’ as a concept is charming, but at the same time theoretically vague. Nowadays almost all photography, both autonomous or documentary, is labeled as storytelling. The first cliff, the truth, is bypassed by assuming that the story is essentially personal and subjective. A subjective story does not have to be true. Robert Frank was hailed because he made a personal and subversive story about America, absolutely not "true", but with an important message. The cliff of beauty is bypassed because a visual story is not a collection of beautiful photos that must be experienced as individual art objects, but as a series of photos in the context of the story.
However, the problematic concept of narrative photography lacks persuasiveness, since photos tell a story that you can either believe or not. Can we see war photos as a story? Where is the boundary between documentary and autonomous photography if everything is called storytelling? A philosophical solution could be the assumption that there has never been a real distinction and that the space between the two forms of photography, one claiming reality and the other depicting personal, subjective emotions, has finally been filled theoretically. Another answer could be that all forms of storytelling are essentially myths, believed by representatives of a certain culture. Leslie Mullen writes in her Truth in Photography: “In other words, journalists, as participants in a certain culture, are bound by the 'cultural grammar' that defines the rules of the narrative construction, an awareness that the notion of the 'objective' translation of reality changes.” (Mullen, 1998)
One could conclude that both documentary photography and art photography are both a form of storytelling in different ways, and as such form myths of truth and beauty. And as myths, the underlying interests can remain concealed.
The hidden structure of photographic myths becomes more apparent since the concept of storytelling has been adopted by commerce. Advertisers no longer praise their products with photos that have to prove their quality, but with photos that tell a story. A brand has become a story. A Car is not a car, but the story about the Car that always remains a loyal friend in the rough nature and strengthens your identity. Any brand consists almost exclusively of storytelling. With the story, a brand creates a myth in which the customer wants to believe, because he needs to distinguish himself by becoming part of that myth. A Louis Vuitton bag is not a bag, but the story about prestige, money and above all, success. For an advertising campaign, the stories of astronauts, movie stars, and Gorbachev (who drives along the last remains of the Berlin wall in the back of a car) were all photographed by Anna Leibovitz. If the visual story is the central benchmark of all photography, then credibility does not get any clearer. A critical, evaluative attitude when consuming photographic images is needed to investigate the context and origin of the image. As a viewer, we cannot and do not have to believe every story, whether a photo is "real" or "manipulated."
The power of the media
Different theories about visual culture do not stop at the image itself, they also take the position of the viewer into consideration. Who is the viewer? Is he a New Yorker who watches commercials on Times Square? Or a Moroccan Berber who sees a billboard along the road in Ouarzazate? Or a inhabitant of the capital of Ghana?
In their sturdy book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that the position of the viewer determines to a large extent the final reading of the image. Even more, images determine the reader himself. (Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, 2008) According to them, the viewer creates an identity of himself by looking at images. “The image or visual appearance is not simply a representation or a way of information. It is one of the elements in the broad network in which the subject was created at a given historical and cultural moment.”
The New Yorker will easily identify with an advertising image for an iPhone, while the Berber woman might experience alienation. But we can no longer speak of ‘audience’ in the traditional sense of the word. In the digital world, the audience is fragmented into numerous subgroups, into individualized cells. That is why there is less discussion about mass media and more about social media. The power of the medium is becoming more diffuse. The mass media could easily distinguish a leftist from a rightist newspaper and create the underlying codes of images, the hidden power behind Facebook's algorithms is not easy to detect. Traditionally, the Marxist theorists have dealt with the power of the media. According to the theorists of the Frankfurter Schule such as Theodor Adorno, the power of the media is created by the disguised propaganda for the capitalist system. The many Instagram accounts that work for major brands prove that once again.
The Pencil of Nature
With the advent of digital photography and social media, our culture has become a visual culture par excellence. Millions of photos are shared every day via Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, which means that billions of people around the world now communicate with each other through images. Everyone who looks at his Facebook account on his smartphone every day lives a kind of double life: one in the physical reality and one in the virtual world of images. The environment that people experience becomes more and more visual.
However, the question is whether all users of photography actually understand the language of the photographic image. We are supposed to be able to analyze countless images, not only based on the information that the images provide, but also based on the context of these images. Who sends these images into the world and what interests play a role in this? Some images might look innocent, but on closer inspection they appear to serve major commercial interests. The popular television personality Kim Kardashian, for example, has more than 155 million followers on Instagram. She posts seemingly non-posed, spontaneous, attractive and slightly sexy photos of herself. On her account you will find a link to the iTunes store, where you can purchase an app to follow even more of her. On clicking you will see advertisements from Giorgio Armani and Saint Laurent. The innocent Instagram photos appear to be part of a sophisticated commercial strategy.
Social media appears to be disguised commercial media. It is now clear to everyone that after you've googled on a flight, you immediately see all kinds of advertisements about traveling on Facebook. "Promoted tweets" from TripAdvisor also appear on Twitter immediately afterwards. Images appear on all these digital media, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to trace the origin and unravel the intentions of these images. While photography initially had an unambiguous context that made it easy to interpret photos, it is now part of a rapidly and continuously changing context.
Too often it is assumed that photography is a universal language that everyone understands. The worn-out slogan that a photo tells more than a thousand words sounds like an echo from the past in which the naive belief in the truth of the photo prevailed. The English inventor of photography Fox Talbot made one of the first photo books in the history of photography, The Pencil of Nature, in which he wrote that his images were created by the hand of nature itself, only through the effect of light on paper. Underneath the photograph The Haystack (plate X) he writes hopefully and with conviction: “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.” (Talbot, 1844, 2014)
Truth and Reality
Even though we are almost two centuries later, there is still the often-unconscious belief that the photographic image is a direct and truthful account of reality. We still witness many discussions among photographers, technicians and curators about supposed manipulation of submitted photos for the World Press Photo, in which the veracity of photography is often treated by realists like the holy grail.
Does photography represent reality and could the photograph actually be called an image of the reality? Many discussions clearly show that we are still stumbling over the old concepts of truth and reality, even without any consensus about them.
Journalistic news photos, according to common opinions, should not be manipulated through interventions with Photoshop, because that will affect the truth of the image. The truth? Philosopher Roland Barthes would say that we have created a myth which a certain social class believes. Sociologist Stuart Hall would say that all who believe in photojournalism are engaged in a dominant reading of the news photo.
It is clear that a critical philosophy of our visual culture is urgently needed and that it must be taught on all photography courses. We are taught to read and write starting in primary school, but we are never confronted with a proper analysis of images through which we communicate on a daily basis.
To fully understand the value of photography in terms of communication, we should consider photos as text, just as complicated, equally subject to grammar rules and style figures and full of layers of meanings. Howels and Negreiros write in their book Visual Culture (Richard Negreiros & Howells Joaquim, 2018) that photos should be regarded as visual texts. Images must be read with the same discipline as texts. We need a literacy of the image. “Visual literacy should not be limited to people with a creative or professional interest in visual culture. On the contrary, this should be widely distributed.”
We often view visual "texts" superficially, namely as images. Images seem unambiguous, but viewed and analyzed as visual texts, embedded with hidden layers, images appear ambiguous. We have to learn to analyze images, and in particular photos, and unravel the cultural codes that have been hidden in them.
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy. But this is just one part of the analysis. A photograph always appears in a certain context and comes to the spectator
by a particular communication channel. This urges us to investigate the political or commercial interests of the distributor of the image. We cannot separate the meaning of images from the underlying interests, because the images are produced in a culture in which images are part of merchandise. Visual culture has become a part of capitalism. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in An introduction to Visual Culture: "Capital has made all aspects of daily life a commodity, including the human body and even the process of looking." And visual culture - by assuming that the image is universal - has become an integral part of globalization: images are produced and consumed worldwide. (Mirzoeff, 2009)
Understanding the cultural codes is the key to visual literacy
Semiology and Marxist aesthetics
To understand both aspects, two methods of research have been historically important: semiology and Marxist aesthetics. They represent the analytical and ideological way of looking at images. Roland Barthes has been the forerunner of the semiology of photography, but in his critical reflections on culture, he also appears to have incorporated ideological aspects. Susan Sontag and John Berger have explained and criticized the ideological backgrounds of the production and distribution of images, inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin. Both were strongly opposed to consider photography as art, because that would ignore the political and social context of photography. In addition, art has often been analyzed from the point of view of iconography, which often ignored the underlying interests. The theories of Roland Barthes were undermined by himself in his poetic reflections in Camera Lucida. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1993) Susan Sontag later corrected herself in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, 2004) and John Berger mainly analyzed painting and the relationship to possession.
Jean Baudrillard is a philosopher who went beyond the criticism and analysis of the single image. In his book Simulacra and Simulation, he observed that the enormous quantity of images made them meaningless. (Baudrillard, 1981, 1994) According to Baudrillard we live in a kind of Disneyland of images. They no longer have a direct relationship with the reality that is assumed behind the image, but they are fantasy images: simulacra. His position seems exaggerated, but when one realizes that by now a quarter of the photos that are made for Ikea are made on the computer using the so-called CGI method without the use of a camera, the notion of fantasy images comes very close. With CGI photography, the reality behind the image appears to have disappeared completely. This means that the original credibility of the photographic image has lost its physical basis, and the digital manipulation, if that word still applies, has taken over the photographic domain.
This completely debunks the myth of photographic truth; which Barthes already did in his collection of essays Mythologies. (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957). According to him, our culture believes in many myths, just as primitive people did. One of the myths is the truth in the photographic image. He calls the myth a semiological system, a way of speaking, a language. But, and this has often been underexposed, Barthes also called the myth an ideology. Because, according to him, the photographic language is also a mythical language, there is always an ideology in the photographic image.
According to Barthes, we experience myths as natural. "Here we come to the ultimate principle of myth: it transforms history into something natural." If applied to photography, it follows that the natural truth we attribute to photographic images always turns out to be determined by social motives. Meaning, there is no truth behind the image, but there are opposing social, political and commercial interests. Barthes appears to be more politically oriented and more a Marxist in his Mythologies than in his writings on photography. He continues to say that capitalism and its masquerade, the bourgeoisie as the underlying political and social system, is mythologized. The myth is, according to him, a depoliticized speech: it makes speech innocent.
If we apply this to the truthfulness of photography believed by many since Fox Talbot, photographic images represent an interest which is obscured by the natural connection with reality.
Mass media and manipulation
The sociologist Stuart Hall takes a step further than semiology. He studies the way that mass media work. Through which media do we receive information and what interests are at stake? Because each photographic image is coded by the person who created and distributed the image, the photo must be decoded again by the viewer. The viewer can therefore only understand a photo if he knows the code behind the image, if he is part of the same visual culture. If you are part of the same cultural group, you take the photo as truth - this is the dominant reading. You share the code in the image. If you disagree in advance with the medium in which the photo appears, you can read the image as manipulation or as propaganda. You reject the underlying cultural code. Both ways of assessing images are not critical. Only if you strive for a so-called critical reading of the image, do you investigate the underlying code for the underlying interests. The interesting thing about this theory is that you, as an audience, always have to evaluate which underlying code is sent with the image. Even a press photo that is not digitally manipulated and accepted as true according to the rules of a competition can carry a cultural code that requires a critical assessment. The analysis of photography is not about a microscopic study of Raw files but about the codes that we accept as true in our, according to Barthes, bourgeois and capitalist culture.
The bag of Gorbachev
But how can we, if we do not want to give up the positive belief in the communication of photography, produce and consume images in a jungle of interests and in a swamp of doubts about the authenticity of photography? The key word of the present time is the story. The story becomes the replacement of the truth, it becomes a surrogate for reality and that is why it is broadly and universally applicable as a concept. The concept of the story in photography clears the road for photographers to create personal images that get a social context through metaphorical references.
The concept of visual storytelling has turned out to be a charming solution to bypass the cliffs of truth and beauty that Susan Sontag has marked off in her book On Photography. (Sontag, On Photography, 1980, 2008) The ‘story’ as a concept is charming, but at the same time theoretically vague. Nowadays almost all photography, both autonomous or documentary, is labeled as storytelling. The first cliff, the truth, is bypassed by assuming that the story is essentially personal and subjective. A subjective story does not have to be true. Robert Frank was hailed because he made a personal and subversive story about America, absolutely not "true", but with an important message. The cliff of beauty is bypassed because a visual story is not a collection of beautiful photos that must be experienced as individual art objects, but as a series of photos in the context of the story.
However, the problematic concept of narrative photography lacks persuasiveness, since photos tell a story that you can either believe or not. Can we see war photos as a story? Where is the boundary between documentary and autonomous photography if everything is called storytelling? A philosophical solution could be the assumption that there has never been a real distinction and that the space between the two forms of photography, one claiming reality and the other depicting personal, subjective emotions, has finally been filled theoretically. Another answer could be that all forms of storytelling are essentially myths, believed by representatives of a certain culture. Leslie Mullen writes in her Truth in Photography: “In other words, journalists, as participants in a certain culture, are bound by the 'cultural grammar' that defines the rules of the narrative construction, an awareness that the notion of the 'objective' translation of reality changes.” (Mullen, 1998)
One could conclude that both documentary photography and art photography are both a form of storytelling in different ways, and as such form myths of truth and beauty. And as myths, the underlying interests can remain concealed.
The hidden structure of photographic myths becomes more apparent since the concept of storytelling has been adopted by commerce. Advertisers no longer praise their products with photos that have to prove their quality, but with photos that tell a story. A brand has become a story. A Car is not a car, but the story about the Car that always remains a loyal friend in the rough nature and strengthens your identity. Any brand consists almost exclusively of storytelling. With the story, a brand creates a myth in which the customer wants to believe, because he needs to distinguish himself by becoming part of that myth. A Louis Vuitton bag is not a bag, but the story about prestige, money and above all, success. For an advertising campaign, the stories of astronauts, movie stars, and Gorbachev (who drives along the last remains of the Berlin wall in the back of a car) were all photographed by Anna Leibovitz. If the visual story is the central benchmark of all photography, then credibility does not get any clearer. A critical, evaluative attitude when consuming photographic images is needed to investigate the context and origin of the image. As a viewer, we cannot and do not have to believe every story, whether a photo is "real" or "manipulated."
The power of the media
Different theories about visual culture do not stop at the image itself, they also take the position of the viewer into consideration. Who is the viewer? Is he a New Yorker who watches commercials on Times Square? Or a Moroccan Berber who sees a billboard along the road in Ouarzazate? Or a inhabitant of the capital of Ghana?
In their sturdy book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that the position of the viewer determines to a large extent the final reading of the image. Even more, images determine the reader himself. (Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, 2008) According to them, the viewer creates an identity of himself by looking at images. “The image or visual appearance is not simply a representation or a way of information. It is one of the elements in the broad network in which the subject was created at a given historical and cultural moment.”
The New Yorker will easily identify with an advertising image for an iPhone, while the Berber woman might experience alienation. But we can no longer speak of ‘audience’ in the traditional sense of the word. In the digital world, the audience is fragmented into numerous subgroups, into individualized cells. That is why there is less discussion about mass media and more about social media. The power of the medium is becoming more diffuse. The mass media could easily distinguish a leftist from a rightist newspaper and create the underlying codes of images, the hidden power behind Facebook's algorithms is not easy to detect. Traditionally, the Marxist theorists have dealt with the power of the media. According to the theorists of the Frankfurter Schule such as Theodor Adorno, the power of the media is created by the disguised propaganda for the capitalist system. The many Instagram accounts that work for major brands prove that once again.
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