#Allan sekula the body and the archive archive
Sekula posits the idea of the power relationship of the archive and how does photography speak for everyone when each person takes a different value from the scene or image. Seeing a photograph on front of The Times newspaper that is used to draw attention to an article on Jewish women, I see not merely the look of the woman whom I am asked to consider as Jewish but the artificiality of the context, the idea that there is such a thing as a typical Jewish woman.We are asked to read and comment on Reading the Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital (pp181-192) by Allan Sekula.
Sekula’s article has certainly had an effect on me. The work of Peirce, the semiotician, is mentioned he “ made a useful distinction between signs that referred to their objects indexically and those that operated symbolically.” For Bertillon, “ the photograph was nothing more than the physical trace of its contingent instance” while Galton (along with Stieglitz) “ attempted to elevate the indexical photographic composite to the level of the symbolic.” Both had different approaches to the task of classifying people and trying to determine typologies. Hence, the work of two leading figures in this field is considered, the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon and the Englishman Francis Galton. Much of Sekula’s essay is in fact not about photography but dwells instead on the systems of thought that gave the photographic archive organisation and methodology. As Sekula writes, it is “ extraordinary that histories of social documentary photography have been written without taking the police into account.”įurthermore, “ Photography was to be both an object and means of bibliographic rationalisation.” The photographer August Sander was a modernist who “ embraced the archival paradigm” while Walker-Evans in the classic “American Photographs” (1938) attempted “ to counterpose the “poetic” structure of the sequence to the model of the archive.” The sciences of phrenology and physiognomy used photography in an attempt to further their claims and develop their research. It was aimed not only to make a recognisable record of criminals but also to try and determine what the criminal type might be. Nevertheless, it is extensive and has created an interesting record beyond it’s original purpose. The use of photography by the police has been significant and impacted upon society yet this is largely unrecognised. Sekula is writing about an aspect of photography that has been largely ignored such as in Newhall’s History of Photography and many other histories. Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) used the term to define the “essentially competitive individual human nature” in which human labour was increasingly taking the form of an alienable commodity. I find the word “ bourgeois” a bit vague and rather sweeping but the footnotes are there to explain it.
Historical in approach, there is a political flavour from the beginning. The photographic portrait can be honorific (conveying the dignity of that person) or repressive (recording the features of a criminal for instance) … “ photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together.” Sekula further writes “… the photographic portrait extends, accelerates, popularises, and degrades a traditional function … the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self … photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same thorough and rigorous fashion … Thus photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other.”Ĭontinuing … “ the photographic portrait in particular was welcomed as a socially ameliorative as well as a socially repressive instrument … a means of cultural enlightenment for the working classes, but family photographs sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants.” “ photography is modernity run riot …” is another interesting statement as is “ Photography promises an enchanted mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.” The simultaneous threat and promise of the new medium … Initially, photography threatens to overwhelm the citadels of high culture” the paradoxical status of photography within bourgeois culture. Every now and then, I come across a piece of writing about photography that encourages me to consider the medium in a new or original way and this article, suggested by my tutor Peter Havelland, titled “The Body and the Archive” is one such piece.
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