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This essay was an exploratory venture in the reformulation of photographic discourse that subsequently expanded into a book project of the same name.

Studies in photography tend to lie in two general fields: photography as practice, photography as art. Both offer an uncritical initiation into the dominant beliefs and values prevailing in art institution as whole and the issues are relegated to technique and aesthetics rather than forces of production [1]. True critical approaches, then, have to "reject tendency to confine discussion of photography to some narrowly technicist and/or aesthetic realm of ideas … to understand photography not only as a practice in its own right but also in its relation to society as a whole." [2] However, critical perspectives on photography and the image tend to be dominated by semiotics or visual literacy. Both perspectives, despite generating ideas crucial to our understanding of the image, are nevertheless restricted by their omission of the materialist origins of the image and the forces of production that determine its form.

Semiotics hoped to reveal the contradictions in social relations by contrasting the connoted and denoted signifiers of the image. Barthes saw photography as an institutional activity whose function is to integrate and reassure humanity. By analyzing the arbitrary and rational codes embedded in a photograph, one can "hope to recognize in their complexity, the forms our society employs to reassure itself, and thereby grasp the extent, the detours, and deep function of this effort." [3] However, Burgin argues that semiotics is insufficient to account "for the complex articulations of the moments of institution, text, distribution, and consumption of photography." [4]

Recent debates on visual literacy, as exemplified by Messaris and Gombrich, elides the issue altogether by rejecting the semiotic assumption of a universal signification and focusing instead on the psychological processes of how individuals derive meaning from an image [5]. I liken both perspectives to the act of looking out of a window; in the process of explaining the significance of the view and how we perceive and derive meaning from it, they fail to see how that view of reality is itself framed and contained within the material window frame.

By ignoring the material window frame, semiotics and visual literacy rationalize and presuppose the photographic image as reality, as well as the social structures that justify it. This dialectical reversal also extends to how their attempts to liberate and demystify the image simultaneously colonize and mystify (the meaning of) the image by schematizing signifiers and psychological processes behind interpreting an image.

Although Jameson criticized the Frankfurt School's valorization of modernist art as ahistorical, their dialectical analysis of culture demonstrating the presence of the commodity structure in the form and content of populist and 'high' art is critical in understanding the window frame that structures our view of reality [6]; notably, Benjamin's perception of things as fossils - where traces of history are embedded within but are concealed by a Darwinist rationalization of progress. A photograph then, comes close to an 'ideal' fossil as not only the social history of its production is not embedded in it, but 'history' itself is recorded on its emulsion. Buck-Morss describes this as,

Not the medium of representation, not merely the concreteness of the image or the montage form is crucial, but whether the construction makes visible the gap between the sign and referent, or fuses them in a deceptive totality … When historical referents are called "natural" in uncritical affirmation, identifying the empirical course of their development as progress, the result is myth.

The concept of myth is central to dialectical materialism; it underlines Marx's commodity fetish, Adorno's negative dialectic and Benjamin's phantasmagoria. Sometimes described as ideology, it refers to how forces of production have concealed and rationalized contradictions in social relations. I have opted to use myth in this essay as it better encapsulates the different forces at work as well as connoting a historical premise. The window frame, then, is the myth through which we view reality that needs to be demythified, akin to Foucault's middle eye. The ontology of reality on the other side of the window is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead this paper attempts to continue Burgin's project of "developing a materialist analysis of photography" by examining how the reality perceived is corrupted by the mediation of the forces of production materialized into a window frame [8].

Systems of Production

The photograph is the first encounter of machine and human being, where the artist's attempt to replicate nature was made scientific. Photography encouraged practice of amateurs so that line between artist and public began to blur and the production of images was democratized [9]. Art was no longer deeply beholden to the intentions of artist but "mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong." [10] Painters, who attempted to defend themselves against the new technology by denying it as art, missed the real threat to their cultural creativity which is the effect of the capitalist market brought upon by the technology of reproduction. [11]

The photographic reproducibility of an artwork leads to loss of aura; which is its unique temporal and spatial presence. Benjamin saw this contemporary decay in aura as having a social basis; that is the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" by the way of its likeness and reproduction. Mechanical reproduction emancipates art from its "parasitical dependence on ritual", the consequence of which that the copy becomes the criterion in producing artworks. No longer does cult value of original determine artwork but the exhibition values of its copies which are ultimately experienced as more real than their originals [12]. This is not just a new aesthetic style but the "cultural transformation of the subjective fantasy of art into objective material forms of reality" where the production of art began to resemble those of commodity due to the distorting effects of capitalist social relations. [13]

Adorno and Horkheimer saw the technology of the culture industry as "no more than achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system … The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality … Everyone must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type." [14] The contemporary marketing of photography supports their insights. Cameras are produced along "amateur", "advanced", and "professional" lines for varying skill and expenditure levels. Even photographic film and paper is distinguished by myriad different "general purpose" and "professional" brands and varieties. Even the form and content of the photograph itself becomes a hierarchical device: a reproduction of Ansel Adam's print of Half Dome is more prized than a reproduction of the same view by an unknown photographer.

Reproduction is not restricted to physical replication, but also the replication of the view through technology and technique. The use of such techniques are "surprises" for the spectator, but merely "performances" for the photographer [15]. This has implications on the praxis of art as reproducibility ensures canonization, and canonization ensures the same forms perpetuate themselves; "The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion." [16] However, once the particular brand of deviation from the norm is noted and accepted, it belongs to the industry and work will surface bearing that same brand of deviation that was once unique [17]. Jameson notes that the critical edge and innovations of the modern movement have become 'rather realistic' due to canonization and academic institutionalization. They no longer scandalize but are received "with the greatest complacency", and have become themselves institutionalized into the official or public culture of western society [18]. Watney sums up the defeat of art as critical faculty, by its corruption by the commodity structure;

It does not require an especially strong sense of irony to appreciate the way in which a range of photographic techniques, which had been expressly developed to reveal the conditions of alienated life and consciousness, became themselves objects for alienated aesthetic contemplation, a shattered mirror which obediently continued to reflect the world as it is not. [19]

For Jameson, art in pre-capitalist society was like an aesthetic "contract" between a cultural producer and a certain homogeneous class or group public. The relationship between artist and public was still a social institution and a concrete social and interpersonal relationship with its own validation and specificity. With the coming of the market, art becomes one more branch of commodity production, the artist loses all social status as this institutional status of artistic consumption and production vanishes [20]. Art becomes produced for production rather than for art's sake. As Adorno puts it,

What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes place among the consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty. Art as a separate sphere was always possible only in a bourgeois society … until the eighteenth century, the buyer's patronage shielded the artist from the market, they were dependent on the buyer and his objectives. The purposelessness of the great modern work of art depends on the anonymity of the market. Its demands pass through so many intermediaries that the artist is exempt from any definite requirements. [21]

Art becomes deception; it becomes part of the commodity system it was supposed to be separate and liberated from. Use value is replaced by exchange value and "in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur." [22] Art becomes collectible.

Sontag observes how photographs as collectible objects "do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire." She traces it to the subsequent industrialization of camera technology transformed the act of photography from a specialized craft to the ubiquitous pocket cameras. The omnipresence of cameras suggest that time consist of interesting events worth photographing; so reality becomes an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent photographer. [23]

Sekula traces the genesis of the construction of photograph as art object to Stieglitz's Camera Work. The precursor to present day coffee-table books, it marked photographs contained within as "precious objects, as products of extraordinary craftsmanship ... For the first time, photographic reproduction signifies an intrinsic value, a value that resides in its immediate physical nature, its 'craftedness'." [24] This "binding quality" of photographs is produced and reproduced by certain privileged ideological apparatuses which confer power and privilege to photography [25]. Museums and art galleries become part of the "art-marketing system" that provides photographs with "a new order of instrumentality, with a straightforward economic value that can be mobilized to secure more value." [26]

There is a dialectical tension inherent in fine art photography. A photograph is imminently reproducible yet art has traditionally been a unique object. Asking for an "authentic" print makes no sense as one can make any number of prints from a negative. The criterion of authenticity ceases be applicable to artistic production, the cult value is displaced by exhibition value. In place of authenticity, the art market creates gestures towards authenticity. Photographers create editions of their work, sometimes forcibly limiting production, in an attempt to restrict the decay of the aura by embedding it across the number of editioned copies. Each image is invested with a unique history to enhance the aura and its status as an art object. The story of Ansel Adam's famous "Moonrise over Hernandez" is archetypal of such histories - the photographer sees the vision unfold before him, it would have been lost forever but his technical mastery of the camera enabled him to translate the vision onto the emulsion of the film and paper, preserving it for posterity. Well known photographers will naturally have greater exhibition value which in turn translates into exchange value for their work. Yet there is a dialectical tension in the exchange value of art photographs. "Vintage prints" are early copies in the edition, and fetch higher prices in the auction market. The belief is that the early copies are closer to the photographer's original intentions than later copies, so it is more "authentic." Yet artists claim their printing improves as they execute more copies, so that later copies are closer to what they really envisioned. Since this is more "authentic", later copies in the edition typically are priced higher than early copies when they are first sold. Sekula sees these gestures towards authenticity and art as an ideology that conceals the market and the production process.

Treated by the vigorous new art history of photography to an expanding pantheon of independent auteurs, we forget that most photographers are detail workers, makers of fragmentary and indeterminate e visual statements. These photographs take on a more determinate meaning as they pass through a bureaucratically organized and directed process of assembly. [27]

The concept of commodity changes "what was conceived as the universal description of the aesthetic experience as such and in whatever form". Art becomes rigorously quantified and abstractly comparable through medium of money without any qualitative use value in itself [28]. The emphasis on exchange value implies that creativity is interchangeable; so that exchange value becomes a benchmark of creativity.

Reification and Utopia

Burgin saw ideology as mystification and imprinted in society's production and consumption of material objects. The photograph is no longer an innocent view of reality but a reified way of seeing the world that supports the capitalist society.

Even the natural landscape is appropriated by ideology, being rendered, in anthropocentric perception, 'beautiful' or 'hostile' or 'picturesque' … This distancing of the subject from a separate and neutral reality, in what Husserl called the 'natural attitude', is magnified when the world is viewed through a lens. Compressed against the viewing screen into a single plane, chopped by the viewfinder into neat rectangles, the world is even more likely to be experienced as remote and inert. [29]

Oil paintings were the first forms of possession by the way of seeing. The paintings reified the way of life by its vivid depictions of property and things [30]. In the 19th century, the invention of photography coincided with the beginning of capitalism and the zeitgeist of positivism which aimed at appropriating nature. Torgersrud writes,

It is no wonder that photography was epitomized 'the new truth.' The capitalist society, in which production and ownership were main concerns, was able to see photography as both a manifestation of its relationship to the world and as the producer of their knowledge. The camera made possible the possession of objects through the photograph. [31]

The camera as voyeur becomes an insufficient metaphor for the colonizing gaze of the camera. The camera occupies the center in Foucault's Panopticon and enables the interchangeability of the center of visual authority due to the reproducibility of the photography. This commanding view takes the forms of photography used in portraying landscapes, architecture, as well as sites for surveillance. Spurr considers it an originating gesture of colonization of nature by offering "aesthetic pleasure on one hand, information and authority on the other … for it conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown." [32] Such a colonizing gaze, thus enabled photography to be used by institutions of power as a tool of control. Sekula describes the photograph as having a "mythical truth value"; or how the 'informative' function of photograph served as legal power of proof and empiricism. Through 'rational' functions invented for photography, the portraits of American Indians, and of French conquests in Egypt memorialized the act of colonization and served as "ideologically charged reification of the expanding boundaries of the bourgeois state" through which mythical image of the "frontier" was realized. [33]

Such photographs afford a phantasmic relationship with an organic image of Nature which has been irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital; The technology of photography "is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control." [34]

Sontag says "to photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects." Movie stars are stars simply because they are photographed; the act of photography itself confers importance on their personages.

Weston, one of the first modernists, created two sets of images in his career that entirely redefined our way of seeing through the camera. His dramatic prints of the Armco Steel mills in Ohio in 1922 overturned Pictorialism's project to make photography more like classical art with its emphasis on landscapes and portraiture, and made the city and industry legitimate objects of beauty. His close ups of various peppers throughout the 1930s made simple mundane objects beautiful. The modernist movement in art, then becomes guilty of conferring importance to the symbols and ills of capital; their aestheticization of objects and industry ensures reification.

Benjamin was one of the first to comment on the transfiguring gaze of the camera. He saw that it succeeded in transforming even abject poverty "by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment … it has made the struggle against poverty an object of consumption." [35] Spurr writes that such images "colonizes the victims of famine or disaster by reducing the victim's identity to a sign of suffering." [36] Phil Borges' hand-colored portraits of Tibetian refuges succeeded only in transforming their stoic faces into symbols of martyrdom, instead of raising questions on the political situation that caused their flight.

In such images, the body becomes a landscape to be conquered - "The eye treats the body as a landscape: it proceeds systematically from part to part, quantifying and spatializing, noting color and texture, and finally passing an aesthetic judgment which stressed the body's role as object to be viewed." [37] Shomei Tomatsu's photograph of a Hiroshima victim transformed the man's pain and suffering into a landscape of valleys on his skin for our aesthetic consumption. The work of documentary photographers such as Dorothea Lange become questionable, because in their aim to portray suffering, they invariably aestheticize it and commodify it for consumption.

Sontag questions the intentions and morals of such photographs,

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. [38]

With the ease and speed of reproduction, these can have a significant impact on our view of the world. Spurr observes the dialectical reversal of how such photographs distance in an attempt to bring us closer.

The visual enframing and metaphorical transformations that characterize such images have a distancing effect: while calling attention to suffering, they also show it as out there: contained, defined, localized in a realm understood to be culturally apart. But the speed with which these images are brought to us do not bring us closer to that world or make it more real for us. One the contrary, the technology of the modern media alienates us from the reality of the foreign and remote by the very ease with which it produces images of that world; the images are produced at random and can be made to disappear by the turn of the page or dial. [39]

In the end, all these photographs merely added to infinite production of hyperrealist "reality" [40]. Baudrillard pointed to the creation of a reality that is induced or created by media, which is self-contained and bears no relation to reality. Images move from simply pointing or copying reality to simulating and hiding reality. The impoverishment of first hand experience and makes us unable to separate real from artificial and true from false [41]. This transition is rooted in the transformation of object into commodity. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie owned things and this was reflected in photographs made at the time which sustained themselves as permanent and unique objects. In the 20th century objects have become substitutable entities; they are transient and are not to be owned but consumed to fuel the engine of mass production and consumption. [42]

Jameson describes the utopian gesture as an act of compensation that ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses; "sight, the visual, the eye … now reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital" [43]. Binkley sees this utopic gesture in how the camera "is borne as if a shield by the dispassionate observer who strides out with the box and its film to confront reality but avoid engagement; the instrument alone bears the blows while permitting the observer to bring home its reconnoitered imprints as trophies of capture." [44] With industrialization and mass production of cameras, everyone is able to possess a slice of reality as a trophy of conquest. According to Jameson, the tourist transforms the landscape into its own material image by taking a snapshot of it, hence

The concrete activity of looking at a landscape - including, no doubt, the disquieting bewilderment with the activity itself, the anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human, wonder what they were doing there and what the point of purpose of such a confrontation might be in the first place - is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting it into a form of personal property. [45]

The flip side of such utopian gestures is that it relies on industrialization and mass production which results in increasing degrees of separation between the self and the mediating camera. The act of taking a picture becomes part of a mass production process which wrests control over the material form of the image from the photographer. Technology supposedly enhances the ease of use but turns it into a fetish in itself by mythifying the act of capturing an image. As Sontag puts it, "in the fairy tale of photography, the magic box ensures veracity and banishes error, compensates for inexperience and rewards innocence." [46] In the early days of photography, photographers built their own cameras, and made their own film and paper. The reliance on commercial production ensures the standardization of film and camera formats. Reality is now consistently framed and captured within commercially dictated window dimensions.

The development of faster shutter speeds and sophisticated lenses result in sharpness as a primary aesthetic. Photography "how to" books are filled with formulas on how to slice and dice reality to get the best (i.e. sharpest) picture for any situation. This reified aesthetic of "freezing" time led to the decline of pinhole cameras as it required longer exposure times and not just "quick snaps" of contemporary cameras. In a typical camera with lenses, the act of capturing reality is a zero sum game, as the use of higher shutter speeds to freeze time more perfectly necessitates the simultaneous increase in the lens aperture which results in a decreased range of resolution (or depth of field). But the pinhole camera is not a zero sum game by its ability to render infinite depth of field. However, the marketing of modern cameras and the formulations in photo books have convinced us that it is an inferior device as it does not render "tack sharp" images and could not freeze time by 1/4000 of a second. Technology produces a reified aesthetic which perpetuates itself.

Consider the camera lens; it renders hyperreal reality in its "standardization" of light rays by recording each with perfect clarity. The human eye can only pick up a specific focus or a general panorama at any point in time; it can never record the perfect clarity of everything in the range of view (or afford increasingly telescopic and microscopic views via enlargements and close-ups) that the lens does. Throughout 19 and 20th centuries the technology of photography developed lenses and increasingly complex shutter mechanisms designed to facilitate quicker, easier, and more refined picturing resulting in a "high resolution look". The photograph becomes appreciated for the form itself rather than the content.

Burgin notes that "if we bear in mind the gestalt orientation of the mirror-phase - its emphasis on surface and boundary - we can admit that a narcissistic investment may be made in respect of the very specular brilliance of the tightly delineated photographic surface itself; certainly, the appreciation of the superficial beauty of the 'fine print' is a centerpiece of photographic connoisseurship." [47] The distinguishing feature of fine art prints is its concealment of surface blemish. Through darkroom manipulation and retouching, the photographers or their assistants painfully etch or cover up flaws in the emulsion.

The image becomes the ultimate deception. Seduced by the superficial aspects of the photograph, reality can only pale in comparison. The dramatic landscapes one sees in photographs, is disappointingly less rich in color and structure. Product photography emphasizes the perfection of the product through an array of lighting and camera techniques, the consumption of the product would be the fulfillment of all our desires. Yet the gorgeously "delicious" colors of the iMac computers are disappointingly dull under normal lighting conditions. The image promises utopia but not delivering it (to ensure the cycle of consumption). Reality is anticlimax, the Image is utopia.

The Age of Digital (re)Production

Like the traditional image, the digital image expresses a world view. The digital photograph no longer relies on an indexical print of representation; the referent disappears in the translation of analogous image into numerical code. For Benjamin, the loss of aura led to copies as being experienced as more real. Baudrillard extends this development to having three stages. In the first, technical media double reality that they continue to represent; in the second, objects are produced immediately with a view to reproduction; and in the last stage, one can no longer speak of reproduction as the referent disappears [48]. The digital is simulacrum. The image is no longer subject to the decay of the physical emulsion, time becomes perfectly reified ready to be transmitted or manipulated at the touch of a button. With the changeability of the image, images of past are no longer fixed but are open to continual deconstruction and reconstruction. [49]

Traditional photographers are threatened by digital technology as art, citing the displacement of craft with technology - an argument not dissimilar to the painter's argument against photography in the 19th century. Digital photographers, like the traditional photographers before them, gesture towards authenticity and art in an attempt to legitimize their work. The archival quality of digital printouts is stressed, or they emphasize their use of a hybrid process to make their work less of a "printout", as well as editioning their work. However, the notion of "editions" becomes itself a simulacrum in digital photography. While editions in traditional photography can have a claim to some semblance of authenticity by how the photographers change their printing techniques over time to better reflect their visions, thus evoking subtle changes; digital printouts are identical - the first printout is exactly the same as the thousandth.

Digital photography threatens traditional fine art photography as it demythifies the process and product, making perfection no longer the attainment of artists. Yet digital photography is not the postmodern dream of emancipation but a 'demystification' that mystifies itself. Binkley noted that the working mechanisms of camera are more or less transparent as they could be taken and their inner workings understood, but not so for computers [50]. The digital process requires an increasing degree of separation from the mediating object, by increasing the reliance and dependence on production; film packs, software, batteries and power cables, laptops, portable hard drives etc. One can no longer comprehend nor grasp the extent of any single part of the production process. The capturing and framing of reality becomes even more dictated by production standards which changes the relation between the object and subject. The digital becomes the ultimate utopic gesture; one can improve on reality and suture its imperfections by "removing wrinkles instantly". With its inherent ability to standardize and reproduce perfectly, it promises the end of material decay.

p. Art is complicit with the commodity structure, and the trend towards digital photography and art makes it even closer wedded to the capitalist system; by mediating and dichotomizing the experience of creating and experiencing art with mysterious and inscrutable "black boxes", such as computers, that no single person can have absolute control or knowledge of. Production of art becomes increasingly specialized and instrumentalized as evidenced by the hierarchy of heterogeneously skilled workers need to produce a computer animation. Yet, although the digital has emancipated representation from the referent; there are still gestures towards older conceptions of art in order to validate itself as a progression of the old order. The biggest obstacle to art is to pierce through reifications of our experience and enable us to see things in a new way, and

(to) understand the extent to which art redeems a repressive social order by offering a wholly imaginary transcendence, a false harmony, to docile and isolated spectators. The cult of private experience, of the entirely affective relation to culture demanded by a consumerist economy serves to obliterate momentarily, on weekends, knowledge of the fragmentation, boredom, and routinization of labor, knowledge of the self as a commodity. [51]

In addition, Benjamin exhorts artists to transcend the trend of specialization in the process of production as it is myth; "for in thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus that in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control." [52]

Granted, technology was inherently progressive, promising socialist forms of living and culture; but so long as its development was appropriated for the purposes of capitalism and the state, it produced only reified dream images of that promise, a phantasmagoria of the 'new nature.' … Neither technician nor artist was to be affirmed unequivocally. Both, lacking control over the means of production, submitted to the demands of the market and thereby helped to perpetuate the nonidentity between social utility and capitalist profitability. As producers of strategic beautification or of patriotic oration, both served the interests of political reaction. Both were caught up in the dream-state of technology. [53]