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Photography after photography

Gender, Genre, And History

Duke University Press

Inside/Out

(1995)

In her withering critique of the work of Diane Arbus — itself part of a larger thesis about the baleful effects of photography's colonization of the world and its objects — Susan Sontag argued that certain forms of photographic depiction were complicit with processes of objectification that precluded either empathy or identification with their subjects. In producing a photographic oeuvre featuring subjects who were physically deviant (e.g., giants, dwarfs) or those deemed socially deviant (e.g., transvestites, nudists) or even those who through Arbus's singular lens merely looked deviant (e.g., crying babies), and by photographing them in ways that defiantly renounced either compassion or sympathetic engagement, Arbus was indicted as a voyeuristic and deeply morbid connoisseur of the horrible:

The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is a supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects — to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Sontag's critique of the touristic and anomic sensibility informing the work of Arbus (a critique that was clearly meant to encompass many other comparable practices) turns, among other things, on the binary couple inside/outside. In fact, Sontag closes the paragraph cited above by remarking of Arbus that "her view is always from the outside." This binarism, which is but one of a series that underpins much photography theory and criticism, characterizes — in a manner that appears virtually self-evident — two possible positions for the photographer. The insider position — in this particular context, the "good" or "virtuous" position — is understood to imply a position of engagement, participation, and privileged knowledge. Whereas the second, the outsider's position, is taken to produce an alienated and voyeuristic relationship that heightens the distance between subject and object. Along the lines of this binarism hinges much of the debate concerned with either the ethics or the politics of various forms of photographic practice. In this respect, Sontag's critique is best characterized as an investigation of the ethics of photographic seeing. This might be contrasted with Martha Rosler's no less uncompromising critique of traditional documentary practice — I refer here to her 1981 essay "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)" — structured around an explicitly politicized analysis of how such photography actually functions. "Imperialism," she wrote, "breeds an imperialist sensibility in all phases of cultural life," a comment that might be paired interestingly with Sontag's "Like sexual voyeurism, [taking photographs] is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening." Accordingly, where Rosler sees the issue of photographic voyeurism and objectification as a synecdoche of a larger political and cultural totality, Sontag tends to locate the problem in the photographic act itself. Nevertheless, and despite the important difference between the terms of an ethical or a political critique, both Sontag and Rosler are equally aware of the problematic nature of the photographic representation of the other, whether that other is incarnated by the handicapped, the freak, the wino, the poor, the racial or ethnic other — the list is obviously endless. And although the inside/outside dichotomy for Sontag pivots on the possibility (or lack) of empathy and identification, and where for Rosler it devolves on issues of power and powerlessness, it is nonetheless significant that from either a liberal or a left perspective, the inside/outside couplet is a central theme. Among other things, such a distinction operates to differentiate the kind of practice Rosler calls "victim photography" and at least one possible alternative — the putative empowerment of self-representation. In other words, where the inside/outside pairing is mobilized with respect to the representation of the other, the operative assumption is that the vantage point of the photographer who comes from outside (the quintessential documentarian, the ethnographer or anthropologist, the camera-wielding tourist) is not only itself an act of violence and appropriation but is by definition a partial if not distorted view of the subject to be represented.

Without necessarily disagreeing with this characterization, I would suggest, however, that the terms of this binarism are in fact more complicated, indeed far more ambiguous than they might initially appear. One of the lessons of deconstruction is to look closely at the structure of binary oppositions, not merely to reveal the hierarchy masked by their juxtaposition but also to identify those areas of undecidability and equivocation that subvert the supposed stability of the opposition, uncovering suppressions, destabilizing the very terms of the binary. And while there is a perfectly commonsensical way in which we all grasp what is meant by Sontag's description of a photographer being "outside rather than inside a situation," and the implications thereof, there is yet a stubborn resistance in photography, even a logical incompatibility with these terms. We frequently assume authenticity and truth to be located on the inside (the truth of the subject), and, at the same time, we routinely — culturally — locate and define objectivity (as in reportorial, journalistic, or juridical objectivity) in conditions of exteriority, detachment, of nonimplication.

It is in this context suggestive, therefore, that one of the recurring tropes of photography criticism is an acknowledgment of the medium's brute exteriority, its depthless-ness, perceived as a kind of ontological limitation rendering it incapable of registering anything more than the momentary accident of appearances. "Less than ever does a simple reproduction of reality express something about reality," wrote Walter Benjamin (citing Brecht) on a photograph of a Krupp munitions factory. "Only that which narrates can make us understand," cautions Sontag nearly forty years after Benjamin's essay. "The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist."

But if the medium is itself understood in this quasi-ontological sense as inescapably limited to the superficiality of surface appearance, how then does one gauge the difference between the photographic image made with an insider's knowledge or investment from one made from a position of total exteriority? If the inside or outside position is taken to constitute a difference, we need to determine where that defining difference lies. In other words, is the implication (from the Latin, implicare — to be folded within) of the photographer in the world he or she represents visually manifest in the pictures that are taken, and if so, how? Are the terms of reception, or, for that matter, presentation, in any way determined by the position — inside or out — of the photographer making the exposure? Does the personal involvement of the photographer in a milieu, a place, a culture, and a situation dislodge the subject/object distinction that is thought to foster a flaneur-like sensibility? And what exactly is meant by the notion of "inside" in relation to an activity that is by definition about the capture — with greater or lesser fidelity — of a momentary appearance?

This dialectic of inside/outside, considered in relation to the artists exhibited in Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document, has multiple resonances. Insofar as the work of most of the artists represented, including the painter Gerhard Richter, reflects on the various modalities or instrumentalities of photographic representation (including video and film), it is possible to chart the paradoxes and ambiguities of the inside/outside binarism in much of the featured work. In this respect, Ed Ruscha's photographic book works, such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), or Dan Graham's Homes for America (1965–70) might be considered the degree zero of photographic exteriority, for not only are the photographs themselves exterior views, they model themselves directly on the impersonality, anonymity, and banality of the purely instrumental image. Insofar as the former work is structured as an arbitrary inventory, providing nothing other than the external signs of its own given parameters, it can be said to thematize the perfect solipsism of the instrumental photograph. In fact, it is precisely this evacuation of subjectivity, the refusal of personality, authorial style — in short, the rejection of all the hallmarks of photographic authorship, no less than the nature of the subject matter itself — that would seem to situate such work logically as the "outside" pole of photographic practice. It was, furthermore, these very qualities of vernacular photograph (its lack of complexity, its humdrum ordinariness, and, of course, its mechanical reproducibility) that fostered its widespread use by artists like Ruscha in the first place, as well as by so many of the artistic generation that succeeded abstract expressionism, including Warhol and Richter.

At the other pole of photographic representation is the "confessional" mode represented by Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, who deploy a photographic rhetoric of lived experience and privileged knowledge, and who declare their personal stake in the substance of their representations. Such work is one of the historical legacies of art photography to the degree that it affirms the medium's capacity to render subjectivity, whether that of the photographer or that of his or her subjects. Putting aside for the moment discussion of the viability of this claim, it is nevertheless the case that the work of Clark and Goldin raises some of the same issues posed by the work of Diane Arbus, for the subjects of these works are variously outlaws, hustlers, drug addicts, marginals, transvestites, and so forth. Notwithstanding how their photographic representations were originally intended or used, they exist now in a nether zone between art and spectacle, on view for the gallery- and museumgoer or the purchaser of photography books. In contrast, however, to Arbus's manifestly different class and social position vis-à-vis many, if not most, of her chosen subjects, Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) or, more recently, The Other Side (1992) are the products of an insider's position:

People in the pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other aspect of knowing me. It's as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I'd want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instance of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one to be invited to the party. But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.

In both of Goldin's photographic projects, we are therefore presented with the residents of her own social and sexual world, and, in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with several images of Goldin herself. She appears, for example, in the jacket photograph, lying in bed and looking at her boyfriend, who is smoking and seen from the back (fig. 1.2). She appears in another picture with battered face and blackened eye, after having been beaten by her boyfriend, and in two other instances, is photographed in explicitly sexual situations. Although she is not represented in the photographs that constitute The Other Side, in her introductory essay she acknowledges her emotional, and indeed romantic, involvement with the drag queens, transsexuals, and transvestites who are the subject of the work. For all these reasons, both The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Other Side can be considered as exemplary of the insider position, a position further established by what I have termed the "confessional mode" — le coeur mis à nu ("the heart laid bare"; Charles Baudelaire).

In the case of the latter project, and by way of examining the terms by which insiderness comes into play, the viewer can readily assume from the content of the images that the photographer is in a position of intimate proximity with her subjects. This is suggested by the depiction of the conventionally private activities of dressing and undressing, bathing, and putting on makeup; the apparent physical closeness of the camera's lens to its subjects in many of the pictures; and, lastly, toward the end of the book, three images of one of the transvestites and his lover in bed together.

But having said this, how does the insider position — in this instance, that of someone who has lived with the subjects (i.e., the pictures from the 1970s taken in Boston), who loves and admires them and who shares their world — determine the reception of these images or even the nature of the content? The dressing/undressing images, for example, which could be said to signify effectively the intimacy of the relation between photographer and subject, have a specific valiancy with respect to cross-dressing and transvestism. In other words, whether or not one considers these to be indicative of identities, roles, masquerades, or "third genders," the very nature of the entity "drag queen" or "transvestite" is predicated on the transforming act of dressing up, on gender identity as a form of performance. To photograph different moments in that transformation from biological male into an extravagant fantasy of made-in-Hollywood femininity and glamour is to document a ritual that is itself about exteriority, appearance, and performance. For it is, after all, on the level of appearance that drag queens stage their subversive theater of gender.

In the first grouping of photographs that opens The Other Side, the intention seems to be to produce — actually to reproduce — the desired personae of the subjects. In this sense, Goldin's insider relationship facilitates her ability to produce the image of the subject's desire — but this is not structurally different from any other photographic collaboration between photographer and model. In fact, certain of the Boston pictures (which are all in black and white) resemble nothing so much as arty fashion photographs, very much in the style of the period. One would not necessarily think that certain of the portraits — particularly those of the person called "roommate" — represented anything other than a fragile-looking, fine-boned woman. But this too subverts the privilege and authority of the insider position, insofar as one confronts what is itself a perfection of simulation. Later in the book (and later chronologically) the style changes; the photographs are now in color, more informal, more spontaneous looking. It seems as though the stylistic referent shifts from art photography to cinema verité, and, analogously, the images of the subjects become more revealing, pictured often in various in-between states of physical transformation. Still later in the book, after New York, Paris, and Berlin, the action moves to Manila and Bangkok, where the drag queens, transvestites, and transsexuals are portrayed in the bars they work at, at the revues they perform in, or, in a few instances, in the midst of their families. Insiderness here, as elsewhere, can thus be seen to be about access and proximity, but whether one can argue for a nonvoyeuristic relationship in consequence of the photographer's position is another matter entirely.

As with Arbus's photographs of freaks and deviants, the risk is that the subject, irrespective of the photographer's intention, becomes object and spectacle for the viewer, if not for the photographer who made the exposure. Where the subjects are in reality so often victimized, marginalized, discriminated against, or even physically assaulted, as is often the case with drag queens, the political and ethical terms of their representation are inseparable. Goldin may well claim her devotion and emotional closeness to her subjects, but does this mitigate the prurience, or indeed the phobic distaste, so often manifested toward her subjects by the straight world? Does a photographic representation, however sympathetic, of drag queens and transsexuals constitute an effective intervention against the political and ethical problem of homophobia? In any event, it would be naive to disclaim the nature of most people's interest in photographs of drag queens, and surely part of the fascination of these photographs lies in the uncanniness of gender masquerade itself. Thus, there are the drag queens who so astonishingly simulate female beauty as to destabilize the very nature of the divide, and then there are those who retain — disturbingly — the signs of both sexes, both genders. To the degree, therefore, that the photographer produces a seamless illusion of the subject's successful performance of "femininity," we are not so far from the photo studio of the fashion photographer. To the degree that the masquerade is revealed as such, we are in the province of the exposé. In neither case does the camera transcend the exteriority of appearance, nor, for that matter, does it provide an interiorized truth of the subject.

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Excerpted from Photography after photography by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Sarah Parsons. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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