User:Aitantv/John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories

A Democracy of the Image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production

• "In this transitional period, the emerging middle-class market for portraits had not yet spurred the development of novel artistic modes but, rather, saw the adoption of artistic conceptions and forms of representation from the displaced nobility - modes which were modified according to new needs. What was demanded of portraits was, on the one hand, that they incorporated the signifiers of aristocratic portraiture and, on the other hand, that they be produced at a price within the resources of the middle-class patrons. The fashionable miniature became one of the first portrait forms to be,adapted to the needs of a new clientele in this way." (p36)
• "The ideological conception of the photograph as a direct and 'natural' cast of reality was present from the very beginning and, almost immediately, its appeal was exploited in portraiture." (p41)
• "Commercial and colonial competitors, however, were not to be so easily convinced. The Leipzig Ciry Advertiser denounced the process as sacriligious, especially where it involved the representation of the human face: To try to catch transient reflected images is not merely something that is impossible but, as a thorough German investigation has shown, the very desire to do so is blasphemy. Man is created in the image of God and God's image cannot be captured by any human machine. Only the divine artist, divinely inspired, may be allowed, in a moment of solemnity, at the higher call of his genius, to dare to reproduce the divine-human features, but never by means of a mechanical aid" (p41)
• "In a 'daguerreotypemania', the middling people flocked to have photographs made, soon outnumbering the factory owners, statesmen, scholars, and intellectuals amongst whom photographic portraiture was first established." (p43)
• "The example I have chosen (Plate 13) is a bizarre one in which a private image, not dissimilar to others we have looked at, was given a new currency ten years later in an attempt - so characteristic of the Mirror to this day - to anchor a dramatic event in a representation of its 'human face'." (p56) [the picture itself on the front page of the Daily Mirror, is of a mother and her baby daughter, the wife and child of a captain who sunk with the Titanic]
• "What Walter Benjamin called the 'cult' value of the picture was effectively abolished when photographs became so common as to be unremarkable; when they were items of passing interest with no residual value, to be consumed and thrown away." (p56)
• "It was not on the exalted heights of autonomous Art that photographic portraiture made its lasting place, but in a profane industry which furnished the cosier spaces of the bourgeois home. And not only there. Such photographs also found a place in files - in police stations, hospitals, school rooms and prisons - and in official papers of all kinds." (p58)
• "It was no longer a privilege to be pictured but the burden of a new class of the surveilled." (p58)
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