Lucian Wester Trimester1-Draft

Outline essay

Question.

In our daily life we relay on photographic images to give us information, to verify if the written accounts we read can be considered truthful. We want to see pictures to be sure that a story is real. Newspaper and other media supply us day in day out with photographical evidence of their truth. And so the question that I want to discuss is: why is photography considered to be objective? Why do we trust it and were lies its origin, was photography always considered to depict the world as it appears to us?

For this essay I have taken two text, Objectivity by Lorraine Datson & Peter Galison and The burden of representation by John Tagg and tried to combine them to make a sketch of how photography developed. In Objectivity Lorraine Datson & Peter Galison describe the change in the scientific virtues and practices over time illustrated by the images from various scientific atlases. John Tagg describes in The burden of representation the history of photography and in particular that of the portrait and how it is used as a machine of power.

What.

Objectivity and subjectivity.

Let us first look at what objectivity implies. To start objective is closely linked to subjective and the one cant be described without the other, the two are each others opposites. Subjective is mostly described as expressions from someone’s mind or in other words the expressions of a subject. Subjective ideas and thoughts are tied to one subject in particular, although thoughts and opinions are shared between multiple subjects, the fact that the subject knows that there are different and even contrary thoughts makes him chouse one and therefore a subject. The subject must interpret, classify, change, make information his own, form his own opinion. Objective is mostly described as something outside of your self, something that is bigger than your self. The object does not have an idea of its own, its just simply there. And in a sense it is something that is shared between subjects; if there are ideas that are shared by a large number of subjects those ideas could be called objective. But in a lot of cases, as we shall see, the shared idea is not enough to call it objective, we need something outside ourselves that proofs that something is indeed objective. ‘Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation or intelligence.’ (Objectivity p.17) Objective and subjective haven’t always has the same meaning as they have today, in fact they were used in a complete opposite: ‘“Objective” referred to things as they are presented to consciousness, whereas “subjective” referred to things in themselves.’ (Objectivity p.29) It’s after Kant that the meaning of the two words begins to change: ‘For Kant, the line between the objective and the subjective generally runs between universal and particular, not between world and mind’. (Objectivity p.30). Kants notions of the words is still different than that of ours but he lays the foundations for the way how we understand the words. In the beginning of the 19th century objective is referred to as nature and subjective as the self or intelligence.

Kant idea that someone thinks and therefore exist lays ad the hart of how we understand the words subjective and objective.

Objectivity and Truth to nature.

In the book Objectivity Lorraine Datson & Peter Galison define the scientific practise before the objective mode Trhut-to-nature. The difference between the two is that truth-to-nature for example depicts a flower in an atlas as one who stands for the whole while objectivity shows the variety of the hole. In other words the first is stylized the other isn’t. The Truth-to-nature scientist seeks to unravel the underling structures in the variety of forms in witch nature percents its self. To do so a scientist must be an expert in observation: “genius of observation” (Objectivity p.58). The scientists needed to see a lot of different specimens to render an archetype witch could stands for the whole. Seeing and observing needed a lot of practise before findings of a scientist could considered to be truthful therefore the scientist hat to train their observation skills but also their own mindful will to see the truth of nature. Whiting these images of observation there are two ideas: ‘The “ideal” image purports to render not merely the typical but the perfect, while the “characteristic” image locates the typical in an individual.’ (objectivity p.70). Within the “ideal” images the scientist seeks to combine truth and beauty to get the purest images. In a sense the pictures created by these observation practises are more real than nature itself because they try to show the underlining structures of nature. The scientist witch practise Truth-to-nature didn’t reject beauty moreover they tried to show the beauty of nature, the beauty of structures underneath the chaos of appearances. It is good to realize that almost all of these scientist where religious people and what they tried to unravel was in a sense the hand of god. To translate these observations onto a piece of paper the scientist needed an artist with also good observation skills. Artist and scientist worked closely together is those days and even more interesting the practise of the artist and that of the scientist had a lot in common, for example the observation and interpretation.

In the mid and late 19th century there were some scientist that noticed that the interpretations they made were sometimes the wrong ones. So to make no more mistakes or better misinterpretations the scientist needed create a system that would protect them from jumping to quick to conclusions. Their new goal was to: ‘Let nature speak for itself’ (objectivity p.120) witch meant that ‘wilful intervention of the artist-author’ (objectivity p.121) has to be repressed by ‘a strict protocol, if not automatically.’ (objectivity p.121), the scientist must be self-regulated. In this banning out the subject of the scientific practice mechanical devices and machines where very helpful because they lack a free will to intervene. Photography is one of these mechanical devices that the scientist used because of it so called: ‘blind sight.’ (objectivity p.124). The blind sight that a photograph has is a ‘judgment-free representation’ (objectivity p.139) and the scientist aimed to see like a photograph, whiteout judgment and to be like the machine. But images are always mediated and so a photograph is never free from intervention by a subject. The dream of the objective scientist to have images that are completely objective was never fulfilled: ‘Merely using photography could not cure the diseases of the will, a disorder that survives in the very construction of the German word willkürlich.’ (objectivity p.151) (willekeur – dutch or arbitrariness – English)

How.

How photography became objective?

In the year after photography was introduced in 1839 it was mostly used for making cheap portraitures of the middle class. In this sense photography was used as a substitute for art and there was no real distinction between art being more subjective and photography being objective. When photography was introduced it was immediately loved for its fine detail and its naturalistic depiction of the natural world. Therefore it is not surprisingly that lots of people where going to photographers to have there portraits taken, John Tagg mentions in The burden of representation that: ‘It is estimated that more than ninety per cent of all daguerreotypes ever taken were portraits.’ (John Tagg p.43) and ‘By 1853, three million daguerreotypes were being made annually ..’ (John Tagg p.43). Photography became in a short time a big industry, but it is was more an easy way to get a portrait than a device for science. And of course there where a lot of problems with photography in those days, fore beginners the long exposure time and the fact that a daguerreotype is a direct positive and cant be reproduced. This last problem was fixt by the negative-positive system by Henry Fox Talbot but that was for a long time of al lot less quality than the daguerreotype. But photography developed rather quickly, exposure times getting shorter by more sensitive paper and glass plates instead of paper as a negative and shaper lenses. By 1860/70 photography is getting interesting fore scientist to make images that they can study for research. Ad the same time photography is also used for the identification of people, mostly by the police and in prisons to register criminals. Tagg describes the difference in pose of the artistic portraiture, like Nadar, and the so called head-on view that is used by the normal photographers and also is used by the institutions to make photographic documents, documents that gain power over society. ‘The portrait is therefore a sign whose purpose is both the description is an individual and the inscription of social identity.’ (John Tagg p.37)

Why

Why did science shift from truth-to-nature to objectivity?

The prologue from Objectivity describes how a physicist named Arthur Worthington studies the impact of a liquid drop on a flat service. In the beginning he makes drawings of his own observations with a flash that leaves an image of a spit second in his mind. The pictures that he draws from his observations show us beautiful symmetrical drops of fluid bouncing back when hitting the table. A few years later he re-enacts his research but this time using photography to catch the different stages of the impact. The drawings made by hand and observation where stylized and in perfect symmetry the photographs however showed a more chaotic splash. After comparing the drawings to the photographs the physicist realised how much his own subject, his own prejudice was involved in making these drawings. It’s in these stories that we see very clearly why photography is objective, because it’s just a machine that catches light, blind sight nothing more. In a sense this is true but from the early beginning of photography photos are being manipulated not to mention that there is always a photographer who decides what will be in the frame and what not.

Photography made, not by its self, objectivity possible and objectivity made photography the objective eye on the world, it made that we consider photography to be truthful.

(This change appears because of what is illustrated in the prologue: ‘their fear was that the subjective self was prone to prettify, idealize, and, in the worst case, regularize observations to fit theoretical expectations: to see what it hopes to see.’ (objectivity, p.34))

How did it change our subject?

We became conscious of our own subjective and prejudice will to intervene with and interpretate information. The fact that we need machines and strict protocols to suppress our own subject to be able to produce truthful data that can be studied shows us that it’s very hard to be objective. The interesting contradiction within this is that because we thought that we needed to be more objective we became more a subject.

Research strands.

What would be interesting for further investigation is the question how photography began to use its objectivity within the discourse of art? In my idea this emerges in the 1960thies with the arrival of conceptual art. This because before conceptual art, art was considered to an expression of an individual artist and not something reconstructed. In other words art was, and maybe still is, thought of being something subjective while conceptual art uses structures and methods to make work something that has an notion of being objective.