The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy by Walter Benn Michaels

Author:Walter Benn Michaels [Michaels, Walter Benn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 13. August Sander, Children Born Blind (ca. 1930). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York.

Figure 14. Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York (1916). Platinum print, 34 × 25.7 cm. Alfred Stieglitz Collection (1933). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

With respect to photography’s literalizing the problem of the pose, the point can be made clear just by noting its difference from painting. In painting (Gerhard Richter’s well-known Lesende would be an exemplary instance here), the question of absorption is not about whether the models were in fact absorbed but about whether the painter makes them look as if they were.14 Indeed, the question is not about the models at all—it’s about the subjects, a point that’s made clear by remembering that paintings in the absorptive tradition (made to produce an absorptive effect or, for that matter, a theatrical one) could, of course, be produced without any models at all. So the problem of the model’s awareness need not be solved or even raised—the painter doesn’t have to paint what he sees. With a photograph, however, the situation is obviously different. You cannot do without the literal presence of the photograph’s subject, and you can (at least sometimes) photograph people without their being aware of it. Strand’s and Evans’s efforts to do this thus not only mark their allegiance to the ideal of absorption but, more fundamentally, their commitment to the idea that what Fried originally described as a “theme” in painting should in photography be understood as a condition of the medium.15 Because the photograph requires a subject who can perform and because the presence of the photographer can be understood in itself to elicit a kind of performance, the task of the photographer must be to overcome or neutralize that performance.

Thus, while Blind Woman is obviously a powerful piece of documentary, it is also an ingenious solution to an aesthetic problem: taking as its subject a figure who does not need to be deceived in order to be caught unaware. She is, in effect, ontologically unaware, unable to see that her picture is being taken and therefore unable to feel the temptation or necessity to pose for it, or even to try not to pose for it. Furthermore—and this speaks to the disarticulation of a specifically representational antitheatricality from absorption as such—her unawareness is in a certain sense specific to the camera. What I mean by this is just that she’s not in any sense unaware that people are passing by her in the street and may be looking at her. Quite the opposite; the whole point of the sign she’s carrying is to get them to do so. For the purposes of the photograph, what she’s unaware of is only the camera. To put this in the terms of Becher’s description of Sander, she is, like Sander’s subjects, “performing a role” (the role of a beggar), but, unlike Sander’s subjects, she’s not performing it for the photographer.

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