Getting Inside Your Head by Lisa Zunshine

Author:Lisa Zunshine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Death and Photography

Embodied transparency in photography deserves a separate chapter, with subsections on candid photography and street photography, on Henri Cartier-Bresson and Arthur Fellig (Weegee), on Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. I don’t deal with photography in this book, though, and bring it up now only briefly as a point of comparison for my discussion of cinéma vérité’s gradual turn to unfakeable physiological experiences in the 1970s and 1980s.

Generally, photographers seeking to capture unmediated emotions face even greater challenges than do documentary filmmakers. Unlike the latter, they don’t have the advantage of a narrative that leads up to the presumed moment of direct access and thus assures viewers (at least to a point) that the emotions they see weren’t merely performed for the camera. This may explain why photography often turns to subjects that come with their own, built-in, so to speak, embodied transparency, such as infants and young children (see fig. 21 as an illustration of the ease of arranging a shot that captures a child’s “true” feelings, such as, in this case, his absorption in a puppet); attendees of engrossing performances and athletic events (such as Weegee’s “Teen Age Audience”); and people whose range of likely thoughts and feelings has been drastically narrowed by famine, impending execution, and other life-threatening circumstances.

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