Photography and the Gaze of History; An Introductory Note
Photography, in certain locations, has the power to connect an expression of identity (national, racial, cultural, individual) to a condition of the human gaze. There are many specific instances when photography has been used to affect a ‘power’ shift in the perception of historical time. What is of interest is that point in photographic history when photography stood in specific relation to its own condition of possibility as photography. My suggestion is that in that instance photography achieves its greatest power and fullest expression in a still, silent image.
A shift in perception
Perhaps the first example of this, and one that I am particularly interested in, occurred in the 1860’s with the American Civil War photographers such as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan. This period coincides with the invention of the wet collodion process whereby a glass plate is sensitised before exposure, giving greater flexibility of use and better quality negatives. Combined with the improved optics of the new lenses, photography becomes to all intents and purposes as we know it today. When Matthew Brady arranged for the exhibition of these photographers in New York, it marked a shift in perception of historical events that were to be experienced as mediated, not by the ‘genius’ of an artist’s hand, but by what is essentially a machine, the camera.
Photography, a new contingency
In
photography the view-point is always part of a larger field from which
the photographic picture is removed; another gaze exists outside of that
margin. Because all camera views are essentially partial, the human subject
as a participant of history is transformed into a subject that no longer
experiences the spectacle, but instead sees it from a point of view which
is contingent to the real event. Even when a photographic subject (a building,
the figure of a soldier) is central to the picture the viewer is confronted
with the traces of an ‘outside’ gaze introduced by the particularity
of photography to see all in the range of the lens. Notice in the battlefield
photography of Gardner and Barnard that despite the grotesque littering
of corpses there is always some domestic or vernacular feature (a small
house, a white painted fence, an oaken bucket), which has seemed, by chance,
to find itself in the view. It is here in the ordinary details that the
seat of the trauma of these images is located. In fact the (dead) body
is de-mythologized as a metaphor of historical image and is supplanted
by ‘place’ which is actually a form of text, a ‘name’.
Here in the photograph above, ‘Fredricksburg’ by Captain A.J.
Russell, this other, disturbing gaze, is emerging in a small rustic house
on the horizon. The viewer’s gaze automatically shifts towards what
is outside of the image, toward its contingencies. It is from this point
that the gaze is returned to the viewer’s eye. The photographer,
unlike the painter, is present in the face of this former subject of history.
He or she confronts the aftermath of history directly. Russell’s
photograph introduces a new meaning to both war and photography. The photograph
expresses multiple viewpoints that seem to me to be at the foundation
of photography itself. Photography introduces an image of the invisible
to the gaze, in this instance the unseen face of the dead soldier, head
thrown back, gazing into nowhere.
In the interstices of these overlapping fields, the author loses centrality, becomes a contingency in the margins of the historic image.
Ed Whittaker 2003