Photographs are not windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence – often spurious, always incomplete – in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.
How? By statements about what is in the world, what we should look at. Photographs tell us how things ought to look, what their subjects should reveal about themselves.
Photographs taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely fail to make visible the markers of status. We associate this with posing. The process itself took time: one couldn’t take photographs on the run. With posing, whether in a studio or portrait or in pictures of people taken on the sites of work and recreation, there can be a conscious construction of what is seemly, appropriate, attractive. The way most old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this cannot only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. Modern taste judges the way workers in the old photographs of building sites and factories were stiffly posed to be a kind of lie – concealing, for instance, the reality of their physical exertion. We prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking shots in which people are caught in a movement – that is what looks truthful (if not always beautiful) to us. We feel more comfortable with what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the realities of control (self-control, control by others), of power – revelations we now judge, oddly enough, to be “artificial.”
Susan Sontag,
“One Hundred Years of Italian Photography”
Photography and Ideology
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