The causal process of which the photographer is a victim puts almost every detail outside his control. Even if he does, say, intentionally arrange each fold of his subject’s dress and meticulously construct…the appropriate scenario, that would still hardly be relevant, since there seem to be few ways in which such intentions can be revealed in the photograph…
…The search for meaning in a photograph is therefore curtailed or thwarted: there is no point in an interest in detail since there is nothing that detail can show.
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The photograph has been reduced to a kind of frame around which he paints, a frame that imposes upon him largely unnecessary constraints. In other words, when the photographer strives toward representational art, he inevitably seems to move away from the ideal of photography which I have been describing toward the ideal of painting.
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For exactly the same might be said of a mirror. When I see someone in a mirror I see him, not his representation…
…But representation will not be a property of the mirror. It is impossible that I could, simply by holding a mirror before someone, make him into a representation of himself. For after all, whether I look at him or at the mirror, in either case it is he that I see.
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A photograph of a representation is no more a representation than a picture of a man is a man.
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Scruton, R., 1981. Photography and Representation. Critical Inquiry 7(3): 577-603.
I don’t think I buy Scruton’s argument that representation by an art object requires a perceived intention of the artist by the viewer, or that a complete control over aesthetic details implies (and is necessary for) an intention to be perceived. I think a photographer is painfully aware of the limitations of the framed image, and the act of composing an image within a frame implies intention (hence why a photograph can be considered to be well or badly composed). Scruton’s Ideal Photograph is devoid of all authorship - not only is there no eye looking through the viewfinder to compose an image, there could not be any agency over the camera (e.g. the placement of a security camera) for his argument to hold.
I can accept that a photographer isn’t capable of controlling every detail within a composed image, but are we to believe that a painter is capable of such a feat (if a painting is to represent the ideal 2D art form capable of representation)? I painter can hardly control every bristle on a brush and the placement of every droplet of paint just as a photographer is at the whim of the wind in determining the placement of every blade of grass in a field. It seems that much of the aesthetics of a painting is only controlled to a degree.
So does a painter have a greater degree of control than a photographer, making the representation conveyed by a painting truer to the intent of the artist than that of a photograph? Is this why works by photomontage artists, as well as photoconceptualists like Jeff Wall and Scott MacFarland who use seamless (or near seamless, as does the latter) photomontage are so compelling? Are the works of Wall and MacFarland the necessary end result of photography’s formalist struggle with obtaining representational meaning?
Lastly, regarding Scruton’s mirror analogy, I find it troubling. When I look into a mirror, I don’t see myself. I see a reflection of myself. If the person in the mirror were reproduced next to me, it would not be me - it would be a mirror image of me, for the very fact that my heart would remain on the left side of my body cavity, while my mirror self’s heart would be on his right side.
So is my reflection in a mirror a representation of myself, or just a system of signs without intent? Like a photomontage recontextualizes pieces of photographs to produce meaning (via the artist’s intent), the mirror recontextualizes the image of myself into something new, but is there new meaning attached to a mirror image that would be absent from a photograph? I’m not sure…
Of course, all of this is contingent on a strongly formalist interpretation of art objects, something of which I am not particularly keen. The art objects relationship with other art objects (e.g. the editing and sequence of a photo book or essay) and the cultural conditions under which the works are produced strongly influence the meaning being represented by an art object, and formalist theory is an important tool used to help uncover this meaning. Just ask an anthropologist.
