Michael A. Vuksta
The most popular use of the photograph is as a memento of the absent.
1
Denise enters the classroom and pulls out a small, pink, rectangular, walletlike object from her purse. She passes it to Stephen asking, “Do you want to look at pictures of my niece and sister?” As Stephen assents Patricia arrives and reaches for the photo album that is already in Stephen’s hands. A mock tugof-war ensues; Stephen tightens his grip while asking, “Who is this?” and “Is this your brother?” and “Isn’t this Walter?” Other students have now come closer to investigate the activity and noise. They all appear interested in the tiny album; so Denise, recognizing that there would not be enough time for each of them to view the album on their own and for her to answer each one of their inquiries, takes the album back from Stephen. The children now vie for vantage points next to, around and in front of her. She begins turning the pages, reciting each name and their family relation to her.
As I come closer to this group of students I can see that the album contains photographs of a variety of people; some appear singly, most appear in pairs or in trios, and only a few appear in larger groups. The pictures exhibit an equal diversity of size, printing technique, and quality. Some of these have been cropped from larger compositions to isolate a certain person for inclusion in Denise’s collection (one wonders which people have been excluded because she could find no picture conforming to the album’s dimensions). Although there are a few pictures of friends, this is primarily a family album.
Many of the pictures include some evidence of the location and occasion of the photographic event. Some photographs show signs of family gatherings on birthdays; others seem to indicate that the occasion is a national holiday. However, Denise’s remarks do not bring attention to any of this. Her commentary is simply a litany of names. They give no sense of the nature or quality of the relationship she or the photographer or the photographic subject have to each other. Her thoughts and feelings about these people remain concealed; her hands continue to turn the plastic pages rapidly. Denise’s observations allow us to identify these people, but we are less capable of deriving—or she is less willing to derive—any greater meaning from these images.
The question “What does a photograph mean?” is a difficult one. Answering it involves skills and methods of visual and verbal literacy that are categorically absent from today’s classrooms. We live in an imagesated culture in which we are presented with many photographs in the normal course of our lives. It is inevitable that we accept this, but this acceptance need not be restricted to a quick and superficial glance that understands a photograph simply as an object or a product manufactured for our inexhaustible consumptive needs. In doing so, we unwittingly reject a deeper and lasting understanding of the context (or the experience or the process or the relation) of the people involved in the making of these images. Ultimately, this neglect of the context of the photographic moment (whether the posing, the taking or the viewing) is a diminution of our own knowledge of ourselves.
The inability to derive meaning from a photograph is not peculiar to Denise. It is characteristic of the medium itself. John Berger in his essay “Uses of Photography” argues that:
The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind’s eye, the faculty of memory. . .
Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. They offer appearances—with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances—prised away from their meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions. ‘. . . Only that which narrates can make us understand’. Photographs in themselves do not narrate. Photographs preserve instant appearances.
2
You may ask, as Berger himself has elsewhere queried: “Why complicate in this way an experience which we have many times a day—the experience of looking at a photograph?” Berger offers one possible answer:
Because the simplicity with which we usually treat the experience is wasteful and confusing. We think of photographs as works of art, as evidence of a particular truth, as likenesses, as news items. Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality.
3