Beliefs, Images, Culture

Barthes says at one point in his little book that advanced cultures consume images rather than beliefs, and that this (somehow) makes them more liberal, less fanatical, but also less authentic. Levi Strauss in his more recent and slightly littler book quotes this.

Possibly they would argue that contemporary society is not "advanced" at this moment in time, but at any rate is is absolutely false that we consume images in preference to beliefs. Rather, we use photographs to anchor and reify beliefs that we already hold.

A news photograph to accompany the story of a riot has a photograph of the riot. A common complaint levelled in these modern times is that the photo of the riot does not represent the rioters properly (if the speaker sides with the rioters, if otherwise the speaker doesn't give a shit if the rioters are properly represented.) This complaint is to miss the point of the news photo.

That the photo of the riot looks like any other riot is the point. This is a riot, and in many ways it was like any other riot, and the photograph's actual job is to make that point. Of course, the riot was also unique and special in some ways, a veritable snowflake of a riot, but that is in general not what a news story is aimed to tell. Maybe someone will write a book or something, but for this page 3 news story the guts of the story is that there was a riot, a lot like any other riot, but it was at this place, this time, this many buildings and police cars were torched, and the riot was over, broadly, these issues.

A corporate headshot isn't supposed to reveal the character of the CEO, it's supposed to look like a corporate headshot, and to paint the man as intelligent, caring, firm, and so on. Exactly like every other corporate headshot, but as it happens, of this particular guy.

A photo of a toothbrush for an ad, or a senior for graduation, or a girl in a prom dress or a bride, or a landscape, or a bum, these are all primarily stand-ins. They are, as Barthes might remark, reduced to signifiers. They do not, pace Barthes, refer irrevocably to their subjects. They refer to their specific subject, in fact, only very gently. They refer to the larger idea (signified) of "a riot," "a girl in a prom dress," "a toothbrush."

We glance at every one of these photos, and note that they look as they ought to look. The photo reifies the riot, the CEO, the toothbrush, the bride. Look, there he, she, it is. We are offended and angry when the wrong riot photo gets run next to the article, but it doesn't actually matter. It happens all the time, and every riot photo looks like every other riot photo. But we expect to get the right photo, because the point is to reify this riot, not that one, this CEO, not that marketing exec.

This happens surprisingly often with rocket launches during military conflicts, for some reason. Nobody denies that so-and-so is indeed firing off rockets at so-and-so, but for some reason a photo from a completely different conflict is used. Nobody even notices until some sharp-eyed fellow recognizes the specific photo.

One rocket launch looks a lot like another, it turns out, and it didn't really matter which picture was used. But we want our belief in the actual rockets to be supported by an actual photo of the actual rockets. That is the social function of the photo, here. The details of the picture's content don't matter. It could be a photo of Elmo the muppet for all it matters, if somehow Elmo could contrive to look a little like a rocket, or a CEO, or a riot. But we demand the right thing because this is the social function of the photo. Like Climate Change Science, we imagine that we could verify the truth of it ourselves, if we were so inclined, and Elmo in a Rocket Costume simply won't work.

I have argued, at length, that something quite different from this trivial, uncaring, glance happens when we look at photos. We enter the picture, and blah blah blah. I will now slightly adjust this position:

This complex engagement with a photo, I maintain, is what happens when we actually bother to look at the picture. Most of the time we don't. When we glance, when we consume the photo normally, we do not enter the picture, or imaginatively fill in a world, or whatever. We simply note that the object or event in question has been duly reified, and we move on.

It is when we care that we examine the photo, and experience a "blind field" or whatever you want to call it. When we are invested in the political issues that surround the riot, and choose to look at the photo seriously, for whatever reason, then we examine it; then we imagine the riot; then we sort the players into good guys and bad guys; we examine the photo (and our imagination) for evidence to support our positions.

When we examine the photo lightly, in the usual way, we are working with what are usually a bunch of words around the picture. A news article, a voiceover, a talking head. The words tell us the sketch of the situation, we form an opinion if we have not already done so. We gather up our belief or cloud of beliefs, and merely glance at the photo to confirm them or to support the idea that we could confirm them if we chose to do so.

You could argue, I suppose, that we are not consuming beliefs here, as much as we are applying them to the photos we are consuming, and perhaps that is the point. To be honest, Barthes' remark is one of those glib statements that sounds very clever, but does not actually seem to mean anything when you clear away the underbrush.

The idea, though, that we are evolving into a primarily visual culture, a culture of pictures without words, is pretty much completely wrong. The words we're using aren't exactly subtle or nuanced, but we're as word-based as we ever were. Photographs are not eating everything.