Social Semiotics

ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur:

Photography as a Performance of Power

Paul Frosh

To cite this article: Paul Frosh (2001) The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a
Performance of Power, Social Semiotics, 11:1, 43-59, DOI: 10.1080/10350330123316

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330123316

Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 959

View related articles

Citing articles: 15 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csos20
Social Semiotics, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2001

The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur:

Photography as a Performance of Power1
PAUL FROSH

This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communi-
cation, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic
practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in
advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic
activity and provides conventional and de® nitive representations of the domestic. These
functions are ostensibly opposed to photography’ s role in the public realm: the same visual
technology becomes, in the mass media, both the index and agent of publicness itself, with
the paparazziÐ especially in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s deathÐ symbolizing the
violation of the private. The paper explores the ways in which photographic performance at
the public/private boundary dramatizes power relations through forms of social transpar-
ency, voyeurism and memoralization. It also asks whether momentary crises in the
dominant scopic regime can provide the basis for alternative `uncanny’ visual practices that
are tenable and empowering.

In this sovereign age of the digital image, the metaphorical `death of photography’
has been proclaimed with such frequency and con® dence that it seems almost an
established fact.2 It is somewhat perverse, therefore, that photography should answer
the sentence of history and technology by apparently causing a very real and royal
fatality. And it is through parables such as that of Princess Diana, in which the lethal
violation of privacy is redeemed by conspicuous public piety, that photography’ s
spectral powerÐ the power to make visible the real and give reality to the visibleÐ
has returned to plague the zeitgeist.

Representational Power and Spectacular Power

This paper has two complementary theses. The ® rst is that the power of photogra-
phy can best be grasped if photography is understood not merely as a technology of
visual representation, but as a constitutive type of (visible) action within the social
world. In other words, photography is a `performance of representation’ , in which
both the act and the material product of the act, the photographic image, generate
multiple and inter-related meanings. Photography, to modify a term used by
Silverstone et al. (1994), is subject to `triple articulation’.3 It is a practice whose
product, the photograph, is both an image and a material artefact. While this is also
ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/01/010043-17 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/10350330120010957
44 P. Frosh

true of painting, for example, photography’ s uniqueness stems from its fusion of
indexical and iconic signi® cation in a mechanical± chemical process: the fact that the
camera can create realistic and in® nitely reproducible images of whatever is situated
within its ® eld of view. This combination of physical contiguity, visual similarity and
unlimited multiplication with regard to the visible world endows photography with
what we can call `representational power’ ; and it is of a type and degree that
constitutes a historic transformation of representation in relation to previous visual
media.4
But representational power is only half the story, for it ignores the `knowledge’ of
that power among photographers, viewers and the photographed themselves. Famil-
iarity with photographyÐ beginning with a rudimentary understanding of the con-
nection between the camera and the photographic printÐ is almost universal in
advanced media societies, and it is a form of knowledge that is subjectively internal-
ized from a very early age. Hence, the power of a photograph depends, in part, on
viewers’ understanding of the social context and technical processes through which
the image is created (Aumont 1994: 81, 121). These include the assumptions held
by the photographed and the photographer regarding the image’s potential audience
and their `right’ to see, assumptions that are frequently in con¯ ict and that demon-
strate differential power relations. Furthermore, that knowledge is itself made
visible. Rehearsed, enshrined and exhibited in ritual photographic practices in the
home and beyond, it is performed in tourist snapshots, in wedding photos, in the
automatic propensity to pose before the camera, in the cat and mouse games of press
photographers and their celebrity subjects.
In fact, the internalized knowledge of photography’ s representational power is
dramatized, in part, through the iconography of the image itself: content, composi-
tional clues, focus, colour, and the response of those photographed to the presence
of the camera. In the case of domestic photographs, for example, the medium is
generally either entirely transparent, in that the camera’s presence is not acknowl-
edged by those photographed, or it is represented as a welcome guest, usually
through the subjects’ smiles. Being photographed by the paparazzi, in contrast, is a
burden to be borne; and the more burdensome it is seen to be, the greater one’ s
celebrity, which further diminishes one’ s power to evade the cameras. No less
signi® cantly, cameras and photographers are themselves conspicuously represented
within many celebrity photographs, and certainly in television coverage, as the very
signs of publicness. The visible extent of their intrusiveness, registered either in the
celebrity’ s manifest displeasure or unawareness of being photographed (the result of
hidden cameras or powerful lenses), and in the symbolism of the camera equipment
itselfÐ the phallic zoom lenses, the immobilizing ¯ are of the ¯ ash gunsÐ becomes
the index of the celebrity’ s rank within a hierarchy of popularity.
This enmeshing of representational technology, subjectively sublimated knowl-
edge and conspicuous ritualized interaction endows photography with spectacular
power. The word `spectacular’ is used both ® guratively and literally here, conveying
not merely the extent of photography’ s representational potency, but the fact that it
is maintainedÐ across a range of social contextsÐ by being `put on display’. Spec-
tacular power thus links photographic signi® cance to the question of cultural agency,
 Photography as Performance of Power 45

suggesting a `pragmatics’ of photography in which interpretation is as much about

what photographic acts are conventionally known and shown to do within speci® c
social contexts, as it is about what the content of photographic images might mean.
Photography’s spectacular power has, however, developed incrementally, and has
been transformedÐ and multipliedÐ as a result of historical, technological and
cultural factors. Notwithstanding the expressions of wonder in the years immediately
following photography’ s invention in the 1830s, its effectiveness and magnitude as
a performance of power relations were clearly different from those of today. To
begin with, the diffusion of photographs, while increasingly extensive, had to wait
until the invention of the half-tone printing process in the 1880s before it could be
integrated into the mass media of newspapers and large-circulation magazines.
Additionally, the expense, bulk and complexity of camera technology severely
limited exactly who could photograph: again, it was not until 1888, with the
introduction of George Eastman’ s Kodak camera, that photography approached
anything like the potential for large-scale social adoption necessary for almost
universal domestication within industrialized societies, and which is a pre-condition
of the widespread subjective internalization of photography’ s representational power
already mentioned. Content was similarly subject to restrictions that were only lifted
over time, driven by and leading to changes in photographic conventions and
audience expectations: for example, `it wasn’t until the 1920s that new lenses and
® lm stocks enabled the ª snapshotº photo-journalism with which we are so familiar
today’ (McQuire 1998: 137), and which replaced recording the `aftermath’ of events
(such as battles) with the ability to photograph what Henri Cartier-Bresson called
the `decisive moment’. These technological developments were, in turn, intimately
connected with the rise of marketing and advertising, and the whole panoply of
techniques, discourses and organizations associated with the mass media and con-
sumer society, not least the commodi® cation and standardization of production
processes, professional equipment and practices, civic and domestic spaces, and
leisure activities. Hence, changes in the publics addressed and formed by photo-
graphic technology, coupled with the transformations of photography itself and what
we can call the `imperialistic’ tendency of its developmentÐ its progressive exposure
of more of the world to more of the people within itÐ mean that the current
state of photography’ s spectacular power was neither historically inevitable or
technologically pre-ordained.

The Public as a Scopic Regime

This brings me to my second thesis. Photography, as a manifest performance of the
power to make visible, has become fundamental to our use of the social. In
particular, its spectacular power is central to the structuring and negotiation of the
public and the private as experiential categories in a society where publicness and
visibility are closely interwoven. The fourth aphorism of Guy Debord’ s Society of the
Spectacle declares: `The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation
among people, mediated by images’ (1970: 2), and we should re® ne this notion of
`mediation’ to convey the sense of social relations both as `re¯ ected and constructed
46 P. Frosh

by images’ and as `performed through the making of images’ . Spectacular power

thus makes photography the agent of an historical ® eld of the visual that shapes
contemporary social experience: photography is invariably, although by no means
only, a performance of the bestowal, exercise and revocation of social power through
visibility.
The notion of the public that emerges in this account, and its relationship to
photography as well as to the private domain, is haunted by a number of conceptual
ghosts, most notably Foucault’s (1979, 1980) surveillance society, Debord’ s (1970)
society of the spectacle, John Thompson’s (1990) mediated publicness, even Goff-
man’ s (1958) theatrical metaphor of `front region’ and `back region’. What these
diverse, and fairly weighty, spectral presences contribute is the attempt to grapple
with visibility as a ® eld in which publicness, and with it certain forms of social
power, comes to be experienced and conceptualized.5 In essence, they help to
demarcate the `scopic regimes’ (Jay 1988) of the public realmÐ `the regimens that
prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or render unten-
able other modes and objects of perception’ (Feldman 1997: 30) suggesting, in the
process, that publicness itself is constituted as a scopic regime.6 They also contribute
a critique of rationality, especially one based on the privileging of verbal discourse,
as inadequate to the task of analyzing a public domain that includes the irrational,
the affective and the violent (a chief target of this critique would of course be
Habermas’ (1989) conception of the bourgeois public sphere).7
A very obvious historical connection can be made between photography and the
emergence of the public as a domain of openness and visibility. Perceived initially
(for example, by both Daguerre and Fox Talbot) as a means by which nature could
represent itself, photography became increasingly utilized for explicit social pur-
poses, particularly for the task of liberal-democratic social and political transparency.
In the form of portraits of the wealthy and mighty, it brought images of the ruling
classes into the possession of the ruled in quantities never previously imagined; it
also made the portrait, in its painted form the province only of the very wealthy,
available to the expanding middle classes, thereby enabling the honori® c ceremonial
representation of the bourgeois self to `proliferate downward’ in the social hierarchy
(Sekula 1989: 345). Documentary photography, forged within a discourse of social
progress, sought to illuminate the dark corners of society and make visible the
underprivileged and unsightly in order to prick the conscience of the powerful.
Finally, projects concerned with social diagnosis and control, hitched to the dis-
course of scienti® c positivism and the colonial enterprise, created the new photo-
graphic genre that Sekula calls `instrumental realism’ (1981: 16, 1989: 344),
manifested in state security and police archives as well as in psychiatric and
anthropological photography (Pinney 1992) of psychological or cultural `others’.
Common to all these practices is the fact that certain people are made visible to
others through the agency of a third party: photographers. This mediating function
does not, however, guarantee symmetrical power relations between photographer,
viewer and viewed. On the contrary, photography’ s structuring role in the domain
of public observation makes speci® c groups visible to others with varying degrees of
control over the production, distribution and iconography of the images and, at the
 Photography as Performance of Power 47

very least, gives photographers themselves a degree of power over those they
photograph. As Hella Belof observes: `Interaction in photography accepts the power
of the photographer’ s status. That status always has an edge over that of the subject’
(1983: 171).8 Moreover, as dramatizations of the relations of power over visibility
and representation, photographic practices constitute a site of social struggle as well
as a mechanism of social control. Such struggles and asymmetries are made
manifest: in the power of nineteenth-century colonialism to make visible `primitive’
peoples, such as Native Americans, at the very moment of their annihilation
(McQuire 1998: 125); in the power of the liberal state to exhibit the white and black
poor as part of the 1930s Farm Security Administration photographic project (Tagg
1988); and in the power of the corporate-sponsored art establishment to display the
American white underclass of the 1980s through Richard Avedon’ s `In the American
West’ series (Bolton 1989). Frequently, these practices are also imbued with the
threat of violence. This is not only re¯ ected in the appropriation of hunting terms
such as `loading’, `aiming’ and `shooting’ (Sontag 1977: 12± 15), which became a
key theme in the discourse around Diana’ s death (Screen Special Debate 1998). In
particular arenas of violent con¯ ict, such as Northern Ireland, metaphor expands
into the real: being identi® ed in a photograph can literally lead to one’s assassin-
ation, and the very practice of political violence is woven around a discourse of
photographic visibility (Feldman 1997).
Yet, although power can translate into the direct control of representation, a
number of inter-related factors have historically granted the realm of public visibility
relative autonomy, even to the point of intermittent con¯ ict with sources of social,
economic and political power, including the state: the institutionalization of pho-
tography as a profession with the rise of the popular press and the appearance of the
profession’s binary oppositeÐ popular domestic photography; the systematic com-
modi® cation of images within a growing and highly competitive market; and the
ideological masking of the latter within a liberal-democratic rhetoric of rights
whereby visibility is con¯ ated with access to information and accountability: the
public’ s right to know becomes the public’ s right to see.
The relative autonomy of the ® eld of public scrutiny, and the ways in which it is
energized, regulated and perpetuated through the systematic production and circu-
lation of photographic images as commodities, begs an important question: to what
extent has public visibility become independent of the seeing eyes of actual viewers?
Or, as Feldman puts it, `What sees in the scopic regime?’ (1997: 32). Feldman’ s
answer is characteristic of many others:

A scopic regime, like Foucault’s panopticon or Lacan’ s mirror stage, is an

apparatus that has no human eye as its point of origin, for seeing, no matter
how privileged; it is but a position internal to, and a function and product
of, the total scopic apparatus. Hence the distinction between the eye and
the gaze. The latter is a mechanics of power, the former a sensory organ
that can be socially appropriated to channel and materialize normative
power in everyday life. Here human vision becomes an adjunct, an instru-
ment and an automation of the scopic regime. (1997: 33).
48 P. Frosh

I have quoted at length because this answer is, I believe, both problematic and
revealing. In particular, it reproduces a `rhetoric of mechanization’, largely but not
exclusively Foucauldian in inspiration, that is pervasive in contemporary accounts of
visuality. From Foucault’ s famous description of the `Panoptic machine’ (1979:
217) to Comolli’ s (1980) `machines of the visible’, Baudry’ s (1974) `cinematic
apparatus’ , Virilio’ s (1994) `vision machine’ and Crary’ s (1992) `techniques of the
observer’ , to name but a few (and, with the exception of Foucault, I have only
mentioned phrases appearing in the titles of work), critical discourse on vision
frequently deploys mechanical and technical metaphors to convey the `relentless
abstraction of the visual’ from the actual eye of a material observer (Crary 1992: 2).9
Despite Feldman’s speci® c concern with the relationship between vision and viol-
ence in Northern Ireland, his text, especially the last sentence in the earlier quote,
is ® rmly in this tradition. The critical contribution of this rhetoric is that it decentres
the individual subject as the sovereign origin and destination of sight yet, as a
discourse of the `mechanization’ of vision, it frames the modes and effects of
visibility exclusively in terms of rigidity and ® xity, discipline and control (both for
observer and observed), eliding alternative and perhaps more ¯ uid modes of decen-
tred vision (Friedberg 1993: 15± 20). In the process, it runs the risk of ossifying the
social relations and processes that act upon the human sensorium.
Nevertheless, Feldman’ s point does ring true. The total assemblage of practices
and relationships of public image-production seems to be a self-perpetuating system
that is ultimately indifferent to encounters with the material viewer. This may be, as
Feldman suggests, because the system produces abstractions of subjective viewing
positions (such as the `end user’ , `consumer’, `market segment’ or `demographic’)
that are both internal to its own functioning and hegemonic across the whole
culture, and into which individuals are assumed to slot. In a sense, however, what
happens in arguments like that of Feldman is that the theoretical discourse mimics
the very system it analyzes: systemic critique, totalizing in order to encompass its
object, effectively deals with subjectivity through the notion of incorporation (or a
variant of it). While this conception is very different from Jay’ s more dialectical
notion of scopic regimes as con¯ icted and in crisis even when they are dominant, it
does reveal the dif® culty in conceiving the material viewer from both within and
beyond the scopic regime or dominant discourse. The dif® culty underlies Feldman’ s
claim of `a disassociation [in the scopic regime] between rendering the visible and
receptive cognitive seeing in which the latter is simply an imprecise anthropomorphic
® gureÐ a ® ctive terminus for the images created and consumed by the scopic
machine’ (1997: 33, emphasis added), as well as Foucault’ s description of the power
of `opinion’ being exercised `in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze’
(1980: 154, emphasis added). The dif® culty also appears in more popular discourse.
The notion of the `public eye’ nicely encapsulates the collective and anonymous
nature of the sovereign public gaze, as well as its totality. The public eye is not an
organ that one appears `before’ : it is something that one is `in’ .
Feldman’ s disjunction can perhaps be resolved by focusing more minutely on the
speci® c relations of viewer and viewed in the public realm of visibility. First, it is
clear that this realm does not require the attentive scrutiny of images at all times by
 Photography as Performance of Power 49

all viewers. As with the panopticon, it is suf® cient that someone may be watching for
visibility to exercise a disciplinary effect. This uncertainty itself invokes differential
power relations within each particular `moment’ of the visual ® eld: although poten-
tially all may become visible to all, some will be seen, at any particular instance, by
many others who themselves remain concealed. (Thompson (1990: 225± 238) makes
a similar point in his analysis of `mediated interaction’ .) Hence, the micro-processes
of the public scopic regime do not operate through an all-encompassing illumination
and transparency, but through the structured imbalance of visibility and invisibility.
Moreover, in terms of binary oppositions, the association of visibility and publicness
invites the contrary pairing of invisibility with privacy. In other words, the relation-
ship of visibility and invisibility at the core of public visuality breaches the self-
contained totality of the public `scopic apparatus’ , for those who may see and are not
seen, according to this de® nition, do their looking `in private’ .
The repeated use of the conditional in the previous paragraph is deliberate, not
simply because uncertainty is a concomitant of the power-effect of the viewer’ s
concealment, but because it reveals an assumption about vision and subjectivity that
lies at the root of the public scopic regime and its critical analysis. The assumption
is that individuals want to look. Someone who may look will: images produce viewers
as ineluctably, it seems, as ideology interpolates a subject or a letter reaches its
destination. Hence, the conjunction between the public realm of visibility and the
material viewer raises voyeurism to the level of social regulation: visibility as public
social power depends for its force on the secure invisibility of the desiring viewer
entrenched within the private domain.

The Citizen-Voyeur
The use of terms like `desire’ , not to mention the word `voyeurism’ itself, inevitably
conjures up the vast universe of psychoanalytic theory, its assumptions, insights,
modes of thought and expression, and its problems. This article, however, is not the
appropriate context for an in-depth analysis of the place of voyeurism within
psychoanalysis and photography theory. Instead, I will limit myself to a few brief
comments on the potential of the concept for explaining the relation between the
material viewer and the public scopic regime, and on its pitfalls.
Voyeurism is an effective concept because, as I have already suggested, it makes
manifest the (unstable) construction of private/public boundary. Voyeurism screens
the viewer off from the ® eld of public visibility at the very moment in which he/she
becomes central to its operation. By making the gaze of the private viewer integral
to public visibility, the concept of voyeurism undoes the rei® cation of public and
private as two static domains and re-establishes them as the terms of a dynamic
separation, as social correlates of the spatial distinction between inside and outside,
of the psychic constructions of self and other, and of the epistemological categories
of fantasy and reality. Indeed, voyeurism can be seen as that moment when the
public/private boundary is instituted within the construction of subjective experi-
ence, creating across the visual ® eld the separate identities of public citizen and
private person, a process whose precariousness requires its regular reiteration. And
50 P. Frosh

what is more, this splitting of domains is accompanied by a sense of the `empower-

ment’ of the private viewer in relation to the publicly viewed, of privileged detach-
ment from the system by which publicity and celebrity are created and to which they
are subject.
Photography, as a performance of the exercise of social power through visibility
that is undertaken on behalf of the viewer, consistently re-af® rms this vicarious,
voyeuristic empowerment. Thanks to photography’s spectacular power, the decod-
ing of the image content invokes the socialized understanding of the power relations
between photographed and photographer that produced the image, transforming it
into a dramatization, upon the stage of direct social interaction, that maps and
mirrors the relationship of the viewer and the photographed: it articulates both the
power and the right of the viewer to see representations of the viewed. In fact, this
dramatization doubly empowers the viewer. For, as much as the viewer is empow-
ered via the photographer, it is only in the name of the voyeur `as citizen’, through
the legitimating discourse of public information (which masks the underlying necess-
ity of commercial success), that the photographer has any rights at all. Photography,
as the agent of public visibility, must be seen to `serve’ the sovereign viewer, at which
point the roles of voyeur and informed citizen combine.
The account of voyeurism offered so far is, however, radically incomplete. It
has ignored the fact that voyeurism is centrally structured by the question of
sexual difference, such that, in Laura Mulvey’ s (1975) classic and controversial
account, the obscopophilic gaze is constituted as active/male, while women are
correspondingly analogous to the image, connoting a passive `to-be-looked-at-
ness’ .10
This centrality of sexual difference to voyeurism both accords with and compli-
cates the place of photography in relation to the public/private boundary. For, as was
evident in the case of Princess Diana, photography’s performance of power is overtly
gendered. Such overt gendering is, in fact, appropriate to one of the key ideological
elisions of Habermas’ public sphere as a normative category, which is simultaneously
a historical one: normatively inclusive of everyone, it is historically founded on the
exclusion or repression of women: `The exclusion of women from the bourgeois
public was not incidental’ , Landes (1988: 7) reminds us, `but central to its
incarnation’, an exclusion echoed in the etymology of `public’ as a con¯ ation of
`populo’ (the people) and `pubes’ (adult men) (Mitchell 1994: 379). It is there-
fore no accident that women are conspicuously and aggressively surveyed through
a voyeuristic and patriarchal visuality that is mediated largely by men with
cameras.
The complication is that the voyeuristic gaze, in Mulvey’s scheme both active
and male, emanates from a private, domestic sphere that is traditionally con-
ceptualized as a `feminized’ space excluded from the muscular realm of male civic
and political activity. This would suggest that voyeurism, at the same time as it
enforces gender boundaries, also transgresses them, creating a visual `pocket’ of
masculine aggression within the home that objecti® es, paci® es and `feminizes’ the
customarily male province of public life through its identi® cation with the all-
pervading camera.
 Photography as Performance of Power 51

Domesticating Visibility

How is it that this `pocket’ of photographic voyeurism is not itself turned on the
home? For, at the same time as the public is constituted as a realm of visibility
through photography, so the private domain of the home also becomes visible, both
to itself and beyond. Lurking within this statement is a contradiction: the privateÐ
de® ned, in opposition to the public, as the realm of the `invisible’ and the hiddenÐ
should retreat from the home as soon as photography enters it. But as we have seen
in the case of voyeurism, the constructed boundary between the public and the
private is both porous and precarious. Crucially, however, not everything that occurs
in the home is represented in family snapshots and, ironically, this residue of
invisibility exists in large part thanks to the shaping and constraining of domestic
photography by commercial and aesthetic discourses that emanate from outside the
domestic realm. As many others have observed, since George Eastman’ s marketing
of the Kodak in the late nineteenth century, the camera has entered the home as a
commodity, participating in the commodi® cation of domestic space and leisure
time.11 Hence, the use of photography in the home is framed by its image in the
advertising campaigns that mediate its penetration of the domestic market: once
again, I wish to stress that photography is a performance of representation that is
itself represented.
This framing is effected both through `ritualizing’ family photographyÐ
designating those occasions and contexts when photographs may, and indeed
should, be taken (including when the family leaves the home as tourists), and how
and by whom they may be displayed and viewedÐ and by `conventionalizing’ the
iconography of the photographic image itselfÐ it is, ideally, in colour, in focus, and
framed centrally around its object, who is preferably a happy loved-one.12 In the
latter case, conventional iconography suppresses almost all traces of determination
beyond the hearth, substituting it with the `egalitarian’, consensual and amateur
agency of family members (any of whom may take the pictures), with the idealized
intimacy that arises from the images’ leisure-based content, and with the self-
containment of their assumed audience: the family itself. The result of this complex
process is that photography’s representational power is harnessed to produce an
idealized construction of self and family, and a highly selective personal and family
history, manifested most clearly in the family album.
Such a rosy picture conjures up Habermas’ description of the intimate bourgeois
family as the guarantor of personal autonomy, an idealization achieved through the
effacement of its economic basis, social conditions, and internal structures of
domination: `It seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to
be maintained without coercion; it seemed to rest on the lasting community of love
on the part of the two spouses; it seemed to permit that non-instrumental develop-
ment of all faculties that marks the cultivated personality’ (Habermas 1989: 46± 47).
The very stillness of photography appears eminently suited to this representation,
detaching social relations from their temporal and spatial contingency and present-
ing them as the objective re¯ ection of immutable social facts (Bourdieu 1990: 76).
It has also, of course, invited psychoanalytic interpretations of the repressed in
52 P. Frosh

family photographÐ that which remains invisibleÐ something that I will touch upon
in my ® nal comments. But it is clear that the image of photography in this
idealization contradicts its image as the agent and index of voyeuristic public
scrutiny. Through family photography, visual representation becomes a catalyst for
familial intimacy and sentimental memorialization, and the very conditions of
visibility itself are domesticated.

You Must Remember This

The term `memorialization’ leads me, in this penultimate section, to consider the
relationship between photography’s spectacular power and our experience of the
past. For while photography’s spectacular power is, ultimately, historically contin-
gent, there is a sense in which historyÐ both historical consciousness and personal
memoryÐ is increasingly in thrall to photographic images. Photographs can be
conceived as `both permanently implicated in memory and antithetic to it’ (Keenan
1998: 61). They are a technical prosthesis to memory in the face of the fact of
forgetting, but their very durability also threatens to replace memory.13 Barthes
(1982: 91), in particular, claims that the photographic image is a `counter-memory’,
not so much because it might supplant the faculty it ostensibly supports, but because
of its relationship to time. Memory, both historical and personal, involves the
present weaving of selected past events into an integrated and meaningful narrative.
The photograph, on the other hand, is non-narrative (even though viewers may be
lead to construct narratives around the image); it is characterized by stasis. In
photography, the past is `arrested’ , the temporal ¯ ow is rescued from ephemerality
by being petri® ed: or, as Barthes puts it, `Time is engorged’ (1982: 91). This means
that photographic `evidence’ of the past seems discontinuous with the present, and
is experienced as a lost world of potentiality. Hence, for many, photography
privileges mourning over recollection, nostalgia over history, memorialization over
memory.
This relationship to time and memory has signi® cant implications for the con-
struction of public and private domains. These domains are not just `spaces’ ; they
are also structured temporally by multiple and often competing discourses and
narrative practices (including popular entertainment, historical scholarship, journal-
ism, folklore, and popular and personal memory) for which the visual stasis of
photography constitutes a signi® cant antithesis. Thus, in the domestic sphere,
photography has emerged as the most effective way of producing fantasies of the
uni® ed extended family in the very era of its disintegration, whereby `those ghostly
traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives’ (Sontag
1977: 9). In the public domain of visibility, photography does not simply support a
traditional but precarious media discourse of journalistic objectivity and documen-
tary evidence (Hall 1972). Increasingly, the widespread mass media use of old or
`old-style’ photographs (especially in advertising and non-news features) has `turned
on a dialectic of ª nowº and ª thenº rather thanÐ as in more traditional historical
narrative, with its sequence of events or developmental laws of changeÐ ª beforeº
and ª afterº . Instead of the past being a prelude to the present it was an alternative
 Photography as Performance of Power 53

to it’ (Samuel 1994: 322). Through photography, the temporal construction of both
private and public domains appears to work dialectically rather than progressively,
resting on an opposition between the present and a past frozen, memorialized and
nostalgically craved.
Memorialization affects photography’s spectacular power in a number of contra-
dictory ways. To begin with, it means that images not only manifest the power of
photography to represent the present, but also its power to ® x the past. This
intensi® es photography’ s position as a site of struggle between competing social
forces and their con¯ icting historical memories. As well as serving dominant versions
of the past, photographic memorialization can also become a powerful tool in the
hands of groups seeking to redress past suffering. The sense of the past errupting
into the present as its palpable negation can be felt both in acts of deliberate
memorialization (as in the use of photographs of the victims, healthy and unaware
of what awaits them, in Holocaust museums) and in acts of protest (as in the
photographs of the `disappeared’ carried by demonstrators against the military
dictatorships of Argentina and Chile). Thanks to photography, the dead rise up in
all their pre-catastrophic innocence and potentiality to accuse their oppressors.
`Memory’, writes Anton Kaes of photographic and cinematic images of the past,
`in the age of electronic reproducibility and dissemination has become public;
memory has become socialized by technology. History itself, so it seems, has been
democratized by these easily accessible images, but the power over what is shared as
popular memory has passed into the hands of those who produce these images’
(1990: 113). What Kaes does not mention is that, in the case of many photographic
images, it is becoming increasingly dif® cult to locate the source of photography’ s
representational power: who wields it and to what end. This is because of a radical
disjunction between the moments of image production and later moments of
distribution and reproduction, brought about by what can be described as the
`corporatization’ of photographic archives. In the past, it was relatively safe to
assume that the photographers and news agencies who produced news and docu-
mentary images maintained ownership and control over their reproduction, and that
there was a direct organizational and professional connection between production
and distribution. This link was in fact based on a separation, both discursive and
institutional, between historical and photojournalistic photographers and archives,
and ® ne art photographers and archives, and those working in advertising and
marketing. The distinction ensured a certain continuity of interpretative context
between production and subsequent reproductionÐ a photojournalistic image may
have been reproduced in a history book, for example, but very rarely in an
advertÐ that guaranteed the validity and constancy of the conventional assumptions
upon which spectacular power depends.
It comes as no surprise that these boundaries have disintegrated. Or rather, that
the domains of historical and photojournalistic photography, and also of ® ne art
photography, have been enfolded within the tender embrace of the master dis-
courses of marketing and advertising. In 1996, Getty Images, a multinational giant
of the `visual content’ industry that also owns one of the largest commercial stock
photography agencies (Tony Stone Images),14 stock ® lm footage agencies, and one
54 P. Frosh

of the world’ s leading providers of imagery on the internet and on CD-ROM

(PhotoDisc), acquired the Hulton Deutsch Collection that they renamed the Hulton
Getty Picture Collection. This collection comprises 15 million images from the
major British newspaper and press archives of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. Another company, Corbis, ® nanced by Bill Gates, now owns the repro-
duction rights to the Bettmann archive, which includes the United Press
International photo library and extensive material from Reuters and Agence France
Press; this is in addition to its acquisition of stock image libraries for marketing and
advertising, as well as the digital reproduction rights to much of the world’s ® ne art
(see Batchen 1998). Needless to say, the images in these historical archives are
available for almost any use, but among their primary markets are advertising and
marketing sectors awash with `vintage’ photographs. Admittedly, the connection
between the production and distribution of photographs has been increasingly
tenuous since the emergence of photography as a media profession, but these latest
trends, with the acquisition of historical archives and exclusive reproduction rights
by multinational corporations that specialize in all types of `visual content’ , signi® es
the absolute decontextualization and abstraction of historical images necessary for
optimum commodity exchange. This radical severing makes it almost impossible for
viewers to read the real relations of power through photographic performance, to
determine who is exercising the power to expose the world, and ® x the past, in this
particular way: Kaes’ (1990) `producer’ of the image is often irrelevant. In other
words, spectacular power, the conventional knowledge of representational power
relations conveyed by the image and its cultural context, is in certain domains
beginning to break down. This is the last, and perhaps most worrying, aspect of the
relationship between history, memorialization and photography’ s spectacular power,
where structural and organizational shifts in image production and reproduction
intersect with a transformation in the control, deployment and interpretation of
images of the past. It is even possible to argue that this collapse contributes to a
disorientation in the present that augments the appeal of the past as a stable and
Edenic alternative, thereby bulwarking the memorializing power of photographs at
the moment when their performative meaning is increasingly non-synchronous with
the power relations that structure their use.
One need not be a card-carrying postmodernist to see that such concepts as
`nostalgia’, `pastiche’, `historicism’ and, perhaps above all, `the breakdown of the
signifying chain’ (all elements of Jameson’ s (1984) critique of postmodernism) have
a direct bearing on these developments, even as one realizes that there is a long way
to go before all spheres of photographic production and performance are similarly
affected. The conventions of domestic photography, to be speci® c, seem to have
been largely untouched by these transformations in the realm of public visibility, and
even by the creeping incursions of digital imaging technologies into the household
(Slater 1995). This temporary immunity would suggest the domestic as a normative
alternative to the aggressive realm of public visibility in which real (largely corporate)
power is heavily cloaked, and hence as a site of representational resistance, were it
not for that fact that the internal power structures of the home have been similarly
disguised by most domestic photography for decades.
 Photography as Performance of Power 55

The Photographic Uncanny

So instead of a naõÈ ve antimony between `dominant’ public and `resistant’ private

photography, I wish to conclude by proposing a strategy for reading spectacular
power that recon® gures the relationship between photography, the public and the
domestic. To do this, I will borrow another psychoanalytic term, Freud’ s `uncanny’
(`unheimlich’ ), bearing in mind the problems involved in such an appropriation
mentioned earlier in the discussion of voyeurism.. According to Freud (1955: 224),
the uncanny arises when something is defamiliarized and dislocated by being made
visible. Hence, it cuts across the axes of private/public and invisibility/visibility, and
questions the very possibility of domestic photography’ s spectacular power: the
photograph makes us inescapably other, complicit in our own estrangement from
ourselves. As Barthes says of being photographed: `I constitute myself in the process
of ª posingº , I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in
advance into an image’ (1982: 10). This photographic defamiliarization raises,
within both public and private forms of visibility, the spectre of the return of the
repressed: `this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is
familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression’ (Freud 1955: 241).
What exactly has been repressed, and with what relevance to photography? We
can tease out some conclusions by referring to two broad `effects’ of the uncanny
that Freud discusses: the connection of the uncanny with the fear of being robbed
of one’ s eyes, and with the fear of the `double’ (Freud 1955: 230± 237). The former,
associated with the castration complex by Freud, also sustains the more literal
reading of the fear of the loss of `vision’, implying that the visibility of others, their
availability for observation made manifest in photographic performance, is crucial
for channelling psychic energies into subjective orientation within the social world:
voyeurism becomes the key to citizenship. Fear of the double, in contrast, can be
linked to the loss of control over `representation’ by the photographed. One
encounters one’ s double as an unfamiliar version of oneself; or, more threateningly,
the interminable and uncontrollable production of unfamiliar doubles. The incess-
ant (re)production of the celebrity’ s public `image’, and its alleged difference from
his/her authentic self, is an extreme example of this doubling.
The repressed in this account is the mutual imbrication of these two factors: no
vision of otherness without the otherness of representation, no voyeurism without
exposure to view and self-estrangement. In repression, these two factors are spliced
apart and distributed across two polar universes, where they are constituted as the
scopic regimes of nominally exclusive domains, each `blind’ to the other: a private
realm of self-representation without loss or threat, and a public realm that promises
vision without limit or responsibility (hence viewers’ ability to criticize the paparazzi
while routinely buying the papers that make their profession pro® table).
The photographic uncanny, then, is a type of reading that creates dislocations of
photography’ s spectacular power, in which the repressed embrace of visibility and
representation can be brought into the light. But to what extent does it therefore
breach the systematic reproduction of the dominant scopic regime through photo-
56 P. Frosh

graphic performance? And, as well as constituting a demysti® catory tool for the
cultural critic, is it available to viewers as a critique that emerges `naturally’ from
within photographic practices and images? As a `redemptive’ strategy that unlocks
the repressed potentialities of photography from conventionalization and ritualiza-
tion, the uncanny may serve as a basis for the development of alternative modes of
image production and consumption, certainly within domestic photography, al-
though this is likely to remain a minority, if not an elite, preoccupation.15 With
regard to the ® eld of public visibility, the disclosure of the culpability of the citizen
as voyeur suggests a critical and pedagogical project that can build upon the system’ s
spectacular `neuroses’ , those `moments of unease’ (Jay 1988: 4)Ð such as Princess
Diana’s deathÐ where the scopic regime encounters the limits and contradictions of
its own founding discourses, allowing viewer’ s to ask `why, and by what right and
power, do I see this?’. Whether this already constitutes or can be developed into
counter-hegemonic visual practices remains a moot point, for its success will
partially depend on the selective deployment of its most radical acts: the rejection of
photographic exposure as a necessary condition of civic knowledge, the strategic
refusal to photographÐ and to look.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Yosefa Loshitzky and Tamar Liebes for their
suggestions and advice with regard to the two papers on which this article is based.

Notes
[1] This article is based on two earlier papers given at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies
Conference at Tampere, July 1998, and at the International Communication Association
pre-conference session The Blurring of Boundaries Between Mass and Interpersonal Communi-
cation held at Haifa University, July 1998.
[2] Declarations of a `post-photographic era’ are made by, among others, David Tomas (1996)
and William Mitchell (1992). For a critique, see Kevin Robbins (1996) and Sarah Kember
(1996). Volume 22 (1) of the journal History of Photography (Spring 1998) is devoted to the
subject of digital photographic technologies.
[3] Silverstone et al. use `double articulation’ to describe information and communication
technologies as both `objects’ of consumption and `media’ of consumption within the
household. I prefer `triple articulation’ because technologies such as photography, video
and, possibly, computers are also `consumed’ through `practices of production’ , a point
thoroughly covered by, for example, Don Slater (1991, 1995).
[4] Of the many diverse texts dealing with this transformation, the best known and most
in¯ uential are probably Walter Benjamin (1980, 1992), Roland Barthes (1982) and Susan
Sontag (1977).
[5] This is not to argue that these critical accounts can easily be harmonized. Foucault’ s
dismissal of the `society of the spectacle’ is particularly famous: see Jonathan Crary (1992:
17± 18) for a discussion.
[6] Jay borrows the term from Christian Metz (1982: 61).
[7] Habermas’ (1989) account is implicitly hostile to the visual. He suggests that visual (and
 Photography as Performance of Power 57

aural) mass media are partially responsible for the replacement of a culture-debating public
with a culture-consuming one since they substitute `the spell’ of direct sensation for the
critical distance fostered by the reading of printed texts (see, especially, pp. 169± 175). For
a perceptive analysis, see the `Introduction’ to Hansen (1991), while Thompson (1990:
238± 248) also provides a valuable discussion of `discursive’ and `visual’ notions of
publicness.
[8] Beloff’ s analysis of photography as social interaction differs from mine in a number of
important ways: (1) it does not link photographic interaction historically to the rise of a
public realm in which power relations are manifested through visibility; (2) it focuses on the
interaction between photographer and photographed, and does not really deal with the
viewer; and (3) it does not link photography as a social interaction to the key boundary
between the private and the public.
[9] There is some historical slippage in the use of this rhetoric. The quote from Crary describes
contemporary developments in digital technologies: the rest of his book is actually
concerned with the techniques, devices and apparatuses of nineteenth-century observation.
Virilio’ s article mainly deals with computerized vision. Baudry and Comolli focus on
(pre-digital) photographic and cinematic technologies.
[10] For a counterpoint to Mulvey’ s ritualistically quoted and suggestively problematic essay,
incisively noted by Burgin (1990), see Rose (1981). It needs to be stressed that theorists
of visual culture prefer to engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis, partly, as Rose implies, due
to the prominence of optical and geometrical models in Lacan’ s writings.
[11] The list is very long, although I am thinking mainly of the work of Jo Spence (1986), Don
Slater (1991, 1995), Judith Williamson (1986) and Susan Sontag (1977).
[12] These conventions of the `good’ domestic photograph mean that deviations are usually
discarded as `mistakes’ rather than, say, as instances of artistic experimentation. On the
connection between photographic conventions of focus with gender and the domestic, see
Lindsay Smith (1992).
[13] McQuire (1998: 130) notes that Plato made the same charge against writing.
[14] Stock photography is a billion-dollar global industry that produces ready-made images for
marketing and advertising purposes, supplying around 70% of the images actually used. In
September 1999, Getty Images acquired The Image Bank group of stock agencies and
historical archives from Eastman Kodak for $183 million, making it by far the largest
`visual content’ corporation.
[15] Jo Spence (1986) proposed and engaged in such a practice, while much of the work of art
photographers such as Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin defamiliarizes the space of the home
by engaging with the `accidents’ of domestic photography.

References
Aumont J 1994 The Image London British Film Institute.
Batchen G 1998 `Photogenics’ History of Photography 22 (1) 18± 26.
Barthes R 1982 Camera Lucida: Re¯ ections on Photography London Fontana.
Baudry J 1974 `Ideological effects of the cinematic apparatus’ Film Quarterly 28 (2).
Beloff H 1983 `Social interaction in photographing’ Leonardo 16 (3) 165± 171.
Benjamin W 1980 `A short history of photography’ in A Trachtenberg (ed) Classic Essays on
Photography New Haven CT Leete’s Island Books 199± 216.
Benjamin W 1992 `The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ in H Arendt (ed)
Illuminations London Fontana 211± 244.
Bolton R 1989 `In the American east: Richard Avedon incorporated’ in R Bolton (ed) The Contest
of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography Cambridge MA MIT Press 261± 282.
Bourdieu P 1990 Photography: A Middle-Brow Art Cambridge Polity Press.
58 P. Frosh

Burgin V 1990 `Geometry and abjection’ in J Fletcher & A Benjamin (eds) Abjection, Melancholia
and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva London Routledge 104± 123.
Comolli J 1980 `Machines of the visible’ in T de Lauretis & S Heath (eds) The Cinematic
Apparatus London Macmillan 108± 117.
Crary J 1992 Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
Cambridge MA MIT Press.
Debord G 1970 Society of the Spectacle Detroit MI Black & Red.
Feldman A 1997 `Violence and vision: the prosthetics and aesthetics of terror’ Public Culture 10
(1) 24± 60.
Foucault M 1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison New York Pantheon.
Foucault M 1980 `The eye of power’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972± 77 Brighton Harvester Press 146± 165.
Freud S 1955 `The ª uncannyº ’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works vol
XVII London Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis 219± 252.
Friedberg A 1993 Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Berkeley CA University of
California Press.
Goffman E 1958 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Edinburgh University of Edinburgh
Social Sciences Research Centre.
Habermas J 1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society Cambridge Polity Press.
Hall S 1972 `The determinations of news photographs’ in Working Papers in Cultural Studies
Birmingham UK 53± 87.
Hansen M 1991 Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film Cambridge MA Harvard
University Press.
Jameson F 1984 `Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ New Left Review 146
53± 92.
Jay M 1988 `Scopic regimes of modernity’ in H Foster (ed) Vision and Visuality Seattle WA Bay
Press 3± 23.
Kaes A 1990 `History and ® lm: public memory in the age of electronic dissemination’ History and
Memory 1 (2) 111± 129.
Kember S 1996 ` ª The shadow of the objectº : photography and realism’ Textual Practice 10 (1)
145± 163.
Keenan C 1998 `On the relationship between personal photographs and individual memory’
History of Photography 22 (1) 60± 64.
Landes J 1988 Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Ithaca NY Cornell
University Press.
McQuire S 1998 Visions of Modernity London Sage.
Metz C 1982 The Imaginary Signi® er: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema Bloomington IN Indiana
University Press.
Mitchell W 1992 The Recon® gured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era Cambridge MA
MIT Press.
Mitchell WJT 1994 Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation Chicago IL Chicago
University Press.
Mulvey L 1975 `Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ Screen 16 (3) 6± 18.
Pinney C 1992 `The parallel histories of anthropology and photography’ in E Edwards (ed)
Anthropology and Photography 1860± 1920 New Haven Yale University Press 74± 95.
Robbins K 1996 Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision London Routledge.
Rose J 1981 `The imaginary’ in C MacCabe (ed) The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and
Language London Macmillan 132± 161.
Samuel R 1994 Theatres of Memory Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture London Verso.
Screen Special Debate 1998 `Special debate: ¯ owers and tears: the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales’ Screen 39 (1) 68± 70.
 Photography as Performance of Power 59

Sekula A 1981 `The traf® c in photographs’ Art Journal 41 (1) 15± 25.
Sekula A 1989 `The body and the archive’ in R Bolton (ed) The Contest of Meaning: Critical
Histories of Photography Cambridge MA MIT Press 342± 388.
Silverstone R, E Hirsch & D Morley 1994 `Information and communications technologies and the
moral economy of the household’ in R Silverstone & E Hirsch (eds) Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Space London Routledge 15± 31.
Slater D 1991 `Consuming Kodak’ in J Spence & P Holland (eds) Family Snaps: The Meanings
of Domestic Photography London Virago.
Slater D 1995 `Domestic photography and digital culture’ in M Lister (ed) The Photographic Image
in Digital Culture London Routledge 129± 146.
Smith L 1992 `The politics of focus: feminism and photography theory’ in I Armstrong (ed) New
Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts London Routledge 238± 262.
Sontag S 1977 On Photography New York Doubleday.
Spence J 1986 Putting Myself in the Picture London Camden Press.
Tagg J 1988 The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories London Macmillan.
Thompson J 1990 Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass
Communication Stanford Stanford University Press.
Tomas D 1996 `From the photograph to postphotographic practice: toward a postoptical ecology
of the eye’ in T Druckery (ed) Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation New
York Aperture 145± 153.
Virilio P 1994 The Vision Machine Bloomington IN Indiana University Press and BFI Publishing.
Williamson J 1986 `Family, education, photography’ in Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of
Popular Culture London Marion Boyars 115± 126.