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 communication, 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 photographys role in the public realm: the same visual technology becomes, in the mass media, both the index and agent of publicness itself, with the paparazzi especially in the aftermath of Princess Dianas death 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 transparency, 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 photographys spectral power the power to make visible the real and give reality to the visible has returned to plague the zeitgeist. Representational Power and Spectacular Power This paper has two complementary theses. The rst is that the power of photography 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 DOI: 10.1080/1035033012 0010957 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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true of painting, for example, photographys 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. Familiarity with photography beginning with a rudimentary understanding of the connection between the camera and the photographic print is almost universal in advanced media societies, and it is a form of knowledge that is subjectively internalized 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 demonstrate 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 photographys representational power is dramatized, in part, through the iconography of the image itself: content, compositional 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 cameras presence is not acknowledged 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 itself the phallic zoom lenses, the immobilizing are of the ash guns becomes the index of the celebrity s rank within a hierarchy of popularity. This enmeshing of representational technology, subjectively sublimated knowledge 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 photographys representational potency, but the fact that it is maintained across a range of social contexts by being `put on display . Spectacular power thus links photographic signi cance to the question of cultural agency,

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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. Photographys spectacular power has, however, developed incrementally, and has been transformed and multiplied as a result of historical, technological and cultural factors. Notwithstanding the expressions of wonder in the years immediately following photographys 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 photographys 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 snapshot 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 consumer 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 photographic technology, coupled with the transformations of photography itself and what we can call the `imperialistic tendency of its development its progressive exposure of more of the world to more of the people within it mean that the current state of photographys 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 Debords 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

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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 Foucaults (1979, 1980) surveillance society, Debords (1970) society of the spectacle, John Thompsons (1990) mediated publicness, even Goffman 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 realm `the regimens that prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or render untenable 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 purposes, 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 discourse of scienti c positivism and the colonial enterprise, created the new photographic 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, photographys 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

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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 photographers 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 ones assassination, 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 photography as a profession with the rise of the popular press and the appearance of the professions binary opposite popular domestic photography; the systematic commodi 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 circulation 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 Foucaults 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 instrument and an automation of the scopic regime. (1997: 33).

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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 violence 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 decentred 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 gure 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

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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 potentially 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 relationship of visibility and invisibility at the core of public visuality breaches the selfcontained 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 experience, creating across the visual eld the separate identities of public citizen and private person, a process whose precariousness requires its regular reiteration. And

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what is more, this splitting of domains is accompanied by a sense of the `empowerment of the private viewer in relation to the publicly viewed, of privileged detachment 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 photographys spectacular power, the decoding 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 empowered 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 necessity 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-atness .10 This centrality of sexual difference to voyeurism both accords with and complicates the place of photography in relation to the public/private boundary. For, as was evident in the case of Princess Diana, photographys 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 therefore 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 conceptualized 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 allpervading camera.

Photography as Performance of Power Domesticating Visibility

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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 private de ned, in opposition to the public, as the realm of the `invisible and the hidden 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 photography 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 viewed and by `conventionalizing the iconography of the photographic image itself 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 selfcontainment of their assumed audience: the family itself. The result of this complex process is that photographys 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 development 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 presenting 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

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family photograph that which remains invisible 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 photographys spectacular power and our experience of the past. For while photographys spectacular power is, ultimately, historically contingent, there is a sense in which history both historical consciousness and personal memory 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 construction 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, journalism, 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 documentary 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 now and then rather than as in more traditional historical narrative, with its sequence of events or developmental laws of change before and after . Instead of the past being a prelude to the present it was an alternative

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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 photographys spectacular power in a number of contradictory 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 photographys 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 photographys 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 documentary 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 reproduction a photojournalistic image may have been reproduced in a history book, for example, but very rarely in an advert 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 discourses 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

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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 centuries. Another company, Corbis, nanced by Bill Gates, now owns the reproduction 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 worlds 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 photographys 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 The Photographic Uncanny

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So instead of a na 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 photographys 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 posing , 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 incessant (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 photographys 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-

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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 ritualization, the uncanny may serve as a basis for the development of alternative modes of image production and consumption, certainly within domestic photography, although 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) such as Princess Diana s death 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 photograph 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 Communication held at Haifa University, July 1998. 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. 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). 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). This is not to argue that these critical accounts can easily be harmonized. Foucaults dismissal of the `society of the spectacle is particularly famous: see Jonathan Crary (1992: 17 18) for a discussion. Jay borrows the term from Christian Metz (1982: 61). Habermas (1989) account is implicitly hostile to the visual. He suggests that visual (and

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6] [7]

Photography as Performance of Power

57

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11] [12]

[13] [14]

[15]

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. 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. 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. Virilios article mainly deals with computerized vision. Baudry and Comolli focus on (pre-digital) photographic and cinematic technologies. 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. 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). 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). McQuire (1998: 130) notes that Plato made the same charge against writing. 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. 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.

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