What is a photograph 2

Referring back to the previous blog we are still left with the question  “What is a photograph?” Does the question have an answer? It is relatively easy to describe the physical properties of a photograph. Yet these are not unique and a physical description would not distinguish it from a number of other things. Barthes in “Camera Lucida” (p76) argues that it is not possible to deny that the subject of the photograph “has been there”. It is this unique property that is the essence (Barthes uses the term ‘noeme’ ) of Photography. He gives the noeme a name: “That has been”. It can be argued that a photograph is a photograph because it shows something ‘that has been’. If this is true then anything that does not have the property of ‘that has been’ is not a photograph. We seem to have answered the question.

It is a reasonable presumption that of those things that we name ‘photographs’ the vast majority would qualify to be a photograph - their subject is something that ‘has been’. Yet there is a significant minority of things that we call photographs that are of things that ‘have not been’. I am not thinking here of such images such as the infamous ‘Fairies at the bottom of the garden’. Although the fairies are not there the children’s toys that were supposed to be the fairies are there and the term ‘that has been’ can be truthfully applied to the image i.e. it is a photograph. What I am thinking of are images that ‘bend’ the truth. 

In the Autumn Review of the British Journal of Photography there is an article discussing a work by Erica McDonald titled T’he Laundry Sherpas of Brooklyn’ which mixes fact with fiction. Prompted by seeing people carrying laundry in Brooklyn McDonald was reminded of people in poorer countries who have to walk miles to find sufficient water to do their laundry. She created a story line where the laundry carriers were journeying through an urban area. What is not too obvious from the images is that those photographed are acting, pretending that they have been wandering for hours. McDonald prefers the term ‘fictive’ to ‘fiction’ arguing that what she has created does not oppose the facts. Of course we are only asking whether the images are photographs. Can it be said of what is in the photographs ‘has been’?  The answer is ‘Yes’ although what they are attempting to portray is a falsehood. Yet Barthes’ criteria does not require us to ask of the image whether what the photograph is showing is true only that what we see was there. Clearly the people were there so using Barthes’ criteria it is a photograph. We can draw the conclusion that even though what the image purports to be is untrue providing the subject matter was in front of the camera then the object is a photograph. A photograph can lie.

We can also consider montages where the image we see before us is made up of a number of images that were not necessarily taken at the same time. They may create a very realistic image such as when we remove a background and replace it with another. They may create something that cannot exist in reality but all parts were photographed and can be legitimately called ‘has been’. Is time something that negates a photograph? Barthes is silent on this aspect of a photograph but there is nothing in his model that precludes differing time elements.

There are elements that are common in all the images above and that is the use of a camera (in the broadest sense of something that records the full spectrum of light storing it on some kind of medium) and the presence of something before the camera at the time of recording. Providing these conditions are met then the resulting product is a photograph.