Between 2008 and 2015 the contemporary photographer Thomas Struth made a number of large color photographs of technological and scientific subjects, twenty-five of which (or more, depending on how one counts) were included in the exhibition titled Nature and Politics that for two years (2016-18) traveled among museums in Essen, Berlin, Atlanta, and St. Louis. (There is a comprehensive catalog with excellent illustrations of all the photographs.)1 Struth refers to them as his “technology” photographs, and I shall follow him in this. I’m not sure exactly when I saw a few of them for the first time, but from the start I found them compelling, and over the years, in galleries in this country and abroad, I watched the series ramify and develop. What I want to do in this essay is look closely at a number of the technology photographs in an effort to explain exactly what it is that makes them singularly gripping (to me, anyway) at the present moment (time of writing: summer 2016) in the evolution of the contemporary “visual” arts.2

Let me begin by glancing at one of the first in the series, Space Shuttle 2. Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral 2008. Right off, it calls to mind a large and impressive photograph by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, Restoration (1993), which depicts youthful restorers at work on the so-called Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne. (The 360-degree panorama by Edouard Castres depicts a scene from the Franco-Prussian War, the arrival in Switzerland of the starving and exhausted remnants of the French Army of the East led by General Charles-Denis Bourbaki.) The two photographs differ in format, Wall’s being quasi-panoramic in its own right, but the basic idea of depicting a woman restorer on an elevated platform has much in common with Struth’s composition of fifteen years later. I have to assume that Struth was aware of this and at the very least was willing to accept the comparison.3 As we shall see, Struth’s technology photos are in implicit dialogue both with earlier series in his own oeuvre and with the work of other photographers, not just Wall but also, especially, Struth’s younger contemporary, Thomas Demand.

For me the deeper interest of Struth’s photograph is thematic: the upper half of the composition is dominated by the under-surface of the Space Shuttle with its diagonal grid of heat-defying ceramic tiles; the implication is that the young woman in the left foreground and perhaps also the two men farther back and to the right are working on these. That they are doing so is nothing less than a matter of life and death. That is, it is absolutely crucial to the success of the Shuttle’s missions and the survival of the astronauts inside it that the tiles resist the formidable heat of reentry and even more that they do not come loose from the surface of the Shuttle. This may seem to go without saying, and in a sense it does, but taking this photograph as thematic for the series as a whole (as its position early in the exhibition catalogue encourages one to do), it also suggests that there will be no tendency in the series to shift the implied locus of agency away from human beings to the technology itself—a point driven home by the fact that this is the only one of the technology photographs to include human agents. And this means that the technology photographs will have nothing whatever to do with any so-called “vital materialism” such as that espoused by political scientist Jane Bennett and other theorists of her inclination, which would seek to minimize the role of human agents in any consideration of human/technological interaction in the direction of the so-called vital capacities of the technology as such.4  Thus Bennett supports Bruno Latour’s notion of “distributive agency,” a feature of his so-called “Actor-Network theory,” according to which Latour “strategically elides what is commonly taken as distinctive or even unique about humans” (ix). As she also remarks, she wants to highlight “the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces . . . in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human action and thought” (xvi). (By which she means she wants to counter the basic distinction between animate subjects and inanimate matter. All this she imagines as ultimately a political project designed to include material objects in a larger conception of the polis.) I find such arguments unpersuasive, not to say absurd, but they have found traction in various precincts of the academy in the United States and abroad, and it seems important to put them out of play from the start. More precisely, I take Struth’s Space Shuttle 2 as performing such an operation—as establishing certain basic parameters for coming to terms with the photographs that follow. This would be one implication of his allusion, if that is what it is, to Wall’s Restoration, another image of human beings repairing a material artifact.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the very next photograph in the catalogue, Control Panel, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral 2008, makes a point of the same issue of agentic control by showing us three lateral rows of individual control panels, all bearing evidence of their absent human occupants (looseleaf binders, binoculars, earphones, etc.), with chairs bearing on their backs lightweight jackets with the designations “IBM,” “McDonnell Douglas,” and “Boeing”—but with no humans in sight (the rule from here on out). Yet there is not the slightest implication that the control panels are capable of operating on their own. Indeed it is as though Struth is deliberately emphasizing the issue of control in these early photographs, by way of clearing the ground interpretively for what will follow.

And something else: Control Panel, Kennedy Space Center may be seen as alluding to a well-known earlier photograph by Thomas Demand, Poll (2001), which was based on media images of the Emergency Operations Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, where in November 2000 election authorities went through tens of thousands of ballots in an attempt to determine whether Albert Gore or George W. Bush had won the state and hence the national election. (Eventually, of course, the count was halted by a decision of the Supreme Court and the election handed to Bush.) As by now is widely known, Demand’s photographs begin by reproducing in paper and cardboard, most often at full scale, a scene, place, or situation known from media images and then photographing with a view camera the model that results. (Demand began as a sculptor and thinks of the models as sculptures of a sort, given definitive form by the photographs of them; this will be of further interest to us.) Invariably, the paper and cardboard models are at once meticulously made and visibly flawed, lacking important details (in Poll all the ballots and post-its are blank, the telephones lack numbers on their faces, and there is no room for seats between the curving rows of desktops), so as to leave the viewer in no doubt as to what he or she is looking at—a photograph of a model rather than of an original scene. The question that must then be asked is why Demand chooses to proceed in this extremely labor-intensive way, and my answer, first put forward in my book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), is that by so doing he is able to accomplish two complementary purposes: first, to present images of places and objects that have been rigorously purged of every causal trace pertaining to the original situation; and second, to replace those traces with marks and indices of his own process of making, which is to say “to replace one or more mediatic images of [a particular place or situation] with a counter-image of sheer artistic intention, as though the very bizarreness of the fact that the places and objects in the photographs, despite their initial appearance of quotidian ‘reality,’ have all been constructed by the artist throws into conceptual relief the determining force…of the intentions behind them.”6 (More on that too further on.) Seen in this light, Poll is virtually an allegory of Demand’s basic project, in that what took place in the Emergency Operations Center was a days-long attempt to determine the intentions of a substantial number of Florida’s voters, whereas the photograph makes visible—it exists to make visible—no intentions other than the artist’s own. More broadly, Demand’s photographs invite being understood as thematizing intendedness as such, an aim that locates them at the farthest pole from the emphasis on indeterminacy—the idea that the meaning of a work is nothing other than each viewer’s subjective experience of it—that has been a staple of postmodernism from the very start. (A large topic, needless to say, from which I will draw back. My profound disagreement with the indeterminacy position goes back to the critique of minimalism/literalism in my 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” and indeed earlier.)7

Shortly it will become clear why the digression on Demand was necessary. At the very least, though, we can say that Struth’s Control Panel stands in a kind of dialectical relation to Demand’s Poll by virtue of supplying the sorts of real-life details that the earlier work systematically elided.

2

We come now to one of the first technology photos that initially caught my attention, Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery, Max Planck IPP, Garching 2009. Garching is a recently created city near Munich, and a tokamak is a device for producing nuclear fusion by containing the super-heated plasma (the fourth fundamental state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases) based on heavy hydrogen (i.e., the isotopes deuterium and tritium) within a powerful magnetic field. Obviously the photograph shows us only a portion—presumably a small portion—of the entire device; equally obviously, Struth cannot have expected his viewer to know even approximately what they were looking at, or even, having read the title, to know what a tokamak is. (My knowledge, needless to say, has been gleaned from Wikipedia.) What the viewer does understand, however, is that they are in the presence of a photograph of an extraordinarily complex piece of equipment, one comprising an uncountable number of tubes and wires as well as a host of subsidiary devices, with none of which the viewer is familiar, all assembled and connected with one another in immeasurably complex ways. Put slightly differently, the viewer realizes at once that what they have been given to see goes far beyond their power to take it in, no matter how long or with what effort of scrutiny they give themselves over to the image.

In this regard the technology photographs—taking Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery as characteristic of them as a group (or at least of a subgroup that particularly interests me)—bear a close relation to an earlier series by Struth, his Paradise photographs (1995-2008), in which, as he put it in an interview with an art critic for the British newspaper The Guardian, “everything was so complex and detailed that you could look at them forever and never see everything.”8 (We are looking at Paradise 28 [2005].) As he earlier remarked, the Paradise photographs “contain a wealth of delicately branched information, which makes it almost impossible, especially in large formats, to isolate single forms. One can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless before them.”9 For Struth, the further import of those photographs is “spiritual”—as I wrote in Why Photography Matters, “the pictures in his view ‘emphasize the self’ and provide occasions for meditation and internal dialogue” (WPM, 300). But I also suggest that the viewer is in effect distanced and excluded by such imagery, as if Struth in that series were seeking to go against his own natural impulses by bringing about “a different, resolutely non-empathic relation between picture and viewer” (WPM, 299).

If we now return to a consideration of Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery, several points begin to emerge. As some have noted, it and other photographs like it are characterized by a degree of internal complexity comparable to that of the Paradise photographs. But there are crucial differences between the two series. For one thing, whereas in the Paradise pictures the foliage in a variety of greens creates a dense screen that effectively resists our acts of seeing, a photograph such as the one we are looking at—close-up, high-definition, seemingly brightly lit—positively attracts the gaze even as it offers the latter far more information than can be effectively processed. So it wouldn’t be true to say that the proliferation of elements makes it almost impossible to isolate single forms. Rather, we are offered a profuse tangle of such forms, especially metal tubes and wires, the latter differentiated in part by bright color—blue, red, white—which one takes to be veridical. (According to Struth, the photographs are “basically straight.” A number of them are digital, with no negatives. In a few instances he combined two negatives to create a more panoramic picture ratio. In any case, color plays an essential role throughout the series—it is impossible to imagine any of the photographs succeeding aesthetically in black-and-white.)10 Or take the thicker dangling length of tubing at the upper right, or the lengths of piping below it, or the thicker tube at the very top of the picture, left of center—to say nothing of the numerous smaller, subsidiary devices, especially toward the upper left and lower left and center of the picture. In other words, there is a fundamental difference between the naturally teeming, monochromatic (i.e. green), undifferentiated content of many of the Paradise pictures and the entirely man-made, constructed content of the technology photographs. This seems obvious, but the further import of that difference calls for spelling out. Here one comes to the interpretive core of the technology photographs as I understand them.

What I mean is the following: the technology photographs appear full of—in effect charged with—the evidence of human intentions. That is, we do not doubt for a moment that every wire, every length of tubing, every switch, diode, transistor, condenser, resistor, amplifier, oscillator, and voltage regulator (to name various pieces of electronic equipment on the supposition that some at least of these are in play in various of the photographs), in short every electronic device and accessory however small and inconspicuous, was positioned where it is shown to be by a human agent or a team of human agents so as to bring about a nested series of specific outcomes. At the same time, equally crucial to my account, no matter how hard or closely or committedly one looks one is absolutely unable to grasp either the larger, overarching purpose of the tokamak itself (only part of which is shown; how large a part? we have no idea) or for that matter the lesser, partial purposes of the individual devices and their connections. Indeed my further suggestion is that precisely this double state of affairs—the evocation of an unexampled density of intentional, purposive traces or indices that on the one hand compels the viewer’s close, not to say strained attention and on the other defeats from the start the viewer’s best efforts to make sense of what they have been given to see—is a major source, if not the major source, of the fascination that many persons have reported experiencing in the face of the technology photographs.

In itself this is extremely interesting, not least because it forms a link with Thomas Demand’s oeuvre by way of the latter’s systematic thematization of authorial intention as I have presented it. In fact, there is also a link with a famous series in Struth’s own previous production, his greatly admired black-and-white cityscapes from the 1980s, which in Why Photography Matters I gloss as virtual palimpsests of traces of intentions as expressed in urban architecture and its historical vicissitudes. (For example, Düsselstrasse, Düsseldorf [1979].) As I there put it: “The places in Struth’s [city] photographs typically represent the collaging together of traces of multiple intentions, traces laid down at different, even widely disparate moments, thereby modifying, covering, or effacing the traces of previous intentions, so that the scene as a whole presents itself as everywhere stamped by intention albeit…not by a single or a collective intention to produce the scene, the place, the milieu as it appears to the viewer” (WPM, 277). In this connection I quote the twentieth-century German writer Robert Musil: “[The individual] is formed by the back-formations of what he has created. If one takes away those back-formations, what remains is something indefinite, unshaped. The walls of the street radiate ideologies” (WPM, 281). I might add that black-and-white with subtly differentiated greys is as instrumental to the success of the cityscapes as color is to that of the technology photographs. I also suggest that Struth’s cityscapes “were a crucial element in the artistic and intellectual context within which Demand’s almost exactly antithetical initiative…took shape” (WPM, 281). In other words, with Struth’s technology series we apprehend a three-stage relation between Struth’s black-and-white cityscapes, Demand’s photographs of his ingenious paper reconstructions, and the technology photographs themselves, all keyed to the primacy of intention, each stage in the dialogue or dialectic implicitly alluding to the one or ones before.

But we are not done with Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery and its thematizing of intention. For what also strikes me (with ever greater force on repeated viewings) is the blend it offers of what I have called density of intentional indices with the simultaneous assertion of something very like contingency. By contingency I’m referring above all to the general sense of tangle and confusion that issues from the bunches of fine colored wires at the heart of the image, or the various loops and semi-loops formed by lengths of somewhat thicker gray wire or tubing as if in counterpoint to the thinner ones, or the hanging semi-loop of thicker tubing at the upper right, and more broadly to the overall looseness or slackness, the (to me surprising) non-rigidity, of the bulk of the elements which the image comprises. More precisely, it seems clear—one assumes without thinking—that each of the many wires connects two or more points that need to be connected in order that the larger device, the tokamak as a whole, operate as it is meant to do. And it seems equally clear that the precise configuration of wires and such—the various curving or looping paths they follow—were not specifically intended by the tokamak’s designer or maker or team of designers or makers to be precisely or even approximately as we find them. (The exact configuration, we might say, was a matter of artifactual indifference so long as it allowed the required connections to be made.) In other words, the tokamak photograph brings together in a single dense, complex, internally multifarious image a sense of absolute purposiveness—this must connect with that or the device will fail (not that for the most part we are plainly shown the connection points, the “this” or the “that,” but we assume they exist)—and a sense not quite of arbitrariness but of very considerable flexibility with regard to everything that lies outside the realm of strict technological necessity.

Another photograph will help develop this thought—Struth’s Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Detail, Max Planck IPP, Greifswald 2009, a larger and in obvious respects far more complex and ambitious work. Again, an unreadable ensemble of hundreds (at least) of electronic and mechanical elements has been photographed at close range in the sharpest imaginable overall focus. Like the tokomak, the stellarator is a device for promoting nuclear fusion; as in the former, the plasma is contained in a magnetic field, where it is brought to tremendously high temperatures. According to Wikipedia, the Wendelstein 7-X is (or was) the most advanced of all stellarators, featuring a toroid (a kind of hollow twisted doughnut) with 70 superconducting magnetic coils, the whole thing roughly eleven feet high with a diameter of more than 50 feet. But what exactly are we looking at? A wide-angle view inside the stellarator? Notice in the first place that the image yields no sure sense of scale; at first, if my experience is typical, one has an impression of relatively modest dimensions, say six or seven feet across. But then one notices the lengths of metal (aluminum?) tubing at the bottom and the top left, as well as a certain diminution of scale in the uppermost tubes and the top of the photograph generally, and it begins to seem plausible that one is seeing a wide-angle view from above of a much larger compound piece of equipment. In any case, the viewer is subjected to vastly more multicolored information than they can readily process, a quantitative overmatching compounded by the fact that the ordinary viewer also lacks the technological knowledge that would enable them to identify the host of subsidiary devices which the image comprises or, a fortiori, to arrive at even the slightest understanding as to why such devices are juxtaposed with and connected to one another in precisely this manner. Not that the viewer doubts for a moment that everything in the photograph has been set in place in order to do its job. (The Shuttle photographs help secure that conviction from the start.) But even more, indeed far more than in the case of the tokamak photograph, the viewer’s conviction of overall technological purposiveness coexists with an almost complete inability to understand what they are looking at (what on earth is that three-, no, four-part angled element in the upper right quadrant of the image? or the four items surprisingly wrapped in translucent plastic? and why are they so wrapped?), as well as with a complementary sense of something like improvisation and arbitrariness in the relations among the various elements (the wrapping just mentioned seems nothing if not makeshift). Put the other way round, the dominant impression is not, or not simply, of extreme complexity—it is also, equally, one of contingency, irregularity, even a sort of creative chaos, as the innumerable elements for which one has no name nor the least grasp of function appear to have been fitted together any which way (so long as the fitting works), with the result that the total configuration lacks all sense of satisfying symmetry or even, except locally, visible order. And yet to come full circle (again, if my experience is typical), the viewer is drawn and held by a counter-impression of sheerest nested purposiveness from one margin of the photograph to the other.

At this point I want to make a suggestion that may seem to come out of the blue, but which in fact has been prepared by my descriptions of the tokomak and stellarator photographs—namely, that in certain crucial respects (the ones I have highlighted) Struth’s technology photographs invite being understood in relation to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s account of the nature of aesthetic judgment, the judgment of the beautiful, in his magisterial Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), the third of his great Critiques and arguably the most important treatise in all of philosophical aesthetics.11 As is well known, fundamental to Kant’s position is the claim that judgments of beauty are essentially subjective, grounded in feeling, which is to say that they are not based upon concepts (there are no arguments that can in effect compel someone to regard a particular work or object as beautiful), but that despite being grounded in feeling in this way judgments of the beautiful precisely make a claim of universality or universal validity. (It is not merely my personal view that a particular object or work is beautiful, rather my subjective experience somehow licenses the claim that everyone ought to agree with my judgment.) This is a difficult crux, to say the least, and philosophers down to the present are in disagreement as to what exactly Kant understood by such a claim and whether or not he can be taken to have succeeded in establishing its validity.

Fortunately this is not our problem in this essay. But Kant also made two related claims that are of immediate interest to us: First, that judgments of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or purpose—in German, Zweck—which the object is taken to satisfy. (This is related to the idea that their universality is not based on concepts or reasons.) Second, that such judgments “nonetheless involve the representation of what Kant calls ‘purposiveness’ [Zweckmässigkeit]. Because this representation of purposiveness does not involve the ascription of a purpose, Kant calls the purposiveness which is represented ‘merely formal purposiveness’ or ‘the form of purposiveness.’”12 (Famously summed up by the phrase “purposiveness without a purpose.”) And a related claim: that the unique kind of pleasure basic to judgments of the beautiful arises from what Kant calls the “free play” or “free harmony” of the faculties of imagination and understanding. In Hannah Ginsborg’s helpful summary in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (from which I have been quoting):

In the Critique of Pure Reason, imagination is described as “synthesizing the manifold of intuition” [think of the latter as a mass of raw unstructured sensory data] under the governance of rules that are prescribed by the understanding….[Such rules] are, or correspond to, particular concepts which are applied to the object. For example, when a manifold is synthesized in accordance with the concepts green and square, the outcome is a perceptual experience in which the object is perceived as green and square. But now in the Critique of Judgment, Kant suggests that imagination and understanding can stand in a different kind of relationship, one in which imagination’s activity harmonizes with the understanding but without imagination’s being constrained or governed by understanding. In this relationship, imagination and understanding in effect do what is ordinarily involved in the bringing of objects under concepts, and hence in the perception of objects as having empirical features: but they do this without bringing the object under any concept in particular. So rather than perceiving the object as green or square, the subject whose faculties are in free play responds to it perceptually with a state of mind which is non-conceptual, and specifically a feeling of disinterested pleasure. It is this kind of pleasure which is the basis for a judgment of taste [of the beautiful].

The two points, purposiveness without purpose and the free play of the imagination and the understanding, are different aspects of the same basic notion. In Robert Pippin’s formulation:

The [first] is the “objective” dimension, the significance of the beautiful with respect to our understanding of our location in the world. The free play or harmony point is the “subjective” pole, how what would or could have been a conceptually regulated harmony of sensory material is occasioned without such a concept (i.e. without a concept of any purpose). That absence allows the distinctive harmony, that is, it allows the imagination free play but, somewhat miraculously, an ordered free play on its own; the intimation of purposiveness (without purpose) amounts to the significance of that experienced harmony.13

I hope the reader will excuse the seeming diversion into Kantian esthetics, but I also hope that they may already have begun to see why I believe that the diversion was called for by the tokomak and stellarator photographs. For consider: in the first place, I have been emphasizing the way in which both photographs leave the viewer in no doubt as to the overall, minutely calibrated purposiveness of the highly complex arrangements that they present to be seen while at the same time they totally defeat or deflect any possible understanding of what the overarching purpose or indeed the countless smaller nested purposes of those arrangements might be (and of course in both cases we are shown only part of the total device, how much or how little we have no idea). In other words, on the level of depiction, both images convey a sense of purposiveness without purpose. (Granted, we know, at least we do not doubt, that the real-world devices in question have an overarching purpose. But the photographs adamantly refuse to make that purpose accessible to us.)

And in the second place, I have been stressing the degree to which in both photographs the sense of purposiveness coexists with a strong impression of contingency, arbitrariness, improvisation—a sort of free play of elements and connections which somewhat miraculously (as Pippin says) produces a sense of harmony and order, which is to say of mutual attunement among the elements and connections, and also in a sense between the image and the viewer, the ultimate basis of which we can only faintly intuit. (As Kant remarks early in the Third Critique, “The representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life, under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which grounds an entirely special faculty for discriminating and judging that contributes nothing to cognition but only holds the given representation in the subject up to the entire faculty of representation, of which the mind becomes conscious in the feeling of its state.” [CPJ, 90]. A mouthful, but the meaning is clear.) Seen in this light, the tangles of wires and tubing in the tokamak photograph epitomize the “subjective” pole of such free play, as does the more embracing evocation of near-chaos in the stellarator image—so I want to suggest. What all this amounts to is the proposal that Struth’s technological photographs, or at least the tokomak and stellarator images (with certain others to come), may be seen virtually as allegories or, perhaps better, as actualizations—“objective correlatives,” to use an Eliotic term in a context he could not have imagined—of the Kantian judgment of the beautiful, which is not exactly the same as saying that they are beautiful on a Kantian interpretation of the concept. But understanding the photographs in these terms helps account for their very considerable sensuous-intellectual allure, which even at first encounter seems disproportionate to the theme of technology as such. (My impression is that I am by no means the only viewer to so respond to them.14 ) Let me add that seeing the photographs in this way militates against the idea that they “confront forms of a negative technological sublime,” a formulation first put forward by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.15

To which it should be added that for Kant theorizing the beautiful, the purposiveness at issue is pleasant in some sense or other because it is nature’s purposiveness, and in the judgment of the beautiful we experience a kind of reassuring “fit” between our moral or “supersensible” vocation and nature itself—a large and subtle matter which goes beyond the scope of this essay. (Hence the sense of attunement between photograph and viewer mentioned a moment ago.) Kant of course has nothing to say about technology—he is too early for that—but it seems fair to speculate that for him nature versus technology would be a huge dichotomy, which makes it all the more significant that the photographs we have been discussing intimate a Kantian pleasure in a mode of free play which they occasion precisely in the presence of the latter. The link with the Paradise pictures also seems deliberately to call the technology photographs’ breathtaking complexity to mind as on a par with—contrary to any dichotomy—nature itself. On this basis alone, the tokamak and stellarator photographs are indeed works of the highest fascination.16

Five more photographs might be glanced at in this connection: Grazing Incidence Spectrometer, Max Planck IPP, Garching, Germany, 2010, High Harmonic Generation Spectrometer, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot 2009 (the lurid green not having been added by Struth), Z-Pinch Plasma Lab, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot 2011, Field Ion Microscope, University of Zurich 2010, and Measuring, Helmholtz-Zentrum, Berlin 2012. The third of these, Z-Pinch Plasma Lab, has the slackest set of wire connections we have yet observed, while the fourth, being a microscope but unrecognizable as such to the uninformed (i.e., to us), underscores the degree to which the devices photographed by Struth are devoid of the least hint of anthropomorphism. The last, Measuring, with its depiction of separate floor units having been brought loosely together into a single incomprehensible configuration, carries the motif of improvisation or indeed assemblage to a new extreme.

3

At this point, I want to shift gears (not really, as will become clear) and look at a number of other photographs that will introduce a different but related theme—that of the formal organization of the photographs themselves. Let me start with an early image, Saturn V Engine, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral 2008, a view of three of the Saturn V’s five Rocketdyne F-1 engines, seen in angled perspective from relatively near to relatively far, all three severely cropped by the edges of the print. (In fact we glimpse a bit of a fourth engine at the upper right.) As is at once clear, this image differs radically from those we have been looking at owing to its much greater simplicity and the absence of any multiplicity of elements; instead it rather dramatically juxtaposes the engines with their sweeping curves with the straight-edge, rectilinear limits of the photograph to powerful effect.

No other technology photograph is quite like this one.17 But consider, for example, Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Interior 1, Max Planck IPP, Garching 2010, which depicts a large and elegant device—presumably the tokamak itself—circular in basic form (or say footprint) and with gleaming metallic concave walls, set in a round room or chamber of unreadable dimensions. The chamber in turn has concave walls, inset with gleaming metal plates similar to those on the central form and also inset with a host of sophisticated-seeming devices all no doubt having to do with controlling the fusion processes in the tokamak itself.

Or, moving ahead in time, there is Epitaxy, JPL, Pasadena 2014, a device or part of a device for “depositing a crystalline overlayer on a crystalline substrate” (Wikipedia again), so as to produce extremely refined detector arrays for large telescopes and the like (“JPL” being the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech). (Needless to say, I can’t guarantee the rightness of my explanation.) Once again, there is a strong impression of bricolage, with numerous largely slack wires in blue, black, gray, and red and only the most minimal or intermittent sense of a rigid supporting architecture, much of what there is coming down from above. Notice, in this connection, the TV-like unit at the lower left, with an orange hammer lying on top of it; and notice, too, what seems a kind of inverted waste-paper can underneath the unit and supporting it—can this be right? And is the unit part of the larger assemblage or not? In other words, the epitaxy itself has much in common with the “free play” aspect of the tokamak and stellarator photographs. But more than in either of those images there is also a definite sense of concavity, largely owing to the fall of the thick blue and black wires at the left and the light gray wires to the right, so that here too, as in the Tokamak Asdex Interior 1, the viewer instinctively contrasts the disposition of the device (upright but internally slack and curving) with the rectilinearity of the enclosing image-shape (itself affirmed, as is not the case in the tokomak photograph, by architectural elements chiefly in the upper region of the image).

To confirm the point—to bring out as strongly as possible Struth’s emerging stake in the juxtaposition of round versus straight (at a bare minimum)—we might look at Hall Thruster, JPL, Pasadena 2013, a propulsion device for space travel. Wikipedia: “Hall-effect thrusters trap electrons in a magnetic field and then use the electrons to ionize propellant, efficiently accelerate the ions to produce thrust, and neutralize the ions in the plume.” None of this can be gleaned from the photograph, of course—in that sense it remains consistent with the purposiveness without purpose theme I have been stressing—and we should note too the slackness of the orange wires and the improvisational feel of the way in which various lengths of tubing (as it seems) have been tied to upright elements that provide a kind of minimal architecture for the device as a whole (or as much of the device as we are shown). But what is even more striking is the fact that the photograph appears to have been taken through some kind of oculus, with the result that the curved-versus-straight theme is here made perfectly explicit, and in a way that redounds back on the character of the central image itself (we belatedly take in the juxtaposition of the curving wires with the minimal architecture).

Or, as if deliberately going further with the same basic compositional structure, there is Vacuum Chamber, JPL, Pasadena 2013, in which the central device or piece of equipment, shown mainly in silhouette, is framed by a large oculus-like opening which itself has a double character—a dark ringlike form “this” side of the opening (mainly evident to the right, where it appears sheathed in dark plastic) and a second oculus beyond that, which seems to be largely wrapped in light blue plastic. Plus there are four round forms with small central perforations to the right and left of the main opening, the two at the bottom sharply cropped by the framing edge, further underscoring the round-versus-straight idea.

Finally, there is GREAT, Armstrong Hangar 703, Palmdale 2014, a large spaceship-interior-like structure the function of which eludes me (Wikipedia is no help) but which exemplifies, on a very large scale, both the purposiveness without purpose and free play themes that I have associated with the technology photographs generally and the round-versus-straight motif that, starting with the photograph of the Saturn V engine, I have been bringing to the fore. I regard it is self-evident that the latter compositional motif can only be deliberate on Struth’s part, and can only have for its aim the imposing of a definite formal structure on the images in question—as if (but really there is no “as if” about it) he is seeking to supplement the absence of (intelligible, specifiable) overall purposiveness that marks so many of the technology photographs with a conspicuous (because contrastive) overall purposiveness of his own, a purposiveness (or intendedness, to hark back to an earlier term) that governs not the contents of the image (which of course are beyond his power to influence) but the nature, the structure, of the image itself.

It follows that the photographs in question—the last five I have discussed—are doubly Kantian: by virtue both of their analogy with the judgment of the beautiful and of their ultimate reliance on a concept of form that is perhaps Kant’s most conventional, eighteenth-century piece of theorizing in the Third Critique. The somewhat notorious passage reads: “In painting and sculpture, indeed in all the pictorial arts . . . the drawing is what is essential, in which what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste [i.e. the judgment of the beautiful] is not what gratifies in sensation but merely [i.e. strictly] what pleases through its form. The colors that illuminate the outline belong to charm [i.e. not beauty]; they can of course enliven the object in itself for sensation but they cannot make it worthy of being intuited and beautiful . . .” (CPJ 110). Needless to say, my characterization of these remarks as conventional does not imply a criticism of Struth’s photographs in which the curved-versus-straight compositional structure is manifestly in force. Not only did his images, being works of art-in-the-making, require to be framed in some decisive way (i.e., one that declares their pursuit of strong aesthetic autonomy). It is also the case that the curved-versus-straight “solution” turns out to be far more effective, at least to my eye, than when Struth opts for a more conventional match between a rectilinear internal structure and the rectilinear limits of the photograph (see e.g. Pharmaceutical Packaging, Laboratories Phoenix, Buenos Aires 2009 and Distillation Column, Gladbeck 2009). But framing as such inevitably belongs to what Kant in the passage just cited calls drawing, with the consequence that the deeper internal structure of the technology photographs as a group makes their partial reliance on a merely formal notion of form (if I may so put it) stand out more strongly than might otherwise be the case.

4

Finally, a word about the implication of the technology photographs for thinking about sculpture. It is Struth himself who suggests the relevance of doing so when he writes that he has sought “to open the doors to what our minds have materialized and transformed into sculpture and to scrutinize what our contemporary world creates in places which are not accessible to most people.”18 This is a tremendously interesting remark, which to the best of my knowledge Struth has never followed up, and my thought is that it is most usefully pursued in connection with the dialogue I have already evoked between the technology photographs and the brilliant and resourceful oeuvre of Thomas Demand. As was mentioned earlier, Demand began as a sculptor making works in paper and cardboard and turned to photography when it became clear to him that the models themselves lacked something vital—a kind of definiteness and specificity with regard to distance from the motif, point of view, lighting, and even color—which photography then very effectively conferred on them. (Cf. Baudelaire’s argument in his Salon of 1846 that, compared to the “despotic” character of painting which imposed a single point of view on the beholder, sculpture in its three-dimensionality was “vague” and “ambiguous,” hence unable to establish itself as art with requisite force. Demand’s photographs amount to an inspired response to such criticism, not that they were intended in that light.19 ) For Demand, as we have seen, the gain in definiteness is in the interest of the thematization of intendedness or purposiveness, in my account his basic concern—one that I have suggested had a certain precedent in Struth’s black-and-white cityscapes and a sequel precisely in the technology photographs.

The comparison with Demand has two further implications: First, although Struth does not say as much, I take his remark about what “our minds have materialized and transformed into sculpture” to apply less to the devices he photographs, though that may indeed be what he meant, than to the devices-as-they-appear-in-his-photographs, where in addition to a Demand-like definiteness as regards point of view, lighting, and color, they are marked by an ocular precision, keyed to an incommensurable fineness of detail, that simply in themselves—as objects in the world, encountered by human subjects operating under the normal conditions of ordinary shifting-focus binocular vision—they would surely lack. (A version of Baudelaire’s point, made more general.) This is particularly impressive, I think, in the case of Measuring. Helmholtz-Zentrum. Berlin 2012, generically less a sculpture than some sort of assemblage (as my earlier description of it suggested). I have never been a fan of assemblages as works of art, and my sense is that had I encountered the original congeries of devices on a visit to the Helmholtz-Zentrum, assuming such a visit to have been feasible, it might have snagged my attention for a moment but would not have stopped me in my tracks and compelled me to contemplate it for any length of time. As photographed by Struth, however, the loose but collectively purposive gathering of elements with its snaking tubes, seemingly tangled wires, and portions wrapped in crinkled aluminum foil (see the upper middle and to the right, beyond the sideways rounded form in a light blue “hood”) turns out to be hypnotically arres­ting, a state of mind that finds its own image, so to speak, in the gleaming convex metal element which is suspended roughly halfway up in the left-hand half of the photograph and which reflects in distorted form a portion of the room in which the photographer is at work. (A stunning photographic detail in the catalogue shows that the latter point was not lost upon Struth.) There is in all this a larger question as to the relationship between sculpture and photography in the present state of the two arts which there is no time to pursue.20

A second implication of the comparison with Demand is that Struth’s “use” of actual devices rather than cardboard models of places and things makes possible the eliciting in the viewer of a sense of mysteriousness or even awe about the devices’ own mode of being, a feeling that Demand’s subtractive procedures rule out from the start. (A certain ghostliness or emptiness, a sense of the uncanny, marks Demand’s production, as others have observed; this is not a criticism, merely a characterization of the Stimmung of his marvelously original photographs.) Interestingly, actual persons have no place in either body of work, in Demand’s case by its very nature, in Struth’s, with a very few exceptions, one of which is the picture of the Shuttle under repair, because they would distract from the relentless focus on the technology itself. Indeed it is hard to imagine Demand modelling any of the devices in Struth’s photographs (the models, one feels, would have to be constructed with exactly the same components as the devices), though as mentioned earlier Struth’s image of a NASA control panel almost certainly is a nod to Demand’s Poll—and a subsequent Demand photograph, Control Room (2011), based on the Fukushima disaster, could simply as regards their respective dates be seen as going on from the Struth. In sum, it is as if Struth, in the most characteristic and, to my mind, the most vivid and compelling of the technology photographs, such as those treated in this essay, deliberately chose subject matter that Demand could not have engaged with—though it goes too far to suggest that Struth was actually thinking along these lines. But of course that only makes the dialectical relation between their respective oeuvres all the more intriguing to contemplate.

5

A postscript (2020). In a brief section called “On the Ideal of Beauty” Kant distinguishes between the normal idea of the beautiful, defined as “the image for the whole species, hovering among all the particularly and variously diverging intuitions of the individuals, which nature used as the archetype underlying the productions in the same species, but does not seem to have fully achieved in any individual,” and the ideal of the beautiful, “which…can be expected only in the human figure.” He continues:

In the latter the ideal consists in the expression of the moral, without which the object would not please universally and moreover positively (not merely negatively in an academically correct presentation). [Negatively in the sense of avoiding individual particulars.] The visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings, can of course be drawn only from experience, but as it were to make visible in bodily manifestation (as the effect of what is inward) their combination with everything that our understanding connects with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness . . . The correctness of such an ideal of beauty is proved by the fact that no sensory charm is allowed to be mixed into the satisfaction in its object, while it nevertheless allows a great interest to be taken in it, which then proves that judging in accordance with such a standard can never be purely aesthetic, and judging in accordance with an ideal of beauty is no mere judgment of taste. (CPJ, 119-20)

Not surprisingly, Kant, not being Hegel, gives no example of such an ideal in actual art, but perhaps his remarks (a slight qualification of the generality of his basic theory) provide a basis for introducing two arresting photographs by Struth that in effect bring the technological series in Nature and Politics to a close, Figure, Charité, Berlin 2012 and Figure II, Charité, Berlin 2013. The first is of a prostate operation conducted by a “Da Vinci remote surgery machine,” the second of a moment before a technology-assisted brain tumor operation, with the patient under anesthesia—in Struth’s words “a dramatic moment, an expression of hope in and surrender to technology and its use through the human hand and mind.”21 In neither, of course, is the human figure visible as such; nor is either aesthetically compelling in the vein of the photographs considered in this essay. But both photographs, it might be argued, invoke under the sign of technology “the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness”—no mere judgment of taste but of value nevertheless.22

Michaels is drawn to Anscombe because her 1958 book Intention talks about intention and embodiment in ways that don’t cordon off something called the “mind” from the rest of the perceptible human body. In saying that someone is raising her arm because she “wishes” or “wants” to get the attention of a waiter, we shouldn’t picture these wishes and wants as residing in some inner space, generating—but ultimately divorced from—her bodily movements. The raising of her arm isn’t triggered by her intention; it embodies her intention. It is not the visible effect of an essentially private episode, nor the combination of two separable components (body + mind, movement + intention). It is a single purposive act—something she does rather than something she observes a body (hers) doing. On Michaels’s reading, Winogrand’s artistic practices make strikingly visible the merging of purposiveness and materiality that Anscombe attributes to human actions generally. Winogrand’s photos have been criticized by some artists and commentators—Robert Mapplethorpe and Arthur Danto, for instance—for being mere “documents,” bare inartistic records: they offer information about (e.g.) fashion in a particular decade or Winogrand’s own sexual hungers, but nothing aesthetically compelling. But to believe that, claims Michaels, is to underappreciate the specific ways that Winogrand’s photographs “transcend” the subject matter he shoots. A woman standing in her yard, for instance, is photographed through the window of a car door, which presents her in a voyeuristic light (i.e., we are in the position of passenger or driver looking for a cheap thrill); but the photo is tilted in a way that foregrounds the contrast between this car window and the four edges of the photograph itself. The photograph, in other words, composes its internal relations in particular ways, enabling it to include “the view” of the woman without being reducible to that view. The meaningfulness of the photograph is thus not consigned to Winogrand’s head (as, in different ways, it seems to be in Warhol or Mapplethorpe), but is all right there in the picture itself—much as, for Anscombe, the meaningfulness of an action is perceptible right there in the body, not anterior to or separate from it.

These nonsite essays echo some of Michaels’s earlier writing, particularly the second chapter of The Shape of the Signifier (2004), where James Welling plays something like the role that Winogrand plays in these more recent pieces and Cindy Sherman plays something like the role of Mapplethorpe.1 Throughout these works, Michaels offers what might be called, broadly speaking, a non-Cartesian dualism about intention:  human bodies are essential to our understanding of mindedness, but mindedness is not identical to bodily behavior. And broadly speaking, he is a cognitivist about art: the making and perception of artworks involve affective responses, but are also always subject to rational evaluation—i.e., criticism, be it the casual conversation of moviegoers, the shop-talk of practicing artists, or the formalized exchanges of scholars. As a dilettante about contemporary photography, I was grateful to have learned a bit about recent artists and critical debates. And I’m persuaded by the idea that “photographic agency” isn’t fundamentally different from the sort of agency exhibited in the other arts, even if that agency is achieved differently than elsewhere: in, for instance, the way Winogrand seeks to “disarticulate” the ostensible subject of the picture from the work of making the photograph itself, a process sometimes completed years after the camera itself clicked and recorded what’s in front of it, when the photographer distinguishes boring from “interesting” photos. I’m also convinced that the specific questions about agency and intention raised by photography are in part why photography has come to seem so important in accounts of the history of late-twentieth century art, when ideas of artistic intention begin to get renewed scrutiny among both theorists and practicing artists.

I am less sure, however, that I fully grasp the philosophical framework of Michaels’s essays, and in what follows, I’ll try to say why.

The first thing to say is that both of the ideas that I just attributed to Michaels—the non-Cartesian dualism, the cognitivism about art—emerge out of much longer conversations and traditions. The claims about mindedness, for instance, were relatively widespread in the mid-century Anglophone philosophical world. Gilbert Ryle famously criticized the image of the “ghost in the machine” with remarks that wouldn’t look out of place in Anscombe’s Intention: “Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.” Wilfrid Sellars questioned the image of a person as a two-part entity, “a mind that thinks and a body that runs,” and J. L. Austin warned us against regarding our speech acts “as (merely) the outward visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act,” as if some “backstage artiste” were categorically distinct from the “tongue” that swears an oath.2 Behind all these figures, of course, stands Anscombe’s teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose later work is full of aphorisms and arguments designed to deflate our tendency to reify what’s “inside” us. “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria”; or, even more famously and obliquely, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”3 As for the cognitivist claims about art, variations on this idea, too, have a long history. It was Aristotle, recall, who stressed the difference between a corpse and a picture of a corpse (the former triggers horror, the latter prompts our understanding), and Hegel talked of works of art as the transformation of mere matter: art emerges when “external existence” receives “the baptism of the spiritual,” when it is drawn through “spiritual productive activity.”4 Phenomenologists and pragmatists have likewise been keen to describe the entanglement of thought and sensation that gets embodied in painting, music, or literature, and a similar thought could be attributed to psychoanalysis, at least in some of its strands: unconscious intentions might be by definition unknown by the author, but they are intentions all the same, and thus interpretable by the therapist/reader.

I cite these predecessors not because every philosophical discussion needs to address, as Robert Pippin recently characterized some of his own work, the “great agenda-setting figures from the past who have interests similar to one’s own.”5 I mention them instead to ask why precisely Anscombe’s text is chosen to play the central role that it does in Michael’s accounts of photography. Intention is indeed a remarkable book and deserves the luminous praise it gets (my 2000 edition includes blurbs from Robert Brandom, Cora Diamond, David Velleman, Crispin Wright, and others).6 And again, I entirely share Michaels’s basic attraction to it. But I’m unsure how resonantly her book chimes with what he wants to say and, conversely, how far his essays line up with Anscombe’s own interests.

At the most basic level, concentrating on Anscombe’s book risks flattening the field of discussion quite considerably. The title of Michaels’s second paper—“Anscombe and Winogrand, Danto and Mapplethorpe”—presents a neat stand-off, as if one philosophico-artistic duo had united to do battle with another. But there are many ways to be an intentionalist. Time is always limited, of course, but each of the various historical predecessors I sketched a moment ago offers distinct nuances, and mentioning them reminds us of the sheer variety of positions—about what’s possible, about where the challenges lie, about where the accent should go—that have been available to thinkers trying to understand intentions in a material world. (The same is obviously true about the variety of ways to be skeptical about intention. Michaels tends to focus on the anti-intentionalism of contemporary art and theory, but other developments and strands of thought—data sciences, digital technology, neo-Darwinism—have probably done the most to erode the concept of intention over the last half-century, at least outside our increasingly marginal humanities departments.)

More importantly, however, I wonder whether Intention, for all its penetrating analyses, provides exactly the sort of resource that Michaels wants for discussing the philosophy and criticism of art. I mean this in a few senses. First, Intention is a stunningly difficult book, and part of what makes it stunningly difficult is that its author seems to be thinking through a set of issues rather than recording arguments about them. Michaels’s essays refer at various points to texts and artworks that offer what he calls a “theory of action.” But virtually every categorical assertion in Intention is followed by an obscuring qualification or nuance, and most of the text seems to consist, as Wittgenstein said of his own book, of “sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of … long and meandering journeys,” its reflections traveling “criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought.” (3). Anscombe may lack the power of aphorism and figuration that Philosophical Investigations puts everywhere on display, but she is every bit as committed to the power of example, and she circles repeatedly around an imaginative array of specific scenes, characters, and miniature narratives: Smith lying on his bed, the man jumping at a loud noise, the photographer setting up a camera, the man seeking revenge for his father’s death, the soldier with the false teeth, the farmer in need of a Jersey cow, and of course the man pumping the well—among many others. On the opening page, Anscombe suggests that there is “nothing wrong with taking a topic piecemeal,” and near the end, looking back on what she has written, she refers to having presented “an enquiry into intentional action and intention with which an action is done” (90). It’s hard to get a “theory” from piecemeal inquiries, and the specificity of the scenes that Anscombe dizzyingly conjures make it difficult to draw out just what kind of general claims she is presenting.

Second, it’s not always clear that the examples that do appear in Anscombe’s inquiry are the sort that will best inform the criticism of art. Most of Michaels’s references to Intention come from a couple sections in the middle of the book, when Anscombe is questioning the role of the “interior” in our understanding of someone’s intention. That focus is appropriate, given his own criticism of the caricatural terms theorists have sometimes used to discuss intention. But these passages appear within a much wider setting, and I wonder what happens when we are less selective with her book.

Take a moment near the beginning of Intention, for instance, when Anscombe asks how we recognize someone’s intentions—that is, as she says, whether there are statements of the form “A intends X” that “have a great deal of certainty” (7-8). Her answer is confoundingly simple: “Well, if you want to say at least some true things about a man’s intentions, you will have a strong chance of success if you mention what he actually did or is doing.” Why? Because “whatever else he may intend, or whatever may be his intentions in doing what he does, the greater number of things which you would say straight off a man did or was doing, will be things he intends.” As she says in the next paragraph, in both a law court or everyday life, it is usually unproblematic to say what a person is doing; and that person could likewise say what he or she was doing “perhaps without reflection, certainly without adverting to observation” (8). In its emphasis on the immediacy of understanding mental states, the passage recalls Wittgenstein’s repeated complaint that philosophy intellectualizes our responses to the world and to one another: “Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else’s fear or pain!” (108). Anscombe’s point is that when we watch, say, a carpenter build a table or a basketball player shoot a jump shot, we aren’t extrapolating his or her intention. We perceive his or her intentions non-inferentially, grasping bodily motions as expressions of one intention rather than another—none of which requires, as she says, asking what is “purely in the sphere of the mind” (9). Obviously a person can lie about wanting to do something, or could pretend. But pretense and falsehood are intelligible only to speakers who already know how to read “straight off” or speak “without reflection,” and such scenarios certainly can’t be how the language of these states gets set up and instituted in the first place. (Hence the persistent emphasis in Wittgenstein on learning, training, and education.)

As Michaels knows, such remarks are bound to be simply ignored by a great swath of literary theorists, who would see them as naïve or outright unintelligible. And yet, if those same literary theorists wondered just how germane these examples and remarks are to artworks—not just photographs, but also to poems, paintings, music, literary works—they might have a point. Not because photographs and other works aren’t made with intentions, but because these intentions can seldom be “read off” the works in the way we understand “with a great deal of certainty” the intentions of a carpenter or basketball player. That’s why photographs, poems, paintings, etc. can puzzle as much as attract us. Indeed, when the intentions of a work are straightforwardly certain, it’s often a symptom of its being second-rate: fantasy, propaganda, advertising. With genuine artworks, our initial responses are often quite circumspect and tentative. We feel a mood, hear a tone, notice a line, perceive an echo or a connection between two images; we might look at a photograph and notice what Michaels nicely calls, in a discussion of Cartier-Bresson, the “rhyme” of a visual pattern. We often proceed quite slowly, returning to a work over and over, appraising and reappraising what we perceive. And we might find that, to make sense of these works, we need to start making inferences—situating a work in the context of the artist’s other works, comparing it to other works, placing it next to other exemplars of the genre. The point isn’t that we never come to grasp a work at all; we do, or at least sometimes it feels like we do. The point is simply that this gradual, drawn-out process of interpretation is a good deal more complicated than the immediate intelligibility that interests Anscombe, the kind we experience when we watch the hammer hit the nail or the basketball leave the shooter’s hand.7

Or take a later moment in Intention. “Can it be,” Anscombe asks around two-thirds of the way through the book, “that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge?” (57). The final parts of Intention are devoted to attacking modern philosophy’s “incorrigibly contemplative conception knowledge” and contrasting it with an account of what it means not only to know the truth but also know what to do. In a careful analysis of “wanting,” “should,” “pleasure,” and related terms, Anscombe pieces together an Aristotelian description of rational agency, reconstructing the order of reasons that would justify an agent’s doing one thing rather than another or moving out of sheer whim. As illustration, she imagines a group of Nazis who, facing certain death, try to assess what to do with the compound of Jewish children near them. One of the Nazis sets up a mortar near the compound. Why? Because the mortar will be better placed to hit it. Why hit it? Because it will kill the children. Why kill the children? Because they are Jewish. Why kill Jews? Because it befits a Nazi to kill Jews, even in his final hours. With this final answer—roughly what Anscombe translates from De Anima as “Such a one should do such a thing” (64)—we arrive at the “desirability characterization” that obviates any further “What for?” questions. The “chain of ‘Why’s’” comes “to an end” (78).8 None of this means—as Anscombe immediately notes—that such reasoning necessarily goes through the head of an agent every time, step by step. No Nazi calculates so laboriously. The goal of spelling out the chain is that, as Anscombe says, “it describes an order which is there whenever actions are done with intentions.” The steps are a device that “reveals the order that is there in this chaos” of actions and events (80). Practical reasoning helps us make explicit the ways that a person’s actions are intelligible, laying out the means he or she has taken to achieve a given end, or—equally important—identifying just how these ends might not have been met. It makes sense to question a player’s decision to take a jump shot even if we know that, in the moment, the player wasn’t “deciding” anything, but just taking the shot.

Several passages in this stretch of Intention strike me as pertinent to an account of art, including Michaels’s account of contemporary photography. Not even the most strident intentionalist seriously believes, for instance, that artists sit down and plan out each word, brushstroke, note, etc. before they undertake the act of making something. Certainly Garry Winogrand seems not to have done so. Yet as Anscombe’s Aristotelian reconstruction of practical reasoning suggests, we shouldn’t take this fact to mean that the words, brushstrokes, notes, etc. are therefore arbitrarily tossed out, or the product of blind natural forces. In general, says Anscombe a little earlier, again invoking Aristotle, “one does not deliberate about an acquired skill; the description of what one does, which one completely understands, is at a distance from the details of one’s movement, which one does not consider at all” (54). The making of art is in many regards a paradigm of such skillful know-how. Whatever improvisations go into the making of them, artworks are in a certain sense rational, which is just to say that, in perceiving them, we as audiences and critics can begin to “reveal the order” that they display, an order “that is there whenever actions are done with intentions.”

At the same time, however, Anscombe’s example again raises the question of how far her account actually matters for the sorts of artists and artworks that interest Michaels. No doubt poets, painters, musicians, filmmakers, photographers have certain skills and trained capacities, about which they don’t give much step-by-step thought. That is in part why MFA programs could have come into existence. One goal of such institutions is to get its students to internalize a set of judgments, to make explicit procedures into implicit intuitions. But there’s also a reason why MFA programs have from the start been controversial. Both the Nazi and the non-Nazi know pretty well which range of behaviors are suitable to being a Nazi, and that killing Jewish children falls well within that range. The Nazi teacher knows to inculcate that lesson. Ditto with teaching carpentry and teaching basketball, however varied the means to those ends may be. If, however, there ever were such comparably clear criteria for “art” and “artist,” that day has long passed. In the domain of art, the Aristotelian premise that plays such a role in Anscombe’s account of practical reasoning— “Such a one should do such a thing”—no longer has the purchase it might once have had, and accordingly, the question “What for?” nowadays is brought much less easily to a clear end. We no longer, that is, have much shared agreement about what counts as “successful” or “good” art, or even “art” at all, and we no longer agree how best to become the kind of person who creates it. Hence Winogrand can look like a clumsy non-artist in the eyes of Mapplethorpe and Danto but an inventive, insightful, even paradigmatic photographer to Michaels. That such immensely thoughtful people, such educated critics and such skillful practitioners, could disagree about something as basic as the ends of photography and its exemplary cases—such a situation is a testament to the anomalous nature of art today relative to most other domains, including the domains that most interest Anscombe. Such a situation is conceivable only when, as Stanley Cavell puts it in an early essay on modernism, the question of “fraudulence” has become inescapable in discussions of art, and when our ability to distinguish the genuine from the imitation is too unstable, too fraught, to be “insured” by our knowing the right language or having healthy sensory reception. It is a situation in which, as he says, “crimes and deeds of glory look alike,” and “you often do not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer.”9 (190-91). It’s far less clear how to identify the artistic failure than it is to identify the bad Nazi, the table that wobbles, or the jump shot that bounces off the rim.

Mentioning this early paper by Cavell allows me to raise one final question that may sum up my others. As Michaels notes, Cavell learned a lot from Anscombe, and occasionally cites her in footnotes. But she never, tellingly, became central to his work. One reason, I suspect, was simply that the arts—Cavell’s own earliest passion, and what motivated so much of his own philosophical reflection—are not very seamlessly assimilated to a “theory of action.” They exemplify but also complicate standing ideas about how things get done, how they mean, and how we understand these doings and meanings. “The interpretation of the meaning of every work of art,” declares Michaels near the end of “Anscombe and Winogrand, Danto and Mapplethorpe,” “is an account of what the artist intended.” And then, after a brief and illuminating reading of Winogrand photograph Los Angeles: “But should we look at it this way? This is a question about how Winogrand meant it to be seen, which is to say, a question about what the photograph is about.” A sentence later, he says that his question is one about what “Winogrand was trying to do,” how his photograph “asks to be understood,” “what it means for it to be intended.” I confess to having difficulty following Michaels here, and I can’t tell whether all these terms—“intention,” “meaning,” “is about,” “asks to be understood,” “to be intended”—are meant (or intended?) to be synonymous. I have trouble understanding such statements not because I think artworks don’t have meanings, or because those meanings are not intended. I have trouble instead because I don’t grasp the singular noun “meaning” in that phrase “the interpretation of the meaning of every work of art,” or how precise of a “meaning” any particular work is supposed to have. Cavell’s early essay on modernism helps me articulate some of my misgivings, in particular the following single sentence, which appears a few pages after his remarks on fraudulence: “A work of art does not express some particular intention (as statements do), nor achieve particular goals (the way technological skill and moral action do), but, one may say, celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all (if you like, that they are free to choose), and that their actions are coherent and effective at all in the face of indifferent nature and determined society.”10 The Kantian ring of that remark is hard to miss: aesthetic pleasure arises when we grasp not a particular intention but intention as such, not the meaning but meaningfulness. Anscombe was a philosopher with a keen interest both in statements and in moral action, i.e., purposive behaviors performed either with particular intentions or with particular goals. Winogrand’s main intention in his photographs seems, by contrast, to have been more diffuse, less easily definable—the celebration of invention, display, and a certain conception of freedom. That distinction may get lost if we insist too much on having a unified theory of action, and Anscombe’s relative indifference to it may render her more marginal to discussions of the arts than we her admirers want to believe.

In his recent essays on art, philosophy, and the concept of intention in criticism—essays that are at once attentive and courageous, as notable for the force of their readings as for the insight of their ideas—Michaels suggests that the “opacity” of a photograph with regard to the photographer’s intention, and photography’s taking up intention and chance as central animating problems, account for the medium’s increasing art-historical importance over the last several decades.3 In what specific and concrete sense, Michaels asks, is the taking of a photograph an intentional act? If it is not in the collection or aggregate of things pictured in the frame, and if it is not in the mechanics of capture, where in the art of photography does the artist find room for the intentionality of her act to take shape and form?

One way to underline the originality and critical significance of the path Michaels travels into these questions in his essays on art and the philosophy of G. E. M. Anscombe is to say that Michaels shows that artists in the postwar and contemporary periods overwhelmingly are better and more incisive thinkers on these questions than philosophers and literary theorists. In an exemplary instance of the spirit of a certain kind of work emerging today at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, criticism, and the arts, Michaels allows the labor and the insights of “thinking” on the topic of art and intention to belong to artists and to reside in the contours of their artworks. For as he shows in the series of essays dedicated to exploring the implications of Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy for understanding certain works (the street photographs of Garry Winogrand or the Blind Time pieces of Robert Morris) and certain kinds of art criticism (Michael Fried), art animated by a creative tarrying with intention evinces a clarity and incisiveness on this topic, one whose exposition and exploration traditionally has belonged to philosophers and theorists. It may be the conceptual failings and disappointments of the latter, in fact, that at least implicitly account for Michaels’s continued attraction to intention as an old topic to be productively renewed again and again. In the essay “‘I Do What Happens’: Anscombe and Winogrand,” Michaels summarizes his project in just these terms: his ambition, he writes, is to show “the ways in which the practices of some photographers have themselves functioned as efforts to think about intentional acts.”4 Later he is even more forceful in recruiting art for the project of thought when he claims that photography in recent decades becomes “a medium in which to think about some problems in the theory of action.”5 In short, we can learn a lot about intention by looking closely at the works and practices of the artists Michaels singles out, and we stand to learn a lot about the social and aesthetic significance of intention as a persistent question for art generally, and as a special question in the context of late capitalist cultural production, if we allow Anscombe specifically to guide us toward an understanding of what intention in art and in life is.

Anscombe’s philosophy thus guides Michaels toward an orientation in reading that lets him see intention in dimensions or aspects of artworks that are not often invested with the weight of human intentionality. This is a real reward in the essays, a way of reading that is both conceptually and aesthetically satisfying—a new way of thinking and looking at once. Anscombe is useful for Michaels because her ideas sever intention from an inner willing or wanting and align it, instead, with consequence and happening (“what happens”). Anscombe explains at the conclusion of her book Intention:

Of course we have an interest in human actions: but what is it that we have a special interest in here? It is not that we have a special interest in the movement of these molecules—namely, the ones in a human being; or even in the movements of certain bodies—namely human ones. The description of what we are interested in is a type of description that would not exists if our question “Why?” did not. It is not that certain things, namely the movements of humans, are for some undiscovered reason subject to the question “Why?” So too, it is not just that certain appearances of chalk on blackboard are subject to the question “What does it say?” It is of a word or sentence that we ask “What does it say?”; and the description of something as a word or sentence at all could not occur prior to the fact that words or sentences have meaning. So the description of something as a human action could not occur prior to the existence of the question “Why?”, simply as a kind of utterance by which we were then obscurely prompted to address the question.6

As Michaels argues, the significance of an action for Anscombe is not exhausted by, explained by, or caused by the phenomenon—a real, objective phenomenon—of human intentionality, of someone’s intending to do some concrete thing. Surely we have an interest in human actions that are intentional, she writes, and these actions are interesting or important to us precisely because of the human intent they bespeak. But it does not follow for Anscombe that intention acts only as a primary cause or controlling agency within the field of action. To follow Michaels’s very instructive parallels, the hand’s action of drawing something specific or the person’s intention to draw some concrete object or scene are not the only ways that one can make a drawing with intent—that is, not the only ways to draw. Anscombe thus not only cuts off the philosophical concept of intention from an intangible inner wanting-to or wishing-that, as in the tradition of Wittgenstein, but she also—even further—makes central to human intending an objective field of resonance, material consequence, and actual happening that both precedes one’s having any intent and then exceeds the foreseeable scopes of that intention. Thus while Anscombe’s philosophy of intention is not anchored in aesthetics, it is for this reason that for Michaels she is nonetheless the most useful philosopher to approaching several contemporary art practices.

The payoff of this remarkably insightful conjunction of Elizabeth Anscombe and contemporary art is in the readings Michaels offers that demonstrate just how much we need this sharp and capacious conception of intention to understand not only what certain contemporary artists have done but also, we might say, what they are up to. Michaels’s recent essays take up artists who give up or refuse drawing just as they continue making marks and drawing things; or photographers who avoid the viewfinder or give up controlled perspective altogether just as they carry on deliberately taking photographs. As Michaels so convincingly shows in his readings of Robert Morris or Garry Winogrand alongside Michael Fried, what results from practices like these that disavow the traditional crafts of picture-making is not at all randomness or incoherence. It is important to note in the context of Michaels’s larger projects in cultural theory that such contrary practices also emphatically do not serve to affirm the nonagency of the artist or the final relinquishing of the ghost of classic authorial intent. Instead, in Michaels’s care, artists like Winogrand and Morris offer reflections, in the form of art, on intention and meaning in art within a context—possibilities, fractures, and novel ways of reaching with intent, of having something to say and show and then of making it count as that having-something-to-say-and-show. And Michaels, in turn, offers forms of reading sensitive to what such artworks actually want to say.

The example of Garry Winogrand’s photographic practices stands out for me as a case that Michaels illuminates with a special vividness and sense of discovery; one has the feeling that this artist needed this critic. The case thus highlights the immense rewards of Michaels’s readings and what I will suggest in conclusion perhaps also indicates a limiting horizon beyond which to continue exploring and thinking at this crossroads of art, philosophy, and criticism. Winogrand’s practice of taking mountainous numbers of photographs and waiting several years before beginning the process of selection and developing his film represents his aim, in his own famous words, to take photographs in order to find out what something will look like photographed. As Michaels puts it, what Winogrand sees at the moment he is taking a photograph is not what he will see later on when he selects the “work” from the pile of photographic film years later. Winogrand’s interest in photography thus cannot be established by or anchored in his interest in any particular or single photograph. Why or how a photograph comes to interest him years later or comes to the foreground within the mountain of possible photographs is a matter of his own discoveries, and it is not at all determined by his intention in the moment of taking the picture. Meaning in his artistic practice is thus not something going on “inside the photographer’s head” but rather a purposeful contortion of and meaningful agility with photographic processes. Explicitly echoing several moments in Michaels’s illuminating readings, we might say that intention in Winogrand’s photographic process is first suspended and then years later overlaid onto the photographic image as though it were an aftereffect, the nonintentional act transformed by a process that Michaels sees as allegorical of all art—the rendering of something as intentional.7 Like Morris’s Blind Time drawings that expose and document the distance between what the artist hoped he might be doing and what he actually does, separating intent and outcome structurally, Winogrand’s photographs too insist on the gap between intention and formal artwork.8

The introduction of a distance between what you want to say and do (intention) and what you have said and done (artwork) is definitional for Michaels of art’s situation in the context of late capitalism. This is a line of thinking in the recent essays that follows from his earlier work and investments. Meaning in art (what you have actually done and said) slips away from the artist’s ranges of control within the environment, for example, of the unprecedented circulation of commodities. But instead of allowing meaning and intention to be coopted, predictably and inevitably, the artists Michaels admires evacuate the work of emotional, affective, or personal forms of address preemptively, as though anti-pathos and anti-sentiment were a shield or defense. In his earlier The Beauty of a Social Problem, Michaels already identifies this tendency specifically in contemporary photography as its explicit anti-pathos, “making it impossible for us to identify,” he writes, “by giving us no one to identify with”—an art that precisely “doesn’t reach out” and declares the irrelevance of our feelings or concerns. In that book, Michaels’s stake is in locating the social force and social-economic insights of an art that “refuses the politics of personal involvement.”9 And even earlier in the seminal The Shape of the Signifier, Michaels had already outlined his allegiances in these terms:

So the address to the subject becomes the appeal to the subject’s interest, while the address to the spectator appeals to his or her sense of what is good, of what compels conviction. And if one more or less inevitable way to understand this distinction between paintings he likes and paintings he doesn’t, Fried’s insistence that good paintings compel conviction seems designed precisely to counter this objection, to counter the criticism that the difference between interesting and convincing objects is just the difference in our attitude toward those objects. For what makes conviction superior to interest is the fact that interest is essentially an attribute of the subject—the question of whether we find an object interesting is (like the question about how the waterfall makes us feel) a question about us—whereas objects that compel conviction do not leave the question of our being convinced up to us. Compelling conviction is something that work does, and it is precisely this commitment to the work—it is good regardless of whether we are interested—that Fried wants to insist on.10

The numerable Kantian echoes in this passage (subjects, objects, interests) draw attention to the role that a perhaps too-strict formalism plays in Michaels’s understanding of his larger aesthetic-political project in reading. As in his recent essays on art and philosophy, feelings and emotions in this early passage are understood as and thus reduced to likings or interests: attributes of the subject that, as in Kant’s third Critique, must be suspended for meaningful aesthetic judgment and response. Personal interest, after all, is for Michaels precisely unconvincing. Questions about art, as he writes here, should not be questions about us.11

Yet questions about art are always questions about us, and this constitutive fact about artworks—that they are made by us and are not otherwise objects or things merely in the world—seems to me in fact the very starting point for the incisive readings, guided by an investment in art as an intentional practice, that are so distinctive of Michaels’s work and critical perspectives. As he writes, if you treat the painting as unintended, “you will not be seeing it as a work.”12 Thus the tension between Michaels’s investment in the category of intention and his full refusal, one which I sense is both intellectual but also instinctive, to consider with a more complex vocabulary how we becomes engaged in and attentive to art as the very people we are is what I might mark as a limiting horizon in his project. For there are surely ways of understanding art’s forms of address and appeal that do not rely on a strict contrary between form and human feeling, aesthetic composition and personal responsiveness. One senses in these essays especially Michaels reaching for a vocabulary that finds a hyperpersonalized term like desire as deficient as the impersonal term affect and, having given up, settling for something else altogether: form.

But just as art photography takes some of its most interesting shapes by harnessing the medium’s inherent chance and automatic capabilites, it also tangles itself in interesting strains in domestic, pornographic, sentimental, commercial, journalistic, and documentary forms—those everyday genres that in all instances want something from us. It thus seems to me worthwhile for criticism, on the whole, to develop a vocabulary in reading that register the entreaties and appeals artworks can make on us with a complexity that is faithful to the complexity of human responsiveness to art.

As an instructive example, John Lysaker writes about artworks as solicitations that petition us, like invitations that radiate an ethos and that hold up their own bearings and values through a second-person, address-like appeal.13 Michael Fried’s conception of the antitheatrical tradition in Western art might point in an exemplary direction in this regard too. In his readings of Fried’s art criticism, Michaels argues that the figure of Fried’s beholder when standing before a work of art discovers “the irrelevance of her own position in real space.”14 Yet Fried’s actual emphasis differs in a manner that points us toward a more complex sense of the responsiveness involved in aesthetic appeals. For Fried is concerned in all of his art-historical writings with the active formal work involved in the artwork’s ensuring that it is as though the beholder were not there—not “irrelevant” but not there.15 The artworks in the tradition of absorptive realism that interest Fried are engrossed in their own worlds, as though self-enclosed and self-sufficient universes. These artworks insist on the world-apartness of the world they depict from the space or world that the viewer occupies. Direct signs of address to the beholder—signs of confrontation, desire, calculation, conscription—all threaten to puncture the integrity of these aesthetic worlds. But Fried underlines that when the artwork in effect turns away from the beholder and negates her in this manner, it thereby manages to address, arrest, spellbind, and thus absorb her as a viewer of art too. It is not her personal involvement or the particularity of her existence that the viewer leaves behind on Fried’s account but her physical presence, which is “counteracted” by the painting or work that in turn relies on the “fiction” of her absence.16

The imagery throughout Fried’s criticism is thus not of making the beholder irrelevant but, precisely through an appeal to her cares and investments, making her capable of imagining something other than her own world and position. But in order to do anything like this, as Fried writes, the artwork has to set in motion a set of felt, lived contrasts between the world she lives in, the one she perceives and moves within, and the one the work holds out, reflects, or constitutes. That sealed realm is closed off from the viewer, structurally, but its aesthetic conviction nonetheless lives and dies on the actual engagement of her absorbed capacities.17

That is to say, when the description of what happens is the very thing which I should say I was doing, then there is no distinction between my doing and the thing’s happening.1

Michaels goes on to argue in his essay that the account of human agency that Anscombe endorses is sharply different from that of Donald Davidson, despite the common depiction of the two of them as allies in an “Anscombe–Davidson view” of intentional action, and that the difference in their respective positions can be brought out by considering the peculiar form of agency involved in photography. I believe that Michaels is right on both counts, but wrong in some of the details of his argument—partly because of what I will argue is a misreading of one of the texts on which that argument is premised.

I

Let’s begin with Anscombe’s “formula.” As Michaels notes,2 Anscombe writes in Intention that she “came out” with it in considering the following remarks in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

6.373   The world is independent of my will.

6.374   Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.3

Here is how Anscombe glosses the position that she finds here—it is within the context of considering the strange idea that “I really ‘do’ in the intentional sense whatever I think I am doing”:

E.g. if I think I am moving my toe, but it is not actually moving, then I am “moving my toe” in a certain sense, and as for what happens, of course I haven’t any control over that except in an accidental sense. The essential thing is just what has gone on in me, and if what happens coincides with what I ‘do’ in the sphere of intentions, that is just a grace of fate. This I think was Wittgenstein’s thought in the Tractatus… (Intention, 52)

Having explained the Tractarian position as she understands it, Anscombe then calls it “nonsense,” and criticizes her teacher as follows:

if nothing guarantees that the window gets opened when I “open the window,” equally nothing guarantees that my toe moves when I “move my toe”; so the only thing that does happen is my intention; but where is that to be found? I mean: what is its vehicle? Is it formulated in words? And if so, what guarantees that I do form the words that I intend? for the formulation of the words is itself an intentional act. And if the intention has no vehicle that is guaranteed, then what is there left for it to be but a bombination in a vacuum? (ibid.)

I find it hard to be wholly persuaded by Anscombe’s anti-Wittgensteinian argument here, partly because I’ve been brought up in a philosophical tradition where we are comfortable thinking of the “vehicles” of our mental attitudes as the states of a person’s brain. But I’m nevertheless strongly attracted to the alternative position she recommends, with its refusal to construe intentions as mental items that exist alongside bodily movements and their downstream effects. For Anscombe, if we wish to explain what intentional actions are, it “will be a mistake to look for the fundamental description of what occurs—such as the movements of muscles or molecules—and then think of intention as something, perhaps very complicated, which qualifies this. The only events to consider are intentional actions themselves, and to call an action intentional is to say that it is intentional under some description that we give (or could give) of it” (Intention, 29).

II

This last claim is one that Dominic McIver Lopes, whose account of photographic agency Michaels means to be disagreeing with, professes his own allegiance to. Lopes suggests that the key to understanding intentional action is “a bit of action theory originally due to Anscombe, made standard by Donald Davidson”:

An action is an event, one that happens intentionally. However, attributions of agency and intentions serve different purposes. In attributing agency, we credit an agent or hold them responsible for what happens. In attributing intentions, we explain or justify what an agent does—we work out their reasons for acting. Moreover, one and the same event can be intentional under some descriptions but not others. The guard flips a switch, turns on a light, draws 5.4 Amps, illuminates the room, and alerts a prowler: these are one action described in four ways, and what the guard does is intentional under some but not all of these descriptions—she did not intend to draw 5.4 Amps or alert the prowler, for example. An event is an action as long as it is done intentionally under some description. We explain the action by attributing intentions relative to descriptions, but we credit the act under all descriptions. The guard did draw 5.4 Amps, though she did not intend to, because what happens is 5.4 Amps get drawn and that is the same event as turning on the light, which she intended to do.4

While this position does indeed coincide with Anscombe’s on many particular points, her fundamental disagreement with it can be brought out by looking at the third sentence quoted here. According to the Davidsonian position that McIver Lopes favors, we are to treat “what happens” in action as a particular event that can be singled out independently of its connection to a person’s activity, so that “attributing agency” is a matter of postulating some relation between the two: here, a relation of credit or responsibility. On this position, we find intentional activity whenever a person, or a certain group of her mental states, causes something to happen, where what happens corresponds appropriately to the agent’s internal representation of it. Anscombe, however, says that when we act, what happens is simply what we do. Yet this formula does sound pretty “paradoxical and obscure,” and this is surely a large part of why the dominant tendency among analytic philosophers has been to read Anscombe as having largely the same view as Davidson. Can we bring out the coherence of her position by reflecting on the nature of drawing as a form of image making?

Michaels seems to me to get right to the heart of these matters in his discussion of the work of Robert Morris in his essay “Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe).” Morris’s Blind Time drawings were made blindfolded or with his eyes closed, the artist moving his hands across the canvas in a series of planned steps. In his essay, Michaels quotes Jean Michel Roy’s illuminating description of the philosophical vision behind this project:

Traditionally, [Roy] says, we might think that “drawing is a direct product of an intention” (136). We would, for example, describe ourselves as “drawing a horse” or “drawing a diagonal line” and we would think of the horse or the line as the product of our intentions. But the Blind Time drawings and the accompanying commentary show that that would be a mistake. The artist’s intentions are not to draw a horse but to move his hands on the paper in various ways (“upward” and then “outward”); the drawings are what happens when he does that. Thus, Roy says, they should be understood as “the by-products of the artist’s intentions and not its products” (137).5

Michaels then draws an instructive parallel between this position and that of Davidson in his paper “Agency.” For Davidson, the relation of what he calls a person’s “primitive actions” to any wider descriptions that hold true of what a person does is a relation of cause to effect:

When we infer that he stopped his car from the fact that by pressing a pedal a man caused his automobile to come to a stop, we do not transfer agency from one event to another, or infer that the man was agent not only of one action but of two. We may indeed extend responsibility or liability for an action to responsibility or liability for its consequences, but this we do, not by saddling the agent with a new action, but by pointing out that his original action had those results.

We must conclude, perhaps with a shock of surprise, that our primitive actions, the ones we do not by doing something else, mere movements of the body—these are all the actions there are. We never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.6

We should be struck by the similarity between Davidson’s position and the Tractarian one that Anscombe rejects. Both positions depict the core of agency (either “willing” or “primitive action”) as on one side of a divide and the world (the results, the wider descriptions) as on the other, with the connection between these things depicted as something further that a human agent must presume but is powerless to effect. And this is exactly the opposite of Anscombe’s own view. For her, “what happens” when we act, even under descriptions in terms of what goes on at a distance from the movements of our bodies, is itself the stuff that action consists in, and not a mere consequence or result of what we do. As Michaels puts it, Anscombe’s crucial idea is that “we should not think of what we’re doing [in acting] as moving our hands in such a way as to cause there to be a drawing or a word—we should think of ourselves as drawing or writing” (“Blind Time,” 3-4).

But I think that Michaels misreads, in a way that ultimately reverses the lesson we are meant to draw from it, a passage in Intention where Anscombe reflects on the role of perception in writing or drawing. That passage follows her introduction of the formula “I do what happens,” which she acknowledges was found “extremely paradoxical and obscure” by everyone who heard it. Anscombe continues:

And I think the reason is this: what happens must be given by observation; but I have argued that my knowledge of what I do is not by observation. A very clear and interesting case of this is that in which I shut my eyes and write something. I can say what I am writing. And what I say I am writing will almost always in fact appear on the paper. Now here it is clear that my capacity to say what is written is not derived from any observation. In practice of course what I write will very likely not go on being very legible if I don’t use my eyes; but isn’t the role of all our observation-knowledge in knowing what we are doing like the role of the eyes in producing successful writing? That is to say, once given that we have knowledge or opinion about the matter in which we perform intentional actions, our observation is merely an aid, as the eyes are an aid in writing. Someone without eyes may go on writing with a pen that has no more ink in it; or may not realise he is going over the edge of the paper on to the table or overwriting lines already written; here is where the eyes are useful; but the essential thing he does, namely to write such-and-such, is done without the eyes. So without the eyes he knows what he writes; but the eyes help to assure him that what he writes actually gets legibly written. In the face of this how can I say: I do what happens? If there are two ways of knowing there must be two different things known. (Intention, 53)

The second to last sentence quoted here should signal to the reader that Anscombe is not putting this argument forward in her own voice: it’s rather a natural line of reasoning that she thinks will lead a person to resist the formula “I do what happens,” since it gives expression to a picture of agency that makes that formula appear so paradoxical. On that picture, in writing a word a person may have to rely on her eyes to know what is written when she writes something, but the fact that she is writing a certain thing is something she can know even if her eyes are shut. And this reinforces the very division between “doing” and “happening” that Anscombe is out to challenge: it treats these as two different objects of knowledge, the first known from within by a person who may have no idea of the other, and the second known through perception in the same way as an outside observer might.

Yet Michaels makes the mistake, which I should emphasize is an easy one to fall into, of reading this passage as an expression of Anscombe’s own view. As he reads it, the proper conclusion of this passage is that in an activity like writing “‘the essential thing’…has nothing to do with observation—my eyes are useful in making sure that what I write is written legibly, but I’m writing what I’m writing (and I know what I’m doing) without them” (“I Do What Happens,” 2). And to say this is just to abandon Anscombe’s central thesis. If it were possible for me to be writing what I am writing even if the words weren’t appearing on the page (or screen), then the doing that is my action would stop short of the happening that is their actual appearance. And if it were possible for me to know that I am writing what I am writing even if I didn’t know whether the words were actually getting produced, then what I’d know in knowing this wouldn’t be “exactly the same thing” that can also be known “by observation of what takes place” (Intention, 51). We would be back to something like the “mad account” that Anscombe started off with, on which “what one knows as intentional action is only the intention, or possibly also the bodily movement; and that the rest is known by observation to be the result, which was also willed in the intention” (ibid., 52).

This is not the place for me to take on the very difficult question of how Anscombe wishes us to understand the role of perception in the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions.7 Rather, I have focused on the proper interpretation of the case in which Anscombe writes with her eyes shut because doing so is a way to bring out very clearly the commitment of Anscombe’s that Michaels wants us to endorse, even if his own understanding of the case ends up pushing us in what I think is the wrong direction. What makes Morris’s artistic practice so strange is precisely that it represents the artist’s drawings in the way that “successful writing” is treated by Anscombe’s imagined interlocutor: these things may result from a person’s activity so long as all goes well, but whether this actually happens is something that the agent must rely on observation to determine. By contrast, in an ordinary productive activity like drawing a picture, writing a word, constructing a building, and so on, the agent’s relation to her work is more intimate than that.

III

This brings us around to Michaels’s discussion of the philosophical problem of photography, i.e. of what he calls the “pressure” that photographic agency puts “on the relation between what I do and what happens.”8 As I understand his argument, the nature of the pressure is supposed to be as follows. In drawing or painting, what’s depicted in the image that an artist creates will be depicted only because the artist herself meant to depict it. Thus, for example, it simply makes no sense to suppose that it may have “just happened” that there’s a child in the background of Courbet’s The Grain Sifters who is peering into the machine in the corner. For such a thing to happen, Courbet must have painted the boy intentionally, and so Anscombe’s “certain sense of the question ‘Why?’”9 will have application to the boy’s appearance. Having seen the boy in the image, we are immediately invited to ask: What was Courbet doing, in putting him there? Why did he make this choice? What is the significance of showing this child, within this context of domestic labor, doing the thing that he is?

As I have argued, on the Anscombean position that Michaels and I share questions like these are not at all ones about the “mind” of the artist as distinct from what he or she actually does.10 The situation is just as with the people depicted in Courbet’s painting: when we look at the painting and describe what they are doing (sifting grain through a sieve, picking things off a plate, peering into a box) we thereby describe many of the intentions with which they are acting as they are. (For this point see Anscombe, Intention, 7-9.) Similarly, our questions about Courbet’s intentions in painting the boy aren’t questions about how it came to be that this bluish-green patch is off to the right of the center of the canvas. Rather, they are questions about why Courbet painted the boy—and so a discovery that this isn’t what Courbet intended to be doing after all (that he was painting with his eyes closed, perhaps, and this is just what materialized: surely an impossible thing to imagine in the case at issue!) would then lead us to abandon this as a description of what he did, and indeed of what is there on the canvas, after all. Not a boy, perhaps, but a splotch of paint that can easily be mistaken for one.

But things are quite different when it comes to photographs. When Cartier-Bresson took his photograph of the couple appealing to Cardinal Pacelli, he also took a photograph of everyone else in the surrounding throng, including the balding man with the unfortunate mustache who is shown in the upper left of the image. And our judgment that Cartier-Bresson photographed the mustached man will not be called into question by the discovery that he didn’t intend to do so—that, perhaps, he didn’t know the man was there, or knew he was there only after he observed his face in the corner when the photograph was developed (compare Anscombe, Intention, 11 and 14). While it’s true, as Lopes emphasizes, that in such a case photographing the man will nevertheless be something that falls within the scope of Cartier-Bresson’s agency, so that it is something we can attribute to him and judge him responsible for, this won’t be in a way that gives the Anscombean “Why?” question application to it. To the question, “Why is that mustached man shown in the corner?,” the answer “He just happened to be in the background when the picture was snapped” does not give a reason for photographing the man, but rather a cause of why the man appears in the photograph. It does not, however, impugn the judgment that he does appear there, in the way that the corresponding judgment about the boy would be, if we discovered that this splotch of paint was put there without intending it to depict what it evidently does.

I have tried to be very cautious in the way I’ve put this point. As I see it, the pressure that photography puts on the Anscombean understanding of how an artist’s productive activity relates to the work that she produces is by far the most acute when our concern is with what is represented or depicted in an artwork. That is, it is insofar as the bit of paint off to the right of the center of Courbet’s canvas is taken to depict a boy that we think it couldn’t be there unless he intended it to be so—and then, in the unbelievable case where we discovered that this isn’t what Courbet was out to depict, we would be forced to conclude, not that Courbet didn’t intentionally put the paint there (even in “in that shape,” perhaps), but that in so doing he didn’t paint a boy in that portion of the canvas. By contrast, the fact that a balding, mustached man is depicted in the top left corner of Cartier-Bresson’s photograph is entirely independent of the photographer’s own judgment: the man can be in that corner of the photograph without Cartier-Bresson having put his him there. In this respect, what happens when Cartier-Bresson takes his photograph is, to look back to that phrase of Wittgenstein’s, to a significant degree “a favour of fate” (Tractatus 6.734). The man may have happened to show up in the background of Cartier-Bresson’s photograph in a way that the boy can’t have happened to show up in the background of Courbet’s painting.

This is not just a point about the “descriptions under which” an act is intended. (For this phrase, see Intention, 10-11.) Pacelli was born on the 2^nd of March, and so in photographing him Cartier-Bresson photographed a man who was born on that date: and what he did may have been unintentional under this description but intentional under the description “photographing Cardinal Pacelli.” But that point holds just as much in the case of painting as in that of photography, whereas the one I’m after is more specific. I might put my point by saying that, in painting or drawing, depiction is an essentially intentional act: the shape that one paints on a canvas, or draws on a page, may be only unintentionally a depiction of X, as one may not have known that “X” was a true description of whatever one depicted. It must, however, have been an intentional description of someone or something if it is to have been a depiction, intentional or not, of anyone or anything at all. (So the discovery that Courbet didn’t know the date of birth of the boy he painted wouldn’t bear on the question of whether a boy who was born on that date is depicted in his canvas in the same way as the discovery that, impossibly, Courbet didn’t know that he was painting a boy there at all.) By contrast, it is quite possible to take a photograph of someone or something while having no idea at all that you are doing this, since the status of a region of a photograph as depicting someone or something is secured just by its having come about through an appropriate mechanical process.

Yet, for all this, clearly it is possible for a person to photograph someone or something intentionally, and thus for Anscombe’s question “Why?” to have application to some aspect of what is depicted in a photograph, or to how this depicted thing appears. And this possibility opens back up the way of thinking about agency that the formula “I do what happens” was supposed to help us resist. When Cartier-Bresson pushes the button on his camera, a certain mechanical process begins to unfold, and this process results in an image that contains Pacelli, the couple in the foreground, the mustached man in the top left, and so on. And all of this could also have happened entirely by chance, or if Pacelli’s intention was to do something quite different from what he did. What, then, is Pacelli’s intention supposed to be, if it is not an inner state of mind, something “attaching to the action at the time it is done,”11 and which does not enter into the description of what happens when, thanks to Pacelli’s push of a button, the mechanism in his camera goes on to generate his photograph?

IV

I think that Michaels’s response to this question is largely on the right track, and largely in line with Anscombe’s own. (This convergence is no accident: I am, like John Gibbons, the kind of person who’s inclined to think “that being incompatible with Anscombe is a little like being incompatible with the facts.”12 ) Toward the end of Intention, Anscombe encapsulates her position with another fairly obscure slogan, writing that “the term ‘intentional’ has reference to a form of description of events” (Intention, 84). The point of italicizing the word “form” in this context is to mark an opposition with the idea that in describing an action as intentional we posit a special element that exists alongside, and is somehow appropriately connected to, the agent’s bodily movements. Her idea is, rather, that the description of what these movements are, spelled out in a way that gives her question “Why?” application to them, is itself a description of a person’s intentional activity.

Here is how this position is supposed to apply to the case of taking a photograph. I have tried to bring out how, in photography, there is a distinctive kind of gap between a person’s immediate movements and the product that results from them—a gap that is filled by the operation of a mechanical process, with plenty of room for the “favour of fate” to intervene. Still, it is not as if a photographer’s contribution to this process is simply in the press of a button that sets it off: for there is also the process of setting up from an appropriate angle, focusing the lens, identifying successful images and then perhaps cropping and retouching them, and so on. None of this puts the photographer in quite the same position as the painter, since the way that her image comes to depict what she photographs means that the response “Oh—I didn’t see that this (he, she) was there; it’s just how things happened to be when I took the picture” can have a significance that isn’t available in relation to something that one has drawn or painted. But the status of photography as an intentional activity, and in some cases a form of artistic practice, is constituted by the wider context in which this activity takes place.

Of course, the wider context that’s supplied by what we might call traditional photographic practice, where the role of the photographer is to deliver a faithful representation of things as they anyway are, is only one among many of the contexts in which photographs can be taken. Lopes and Michaels identify several of these over the course of their exchange: among them we have Garry Winogrand’s street photographs and Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes, which stand opposed to one another in the way they conceive of the photographer’s relationship to his or her subject matter. And I agree with Michaels that part of what makes this work philosophically interesting is precisely the way that its wider context includes an awareness of the photographer’s peculiar relation to the image that is the product of her work—so that the work comes to have the circumstances of its production as one of its own topics, and can’t really be understood independently of this reflexive concern.13

I often link the aesthetics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art to my study of nineteenth-century art; I do this not because the later era finds its cause in the earlier but because the central issues—those of interest from my perspective—remain much the same. To distinguish the postmodern from the modern within this historical span seems academically myopic, especially if the intention is to signal a definitive disjuncture in cultural practice.1 It is all “modern,” this art of many media and techniques, produced under conditions of rapid technological change and increasingly global commerce that threaten whatever persists of traditional forms of social interaction. All the while, conventional sources of identity (nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, profession), even in their transgressional manifestations (statelessness, queering), lose their import. All appear the same to technology and commerce, unruly offspring of human ingenuity. They show no respect, exercise no tact, acquire no manners.

Changing the world

A colleague recently made an off-hand remark, a friendly provocation to a person like myself, engaged in interpreting the techniques and imagery of painting: “You know, photography changed the modern world a lot more than Paul Cézanne ever did.” If taking second place in transforming history amounts to creative or moral deficiency, the failing was in Cézanne’s preferred medium of painting, not in the artist, who was remarkably independent and bold. Photography and painting are both technologies; but by the usual standards, photography is the more advanced—by the usual standards. Photography generates visual imagery with increased representational nuance, greater efficiency, and greater economy than is possible with painting. After a relatively short period of commercial development, its quotidian use required minimal familiarity with its materials and virtually no training. Yet the same could be said of painting, which enjoyed a late nineteenth-century vogue as a bourgeois pastime—anyone could do it. “To be a painter or not to be a painter! This is the great modern anxiety,” Octave Mirbeau ironized in 1892: “We are living in the age of oil.”2 The results of amateur painting, however, remained far less refined than those of amateur photography, less comparable to an acknowledged professional standard. We sometimes refer to self-taught painting as “outsider art”; I have yet to hear of “outsider photography.” Photography, a great leveler, had the advantage of standardized equipment and a mechanism with the potential of normalizing its use. Representation within this medium rendered the differentiation of amateur and professional, as well as the distinction between document and work of art, nearly irrelevant. Photography truncated any future for painting, a medium comparatively rarefied that would never again play a leading role in public communication. Perhaps painting retains some competitiveness as graphic design rather than as naturalistic depiction. The most recognizable painter’s image within the West may be Edvard Munch’s Scream, which, in reduced graphic form, rivals the familiarity of corporate logos like those of Apple and Nike, yet lacks their global reach.

Without hesitation, I agreed with my colleague’s ranking of photography above Cézanne. Of course, I thought, photography has had the greater impact, and by far. It quickly became the reigning public medium, conveying visual information with relative transparency, comparable to the mass-circulation newspapers and bulletins of the nineteenth century that rendered information accessible in verbal form, just as broadcast radio did in the early twentieth century. Photography had the advantage of seeming impersonal, therefore objectively accurate, at least with respect to its mechanism: “One Artist has one touch for foliage, another has another; and we may from such characteristic touch devine the intended tree and perhaps name the Artist. But your photogenic drawing [the calotype process of William Henry Fox Talbot] would … exhibit the touch of the great Artist, Nature.”3 Nature’s touch had universal style—that is, no style. Talbot himself argued that the new photography would improve the quality of existing modes of representation, not undermine them: “Even the accomplished artist will call in sometimes this auxiliary aid, when pressed for time in sketching a building or a landscape, or when wearied with the multiplicity of its minute details.” There remained “ample room for the exercise of skill and judgment” because the human operator would control certain variations, such as those produced by differences in exposure time.4 By this reasoning, the capacity of photography to capture depersonalized detail presented no threat to the creativity associated with the traditional fine arts. It merely enhanced the field of aesthetic nuance.

A reviewer of the Cézanne retrospective of 1995, timed to the centennial of the artist’s first exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s Paris gallery, stated the obvious without noting an obvious limitation: “It has become almost conventional to view Cézanne as the founding father of a new, 20th-century way of seeing and thinking about the world.”5 Here is the catch: if Cézanne’s art provided access to conceptualizing the world in a modern way, if his unorthodox methods stimulated a new way of thinking about the world, photography, along with its technological derivatives—transparencies, film, video, photoelectronic imagery of all kinds—was and is this world, its pellucid self-image.6 Painting, having lost its preeminence, would be reduced to studying and critiquing photography. And this has happened in abundance during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Studio artists today commonly choose photography or film as their representational model in preference to working from a living body or a physical object.7 Traditional painting retained the material world as its primary object of study; “modern” painting has been studying dematerialized images of the world.

A possible counterargument: painting had always depended primarily on images; its sources were preexisting paintings and sculptures, as well as collections of prints and drawings. In one way or another, painting has always been an art of appropriation. To generalize from painting to other media: all cultural forms are cannibalistic. The various genres of photography were merely derived from those of painting. Yet—a further complication—a new technology, like that of photography, introduces novel qualities of vision, perhaps to be cannibalized by work in the existing technologies. Derivativeness is reciprocal, ultimately indistinguishable from innovation. The notion is common among critics: we innovate by deriving in an abusive form.

The learning curve for photography was hardly steep. From the nineteenth century on, most people have felt competent interpreting photographic depictions. We now receive this imagery on screens of various kinds, thoroughly dematerialized, universally expandable and contractible, suited to all conditions of viewing. Far fewer people would claim competence in interpreting contemporary painting, or, for that matter, Cézanne’s painting, even though in public view for well over a century. Professional critics and academics are aware that photography has a rhetoric just as painting does; but the general population accepts photography as if they understand its rhetoric as a natural language. They acknowledge little need for the analytical distinctions devised by Roland Barthes and other theorists.8 If we are already walking, we hardly need a theory of walking; so it is with photographic imagery, which has saturated social and cultural life. We already perceive and interpret it as a second nature (as Barthes realized and sought to counteract, identifying its mystifications, in effect, its ideology). Photography and its electronic derivatives have entered both public and private realms to such an extent that the imagery has become a naturalized, and hence ideologically compromised, component of modern living. A writer of film criticism can instruct the reader regarding elliptical aspects of a plot or obscure historical references built into a cinematic narrative but has no cause to explain how to watch the movie. The viewer already knows.

Just as photography remedied perceived shortcomings in painting and drawing, in turn, a critique of photography remains implicit in any rival technology that does what photography does not. I have suggested that a critique has long been coming from painting. In the wake of photography, painters felt liberated to pursue ever more esoteric interests, if only because the social demand for transparency was being satisfied elsewhere. Modern painting, like work in other modern outgrowths of traditional media, such as sculptural assemblage and relief, has become a zone for testing perception and challenging acculturated habits of vision, including those induced by photography.

So perhaps I concurred too quickly, conceding that photography was more transformative than painting. I might have argued that, by historical irony, any medium that achieves dominance ceases to be transformative. Yes, photography changed the world, but this revolution in graphic imagery succeeded all too quickly, like the recent revolution in modes of electronic transmission. Whose world did photography change? It left its nineteenth-century world open to being affected by whatever forms of imagery exposed aspects of human experience that photography was never programmed to reveal. One example: the extent to which visual experience has a tactile component becomes apparent only when the more tactile medium of painting mimics a photographic image or process, restoring the suppressed tactile dimension. The high resolution of photographic imagery conceals its underlying physicality—in analog photography a play of minute elements of emulsion, in digital photography a play of electronic pixels.9 A second example: painting indicates the extent to which a photographic image has been (unnaturally) rendered static, stilled, even deadened. When painter Vija Celmins reflected on her use of photographic images as models during the 1960s, she described setting these images “back in the real world—in real time. Because when you look at the work [of painting] you confront the here and now.”10 An image of “the here and now” is inherently low-resolution, relative to whatever passes for a perfected standard, the focused high resolution that is gradually acquired and seemingly timeless. A pictorial surface of low resolution corresponds to the transiency of sensory experience. By the 1960s, when Celmins and numerous other painters were enlivening photographic imagery (often, as with Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, by means of transfer or screen printing), it had become fashionable to refer to the life in photography as death; photographs connoted what-had-been.11 The immediacy of a process of painting would return a living quality to a stilled image, a quality of now as opposed to then. Painting induces acts of viewing that animate its imperfect image.

Photography had probably already “changed the world” by the 1860s, a full century before Celmins, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, when many painters, such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, were stressing the coarse material qualities of their tactile medium. Their technique indicated no interest in competing for photographic finish. This was the “changed” world that Cézanne entered as a young artist. A judgment of what might count as transformative in 1870 as well as now will depend on whose photography and whose painting is under consideration, and how the cultural context of any transformation is to be conceived.12

The analog model and its exception

The so-called academic painting of the nineteenth century was an institutional product designed for standardization and ease of comprehension. Its preferred techniques furthered an effect of transparency by generating a polished surface that was analog in appearance, suppressing signs of its facture, its material fabrication. J.-A.-D. Ingres, often invoked as an exemplary figure, believed that all signs of the manipulation of materials should recede from view, allowing art to rise above folkish craft: “Touch should not be apparent … Instead of the object represented, it makes one see the painter’s technique; in the place of thought, it proclaims the hand.”13 Aside from contour drawing, the fundamental representational device was chiaroscuro, the play of dark and light. A prominent mark or index of the hand would interfere with the continuous transitions of tone known as “modeling”: “The more the mark [tache] assumes importance in itself,” Félix Bracquemond stated in 1885, “the more the modeling disappears.”14 He was writing during the age of impressionism, characterized by painters’ techniques that pressured traditional analog ideals with the evidence of digital process. As culturally coded representation, the mark alluded primarily to making, whereas the modeling alluded primarily to pictorial reference. Two bodies of information, neither of them the greater, but different in kind.

Of course, standing close to a work of large scale would reveal marks of the hand of the most skillful of academic painters; but close was not the natural distance. Resolution was evaluated relative to size. Evident marking at easel scale became far more problematic: “The artist who paints with broad strokes within a small format contradicts himself dramatically because, even as the small scale of the frame invites me to come near, the largeness of the execution holds me at a distance.”15 Charles Blanc, academic theorist and critic, made this statement in 1866. He nevertheless tolerated visible facture in artists who demonstrated pronounced poetic sensibility, such as Camille Corot, whose “impression” of an outdoor scene substituted feeling for precise definition [fig. 1]. Corot’s images manifested, by Blanc’s account, “leaves missing from the trees … fissures left out of the rocks.”16 The image became more of a synthetic visual memory of a scene—a reverie—than its instantaneous (photographic) transcription, all detail included. Critic Charles Clément had preceded Blanc in accepting the look of the “impression” before the manner became codified as “impressionism.” In 1853, he wrote: “[Corot] renders his impression simply and naively… He reduces technique to its most elementary form and puts on the canvas only enough painting to say what he feels, as if he feared obscuring his thought with the veil of an abundance of execution.”17 Elements inessential to an artist’s expression had no cause to be included in the depiction. The implied moral dictum: paint only what you feel, as you feel it, whether directly from nature or from memory. A viewer’s response should also amount to a condition of feeling: “Don’t analyze Corot by dissecting his painting,” Alfred Sensier stated in 1870, “love him as you love a bountiful tree.”18 The sense of an “impression” could be either objective or subjective. In fact, it threatened to obliterate the distinction.

Having praised Corot, Blanc followed with a complaint. Many younger painters were unthinkingly imitating the looseness of this artist’s expressive “impression”; they were creating the “sense of having finished when they had hardly begun.”19 With the critical response to Corot, a low-resolution foot had been stuck in the door of modern painting, as if to acknowledge the perversity of eliminating marks of the hand from a hand-oriented process. As an inherently low-resolution medium in the new world of high-resolution photography, painting reserved its right to poetic expression—but only so long as it avoided abusing its license. It was left to photography to become the paradigm of objective depiction. Of course, critics have demonstrated ad nauseum that the objectivity of photography is mythical, that subjective choice enters the photographic process in numerous ways (as Fox Talbot already realized). But some medium needs to occupy an extreme end of the scale of subjectivity and objectivity, lest the distinction—threatened by the paradoxes of impressionism—lose all meaning.

In 1890, William James defined the habit of vision that identified an artist: “The whole education of the artist consists in his learning to see the presented signs [the marks] as well as the represented things. … The ordinary man’s attention passes over [the patches of color] to their import; the artist’s turns back and dwells upon them for their own sake.”20 In photography, there were no acknowledged marks or “presented signs.” With greater efficiency, the photographic process provided the toneless, uninflected imagery that academic painters had been trained to produce. Those working in the academic tradition would resist excessive involvement with precisely what a modern theorist such as James claimed should be their focus—“signs” in preference to “things.” Theirs was the painting that had no future.

Acting on sensation

Cézanne’s kind of painting—the digital kind, composed of discrete marks—is so far removed from the analog illusions of photography that its engagement with cultural issues is of a divergent sort. By rendering its technique explicit, it revealed its liaison with living sensation, eye-to-hand. Artist-theorist André Lhote wrote in 1920: “A large part of the emotive power of Cézanne’s canvases derives from the fact that the painter, rather than hide them, shows his means.”21 Hiding generates an integrated, analog effect; showing generates a fractured, digital effect. The emotion Lhote addressed did not belong to the subject represented, which by 1920 could be arbitrary without being criticized as such. André Derain wrote to Henri Matisse in 1906 (the final year of Cézanne’s life) that both were fortunate to belong to the first generation at liberty to let their chosen material assume “a life of its own, independent of what one makes it represent.”22 So the emotionality of the art need no longer correspond to the artist’s thoughts about the model depicted, its cultural identity, and all it might connote. A stronger or more direct emotion derived from the material basis of the representational process. Viewers sensed this emotion to the extent that they perceived that a life had been lived mark to mark, moment to moment, sensation to sensation. Such was Cézanne’s life, his digital reality, lived at the same pace as that of the people, objects, and land he painted—lived along with his world. The physiological fiction of a direct correspondence of eye to hand to mark could operate so long as the discrete marks remained unadulterated by adjustments to produce a more analog look. When the painter imposed one mark upon another, the process could be understood as registering a sequence of sensations rather than a correction to, or a refinement of, a picture already conceptualized.

Cézanne was all painter. “Painting in oils”—Michael Fried writes, distinguishing painting from photography—“has had the capacity of thematizing the fact that a finished picture is inevitably the product, and in certain respects, the record, of the painter’s sustained absorption over time in the act of painting.”23 Initially, in the early years of photography, a greater correspondence between the two technologies would have applied. “Absorption over time” becomes an apt characterization of the experience of the first subjects of photographic portraiture—and perhaps, by metonymic contact, the operators of the equipment as well. By enduring the extended photographic exposure, the early models contributed to the creation of their own pictures. This was Walter Benjamin’s now-celebrated insight: “The procedure itself taught the models to live inside rather than outside the moment. During the long duration of these shots they grew as it were into the picture and in this way presented an extreme opposite to the figures on a snapshot.”24 With decreased exposure time, photography soon developed “outside the moment”—its moment was hardly long enough to be one—whereas painting remained “inside the moment.” Cézanne told his portrait model Vollard to “be still like an apple.”25 Still like an apple in time, not like a still photograph, which passes out of time.

Yes, Cézanne was a painter; and facture, which entailed effort through time, was an issue. “I have very strong sensations,” he remarked in 1870, early in his career.26 He intended his statement to justify the aggressive, disjointed appearance of his strokes. He implied that painting must follow, even reduce to, the life of sensation. Shortly after Cézanne died, the critic Charles Morice reversed the equation. In his perception of Cézanne, living had not been enhanced by painting but had been restricted to painting: “We hardly dare say that Cézanne lived; no, he painted.”27 Rather than give clues to the many dimensions of a life, Cézanne’s art seemed to have become the only dimension his existence possessed. The painter’s message concerned painting, not the human issues that his subject matter—naturalistic, idyllic, domestic, or literary—would evoke when represented by a different type of artist. Another critic stated a variant of Morice’s notion at about the same time: “They say that Cézanne spent his life clarifying for himself and for others the issues of technique, without caring about the results.”28 However instructive Cézanne’s method might prove, the image he created, his result, remained either incomplete or inconsequential as a reference to an objective situation in the world.29 More existentialist than idealist, he rendered a situation subjective and transitory, not objective and fixed. The so-called “subject” of traditional art was itself hardly subjective but rather identifiable and nameable, a potential object of collective, objective knowledge, as opposed to private sensation. “The subject disappears,” said Cézanne’s admirer Paul Sérusier: “There is only a motif.”30 The motif that gave Cézanne’s painting its integrity or wholeness did not reside in any subject (the person, still life, land, or fantasy depicted) but in the sequence of the painter’s marks—whatever rhythms, harmonies, and bits of internal order might be discerned.31 Thadée Natanson, responding to the 1895 exhibition at Vollard’s gallery, wrote that Cézanne’s art was not to be noted for its cultural thematics but for “all the remainder, which is nothing but painting itself.”32

When a life reduces to sensation, and the sensation reduces to marks, is the artist working “mark to mark” or “mark by mark”? The two phrases can refer to the same condition and distinguishing them is an arbitrary exercise. I nevertheless prefer “mark to mark” because it better conveys the temporal sense of discrete moments in transience. “Mark by mark” connotes adjacency, a spatial sequence. “Mark to mark” is movement from one action to another; it connotes temporal passage. Like the digital ticking of the mechanism of an analog clock, time and space work in synchrony: mark to mark, mark by mark.

When painting from nature, Cézanne in many instances seems to project an inclusive, unedited vision, like that of a camera obscura without the inversion. He filled the field of his image with whatever passed or fell within the scan of his vision. In his portrait of the influential critic Gustave Geffroy, 1895 (fig. 2), local areas of marking are more compelling than the sense of the whole as a composition. Fragments of Geffroy’s library and furnishings surround him. Aside from the portrait subject occupying the central area of the canvas, compositional hierarchy is suppressed. The painting does not lack compositional features, but its composition is indiscriminate. A play of diagonals involves the rigid posture of Geffroy’s arms, the open books on his desk, the angles of his chair and fireplace instrument, and the placement of the volumes on his shelves. His body becomes one among these equivalent, exchangeable elements. Because Cézanne’s framing of the entire view seems arbitrary (as it might in a photograph), Geffroy’s accoutrements appear only casually arranged, as if they could continue beyond the edges of the canvas with as much order (or lack of it) as within. The critic’s writing desk falls forward, belonging not to pictorial, composed space, but to lived space—as if Cézanne were looking forward at the sitter, then down at the desk, and failing, or not caring, to coordinate and integrate the two perspectives.33 His painting preserves the sequential existence of the features of the scene as they formed his experience, while the picture offers no instruction as to what a viewer should notice first. The composite image is dense with the spatial and temporal charm of life, its vicissitudes and variations. The portrait of Geffroy is a living scene, yet its life is not the sitter’s. It belongs to the experience of the artist.

Composite yet not strictly compositional might designate Cézanne’s pictorial effect of mixed perspective and arbitrary endings. His graphic mark usually makes little or no direct reference to the surface qualities of the objects and environments he represents: the edges of actual human bodies are neither discontinuous nor multiple; and actual apples are not faceted, as they appear in Still Life with Fruit Dish, a characteristic work of about 1880 (fig. 3). Cézanne’s mark is natural only in relation to becoming an index of his brush or, at times, his palette knife—an index of his bodily action in time. The mark tends to repeat as a cipher, not an icon, one slanted stroke beside another. It projects no personality, becoming a non-mimetic abstraction, the record of a sensation that represents itself before it refers to anything else, including its author-artist. Rather than the artist’s signifier, it is sensation’s signifier. And when evidence of a specific category of sensation appears in Cézanne’s art, consistent use is unlikely to follow. Sensation—for an artist (as James indicated)—does not fall under the control of categorization. In Still Life with Fruit Dish, two of the apples reflect their color onto the neutral white napkin beneath them. The apple in the central foreground casts its green below; the apple to its left casts its blue below—a blue denoting the shaded, recessive turn in the volume of the fruit. Yet Cézanne did not adhere to a principle of reflectivity, for no other apple follows this schema. Apparently, no schema was in operation; instead, the artist experienced two unique observations, moment to moment. His arrays of marks denote the interaction of an object-to-be-seen and an artist-seer, constituting clustered moments of sensation.

Categories of sensation can be discussed and theorized; as categories, they are already generalized. The painter’s sensation is otherwise. Shoshana Felman writes: “Unlike saying, doing is always trivial [specific, singular]: it is that which, by definition, cannot be generalized.”34 Seeing or sensing is doing. Recording the painter’s vision, the mark does something without saying something or saying very little, nothing that sustains commentary. Although Cézanne’s arrays of marks are typical of his practice and recognizable as his, each array projects a unique state of emotion. Think of how the tonality of a spoken sentence projects its affect, independent of the fact that the sentence refers to a situation, or repeats another statement, or connotes a degree of cultural status. Cézanne’s themes are generic and familiar; his renderings often become variations of each other. Many of his paintings (usually the smaller ones) appropriate images authored by others. Despite all this, Natanson in 1895 alluded to a localized, concentrated force in Cézanne’s art that had no parallel: “He makes apples his own … They are to him as an object is to its creator.”35 To paraphrase: Cézanne’s “apples” are a breed apart, like the rest of his thematic material. They are not the apples known to society, culture, and history; and to evaluate them in relation to the generic apples of apple-lore and apple-mythology—the customary channel for interpretation—dims the light of their particularity.36 Cézanne’s erudition and wit—he would “astonish Paris with an apple”—as well as his (possibly ironic) indulgence in themes of lust and violence became lures to psychoanalytically oriented critics during the twentieth century. His immediate contemporaries put their attention elsewhere: apples as brute sensation, neither sophisticated literary reference nor wish fulfillment.37

As Cézanne laid down his marks, his hand was never as quick as the camera mechanisms of his time, able to focus a scene and fix it on film with light-sensitive emulsion. Although painters have often imitated the technical effects of photography, including variable focus and blur, their work in the guise of a camera is more like that of a surveillance video, for a painter’s image has unlimited potential duration; it reaches a state of completion and separation only arbitrarily. Most of Cézanne’s canvases leave the impression that he could have resumed painting on them. “I’d like to finish all these,” le Douanier Rousseau reportedly said when he saw Cézanne’s works at exhibition.38 Recording nature through time, Cézanne could not catch up with himself: “I cannot reach the intensity that develops in my senses,” he wrote in 1906, already at the end of his years of trying.39 By the Corot criterion, Cézanne needed “only enough painting to say what he feels”; if, by his own estimation, he usually fell short of this modest goal, it would explain his tendency to rework some canvases excessively while leaving others only scantily covered. Most likely, he had abandoned the paintings left in a rudimentary state, while those laden with paint and even overworked in appearance represent his search for “only enough.” The repetitive excess of his marking represented his continuing sensation, always fresh.40

Cézanne’s view of an inhospitable ravine, probably painted around 1878–79 at the Mediterranean town of L’Estaque, shows areas of foliage and rock with passages of blue sky as their nominal background; the sky, our immaterial atmosphere, is as heavily encrusted with paint-matter as the adjacent forms that represent substantial physical substances (fig. 4). As in certain still life and figure paintings, the contours that define the articulated forms—dividing tree branches from rocks, rocks from sky—are depressed in relation to the adjacent passages of much heavier paint application. Apparently, at this point in his career, Cézanne felt a need to adjust the interiors of forms more extensively than the initial layout of the elements of the landscape. This suggests that as the artist worked on the canvas, he regarded composition, the general order of representational elements, as secondary to sensation, the recording of moments of vision. In fact, the composition of this painting seems arbitrary and unconsidered; our interest is drawn to color and texture rather than to a play of directional vectors. It remains odd that the sensation of blue sky, presumably invariant in the Mediterranean climate, required such a degree of reconsideration. It may be that at some point in Cézanne’s process, the source of sensation became the canvas itself and not the external view—a condition that would put all areas of the developing image equally in play. This possibility accords with Émile Bernard’s estimation that Cézanne gradually distanced his image from external observation, one mode of sensation supplanting another: “The more he works, the more his work removes itself from the external view [and] the more he abstracts the picture.”41 In instances of portrait painting, this same condition induced the type of remark repeated by several critics: “Cézanne takes no more interest in a human face than in an apple.”42 All elements of a picture attain analogous sensory significance—people and things look alike (as in the portrait of Geffroy)—when engagement with the technical process supersedes concern for a pictorial result guided by normative thematic hierarchies.

“Sensation above all else,” Cézanne said.43 It mattered little what the sensation was. He sought a method of painting that would track the transiency of sensory experience, the range of qualities the senses presented, as well as his changing emotional state, which might be confused (rightfully) with the state of the surrounding environment. Sensations and emotions are always present to be represented: in fast time, in slow time. There were days when Cézanne was deliberative: one of his young friends in Aix-en-Provence, using hyperbole to make the point, reported that the painter “sometimes remained still for twenty minutes between two strokes of the brush.”44 Pierre-Auguste Renoir recalled that his old impressionist colleague used paper flowers as a studio prop because live ones would fade faster than he could develop his painting.45 Yet deliberation over the marks did not prevent Cézanne from shifting to impulsive and spontaneous actions, perhaps an aspect of his futile attempt to keep pace. Bouts of self-criticism followed prolonged, intense engagement: “Cézanne at his easel, painting, viewing the countryside: he was truly alone to the world, ardent, focused … and sometimes he would [abruptly] quit the site dispirited, abandoning his canvas on a rock or in the grass.”46 On a good day, the direction of a painting might settle into a compelling rhythm, with visual sensation and pictorial evolution seeming fully integrated; on a bad day, the process became unworkable. Changes in attitude, in behavior, and within a specific painting might occur for something less than an articulate reason, by a cause so beyond logical reach it might as well be chance: a feeling.

Sensation and feeling

“Sensation above all else”—but what is sensation? C. S. Peirce, precisely Cézanne’s age (historical coincidence), theorized sensation in a way suited to the artist’s painting. Peirce’s terminology distinguishes sensation from feeling; the latter is such a primary experience that we merely endure it rather than consciously attend to it. “Feelings compris[e] all that is immediately present, such as pain, blue, cheerfulness … A feeling is necessarily perfectly simple, in itself.” Properly speaking (in Peircean language), sensations mark the transition from one state of feeling to another—each is a disturbance. Sensations are “sensations of reaction.” They oppose feelings, marking consciousness of one feeling as consciousness of a subsequent feeling: “Suppose I had nothing in my mind but a feeling of blue, which were suddenly to give place to a feeling of red; then, at the instant of transition, there would be a shock, a sense of reaction, my blue life being transmuted into red life.”47 This is the shock of sensation, like Cézanne’s red mark next to a blue, whether rendering a woman’s dress or Mont Sainte-Victoire. Sensations are feelings activated, as one feeling displaces another. They are themselves actions.

Every stroke of Cézanne’s brush, every mark, represents an act of sensation—more reactive than imitative. By 1885, Paul Gauguin, who had purchased Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish, was proclaiming its extraordinary quality to anyone who would listen. He admired the “essentially pure” character of Cézanne’s technique, the direct, uninflected quality of his marking, which he distinguished from the look of Claude Monet’s paintings of the same period, with their cultivated virtuosity.48 Gauguin referred to Cézanne’s brilliant arrays of color as products of sensory intuition rather than an intellectual system, believing that the marks conveyed emotional content independent of the subject matter.49 This division of “form” from “content,” perceived in Cézanne, became the hallmark of decidedly “modern” painting, regarded as a means of escape from the dehumanizing, restrictive culture of the bourgeoisie (recall Derain’s comment to Matisse). Intellectual or conceptual “content,” that is, subject matter, fell under the regulation of ideological systems. “Form,” however, if generated by sensation rather than theory and academic training, evaded ideological control. Sensation, which might translate into no more than “a simple decoration for the pleasure of the eyes,” became the means to social and cultural salvation.50

Though we feel life as continuity, its feelings are experienced only as one (Peircean) interruption after another, a digital effect of discrete moments of sensation. In resistance to fixing an image of any specific moment, a “modern” painting reveals its process of production—in Lhote’s terms, shows its means. It becomes not only the record of an experience in lived time but the generator of such experience. Painting brings to the surface of its imagery the moment-to-moment quality of consciousness, a digital reality that the photographic process—analog and mechanical in the nineteenth century, digital and electronic now—disguises as thoroughly analog. By this distinction, photographic imagery becomes fantasy imagery—the fantasy of fixity—detached from the essential physicality of living.

In 1889, aesthetician Paul Souriau, a near-contemporary of Cézanne, noted that French academic painters were often criticized for the artificiality of their figures’ gestures; the complaint was justified because these artists relied on preconceived models and standardized compositions, as if to depict only “those postures we adopt to express our feelings to show them on the outside.” The notion of an academicized mode of representation corresponded to standardization in bourgeois behavior. Souriau continued: “Truly expressive postures are those that do not set about to express anything but are unconsciously determined by a deeply felt emotion.”51 This insight—if uttered today, vaguely Freudian—raises an interesting possibility: subtle movements that reflect a subject’s emotional state represent nothing specifically nameable. Perhaps Souriau’s thinking recalls the results of candid photography, its capacity to capture unguarded postures, difficult to interpret. But Cézanne’s marks are also such unguarded movements, often violating the implied norm of a contour. Souriau’s distinction between, as it were, exterior and interior postures parallels Felman’s differentiation of saying and doing. Each gesture or act of sensation must have a unique meaning—yet a meaning that is unique is no “meaning” at all because it lacks the means to participate in discursive exchange. Although we feel such “meaning,” or imagine that we do, we have no capability to articulate it, paraphrase it, discuss it. The emotional force of a sensation is inarticulate, a difference absent any terms of differentiation.

During the summer of 1906, Cézanne painted from positions along the river Arc, outside Aix-en-Provence. His remarks to his son indicate his sensitivity to the shifting emotionality of sensation in time and space, from moment to moment, angle to angle: “The motifs multiply, the same subject seen at a different angle takes on the greatest interest, and there is such variation that I believe I could work away for months without changing position but just by leaning a little to the right and then a little to the left.”52 Unlike Monet, who conceived his series of views to capture different times of day or changes in atmospheric conditions—effect of fog, effect of rain, effect of dawn—Cézanne did not conceptualize his repetitions of a scene. His multiple views of Mont Sainte-Victoire suggest no sequential or otherwise rational order.

Painting a photograph

Each of us enters human history with a specific set of tools, devices, and practices at our disposal, corresponding to our position within an evolution of technologies. If the electromechanical computer has changed the shape of my society within the span of my lifetime, how, if at all, has it changed me? It determines much of my daily activity, yet I lived my most formative years without it. Has it altered only the quantity of information available, or has it also affected the qualities I perceive? And if so, for better or for worse? I could ask the same of photography and painting, though they have been contributing to my aesthetic and cognitive experience, presumably forming it, always. This was Cézanne’s situation as well, but just barely; he entered human history in January 1839, twelve days after Louis Daguerre introduced his photographic process, converting his private invention into a public resource.

It remains an open question whether an evolution in perception follows from technological advances or enables those advances. Once a need emerges, technology adjusts to meet the need. Technological innovation also appears to generate the needs (or desires) that its devices satisfy. I was unaware that I needed a wireless telephone until I had one, just as those with fast postal service (as it once existed) did not realize they needed a telephone, wired or otherwise. Silent movies satisfied their audience until the advent of sound film, which arrived as if an improvement on mime had been demanded. Perhaps perception and discernment also improve according to demand, desire, or need. However much the development of skills and sensitivities may increase perceptual capacity, it seems odd to consider that human perception itself changes for the better. It may be that acuity in one area of perception entails diminishment in another. Nothing guarantees that changes in perception are progressive.

If there is an evolution, or many evolutions, in visual perception, its fossil history can be found in the appearance of created objects, especially objects of art through which the greatest amount of perceptual energy has been concentrated. To create a work of art, Bridget Riley wrote in 1965, “perception is the medium.”53 Painting, Riley’s aesthetic technology, contacts perception and expands the artist’s awareness in the process of creating art: “In order to see one had to paint and through that activity found what could be seen.”54 Finding by making is key to her understanding. At around the same moment—another historical coincidence—psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan pondered the case of Cézanne: “Those little blues, those little browns, those little whites, those touches that fall like rain from the painter’s brush. … the painter’s brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated. … we are faced with the element of motive in the sense of response, in so far as it produces, behind it, its own stimulus.”55 Painting doubles back on perception. Painters, according to Riley and Lacan, paint the feel of seeing rather than what they see. Cézanne recognized this in himself, articulating the experience as “The motifs multiply, the same subject seen at a different angle takes on the greatest interest …”56 The river Arc remained the same, true to its conceptual identity; but the sensation of it, the seeing, shifted.

When Cézanne took a graphic image as his model—often a print he had acquired, or an illustration from an art publication or popular magazine—he responded to the preexisting image as he would to external nature, applying his process of marking. He would regenerate aspects of the look of the alien image as if it were the sole occupant of his attentive vision. It was also not unusual, certainly not exceptional, for Cézanne to use a photograph as his model. Photographic imagery was no farther removed from nature than the imagery of printed illustrations—in fact, in most respects, photography was closer, since (as argued by the earliest practitioners) no aesthetic temperament stood between the mechanism of the camera and its object in nature. Among Cézanne’s known photographic sources, most served his portrait and other figure painting, just as photography did for his contemporaries. There exists an anomalous case: Cézanne once enlisted as a source a photograph of a landscape, presumably an image of the forest at Fontainebleau, possibly a work of Eugène Cuvelier (fig. 5).

Most likely, Cézanne painted the work now called Melting Snow at Fontainebleau (fig. 6) during the winter months of 1879–80 while keeping a studio in Melun, a town located about thirty miles southwest of Paris.57 Another five miles would bring the artist to the village of Fontainebleau, the site of a royal château surrounded by scenic forest cut by glacial ravines, formerly reserved as a hunting ground. Perhaps convenience was the impetus to turn to a landscape photograph—the need to remain indoors during inclement winter weather. By the 1870s, scenes of Fontainebleau forest had become pictorial cliché. The area attracted hundreds of landscape artists—painters, both conservative and experimental, joined by numerous photographers—all of them struck by the size and age of the trees, as well as the primitive ruggedness of the terrain, the stuff of romantic fantasy.

Cézanne remained faithful to the general distribution of forms in the photograph, while converting the original black-and-white to full chromatic color. As with his views from nature, he kept elements of the scene as they were, with subtle adjustment resulting from his marking process, more, it seems, than from decisions over the general composition. Nevertheless, with respect to the source, Cézanne’s input is immediately evident. He developed the Fontainebleau image at a much larger scale and with a notably different quality of resolution. At a width of one meter, nearly forty inches, the canvas is unusually ambitious for a Cézanne landscape of its time. The changes not only distinguish a painting practice from a photographic parallel, but also reflect the technical experience and aims of Cézanne as an innovative artist. When the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired this work, curator Alfred H. Barr, Jr. described it as “austerely beautiful,” presumably a response to the prominence and relative rigidity of its marking system.58 Here, as in other paintings that Cézanne derived from a planographic source, the pattern of small parallel strokes maintains a noticeable regularity of touch, as if the artist were responding to the lack of actual volume in the model.

When Cézanne rendered the Fontainebleau photograph with his characteristic hatch marks, he converted an analog image to a digital effect, introducing an altered sense of time to the image. The marks have their own organicism, their own life, independent of the depicted trees and rocks. There is also color to consider. Cézanne endowed the black-and-white image with chromatic energy. Converting black-and-white to full color was for him hardly an alien process. Bernard, having visited the artist’s studio in 1904, wrote: “To my great astonishment, Cézanne had no objection to a painter’s use of photography; but in his case, it was necessary to interpret this exact reproduction just as he would interpret nature itself.”59 According to another observer, “Cézanne sometimes copies onto his canvases scenes from popular prints and almanacs … faithful to them at least in terms of the [subject matter] … Through color he composes.”60 The essential graphic forms would remain as they were, though transformed by the new chromatic scale.

Ironically, landscape photographs of Fontainebleau capitalized on the soft-focus effects of a paper-print process, allowing their take on nature to become more competitive with paintings of similar subjects. A subtle sense of photographic blur would animate the pictorial surface, bringing its optical effect closer to a typical naturalistic painting, one displaying a relatively coarse pattern of discrete strokes with fuzzy edges (recall the work of Corot in 1866). In Cézanne’s photographic source, both foreground vegetation and background foliage appear off-register with respect to the camera mechanism; the sharpest focus is reserved for the trees of the middle ground. For nineteenth-century viewers, the shifting focus, this unstable factor of resolution, generated more of an aesthetic pleasure than consciousness of a technical deficiency. Paper-print photography pushed the medium known for precision in the direction of a medium (painting) less precise but more expressive, more personal.61 When critics reviewed exhibitions of landscape painting, they tended to admire a degree of poetic license, often objecting to descriptive accuracy that had been taken too far.62 Such detail violated the reality of living vision; it approached the “photographic.” A looser look, with a greater indication of the intervention of the artist’s hand—and through the hand, the personality—added expressive features to the naturalistic detailing of shape, color, and illumination. Such “expression” animated the view.

To stress the point: paper-print, negative-process photography (the calotype) lessened the focus present in the rival positive process, the daguerreotype. This technical switch increased what nineteenth-century viewers regarded as the expressive character of the image. The cultural preference for animation—like that of a lively human face or a tree branch quivering in the breeze—encouraged aesthetically oriented photographers to mimic some of the imprecision of painting. Whether they thought of it this way or not, mid-century photographers were gesturing in the direction of the early impressionism of Cézanne and other naturalistic painters. The same cultural imperative encouraged painters themselves to “blur” their brushwork, stressing its animate quality by allowing its movement (the hand at work) to remain apparent. The two groups, photographers and painters, recognized a common need to which they were destined to respond. Hippolyte Taine, who taught art theory to Cézanne’s contemporaries at the official École des beaux-arts, equated the sensory observation of external objects to “transient moments of our being.”63 Taine emphasized the instability of any experience of reality, which, although leaving a lasting imprint in the human mind, also remained subject to change. Sensation affected the individual long after its occurrence; it was both immediate and lasting (like “our being”). For the following generation, Henri Bergson’s notion of “duration” (la durée) established much the same principle.64 An artist’s need to provide a permanent picture of transiency corresponds to Cézanne’s understanding of his own “sensation”; his term linked external observation to internal feeling, preserving both in fruitful tension.

How to represent—or, better, to create—“sensation” in a painting? The challenge was to introduce the experience of external and internal simultaneously. Further complication: the demand would have to be met without losing the active presence of the living artist, that is, without reducing the process to a mechanism. A problem for photography: even when it exhibited blur, it suffered the slur of appearing mechanistic. A satisfying image of nature would need to incorporate, on the one hand, nature’s essential animation, and, on the other hand, the animation associated with the living, sensing being of the artist—the artist as both sensing nature and recording this sensation. Melting Snow at Fontainebleau becomes a demonstration of how the problem of representing sensation resolves itself. Here, the painter’s object is not a view into the forest but the study of a photograph. It is as if the nature that the mechanism of still photography deadened (despite the photographer’s intention) was being returned to life by a living act of painting. In his last years, Cézanne received credit for having reanimated a moribund classical tradition, nobly represented by the art of Nicolas Poussin. “To bring Poussin back to life by nature,” was the aim Cézanne announced, according to those who labeled him “the Poussin of impressionism.”65 As it seems, he was also the impressionist of photography, or rather, of black-and-white. Every time that he painted from a black-and-white source (photograph, book illustration, graphic print) he was doing what he did with Poussin’s classicism—restoring an alienated genre or medium to life. In each instance, along with the movement of his brush, color was the animating force.

Cézanne regarded any object of vision—landscape en plein air, still life in the studio, bathing figures reimagined from the holdings of the museums—as an appropriate target for his paint-embedded expression. Everything was “nature,” an object of sensory experience. Near the end of his life, he advised a young admirer: “If the strong sensation of nature … is the necessary base of every artistic idea … knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential.”66 Melting Snow at Fontainebleau renders apparent the “means of expressing our emotion.” Cézanne’s reinvention of a photographic play of black-and-white as color exposes his method to plain sight. The transformation of photograph into painting is, however, double-edged. At the left side of the photograph, in the far distance—compositionally, between two large trees in focus in the middle distance—is an area of dense undergrowth that the camera captures in detail as nuanced grays (fig. 7). Perhaps too detailed to accommodate Cézanne’s expressively coarse touch. In response, he converted the undergrowth to a rise in the ground plane; this invented aspect of the “representation” could be conveyed broadly, as was Cézanne’s custom (fig. 8). He rendered this area as brilliantly colored as any other, as if a place of illumination rather than fade. It amounts to an exercise in poetic license, sparked by the sensation of the painting emerging from his brush, not to mention the technical exigency.

Technical exigency applied to the photographer as well. Advances in the photography of Cézanne’s era were rapid, but mid-nineteenth-century practice remained limited by the relatively long exposure time required to capture details in the less illuminated areas of an outdoor scene. Snow on a winter day at Fontainebleau challenged the capacities of the medium by its extreme contrast of areas of light (foreground snow, background sky) and areas of dark (the trees, the depths of the forest). Even a summer view would have produced a bleached-out sky; and for the winter view, the same problem extended to parts of the foreground. Performing his transformation, Cézanne articulated the relatively blank areas of the photograph with a material density and intensity that he introduced throughout, deploying his accentuated brush work. He animated all parts of the image equally, bringing “sensation” where there had been little or none. The foreground coloring, primarily blues and greens mixed with whites (bits of yellow and violet also), represents areas of snow with protruding vegetation and rocks. This predominately cool range of hues leaves a relatively neutral impression, seeming to capture the tonal range of the photograph quite faithfully. The trees themselves, correspondingly dark, gradually reveal to the eye a surprisingly full chromatic range. Cézanne appears to have mixed near-complementaries, such as dull ochre and deep blue, to arrive at complex chromatic browns—linear bands alive with color. He reserved his most aggressive combinations of hues for the spaces that amount to photographic left-overs, the areas of background sky that become over-exposed and, as it were, inert. His painting converts these areas to parallel strokes of a full spectrum of hues, including an ample amount of yellow, orange, and pale violet, which together generate a warm glow (fig. 9). Coupled with the brilliant color, the divided strokes—sometimes tracing the contour of a rock or a tree, sometimes independent of any descriptive shape—constitute the essence of Cézanne’s variant of impressionism.

Where nineteenth-century photography fails, because of insufficient capacity to capture both lights and darks, nineteenth-century painting reaches its heights of inventiveness. Cézanne’s landscape combines areas that are structured by value contrast and areas that are structured chromatically.67 It borrows only so much from the photograph and then goes its own way, in a direction that the photography of the time could not pursue. Late in life, Cézanne stated his goal: “To rid the mind of the formulas of our illustrious predecessors, [giving] the image of what we see, forgetting how things appeared before our time.”68 Melting Snow at Fontainebleau reveals the elemental nature of this process, applied appropriately to an elemental, primeval landscape, with the added irony that the artist’s age-old medium brought enhanced expressiveness and even enhanced descriptive power to a product of advanced optical technology.

Does the claim of greater descriptive power go too far? Consider the factor of time. Walking toward Cézanne’s painting is like walking into a forest. Melting Snow at Fontainebleau reveals dimensions of temporal experience as well as those of spatial experience. At first glance, and especially from a distance, its light appears more neutral, tonal, and photographic than it will subsequently seem. Move closer, and the painting becomes progressively more animated as it appears more chromatic. The high contrast of the foreground colors suggests spatial proximity as well as a strong, cold light (like reflection off a bank of snow). Move still closer, and the warmth and complexity of the coloration of the tree trunks and branches becomes evident. Then the areas of sky open channels of warm brilliance into indeterminate depth. Yet, at every moment, the materiality of the stroke—and with it the presence of the fabricating painter—remains palpable.

By comparison with painting like Cézanne’s, the photography of his era stilled its image. “Still photography” is no misnomer. Photographs represent past moments, yet the images lack temporal dimension. Only in recent years, with the innovative photographic work of artists like Chuck Close (analog in a strange way [fig. 10]) and David Hockney (digital in a strange way [fig. 11]) has practice in this medium introduced the degree of dimensionality present in Melting Snow at Fontainebleau. Significantly, Close and Hockney are painters, applying a painter’s understanding of scale, variable resolution, and focus to the construction of photographic images. Cézanne, who may never have taken photographs himself (this is unknown), may yet have taken photography, along with painting, into its future.

Nearly two decades ago, photo historian Douglas Nickel observed that traditional art history had not yet developed the tools for handling non-art photographs.1 In many ways, much progress has been made since 2001: vernacular photographs of every kind have become worthy objects of study for scholars and critics—not only within visual culture, but in history, sociology, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. In fact, these days, as Nickel himself has pointed out, studies of vernacular photographs outpace the production of monographic books about “fine art photographers.”2

However, it remains difficult for art historians to build an interpretative model that takes full measure of the visual subtleties of non-art photographs—including their unexpected aspirations towards the aesthetic—without slighting the historical and social conditions in which they were produced.3 With that challenge in mind, I consider here those very aspirations, as they surface repeatedly in a group of “medical portraits”: casebook photographs of patients made between 1885 and 1916 at the Holloway Sanatorium in St. Ann’s Heath, Virginia Water, Surrey, England (fig. 1). My intention is to offer the beginnings of a method that might help us both identify, and extract meaning from, the aspects of the images that cannot be accounted for by the conventions of medical or scientific representation. In so doing, I recognize that as objects of study these photographs cannot be detached from the entangled motivations that shaped their production, or the material conditions to which they remain bound.

To cite just an obvious departure from institutional convention, the dry-plate paper photographs produced of about a third of the patients at Holloway were scissored into various shapes—some more ornamental than others—and glued, pinned, and tucked into carefully incised corners, or loosely inserted into the pages of large, leather-bound casebooks. These folios contained the staff’s narratives of their patients’ case histories, which were inscribed upon admission in the following order: name, religion, occupation, marital status, number of children (if any) medical and family history, and the date and duration of the “precipitating incident” that had prompted the patients’ relatives or doctors to bring them to Holloway in the first place.

Holloway was not an ordinary nineteenth-century insane asylum; it was a “benevolent asylum for the mentally afflicted of the middle classes.”4 Thomas Holloway, the original founder, a highly successful merchant of medicinals looking for a salutary way to distribute his inheritance, was inspired to build such a sanctuary by a speech delivered by Lord Shaftesbury, the liberal MP and philanthropist who pointed out that the middle and upper-middle classes were under-served populations: too well off for the pauper asylum, yet not wealthy enough to be tended at home by servants and a shamed if compliant family.5 The lavishly decorated, beautifully landscaped Gothic revival structure by William Crossland was erected on twenty-two acres of rolling hills on St. Ann’s Heath, Virginia Water, Surrey, and easily reached by rail from London (fig. 2a).6 Holloway opened to much fanfare in 1885, at a ceremony attended by the Duke and Duchess of Wales. The sanatorium was originally imagined “for the unfortunate student who has overdone cramming for some public examination, for the over-worked barrister or clergyman, for those whose minds are filled with illusions on account of domestic troubles or bereavements.”7 About a quarter of the patients admitted were “Voluntary Boarders,” who desired an escape from the strains of life, and could afford to admit themselves without being “certified.” They were allowed not only to roam the grounds, but also to visit the neighboring village, without supervision. Eventually about half of the VBs, as they were called, were certified and admitted to Holloway, with mixed results. Others began as certified patients and decided to stay on as Voluntary Boarders after they had officially been pronounced “recovered.”8

The interiors of the “benevolent asylum” were painstakingly decorated and beautifully furnished; Crossland’s Gothic revival style featured lofty, arched ceilings and hand-stenciled foyers (fig 2b, fig 2c). There were individual villas for visiting families who wished to bring their servants. In the words of George Martin-Holloway, the brother-in-law of Thomas (who died before the plan could be fully realized), “a cultivated person whose mind is affected will never be cured if surrounded by vulgar accessories.” The monumental stone entryway, for example, was brightly gilded, because otherwise the cold grey “would sit heavily on a mind diseased.”9

The emphasis at Holloway was on integrating the patients back into the lives they had left behind. Thus, myriad conventional upper middle-class activities were offered. There were cricket games, dances, theatricals, and strolls around the grounds, even the possibility of riding one’s own horse, which could be stabled on the grounds. Since the majority of the patients were from well-off, educated families, the most advanced treatments and the newest drugs were expected to be utilized (electrotherapy, exercise, digitalis, bromide, hypodermic morphia and purgatives were among the most favored).10 The sleeping quarters of patients were segregated by gender—although spaces such as the dining room and parlors were available to both male and female patients who demonstrated appropriate social behavior. The casebooks were organized by gender, and separate folios were kept for Voluntary Boarders, although the narratives in these are far more rudimentary, and the photographs few.

The Shadow Archive

Over thirty years ago, Allan Sekula famously characterized the vast compendium of nineteenth-century photographs of “the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female” as “the shadow archive.” According to Sekula, this archive stood as the antithesis to the imagery of the wealthy and celebrated, an opposition that he distilled as “the honorific and repressive poles of portrait practice.”11 Sekula was largely correct. Most photographs that comprise the taxonomies of the guilty, the insane, and the deviant of these years did generally conform to roughly the same format: a rectangular, occasionally square, image of a frontal or profile view of a bust-length figure, whose face betrayed little or no affect. In fact, this very type of image was employed around 1900 at an institution just a few miles away from Holloway: the Ewell Epileptic Colony (later St. Ebba’s Hospital) in Surrey (fig. 3). At Ewell, a mug-shot like view of each patient was taken at the time of admission, and pasted at the top of the casebook page, with the pertinent medical history written directly below. Both the timing of the image and its use as an exemplary illustration of symptoms described in the narrative were straightforward, as was the organization of the narrative itself.

At Holloway, only some of the patients were pictured—no record of an organizing principle for determining how they would be identified has emerged. We do know that the pictures we have represent only the patients who agreed to be photographed. The timing of this process was unpredictable, and could range from days or even months after admission to shortly before discharge. In fact, photographs could be taken anytime within the patient’s stay, which lasted anywhere from a few days to decades—a duration that went against the express wishes of Thomas Holloway, who had intended that no patient should remain for more than six months.12

Aside from the fact that Holloway’s casebook photographs were cut into a variety of shapes, the patients themselves were featured in a range of poses, facial expressions, and manners of address to the camera. We see everything from a blank stare or a knowing sidelong glance, to an intensely searching gaze that appears to be reaching through the camera lens, as if to collapse the physical distance between the subject and the photographer. The pictures were produced by collective authorship, by largely anonymous staff members who sporadically initialed the images they made. On a number of occasions, multiple patients would be photographed on the same date, and in roughly the same format, suggesting that some of the work was done by itinerant photographers who would have been paid by the day.13

The very first Holloway casebook (1885–1897), dedicated to female patients, which I have written about elsewhere, includes some rather stunning anomalies in the history of medical photography.14 Not only are there a number of group portraits in this folio (fig. 4a and fig. 4b), the casebook also includes single-figure images of fashionable women patients that betray not a single trace of their institutional location (fig. 5) nor any sign of the presumed mental strain or deviant behavior that precipitated their admission to Holloway.

The group portraits in the first casebook were by and large composed of women whose histories were replete with accounts of their anti-social behavior. The case histories attest that at least some of the subjects were averse even to rising from bed in the morning, let alone getting properly dressed up to be photographed. None of the women pictured in either fig. 4a or fig. 4b were known to be particularly communicative—with either the staff or the other patients. Yet here they are together, not unlike relatives at a family reunion who do not know each other well, although they share a certain lineage. There are signs of deviance (anomalies of gaze or pose), but they are not obvious. The variations in class position—for Holloway did accept some patients from workhouses and public hospitals—are more overt and conveyed by the subjects’ costumes, which range from feather-trimmed coats and fur muffs to plain work jackets and skirts made of visibly coarse fabric. In the single-figure photographs the subjects use the exterior colonnade of Holloway as a veritable stage for their skills as elegant hostesses, which have presumably remained undiminished during their stay. Maria W. (fig. 5), in fact, has styled herself as a fashion plate, a perception reinforced not only by her idiosyncratic costume, but by a silhouetted pose that could have been lifted from a copy of La Mode illustrée.

Objectivity: Variations on a Theme

As Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston have pointed out, “policing objectivity” during the nineteenth century demanded that the scientific photographer renounce both theorizing and aestheticizing.15 The Holloway images appear to violate both prohibitions, in ways that are difficult to class. They neither fully embrace the aesthetic nor do they unconditionally repudiate the objective, veering between a kind of idiosyncratic, suggestive portraiture and a systematically unsystematic documentation. In their structure, function, and manner of presentation these photographs enact the very tensions that emerge when the boundaries between the objective and aesthetic are assumed rhetorically, but visually stretched to breaking.

At first glance, insisting on the relevance of aesthetics to the Holloway casebook photographs may seem profoundly misguided. As material objects, the pictures are, literally, rough around the edges: crudities of lighting, exposure, framing, and presentation abound. For the most part, the settings for the patients’ portraits seem to have been improvised. Despite the photogenic, decorative surfaces that were abundant at Holloway—hand-stenciled walls, carved architectural details, and ornamental fireplaces—the backgrounds that frame the subjects are at times distractingly shabby. Perhaps the relative lack of visual finesse was deliberate, a self-conscious affirmation of the medical photograph’s status as a scientific, non-art object—an expression of what Martin Kemp has identified as a “rhetoric of objectivity.”16

Yet the sheer variety of forms and presentational strategies that recur in these casebooks serve no obvious function within such a rhetoric. Some pictures are marginal strips cut to fit into the narrowest possible space, clearly subordinate to the “primary” text of the case-notes. Others are larger, square and flat, emulating the proportions of an identity card, and are pasted firmly into the center of the casebook page, “framed” by the text. Still others mime the conventions of a studio family portrait, or a sentimental album picture, having been shaped into an oval. A number of patients’ images are faceted like old tintypes; and occasionally a picture has the ghostliness of a one-of-a-kind daguerreotype. Although the photographs were, in principle, reproducible, as any dry plate photo would be, their context is singular, and impossible to recreate. The sheer variety of the pictures’ material properties and their surrounds, absent any prevailing logic to account for them, lends each of these photographs the potency of an original—precisely the opposite of the monotony we have come to expect of institutional photography.

And while the collective authors of these pictures may not have employed the more obvious trappings of the late nineteenth-century portrait studio—fur rugs, free standing columns, painted backdrops—they did consistently employ schematic, improvised variants of its signature conventions. In most cases there was at least a modest background, a self-conscious pose, deliberate framing, and a visible address—or resistance—to the camera. It is critical to remember that the families who chose to have their son, wife, daughter, or husband admitted to Holloway would have been among photography’s most eager consumers, even if the family member who was the patient was not included in the images typically circulated to document the family’s life. The Holloway pictures exist at an oblique angle to the usual portrait conventions, neither fully refuting nor embracing them, but offering us new composites that challenge the boundaries between what are usually regarded as distinct formats, as well as functions.17 The multiplicity of unfamiliar forms and approaches promotes a confusion as to the purpose of the photographs. It is often unclear as to whether the photographs produced at Holloway were intended to record, produce, or suppress the conditions that were their ostensible raison d’être.

The casebook photographs seem simultaneously archaic and experimental. There is a restlessness about them, as if the entire inventory of the history of photography to date is being appropriated, only to be partially cast off, or reinvented. Not only are there visual affinities with historical formats, such as the daguerreotype or tintype; there are intimations of the future in sequential, almost cinematic images. It is a rehearsal of photography’s own history, a vigorous, even if apparently naïve, plundering of its myriad tools and effects.18

Nine of the Holloway folios at the core of this essay are now housed at the Wellcome Library in London; forty-two are in the collection of the Surrey History Centre in Woking.19 Some of the casebooks are in relatively good condition, others have suffered from water or fire damage, a number of them are simply lost. It should be emphasized, however, that their survival is due principally to a group of heroic archivists who quite literally rescued them from either the “skip” or a series of bonfires set by squatters who had settled in the half-abandoned asylums of Surrey in the 1980s and 1990s, when many of these institutions were de-commissioned.20 (Occasionally, a missing volume surfaces. The Wellcome Trust purchased one on eBay several years ago).

Between the Aesthetic and the Objective

I concentrate here on a selection of the casebook photographs that pose a significant challenge to the standard assumptions about non-art photographs, especially when they are produced within a medical or scientific context. Special attention is given to those pictures that seem to hover somewhere in the space between the aesthetic and the objective—or perhaps, more precisely, in a register where the distinctions between these categories become so attenuated as to be virtually unrecognizable. I see this in-between space not simply as a site for formal experimentation, but as an opening for an interaction between the patient and the photographer, through which that patient could push against the enforced passivity of the institution—however subtle the signs of Holloway’s purpose remained.

My hope is to write about the Holloway photographs with the kind of nuanced historical eye that I continue to believe art historians possess in a way that is distinct from that of most practitioners in related humanities and social science fields. The process is admittedly difficult, and the development of a method worthy of these images is ongoing. Although I have embraced the idea of “interdisciplinarity” in my own work, and actively participate in many such initiatives across my university, I am intent here on underscoring what art historians know how to do better than anyone else: comprehend and enunciate how images and art objects are repositories of knowledge—especially when that knowledge is embedded in unexpected forms and spaces.21

The Medical Portrait

Medical portraits are themselves equivocal, hybrid objects. A growing literature has emerged to grapple with the ambiguities of the genre, challenging the conventional assumption that a medical image or object is equivalent to an empirical study, a confirmation of a text that has already been written, a diagnosis already delivered.22 In its broadest terms, the medical portrait can encompass oil paintings, sculptures and prints of both physicians and patients; tinted wax moulages of faces and body parts, originally made as teaching tools to demonstrate the visual signs of disease or defect; and painted plaster casts of body parts.23 But, as Ludmilla Jordanova has recently emphasized, photography is the medium that has been the focus of most of the discussions, and generated the greatest controversy.24

Unsurprisingly, the photographic medical portrait is considered to be especially fraught when the subjects represented have been judged to be mentally ill. Two groups of images have dominated the discussion over the past twenty five years: the pictures taken directly by Hugh Diamond, doctor and Superintendent of the women patients of the Surrey County Asylum (and founding member of the Photographic Society of London) during the 1850s (fig. 6); and those staged by the photographers working under Albert Londe for neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital (fig. 7).25 Both Diamond and Charcot readily displayed the photographs they either took themselves or presided over: Diamond exhibited them within his own asylum, and even showed them to patients, hoping that visual evidence of their troubled states would spur them on to better health.26 Londe and his fellow photographers knew from the outset that their images were intended for publication in Charcot’s medical journal, the Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière, which was published from 1875 to 1893, as a kind of visual atlas of the bodily evidence of neurological disease and defect.

Diamond’s and Charcot’s photographs were produced roughly thirty years apart. And naturally there are obvious differences in format, scale and effect: most of Diamond’s were half-length and focused on the uncomprehending expression of the patient. The majority of Charcot’s staff’s photographs represented the full figure, the better to display the full array of deviations in bodily comportment that revealed neurological defects, including the nine states of hysteria. Despite these obvious differences of form and emphasis, and a generation’s worth of change in the treatment of the mentally ill, the photographs produced by Diamond and Charcot and their surrogates shared two fundamental assumptions: an unequivocal faith in the transparency of the photograph, and a conviction that the patients they studied and photographed were unmistakably other. Almost all of the women whom Diamond photographed at the Surrey County Asylum appear definitively out of reach of conventional social exchange: compliant enough to be photographed, but unresponsive to any demands made by the photographer as to affect or expression. They have none of the decorum of the engaged, complicit subject. The photographs of Charcot’s patients fully intended to “make hysteria perceptible on the body’s exterior,” as Mary Hunter has put it. The more theatrically aberrant their movements were, the greater the clarity.27

There was no professional photography studio at Holloway, perhaps indicating a reluctance to fully embrace lock-step documentation for the upper middle classes. The sole reference to the practice appears in a list of improvements that long-time Superintendent Dr. Rees Philipps included in his annual report for 1890.28 The “setting up of a photography room”—with no further elaboration—is listed as a chore completed, tucked between the construction of a new sewage system, and the nine-foot-high wall intended to keep Voluntary Boarders prone to suicide away from the nearby railroad.

Diamond and Charcot intended from the outset that their patients’ photographs would be seen—by the patients themselves, in some cases, by professional colleagues (in both medicine and photography), and by the public. As far as we know, the Holloway casebook photographs were seen only by the staff and the Commissioners on Lunacy, a committee formed of doctors and a board of local governors, including the town’s vicar, who inspected the casebooks and interviewed the patients at least twice a year.29 Whether any families knew of the photographs, or requested copies of them, remains unknown. It is disquieting to realize that during a period when just about everyone who could afford to do so would sit for a portrait in a studio or take one of their own, at least some of the casebook photographs are likely to be the only images that ever existed of their subjects.30 Their exclusion from anything resembling “ordinary circulation” brings to the fore the problem of our own complicity in studying images that we were never meant to see.

To those who immerse themselves in the Holloway images and the narratives that accompany them, there is admittedly a risk of indulging in a certain degree of voyeurism. However, if we cease to regard these subjects as “other,” we have an opportunity to recognize the risks taken by even the most vulnerable among us, just to be seen. Here is how Lord Shaftesbury put it, in his first attempt to demand better mental health care for everyone, in a speech he delivered to Parliament in 1845: “Here we are sitting in deliberation to-day, to-morrow we may be the subjects of it; causes as slight apparently as they are sudden, varying through every degree of intensity—a fall, a fever, a reversal of fortune, a domestic calamity, will do the awful work, and then “farewell king!” The most exalted intellects, the noblest affections, and transformed into fatuity and corruption; and leave nothing but the sad though salutary lesson, how frail is the tenure by which we hold all that is precious and dignified in human nature.”31

In spite of the historical and ethical difficulties these photographs pose, I would argue that the hesitations are worth overcoming, as the images have a great deal to teach us about the power immanent in the very act of posing for a picture, even when the imagined audience remains unseen. Through the photographs made at the Holloway Sanatorium, a modicum of agency may have been granted to those who were generally presumed to be without it. And thus, even if only for the span of time it took to stage and take the photograph, a highly vulnerable person could resist being reduced to the category of specimen, and could become, instead, a subject.32

Mary C.

In spite of their modest scale and proscribed medical context, some of the Holloway pictures conjure the kind of affective power that we associate with painting. Unlike most of Diamond’s insensible patients at the Surrey Pauper Asylum, or Charcot’s theatrical hysterics (who also performed during his Tuesday afternoon lectures), many of the Holloway subjects engage directly with the photographer and, by extension, with the imagined viewer beyond—sometimes with what appears to be great emotional intensity.

Mary Elizabeth C. (fig. 8), for example, thirty-six-years old, was melancholic and plagued by anxiety.33 She had recently lost three sisters and a brother to consumption. The accompanying notes mention Mary’s “confused, anxious, worried, expression.” She fears that someone is “mesmerizing” her, which may account for her faintly desperate gaze, which emanates from deep-set eyes wreathed in shadow. In the photograph, Mary’s direct stare makes it appear as if she is looking through the camera, as if to directly beseech whoever is on the other side: a grand gesture by a small person. The force of that effect is enhanced by the way the paper photograph has been shaped into an extended square with rounded corners, now effectively the frame for a close up of Mary’s face, and the simple white blouse she wears. The photograph’s curving edges arc around her head with its rounded cap of hair, further intensifying the impact of that gaze. Mary’s proportions resemble those of a young child; with her large, moon-shaped face hovering above the small triangle of her exposed neck and narrowed shoulders. Her eyes, however steady their gaze may appear, betray the weariness of someone aged beyond her years. The date on which the photograph was taken, “Sept. 4^th/ 90”, is underscored by a carefully broken line that bends away from the edges of the picture: as if a schematic honorific has been improvised for the occasion. In the early spring of the following year, Mary was moved to the “Brighton House for sea air.” This would have been the Hove Villa, bought as a kind of annex to Holloway by the original benefactors two years after the sanatorium’s opening, and supervised by Rees Philipps’ wife. Mary C.’s husband visited her there, and “found her sufficiently well to be tried at home.” She went with him on leave, and in July was “discharged recovered by the authority of her husband.” Most married women, unless they were discharged “relieved” to another institution (often a smaller, private facility), were indeed dependent upon “the authority” of their spouses. Only Voluntary Boarders could discharge themselves. Male patients were most often discharged by the authority of a male relative. The phrase “by the authority of his wife” has not surfaced in the casebooks to date.

The Captain

Unlike Mary, other patients actively resisted those who were trying to capture their likeness. We know from the staff’s notes that Cuthbert Charles M., a Captain of the Royal Engineers (fig. 9), was bitterly discontent. He had contracted malaria while in India, and was now given to melancholia and erratic episodes of intense violence. He crafted many letters of complaint to the Superintendent. One of these (fig. 10) contains an accusation about a theft, which Charles illustrated with both a profile portrait of the alleged perpetrator and a small, inexplicable, sketch of a church. The patient’s case history of sullen discontent and delusion is inscribed around a poorly exposed, but nonetheless decoratively shaped, picture, which was pasted in the center of the page with the writing coursing around it, as if the image were being granted pride of place.

At first Charles M. seems to be leaning against a stone wall; but given the rippling shadows that hover next to him on the right, we can surmise that this is instead a paper backdrop tacked or taped up for the occasion. With his cuffed wrists tucked tightly into crossed arms, and his eyes closed, the Captain declares that while he may have agreed to stand before that creased paper backdrop, he is damned if he is going to meet the photographer’s gaze. As Jennifer Green-Lewis has pointed out, “closed eyes can be a form of resistance.”34 On his face is an expression that oscillates between a self-satisfied grin and a grimace. Not only is this man discontent; he wants the viewer to see that he is discontent. The slight smile and self-protective arms signal a performance of resistance, enacted expressly for a witness.

Despite what we see first: the rigidity of the subject’s body, and the arms pressed against his chest like a shield, closer study reveals that the Captain is much younger than his manner suggests. He is also well dressed in a suit of textured, striped wool, and perfectly starched cuffs. In general, the male patients at Holloway are more consistently attired in proper upper middle-class costume than the women are. One consequence of this propriety is that mental states are more easily masked; the suit, cravat, and collar become a form of camouflage. We see variations of middle-class masculinity under duress. In some pictures, the masculine body seems on the verge of collapse; in others, the socially appropriate male patient appears as a fortified carapace, impervious to the ebbs and flows of mental strain. While Mary C. had expressed a conviction that she was being “mesmerized,” her preternaturally intense study of the camera seems a quest to understand a force that she can sense, but not control. In contrast, Captain Charles experiences the camera’s and, presumably, the photographer’s presence as physical intrusions, in response to which he closes his eyes, covers his chest and stiffens the body inside that severely tailored suit. 

Julie P.

Some patients seem to have actively collaborated with their photographers. Julie P. first came to Holloway as a Voluntary Boarder but was later certified. According to the notes made upon admission, Julie was oppressed by “mental worry, and an inability to recognize anybody.” For the last several months, according to the staff notes, “she has not been in possession of her reason.” But the photograph we initially see pasted to the page is completely at odds with such a description (fig. 11a). In fact, Julie stands before Holloway as if it were her manor house, with no trace of the distractible behavior she apparently manifested upon admission. Her hair is swept into an elaborate cascade of curls atop her head. There are jewels in her ears. She is clearly corseted, as the curving, concave row of tiny buttons indicates. A lustrous stole encases and broadens her shoulders. Although her lowered hands are outside the margin of the picture, we can assume with confidence that they are demurely clasped together. Julie’s unusually pale eyes seem sharply focused, although they are directed out of the picture, as if she is knowingly offering her most advantageous side to the photographer.

Pasted above Julie’s portrait as a lady of the manor is a piece of medical ephemera—a temperature chart that documents (fig. 11b) the spiking fever from which the patient suffered not only at the time of admission, but through much of her stay. Apparently, days passed before it was discovered that Julie was suffering from an open wound in her lower back that had never quite healed. The temperature chart can be unfolded and opens well beyond the page’s edge.  Allowing the entire chart to be visible seems a deliberate gesture of transparency, a move towards supplying the “objective” medical evidence that might explain the young woman’s temporary loss of reason as described in the narrative, which seems grossly mismatched to the photograph. However, it turns out that the clinical chart is performing an act of concealment. Hidden directly underneath the fragile paper diagram, visible only when the chart is gently pulled away from the page, is an overexposed photograph of an emaciated, distressed young woman: Julie’s “before” picture, made shortly after admission, and dated “Spring 1891,” a photograph we are not initially allowed to see (fig. 12). Julie’s figure here is slightly blurred, as if her agitation cannot be stilled. Her head is tilted, and her mouth is half-opened, as if she is in the midst of some utterance; her eyes, so directed in the first photograph we saw, look wildly unfocused in this image. In addition, Julie’s hair looks both sparse and disheveled, and is pulled back gracelessly from her forehead. A narrow lace collar presses against the neck of an otherwise unadorned black dress. The woman in this photograph seems as bewildered and detached from her surroundings as one of Hugh Diamond’s patients. The picture of the elegant young matron we saw first was taken in October of the same year—effectively, the “after” photograph attesting to Julie’s improved health. Both photographs were taken by the same staff member, the only one who displayed a strong interest in photography: Dr. Jane Henderson.

Jane Henderson was the very first woman doctor hired at Holloway, where she stayed for only two years. She seems to have taken a genuine pride in her photographs, as she initialed every one of them, and was virtually the only staff member who routinely made an explicit connection between a photograph and the symptoms described in the accompanying texts.35 (On the whole, her narratives appear longer and more nuanced than those of her contemporaries. She seems to have been a more patient listener.) When Jane Henderson left Holloway, she travelled to Paris, where she spent her time attending Dr. Charcot’s lectures at the Salpêtrière. She apparently did so with such enthusiasm and frequency that she published an admiring tribute about him shortly after his death in 1893 in a Glasgow newspaper.36 Jane Henderson may well have been familiar with the Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière—although she had not met Charcot before she came to Holloway. But her construction of exemplary moments in Julie P.’s life as a patient at Holloway suggests a very different approach towards medical photography, one that seems far more fluid than the neurologist whose work she so admired. If we assume that Dr. Henderson composed the page herself, masking the picture of a highly distressed subject with the temperature chart, effectively, she collaborated (or colluded?) with her patient to produce a curious amalgam of medical transparency and sleight of hand, in which Julie’s “after” photograph functions as the “evidence” of a kind of magic trick.

Timing

While the function of what are effectively Julie P.’s “before and after” photographs—the initial inaccessibility of the former notwithstanding—is relatively clear, the impetus for the timing of most of the casebook pictures is far less apparent. Some photographs were taken in the midst of treatment, weeks or months after admission, and are only intermittently related to the hand-written narratives that ebb around them. Under these circumstances, it is often difficult to assess whether the casebook image is meant to capture some evidence of the crisis that brought the patient to Holloway in the first place, or the resolution that allowed them to leave.

When was Alice S. photographed, for example (fig. 13)? Wary but engaged, she stands primly before us, with her head slightly tilted as if to remain alert to what the photographer is doing. Encased in an ensemble of oversized black sleeves and a high, tiered collar that completely covers her neck, she resembles a small, hatless witch. She appears to hold a small purse or handkerchief, whose almost perfectly balanced triangular shape reiterates the geometry of her form in its entirety. Her lacy apron would perhaps look more appropriate in a domestic setting, although it is also at odds with the near theatrical scale of her sleeves. The date of the picture, 27 June 1898, several days after admission, is written twice—once directly on the photograph, and again alongside it, as if to match the patient unequivocally to her representation.  Admitted at age forty-six, the wife of a baker, Alice is a success story. She had been “slightly suicidal”—a behavior that continued at Holloway after admission. “All life is a trouble to her,” say the doctor’s notes, “she can settle into nothing.” Just weeks later, she improves, and by August, she “feels quite a different creature than she did when she came here,” as the notes put it. She is discharged on 24 August 1898, “by the authority of her husband.” At what point in her roughly two-month stay did she pose for this photograph? Before she put a stocking around her throat, in a documented suicide attempt? Or after? Is this a “typical” representation of her “disease,” which sounds like what we would call depression today, or an instance in which her black mood has been “corrected”—even if temporarily—for the camera?

Temporality is both invoked and deflected in what initially appears to be a sequence of photographs of Agnes Alice S. (sometimes identified mistakenly in the casebooks as “Agnes Mary S.”), who was known as “Lottie.” Although two of the images are given approximate dates (“Spring 91” and “Oct. 91” respectively), they do not appear to accurately portray the behaviors and moods noted in the doctors’ narratives that are placed alongside them. The staff consistently describes Lottie’s behavior as oscillating between extreme agitation and stupor. The earliest of the photographs, taken a few months after her admission (fig. 14a) has the pallor of a faded daguerreotype, although enough of the image remains that we can spot Lottie sitting distractedly by a window, her eyes glazed, uninterested in the presence of the camera. The print seems to have been over-exposed initially, but it is also water-damaged. It can take a while to realize that Lottie is not alone. Two female attendants (the one with the lace-trimmed cap is likely a nurse) loom into the frame from the upper right and lower left respectively. The nurse on the right bends her head down so far that it seems to touch Lottie’s; the other attendant peers up to her from below, crowding Lottie’s body with an urgency that suggests that the possibility of physical restraint is hanging in the balance.37

The next photo of the patient (fig. 14b), taken several months later, would seem to represent a woman whose responsiveness, and self-care, have improved. She is pictured without her caretakers, outdoors, rather than constrained inside. In this second picture, Lottie’s head is swiveled to the right and her gaze seems alert, as if she has spotted something compelling in the distance. Her hair is gathered neatly into a tightly wound topknot, and the mutton-sleeved coat she wears, with a high fur collar cradling her long neck, is quite fashionable. Separate the photograph from the casebook and she could be a young woman paused on the curb of a London street waiting to cross it. Twelve years pass before the third photograph appears (fig. 14c). By then, the staff’s narratives have been reduced to a laconic phrase or two, typically added only once a year. This last image has the studied informality of a snapshot. Despite the long interval between photographs, Lottie does not seem to have aged significantly. Although her brow is slightly furrowed and her eyes are cast down, the outdoor setting and signs of a breeze ruffling her hair suggest that she is standing in a field under the sun—she could be a young mother looking down at the child who plays by her feet.

At first, the trio of Lottie’s photographs appear to provide a more “complete” narrative of her life than we customarily see in the casebooks, a perception initially reinforced by the presence of a letter she wrote to her mother, pleading to come home (fig. 15); and a “Caution as to Suicide” notice that she was given shortly after admission (fig. 16). We seem to have more information here than we usually do. But the written record refutes any trace of either narrative or pictorial logic. Although Lottie does not appear to get much older, these photographs were taken years apart, hardly an adequate representation of someone who spent so much of her life at Holloway. And the appropriate-looking, even relaxed, casebook portraits are in fact entirely at odds with Lottie’s actual behavior, which apparently grew more and more “stuperous” over the years.

Perhaps the pictures perform another function, whether intentionally or not: they suggest an idealized vision of the life that this young woman might have led, had her circumstances been different. The photographs “perform” a life that was not, in fact, possible for Lottie to lead. As such they act as a parallel fiction—Lottie stands in for an ordinary middle class young woman occupied in the events of her day. The infrequent notes on her continuing lack of progress trail off almost completely around 1907, at which time they apparently continue in another casebook, which is now lost. Unmarried women whose relations with their families were troubled (she had expressed a “violent hatred” towards her mother) tended to remain in Holloway for many years—hardly the resolution that Thomas Holloway had originally intended.

Text and Image

While Lottie’s history was all but detached from the pictures that purported to “illustrate” it, that is hardly the only disjunction between text and image in Holloway’s casebooks. In general, there is no systematic separation of image and text, as would be expected in a medical ledger. Sometimes, the two compete for visual authority directly on the page. In many instances, the doctors’ observations are inscribed around the photograph, as if the image is the primary object to which the text defers. Yet in other instances, notes or dates are written directly over the image, as if it is simply another equivalent, or even lesser, text. Captions to the photographs were exceedingly rare, as if the images themselves were self-explanatory; and indeed, this would have been in keeping with Hugh Diamond’s influential dictum that photography was the only language necessary. As he wrote in 1856, “The Photographer … needs in many cases no aid from any language of his own, but prefers rather to listen, with the pictures before him, to the silent but telling language of nature.”38

Apparently, Holloway’s are the first medical casebooks in which illustrations and case-notes were produced at roughly the same time, which makes the dissonance between them all the more noteworthy. They represent a marriage of word and image that is at times not unlike the composition of certain illustrated medieval manuscripts, in which the marginalia acted as a counter-text commenting upon, elaborating, but at times contradicting what the inscribed text, and its accompanying illuminations, related. The Holloway casebooks offer a medicalized, secular version of what medievalist Michel Camille referred to as the disputatio.39 Doctors’ notes vie with the patients’ own accounts, which are often contradicted, in turn, by the comments of the relatives who brought them to Holloway, and then finally, by the photographs themselves.

A crucial part of Holloway’s practice was to retain all the test results, letters, and drawings executed by or pertaining to the patients themselves. We have already seen Lottie’s letter to her mother and her “Caution as to Suicide” notice (which were unfortunately quite common) as well as Captain Charles’s rant to the Superintendent. Many female patients wrote to the lost loves whose abandonment had reportedly precipitated their “attacks”; many male patients, like the Captain, wrote notes to the Superintendent, accusing a staff member or another patient of theft or an act of violence. Quite a few Holloway residents, both male and female, penned missives to the Queen, whose country residence, Windsor Castle, was nearby. And of course there were a number of death notices. Holloway’s medical casebooks brim with so much material “evidence” that at times they seem to mimic the features of a family scrapbook.

Performing Sanity

The desired relationship between text and image at Holloway remains difficult to assess, and inevitably shifted with time, and different administrations (although Rees Philipps presided as Superintendent for over twenty years). On one hand, the photographs were clearly not straightforward clinical records, laid out on the page expressly to support a text. But neither were they conventional portraits that could stand alone without a text. The ambiguities are distilled in a series of pictures in which patients seem to perform expressly for the camera. Reportedly violent, delusional patients sit quietly, even ingratiatingly, for the photographer; and patients whose photographs suggest a despair beyond intervention are reported as cheerful and occupied, and are discharged “relieved” or even “recovered,” as the notes attest.

Albert W. (fig. 17), admitted in February of 1902, for example, seems the picture of upper middle class, masculine propriety and restraint—as did most of the men who agreed to be photographed. Yet the case-notes above his photograph (which happens to be glued directly on top of the notes themselves) read: “His appearance and manner are insane; he is eccentric and solitary, irritable, violent and rapid in his movements and is very passionate when opposed.” The patient Arthur T. (fig. 18) affects amused tolerance for the photographer. He is handsome and animated, indulging the photographer with a carefully casual pose, as if he is sitting in a professional London studio, rather than before a crudely hung, paper backdrop. Perhaps he imagines that he is looking at the Queen, to whom he had penned several letters. George Howard M. (fig. 19), a mining engineer, was photographed in June of 1903. Despite a certain vacancy in his eyes, he appears well groomed and presentable. Decorous appearance notwithstanding, the most pronounced theme within George M.’s case-notes is his homicidal violence.

That appearances can deceive, or at least re-direct one’s impressions, seems especially pertinent in the photograph of Herbert D., a thirty-seven-year-old brewer’s clerk (fig. 20). The photograph is larger than most casebook images, and was inserted loosely into the pages, rather than being fixed permanently. Herbert sits on a makeshift bench, before that wrinkled paper backdrop, with the expansive masculine authority of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832). Indeed, Herbert himself could almost be an educated man of leisure, with his watch fob, high collar, cravat, and fluffed-out handkerchief. He looks confident, at ease in what appears to be a wool suit and vest, with a collar and cravat. The way he tucks his hands in his pockets suggests a gesture of leisurely satisfaction, rather than shyness or restraint. Herman seems to preside comfortably over the photographer and his imagined audience, rather than simply sitting passively to be observed. Yet, the case-notes on the preceding page emphasize that Herman was solitary, suspicious, and reserved, and spent most of his time answering the voices of his auditory hallucinations. Perhaps he could “perform” sanity for at least the time it took to set up the paper backdrop and the bare wooden bench. Through the photograph he might reclaim—if only temporarily—a “self” that was no longer on display in the wider world. In collaboration with the photographer, Herman effectively staged the picture of a self-possessed, sane man at ease in the world, a performance now memorialized in a medical document that was unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of people.

At other times, the recurrence of a patient’s photograph tells a story more eloquently than any text can. Herbert A., age twenty-two and single (fig. 21), is described as a pianoforte manufacturer. He seems perhaps a bit arrogant, faintly unyielding, with his shoulders squared and his head faintly tipped back. He manages to command his small area of the page. This imagined “Prince of Italy,” son of the King, which he believed himself to be, seems to be enacting his supposedly elevated status. His body is pressed against the chair back, envisioned from below, an angle that monumentalizes him. He sits agreeably enough, as if he is accustomed to being looked at, although he does not deign to acknowledge the photographer. The decorative flourish added beneath the centered photograph and accompanying texts becomes a frame for a kind of triptych—with Herbert’s image floating like a donor portrait between the now-honorific words penned on 15 July: “Discharged” on the left; and “Recovered” on the right. Unfortunately, Herbert would not remain recovered; he would return repeatedly in the years to come, the victim of increasingly frequent manic episodes. His photograph resurfaces over and over like a reproach to the sanatorium that failed him. 

The Page as Pictorial Field

While there are narrative disjunctions between image and text, there are also unexpected visual juxtapositions that generate a dialogue between them, activating the entire visual field of the casebook page. Maude B. (fig. 22), age twenty-seven, was a governess whose engagement was broken, apparently because of her reluctance to leave her teaching career, to which her fiancé objected. The casebook notes editorialize on this matter, adding that the “engagement seems to have been broken several times mainly owing to her capriciousness.” The doctor’s notes cite a phrase she utters over and over: “I am a blank.” The empty space of the casebook page, whether or not it was intended to remain unfilled, produces an almost poetic dialogue between her image and her utterance. Perhaps the patient believes, like a young child, that if she closes her eyes, no one will see her. With eyes shut, her portrait is reminiscent of the criminals of the 1870s who squeezed their eyelids tightly when they were photographed by their arresting officers, thus defiantly foiling attempts at the public’s recognition.40 Perhaps Maude’s refusal to disclose her features fully was a form of resistance that preserved at least a trace of her own.

At times, the arrangement of the casebook photograph on the page seems not only provocative but performative. For example, the first photograph we see of Eleanora Susannah S. (fig. 23a), has been slashed to fit the casebook’s narrow margin. Her diagnosis is “melancholia with stupor,” and her posture is erect to the point of panic. Her hands seem gnarled, gripping something that cannot be identified. She is a widow at only thirty-one years old, although she looks much older. Six months later, she is reported to be cheerful and occupied, and has a fair amount of initiative, as well as an ability to convey emotion appropriately. She is discharged, recovered, in July. In the photograph pasted near this more optimistic report (fig. 23b), also taken at Holloway, Eleanora Susannah is fuller faced, almost smiling above a broad white collar and fluffy bow, looking directly into the camera without strain. Through a few pages of the casebook, which collapse together the trials of several months, her image has been transmuted from the narrowed marginal representation of an impossibly strained body and grim visage to this quite pleasant portrait, pasted onto the page proper, not its margins, and shaped into the oval typical of a sentimental family souvenir. It is as if, with health restored, Eleanora Susannah now deserves a genuine portrait. Lora B.’s, in contrast, was faceted like an old tintype (fig. 24), cut into an octagon before being pasted into the casebook. The archaic form of her photograph seems in tune with her relatively old-fashioned dress, and severely drawn back hair.

Another patient, Constance B., is presented in three distinct formats in her casebook, each of which suggests not only a different behavior of an individual patient, but also a different conception of image-making. In the first photograph we see (fig. 25a), Constance is outdoors, her wispy, bound hair irradiated by the sun. But her eyes are closed, and her head seems wobbly on her neck, as if she is about to tilt forward under the force of the light, and perhaps the imagined violation of scrutiny. A few pages later, there are two photographs side by side. The one on the left (fig. 25b) has the matter-of-fact scale and proportion of a nineteenth-century identity card, along with some of the conventions of the studio portrait. Constance’s hair is pulled back with fierce restraint into a tiny topknot; the sleeves of her jacket appear to swell out as we observe them, and the colossal buttons on her jacket seem like eyes punctuating a large, amorphous face. It is as if the costume itself is posing, rather than the young woman who inhabits it. The narrow photograph pasted next to this is far more unsettling (fig. 25c). Constance is dressed like a young girl off to a Sunday picnic—she wears a blouse, a walking skirt, and a rather extravagantly decorated straw hat, completed by a large bow tucked under her chin. But she perches on a stairway like a rag doll being held up by invisible wires, her arms hanging slackly by her side. There is a rare caption beside the photograph that says “usual attitude, Arms falling to side.” Constance’s aberrant posture is reminiscent of one of Charcot’s full-body visualizations of pathology.41 The patient is apparently older than she looks, and had suffered a bicycle accident some weeks ago. Since then, she says that devils have taken possession of her, that her friends are trying to poison her. She needs to be tended like a young child, crooning to herself in meaningless cadences. Constance’s history as “neurotic,” even “hysterical,” is invoked repeatedly, while the recent accident in which she may well have suffered a serious head injury is only fleetingly mentioned. Her history trails off into other casebooks, years into the future, until she is discharged to the Manor Asylum in Epsom after pushing a hairpin down her throat. There are no other photographs of her.

Arthur B., (fig. 26), age twenty-six, initially seems to have a more optimistic future ahead of him, although unfortunately he will stay at Holloway for years to come. He is a single clerk, and although he appears energetic and alert, he has been suffering from depression. His bust-length portrait is centered at the very top of an otherwise blank page. His missing body becomes a kind of imagined column on which sits the head that nearly fills the photograph, which has been cropped to its proportions. Arthur’s curly hair, high collar, cravat, and above all the long, waxed moustache, rivet attention to his head, which further intensifies our awareness of his absent body. His dark features atop that empty space produce an effect not unlike that of an Egyptian Fayum mummy portrait in which the body of the deceased has effectively disappeared into its wrappings, the only trace of human presence the stark, beautiful oval of the painted face.42

From the point of view of class, Alfred S. (fig. 27a) offers a direct contrast to Arthur B.  Although Holloway was indeed mostly filled with people from the upper middle and middle classes, some patients less fortunate were occasionally admitted. Eventually, many of them were employed at the sanatorium. Alfred S. was a twenty-two-year-old tenant farmer, admitted in May of 1898. His precipitating attack was reported to be caused by a combination of “influenza” and the “strains of responsibility.” The first photograph we see, small and overexposed, was taken about a month after admission; the date is written right over the picture. Alfred’s body is layered with shapeless work garments, which nearly slide off his shoulders as he sits, vacantly, as if unconscious of the photographer’s presence. A few pages later, a slightly larger, more formal photograph is loosely inserted into the casebook (fig. 27b), likely taken close to the time of his discharge. Alfred’s body, centered for the camera, now fills over half the frame. The wool suit he wears (in the month of August) is likely not his own. The case-notes tell us that he worked steadily on the grounds at Holloway throughout his stay, and by the summer, “he has now attained to almost his normal mental condition, which is not very brilliant.” The notes add: “He is grateful to us for his recovery.” What is perhaps most revelatory about this photograph is the gap between the crookedly hung paper backdrop and the flowered wallpaper behind it—the “real” Holloway décor that is barely masked by the provisional, “objectifying” length of paper. Alfred is in limbo, stranded between different worlds—of class, geography, and conceptions of illness and health. And so is his photograph, poised as if somewhere between, or outside, the worlds of vernacular and art photography.

There are occasional oddities in the casebooks that cannot be fully accounted for—either aesthetically or medically. Some patients’ photographs are paired with narratives whose juxtaposition is not simply obscure, but downright disturbing. Often these particular case notes contain highly judgmental observations that go beyond the need to record revealing symptoms. For example, the first casebook contains a picture of a comfortably seated, grandmotherly woman, complete with apron and lace cap, who seems to be looking kindly at her viewer. Marie P. (fig. 28) was a Prussian-born former governess, who was consistently described by the staff as a proud, haughty woman, and who frequently expressed disdain for both her “subjects” (the other patients) and the doctors who questioned her. Her caretakers seemed to bitterly resent her attitude, although they remained somewhat intimidated by her. The casebook photograph that accompanies the narrative about her hauteur presents her as the object of ridicule: the large black cat spread out across her lap was notoriously fat (partially because she overfed him), although she was consumed with worry over his imagined starvation, as well as his heart disease.  Here, the photographer has put Marie P. in her place, so to speak: the highly educated governess to the upper classes has been reduced to a foolish, sentimental domestic servant.

The patient Jane S. (fig. 29) was suffering terribly from mania caused by a dangerous post-childbirth infection called puerperal fever. She is delusional, violent towards others, self-destructive, and refuses to wear her clothing. Yet, perhaps because she is a “small, delicate-looking woman, sparely nourished with an abundance of dark brown hair, green eyes with dark lashes,” as the case notes tell us, she has been staged for the photograph as a kind of fashionable mannequin. The vacancy in her eyes suggests that it was not her decision to be pictured at all, let alone to be dressed in the elegant but restrained fashion of an Oxford student on an outing.43

Conclusion

Sometime around 1910, photographs began to disappear from the casebooks. Confusion about the role of photography at Holloway seems to have intensified, rather than dissipated, as two last photographs demonstrate. Neither of these shows the patient as they would have appeared at Holloway. One of the latest casebook images is—one is tempted to say—a portrait of a cirrhotic liver (fig. 30a), sensitively lit and centered on the page: the material trace of a female patient, Sylvia T., who had died of alcoholism. A letter accompanies the photograph (fig. 30b), written by her present doctor to her former physician, affirming that there was nothing that either of them could have done. While the patient’s body has disappeared, the diseased organ seems presented as material proof of the doctors’ innocence in Sylvia T.’s inevitable demise—evidence that would presumably be interpretable only to other medical experts. For all intents and purposes, the person of Sylvia T. is gone.

Another of the late photographs in the casebooks was not made at Holloway at all, although it does portray a former patient. In April of 1906, a young woman named Corisande C. was admitted to Holloway. She was single, twenty-six years of age, and had no occupation. She had an interest in dancing and singing, voiced in a letter—pinned still to the casebook pages—to a doctor who had ignored her musical aspirations. Evidently, the lack of encouragement Corisande received at Holloway did not deter her from a successful career as a “classical dancer.” The photograph inserted into the casebook (fig. 31), torn from a contemporary journal, tells us that “Miss Corisande has recently appeared at the Aeolian Hall.” Her bejeweled, risqué top and what seem to be harem pants affirm that she is costumed as some kind of Orientalist “exotic.” The stark sensuality of her reclining pose and revealing dress are at odds with her downcast eyes. Perhaps for the pages of this London illustrated journal (whose name we no longer have), she became adept at resisting the intrusion of the camera. Although Corisande was not photographed while at Holloway (or listened to particularly closely), her confident, professionalized femininity apparently testifies to the success of Holloway’s “cure.”

Sylvia’s cirrhotic liver and the trappings of Corisande’s post-Holloway career suggest the vast range and kinds of questions that can be posed about the casebook photographs of the sanatorium. My essay here has been intended as an introduction to the complexity and challenges of this difficult, but incomparably rich, visual, material archive. A variety of methods and conceptions about image-making and its intersection with materiality will need to be developed to extract everything we can about what these photographs reveal about the intersection of medicine, gender, history, and image-making around the turn of the twentieth century. While we are enormously privileged to be able to access all the casebook photographs from the online catalogue of the Wellcome Library, I urge anyone who is interested in studying them to see these folios in person in London, and in Woking, Surrey: to turn the pages of a casebook, consider a selection of the photographs that lie within them, note the “cautions to suicide,” the drawings, the test results, the death notices, the letters to the Queen or to former, or imagined, lovers. There is even an X-ray of a patient’s broken femur slipped into the pages. Reading the case histories and studying the photographs and all the ephemera attached to the pages is difficult, sometimes heartbreaking, work. But an intensive consideration of these photographs, in tandem with the histories they accompany, offers these long-departed subjects a version of the audience they imagined when they looked into, or even away from, the camera.

Dominic McIver Lopes and I agree that (in his words) “to understand a photograph is at least in part to explain the act of making it, which is to get at what the photographer meant.”1 This agreement is not universal. Many people think that the artist’s intention is either irrelevant or at least not dispositive in determining the meaning of any work of art. Others think that even if the interpretation of, say, a painting must necessarily be an interpretation of what the painter intended, intention cannot play that role in photography. If the famous Cartier-Bresson photograph of Cardinal Pacelli were a painting, for example, there might easily be some question about why the painter depicted the mustached man to the left of the Cardinal looking down but there could be no question at all about the fact that the painter meant to show him looking down. A painter who preferred to show him looking at the Cardinal could just make him look at the Cardinal; Cartier-Bresson, however, had no such power. He may have wished the man were looking at the Cardinal but the direction of the man’s gaze was entirely determined by the depicted man, not by the man doing the depicting. This is why Susan Sontag says that “Photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist.”2 It’s what Lopes calls the standard theory of photography.

Lopes thinks the standard theory is misleading and that photographs are not distinctively unintended. Following Elizabeth Anscombe, he argues that all acts are, like the act of taking a photograph, intended under some description (Cartier-Bresson meant to show Pacelli) and unintended under others (he didn’t mean to show three balding men), and hence that “Photographic agency is plain vanilla: no different from the agency of…the painter.” And insofar as my discussion in “I Do What Happens” (the title is a quote from Anscombe) dealt with this view, my point was not to disagree. I think that what Lopes calls his “first deflationary maneuver” (because it deflates the idea that photographic acts are either some philosophically special kind of act or not acts at all) is right.

But I also think it doesn’t actually deflate anything that matters. Lopes’s point is that the unintended aspects of the act are just as much a part of the act as the intended ones, in the way, for example, that the unintended aspects of my typing this response (using electricity) are as much a part of the act as the intended ones (responding to Lopes). But that doesn’t make them a part of its meaning. So if you think that explaining what a photograph means is explaining what the photographer meant by it, the reminder that even if Cartier-Bresson only made the man look down unintentionally, he still made him look down, is beside the point. The question is not only what did Cartier-Bresson do but what did he mean?

Hence, if you want to preserve the force of the first deflation (photographic acts are like every other act), you need a second deflation, one that will make photographic meaning as vanilla as photographic agency. And Lopes tries to get this by returning to what we both agree on—that “to understand a photograph is at least in part to explain…what the photographer meant” but this time insisting on the “in part” part, and arguing that just as agency is not entirely identified with intentionality, meaning isn’t either. There’s a difference between “the semantic content of a vehicle of communication” and “what the communicator uses the vehicle to communicate.” Just as the sentence meaning of a speech act may, for example, be different from the speaker’s meaning so may what the photograph records be different from what the photographer seeks to communicate.

But this second deflation seems to me to work no better and in some respects less well than the first one did. Where the first one didn’t really deflate anything that matters, this one doesn’t deflate anything at all. Suppose the meaning of the photograph is indeed determined by both the photographer’s intention and the relevant “facts about the working of the photographic mechanism.” This obviously doesn’t alter the fact that any interpretation of the photo will be (at least “in part”) an account of the photographer’s intention. And if what’s distinctive about photography are the kinds of issues it raises not about action as such but about action in relation to meaning, those issues are either left untouched or accentuated by the appeal to the mechanism. In the painting of Cardinal Pacelli, for example, we might have an interpretive disagreement about what was meant by the fact that certain figures were shown looking away from the central figure, and that argument would be about what the painter meant by depicting them in this way. But with respect to the photograph, a different sort of argument is not only possible but sometimes unavoidable: did the photographer mean anything at all by depicting them in that way? And this disagreement (which for both Lopes and me is over at least “a part” (the intended part) of what the photo means) is utterly unaffected by the reminder that, whatever the photographer meant, that’s what the camera recorded. We already know that.

In other words, the effort to appeal to a theory of action and then of meaning in order to demonstrate that there’s nothing theoretically distinctive about action and meaning in photography is not so much mistaken as it is beside the point. Why? Because it’s not true that “Getting the nature of action right deflates the difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency.” Actually, almost the exact opposite is true. If we can get the nature of action and meaning even a little bit right, then we begin not to deflate the difficulties that seem to (and really do) come with photographic agency but to understand them. It’s really hard to paint a picture of a man looking down without meaning to; it’s really easy to take a photo of a man looking down without meaning to. So in photography the question of what was meant can be shadowed by the question of whether it was meant in a way that it isn’t in painting. That’s a difficulty (also an opportunity) that comes with the exercise of photographic agency.

Putting the point this way, however, my criticism of Lopes might also identify a real area of agreement. Insofar as Lopes’s idea is, first, that because there are no philosophical differences between, say, painting and photography (i.e. they don’t require different theories of action), there are no distinctive philosophical difficulties raised by photographic action, we’re good. And insofar as his idea is, second, that making a painting is nonetheless different from making a photograph (they don’t require different theories but they do require different actions), all that’s needed for us to still be good is the agreement that these different actions may plausibly produce (and have in fact produced) both different kinds of difficulties and different kinds of projects aimed at overcoming them. Michael Fried reads Thomas Demand’s practice of building models and then photographing them as a way of producing pictures from which everything but the intention of the artist has been excluded. For example, every blade of grass in Lawn was first constructed in Demand’s studio, thus turning what would otherwise be a kind of epitome of the unintentional (in an ordinary photograph of a lawn not only would the relations between the blades of grass be unintended by the photographer, they would also of course be unintended by the grass itself) into just the opposite—what Fried calls an image of “sheer artistic intention.”3 Neither the problem (how do I make this picture assert its intentionality?) nor the solution (build a model) would make much sense for a painted Lawn. Rather, since everything depicted in such a painting would already bear the mark of the painter’s intentionality (each blade would only and necessarily look the way it did because the painter had painted it that way), the problem of making something that bore the mark of being made that way would never even arise.

Assuming Lopes and I agree on all this, I still don’t quite see why he thinks of himself as having a philosophy of photography instead of just having his version of an Anscombian theory of action, but I also don’t think it much matters. We both get to talk about why and how the questions of meaning, intention and action might matter differently in photography than in painting (or writing or other arts) but we don’t have to think that photography requires a special theory of agency or of meaning or that it shows the irrelevance of agency or meaning. And we don’t have to deny that it might for some photographers (in my account, Winogrand) become a medium in which to think about some problems in the theory of action. Although here, perhaps, the agreement begins to break down, as it surely does when, in deploying his theoretical distinction between the two different kinds of meaning, Lopes seems to me not to feel the force of the example from Anscombe that is central to my discussion—the ironic hug.

For Lopes hugging someone to express contempt instead of affection shows how “the semantic content of a vehicle of communication is not always what the communicator uses the vehicle to communicate.” The semantic content of the hug—“a big hug signals affection”—is “determined by social conventions, not the hugger’s intentions.” So when you hug someone, the convention says you’re signaling affection. If, however, what you’re actually trying to signal is not affection but contempt (“you silly little twit”), that’s your intention talking. The point for him is that “some meaning” is not “inseparable from intention”; you can “prize” it “apart from intention.”

But how does the distinction between the social convention and the intention “prize some meaning apart from intention?” The ironic hug doesn’t have two meanings, one conventional and one intentional. If we’re trying, in Anscombe’s words, “to give a correct account of the man’s action,” the correct account is just that it’s contemptuous. And, of course, that would be equally (albeit differently) true of a non-ironic hug. It’s not, in other words, as if the non-ironic hug is sincere by convention; it’s sincere because it’s meant sincerely. Which is just to say that the social convention only functions as a vehicle of communication if someone is using it as a vehicle and the act of using the vehicle only means what the user means by it.

My point here is partially that, as long as you’re thinking of meaning as an act, you can’t prize any of it apart from intention. (There’s a reason why Anscombe put “Signing, signaling” on a list of “happening[s]” that “can only be voluntary or intentional” [85].) Hugging someone contemptuously and hugging him affectionately are two different acts; the ascription of intention is internal to the description of them both and is their interpretation.

2

But part of the interest of the example—what made it, in my view, particularly relevant to Winogrand and what, I want to suggest now, makes it relevant to how we understand the history of art in the second half of the 20^th century more generally—is the fact that the difference between the two hugs may be thought of, Anscombe says, as “a purely interior matter.” What she means by this is that there is no physical difference between them and hence “no outward sign” that one is affectionate and one isn’t. Which might seem to suggest a picture of the act as a physical event that we interpret by reference to some mental state external to the act itself but internal to (in the mind of) the agent. And although this is not in fact what Anscombe means to suggest (her view is just the opposite), in its account of the intention as something mental and of the act as something physical, it does give us a picture of intention (what Stanley Cavell, usefully influenced by Anscombe called a “bad picture”4) that has been foundational for a lot of literary and art critical work in the last half century.

It’s this picture, that animates Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy,” and that Cavell criticized in the new critics, arguing that it was only because they saw the intention as “outside the work” that they could imagine it was irrelevant. It’s this picture (more generally) of any act as, in Arthur Danto’s words, a “movement of the body plus x” and (more particularly) of the “work of art” as “a material object plus y” that produced Danto’s enthusiasm for Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.5 His idea was that because you cannot see the difference between the physical object that is an ordinary Brillo box and the physical object that is a piece by Warhol (they’re “perceptually indiscernible” [61]), what the Brillo Boxes show is that you need to look for something outside the object (“y”) to understand which is which. Thus, although Danto was no fan of New Critical anti-intentionalism,6 he nonetheless shared their sense of the relation between the physical object and the intention. The difference was that he thought adding something like the intention was essential rather than irrelevant or impossible or harmful.

And, as I began to suggest in “I Do What Happens,” it’s this subdivision of the work into two separable components—the object and the intention that gives the object its meaning—that comes to function for Winogrand as a problem. Obviously, this apparent separability didn’t count for all artists as a problem (it wasn’t for Warhol7) and, equally obviously, it wasn’t just an issue for photography (again, Warhol). But it’s easy to see how the photograph and especially the snapshot (where is the difference between the physical object that’s a picture of your friends and the one that’s a work of art?) might come to seem a powerful instantiation of the difficulty you could have in making your act count as what you meant it to be. Without, that is, pointing to something outside it—like what was going on inside your head. In this sense, part of the interest of the photograph is that it runs the risk of reducing the artist’s intention to what Anscombe called “a performance in the mind,” what you’re thinking while you take the picture.

The Anscombian response to this worry is that it’s a mistake to break the act down into component parts, a mistake to think of the intention as something that’s outside of the physical act, either as its cause or as a mental state existing either prior to or alongside it. That’s why she says your hug isn’t given its meaning by the words “you silly little twit” “occur[ring]” to you while you embrace your old acquaintance, they have to be “seriously meant.”8 And you could mean the hug to be ironic even if you were thinking only affectionate thoughts at the time you administered it, or thinking nothing at all. The correct answer to the question, “why did you hug him?” would still be, to show my contempt.

But, of course, you might not succeed in showing your contempt. You might hug him ironically but he might fail to see the irony. Obviously all meaningful acts are subject to misinterpretation but part of the point of juxtaposing the ironic hug, the Brillo box and the snapshot has been to suggest that because each of them looks like something it isn’t as much as it looks like something it is, they all raise the question of what they mean in terms which seem to suggest that the answer to that question cannot be found in them. For Danto’s Warhol,9 this counts as the discovery that what makes an object a work of art need not be visible in the object itself, that the question of what it means or even of whether it means demands an answer that you can’t see in it. Because the Brillo Boxes don’t look like art, they lay bare the condition of what it is to be art. They’re both both an instantiation and an allegory of Danto’s analogy between the “bodily act” and the “mere thing” on one side and what he called the “basic action” and the work of art on the other, an allegory both of the essential importance of intention to the work of and of what he conceived as the relative autonomy of intention and work.

A snapshot is obviously different from a Brillo box but not necessarily because it looks more like art. Indeed, in 1965, in Photography, A Middle-brow Art, Pierre Bourdieu remarked that “The realization of the artistic intention is particularly difficult in photography, probably because, fundamentally, it is only with difficulty that photographic practice can escape the [domestic, journalistic, etc.] functions to which it owes its existence” (71). For our purposes and for Winogrand’s practice, the difficulty is doubled—first for the Bourdieusian reason that it’s hard to make the snapshot look like it’s intended as art and, second, because, given how much the camera does on its own and how little control the street photographer has of his subjects, it can be hard to make it count as meaningful, hard to make visible the difference between it and a “mere thing.” And this difficulty, as I’ve already suggested, can be understood to instantiate the separation of the intention and the object that for Danto makes it necessary to look beyond the object.10 Thus, if we think of Warhol as concerned to identify whatever it was about an object that made it a work of art (what Danto in 1981 called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace), we can think of Winogrand as at least as concerned to describe what he (also in 1981) called the “transformation” of “banality” that enabled the “artist” to turn the photograph into something other than a source of “information.”11

But if we look at some of the work Winogrand was producing in 1964 (the year of the Brillo Boxes and “The Art World”), we can see that even though the ambition to make art out of a “mere thing” is something Danto’s Warhol and Winogrand have in common, their ways of going about it were very different. The point of the Brillo Boxes, as Danto understood it, was that they were “indiscernible” from the real thing, indeed, from Danto’s standpoint, there was no reason not to “use the real thing” since the difference between it and the work of art was not in the object itself but in the mind of the artist. What makes the thing art is the artist’s claim that it’s art, itself an invisible gesture brilliantly captured by one of Guy Davenport’s illustrations for Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters: “Mr. Andy Warhol Fetches a Work of Art Through a Metaphysical Barrier.”12 Making that claim visible is a function of what happens after, of the object being exhibited in galleries, bought and sold as art, shown in museums.

Winogrand’s photos were also destined for museums; in fact, the one above was shown at MoMA in 1967. But the photograph’s claim to be art is meant to be visible in it. One way to put this might be to say that its passage through the metaphysical barrier is meant to be visible in it. Another way might be to say that the act of making the snapshot be art cannot quite be understood on the model of Danto’s metaphysics because it’s susceptible to failure in a way that metaphysical fetching is not.

What I mean by this is just that no one could say of the Brillo Boxes that they fail because they don’t look like art. But one could say this of Winogrand’s snapshots and, indeed, years later (in his 1995 book on Robert Mapplethorpe), Danto himself did, describing them (specifically the pictures of women) as providing the information Winogrand explicitly sought to transcend; they “document” “how women dressed in the Sixties; how they wore their hair and made up their faces,” and they also “document” Winogrand’s “yearning” for the women and his “sexual desperation.”13 Mapplethorpe, by contrast, made art. Indeed, Danto describes Mapplethorpe in terms that replicate his interest in Warhol and the entire argument of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, only here it’s not the “mere object” that poses the challenge and supplies the opportunity for art but “mere pornography”: in a sentence that uses a phrase from Mapplethorpe himself and that gives the book its title, he describes Mapplethorpe as “play[ing] with the edge that separates art and mere pornography.” His ambition, Danto writes, “was to create work that really was pornographic by the criteria of sexual excitement, and really was art. And it incorporated the ‘edge.’”

For Danto, it’s Winogrand—producing documents of his own desire—who ends up in the role of the mere pornographer. The “images are extremely aggressive towards the women for whom [he] hungers” and the camera is tilted “in such a way that it is impossible to suppress the thought that [it] offered [him] a way of looking down bosoms” (27). In fact, taking seriously Mapplethorpe’s (absolutely on target) characterization of his own work as “the opposite of Garry Winogrand’s” (25), Danto’s descriptions of all the things Mapplethorpe does are inversely mirrored by his descriptions of all the things Winogrand does. Mapplethorpe is described as dedicated to a “formalist approach” that requires a kind of “control”—“the people he photographed had to be doing what he wanted them to.” So he realizes, first, that “sex was not really meant to be photographed” (because people having sex mainly do what they want to do) and, second, he understands in order to be able to tell his subjects what to do, he had to have their “consent” and in order to be able to win their consent he needed to win their trust. Danto makes this point many times: “In order to be in control, Mapplethorpe required his subject’s agreement, their knowledge and, as emphasized, their trust” (79). And he goes on to say, this “moral relationship between subject and artists was a condition for the artistic form the images took.” Thus, for example, “As if in formal acknowledgement of the agreement between subject and artists, the images in Some Women are extremely well composed” (31) and it’s at least in part the fact that his “pornography” is “beautifully composed” (90) that brings it “up into the plane of art” (91). Control, consent, composition make the simultaneity of pornography and art possible, make possible work that “incorporates the ‘edge.’”

By contrast, Winogrand’s photos of women “seem uncomposed” (25) just as the women themselves seem “uncomposed.” The women seem uncomposed because their pictures are taken without their consent (“invading” their lives, “if only momentarily,” Winogrand “violated” their “right to privacy” [27]); the pictures seem uncomposed because in his “aesthetic,” “accident was assigned a role altogether at odds with the firm imposition of artistic will central to Mapplethorpe’s composition” (104). Hence, even though they are “fully clothed,” Winogrand’s women are “seen as female flesh” (27)—the “victims” of his “obscene attention” (29). Without consent, control and composition, failing to incorporate the edge that will “transcend” the position of the pornographer, Winogrand fails to bring his pictures “up into the plane of art.”

Winogrand, however, had a different account of the edge, or, perhaps more accurately a similar account of the edge but a different practice for incorporating it. The similarity is that for him, as for Danto’s Mapplethorpe (and, of course, Danto’s Warhol), it involved the transformation of something that wasn’t art into art, “how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.” For the Brillo Boxes, that transformation is invisible (purely conceptual); for Mapplethorpe, it’s the “formalism” that keeps the work from being pornography: “Without the formalism,” Danto says, “the work goes over the edge” (79). The difference is that for Winogrand, the edge is both more literal and more conceptual. For example, the 1964 picture above (Los Angeles 1964) shows one of the “anonymous women” involved in one of the “private” activities (i.e. not posing for the camera) that Danto rightly says are characteristic of Winogrand’s photographs, and the fact that it’s shot through a car window makes the identification of the photographer with the “voyeur” that Danto insists on even more vivid. But the window plays a role in relation to the four edges of the photograph that’s different from the one it plays in relation to the photograph’s subject. On the one hand, it frames our view of the subject; on the other hand, because it’s tilted at an angle to the literal edges of the photograph, it mobilizes them as an element in (not just the site of) what Danto might have called the picture’s composition. That is, the four edges that any photograph automatically puts around the “information” have been made to function as a structural element that’s internal to the picture, that turns information into form. Because the internal frame of the window creates a space outside it as well as inside it, in front of it as well as behind it, the elements that don’t belong to the view (the inside of the car, the bits of the garden and the house and even of someone else gardening) are asserted instead as belonging to the picture. The picture is disarticulated from the view.

The view, in other words, is of the woman but the photograph isn’t. It includes her; which is to say, it includes the view without being reducible to the view, and, precisely because of the non-identity of the view and the literal frame of the picture, it gives the literal frame conceptual weight. It’s not just where the picture ends; it’s how the picture establishes its difference from the (voyeuristic) view of the woman, from the information the photograph conveys—about the world and even about the desires of the photographer for the things of the world. In this respect, although what we might (following Kenner and Davenport) call Winogrand’s metaphysical ambitions have a lot in common with Warhol’s, his formal ambitions have a lot more in common with someone like Kenneth Noland’s. Or are, at least, more responsive to what Michael Fried (in 1966) described as the new (since “shortly before 1960”) discovery of the importance of the relation between depicted and literal shape, and more responsive especially to the sense that depicted shape could be called upon “to establish the authority of the shape of the support.”14 Obviously, these are terms that derive from painting, and from abstract painting to boot. But the desire to make the straight up rectangle (i.e. the physical fact) of the print itself signify—first by setting it against the tilted rectangle of the viewfinder and hence of the four edges inside the picture and, second, by making it function not just to delimit but to incorporate what exceeds the internal frame—is hard to explain except as the effort not exactly to declare that snapshots can be art but to make one that is.

This is, if one likes, a kind of formalism (the Fried essay quoted above was called “Shape as Form”) and, of course, the women in Winogrand are as much the literal material out of which he made his photographs as is the paint in Noland. But Danto’s worry about Winogrand’s “obscene attention” to his subjects finds no color field application. The relevant parallel and alternative would be Mapplethorpe, whose own “formalism” (as we have seen) Danto praises as the reason for “the moral relationship” he established “between subject and artist.” Because, even when he’s taking pictures of a model’s breasts, Mapplethorpe treats her “as an end and not as a means,” there’s “not the slightest sense of obscenity.” Rather, this treatment is the essential “condition for the artistic form [his] images took” (79).

And here again both Mapplethorpe’s morality and his idea of art truly are “the opposite of Garry Winogrand’s.” For Winogrand’s ambition was always and only to use those women as means not ends, and what worried him about his pictures of “attractive” women was that they didn’t always fulfill this ambition. Indeed, he thought Women Are Beautiful was “not as good” as his other books because the question the photos raised—“when the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman?”—didn’t always get answered in the right way. Too often, it was the woman. But, whether in success or failure, the relevant thing is that making an “interesting” picture required not so much a “formalist approach” to a subject as it did making something that had form.

It’s in this respect that Winogrand may be said to have had a theory of intention (or of action) that was different from Danto’s Warhol and his Mapplethorpe. With respect to Mapplethorpe, we can see it in Danto’s enthusiasm for the idea, conveyed to him by Dimitri Levas, that (where Winogrand famously claimed not to know what the photograph would look like until after he’d taken it), “all the shots” in Mapplethorpe’s “contact sheets looked pretty much like the ones selected for the final image, as if the photographer knew precisely what the outcome would be. He did not count on the fortuitous fall of a garment, an unanticipated ripple of muscle” (31). The “firm imposition of artistic will” that makes “mere pornography” into art valorizes what’s inside Mapplethorpe’s head in the same way that the transformation of a mere object into a work of art valorizes what’s inside Warhol’s. Both are resistant to the accidents that infect Winogrand.

But if Mapplethorpe is Winogrand’s opposite as an artist, Warhol is his opposite as a theorist. In Mapplethorpe what’s in your head is prior to the act and making the picture is the effort to make what’s inside your head visible. In Warhol—in the very idea of the indiscernible—the whole point is what’s not visible. That’s why Danto insists on the way in which “the relationship between an artwork and a thing just like it is…analogous to the difference between a basic action and a bodily movement just like it, to all outward appearances” (48). In effect, the Brillo box allegorizes what it takes to turn a bodily movement (standardly,15 the raising of your arm) into an act (instead of, say, “a spasm”)—the appeal to an intention you can’t see in it because it isn’t there; it’s in your head. For Danto, in other words, the transfiguration that takes place when the object is made into art by being offered as or declared to be art emblemizes the transfiguration that makes a bodily movement into an act.

But the point in Anscombe is that neither your intention nor anything else makes a bodily movement into an act. Beginning with her idea that “Intentional actions…are the ones to which the question ‘Why’ is given application” (24), she means not that we have to add what’s in the person’s mind to the act but just the opposite: “we do not add anything to the action…by describing it as intentional. To call it intentional is to assign it to the class of intentional acts and so to indicate that we should consider the question ‘why’ relevant” (28) in a way that it wouldn’t be if, when asked why you were raising your arm, you responded, “I was not aware I was doing that.” And confronted with the “mere thing” turned into a work of art, we can see her point, albeit from a slightly different angle. “The difference between a basic action and a mere bodily movement,” we have seen Danto say, “is paralleled in many ways by the difference between an artwork and a mere thing.” (5) So how does a mere thing get to be an artwork? The artist “declares” (3) it to be one: “Duchamp declared a snowshovel to be one, and it was one.”16 But a bodily movement doesn’t become an action when the agent declares it to be one. My raising my arm to signify, say, my desire to speak, is not an act of signification because I declare it to be one or because of anything I add to the bodily movement—it’s what the bodily movement is from the start.

And once, on the model of the analogy between the mere bodily movement and the mere thing, you understand making the art as adding the intentionality, you’re confronted with the further question of what exactly that adding consists in. In other words, the double reification—of the intention on one hand and the thing on the other—makes the question of what the artist does a puzzling one. That’s really the point of Davenport’s brilliant illustration—what kind of act is fetching a mere thing through a metaphysical barrier? It’s not that you can’t come up with something—buying the thing, taking it to the gallery, putting a price on it, etc. And it’s not that the thing isn’t—because of what you’ve done—a work of art. It’s that its interest as a work of art is the way it allegorizes the idea of the autonomy of the intention as an internal state, an Anscombian “bombination in a vacuum.”

Of course, it hasn’t been a standard requirement for artists (any more than for anyone else) that they have a good or even a bad theory of action. People do what they do. But the minute the meaning of the work is imbricated in the question of what the work is, the question of how the work was made (what the artist did) ceases to be a merely causal one and becomes instead an element of that meaning. The work that produces a theory of itself (say, that its claim to being an artwork is invisible) produces also a theory of action (the intention that makes it a work of art is in the artist’s head). More generally we might say that the resemblance between the work of art and the thing comes to matter precisely because it provides an opportunity to think about what an action is, and thus photography becomes increasingly important not despite but because it raises questions about action and intention. If, in other words, the worry about whether you have enough control is forestalled by the Brillo Boxes (since what gives them their meaning is in Warhol’s head, you don’t need any control), that same worry is addressed in the same way by the transfigured pornography: the actual picture is an epiphenomenon of what was already in Mapplethorpe’s head.

Winogrand, who would in the last years of his life take hundreds of thousands of pictures that no one ever saw, was hardly immune to worrying about control. If we think that he no longer needed to see the film developed in order to know what he’d done, his previsualization seems even more complete than Mapplethorpe’s, and if we think that what he was doing no longer involved developing the film, then the act of actually taking the picture begins to look almost as mysterious as the act of fetching the work of art through its metaphysical barrier. And, of course, insofar as the alternative to these two different ways of imagining the primacy of intention might seem to be its irrelevance, or its consignment to a merely causal role in the production of the work of art, what you would get is the photograph as thing, which is to say as information—about the world, or about the photographer or even about the beholder. But Winogrand’s commitment to form instead of information on the one side and to form instead of a “formalist approach” on the other required him to refuse this double reduction. It’s not exactly that he had a different theory of action than Danto; it’s that his idea of art entailed a different theory of action, and his idea of a successful work of art (an “interesting picture”) required him to make that theory visible.

3

All acts are intentional under some description (and under some other description not intentional); this is uncontroversial. The interpretation of the meaning of every work of art is an account of what the artist intended. This is controversial (thus, for example, even Lopes and I, who begin by declaring agreement with each other turn out really to disagree), but if it’s true it was always true, as true in the 11^th century as in the 21st, and true even of works created by artists who don’t believe it or who never thought about it.

But many artists have thought about it; in fact, it might almost be a definition of modernism (and, depending on where their thoughts led them, postmodernism too) to say that insofar as thinking about what kind of object a work of art is involves thinking about the relation between the conditions of its production and its meaning, all modernists and postmodernists have thought about it. It’s for just this reason, as Michael Fried and I have both argued, that photography began to assume a new importance in the second half of the 20^th century. With respect to the question of intentionality, for example, it’s because so many things about the photograph could seem to be unintended (in the ways described in 1 above) that many artists and critics could turn to it as a way of refusing intentionality or of demonstrating the ways in which the meaning of the work necessarily exceeded the artist’s intentions. Indeed, once you understand the artist’s intention as the mental state that gets added to the physical fact of the work (the thought you have while taking your picture), you can’t help but start to wonder why it should make any privileged difference to the work’s meaning. Thus a certain defense of intentionalism and a certain critique of it are significantly compatible, and precisely because making a photograph can be thought simultaneously to internalize the intention and externalize the work, photography becomes a central site for trying to do both.

And a central site for trying to do neither. Thus Winogrand imagines the difference between a photography in which the photographer’s intention plays a merely causal role and one in which the intention both is and is visible in the picture itself by distinguishing between the pictures he himself can make (as a “craftsman”) and the pictures he’s trying to make instead. The “good craftsman” has “a particular intention”: “let’s say, I want a photograph that’s going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what—I know how to do this. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It’s a bore.”17 What craft means here is obviously not that there is no intention but that the beholder doesn’t have to understand the intention in order to experience the effect. That’s the force of “press a button”—if you ask the craftsman the Anscombian question of why he took the picture from that angle, he has an answer—to make you “feel warm.” So taking the picture was an act. But you don’t need to ask the question or know the answer to experience the effect—from the standpoint of the beholder, the fact that it is an act is irrelevant. In other words, the craftsman seeks to produce an effect but he doesn’t seek to produce that effect by having the beholder recognize his intention to produce that effect. The beholder doesn’t need to interpret his act.

By contrast, if we extend our reading of Los Angeles, 1964, we are immediately confronted with a question of description that isn’t easy and is completely, in the relevant sense, interpretive. For we might say that the picture is structured not just by the inner and outer frame described above but by a third framing device: first, the four edges of the photograph itself, second, the car window and third, a series of vertical lines—on the right, the tree and then another tree behind it and aligned with it and on the left, the fence and the house next door—which produce a recessional effect that seems to locate the frames in deep space. With the result that, if we look at it this way, the actual (literal) edges of the picture begin to seem nearer to us—as if they were inside the picture (and no longer literal). And thus what I described above as the desire for the view (what it’s a photo of) to be subsumed by the picture is matched by a desire for the physical object that is the photo to be subsumed by the picture; the picture is disarticulated not only from the view but also from the photograph.

But should we look at it this way? This is a question about how Winogrand means it to be seen, which is to say, a question about what the photograph is about. Whereas the craftsman’s photographs, as Winogrand presents them, aren’t about anything. In other words, this photograph can only have the right effect on us if we understand what Winogrand was trying to do whereas we can be made to feel warm (the craftsman’s desired effect) without being the slightest bit interested in whether he meant us to. The two photographs are equally intended, but only Los Angeles asks to be understood. And only Los Angeles, with its (if I am right) elaborate enactment of its ambition to be understood, is also about what it means for it to be intended, about its own demand to be understood. Its claim to be made by an artist instead of a really good craftsman is its effort to make us see that demand.

Of course, the Brillo Boxes also demand to be understood (they are about something), but that demand is not visible in them. It’s made instead by what Warhol does with them—by his taking them to the gallery to be displayed and by the gallery’s offering them for sale. It’s as if, in other words, Danto’s Warhol recognized that declaring a mere object to be a work of art required something more than simply thinking about it as if it were a work of art or saying it was a work of art; you had also to treat it like a work of art. (You had to seriously mean it.) And the way to treat it like a work of art was to offer it for display and for sale. Which, in the case of the Brillo Boxes, as Blake Stimson points out, involved taking the kind of commodity you could buy in a supermarket and elevating it to “a higher exchange value” by placing it “in the boutique context of an art gallery.”18 Stimson makes this point following and revising Danto; where Danto thought the Brillo Boxes were about art keeping the work “from collapsing into the real object which it is,”19 Stimson says just the opposite: they don’t keep the work from collapsing into the object, they collapse it, only the object is a commodity, and the collapse is of the “once interiorized category of art into the exterior category of exchange.”

For our purposes, however, we don’t really need to choose sides. For insofar as the way to turn the mere object into a work of art is to treat it like a commodity and insofar as the commodity, as Nick Brown argues, is crucially distinguished from the work of art precisely by what it has in common with the mere object (its meaning is not determined by its maker’s intentions, which is to say, like the mere object, it has no meaning), then the Warhol-style transformation of the thing into the work (call it postmodernism) is really the transformation of a thing into another thing. It’s precisely in this context—confronted by what Brown has called the possibility of “its real subsumption under capital”—that the work of art finds it necessary to assert its status as a work of art instead of or rather as well as a commodity. For we may well take the point that since the beginning of modernism (whenever that might have been), works of art have necessarily been commodities but only when it begins to seem possible (the beginning of postmodernism20) that they can be nothing but commodities does it become desirable to assert the ways in which they’re not just commodities. By the same token, works of art have always meant what they were intended to mean but it’s only when it began to seem possible for their meaning to be irrelevant or to be subsumed by their use value that it became desirable for them to be about the fact that they are intended, for their meaning to include the fact that they are meaningful. It’s for this reason that, called upon to produce its theory of itself, Winogrand’s photo produces an account of what it was meant to do and thus a theory of action.

1

Deflationary maneuvers are not facile attempts to expose our struggles as elementary errors. Critics, theorists, and philosophers have wrestled with how photography puts in question artistic agency. Only subtle theorizing can quiet the struggle while still taking it seriously.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Cardinal Pacelli depicts a man with a toothbrush mustache looking away from the prelate. Suppose that the photographer did not intend to show the man as looking away (set aside epistemic questions about what evidence supports the supposition). How can taking the photograph be an act of the photographer—an act for which he gets credit—if aspects of it are unintended? After all, photography is an automatic imaging system, which is to say that photographs record scenes without regard to photographers’ intentions.3 Eddie Adams’s photograph would have depicted Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s prisoner as wincing no matter what Adams thought was in the scene when he exposed his film. Jeff Wall’s Mimic would have depicted the white dude as pulling his eye with his finger no matter what Wall thought was in the scene when he exposed his film. At the photographic moment, the agency of the photographer is exhausted by the act of tripping the shutter, and the photographic moment is the moment when information in light is inscribed on a photosensitive surface to create an image. If the agency of the photographer lies in what she does intentionally, then it shrinks to a point. Its shrinking to a point might induce anxiety about whether photographs afford the kind of agency needed to make art. Alternatively, its shrinking to a point might open up new avenues for making art.

A constellation of theoretical propositions animates this familiar pattern of thought. Photography is a system that automates image-making. Agency lies in acting, where actions are behaviors done intentionally. Except in some conceptual art practices, artists make things by acting intentionally. The difficulty is that not all of these propositions can be accepted at face value, yet none is clearly false.

The deflationary counter-maneuver deploys a bit of action theory originally due to Anscombe, made standard by Donald Davidson.4 An action is an event, one that happens intentionally. However, attributions of agency and intentions serve different purposes. In attributing agency, we credit an agent or hold them responsible for what happens. In attributing intentions, we explain or justify what an agent does—we work out their reasons for acting.5 Moreover, one and the same event can be intentional under some descriptions but not others. The guard flips a switch, turns on a light, draws 5.4 Amps, illuminates the room, and alerts a prowler: these are one action described in four ways, and what the guard does is intentional under some but not all of these descriptions—she did not intend to draw 5.4 Amps or alert the prowler, for example. An event is an action as long as it is done intentionally under some description. We explain the action by attributing intentions relative to descriptions, but we credit the act under all descriptions. The guard did draw 5.4 Amps, though she did not intend to, because what happens is 5.4 Amps get drawn and that is the same event as turning on the light, which she intended to do. One corollary of this theory of action is that it allows for acts of discovery. James Watson and Francis Crick get credit for discovering the structure of DNA. Their act was intentional under some descriptions—they wanted to use X-ray diffraction—but they did and could not intend to discover that DNA is a double helix.

Even if he did not intend it, Cartier-Bresson gets credit for taking a photograph that depicts a man looking away from the prelate. Winogrand also gets credit for discovering how the street looks photographed, without intending to depict it looking precisely so. Photographic agency is plain vanilla—no different from the agency of the security guard, the scientist, or indeed the painter. Granting that the painter must intend to depict things looking precisely so, there are nevertheless many descriptions under which the act of painting is not intentional. To reply that taking a photograph and making a painting are intentional and unintentional under different descriptions is simply to restate that photography and painting are different ways of making images. We draw on different resources to explain how they come about.

Getting the nature of action right deflates the difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency.

2

Inspired by some of Anscombe’s reflections, Benn Michaels contends that the deflationary cure is worse than the disease.

The trouble is not that the deflationist thinks “it’s a mistake to tie any art too closely to the artist’s intentions.” If artworks are artifacts, they are products of action, but actions are behaviors done intentionally, so there is a close, indeed constitutive, tie between art works and artists’ intentions. Let the platitudes stand.

Rather, the trouble is that the deflationary maneuver puts in play which specific intentions are required in acts of making visual art works. For Benn Michaels, the difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency stem from making sense of how photographers could possibly express the kinds of intentions that are standardly attributed to visual artists. Whereas we explain image-making acts by attributing a particular kind of intention, it is hard to see how photographers can take pictures with those very intentions.

Anscombe mulls a case where someone has a contemptuous thought about a peer, so that he means his polite and affectionate gesture ironically, though he betrays no outward sign of contempt. Thinking something while acting is not the same as meaning something by doing the same act, where meaning is expressed in the the act itself. No agent can mean an affectionate gesture to express irony without intending to express irony.

From Anscombe’s case Benn Michaels draws the lesson that “meaning is inseparable from intention.” In addition, he assumes that to understand a photograph is to explain the act of making it, and to explain the act of making it is to zero in on what the photographer meant. It follows that the deflationary attempt to unravel the ties between photographic agency and intentions is “doomed.” The logic is: understanding a photograph requires explaining its making, explaining its making requires getting what the photographer meant, and meaning is inseparable from intention, but photography is opaque to intentions.

The deflationary maneuver once again meets, at a deeper level, some difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency.

3

Grant that to understand a photograph is at least in part to explain the act of making it, which is to get at what the photographer meant.7 Therefore, the question of whether or not the deflationary account of photographic agency is doomed hinges on the proposition that “meaning is inseparable from intention.”8 Thinking through this proposition invites a second deflationary maneuver.

Benn Michaels’s deep point is that there is a class of descriptions under which an act must be intentional if we are to explain the act as one of making an image. We must ascribe to image-makers such intentions as are needed to make sense of image-making acts as meaningful. In this sense, the road to meaning is paved by intentions.

A passenger responsible for navigation on a long road trip remarks to the driver, “there’s a gas station up ahead.” Obviously the sentence means that there is a gas station up ahead, but that is not what the passenger means. He means that the car is low on gas. What a sentence means is not always what a speaker means. Generalizing, the semantic content of a vehicle of communication is not always what the communicator uses the vehicle to communicate. A conventionally signals affection but the hug might used to ironically, to express the hugger’s contempt. U.S. Army photographers recorded the bloody aftermaths of battles in the U.S. Civil War. What the images depict is mud and slaughter. By taking the photographs, army photographers communicated their attitude to the war.

So the road to meaning is not necessarily paved by intentions. “There’s a gas station up ahead” means that there’s a gas station up ahead. Here sentence meaning is determined by linguistic facts, not facts about the speaker’s intentions. That a big hug signals affection is determined by social conventions, not the hugger’s intentions. According to the standard theory of photography, a photograph’s depicting blood and slaughter is determined by facts about the working of the photographic mechanism, not the photographer’s intentions. True, the road to what the photographer means is paved by intentions, but not the road to what their photograph records. Some meaning is separable from intention. I propose to save the first deflationary maneuver from doom by this second deflationary maneuver, which prizes some meaning apart from intention.

To repeat, deflationary maneuvers are not facile attempts to expose elementary errors. According to the standard theory of painting and drawing, the tonsured monk on the left of The Third of May 1808 is depicted as looking down because that is what Goya intended.9 Intentions pave both the road to what a painting depicts and the road to what a painter means by making a painting with that semantic content. A double distinction is needed between photographs and other images and between what a communicative vehicle means and what a communicator means by making it.

Cartier-Bresson takes a photograph that depicts a mustached man looking down. His taking a picture with this very semantic content is something he does—it is his act—even if he does not intend that the photograph capture the mustached man as looking down. At the same time, Benn Michaels is right to point out that the photographer means something about church and state politics by making this photograph. What he means by making the photograph is something he intends to convey. The first deflationary maneuver, which quiets our difficulties over photographic agency, is consistent with the constitutive role of intentions in meaning by making. Hence it ratifies those critical projects where the assumption is that to understand a photograph is to explain the act of making it, which is to get at what the photographer meant.

Combine a deflationary theory of photographic agency with a richly intentionalist approach to understanding what photographers mean by making photographs. We are now equipped to make sense of Winogrand’s practice of discovery. The photographer takes a picture of a beggar on the street, not intending that the scene look precisely so. Its looking precisely so is his discovery—it goes to his credit, not the camera’s. At the same time, by making the photograph, he means to tell us something about the beggar and how we should see him. Maybe he also means to tell us something about being a photographer, who means by making, even as what he makes is not just what he means.

During the month of April, 1971 Clement Greenberg gave nine sem­i­­nars on esthetics at Bennington College. Greenberg, then in his early 60s, was I think aware that he had little more to say as a critic of contemporary art, and he seems to have wanted to leave a legacy of a more theoretical or phi­lo­sophical kind albeit one keyed to the develop­ments in modern painting and sculpture that for more than three decades had engaged his attention. Over the next seven or eight years he worked further on the texts, eight of which eventually were pub­lished one at a time in Art International, Studio Inter­national, and Arts Magazine. The essay I want to discuss today was originally entitled “Con­vention and Inno­vation” and was published as “Seminar 6” in Arts Magazine in June 1976. (Republished more than twenty years later in a volume called Homemade Esthetics, it was again titled “Convention and Innovation.”) It begins:

Experience says that formalized art, the kind most people agree to call art, offers greater satisfaction by and large than any other aesthetic experience. Formalizing art means making aesthetic experience communicable: objectifying it, making it public, instead of keeping it private or solipsistic as happens with most aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience to be communicated it has to be submitted to conventions—or “forms” if you like—just as a language does if it’s to be understood by more than one person.

Conventions put resistances, obstacles, controls in the way of communication at the same time that they make it possible and guide it. The particular satisfactions we get from formalized art are due, in some essential part, to the sense gotten of resis­tances coped with by dint of choices or decisions (intuited decisions or what I call judgment-decisions). Quality, the very success or goodness, of formal art derives, formally, from these decisions, from their intensity or density.1

There is much here I’m not happy with, such as the sug­gestion that the artist begins with, or in, private or even solip­sistic aesthetic experience and then, if he or she is to get beyond that (if he or she has what it takes to become a real artist), finds the means, via conventions or forms, of making that experience public—as if Edouard Manet (for example) began with the first sort of experience (as it were inside his head) and then, via the conventions of the nude, which is to say in the course of both working with those conventions and refusing to submit to them as they stood, dis­covered a way to communicate that experience to others in the painting we know as Olympia. Or as if, to take up Greenberg’s language analogy, linguistic communication begins in a private experience or feat of self-communication that then makes use of linguistic conventions to get through to others. I am going to assume that in this post-Wittgensteinian age the unconvincingness of such scen­arios doesn’t require demonstra­tion.2

But my aim in this talk is not to dwell on Greenberg’s deficiencies as a thinker about such issues. “Convention and Innovation” con­tinues:

The density or intensity of decision that goes into the making of communicable art has nothing to do with quantity or multiplicity. But it’s impossible not to resort to quantitative terms in discussing the matter: thus as when I affirm that as “much” density of decision can, in principle, go into the shaping of a box as into the carving or modeling of a representation of the human figure. The size, proportions,   material, and color of a box can bear as great a weight of intuited decision as the sculpture that fills a pediment. The fact that this has proven unlikely so far (despite the achievements of one or two minimal artists) doesn’t make it any the less possible.

To say it again: under a certain aspect, and a very real one, quality in art appears to be directly proportionate to the density or weight of decision that’s gone into its making. And a good part of that density is generated under the pressure of the resistance offered by the conventions of a medium of communication. (48)

Finally, there is this:

Most of what I’ve just said is not new. But the emphasis I’ve put on decision or choice may be. If so, that would be thanks to what’s happened in art itself in recent years. It’s the boringness, the vacuousness of so much of the purportedly advanced art of the past decade and more that has brought home—at least to me—how essen­tial the awareness of decision is to satisfying experience of formal art. For the vacuousness of “advanced” art in this time is more like that of “raw,” unformalized art or aesthetic experience, which vacuousness derives precisely from the absence of enough conventions and the want of decisions made or received under the pressure of conven­tions. (49)

“Convention and Innovation” goes on for another nine or so pages, but I want to stay with the passages I have just quoted, in particular with Greenberg’s emphasis, new in his writing, on what he calls the density or intensity or weight of decision in the making of a work of “formal” or “for­mal­ized” (please note: not “formalist”) art.

One reason Greenberg’s remarks first caught my attention is that they chime with claims that I have made in recent writings about a similar density or intensity or weight of intention—which is to say of decision—in recent sculptures by Charles Ray such as his marvelous Hinoki (2007) and in the photographic work of Thomas Demand as well as in the lat­ter’s tour de force two-minute stop-motion film, Pacific Sun (2012). Thus in the chapter on Ray in my book Four Honest Outlaws I argue that the entire point of Demand’s labor-intensive project—reconstructing certain often notorious places or settings in colored paper and card­board in such a way that the fact of reconstruction is made salient and then photographing the result at something like life-scale—is to produce photo­graphs “that are saturated with traces of nothing other than [Demand’s] own artis­tic intentions—not just the general intention to repro­duce the scene but the specific inten­tions invol­ved in remaking it at every point, so to speak.”3 And I pro­ceed to compare Demand’s project to Ray’s in Hinoki, which involved discovering by chance an especially charis­matic 30-feet-long fallen oak tree in the California countryside; sawing it into sections and bring­ing the latter to his studio; making molds of those sec­tions and then fiberglass casts from the molds, and even­tually five “barrels” that locked into each other so that the log could now be reas­sembled as a simu­lacrum of the original. These were then shipped to Osaka, where a master carver, Yuboku Mukoyoshi, and his team repro­­duced the log, first its hollow interior and then its exterior, carving the whole in cypress blocks the separateness of which can clearly be discerned in the finished work. The entire project took more than five years, before Ray decided that the piece was finished. He then had to figure out exactly how to display it (by mounting it on cypress blocks). Only then was Ray able to release the sculpture to the vagaries of time.

I go on to claim that Demand’s photographs and Ray’s Hinoki (as well as the latter’s figurative sculptures in cast alu­minum or machined steel) stand in the sharpest, most emphatic opposition to the bias toward indeterminacy in Minimalism/Literalism (my reference here is of course to my 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood”4). Caro’s sculptures, too, are anything but indeter­min­ate, as are those of David Smith and countless other sculptors and painters prior to Minimalism; the dif­ference is that none of those artists, Caro inclu­ded, ever felt called upon to thematize intentionality as both Demand and Ray have found it necessary to do. Indeed Hinoki’s remarkable authority as a work of sculpture is for me inseparable from my sense of it as an onto­log­ically extremely dense intentional artifact, the intentions in question belonging in the first place to Ray and in the second place to Yuboku and his team of carvers who worked for five years as a collective expression of Ray’s artistic will but whose traditional training and perhaps also whose personal inclinations are inevitably and everywhere inscribed in the surface of the piece, including, consistent with Ray’s intentions, the surface of its hollow core. As if the weight or density of so much concen­trated intentionality functions as an ontological counterforce to Ray’s original empathic sense of the years of sun, rain, and ultraviolet radiation that had hammered down on the original log—“the pressure was just incredible,” he once said to me—and in another five or ten years might well have driven it to the point of collapse. (103, emphasis in original)

In other words, that Ray’s and Demand’s work (including, as I argue in a later essay, Pacific Sun) foreground density of intention in this way is understood by me as at least partly a response to or reaction against the valorization of indeter­minacy in the first place in Minimalism/Literalism (my target in “Art and Objecthood”) and beyond that in Post-Modernism generally.5

Interest­ingly, Greenberg says something not dissimilar when he remarks that the emphasis he puts on decision or choice may have been inspired by the recognition that “so much of the purportedly advanced art of the past decade or more”—his reference is to the 1960s—has been thin or trivial or vacuous precisely on those grounds, a state he goes on to relate to “the absence of enough conventions and the want of decisions made or received under the pressure of conventions.” At the same time, he wants to insist—this is pure Greenberg—that there is in principle no reason why the shaping of a box (he is clearly thinking of Minimalist/Literalist works like Tony Smith’s archetypal Die or various boxes by Donald Judd) couldn’t bear just as much “weight of intuited decision” as a sculpture for a temple pediment. I say this is pure Greenberg because it is such a “formalist” remark: for Greenberg, to entertain the thought that there could, practically speaking, be a difference in this regard between a box or a cube and a temple pediment would be to attach fundamental significance to considerations of something like subject matter (in this case, the difference between an abstract cube and the gods, warriors, and centaurs on a temple pediment), which by his lights properly could have no bearing on artistic issues properly understood. This seems to me misguided for reasons that, again, shouldn’t need elabo­rating at this point in time: it is, after all, no accident that the cube or box (a strong gestalt, Robert Morris would have said) played so important a role in the Minimal­ist/Lit­eralist project as anatomized in “Art and Object­hood” (an essay Greenberg never began to try to understand; the whole argument about theatricality mostly set his teeth on edge6). In other words, Greenberg both related his claims about “how essential the awareness of decision is [i.e. has become] to the satisfying experience of formal art” to the weakness of certain recent purportedly advanced work and refused at least on this occasion to con­sider what it was spe­ci­fic­ally about that work that led or conduced to the paucity of conven­tions he so deplored.7

2

But, again, my aim in these remarks is not to critique Greenberg’s ideas. Instead I want to seize upon the thought of density or intensity or weight of intuited decision and to associate that thought with a body of work to which, on theoretical grounds, it might seem to have nothing in common—the photographic oeuvre of Robert Adams. Very briefly: Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937; his family subsequently moved to Madison, Wis­consin and a few years later to the suburbs of Denver. Adams got his B.A. from the University of Redlands in California, and went on to do a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. In 1962 he began teaching English at Colorado College but around that time became interested in taking and making photographs; by 1967 he was doing so seri­­ously, and in 1970 he stopped teaching in order to photo­graph full time. An important photobook, The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range, appeared in 1974 and a year later his work was shown in the impor­tant exhibition (in retrospect a mile­stone in American photographic history), New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). Since that time superb photobooks have appeared with some regularity (Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area [1977]; Los Angeles Spring [1986]; What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-74 [1995 and 2009]; and Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration [2005] among them), and of course for a long time now Adams has been widely recognized as one of the most distinguished photographers at work anywhere. My personal familiarity with his art is quite recent, dating as it does from the major retro­spective exhibition, a selection of nearly 300 works, organized by Joshua Chuang for the Yale University Art Gallery, which opened in Vancouver in the fall of 2010 and over the next few years traveled to a number of venues in this country and Europe.8 (I saw it in New Haven in the fall of 2012 after having caught it some months before at LACMA. Let me also say that I had the privilege of going through the exhibition at LACMA with Jim Welling and at Yale with Josh Chuang; I’m grateful to them both for count­less insights.) Simply put, I was swept away by what I saw. Naturally I had admired individual photographs and even small shows of Adams’s work in the past. But Josh Chuang’s exhibition established Adams’s sta­ture as a major artist beyond the possibility of dispute, by virtue both of the taste, intel­ligence, and amplitude of the selection and, in both museums but espe­cially in New Haven, the effectiveness of the installation.

Before saying anything further about Adams, however, I should explain what I meant when I remarked that the notion of density or intensity or weight of intuited decision as put forward by Greenberg might seem, on theoretical grounds, to have nothing to do with work such as Adams’s. I’m referring, of course, to the emphasis in photographic theory on what is usually called the index­icality of the photograph, which is to say to the important sense, brilliantly developed in recent writings by Walter Benn Michaels, in which a photograph may be understood as not properly speaking a repre­sen­ta­tion of the thing it is a photograph of but rather an indexical, fossil-like trace of that thing. As Michaels shows, such an emphasis turns out to be linked with the post-modern cri­tique of modern­ism, understood in turn, as he remarks, “as crucially the critique of repre­senta­tion, of the pic­ture and of the categories associated with it: ‘aesthetic inten­tion,’ ‘work of art,’ ‘author­ship,’ etc.”9 Michaels’s argu­ment is cha­rac­teristically com­plex but I want to single out the issue of intention, as expressed for example by Patrick Maynard (quoted by Mich­aels) when he asks whether the pho­to­graph “‘sufficiently expresses or manifests intentional states of people, rather than other formative factors [like the] photoche­mi­cal/elec­tronic mark­ing process.’ Thus, as [Maynard] puts it, ‘there will be effects in successful photos that one does not know how to attri­bute,’ by which he means one doesn’t know whether or not they’re there on purpose. The standard example here is the profusion of detail in the photograph, the way in which the photograph shows things the eye did not see. [All the leaves on a tree, for example, or blades of grass on a lawn, or similar details of that sort.] And it is such details, Maynard says, that raise ‘the question of the kinds and proportion of controlled features relative to uncontrolled ones, as compared with drawing and pain­ting’” (13).10 (The most emphatic version of this argument is Roger Scru­ton’s in his 1981 essay “Photography and Repre­sen­ta­tion,” which essen­tially denies to photo­graphy the status of an art.11 One short quotation: “The photograph is a means to the end of seeing its subject; in painting, on the other hand, the subject is the means to the end of its own representation. The photo­graph is transparent to its subject, and if it holds our interest it does so because it acts as a surro­gate for the represented thing. Thus if one finds a photograph beau­tiful, it is because one finds some­thing beautiful in its subject. A painting may be beau­ti­ful, on the other hand, even when it represents an ugly thing” [590].)

All this is much too summary, but it is meant chiefly to prepare the ground for the counter-claim—in effect the point of this talk—that Adams’s photographs, both individually and en masse, struck me in 2012 as epitomizing Greenberg’s empha­sis on density or inten­­sity or weight of intuited decision (or judgment-deci­sion) in the strongest possible sense. And this not despite the fact that they are photographs so much as because they are, if I may so put it. Take for example the photograph Adams calls “Colorado Springs, Colorado,” from his photo­book The New West, of which it was the fron­tis­piece. (It is also the frontispiece to volume one of The Place We Live, which further suggests that Adams places great stock in it.) In various respects, it is emblematic of his work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the setting is a suburb (often unfinished), with tract housing, undistin­guished construc­tion, unimpressive spaces—in effect despoiling nature in a more or less uncon­scious manner. (Adams means the viewer to receive such images in that spirit.) Note in this case the unattrac­tiveness of the “in-between” space with which we are presented, with scarcely a place for the two human beings (a man in glasses at the right, a woman in trousers to the left, both viewed largely from behind) to stand and talk. Not to mention the small heap of rubble directly behind the woman, which she appears to ignore, or the completely un-aesthetic juxtaposition to her left of the two exterior walls with their ill-matched horizontal striations or the strange stony interstice between the two. (The sloping metallic roof adds another quietly discordant note.) In short, scarcely a beautiful subject, in Scruton’s terminology. But Adams’s photo­graph is breathtaking. Indeed what is difficult is to know where to begin extolling its perfection. In the first place, there is the thrill of its utter clarity, its sheer sharpness of focus, throughout the entire depth of field, which of course is a function of the combination of lens opening and shutter speed choices (that is, intuited decisions) as well as the choice of film—and prior to that, the choice of camera, lens, etc. And in a photograph such as this one, as throughout Adams’s work, there is also the stunning, unexpected rightness of the composition, about which one could go on at length (in fact almost indefin­itely). So for example there is the objectively startling interplay between the man all of whom is in dark shadow save for his face and the white rectangle of the upper story of the building beyond him, the lower right-hand corner of which comes extremely close to making visual contact with his forehead, thereby telescoping the spatial separation between them, or very nearly so. Note too the way the woman’s dark-haired head breaks into the same white rectangle over toward the left, which is what gives such particular poignance to the exquisitely calibrated sense at once of distance and of communication (or should the terms be reversed?) between the two protagonists. And of course there is the towering, cut-off building at the right, which anchors the composition by virtue of its strong vertical emphasis (with horizontal striations, a hallmark of the image as a whole) while remaining at the same time somehow unobtrusive, the “action” of the image being entirely to the left. Adams himself cites the photographer Edward Weston as saying that good composition is “the strongest way of see­ing.”12 What Weston appears to have meant, Adams goes on to state, is that a photographer “wants Form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photo­grapher hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact it is peace.” And: the right set of relations is “discovered in a split second of lit­eral fact” but unlike (for example) a glimpse from a car window “it implies an order beyond it­self, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit per­fectly.” (Among those “fragments,” in this photograph, are the man and the woman; what it means that they are subsumed so acutely in the emerging order of the composition is a question without a knockdown answer. But it is a question one cannot simply put aside.) All this, I need hardly add, has everything to do with the fact that a camera such as Adams used to make this photograph had only one lens (that is, one combin­ation of lenses), not two set side by side, like constantly focusing and refocus­ing human eyes, which is to say that nothing could be less like lived vision (to use the lan­guage of Merleau-Pontyan phenomen­ology) than the fixed ultra-sharp arrangement of elements “Colorado Springs, Colorado” gives us to see. But that unlikeness itself was in effect intended by Adams, who in a sense anticipated the end result, not com­pletely, that indeed would have been impos­sible, but at least up to a point. And of course—some­thing it is easy to forget—the finished photograph reveals its perfection precisely to the human gaze, which finds in it the grounds for an exhil­aration that ordinary vision as such does not afford. (Weston’s “strongest way of seeing” is to be found only there.)

Then there is the light. To quote Adams again, about the photographs in The New West: after acknowledging the drabness of the suburbs and the tract housing he writes, “Paradoxically, however, we also need the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a place; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”13 (The notion of grace is of special interest to me, needless to say.) He continues: “The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or free­ways but the source of all Form, Light. The Front Range is aston­ish­ing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivi­sions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of the day transformed to a dry, cold bril­liance.” And: “Nothing permanently dimini­shes the affirma­tion of the sun.” Finally, he quotes Jean-Luc Godard’s cameraman Raoul Contal: “Daylight has an inhuman faculty for being always per­fect.”14

Here it is worth pausing a moment to underscore the self-evident: the light Adams celebrates in these terms is ren­dered in his photographs not in full color but in black and white (and all the myriad greys between). This is at once a radical simplification and a considerable enriching of ordinary vision: a simplification in the obvious sense that we lose the sensuous richness of color as such and an enriching in that the infinitely precise play of values, of shades of light and dark, that black-and-white photography makes possible is not something that ordinary lived full-color vision is capable of registering on its own. (Nor, by and large, is color photography, but that is another matter.) The pursuit of what Adams calls Form thus inevi­tably involves taking account both of the sharpness (the absoluteness) of the contrast between black and white and of the proli­fer­ation of minutely discriminable light/dark values between the two extremes, and let me say at once that to the best of my knowledge no photographer has ever been more in com­mand of this parti­cular resource than Robert Adams. So that while Adams is undoubtedly correct to speak as he does of the natural light of the Front Range, the fact that his pho­to­graphs make it stunningly present is an esthetic achieve­ment of a very particular sort. (As Jim Welling has made clear to me, this has much to do with Adams’s masterly printing of his own photographs—a fascinating topic that I hope Welling writes about some day.15)

Another self-evident point concerns the small scale of Adams’s photographs—for the most part a matter of inches only. Needless to say, this is a major difference between his work and the High Modernist painting I began my career as an art critic by celebrating and indeed that Greenberg would have had in mind as well—think of Pollock, De Kooning, Kline, New­man, Still, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Olitski, Stella, Poons—and of course it is an almost equally salient point of difference between Adams’s photographs and the new tableau-scale art photo­graphy that has come drama­tically to the fore starting in the late 1970s, I mean the work of Wall, Bustamante, Ruff, Struth, Gursky, Höfer, Demand, et al., the photographers discussed in my 2008 book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. My argument in that book is that the new tableau photography, by virtue not only of its scale but also of the fact (noted by Jean-François Chevrier) that it was made for the wall, necessarily engaged with the problem of the relation of work to beholder that I had previously tried to show emerged as central to ambitious modern (and then, subsequently, modernist) painting starting in the mid-1750s in France. I can’t go further into this here, though it should at once be clear that Adams’s photographs operate differently: they are not beholder-oriented in the tableau way even as their relatively small scale invites an intensity of close looking capable of discerning and taking esthetic pleasure in the rightness of the different sorts of relationships I have tried to evoke. Indeed there is a sense in which his photographs might be said to have been made ultimately to find their ideal place in care­fully plotted, aspirationally unified photo­books, a medium within which Adams’s lyric sensibility re­veals itself to the fullest extent.16

With respect to the recent history of photography, in other words, Adams’s photographs belong to a developmen­tal moment prior to the present one, assum­ing we can spe­cify the latter moment with any fixity. And my basic claim in these pages is that there are aspects of that earlier moment that may be seen, by a sort of Nachträglichkeit, as taking on a new and highly charged signi­ficance in the present situation (an “as never before qua­lity,” in a manner of speaking), as if Adams’s concen­trated pursuit of an absolute perfection of manifold small-scale internal rela­tions within the sharply circumscribed rectangular photographic field can today be under­stood as instan­tiating Green­berg’s notion of a density or intensity or weight of intu­ited decision—also his emphasis on the produc­tive role of what he calls conventions—with a new force­fulness and perspicuousness. This is to say that the strictly docu­men­tary character of Adams’s work, which by and large claimed viewers’ attention at the time of New Topographics, has somewhat receded in impor­tance. And it is also to suggest that the theoretical issue of the non-representational nature of the photograph as well as of the prob­lem­atic status of the photographer’s inten­tions owing to the photograph’s indexicality, on which earlier writers have laid such stress and which, inflected differently—that is to say, “positively”—has also been central to Michaels’s re­flec­tions on the medium, turns out to be not quite rele­vant to the present case. Or rather, more pre­cisely, it is as if the “weak intention­ality” of the pho­to­graph in the latter regard (to adapt a term of John Ber­ger’s put in cir­cu­lation by Michaels17) turns out to throw into relief the extra­ord­inary strength and efficacy of Adams’s esthetic perfection­ism—the density or intensity of his judgment-decisions, in Greenberg’s lingo—with respect to the appear­ance of the final print, the esthetic artifact as such. I need hardly add that this last claim requires demonstration and analysis at far greater length and, no doubt, depth than have been here provided.18

At bare minimum, the attraction of the Great Wave in 1999 had something to do with its representation of frenzy and impending crash. In reporting the sale in The New York Times, Souren Melikian provided what must now count as the standard late-twentieth-century description: “The albumen print conveys in beautiful tones of sepia brown and white the threatening atmosphere of the early stages of a tempest at sea. The storm is gathering at the left, already plunged in darkness, soon to be reinforced by huge clouds coming in from the right. The white glare of the froth crowning the waves in the foreground, the sharp black rocks emerging here and there, give the print a curious kinship to some of Courbet’s paintings.”3 Out of a frozen moment in time, the photograph is made to imply dynamic movement, transition, change. The punctuated comparison of Le Gray and Gustave Courbet only serves to emphasize and clarify these temporal concerns, concerns that have long informed our understanding of their relation.

In December 1878, for example, the critic and art historian Paul Mantz sought to explain the limits of Realism’s adherence to the “strict truth of photography.” Taking Courbet’s Stormy Sea (The Wave) as exemplary, he pointed to the artist’s imaginative, if failed, attempt to “fix […] the moving image” of waves breaking on the shore and to “render such turbulent sights, so fugitive in their insistently changed shape.”4 (Fig. 2) The same month, the appearance of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of galloping horses in the French journal Nature opened the door to an instantaneous picture-making that could approach what, for Courbet, had been “impossible.”5 (Fig. 3)

Ever since, Le Gray’s Great Wave, Sète has been folded into the wider visual culture of instantaneity. And rightly so, to an extent. It is, as I will argue here, a picture of an instant, and our ways of seeing easily recognize this. We are habituated to understanding how photographic images capture or represent passages of time, moments, that defy our own perceptual or phenomenological perception. A description such as Melikian’s rests precisely on a presumption of the coherence and consistency of the temporality represented in The Great Wave. It is a description, that is, attuned to photographic practices that emerged after 1878. To say, however, that Le Gray intended his photograph to be understood in 1857 as a representation of time, as a representation of instantaneousness, is to insist on a slightly different, but importantly different, set of assumptions about time and photography. Time, like photography itself, has a history and a philosophy, and this essay is a narrow and modest attempt to elaborate one strain of their conjunction.

Historical beholders of Le Gray’s photograph recognized its distinctive temporal concerns. The newspaper columnist Henry d’Audigier, for example, singled out The Great Wave for special attention in his published account of a visit to the photographer’s home in 1858. “There is a view of the Mediterranean taken opposite the city of Sète” he wrote in the July 25 issue of La Patrie, “the swells become fleecy in the distance, descend foaming toward the viewer and break like white powder on the rocks along the shore. Each wave is crowned by a little white puff whose every bitter drop we can count; on the edge of the picture, an enormous swell that breaks against a large black reef, is so well launched, so fast, so bubbly, that one would be tempted to step backward in order not to be touched by its furious momentum. The time it must have taken to observe and fix this little scene on glass is, so to speak, imperceptible: it’s 1/20th of a second. No one has yet achieved such a wonder of speed and dexterity.”6 The French words in this last phrase are promptitude and dextérité, which might also be translated as “rapidity” and “precision,” but either way the emphasis on the instantaneity of the image is clear.

Le Gray’s ability to capture such quickly passing scenes—to “instantaneously reproduce and fix” a “stormy sea”—had been noted before. The photographer’s one-time critic, François Moigno, for example, praised his seascapes in 1857 for offering the viewer “instantaneous pictures.”7 In general, it was immediately recognized how unprecedented the overall clarity and technical speed of the exposure must have been. Even early on, however, there were those who noted a certain artificial quality in Le Gray’s seascapes. An English critic found their light especially troubling, but bowed reluctantly to the general consensus. “It is a difficult matter,” the reviewer conceded, “to condemn as utterly untrue pictures to which universal praise is given to truthfulness.”8

The intuition of artificiality would be borne out ultimately by the posthumous revelation that Le Gray in fact produced The Great Wave, and several other prints around this time, using two negatives: one for the sea, and another one for the sky. Such combination printing went undetected at the time, and Le Gray never admitted it, but a close viewing of a print such as the one in the Vernon collection at LACMA gives some small but telling indications of the procedure: the seam between the negatives is just barely visible on the right side of the print. (Fig. 4)

As any history of photography will tell you, this technique arose in response to the different exposure times required to capture the sea and sky when using wet collodion. This was not so much a problem of the different speeds of the passing clouds and the waves beneath them, but rather one having to do with the chemical sensitivity to light. Glass plates and exposure-times appropriate for a landscape would almost inevitably produce a kind of blotchiness in the sky. Consequently, as Mia Fineman and others have demonstrated, various techniques including combination printing and painting on the negative were used by landscape photographers until quite late in the nineteenth century.9 The standard account today of the technical and artistic innovation of The Great Wave is anchored in Le Gray’s ability to conceal the fact that this was a combination print and not a print made from a single exposure. For many of us today the picture no doubt succeeds in this respect.

In other prints, the facts of production are harder to deny. Photographs such as Seascape with a Ship Leaving Port and Large Wave, Mediterranean Sea, for example, show how Le Gray recycled certain negatives of the sky in a number of seascapes. (Figs. 5 & 6) These pictures are very closely related to the better-known image of Sète—the jetty in the Large Wave seems to be the same as in the foreground of the Great Wave—and they suggest that Le Gray tried a variety of combinations before considering any one of them a success. A juxtaposition of two such closely overlapping prints also makes the disjunction between sea and sky both more obvious and a more uncanny, as if the duplication of the clouds was a coincidence of nature rather than an intended and contrived construction. Or as if the unusually shaped cloud at right might also be a construct itself. In any case, they alert us more viscerally to the double-negative in The Great Wave.

Despite or even because of this, we now know and in sense admire the combination printing of The Great Wave. Such techniques have been fully legitimized by certain tendencies in recent art photography—the late-twentieth century work of Jeff Wall comes immediately to mind. But for the historical viewers of Le Gray’s work, the construction of the image was not a salient part of the photograph. Even for later critics of combination printing like Peter Henry Emerson, double-negative printing in landscape photography was seen as a necessary compensation for the different exposures needed to capture a “naturalistic” image of both earth and sky.10 The Great Wave was no doubt seen as a unified and instantaneous picture. The core issue for any interpretation of the photograph, then, is how such instantaneousness was intended to be perceived. To understand such an historical phenomenology of beholding more broadly would require situating the emergence of new aesthetic forms like instantaneous photography in dialectical relation to the visuality that made them artistically possible and legible to their intended audiences.

The concept here of “visuality” might prove especially useful for an understanding of photographic temporality within a larger visual culture. “When we speak of visuality,” Whitney Davis explains, “rather than simply vision or visual perception, we address the difference introduced into human seeing by traditional cultural meaning consolidated and reconfigured in images.”11 The instantaneity of photography could have been recognized, that is, only to the extent it was comprehended in distinction from the duration and slowness found not only in earlier pictures, but within the broader economic and social structures then transforming the experience and understanding of time in the nineteenth century.12 Le Gray almost certainly intended The Great Wave to be understood as a unified image of time, of a passing instant. Yet, he had to manage the fact that such a photographic image was not technically possible, that knowledgeable viewers very well might understand the picture as not one but two separate moments.

Early descriptions of The Great Wave, like that of Henry d’Audigier, tend to linger on the foreground. The visual interest of the picture, as signaled by Le Gray’s title, has always been the photograph’s capture of the waves and swells crashing in what appears to be a split second—“1/20th of a second.” But the uptake of this imperceptible instant arises against the backdrop of stillness: the black breakwater on the left, the rocks in the foreground, the clouds in the sky. It is a rarely noted aspect of the photograph that the clouds are more clearly focused than the waves below. By the standards of visualization that later emerged, after 1878 most notably, the clouds are the more instantaneously rendered; the waves are unacceptably blurred. For obvious reasons, this blur registers as speed. Yet the assertion that the photograph captures the spray of water—“every bitter drop”—is largely fanciful, and more importantly it ignores the varying temporalities represented in the picture. The instantaneousness of the waves takes form only with and against the more durational time of the jetties and clouds.

While the use of the double-negative combination print can be understood to resolve a fairly common technical problem, it nonetheless created the all-but-indiscernible appearance of a double-time in The Great Wave. The difference between these times is made more dramatic, and importantly it is represented, as a result of the combination of two different negatives taken at different moments with different exposure times. As such, Le Gray, came to produce a picture of time that not only found wide admiration, but that continues to sit, unacknowledged, at the edge of a much-discussed issue in the history of photography: how does photography represent time? how does it figure the temporal nature of the medium? what kind of philosophy of time, if any, can be found in photography?

One prominent account of photography and time sails under the banner of the index. In a sense closely related to Honoré de Balzac’s belief that photographs physically transfer skin-like layers of reality, photographic theories of the index—or the trace, or the fossil—insist on the compressed temporal continuity of light hitting an object, entering a lens, and activating chemical (or digital) processes that result in the photographic image.13 And yet, as Kaja Silverman has rightly noted, “Discussions of photographic indexicality always focus on the past.”14 For Roland Barthes, famously, every photograph shows the “this-has-been.” In Alexander Gardner’s picture of the condemned conspirator Lewis Payne: “The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die.” (Fig. 7) All photographs ultimately, inevitably, offer a fossilization of the past, even as their persistence for us means there is “always a defeat of Time in them.”15

Michael Fried offers an important gloss of this line of thought about indexical temporality: “Time, in Barthes’s sense of the term, functions as a punctum for him precisely because the sense of something being past, being historical, cannot be perceived by the photographer or indeed anyone else in the present.”16 The special and pathos-ridden door the photograph opens to the past hinges on the beholder’s historical relation to the subject indexed by the camera. Our temporal distance from these men is what gives their portraits significance.17

The relative distance in time a person or event has to another person or event was characterized by the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart in his famous 1908 essay “The Unreality of Time” as distinctive of what he called the B-Series.18 We can speak of something occurring two days earlier than, one day earlier than, simultaneous with and so on. This he opposes to the A-series, or: being two days future, being one day future, being present, being one day past. Few today agree with his conclusion that the contradiction in the A-series—namely, today cannot also be yesterday and tomorrow—means time is an illusion, but the related problem of the existence or nonexistence of the past remains a question with real (and largely unthought) applications to our understanding of photography. The vast majority of writing on photography presumes something like a presentist philosophy of time—photography captures a moment that now no longer exists (because only the present is real)—as opposed to an eternalist one that posits that the past (like the future) exists.19 At their most sophisticated, writers on photography have at least understood the strangeness of photography and time. For example, Ann Banfield puts the unspeakable tense of the photograph thus: “this was now here.”20

Le Gray arguably had some flickering awareness of these problems in photographic temporality. Like Nicéphore Nièpce before him, he had an early interest in using photography as a means of artistic reproduction. In 1848, he used a daguerreotype to trace, to index as precisely as possible the painting of Anacréon, Bacchus et l’Amour by his school-mate Jean-Léon Gérome. (They had both studied in Paul Delaroche’s studio). A bit later, Le Gray’s meteoric rise to success in the mid-1850s flowed from his ability to make beautiful photographs of prominent subjects of potentially historical significance. That his portraits of Empress Eugénie at Saint Cloud may have been done as studies for a never-completed painting by Thomas Couture only confirms the sense that they were made to be seen from a future, that is from a retrospective, historical standpoint. (Fig. 8) In large part, photography for Le Gray was intended to record the present for posterity. He certainly wasn’t alone in thinking this to be so. In April of 1857, at exactly the same moment that The Great Wave was exposed, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake asserted that “Every form that is traced by light is the impress of one moment, or one hour, or one age in the great passage of time.”21

There are, of course, other ways of thinking about photographic temporality that do not rely so exclusively on the duration between photographic production and reception, on the “great passage of time.” The work of Jacques-Henri Lartigue offers countless images of instantaneousness, many of which are now of primarily historical interest. (Fig. 9) But unlike the indexical sense of inevitable pastness, they also provide an image of time that unsettles or makes strange our ordinary time perception. We are forced when looking at instantaneous photography to imagine what the nature of time might be if it can look like this. It heightens our awareness of what William James famously called “the specious present” or “the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.”22 The interest here is the remarkable difference between photographic time and our own phenomenology of time consciousness.

Lartigue’s picture also crystallizes the way photographers, since the mid-nineteenth century have increasingly sought to manage the range of possible exposure times to produce a deliberate representation of time. Hence Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” which for him relies on “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give the event its proper expression.”23 Or by contrast, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s 90-minute exposures of the interior of movie theaters, something he has half-jokingly called the “indecisive moment.”24 Between what the French call instantané and pose (snapshot and time-exposure), photographers have come to recognize the temporal component of the photographic medium as one of its defining characteristics.25

Le Gray certainly can be situated within the prehistory of instantaneous photography. My own interest in The Great Wave emerged from an inquiry into the discourse surrounding pictorial instantaneity prior to the publication of Muybridge’s famous split-second photographs of horses in 1878. It became clear that an extensive commentary on the problem and the promise of instantaneous photography dated back as early as 1841.26 Importantly, however, the definition of the term shifted from meaning something like an exposure of several seconds to meaning rather precisely any exposure-time less than 1/10 of a second after 1878—faster, that is, than the eye can see.27 For all its use and abuse in recent art historical writing, Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” refers pretty specifically to this traversal of the perceptual horizon, in the visualization in “slow motion and enlargement” of “the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step.”28 Or, when a wave crashes.

“In his famous painting, The Wave,” Benjamin wrote only a few years later, “a photographic subject is discovered through painting. In Courbet’s time, both the enlarged photo and the snapshot were unknown. His painting showed them the way. It equipped an expedition to explore a world of forms and structures which were not captured on the photographic plate until a decade later.”29 It has become such a commonplace in the art historical literature to see Le Gray lurking behind Courbet, to see him offering a model of a possible pictorial instantaneity, that we have lost hold of Benjamin’s more basic insight. That is, Courbet’s painting constituted only one part of a larger desire for pictorial instantaneity that photography could not then produce. Or more to the point—and here Benjamin is typically half-right—Courbet’s painting partly seeks to produce an emerging and still inchoate effect of pictorial instantaneousness, within and against a Realist concern with a slower and more durational time.

Le Gray too wished to produce such pictorial instantaneousness in his photography. Like the painter he was, he fully accepted the necessary fictitiousness of the resultant image, but the construction of a photograph of instantaneousness allowed him to realize a representation of time, properly speaking, that indeed would not be realized in photography for several decades. As such, The Great Wave might be said to offer a reflexivity about time that straight-forward instantaneous photography typically lacks. Or, that is, it relied on a constructedness, however successful its fictional coherence, that implicitly acknowledged the fictitiousness of its own representation of time. Why then, did Le Gray want to produce this image of time?

The Great Wave surfaced in the wake of another, once equally-famous seascape. Brig on the Water was a sensation when it first appeared at the Photographic Society of London in the fall of 1856. (Fig. 10) An advertisement in the British press reported that 800 copies of the print—it was then called Sea and Clouds—had been subscribed in only two months.30 Queen Victoria was among the buyers. Soon after, a French paper noted the photographer had already received orders worth 50,000 francs as a result of the exhibition.31 Gordon Baldwin has subsequently claimed that “for Europeans it was probably the most famous photographic image of the nineteenth century.”32 The enthusiasm for the photograph was also importantly tied up—for the first time—with the perceived instantaneity of the exposure. Not a combination print, the technical sleight of hand was replaced here with a titular one. Exposed in full sunlight, the photograph was shown in Paris as a moonlit scene.

In February of 1857, Brick au clair de lune was exhibited alongside a proof demonstrating its origin in an untouched negative at the Second Exhibit of the Société française de photographie. The show took place in Le Gray’s own studio at 35, boulevard de Capucines, an elaborate and expensive space he had acquired just over a year before with the financial backing of Barnabé Malbec de Montjoc, the Marquis de Briges, who fronted the 100,000 francs needed to incorporate Le Gray’s growing enterprise. Although a silent partner, the Marquis had apparently pressured the photographer to focus on his portrait business rather than his more personal concerns with landscape photography. The runaway success of the Brig on the Water seems to have encouraged Le Gray to keep at the subject, and to attempt to persuade the Marquis of its artistic and commercial significance.

Less than two months after the Paris exhibit, Le Gray found himself in the south of France. On April 2, he photographed the official opening of the new railroad connecting Toulouse and the port of Sète. Around this time, likely in the days that followed, he framed a number of views of the jetty and breakwater looking out to sea from the port. Back in Paris, these negatives were combined with others of the sky, possibly also made at Sète. The Breaking Wave is obviously a variant on The Great Wave. (Fig. 11) As Sylvie Aubenas has interestingly suggested, these photographs may have been produced as part of the renegotiations of the backing of Le Gray’s company following the unexpected death of the Marquis de Briges on April 17.33

In any case, these prints were two of only three that the photographer submitted to the French government for copyright protection in 1860, amid the bankruptcy and liquidation of his company. In other words, they mattered to him. Although obviously complementary pictures, their differences too are telling. Why, we might ask, is one so much more celebrated than the other? Part of the interest of The Great Wave compared even to The Breaking Wave is the way it brackets the relation of the port and the sea. It gives priority to the waves and the breakwater, but unlike most other seascapes, maybe especially painted ones, the place and scale of ships and the harbor are left decidedly vague. This is perhaps why it can be called the “great” wave. In fact, it is not actually a very large wave. But this is also why critics could zoom in on the photograph as an image of time. Given the photographer’s formal decision in The Great Wave to prioritize only the waves, the shore, the breakwater and the clouds in the sky, it is also part of the fabric of his intentions.

Le Gray’s motif is unusual within the iconography of the port of Sète. No other picture of the site, before or since, even comes close to that which is framed by The Great Wave. An annotated postcard shows both the more typical view and the likely position and direction of Le Gray’s camera in April 1857. (Fig. 12) Looking east from the hillside of the town itself, tourist views like this often show the entrance to the harbor, with its prominent breakwater on the right, but with the lay of the land and sea in full view. Given the details of ships, the photograph here seems to be a mid twentieth-century one. It is certainly well after 1879, when the breakwater at right was extended some distance to the east. (It has since been extended very far down the coast). None of these details are legible in The Great Wave.

As the topography shows, the exposures Le Gray made in Sète were taken not from or of the port itself, but rather from the so-called môle Saint Louis, the jetty extending out from the town to the lighthouse. An annotated detail of a map from the early twentieth century makes this a bit clearer.34 (Fig. 13) Le Gray’s camera was thus pointed south across the western entrance of the harbor, a location that entirely brackets the port and harbor itself—and quite deliberately it would seem. Given the fame and ubiquity of The Great Wave, it can come as something of a surprise to discover the more precise location of the picture’s frame. Again, what this seems to suggest is that Le Gray sought out a motif that would resist the conventional view of the site in order to give priority to an image of the sea that would match or outdo the earlier success of the Brig on the Water. Cutting the ship out of the picture, so to speak, seemed the best procedure.

The Great Wave is not the first photograph to capture a breaking wave on the coast. The Welsh photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a student of Henry Fox Talbot, had succeeded as early as 1853 in producing such print. (Fig. 14) Note, however, the sky: painted black in the negative, it has turned white in the print. Again, more than anything, the successful exposure of wave and cloud at the same time was Le Gray’s perceived accomplishment. He was precisely seeking to outdo such experiments in photographic time compression. Whether he actually saw Llewelyn’s photograph is irrelevant, as the discussion of such attempts was widespread in the French and English photographic press.

The same year, 1853, Ernest Lacan noted that Le Gray’s colleague Charles Nègre had produced a three-second exposure using the new wet-collodion process that was, as he put it, “practically instantaneous.”35 Although he remained a champion of the calotype, Le Gray had actually pioneered collodion photography and understood its necessity. Not only did it offer faster and faster exposure times—Muybridge himself used it in 1878—but it made combination printing considerably less arduous.

Le Gray, Nègre, and the German-born Edouard Baldus had all been members of the famous government-backed Mission Héliographiques in 1851. These photographers, each of whom was originally trained as a painter, were tasked at the time with documenting the architectural treasures of France. To manufacture his famous photograph of the Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles Baldus made use of ten separate wax-paper negatives to produce the final print. (Fig. 15) Le Gray obviously knew of Baldus’s combination printing, and others such as their friend Hippolyte Bayard had also experimented with it, but for his part he never seems to have used it in his own calotypes. With the advent of the glass plate, however, the possibility of producing a crisp, coherent, instantaneous picture of the temporally complex visual world must have come to seem irresistible.

The word “collodion” shares an etymological origin with “collage.”36 What Le Gray invented in 1857 was a kind of temporal collage—the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, two times are placed edge to edge. The easiest way to see the resultant picture is as a harmonic synthesis of the two. Within the constraints of a nineteenth century visuality, this might have been the dominant way of perceiving The Great Wave. But the recognition of the artificiality of the process, the intuition that the suture did not quite hold, makes it possible to see a period significance to the temporal double-structure of the photograph.

Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth-century, two temporalities became increasingly recognizable in modernizing societies. The “lived time” of premodern and natural cycles oriented to the sun, the tides, the moon became the “measured time” of the clock and the workday, of shipping times and railroads connecting major cities. Although the conventional view would have it that speed and instantaneousness decisively came to dominate with the advent of the railroad and the telegraph, a deeper analysis indicates that only a small percentage in the nineteenth century felt the rigors of measured time decisively undoing an older, natural time. In the provinces of France, for instance, work in both the office and fields continued to operate under what Guy Thuillier has called the “ancien régime of time.”37 Pictorial instantaneity, then, in the work of Le Gray and Courbet alike, should be understood to have emerged from a visceral and ongoing cultural tension between older and newer temporalities. For whom, then, finally, would this tension have been legible?

The views of Sète were likely produced with one original and specific audience in mind: the Marquis de Briges and his heirs. The family came from a long line of aristocratic landowners in the Languedoc, but the marriage of Barnabé Louis Gabriel Charles Malbec de Montjoc to Marie-Barbe de Longaunay brought a large influx of new money.38 The Marquis and especially his sons sought to invest this new money in various risky new enterprises such as Le Gray’s photographic studio. To give another example of their investments, in the 1870s, the family got caught up in a legal conflict over a speculative property deal developing a hotel in Calaveras County, California, a case that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.39 The Malbec de Montjoc family were thus typical of a certain strain of wealthy European investors who sought to transition their fortune from the slower, more predictable returns from property and rent to the faster and less reliable speculative economy. For them, the tension between older and newer temporalities was their economic lifeblood.

In 1857, the speed of finance was reaching one of its periodic frenzy points. In France, the early phase of Haussmannization as well as a trade-deal with Britain brought a booming economy especially favorable to real estate and stock market speculation. On the steps of the Paris Bourse a flourishing market in “outside banking,” the so-called coulissiers, who made quick fortunes in unregulated futures and derivatives, were an increasing cause for concern. The French State introduced taxes on financial transactions later in the year, and in 1858 severely restricted the activities of the outside bankers.40 In the United States, the same booming economy came crashing down in September, with the famous Panic of 1857.41 The ripple-effect on the French economy was relatively short-lived, but widely noticed, not least on the stock exchange.42

This new speculative economy was built on and carried with it a new philosophy of time. As Thomas Piketty has shown, wealth accumulation in the nineteenth century was largely a matter of time, of simply waiting for predictable returns on investments. Rents and stock dividends provided income at an astonishingly steady rate of 4-5%. Inheritance flow maintained the steady rise of capital in the longue durée.43 But in what Piketty calls the “clash of temporalities,” this durational wealth expansion becomes almost invisible in the daily economy.44 It also fades from view in times of heightened financial speculation. In periods like the 1850s, “The belief in the value of lasting equilibrium and the well-defined object gave way to such values as mobility, flexibility, and a capacity to invent and adapt.” As Michel Melot has argued, this shift in the philosophy of capitalism occasioned a complete “revision of the notion of time.”45 Speculative stock trading, to say nothing of the sale of futures and derivatives, obtains its profit from the speed of transactions and the accuracy of predictions. In the nineteenth century nothing could be further from the property-owner’s own expectations of the economy of time. Both the landowning aristocrat and the speculative entrepreneur, then, adhered to a philosophy of time. But these philosophies were different, and these differences might very well be given representational form in the temporality of photography.

When the heirs to the fortune of the Marquis de Briges formally signed a new contract with Le Gray one month after the New York Stock Exchange plunged, sending ripples worldwide, they must have known the risks. And risks they were: within three years the business was bankrupt and Le Gray had sailed away—literally, first to Palermo, Italy, then to Egypt, where he died in the early 1880s. The reasons for the failure are not entirely clear. Nadar, who later came to occupy the studio at 35, boulevard de Capucines, claims in his memoir that the portrait business just could not be maintained in the face of the runaway success of Eugène Disderi’s carte-de-visite. “Le Gray,” he wrote, “could not resign himself to turn his studio into a factory; he gave up.”46

An important part of Le Gray’s ambition, then, in producing The Great Wave, Sète in early 1857, was to figure the tension between temporalities that both he and his financial backers were coming to recognize as the structural condition of their world. For Le Gray himself, the “industrial madness” of late-1850s photography came to force his practice into another realm of economic production, one whose speed and mechanization he ultimately resisted altogether. But in 1857, a compromise formation between the instantaneousness of the glass-plate negative and the constructed—indeed collaged—print that fictionalized that same instantaneousness seemed possible, if not downright necessary.  Its ultimate legibility as a multivalent temporal register remains a matter of interpretation. But as such, the The Great Wave offers not only a implicit critical reflection on time in the nineteenth century, but on the very possibility of its representation in photography.

Notes

My thanks for feedback from the participants and audience who heard this paper at the “Photography and Philosophy” conference at LACMA in March 2015. Comments from Tim Clark and Walter Benn Michaels were especially productive in the revision process. My wife, Gabrielle Larocque, helped me find the time to write and rewrite this essay.

All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

“See also Sylvie Aubenas, “From One Century to the Next: The Fate of Le Gray’s Work in Photographic Collections,” in Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray, 1820–1884 (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 323.