Minutes, weeks, years

I’m using a Kindle version of this text that doesn’t have page numbers, so my citations are weird. I apologize. Also, I’m responding to two quotes, both of which appeared in Berger’s text.

Throughout the text, Berger is asking me to do a lot. He’s asking me to consider the camera as a box of moments that captures images predictably and consistently, while considering the photographer a storyteller who seeks to separate his images from language, but realizes the difficulty in doing so. The latter, I’m ready to do. The former, well, not quite.

“Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too: a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a spring board” (What Did I See, para 1).

This quote appears in the section that finds a photographer asking viewers to explain the story of his photos. Very few viewers were able to correctly identify the action taking place in the images. This experiment (test, game) shows us the associative properties of images and their ambiguity. Each viewer offers an interpretation based on his or her experience. Many of them even say “I’ve seen this look before” or “I know this look,” further supporting Berger’s claim that images “claim minutes, weeks, years” in creating any myth or significance. Like Logan, I’m considering what Kress might say about all of this. Berger, unlike Kress, resists the temptation to separate images and words, demonstrating his resistance in this experiment. In my reading of Kress (and I’ve only read selections of his work on multimodality), I got the feeling that he believed images communicated more clearly than words. I remember talking back to this in class and my professor responded saying “if I told you I spilled coffee and to bring me a broom what would you say?” Of course I insisted on a mop. She explained that she meant coffee grounds and if she had used an image to communicate it, we would not have had such a misunderstanding. I still don’t really buy this example, though, because if she had shown me a picture of coffee grounds, I still might not have brought her a broom, but a coffee filter. And if she had just said I spilled coffee grounds, I would have brought the correct tool. As Berger says in this quote, I might have still rejected the truth she was trying to create in the image. While we’ve been reading Hawk, too, the simile here resounded with me: “the image is like a spring board.” It makes me wonder how images might function as invention in composition classrooms.

“The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness” (The ambiguity of the photograph, para 34).

Throughout the text, Berger seems to regard the camera as a merely mechanical tool. Although Berger denies the photographer objectivity, and even draws attention to the social contexts a photographer operates in, he seems to regard the camera as an objective tool. This is troublesome to me.

In his book chapter “Lighting for Whiteness,” Richard Dyer provides a brief history of film and the use of light for photography. Although he is focusing mostly on film and motion pictures, Dyer draws attention to some important social issues that shaped the development of the camera and its use of light. Dyer claims that photography and camera technologies evolved to capture the white human face for historical documentation. Even as color film emerged, the subjects of photos sought to increase their white appearances. Simply and concisely: Dyer argues that cameras were developed in order to capture light because that was the best way to capture white faces on film - not because this was objectively the only way to do so. In motion pictures and photography still, people of color are often distorted in photographs. Dyer points to Rising Sun and A Few Good Men and other 1990s films as examples, but as an editor at a newspaper, where photos of people of color often had to be manipulated to improve the light capture for viewing and printing, I found this to be true also. I don’t know enough about photography or chemistry to say whether Dyer is right or wrong in his history and critique of photography methods, but I do agree with his overarching claim: technology is never neutral or acontextual. Just as an image relies on “minutes, weeks, years,” so, too, does the technology required to capture the image. I don't feel like Berger addresses the social factors that influence the camera itself, although it may be a technology largely unchanged.