Tagg J., Rekonstrukcje przeszłości w perspektywie teorii fotografii
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material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature with-
out human intervention” (133).
As Baudrillard has remarked, “By not submitting use value to [the] logic
of equivalence in radical fashion, by maintaining use value as the category of
‘incomparability,’ Marxist analysis has contributed to the mythology (a veritable
rationalist mystique) that allows the relation of the individual to objects con-
ceived as use values to pass for a concrete and objective—in sum, ‘natural’—rela-
tion between man’s needs and the function proper to the object.” Baudrillard,
“Beyond Use Value,” chap. 7 of
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,
trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1981), 134.
56. Stuart Hall, “The Social Eye of
Picture Post,
”
Working Papers in Cul-
tural Studies
(Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), no. 2
(Spring 1972): 71–120.
57. In May 1943, McKinley Morgan
W
eld, known as Muddy Waters since
he was a child, left Clarksdale, in the heart of the Mississippi cotton belt, by train
for Memphis and, from there, rode the Illinois Central north to Chicago. Here,
in the segregated ghetto of the South Side, Muddy’s harsh and emotional Delta
country-blues was to be reampli
W
ed for a new Black urban–migrant market,
through the entrepreneurial networks of nightclubs, independent recording
companies, and trade journals that, between 1948 and the early 1950s, took his
local success to a national level. A landmark in this passage was the January 1950
extracontractual recording session for Parkway, with Little Walter and “Baby
Face” Leroy Foster, which produced the two unsurpassable versions of “Rollin’
and Tumblin’.”
5. The Pencil of History
1. O. K. Werkmeister’s comments were made in an unpublished lecture
for a conference entitled Culture and the State, in the series Current Debates in
Art History, at Binghamton University in 1990. For Thomas Crow’s review of
Donald Preziosi’s
Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science,
see “Art
History as Tertiary Text,”
Art in America
78, no. 4 (April 1990): 43–45.
2. William Henry Fox Talbot,
The Pencil of Nature
(1844) (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1968), n.p.
3. Roland Barthes,
Camera Lucida: ReXections on Photography,
trans. Richard
Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 93.
4. Stephen Bann,
The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of His-
tory in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 3.
5. Ibid., 3–4.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 – 345
6. H. D. Gower, L. Stanley Jast, and W. W. Topley,
The Camera as Histo-
rian
(London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1916), iii.
7. Cf. Harry Milligan, “The Manchester Photographic Survey Record,”
Manchester Review
7 (Autumn 1958): 193–204, and John Tagg,
The Burden of Rep-
resentation: Essays on Photographies and Histories
(London: Macmillan, 1988), 139.
8. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
v.
9. Ibid., vii.
10. Ibid., vii–viii.
11. Lynn Hunt, “History beyond Social Theory,” in
The States of “Theory”:
History, Art, and Critical Discourses,
ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 95.
12. Mark Cousins, “The Practice of Historical Investigation,” in
Post-
structuralism and the Question of History,
ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington,
and Robert Young (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 126–36.
13. Cf. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” trans. Rupert
Swyer, appendix to
The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972): “History, as it is practiced today, does not turn its
back on events; on the contrary, it is continually enlarging the
W
eld of events” (230).
14. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
2–3.
15. A. Pugin and A. W. Pugin,
Examples of Gothic Architecture: Selected from
Various Ancient Edi
W
ces in England,
3 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1850), quoted
in ibid., 2.
16. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
1.
17. Ibid.
18. Charles Alfred Stothard,
The Monumental Ef
W
gies of Great Britain,
Selected from Our Cathedrals and Churches, for the Purpose of Bringing Together, and
Preserving Correct Representations of the Best Historical Illustrations Extant, from the
Norman Conquest to the Reign of Henry the Eighth
(London, 1817–33), quoted in
Bann,
The Clothing of Clio,
64.
19. Stothard, quoted in A. J. Kempe’s introduction to
The Monumental
Ef
W
gies of Great Britain,
2, quoted in Bann,
The Clothing of Clio,
65.
20. Bann,
The Clothing of Clio,
67.
21. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
80.
22. Ibid., 3.
23. Bann,
The Clothing of Clio,
138. The problem is that, whereas Bann is
concerned to reveal the morphology of nineteenth-century rhetorics of histori-
cal representation, he wants to insist on “the fundamental difference between
historical discourse, on the one hand, and the photograph” (135). The difference,
346 – NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
for Bann, following Roland Barthes and John Berger and others, is rooted in the
indexicality of the photograph as a guarantee of meaning outside the morph-
ology of narrative and rhetorical structures that he analyzes. Photography,
therefore, comes to take on the “unique function of representing the past, of
making manifest to the spectator what Roland Barthes has called the ‘having-
been-there . . . the always stupefying evidence of
this is how it was
’” (134). This
leads Bann even to propose the possibility of identifying Ranke’s
wie es eigentlich
gewesen
with the “having-been-there” that, for Barthes, inhabits the photograph.
Elsewhere, Bann writes of the photograph as “not simply an automatic, and
to that extent a more ef
W
cient, means of reproduction” but as “a reproduction
with a signature in time” (134). And in the context of discussing “the succession
of technical developments, beyond the sphere of language, which offered a tempo-
rary or more long-lasting effect of illusory recreation”—an illusory re-creation
central to “the new historical sensibility, striving to annihilate the gap between
the model and the copy, and offering the Utopian possibility of a restoration of
the past in the context of the present”—he suggests that “only the photograph,
with its capacity to record and perpetuate light rays on a chemically-prepared
surface, was able to achieve this effect with complete success” (138).
24. Ibid., 139.
25. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
35.
26. Ibid., 213.
27. Ibid., 99–100.
28. Ibid., 6.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Ibid., 6.
31. Ibid., 177.
32. Ibid., 160–61.
33. Ibid., 48.
34. Ibid., 80.
35. Ibid., 94.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 96–97. It is worth noting that, of the authors, L. Stanley Jast was
deputy chief librarian of Manchester Public Libraries and honorable secretary
of the Library Association, while W. W. Topley was a member of Croydon
Libraries Committee.
For the in
X
uence of bibliographic science on the organization of photo-
graphic archives, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,”
October,
no. 39
(Winter 1986): 56–57.
38. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
71.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 – 347
39. Ibid., 70.
40. Ibid.
41. See, for example, George Brown Goode (assistant secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution in charge of the National Museum), “Report of the
Assistant Secretary,”
Report of the National Museum
(Washington: National
Museum, 1893).
42. Frederick William True, “The United States National Museum,” in
The Smithsonian Institution, 1846–1896: The History of Its First Half Century,
ed.
George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: De Vinne Press, 1897), 335.
43. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 16.
44. Gower, Jast, and Topley,
The Camera as Historian,
85.
45. Gower, Jast, and Topley’s
Camera as Historian
is quite clear about the
addressee of the Survey archive: “To the historian and the scientist the value of
exact records, indisputably authentic, can hardly be overrated. Such are the pri-
mary requirements of their work, the raw materials necessary for their labours”
(3). “The architect, and especially the student of architecture, will
W
nd there is
no index to what has been accomplished so instructive as a series of photographs,
comprehensively recording both broad outlines and details, compactly arranged
and classi
W
ed in such manner as to facilitate reference and comparison” (3). “The
politician, in his efforts for the betterment of our social structure, must, if his
constructive work is to stand the test of actual trial, take for his starting point
the existing conditions of his time, and must duly weigh the evolutionary forces
which have brought those conditions into being. For both purposes exact records
of material conditions, chronologically arranged for purposes of comparison,
furnish a valuable, indeed a necessary, basis for generalization” (3–4). “Nor is
the work without value in a commercial and legal sense. Questions relative to
property, and mutual rights therein, often arise, the solution of which requires
evidence based on a state of things which has passed away” (4). “The value of
adequate photographic records, kept as the common heritage of all, in fostering
the civic spirit, is not to be overlooked. A healthy corporate consciousness con-
stitutes a quality in our civic and national life which cannot be too highly valued
or too sedulously fostered. . . . And in the fostering of such a consciousness exact
records of fact, by reference to which misunderstandings and misapprehensions
can be dispelled, have their
W
tting place” (4).
46. Jean-François Lyotard,
The Differend: Phrases in Dispute,
trans. Georges
Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 177,
sec. 251.
47. Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 190–91.
348 – NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
48. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 16. For the development in the
nineteenth century of nonmimetic strategies of historical representation, see
Bann,
The Clothing of Clio,
138ff.
49. See, esp., John Tagg, “The Discontinuous City: Picturing and the
Discursive Field,” in
Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discur-
sive Field
(London: Macmillan, 1992), 134–56, and
The Burden of Representation.
50. Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in
Vision and Visuality,
ed. Hal
Foster, Discussions in Contemporary Culture no. 2 (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press,
1988), 43. See also Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press/October Books,
1990), where he argues, somewhat differently, though still in terms of an epochal
visuality, that “the camera obscura and the photographic camera, as assemblages,
practices, and social objects, belong to two fundamentally different organiza-
tions of representation and the observer, as well as of the observer’s relation to
the visible. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the camera obscura is
no longer synonymous with the production of truth and with an observer posi-
tioned to see truthfully. The regularity of such statements ends abruptly; the
assemblage constituted by the camera breaks down and the photographic cam-
era becomes an essentially dissimilar object, lodged amidst a radically different
network of statements and practices” (32).
51. Lyotard,
The Differend,
47, sec. 75.
52. Ibid., 44, sec. 68.
53. Ibid., 47, sec. 75.
54. Ibid., 50, sec. 81.
55. Ibid., 55, sec. 92.
56. Ibid., 53, sec. 88.
57. Ibid., 56, sec. 92.
58. Ibid., 55, sec. 92.
59. See ibid., 32–58. See also Bill Readings,
Introducing Lyotard: Art and
Politics
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991), esp. chap. 3, “Politics and
Ethics,” 86–139.
60. Lyotard,
The Differend,
181, sec. 263.
61. Ibid., 57, sec. 93.
62. Ibid., 53, sec. 88. One might compare Derrida’s remark, in
Archive
Fever,
that “each time a historian as such decides to ‘step aside and let . . . speak,’
for example to let a photographic specter . . . speak, it is the sign of a respect
before the future to come of the future to come. Thus he is no longer a histo-
rian.” Jacques Derrida,
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,
trans. Eric Preno-
witz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 70.
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