 |  Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X | |||||
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Issue 14. Painting / portrait
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The pose in early portrait photography: Questioning attempts to appropriate the past. | ||||
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Author: Fulya Ertem
Published: July 2006
Abstract (E): In the early years of photographic practice, we can observe a desire of making photography a medium of artistic expression. In that respect, photographers of the early period, who were mainly coming from the painterly tradition, were attempting to shoot photographs that looked like paintings. One of the key factors in that attempt was to borrow the poses and settings of the painterly tradition. But was this attempt really successful? Did the attempt of imitating the “artistic” poses of the paintings made photography a continuation of painting? This paper will attempt to find some answers to those questions, departing from a close analysis of some paintings and photographs of the early years of photographic practice.
Abstract (F): Les premières années de la photographie sont caractérisées par le désir de transformer le nouveau média en pratique artistique. Les photographies, dont beaucoup avaient eu une formation de peintre, s’efforçaient de faire des images qui ressemblaient à des tableaux. Un des éléments qu’ils favorisaient étaient les emprunts picturaux en termes de pose et de décor. Mais comment évaluer cette tentative de copier les modèles picturaux ? Est-ce que l’effort de ne pas s’éloigner de la pose « artistique » faisait de la photographie une continuation de la peinture ? Le présent article fournit quelques nouvelles réponses à cette question, à partir d’une lecture détaillée de quelques tableaux et peintures des premiers temps de la photographie.
keywords: Early photography, Posing, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imitation.
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In the early years of photographic practice, one can observe a desire of making photography a continuation of painting. In that respect, photographers of the early period were attempting to shoot photographs that looked like paintings. One of the key factors in that attempt was to borrow the poses and settings from the painterly tradition .
In this article, I will question th is attempt of continuity between early photography and the painterly tradition by analysing some photographs and paintings of the end of 19 th century, in terms of the poses of the models. In examining and theorising the act of posing in early portrait photography, I aim to answer the fallowing questions: Does barrowing the poses from the painterly tradition make photography the extension and/or continuation of painting? Is it possible that the poses of the models in the early "artistic" photographs question the idea of imitation and therefore collapse the attempt or desire by early photographers to imitate the painterly poses and settings?
1. A Photograph as a starting point of analysis
I want to let an image be the starting point of my inquiry. Here is a photograph from 1865, entitled Divine Love by Julia Margaret Cameron (Figure 1). Until I saw this photograph I underestimated the importance of colours in our perception of black and white photographs. One who faces this photograph for the first time, might indeed think: "Here is a colourless photograph belonging to the first years of photographic practice". However this photograph is not colourless. On the contrary its colour is very effective. So effective that it can evoke the idea of sculpture. The greyish brown that governs this image reminds me of the colour of a sculpture dirtied and aged with time. Moreover, the grains producing that colour are visible and they give the impression that the two figures have a textured body, a body made out of small particles that could be felt if touched, like the particles of marble, of clay or other residues one can feel while touching a statue.
Figure 1. Julia Margaret Cameron, Divine Love, Mary Hillier 1865.
Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work , London : Gordon Fraser, 1975,13.
However colour and texture are not the only aspects of the photograph that creates such a sculptural effect. The pose of the two figures, their immobility without any trace of tiredness, their subtle connection with each other where the woman holds the child very gently and touches his head with a tender kiss, increases the sculptural effect of this image by creating the impression that every gesture is perfectly arranged, calculated and performed without leaving any room for chance, or unexpected occurrences that would sharply blur the image.
Considering all these, we can ask some questions about the nature of this photograph such as: Why it has such a sculptural effect? Why the models pose in such a way? Is it possible that they represent a mother and her child? If so, why are they dressed up in old-fashion clothes, then? They look as if they are acting or imitating other images, other poses. Are they imitating Christian iconography? Are they pretending to be Madonna and the child? And more importantly, are they really "imitating" something? To be able to answer those questions more in detail, let's first look at the original conception of photography.
2. The conception of photography at the beginnings of its practice
When, at end of 19th century, the French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed, "Painting is dead" (Delaroche qtd in Caffin, 1) in front of Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre's new "light-pictures" (12) he was perhaps initiating a debate about the place of photography within the artistic realm. Like other admirers of the new medium, Delaroche was probably very impressed by the success of the photographic image in representing nature. He was thus recognising in this new invention, qualities and possibilities that would bring it to the same level as other techniques of visual representation.
Indeed the fascination exerted by photography was related to a certain conception of art, one dedicated to the exact reproduction of nature. Photography could be that dreamed of industry that could overcome the problems of exactitude posed by the art of painting.
However it was not so easy to consider photography as the newest art among the other arts. The main reason why the new medium was not easily recognised as artistic was due to its being understood as a scientific apparatus, "substituting a soulless eye for the artist's individual vision" (13) as Charles Caffin argues in his book Photography as Fine Art .
In fact, like Caffin, André Bazin points out in "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" that, the photographic lens, which is considered as the basis of photography, is called "objectif" in French and the objectivity of the photographic camera comes, not from its ability to reproduce images but from its ability to form images with limited human intervention. For Bazin, photography, unlike other forms of visual representation that are based on the presence of man, seems to derive an advantage from its absence. The photographic camera seems thus to offer a more accurate and objective image, creating a feeling of certainty about the thing it captures.
For Roland Barthes, this feeling of certainty that a photograph produces, is not a certainty in the sense of restoring what has been abolished by time or distance, nor in the sense of exactitude and perfect resemblance, (the first photographic images lacked colour information and details), but rather in the sense of certifying that, what is seen has existed. In a way, photography cannot lie about the existence of its referent and it is this particularity which makes it also distinct from painting.
From this perspective we can say that at the very beginnings of its practice, photography was conceived as an apparatus limiting the artistic touch of the photographer, and becoming a source of "scientific" evidence claiming an objective and accurate representation. It was thus not immediately seen as an artistic medium but rather conceived as an objective and scientific tool of recording.
One of the names, who used photography in the 19 th century for such scientific purposes, was Duchenne de Boulogne. He was one of the first photographers who didn't use photography for artistic portraiture but for illustrating his research on the electro-physiological analysis of the human expression.
Indeed, analysing the human expression and face in order to have access to the inner character of a human being, was an earlier desire, manifested in the proliferation of two scientific disciplines that emerged between the end of 18 th and the beginning of 19th century: Physiognomy and Phrenology. Physiognomy, systematised by Johann Caspar Lavater, was a science seeking to isolate the profile and the various anatomic features of the head, such as forehead, eyes, ears, nose, chin, in order to have access to the individual character. Phrenology, which emerged in the researches of the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, sought to analyse the topography of the skull in order to reveal the correspondences between the skull and the mental faculties, seated within the brain. Both of these scientific disciplines were reducing an entire range of human diversity into specific categories.
Allan Sekula, in his article "Body and the Archive" refers to the coincidence between the emergence of photographic practice and those disciplines, that categorise, archive and control the individual body. For him, photography subverted the privileges inherent in portraiture. As a result photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same fashion. This role did not come from the old honorific portrait tradition but from the imperatives of medical and anatomical illustration that established and delimited the terrain of the "other". Sekula adds that photographic portraiture was a double system of representation, functioning as both honorifically and repressively.
On the one hand, photographic portraiture, unlike the traditional 17 th century portraiture that provides a ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self, was popularised and extended to all realms of society. As a result it democratised the honorific functions of bourgeois portraiture. As quoted by Sekula, Jane Welsh Carlyle describes the inexpensive portrait photography as a social palliative:
On the other hand, this usage of portraiture was not separated from its repressive use. Beginning with being a cheaply affordable aesthetic pleasure, photography became later on an utilitarian social machine which created a social archive containing and creating the traces of the bodies of "betters" and "inferiors", and thus providing a list of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, as well as, of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the non-white and the female. Those identities were created through different social institutions of the period and photographic camera played an important role in that process.
As early as 1843-44, police departments in all over Europe started to use photographs in the research on criminalities. Hugh Welsh Diamond was photographing the countenance of the insane in Great Britain . The ethnographer Louis Agassiz was having daguerreotypes taken of American slaves. And, society portraitist André-Adolphe-Eugene Disdéri was patenting his first carte-de-visite.[1]
For Robert Sobieszek all these medical, psychiatric, anthropological/ethnographic, scopophilic and judiciary agendas of the period used portraiture to present the appearance of a certain individual or type, without the flattering or idealising goals of artistic portraiture.
In addition to these, John Tagg in his book The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories argues that the evidential character of photography at the beginning of its practice, cannot be separated from the new practices of observation and record keeping of the late 18 th and early 19th century European societies. These practices play an important role in the development of a network of disciplinary institutions such as the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals, departments of public health and schools, and they secrete new and strategically connected discourses which function as tools of power producing new objects and identities.
However , despite this "objective" power of photography, working on a different level than the artistic realm, there were still some photographers who claimed that photography could be art if the photographer could emphasise his or her superiority over the limitations of the apparatus. But to achieve such a freedom was not so simple. The circumstances of the practice of photography were different when compared to the practices of other visual representations. Comparing the ways the painter and the photographer deal with their models, Caffin argues that the painter can correct and modify his model's posture. But the photographer has to use devices such as head clamps in order to make the sitter remain immobile and to avoid any blurring in the picture, while at the same time, he has to save the sitter from the oppressive feeling of being operated upon. It was perhaps because of this that the first photographers were called operators.
However, these operators in order to weaken the scientific atmosphere created by the photographic setting and to make the photograph look like other artistic representations were also operating on their models and the composition, by imposing the poses, the settings, and by barrowing the representation style of other artworks.
In Cameron's photograph (Figure 1) for example, we can clearly see a desire to refer to Christian iconography and in addition to that, we also find the influence of the sculptural tradition, especially if we consider that both sculptors and photographers had to suggest certain colours only by a distribution of light and shade. However, painting has always been considered to be much more influential on early photography than sculpture.
"The first man who saw the first photograph must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective" (31) says Roland Barthes. In fact professional photographers had the same scenic accessories as painters in their studio. The painted backcloth, the brocade drape tied back with a heavy cord and the tapestry footstool not only denoted the class of the sitter but also created some movement and richness in the frozen atmosphere of the early photographic studios.
Figure 2. Gaspard Félix Tournachon Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt , 1859. Image reproduction in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the present day . London : Secker and Warburg, 1965, 54.
This relationship between painting and photography can also be observed in the poses of the models. For example, in one of the portraits of the famous French portrait photographer, Gaspard Félix Tournachon Nadar, where he took the photograph of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, (Figure 2), we can see the traces of painterly tradition, such as choosing a celebrity as his model, and imposing on her a pose, which can be found in many painted portraits of the same period, such as the portrait of Mme. Inés Moitessier by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingrès (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Auguste Dominique Ingres, Mme. Ines Moitessier Seated, 1856. Image reproduction in Robert Rosenblum, Ingres . New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1975, 165.
If we compare these two images we can see that both of the portraits have as their subject matter famous, influential women. Moreover, they represent their model in a posture borrowed from classical figures. The gesture shared by both models in which the right hand is placed delicately on the face, and which can be interpreted both as a sign of reflection and tranquillity, is a gesture found in other classical representations, such as the frescoes of Herculaneum (Figure 4).
Until now we have seen the classical debate brought up by the invention of photography in 19 th century about the place of photography within the artistic realm, and how this debate resulted in a desire and attempt to make photography look like previous artistic representations. However, we can now put this attempt into question in order to point our attention to a new question namely, whether such an attempt can really be possible.
Figure 4. Roman fresco from Herculaneum , Hercules and Telephus . Image reproduction in Michael D. Gunther / www.art-and-archaeology.com
3. Is photography an imitative representation?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in an introduction to a book on photography entitledThéatre des Réalites , bases himself on Walter Benjamin's criticism of the debate on photography in the 19 th century, arguing that, in only asking whether photography can be art or not, we miss an important question raised by photography, that is, what can photography tell us about art or representation itself? Lacoue-Labarthe noted that one of the important figures of that period, which paradoxically and unwillingly pointed to this issue, was Charles Baudelaire.
It is true that Baudelaire criticised photography harshly and denied it the possibility of claiming a stake to art as he sees photography as the antithesis of art, as something anti-imaginative and the product of an industry. Moreover, Baudelaire sees this technique as one that replies and corresponds to the most limited conception of art as simply an imitation of nature, a form of reproduction. However in a close analysis of Baudelaire's text entitled "Salon 1859", Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that, rather than questioning the duplicative aspect of the medium that ruins the artistic gesture, Baudelaire unwillingly brings to the fore an important and innovative aspect of photography. Let's refer to a passage from this text:
It seems indeed that the accusation by Baudelaire of photography is not simply an accusation that the new medium is a cheap reproduction of artistic gestures. Nor is he questioning the accuracy of this reproduction. Rather, Baudelaire seems to point to the connection that exists between photography and theatricality when arguing that photography is a bad imitation of painting, a bad theatre. Why asks Lacoue-Labarthe, does Baudelaire conceive of photography as theatre rather than reality? His answer is that, Baudelaire, despite himself, would have felt that the origin of both imitation and imagination is a mimique , a form of theatre.
The connection between theatricality and artistic representation is an important one for Lacoue-Labarthe since it allows him to re-think the concept of mimesisconceived until now as an indirect way of representation, understood as imitation. Indeed for those who condemn mimesis , thus primordially Plato, theatre is essentially targeted because the miming of human action not only provokes a certain number of emotions that are thought to be dangerous but also, because, the actors on the stage have nothing to do with the characters they incarnate. Thus the main disadvantage or immorality of the theatrical act lies in its being an illusion where everything can be offered without impunity and responsibility. For Lacoue-Labarthe this conception of theatre comes from a limited understanding of mimesisas imitative representation.
However the word representation itself is a problematic word for Lacoue-Labarthe. It has been understood as imitation, as reproduction, because of the prefix re- that gives it a value of doubling and seconding. But Lacoue-Labarthe, basing himself on Diderot's analysis of the theatrical act, argues that to represent is to render present. Thus, an actor is not someone who reproduces the gestures of another it is rather someone who presents and makes a character exist, someone who "builds up" a character. Thus, mimesis is not an imitation but rather it is making "present" something, some idea or some person (mythical heroes in the case of the actors of Dionysos). This "rendering present", argues Lacoue-Labarthe, is not to make "present" what is empirically absent (the problem of realism) or make "present" the pure absence (the adventure of Modern Art) but rather to reveal the presence of the presence itself, to reveal the being present of what is present.
From this opening up of the concept of representation as something other than imitation, we can now try to see the early artistic photographs from a new perspective-as images that present the presentation, images that perform the performance by relinquishing a definitive, stable connection between the image and its referent. In order to reveal this possibility, let's now focus on the act of posing in general and then analyse the poses within some other photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron to be able to see how the poseurs of the early "artistic" photographs, failed in "imitating" the poses of the painterly tradition.
4. Posing as an impossibility of imitation
In its general sense, posing can be considered as the way in which the "subject" responds to the (implied) presence of the beholder. It is, assuming a posture, an imaginary self, in front of any captivating gaze. When in front of the photographic camera, posing can be seen as a reaction to the camera's deadly capture. Roland Barthes, extending the pose to inanimate things, also describes it as an "instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye." (Barthes qtd in Owens, 210).
Posing is thus a moment of immobility where the poseur turns him/herself into a frozen image. It can also be considered as a moment where the poseur tends to imitate a certain image he/she has in his/her mind in order to project it onto his body and gesture.
However, Kaja Silverman in The Treshold of The Visible World claims that, posing is not imitative of a pre-existing image, it is imitative of photography itself, as she says that the pose does not only arrests the body, "hyperbolising the devitalising effects of all photographic representation"(202) but also resembles the "three-dimensional photography". Indeed Silverman adds that in the field of vision the subject does not passively wait for the camera/gaze to photograph him or her. On the contrary he or she "may give him or herself to be apprehended by the gaze in a certain way, by assuming the shape of. a desired representation.."(201, 1996). When this happen the subject does not simply hold up the imaginary photograph in front of him/her but rather try to approximate its form. It is in that sense that it resembles the "three-dimensional photography"
Much like Silverman, Craig Owens also says: "What I do when I pose for a photograph? I freeze.as if anticipating the still I am about to become; mimicking its opacity, its stillness; inscribing, across the surface of my body, photography's 'mortification' of the flesh." (210, 1992).
Considering these accounts of the act of posing we can argue that posing is not an imitation of a specific image. But rather it is a re-enactment of the some qualities pertaining to photography. Indeed Silverman argues that if posing resembles anything it resembles mimicry and mimicry is not a simple imitation.
Silverman refers to Jacques Lacan's description of the phenomenon of mimicry in his Four Fundamental Concepts and argues that for Lacan, although mimicry is the behaviour of certain species of insects, which seem to adopt the shape, and the natural colour of their environment for protective reasons, mimicry is more an attempt to become part of a particular picture rather than an attempt to imitate a pre-existing image. Mimicry is thus "a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids: sculpture-photography." (Flusser qtd in Silverman p. 201) as Wilem Flusser also argues in Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
In that sense what is significant here is that posing as "mimicry" is not an imitation of an image or a person. It is a mimicking of the stillness of photography.
Departing from all these accounts we can argue that posing is a paradoxical experience that seems to collapse and/or prevents any attempt of imitation, causing a disappearance of the referent. Perhaps the poseurs who tried to imitate the painterly poses were not imitating anything but they were just re-presenting in Lacoue-Labarthe's terms? And thus they were becoming something unrecognisable, something that rejects resembling and identification? In order to understand this better let's now return to some other photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.
As one of the first women photographers working apart from the mainstream professional photography, Julia Margaret Cameron's work has long been subject to debate in the artistic field. Some critics have devalued her photographs because of their lack of focus. This was considered a lack of artistic accomplishment because focusing was considered a sign of mastery of the photographer over his medium. However others found her work promising in terms of representing the emotions of her models.
At a time where photographic practice was under the influence of Cartomania , the impulse to own and trade carte-de-visite portraits, Cameron was perhaps trying to save photography from its commercial aspect by giving it an artistic air through arranging her models and her compositions like some of the pre-Raphaelite paintings of her time.
Figure 5. Julia Margaret Cameron Enid, Emily Peacock , 1874. Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work . London : Gordon Fraser, 1975,96.
Let us focus on a photograph that bares traces of such an attempt. Her 1874 photograph entitled Enid (Figure 5) seems to have the same subject matter as one of the paintings of a pre-Raphaelite painter of the same period, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Figure 6): a woman with a musical instrument. But more than that, the expressions of the two women who look as if they are going to sing, their nostalgic air that seems unaffected by any gaze, their hairstyles free and floating as if to give a sense of naturalness, seem to echo each other. Yet there's something more in the photograph, something that makes the viewer react to it differently. Even if I had not come across Rossetti's painting and had not been able to foreground its influence on Cameron's work, my memory would still be triggered by the question "where I have seen this before?" upon viewing this photograph.
Figure 6. Dante Gabriel Rosetti Christmas Carol 1867 image reproduction inhttp://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.html
By "this", I refer neither to the model nor to the photographic image per se but rather to the pose of the model and to the composition of the picture. Yet my memory would still fail to be satisfied since this impression of déjà vu , like all déjà vus , emerges because it can never be traced back. It is a photograph that gives the impression that you have seen it before without localising what it is that you have seen.
Moreover, unlike the painting, the photograph has a neutral dark background that evokes in me some theatrical settings, such as settings for pantomime where communication is possible through the body language of the actor whose body generally stands out in front of a dark background. This photograph that is devoid of voice and that makes its actor emerge in front of its dark background, provokes however a silence on the viewer because what it tries to represent is nevertheless still ambiguous.
After having read that Cameron chose her models among the members of her friends and family, I can't escape thinking about the real person behind the actor, since I know, thanks to the particularity of the photographic image, that the woman depicted here is an actual person in front of a camera. Though invisible in the picture, she has a personal narrative (her past, her relationship with the photographer etc.) Although she looks aware of her pose I wonder whether she was aware of the connotations her pose has to the paintings of her era. Perhaps she had in her mind some gestures, some expressions she unconsciously appropriated from the paintings she saw. Because of this intersection or superimposition of narratives, it becomes impossible to claim that this photograph imitates Rossetti's painting; rather, what it represents is the process of representation. Perhaps another photograph can help us to better grasp this aspect of early artistic photographs.
Here is another photograph by Cameron entitled Lancelot and Elaine . If I saw this image (Figure 7) as a photocopied reproduction, I would not immediately be able to recognise that it is a photograph. It could easily passed off as a photocopied reproduction of a painting. Yet getting closer I can see some disturbing details which prevent my reading of it as a painting: the blurs. The hands of the two models, some details of their dress and the background are blurred and unclear. In addition, the grains that I already mentioned in Divine Love (Figure1) are much more obvious in this photograph, especially in the areas of transition between dark and light tones, such as the cheeks of the models. Discovering that this is a photograph, I am filled with wonder. This feeling emerges because, although this photograph seems to represent two legendary figures (Lancelot and Elaine), next to the title there are, strangely enough, two other names, the names of the models: William Warder and May Pinsep.
Figure 7. Julia Margaret Cameron Lancelot and Elaine, William Warder and May Prinsep, 1874. Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim ,159.
Paintings where the names of the models are written together with the title are rare, especially if they are paintings that represent legendary stories. But in this case the models and their narratives become as important as the subject matter of the photograph because we know that they really existed in front of the camera, they are not the mere imagination of the artist. This increases the effect that this photograph is not representing a legendary story but rather represents the "representation" of a legendary story by two models.
In other words, this photograph refers on the one hand to the art of painting representing a legendary story (since the pose of the models and the setting is very reminiscent of a painterly setting), but on the other hand, it represents the performance of the models representing their own interpretation of the legendary heroes Lancelot and Elaine.
In either case, it is not easy to trace back or stabilise the referent of this image. Like Cindy Sherman's History Portraits where she re-creates the historical portraits by using grotesque prostheses or heavy make-up on her own body in order to point to the theatricality of our cultural imaginary this photograph faints the possibility of identification, recognition, and comparison.
Indeed Cindy Sherman's work, from her black and white film stills of the late 1970's to the colour images of 1980's and her history portraits of the 1990's, is the result of a project that calls into question any received notion of subjectivity or identity by emphasising its performative and theatrical character. She makes this emphasis through parodying the illusion of mimetic representation that dominates the conception of photography. But more than that she also emphasises the paradoxes of the act of posing.
Amelia Jones' reading of Cindy Sherman's photographs, in her article "The 'Eternal Return': Self-Portrait photography as a Technology of Embodiment" emphasises the fact that in Sherman (but also in other cotemporary artists such as Hannah Wilke), the act of posing (for photographic camera) is a representation which predicates a freezing of bodily motion where a death of the subject is enacted. However she also mentions that, although posing is a projected immobility on the past (in Barthian terms), this immobility "can after all be transformed into a sign of eternal life.sustained via deferral through the other."(956, 2002). Few paragraphs later she also adds: ".the performative posing of the self, whether photographically documented or "live" is always already a performance of the other" (965,2002).
Considering all these, we can argue that what is happening in Cameron's and Sherman's photographs is not only a questioning of the theatricality of our cultural imaginary but also, a relevance of the paradox of the act of posing: the splitting of the subjectivity of the poseur under the illusion of unity, revealing the never ending production and deferring of subjectivity, as it is best described in Roland Barthes's words: "in front of the camera I am the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art "(13).
As we have already seen the poseurs of Cameron's photographs who tend to imitate paintings, are also embedded in deferral of their referent. They are splitted during their performance of classical figures because their attempt of re-enactment of other poses and gestures, becomes impossible and their pose point to the impossibility of imitation.
Considering all these, we can argue that Cameron's poseurs refuse in way to reveal their subject matter by deferring the referent. It is perhaps in that sense that they are "representing" in Lacoue-Labarthe's terms. They are rendering present what is present because they are breaking the continuous and comforting relationship between the referent and its representation.
Moreover, Cameron's photographs also point to our presence, to our being present in front of them. It is in that presence that they make us aware of our participation in and production of the narrative frameworks, which constitute meaning. In that sense these photographs also make us aware that meaning can be unstable, fleeting, and fugitive.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Trans. Richard New York :Hill and Wang.
Bazin, André. 1967. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." What is Cinéma.Trans. Hugh Gray. London : University of California Press.
Caffin, H. Charles. 1971. Photography as a Fine Art. New York : Morgan&Morgan.
Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Jones, Amelia. 2002."The 'Eternal Return': Self-Portrait photography as a Technology of Embodiment". Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society , vol.27, no 4. University of Chicago Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe.1996. Théatre Des Realités. Trans. Christine Decruppe. Paris :Caves Sainte-Croix .
Owens, Craig. 1992. "Posing" Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Wienstock. Introduction by Simon Watney. Berkeley , Los Angeles , Oxford : University of California Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1989. "The Body and the Archive" The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography , ed. Richard Bolton. London : Mit Press.
Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Treshold of the Visible World . New York and London : Routledge.
Sobieszek, A. Robert. 1999. Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul 1850-2000, Essays on Camera Portraiture. California : Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.
Tagg, John.1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories London : The Macmillan Press.
Illustrations
Figure 1 Julia Margaret Cameron, Divine Love, Mary Hillier 1865.
Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work , London : Gordon Fraser, 1975,13.
Figure 2 Gaspard Félix Tournachon Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt , 1859. Image reproduction in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the present day . London : Secker and Warburg, 1965, 54.
Figure 3 Auguste Dominique Ingres, Mme. Ines Moitessier Seated, 1856. Image reproduction in Robert Rosenblum, Ingres . New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1975, 165.
Figure 4 Roman fresco from Herculaneum , Hercules and Telephus . Image reproduction in Michael D. Gunther / www.art-and-archaeology.com
Figure 5 Julia Margaret Cameron Enid, Emily Peacock , 1874. Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work . London : Gordon Fraser, 1975,96.
Figure 6 Dante Gabriel Rosetti Christmas Carol 1867 image reproduction inhttp://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.html
Figure 7 Julia Margaret Cameron Lancelot and Elaine, William Warder and May Prinsep, 1874. Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim ,159.
Notes
[1] A pocket-sized card, bearing a small and full-size photographic likeness in place of the person's name.
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