Last week we spent a large chunk of class time talking about Riis and looking at images of New York and its inhabitants spanning from Riis’ time all the way to the present. I know that we didn’t see all that many of Riis’ photos, but I do think we looked at enough to get a sense of his overarching project–and to think about what it means to “read images.” Several of you mentioned that Riis’ work was a form of “propaganda,” an observation which interested me a great deal because the term often carries with it negative connotations, but it also seemed as though across both classes Riis’ work was recognized as being important, perhaps even crucial to social reform.
This led me to think about the genre of the photograph. What does a picture do that words can’t? That a painting can’t? I think immediately of two writers I admire who write critically on the subject of photography: Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Barthes (in his book Camera Lucida) observes, “society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it…” In other words, it seems as though Barthes sees that photos can do something big, something disturbing, something that might want to be repressed by the mainstream.
When writing about Diane Arbus (whose work we saw in class last week), Susan Sontag states, “the photographs don’t allow the viewers to be distant from the subject…Arbus took photographs to show something simpler–that there is another world…” Perhaps Sontag helps us make the move from the uniqueness of the medium of the photo, to the power of its content? When we’re taking pictures in our personal lives, I think we tend to see the photo as a mandate to look “pretty” or “handsome.” But, as an art form, that stereotypical ideal of beauty is different.
I love taking photos. And, I am interested in taking pictures of things that I don’t usually notice or see. That happens a lot in NYC. But, that also means that I tend to take photos of buildings instead of people. Even though, as a viewer, I prefer images with people in them.
I am just back from Minneapolis, where I had the luck of getting to go to the Walker Art Center, and catching the Cindy Sherman Exhibit that I’d missed when it was in New York. There is nothing quite like seeing enormous prints of Sherman’s photographs–people or characters are always front and center and they never cease to fully overwhelm me. Sherman also pays attention to every single detail of the photo–from the subject’s outfit, to hints of plastic surgery scars, to eyebrows peeking out from under a thick coat of foundation.
This image from the show has stayed with me–I was really taken by the idea that the clowns (who are all the same clown, and also all Sherman herself) smile without smiling. The teeth are painted on. And, I can’t stop thinking about them.
What does any of this have to do with our class? With Yezierska? I wonder if the stories we’re reading for tomorrow share any of the attributes of these photos? Can you see the characters? Can dialogue have the same level of impact as an image?
I think that photography is so different from writing because there is usually no confusion about what is in a picture. It hits us square in the face and the only thing that we have to determine is how we feel about the picture. Reading a piece of writing, on the other hand, is a much less personal experience. Jacob Riis can describe tenements with the most gruesome details, but until we actually see them, we will take the liberty to construct our own image of the tenements and fill in the missing parts. More often than not, I tend to imagine things in a far better light than they are actually intended to be imagined. Reading Yezierska’s stories, however, was a bit of a different experience. In “The Lost Beautifulness”, Hanneh’s dialogue was so reflective of Russian speech that I couldn’t help but feel her pain. As a Russian speaker myself, I was able to understand her odd phrases and expressions. In this case, dialogue had a very similar level of impact as an image because it was so personal.