Abstract
Greg Battye’s timely new book provides a concise and insightful overview of Anglophone theoretical writing about still photography. He is sensitive to the many different kinds of photograph and to the ‘discourses’ that envelop them in today’s academy, but he is as refreshingly enthusiastic about everyday snap-shots and ephemera as he is about more deliberate, professional image-making. Hence Photography, Narrative, Time scrutinises actual photographs and photography and is not a tendentious pre-text for the writer to pursue abstract theoretical questions for their own sake. Immersed in both the practices and theory of photography, Battye seeks to understand, rather than to condemn by obfuscation, photography’s burgeoning cultural contexts. He explores why what we literally see in images forms only part of what we know (or believe) when we attend to them in context and draw out their narrative implications.
Photography, Narrative, Time begins by considering what might be called the ‘strong thesis’ regarding the photographic paradox – that a photograph occludes rather than reveals reality, precisely because it purports to record fragments of the past as timeless. Battye develops a series of thoughtful and jargon-free discussions of this paradox by focusing on the temporality of the still image. Its instantaneous arresting of the flow of time paradoxically implies one or more temporal contexts – a photograph implies both stasis and change. It freezes its subject ‘out of time’ and so connotes timelessness, but it also seems to whisper that the moment of its recording has passed – vanished, except for the fading, fragmentary image itself: All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. (Sontag, 1979: 15)
This was the point of departure for Susan Sontag’s seminal investigation of the uses of photography almost half a century ago. Before digital imagery expanded the empire of photography into every mode of human interaction and representation, Sontag wrote about broad genres of photos in terms of their social and political uses. Battye takes up this line of analysis, acknowledging that although a photograph may be a (chemical or digital) ‘death mask’ it is potentially much more polysemous than this suggests. A photograph is also a frame that implies one or many possible narratives if it is to be meaningful to its viewer. To expand on this thesis, contra Sontag, Battye’s reproduced images provoke him to think at length about how actual photographs convey or imply meaning. His discussion of Larry Clark’s (1971) photo of a young pregnant woman injecting in a bare, softly lit room, shows the value of his return to a kind of practical criticism from which theoretical arguments can be built. It is one of many examples in his book where Battye responds to the implied stories of which a framed image is but a fragmentary, if eloquent, memorial. In the Larry Clark example, time, change and mortality are poignantly, even shockingly, implicit in the woman’s visible pregnancy.
Battye again quotes Sontag as she expands on Walter Benjamin to observe that ‘a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about that orgnisation’. Sontag stressed the need for the viewer to access relevant temporal contexts of an image if it could be claimed to convey any genuine knowledge or understanding: In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. (Sontag, 1979: 23)
However, Battye presents Sontag’s claims only as a starting point. He wants to avoid the cul de sac of reductive cultural pessimism to which Sontag’s path inevitably led. By contrast, his book can be seen as a counterpoint to her rigorous pessimism, and to writers such as John Berger and Victor Burgin who also took up Walter Benjamin’s critical–political analyses of ‘the work of art in the era of its mechanical reproducibility’. Yet Battye does address many of the same problems: how, and why, do photographs mean? How can they provoke deep narrative meaning, however little they actually depict? How is context essential to reading the temporal aspects of a photo? To answer such questions he invokes various theories of narrative and narration. He considers ‘narratemes’, and explores ‘schema’ as ‘frame narratives’, allowing, following Prince (1982), that a text (in any medium) may exhibit degrees of narrativity. As I read him, photographically depicted action is a necessary condition for inferred narrative. Perhaps it is a sufficient condition, but only insofar as it implies coherent contexts for viewers to understand – and that means, to narrativise: The perceived totality of any complex visual narrative is formed not only by the appearance and understanding of its component parts (what is represented in the image) but also by the relationships between those parts (the foreground/background relation; the time/age of the image and of the observer; the context/action shown; the causal/staged relation; etc.). (Editorial introduction, p. ix)
The strength of Battye’s book is that it moves well beyond his editor’s (perhaps confusing) claims to present a coherent discussion of photographs as ‘distinctly different from all other pictures’ – of taking and making photographs and of using and understanding them. Photography is ‘a branching family of technologies, with different uses’, writes Battye, quoting Patrick Maynard (1997: 3), and not ‘every picture tells a story’. However, it is the photo’s potential to be the pre-text for, as well as the realisation of, various narratives that Battye wants his readers to think about. For him, photographic images are not usefully understood simply as ‘timeless’ transcriptions of reality and therefore as unarguably ‘real’ or ‘true’. Yet photographic images always implicitly refer to real events and situations, however open they may be to narrative re-contextualisation by their users. Perhaps what makes photos such rich provocations to story-telling is their temporal ambivalence. If photos allow or license narratives, if they draw attention to time itself in the process (Battye considers Cartier Bresson’s Place de Europe, Paris, 1932), this is not because they are open to unlimited ‘readings’, but because each uniquely constrains the reader to use it as a pre-text for the invention of specific time-flowing stories. A photo’s narrative potential is always anchored in the particular – in the actual.
When immersed in the detail of a Cartier-Bresson or David Hockney image and discussing actual photographic practice (exposure time, for instance), Battye eloquently expands the reader’s sense of the narrative potentials of self-consciously constructed ‘art’ and vernacular photos alike. His principal examples are mainly drawn from ‘art’ photography, for no other reason than that they are likely to be familiar to his readers. But Battye’s encyclopaedic knowledge of photography allows him to illuminate a revealing range of images – from the personal to the epic, the historical to the satirical, both analogue and digital.
Given his familiarity with this range of photographic practices it is surprising that Battye makes little explicit use of the concept of genre, without which any systematic discussion of optional narrative contexts for particular examples must remain rather subjective. In the absence of a theory of genre, I believe Battye’s turn to cognitive models of narrative is less productive than he hoped it might be. I doubt that understanding photographically implied narratives (’storyworlds’ included) demands any particular cognitive or narratological models as such.
Photogaphy, Narrative, Time is much more convincing when it considers what Battye calls ‘Possible Worlds’ – imagined states of affairs which could be actual – that is, strongly realistic images, including what some commentators would call the ‘hyper-real’. Discussing Mark Hogencamp’s photographs of ‘unsettling’, doll-peopled world(s), Battye shows that thinking about actual images can generate a host of insights into photography generally. His sophisticated practical criticism of particular bodies of images (digital or analogue, technically accomplished or not) pays off generously in educational terms. This section of the book will be widely used in classes dealing with perennial questions that continue to hover around issues of photographic representation and ‘truth’.
Photography, Narrative, Time should meet the needs of teachers who wish their students to mine the rich vein of theoretical analysis of photographs and photography – analogue and digital, public and private, abstract and functional –that has emerged since the founding Anglophone texts of the 1970s. Greg Battye brings photographic theory into subtle contact with more general cognitive approaches to narrative, but not at the expense of understanding the photograph’s unique ontological and epistemological status. His book will provoke strong opinion, but it also provides the theoretical resources to re-open debate about the nature, uses and cultural–political significance of what remain photo-graphic images, even in the digital age.