NETWORKED PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECTION

“ … the age of the photograph corresponds precisely [with] the explosion of the private into the public, or rather in the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private consumed … publicly.”
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

After nearly 175 years, the photographic apparatus has become so enmeshed in the daily lives of individuals that the image is now typically experienced with such normative indifference that photographic representation is taken practically as common sense, even natural.

Under the managing guidance of a succession of cultural institutions – from Eastman Kodak to the Farm Security Administration (a Depression-era agency set up by FDR that John Tagg's The Disciplinary Frame notes as playing an essential role in developing ‘documentary’ forms of photography as part of the discourse of democracy, tying photographic practice to as part of modern citizenship) to the Joint Photographic Experts Group (a German organization responsible for the eponymous .jpeg format) – photography has been swept up in a number of social projects, ranging from nation-building to democratic self-empowerment, in the hope that the performative force of photography could shape society by projecting particular meanings and models of ritualized action. To what degree these programs of social engineering have been ‘successful’ remains to be seen.

However, what does seem to be clear is that communities in our current era are historically unique in their dependence on photographic imaging to build and maintain – often simultaneously – national, communal, even family relationships and identities.

 The sociological work of Sabina Mihelj (2011) has shown that – despite the rise of global multimedia networks – nationalism has not disappeared in the modern world, as many digital utopians and globalists had predicted. We should not underestimate how photographic imaging technologies (on both the end of consumption/production and that of distribution) have helped to make this possible. By establishing specific vernaculars of photographic production in the news media, celebrity tabloid coverage, and family events, subjects are positioned within localized discourses of visual culture. Particularly in the case of photographic devices designed for consumer use, the camera comes to play a myriad of roles in the banal practices that reinforce both national and individual identity and the ritualistic use of tethered media technologies as a form of social inclusion/exclusion or boundary-making (see S. Mihelj's Media Nations and N. Couldry's Media Rituals for more on these processes).

Since snapshots represent not only what Catherine Zuromskis calls the “most banal form of image-making,” but also the vast majority of photographs taken, this particular photographic discourse must undoubtedly have an intimate relationship with the establishment of the subject in visual culture.

The network effect that defines contemporary forms of computer-mediated socialization further integrates the photographic apparatus into the experience of the (tele)present self. As snapshot photography becomes more and more of a daily rituals due to the convergent forces of increasingly photographically capable smartphones, the prevalence of televisual discourses that celebrate the ‘ordinary’ or ‘reality’, and the constant need for new content on social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, there has been a considerable change in both the social position of the self-portrait and the sheer number of self-portraits being created. While personal photographs of the cultural elite began to fade out of the public discourse in the years leading up to the 1930s (not coincidentally the same period in which photography was pegged as a tool for social renewal, education, and consumer/citizen empowerment by outspoken practitioners like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Lewis Hine), today celebrities, politicians, technicians and ordinary individuals alike seem to be caught up in a normalizing discourse of the photographic self-portrait - or as it has been dubbed in recent years: the ‘selfie’.

In journalistic accounts, this is typically explained as a consequence of the incredible ease of operability that the general user interface of the smartphone offers, a maligned, overstated narcissism in millennials, the number of pictures capable of being stored digitally, and the inherent portability of our now ubiquitous handheld multimedia devices. (Storage and accessibility are often cited as a primary difference between analog photography anddigital imaging, however note that as early as 1913 there was a 35mm camera known as the ‘Tourist Multiple’ capable of shooting more than 750 exposures on a single roll, surpassing the onboard storage of some lower end phones.)

Rather than being a simple result of the intentionally ‘dumbed down’ design of the camera in screen-based mobile phones or an effect of consumer empowerment, the rise of the selfie should instead be linked to the evolving role of televisual discourses in maintaining disciplinary regimes of self-control in cultures of consumption. Consider for a moment that in 2008 – only four years after its launch – Facebook became the world’s largest repository for photographic images with over 40 billion images on file. On top of this, as of 2012 Facebook’s approximately 1 billion users upload more than 300 million photographs to the site every day, making this number an exponential function and one of the primary tasks of the platform. With this in mind, Facebook’s sudden purchase of the photo-sharing application Instagram – at the time a 19 month-old ‘company’ consisting of 12 people with no prospective earnings – for nearly $1 billion seems almost reasonable.

Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are inherently dependent on its users’ submission to photographic self-imaging for a sense of legitimacy. Indeed, this is what separates most modern platforms from the older cyberspace where “nobody knows you’re a dog.” For Facebook in particular, this is of the utmost significance; the site strives to link a user’s offline identity with their mediated Facebook self-presentation. In fact, anonymity is not permitted within Facebook’s terms of service, and the photographic self-portrait plays an essential role in legitimizing this claim of coherence between online and offline subject positions, essentially enabling what Manuel Castells (in his own techno-utopian way) called “mass self-communication.”

It is the symbolic position of Facebook as a platform for ritualized identification, participation in photographic production, and self-affirming communication within a recently expanded televisual discourse that seeks to position and classify individuals as at once ‘ordinary’ and within the culture industries as pseudo ‘media personalities’ that most accurately explains the modern surge in photographic self-portraiture. However, as Judith Butler has made clear, this is not a simple act of submission – it is the necessary negotiation of a sensible position for the subject within a pre-existing discourse of visual culture. If the individual refuses to take up a position within this discourse, then for all intents and purposes, they do not exist as a subject and forego participation in this interpretive community. By maintaining a Facebook profile, the subject of visual culture is not only granted access to the ostensibly participatory pseudo-public of televisual representation (that until very recently was most commonly associated with the consumption of broadcast television and cable news), but is positioned as a member of that televisual public as part and parcel of a particular group of intimate, more traditional community relationships. As anthropologist Daniel Miller has noted on the use of Facebook in Trinidad:

“Facebook provides the co-presence of the intimate … through [an] entirely public domain where a thousand other friends can simultaneously overhear. The everyday then becomes a kind of substance that is mixed into the Facebook pot, along with poet[ic]s and politics.”

- D. Miller, Tales From Facebook

Much of this mediated intimacy is enabled by the projective qualities inherent in the subject’s relationship with photographic images – described as the emotional bonding of ‘televisual affect’ in the work of critical media theorists Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine – which serve as the primary way that most people define their online presence on these sites. Thus the construction of the mediated-self today is generally interwoven with the domain of the profile picture.

On Facebook, a profile picture amounts to something like a creative mugshot – a sort of photographic placeholder for identity – and many self-portraits (and even some portraiture done by others) display this characteristic of technologized self-maintenance that bears a striking similarity to the police photographs referenced. However, this participatory photographic self-surveillance is tempered by an unprecedented (and often strangely sensual) intimacy – in both physical proximity with the camera and the general blitheness and spontaneity at the point of capture. The camera is experienced as a welcome intruder for subjects of visual culture, as would be expected by the subjectification process laid out by Butler. And there is plenty of evidence to this end in the deluge of normalized photographic self-representation flooding Facebook and Instagram everyday.

Looking to these selfie photographs, it’s clear there is a considerable amount of homogeneity in projection through photographic self-portraiture. Generally, subjects are positioned within an arms’ length of the camera (typically a screen-based smartphone) with beaming smiles or ‘come hither’ pouts. In some cases, a mirror is used to capture both the photographer/subject and the camera, making the presence of the photographic imaging device a significant part of this self-projection. Indeed, the make and model of the phone used to capture a self-portrait is often a statement of status as much as fashion.

However, it is also apparent that these ritualized actions are not without their fair share of iterability; there is a significant amount of play and transgression involved in the photographic capturing of the self. Participants often will make faces to the camera, upsetting the normalized photographic projection characteristic since the appearance of the family photo album (though of course there are plenty of subversive performances in the face of the family photograph, which could be an essay in itself). Subjects will occasionally even appropriate photographs of others, drawings, press photographs, memes, or other apparently unrelated images as self-portraits, disrupting the typical function of photograph for their own projective ends.

Even so, because these photographic representations are tethered to the user’s Facebook profile, they come to serve as individualized projections of identity and inevitably establish the individual as a subject of visual culture. This technical structuring of the self as visual subject involves a great deal of performative action. In staging the self in relation to the camera – that is to say, constructing the visual subject within the photographic apparatus – there are a number of important variables to consider concerning the capturing and eventual creation of self-image. In operating a camera (or more commonly today, another screen-based device including a camera), particularly when the image created is intended to be shared digitally across social networking services, there is a consistent emphasis on choice: the decision about which moment to capture, what angle from which to shoot, what photographic technology to use in the first place (webcam, smartphone, digital SLR, scanned film, roller coaster souvenir photo), what to wear, what facial gestures should be assumed, and what, if any, editing or filtering should be made to the image before publication. In many cases, these decisions are likely made subconsciously, and form the basis of the inherently performative consumerism involved with photographic representation. In the words of John Schroeder:

“Visual consumption encompasses critical ways that people represent themselves. What we see, what we notice, what we photograph are all important consumer processes … In one sense ... one might say that the consumer produces representation through photography. This apparent paradox - production through consumption - characterizes consumer culture.”
– J. Schroeder, Visual Consumption

The selfie is the contemporary equivalent of the autograph: a stylized representation of the self meant to be uniquely indicative of the subject. It is a way of saying, “this validates me” as a legitimate subject in a culture increasingly organized around the consumption of media. In the sphere of networked, computer-mediated communication, this projection to the camera is the necessary work, in every instance, of self-imagination for a potential position within televisual discourse. Rather than dissolving the unitary subject (as had been the hope of some academics and indicated by the work of postmodern photographers like Cindy Sherman), photographic representation has instead been appropriated by the global institutions of a consumerist, neoliberal lifestyle as a way of framing the production of identity within normalized frameworks of meaning. The selfie is intimately bound with what it means to be part of the televisual in this context, and as such is linked with the ideologies of fame, narratives of technological progression, conspicuous consumption, and celebrity culture.

 

 

 

THE KODAK MOMENT

Through its first 50 years, photography was mostly the domain of the wealthy and enterprising, limited to those who could afford either prohibitively expensive photographic equipment or time in a photo studio. The vast majority of portraiture through this period was done in commercial and artistic studios, where professionals would help the subject achieve the desired self-image with the use of props, outfits, and opulent furniture. Self-portraiture outside the educated circles of professional photographers and well-to-do socialites was practically non-existent.

This had started to change by the 1880s. Having quickly realized that photography could be useful for classification and record keeping, law-enforcement agencies began to use photographic images when booking criminals. However, it would be a private security firm founded by Allan Pinkerton - the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago - which would be the first to systematically use what came to be known as the ‘mug shot’. This model of systematized, easily reproduced photographic representation would be adopted by state police forces almost immediately, and photographic surveillance would rapidly become an essential part of both booking and detective work. In 1881 British inventor Thomas Bolas patented the first ‘detective’ camera – a miniaturized version of the bulky equipment common at the time that made use of new developments in dry-plate and gelatin-based emulsion. The legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz would lament the ‘enthusiastic button pushers’ who would pick up detective cameras as a past-time, not knowing what was to come in photography's future. Meant to be hidden under hats or clothing to allow candid surveillance, the design would swiftly cross-fertilize into the wider photographic market due to the work of American entrepreneur George Eastman.

In the same year that Bolas patented his ‘detective’ camera, Eastman and his business partners founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, NY and began work that would not only fundamentally change the photography industry, but the entire culture of visual representation in the West.

After buying a patent for roll film and devising a method of industrial mass-production for the new film stock (through horizontal integration of farms, factories, and chemical facilities), in 1888 the Eastman Dry Plate Co. unveiled what would mark the beginning of amateur photography: the Kodak camera, later renamed the Kodak No. 1. Little more than a simple box with a lens in one end, the Kodak camera’s use of flexible film rolls gave photographers enough footage for 100 exposures straight out of the box. While this was innovative in itself, Eastman’s true impact on photography would lie in his company’s consumer-based business model.

Kodak No. 1 (1888)

Kodak No. 1 (1888)

By 1889 the Eastman Company - as it was rebranded that year - had begun the first of its many famous advertising campaigns (it's worth noting that Eastman and other photographic companies at the time were heavily involved with advertising agencies who helped sell their products, essentially developing the language and models of the modern advertising industry). Penned by Eastman himself, the slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” would come to encapsulate the changing nature of photography and signals the beginning of a process that would eventually culminate in the point-and-shoot digital imaging technologies that permeate the contemporary environment of visual communication. Once the roll of film had been exhausted, all the photographer had to do was mail the Kodak camera back to the Eastman company, where the film would be developed, the cameras reloaded, and sent back to the user. By significantly reducing the amount of technical knowledge and physical equipment needed to participate in photographic production, Eastman had created a new type of industrialized, consumerist photography that emphasized accessibility and ease of use.

One of the first Kodak advertisements (1889)

One of the first Kodak advertisements (1889)

The company again renamed itself in 1892 to the Eastman Kodak Company, taking on the name of their exceptionally popular camera. Nowhere is this spirit of accessible photographic production (and consumption) more evident than Kodak’s release of the Brownie Model B in 1900. Designed to be as easy to use as possible, the Brownie sold for $1.00, came loaded with six exposures, and was aggressively marketed through print advertisements.

Eastman Kodak Brownie advertisement from 1900 (taken from the Duke University library’s “Emergence of Advertising in America“ digital collection)

Eastman Kodak Brownie advertisement from 1900 (taken from the Duke University library’s “Emergence of Advertising in America“ digital collection)

The name itself came from popular Canadian children’s book author Palmer Cox, whose “Brownies” were mischievous, child-like illustrated sprites, images of which adorned the camera’s box, and the accompanying advertising campaigns declared that “Any schoolboy or girl can make good pictures,” as long as it was with a Kodak camera. This also represents one of the first high-profile endorsement campaigns – now common in modern celebrity culture. By bringing together coordinated advertising campaigns, industrial modes of production, and a reconfigured photographic technology designed for non-professional, consumer use, Kodak was able to sell more than 150,000 Brownies in 1900, and would lay the foundation for photography’s development through the next century.

The packaging from Kodak's Brownie No.2 featuring one of Palmer Cox's 'Brownies'

The packaging from Kodak's Brownie No.2 featuring one of Palmer Cox's 'Brownies'

The previously exclusive domain of self-portraiture would open up almost overnight with the proliferation of affordable amateur photography. Indeed, it is tremendously significant that a number of the advertisements for the Brownie featured a woman who appears to be taking a self-portrait, with the viewer serving as the mirror: photography was now meant for everyone: and now everyone was meant to be photographed. The Kodak era of photography marks the emergence of snapshot culture, the family photo-album, and the postcard – essentially introducing photography as a ritualized (and publicized) mass medium of cultural production informed by the discourses of a consumerist lifestyle.

By 1908, the United States Post Office would estimate that nearly 700 million postcards had been sent by mail over the previous year – at a time when the population of the US during this same period was less than 90 million. The decades that followed the turn of the 20th century saw exponential growth in almost every facet of photographic technology: auto-focus, stroboscopy, half-tone printing, single-lens reflex cameras, autochrome, Kodachrome, and Ektachrome (early color stocks), high-speed film stocks, standardized 35mm roll film, documentary, television broadcasting, and eventually video recording, digital imaging, computers and portable multimedia devices; there have been immense developments in the technical and social infrastructure surrounding the photographic apparatus. Unfortunately, due to limitations of time, these cannot be explored here. However, the changes embodied by Kodak’s projective influence continue to resonate in contemporary photographic practice; to this day photography remains an activity intended for consumptive ends inextricably linked to industrial modes of cultural production. Nowhere is this more apparent than the copious amounts of digital photography produced for computer-mediated social networking.

TURN THE CAM AROUND

“No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependency is an imaginary one … I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image – my image – will be generated.”
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Perhaps unsurprisingly, portraiture was the primary work of photographers in the early years: typically of the intrigued upper classes, dignitaries, or famous artists. A few enterprising practitioners of the nascent art form made their subject matter themselves – most notable of these self-portraiture pioneers were Hippolyte Bayard in France, Robert Cornelius in the United States, and the team of David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson in Scotland. In submitting their selves as image to the camera, these men would lay the groundwork for much modern photographic practice.

Robert Cornelius poses for what may be the first photographic self-portrait ever captured (1839)

Robert Cornelius poses for what may be the first photographic self-portrait ever captured (1839)

Cornelius was possibly the first person to intentionally capture himself photographically. As a young metallurgist in Philadelphia, Cornelius became interested in photography after hearing of the Daguerreotype process in 1839 and set out to mimic the chemical composition for his own use. Sometime thereafter, in October of the same year, he set up a camera outside the family business, struck a defiant pose, and shot. Despite opening a successful photo-studio, Cornelius would lose interest and discontinue the practice in the 1840s.

Hippolye Bayard is the author and subject of the most famous of these early self-portraits. Having been a part of the small group of French scientists and artists that had encountered Daguerre and Niépce’s experiments, Bayard set out to develop his own method: the ‘direct positive process.’ During July 1839 he would present it in what would be the first-ever public exhibition of photographs. However, failing to catch on in the same way as the Daguerreotype and Talbot’s kalotype, he was left discouraged and poverty-stricken. It was in this context that, in 1840, Bayard took what is generally considered to be the first theatrically staged photographic self-portrait: his Self Portrait as a Drowned Man.

Hippolyte Bayard playing dead in his Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840)

Hippolyte Bayard playing dead in his Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840)

Into the back of the photograph Bayard inscribed: “The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him.”

This playful self-staging for the camera would also be explored by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in their 1845 The Morning After “He Greatly Daring Dined”. While it is only Hill that appears in the photo (along with Professor James Miller of St. Andrews University), the two men were rapacious portraitists and only worked as a team – as such the image should rightly be considered a self-portrait.

D.O. Hill & Robert Adamson's The Morning After He 'Greatly Daring Dined' (1845)

D.O. Hill & Robert Adamson's The Morning After He 'Greatly Daring Dined' (1845)

Hill seems to have been known to frequently indulge in drink and social gatherings, and the photo depicts his hangover from one such occasion, marking one of the first times a photographic self-portrait would be used to indicate particular qualities of the subject.

Bayard, Cornelius, and Hill’s interactions with the camera would prefigure the modern practice of photographing the self. However, the almost confrontational informality of Cornelius would not become common until 1900, and although the theatricality of the pose for contemporary photographers is typically more tacit than Hill and Bayard’s, it remains a significant and persistent part of the contemporary structure and cultural norms of photographic performativity.

By the 1850s, photography had already become cemented as a social activity for the middle and upper classes in the West. In fact, many photographic techniques we associate with the modern practice of the medium where developed when the technology was still nascent. For example, stereoscopic imagery - now essential for 3D projection and VR. The technique, where two cameras spaced at a ratio approximating that of the human eyes, were used to capture images that would be viewed through mirrors to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, proved popular with the British population after Queen Victoria expressed her amusement with the invention at the 1851 Great Exhibition of London, beginning a deluge of travel, educational, and pornographic stereoscopy that has only recently been rediscovered.

A.A.E. Disderi posing in his studio

A.A.E. Disderi posing in his studio

In 1854, French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (another self-portraitist) patented a multi-lens camera system capable of making several small images on a single photographic plate. Prior to this point, cameras would generally have to be reloaded after each shot, and duplicates were expensive. The invention would mark the beginning of trend in England, France, and the United States where families and individuals would visit the newly established photography studios to present – or project – themselves to the camera in a visual illustration of social class, interests, and affluence. The resulting collection of photographs – printed onto thick paper cards known at the time as cartes de vistite (literally, 'visiting cards') – would be taken home and traded amongst friends and relatives. Within the span of ten years, this practice would spread across the middle classes and affluent of Western culture. Hundreds of millions would be made and exchanged by the end of the decade. In her abbreviated history of major changes in photography, Mary Warner Marien notes:

“In parlour collections, celebrity photos mixed with images of next-door neighbours, and political figures were shuffled together with distant relatives. People in the public eye, nobles ... military figures, actors, all submitted themselves to carte photography and bought many pictures to give away … Cartes defined photography as a democratic source of virtual access to especially powerful people. Seen as such, they became a formidable symbol of social and political rights.”
-M. Marien, 100 Ideas That Changed Photography

From very early on, photography presented itself as a form of “virtual access” to – or telepresence in – a visual culture that was otherwise out of reach. Through the quickly advancing technology of capture and developing methods of display and reproduction, normative values and rituals began to form around the apparatus and institutions of the camera. These dispersed, technologized rituals that quickly domesticated photography would influence its development through the next century.

 

 

 

 

VIZUALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The photograph’s ability to represent the subject of the captured image as an index of actuality - a legitimate measure of a real object - is one of the primary consequences of what Ron Burnett has called visualization. For Burnett, photographs are literally ‘visualizations’ – perceptual manifestations – of their subject:

“Visualization is about the relationship between images and human creativity. Conscious and unconscious relations play a significant role here. Creativity in this instance refers to the role of viewers in generating what they see in images. I am not talking about vision in general but the relationships that make it possible to engage with images … To visualize … means to bring into being.”

– R. Burnett, How Images Think (2004)

In many ways, this idea is similar to what I am trying to express with my formulation of ‘projection’. In both visualization of and projection to the photographic, the subject-depicted’s presence as other is performatively enacted by the viewer (and both are highly informed by Sartre’s work on the imaginary). That is to say, the individual photographic image, the apparatuses that inform that particular image, the photographer, and the viewer all converge to articulate the image as reality. I am using the term 'articulation' in the way put forward by Stuart Hall, in which the producers and consumers of any particular discursive message act as nodal points in the interpretation, reception, and circulation of that message. Meaning can only arise once these vectors converge and ‘articulate’ it according to their respective positions in a particular interpretive community (see Hall's Encoding/decoding*)

Taken as a whole, this process of articulation in relation to the photograph represents the sum of those projections that inform both the reception and the production of any photographic image. Paradoxically, this active ‘realization’ of the image-subject involves the work of imagination, and therefore fully implicates subjectivity in the apprehension of photographic images, despite its seeming function in these cases as objective depiction of the subject. (Note: there are many other discursive forms of the photograph, however the forms claiming the represent the ‘real’ or ‘true’ image of the self is our focus here)

However, by insisting on the visual aspect of this performative relationship in visualization’ Burnett’s term misses out on something that Jean Paul Sartre pointed out about our experience of representational imagery in The Imaginary; that often, it is not exclusively visual. As an object of thought, the image becomes imbued with forms of knowledge, and the ‘visuality’ of this mental or physical representation is usually quite limited in its accuracy. Indeed, in Sartre’s opinion, photographs and mental images are essentially two positions on a spectrum of “analogical representatives,” and rather than being turned into a mental image, the photograph is always already experienced to some extent as capable of operating as a mental image. He gives the example of picturing the Parthenon in your mind, and then attempting to count the number of columns on the outside. This is extremely difficult to do from a mental image if one hasn’t committed the number to memory. As a matter of fact, it is even difficult to do this with a photograph, as the image will be limited to a particular angle that may not show every column.

The diffuse, incomplete nature of the image is an indication of its relation to the imaginative, psychic life of the subject, which is itself always the tenuous production of discursive or symbolic systems and the appropriating unconscious or ipse. This means that not only is the photographic apparatus implicated in the production of the subject, but that the very experience of particular models of the photographic image as articulating the other or object-represented is performed at a level constitutive of subjective identity. This experience of the photographic image that seems to bridge psychic life, discursive representation, our imagined relation to the real, and its locality in the processes that maintain subjectification is why I believe the term projection is the best possible way to describe the contemporary subject’s relationship with photography and identity. It is a productive relationship that necessarily exceeds the frame of any image, and one that connects the subject to telepresent others, spaces, and forms of embodied knowledge. The term (and practice) is itself already enmeshed in photographic and cinematic production, and it captures the essence of what Manuel Castells has called ‘mass self-communication,’ (see his Communication Power for what is basically a description of modern social networking rituals). These practices are inherently dependent on the televisual, affective qualities of ritualized photographic representation, and its discursive position as validating, technologized other.

My application of the term is also influenced by Butler’s decision to use revised psychoanalytic principles in her description of performativity. It was Freud himself who first described the process of projection as a defense mechanism in a series of letters between himself and Wilhelm Fliess, which would later become the basis for Freud’s psychoanalytic practice. The subject was understood to ‘project’ unacceptable qualities of the self onto objects or others in order to ‘evacuate’ these undesirable traits and stabilize the self as an object of love. My use is somewhat closer to the adaptation of this concept into ‘projective identification’ by child psychologist Melanie Klein, where it is not simply ‘bad’ qualities that are projected onto the idealized object, but any aspect of self-identity can become associated with – and thereby dependent on – an external manifestation. For our purposes, it seems like this external manifestation of identity has become archetypal in the form of the photograph (though perhaps the more stylized online avatar will come to occupy this space if VR becomes a primary mode of communicative practice).

It should be telling that a number of photographic theorists have commented on photography’s ability to replace or supersede our experience of things with a photographic version of events. There is an existential anxiety concerning the image that many authors and cultural theorists have alluded to in their writings:

“The photograph then [is] a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time … a modest, shared hallucination.”

– Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

“ ... Walter Benjamin’s critique [of mechanical reproduction] can be extended beyond the arena of art. What has been dissipated by the reproductive onslaught of photography is not just the aura of art, but reality itself. Photography is no longer simply the litmus of reality; it has become reality’s replacement.”

– Andy Grundberg, The Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography

“This is what we really mean by ‘virtual reality’ … a term that we have mistakenly assigned only to the digital. Diffracting and diffusing the multiplicities of existence, keeping things captive within its ephemeral mind-set, the analog [photographic] media have been pivotal in the creation of a shadow planet.”

– Fred Ritchin, After Photography

“By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is … Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

– S. Sontag, On Photography

However, for lack of a prevailing vocabulary these major works of the photographic canon remain disconnected. I believe this hypothetical model of imaginative projection within televisual discourse is capable of overcoming this theoretical rift between the ‘real world’ and the imagined, photographic one by rendering it moot. The photographic, or televisual, hasn't replaced the real so much as it has become the primary way of understanding and accessing it. The real is always, already mediated in expressible experience, and attempts to comprehend it otherwise fall into tautological traps or conservative romanticism. To say that reality has been 'replaced' in this context merely implies that the technological basis of accessing the other has shifted from a previously established forms.

If photographic images have become the new standard of beauty (as was suggested by Sontag: “So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful ... We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.”), it is because we have projected our psychic lives into photographs, and the paradigms of photography have been projected into us. We exist in what Flusser called ‘the photographic universe’:

“To be in the photographic universe means to experience, to know and evaluate the world as a function of photographs. Every single experience, every bit of knowledge, every single value can be reduced to individually known and evaluated photographs. And every single action can be analyzed through the individual photos taken as models.”

- V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

How did this photographic universe come into being?

 

PROJECTION AS CULTURAL PRODUCTION

“Even Narcissus needs a mirror: and the best mirror ... is another pair of responsive human eyes.”

- Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics

How can the metaphysical concepts of the post-structuralists be applied to photography as a modern, ritual practice?

By taking our cue from the cluttered amalgamation of Butler, Derrida, and Flusser outlined in previous posts, the rapid growth of research into visual culture, and a pervasive sense that our technological objects are in the process of upsetting more established modes of human interaction (see Sherry Turkle's Alone Together for more on this), then it seems clear that the camera – and the institutions of the photographic apparatus that validate it – occupies a privileged representational position in our culture of communications. Photographic means of mediated reflection must ‘inform’ the modes through which the subject comes to develop a self-image. 'Reflection' in this usage is to be understood the same way that Butler and Lacan have used it, with the metaphoric mirror coming to implicitly represent the cultural gaze that constitutes the individual subject as an object of symbolic discourse.

Bringing these theories into more modern parlance, psychologists Kathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine have shown in their seminal book Changing the Subject that particular systems of symbolic representation can contribute to the development of system-specific forms of subjectivity, based on the negotiation of positions for the self within that discursive system (in their case study, they analyzed the way mathematics can affect the self-image of students at a young age). If the act of learning arithmetic profoundly effects a child's concept of self, then the processes of photographic subjectification should also be qualitatively different than the image presented as ‘self’ provided by traditional linguistic forms. When we capture our own image in a photograph, the camera seems to be used to not only situate ourselves in relation to others (either among peers or against unfamiliar groups), but to show us ourselves as a material subject. The camera is a performative object – a technology of the self in the purest sense of Foucault's term.

There is some kind of collective imagining going on in the performance that is modern photographic practice, and this should be evident in the nuances of individual photographic expression – including holiday snaps, party photos, and self-portraiture. I would like to propose that the performative actions undertaken by the individual in relation to the camera should be considered an act of self-projection to a potential screen. A similar idea has been proposed (though not in this terminology) by Misha Kavka, in her essay "Intimate Strangers: Big Brother and the Everyday" (see Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy, 2008). Today, this photographically configured projection of the self is one of the primary modes of identification and serves to structure cultural production more generally.

To understand the ways in which the informative nature of the photograph might effect the ontological positioning of its users, consider for a moment the linguistic significance of ‘taking a picture’ as opposed to ‘making’ or ‘producing’ one. It's worth noting this also applies to the Spanish “tomar un foto”, the French “prendre une photo”, and the German “nehmen Sie ein Foto”, indicating a discourse surrounding the camera in the West not limited to the Anglo-American tradition. It seems that in most languages, photographs are “taken” from the outside. Deconstructing the phrase, we see that there is an implication of ‘capturing’ (which is itself significant, as this is the common language of digital film editing and digital imaging more broadly) an image from a place outside the self, and a place outside the camera – a viewpoint that we are implicitly expected to associate with the other, or a quality of ‘otherness.’ The terminology brings to light the camera’s capacity – through the qualities endowed upon it by the entire techno-social apparatus of photographic imaging and the mass ritual it entails – to embody not only the other, but to lend or ‘project’ embodiment (and perhaps even existence) onto that which it captures in the image.

The camera is undoubtedly designed – and its use informed – in such a way that this objectifying, revelatory quality is central to the production and use of photographic images, particularly those snapshot images that make up the dominant mode of picture-taking for most photographic subjects. In photographic theory a "snapshot", rather than just slang, is a more or less technical term describing a relatively spontaneous mode of capture, most typically associated with the intimacy of amateur and family photography – it is the ‘silent majority’ of photographic practice (see Steven Bull's Photography for a concise history). It is snapshot photography that should be our primary concern when considering projection as a mechanism of subjectification, as snapshots not only represent an ideal combination of the power of photographic images to be both indexical and affective, but contemporary self-portraiture has also largely adopted the snapshot aesthetic of ostensible immediacy, non-professionalism, and spontaneity. This is the result of a long process of cultural and institutional adoption as much as it is a part of the technical qualities of the photographic image. (Indeed, what I am trying to point to with this combination of technical qualities - as espoused by Derrida and Flusser - and discursive social influences - as in Butler and Foucault - is that the two are actually indistinguishable.)

Flusser calls this discursive nexus surrounding photoraphic production the ‘program’ of the camera. This ‘programming’ is an intention projected into the design of the technical object by a series of cultural apparatuses and institutions of meaning that inform the use of that object:

“The camera’s program provides for the realization of its capabilities and, in the process, for the use of society as a feedback mechanism for its progressive improvement … there are further programs behind this one (that of the photographic industry, of the industrial complex, of [other] socio-economic apparatuses), through the entire hierarchy of which there flows the enormous intention of programming society to act in the interests of the progressive improvement of these apparatuses. This intention can be seen in every single photograph and can be decoded from it.”

- V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

The Synoptic Camera - copyright Jeff Hewitt

The Synoptic Camera - copyright Jeff Hewitt

This programmed ‘intention’ or 'affordance' to use the words of Donald Norman - see his The Design of Everyday Things for a fascinating, Flusserian look at the household objects surrounding us - and the concept of projection laid out here act as two sides of the same phenomenon. The camera (and thereby the photograph) informs the behavior of the subject, and projection on the part of the subject helps mold the both the identity of the individual and the cultural position of the camera. This implies that not only do the subjects involved with photographic production project aspects of themselves through photography, but that the camera also projects its own ‘intentions’ on the subject through its very use. However, rather than somehow instilling agential qualities onto an inanimate technical object - as has been the downfall of many theorists of information technology - this experience of the legitimacy and desirability of the photographic becomes embodied in the camera through these projective techniques. Although, seen through the theoretical lens of Butler, Flusser, Mumford, and Derrida’s work we should be well aware that there is actually nothing ‘inanimate’ about technical objects. They are constantly in a state of flux, structured by the changing discursive conditions and performative utterances in which they operate.

If the camera projects a particular rubric through which the photographic image should be produced and consumed, it is because the camera has been the vector around which an immense amount of cultural production has already taken place, informed by the technical, historical, and social apparatus of photographic imaging and the discourses that developed it in the first place. I propose that the distributed, photographic mass production within modern culture - a reflective and ostensibly legitimate feedback loop that has come to frame identity, communications, and politics - is best understood through the concept of projection laid out above. We project ourselves through the camera, and to those screens seen and unseen, while the photographic universe that surrounds us projects its own meanings onto the very core of our being.

TELETECHNOLOGIES

Given a contemporary culture in which technical objects of industrial production (television screens, computers and other multimedia devices like tablets, ‘smart’ phones, etc) are the primary ways that individuals maintain access to communities of symbolic production, one is left with the sense that something is missing in the emphasis placed on the psychic ‘interiority’ of the individual's relationship with the other put forth by Butler, Lacan, and Foucault. While the individual's mind is certainly the locus of discursive power in the contemporary era, there remains the difficulty of understanding the particular technical means through which the subject is constituted as an object of the cultural gaze in a society where physical proximity is not always required for participation, and in which Foucault’s model of society as Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon becomes tenuous. This is essentially a question of the contemporary role of 'technics' in subject formation. My proposals lean heavily on the culturally privileged position of technics in offering a platform for the subject to perform itself.

In her introduction to Echographies of Television (2002), Jennifer Bajorek gives an excellent description of the concept:

“’technics’ … denotes at once a collection of [technical] skills, procedures or ways of doing something more elusive and essential - what we might think of as ‘technology’ but minus, precisely, the implication of the scientific or the rational.”

However, in my articulation of the term, I believe these scientific and rational (a better term may be utilitarian) qualities remain indissoluble from the current historical manifestation of technics. This is no way indicates a sense of sterile objectivity that is often conflated with those qualities in modern discourse. Rather, performances mediated through these scientific, technical objects are imbued with symbols of objectivity that mask their roots in cultural production.

The ideas put forward by Butler, Foucault, and Lacan all share a dependency on systems of symbolic or discursive representation outside the individual that remain, at some level, irreducibly technical. The reciprocation that occurs in Butler’s account is not only embedded in a particular discursive and bodily mode of production, but is also dependent on an historically / culturally specific, technical means of reproduction capable of legitimately representing the self back to what Jacques Derrida has called the “appropriating-appropriated ipse.”[1]

Derrida’s attention to the role of "teletechnologies" - the technical means of communication - in producing not only the subject, but in a very real way the entirety of the culture it inhabits, must be taken as vital to understanding contemporary culture. The subject only ‘exists’ in so far as it engages as part of a discursive ”artifactuality” that defines the ontological status of humans:

“ ... actuality is, precisely, made ... It is not given but actively produced, sifted, invested, performatively interpreted by numerous [teletechnological] apparatuses which are facticious or artificial, hierarchizing and selective, always in the service of forces and interests to which ‘subjects’ and agents (producers and consumers of actuality ...) are never sensitive enough.”

- J. Derrida, Echographies of Television

These teletechnologies that underwrite the artifactuality of culture are at once technical and social, without the possibility of being reduced to either. Indeed, Derrida’s artifactuality should be considered a sort of conceptualized totality of those embodied, symbolic discourses that Butler’s account of performativity rests on. These essentially technical means of representation are 'inherited' by subjects through socialization. As such, any manifestation of technics occupies a delicate position within cultural inheritance: the shared ‘iterability’ (designated by both Derrida and Butler as a certain form of ‘difference in repetition’) provided by a system of discourse is at once restrictive and productive. Meaning is always already circumscribed to a degree by the apparatus of representation, but the imaginative/psychic life of the subject constantly interferes with the interpretive sifting involved in its appropriation by the self.

To fully appreciate the mechanisms through which subjects are formed in contemporary Western 'technoculture' dominated by screen-based images in both public and private life (see Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and Anna McCarthy's Ambient Television for more on this) we must bring in the criminally overlooked work of Czech expatriate intellectual Vilem Flusser.

Flusser is considered a ‘nomadological’ philosopher, willfully pulling inspiration from a wide variety of interdisciplinary sources while rarely bothering to cite or reference any of them. In two of his major compiled works, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (1999) and Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000), Flusser uses deconstructive and etymological analysis to develop a theory concerning the importance of technological design in modern life. At the heart of this is his use of the term (abused far too often in contemporary discourses surrounding technology) ‘information’:

“ ... as for the meaning of the word in-formation, it has to do with ‘form in’ things. All things contain information: books and pictures, tins and cigarettes. One has only to read things, ‘decode’ them, to bring the information into the open.”

- V. Flusser, The Shape of Things

Today, the definition of information here is well understood within Silicon Valley - the cybernetic ideal proposed by Norbert Weiner is the de facto starting point of all Bay Area tech discourse - but less so by more mainstream representations. A day can't go by without the news media declaring how the 'information age' has changed everything. There is nothing new in information, contrary to two decades of work declaring the arrival of the ‘information society.’ Society has always been informational.

By breaking the word in two, Flusser guides us to the true meaning for something (or someone) to be ‘in-formed.’ An object only becomes an object as such by adopting a discursive form in itself. This form is a product of theory - both social and technological - and its substantiation as an ‘object of use’ is the work of informative design. This is doubly true of tools or technical objects: by reading a book, smoking a cigarette, or looking at a picture, the informative nature of the object is enacted by its user, and the user is simultaneously informed as a particular type of subject by its performative relationship to that object. Design always confers particular aesthetic and functional qualities onto the technical object, and these qualities will inevitably be tied up with political and ideological inheritances of the culture in which it takes place. As such, the work of design always involves the projection of informative, functionalized qualities onto not just the technical object, but also the subject who performatively enacts its uses:

“Objects of use are therefore mediations (media) between myself and other people, not just objects. They are not just objective but inter- subjective as well, not just problematic but dialogic as well.”

- V. Flusser, The Shape of Things

When we use something, it is not only the function of the object - the information imbued within it - that is made apparent, but also our position in relation to said object. The tools we ritually use produce not only their own ends, but are an active part of the production of ourselves.

 

PERFORMING THE IMAGE

It is from this point of departure - the idea that the self is a continual, productive relationship with the image or other that informs the subject - that Butler approaches some of the unsettled questions left by Foucault. If the establishment of the subject is characterized by an unresolved tension between a symbolic discourse (the mirror) and an irreducible, individual psyche (the preconfigured self) that at once submits to and exceeds the disciplinary power that constitutes it as an object, then this ‘inauguration’ of subjectivity must persist within the subject as what Butler calls “a founding moment whose ontological status remains permanently uncertain."

However, if this is the case, what keeps the individual subordinate to those discursive structures that continually subjectify it? Why does what might be considered an 'unself-consciousness' appear to submit and recreate itself through a symbolic order imposed from the outside? For Butler, this is can only be explained by way of a narcissistic desire for recognition located in the unconscious that becomes internalized through an ‘introjection’ of the pre-discursive, appropriating self-object:

“In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object. Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces ... the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection.”

- Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

Desire can be understood here as a survival mechanism, both mentally and physically. The subject becomes entangled in a sort of feedback loop that makes his or her own subjectification an object of passionate attachment, sought out for its ability to support processes of sense-making that establish the subject’s identity as legitimate. This process – which is dependent on a reworking of the mirror stage for coherence – has also been usefully described by Kathy Urwin's Changing the Subject as one in which the subject takes up a ‘discursive frame of reference.’ In Urwin’s work, this frame of reference can be multiple and dynamic, but remains essentially tied to the power relations expressed in the discursive relationship between parent and child. Rather than always being a literal mirror, the mediated expressions of care and all behavioral exchange between infant and adult serves as a ‘mirror’ that provides a point outside the self from which a subject develops a sense of bodily and discursive control that is deeply affiliated with the other. Because pre-existing symbolic discourses represent the only way for an individual to achieve social legibility, and this dependency is a priori linked to a primary and necessary passion shared with caregivers, Urwin the individual is always prefigured as having a ‘fundamental vulnerability’ to subjection. From Butler:

“... the desire to survive, ‘to be’, is a persuasively exploitable desire. The one who holds out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to survive.”

and

“Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself.”

- Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

But as pointed out earlier, this existential dance is and will remain ‘permanently uncertain’ in the subject. How then do we explain the coherent sense of self that many people seem to display? In Butler’s view, this can be accounted for by the ‘non-mechanistic’ relationship of the individual psyche to the performative acts that establish it as a subject of discourse.

It’s important to remember that in these terms, the psyche is not equivalent with the subject. It's considered a precursor. What Butler refers to alternately as a “psychic" or “bodily remainder” (which roughly corresponds to a modified Freudian or Lacanian unconscious), is the "introjected" original object that is suppressed when an individual takes up a position within the symbolic. Its presence is continuously felt – as in Lacan’s model – as a constitutive loss deep within the self. This unknowable loss essentially enables the culturally ‘real’ subject to emerge from a fundamentally imaginative, psychically opaque position - but this unknown, this pre-symbolic image, serves as the foundation of identity. Imagination and the imaginary can be understood as functions of this original image.

Many of Escher's drawings present an aesthetic of the imaginary, the funhouse maze or mirrored labyrinth we find ourselves in.

Many of Escher's drawings present an aesthetic of the imaginary, the funhouse maze or mirrored labyrinth we find ourselves in.

The performance of identity is then unavoidably bound with an imaginative core in the psyche that contributes to the instability and unpredictability of the discursive appropriation of the subject:

“ ... the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive ... constitution of identity. Identity can never be fully totalized by the symbolic, for what it fails to order will emerge within the imaginary as a disorder, a site where identity is contested.”

Therefore, the imagination must be central to our consideration of subjectivity. Rather than the "full siege and invasion" of the interior of the subject by disciplinary power described by Foucault, the experience of subjective power is an ambivalent one – the subject is never fully constituted in the process of subjectification. However, for this very reason, Foucault’s model of normative, subjective behavior again becomes informative to Butler's theory:

“What is brought into being by the performative … is much more than a ‘subject,’ for the ‘subject’ created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for further making. Indeed ... a subject only remains a subject through reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s ... incomplete character.”

- Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

In the face of a world built on pre-existing discourse, social rituals ensure the continuous impression of meaning onto the motions and gestures of the body and figures of the mind. This repetitive self-maintenance is what ensures the reformulation of the subject at any particular moment and enshrines that discursive frame as the agency of the individual. By 'performing' the role of self through normative behavior and mediated action, the subject “congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” – that is to say, Butler believed an identity is experienced as legitimate through this process of self-affirming interaction with the symbolic other.

There is a profound cynicism in parts of Butler's writing, but the concept of performativity she proposes is not entirely a negative one. This sense of performance is not one of artifice, despite how much Foucault and Butler's particular voices lend themselves to this interpretation. The 'act' of perfomativity is not a false face worn for the camera or selective crowds. In fact there is no context-dependent performance of an individual that can meaningfully be described as 'fake', in the way the term is now used to describe reality television stars or the subjective ballet people dance between different social groups. The subject is always expressed through this technical and social web of representation, and does not exist without it.

But a true concept identity is more than the sum of symbolic, technical forces exerting their whims on the individual. Identity is intimately bound with the imaginary - that which comes before the subjectification of the psyche. It is the expression of that identity that must always be technically mediated.

FRAMING THE SUBJECT

What does it mean to be a photographic subject? To understand this idea, we must first understand what it means to be 'subjectified'.

A body of academic work has emerged in recent decades investigating notions of subjectivity and perfomativity as fundamental to understanding questions of both ontology and epistemology. Focusing on the modern individual’s relationship to culture, knowledge, political economy, and technologies of communication, these discourses are guided primarily by the legacy of Michel Foucault and the critical response of academia to contemporary developments in psychology. Foucault’s articulation of ‘subjectivity’ in Discipline and Punish (1977) and its elaboration in A History of Sexuality (1978), as well as the lectures and interviews he gave before his untimely death in 1984, remain a cornerstone of these theories.

For Foucault, the subject (what we might consider the underlying basis the self) is formed through interaction with a variety of discourses of disciplinary power, which inform and develop the body and mind of the subject through repetitive and, above all, normalized ritual action along vectors or channels of mediated power. The individual’s ontological self-image – that is to say, the subject’s sense of ‘being’ – is outlined as being essentially produced through a set of social mechanisms of regulatory management that establish the subject as an object of cultural discourse and therefore, as a node of power. Power, rather than something simply oppressive, was understood to be inherently productive. Indeed, the subject could not exist without these power relations. However, Foucault was famously coy about what might be considered the mental or ‘psychic’ mechanisms by which these symbolic discourses would come to constitute the subject, and refused to elaborate on the matter.

This task would be taken up in the 1980s by the work of another post-structural philosopher: Judith Butler. Butler would attempt to bring together Foucauldian theories of the subject and concepts of discursive power with a legacy of psychoanalysis epitomized by the work of Jacques Lacan that would eventually culminate in her account of ‘performativity’ in Gender Trouble (1990), and which is essential to my thesis here.

However, to fully appreciate Butler’s shrewd combination of the two theorists, we must first explore the latter’s contribution to psychoanalysis.

Lacan is responsible for what might be the largest shift in psychoanalytic practice since Freud, and is generally most remembered for his formulation of the ‘mirror stage,’ which is crucial to the concepts laid out by Butler. In Lacan’s view, the mirror stage is a fundamental step in an infant’s development that facilitates its eventual acceptance into a pre-existing symbolic order – the order upon which the child’s identity will ultimately be founded. Around the age of 6 months, an infant will start to acknowledge their bodily image as it is reflected in the mirror, beginning a process of spatial (and eventually linguistic) identification that firmly establishes the subject’s dependence on the other – that is, a source outside the self – for social existence. In encountering a visualization of the self in the mirror, the ‘I’ of the subject is precipitated and solidified in the body before its “objectification in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.” That is to say, the child sees and knows itself before it acquires the language to articulate this knowledge.

So while this assumption of the ‘I’ in the form of body-image is dependent on the other – or a quality of ‘otherness’ in the mirror – to manifest, it also remains (to some extent) pre-discursive, and irreducible to the individual. This means that at some level, before the vectors of language have a chance to substantiate themselves in consciousness as a Kantian categorical imperative, there is a force – an ipse (an academic sleight of hand that is simply a conjugation of the Latin for 'self' – that is capable of taking up a position. It is only later that this positioning becomes explicitly associated with the socially established ‘other’ provided as an object of discourse:

“This is the function that is at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside ... Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which ... I am photo-graphed.”

- Jacques Lacan, "What is a Photograph?"

              A Diagram provided by Lacan illustrating the cultural gaze as a screen / mirror

              A Diagram provided by Lacan illustrating the cultural gaze as a screen / mirror

Here, to be ‘photo-graphed’ is literally to be graphed or mapped by light into an image that comes to be representative of the subject. In this act, the self-image becomes entwined with a third-party gaze – the cultural gaze – that unavoidably links the image with the presence of the other.  In situating myself in relation to the image, ‘I’ am made.

However, Lacan is at pains to point out that this appropriation of the image as self is never complete:

“This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama ... which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality ... and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity...”

- Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage"

The subject is conceived with a constitutive lack at the core of identity - a sort of existential hole - that can only ever be temporarily filled through a continual recourse to symbolic signification that perpetuates this link of the self-image to the other. In this vein, to 'be' we must constantly align ourselves with the self-image that must always be produced (or reflected) from the outside.

Visualizing Culture as a Photographic Universe

The following series of posts are edited excerpts from my thesis on self-portraiture (often infantilized in contemporary discourse as 'selfies'), written at Goldsmiths University:

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts”
— As You Like It, Shakespeare

To live today is to pose. To post is to live via photographic simulation, or to situate oneself in relation to the photographic. In the culturally diverse media environment that characterizes the contemporary communications – defined as it is by networked, transnational media flows, concentrated ownership of both content and service providers, and the exponential proliferation of personalized multimedia and ‘smart’ screen-based technologies – it is becoming increasingly clear to both academics and marketers that something which might be called ‘visual culture’ is not only fundamental to understanding the process of subject formation, but that the media rituals which direct this process are constantly in flux and scarcely understood.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this, there is a shared sense that the images disseminated through the institutions of televisual production are, to a greater or lesser extent, essential to regulating the productive processes of self-maintenance that make current models of cultural and economic activity at the individual, national, and global level possible.8 However, even with this implicit agreement, there is little in the way of description of what mechanisms allow the subject to make sense of their position within a culture that academics are all too ready to denounce as disembedded, detached, and shallow.

A considerable – and frankly inexcusable – number of these analyses rely on an unspoken reverence for the cultural power symbolically held by technologies of photographic reproduction. Nevertheless, and most likely due to a misplaced academic fear of ‘technological determinism,’ precious little investigation has been made into the role of the photographic image in culture and its relationship to what might be considered neomodern subjectivity.

In order to escape these pitfalls, it is necessary to consider not only the photograph’s relation to the individual subject of visual culture, but also the entire industrial apparatus of photographic imaging that enables the unprecedented amount of photography being produced and consumed today. In this context, the photographic image could be understood as a key device – a ‘frame’ – that serves as a technology of self-making essential to maintaining contemporary forms of governmentality, configuring subjects’ ontological positions in such a way as to make neomodern governance possible. The photographic image becomes one of the primary techniques of embodiment in visual culture, making contemporary photography and its practice inseparable from questions of identification and self-formation.

The current state of televisual mediation – with its abundance of reality- television programming, omnipresent surveillance cameras, ubiquitous multimedia devices, and the exceptional popularity of computer-mediated social-networking platforms reliant on photographic representation of the self – provides an environment in which the gaze of the Other (the social gaze described by Lacan) becomes aligned with the technologized gaze of the camera. The understanding that there are and will be photographic images of the subject – in whatever form, even if those images are never seen by the subject – enact a performative relationship that co-constitutes the existential and epistemological position of the subject in a globally intelligible (though not entirely globally accessible) visual ‘grammar of subjecthood’ entangled with the social, scientific, and economic paradigms of what Robins and Webster have called the ‘technoculture’ of global, industrial capital.

By taking what might be called the ‘photographic subject’ as the object of cultural analysis, we allow ourselves ask questions not only about photography in general, but about the immense performative force and power of famous photographs like ‘Earthrise,’ and the seemingly banal practices of photographic self production and selfon platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Indeed, it seems likely that the ubiquity of photographic representation and their continual reproduction on the screen could serve to erode the distinction between them.

NASA image AS8-14-2383, later named ‘Earthrise.’ Taken by astronaut William Anders.

NASA image AS8-14-2383, later named ‘Earthrise.’ Taken by astronaut William Anders.

If subject formation is becoming increasingly dependent on a widely disseminated array of industrialized teletechnologies that find their most characteristic expression in the photographic apparatus - that is to say, the multiplicity of discourses that inform, surround, and determine the cultural uses and meanings of photographic imaging - then we must develop some kind of theoretical ‘rules’ with which to explain this phenomenon. In presenting the self to a camera that is experienced as omnipresent and internalized, the subject negotiates a position for itself within televisualdiscourse and participates in social ritual through media technologies that are informed by a specifically photographic order of signification.

These ritualized technological and social practices surrounding the image are typified by the self-subjectifying and participatory use of self-portraiture on social-networking applications - most notably, the role of the ‘selfie’ on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.