On Photography: Jean Baudrillard and the Power of Added Meanings

By Stephen David Engel

[Posted on http://www.futurerhetorics.org]

Conventional thinking about photographs understands them as mimetic. That is, photographs are typically thought of as reflecting life, and as doing so “truthfully.” Through photographs, we are told, the likeness of a cathedral can be “captured” and “reproduced” in a print or on a screen. The face of a woman can be “preserved” in a copy that’s “as real as life.” Photographs are seen as re-presenting reality, and their value is closely associated with their ability to represent it accurately, to point beyond themselves and back to the objects they picture.

Jean Baudrillard has a different view of photography, which he expresses in his essay, “The Violence Done To The Image." In certain respects, Baudrillard concurs with the simple mimetic theory of photography. He acknowledges, for instance, the originary connection between the photograph and its object. But he also breaks from the common perspective in a few important ways. On his view: 

1) A photograph is the result of a “stripping process” by which an object loses dimensions—dimensions such as weight, time, motion, context, aroma, relief, and meaning. 

2) This stripping process establishes the photograph as a “pure” appearance, a disembodied “parallel universe,” and the photograph can only remain pure if allowed to maintain its distance from reality.

3) Anything done to restore lost dimensions to the photograph, anything that re-establishes its connection with reality, anything that adds meaning or ideas to the photograph, is a “violence that destroys it as a parallel universe.” 

For Baudrillard, the photograph is never “real as life,” but is created through a process that puts a distance between it and the “real” dimensions of its object. Rather than seeing the loss of dimensions as lamentable, Baudrillard sees it as good. He wants to maintain the gulf between a photograph and reality, and he wants to relieve the photograph of the requirement that it “reproduce” the world faithfully. He wants to liberate the photograph from its representational function, so that it can affect us “below the level of representation,” on a purely perceptual level. And for him, anything that obstructs this liberation should be seen as “violent.”

In some ways, I agree with Baudrillard. Photographs are seldom left alone, and allowed to stand on their own as free-floating, disembodied images, as parallel universes that are valuable in themselves. They are seldom left to operate “below the level of representation,” either because they are pre-fitted with language—

commercial, political, informational, etc.—or because people have been trained to hunt for lost dimensions the second they see a photograph. The problem is acute in the realm of fine art photography, where we tend to overload photographs with ideas, meanings, and explanations in an effort to increase their artistic significance. 

In these respects, Baudrillard’s position seems right. But in his quest to liberate the photograph from its representational enslavement, Baudrillard gets hasty, not acknowledging certain exceptions to his claims. Accordingly, I want to suggest three counterpoints: 

1) A photograph’s power is not always proportional to its purity.

2) Certain added meanings can support the photograph as a parallel universe, enhancing that universe rather than destroying it. 

3) Violence against a photograph’s purity should not always be seen as violence against the photograph as a parallel universe.

Consider this photo:

As we look at this picture, we can try to do what Baudrillard would want us to do. It’s a difficult task, but with effort, we can begin to unlearn common ways of seeing and greet the photo as a pure appearance, a parallel universe, a “depthless other scene.” 

We can try to abstain from searching for lost dimensions, and forgo asking who, what, why, and when. We can try to let the photo affect us “below the level of representation,” in a strictly perceptual way. We can attempt to see the people, trees, and buildings as entities that don’t exist anywhere else but in the photo. We can even strive to unlearn that the figures are people, trees, and buildings (or try to no longer differentiate them)—thereby viewing the photo flatly, as though nothing were in relief and the scene were totally depthless. We can approach the photo without added meanings—such as those we typically find in titles and captions—so that the appearance remains “pure,” and we see only what is there. 

But, as I’ve suggested, certain added meanings can, at the peril of the photo’s purity, serve to enhance its power and standing as a parallel universe rather than diminishing it. 

For example, the picture I asked you to look at is part of a series by Mustafah Abdulaziz called “Memory Loss.” This title introduces an added idea, but this particular idea doesn’t restore a lost dimension. On the contrary, it adds a dimension that was not inherent to the objects of the original scene. Viewed through the language of “Memory Loss,” the figures of the picture alter. They strike a pose. In my viewing: 

The people begin to look as though they are losing their memories.

Then as though they’ve lost their memories.

Then as though they are trying to find memories that they’ve lost.

The rightmost figure looks as though she’s inspecting the garden for clues, on the trail of the memories she’s misplaced, but coming up with nothing, as she can’t remember what she’s looking for. 

The figure in the middle looks lost, as though she’s forgotten where she is, unsure of what to do. 

Both figures look like sites, or loci, of amnesia—as though there’s a void in each of them. 

The yard looks like a forgotten yard.

The trees look like forgotten trees.

The place feels like a forgotten place. 

Seen in this way, through the added meaning of “memory loss,” the photo presents a scene wherein humans have lost their memory, searching for what they’ve lost. Together, the title and the photograph invent a fiction, a particular parallel universe that the photo, as a pure appearance free of added meanings, could never have created on its own. 

This fiction produces a more powerful parallel universe than the photo produces on its own precisely because it comes close to representing reality, but warps it instead. It invites us to view human beings as human beings, but takes away something familiar: the experience of human beings as endowed with the ability to remember things. The title, in other words, takes advantage of the void left by the loss of dimensions, filling it with a fictional element that resists their full return. The scene stands close to, but still apart from, reality, and through this juxtaposition, intensifies our experience of the difference between the two. 

What’s more, the imprecision of “Memory Loss,” the lack of specificity with regard to whom, in particular, is losing memory, allows the idea to spill out and imbue the entire scene as well as its imagined context. The outcome is a surrealistic fiction, one that casts the world in a different, abnormal, obliviating light. 

Did this fiction, this parallel universe of memory loss, come about through a violence against the purity of the photograph? Perhaps it did. But the violence, in this case, was worthwhile.