Rudolf Arnheim The Authenticies of the PhotMedia 1993

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Leonardo

The Two Authenticities of the Photographic MediaAuthor(s): Rudolf ArnheimSource: Leonardo, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1997), pp. 53-55Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576378 .

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DOCUMENT

T h e T w o Authenticitieso f t h e Photographice d i a

RudolfArnheim

A dramatic episode in a recent court trial inLos Angeles has made us aware of the juridical, ethical andaesthetic aspects of authenticity in the use of photographicmedia. A videotape taken of the action of four white policeofficers who had stopped and manhandled a black motoristwas used as evidence to showwhether the police had used un-acceptable violence or whether their behavior was appropri-ate to what their duty required. During the trial thetruthfulness of the tape waschallenged by such means as slowmotion and stop action. This had been done to inform thejury most clearly of the decisive facts. The same modifica-tions, however, were challenged because they changed deci-sive qualities of the crucial event. "Slowmotion minimizes theviolence. In the real world, a faster blow is a harder blow; aslower blow is softer.... Slow motion also makes the beatingseem less real and more fantastic" [1]. Stop motion alsobroke the dynamic impact of the action, and the removal ofthe soundtrack diminished the presence of the event evenfurther.

Quite apart from the political drama of the trial, the epi-sode could not but remind us of an ambiguity that hasplagued the aesthetic and epistemological theory of the figu-rative arts. To the extent that the arts were representational,they aspired to a faithful rendering of the facts of reality;butin order to make their images comprehensible to the humanmind they had to select and shape and organize the materialtaken from reality-they had to find and impose form. Bydo-ing so, however, they had to partially reshape the facts of na-ture perceived by the eyes. Hence aesthetic theory had to putup with a compromise.Another wayof putting the problem is to say that the figu-rative arts are always dealing with two kinds of authenticity.They are authentic to the extent that they do justice to thefacts of reality,and they are authentic in quite another senseby expressing the qualities of human experience by anymeans suitable to that purpose. The latter, the aesthetic func-tion of representations, is greatlyhelped by the former,whichoffers recognizable images of creatures and objects. But thelatter hampers rather than supplements the former: the fan-cies and liberties of the human imagination are anything butauthentic when taken as documents of physical reality.This dilemma was sharpened by the advent of photogra-phy. The mechanically obtained pictures revealed moreclearly than the handmade images of artists ever could thatwhen the imitation of nature was taken literally it could notfully meet the requirements of art in its usual sense. In his

"Salon de 1859," CharlesBaudelaire had published a sec-tion on "LePublic Moderne et laPhotographie," where he praisedthe abilityof the new medium toserve the sciences and the arts,but only as "their very humbleservant" without any further pre-tenses, 'just as the printing pressand shorthand have neither cre-ated literature nor added to it"[2]. But he warned against the

ABSTRACT

Citingheuseandmanipula-tion f videomagesnarecentLosAngelesourtrial s anex-ample,heauthoriscusses hoto-graphic edia,ividinghemntotwo ypes fauthenticity.he irsttypeattemptsorepresenthefactsofreality,nd hesecondtype onveys umanxpression.At tsmost ffective,hotographyblendshese woapproaches,ap-turingleetingmomentst hesame ime s itpresentsom-posedmages.Withhe ntroduc-tion fmotionictures,heele-ments ftime nd ctionllowedfor urther anipulationf mages.Now,headventfdigital hotog-raphyas urtherlurredhedis-tinctionetweenactualealityndexpressiveeality,ncreasingis-trustn hereliabilityf mages.

popular craze for photography as the ideal fulfillment of whatpainting had alwaysaspired to. "Avengeful God has answeredthe prayersof this multitude; and Daguerre was his Messiah."The competition between the two aspirations of authentic-ity has characterized Western figurative art ever since antiq-uity.On the one hand, great painters were praised for imitat-ing nature so perfectly as to deceive humans and animals, andthe sculptor Pygmalion's ivory statue was suitable to be trans-formed into a real woman. The striving for ideal perfectionwas alwaysto be combined with lifelikeness. Once, however,photography was able to take lifelikeness literally,it revealedmore clearly the inherent imperfection of physical appear-ance. The accidental shape of individualspecimens interferedwith the search for canonic perfection and beauty, and theconfusing untidiness of the sights projected by the cameralens tended to make images unreadable. It took training toread photographs, as we know from the puzzled responses oftribal natives confronted with them without preparation.During the earlydecades of photographic art, one tried tomaintain the standards of traditional painting by the properselection and arrangement of subjects and by camera devicessuch as soft focus lenses. Gifted portrait photographers suchas David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson were able to takeadvantage of the long exposure time demanded by the earlyphotosensitive material. Through the mere summation of ac-cidental moments they captured the lasting character and su-perindividual beauty of their sitters.A preference for paintinglike photographs survives in thepresent, but it also has become clear that the photographicmedium finds its highest achievement in works that preserveRudolf Arnheim, 1200 Earhart Road #537, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A.This article first appeared in TheJournal ofAesthetics nd Art Criticism 1, No. 4, 537-540(1993). Reprinted by permission.

LEONARDO, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 53-55, 1997 53


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and stress the specifically photographicqualities of instantaneous exposure, themomentary revelation caught by thephotographer as a vigilant hunter. In-stead of concentrating on authenticityin its second meaning as pictorial com-position, the best photographers nowobtained their finest results from thedeliberate display of the fleeting mo-ment. Even so, its most gifted represen-tative, Henri Cartier-Bresson, never ne-glected what he had learned as apainter, namely, that no image conveysits meaning and expression readablywithout being carefully composed [3].By entrusting himself to what he couldframe with the viewfinderof his camera,he insisted that the photographer's "atti-tude requires concentration, a disci-pline of mind, sensitivity,and a sense ofgeometry." The skillful union of the twoauthenticities became the program ofboth photographic media: still photog-raphyand film.The new concern with the passingmoment aroused an interest in the di-mension of time, explicitly introducedinto the photographic medium by themotion picture. Not only did the newinvention enlarge enormously the rangeof phenomena accessible to visual artand thereby broaden the medium's au-thenticity of the first kind, it also shiftedthe aesthetic emphasis. It enriched au-thenticityof the second kind byfocusingon action. This new world view was for-mulated in 1960 in the principal thesisof Siegfried Kracauer's book TheoryofFilm [4]. It stressed the affinity of thephotographic medium with the transi-tory, the indefinite, the fortuitous andthe indeterminate-an approach whosebroad philosophical aspiration becameeven more evident when Kracauer, in aposthumous work, applied the samequalities to history [5].Kracauer's intention was most clearlyexpressed in the subtitle of his book onfilm, which called for "the redemptionof physical reality."This claim was mosttimely,but it was also one-sided in that itneglected the indispensable contribu-tion of interpretive form [6]. The oppo-site was true of my own book, first pub-lished in 1932. Devoted to "filmas art,"it waswritten to refute the belief that thephotographic medium was nothing buta mechanical copy of the optical projec-tion of nature [7]. I showed that by theframing of an image, its reduced depth,its limitation to black and white andother qualities it used the restriction ofthe optical image as an aesthetic virtue.

I claimed for the film the traditionalqualities of art. Thereby, however, I allbut neglected the "documentary" as-pects emphasized by Kracauer.In prac-tice, any photograph or film partakesofboth authenticities, because, as the poetAlphonse de Lamartine had said, it is "asolar phenomenon, where the artistcol-laborates with the sun" [8].I now turn specificallyto the means bywhich the photographic media en-deavor to make their images readable.Thereby they meet the conditions of anycommunication, be it aesthetic ormerely informational, as for example inthe sciences. To be readable, the imagemust be limited to what is required bythe statement, it must be organized inan orderly fashion, and it must do so insuch a way as to convey the intendedmeaning. In the case of science, themeaning refers merely to factual infor-mation;for the purpose of the figurativearts, the information is presented insuch a way as to convey the desired ex-pression.This condition meets the demands ofwhat I have called authenticity of thesecond kind. I have shown that it canonly be partially met by the photo-graphic media. More specifically, itmakes a difference whether the meanschosen by the photographer or film-maker are derived from the medium it-self or whether they are borrowed frompictorial technique. The first methodworks quite smoothly, the second ismore risky.The first procedure is familiar fromthe work of the cameramanand the filmeditor. The shots taken by the cameraare framed and selected; the editor com-bines the suitable segments in the ap-propriate order. Viewers can be andshould be awareof these formative inter-ferences, which, however, do not harmthe integrity of the chosen material. Al-most equally compatible with the photo-graphic media are combinations of sev-eral shots, fitted together in onecoherent picture. They look like pos-sible documents of physical reality, al-though they are not. They are not au-thentic in the first sense. An earlyexample of the so-called combinationprinting of Oscar G. Rejlander, who fit-ted severalnegatives together in one pic-ture [9]. More skillfully, Jerry N.Uelsmann has created mysterious fairyworlds of perfectly convincing land-scapes and interiors, where positive andnegative material, giant size and minia-tures fuse seamlessly [10]. In these

works, the photographic medium rulesundisturbed over dream kingdoms thatlook entirely trustworthy, and only thebetter knowledge of the viewers dis-closes that they are not.The techniques used for such worksare authentic in the second sense by cre-ating convincing images; and they donot interfere with the nature of the me-dium. Our analysis of the photographicmedia shows that the video material in-troduced at the court trial to which I re-ferred in the beginning obtained certainaspects of authenticity of the secondkind. It elucidated some features of thephysical episode under discussion in thetrial by using slow motion and stop ac-tion-devices often used in scientificdemonstrations or artistic interpreta-tions, as for instance in the stop motionfilms of growing plants. But those videoshots also modified certain other aspectsof the scene, which interfered with thematerial's authenticity of the first kind.Thus far, I have discussed thepicturemakers' techniques of shapingthe material taken from the camera inone of two ways, namely, by derivingtheir approach from the resources ofthe photographic medium itself. Otherformative procedures are taken frompictorial techniques, of which retouch-ing is the oldest and the most obvious.The most legitimate use of retouchingeliminates accidental flaws to obtain pic-tures that present the essentials of thesubject in the clearest fashion, for in-stance, in photographs of machines oranatomical preparations. Retouching isalso employed for the more objection-able embellishment of portraitsor land-scapes to obtain the cheap effects ofprettiness and false perfection. Authen-ticityof the second kind depends on thevalidityof the interpretation obtained-a validitydetermined bydocumentary oraesthetic criteria: How fully has the in-terpretation of the essentials beenachieved, for example, by an illustratorof scientific publications? How strongand meaningful are the images createdby an artist?

It remains for me to refer to the latesttechnological development, which islikely to have far-reachinginfluences onthe documentary and aesthetic charac-ter of the photographic media. Digitalphotography translates the photochemi-cal image by computer into a mosaic ofdots or pixels, whose color and bright-ness can be altered at will. This dis-mantles the image's shape, which can beretained or altered in any of its ele-

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ments. It increases the formative powerof the imagemaker, and when applied tothe extreme degree it becomes a picto-rial technique like drawing and paint-ing-with the difference that it can alsoavail itself of the particular techniquesof computer graphics. When appliedonly slightly, however, digitalization willamount simply to a more refined proce-dure of traditional retouching.What a pictorial technique, whethertraditional or digital, cannot do is to du-plicate the "snapshot" qualities of thephotographic media, that is, the acci-dental, fugitive qualities recognized andappreciated as specifically photo-graphic. I have pointed out that in thecharacteristic works of a good photogra-pher like Cartier-Bresson the authentic-ity of the first order is deliberatelysought and left untouched by the forma-tive means of the second order, used toobtain a suitable composition. Similarly,discriminating viewers know that theycannot look for the total formative con-trol of such a picture, but that they arefaced with a cooperation of nature andthe human mind. Whether the tradi-tional definition of art should be broad-ened to include such works or whether

they should be called partial art is a de-cision that can be safely left to theBeckmessers. What matters is that thedifference between the two kinds of au-thenticity needs to be respected.If digitalization takes over to the ex-tent that the photographic quality allbut disappears, the distinction betweenthe two contributing sources can nolonger be made. WilliamJ. Mitchell, inhis book TheReconfigured ye,which hasthe most complete documentation onthe subject, says that "the digital imageblurs the customary distinctions be-tween painting and photography andbetween mechanical and handmade pic-tures," and he concludes, "wehave en-tered the age of electrobricolage" [11].In any case, the digitalization of thephotographic image will increase thedistrust of the information offered bystill photography and film. The initialbelief that the new medium guaranteedthe reliability of images had to bechecked by increasing skepticism. Themore the photochemical material ofphotography and film becomes subjectto surreptitious modification the moreits consumers will learn to be on theirguard. How much this caution will be

strengthened by the digital techniqueonly the future will tell.References1. Patricia Greenfield and Paul Kibbey,"Picture Im-perfect," TheNew YorkTimes 1 April 1993).2. Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859: Le PublicModerne et la Photographie," OeuvresCompletes(Paris:Gallimard, 1961).3. Henri Cartier-BressonNew York:Aperture, 1976);Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson. heEarly Work(New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1987).4. Siegfried Kracauer,Theory fFilm. TheRedemptionof Physical Reality (New York:Oxford Univ. Press,1960).5. Siegfried Kracauer,History.TheLast ThingsBeforethe Last (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).6. Rudolf Arnheim, "MelancholyUnshaped," in To-ward a Psychology fArt (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of Cali-fornia Press, 1967) pp. 181-191.7. RudolfArnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley, CA: Univ.of California Press, 1957).8. Beaumont Newhall, TheHistory of Photography(New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1964) p. 61.9. Newhall [8] p. 59.10. Steven Klindt,JerryN. Uelsmann:Photographsrom1975-1979 (Chicago, IL:Columbia College, 1980).11. William J. Mitchell, TheReconfigured ye (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) p. 7.

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Rudolf Arnheim The Authenticies of the PhotMedia 1993

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