Is Photography Transformative?

Benjamin Lowy, "Latham Smith" (2010)

John Berger, in his “Understanding a Photograph” (included in his 2012 essay collection of the same name), wrote, “There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus.” In contrast, Janet Malcolm, in her “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008), says, “Taking a picture is a transformative act.” Here are two major photography critics disagreeing on a fundamental photographic issue. Who’s right?

I’m drawn to Berger’s view. I relish photographs that show people, places, and things exactly as they are – unaltered, unfiltered, undistorted. My idea of a great photograph is Benjamin Lowy’s portrait of tugboat captain Latham Smith (see above), which appeared in the April 19, 2010, New Yorker, as an illustration for Burkhard Bilger’s superb “Towheads.” Lowy’s photo brims with raw reality – rope, cables, water, rust, a nearly sunken barge, and Smith himself, leaning forward against a yellow railing, wearing a dark green shirt and navy watch cap, giving the camera a hard-eyed stare.  

In his essay “Appearances,” Berger said, “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.” I agree. Photography is an art of quotation, taking images directly from reality. Lowy’s Latham Smith photo exemplifies the art brilliantly.

In her essay “Burdock,” Malcolm describes the way she photographs burdock leaves. She doesn’t photograph them in situ. She snips them off the plants, takes them to her studio, props them in small glass bottles, and photographs them head on, “as if they were people facing me.” The process, she says, is a form of decontextualization:

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables – these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

Janet Malcolm, "Burdock No. 1" (2005-07)

Malcolm’s method is sourced in Irving Penn’s decontextualized photography: see, for example, his photos of artificially posed Peruvian Indians, Spanish gypsies, and San Francisco Hell’s Angels in his 1974 collection, Worlds in a Small Room. Interestingly, thirty years before she started taking her burdock pictures, Malcolm wrote a piece, titled “Certainties and Possibilities” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1975), criticizing Penn’s approach. She quotes a passage from Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room, in which he says, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” Malcolm comments,

Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens. He lures them into his studio, sits them on cloth-draped structures, subjects them to a north light that shadows half of each face, and sometimes literally pushes them into a corner that his brutal direction has put them emotionally.

She says of Penn’s enormously enlarged photographs of cigarette and cigar butts,

Penn’s pictures of butts exhibit all the rough oddity of the found art object that emerges from the enlargement of a murky detail in a torn, unregarded snapshot or of a quaintly drab illustration in an old textbook; they partake of the transformation that quilts and ship propellers and industrial tools undergo when they are wrested from their functional context and put on show for their aesthetic qualities. And they suffer from the same paradoxical devitalization that comes over useful objects when they are no longer in use. The tacky machine-made synthetic comforter on the bed has more connection with life – is more genuine, in its way – than the handsome antique quilt that hangs on the wall as if it were a painting, and in this respect Penn’s sleek pictures of clothes and caviar in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, far from paling before the rough vigor of his pictures in the museum show, present a kind of rebuke to the latter’s false vernacularism.

Irving Penn, "Cigarette No. 86" (1972)

In a line I’ve never forgotten, she says, “Unlike Weston’s peppers and cabbages, which celebrate Weston’s religion of 'the thing itself' and permanently alters one’s vision of these vegetables, Penn’s butts efface reality.”

Is photography transformative? Yes, it can be, in the decontextualizing sense that Malcolm describes. Does photography have to be transformative in order to be artful? No, it doesn’t. Lowy’s striking “Latham Smith” portrait is proof of that. It doesn’t transform reality; rather, it precisely and vividly quotes from it. For me, the art of photography is, in Berger’s words, “the art of quotation.”