Photodocumentary and Visual Ethnography in a Postmodern Digital World: From Positivist Empiricist Pomposity towards a Critique of Photo-electric Representation

W. Gordon West
Nov. 30, 1996

I. Introduction.

I want to re-examine the social and political claims (and our popular beliefs) that "photographs do not lie"--claims which underpin not only central traditions in photography and film (photojournalism and photodocumentary), but also in many social sciences (visual anthropology/sociology/ethnography.) (These claims also are central in the natural sciences, but I won't deal those issues here.) Wittgenstein's classic treatise expounding a positivist-empiricist epistemology perhaps gives the most classic statement to this worldview; in historical anticipation, Milne playfully undermines it, while Affron articulates postmodernist views of photoelectric representations.

I believe that digital imaging/re-imaging in a cybernetic post-modernist world knit into the WEB fundamentally undermines the classic photodocumentary and ethnographic positions, challenging any and all claims of representation of empirical (social) reality at their very core! What does the technology leave, especially for progressive photographers, social researchers, and social activists committed to social issues (such as myself) seeking not only documentation of various issues, but some fulcrum for social change?

In this short paper, I seek to define some of the major issues, linking claims, assumptions, and questions across disciplines of social science and visual arts/technologies. I will suggest some resolutions of such Gordian knots, and directions for further examination. Centrally, I believe many of the issues here are somewhat rhetorical--but ensconced in a framework which the popular imagination, visual/photographic artists and technologists, and social scientists have traditionally all agreed complicitly to ignore--and continue to deny! Returning to some roots (e.g., Simmel, Marx, etc., in social science, Allard in photography, Chomsky, etc. in linguistics) seems to me to offer some direction and comprehension of issues in human existence and perception which while eternal (or human nature) have nonetheless acquired new dimensions in the last few decades. In a sense, postmodernism and the new media have demanded an honesty of both photodocumentary and visual ethnography too long underplayed or denied by its practitioners.

II Traditional Photo/Documentary and Ethnographic Claims

There is, assuredly, a royal road to Drawing. (Talbot, in Newhall, 1982: 45)

It is hardly too much to call them [daguerreotype photographs] miraculous. (Herschel, in Newhall, 1982: 23)

The quality of authenticity implicit in a photograph may give it special value as evidence, or proof. Such a photography can be called "documentary" by dictionary definition: "an original and official paper relied upon as basis, proof, or support of anything else;--in its most extended sense, including any writing, book, or other instrument conveying information." (Newhall, 1982: 235).

Both photography/film and ethnography/social science have made what I believe are now in retrospect extravagantly empiricist claims to depict fully accurately some presupposed real world. This is not surprising in retrospect, given their almost simultaneous origins in the climate of optimistic scientism and technologism rampant in European society in the mid-1800's.

Perhaps the most central claim of photography in its presumed preeminence among the arts is its claim to represent or depict the empirical world most accurately, in astoundingly minute detail. Personally, coming out of a social science and traditional arts background, this has been a wonderfully entrancing claim: it came to a foreground in trying to depict how some children learned the physical, emotional, and interpersonal/social aspects of sports, while being unable to verbalize their knowledge. For me as a researcher, trying to re-present these learnings in words, given the language limitations of young children, photoelectric representation has offered a solution.

The photographic representation, it is claimed, is fundamentally objective, empirical--freed from the inadequacy of human hands and biased perceptions, hence truthful and scientific. The almost delirious enthusiasm of the nineteenth century inventors and promoters ring with the unbounded faith in science, technology, and human advancement quintessential to Weston's and Strand's beautifully pristine images from photography's moment of high-modernism.

Documentary photography achieved an equally pristine moment during the 1930's, with the support of liberal governments seeking reforms (opposed to socialist solutions to destitution). Lange, Evans, Shan, Bourke-White and others painstakingly documented poverty in America, with extraordinary support from the progressive regime of Roosevelt, in return providing visual documentary support for the New Deal. Life magazine provided an equally elegant and much more popular forum for documentary photography's cousin, photojournalism. Life brought "the world" to a general audience, in retrospect a quite wonderful display of photography's ability to touch us all through its exquisite documentary accuracy.

I would argue that the same scientistic claims to documentary accuracy have haunted and sustained social science ethnography, whether in anthropology's attraction to strange and esoteric cultures, or sociology's penchant for revealing the often sordid undersides of our own societies. The social survey, ethnographic and participant observation traditions in social research have been equally founded upon a claim simply to be objectively reporting (in words) what (especially documentary) photography also claimed to re-produce and document in images.

Some central anthropological traditions have always claimed to be just recording, in as mechanical a fashion as possible, the empirical social reality (e.g.,Spradley, 1980), and more politically oriented researchers (e.g., Willis, 1977) have substantially relied upon the explicit and implicit claims that their words accurately depict (really beyond question) a social reality beyond influence of the researcher or recorder. Some recent attempts by empiricist researchers such as Miles and Huberman (1984) to quantify ethnographic techniques reveal the potential for co-optation of the methodology into very positivist frameworks.

What more attractive technique for social ethnographers, then, than that offered by photography (and more recently film and video), able to "write with light", beyond the human hand, the social reality one sought to depict (Collier, 1966)? Whereas the more traditional academic anthropological or sociological ethnographer might try to write objectively about her/his subject, the more "scientific" ethnographer might (following photograpy's claim) more dispassionately and objectively simply record photographically the human activities under study. More recently, beyond photography and film, video and electronic news gathering has offered an even more technologically sophisticated and accessible means of depicting in "real time" the daily passage of human events.

II. The Post-Modernist Demise of Both Photodocumentary and Empiricist Ethnography

2.161 There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all. (Wittgenstein, 1922)

...late in the century of Joyce and Borges, of cubism and surrealism, of Wittgenstein's loss of faith in logical positivism and of post-structuralism's gonzo metaphysics, the production of reproduction was again redefined. From the moment of its sequicentennial in 1989 photography was dead--or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced--as was painting 150 years before. (Mitchell, 1992: 20)

Could it be, then, that all social science, and documentary photography, might now just disappear, and be supplanted by various technologies of electronic newsgathering? (See American Photo, special issue, May-June, 1996.)

One has only to wander/wonder into the connected live open studios of Toronto's CITY-tv to be almost instantaneously overwhelmed by the continuous live feed-in of a few dozen ENG live networks to be amazed. Fundamentally: the media now enable us to record--in an endless reproduction--but one is forced to ask, for what end....? Such technologies demonstrate an empiricism run wild: even if we could record each and every human activity, would we want to, and why? How do we frame, and how do we edit?

At the same time as we have developed the technologies of empiricists' wildest dreams, we have also developed the technologies of rationalists' dreams--and both their wildest nightmares! Computerized digital imaging now allows us to scan whatever image, reconstruct it, and present it back to a public (both skeptical and desirous of believing) whatever images our minds can conceive. President's heads can be grafted to streetbums' bodies, air force jets land on elegant car hoods, green tomatoes turn brilliantly red--the possibilities are endless. Thoroughly endless: one need no longer rely on any actual reality (be it people or things)--programmes such as fractals allow us to construct virtual realities which are equally convincing as the "real" ones!

A crisis has arisen, fuelled by our own expectations of empirically knowing all, but fundamentally undermined by our growing awareness of the vulnerability of all our knowing (perhaps nothing). The life-experienced cynicism of Generation-X (and beyond) (tempted to high-consumerism, but not offered jobs to realize their parents life-styles, while raised on such hopes) thoroughly informs the images produced by contemporary media students.

While all this is intellectually acknowledged among the aesthetic and computer literate, I am much less sure that more rightist enthusiasts of the construction of virtual social realities have admitted their own hubris (West, 1987a, b, c.) (But of course, why would they so undermine key aspects of their dominance--and profit?)

My fear is that the attractiveness of the technologies will seduce us both subtly and overwhelmingly into believing whatever we (or those dominant powers among us) want us to believe. Visually, we don't like to see mundane, boring poverty: it's not aesthetic, it doesn't move, it's aching; we'd rather see a 90 minute coloured depiction of the world with black-and-white good-guys and bad-guys, with action car chases, and final resolutions.

Reagan's presidency brought the skills of Hollywood fantasy to television publics in ways perhaps not experienced since Hitler's use of radio (see West,1987b); the words and images so often used had not only no relationship to empirical, lived reality in Central America, they blatantly defied and re-defined that reality! Numerous sources and materials now make it clear, for instance, that while Nancy Reagan was "Just saying 'No!'" to drug use, her husband and his Vice-President George Bush were using the CIA and US military bases to run one of the biggest importation scams ever, in order to finance the Contra war! (Cockburn, etc.) As so repeatedly the case in past human history, our new photoelectric technologies are available for both good and evil.

III Reconcilation Through Returning to Epistemological Roots.

2.172 A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it.(Wittgenstein, 1922)

In a more sophisticated reading, left documentarists and ethnographers have also been very guilty of ignoring some of the most fundamental notions of earlier thinkers. For instance, Marx's epistemology: that the world of appearance, while highly connected to the underlying nexus of human relations, does not directly reveal this underlying structure--i.e., simply depicting our phenomenal, directly experienced world cannot reveal the fundamental underlying structural truths of our human relations which give rise to such phenomena! (Marx and Engels, 1848) (No more can immediate perception reveal the laws of physics, a fundamental perspective recognized since the Greeks, and foundational to contemporary sub-atomic physics!) Even the early Wittgenstein recognized in his most positivist-empiricist work its very serious limitations--and later went on to refute such logical-positivism in his Philosophical Investigations.

For Marx, as for Simmel (a founder of symbolic interactionist Chicago-school ethnography, and visual anthropology), forms and formal concepts inevitably are selective; they both reveal and hide aspects of the social world. But whereas for Simmel, following from Kant, it is the non-formalised content of human activity which could not be known (i.e., "rationalized" into formal categories for analysis), Marx developed a particular notion of ignorance: formal ignorance, or ideology. Where Simmel and interactionism revel in substantive alternative conceptions, world-views, etc., for their diversity, and encourage comparative sampling for clarification, Marx goes beyond this to recognise that some viewpoints (e.g., political economy) become socially and politically definitive, attain dominance, and override others in a mystifying way which precludes the perception of alternatives to their assumptions, or even recognition of their own foundations:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. (Marx and Engels, 1846/1977: 64)

This notion of contradictory formal knowledge-and-ignorance also clearly goes far beyond the traditional view of false-consciousness and ideology:

First, if as Marx contends, phenomena can be deceptive and phenomenal categories in some sense inadequate, the inadequacy is not simply one of subjective perception. It isn't a matter of people seeing the world wrong; on the contrary, if conceptions correspond to experiences, then the inadequacies must lie at the level of experience itself. Illusoriness then becomes a matter of the forms in which the world presents itself to experience, and not a matter of inadequate perceptions of these forms. Secondly, and conversely, it is evident that phenomenal categories cannot be totally inadequate; they must allow people to make sense of their experience. (Sayer, 1975: 783

Following Marx, then, we must seek some way to be able to interrogate dominant or taken-for-granted categories, including lay concepts, but especially including received social scientific and formal-administrative ones. Marx does not merely do political economy, he critiques it, thereby developing a critique of the social order it as a science comprehends.

Political economy begins with the fact of private property; it does not explain it. It conceives the material process of private property, as this occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas which then serve it as laws. It does not comprehend these laws; that is, it does not show how they arise out of the nature of private property....

Classical political economy borrowed from everyday life the category "price of labour" without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? (Marx 1867/1967: 537)

Ironically, The German Ideology provides what can be interpreted as a clear justification of the utility of visual ethnographic and documentary photography, rather than rationalist or structuralist deductive speculation and designing of virtual realities.

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can be verified in a purely empirical way.... (1846/1977: 42, 46-7)

IV Some Conclusions and Directions: Towards a Critique of Photoelectric Representation.

Extending these insights, we need to develop a critical stance to interrogate both traditional and emerging assumptions in visual representation. Interactively, we need to learn how to interrogate our assumptions, and develop both epistemological and methodological approaches which self-critically question both formal and substantive assumptions dominant in art, aesthetics, and photo-electric representations, both visual and oral/aural.

In the past couple of years working in community research and development agencies, I have been trying to develop audio-visual research and development approaches, using photography, digital imaging, and videography for use in both documentation and social animation concerning both formal and community education. These approaches recognize the heavily print-biased nature of Anglo-European education and understandings of knowledge, and allow an exploration of how audio/verbally and visually oriented cultural understandings of knowledge and education might gain entry and recognition within all our global structures. At the same time, while the development of digital and electronic knowledge bases has threatened traditional (especially western European print-oriented) knowledges, this new technology offers some opening to the acknowledgment of alternative (aurally and visually oriented) knowledges. I am very excited about exploring these kinds of interrelationships between "traditional" knowledges and contemporary technologies with students and community leaders in developing world situations.

I recognize this is a double-bladed sword. The technology is undeniably western, digital/numerical, and photo-electric. But at the same time it offers possibilities of undercutting its own presumptions through the non-linearity of hypertext, through the possibilities of an image-based communications, and especially through the interactivity whereby recipients/viewers become appropriators/creators.

With humble reference to Martin Luther King, I too have a dream. In my dream, third world people, women (and others gender oppressed), racially oppressed peoples, variously "handicapped" people, and children--all gain as much access to the WEB as Bill Gates, CERN, IBM, ATT, and North American kids. They might all learn how to play on the net (even if through the most obnoxious and gross video-games), and appropriate the technology to themselves. In my dream, various more traditional actors participate, from corporate philanthropies, through progressive researchers, liberal academics, and even big business entrepreneurs, on through dedicated missionaries and teachers, village leaders and visionaries. In my dream, together, we might all develop an entirely different world, in which we all respect each other (including our different viewpoints/points-of-view, colour schemes, political colours, and sexual proclivities)--we let a thousand flowers bloom! Or rather, some billion!

But I also know, with historical perspective, that whatever the new technology it is most susceptible to corruption and co-optation by dominant forces in the political economy. My nightmare is that the new technologies and medias will reproduce whatever existing world oppressions (see Jay, 1993; Flynn, 1993; O'Neill, 1995).

While acknowledging all the epistemological pitfalls, fundamentally, I am a pragmatist, both epistemologically, sociologically, and politically: if it works (according to basically practical and humanist grounds), it is true. But the fact that even Wittgenstein in his most positivist-empiricist writing stated the same makes me humble and remaining full of self-doubt.... Very--perhaps too very--postmodernist.....???!!!

3.328 If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. ... (if everything behaves as if a sign had meaning, then it does have meaning.)

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

In even more post-modernist style, I want to offer up some other appropriated words which express my sentiments:

4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said.

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said...

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, that he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

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