Introduction: Un-truths of Photography
in Fiction
Agnes Neier and Nancy Pedri
In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary chose the word post-truth as the word of the year. A philosophical and political concept that refers to the blurred lines between “knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth” (Biesecker 329), post-truth has become an everyday staple in our lives. Debates about fake news, alternative facts, and deepfakes as well as an overall questioning of authenticity, veracity, and credibility saturate our private, public and, especially, political spheres. In this climate, the notion of truth has once again risen to prominence within political and ideological, but also social and private contexts, as have questions about truthful representation. In our society, where smartphones and social media platforms play a prominent role in our day-to-day lives and increasingly become more image-based, photographic representation and mediation and their relation to truth have garnered much attention.
The way we take, interact with, and share photographic images has changed immensely over the last 30 years. Holding a physical copy of a photographic image is becoming an increasingly rare experience, the distribution of images has become effortless and instantaneous, and the sheer quantity of images we take and share with others is nearly incomprehensible. Nicholas Mirozeff states that by 2011, there were 3.5 trillion photographs in existence and every two minutes “Americans alone take more photographs than were made in the entire nineteenth century” (4). There is no doubt that global culture is visual and that, in our digital era, the proliferation of photographic images and their modes of distribution has significantly impacted photographic practices, from how photographic images are curated and constructed to the role they play not only in our day-to-day lives, but also in society.
In this climate, it is becoming increasingly apparent that instead of trying to pinpoint where the truth of photography lies and what that truth is, we would be better positioned to understand the workings of photography if we attend to the undecidedness of its truth-value. This special issue of Image [&] Narrative seeks to embrace the uncertainty and ambiguity that surrounds photography and its product, the photographic image. Focusing on the multifaceted layers of untruthfulness that inform photography, contributors reflect on its unstable and suspect relationship to truth and the real. They do so by addressing the implications of photographic fabrications, manipulations, deceptions, alternative truths, defactualization, and deliberate falsehoods in the context of literary fiction. Accepting the “intensity of the problem of truth, especially in an era in which doubts have become pervasive” (Steyerl 2), pushes the conversation surrounding photography and literature to a new and productive terrain that accounts for how the use of photographic images in a literary context is couched in doubt, that is, in a dynamic process whereby readers oscillate between belief and uncertainty.
Faith in the image
From the first days photography was launched into the world, practitioners and theorists in Europe and North America alike began debating the medium’s ability to produce a truthful image of reality and determining the uses to which photography could be put. Generally considered to be “among the most useful and extraordinary inventions” to date (Daguerre 11), photography was immediately recognized for its potential to inform both the sciences and the fine arts. Promoters, theorists, and practitioners of photography were quick to assert the medium’s ability to capture nature and its potential to impact the arts. Photography was praised as being a shortcut to drawing because of several factors, such as the necessary skill set of its user; the cost of production; the quickness of the method; the precision, accuracy, and detail of the visual image produced; and the ease with which the image can be duplicated and multiplied.1 It is thus not surprising that
this new technology quickly and efficiently fed “the fever for reality [that] was running high” (Newhall 11).2 The extant visual apparatuses -- dioramas, panoramas, laterna magica, among others -- could not satisfy the visual requirements of a world that had and continued to quickly change.3 Positivism, the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle class, and modernization in general made photography a necessary medium. Geoffrey Batchen highlights that these changing conditions demanded “an apparatus of seeing that involved both reflection and projection, that was simultaneously active and passive in the way it represented things, that incorporated into its very mode of being the subject seeing and the object being seen. This apparatus was photography” (Batchen, Each Wild Idea 22).
Widely accepted as a “norm of truthfulness in representation” (Ivins 94) and appreciated for its “hyperdetailed facticity” (Thompson 9), the photographic image immediately began to serve several technical, scientific, and aesthetic functions that were tied up in the viewer’s implicit faith in the truth of the photographic record. Produced by a machine and thus free of the artist’s hand, it met the specific needs of a group of social practices and institutions united in their desire to shape our understanding of the world. The remarkably detailed accuracy, indeed, the transparency of the photographic image resulted in its relatively seamless initiation into scientific and technical, but also familial, medical, legal, and governmental institutions. Photographs rapidly came to “function as a means of record and a source of evidence” (Tagg 60) across a number of disciplines and institutions that set up conditions and governed the terms under which photography gained in evidential meaning.
The sentiment that photography is intrinsically connected to the Real and thus presents as intrinsically truthful is echoed throughout its history and up to the present day. For example, André Bazin describes the photograph as an image that is free from the influence of human subjectivity and photography as part of the material object itself, “the photograph is the model” (Bazin 8). The strength of photography’s link to the Real is repeated in Roland Barthes’ famous that-has-been (Barthes, Camera Lucida 77) and in Susan Sontag’s oft-quoted statements that “photographs furnish evidence” and “a photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened” (Sontag 5). However, throughout the history of photography, there were also eminent critical voices that praised photography as an artistic practice or, at the very least, resisted the close
1 See, for example, William Henry Fox Tablot’s “The Pencil of Nature” (1844) in which he praises the usefulness of photography in preserving and copying art (35, 62), or the ease with which it records minute details that no artist would be able or willing to do (33).
2 Batchen references the names of 21 “protophotographers,” people who had the desire to photograph before 1839 (Each Wild
Idea 6-7).
3 Nancy Armstrong links this desire for unmediated images to John Locke’s epistemology (“Realism before and after Photography” 105-106).
(and easy) association of photography and objective truth. Daguerre was among the first to reflect on the photographic image as a highly crafted visual rendition of reality. He emphasized that photographs needed to abide by certain aesthetic norms, especially “the sharpness of the image, delicate gradation of the tones, and above all, the perfection of the details” (Daguerre 12), to fulfill their evidential function. Although he defended photography’s unmitigated connection to the Real, he also voiced equally strong reservations about the medium’s privileged position as the arbiter of truth.
The reassessment of photography’s authority as an objective witness has dominated critical and creative work for the last half-century. While canonical works by Walter Benjamin (“A Short History of Photography,” 1931), Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida, 1981, and “The Photographic Message,” 1977), and Susan Sontag (On Photography, 1977) problematize photography’s vexed relationship to the Real and truth, harsh critiques of photography’s claim to objective and unaltered representation can be found in the work of Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen (“Photography, Vision, and Representation,” 1975), Victor Burgin (Thinking Photography, 1982), Allan Sekula (Photography Against the Grain, 1984), Vilém Flusser (Towards A Philosophy of
Photography, 1984), and John Tagg (The Burden of Representation, 1988). The latter theorists promote a
radical turn to the politics of representation. While Barthes and Sontag adopt a literary and individual approach in their investigations into the nature of photographic meaning and its role in media and ethics, Sekula, Burgin, and Tagg adopt a poststructuralist stance towards the photographic image to examine the social context images reside in and, by extension, assess the ideological structures behind the meaning of photographic images. Undermining deep-rooted ideas that photography produces an objectively truthful image, they emphasize that photographic images do not carry an invariant, static meaning and thus cannot be objectively truthful. As John Tagg convincingly argues, photography and its product, the photographic image, have always existed within a network of discourses that impact their value, meaning, and application. The photographic image “becomes meaningful in certain transactions and has real effects, but […] cannot be referred to a pre-photographic reality as to a truth. The photograph is not a magical ‘emanation’ but a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes” (Tagg 3).
Edward Welch, Andrea Noble, and Jonathon Long give order to the theoretical discussions surrounding photography, observing the existence of two opposing paradigms of how to approach the photographic subject matter: “one which locates thinking about photography in the present and the political, and another which locates that thinking more in the realm of the memorial, the past and the personal […]” (Welch, Noble and Long 15). In this volume, we propose that the question of photographic untruths does not benefit from choosing one theoretical side over the other. Instead, as the emergence of digital photography reminds us, because the meaning of photography is nestled within a web of doubt, it is more productive to embrace the complicated nature of photographic truth in all its richness.
A new era of distrust
From the 1980s and more so in the 1990s, the world of photography underwent another monumental technological change. With the advancement of computer technology, the gears were set in motion for the transition from analogue to digital cameras. This development lead to an ever-increasing rapidness and ease with which virtually anyone could produce, store, and share photographic images. However, the rise of the use and abuse of digital photography fostered a widespread mistrust in the medium’s truthfulness. Scott Walden is adamant that with digital images, it is harder for the viewer to have positive truth connotations towards the photographic image. For him, it is much easier to verify the degree of objective, mechanical
creation of analog photographs than digital ones (Walden 108-110). William Mitchell also references the same mistrust towards photographic truth, attributing it to our intense use of computers instead of film and chemicals. He accentuates how image manipulation is only a matter of changing numbers and that because of the simplicity of the process, “digital images are, in fact, much more susceptible to alternation than photographs, drawings, paintings, or any other kinds of images” (W. Mitchell 7). Geoffrey Batchen shares this sentiment. When he declared, in 1994, that there is a crisis in photography, he was expressing a concern that the widespread introduction of computer-based images would lead to the erosion of people’s trust in photography and its ability to “deliver objective truth” (Batchen, “Phantasm” 46).4 This fear that
computer-driven imaging processes will diminish people’s faith in the truthfulness of photographic images is a profoundly puzzling position to take since making and taking photographs have never been able to production of an unmediated record. Nonetheless, it seems that the advent of digital technologies brought with it a nostalgic and misplaced view that photography once was a technology that granted us a truthful representation of the world around us. These theorists and others like them posit the malleability of digital photography as being at the heart of its uniqueness, but also of a newly kindled awareness of photography’s untruthfulness.
Even a cursory consideration of photography’s various functions and histories indicates that photography, even within discourses that required it to be evidentially sound, was never really seen as producing only an objectively sound or undeniably truthful image. It has always been apparent that photographs show things as they appear to someone; they present their maker’s point of view on a particular subject over which, through the act of photographing, “he exercises his ‘subjectivity’” (Thompson 7). In addition to the human intervention that guides what and how to photograph (framing, subject matter, selecting, cropping, excluding, and other pictorial choices), one must also consider the material constraints -- lighting, lenses, the photo paper5 -- that significantly affect the final image. Photography is nothing if not a representation, and seeing photographs as natural, unmediated images free of the ‘untruths’ of human subjectivity is an “ideological phantasm” (W. J. T. Mitchell 53). It is no surprise, then, that a quick glance over the history of photography reveals how various untruths have always been an integral part of its practices and product.
It seems that the more time that passes between taking and looking at a photographic image, the more the image’s indexical qualities are reinforced and its trustworthiness increased. Owen Clayton cautions against viewing the Victorian public as overtly naïve when it comes to understanding the photographic apparatus and its ability to deceive (Clayton 247). Indeed, numerous examples throughout history demonstrate just how widespread photographic manipulation was before the invention of digital photographic technologies, especially the notorious Photoshop (see Fineman). Even when we are not dealing with photographs born of deliberate deception or playful montage, it is important to note that photography started from a place of necessary untruthful representation of the Real. As Martha Rosler demonstrates, any nineteenth-century photographer trying to marry a cloudy sky with the terrain below it was faced with difficulty since the “orthochromatic film couldn’t do justice to both at once” (Rosler 263). Depicting both resulted in an inevitable montage “posing no problems of veracity for maker or viewer. All these manipulations were in the service of a truer truth, one closer to conceptual adequacy, not to mention experience” (Rosler 263).
Examples of photographic manipulation are plentiful -- from Oscar Rejalnder’s photomontages to Roger Fenton’s “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” from Oprah’s head on another woman’s body to Stalin’s
ever-4 The first crisis -- are computer-generated images trustworthy? -- stems from technology; the other is epistemological, in the sense that the digital era leads to an indistinguishability between simulation and reality (Batchen, Each Wild Idea 109).
5 See Roth, who addresses how film chemistry, photo lab procedures, and color balancing procedures were developed in line with assumptions of “Whiteness” that changed the true nature of the photographic image.
changing comrades -- as are the processes of photographic manipulation, which range from playful montage, misappropriation, restaging, or simple faking to deceptive manipulation and aesthetic decisions to alter what was before the camera’s lens. Reasons behind them are as varied as the images themselves. However, despite these and other examples of manipulation and the substantial critical discourse in photography theory that paints the epistemological status of the photographic image in a dark color, trust in photographic images has remained largely unchanged. Moreover, the digitization of photography has altered approaches to photography rather less than might be expected. This may be because digital photography joins the wealth of photographic apparatuses that operate on different technological bases. Digital photography does not function on another ontological level; rather, it continues to operate within existing photographic codes and historical traditions. Some have even argued that it “productively mimics the indexical photograph, in an unanticipated manner, ensuring the latter’s continued primacy as a vital aesthetic form” (Skopik 270).
Photography oscillates between the documentary and the artistic: on the one hand, it is an indexical image or a snapshot of reality; on the other hand, it is an aestheticized construction of reality, a metonymy or a metaphor. No photograph, digital or analogue, operates purely in terms of its denoted and literal content. Our understanding of photographic truth is based on our belief in the medium’s veracity, but also on the historical context in which photographic images have been placed. Photography is used in many ways that impact our understanding of its truth-value. Reproduced in a newspaper, the same photograph is valued for its ability to truthfully present reality than if it were viewed in a gallery or museum. Linguistic contexts -- captions, headlines, titles -- or the visual space in which a photograph is viewed also alter the way we determine and the extent to which we look for and thus value its truthfulness.
Misplacing the photograph
If “the simplest misrepresentation of a photograph is its use out of context” (Rosler 276), then what forms of untruths open up when photographic images are included in literary works? Does their insertion or reference within the realm of literature speak to how we discern the truthful nature of photographs in general? Clearly, photographs lend themselves to multiple meanings and are open to several interpretations. The inherent multiplicity of photographic images renders them particularly attractive for writers of fiction, who use them in diverse configurations and to various effects. For example, photographic images can be made to function as metonymy and metaphors for “ambiguous concepts such as space and time, memory and loss, appearance and disappearance” (Alù and Hill 7) or to address questions of authorship, subjectivity, and truth. Photographic images in literature can function as tools of detection or revelation, illustrations, visual supplementations, or referential aids. They can pose as found objects or material traces of a past reality, especially when authors reference and reproduce real photographic images that the reader can trace back to the real world. In addition, photography in literature features in a wide range of forms. It presents as domestic or snapshot photography, art photography, portraiture photography, documentary photography, landscape photography, and so forth. Needless to say, the relationship between photography and literature is heterogenous, and its study engages many transitional forms, intermediate stages, and possibilities on how to place two mediums -- words and photographic images -- into a fruitful, dynamic narrative tension. As the options of how to use and produce photography in literature are plentiful, so too is the theoretical material. Before the 1880s when it became possible to reproduce photographic images, the principal way of incorporating photographic images into verbal narratives was by a tipped-in page, making books featuring photographic images expensive and not widely circulated. The subject matter of these books varied from art to travel, science to various ephemera. With advancements in printing technologies, it became easier and less
expensive to include photographic images within a written text. However, with the increased number of books with photographs in them, “‘categories of appropriateness’ for relations between images and texts” emerged (Sweet 34). A rigid relationship between visual images and verbal texts was instated: whereas drawings illustrated fictional literature, photographic images illustrated factual literature, such as news and first-hand travel accounts. Faith in photography’s truth was so persistent that incorporating a photographic image into a work of fiction could undermine the storyworld by connecting it to an external referent. Even in fictional texts that referenced photography as a new and wonderful technology, photographic images functioned as evidentiary material: they were used to reveal the truth of reality or expose someone's real identity (Wilsher 224). When used in literature, photographic images were readily understood to be accurate or truthful representations of a historical, concrete event regardless of whether they were placed in a factual or a fictional narrative context.
Today, the sentiment that photographic images corroborate the verbal narrative persists in considerations of non-fictional literary genres, such as travel-writing or life-writing, where they seem to function as arbiters of truth. Because non-fictional literary genres share a “self-declared obligation to be factual” (Pedri 11), the photographic images included within their pages are often considered to be characterized by a double authenticity: one that stems from a naive understanding of photographic images as truthful and the other from our expectations about non-fiction. But, this double authenticity is also often challenged within the literary works that rely on photographic images. The questionable evidential value of photographic images is particularly underscored in literary narratives that make use of “faulty” photographs, such as those produced with long exposure times and picturing people having three legs or four hands or those whose subjects are out of focus (see Wilsher). Photographic authenticity is also challenged in contemporary postmodernist fiction, where novelists “include photographs as another way to provide authenticity for the purpose of having something authentic to undercut” (Adams 180). The tensions that are put into play between photographic images and verbal narrative highlight photographic truthfulness as highly dependent on the author’s choices, and not so much on the photographic image itself.
Indeed, when photographic images enter the realm of literature, attention is often called to the photograph’s weak narrativity. In these instances, readers are made aware that photographic images cannot articulate specific meanings; rather, (as with other visual images) they can “only frame a general area that contains many shapes and features” (Ryan 9). Owing to this inherent multiplicity, photographic images can certainly represent a historical event, but not with enough specificity that would be able to counter, contest, or negate different interpretations of what is pictured. Regardless of their accuracy or the status of their truth, photographic images simply cannot guide viewers towards one and only one interpretation. In this important sense, photographs in literary texts are at once markers of undeniable reality and, at the same time, representations that require an imaginative intervention in order to be meaningful.
In literature, the photographic image gains in meaning through both its descriptive or documentary quality and its expressive quality. Photographic objectivity thus joins photographic subjectivity to ensure that “the presence of photography in literature almost automatically challenges accepted distinctions between fiction and nonfiction” (Horstkotte and Pedri 8).
The relationship between literature and photography has been widely studied, as attested to by the numerous special journal issues devoted to the topic, including Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature (2004), English Language Notes (2006), Poetics Today (2008), Photographies (2011), and Humanities (forthcoming). The articles collected in these and similar collections trace the growth of thematic
technology (Dinius 2012) and photographic ekphrasis (Miller 2015; Söllner 2018, special issue of Poetics
Today titled Contemporary Ekphrasis (2018)) to the intersection of photography and narrative (Hughes and
Noble 2003). Other prominent areas of study include the relationship between 19th-century literary realism and photography (Green-Lewis 1996; Armstrong 1999; Novak 2008; Clayton 2015) and between modernism and photography (North 2005; Sim 2016; Beeston 2018). Studies that focus on the use of photography within particular national literary traditions also continue to gain in currency (Kawakami 2013; Alù and Pedri 2015; Reischl 2018).
Researchers who study photography’s interaction with literature tend to approach the topic through a factual -- fictional, photographic image -- written narrative lens. Operating with these categories has been high-yielding, but also limiting. When photography intersects with literature, the terms comprising these categories tend to meld together so much so that working within their boundaries risks overlooking central questions that inform photography itself. Contributors to this special issue draw from the terms and notions that inform photography to ask how the explicit nature of photographic untruth opens itself in number of different literary texts.
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Agnes Neier is a Phd student at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research interests include word and
image studies, narrative theory, and lyric poetry. Her doctoral research focuses on the function of photographic images in post-Soviet Estonian fiction.
Email: agnes.neier@ut.ee
Nancy Pedri is Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her major fields of
research include comics studies, word and image studies, and photography in literature. She has edited several volumes and has published many articles in her fields of interest. Her co-authored article, “Focalization in Graphic Narrative,” won the 2012 Award for the best essay in Narrative.
