The hackneyed wisdom is that a picture is worth a thousand words. But in which language?
Although I have no empirical data to support the assertion, I sense that most people regard photography as a universally accessible medium. We believe it’s possible to understand the power of an image across cultures and across languages. We believe something similar in connection to music. Whether it’s Chinese folk music, Hungarian dances, German symphonies, or glam rock, we don’t need to understand the cultural origins of the music before we feel entitled to have an emotional response to it. This is in contradistinction to literature where the equally hackneyed wisdom holds that something gets lost in translation. This is more than simply a matter of linguistic translation; something also gets lost when a novel or a poem is read outside its cultural context. To offer extreme examples, imagine what Miguel de Cervantes would think after reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or Alexander Pope after reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
But is it true that a photograph is universally accessible? It’s easier to see the cultural contingency of novels and poems because they aren’t directly accessible to those who don’t understand the language. Maybe music sits in an intermediate position. It’s possible to passively receive any musical expression – it falls on our ears and we note the rhythms and melodies, the harmonies, polyphony, mood – nevertheless it’s difficult to gauge how much of the composer’s or performer’s intentions we actually get, especially if we are removed from the composer’s or performer’s context.
A good illustration comes from the documentary, A Pervert’s Guide To Ideology, when Slavoj Zizek observes the cultural slipperiness of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy from the 9th Symphony. We tend to think this music stands as a celebration of freedom and the brotherhood of all mankind (my gendered language is deliberate). Nevertheless, it has been deployed by movements that are ideologically opposed. It was used in Nazi Germany to mark public occasions. It became a communist song in the Soviet Union. While it was accepted in China during the cultural revolution, at the other end of the political spectrum, the Ode To Joy provided the melody for South Rhodesia’s national anthem. Zizek suggests that the music works in so many ideological contexts because ideology itself is an empty container.
This is how every ideology has to work. It’s never just meaning. It always has to also work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings. It’s – you know that gut feeling that we feel when we experience something and we say “Oh my God, I’m so moved. There was something so deep.” But you never know what that depth is. It’s a void. Now, of course, there is a catch here. The catch is that, of course, the neutrality of the frame is never as neutral as it appears.
He then presents a clip from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange when Alex hears a woman in the milk bar singing Ode To Joy. Why is this paragon of cynical delinquency so moved? Zizek’s answer is that whenever there appears to be a moment of universal brotherhood, there is nevertheless a sliver of the populace excluded from that grand wave of feeling. Alex identifies with the excluded and perhaps can hear how Beethoven provided a clue in the Ode which speaks to the excluded. The Ode works as an ideological anthem only if it is ripped from its context to evade Beethoven’s critique.
The “anti-metaphysical lesson which is difficult to accept” is that in our consumerist world the surplus value of a commodity (and here we are concerned with a cultural commodity) doesn’t pique our desire to dig deeper to the object’s core, but rather drives us from the object’s core so we can properly enjoy its surface. Zizek illustrates with a Kinder Surprise treat, popping it open to pull out the toy inside while munching on the chocolate surface.
Can a photograph function in the same way? Does it frame our experience of the world in such a way that it is only frame and nothing else? Can it be readily adapted to any ideological point of view? Can it be treated as all surface and no depth?
I wonder, for example, about all those HDR’d photographs of exotic locales where snow-peaked mountains rise to sunset-purpled skies and the whole vista is reflected in a glassy ocean. They litter my twitter feed. People market them as “fine art” and sell them to decorate the lobbies of dental offices and walk-in clinics. They inspire us. We say “Wow!” They fill us with a sense of awe and grandeur. We almost want to believe in god all over again. If we want them to, they can mean anything. They can mean that god is the author of the natural world. They can motivate us to patriotic fervour. They can inspire a commitment to environmental activism, or tourism, or consumerism. Yawn.
But when we’re in the midst of our grand feeling, we often forget to ask what these photos exclude. I think there are two kinds of exclusion that can happen in connection to photos of grandeur. The first kind of exclusion happens when the photographer frames the scene. To produce the photo of grandeur, the photographer may have omitted the factory, or the trash heap, or the pipe dumping effluent into the glassy lake, or the jet’s contrail in the expansive sky. The second kind of exclusion happens when the person viewing the image realizes that she can never afford to travel to exotic locates, or to make the kinds of arrangements (gear, sherpas, guides, dog sleds, etc.) that are necessary to survive long enough to enjoy the vistas presented in such locales. Or maybe the person can afford the travel but realizes that the impact of such travel imposes an unsustainable burden upon the planet.
While a photograph might strike us as universally accessible, it may in fact be constructed from highly contingent conventions. We can’t perceive them as conventions because we are embedded and participate in the culture that produced them. It’s as if we stand in a plot of tall grass and assume we’re in the savannahs; if we could see over the grass, we’d discover that we’re surrounded by parking lots. Yet many of our popular photographs – HDR landscapes, selfies, silky waterfalls – will, in short order, look as quaint and contrived as French postcards and Victorian tableaux.