What is this a
picture of?
Cara Finnegan’s 2006
article “What Is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives”
prompted my choice of topic. Finnegan describes her experience researching in
the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (“FSA-OWI”) photo
collection at the Library of Congress as a way of approaching her real
subject: polysemic meaning in
photodocumentary images.
Though some may consider
squishiness of meaning more in the realm of postmodern criticism than library
science, as one who comes from and hopes to head back to academia, the more
acquainted librarians, archivists, and catalogers are with the issues that the
scholarly community wrestles with the better. Uncovering heretofore unknown
historical data is in only part of a scholar’s task and for some it is not even
their primary focus. Rather, many historians and art historians are revisiting
ground that has been covered before, looking at both primary material and older
scholarship with a more critical, and for the latter, a newly skeptical eye.
Scholarly inquiry is more interdisciplinary as well, which makes research more
difficult, as classification systems have tended to cling to clear demarcations
between subject areas.
As the literature on
image cataloging attests, posing the question “what is this a picture of?” is
essential yet not that easily answered (Layne). In “What Is This a Picture of?”
Finnegan describes her initial inability to locate an original image of a man
in overalls standing in front of a shack. After much searching, she realizes
that she needed to address the image “on its own terms” in order to find it,
meaning that she had to wrestle intellectually with the collection’s local classification
system. She finally discovered it under “Shacks,” a subcategory of “Homes and
Living Conditions” (117). Finnegan draws two lessons about visual literacy from
this experience. The first pertains to the role of classification systems in
assigning meaning to an image and the second addresses the influence of context
on meaning.
For me, the dialectic
between image and context was already a familiar topic, so the fresh take that
I got from this class came from Paul Conway’s and Martha A. Sandweiss’
articles, in which they discuss digital surrogates of photographs and
electronic versus the original viewing environments, and then the effect of
both on meaning. I will discuss their main points below. What was both new and
fascinating to me was Finnegan’s reflections on the role of image
classification systems on meaning, which she derives from Alan Trachtenberg’s
1988 essay “From Image to Story: Reading the File” on the subject categories
and subcategories that organize the FSA-OWI photo collection. I will be
focusing on Trachtenberg’s brilliant and nuanced essay, which I thoroughly
enjoyed reading and highly recommend.
Context, meaning, and
digital surrogates
Over the course of her
research, Finnegan finds the image of the sharecropper in front of the shack
reprinted in different publications and notes how the meaning it has in the
FSA-OWI archive changes depending on where it appears in print—that the context
of the article it illustrates inflects its meaning. Conway’s and Sandweiss’ articles explore the factors that
can affect the meaning of documentary photos, both originals and digital
versions. Their work reminds us of the sheer number and variety of factors that
can affect meaning, and, by extension, that librarians, curators, archivists
need to be mindful of these factors so that they do not unintentionally alter
the significance of their collections.
Sandweiss notes that
photographer, sitter (subject), and viewer all construct meaning, as does the
photographic medium (the production process) (193–97), and in each case she
elucidates how. Finally, she arrives at the digital surrogate, and the rest of
her article deals with the characteristics of these virtual objects vis à vis
their material analogues. She looks at how the ability to hold a photo in your
hand, appreciate its dimensions, turn it over to see markings or a caption, or
view it on an album page or as part of contact sheet surrounded by other
pictures (physical and intellectual context) all contribute to meaning. She
argues for the importance of the information a scholar can glean from the
actual object, and points out that the circulation of an image, as well as its
reappropriation (i.e., its being reprinted or altered) is also part of its
history. Here she veers into the discipline of material culture. Sandweiss is
not arguing against digitization but rather reminding us that as many physical
features of the original as possible need to be included when creating an
electronic version so that vital information is not lost. What I found
interesting about her argument for inclusiveness is that it echoes one made by
medievalist art historians a couple of decades ago for photographing the text
and marginalia juxtaposed to manuscript illuminations so as not to isolate them
from their intellectual context.
Turning to the image in
digital form, a particularly significant passage in the Conway article
addresses the issue of human agency in the digitization process and its impact
on meaning. The digital photographic images we have access to, per Conway, are
the results of decisions and actions among archivists who select the pictures
to be scanned, digital preservation specialists who decide on their resolution
and format, the folks stuck at the scanners, systems architects, and Web
designers (427). Sandweiss concentrates on the archivist or curator, whose
biases dictate which images will and won’t be scanned, thus potentially
affecting not only access but also the researcher’s conclusions about the
meaning of an image, its series, and the photographer’s intentions (200).
Likewise, she argues for the importance leaving a procedural record of the
steps in going from original to digital so it can be verified that the history
of the object has not been falsified by digitization.
Classification system
as master narrative
The central focus of
Finnegan’s article, when all is said and done, dwells on the FSA-OWI photo
archive as a whole, which she terms “a rhetorical construction.” She declares
that “[b]efore we critically engage the artifacts we discover in the archive,
we need critically to engage the archive itself” (118). Trachtenberg’s essay,
in which he deconstructs the history, concept, and rhetoric of the archive’s
classification system, demonstrates that it is neither as factual or as
transparent as its author Paul Vanderbilt claimed. As Trachtenberg shows in his
sustained analysis, the line between the literal meaning of a photo and its
subjective or connotative meaning is fuzzy and constantly shifting (52–56);
moreover, language itself, the tool for describing the categories and
subcategories of pictures in the classification system, is not neutral (56).
 |
| Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream, 1840 |
As Finnegan learned, to
find particular FSA-OWI photos, then, one had to be versed in the master
narrative of civilization to which Western societies and their legal and
political systems adhere, one that gives precedence to landowners and
ultimately to the development of the land into cities with architectural
monuments to human culture and achievement. This sense of progress can be seen
in the early 19th-century paintings by the American artist Thomas Cole, for
example—his Architect’s Dream
and the series The Progress of Empire. Indeed, one can see the preference for those enfranchised by land
and property in a portion of Vanderbilt’s classification system quoted by
Trachtenberg: under the main
category “Houses and Living Conditions” is the subcategory “porches, yards,
gardens, servants” (53). Thus photos of servants in the FSA-OWI collection,
those who are not land or property owners but who are subordinate to those who
are, are effectively dehumanized, just another architectural feature of daily
living.
Pity the cataloger
The last section of
Trachtenberg’s essay gets at the heart of the problem of visual literacy when
it comes to documentary photographs, which can be thought of as both social
records, thus factual, and at the same time artistic. Trachtenberg argues that
the term “realism,” used by Stryker and others to describe the photographic
project of the FSA-OWI, is so value-laden as to incorporate the narrative
discussed above and therefore call the pictures” objectivity (status as factual
documents) into question.
The lack of
straightforward meaning of the photograph, while it may cause much
consternation to the image cataloguer, is vital to acknowledge. Librarians,
archivists, and curators do not simply provide access to information but to
knowledge. Acknowledging ambiguity is a declaration of knowledge.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “The
Photographic Message.” Image, Music, Text. Roland
Barthes.
Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
15–31.
Conway, Paul. “Modes of
Seeing: Digitized Photographic Archives and the
Experienced
User.” The American Archivist
73 (Fall/Winter 2010): 425–62.
Finnegan, Cara A. “What
Is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and
Archives.”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
9.1 (Spring 2006): 116–23.
Kratochvil, Antonin and
Michael Persson. “Photojournalism and Documentary
Photography.”
Nieman Reports (Fall 2001):
27–31.
Layne, Sara Shatford.
“Subject Access to Art Images.” Introduction to Art Image
Access:
Tools, Standards, Strategies.
Ed. Murtha Baca. Getty
Publications,
2002.
Sandweiss, Martha A.
“Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the
Digital
Age.” The Journal of American History (June 2007): 193–202.
Shatford, Sara.
“Analyzing the Subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach.”
Cataloging
& Classification Quarterly
6.3 (Spring 1986): 39–62.
Tibbo, Helen R.
“Primarily History: Historians and the Search for Primary Source Materials.”
Proceedings
of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Portland, Ore. (2002): 1–10.
1935–1943. Eds. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London: Univ. of California Press, in association with the Library of Congress.
1988. 43–73.
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