The Open College of the Arts – Visual Studies 1: Understanding Visual Culture - Part 2: Ways of Seeing.
Since Walter Benjamin and his essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ the standard and methods of mechanical reproduction have changes enormously. For example, colour photography has become the norm and cinema has been superseded by television as the main means of mass visual communication.
Maybe through the development digital technology, the internet will be become the successor of television? It has been suggested that it is in the process of democratising communication, though this was said of the previous successive means of mass visual communication which were in fact, despite of mass access, tightly controlled; concerning both production and distribution.
From photography onwards, new media has become both a significant part of contemporary visual art practice but also central to critical debate.
This week I read and made notes from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930-1920) essay ‘The Social Definition of Photography’. Though this essay covers similar ground to previous essays studied (including those by Osip Birk, Walter Benjamin and John Berger) it does introduce a sociological element to the form of photograph (e.g the social function of ‘frontality’ in photographs).
First section of Bourdieu’s essay (the introduction and ‘Barbarous Taste’) comments as to the way in which photography is taken to be representing the ‘real’. He suggests that perhaps photography is seen as representing the real because society confers on photography the role of such representation, not because it is intrinsic to the medium.
The rest of the essay (‘Hierarchies of Legitimacy’) discusses photography’s position as an art in the minds of a general public and the relationship between the process and the subject. Some discussion of the way in which a subject is chosen and why, and finally he looks at what he calls “The hierarchy of legitimacies”. Could the concept of hegemony applied to Bourdieu’s hierarchy of legitimacies?
I think if you it would be difficult to apply Bourdieu’s argument about photography to contemporary forms of visual artistic expression and performance (e.g. the mediums of video or installation art) as it is specific to photography’s social use being inexplicably bound to social class, though you can apply the concept of hierarchy of legitimacies. As these new forms of visual artistic expression have been adopted by the established market they have also been institutionalised. They are removed from the popular aesthetic and culture and belong to the sphere of legitimacy, though there is an issue with the universal claims of this form of art. This could instead highlight the correlation between high-culture and the avant-garde, in reaction to popular culture.
An interesting point in Bourdieu’s argument:
Since Walter Benjamin and his essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ the standard and methods of mechanical reproduction have changes enormously. For example, colour photography has become the norm and cinema has been superseded by television as the main means of mass visual communication.
Maybe through the development digital technology, the internet will be become the successor of television? It has been suggested that it is in the process of democratising communication, though this was said of the previous successive means of mass visual communication which were in fact, despite of mass access, tightly controlled; concerning both production and distribution.
From photography onwards, new media has become both a significant part of contemporary visual art practice but also central to critical debate.
This week I read and made notes from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930-1920) essay ‘The Social Definition of Photography’. Though this essay covers similar ground to previous essays studied (including those by Osip Birk, Walter Benjamin and John Berger) it does introduce a sociological element to the form of photograph (e.g the social function of ‘frontality’ in photographs).
First section of Bourdieu’s essay (the introduction and ‘Barbarous Taste’) comments as to the way in which photography is taken to be representing the ‘real’. He suggests that perhaps photography is seen as representing the real because society confers on photography the role of such representation, not because it is intrinsic to the medium.
The rest of the essay (‘Hierarchies of Legitimacy’) discusses photography’s position as an art in the minds of a general public and the relationship between the process and the subject. Some discussion of the way in which a subject is chosen and why, and finally he looks at what he calls “The hierarchy of legitimacies”. Could the concept of hegemony applied to Bourdieu’s hierarchy of legitimacies?
I think if you it would be difficult to apply Bourdieu’s argument about photography to contemporary forms of visual artistic expression and performance (e.g. the mediums of video or installation art) as it is specific to photography’s social use being inexplicably bound to social class, though you can apply the concept of hierarchy of legitimacies. As these new forms of visual artistic expression have been adopted by the established market they have also been institutionalised. They are removed from the popular aesthetic and culture and belong to the sphere of legitimacy, though there is an issue with the universal claims of this form of art. This could instead highlight the correlation between high-culture and the avant-garde, in reaction to popular culture.
An interesting point in Bourdieu’s argument:
“In conferring upon photography a guarantee of realism, society is merely confirming itself in the tautological certainty that an image of the real in which is a true to representation of objectivity is really objective”.
I agree that a convention of photography is that, unlike other art form, it doesn’t interpret but only records; though objectivity then only captures an aspect of reality as only the visual qualities, and from one viewpoint (space is thus expressed through the dominant form of Western art perspective), remain.
Unlike traditional artistic mediums, photography (in its most ‘realistic’ form) is deemed not to reflect the personality of the creator; despite the systematic selection of possible photographic subjects. From its inception, photography is considered both realistic and objective due to it recording the visible world; so it assigned the social uses of being realistic and objective.
Photography seems ‘natural’ as its conventional use of perspective makes, for the spectator, the visible legible. This influences our social reading of photography as we refuse the reproduction of reality when it is omits the norm of the canonical aesthetic.
The canonical aesthetic dominates Western pictorial tradition, the use of perspective and thus our perception of our world, which an objective recording reinforces the conveyance of naturalness and truth.
As Bourdieu proposes, this viewpoint is a naive realisation of realism as in fact a photograph is a realistic representation of the real. The conformity to this convention defines photography’s social function to record objective visions of the world.
An initial investigation into the situationist international group (1957-1972) will be helpful in my study of Guy Debord, who was once leader of this group, and the society of spectacle.
I understand that theoretically blended both Surrealism and Marxism to produce a practice of revolutionary art, through ‘situations’, and give a possible insight into the way in which an advanced capitalist society hides the degradation of the life and knowledge behind ‘spectacles’. Here is a quote that I find intriguing:
“The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation”.
Does this build on Bourdieu’s idea of that images are objective representations of objectivity? Would this statement also aide Post-Modern critique?
Further research to be conducted into relationship between culture, society and class distinctions:
- Cook, Jon (2000) ‘Culture, Class and Taste’, in Sally R. Munt (ed) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, London: Cassell, pp97-112.
Bibliography
2010. Situationist International Online. [online] Available at: < www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/index > [Accessed 13 November 2010]
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. ‘The social definition of photography’. From: Photography: A Middleborw Art (Polity Press, 1990) pp.73-98.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge. pp.1-7.
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