The Pivot of the World Photography and Its Nation Blake Stimson Frontispiece: Eadweard Muybridge, Movernent of tile Hand; Beating Time, ca. 1884­ 1887, detail of frame' 1, 2, 7, 8. Courtesy of George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology For Louise All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stimson, Blake. The pivot of the world: photography and its nation / Blake Stimson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISH ! 0-262-69333-X (pbk.) 1. Photography-Social aspects. 2. Photographic criticism. I. Title. TR183.S75 2006 770-dc22 2005051703 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents It is much more difficult to believe that the forms of thought which per­ Acknowledgments ix meate all our ideas-whether these are purely theoretical or contain matter belonging to feeling, impulse, will-are means for us rather than that we Prologue: Lost in the Middle serve them, that in fact they have us in their possession. What is there more in us as against them? How shall we, how shall I, set myself up as Introduction: The Photography of Social Form 13 more universal than they are? -G. W F Hegel, 1831 Photographic Being and The Family of Man 59 My body is the pivot of the world. 2 Photographic Anguish and The Americans 105 -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945 3 The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher 137 Epilogue: Art and Objecthood 177 Notes 189 Acknowledgments My first forays into this project on the 1950s were developed during the early days of my graduate study at Cornell University, only to be set aside for more focused attention on the art of the 1960s. I will return to the later period in studies to come but felt the need, first, to work out my under­ standing of its immediate prehistory, the last gasp of an older ambition before it gave up the ghost in order to be reborn as the new, in the finished form you hold here. With this project now complete, I continue to believe it fundamental to ground my understanding of the very forceful influence of the subsequent art-historical period marked so brightly and distinctly by pop art on one end and conceptual art on the other. During its brief life at Cornell, this project benefited in countless direct and indirect ways from, first and foremost, the learned, sensitive, and agile critical attention and support of Hal Foster. My thinking will be influenced forever by that attention. Susan Buck-Morss was also a constant inspiration and mentor and served as a reviewer of thiS project at its earliest stage. Other teachers who touched on or inspired the project in particularly important ways at Cornell were Emily Apter, Peter Hohendahl, and Eric Santner. So, too, the project would not be what it is without the rich exchanges among a small graduate student cadre of Hal's students: Helen Molesworth, Peter Brunt, Lawrence Shapiro, Frazer Ward, and Charles Reeve were all invaluable interlocutors and good friends. The research and writing of thiS project in its mature form was supported generously by the University of California Humanities Research Institute; the Clark Art Institute; research and publication grants from my home institution, the University of California, Davis; and the goodWill of my colleagues in the Art History Program. I am very grateful to David Theo Goldberg, Carrie Noland and the Gesture group in the first and to Michael x IAcknowledgments Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, Mark Ledbury, Gail Parker, and my colleagues in Prologue: Lost in the Middle the Spring 2004 research program at the second for their support and enthusiasm. Particularly valuable as well in ways both specific to this undertaking and more generally here at UCDavis have been ongOing spir­ ited conversations about shared concerns with Neil Larsen, John Hall, Benjamin Orlove, Clarence Walker, Douglas Kahn, and Simon Sadler. The ideas presented here in final form have been read or listened to and commented on generously and graciously by a greater number than could possibly be listed. Such responses have been invaluable to the development of the project, both because of the suspicions, concerns, critiques, and questions raised that helped me to better understand the limits and pOSSi­ Writing at the dawn of the 1960s, prominent American historian, veteran bilities of my own aims as well the simple affirmation that comes from an cold warrior, soon-to-be librarian of Congress, and aspiring public intel­ engaged audience or reader. This was so at all public venues but especially lectual Daniel]. Boorstin lamented the impact of photography on society. the case for lively audiences at University College, London, the Tate Modern He was concerned that photography's mechanically achieved democratiza­ (for which a version of chapter 3 has since been published), and the Clark tion of image making also served to cheapen and falsify both individual Art Institute. I am thankful in this regard particularly to Andrew Hemingvvay . and collective experience, both sense of self and sense of community. 'I As and his IIMarxism and the Interpretation of Culturell seminar, to Steve individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism,u he Edwards and Dominic Willsdon at the Tate, and to the Clark leadership diagnosed in his popular book The Image or Whatever Happened to the already mentioned above. American Dream: uWe have fallen in love with our own image, with images Valuable readers and attentive critics of the manuscript in part or full of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.'I The problem, have included Alexander Alberro, Sherwin Simmons, Roger Rouse, and Gail he reasoned in the psychosociological language of his moment, was one Finney, who is publishing a version of chapter 3 in her Visual Culture in of boundary confusion or loss of differentiation between authentic and 20th-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle. The manuscript was also com­ inauthentic, self-generated and other-generated forms of representation. mented on generously and helpfully by two anonymous readers for MIT Ulmages,U on the one hand, and Uthe way we think of ourselves,u on the Press and by several more anonymous external readers for an academic other, he wrote, have ubecome mergedU and in so doing, the American review and by my thoughtful and supportive colleagues in the Art History dream of self-realization was squandered. The sheer glut of photographic Program at UCDavis. I am grateful to them all, as I am to two research imagery, its ease of production, and its centrality in cultural self­ assistants, Fauna Taylor and Rebecca Arnfeld. So too I am indebted to Roger understanding had overwhelmed identity by infecting it with the mechani­ Conover at MIT Press for his support of this project. cal qualities of the photographic process and thereby was draining it of Finally, I express special thanks to two friends who supported me with humanity. Full of period psychodrama and period ambivalence about mass undue grace during a personally significant stretch of this undertaking: culture, he declared that this shared pathology was Uthe monotony within Melissa Chandon and, already cited above for his intellectual contribution, us, the monotony of self-repetition. ul That alienated condition was born Neil Larsen. To both, as Neil likes to say, un abrazo. Most important of all, of the brute material, machine-enhanced fact of photography, he reasoned, this book is dedicated to my dear daughter, Louise. of the scary realization that we ulive willy-nilly in a world where every manu had been mechanically endowed with a new and disturbing capacity to be-of all things threatening-lihis own artist. u2 2 I Prologue Prologue I 3 This fear, of course, like the euphoric this-is-the-American-dream flip side generated by the ubiquitous and never-ending flood of snapshots, adver­ of the mass culture Boorstin was critiquing, is as old as photography itself, tisements, and other photographic documents, was thought to bear within but in the 1950s, it had a special, pressing currency. Photography's "deepest it the possibility of a new political identification, the possibility of a civic­ identification," as another critic put it at the time about mass culture more minded collective self-understanding that would generate a new postwar, generally, "rests largely on the least individualized and most anonymous postmodern citizen of the world. Ultimately, the promise of thiS condition aspects of ourselves." As a medium of representation, it was too flat, too was that, when exercised properly, it could be a means of salvation from quick and too easy, and thus the social identification it offered was based the horrors of the recent past and a means to prevent them from recurring. not on identity but instead on "dissociation of personality," on "social The goal was not so much a new, improved, transnational identity­ anonymity."l This heightened period perception of a loss produced by realized in a socially contracted ethic or shared vision of the past or photography is the subject of this book.