Review of *The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship*

The impact of images on contemporary society has long been a subject of intense debate.  The topic has fundamental importance given the literally countless visual productions of every type flooding public life.  The number of photographs circulating in books, magazines, newspapers, and social media like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc., has reached a level never previously seen before.   The resulting excess of visual information is beyond the grasp of any single person.  Is there any possibility for a shared public culture when creators of images target particular groups of viewers and each person selects a small slice of what is produced to follow, effectively excluding much of what others find meaningful?   Given the abundance characterizing visual culture, how can scholars use images to theorize the character of contemporary public life?  This vital question is at the center of this prize-winning book by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, two specialists in communication studies.  They ask readers to reflect on the political, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of the current overabundance of photographic imagery.  Both authors have long worked on photography as central to the construction of public life.  Their collaborations include a previous volume, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and a blog on photojournalism and public culture, nocaptionneeded.com.

The new study raise questions with no easy answers:  How has the profusion of images reshaped how one knows the world? Is it possible to discern the actual from the virtual?  Can decontextualized images produce critical and ethical knowledge? What can viewers learn from images that are alternative and artistic? These questions have been discussed ever since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. During the last forty years, however, critics have given increased attention to the many ways photographs construct understanding of the modern world.  Susan Sontag, for example, in her indispensable essays on photography went well beyond the classic worry that the mass media manipulated photographic images in ways that prevent the public from knowing what was real and what was invented. She took for granted that photographs are intregral to modern experience, transforming apprehension of reality in ways simultaneously creative, communicative, seductive, powerful, and dangerous given that the public no longer can have certainty about what is real.  Other theorists of photography, such as Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Dora Apel, Ariella Azoulay, Geoffrey Batchen, and Susan Buck-Morss, also pushed aside concerns about originality and photographic reality to propose other problems revolving around the photographic image as a strategy for repositioning democracy to reveal its plurality and vitality.  In these earlier examinations of photography, there was often awareness, albeit timidly expressed, that most images produced in the public sphere reinforce ethnocentric worldviews when they circulate in a globalized world that is unfair, unequal, and frequently undemocratic. These writers like Hariman and Lucaites typically responded enthusiastically to the unconventional images of public life that art photographers produced, arguing that aesthetics contributed to building a public of active citizens able to make and carry out choices, a dramatically different public from the passive consumers, distracted, disappointed, and manipulated by mass-circulation media. The abundance of reproduced images becomes a form of mental pollution when it generates, for example, the misguided and insensitive idea that basic needs are more affordable in today’s world than they actually are for most people or that the new forms of social media make everything of importance visible and accessible.

Hariman and Loraites’ new book, while not ignoring the intense relationship that public photography has with the entertainment industry, advertising, and commercial illustration, is sharply focused on art photography.  The authors argue that the relation with contemporary art appeals directly to the public imagination with sensitive, alternative visualizations probing the ethical dimensions of social life.  Pictures considered art are simultaneously rational and imaginative constructions.  The imagination is central to linking photographic imagery to debates over social values because imagination foregrounds capacity to see the world from different perspectives.  Without imagination there can be no empathy, nor any possibility of public space changing to include citizen choices that counter hegemonic power. From this perspective, art photography promoting critical vision expands social understanding by making visible the estrangement inherent to contemporary society, as well as the strength and diversity, the new democratic possibilities, found in unexpected places.  According to Hariman and Lucaites, an image can provoke political and ethical reflection by showing, for example, which parts of the world’s public life rest on the pain of others.

The book is organized around theoretical analyses of forty-eight photographs, work that the authors use to demonstrate the critical potential of art photography.  The book’s seven chapters discuss images as shared experiences, the process of photographic interpretation, realism and imagination, how photography became a form of modern art, theories of visuality, the practice of war photography, and the challenges of artistic abundance. I was particularly touched by the photographs that Aeron Huey took in an Indian reservation in the United States. Huey’s work shows not one person living in the community, only dirt, a wall, and a cemetery.  The photographs succeed in portraying the continuing invisibility of indigenous peoples in the United States today and the threat of oblivion their communities still face. Huey’s images work by showing what a society privileging success and happiness cannot see (drama, violence, poverty), in effect making visible a visual culture that creates the present through oblivion of the past.  A second photograph that I found particularly interesting, by Ramzi Haidar, captures a moment where men at war take a momentary rest.  Haidar’s caption reads, ”After Shiite fighters seized control of parts of West Beirut, the gunman, right, took a break to drink coffee on a sweet corner.” The image suggests an idea of contemporary war as a conflict where those who fight may well be amateurs, indeed ordinary, friendly citizens, not well-armed professional heroes serving an all-powerful state. In addition to photographs of dramatic and violent situations, the authors explore many other types of contemporary public imagery.  They analyze, for example, how photographers are reworking the landscape genre.  The photographs that XINhua/Landov produced of agricultural landscapes in China emphasize the beauty of what human engineering adds to nature, a beauty to be discovered in the human capacity to transform rather than in the power of raw nature.

Many photographs presented in the book push viewers to think about the relationship of what is immediately visible in an image to what is not shown, foregrounding the authors’ contention that art photographers often stimulate imagination of what is not visualized in their pictures. For those living in a world where radically simplistic political and social agendas abound, the work they examine is particularly precious.  Despite the abundance of information and images in circulation, public media actually do a poor job presenting a full range of what exists, of what might be valued if it were visible.  The photographs presented in the book confront the blindspots within an abundance of imagery. They reveal social realities and intellectual possibilities the world contains but most public media do not.

(translation by Richard Cándida Smith)