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Is a photograph worth a thousand films?Jan Baetens

Online publication date: 06 November 2010

To cite this Article Baetens, Jan(2009) 'Is a photograph worth a thousand films?', Visual Studies, 24: 2, 143 — 148To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14725860903106146URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725860903106146

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ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/09/020143-6 © 2009 International Visual Sociology Association

DOI: 10.1080/14725860903106146

Visual Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, September 2009

RVSTIs a photograph worth a thousand films?1

Is a photograph worth a thousand films?JAN BAETENS

This article aims at scrutinising the narrative power of a medium which one considers unable to perform narrative tasks: photography. Not only has photography a problem when it wants to tackle issues of time, storytelling and fiction; moreover, the medium is suffering from the negative comparison with one of the media that has replaced it (‘remediated’ in the sense coined by Bolter and Grusin), film – a medium initially called ‘animated photography’. Yet the analysis of an example, a picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson which also exists in movie form, suggests that the power of a fixed image may exceed, under certain circumstances, that of a mobile image. In order to understand this paradox, however, one needs to analyse narrativity not only in terms of media forms, but also in terms of media practices and to stress the role of the reader.

Hopefully I will be excused for starting with a statement that seems rather obvious, not only in my opinion, but also within the literature that has been published on the matter over the years: narrativity (i.e. the capacity to tell a story) is not to be contained within a single medium. On the contrary, narrativity must be understood as a signifying human faculty that can be extended over different media. The self-evidence of these findings does not mean that the ‘same’ story told through different media would not be influenced by the mediatic diversity of its avatars, but this seems to be something that is taken for granted as well nowadays. The only implication here is that, at a theoretical level, all media are, or may become, narrative. In practice, however, things turn out rather differently. If all media are decent hosts to narrativity in theory, some are nevertheless somewhat more decent than others. Some media are better fitted to accommodate stories in general; others are more gifted to present a certain kind of story.

It is within this perspective that I would like to tackle the issue of narration and photography within the following pages. Not only because photography has remained something of an outlaw with respect to narratology, rightly so or not (and I am personally inclined to adhere to the second opinion), but also, and especially so, because photography is still considered to be an

essentially dull medium at a narrative level and in this way – because photography tells so little and so badly – it deserves nothing but being kept in the margins of narratological investigation.

TO INSTRUCT THE PROCESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

As for the current situation of photography in the field of narratological investigations, in spite of a considerable interest in the narrative aspects of the medium, an even greater number of still existing preconceptions tend to diminish the narrative potential of, and interest in, photography. It is possible in this regard to distinguish two levels, based on whether one considers photography as a medium of the ‘fixed image’ among other such media, or whether one is inclined to endow photography with its own specificity within this group of fixed images media.

On the one hand, the photographic image partakes in the weaknesses of fixed images in general, which are considered to be good at ‘showing’, but not very good at ‘telling’. An image is worth a thousand words, so the proverb goes, and this superiority of visual media over verbal ones at the level of showing is quite obvious. But, from another point of view, one word might as well be worth a thousand images, at least when it comes to enunciation at the level of ‘telling’. To cite Christian Metz: ‘An isolated photograph has got no story’ (Metz 1968, 53).

On the other hand, the photographic image as a subgroup of the fixed images category is considered to be an even worse storyteller than the other types, for reasons that researches of mediatic specificity and cultural history keep pointing out. In this respect, three types of argument, most of the time in combination, are frequently cited.

To the extent that the photograph is conceptualised as a snapshot, the photographic technique itself will, almost by nature, rebel against capturing temporal flow, without which it is quite difficult to produce any kind of story. Snapshot photography brings the difficulties of

Jan Baetens is Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. His interests gravitate towards the interactions between texts and images and recently he published different volumes and articles on novelisations, as a scholar (La novellisation. Du film au roman, Bruxelles, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2008) and as a poet (Vivre sa vie. Une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2005). He is also a member of the executive board of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS; http://www.iawis.org).

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144 J. Baetens

representing time, inherent in all fixed images, to a hyperbolic level. Photography transcends the fixed image’s ambition to tell a story and aims at ‘meaning’, a much more prestigious goal than the story, always lingering in the dubious regions of the anecdote. Of course, just like painting, the photographic medium has means at its disposal for representing a ‘decisive moment’, but the traditional ethics of non-intervention into the reality of the photographed events is indicative of an ancient and rampant contempt towards photographic fiction and diminishes the medium’s chances of finding such an ‘instant’, with which painting suggests a before and an after.

The second argument reinforces the first, in that it underlines the fundamental inaptitude of the photographic medium, not only to capture the temporal dimension that is necessary to tell stories, but also and most of all to generate certain psychological aspects that are no less necessary. A story can neither be reduced to the passing of time, nor to the sole representation of any event. Most of all, this temporal passing on the one hand and the representation of an event on the other must generate a certain interest in the minds of the viewers so that the story ‘crystallises’ around them. Or, just as the signifying dimension of a slice of life is highly dependent upon what is presented concretely in front of the lens, the limited manoeuvring space of photography explains why the medium regularly fails at capturing what is necessary for a story to take off. Various authors contrast analogue photographic images with synthetic images, either painted or engraved. With its inability to focalise the actions that really matter (and leave out what would divert attention) and its incapacity to render the represented events in a dramatic way, photography seems inherently disqualified in comparison with more ancient representational techniques, not to say with more primitive ones.

A third argument against photography consists in the fact that the medium, in contrast to other fixed media, blocks off the transfer into the field of fiction almost as if by law, and it goes without saying that fiction is an important generator of narrativity. This general incompatibility between photography and fiction has been analysed meticulously by Roger Odin (1987). He observes that ‘measured against the criteria we have just proposed, photography seems completely incapable of producing the “fiction-effect”’ (Odin 1987, 47). To give an example, in photography, the ‘illusion of reality’ does not exist as it does in the cinematic medium (the second of the six preliminaries listed by Odin). In a somewhat surprising way, which beautifully exemplifies the

willingness of the author to do away with any possibility of the medium being narrative, he notes:

Photography is quite incapable of creating an ‘illusion of reality’. Certainly, photography will represent reality, but since it is not gifted with the capacity of capturing movement, it does not give us at any time the impression of being confronted with that reality. In photography, representation never surpasses the referential act. (ibid., 47, my translation, emphasis in the original)

As a provisional conclusion, one could state that if fixed images in general are being perceived as less narratively inclined ‘by nature’ than certain other media, the photographic image has the reputation of doing an even worse job in the narrative department, and all this for reasons having to do with the specificity of the medium: photography is devoid of time, meaning and fiction.

THE REMEDIATED PHOTOGRAPH

The appreciation of narrative faculties in a medium can never be determined in an absolute way. Every medium functions at the heart of a mediatic ‘ecology’ where interaction, rivalry and mixed influences are rules rather than exceptions. Since the invention of cinema, attention has shifted towards the comparison between fixed and moving images (the basis of this approach was the mechanical as well as the referential nature of both mediatic images: cinema and photography both offered imprints of reality, obviously obtained without direct human intervention).

To the narrative analysis of the medium, this comparative dimension is of primordial importance, for two reasons. On the one hand, the comparison is enlightening, in that it is only in the light of other media that photography can be delineated. On the other hand, this approach also plays a transformative role, in that it is through contact with other media that the position and forms of photography as a narrative medium are being modified. In fact, the inventory of weaknesses and strong points of one medium can never be definitive. According to the authors of an influential study on the matter (Bolter and Grusin 1999), the internal and external logic of the evolution of media is one of remediation:2 either an old medium is substituted by a newer one that is better equipped to do the job, or an old medium is submitted to a series of metamorphoses inspired by the new one, in order for the former to surpass the latter. The first case is labelled ‘remediation’ in the true sense, within the terminology of Bolter and Grusin, the second

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Is a photograph worth a thousand films? 145

case is called ‘repurposing’ (which in this way becomes an indirect form of remediation).

In the field of narrative photography, both cases apply. The medium itself has been remediated directly by the filmic image, which was thought to be much more flexible, adequate and convincing at a narrative level. The new medium of film exercised an indirect remediation on photography as well, since the cinematographic model unleashed a spectacular return of time and story into the photography of the twentieth century.

These researches on the narrative potential of the medium try to emphasise without exception the medium’s narrative capacities beyond the classical trope of the ‘decisive moment’ on which the pre-cinematographic ideas of time and story have focused. The findings tend to evolve in the following five directions:

• investigations of sequence, which is no longer considered to be a fall-back solution or a journalistic subgenre;

• new experiments with the stretching of time of exposure and/or of developing;

• the integration of photographic material into multimedia installations that will often implicate the idea of a trajectory through temporal flow (or at least through duration);

• the use – revaluation, invention, replacement – of mixed genres that combine a series of images with narrative texts, as for example the photo-novella (probably the most despised photographic genre ever);

• at last, the ever more explicit tendency – at least in the field of postmodern photography – for creating fictional worlds.

It goes without saying that these paths tend to be combined, and are mutually enhancing. However, what is most striking in this context is that in spite of this interest in time, story and fiction within contemporary photography, the prejudices against narratively oriented photography remain powerful, as if the medium itself could only become a narrative tool in a peripheral and secondary manner. At that level, the conclusion will hardly be any different from that reached earlier on through the comparison between photography and other types of fixed images.

THE LIMITS OF REMEDIATION

If many factors seem to compromise or even condemn photography as a vehicle for a structured narrative

programme, it happens at times that photographic practice itself forces one to reopen these theoretical files.

In fact, whatever may be the theoretical objections put forward against the narrative powers of the photographic image, the contact with certain images throws the viewer, often brutally, into the universe of a story.

The exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography that toured Europe in 2004 included a well-known image taken in Dessau, Germany in 1945.3 The picture, taken at the moment of the Nazi deportation camps’ liberation, most definitely tells a story. The caption specifies its

‘subject’: during the registration of the camp wardens by a representative of the American army, a female prisoner who had been set free recently suddenly recognises in the uniformed warden the woman who handed her over to the authorities at the beginning of the war and who has

hence been the primal cause for her imprisonment. In the photograph, the camp warden is facing the US official seated behind a desk and encircled by a group of liberated prisoners, one of whom is shown at the

moment of being about to strike her. This ‘subject’ is narrative, and it is not difficult for the viewer to imagine a story based on this image.

However, what makes this image so fascinating is the fact that within the same exhibition, in a room next to the

one with the photograph, the audience could watch a documentary, Le Retour (The Return), made by the very same Cartier-Bresson, which incorporated the exact same scene, this time ‘in its entirety’.4 One could see how

the warden is brought before the representative of the allies by soldiers, how a woman subsequently emerges from the crowd, and finally how this former prisoner starts insulting and beating the warden, who in return defends herself until the soldiers reappear to put an end

to the fight. In short, what the film shows is not only a decisive moment, miraculously captured by the photographic camera, but also what came before and afterwards (with a voice-over replacing the caption). In fact, in a strange way, and to the extent that I am allowed

generalisations based on my personal and singular experiences (I mean unique, not to be repeated, and of course subjective), to the onlooker, even after a back-and-forth travel between projected image and image on the wall, it is the photographic image that seems most

narrative.

This particular spectatorial experience is far from self-evident. In addition to the danger of turning a singular experience into something universal (‘a photograph is

more narrative than a film’), this way of reading is not at all generally agreed upon in regard to Cartier-Bresson’s

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146 J. Baetens

cinematographic work, where the family ties between photography and cinema tend to be stressed. Serge Toubiana, one of the most astute commentators on this image, both filmic and photographic, recognises the exceptional narrative power of this scene, which he attributes to its unexpectedness, without distinguishing between the fixed and the mobile image:

An interrogation of women: the one who is dressed in black recognises the one that denounced her to the Gestapo: she cannot control herself, and hits the other right in the face. We discover that Cartier-Bresson made a photograph of the scene as well, almost from the same distance as the film scene, and framed similarly. The power of this particular photograph, most well-known within the works of Cartier-Bresson, and of this particular shot are closely linked with the unexpectedness of the scene, which presents itself as a real event. Direct cinema, pictures taken in the moment, like an uppercut or a snapshot. The works of the photographer and the director come together, melt into one and the same gaze. (Toubiana 2003, 353, my translation)

Nevertheless, in certain cases, of which the image under investigation is a good example, one can defend the opposite stance, according to which the photographic image would at the level of spectatorial reception host a higher degree of narrativity than its cinematographic equal. In order to defend this stance, it does not suffice to specify the differences between the photographic and the cinematographic image, since this would be both wrong as a pretext and as an argument (in the cited analysis of Toubiana, one might question the statement that both images are taken ‘almost from the same distance’, since the film frames the two protagonists from a lesser distance than the photograph, where the camera is further removed from its object). The essence of the reasoning must be placed on the side of the spectator, even if the qualities of the image are of importance too. To say it differently: a narratology of the image must be conceived more or less within a cognitive paradigm, so that it may become clear that less information – since a picture shows less than a film – can conjure up a stronger narrative impulse.

From a technical point of view a similar observation remains intriguing. In fact, the story that Cartier-Bresson tries to communicate is shown more adequately by the picture than by the film. What should we think of a practical experience that contradicts the theoretical doxa to this extent? It is of course always possible to ignore the teachings of a case that is too specific to be repeated or

shared, but this attitude may become quite problematic (what is the value of a theory that thinks it fit to ignore practice?) and risks ignoring the most fundamental questions. What Cartier-Bresson’s images show are the limits of remediation and what they do is urge photographic viewers to reconceptualise the photographic story in the light of remediation. Even if the mobile cinematic image is supposed to remediate the narrative weaknesses of the fixed photographic image, this logic does not apply to this case at all and it turns out that, in fact, certain forms deemed non-remediated may very well have a stronger narrative impact than their so-called remediations. Hence, on the basis of a single case by Cartier-Bresson, one may question the relations between narrativity on the one hand and mediatic specificity on the other. That is exactly what will be done in the following paragraphs.

REMEDIATING REMEDIATION

The easiest answer to the question raised by Cartier-Bresson’s images is the following: if the photograph seemingly has a greater narrative potential than the film, this is so because Cartier-Bresson’s fixed image is a superlative illustration of the principle of the ‘decisive moment’, where the film on the same subject by the same author is ‘flat’ to such an extent that it cannot satisfy the narrative desires of the viewer. This reasoning is not wrong, but it is not possible to deduce any intermediatic theoretical conclusions from it. The fact that a certain picture is more narrative than a certain film does not prove that the photographic image in general would be narratively superior to cinematographic ones. What is more important is that even in the absence of the ‘decisive moment’ strategy, photography really can give way to a story, as the renewed theoretical interest in time, story and fiction may prove, but as is also documented by national wisdom that states that ‘every picture tells a story’.

In order to understand the narrative potential of fixed photographic images, it is thus not enough to underline the possible acquaintances with the aesthetics of the ‘decisive moment’. What needs to be stressed is the position that ‘lacunae’ (vacancies, blanks, uncertainties) have acquired within the narrative impulse, becoming the foundation of any narrative reading. On the other hand, it is to the extent that photographs explain, say or show that their narrative powers diminish. If one accepts this hypothesis, the conditions under which the debate must be placed have been drastically changed. What is at stake is no longer the opposition between a certain

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Is a photograph worth a thousand films? 147

medium and another, but the opposition between different uses of a single medium.

From this perspective, one can also get a better grip on the failures of many attempts at remediation, of which the photo-novella remains an infamous instance (Baetens 1993). This is the occasion to recite Roger Odin, who, after having concluded that photography and fictionalisation were fundamentally incompatible, did not hesitate to condemn the remediated form of narrative photography, namely the sequence (his judgement on the matter is all the more striking in that the example he cites enjoys an uncontested cultural legitimacy):

Curiously, photographic sequences (for example, the famous ‘sequences’ of Duane Michals) hardly favour fictionalisation at all. On the contrary, they rather display the tendency of inhibiting such a dimension. The fact is that they state too much; that they are constraining desire. Through imposing a story, they impede all belief in it. . . . In fact, one is rather moved by a single photograph that one is free to construct as one pleases, to one’s own fiction. An isolated photograph is hence a far better operator of fictionalisation than a photographic series. (Odin 1987, 50, my translation)

It is appropriate here to go one step further. If the discussion on the narrative degree of an image reaches further than the simple comparison between media, it cannot be limited to the difference between uses of media either. Indeed, what renders an image narrative does not depend so much on what is there to be seen, as on how one reads what is there to be seen. This hypothesis, which replaces the analysis of the object by an analysis of the reading process, should be situated within the wake of the ‘cognitive turn’ in narratology (Herman 2003). One of its (many) implications concerns the importance of the desire to understand. If the aptitude of an image for storytelling is not (only) a function of the action within the image, but of the way a reader finds it apt to read this image as a story, one could say that this first aspect should be situated at the level of representation and the second at the level of comprehension. To express it more generally: the first dimension can be shown; the second dimension must be understood. In fact, it goes without saying that the fixed image does not raise fewer questions of comprehension than the mobile image. The relation between the ‘lacunae’ or ‘blanks’, the importance of which has already been underlined, and the narrativising reading

process becomes more clear-cut. It is because certain elements at the level of visual representation are missing that the perception of the image, having become more active, will try to overcome the problems of visual comprehension, narrative decoding being without any doubt among the more satisfying paths to choose to achieve this goal. Here as well, the fixed image, being less saturated with information than the mobile image most of the time, is well fitted to instigate the narrative decoding. Paradoxically, the mobile image would from that point of view be handicapped through its talent for directly representing time, since it would disappoint the viewer always in want of mysteries and enigmas.

Is a photograph worth a thousand films? It depends: on the type of photography, on the type of reader, on the type of context. One may only hope that the reflections brought up here might have helped gain an understanding that the question itself, apart from the appearances dictated by common sense, is anything but absurd or ridiculous.

NOTES

[1] A longer and slightly different version of this article was

first published in French in Protée 34 (2/3), 2006. This

version was translated from the French by Heidi Peeters.

[2] Bolter and Grusin (1999) defend media as inherently

mimetic, but we can transpose their arguments without

any difficulty to the field of narrative faculties as well.

[3] The official caption reads: ‘At the liberation of the

deportation camps a woman recognises the informant of

the Gestapo that had handed her over, Dessau, Germany,

1945’.

[4] Technically speaking, the picture by Cartier-Bresson is

not a film still extracted from the film, enlarged and

printed as a photograph; the picture is truly original. As

Serge Toubiana describes it: ‘The film has been produced

by Noma Ratner and the American information services,

in collaboration with the American Army and former

French prisoners. With the help of cinematic operators of

the American Army, Cartier-Bresson was in charge of the

shooting, aided by Captain Krimsky and Lieutenant

Richard Banks’ (Toubiana 2003, 352). This said, the

theoretical stance that I try to define here escapes this

sort of genetic questioning (considering the complexity

of any cinematographic production, one can never

pinpoint authorship unproblematically to one person

only: the director the author, the cameraman, the

producer), just as it is indifferent to the order in

which the fixed and mobile image are being viewed

(whether one sees the fixed image first and then the

mobile image, or the other way round, in my opinion

in no way affects the narrative superiority of the former

over the latter).

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148 J. Baetens

REFERENCES

Baetens, Jan. 1993. Le roman-photo. Paris and Brussels: Les

Impressions Nouvelles.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation:

Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative theory and the cognitive sciences.

Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Metz, Christian. 1968. Essais sur la signification au cinéma.

Paris: Klincksiek.

Odin, Roger. 1987. (Contribution with no title). In Pour la

photographie II. De la fiction, edited by Ciro Bruni, 42–52.

Paris: Grems.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. Narrative across media: The language of

storytelling. Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press.

Toubiana, Serge. 2003. L’œil en mouvement. In De qui s’agit-il?

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Une rétrospective complète de

l’œuvre d’Henri Cartier-Bresson. Paris: Gallimard/

Bibliothèque nationale de France, 348–55.

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