S OLIDARITAT I NTERGENERACIONAL

While it can be argued that the genre of the photographic essay as a construction of narrative by means of photographic material offered ‘a path to greater knowledge and enlightenment about the rapidly changing world’, these same technical approaches were indeed ‘co-opted for reactionary purposes, even if they maintained the sheen of “the new”.’164

In photographic essays, ‘photographs may have functioned like written or spoken language, but as with written or spoken language, they could also be co-opted and misused.’165 Barthes’s reading of both the photographic message and the written message limits our understanding of the photographic essay: in dealing with the photographic images as if they were text, Barthes assumes the documentary nature of the photograph. Whilst Barthes acknowledges the ideological constructions of photographic images (i.e. what a photograph means, its connotations), he does not explore how, and to what extent, the processes involved in the production of photographic images – the staging, organisation and construction of

photographs – influences the narrative of the photographic essay. This is a fundamental limitation of Barthes’s work in the context of press photography and more specifically, the photographic essay. While Barthes’s writing has been influential in the theoretical approach to photography, and photojournalism, and his exploration of the relationship between text and image has allowed for further examination of the specific relationship between these two ‘structures’ in Picture Post, his work has limitations, as will be shown in the following section.

164

Magilow, Photography in Crisis, 13 165 _{Magilow, Photography in Crisis, 7}

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Hence, if the photograph is to be ‘read’ as a text, this highlights the problematic nature of the text/image relationship in the photographic essay. In light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘implied text’ it can be asserted that there are limitations to understanding how a photographic image can function as a language. Bakhtin addresses the function of the text, stating that,

Each text presupposes a generally understood […] system of signs, a language (if only the language of art). If there is no language behind the text, it is not a text, but a natural (not signifying) phenomenon, for example, a complex of natural cries and means devoid of any linguistic (signifying) repeatability.166

This serves as a means to an understanding of the way that the receivers of photographs collectively ‘read’ images. Without a recognised sign system, the photograph – or series of photographs – would not tell a story. The photographic essay relies, to this end, on a

generally understood language, or system of signs, as Bakhtin writes. This may go some way to address the presence of the written word in a photographic essay – that the text (in this instance, the words) – are there to direct and inform. Burgin, too, focuses on the linguistic constraints of photographic imagery, asserting that,

[…] importantly, it was shown that the putatively autonomous “language of photography” is never free from the determinations of language itself. We rarely see a photograph in use which does not have a caption or a title, it is more usual to encounter photographs attached to long texts, or with copy superimposed over them. Even a photograph which

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has no actual writing on or around it is traversed by language when it is “read” by a viewer […].167

However, it has previously been argued that the functions of the visual image and the written text have now been reversed. Kriebel, in her introductory essay, highlights the contradictory nature of photographic theory, in relation to the text/image relationship. In reference to Walter Benjamin and Barthes, Kriebel asserts that,

While Benjamin sees text as offering depth and structure, Barthes ultimately considers text as a repressive form of ideological control: text helps the viewer to “choose” the correct level of understanding, leading the viewer to attend to some signifieds in the image and avoid others.168

Consequently, the written text, rather than emphasising the effectiveness of photographic narration, seemingly imposes an ideological structure on to the image, limiting its multiple possibilities of interpretation. As it has previously been established, Barthes emphasised the oppressive nature of the written text by stating that, ‘[…] in the relationship that now holds, it is not the image which comes to elucidate or “realize” the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image.’169

To summarise, this section has examined the text/image relationship in the photographic essays of Picture Post in light of Barthes’s theories of photography. It has recognised that the inclusion of written language in a photographic essay – the title, captions, articles and

167 _{Burgin, ‘Looking at Photographs’, 143} 168

Kriebel, ‘Theories of Photography’, 14 169 _{Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, 25}

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essays – ‘quickly constrain interpretive possibilities and elicit specific interpretations.’170 The noted limitations of Barthes’s treatment of the press photograph and its relationship with text places significance on the role of written language in the text/image relationship which in turn restricts, or burdens, the reading of the photograph. This, however, is not the intended function of the text in a photographic essay. Rather, it is by means of photographic material that a narrative is constructed. Moreover, it has been acknowledged by Barthes that the signifier of connotation in a sequence of photographs can be found in its construction as a narrative, rather than in the individual images. The photographic image is no longer considered subservient to the text but the processes of manipulation inherent in the

production of a photographic essay have been made visible. According to Gisèle Freund, While the written word is abstract, the photograph is a concrete reflection of the world in which all of us live […]. Photography became a powerful means of propaganda and the manipulation of opinion. Industry, finance, government, the owners of the press were able to fashion the world in images after their own interests.171

Thus, the next section of this chapter will explore the processes of construction involved in the production of a photographic essay and will address how this influences the ways in which a story is told through the assemblage of multiple photographs with text.