However, the shifting history of perceptual psychology is only half

of a problem whose other half is the photographic image's subse-

quent dissemination, circulation, presentation.
The photograph very quickly ceases to be the property of the
photographer, and becomes subject to the often competing choices
of other people; it is 'put to use'. These various interferences concern
the photograph's generical placement (photojournalism, documen-
tary, portraiture, reportage, etc.), its contexts of presentation, the
rhetorical purposes it may be called upon to serve, and above all,
perhaps, the language(s) by which it is accompanied. Max Kozloff
makes the point with invigorating bluntness: 'However they are
conceived, images have to be mediated by words';3 and Victor Burgin
reinforces the case:

We rarely see a photograph in use which is not accompanied by

writing: in newspapers the image is in most cases subordinate
to the text; in advertising and illustrated magazines there tends to
be a more or less equal distribution of text and images; in art and
amateur photography the image predominates, though a caption
or title is generally added. But the influence of language goes
beyond the physical presence of writing as a deliberate addition
to the image. Even the uncaptioned photograph, framed and
isolated on a gallery wall, is invaded by language when it is
looked at. 4

We are familiar with manipulations of the image by cropping, air-

brushing, montaging, digital 'remastering'5 and so on; we are also
familiar with the distortions effected by language, economies with
the truth, the pre-empting of perceptual possibilities. But we are
perhaps less familiar with the range of different kinds of linguistic
accompaniment, and how these vary from genre to genre; and less
familiar, too, with the expressive implications of the syntax and
punctuation which characterize these linguistic accompaniments.
These are the essential concerns of Part I of this book.
Part I shares some of the concerns of Mary Price's The Photo-
graph: A Strange, Confined Space (1994).6 But although Price is
concerned to show how 'the language of description (be it title,
caption, or text) is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at
photographs' (blurb), she does not attempt to differentiate linguis-
tically between different types of description, nor to investigate the

10 THE SPOKEN IMAGE

linguistic structures employed in those descriptions. Her interest
lies principally in a certain vocabulary, in certain metaphors, by
which photography is characterized, and these are fascinatingly
woven around a sustained critique of WaIter Benjamin's photo-
graphic writing.
More pertinent to my enterprise here are remarks made by
Peter Wollen in his suggestive essay 'Fire and Ice' (1989), where he
briefly refers to the presiding linguistic models used in titles and cap-
tions, and speculates about their relation to genres or to particular
photographers:

News photographs tend to be captioned with the non-progressive

present, in this case a narrative present, since the reference is to
past time. Art photographs are usually captioned with noun-
phrases, lacking verb-forms altogether. So also are documentary
photographs, though here we do find some use of the progressive
present. The imperfective form is used more than usual, for
example, in Susan Meiselas' book of photographs, Nicaragua.
Finally, the imperfective is used throughout in the captions of
Muybridge's series photographs, in participle form.?

I am interested not in testing the statistical truth of Wollen's obser-

vations but in following them up, by looking at the grammatical
and syntactical characteristics of titles and captions in certain
photographic genres.
Chapter 1, 'The Nature of Photography', explores the relative
distances and proximities between language and the photographic
image, by tracing the 'life' of a photograph through C. S. Peirce's
semiological categories of index, icon and symbol. The Peircean
categories have long been applied to photography, but with
disagreement, and without a proper exploration of the relation
between them. I try to express the relation as a progressive (or
regressive) one, an itinerary that different genres of photography
may undertake in different directions. Chapter 2 considers some of
the ways in which photographs interact with their titles and captions,
while making a distinction between these two terms; ultimately it
argues that photographs are semantically richer the more 'speech-
less' they are. Chapter 3 examines the different languages used to
present documentary photography, and centres this general investi-
gation on the work of Don McCullin. Chapter 4 looks at the activity

INTRODUCTION 11
 of captions in newspapers (on a specific day in July 1993), and how
their syntactic structure affects the way we respond to the
photographs and their 'news'; here, for example, attention is paid to
what is insinuated by the use of colons and suspension points.
Chapter 5 turns to fashion photography, to the different layers of
language that accompany the fashion photograph and the way in
which these complicate the reader's relation to the photograph
itself; we also discover how adjectival strings equate with the fashion
notions of 'combination' (matching, teaming) and the 'accessory'.
Throughout these chapters, the emphasis is squarely on photo-
graphic genres in their contemporary guises. No attempt is made to
trace either the history of the genres concerned or the history
of the relationship between the visual and verbal in the world of
photography. The purpose of this book is to provide the 'consumer'
of photographic images with a means of integrating linguistic
awareness into photographic response, that is, into a response prin-
cipally to current photographic sources. It is intended that this
'integration of linguistic awareness' should also provide the reader
with methods and tools of analysis, features to look out for, and
ways of transforming data into interpretation. In short, and in the
book as a whole, I have concentrated not on contexts of production
but on aspects of the context of reception, of reading; not on social
backgrounds but on psycho-perceptual mechanisms; not on histories
of relationship - between high and low cultural forms of photog-
raphy, for instance - and development, but on encounters with
individual images and works, in their own space as it were. Of course,
history intervenes, because I have not tried to keep it out; but it does
so unsystematically and untendentiously.
Throughout Part I, I have made occasional reference to literary
texts, not only because writers are often photographers (e.g. Zola,
Shaw, Tournier, Guibert), but also because our assessment of
photography, and in particular our ways of talking about it,
are often generated by literature: for example, even when they are
writing about photography, Benjamin, Sontag and Barthes remain
essentially literary critics. Equally, in Chapter 3, I have used
Hitchcock's Rear Window as an allegory of documentary photog-
raphy, because the filmic and the photographic have closely inter-
twined destinies, share a medium and inevitably reflect upon each
other. This reciprocal, and often mutually corrosive, scrutiny is

12 THE SPOKEN IMAGE

particularly evident in films that investigate the making of narra-
tive; this is why Greenaway'sA Zed & Two Noughts and Antonioni's
Blow- Up are crucial to the concerns of Part 11.
If Part I explores the photographic image's harassment by, and
frequent subjection to, language, Part 11 moves in the opposite
direction, and considers the capacity of the photograph to match,
complement and even supplant language in narrative enterprises.
The seeds of this particular proposition have already been sown in
Chapter 2.
Chapter 6 presents a study of Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two
Noughts, as a way of dramatizing the relationship, and exploring the
ground, between the photographic and the filmic (and, indeed,
the painterly). This chapter implicitly advances the argument that,
of all modern visual media, film is the one best equipped to handle
(post)modern narrative, an argument explicitly questioned in
Chapter 10. Just as Rear Window provided an allegory for docu-
mentary photography, so A Zed & Two Noughts fulfills this func-
tion for narrative photography. One of the compromises between
the filmic and the photographic, the magazine photo-story, is the
subject of Chapter 7. While the photo-sequences of the photo-story
devalue the expressive and narrative power of the individual
image, making this particular solution to photographic narrative
seem peculiarly gauche, an attempt is made to retrieve from it a
social and existential subtext by which the genre might be explained,
particularly in relation to its teenage readership. Chapter 8 examines
the narrative potentialities of the single and compound photograph,
and the ways in which various photographers and photographic
genres have tried to overcome the medium's narrative limitations.
This discussion acts as a prelude to Chapter g, an investigation of
the collaborative work of John Berger and Jean Mohr, which
progresses from a belief in the indispensability of language to
photographic narrative (A Fortunate Man and A Seventh Man) to the
discovery of narrative versatility in the photo-sequence alone.
Nevertheless, Berger and Mohr's thinking about photography as
'another way of telling', independent of language, is still under-
pinned by a linguistic theory of photography. In conclusion,
Chapter 10 briefly considers other examples of the photo-sequence
(by John X. Berger and Victor Burgin), in which photography, no
longer dependent on text for its ability to speak, can turn to

INTRODUCTION 13
 text/language as to a partner (and possible competitor) in the game
of meaning. In this game, in which the score is constantly lost or
erased, and in which the players are likely to change the rules as
they go along, no result is to be expected. The chapter closes by
returning to that other game with which Part 11 began, the game
between the photographic and the filmic, with language as the
ball-boy. An analysis of Antonioni's Blow-Up explores the protago-
nist's inability to become a true protagonist, seeing this as exem-
plary of the modern narrative predicament. The earlier part of the
chapter, however, has already shown that the filmic has no monopoly
of this kind of telling.
Photography is such a fluid, mobile, unstable medium, so diverse
in its applications, that any writer who takes it as a subject should
avoid being too categorical about any aspect of it. In various writings,
for example, Benjamin makes a distinction between painting and
photography based on the indispensable activity of the practising
hand in the one, and the absence of handwork in the other. 8 This
distinction is also part of David Hockney's thinking about photog-
raphy.9 But many photographers would argue, I am sure, that the
finger which releases the shutter is an essential instrument of the
photographer's deep psycho-physical involvement with his subject,
and the co-ordination of eye and finger in the taking of a photo-
graph is quite as complex as that called upon in drawing, even if
very different in nature. A study of the history and changing signi-
fications of the handling of cameras has yet to be written; we can
only speculate about its possible findings. Nevertheless, it remains
inevitable that anyone who essays a typification of photography, or
a classification of photographic species, must commit themselves to
argumentative positions that engage with the categorical. If photog-
raphy is to be thought about at all, these gambles must be taken,
and I have certainly not resisted them. I would, therefore, exhort
the reader to treat confident assertions with the utmost circum-
spection, and consider them as the necessary staging posts of the
thinking process.

14 THE SPOKEN IMAGE

PART ONE

Titles and Captions

ONE

The Nature of Photography

A recurrent question about photography is how much self-expression

it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each
corresponding to a different location of photographic skill. The
opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares's novel The Adven-
tures if a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito
Almanza declares: 'I am convinced that all of photography depends
on the moment we press the release [ ... ] I believe that you're a
photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.' In
making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed
by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: '[ ... ]sometimes
I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn't begin in the
dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.?! Roughly speaking,
then, the first version maintains that the photograph 'happens' in
the act of taking, in visual contact with the world, which exercises
the photographer's ability to see into his environment, to anticipate,
to intuit oncoming revelation or significance in his surroundings;
the second version, on the other hand, implies that the taking of
the photograph is only the necessary bridge between the creative
interventions of the pre-photographic and the post-photographic. 2
In the first version, self-expression means responsiveness to the
circumambient 'dynamic', an empathy with it that endows the
perceiver with a special visual sensitivity to the scene's subtlest
nuances and fluctuatiol1s. Self-expression thus lies in the taking of
an expressive image, not in any imposition of self on scene; in other
words, 'subjectivity' is not conceived as an egoism out to appropriate
the world but as a rare capacity which seems passive but is in fact an
active inhabitation of, or co-operational relationship with, the living
environment. The notion of the camera itself, reduced to a 'sensitive
plate', expresses this state of active availability to one's surroundings.
The art of this first version lies principally in seeing and in
capitalizing upon chance. As far as the latter is concerned, we might

17
 argue as follows: given that the speed of the shutter is what marks
photography off from all other visual media, chance is crucial
to any 'aesthetic', and indeed any expressivity, associated with
photography, even at its most deliberately posed. In this regard,
photography has aesthetic affinities with Surrealism,3 for the
Surrealists not only looked upon chance as the instigator of images
- with the implication 'the greater the element of chance, the more
suggestive, the more profound the image' (one thinks particularly
of the Surrealism's founding image, culled from Lautreamont's
Les Chants de Maldoror. 'He is beautiful [ ... ] like the chance
encounter, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an
umbrella' (my italics);4 they also believed in 'le hasard objectif'
('objective chance'), that magical way in which external reality
often fulfils the desires and impulses projected into it, a preordained
coincidence. As a photographer, Edouard Boubat explains, one must
be prepared to be surprised by chance: 'I am surprised by the photos
I find. I don't make the landscape. It's already there. I'm all the
more surprised because I don't do anything. All you have to do is
open your eyes and release the shutter from time to time.'5

Skill, then, lies in the ability to surprise chance, to anticipate it.

Ultimately though, one needs both capacities, the reactive and the
anticipatory. In Guy Le Querrec's words: 'I would like always to be
available: available to be surprised by what I didn't expect and
sharp enough to recognize what I expected. Two different kinds of
surprise [ ... ]. The important thing is to succeed in taking those
photos which confirm my feeling about life.,6 If the Surrealist
courts the 'merveilleux quotidien' ('the magic in the everyday'), a
photographer such as Lartigue seeks to 'attraper l'emerveillement
qui passe' ('to capture the passing wonderment'),7 and photogra-
phers are best able to provoke reality into providing moments of
revelation by being emotionally attuned to their surroundings - as
Guy Le Querrec implies, emotion passes through the eye - and
totally assimilated into them, so that no self-awareness in the envi-
ronment inhibits its spontaneous self-expression. But the photog-
rapher, of course, also has to be able to see. 8 Photographic seeing
itself follows two different persuasions: (1) the eye of the photog-
rapher is an SLR camera, the brain the film, so that his camera
merely registers what he has already seen (this would be the view,

18 THE SPOKEN IMAGE

for example, of Le Querrec, Cartier-Bresson or Lartigue: 'it is not
the camera which takes the photo, it is the eyes, the heart, the
stomach, all that');9 (2) the camera is a different kind of seeing, and
the photographer has to learn what its eye will reveal, can reveal, in
those split seconds which elude us, which, with our lazy and selective
optical habits, we always miss. WaIter Benjamin calls the place in
visibility peculiarly occupied by the camera 'the optical unconscious':

It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to

the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven
together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together
unconsciousl~While it is possible to give an account of how people
walk, if only in the most inexact way, all the same we know
nothing definite of the positions involved in the fraction of a
second when the step is taken.
Photography, however, with its time lapses, enlargements, etc.
makes such knowledge possible. Through these methods one
first learns of this optical unconscious, just as one learns of the
drives of the unconscious through psychoanalysis. 10

The eye of the camera sees an alternative, parallel, or imbricated

reality to which we must accustom ourselves, for the camera is the
eye of modern technology, and this is the eye we must adopt
if we are not to become 'the illiterate' of the twentieth century.
This was the programme pursued by Moholy-Nagy, and the new
kinds of vision he attributes to photography are: abstract seeing
(photogram), exact seeing (reportage), rapid seeing (snapshots),
slow seeing (prolonged time exposures), intensified seeing (micro-
photography, filter-photography), penetrative seeing (radiography),
simultaneous seeing (transparent superimposition) and distorted
seeing (optical jokes).
What then interferes most with photographic seeing? Perhaps
we should mention just three things for the moment. First, seeing
is interfered with by the intrusion of function, and most particu-
larly by that function of photography which is, precisely; to supplant
seeing: 'Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between
themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure
of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience:
stop, take a photograph, and move on.'ll As an instrument of mental
'tourism', the camera colonizes reality, takes possession of it, turns

THE NATURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY 19

 it into the impotence of image, something without the right of
reply, something subservient to the photographer's gaze. Photo-
graphs of this kind do not relate to the present in which they are
taken, but to the future in which they will be viewed, the future
of the album or slide-show. At the same time, paradoxically, the
photographer can use the photograph to authenticate experience.
The second factor of interference lies in the degree to which the
photographer is identified by his/her subject (and therefore specifi-
cally reacted to, prevented from seeing), or unidentified (and
therefore free to see, to capture the spontaneous, but also invasive,
deceitful, voyeuristic). Nowhere is the dilemma greater than in the
highly moral universe of documentary photography (see Chapter
3). The ideal would seem to be 'identification as a photographer,
but total social assimilation', a mixture that many photographers
would like to feel was achievable, but about which one cannot but
be sceptical. Brassal in the Paris underworld had typical ambitions:
'But it was very difficult to overcome their distrust of me. Despite
the [popular dance-hall] owner's acceptance, in the eyes of some of
them I was still an informer. What I wanted was for the suggestion
to take photographs not to seem to come from me, but from them. H2
Some believe that the subject's awareness of the photographic act
produces an emotional exchange peculiar to it and valuable for that
very reason:

For a long time I sneaked my photographs; that is, took them

unknown to whomever I was photographing [ ... ] But it's really
only a second-best, and I realize now that, terrifying as it may
seem, a confrontation with the person photographed is always
preferable. For it's a good thing for the actual taking of the snap
to be reflected in one way or another in the face or attitude of the
subject: as surprise, anger, fear; amusement or flattered vanity;
buffooning or obscene or provocative gesture. 13

The final factor that interferes with seeing is, of course, language.
Photographs of the kind we are discussing are pre-linguistic, a
'truth' of vision before it has achieved formulation. If we wish to
take this journey in reverse, to return to that freshness of vision
associated with the pre-conceptual, pre-interpretative, then language
must be forcibly stripped awa~ Paul Theroux's Maude Pratt (Picture
Palace, 1978) expresses it thus:

20 THE SPOKEN IMAGE