James Elkins otherwise helpfully breaks the very broad field of photographic theory into three areas of ongoing debate: its standing as a contemporary fine art, its social significance (its history, usages, and the cultural implications of these) and, finally, how it operates as “a way of capturing the world.”²⁰⁷ The first, he suggests, tends to attract art historians, curators, art critics, and also some artists. The second can equally appeal to art historians but also commentators working in socio-political sciences and cultural humanities. The third is largely the realm of thinking theories, concerned with photography’s relations to such matters as “representation, time, memory, duration, presence, love, loss, mourning, and nostalgia,”²⁰⁸ though his list is not exhaustive.

This breakdown, though a useful starting point, is restricted to theorists writing about the photographic. What is overlooked is an important fourth area of inquiry: practice-led approaches by photographers and artists using the photographic as means of interrogating the medium and their other concerns, materially and conceptually, across all three of the critical theory categories outlined. This omission is somewhat astonishing, as in the absence of considered engagement by practising artists, theorists would arguably have less rich material to respond to. Elkins does specifically cite Jeff Wall as an example of an artist working with photography who also writes about it,²⁰⁹ but Wall is best known as an artist whose works “challenge the traditional pictorial protocols linking the photographic image with its referent”,²¹⁰ questioning the temporal and visual veracity of the photographic in, for instance, tableaux made by stitching together images produced in separate time frames and theatrically staged for that purpose. Elkins nonetheless positions Wall as a theorist in the first of the three areas above, that of “the status of photography as fine art”,²¹¹ when the nature of Wall’s work, and his writings about both it and the photographic more broadly in relation to it, better fit in Elkins’ third or thinking theories category, based on his own definition of that. And this, in one example, demonstrates a certain blindspot in photographic theory – a lack of acknowledgement of practice-centred enquiry as a form of critical thinking.²¹² As Alan Trachtenberg observed: “There has been little notable effort to address the medium itself, to examine its evolving character, its social and cultural properties, its complex relations with other media, and the great variety of roles it performs.”²¹³ Kriebel rightly points out that this quote is drawn from a text (Classic Essays on Photography) published in 1980, since when aspects of Trachtenberg’s criticism have been explored to varying degrees. But she then indicates areas of enquiry which she thinks have yet to be addressed: “...how does matter mean? How do the material and physical processes of different photographic practices contribute to the meaning of the image represented? [...] …how does the photographic physicality transform into meaning?”²¹⁴ This research found responses to these interesting questions with the help of Walter Benjamin, through reflections on specific works by certain artists and – most importantly – in the experiences of people living with dementia.

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CHAPTER 3: PICTURING

The photographic medium is of central importance to my research, and I begin this discussion by defining it as the material either generated with any number and variety of photographic apparatuses (cameras both analogue and digital, with and without lenses), or that produced by means of cameraless techniques with light sensitive supports, such as cyanotype contact prints and other photograms. In addition, some forms of process that require light to produce photographic objects, such as photocopies and Polaroids made with an Instant Lab Printer, can be included here.

As an art, photography can then be said to encompass what the material thus generated may be in and of itself, and/or what the artist subsequently makes with it, though the artist may not necessarily have produced the photographic material they use (for instance, collagist John Stezaker appropriates and transforms vintage Hollywoodian publicity portraits of actors),²⁰³ and it may not involve recognisably figurative imagery (as in Christiane Feser’s series of abstract relief works collectively entitled ‘Partitionen’).²⁰⁴ As will be demonstrated by an installation produced in the course of this research, the material may be indirectly photographic (e.g. as video footage of Polaroid emulsions) but still arguably be considered as such, or at the very least be understood as being about the photographic. There is, of course, much more to photography than this. In ensuing sections of this thesis dedicated to my creative practice research I will discuss specific materials and their usages more closely than here.

As I deliberately chose not to approach dementia by photographing people, I feel no need to include critiques of the medium in relation to its purportedly abusive potentiality²⁰⁵ – although I would acknowledge this to be one of the most enduringly dominant lines of thought about it, in this instance it has not been deemed necessary to address it given that the photographs I’ve made and used in my research are largely of objects. Another dominant strand of photography critique is related to technology, as summarised by Sabine T. Kriebel: “How do we speak in one breath of photography, and unproblematically incorporate a range of objects and practices that includes daguerreotypes, calotypes, 35-millimeter [sic] prints, Polaroids, and digital photographs into a convincing theoretical model?”²⁰⁶ To objects and practices can be added qualities and functions and, as Kriebel’s almost rhetorical question concisely suggests, a unifying theory of photography that satisfactorily encompasses every available means of production has proven elusive.

This recognition of a ‘more than’ as advantageous is what can seem, at times, to be missing in many discussions about the photographic, especially those focussing narrowly on its technological or veridical aspects. Just as with plays, poems, performances and other art forms, photographs can be perceived by their audiences as having truth value, or some kernel of such (be this something universally pertinent and/or personal to the individual encounter), even if the work in question is evidently fictional or abstract. According to Hegel, “In art we have to do not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but with an unfolding of the truth;”²⁴³ that works of art ‘aim at truth’ and can provide ‘truth-accessible possibilities’ in ways that are ‘freely interpretable’ and autonomous,²⁴⁴ with and without the artists’ consciously conceived (or unconsciously channelled) intent. Although photography has long been accepted as an artform, an historical, but fairly persistent, conflation of photographic indexicality (the image as inseparable from the thing photographed) with its character as a similar-but-different referent or analogy, can trouble our perception of it. While, compared to other art forms, photography’s indexical or objective qualities are not necessarily epistemically disadvantageous,²⁴⁵ issues arise if, as Martin Lefebvre forwards, “a sign (a photograph) is interpreted in such a way that its epistemic value is understood to rely chiefly on its existential connection to what it stands for,”²⁴⁶ as this then “reduces the image’s contribution to knowledge and limits any potential semiotic growth.”²⁴⁷  

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“The act of photography is one of phenomenological doubt”²¹⁵

By the time phenomenology began to take shape photography was already in its sixth decade of existence.²¹⁶ But though philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre were aware of it to the extent of “mention[ing] photographs as an illustration in… discussion of imagination,”²¹⁷ Cheung Chan-Fai suggests that beyond these early references there was no in depth analysis of the medium from a phenomenological perspective.²¹⁸ This is no longer the case, and the Vilém Flusser quote opening this subchapter is the starting point for discussion of this shift.

At the root of ‘doubt’ is the Latin dubitare, meaning “‘to question, hesitate, waver in opinion’ (related to dubius meaning ‘uncertain’)... with a sense of being in ‘two minds, undecided’,”²¹⁹ corresponding to current understanding and usage of the word. For Kriebel, “the experience of uncertainty yields a pleasurable state of unknowing,”²²⁰ and she suggests that doubt can be a productive space between the binary positions of “those who have insisted that photography is an absolute construction and those who long maintained its ontological referentiality”;²²¹ a zone in which to approach alternative understandings. This space, Douglas R. Nickel proposes, is one of indeterminacy:

Doubt is not a property of the photograph: it is a tendency of the human mind. [...] At a phenomenological level, the photograph offers its hypothetical viewer occasion for both confidence and doubt, and in the act of viewing, this viewer connects ambient social knowledge to what he or she takes as the attributes of the object.²²²

The confidence he speaks of here is situated in familiarity, recognition that “something that looks like a photograph almost always is one”;²²³ that what the viewer brings to their encounter with the photographic are “assumptions about how a medium represents and the empirical status of the thing represented… it is the assumed ontology that matters to our faith, doubt, or any other kind of meaningful response we might have [and] entails not confusing ‘what is’ with ‘what is perceived to be’.”²²⁴

This confusion can be said to be deeply ingrained in our approaches to photography. From its beginnings, claims that photographic imagery perfectly ‘mirrored’ whatever was before the camera when a photograph was made²²⁵ have arguably always been exaggerated, but this has not necessarily impeded our perception of it as realistic. As Steffen Siegel points out, Louis Daguerre himself, aware of his photographic process’ flaws (e.g. images being in black and white, not colour), led the campaign forwarding its detail and realist qualities to counter criticisms of its deficiencies, and thus initiated discourse about the medium’s “representational perfection.”²²⁶ Between 1839, when the first photographic processes were announced (both by Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot), and the advent of technically and commercially accessible colour processes – beginning with the autochrome, invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière, and manufactured by them for sale from 1907 onwards – there is a gap of nearly seven decades, during which time the only way to introduce colour was to tint black and white photographs by hand. The distinctive colour castes of early processes like autochrome, while ‘truer to life’ than black and white, were still not wholly accurate pictorial representations of ‘the world’. Even as colour processes gradually improved and more photosensitive materials were developed (allowing for the ‘capture’ of movement and increasing ability to photograph in lower light levels, for example) – work that continues apace with digital technology – straightforward photographs have only ever been crude approximations compared to what the naked human eye is more flexibly capable of seeing. Imperfections have ranged from the grain and contrast of analogue processes, to the pixellated ‘noise’ and other aberrant visual artefacts of digital technology (none of which are necessarily disadvantageous if they are considered as inherently photographic and exploited as such).

What photographic processes can do that distinguish these from unfiltered human perception is to permit ways of seeing that are distinctly different. As well as pictorially arresting framed instants of time they can show things close to and far away, and so on. The technologies developed are, as can be traced back to Freud for example, “forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions [and that] are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, [hearing] trumpets.”²²⁷ The ‘prosthetic’ devices cited have all evolved since Freud’s day, particularly in the case of hearing aids, but in large part remain at human scale, even as improvements allow for greater subtlety and sophistication in the way they function for our benefit. As tools, they extend and ameliorate human physical limitations and defects (sight deterioration and hearing loss due to ageing, for example).

In the specific case of photography, the apparatuses and techniques of their usage to produce photographic materials requires skill and practice: there is more to photography than the brief action of releasing a camera’s shutter. The act of photographing can involve keen observation: a heightened awareness of the world around one, an openness to the images that might be perceived there, a kind of pattern recognition – Charles Baudelaire’s notion that “the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs.”²²⁸ Baudelaire was talking about painting (specifically the painting of Eugene Delacroix), but it seems even more apt to consider his quote in relation to photography given that, since its invention, the medium has provided increased means to analogically see images in, and draw them out of, the world. American street photographer Garry Winogrand famously said that he took photographs “to find out what something will look like photographed.”²²⁹ Underlying this quote is an awareness of the process of transformation that the act of photographing entails – the rendering of a subjectively time-based, three-dimensional, multisensorial experience (of sound, smell, texture, and so on), into a stilled two-dimensional and purely visual representation. Or analogy, as photographs show us familiar things differently to how we visually perceive them in real time, and additionally show us aspects of things we could not otherwise see even if present at the time of their making, meaning that they can be at once familiar and unfamiliar.

The use of different light sources, high and low shutter speeds, lenses, filters, double exposures, and many other technical choices, can all serve to affect the pictorial outcomes of whatever photographic instrument or process is used. Photographic technology does not dictate these technical choices, anymore than the process imposes points of view or subject matter. Also, though photographic images can be said to reflect only the surface appearance of what they flatly and mutely depict, such transformations can still be perceived as evocative and thus contain potentially transcendent qualities, in that the imagination of the subsequent viewer may fill their sensory and narrative ‘gaps’, much in the way that conjunctions of objectively abstract letters, as words, can generate mental imagery and feeling in their reader. Although we may be still “a long distance from being able to say what happens while we are reading a text,”²³⁰ in the sense of being able to ‘explain’, neurocognitively and philosophically, what takes place when we engage with reading matter (be such stimuli pictorial or textual), perceptual and emotive responses may be aroused, and “almost all people imaginatively project themselves into texts as a fundamental part of any act of linguistic understanding.”²³¹

In addition to the transformations outlined above – from the embodied experience of the photographer into the photographic work that is then experienced by its viewer – other kinds can be cited. Despite the objective-seeming fixity of photographic imagery the medium (or, more accurately, our response to it) is in fact unstable, in that the forms, scales and contexts in which it is seen influence our perception of it. An encounter with an identical picture in a family album, on a social media platform, in a publication, pasted to an advertising billboard, and displayed in an exhibition space affects our reading, as it is seen in different materials, at differing scales, framed by disparate surroundings or supports, and viewed in conjunction with other images and/or texts. Also, though the instant in which a photograph is initially made cannot change (other than through loss or deterioration of the original), our responses to it may shift over time: the image is both of the past and in the present moment of our engagement with it. The ever widening gap between past and present allows for a distancing that in itself is a space of recontextualisation – or indeed multiple spaces, given that the present is perpetually unfolding, attitudes evolve over time, and our encounters with images may not be singular events.

Understandings of photography as temporally ambiguous lead us to Walter Benjamin; despite his purported reservations about the medium,²³² he too considered that photographs occupy past, present and future as “document[s] of history and possibility.”²³³ In Little History of Photography (1931, henceforth Little History) he writes:

The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search… a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long ago forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.²³⁴

This is actually quite a romantic notion, in that it strongly suggests that any such contingency resides in the photographic image rather than its viewer – that it’s just waiting there for us to see. But it can be argued that this is not the case, and to illustrate this point it helps to consider the specific photograph Benjamin’s quote was inspired by.

The image, an oval daguerrotype, was titled ‘The Photographer Karl Dauthendey with his betrothed Miss Friedrich after their first attendance at church, 1857.’ Kaja Silverman posits that Benjamin saw it not in the original (somewhat ironically)²³⁵ but as a reproduction in the book Aus der Frühzeit der Photographie, 1840–1870 by Helmuth Bossert and Heinrich Guttman,²³⁶ and that he was familiar with the background story of the couple in it via the 1912 memoir Der Geist Meines Vaters by Max Dauthendey, youngest son from Karl’s marriage with Charlotte Friedrich.²³⁷ Charlotte was Karl’s second wife; his first, Anna Olschwang, committed suicide in 1855,²³⁸ two years before the cited daguerrotype of Charlotte and Karl was made. And yet Benjamin mistook Charlotte for Anna, and read the image accordingly. The following is what Benjamin wrote directly before his preceding quote:

Or you turn up the picture of Dauthendey the photographer, the father of the poet [Max], from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found one day, shortly after the birth of her sixth child, lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her veins slashed. Here she can be seen with him. He seems to be holding her, but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance. Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us.²³⁹

André Gunthert suggests that certain factors may have influenced Benjamin’s interpretation. One is that, though he could not have seen the portrait of Anna with Karl Dauthendey, a brief description of it is in Max Dauthendey’s memoir, and Gunthert believes this may have been enough for Benjamin to mentally merge this with the image of Charlotte.²⁴⁰ Another concerns Benjamin’s personal circumstances; the year before he wrote his Little History his mother had died, he had divorced, and he was known to have suicidal tendencies, any or all of which could plausibly have led him to identify with what he knew of Anna’s story in a way that coloured his consideration of the image of Charlotte.²⁴¹

Although it means comparing responses by two authors to two photos of two different people, it is still interesting to consider Max Dauthendey’s description of Anna’s photograph: “a woman in a wide crinoline skirt . . . who is sitting on the veranda, watches [Karl] with intelligent eyes. There is no trace of her unhappy future in this image.”²⁴² He was born after her death, so he could only have known her as a photograph and from anecdotes about her in his family’s narrative. As this extract from his memoir suggests, he took what he knew of her suicide from that familial source, searched for some presage of it in her portrait, and could not find it – because it was not there to be seen, any more than it was there to be seen by Benjamin in the portrait of another woman altogether.

Whatever the reasons underlying Benjamin’s interpretation may have been, the point I wish to make here is that the meanings we ascribe to photographic imagery are not inscribed within it. Even when we have – or think we have – some contextual information to draw on that might help us to read the photographic, we can still be mistaken, as Benjamin has helped illustrate. As a photographer and, more importantly, in the context of this research project, this is not an issue in that the work I have made use of photography for does not pretend to any evidential or factual function: it is intended to evoke. In this respect, the capacity of the viewer to see in imagery things more or other than what they are seemingly ‘of’ is not a problem; imaginative engagement is what leads the images to become ‘about’ something more than what they could otherwise seem to flatly depict.

”I am a blurred photograph, one that might remind you of a face”²⁴⁸

In a certain sense, the photographic medium is so difficult to define due to the multiplicity of ways in which it is used and viewed, who by, how, when, where and why, as these differ enormously. The relationship between photography, perception and memory has been hotly debated, but how this might be related to dementia, particularly with regard to lived experience, needs to be more fully explored.

Take, for example, Wendy Mitchell. In her 2018 memoir Somebody I Used to Know and related blog²⁴⁹ Mitchell has, in writing and with supporting imagery, evidenced the various ways that photography serves her in her everyday life:

• In display on the walls of a ‘memory room’; printed images of her past openly arranged where she can see them at a glance, rather than hidden within family albums.²⁵⁰
• As a practical aide-memoire; prints of photographs taken of the inside of her kitchen cupboards remind her of their contents, and of the fact that their doors are doors rather than blank surfaces that would otherwise be invisible to her.²⁵¹
• As an orientational tool; by photographing with her tablet a route she is taking as she goes along (e.g. from a station to a venue), she can later retrace her steps by reconsulting the images,²⁵² and by screen grabbing still images from Google Street View she can plan future routes and use the images to guide her when later in situ.²⁵³

Mitchell can thus be said to perhaps use photography more than many people, and in more diverse ways also. The instantaneity, accessibility and affordability of the digital technology she inventively employs enables her a degree of autonomy. But there is more than the utilitarian in Mitchell’s visual note-making, in that she additionally photographs for the same reasons others do; for the pleasure of recording images (photographing as a process or activity), for aesthetic enjoyment, and as means of sharing observations – showing where she’s been and what she’s seen. In other words, and overall, photography as a mode of communication – by and to herself (these items are to be found behind this cupboard door, this is what the place I visit later will look like), and also to other people.

Returning here to Mitchell’s memory room, what she writes about beginning to select the images she would display in it is:

The upturned box of photographs is scattered across the ivory lace duvet. I pick one up from the pile and turn it over in my hands; [daughters] Sarah and Gemma, aged around six and three, chubby legs neatly fitted inside towelling shorts on a sandy beach. I smile as the moment comes back to me: our first holiday just the three of us, I-spy games on the journey and counting different coloured cars, favourite sweets to make the time go faster, brand new boxes of wax crayons and bumper colouring books opened on the way. We’d arrived at our chalet on the Norfolk coast, dumped our bags and run straight to the sea, and this photograph was taken the first moment their feet sank into the sand. I could still hear their excited squeals… […] Am I really going to forget all this? Will I, one day soon, clutch this photograph in my hands and not know the two happy faces that smile back?²⁵⁴

The detailed information she gives – about the identity and approximate ages of the girls in the photograph, the occasion and location of its making, and the events leading up to that – are not apparent in the image she describes. What this anecdote indicates is that she didn’t consider such photographs as memories in and of themselves; they are there to serve as prompts for recollection. It also illustrates the synaesthetic potentiality of the photographic; the image stimulates, through memory, the impression of hearing sounds.

Mitchell is also aware that, as her neurodegenerative conditions progress, she will cease to identify the people in her pictures. While she may still be able to recognise this print as a photograph and what the image formally depicts – two small girls on a beach – it may not, as so vividly recounted in this anecdote, spark the memory that allows her to specifically recall its particular significance to her. What does this help us to understand about the photographic and memory? In the process of unknowing the analogic thinking learnt through photography, does the person with dementia-related memory issues eventually start to see the photographic in ways that we can’t – because we can’t help reading significance in imagery (as Benjamin has illustrated)?

The author J. Bernlef can perhaps help us here. The following is extracted from his award winning 1988 novel Out of Mind, which is a first person fictional account of the dementia experience of Maarten Klein, a retired Dutch marine consultancy employee who had emigrated to America after surviving the Nazi occupation of Holland. Here, in an inner monologue, he considers the effect of looking at a family album with his wife Vera, who is unaware that she’d just had to identify his mother in a photograph for him:

Strange how after a certain page – October 1956 – the past suddenly springs into colour. But even the colours do not help me. Maybe it is because of the photographs themselves. A camera makes no distinction between important and unimportant, foreground or background. And at this moment I myself seem like a camera. I register, but nothing and nobody comes closer, jumps forward; no one touches me from the past with a gesture, a surprised expression, and these buildings, streets and squares exist in towns and cities where I have never been and shall never go. And the closer the photographs approach the present, as appears from the dates written underneath, the more impenetrable and enigmatic they seem to become.²⁵⁵

There are several things of note here. Firstly, Maarten’s observation that recent photographs seem more inscrutable to him than older ones is a photographic variant of the book metaphors used in discussions of short term memory loss in dementia.²⁵⁶ Secondly, it’s clear from the text that Maarten recognises photographs as the objects they are, and also what they depict, albeit to a limited degree: he sees people, architecture and place in them, though they draw no recollection or emotion. As an example, of the image of his mother is written; “‘Mother,’ I say, and I look at the bespectacled woman who leans with broad hands on a white garden gate.”²⁵⁷ Of course, Maarten is a fictional character, and it never becomes clear in the novel what precise type or combined types of dementia he is living with. Nonetheless, the experience described in the above extract can be said to be well observed. In 2010 Astell et al. conducted a study which found that people living with dementia respond better to generic photographic imagery than to photographs drawn from their personal archives.²⁵⁸ The study also concluded that it didn’t matter if the generic photographs were in black and white or colour, as they still served as prompts for story telling or conversation. In contrast, the more personal photographs were notably less successful in stimulating conversational responses, and the authors suggest that we can understand this marked difference in the sense that, unlike images with direct connection to a person’s past, generic photographs are not “tied to a right answer”.²⁵⁹ As is the case for real people living with dementia, Maarten’s anxiety about not being able to recognise his own mother in a photograph without his partner’s help (and even then), rings true.

Finally, that Bernlef’s character likens himself to a camera is fascinating. All photographic cameras are, in essence, enclosed spaces with apertures,²⁶⁰ not so very far removed from camera obscuras, the understanding of which eventually enabled the invention of photography once light sensitive materials were developed. To function, a camera needs to be operated; as Flusser pointed out, decisions have to be made about what to photograph and how²⁶¹ – about what might be significant enough to warrant the effort of recording it. The camera does not make such decisions, however, and the photographs that result are, in a sense, brute recordings of what was before the camera in the moment of exposure: while photographers can suggest significance by means of familiar, legible aesthetics in the images they produce, what these depict can still be seen as indiscriminate in the sense that, objectively, there is arguably no hierarchy of information – a blade of grass in the foreground of a landscape photograph is, for the camera, an equal part of a composition as a whole and it is the viewer who decides, when decoding it, what elements are more or less noteworthy. What Bernlef seems to suggest, then, is that while Maarten can recognise what is depicted in photographs, he lacks the ability to analogise and thus read meaning in them. To rephrase Eduardo Cadava, “What makes photography photography is not its capacity to present what it photographs, but its character as a force of…” interpretation.²⁶² 

In the aforementioned 2010 study by Astell et al., the authors raise another interesting point: noting that the generic imagery shown to participants with dementia did not always elicit responses that seemed directly related to their subject matter, they write, “Although… there is clearly information that goes along with whatever is depicted in the photograph, e.g., a beach or people at a birthday party… [i]f a person with dementia tells a story that is not apparently connected to the immediate stimulus, is this wrong?”²⁶³ They conclude, of course, that it’s not, as in this context the focus is in the use of photography as means of generating social interactions that are stimulating and support a person’s confidence and sense of self. As the present research is centred in photography such is of particular interest, as it confirms the medium’s relevance to dementia, and further demonstrates that access to visual imagery can “provide and facilitate a conversational space in which experiences can be shared… where less importance is assigned to rational cognitive responses, and, in particular, where personal experiences are valid.”²⁶⁴ But it also suggests that, in this study, participants retained an ability to analogise to a degree, albeit not in a way that could be recognised by onlookers, similar to Solnit’s observation about her mother’s ‘wrong map’.

With this in mind, does it matter that Benjamin misread the Dauthendey daguerreotype previously discussed? The people in the image he responded to had no direct (as in familial) connection to him and, as such, their image was generic so could be likewise understood as having no ‘right answer’. However, Benjamin’s misinterpretation was expressed in a text that has since become part of the accepted canon of photo theory and therefore has influenced critical thinking about the medium in ways that may need to be reconsidered. Silverman contends that the paragraph about the Dauthendey portrait is “one of the most important passages [about photography] that he ever wrote, [and] begins with a description of the daguerreotype that emphasizes its uniqueness, its non-reproducibility, and its elusiveness— i.e., everything that distinguishes it from mechanical reproduction.”²⁶⁵ As his claim about the ‘aura’ of the specific type of photograph that is the daguerreotype – its authenticity as a unique referent with direct indexical connection to the subjects it depicts – was based on the erroneous reading of one he saw as a reproduction in a book rather than in engagement with the original, do the conclusions he reached about photography and mechanical reproduction still hold true? Does this misreading, in fact, undermine claims about the ‘auratic’ value or perceived authenticity of certain forms of photographic imagery? While daguerreotypes can undoubtedly fascinate, Benjamin’s contention that they make “a more vivid and lasting impression on the beholder” for the precise reason that, in the lengthy exposures required, their subjects have time to ‘grow’ into the pictures,²⁶⁶ is questionable.

Benjamin’s Little History was originally published in 1931, by which time Charlotte Dauthendey had been dead for 58 years, and the daguerreotype of her dating from 1857 was roughly 74 years old. As Benjamin’s encounter with this image was as a reproduction in a book, he must have also drawn, in his imagination, on familiarity with the daguerrotype as a photographic material in order to extrapolate from the reproduction what an encounter with it as a unique original might be like. As he can be said to have successfully achieved this, given his influential writing about it, what does this indicate in relation to the materiality of the photographic?

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“Photography is my skin.”²⁶⁷

We do live in an age in which technology permits us to rapidly record and save data. Photographs that would once have required time to process and print in order to be viewed can now be made, seen, shared, and stored (in the virtual shoeboxes of folders in clouds, hard drives and memory sticks) in shorter spaces of time than ever before. In this respect, photographic images as tangible objects could be considered almost anachronistic: Robert Heineken’s claim that “the photograph… is not a picture of… but an object about something”²⁶⁸ dates from 1965, coincidentally a short time before the advent of the digital revolution in 1969, but decades before widespread domestic access to (and reliance on) such technological artefacts as tablets and smartphones became possible. And yet, the photographic still includes daguerreotypes, reproductions in books and more; thus, the materiality of imagery remains relevant, and it’s the photographic as ‘object about’ that I now wish to discuss.

Elena Filipovic forwards that “sculpture is conventionally thought to be concerned with materiality, solidity, and space, while photography – a fleeting moment imprinted on a light-sensitive surface – seems its diametrical opposite.”²⁶⁹ It is perhaps for this reason that critical appraisal of the medium as spatial or sculptural is significantly lacking: despite the quantity and variety of photographic theory now widely available, searches for any relating to its materialities tend to bring up analyses of its usage in pictorially recording sculpture. Art and photography commentators alike address what images are of and about, but rarely in relation to their ‘object-ness’. In order to discuss the medium as dimensional, I’ve had to turn to practitioners such as Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) and Helen Chadwick (1953-1996), some of whose works challenge the assumptions outlined above by Filipovic.

There are many interesting similarities between these two artists, who have not before now been critically considered together.²⁷⁰ Both approached the corporeal and embodied experience in what can be understood as visceral ways. At times, both used casting as means of making – a way of creating traces arguably not so far removed from photography in the sense that, as a cast is “a direct registration of the real… the specificity of photography[‘s indexicality] can be effectively extended to casting.”²⁷¹ But it is their respective approaches to photography as a material or spatial, and evocative, medium that is of import here.

Although Szapocznikow gave the title Photosculptures (1971) to a work that was a series of twenty straightforward printed photographs of chewing gums after they were sculpted in her mouth, the term ‘photosculpture’ can be aptly applied to other late works by her. In 1967 she began embedding photographs in semi-translucent resin, and neither material was then in wide usage in the arts: “Photography as a medium was only just becoming accepted as a fine art form, and it was rarely used in relation to sculpture.”²⁷² With Pamiątki (Souvenirs), a series she worked on 1967-1971, layers of “skin-like resin coats images of celebrity figures”²⁷³ such as the model Twiggy, but also artist friends like Christian Boltanski, self-portraits, and media imagery such as pictures of the holocaust. These latter were also included in the series Tumeurs, begun following her cancer diagnosis in 1969. Although Szapocznikow wrote of Photosculptures “[o]ne has only to photograph and enlarge my masticated creations in order to achieve a sculptural presence,”²⁷⁴ it’s her embedding of photographs in resin that reframes the photographic dimensionally, as sculpture.

Unlike other parts of the body (both interior and exterior) that have distinct forms and functions to perform, there is no beneficial symbiotic relationship between a cancerous tumour and its host, and as tissue it has no reason to be other than to shape its own augmenting self. As Malabou says, “[d]estruction has its own sculpting tools,”²⁷⁵ and the bulbous, irregular masses of Szapocznikow’s Tumeurs (1969-1971) can seem, then – similarly to the chewing gums depicted in Photosculptures – like emanations of matter sculpted in the artist’s body. In this sense the Tumeurs can be read as votive objects,²⁷⁶ with the difference that – unlike ancient anatomical ex voto, the majority of which do not depict afflictions²⁷⁷ – they manifest disease. The inclusion of photographs in these resin excrescences personalises them; the artist ‘invades’ the symbolic cancerous interlopers by placing something of herself within them. As prints, the embedded photographs are materials in the same way that the gauze, newsprint and other ephemera also incorporated in the resin are, and as image traces they can be seen as adding spatial and temporal dimensions as well as pictorially alluding to potential meanings. For example, the Grand Tumeur (1969) works and Souvenir I (1971) include the same image of a holocaust victim, but in the latter work this is collaged into resin with a family snapshot of the artist as a young girl sitting on her father’s shoulders.²⁷⁸ Reading this artwork in conjunction with the title, which (in French) invites us to engage with it as a formed memory,²⁷⁹ it can be seen as a materialised allusion to the complexities of a life containing extremes of pleasure (carefree childhood) and pain – the trauma of concentration camps, in several of which Szapocznikow had been incarcerated during WWII.²⁸⁰ No matter how incongruous their pairing may initially seem, the fusing of a holiday photo and a holocaust portrait together in one object arguably gives them comparable weight, but the placing of the holiday photo above the holocaust portrait could suggest a hierarchy of importance, raising questions about analyses of this work that interpret the former through the latter. In an oft quoted letter from 1972, Szapocznikow wrote “[n]othing is definitive in my work, if not the immediate pleasure of feeling the material, of touching and palpating… the mud as children [do] on a riverbank.”²⁸¹ Less than a year later she died,²⁸² but even writing close to her own death, after having also experienced at close hand that of others in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen earlier in life, she was still capable of connecting, in her work with materials, with child-like delight.

For comparison, consider now the Grand Tumeur elements of the Tumeurs series, a group of three works that similarly appear to broach pleasure and pain, albeit in another way: in them, the same holocaust portrait image is paired with a headshot of actor Emmanuelle Riva drawn from Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, “head thrown back and mouth parted in apparent ecstasy.”²⁸³ This is suggestive of adult pleasure, different to that which is seemingly alluded to in the image of the artist as a child in Souvenir I, but the juxtaposition of superficially conflicting subject matter is very similar and, considered together, all these works suggest, to me, a both/and rather than a binary either/or understanding of pleasure and pain over the life course.

But I have myself fallen into the trap here of discussing these sculptures in terms of the images in them being ‘of’ and possibly ‘about’. In the Grand Tumeur series the photographs, while still legible as such when the works are viewed from certain angles, are materially recontextualised by the resin and transformed by changes in scale – enlargement being an advantage of photography over direct casting. The convex and concave resin volumes distort the images like reflections in an extremely warped fairground mirror, cast in 3D. Although these works have most often been documented from a vantage point that allows the photographs to be clearly seen, the few views of them photographed from alternative perspectives aid understanding of them as distinctly different to conventional photographic objects, in that they are meant to be explored from all sides and, in so doing, the images in them are revealed and concealed. With some of the smaller sculptures from Tumeurs, the resin is so thick that photographs, if that’s what’s within, are secreted. In other works, such as Sans Titre (Hommage à Pierre Restany, 1969) and Alex (1970), areas of resin appear to have been polished, creating an impression of glassy depth and contrasting textures that make one wonder what these objects feel like.

To better understand in what ways these sculptures differ from conventional photography, however, I return here to Souvenir I. As an object, the finished work is very different to the preparatory collage for it: while we cannot help but continue to see the photographic, the resin the images are fixed in give the embedded prints the form, colour and apparent texture of preserved tattooed skin²⁸⁴ – and, crucially, this impression is generated not by the photographs but the material object as a whole. For Griselda Pollock, Souvenir I, then, is “horribly reminiscent of one of the atrocious remnants of National Socialist sadism in which human skin was harvested from corpses, especially when that skin bore a tattoo.”²⁸⁵ This isn’t something I was aware of, but I didn’t need to be in order to also see the work as skin-like, which indicates that this quality is successfully suggested by the work. But in strongly associating it with historical atrocity there is the danger of overpowering additional appreciations. Souvenir I is far from being the only work by Szapocznikow that’s fleshy, with the difference that this particular piece is distinctly personal in that it is dominated by a picture of herself from what can be seen as a happier time in her past. As she also famously wrote: “Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth…”²⁸⁶ However consciously inadmissible it may seem, one of the “paradoxes and absurdit[ies]”²⁸⁷ of Szapocznikow’s aesthesis – which Pollock defines as “a form of knowing and an economy of affects that holds the sensuous, sentient and reflective together”²⁸⁸ – is that suffering does not necessarily preclude joy.

It becomes interesting here to consider Chadwick’s approach to photography. The thirteen works in the series Wreaths to Pleasure (1992-1993), for example, use the seductive qualities of photography to allegorise, in combinations of natural and synthetic materials, “the manipulation of human biology within scientific research and medical practice,”²⁸⁹ amongst other things. Chadwick was known to have thought of the circular forms these pieces took in several ways; as eyes, as ‘libidinous bubbles’ (in reference to the bubble as symbol of transience in the vanitas tradition), and as petri dishes in which the artist’s cultures form.²⁹⁰ The seductiveness of photography referred to, and knowingly utilised by Chadwick, is that of its capacity to aestheticise: she saw the rich depth of cibachromed colours in the Wreaths as “key” to the viewer being “lured” into looking²⁹¹ at organic matter in the forms of chocolate, fur, fruit and flowers, arranged as atoms, cells²⁹² and “indifferent, ambiguous genitalia”²⁹³ in contrasting sumps of “dangerous fluids”²⁹⁴ such as engine oil, Swarfega, Germolene and washing up liquid. The flowers in particular, though seen as “fresh, beautiful and alive”²⁹⁵ are, in fact, “dying organs”²⁹⁶ in that, once cut, they are the amputated hermaphroditic reproductive parts of plants. Photographed between life and death, the “membranous skin-like quality”²⁹⁷ of petals simulated, in Wreaths to Pleasure No. 10 for example, “contrasting textures of penile and scrotal skin”.²⁹⁸ For Chadwick, these were not simply substitutions of one substance for another but “propositions for being in the world,”²⁹⁹ a world in which there is an “[a]bolition of all frontiers + dissolution of finite existence into infinite continuity of matter.”³⁰⁰ This ‘continuity of matter’ occurs at quantum level as “[p]articles interact so intimately with each other that they are each other.”³⁰¹ At such level identifiable boundaries between all things – solid and fluid, corporeal and cognitive – are immaterial and, in the sense that the photographic makes no distinction between living or dead, large or small, nutritious or noxious, it is the perfect medium for Chadwick’s Wreaths.

Chadwick was well aware of how photographs can be seen to function. Though she aimed to avoid it by working towards visual expressions of what lays beyond language, she knew that “as soon as you try to embody things, it [sic] becomes a language.”³⁰² All the Wreaths began as sculptural mises en scène, and what the substances in the resulting images might feel and smell like – the cloy of engine oil, the tang of tomato juice – are sensually alluded to in these photographic objects but can only be accessed through memory and imagination, much in the way that Benjamin ‘grasped’ a Daguerreotype from a reproduction of one. The images are at once ‘analoga’³⁰³ of what they depict but also analogical in the sense that they metaphorically gesture to things beyond what they portray, as “narrative[s] of material objects.”³⁰⁴ A way of understanding the photographic in works like these is that, sitting at a “threshold of representation, not quite real, not exactly alive,”³⁰⁵ it skins the bounds of vision and our other senses, and this may be something Chadwick and Szapocznikow have in common.

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“a reality that is both subjective and a record of something”³⁰⁶

In this chapter I have discussed photography in ways that could be seen as contradictory. On the one hand, I’ve forwarded photography as a meaningful material, with works by Szapocznikow and Chadwick as examples of its seductively allegorical qualities. On the other, I’ve disclosed how dementia reveals the full extant to which photographs depend for their meaning on interpretation. Are these two positions necessarily antithetical?

Reconsidered from the perspective of dementia, Barthes’ contention that in photography the “image is penetrated through and through by the system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages”³⁰⁷ does not hold, given that access to language of every kind is eventually disrupted by cognitive decline. What changes is not the photographic but the capacity to read it. Prior to dementia’s advanced stages, people living with it can, like us, recognise photographs as such, but the ability to also decipher imagery in ways that align with the comprehension and expectations of other viewers is, as exampled in the cited study by Astell et al. (2010), not necessarily a given.

However, when Barthes calls photographs “matte and somehow stupid,”³⁰⁸ in a sense he is not wrong in that photographs are, at base, raw ‘data’, and it’s we who draw ‘intelligence’ from them. A “photograph is always invisible: it’s not it that we see”³⁰⁹ but our interpretations of the image it presents us with, as we bring to our encounters with photography “assumptions about how a medium represents and the empirical status of the thing represented”³¹⁰ – assumptions that can confuse “‘what is’ with ‘what is perceived to be’.”³¹¹ As one does not need to have a form of dementia to misread photography, theorisations of it (including this) can be seen as more revealing of its interpreters and their socio-historical contexts than of the medium. This is not to say that interpretation is without value – it greatly enriches our understandings of what photography can mean to us. But awareness of what it is relative to cognitive decline can help us to reevaluate certain assumptions about the medium.

According to Siegfried Kracauer photographs reveal nothing, as in them “a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow.”³¹² At the beginning of my research I would have categorically disagreed. Now I think there’s some truth in it, especially when considered in relation to dementia, but it’s equally true – in a both/and, familiar/unfamiliar way – that there is more to them than this, if only because we want there to be. We just have to keep in mind that the ‘more than’ is in the eye of the imaginative beholder.

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