Cracking Kracauer

I’m was reading a Siegfried Kracauer essay on photography today and couldn’t keep my pen out of the margins. I’m struck by how blind he can be even while making brilliant observations and offering astute insights into the nature, theory, and practice of photography. In particular, I’m frustrated with his lack of critical distance at critical junctures. Or to put it another way, there are instances when he accepts assumptions (even clichés) about photography as facts from which he then bases his argument.  And sometimes he gets the facts wrong (like saying that “Julia Margaret Cameron availed herself of badly made lenses in order to get at the ‘spirit’ of the person portrayed without disturbing interference of ‘accidental’ detail” — that’s an unsubstantiated myth that flies in the face of all evidence that she in fact possessed and used some of the best made Dallmeyer lenses of the time).  To his credit, Kracauer delineates the major divide between the “realist” and the “artistic” camps that staked their respective grounds in the last half of the nineteenth century and follows it to their descendants the “straight photographer” and the “experimental photographer” of the twentieth century and in so doing marks out a range of practices. Knowing him, you know he’s siding with the Real Straight Shooters. His stated goal is to describe the distinctive nature of the “photographic medium” and the proper practice of photography that follows from that nature. That’s where the problems arise on two fronts.

First, he casts — in effectively moral terms — this divide of realist/straight versus artistic/experimental as one between valuing “truth” versus valuing “beauty.” The straight-realist-truthful photographer reveals and records external reality in the raw thanks to the medium’s ability to render detail that sometimes eyes don’t catch or can never catch; the experimenter-artist-beautiful photographer indulges (his word) in expressing a formative inner vision regardless of and counter to the essence or ideal (my words) of the medium. In short, Kracauer ends up effectively labeling as non-photographic anybody who doesn’t reside in the realist/straight photographer camp. He tries to nuance this divide by finding a place for the artistic/beautiful within the realist/truthful (because he clearly sides with the Realist Truth gang but wants it to look good), but it’s a false dichotomy that he’s bought into in the first place. And he never stops to consider why following the presumed prescriptions of the medium is in itself to be valued (answer: because he values realism). He simply assumes that realist = truth and so it’s self-evident that if photography’s great distinction is its ability to reveal the external objective world in a realist mode (and therefore possess “truth”) then that’s what is proper to photographic practice. It’s okay to sacrifice beauty in the name of truth (if beauty happens to come with truth it’s a bonus), but not the other way around because that would betray the true essence of the photographic medium. Or so he thinks.

Second, his insistance that photographic practice must remain within what he (mistakenly in my opinion) identifies as the distinctive features of the photographic medium implies a technological determinism that he doesn’t acknowledge or recognize because he sidesteps the entire question of the physical aspects of the medium (lenses, shutters, emulsions) and their specific histories. He begins by disingenuously citing the realer-than-real detail of Daguerrotypes as demonstration of the medium’s essence when Daguerrotypes were quickly a technological dead end given the expense, difficulty, and danger in producing them. Even the finished products were compromised because they could only be seen at the right angle for full effect and as direct positive images struck on silver-plated copper or brass plates they were not reproducible as negatives would be (and I would argue that reproducibility of prints from negatives is one hallmark of the photographic medium). In other words, modern photography did not descend from Daguerrotypes. The Daguerrotype may have been the first commercially successful photographic process, but it was a fluke, an accident, and despite its superior resolution and detail, became extinct in the face of the negative-positive process done on substrates of paper, then glass, and eventually flexible rollfilm. No offense to Monsieur Daguerre, but his miraculous images are not representative of the medium as Kracauer makes them out to be.

The sleight-of-hand that Kracauer employs with Daguerrotypes aside, it’s the unacknowledged technological determinism of his position that gets under my skin. That determinism is implied in the four “affinities” (his word) inherent in the medium that give it its raison d’être according to Kracauer: “unstaged realism” (“Pictures which strike us as intrinsically photographic seem intended to render nature in the raw, nature as it exists independent of us. Now nature is particularly unstageable if it manifests itself in ephemeral configurations which only the camera is able to capture”);  fortuitousness (“Random events are the very meat of snapshots”); endlessness (“This follows from its [photography’s] emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes. A photograph, whether portrait or action picture,is in character only if it precludes the notion of completeness.” — in other (my) words, it doesn’t appear artificially framed); and finally, indeterminateness (“Photographs . . . transmit raw material without defining it.”)

All of these qualities certainly exist in certain photography and can only be executed in their ideal form with photographic technology that maximizes speed and mobility; more than once in this piece Kracauer invokes “the snapshot” and “instantaneous photography” as his example for photography in general. And, as mentioned in our article on The Snapshot, snapshots benefit from — if not require — fast lenses, fast shutters, and fast films. It also helps for the camera design to be compact and easy to use quickly. Strictly speaking then, everything pre-Kodak is, according to Kracauer’s “systematic considerations”, not photographic. That could very well be his point — that photography before the photographic had not yet become photographic because of technological limitations that would eventually be overcome. That’s an interesting idea . . . for about a shutter-snap of a moment until you realize that the technological teleology and the ahistorical  backflip this implies.It’s as if the Platonic Idea of Photography was simply Out There waiting for better glass and shutters and emulsions to realize it. Kracauer’s problem is that he’s embedded within a specific historical context of photography’s development and is trying to universalize it for the sake of his own investment in realism. He also buys too deeply into “capturing the [unstaged/spontaneous = truthful] moment” as the end-all be-all of “real” photography. I’ll continue this line of inquiry in the next full-fledged article, “The Decisive Moment?” . . .