The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning- John Tagg (2009)

In this book Tagg asks how the meaning of a photograph becomes fixed and analyses the ways in which photography claims to be truthful evidence. He looks at the discourse surrounding photography and how the discipline of all that frames it keeps the photograph and viewers in place and determines it’s truthfulness.

He explains that during the 19^th century it became obvious that a photograph can’t be viewed as “transparent”. Tag describes it as the image having no power of its own but is an instrument for those who have power, “the transparent reflection of a power outside itself” (Tagg, 2009:pxxix). Tagg points out that discursive formation is not a surrounding context or a frame, but that the effect of a photograph are made by the discursive formations of both the photograph and the apparatus of discipline. He shares arguments that shows that documentary value cannot be within a camera itself and its imagined access to the real, because of the institutions, discourses and systems of power which “sully” it (Tagg, 2009:pxxxii). Tagg calls this a mutation from “document” to “documentary”.

His first chapter follows the role of the photographic archive and the social regulatory uses of photography in the constitution of the modern Liberal State. He says that the State in this sense has a war logic of coercive force and instrumentalises culture promoting social inclusion and citizenship.

He proceeds through the documentary photographic work of the late 1920s and 1930s, John Grierson, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Here he describes how the paternalistic state and expressed itself in photography based on transparency. Tagg describes the then photographer’s moral burden to join the dignity of fact with the burden of truth; an “ethical contract between the citizen and the state as the form of our collective participation in that truth” (Tagg,2009:93). He then explores Walker Evan’s documentary photography work in the 1930s, where he finds his ambiguity, gives distance from its subject and power to that which creates the subject.

In his chapter Running and Dodging, 1943: The breakup of the documentary Moment, Tagg shows that the end of the FSA project, World War 2 and political changes which altered social groupings meant that the previous documentary “contract” lost its conditions. It seems that this negated the idea of the transparency of a photograph alone in representing a subject, as there was now a social transparency which through photography could be interpreted as visual and symbolically transparent (Tagg,2009:207).

Tagg refers to Foucalt who installed the evidentiary value of an image in disciplinary knowledge, however he insists that the meaning and power of photographs are due to the discursive effects of the regimes that produce them, for example historical, art, or documentary; “If Documentary documents anything, it is only a certain strategy of power and desire… If documentary captures anything, it is only a certain subject-subject to that strategy of power” (Tagg, 2009:94).

He also investigates Barthes idea that the inventions of photography and history were simultaneous and that history needs such a code to be a discourse. Tagg finds himself that whilst a photograph is a “certificate of presence” it doesn’t invent but authenticates, and history lacks authentication.  He finds lots of paradoxes; a photograph is complete and finite and can authenticate history, yet it is “fleeting” as we can’t be sure of its duration.

Taggs final chapter explores elements of “the frame” as a discipline; discussing the image (the work itself), the frame (that which gives rise to the work), and the apparatus (Museum apparatus- art history). He looks at possible directions for continuing the 1970s project of New Art History and calls it “endless metacommentary” (Tagg, 2009:259). This metacommentary is where discursive practice is attached to the realm of the social and political. He ends by suggesting we should “strike against the frame” (Tagg, 2009:263).

Reflections:

I have previously read from John Tagg’s Essays on The Burden of Representation (1993). The corresponding essay for me in that book is Chapter 2 Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State. Here he says that photographs are not evidence of history but that they are themselves historical (Tagg,1993:65) and interestingly suggests here that the way photography has been historically implicated in the technology pf power-knowledge should be studied. In that book Tagg also draws on semiotics, cultural debate and the work of others such as Foucault to reject photography as a “record of reality” and calls for an analysis of the part these representations played in social regulation.

In this book he like Sekula challenges the notion of photography as neutral but in particular Tagg insists that the meaning and power of photographs are due to the discursive effects of regimes such as history, art, or documentary.

References:

Tagg, J. (1993) The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories. Vol. 80. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Tagg, J. (2009) The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 392 pp. ISBN 978—0816642885. Minneapolis: The university of Minnesota Press.

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