Negotiating the
Visual Turn:
New Perspectives on
Images and Archives
Joan M. Schwartz
I n t r o d u c t i o n : V i s u a l C u l t u r e a n d t h e V i s u a l T u r n
As archivists, our concern for visual images must not be limited to those within our holdings, for archivists not only acquire and preserve visual images, we also produce, manipulate, and disseminate them in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. We copy them in ways that do not always respect their integrity as records. We create catalog cards and other reference tools that reproduce them in standard sizes, change colors, mask physical attributes, obscure their documentary context (s) and evidential linkages. We disassemble albums, mat water. colors, and lift photographs from pages, reducing visual narratives to individual images. We ignore the significance of intertextuality when we remove and flatten maps originally folded and bound into reports. We display visual images in exhibitions and incorporate them into official and popular publications, Web sites, PowerPoint presentations, and reports seeking resource allocations or supporting corporate accountability, often with too little thought as to what such images convey about our assumptions and with too little consideration for how we frame their meaning for viewers by the very way(s) in which we situate them in physical or intellectual space. Postmodern sensitivity to the power of visual representation now means that archivists can no longer naively collect, use, and create visual images as if we were neutral, detached observers. Nor can we ignore such theory when new ideas about the world we live in, the records we preserve, and the relationship between the two have shaken the foundational assumptions upon which archives and the archival profession have long been based.
R e a d i n g V i s u a l I m a g e s : G i l l i a n R o s e , V i s u a l M e t h o d o l o g i e s
Because our need to understand the many ways in which images are made meaningful is predicated on the fact that archivists are not only keepers of visual images, but also creators of visual images, Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies should be of interest not only to everyone in the Visual Materials Section of the Society of American Archivists, but also to archival educators, reference archivists, and anyone responsible for description, public programs, and on-line access. In this book, subtitled An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Rose seeks to provide to readers, primarily students of visual culture, a "critical visual method-ology," defining "critical" to mean "an approach that thinks about the visual in terms of the cultural significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded." Her emphasis is on "meaning and significance," and she examines "why it is important to consider visual images, why it is important to be critical about visual images, and why it is important to reflect on that critique." Visual Methodologies is divided into eight chapters, each dealing with a specific method, and while individual chapters examine a narrow range of visual sources-"paintings, photographs, films, televised soaps and adverts"-the methods Rose discusses relate to all forms of visual images and can equally be applied to other media and genres, including those of direct archival concern, such as architectural records, maps and plans, video, and Web sites. Following an engaging and substantial introduction, separate chapters treat compositional interpretation, content analysis, semiology, and psychoanalysis. These are followed by two chapters on different aspects of discourse analysis; the final chapter treats other methods as well as the mixing of methods. Of particular relevance to archivists are the two chapters on discourse analy. sis: the first focuses specifically on text, intertextuality, and context; the second examines institutional practices. Rose clarifies the difference between the two forms of discourse analysis by citing two approaches to "the archive": the former treats archives as transparent windows, concentrating instead on the source mate. rials; the latter views them in relation to issues of power and knowledge, emphasizing the ways in which they not simply preserve, but in fact create "orders of value" as Brien Brothman has clearly articulated. In introducing the notion that institutions are inextricably tied to the workings of power, Rose cites the work of both Allan Sekula and John Tagg on photographic archives, pointing out that this type of discourse analysis emphasizes sites of production and reception and what Rose calls "social modality," by which she refers to "the range of economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used." Rose cites Sekula's claim that "archives are not neutral," but rather "embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection and hoarding, as well as that power inherent in the command of the lex. icon and rules of a language," a notion recently explored by the contributors to two double issues of Archival Science devoted to the theme of "Archives, Records and Power.** It is both easy and useful to extrapolate from Rose's exploration of the "apparatus" and "technology" of the art gallery and museum to the architec tural spatial, and bureaucratic and intellectual practices by which archives frame the use and meaning of the materials in their safekeeping. While her references are extensive, Rose's selection of "useful reading on various visual media" is thin, particularly for photographs and maps; however, this may well reflect her intention to produce a manageable overview of visual methodologies rather than an exhaustive compendium of analytical approaches. She also cautions that Visual Methodologies touches upon both theoretical and methodological issues, each with its own, often esoteric, vocabulary. Not everyone is familiar with the notion of "preferred readings" or "discursive formations" or "scopic regimes"; and, I suspect, few archivists traffic in the jargon of cultural studies. Even common words, such as "audience," "gaze," "narrative," and "surveillance," are now freighted with meaning beyond common parlance. To flag important ideas and to make obscure or complex concepts more accessible, key words are highlighted in bold and noted in the margin the first time they are discussed; they are also included in a "list of key terms" with references to the place where each word or phrase is explained. This should prove particularly useful for harried archivists with little time and less patience for such seemingly irrelevant postmodern, theoretical mumbo-jumbo. Visual Methodologies is a valuable primer for gaining a deeper appreciation and fuller understanding of visual images. It offers archivists an opportunity to add new interpretive skills to their professional toolkit, skills that can help in appraisal and acquisition decisions, guide selection and arrangement practice, inform description activities, and ultimately increase the use, enjoyment, and understanding of the materials in their care.
Back to Basics: Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing
At the outset, Peter Burke explains that he wrote Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence "both to encourage the use of ... evidence [from images] and to warn potential users of some of the possible pitfalls." He weaves a middle ground between "positivists who believe that images convey reliable information about the external world, and the sceptics or structuralists who assert that they do not." Burke suggests that instead of insisting on the binary At the same time that Burke claims that the message of a painting or pho tograph "may be scanned with relative rapidity," he states that his book is intended to show that "images are often ambiguous or polysemic." He then goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate how an understanding of context can help us through the thicket of slippery or multiple meanings. Indeed, Burke quite rightly points out that historians would not have been able to widen their interests over the last generation or so and carry out research in a number of new directions including the history of everyday life, material culture (chapter 5), mentalités (chapters 6 and 7), the body, and other fields had they limited themselves to traditional (written] sources such as official documents, produced by administrations and preserved in their archives." However, his conclusion that visual images "have often played their part in the 'cultural construction' of society," underestimates just how pervasive and powerful their part has been over the last century and a half. Burke's credibility in the world of archives surely unravels four pages from the end of the book with his declaration that Documentary evidence is often available only to someone prepared to visit the archive in which it is stored, and may take hours to read, while a painting or a photograph is often easily accessible, especially in reproduction, and its message may be scanned with relative rapidity. Whereas Burke here acknowledges that archival research into textual documents is a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity, equally, there are no shortcuts through the primary sources in visual form. Visual materials research, like any other historical research, involves long hours in an archives, where, in fact, paintings and photographs are far less accessible cannot be viewed at all times, cannot be viewed without supervision, cannot be placed in a locker for consultation after hours, and often must be consulted only in special vaults or viewing spaces. In my comments here, there is an implicit admonition for archivists enamored of digital access. Perhaps it is not surprising that Burke, as a trained historian, uses the term "documentary evidence" to refer only to textual records, suggesting that visual materials researchers need not visit archives, consult originals, or engage in the usual lengthy and often frustrating historical research processes. He also implies that the message delivered by photographs is easily understood thus obviating the necessity of reading his book and becoming visually literate and that paintings and photographs are not only easily accessible in reproduction form, but that it is sufficient to consult them as such. The notion of doing visual materials research using paintings and pho tographs in reproduction form ignores the meaning-making attributes of an image's materiality, its physical presentation, its immediate documentary uni-verse, its archival context. The kind of research Burke seems to recommend can be done with catalog cards, books, or library vertical files where paintings and photographs are available as single, invariably decontextualized images, cataloged and made accessible by keywords derived from their subject content. (This suggestion is further exacerbated by the idea that the "message" of an image "may be scanned with relative rapidity.") Burke, here, follows the mis guided historiographical approach, all too often taken by archivists as well, that conflates content and meaning. Eyewitnessing then ends rather abruptly after Burke posits four general points, which he is careful to offer not as universal principles, but as "summaries of problems of interpretation." In his very brief preface, Burke acknowledges that he wrote Eyewitnessing relatively quickly, but that his preoccupation with the subject of images as his torical evidence goes back more than thirty years to a time when he was writing a book for a series that did not include illustrations. If, as Burke suggests, he was on the leading edge of the visual turn some three decades ago, it is a shame that he waited so long to publish his thoughts on the subject. In so doing, he missed an opportunity to nurture a significant shift in historiography and has now produced a book that, while interesting enough, is more catch-up summary than cutting-edge methodology. Burke's problem in this regard may be one of disciplinary insularity. Missing from his "Select Bibliography" are a number of important works from a range of disciplines outside academic history on the nature and role of images. Where, for example, are seminal writings by Rudolf Arnheim, John Berger, Victor Burgin, Richard Bolton, Estelle Jussim, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Barbara Maria Stafford? Also missing are references from the voluminous literature on museums and memory that explores analogous historiographical issues through the lens of institutional practices and physical objects. One area that has contributed greatly to our understanding of photographs is visual anthro pology, and no author has contributed more in this regard than Elizabeth Edwards, whose most recent collection of essays is, as I shall go on to explain, also well worth archival scrutiny. Ultimately, Burke's discussion of the use of visual images as historical sources raises interesting possibilities, poses sticky questions, and presents dangerous pitfalls. Yet, in the end, much of Eyewitnessing is basic and adds little to the increasingly sophisticated methodological literature on the use of pho tographs, paintings, maps, and film as evidence. That said, Burke is an interesting read that warns against presentist tendencies and emphasizes context as the basis for understanding the meaning and power of the visual document.
Conclusion: Reading Outside the Archival Box
Writing about the applicability of a textual model of binary word-image relations in an age of electronic records, Elkins suggests that such relations are "demonstrably untrue" and persist "because they correspond to institutional habits and needs [and] are too ingrained to be abandoned or easily critiqued."16 These four books, if read in the spirit of interdisciplinarity and embraced for the lessons for archives embedded in their approaches to visual materials, will help us understand, critique, and even abandon those ingrained professional needs and institutional habits that, more than time, theory, or money, hinder archives and archivists from engaging with lessons of current scholarship on "the archive" and putting postmodern theory into everyday practice. In his preface to The New Nature of Maps, Paul Laxton calls Brian Harley "a learner and borrower from other disciplines." Perhaps this is the lesson at the heart of this review essay. Archivists, too, must be learners and borrowers- from other forms of representation, from other disciplines, and from other profes-sions. If we are prepared not simply to adopt, but to study, evaluate, and adapt--ideas, methods, strategies, and models from outside the world of archives, we have much to gain and nothing to lose from such cross-border intellectual shopping. Individually and collectively, these writings by Rose, Burke, Harley, and Edwards offer the opportunity to engage in just such an exercise.
*5 Brien Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival (Summer 1991).
*6 See "Archives, Records, and Power (I & II)," Archival Science 2 (2002), guest edited, with introductory essays, by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook.
*7 Luciana Duranti, 'The Concepts of Reliability and Authenticity and Their Implications," Archivaria 39 (1995): 5-10.
*8 Estelle Jussim, 'The Research Uses of Visual Information," Library Trends 25 (April 1977): 763-78. The quoted passages are on pages 764, 763, 773, and 775 respectively.
*16 Elkins, The Domain of Images, 84.