Visual Studies Visual sociology, documentary photography ... · PDF fileVisual sociology,...

11
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: On: 26 October 2010 Access details: Access Details: Free Access Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713689928 Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's (almost) all a matter of context Howard S. Becker a a Professor of Sociology, University of Washington, To cite this Article Becker, Howard S.(1995) 'Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's (almost) all a matter of context', Visual Studies, 10: 1, 5 — 14 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14725869508583745 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725869508583745 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Transcript of Visual Studies Visual sociology, documentary photography ... · PDF fileVisual sociology,...

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by:On: 26 October 2010Access details: Access Details: Free AccessPublisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713689928

Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's(almost) all a matter of contextHoward S. Beckera

a Professor of Sociology, University of Washington,

To cite this Article Becker, Howard S.(1995) 'Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's(almost) all a matter of context', Visual Studies, 10: 1, 5 — 14To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14725869508583745URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725869508583745

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

V/suaZ Sociology, 10 (1-2), pp. 5-14 © International Visual Sociology Association, 1995

Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography,and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context

Howard S. Becker

Visual sociology, documentary photography,and photojournalism are social constructionswhose meaning arises in the contexts,organizational and historical, of differentworlds of photographic work. Rereadingphotographs made in one genre as thoughthey had been made in another illustratesthis contextuality of meaning.

Three Kinds of Photography

People who want to use photographic materi-als for social science purposes—to do what is

sometimes now called visual sociology—often getconfused. The pictures visual sociologists makeso resemble those made by others, who claim tobe doing documentary photography or photojour-nalism, that they wonder whether they are doinganything distinctive. They try to clear up theconfusion by looking for the essential differences,the defining features of each of the genres, as if itwere just a matter of getting the definitions right.

Such labels do not refer to Platonicessences whose meaning we can discover byprofound thought and analysis, but rather are justwhat people have found it useful to make thembe. We can learn what people have been able todo using documentary photography or photojour-nalism as a cover, but we can't find out what theterms really mean. Their meaning arises in theorganizations they are used in, out of the jointaction of all the people involved in those organiza-tions, and so varies from time to time and place toplace. Just as paintings get their meaning in aworld of painters, collectors, critics, and curators,so photographs get their meaning from the waythe people involved with them understand them,use them, and thereby attribute meaning to them.(See H. Becker 1982)

Visual sociology, documentary photography,and photojournalism, then, are whatever theyhave come to mean, or been made to mean, intheir daily use in worlds of photographic work.They are social constructions, pure and simple. Inthis they resemble all the other ways of reportingwhat we know, or think we have found out, aboutthe societies we live in, such ways as ethno-graphic reports, statistical summaries, maps, andso on (H. Becker 1986). We can raise at least twokinds of questions about this activity of namingand attributing meaning.

OrganizationalWhen people name classes of activity, as theyhave named these forms of picture-making, theyare not just making things convenient for them-selves and others by creating some shorthandtags. They almost always mean to accomplishother purposes as well: drawing boundariesaround the activities, saying where they belongorganizationally, establishing who is in charge,who is responsible for what, and who is entitled towhat. A contemporary example can be takenfrom the field of drug use. Marijuana, cocaine,and heroin are drugs but alcohol and tobaccoare—what? Recreational products? The terms donot reflect a chemical distinction based on themolecular structure of substances. They distin-guish, rather, ways of treating substances, sayingthat one is to be banned and subjected, amongother things, to Presidential disapproval while theother can be used for Presidential pleasure.

So we want to ask, of these different ways oftalking about photography: Who is using theseterms now? What are they trying to claim tolocate that work in some work organization?Conversely, what kind of work and which people

Howard Becker, Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, is one of the founders of the visualsociology movement.

5

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

Howard S. Becker

do they mean to exclude? In short, what are theytrying to accomplish by talking this way?

HistoricalWhere did these terms come from? What havethey been used for in the past? How does theirpast use create a present context and how doesthat historically based context constrain what canbe said and done now? "Documentary photogra-phy" was one kind of activity around the turn ofthe century, when great waves of social reformswept the United States and photographers had aready audience for images exposing evil, andplenty of sponsors to pay them to create thoseimages. "Visual sociology," if we can talk aboutsuch a thing in that era, consisted of much thesame kind of images, but published in the Ameri-can Journal of Sociology. Neither term meansnow what it did then. The great social reformorganizations have changed in character, their useof photographs subsidiary to a host of othertechniques, and sociology has become more"scientific" and less open to reports in anythingbut words and numbers.

The three terms, then, have varying historiesand present uses. Each is tied to and gets itsmeaning in a particular social context.

Photojournalism is what journalists do,producing images as part of the work of gettingout daily newspapers and weekly news magazines(probably mostly daily newspapers now, since thedeath in the early nineteen-seventies of Life andLook). What is photojournalism commonly sup-posed to be? Unbiased. Factual. Complete.Attention-getting, storytelling, courageous. Ourimage of the photojournalism insofar as it is basedon historical figures, consists of one part Weegee,sleeping in his car, typing his stories on thetypewriter stored in its trunk, smoking cigars,chasing car wrecks and fires, and photographingcriminals for a New York tabloid; he said of hiswork "Murders and fires, my two best sellers, mybread and butter." A second part is Robert Capa,rushing into the midst of a war, a battle, to get aclose-up shot of death and destruction (his watch-word was "If your pictures aren't good enough,you aren't close enough" (quoted in Capa 1968)for the news magazines. The final part of thestereotype is Margaret Bourke-White in aviator'sgear, camera in one hand, helmet in the other, an

airplane wing and propeller behind her, flyingaround the world producing classic photo-essaysin the Life style. Contemporary versions of thestereotype appear in Hollywood films: Nick Nolte,standing on the hood of a tank as it lumbers intobattle through enemy fire, making images of waras he risks his life,

The reality is less heroic. Photojournalism iswhatever it can be, given the nature of the journal-ism business. As that business changed, as theage of Life and Look faded, as the nature of thedaily newspaper changed in the face of competi-tion from radio and television, the photographsjournalists made changed too. Photojournalism isno longer what it was in the days of Weegee or thefirst picture magazines in Germany (K. Becker1985). Today's photojoumalists are literate,college educated, can write, and so are no longersimply illustrators of stories reporters tell. Theyhave a coherent ideology, based on the concept ofthe story-telling image. Nevertheless, contempo-rary photojournalism is, like its earlier versions,constrained by available space and by the preju-dices, blind spots, and preconceived story lines oftheir editorial superiors (Ericson, Baranek, andChan 1987). Most importantly, readers do notexpect to spend any time deciphering ambiguitiesand complexities in the photographs that appearin their daily newspaper or news magazine. Suchphotographs must, therefore, be instantly read-able, immediately interpretable (Hagaman 1994,1996).

Photojournalism is constrained, too, by theway editors hand out photographic assignments.Except for sports photographers, who sometimesbecome specialized in that area, photojoumalists,unlike reporters, never develop a "beat," an areaof the city's life they cover continuously and knowso well that they develop a serious analysis andunderstanding of it. Since the photographs theymake inevitably reflect their understanding ofwhat they are photographing, that job-enforcedignorance means that the resulting images willalmost necessarily reflect a superficial under-standing of the events and social phenomenabeing photographed. Heroic legends describe thefew photographers—Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson—who were brave enough or independentenough to overcome these obstacles. But thelegends serve only to hearten those whose workstill reflects those constraints. (A number of social

6

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

A Matter of Context

scientists have studied the organization of newsgathering. See, for instance, Epstein 1973, Hall1973, Molotch and Lester 1974, Schudson 1978,Tuchman 1978, and Ericson, Baranek, and Chan1987. Hagaman 1996 gives a detailed account ofthe situation of newspaper photographers and ofthe constraints the job imposes on the picturesthey make. See also Rudd 1995.)

Documentary photography was tied, histori-cally, to both exploration and social reform. Someearly documentarians worked, literally, "docu-menting" features of the natural landscape, as didTimothy O'Sullivan, who accompanied the UnitedStates Geological Exploration of the FortiethParallel in 1867-69 and the surveys of the south-western United States led by Lieutenant George M.Wheeler, during which he made his now famousimages of the Canyon de Chelle (Horan 1966,151-214 and 237-312). Others documentedunfamiliar ways of life, as in John Thompson'sphotographs of street life in London (Newhall1964, 139), Eugene Atget's massive survey ofParisian people and places (Atget 1992), orAugust Sander's monumental study (finallypublished in English in 1986) of German socialtypes. The latter two projects were, in fact, mas-sive and monumental and in some deep senseimpractical, that is, not tied to any immediatepractical use.

Others worked, like Lewis Hine (Gutman1967), for the great social surveys of the earlypart of the century or, like Jacob Riis 1971[1901], for muckraking newspapers. Their workwas used to expose evil and promote change.Their images were, perhaps, something like thosejournalists made but, less tied to illustrating anewspaper story, they had more space to breathein. A classic example is Hine's image of "Leo, 48inches high, 8 years old, picks up bobbins atfifteen cents a day," in which a young boy standsnext to the machines which have, we almostsurely conclude, stunted his growth.

What is documentary "supposed to do"? Inthe reformist version, it's supposed to dig deep,get at what Robert E. Park (a sociologist who hadworked as a journalist for daily papers in Minne-apolis, Denver, Detroit, Chicago and New York)called the Big News, be "concerned" about soci-ety, play an active role in social change, besocially responsible, worry about its effects on thesociety in which its work is distributed. Photogra-

phers like Hine saw their work, and it has oftenbeen seen since, as having an immediate effect oncitizens and legislators. A photographicallychauvinistic view of history often explains thepassage of laws banning child labor as the directresult of Hines' work.

In its alternative version, documentary wasnot supposed to be anything in particular, sincethe work was not made for anyone in particularwho could have enforced such requirements.Sander, who hoped to sell his work by subscrip-tion, described it variously as depicting the "exist-ing social order" and "a physiognomical timeexposure of German man" (Sander 1986, 23-4).Atget, rather more like an archetypal naive artist,did not describe his work at all, simply made itand sold the prints to whoever would buy them.Today, we see this work as having an exploratory,investigative character, something more likesocial science. Contemporary documentaryphotographers, whose work converges moreconsciously with social science, have becomeaware, as anthropologists have, that they have toworry about, and justify, their relations to thepeople they photograph.

Visual sociology has barely begun (but seethe collection edited by Jon Wagner 1979, thethorough review by Chaplin 1994, and the publi-cations of the International Visual SociologyAssociation). It is almost completely a creature ofprofessional sociology, an academic discipline,and a poor relation of visual anthropology (Collierand Collier 1986), which has a somewhat cozierrelation to its parent discipline; in the anthropo-logical tradition, which required investigatorsgoing to far-off places to gather skulls and linguis-tic texts, and dig up archeological materials aswell as gather conventional ethnographic materi-als, making photographs was just one moreobligation of fieldwork. Since visual imagery hasnot been conventional in sociology since itsbeginnings, when it was more tied to socialreform, most sociologists not only do not acceptthat obligation, they see few legitimate uses forvisual materials, other than as "teaching aids." Itis as though using photographs and films in aresearch report constituted pandering to the lowtastes of the public or trying to persuade readersto accept shaky conclusions by using illegitimate,"rhetorical" means. In short, using visual materialsseems "unscientific," probably because "science"

7

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

8 Howard S. Becker

in sociology came to be defined as being objectiveand neutral, just the opposite of the crusadingspirit which animated the early muckraking work,itself intimately tied to photography (Stasz 1979).

The definition of visual materials as unscien-tific is odd, since the natural sciences routinelyuse visual materials (see the discussion in Latour1986). Contemporary biology, physics, andastronomy are unthinkable without photographicevidence. In social science, only history andanthropology, the least "scientific" disciplines, usephotographs. Economics and political science, themost "scientific," don't. Sociology, trying to apethe supposed scientific character of the latterfields, doesn't. As a result, the few active visualsociologists are people who learned photographyelsewhere and brought it to their academic work.

What is visual sociology "supposed to do?"We can answer that by saying what visual sociolo-gists would have to do to compel the attention andrespect of their discipline. What would they haveto accomplish to convince other sociologists thattheir work is in some sense integral to the socio-logical enterprise? But it's not only a matter ofconvincing others. They must also convincethemselves that what they are doing is "reallysociology," not just making pretty or interestingpictures. To do that, they would have to show thattheir visual work furthers the enterprise of sociol-ogy, however the mission of the discipline isdefined. Since sociologists differ on what sociol-ogy should be, the mission of visual sociology issimilarly confused. At a minimum, it should helpto answer questions raised in the discipline in away acceptable to one or more disciplinaryfactions.

Better yet, it might add something that isnow missing. Are there topics for which photogra-phy would be a particularly good researchmethod? Douglas Harper, an important visualsociologist, suggests these possibilities: studies ofinteraction, the presentation of emotion, the use ofphotographs to elicit information in interviews,and studies of material culture (Harper 1988).

Having made these distinctions, it remains tosay that the boundaries between them are increas-ingly blurred, as the situations in which peoplework and the purposes for which they makephotographs increasingly blend two or moregenres.

ContextPhotographs get meanings, like all cultural ob-jects, from their contexts. Even paintings orsculptures, which seem to exist in isolation,hanging on the wall of a museum, get their mean-ing from a context made up of what has beenwritten about them, either in the label hangingbeside them or elsewhere, other visual objects,physically present or just present in viewers'awareness, and from discussions going on aroundthem and around the subject the works are about.If we think there is no context, that only meansthat the maker of the work has cleverly takenadvantage of our willingness to provide thecontext for ourselves.

As opposed to much contemporary photog-raphy made in the name of art, the three photo-graphic genres discussed here insist on giving agreat deal of explicit social context for the photo-graphs they present. (This is not the place toconsider the fluidity of definitions of photographicart. But the last statement needs to be qualified torecognize that the art world has frequently incor-porated into its photographic canon work madefor reasons quite different from those of self-conscious art, including work made as journalismor documentary. The extreme case is Weegee,whose work now rests in many museum collec-tions.) Contemporary art photographs (I'm think-ing of the work of Nicholas Nixon as an example)often show us something that might well havebeen the subject of a documentary photograph(poor kids standing around a slummy street, forinstance). But they seldom provide any more thanthe date and place of the photograph, withholdingthe minimal social data we ordinarily use to orientourselves to others, leaving viewers to interpretthe images as best they can from the clues ofclothing, stance, demeanor and household fur-nishings they contain. What might seem to beartistic mystery is only ignorance created by thephotographer's refusal to give us basic informa-tion (which, it is likely, the photographer doesn'thave).

The genres we're considering—documentary,photojournalism, and visual sociology—routinelyprovide at least a minimally sufficient backgroundto make the images intelligible. A classic examplefrom visual anthropology is Gregory Bateson andMargaret Mead's Balinese Character (1942). Each

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

A Matter of Context

photograph is part of a two page layout, one pagedevoted to photographs, the other to two kinds oftext: a one or two paragraph interpretive essay,describing a topic like "The Dragon and the Fearof Space" or "Boys' Tantrums" or "The Surface ofthe Body," these essays having a further contextin a long introductory theoretical essay on cultureand personality, and a full paragraph of annota-tion for each photograph, telling when it wasmade, who is in it, and what they are doing. (Seethe discussion in Hagaman 1995.)

Some works in the documentary tradition,often influenced by the photographer's exposureto social science, provide a great deal of text,sometimes in the words of the people involved (e.g., Danny Lyon's Bikeriders (1968) or SusanMeisalas' Carnival Strippers (1976) both done asindependent projects). The text may be no morethan an adequate caption, in the style of LewisHine or Dorothea Lange, or as in Jack Delano'sportrait of a railroad worker, made in Chicago forthe Farm Security Administration, whose captionreads, "Frank Williams, working on the car repairtracks at an Illinois Central Railroad yard. Mr.Williams has eight children, two of whom are inthe U.S. Army. Chicago. November, 1942." (InReid and Viskochil 1989, p. 192.) Photographicbooks often contain extensive introductions andessays setting the social and historical stage forthe images.

But things aren't that simple: leaving thecontext implicit does not make a photograph art,while a full context makes it documentary, socialscience, or photojournalism. Not all good works ofdocumentary provide this kind of context. RobertFrank's The Americans (to which I will devotemore attention below) gives no more textualsupport to the images than most art photographs,but it is not vulnerable to the above criticism. Whynot? Because the images themselves, sequenced,repetitive, variations on a set of themes, providetheir own context, teach viewers what they needto know in order to arrive, by their own reasoning,at some conclusions about what they are lookingat.

In short, context gives images meaning. Ifthe work does not provide context in one of theways I've just discussed, viewers will provide it, ornot, from their own resources.

Let's pursue this line of thought by looking atimages which exemplify each of the three genres

and seeing how they might be interpreted as oneof the others. What if we take photographs of eachtype to be other than what they were made as—take a documentary photograph, for instance, asa news photograph or a work of visual sociology?What happens when we read these images inways their makers didn't intend or, at least,differently than the way they are conventionallyread?

Reading a documentary picture as visualsociology or photojournalism

In "En route from New York to Washington, ClubCar" (Frank 1959, p. 25), three men sit in arailroad club car. Two large men sit with theirbacks to us, near enough to the camera to beslightly out of focus. They wear tweed jackets,have dark slick hair, lean toward each other, andoccupy half the frame. Between them, in focus,we see a black-suited third man's bald head and,behind him, the bar, above which shine manysmall star-shaped lights. His face is jowly, hisforehead lined. He isn't looking at either of theothers. He seems serious, even somber.

Robert Frank made this picture, as he madeall the pictures in The Americans with a documen-tary intent, as part of a larger project designed todescribe American society.* Frank described thatintent in his application for the Guggenheimfellowship that made the project possible:

What I have in mind, then, is observation andrecord of what one naturalized American findsto see in the United States that signifies thekind of civilization born here and spreadingelsewhere. Incidentally, it is fair to assume thatwhen an observant American travels abroadhis eye will see freshly; and that the reversemay be true when a European eye looks at theUnited States. I speak of the things that arethere, anywhere and everywhere—easilyfound, not easily selected and interpreted. Asmall catalog comes to the mind's eye: a townat night, a parking lot, a supermarket, ahighway, the man who owns the three cars andthe man who owns none, the farmer and hischildren, a new house and a warped clapboardhouse, the dictation of taste, the dream ofgrandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces ofthe leaders and the faces of the followers, gastanks and post offices and backyards. . .(Tucker and Brookman 1986, p 20)

In another place, he explained his project thisway:

With these photographs, I have attempted toshow a cross-section of the American popula-

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

10 Howard S. Becker

tion. My effort was to express it simply andwithout confusion. The view is personal and,therefore, various facets of American life andsociety have been ignored. . . .

I have been frequently accused of deliber-ately twisting subject matter to my point ofview. Above all, I know that life for a photog-rapher cannot be a matter of indifference.Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism.But criticism can come out of love. It isimportant to see what is invisible to others.Perhaps the look of hope or the look ofsadness. Also, it is always the instantaneousreactions to oneself that produces a photo-graph. (Reprinted from U.S. Camera Annual1958, U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., NewYork, 1967, p. 115, in Tucker andBrookman, p. 31)

Seen in this context, we can understandthe image as a statement about Americanpolitics. These men (large, physically imposing)are the kind who occupy positions of politicalpower, who inhabit such places as the club carsof trains going between Mew York, the country'sfinancial center, and Washington, the center ofpolitical life. What makes this image documen-tary, and gives it its full meaning, is its context.The image says nothing explicit about Americanpolitics. But we understand its political state-ment by learning, from their use elsewhere inthe book, the meaning of the image's details.We learn that a big man is a powerful man (asin Frank's "Bar—Gallup, New Mexico," in whicha large man in jeans and a cowboy hat domi-nates a crowded bar), and that a well-dressedbig man is a rich and powerful man ("Hotellobby—Miami Beach," in which a large middle-aged man is accompanied by a woman wearingwhat seems to be an expensive fur). We learnthat politicians are big, thus powerful, men("City fathers—Hoboken, New Jersey," in whicha group of such men fill a political platform). Wesee these big, well-dressed men on the trainbetween these two power centers. The stars inthe lights above the bar recall the Americanflags, and their use and misuse in political andeveryday settings, in other photographs in thebook, and suggest that we are looking at thepowerful at work in some unspecified way,probably one that will not do us any good. Theimage functions as part of Frank's analysis—implicit, but nonetheless clear—of how the

American political system works.If the analysis were made explicit, its complex-

ity might well qualify it as a work of visual sociol-ogy. We would probably, in that case, want to knowmore about what we were seeing. Who are thesepeople? What are they actually doing? But, moreimportantly, we would want to know more clearlywhat Frank was telling us about the nature ofAmerican politics. We would want to replace thenuance of the photographic treatment of Americansociety, as many commentators have in fact done(cf. Brumfeld 1980; Cook 1982, 1986), with anexplicit statement about the nature of that society,its class and political structure, its age grading, itssexual stratification, and its use of such majorsymbols as the flag, the cross, and the automobile.Such an explicit statement of cultural patterns andsocial structure would make the image speak to thekind of abstract questions about the organization of,society that interest professional sociologists.

Even then, it's not likely that many sociolo-gists would accept Frank's book as a work ofscientific sociology. They would assume, correctly,that photographs are easily manipulated; thesophisticated ones would know that you need notalter the actual image, just frame the elementsproperly and wait for an opportune moment. Theywould worry, properly, about using one image as asurrogate for a larger universe of similar situations.They would not be sure, and have warrant for theiruneasiness, that the images have the meaning 1 amimputing. They would not, however, take the nextstep, which would be to see that every form ofsocial science data has exactly these problems, andthat none of the commonly accepted and widely-used sociological methods solves them very welleither.

Set on the front page of a daily newspaper, wemight read the same photograph as a news photo-graph. But the people in it are not named, andnewspapers seldom print photographs of anony-mous people. Quite the contrary. Photojournalistsare trained, until it is instinctive for them, to getnames and other relevant information about thepeople they photograph (so a student in a course inphotojournalism will be warned that a misspelledname will automatically lead to failure of thecourse). To function as a news photograph, theimage would require a quite different caption thanthe one Frank gave it. For instance: "Senator JohnJones of Rhode Island discusses campaign strategy

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

A Matter of Context 11

with two assistants." But even then it's unlikelythat the picture would appear in the daily newspa-per, because it is grainy, not in sharp focus, andthe two staff aides have their backs to us. Theeditor would send the photographer back for amore sharply focused image of such a routineevent, one that was less grainy and showed us thefaces of all three men.

In fact, many conventional photographersand critics complained about Frank's work in justthe way this hypothetical editor would have. Theeditors of Popular Photography, for instance,didn't like Frank's book. These comments ap-peared in Vol. 46, no. 5 (May, 1960):

Frank has managed to express, through therecalcitrant medium of photography, anintense personal vision, and that's nothing tocarp at. But as to the nature of that vision Ifound its purity too often marred by spite,bitterness, and narrow prejudices just as somany of the prints are flawed by meaninglessblur, grain, muddy exposure, drunken hori-zons, and general sloppiness. As a photogra-pher, Frank shows contempt for any standardsof quality or discipline in technique. . . .(Arthur Goldsmith, quoted in Tucker andBrookman, pp. 36-7).

And another critic said:It seems as if he merely points the camera inthe direction he wishes to shoot and doesn'tworry about exposure, composition, and lesserconsiderations. If you dig out-of-focus pictures,intense and unnecessary grain, convergingverticals, a total absence of normal composi-tion, and a relaxed, snapshot quality, thenRobert Frank is for you. If you don't, you mayfind The Americans one of the most irritatingphoto books to make the scene. (James M.Zanutto, quoted in Tucker and Brookman, p.37)

If, however, a photojournalist had made thepicture during an expose of political corruption, aneditor might well excuse such "technical" flawsbecause of the importance of what was revealed.In this case, the caption might read "JamesMcGillicuddy, Boston political boss, talking withSenator John Jones of Rhode Island, Chairman ofthe Senate Armed Forces Committee, and HarryThompson, CEO of a major defense contractingfirm." The editor might make this the basis of astrong editorial and the Senator, like so manypoliticians accused of wrongdoing, might want todeny he was ever there.

In fact, at least one of Frank's photographs(made at the 1956 Democratic convention) mightwell, in the proper context, have appeared in a

daily newspaper or news magazine as "news." Thecaption ("Convention hall—Chicago") characteris-tically names no one. Here we see the crowdedfloor of a political convention. Again, two menhave their backs to us. On either side of them, twomen face us. One, wearing dark glasses, lookssuave and calm. The other, jowly, looks downworriedly. The faces of these two politicians were,at the time, recognizable, and their names mighthave given the picture "news value." The troubledlooking gentleman was a sociologist (from whom Itook a class at the University of Chicago, which iswhy I recognized him) who had left academia forpolitics: Joseph Lohman, a well-known criminolo-gist who became Illinois Secretary of State, madean unsuccessful try for the Democratic gubernato-rial nomination, and then left politics to becomeDean of the School of Criminology at the Univer-sity of California at Berkeley. At the time of thephotograph he was still active in Illinois politics,seen as a "good government" type in the AdlaiStevenson tradition. He is talking, I believe (butam not sure), to Carmine DeSapio, a major MewYork City political figure, in the old-fashionedparty boss tradition. In the context of that conven-tion, the image of their conversation might, byindicating an unlikely and therefore interestingpotential political alliance, have been "news".

Reading a sociological picture asjournalism and as documentary

Douglas Harper did his study of tramps as a workof sociology; the original dissertation relegated thephotographs he had made to a "Volume 2," wherethey had no captions. But the book he turned thethesis into, Good Company (1982), contained alarge number of photographs, not as illustrations,the way photographs appear in sociology text-books, but as elements integral to the sociologicalinvestigation and therefore to a reader's sociologi-cal understanding. They contain, and express,ideas that are sociological in their origin and use,and thus may not be as transparent to an immedi-ate reading as other photographs. For instance,the photograph of a man shaving needs to beseen in context, as Harper points out, as evidencethat refutes the common notion that these menare bums who don't take care of themselves anddon't share conventional standards of decorum.As he says, when we see these men with a a twoday growth of beard we should realize that thatmeans that they shaved two days ago.

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

12 Howard S. Becker

What makes these images visual sociology isnot their content alone, but their context. Theyappear surrounded by a sociological text, al-though an unconventional one, which explainstheir import to us. One part of the text describesthe way Carl, a tramp Harper met during hisfieldwork, indoctrinated him into hobo culture. Asecond part describes, in analytic sociologicallanguage, that hobo culture, the characteristicforms of social organization hobos are involved in,and the conditions under which such adaptationsgrow up and persist. The text, both the narrativeof Harper's training in how to live on the road andthe later explicit sociological analysis, give thepictures added substance, sociological meaning,and evidentiary value.

Try reading these same images as photojour-nalism. Imagine them as illustrations for anewspaper's series on the fashionable topic of"homelessness." Read in that context, they wouldget their meaning, as photojournalistic imagestypically do, from the stock of easily availablestereotypes daily newspaper readers carry withthem. We probably would never see the manshaving because, for one thing, it's unlikely thatany working photojournalist would want, or beable, to spend the months on the road that al-lowed Harper the ease of access and, moreimportantly, the background of knowledge thatgave him the image's meaning. As famous aphotojournalist as W. Eugene Smith, at the heightof his career, still had to fight with Life repeatedlyto get to spend as much as three weeks in oneplace.

In addition, an editor would probably say tothe photographer who brought such pictures in,"These don't say 'homeless' to me." Why don'tthey? Because editors know, or think they know,in advance of any investigation, what their storyline is going to be. Whatever a story says about"the problem" of homelessness will be well withinwhat readers already know and believe. Anappropriate photograph will rely, for its instantreadability, on readers having that knowledge. Forthe editor, and therefore for the photographer,what "homelessness" is has already been decided;they are not trying to find things about it theydidn't know before. The only problem is technical:how to get the image that tells the already se-lected story best. (See Hagaman 1996 and Rudd1994).

Can we read Harper's photographs asdocumentary? Yes, we could see them, in LewisHine's classic phrase, as showing us what needsto be changed or, perhaps, the other half of Hine'sfamous remark, what needs to be appreciated. Wemight, in an appropriate setting of text and otherphotographs, see them as part of the effort of anaroused group of professionals to straighten outthe lives of these men who wandered the country.Or we might, nearer to Harper's own intention,want to celebrate the independence and way oflife of these men, in just the appreciative wayDavid Matza (1969) described the Chicago Schoolof sociology appreciating what was ordinarilycondemned. This celebratory mode of readingshares much with the common anthropologicalinjunction to respect the people you study.

Reading a journalistic picture as visual sociol-ogy and as documentary

Consider this picture.** We see a helicopter on alawn, in the garden of what looks like the WhiteHouse. A carpet runs from the building to thehelicopter. A man, head down, shouldershunched, walks along the carpet to the planewhile, on either side, people stand weeping.People who were not old enough to be interestedin politics in 1974 may not know what the imageshows us, but it was then instantly recognizable toanyone reading the newspaper, anywhere in theworld. Richard Nixon is leaving the White House,having just resigned the Presidency of the UnitedStates, his boast that he was not a crook belied bythe continuing exposure of what he knew andwhen he knew it. In its day, it was a classic newsphotograph.

Shortly after its publication, it suffered thefate of all news photographs, which is that theyare soon no longer news and have "only histori-cal" value. Their news value depends on context,on the event being contemporary, "now." In fact,the pathos and emotional impact of the Nixonimage required every viewer who picked up thepaper and saw it to furnish that context, to knowthe second they saw the picture exactly what theywere looking at. The image summed up a storythey had followed for months in the papers and ontelevision, the gradual and seemingly inevitabledownfall of a powerful political leader, toppled byhis own lies and paranoia, finally succumbing to acombination of political and journalistic attacks.

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

A Matter of Context 13

Years later the image has no such connota-tions. It records an event which people who didnot read newspapers and magazines at the timehave possibly read or heard about. But it is notnews, not the end point of a story whosedenouement was, until then, unknown and indoubt. It has to be something other than news.What else could it be?

In the proper context, news photographs ofcontinuing interest become documentary, asErich Salomon's photographs, made between thetwo World Wars, of such phenomena as theVersailles Peace Conference, have becomedocumentary (Salomon 1967). The politiciansSalomon photographed—such luminaries of thetime as Gustav Streseman and Aristide Briand—are no longer news. But we might combine theNixon image—no longer news to us—withSalomon's photographs to create a generalizeddocument of aspects of the political process.Others, more historically minded, might like tosee the Nixon image embedded in a larger con-sideration of the Watergate events.

Could the Nixon image be part of a socio-logical analysis? An analyst might be concerned,as many have been, with the way the print mediadeal with the generic phenomenon of politicalscandal (Molotch and Lester 1974), the way thedevices of photographic representation are usedto indicate the political downgrading of a dis-graced leader. A good sociological analysis of thisproblem would require comparisons of photo-graphs of Nixon at various stages of his career.Nixon would be an excellent subject for such ananalysis because his career and reputationfluctuated so widely in such a relatively short timeand the photographic representations could beexpected to vary correspondingly.

Other analysts of political behavior mightconcern themselves with the public rituals ofsocieties, with the use of quasi-regal parapherna-lia and events to create a sort of monarchicalregime within a political democracy. Photographsof Nixon, in such a research, would be surroundedby other photographs of similar rituals and bytexts which revealed other devices aimed at thesame result.

Summing upWhere does this leave us? Photographers worryabout what they are doing, and hope to clear their

confusion up by finding the right name for whatthey do. But "word magic" is no more effective insolving photographic problems than it is anywhereelse. Visual workers will find their legitimation inthe response their work generates in viewers,whatever name that work goes by. They will findthe direction for what they do in the particularcircumstances of its doing, in the combination oforganizations, audiences, and peers that surroundthem as they do the work.

For sociologists and other social scientists,these examples provide a warning against meth-odological purism, an illustration of the contextualnature of all efforts to understand social life. Thesame examples provide material for the continu-ing examination of ways of telling about society,whether through words, numbers, or pictures.

Notes* Treating art photographs as social science

has its own hazards. We were unable to procurepermission from either Mr. Frank or his represen-tative, Peter McGill of the Pace-McGill Gallery inNew York, to reproduce any of the images Idiscuss here. I have tried to provide a descriptionin the text that is sufficiently complete to allowreaders to follow the analysis. It would be better,of course, to consult a copy of Frank's The Ameri-cans and have the image before you as you read.

* * 1 have not been able to find the image Idescribe here, but have found others sufficientlysimilar as not to mar the argument. I've taken theliberty of describing the "perfect" image 1remember.

ReferencesAtget, Eugene. 1992. Atget Paris. Paris: Hazan.Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead. 1942. Balinese

Character. New York: New York Academy ofSciences.

Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press..1986. "Telling About Society," pp. 121-35 in Do-

ing Things Together. Evanston, IL; Northwestern Uni-versity Press.

Becker, Karin E. 1985. "Forming a Profession: EthicalImplications of Photojournalistic Practice on Ger-man Picture Magazines, 1926-1933," Studies in Vi-sual Communication 11 (2): 44-60.

Brumfield, John. 1980. "The Americans' and The Ameri-cans," Afterimage (Summer): 8-15.

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010

14 Howard S. Becker

Capa Cornell, ed. The Concerned Photographer. NewYork: Grossman.

Chaplin, Elizabeth. 1994. Sociology and Visual Repre-sentation. London: Routledge.

Collier, John Jr. and Malcolm Collier. 1986. Visual An-thropology: Photography as a Research Method. Al-buquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Cook, John. 1982. "Robert Frank's America," Afterim-age (March): 9-14.. 1986. "Robert Frank," Exposure24 (1): 31-41.

Epstein, E. J. 1973. News from Nowhere. New York:Random House.

Ericson, Richard, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B. L.Chan. 1987. Visualizing Deviance: A Study of NewsOrganization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gutman, Judith Mara. 1967. Lewis W. Hine and theAmerican Social Conscience. New York: Walker andCompany.

Hagaman, Dianne. 1993. "The Joy of Victory, the Agonyof Defeat: Stereotypes in Newspaper Sports Fea-ture Photographs, Visual Sociology 8, pp. 48-66.

. 1995. "Connecting Cultures: Balinese Characterand the computer," in Susan Leigh Star, ed., TheCultures of Computing, Keele: The Sociological Re-view (forthcoming).

. 1996. How I Learned Not To Be a Photojournal-ist. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Hall, Stuart. 1973. "The Determination of News Photo-graphs, pp. 176-90 in Stan Cohen and Jock Young,eds., The Manufacture of News: A Reader, BeverlyHills: Sage.

Harper, Douglas. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

. 1988. "Visual Sociology: Expanding SociologicalVision." The American Sociologist 19 (1), 54-70.

Horan, James. 1966. Timothy O'Sullivan: America's For-gotten Photographer. New York: Bonanza Books.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. "Visualization and Cognition:Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge andSociety 6, pp. 1-40.

Lyon, Danny. 1968. The Bikeriders. New York:MacMillan.

Meisalas, Susan. 1976. Carnival Strippers. New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Matza, David. 1969. Becoming Deviant. EnglewoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Molotch, Harvey and Marilyn Lester. 1974. "News asPurposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Rou-tine Events, Accidents, and Scandals," AmericanSociological Review 39: 101-12.

Newhall, Beaumont. 1964. The History of Photography.New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Reid, Robert L. and Larry A. Viskochil, eds. 1989. Chi-cago and Downstate: Illinois as Seen by the FarmSecurity Administration Photographers, 1936-1943.Chicago and Urbana: Chicago Historical Society

and University of Illinois Press.Riis, Jacob. 1971 [1901]. How the Other Half Lives.

New York: Dover.Rudd, James. 1994. "Picture Possibilities: An Ethno-

graphic Study of Newspaper Photojournalism."M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology, University-of Washington.

Salomon, Erich. 1967. Portrait of an Age. Collier Books:New York.

Sander, August. 1986. Citizens of the Twentieth Cen-tury. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Stasz, Clarice. 1979. "The Early History of Visual So-ciology" in Wagner 1979, pp. 119-36.

Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making News. New York: FreePress.

Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News. NewYork: Basic Books.

Tucker, Anne Wilkes, ed. and Philip Brookman, asso-ciate ed. 1986. Robert Frank: New York to NovaScotia. Boston: Little Brown.

Wagner, Jon., ed. 1979. Images of Information: StillPhotography in the Social Sciences. Beverly Hills:Sage Publications.

Downloaded At: 18:20 26 October 2010