MEANING AND THE IMAGE: an exploration of some theoretical approaches

Ditulis oleh: Karen Strassler

“...the image is felt to be weak with respect of meaning: there are those who think that the image is an extremely rudimentary system in comparison with language and those who think that signification cannot exhaust the image’s ineffable richness. Now even—and above all if—the image is in a certain manner the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?” (Barthes 1977: 32)

What are the modes of analysis that have been developed for studying how images signify, and what do these imply about how images are read in everyday life? How is visual representation distinct from verbal texts? What is particular about photographic images?


Barthes’ quotation evokes the elusiveness of a theory of images, and the contradictory and ambivalent evaluations of visual forms as modes of signification. In this essay I will look at attempts to understand how images become meaningful to people. As Barthes suggests, this requires both a study of processes of signfication and a broader cultural and historical examination of context. I will begin by looking at debates about the nature of images in relation to texts, as a way to specify visual modes of representation, and to identify some of the ideologies of representation that a discussion of visual imagery necessarily confronts. I will argue that while there is no absolute or essential divide between visual and linguistic forms, neither should differences in modes of signification and reception be overlooked. Second, I will briefly discuss debates about the nature of photographic signs—do they have intrinsic qualities or is their alleged “essence” historically produced? I will argue that a full account of photographic images has to take into account both their historical and cultural determinations and their intrinsic qualities as particular kinds of signs and material objects. Third, I will look at strategies for analyzing the meaning of the image developed within semiotic, discursive, and social-historical analysis. Finally I will question the dominant model of image reception as a form of “reading” modeled on the reading of texts. I will suggest some possibilities for a fuller account of image-reception.

THE WORD AND THE IMAGE
To ask what images are, and what their relationship to words is, is to ask questions that are not merely theoretical but contested ideological and inevitably historical ones. The problem of defining the term “image” becomes an extraordinarily complex one that brings us to the very heart of “Western” epistemologies (Mitchell 1986: see especially Part One). In his etymological genealogy of the term “image,” Mitchell notes the close linkage between the concepts of “image” and “idea”, and the polysemy of this word which can mean mental representations, material visual images, and figurative language. According to Mitchell, the very idea of the image as it has been elaborated in Western philosophy is tied to representational theories of mind and metaphysical divisions of mind-matter and subject-object (1986: 16). As he argues, “consciousness itself [has been] understood as an activity of pictorial production, reproduction, and representation” (1986: 16). Although the importance of the idea and the mental image has its roots in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, the Cartesian model of mental representations has set the terms of the debate for “modern” theories of vision and images (Jay 1993). Not only does the Cartesian mental representation model reduce consciousness and perception to a visual model, but it posits both a one-to-one correspondence and a radical ontological separation between internal mental representations and the external objects they represent.
If the polyvalent term “image” already suggests the difficulty of disentangling linguistic and visual operations, Mitchell points out that attempts to distinguish text and image have to be understood in ideological terms:
“The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that culture weaves around itself. What varies is the precise nature of the weave, the relation of warp and woof. The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a ‘nature’ to which only it has access" (Mitchell 1986: 42-3).

He suggests that the attempt to distinguish between words and images has tended to reflect metaphysical distinctions between words and things and, more broadly, between culture and nature (1986: 43). As with any metaphysic, the valuation of the opposed terms may be reversed: at certain historical junctures and in certain institutional settings it is signs allied with “nature” that are privileged, while in others it is the “cultural” that are held in higher esteem. Hence the valuation of photographs as “natural” documentary evidence in certain legal traditions, while in other contexts the human word is accorded greater authority. Stressing the ideological nature of these distinctions, Mitchell argues against positing any essential diffence between verbal and visual representation (49). While I agree that differences in modes of signification are always subject to cultural valuations, I disagree with Mitchell’s radical conventionalism, which seems to eliminate the possiblity of any meaningful exploration of either the human mind or the intrinsic material qualities of symbolic forms.
The question of defining visual as opposed to textual modes of signification has been of central importance within the philosophy of art. In her Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer made an influential effort to distinguish modes of “reading” images and texts (1966). Langer’s dichotomy of “discursive” versus “presentational” forms was an attempt to argue that images and other non-linguistic forms of expression were amenable to semantic analysis. Where they had previously been shunted off to a nebulous realm of feeling and psychological intuition, Langer insisted that images, rituals, music, and other presentational forms could be subjected to “rational” analysis—but on different principles than discursive texts. Language, she argued, was discursive, meaning that it unfolded in a linear progression (over time), while presentational forms were apprehended wholisitically and immediately. Language operated according to the mental processes of logic, while presentational forms were closer to the sensory organs which abstract from the chaos of sensory stimuli to produce symbols. Yet like so many attempts to define the difference between texts and images, Langer’s theory founders on her binary logic and essentialism. Her attempt to find a vocabulary for analyzing presentational forms was crippled by an overly narrow definition of language (dominant at the time of her writing) which viewed language as primarly a logical system of propositions and a conscious, explicit instrument of communication. Thus her definition of “discursive” tended to be excessively narrow and reductive and led her into various corners, such as her argument that poetry is a presentational rather than a discursive form (Langer 1966: 261-2). Langer falls on the side of celebrating, in Barthes’ words, the image’s emotional “richness,” yet her project was designed to render the apparently “ineffable” nature of images articulable.
Langer also suggested that, being closer to the symbolic work of the senses, presentational forms were more “natural” than discursive ones. The Platonic distinction, debated in the Cratylus, between “natural” and “conventional” signs has long informed the effort to distinguish images from texts. In his early, most influential work, Art and Illusion, Gombrich argued against a radical distinction between visual and linguistic forms, and in particular against the idea that images were inherently less conventional than words (Gombrich 1956). He also attacked the art historical assumption that visual perception was precultural and universal, arguing: “the innocent eye is blind” (cited in Mitchell 1986: 38). However, in reaction against semiotics, Gombrich subsequently moved away from this early position, to argue in a neo-Platonistic vein that there were both “natural” signs and “conventional” signs. In Gombrich’s reinscription of the ancient dichotomy, words are thoroughly conventional but visual images tend to be “naturally” recognizable because they iconically imitate the world of visual perception (see Mitchell 1986: 77; 81).
Philosopher Nelson Goodman argued, by contrast, that the distinctions among kinds of symbols were not intrinsic to (or given in) specific media but rather were thoroughly conventional and thus, historically and practically constituted (Goodman 1976; see Mitchell 1986: 69). Thus photographs had no special status as “uncoded mesages” that record the real, because the definition of the “real” on which photography’s claims to authority stood was itself a culturally specific and historically produced matter (Goodman 1976). Goodman argued, for example, that a caricature might be deemed in certain contexts and regimes of value a more “realistic” portrayal than a photograph. Indeed, we will see in the debates specific to photography between Barthes and Tagg, for example, a replay of this question of whether or not photographs are “natural” or “conventional” signs.
Semiotics has provided a powerful framework to undermine the radical distinction between text and image. Semioticians argue that since all visual perception is culturally trained there can be no radical distinction between the “naked” world we observe and the pictorial or mental representations we have of it. Moreover, all visual perception is linguistically mediated so there can be no pure visual perception and no “language” of images (Eco 1982; Burgin 1982; Wartofsky 1980). In arguing that vision is not a precultural perceptual activity but a socially and culturally constituted practice, Barthes’ early semiology elaborated a methodology for reading images based on strategies of reading of texts, borrowing terms from classical rhetoric in order to argue that the image is a symbolic system that can be decoded like language. However, as I examine in more depth below, Barthes has also been accused of reinscribing a distinction between the “real” world and the world of symbolic meanings. Nevertheless, the conventional position of semiotics is well summed up in Victor Burgin’s statement that “the putatively autonomous ‘language of photography’ is never free from the determinations of language itself” (Burgin 1982: 143-4; see also Barthes 1977: 28). In any encounter with an image, argues Burgin, “visual and non-visual codes interpenetrate each other in extensive and complex ways” (Burgin 1982: 83).
It is often difficult to distinguish within semiotic studies, however, whether the relationship between text and image is an analogical one (we “read” images like we “read” texts—both are conventionalized, decoding activities) or a kind of linguistic imperialism (language shapes our perception of the world, thus we can only perceive visually through the filter of the categories our language provides). Barthes himeself argued that semiology was a branch of linguistics (for him defined in Saussurean terms), and that “it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signified can exist independently of language” (Barthes 1977: 56). Mitchell notes that as a result of this tendency to linguistic imperialism, semiotics has been regarded with suspicion by art historians eager to preserve the essential nature of visual representation: “Insofar as semiotics...treats every graphic images as a text, a coded, intentional, and conventional sign, it threatens to blur the uniqueness of graphic images, and to make them part of the seamless web of interpretable objects” (Mitchell 1986: 156).
Part of the problem, however, has been mainstream semiotic’s adherence to a Saussurean account of linguistic signs as a model for all sign activity. Peirce’s semiotic offers an alternative to Saussurean semiotics, allowing for different types of sign activity. As Daniel notes, as opposed to the hermetic system model of Saussurean semiotics which identifies sign and concept and leaves both the material world and the reader out of the semiotic picture, the Peircian framework includes both the empirical object (material or not) and the empirical subject in the analysis of semeiosis (Daniel 1984: 15; also Colapietro 1989: xix). More profoundly than Saussure-inspired semiotics, Peirce ruptured the mind-matter, thought-world dichotomies on which representational theories of signification rely. His definition of a sign—“something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity”—was broadly inclusive, refusing to extract signs from the world: “every picture, diagram, natural cry, pointing finger, wink, knot in one’s handkerchief, memory, fancy, concept, indication, token, symptom, letter, numeral, word, sentence, chapter, book, library” (Peirce, cited in Colapietro 1989: 3).
Peirce’s triadic definiton of the sign offers a much needed way out of the quandaries I have been outlining. In defining three basic modes of signfication—indexicality, iconicity, and symbolism—and in arguing that there were no “pure” signs, Peirce emphasized the specificity and multiplicity of relations between signs (representamen) and objects, including contiguous and mimetic relationships. Like other branches of semiotics and like Goodman’s conventionalist symbolism, the Peircian system does not posit any essential difference between text and image. However, in identifying different types of sign relationships it does attend to the particular qualities of objects, signs, and interpretants and thus does not simply assimilate images to texts. Signs are always embodied, a fact that bears on relations of signification (Colapietro 1989: 70, 85). As Daniel notes, “an image..is an iconic Second. Its iconicity is more dominant than in the case of the metaphor. Its separation from its object—ergo its contiguity with it (in reality or in the mind) remains apparent, an dhence its indexical function is conspicuous” (Daniel 1984: 51-2). Mitchell rejects Peirce’s model, arguing that it reinscribes a notion of “natural” signs (Mitchell 1986: 56-63); however, Mitchell’s stance misconstrues Peirce, by missing both Peirce’s refusal of “purity” of signification (there are no pure iconic signs) and because he misses the thoroughgoing nature of Peircian semeiotic in which the distinction between “nature” and “convention” iteslf breaks down.
Just as Mitchell argues against opposing text and image on the basis of inherent qualities of signs, he also argues against grounding accounts of visual experience in a theory of human minds (Mitchell 1986: 49). Yet such cautions against essentialism should not turn us away from all investigations of cognitive processes as potentially relevant for an understanding of proceses of signification. In cognitive psychology there has been a longstanding debate parallel to that over text and image in art history and semotiics: whether there are internal, “depictive” mental representations or merely a general form of “propositional” cognitive processing that is the same for language and for imagery (see Kosslyn 1994). Recent studies indicate that people do mentally rotate envisioned objects and scan imagined distances in a kind of “functional [mental] space” and that this mental visual imagery is an integral part of the process of visual perception itself (Kosslyn 1994: see for example 21). Cognitive theories of the modularity of the mind also lend support to the idea that the processing of visual information occurs in different parts of the brain and through different procedures than verbal infomation (Schacter 1996). (Though neither of these approahces suggests that there are “pure” visual processes divorced from linguistic operations). I am in no position to evaluate these claims, however, it seems to me that such studies of the structure of a “universal” human mind should not be treated as antithetical to a productive inquiry into the nature of signification. It should be possible to find a way of analyzing how visual imagery is “processed” differently from verbal information without overly dichotomizing the visual and the verbal and without obviating a critique of the historically contingent ideologies and meanings that have been attached to such differences.

SPECIFYING THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SIGN
Many of the debates about natural and conventional signs have been replayed in attempts to specify photographic modes of representation. Early writings on photography emphasized its qualities as a “natural” sign—“the pencil of nature” in Talbot’s famous phrase—and its radical difference not only from words but from more overtly conventionalized, artificed forms of images exemplified by paintings (Trachtenberg 1980). Wood’s distinction between photography and painting is just one of many oppositions of this kind:
“The painted moment is assembled, not witnessed...The elements of a painting are simultaneous within the continuous present of a spatial art; their co-existence, their relationships are willed, meaningful, purposed. The elements of a photograph are simultaneous out of a frozen time; their coexistence is discovered (possibly...only after the photograph has been taken), snatched, isolated.” (Wood 1984: 151)

It is in part out of this taxonomic confusion over the status of photographs as “natural” images that such a huge amount of photography criticism has been devoted to photography’s ambiguous qualifications as a “fine art” (see Berger 1972, Burgin 1982). Of course, it was Benjamin’s insight that the advent of photography forever transformed the nature of art itself, by turning the orignal work of art into the original of a reproduction (1968).
Barthes also grappled with these questions in his attempts to outline a structural semiotic analysis of the photographic image. In his famous declaration that the photograph was a “message without a code” Barthes seemed to fall into the naturalist position (Barthes, 1977: 36). However, Barthes is usually read far more categorically and reductively than a careful examination of his analysis allows. Barthes argued that there were denotative and connotative levels of signfication in each image—but that in normal reception the two levels were taken in as one. The denotative level is the image’s transparent transcription of real objects placed before the camera, the literal uncoded message of the image (although he does not deny that those objects are themselves culturally and lingusitically constituted, see1977: 28-9). The connotative level is the level of cultural codings which are “connected, actualized, ‘spoken’” through the configuration of signs presented in the denotated scene (1977: 51). The coded level, or connotative level, imbues this configuration of elements with cultural meanings depending “on [the] different kinds of knowledge” to which the reader/viewer has access (Barthes, 1977: 47). Looking at pose, objects, perspective, and other aspects of the structure of the image, such an analysis locates “signifiers” that can be more or less stably attached to a range of culturally-relevant “signifieds.”
Barthes, embracing what he calls a “realist” position, argues that the unique authority of the photograph—indeed its very “essence” (1981: 76)—lies in its power of authentication as a direct transcription of real objects and spaces. The photograph is in fact “literally an emanation of the referent” (1981: 80), a physical trace of the real, and hence no matter how artfully and intentionally composed, the image presents the “stupefying evidence of this is how it was” (1977: 44). Although it reduces three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image, it does not enact a “transformation” of reality; rather, the photograph is reality’s “perfect analogon” (1977: 17). Barthes’ contention that the real is inscribed onto the image does not deny the culturally constructed nature of the image. Rather, it is this evidence of the real in the photographic image that lends authoritative power to its cultural “message.” Thus in an extraordinarily effective ideological formula, the “cultural” meanings of the image are “naturalized” through being mapped onto the denotative, or literal, representation of the real (1977: 17): “the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence” (Barthes, 1977: 51).
Tagg, however, argues against Barthes that the photograph represents “the production of a new and specific reality...which becomes meaningful in certain transactions and has real effects, but which cannot refer or be referred to a pre-photographic reality as to a truth” (Tagg 19988: 3). Photographs are merely “paltry paper signs” onto which not reality but “histories are scored” (Tagg 1988: 65). For Tagg and other theorists, there is no reality “out there” that can exist separately from the discourses and practices by which it is made meaningful (Tagg 1988: 23-4; Hall 1993: 95) hence the analytic distinction between “reality” and “image or representation” on which Barthes’ theory of photographic authority rests is itself a false distinction: as Burgin says, “all that constitutes reality for us is, then, impregnated with meanings. These meaning are contingent products of history” (Burgin 1982: 47). Moreover, they argue, the complex processes of selection (choosing when to take the picture and where, choices about framing, angle, lighting, and depth of focus) enact such a distortion in the transition from actual space to image that Barthes’ notion of an “analogon” cannot stand. Finally, there can be no fundamental distinction between that which is real and that which is a representation, since perception of both involves a decoding activity that employs the cultural codes provided by linguisitic classifying systems; the very act of perceiving (“image” or “reality”) filters all that is received through a cultural screen (Eco 1982: 34; Burgin 1982: 63; Tagg 1988: 187; a point that Barthes acknowledges, 1977: 28-9). For Tagg and other anti-realists, the photograph’s authority in myriad practices is not the result of anything intrinsic to the photograph: “what Barthes calls ‘evidential force’ is a complex historical outcome and is exercised by photographs only within certain institutional practices and within historical relations” (Tagg 1988: 4). Tagg argues that in fact photographs are only recognized as “realistic” within certain institutional and cultural constraints (1988: 160). The important thing, then, is to look for the conditions of the production of “truth,” for the institutions and practices by which photographs are accorded the qualities of authentic representations of “reality”.
Tagg argues, moreover, that the search for an essential nature for photography is fundamentally misguided. He insists that an investigation into photographic practices must in fact begin not with “photography” but precisely with the specific institutions which produce images. Any notion of a “medium” of photography is itself flawed in its implication that photography is “a neutral technology or means of representation to which any general and unconditional definition could be given...the so-called medium has no existence outside its historical specifications ...Photography as such has no identity” (1988: 18). Elsewhere he argues that photography’s “history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such” (1988: 175).
The debate between Barthes and Tagg no longer seems as dramatic as it once did. Recent treatments of photography tend to follow Tagg’s general proscription against positing an ahistorical “essence” of photography yet are willing to entertain the specificy of photographic modes of signification (see Lury 1998; Price 1994; Hirsch 1997; Taussig 1993). However, if recent accounts echo Barthes in emphasizing the importance of the indexicality of photographic images, this inherent semiotic quality does not predetermine the “meaning” or interpretation it is given in particular historical and cultural contexts. Thus the indexicality of photographic images has been the basis for cultural evaluations of the image as a form of “objective” scientific documentation (Sekula 1982) and for the seemingly opposite evaluation of photography as a form of sympathetic magic (Taussig 1993).
Pinney’s ethnographic history of photograhic practices in India traces how different qualities of photographic images have been highlighted at different moments. While colonial image-making stressed the indexical nature of photographs as documentary evidence, contemporary practices downplay indexicality and treat photographs as ontologically the same as other iconic representations (Pinney 1998). Pinney himself argues against any kind of essentialist reading of photographic signification, noting that popular photography in India favors photography’s capacity to create rather than duplicate worlds (1998: 191-2). However, I would suggest that perhaps the reason photography is such a privileged medium for this kind of performative fantasy is precisely its indexicality, which gives even the most self-consicously bizarre and playful images a certain edge, an undeniably powerful “as if” quality.

CONTEXT AND MEANING
Barthes suggested there was a “structural autonomy” to the image that could be analyzed independently by the semiotician; analysis of the production and reception of images, meanwhile, was the task of sociology (1977). Yet this statement appears somewhat more drastic than it was. For the semiotician to understand the image required a significant amount of cultural knowledge, however: one had to trace the iconographic history of images, one had to know the cultural codes to which various symbols, poses, framing and lighting referred. The immediate context of the image—its placement in a text for example—was part of the image’s “code”, as was its itntertextuality with other images. Barthes assumed that the reading of an image was an active, interpretive process: the photograph “is not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs” (1977: 19). Since “all images are polysemous...they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (1977: 38-9). Yet in practice his structural analysis of the image held the reader constant and bracketed the use of the image. Clearly, Barthes’ own work on “reading,” for example in his essays “Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text” suggested attention to the reader as the site of meaning production rather than the image itself as the determiner of meanings (1977; also 1981). Yet in his early treatments of photography, the reader was posited as a chooser among codes whose subjectivity was prior to and separate from the image itself.
Burgin writes: “very crudely characterized, [structuralist semiotics] assumed a coded message and authors/readers who knew how to encode and decode such messages while remaining, so to speak, ‘outside’ the codes” (Burgin 1982: 145). He draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to argue that the subject is coextensive with rather than prior to and separate from the image: “the subject... is not the fixed, innate, entity assumed in classic semiotics but is itself a function of textual operations, an unending process of becoming” (ibid.). This recognition that analyis of the interpretation of images—the making of meaning from them—cannot be divorced from the process of subject formation echoes shifts in lingusitic theory from Saussurean models to more pragmatic models that see speakers and language as mutually constituting. Borrowing also Althusserian notions of interpellation, Burgin argues that “it is precisely in its apparent ingenuousness that the ideological power of photography is rooted—our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of the photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking” (Burgin 1982: 148). He points to four diffferent “types of look” which structure the reading of the photographic image (Burgin 1982: 149-150). Each of these “looks” positions the reader and in so doing brings her into being as an ideolgoically interpellated subject..
While Burgin emphasizes subject formation, Tagg’s heavily Foucauldian analysis focuses on the “currency” of the image, delineating the discursive formations and institutional practices which (alone) give it meaning. Arguing against Barthes’ claims for strucutral autonomy of the image, Tagg argues that “we have to make a radical break with the idea of the work as an organic, complete and ordered whole. The very notion of a definable boundary between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations is called into question” (Tagg 1988: 176). Meaning is not “contained” in codes within the image, but rather is emergent, generated dialogically within a discursive context. For these theorists, the image is an “incomplete utterance” (Sekula 1982: 85) whose meaning is realized only in the process of its “performance” (Burgin 1982: 146) within a cultural, social, and historical context: “the photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome” (Sekula 1982: 91). The ‘photographic message’ is necessarily situationally determined (ibid., 85). Photographic meaning is therefore inherently unstable, but shifts in meaning are not open-ended, rather they are constrained by the specific contexts which shape the image’s intellibility (Sekula 1982: 91). Burgin notes:
“the intelligibility of a photograph is no simple thing: photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourses,’ but this discourse, like any other, engages discourses beyond itself, the ‘photographic text,’ like any other, is the site of a complex ‘intertextuality,’ an overlapping series of previous texts ‘taken for granted’ at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture” (Burgin 1982: 144).

Tagg argues that “what we must explain is the formation and disintegration of socially structured ‘ways of seeing’ and the specific genres of image-making in which they are realized” (Tagg 1988: 117). But his historical analyses focus on the production ofimages rathe rhtan their reception and he tends to assume a kind a totalized and singular discursive context that structures meaning. The emphasis on institutinal determinations tended to treat subjects as passive recipients rather htan active readers of hte iamges.
Bourdieu’s examination of photography in France in the mid-sixties also considers photography as a practice associated with class position (Bourdieu 1990). This study is an early attempt at systematic study of practices of “distinction” and the tastes by which social groupz are subtley but surely demarcated from each other. Bourdieu notes that while despite the infinite possiblities of photographic representation, popular photography is highly conventionalized and limited to a narrow range of genres, subjects, and compositions. Bourdieu undertakes a systematic study of the kinds of images people take and the images they like, mapping these highly regular proclivities to class ethos and position. However, he tends to treat the photographs themselves as a cipher, an “exteriorization” of “interiorized” class position, and thus little more than a reflection of a reality that lies outside of the images. He does not consider these images and the social practices that surround them as constitutive of social life and “reality”, except for a rather banal (very Durkheimian and functionalist) observation that family photographs serve to integrate family life (Bourdieu 1990: 19-20; 26, 29-30). On the other hand, a major innovation is the move beyond the intentionality of the photographer to a broader consideration of the implicit meanings encoded and reproduced in phtoography and its rather unselfconsious (as opposed to more high culture arts) but highly regulated aesthetics:
"Adequately understanding a photograph...means not only recovering the meanings which it proclaims, that is, to a certain extent, the explicit intentions of the photographer; it also means deciphering hte surplus of meaning which it betrays by being a part of the symbolism of an age, a class, or an artistic group" (1990: 6-7)

Bourdieu’s methodology, however, which involved interviewing people about their photography and eliciting responses to specific images chosen by the research team, emphasizes the regulariteis of taste over the idiosyncracies of unique and private meanings some images may have for people. It thus highlights the normalizing functions of photography rather than the particularities of history and use (1990: 30-1). Bourdiue thus argues that, Benjamin’s hopes to the contrary, photography as it is practiced popularly seems determined “to strip photography of its power to disconcert” and to subordinate unqiue experience to the formulaic (1990: 76). Despite its structuralist rigidity and tendency to reify class (and overlook other forms of affiliation), Bourdieu’s study has to be credited as an early attempt to attend seriously to the meanings of popular photography as a social practice.
More recent examinations of phtoography as a cultural practice considerably complicate both Tagg’s notion of discursive context and Bourdieu’s insistence on the regularized nature of photographic practice. Some call attention to the movement of images in and out of contexts over time and to performative play with photographic genres. Lyman’s study of Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans, for example, highlights how images originally produced as part of a nostalgic salvage anthropology became recontextualized in the 1970s by Native Americans as powerful symbols for an emerging indigenous rights movement (Lyman 1982). Joanne Scherer’s study of Native American activist Sarah Winnemucca’s attempts to manipulate stereotypic iamges of the “Indian Princess” highlights not only a creative act of appropriation but the social significance of “cartes de visites” in nineteenth century America (Scherer 1988). Ben-Ari examines how photography has been integrated into a Japanese ritual, pointing out how different kinds of photographic practice suggest distinctive involvements of different actors within the ritual. The photographs that family members of participants take, for example, are markedly different from those taken by city tourists watching a rural “tradition” (Ben-Ari 1991). If the discursive and institutional context of these images is the Japanese nostalgic rural idyll called “furusato” (Robertson 1991), it is only in concrete examinations of performances by situated actors that the “meaning” of photographic practices can be understood.

VISUALITY
Yet the contextualization of image-production and reception needs also to account for the broader visual culture in which particular image practices are situated. The term “visuality” is generally used to emphasize that “vision is a skilled cultural practice” and a historical artifact (Jenks 1995: 10; see also Foster 1988). Pinney, for example, contextualizes Indian photographs within a variety of image-related practices and historically within changing valuations of visual representation (1998). He finds personal photographs alluding to and borrowing conventions from Hindi film and from religious posters. He notes, too, that certain kinds of paintings are called “photographs” and painting over photographic images is a common practice, suggesting blurred visual genres and a social defintion of “photography” that is not limited to a technological device (1998: 131). He thus illuminates the social practice of photography through a broader analysis and history of Indian visualities. While the delineation of visualities is an important analytic tool for contextualizing images and image-reception, there is a danger of tracing a history of visual practices in such a way that visual representation becomes isolated from textual and other representational practices.
In specifying the nature of visualities, Jay uses the term “scopic regimes” to suggest that while multiple visualities may operate at any given historical moment, usually one in particular is accorded hegemonic power. He thus points out that culturally trained ways of seeing are inevitably imbricated in power relatoins (Jay 1993). This approach might be contrasted with art historical notions like Baxandall’s “period eye” which point out that vision is trained, but do not imply that the training of the eye is a question of power (Baxandall 1972). Similarly, in anthroplogy, Geertz’s treatment of art attends to culturally learned dispositions as the basis of aesthetic sensibilities but makes no ties to power relations. Indeed, he tends to assume that aesthetic sense is evenly spread throughout a bounded cultural community, and therefore that images “mean” the same thing to each viewer (Geertz 1983): “to study an art form is to explore a sensibility...[and] such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation” (1983: 99).
Bourdieu’s treatment of aesthetics in Distinction (1984), and his specific examination of photography (1990), instead concerns the class-based nature of aesthetic tastes. Yet Bourdieu perhaps goes too far in the opposite direction from Geertz, overstating the improtance of the class habitus in forming aesthetic tastes, carefully delineating “rules” of taste as indices of social position, without attending to the broader sensiblity at work in shaping the field of artistic production. Nevertheless, the idea that different social positions, experiences, and subcultural affiliations may yield different visualities—existing in different relationshps to hegemonic scopic regimes—is crucial for a broad interpretation of reception of images that does not fall into a kind of individualized “resistance” model that implies free choice in the making of meanings (de Certeau 1984; Fiske 1989; see Hall 1993 for a critique of this idea of openness). It also helps us go beyond some of the constraints of the discursive approach described above. The authority of a photographic image to make truth claims, for example, is certainly a question of its historical and institutional positioning, as Tagg argues so forcefully. However, it is also a matter of the positioned viewer; and it is vitally important not to assume that everyone yields to that authority or percieves it in the same way. The examination of “visualities” and their social distributions may be an important way to incorporate images, institutions, and subjects into the same field.

ARE IMAGES “READ”?
I began this essay with attempts to define the relationship between texts and images, and in particular with the vexed question of whether texts and images are “read” differently. We have seen that, despite different answers to this question, the dominant paradigm in semiotic and discursive approaches to images is an interpretive one that relies on a model derived from the reading of texts. So, too, Geertz, paraphrasing Baxandall, argues that “one has to learn to read [pictures], just as one has to learn to read a text from a different culture” (Geertz 1983: 108). But are these methodological prescriptions for would-be cultural analysts or are they meant to be accounts of how people actually approach and live with images? Certainly Barthes’ methodology for analyzing the denotative and connotative codes of the autonomous image was a rarefied scholarly strategy rather than a theory of reception; he argued that these levels were collapsed in the act of reading the image. Yet Barthes did not question or specify the implications of the notion that images are “read.” Burgin, too, suggests that viewing an image is a matter of “decoding”: “the photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which the reader deploys and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense” (Burgin 1982 152; see also Hall 1993). But does this idea of reading replicate the “natural life” of images as they are engaged with in everday experience?
Rather than essentialize the difference between reading texts and images, we might instead turn to work that seeks to expand and specify our notion of “reading”. For if the reception of images is a complicated matter, so too, there is no single way to read texts. In a recent collection called The Ethnography of Reading, Boyarin and other scholars argued against the presumption of a solitary, silent reader which has governed anthropological treatments of the shift from orality to literacy (Boyarin 1993). They specify a variety of historically and culturally determined modes of reading. A parallel effort might be undertaken for images. The solitary reader tends to be assumed for photography as well (see Metz, cited in Pinney 1998: 124; Barthes 1981: 97-8) and the model of “reading” is rarely specified. Not only are there cultural and historical determinants of the way images in general are valued, but it may also be productive to think about genres of images as not only carrying different conventions of composition, pose, and subject matter, but also different social lives and different reading conventions. Certainly a family photograph is read differently than an advertizing image one sees flash by on a bus.
But it is not just a too narrow notion of reading, but an impoverished notion of vision that needs to be challenged. It may be argued that the reigning paradigm of vision in Western philosophy, which implies a distanced, contemplative observer, has itself crippled theories of image reception (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Foster 1988; Jenks 1995; Jay 1993). Moreover, art history has been the most powerful disciplinary source of theorization about the nature of “reading” images. But paradigms like Panofsky’s “iconography” (1962), which may be helpful for understanding certain kinds of art works that were designed for an audience trained at deciphering hidden symbolic messages from the surface of the image, are of dubious value not only with other genres of painting (see Alpers’ critique 1983: xxiv, 236n), but particularly with photography. More generally, the institution of art in the Western tradition in which most art historians work, is one which constructs visual forms as objects ideally isolated from everyday life and displayed in contexts designed to enhance contemplative observation.
The Peircian attention to different modes of signification, and, in particular, to different kinds of interpretants, may suggest ways of specifying different modes of reception. The dynamical interpretant—the direct effect of a sign—may be “emotional”, “energetic”, or “logical” (see Daniel 1984: pp. 291-4). These relationships are not given in advance; since they arise from particular conjunctures between objects, signs, and interpretants they must be analyzed as they arise. However, there may be conventions that to some degree govern modes of signification and reception. The Peircian model looks at semiosis as event and process; thus the “meaning” of a sign is never contained within it or predetermined by it.
As Daniel points out (1984: 295) there are certain affinities between Peirce’s analysis and Derrida’s notion of “differance” or the play of signs (see Derrida on Peirce, 1974: 48-50). For Derrida, all representatiosn are “sendings” that never finally arrive at their destination (see Jay 1993: 507). The implications for analysing the “reading” of images are profound—the very idea of “reception” is called into question. Derrida represents an extreme insistence on treating the reading of photographs on the model of textual reading. Emphasizing the “graph” in photograph, Derrida suggests that photographs do not present a viewed spectacle but a text that demands “exegesis” (see Jay 1993: 518-19). On the other hand, Derrida rejects the ontological separation of text and image. Derrida notes Plato’s condemnation of writing, based on an analogy with painting, in which meaning moves beyond the intentions of the writer (1978: 8):
“The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but...they go on telling you just the same thing for ever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place...” (Plato’s Phaedrus: 158, my emphasis).

For Derrida, this threat posed by both writing and painting is also the promise of the fundamental openness of semiosis. Just as Barthes’ notion of the “text” versus the “work” radically opened the model of reading (1977), so Derrida’s emphasis on dissemination, play, and supplementarity fundamentally transform what it means to “read” beyond a model of deciphering.
But it is not only the openness of meaning but the habituated nature seeing that must be taken into account when considering such pervasive images as photographs. For Benjamin, the notion of habit is crucial to understanding visual perception as it takes place in daily life. He suggests that in conditions of capitalist modernity, most reception takes place in “a state of distraction.” Nevertheless, “the distracted person, too, can form habits” of seeing (Benjamin 1968: 240). As noted in the discussion of “visuality,” visual “habits” need to be tied in to culturally specific ‘ways of seeing’ that structure everyday interactions with images. Habituated ways of seeing—we might say, following Bourdieu, a “visual habitus”— appear “natural” and may be enacted unconsciously yet are the outcome of an interpretive process that is historically constituted and more or less shared. Following Peirce, Daniel argues, “the process of habit taking is an inferential process, albeit one that is tacit or even unconscious, so much so that it is equated with such “natural” immediacy as intuition and instinct” (26; see also Colapietro 1989: 43, 90).
Benjamin’s notion of “tactile appropriation” is also helpful for thinking about habituated, everyday experience with images. Comparing the reading of images to the perception of architectural space, Benjamin argues that the image is received not so much with a conscious visual perception as with a form of tactile knowing:
“tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in an incidental fashion” (Benjamin, 1968: 240).

Taussig elaborates on Benjamin’s conception (and echoes Bourdieu), arguing that this kind of habituated, tactile knowing is precisely where “radical change is effected, where unconscious strata of culture are built into social routines as bodily dispositions” (Taussig 1993: 25). Taussig’s use of tactility provides a way of reappropriating vision from a paradigm of Cartesian spectatorship, which assumes a detached observer. In “Tactility and Distraction”, Taussig argues that anthropological models still privilege “contemplation” as a model for seeing over the “distraction” whichi s more typical of veryday, “barely conscious perpheral-vision perception” (Taussig 1992: 9). This notion of habituated knowledge and distracted, tactile seeing may provide a more nuanced account of how images are received and more importantly, how images take part in making subjectivities and social relations.
Another issue which challenges the governing model of “reading” as principally a matter of decoding is the materiality of the image. Art historical and semiotic approaches to images tend to focus on representation as the source of meaning. Accounts of the discourses and institutional structures surrounding images locate images within hierarchies of truth claims and nexes power relations, but pay scant attention to the social life of photographs as objects in the world. The attention to how images represent tends to obscure the importance of images as material objects. Morley makes a similar critqiue of cultural studies approaches to television, which examine the texts of television programs but tend to dissolve the physicality of the television as an object which organizes space, structures social interaction, and signifies in its own right (in Jenks 1995: 170-189). Similarly the meaning of photographs and other kinds of images has to be located not only in their modes of symbolic signfication but in the forms of their physical embodiment, their moblity and exchange, and the systems of value in which they are embedded—as Pinney suggests their “social life” (1998).
Ironically, Seremetakis has called the approach to material culture which treats artifacts as texts the “photo-centric” model of cognition; for her, the photograph is an emblem of an optical model that “requires no excavation, no mediating and interruptive textures of the thing or the sense, and no emotional force; only the transparency and facileness of ideology and object as mutually reflecting mirrors” (Seremetakis 1994: 134). She argues that material culture theorists think of artifacts “as if the dense and embodied communication between persons and things were only a quick exchange between surfaces” (1994: 134). Yet I see no reason why this should be an adequate model for photographs either, which after all are material objects with, at least some of the time, emotional force. This is but one final reason why the question of image “reception” (which is ultimately the question of meaning) needs to be examined in a carefully contextualized way that does not treat images as disembodied signs.

CONCLUSION
In this essay I have attempted to trace some of the answers to the questions that Barthes raises about the nature of “meaning” in images. All seem to point to the importance of looking at images ethnographically—so that we will neither rely on essentialized distinctions between images and texts nor assimilate images to texts in an unexamined model of “reading”. I have traced a series of related questions and debates: how or whether to distinguish images and texts, how or whether to specify photographic modes of signification, how to locate and contextualize the meaning of an image, how to situate images in broader “visual cultures”, and finally how to broaden our assumed models of “reception.” Clearly, if there are no simple answers to Barthes’ questions, there is a rich history of inquiry and a variety of powerful conceptual tools from which to draw. These “tools” for analysing the “meaning” of images range from the highly specific, structural analysis of singular images to the much broader delineation of the historical and social shaping of vision itself. It seems best to leave these questions in play rather than trying to resolve them; to be agnostic, eclectic, and flexible in the use of these “tools” and theories so as best to remain sensitive and open to what we find.

(Tulisan ini pernah dimuat di Jurnal Jerat Budaya edisi No. 4/III/2000)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. VISUALITY
1. TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF IMAGES
Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. London: Penguin.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. "Art as a Cultural System" In Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
Gombrich, Ernst. 1956. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kosslyn, Stephen M. 1994. Image and Brain. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Langer, Susanne K. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge: Harvard Unviersity Press.
Mitchell,W.J.T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Panofsky, Erwin. 1962[1939] Studies in Iconology. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Peirce, C.S. 1955. "Logic as Semeiotic: The Theory of Signs." In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications.
Plato, "Cratylus" 1997. Plato: Complete Works, ed. by John M Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett: 101-156.

2. MODERN VISUALITY AND CRITIQUES
Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The Art of Describing. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1936]. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Bennet, Tony. 1994. "The Exhibitionary Complex" in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Theory. Nicholas Dirks, GeoffEley, Sherry Ortner, eds. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century Cambridge, MA:
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Alan Sheridan, Trans. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1994 (1966) The Order of Things. NY: Vintage Books.
Jay, Martin. 1993 Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, (on Plato, Cartesianism, Enlightenment Scopic Regimes)
Jenks, Chris, ed. 1995. Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
(especially Jenks "The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: an Introduction"
Morley, David. "Television: Not So Much a Visual Medium, More a Visual Object"
Slater, Don. "Photography and Modern Vision: the Spectacle of 'Natural Magic')
Keller, Evelyn Fox and Christine R. Grontokowski. 1983. "The Mind's Eye" in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Levin, David Michael, ed. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1989. "The World as Exhibition" Comparative Studies in Society and History 31
Snyder, Joel. 1980. "Picturing Vision" Critical Inquiry 5(3)

3. TOWARDS POSTMODERN VISUALITY AND ITS CRITIQUES
Baudrillard, Jean. 1988 [1981] "Simulacra and Simulations" in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Mark Postered. Stanford:Stanford University Press: 166-184.
Debord, Guy. 1995[1967] The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. by Donal Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 2. Seattle: Bay Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1992. "Tactility and Distraction" in Rereading Cultural Anthropology. George E. Marcus, ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1993 Mimesis and Alterity. London and New York: Routledge.
Serres, Michel. 1989 "Panoptic Thoery" in Tomas M. Kavanagh, ed. The Limits of Theory. Stanford:

B. THEORIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1936]. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books
Benjamin, Walter. 1980 [1934]. "A Short History of Photography" in Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Books.
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books
Berger, John. 1991. About Looking. New York: Vintage International
Burgin, Victor, ed. 1982. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Haverkamp, Anselm. 1993. "The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography." In Comparative Literature 45: 258-79.
Kracauer, Siegried. "Photography." Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. In Critical Inquiry 19(3): 421-434.
Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truths in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Price, Mary. 1994. The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1982. "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning" in Thinking Photography. Victor Burgin, ed. London: Macmillan.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Rosier, Martha. 1989. "Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations" in Afterimage. November: 7-11.
Wartofsky, Marx W. 1980. "Cameras Can't See: Representation, Photography, and Human Vision" in Afterimage 7 (9)

C. READING PHOTOGRAPHS
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang
Eco, Umberto. 1982 [1970]. "Critique of the Image." In Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin, 32-38. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Burgin, Victor. 1982. Thinking Photography. Victor Burgin, ed. London: Macmillan Publishers.
"Introduction": 1-14.
"Photography, Phantasy, Function": 177-216.
"Looking at Photographs": 142-153.
"Photographic Practice and Art Theory": 39-83.
Lutz, Catherine and Collins, Jane. 1993. "The Photograph as the Intersection of Gazes" in Reading National Geographic. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

D. ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL APPROACHES: PHOTOGRAPHY
AS PRACTICE & PERFORMANCE
Ben-Ari, Eyal. 1991. "Posing, Posturing and Photographic Presences: A Rite of Passage in a Japanese Commuter Village." Man 26: 87-104.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990 [1965] Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lalvani, Suren. 1996. Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies. Albany: SUNY Press.
Ruby, Jay. 1981. "Seeing Through Pictures: the Anthropology of Photography." Camera Lucida, the Journal of Photographic Cricticism. Spring: 19-32.
Sekula, Allan. 1989. "The Body and the Archive." In The Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1982 [1975]. "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning" in Thinking Photography. Victor Burgin, ed. London: Macmillan Publishers - 84-109.
Scherer, Joanna Cohan. 1988. "The Public Faces of Sarah Winnemucca" in Cultural Anthropology 3(2). 178-204.
Sprague, Stephen. 1978. "Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves." African Arts 11(1): 52-59.
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

E. VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND STUDY OF VISUAL CULTURES
1. PHOTOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
a. Colonial Anthropology: inscribing difference and positivist uses of the camera
(this is also Critique of Anthropology and Anthropology of Colonialism)
Albers, Patricia C. and James, William R. 1990. "Private and Public Images: A Study of Photographic Contrasts in Postcard Pictures of Great Basin Indians, 1898 - 1919" Visual Anthropology 3(2-3). Harwood Academic Publishers: 343 - 366.
Alloula, M. 1987. The Colonial Harem. Manchester: University Press.
Banta, M., and Hinsley, C. 1986. From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press.
Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. 1992. Anthropology & Photography 1860-1920. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 1990. “The Image as Anthropological Document: Photographic "Types" and the Pursuit of Method" in Visual Anthropology 3: 235-258.
Geary, Christaud. 1990. "Impressions of the African Past: Interpreting Ethnographic Photographs from Cameroon." Visual Anthropology 3(2-3): 289-315.
Lyman, C. 1982. The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. Washington D.C.: Smithsonion Institute Press.
Pinney, Christopher. 1992. "The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography" in Anthropology and Photography, 1860 -1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 74-95.
Pinney, Christopher. 1990. "Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction of Caste and Tribe." Visual Anthroplogy 3(2-3): 259-288.
Pinney, Christopher. 1989. "Other People's Bodies, Lives, Histories? Ethical Issues in the Use of a Photographic Archive," Journal of Museum Ethnography 1: 57-68
Poignant, Roslyn. 1992. "Surveying the Field of View: The Making of the RAI Photographic Collection" in Anthropology and Photography, 1860 - 1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 42-73.
Prochaska, David. 1991. "Fantasia of the Phototheque: French Postcard Views of Colonial Senegal." African Arts. 24: 40-7.
Scherer, Joanna C. 1992. "The Photographic Document: Photographs as Primary Data in Anthropological Enquiry." Ln Anthropology and Photography, 1860 -1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, 32-41. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Street, Brian. 1992. "British Popular Anthropology: Exhibiting and Photographing the Other" in Anthropology & Photography 1860-1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 122-131.
Wright, Terence. 1983. "Photography, Realism and 'The Natives.'" In British Journal of Photography 130:340-2.
Wright, Terence. 1992. "Photography: Theories of Realism and Convention" in Anthropology & Photography 1860-1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 18-31.

b. Boasian and British Social Anthropology: viewing culture: photography & film
as methodology
Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret. 1942. The Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York Academy of Sciences, Special Publications 2.
Geertz, Hildred. 1994. Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Hutnyk, John. 1990. "Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritcarhd's Nuer Photography." In Critique of Anthropology 10(1): 81-102.
Jacknis, Ira. 1989. "Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film," Cultural Anthropology 3(2): 160-177.
Jacknis, Ira. 1984. "Franz Boas and Photography." Studies in Visual Communication. 10( I ): 2-60
Lakoff, Andrew. 1996. "Freezing Time: Margaret Mead's Diagnostic Photography" in Visual Anthropology Review 12(1): 1-18.
Wright, Terence. 1991. "Fieldwork Photographs ofJenness and Malinowski and the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology," Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 22(1) 44-58.

c. later elaborations - photography & film as method
Collier, John Jr. and Collier, Malcom. 1986. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Gross, Larry. 1980. "Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications." Studies in Visual Communication 6:2-19.
Hockings, Paul, ed. 1995. Principles of Visual Anthropology. Berlin and London: Mouton de Gruyter (second edition).
Especially:
Mead, Margaret. "Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words" [1974] pp. 3-12
de Brigard, Emilie. "The History of Ethnographic Film" [1974] pp. 13-44
Rouch, Jean. "The Camera and the Man" [1974] pp. 79-98
MacDougall, David. "Beyond Observational Cinema" [1974 w/ 1995 postcript] pp. 115- 32
Lajoux, Jean Dominique. "Ethnographic Film and History" [1974] pp. 163-80
Scherer, Joanna Cohan. "Ethnographic Photography in Anthropological Research" pp. 201-16
Ginsburg, Faye. "Ethnographies on the Airwaves" pp. 363-98
Carpenter, Edmund. "The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness" [1974] pp. 481-92.
Johnston, Patricia, ed. 1991. "Ethnographic Photography." Exposure 28:3.
Worth, Sol and Adair, John. 1972. Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2. IMAGES OF CULTURE AND CULTURES OF IMAGES: RECENT APPROACHES TO
VISUALITIES
Devereaux, Leslie, and Hillman, Roger, eds. 1995. Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hastrup, Kristen. 1990. "Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority" In Authority, Representation, and Anthropological Knowledge.
Jenks, Chris, ed. 1995. Visual Culture. London: Routledge.
Lutz, Catherine and Collins, Jane. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Myers, Fred R. 1988. "From Ethnography to Metaphor: Recent Films from David and Judith MacDougall" In Cultural Anthropology 3(2):205-219
Pels, Peter. 1996. "Visions of Anthropology." Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (2): 376 - 394.
Sapir, David J. 1994 "On Fixing Ethnographic Shadows." American Ethnologist 21(4): 867- 885.
Soussloff, Catherine M. 1996. "The Turn to Visual Culture: On Visual Culture and Techniques of the Observer." Visual Anthropology Review 12(l):77-83.
Crawford, Peter lan, and Turton, David, eds. 1992. Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Taylor, Lucien, ed. 1994. Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994. London and New York: Routledge.
Tyler, Stephen 1984 "The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Eye Sees" Journal of Anthropological Research 40(1): 23-39
Howes, David, ed. 1991. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

3. CULTURE OBJECTIFIED. DISPLAYED. FETISHIZED: ON MUSEUMS,
COLLECTIONS, EXHIBITIONS. ART. AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. "The System of Collecting" in The Cultures of Collecting. John Eisner and Roger Cardinal, eds. pp. 7-24. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1994. "The Exhibitionary Complex" in Culture/Power/History. Nicholas B. Dirks, GeoffEley, Sherry B. Ortner eds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1994. "The Genuine Article." In Stephen Harold Riggins, ed. The Socialness of Things: Essys on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1994.
Eisner, John and Roger Cardinal, eds. 1994. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Selections)
Kirshenblatt -Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. "Objects of Ethnography" in Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, pp. 386-443. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kirshenblatt -Gimblett, Barbara. 1989. "Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review." in Oring, E. ed. Folk Groups and Folk Genres: A Reader. Logan: Utah: Utah State Press.
Kopytoff, lgor. 1986. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Ann Smart. 1993. "Makers, Buyers, Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework." Winterthur Portfolio 28/2-3(Summer-Autumn): 141-158.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1992. "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order." In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Prown, Jules David. 1982. "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method." Winterthur Portfolio 17/1 (Spring): 1-20.
Prown, Jules David. 1980. "Style as Evidence." Winterthur Portfolio 15/3 (Autumn): 197-210.
Riggins, Stephen Harold, ed. 1994. The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sherman, Daniel and Rogoff, Irit. 1994. "Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis" in Museum Culture. Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. London and New York: Routledge.
Tilley, Charles, ed. 1990. Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.