Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture (review)

Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture. Barbara E. Savedoff.

According to Barbara Savedoff, photographs of things work on us through two kinds of assumptions. First, due to background beliefs about how they are made, we tend to consider them as having a connection to reality not shared by other image-making techniques: as "documents" of what they represent (48). Second, given the success of photo-optics, we tend to assume--with caveats and exceptions--that photos of things accurately "duplicate" the appearances of things (87). To that pair Savedoff adds a third factor: that the assumption about duplication of appearances leaning is reinforced by the documentary assumption, "our faith in the documentary character of the photograph is inappropriately, but irresistibly, transferred to the way things appear" in it (88; cf. 193). The main theses of Transforming Images are that photography's encouragement of credibility has been in some ways artistically good, in other ways not good, and that the advent of digitalization threatens the good part. Large topics these, especially as Savedoff argues by sensitive consideration of about seventy thoughtfully chosen pictures in a fairly short work of connoisseurship. This is possible because her focus is only on "the way photographs transform works of art and other representations," with the wider theme of how they "transform" the appearances of everything else made important but subsidiary (5). Transforming Images is specifically a study of how images or representations appear within other pictorial images, and most of the illustrations are of artworks, paintings, or photographs of that kind.

Visual images show up within visual images in a number of interestingly different ways, including quotation, embeddedness, reproduction. In visual art, as in language, this was commonplace long before the days of photography. Indeed, to argue what is distinctive about photography, Savedoff first samples the richness of Italian Renaissance, Northern, and modern painting to produce a distinction between two kinds of ambiguities in embedded and enclosing representations that have been exploited over the centuries for different reasons. "Gestural ambiguity" occurs when a figure clearly depicted as a statue or in a picture has, simultaneously, the role of suggested "animation"--that is, as an active participant within the scene depicted. The larger related concept of "perceptual ambiguity" applies to cases in which, without such animation, a representation depicted within a picture suggests that it is part of the scene. The latter effect is commonly evoked by absence of spatial demarcations, within three-dimensional scenes, of the two-dimensional representations--notably pictures--within them. But to show that perceptual ambiguity is not just a matter of two and three dimensions. Savedoff makes a typically astute distinction between the "gestural ambiguity" of sculpted figures in Botticelli's Calumny of Apelles and the "perceptual ambiguity" of a cupid in Cézanne's Still Life with Plaster Cast (17, 24).

Thus painting: what about photography? Savedoff shows us how well Eugene Atget, Cartier Bresson, André Kertész, Walker Evans--one could add Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and others--have exploited gestural and perceptual sorts of ambiguity, photographing besides pictures and sculpture also mannequins, reflections, and shadows. Through its assumed "documentary" character, the "taken" eccentric vision of photography yields a much stronger sense of transformation and defamiliarization of things than can painting's "made" effects, since we understand these photos as revealing strange aspects of reality lurking hitherto unnoticed in the most common sights. Indeed so great is the force of phototransformation that it even survives obvious staging; and even where, as in a Jerry Uelsmann combination photo, the image is clearly the result of several taken images, the effect is still unique, "as though he had photographed his dreams" (121). Yet, ironically, Savedoff argues, the much advertised transforming powers of digitalization may eventually deprive photography of this perceptually transformative advantage over older media, by eroding our documentary assumptions behind it.

Unlike most treatments of photography, Savedoff's gracefully crosses the barrier to cinema, without reductive simplification. Since her two kinds of...