Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op - New Edition

CHAPTER 6: The Person and the Pose

CHAPTER 6 The Person and the Pose a Today we are aware, as never before, of the artifice that constitutes the pose. We are as fascinated by how images are made as we are by what they mean. In popular culture, politics, and everyday life we have elevated the image-making process to a subject in its own right. In some moods we are connoisseurs of the slickly produced image, whether in political ads, celebrity photos, or popular movies . In other moods we are outraged by the distortions and deceits that images purvey. Fascinated though we are with the process of image making, another side of us believes in the images we see. This belief stems from the fact that images are bearers of meanings, enduring carriers of ideals and myths. It also stems from our continuing confidence in the camera’s ability to reveal a deeper truth, to move beyond the surface, to record reality and document facts. America’s photo-op culture plays out in heightened form the tension between the person and the pose, between the claims of the subject and meanings attached to the photograph by the photographer and viewers. But beyond photo ops, this tension is part of every photograph. The photograph converts the subject from an active state to stillness. A photograph is even called a still. Although the person may of course have been in movement, she or he is caught in a moment of time, and will be forever. The word pose is connected to repose, to be at rest. The pose is not necessarily what the person in the photo is doing. A person may be running, working, fighting, talking to friends, mourning, pausing to reflect, or staring off into space. The photograph takes all this free play of movement and feeling 244 a C H A P T E R 6 and freezes it. In this sense, the pose converts the person into a captive. The capture can be captivating and transcendent or it can be a trap. The caption of the photograph is another form of capture. It too can be illuminating or like putting up a sign on the cage of an animal in the zoo. If the opposite of capture is freedom, the act of taking photographs can impinge on the freedom of the subject. What freedom is at stake? It is not the freedom of movement; the subject can keep moving through the world. It is the freedom to interpret one’s own action and being. What the photograph captures by freezing the frame is an interpretation, an interpretation that the subject of the photograph may or may not share. What’s really at stake in the contest for the control of the image is the ability to interpret the meaning of the person or moment captured in the frame. We use the word frame in relation to photographs , but we also use it to describe framing a question, an argument, or debate. To frame an issue is to exercise some interpretive power. Being framed is having an interpretation placed on your action that might be false—like being framed for a crime you did not commit. But it need not be false in this respect. It is a way of seeing that can convey great affection, as when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Once you are in the frame, once you exist in a photograph, you are subject to the gaze of others, who may or may not know you, understand you, or be sympathetic to you. That’s why the publicprivate divide is so delicate and elusive when it comes to photographs . Some photographs capture the very essence of a family member or friend so deeply that we share them only with intimates . Roland Barthes gives a powerful testimonial to this view of the photograph in his book Camera Lucida. Barthes includes a number of photographs, but there is one photograph he does not show, and that is the one he treasures most. Its discovery is an epiphany: There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under T H E P E R S O N A N D T H E P O S E a 245 the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her...