At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen by Shawn Michelle Smith (review)

This book comprises a collection of essays on the work of photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, A. J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, as well as essays on Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida, and on the images from Abu Ghraib.

The title of Shawn Michelle Smith’s work comes from her use of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious. Smith finds that as photography expanded the realm of the visible, it “simultaneously demonstrated” the limits of what we can see. She is thus interested in the ways each of these photographers leads us to places where their unconscious drive has exceeded the limits of their medium. Much like Martin Berger, whose 2005 Sight Unseen, in Smith’s words, “argues that representations of the landscape are always racialized” (p. 123), Smith identifies the problem of race and representation within the work of each of these photographers, giving important new readings to canonical works.

Writing with a sure, confident voice, as well as being well read in the critical literature, Smith is exactly the guide one hopes for when approaching unfamiliar territory, and anyone seeking a well-rounded, insightful discussion of any of these photographers will find this book a valuable resource. Any text that immediately inspires one to strong argument certainly has proven its value.

Smith’s reading of F. Holland Day’s work is especially strong, as she sets his male nudes both within the pictorialist aesthetic where he is usually found, and alongside the archives of eugenics, anthropology, crime, and sexual science, where similar contemporary photographs exist. Smith brilliantly shows how the pictorialist insistence on expanding the traditional definition of photography as unbiased representation allowed Day to explore his own untraditional desire for and admiration of men, and the male body. Her discussion, which concludes with Clarence H. White’s 1897 platinum portrait of F. Holland Day, in which a black male nude figure rests in the shadows behind the sitter, makes an essential contribution to the critical literature on race, art, and erotic photography, as made at the turn of the century and as seen today.

In an early chapter, Smith reads passages in Camera Lucida in which Barthes refers to a family portrait by James Van Der Zee, introducing readers to her method, setting the work under question into several different contexts, some of which the maker surely knew and understood and others of which the maker was surely unaware, mostly because the problems she identifies are ones that belong to our (and her) era. In this case, the “maker” in question is Barthes himself, and the work his own interpretation of the photograph. Over the course of his essay, Barthes changes his “punctum” from the straps of a woman’s shoes to the necklace she wears, describing the necklace as identical to a gold chain worn by someone in his own family; Smith notes that Van Der Zee’s subject actually wears a string of pearls. For Smith, this error signals a “fundamental interpretive slippage,” whereby personal connotation can efface representational denotation. As a result, “In making himself and his memories the measure of photographic meaning, Barthes obfuscates the presence of other historical subjects, and in so doing disregards the evocative, provoking presence, or present absence, of those represented on photographic film” (p. 34). She goes on to use that slippage to open an elaborate, interesting, and original argument about the way Barthes has elided problems of race, reproduction, and sexuality.

I prefer to see the perception of such slippage as the sign of the critic at work, the moment that allows her to put forward her own perceptions in place of what others have seen. I don’t expect to agree with many specific aspects of Smith’s work. Her arguments deliberately stake out the territory that we cannot share. Every reader of this volume will learn something new...