Mitra Tabrizian’s Artifice

The wave of critical discourse about and around photography that gathered pace during the 1970s revolved around the long-standing claims as to the medium’s privileged relationship to reality. Under the sway of structuralist and post-structuralist, neo-Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytical theory, photographs came to be analysed and understood as constituents of specific signifying systems rather than as simply ‘windows onto to the world’. The new key term was ‘representation’ and with it came the necessary acknowledgement that the meaning of any photographic image could no longer be securely located in the putative object or event that was depicted but was instead located in the codes and conventions that governed its production and reception and that stressed its status as image. 

As a result photography’s relationship to the ‘real’ was, if not entirely severed, then severely weakened. In this retreat from the terrain of realism, photography was forced to surrender its truth claims – at least it was forced to surrender any significant truth claims – and it may seem obvious that the realm of documentary photography and its historical functions was amongst the major casualties. If the shift from thinking about ‘the representation of politics’ to the ‘politics of representation’ was a necessary corrective to the putative transparency of photographs to the world, the danger lay in leaving photography effectively bereft of the kinds of social agency that a tradition of documentary practice had once advanced for itself. 

One way to look at what has happened since that time is that the term ‘representation’ has in some sense been superseded in contemporary critical writing on photography by the term ‘picture’. Insofar that both terms give priority to the idea that the photograph is first and foremost ‘figured’, that is conceived as, or subject to, processes that bring it in line with existing image making conventions, there are important overlaps between them. But there are also important distinctions to be made. Whilst the concept of  ‘representation’ was, and perhaps still is, primarily located in discussions of ideology and the politics of the sign, thinking about photographs as ‘pictures’ has been situated by and large in the discourses of art history and aesthetics (or at least that has been the principal tendency to date). 

Amongst the first to articulate the idea of the photograph as a distinctive contemporary pictorial form was Jean-François Chevrier. 1 Essentially what Chevrier did was to transpose the concept of the picture, drawn from a tradition of post-Renaissance painting and principally associated with the form of the tableau, and adapt it to the distinct characteristics of photographic work specifically intended to occupy the discursive and physical space of the gallery. Produced to be viewed on the wall rather than the page, the scale and internal organisation of such work summons up a ‘confrontational experience for the viewer’ and ‘sets up an implicit relationship between the viewer and the image of his own body’. 2 This relationship is tempered, however, by the assertion of a sense of the work’s autonomy; it does not exactly share the same space as the viewer, rather it ‘produce(s) another space, fictitious in its boundaries’, a space that is self evidently composed rather than simply framed. 3 The latter point is central to Chevrier’s arguments, since it sets apart the conception of the photograph as pictorial form from the prevailing orthodoxy as to what a photograph is. Opposed to the more or less arbitrary framing of the world as a series of discrete fragments whereby the photograph appears as a spatial and temporal slice of reality, pictorial composition imposes order and meaning on what would otherwise be experienced as merely phenomenological flux. If composition is what turns the photograph into a picture, it is also what establishes its relationship to other pictures perhaps more than it does to its ostensible referent. The pictorial form of the photograph thus takes its place amongst other images drawn from the culture at large, from art, from cinema, from photography itself. 

Is it possible to fathom from this seemingly enclosed sphere of pictorial intertextuality a place for a practice of photography that seeks to critically engage with the social world? Or, to put the question another way, is it possible to conceive of a convergence between the concept of the photograph as a picture and the documentary photograph? 

The increasing presence of documentary photography – and more broadly photographic work that claims an allegiance to the photograph as document - within the spaces of the contemporary art gallery and museum is one of the more significant developments in the field of photography in recent years. This is not simply, however, a matter of the relocation of existing modes of documentary photography into the domain of art but the emergence of radically different kinds of documentary practice that are specific to that domain, including certain kinds of practice that may not immediately be recognisable as documentary. Indeed the reconstitution of documentary photography exclusively situated within the gallery and museum opens out the possibility for the use of strategies and forms hitherto deemed either inappropriate or entirely illegitimate within the traditional confines of documentary. The idea that the field of documentary practice might now incorporate the use of constructed imagery and staged events, that it might blur the distinctions between the real and the imagined and between fact and fiction, seems entirely admissible now. The chief issue is whether such practices are capable of fulfilling documentary’s fundamental claims to address the world in which we live and to offer a platform for critical reflection as the prelude to social agency. It is within this context that we might position the work of Mitra Tabrizian. 

Over the last decade Tabrizian has produced a body of work that seeks to explore the political, social and psychological dimensions of a contemporary existence, dominated as that is by the logic of corporate culture and the exigencies of global capitalism. Her more recent series Naked City and Wall House build on her earlier works, such as The Perfect Crime and Beyond the Limits, in their depictions of a world in which the fragmentation of social relationships, the isolation and alienation of the individuals from others as well as from the physical environments they inhabit, and a pervasive sense of aimlessness and powerlessness, prevails. If Tabrizian’s dystopic vision of contemporary society owes much to Jean Baudrillard’s more pessimistic and perhaps fatalistic analyses that few would wish to share, it nonetheless unerringly pinpoints a seemingly endemic malaise of indifference or acquiescence to an existing political and economic status quo. However, as Tabrizian herself has argued in various commentaries on her work, we inhabit a world in which power is diffuse and decentred to the extent that we are all implicated in its operation and all subject to its effects. 

Tabrizian’s practice is one of giving visible form to such conceptual abstractions and to do so she mobilizes a form of picture making that variously draws on the expressive resources of painting, cinema and photography. In his analysis of the picture form of the photograph, which we can equate with the form of the tableau, Chevrier stresses the fact of the photograph being ‘composed’ as central. Traditionally composition was the means by which the artist imposed order and unity on nature, the arrangement and synthesis of the various elements of a scene that would enable it to be viewed as a picture. Perhaps more so with photography than in painting, composition frames and dislodges a scene from reality; composition is the rhetoric of the photographic image as art. 

Composition is therefore always a matter of contrivance, though one of varying degrees. Compared to the relative ‘naturalism’ of much of Jeff Wall’s work, which otherwise shares many of the traits discussed here, Tabrizian’s announces itself as pure artifice. Most of Tabrizian’s photographs make manifest the work of composition through the disposition of figures within the scene, their relationship to each other, and to the spaces within which they are set. The frieze-like arrangement of a group of city workers in Naked City, for example, as in others from the same series, draws attention to itself precisely because of the careful placing of each figure equidistant to the others. This self-evident manipulation of the scene is more notable insofar as the image might be considered to engage with, even whilst it inverts, the central premises and style of the genre of street photography. As an archetype of the photograph as ‘snapshot’, street photography thrives on notions of chance and instantaneity: rendering the world as a fragment of space and time through the arbitrary cut of the camera’s viewfinder and the click of its shutter, street photography searches for ‘eventfulness’ with a restless eye. By contrast, Tabrizian’s photograph orchestrates the scene set before the camera: the crowd assembled, each individual is allotted a place within a compositional schema dictated by the boundaries of the picture itself. 

This calculated organisation of pictorial space is perhaps nowhere more evident in Tabrizian’s work than in the series Wall House, set in the interior and grounds of a residential house designed by American architect John Hejduk and built in Groningen, Holland in 1973. Hejduk’s bare minimalist architecture functions rather like a stage set in these photographs, its imposing forms themselves framing the scene, offering views through entrances and doorways, sometimes cropping a figure who appears as if ‘off stage’. Yet the architecture here is more than mere background to events. The barrenness of this space and the precise placing of the figures within it underpin the pervasive sense of despair and isolation that the photographs evoke. Those set in the landscape surrounding the house similarly psychologise space through a complex play that involves the position of figures in relationship to each other, to the place in which they situated, as well as to the imagined space beyond the frame of the picture. It is, however, in the relationship between the figures set within the fictive space of the picture and the space occupied by the viewer that these pictures gather to themselves a particular kind of psychical distance. The representation of individual figures within these particular images are neither near enough to us for them to be considered as portraits, nor far enough away for the subject to become entirely anonymous. Consequently, as in much of Tabrizian’s work individual figures more often than not are cast as social types, as characters in a narrative in which they caught up but do not control.

In many ways Wall House represents a return to a more conscious and direct relationship to cinema that had characterised Tabrizian’s very earliest works. As she herself has acknowledged the series is very much influenced by the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, and it is easy to see how the photographs are indebted to the Italian director in terms of both iconography and style. There is also a more unexpected connection. Antonioni, like his fellow countryman Pasolini, is noted as a director for the use of a fixed camera position coupled with relatively long takes in which very little happens. The relative stillness of Antonioni’s cinematography gives the sense that one is looking at photographs. If stasis is taken as defining the photograph, then Tabrizian’s images draw attention to this attribute with especial acuity. Often the immobility of the camera matches the immobility of the subjects or otherwise, even when there is the suggestion that the subject is in motion, it appears that that movement has been frozen – not by the camera - but within the scene itself, as if the subjects were holding a pose. 

It is thus one of the most striking features of many of Tabrizian’s pictures that they bring together two of the defining constituents of the photographic tableau: the composition of figural groupings together with the sense of stillness imposed upon them. In this respect Tabrizian’s pictures might be thought of as akin to theatrical tableaux vivants but stripped of their melodramatic themes and postures. Indeed, one of the conceits running through much of Tabrizian’s work – rather like Antonioni’s cinema - is that nothing much happens within the picture. Sometimes whatever action seems to be taking place lies outside the camera’s field of view, beyond the frame of the picture. Figures stand and stare unmoved at something behind the place where the camera is situated, something that will remain forever unknown to us. Otherwise, they often seem to be locked into their own private worlds, lost in thought, caught in a monadic existence, impervious to the presence of others and their surroundings. If Tabrizian’s cast of characters have most usually might been described in terms of their detachment and indifference, and if a sense of social disengagement and anomie prevails in her pictures, the key to this lies with what T.J.Demos has referred to as the ‘catatonic immobility’ of the figures themselves and with the fact that their lack of movement is to be seen as both physical and psychological. Indeed, this sense of the pervasive stillness of Tabrizian’s pictures in general, and the immobility of the figures specifically, points to one further and important aspect of her work. 

The photographs under consideration here all make use of actors - even if, for the most part, they are not professional actors and, even if, sometimes, they are required to play themselves (which is the case in nearly all of Tabrizian’s photographs). Indeed, the actor has always, in some sense, both to be themselves and someone else at the same time. In dramatic performances this is something which the audience is always aware of, even if one of the aims of some kinds of acting has often been to attempt to conceal this fundamental paradox. The effacement of the actor’s own being is essentially a modern trend; a rejection of a tradition of melodramatic modes of acting in which the fact of the performance and the duality of self and other were more pronounced.

The observation that acting always involves a division or distinction between actor and character intersects with long-standing philosophical questions concerning the relationship between the inner and outer self, and between mind and body. Major theories of acting primarily oscillate between the notion that the subjectivity of the actor – his or her personal and intense ‘feelings’ – remain the guide to the truth of a performance, to the idea that there is an objective ‘science’ of mind and body from which one can develop a system theory of performance. Whilst the former position assumes that the body exists merely as a conduit for the expression of thought, the latter psychologizes physical gesture as the primary means of creating a character. If we are considering the role of acting in photography, the second of these positions seems more appropriate and useful. Unlike the situation in both theatre and cinema, the photographic actor has no recourse to the spoken word. In the absence of language as a means of communication, the actor’s body in terms of its physical posture, gesture and facial expression becomes paramount. Moreover, stripped also of the possibility of even mute physical actions evolving in time, the photographic actor can hardly be called on to act in any real sense of the term; rather it is more accurate to say that he or she is required to hold a pose. 

The notion of posing seems pertinent here in two respects. Firstly, ‘posing’ holds different connotations from ‘acting’ when it comes to the relationship between the individual and his or her performance. As already noted acting is usually today thought of in terms of overcoming the gap between the actor’s self and the role he or she plays so that the two are imperceptibly fused together. Posing, however, assumes, or least carries with it the connotations that, the self and the role that is played are, as it were, equally present and visible. Put more simply acting involves the attempt to conceal artifice, posing makes it evident. Secondly, acting is associated most readily with the time-based arts of cinema and theatre and therefore with movement and narrative, posing is something we do when we are photographed and involves the stopping of movement and the stilling of time. 

As previously noted, the dominant trend within modern theatre and cinema has been towards a naturalism that seeks to eliminate the perceptible difference between actor and role. However, the artifice of acting that is here associated with the photographic pose and in which the performance of a role is always made manifest, does find echoes within one major exception to that trend. Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on acting evolved in line with his pursuit of the ‘alienation effect’ – that is the rejection of illusionism in the theatre and the embrace of theatrical self-reflexivity. The audience was to be made aware that they were watching a play and the actor’s part in this was crucial. As such Brecht wrote that:

In his essay Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Roland Barthes argues that this notion of the ‘gestus’ coincides with that of Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’ – which is that significant point in a narrative in around which events of the past, present and future revolve – which he also connects to the conception of the theatrical tableau to found in the writings of Diderot. He writes:

In the tableau everything is laid out for the spectator, and in the immobility of the scene each detail is open to scrutiny and each detail is always the bearer of meaning. Barthes suggests that Brecht’s plays are structured as a series of such ‘pregnant moments’ or tableaux at the heart of which is the ‘social gest’. He writes:

The ‘social gest’ adheres to the Brecht’s basic principle of epic theatre that  ‘the process of showing must itself be shown’ but its importance was far more than this. As Brecht makes clear his interest was not in gesture as an expression of an individual’s psychological state, a sign of solely private feelings and emotions; it was with the idea of gesture as an ‘expression of the social relationships prevailing between a people in a given period’ that mattered.

This notion that bodily movements and actions, physical gestures and facial expressions might be taken as indices of an historical and social consciousness seems a pertinent way in which to approach Tabrizian’s work. Echoing Georg Simmel’s account of the psychic effects of the modern metropolis, the characters that populate Tabrizian’s pictures generally display the kind of reserve and indifference that he saw as endemic to the conditions of the social life and ‘money economy’ of early modernity. Simmel accounted for this blasé attitude in the intensification of nervous stimulation in the urban environment. Faced with this sensory overload the individual adjusts to the external forces by withdrawing into himself and antipathy becomes a means of self-protection. If these sentiments resonate through many of Tabrizian’s images it is perhaps because the world that Simmel described in the early twentieth century is still our own. Her characters betray no inner world that we can identify with; if their physical demeanour and expression speak of anything at all, it would appear to be indifference. And everyone it would seem is equally prey to this emotional atrophy, from the group of youths whose territory is the urban wasteland to the congregation of investment bankers who appear as detached from each other as they do from the luxurious space they inhabit. 

Tabrizian’s photographs offer us what Brecht called the ‘social gest’ and they offer it in a form that is eminently suited to the scrutiny that Barthes suggests is necessary to its understanding. In the immobility of the photographic pictorial tableau we are able to search frozen poses for those symptoms that speak of the body’s habitus. It was Walter Benjamin, amongst others, who noted that the individual subject within modernity had succumbed to the bombardment of external stimuli, internalising the ‘shocks’ of everyday life in a set of barely perceptible involuntary reflexes and unconscious adjustments of the body. If photography lends itself to this microphysics of the body then Tabrizian’s images exploit it to the full. Posing involves an implicit acknowledgement of the presence of the camera – an anticipation and negotiation of the eventual photograph. Posing, thus invokes a performativity that is intrinsic to the medium. Tabrizian’s characters are called upon to act but part of the intrigue of these pictures is the uncertainty between the actors and the roles they perform; where - in these languid bodies, blank expressions and averted gazes – is the line between artifice and symptom?

In conversation with Homi Bhabha in 2005 about her series Beyond the Limits, Tabrizian responded to criticism that the images were ‘cold and flat’ with the observation that ‘Artificiality is not very desirable at the moment: the more we move towards the artificial world, the more we emphasize “reality”’. In 1949 Brecht wrote: ‘Restoring the theatre’s reality as theatre is now a precondition for any possibility of arriving at realistic images of human social life…Reality, however complete, has to be turned into art, so that can be seen as alterable and be treated as such.’

Brecthtian ‘epic theatre’ set itself against classical theatre and its function as entertainment. If the primary aim of epic theatre was the production of social knowledge it was necessary to combat all forms of dramatic illusionism. To this end, empathy with the characters and absorption in the plot were to be replaced by emotional detachment from the actor and critical observation of the narrative. Techniques of estrangement – the radical disjunctures of theatre’s formal means and the employment of various modes of montage -  were to be employed in the pursuit of realism rather then naturalism, that is the reproduction of the world as mere appearance. The critique of the traditional forms of documentary photography that were noted at the beginning of this essay were most certainly informed by this Brechtian model and the more recent reconstitution of documentary practices owes much to its example. Indeed, it was Brecht himself who proffered the way forward in a quotation that both questions the assumed transparency of the photograph to what it represents whilst suggesting the more radical potential of the medium. ‘Less than at any other time’, he is reported to have said, ‘does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality….Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.’