Images through words: the ethics of “reading”

The relationship of images and ethics is often mediated, intensified or otherwise altered by words. In a photographic context, Clive Scott (1999) has problematized the relationship between images and language. Susan Sontag (2004, p.80) argued that the photograph’s inability to “make us understand” runs counter to “narratives”. Yet, the writing of history, too, as Hayden White (1973, 2022) explored, emplots events into narrative representations of reality through rhetorical devices. Related questions of power that accompany image-and-text dynamics are weighted in Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s (2019) approaches to the archive as a space that facilitates history. By embarking on this interdisciplinary context, this session’s papers explore how the coexistence of words and works harbours the ethics of writing and “reading”. 

Whether spoken or written, fragmentary or longform, poetic or “factual”, the occurrence of the verbal next to/around/about/in the work impacts our encounter with it. What are the ethical ramifications of this image-and-text relation, or with the “imagetext” as per WTJ Mitchell (1994)? How do viewers’ ethical perceptions shift when they become readers? How do titles participate in the ethics of the work and how should we problematize cases where the language provision is beyond the creator’s remit? Finally, from an art-historiographic perspective, how does our writing practice meddle (with) the ethical dimensions of the work? From photography scholarship to postcolonial studies and from queer theories to contemporary discussions of ekphrasis, this panel will consider such questions of power, agency and translation positioned at the crossroads of words and images. 

Session Convenors:

Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, York St John University

Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University

Speakers:

Damian Sutton, Coventry University

Gardner’s Hogarth: race, emblem, and morality in “What do I Want, John Henry?” (1862)

A recent discovery that the Scottish-American photographer Alexander Gardner was an admirer of the work of the painter William Hogarth allows for a new and more comprehensive analysis of one of his most difficult images, “What do I want, John Henry?”, plate 27 of his 1866 Sketch Book of the American Civil War.

“What do I Want, John Henry?” is a staged group portrait in which a young African American in Union uniform serves liquor to a white quartermaster captain and his entourage. Throughout the Sketch Book Gardner’s emblem format – with imago, subscriptio, and motto – performs a journalistic or editorial function, as an early photobook, but here offers an allegorical meaning that hints at the deep-seated racist stereotypes of African Americans that underpinned Northern society, even for abolitionists such as Gardner (Foner 2001; Williams 2003; Tractenberg 2008).

Archival newspaper research reveals a revival of interest in Hogarth and eighteenth-century culture 1860s Washington D.C., where Gardner worked, and a news report of a gift to Gardner of a quarto edition of the painter’s works points to a direct influence. Staged group portraits can now be read as conversation pieces, whilst “What do I Want, John Henry?” can in turn be analysed through Hogarth’s treatment of persons of colour in his moral works. Does it merely conform to the representation of continued “submission and subservience” as observed in Black experience of Northern employment in the Civil War (Emberton 2012: 383)? Alternatively, does Gardner instead acknowledge and deploy the black body, as invisible observer, viewer avatar, and bearer of social critique, famously argued of Hogarth by Dabydeen in 1987?

Claudia Mitchell, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

On the ethics of curiosity in reading and performing the archive

This paper examines the interplay of image and text, the private and public, and the past and present in locating/reading/interpreting photos in a family archive. The paper builds on the arts-based photography practices of a range of theorists and artist activists, including Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Jo Spence’s Putting Myself in the Picture, Rafael Goldchain’s staging practices in I Am my family and Rosy Martin’s memory-work photo productions. Working with a collection of 150 or so ‘old country’ Yorkshire and Devon family photos (c.1910–55) from a Canadian prairie archive, and embarking upon a creative, travelling ancestry project involving visiting locations and re-photographing (and re-enacting) many of the photos, the fieldwork for this paper raises a number of questions framed by coloniality and postcolonial theory and the notion of who family is anyway. How do we work with the writing on the photos (textual markers such as handwritten captions) and how do other written texts such as official registries (often handwritten as well and even corrected) illuminate these interrogations? How can photo re-enactment practices inform this work? In working across image and text, the paper delves into, challenges and extends the idea of reading practices as ethical engagement.

Rhiannon Vogl, University of Toronto

I (don’t) See / (what) You Mean: photographs, indexicality and fiction in Lucy Lippard’s I See / You Mean

Lucy Lippard’s only published novel I See / You Mean (1979) began as the art critic’s wry conceptual experiment and eventually became a sensual and provocative self-exploration. Intimately tied to Lippard’s experiences within the New York art world, the rising feminist movement, and her desire to (re)imagine her relationship to both, the novel is structured as a narrated slide show. Over 60 written descriptions of photographs appear throughout the book, depicting spatial compositions, bodies, gestures and actions. Here, Lippard is both the narrator and the photographer. She creates images—tableaux of sorts—that “show” readers her characters, but rarely “tell” us about them. Written with an economy of means, these photographic descriptions are more like diagrams, schema, a system of bodies in relation to one another. And as a reader, I am tasked with deciphering them, with visualizing them, of making sense out of them. I participate eagerly in Lippard’s game, take her words as face value. Because these are photographs. In I See / You Mean Lippard’s ekphrasis is entirely fictitious, yet simultaneously indexical. As a reader, I want to believe her, yet as a writer, I cannot. I am suspicious of her reliability, I question her viewpoint, want to see what is beyond the frame. In this paper, I work to meddle with her text-as-images, and use new archival research to read around them, to find something else within them, beyond just what I see, or what she tries to tell me they mean.

Thomas Symeonidis, Athens School of Fine Arts

Aesthetic re-framing of ethics: reading and writing images and words from Butler to Rancière

In the Psychic life of power (1997) Judith Butler approaches power as a force that, in different forms though, has been internalized by the subject. However, Butler recognizes, following the late Foucault, that the subject has also the power for auto-poetic processes. The self, as conceptualized in Giving an Account of Oneself (2003) is able to reformulate itself through a radical change of perspective in terms of visibility and narrative. On the other hand, following Adriana Cavanero’s Relating Narratives (2009), Butler supports the hypothesis that the self cannot narrate itself, cannot put into proper words its existence, unless there is a relational aspect that forces the subject outside its area of dominance and towards a scene of ethical judgment. This relationality can be intensified by the indeterminacy of the images that appears in front of us, setting the framework for an ethics of reading (NotesToward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015). Against this background, the aim of my paper will be to open up Butler’s ethical approach to an aesthetic of reading and writing along the lines of Jacques Rancière analysis of Pedro Costa and Alfredo Jaar’s practices (Emancipated Spectator, 2008). In fact, Rancière recognizes an ethical suspension of the image in favor of a different politics of art. The emphasis on the beauty of forms and words in Costa is supplemented by the figural use of words in Jaar image-making process. My main argument will be that these two examples of dissensus, the process of opening a new world within an existing one, can serve both, (a) as models of ethical and aesthetic practice of reading and writing and (b) as relational and sensible forms of ethical questioning that effectively reconfigure new topographies of the self (either the viewing