The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning

Barry Mauer

continued . . .

As a detective, I am interested in finding truth, but found photographs present a problem for the detective-polysemy. Some photographic details signify too many things and it is impossible to establish a "correct" inference. At this point, another attitude takes over-a surrealist one. In contrast to the detective, who aims to rule out certain explanations (ideally arriving at one "true" interpretation), the Surrealist purposefully tries to multiply meanings. For the Surrealist, the signifier itself, loosened from the signifying system, takes priority over the signified. I have become increasingly interested in fragmentary details within particular found photographs. Only recently, after years of examining the photograph above, did I notice the objects on the table in front of the woman. An obscure white-on-black shape became more apparent as I enlarged the scanned image on my computer screen. A pirate's hat with a skull and crossbones design appeared. I immediately recognized (or perhaps misrecognized) the object adjacent to it as a family photo album. What significance do these objects have? Do they indicate that the woman was revisiting her past through old photos and reminiscing over part of a child's pirate costume? Or was clutter lying around because of a recent visit by children? My explanation of these details is plausible but not certain. Such details can elicit what Roland Barthes calls the "third meaning," which, according to Robert Ray, is "a reading that fixates on contingent details whose precise meaning eludes, at least temporarily, all available symbolic systems" (32). Photography, for Barthes, registers a partially illegible world that cannot be subordinated to language. Instead, photography makes available a different kind of reading, an "erotics of the image" that attends to surfaces, subverts language and leads to a kind of delirium; we want to say everything about this photograph, yet no matter what we say it resists final meaning.

Barthes's "third meaning" is a classic Surrealist strategy of fragmentation. Surrealists treat the fragment (the individual photograph or a detail within a photograph) apart from its original context. André Breton, Jacques Vaché, and Man Ray developed techniques of film viewing based on these strategies long before the Surrealists began making their own films. Breton and Vaché entered in the middle of a film and left when they began to figure out the plot; Man Ray watched films through a grill made with his fingers. The Surrealists used fragmentation as a means to knowledge, discovering significance in the fragment that had been concealed in the contextualized whole.

Louis Aragon invented synthetic criticism, in which the fragments of a film are reassembled differently to reveal its poetic dimensions. Francis Picabia asked the viewer to project the detached fragments of a film on an imaginary screen. Robert Desnos urged the viewer to abstract his own story from the film. Philippe Soupault invented the "dream script"; his goal was to extract latent dream thoughts from the manifest content of cinema, to contaminate daily life with these dream thoughts, and to transfigure reality according to these thoughts.

Surrealist film viewing habits, such as those listed above, are clearly different from those of conventional film viewers and critics. The latter focus on "the 'above board' aspects of a film, its manifest content seen as an example of genre, as a function of its form, or of the intelligence of the individual who authored it" (Hammond 21). The Surrealist viewer was more like a poet or philosopher, taking the desired fragment (what Barthes has called "the glittering signifier") and re-imagining it, ignoring the rest. Surrealist filmmakers, like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, used several strategies from Surrealist film criticism in their filmmaking practices, including the "jumbling" of images, a discontinuity between image and sound, far-fetched analogies, and personal fetishes. The Surrealists also blurred the line between film criticism and filmmaking by "re-making" existing films; Joseph Cornell remade East of Borneo into Rose Hobart, the screen name of East Of Borneo's star, whom Cornell fetishized.

The practice of making photo albums from found photographs is similar to Surrealist film practices. Both practices rely on fragmentation and de-contextualization, followed by an imaginative recombination that does not respect the intentions of the original owners. For the Surrealists, existing films were "found objects" to be fragmented and used. Finding obscure details within a film aided in the dissolution of the film, and thus to the interruption of its ideological effects.

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