The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning

Barry Mauer

continued . . .

The Surrealists found that a film was easier to dissolve when it was "bad" to begin with. A "bad" film, one lacking in coherence or technical competence, or driving a facile message home with vulgar means, fell apart more easily than a "good" film. Similarly, a "bad" photograph, one that fails to achieve the desired idealized representation of family life, or one that is technically bad, or one that has suffered the effects of deterioration, is easier to "dissolve" than a good one. The photograph below is entitled "Oblitervision" after the visual effect caused by the deterioration. It's like "Cinemascope" or "Technicolor," only different.

Is it any surprise, given their interests in fragmentation, that the Surrealists became collectors and exhibitors of found objects? The Surrealists understood that context "fixes" meaning. They tried to free meaning by destroying or altering context. My habits of compiling and viewing found photographs are closer to Surrealist film criticism and filmmaking practices than they are to traditional interpretive (hermeneutic) criticism, or to sociological methods of interpreting photographs. My compiling and viewing habits developed along these lines not because I didn't want to understand the found photographs by traditional methods, but because the photographs themselves resist traditional methods. In fact, without the verbal descriptions of the album's original owner to accompany them, the ordinary family photo album may be understood as a Surrealist exhibit of decontextualized artifacts, at once quotidian and bizarre.

Questions remain, however, about the exhibition of found photographs. In the mid-1990s, I put a dozen found photographs on the world wide web as part of a project for a graduate seminar in web media. I believed that the questions raised by found photographs were appropriate to ask of found web pages too, particularly the question: "how do others see you?" We seek to contextualize what we find and make inferences about others based on visual cues and cognitive heuristics. Every time I visit strangers' home pages on the web (with photographs of themselves and family), it is like finding private photo albums. The authors of personal home pages, however, are aware that their images are not exclusively private, so they typically seek to contextualize information about their family photographs. The home page owner's written commentary provides a context for the images that tends to interfere with a purely speculative reading.

My site of found photographs, at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~bmauer, contextualizes the photographs not within a narrative about family, but within contemporary theory about museum exhibitions. The site has attracted over eighty thousand visitors, and interest in the found photographs continues to grow. Recently, the web site was featured on a News of the World television broadcast. A web page about the found photographs broadcast is available at http://www.now.com/feature.now?fid=677013. By making a web exhibit of the found photographs, I recontextualized them within the academic and arts communities. This strategy is similar to those of avant-garde artists of the past century. In Henry Sayre's The Object of Performance, he discusses the photographs of Nicholas Nixon, a photographer whose complex appropriations of the family snapshot mirrors the Surrealists' use of found objects. Sayre writes:

In many ways the first question [Nixon's] work raises is just what these pictures are doing in the Museum of Modern Art and Artforum at all. Part of the answer, of course, is that in the context of the museum and the art magazine (as opposed to the mantelpiece) we are forced to approach them differently. The ploy is as old as Duchamp's urinal, and Nixon is by no means the only contemporary photographer to exploit it. These works of art immediately call into question what we might call the official "taste apparatus" at work in our culture. Nixon's Brown sisters and Duchamp's urinal equally undermine the canons of "high" art by revealing the aesthetic power of the vernacular. At the same time they reveal just how powerful our taste-making institutions have become by revealing that it is quite possibly their appearance in the art context alone that makes them art. (38)

Sayre's discussion illustrates the ways in which avant-garde artists explore the uncertainty and ambiguity of ordinary objects. The switch from the vernacular to the museum context puts our expectations about the status of objects on display. The work of avant-garde artists like Nixon challenges our concepts of what things are "supposed" to look like and what they're "supposed" to mean.

This discussion about context leads me to the following point: that we discover intentionality, and thus meaning, in the rationality of institutions. My investigation of found photographs, therefore, examines their value within the world of the family, and within the interrelated worlds of the arts and the academy in which I have transposed them. The family photo album serves as an ethnographic exhibit of artifacts representing the family to itself as an institution with a history. In this way, the album compiler functions like a museum curator. But when museums exhibit family photographs, the institutional logic of the museum supercedes the logic used by the familial photo album compiler.

In my web site, I wanted to raise some of the issues associated with exhibiting found photographs in a museum context, particularly the issues of cultural domination and voyeurism. Karp and Levine's book Exhibiting Cultures, which was written for museum curators who produce cultural exhibits, discusses the effects of exhibits featuring artifacts from "alien" cultures. The authors suggest ways in which the exhibitor could draw viewers' attention to their own cultural apparatus. In my site, I suggested ways in which our fascination with found photographs says more about us than it does about the people in the photographs.

By drawing attention to voyeurism and stereotyping, I am hoping to bring our sense-making apparatus into view and to challenge it. Looking at the woman in "The Leering Jesus," I read her as a mother (a long-suffering one) and a drunk. But when I attend to the singular details in the photograph, the pirate's hat and photo album on the table, I become more interested in things that don't "add up" than I do in confirming my stereotypes. I become a Surrealist just by looking differently.

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