The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning

Barry Mauer

continued . . .

Several conflicting responses come into play when I encounter found photographs; I respond with voyeuristic fascination fueled by stereotypes, but also with a surrealist's glee in discovering the bizarre and with an anthropologist's interest in photographs as cultural artifacts. All of these responses share a common element; they involve inference-making, or making conceptual steps from the known to the unknown. If I were to visit someone's house for the first time and saw a shelf full of books, I would be inclined to make inferences about the person—their interests, their tastes—based on their books. Human beings take pleasure in making inferences. It drives our curiosity and keeps us going out on walks and going to museums and movies.

Voyeurism is a kind of pleasure derived from looking at the intimate moments of other people. It requires social distance between me and the scene. Of course, not all pleasure from seeing intimate moments is voyeuristic. I can take visual pleasure from an intimate scene in which I am involved without that pleasure being voyeuristic. For example, when I look at my own family photo album, this pleasure is not voyeuristic. Seeing the family photographs of strangers, however, gives me voyeuristic pleasure.

Why does it give me pleasure? Because my interest in seeing the intimate moments of other people, especially at a safe distance (which is provided by found photographs), derives from the perverse desire to see that which I was not intended to see. At first sight, most of these pictures are hilarious or tragic or both. Voyeurism allows me to experience these reactions from a comfortable distance. I raise the issue of voyeurism here for two reasons: because I want to draw attention to the conventions of ethnographic exhibitions and because this essay is as much an attempt to understand our responses to found photographs as it is an attempt to understand the photographs themselves.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her study "The Ethnographic Object," warns museum curators against playing to the voyeur's paradigm. She discusses how the ethnographic collector of the 1860s became an "adventurer," and the city a "dark continent," a relationship that gets reproduced between the museum viewer and the ethnographic object.

One of the attractions of poor neighborhoods was their accessibility to the eye, their "intimacy at sight." Any stranger could see openly on the streets what in better neighborhoods was hidden in an inaccessible domestic interior. . . . "Intimacy at sight," which suggests a kind of social nakedness, combines with the "view from the sidewalk" to verge on what might be termed social pornography—the private made public. . . . Historically, ethnography has constituted its subjects at the margins of geography, history, and society. Not surprisingly, then, in a convergence of moral adventure, social exploration, and sensation seeking, the inner city is constructed as a socially distant but physically proximate exotic—and erotic—territory. Visits to this territory tempt the adventurer to cross the dangerous line between voyeurism and acting out. (411-13)

One response anthropologists have to the problem of voyeurism is to ask subjects to examine their own culture in relation to that of the ethnographic object. This is sometimes known as "collapsing the subject/object paradigm." A trip to the museum thus becomes an investigation of the viewer's culture as much as it is an investigation of a set of alien cultural objects.

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