Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)

Abstract

My subtitle recalls an essay I wrote more than twenty years ago, in an effort to understand the long-held belief that photography is a “universal language,” a language legible, as one enthusiastic early American press report on the daguerreotype put it, “in the courts of civilization and the hut of the savage.”1 The wording here was quaint, even for its time, as the white-settler republic drove relentlessly westward, indifferent to the way a renegade Seminole, hiding out in the swamps of Florida, might have responded to the grim-faced daguerreotype portrait of the aged Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. With the advent of neocolonialism, the language became less quaint, but the naive optimism persisted unabashed. Edward Steichen recalled the “rapt attention” with which Guatemalan peasants gazed at his traveling exhibition The Family of Man, not long after the 1954 CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz: “The people in the audience looked at the pictures and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.”2 This conceit, that the globalized pictorial archive benignly conscripts subjects as members of a metaphoric “human family,” now seems quaint in its turn. It is hard (for many Americans, at least) not to look at The Family of Man today without a tinge of nostalgia for an exhausted liberalism. And yet isn’t this notion of mutual recognition, of global connectedness and legibility, at the heart of the promise of the Internet? This promise gives a humanist gloss to the archival collecting of demographic data, much as Carl Sandburg did when he described The Family of Man as a “mult iplicat ion t able of liv ing breathing human faces.”3 Communications technologies—photographic reproduction, linked computers— provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire. This

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.