THE INESCAPABLE BIAS OF REPRESENTATION BY OLUKOYE AKINKUGBE INTERMEDIATE 4 ALISON MOFFET
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–and, therefore, like power. 1
1
Susan Sontag On Photography, 1977, Susan Sontag, p. 4
Dear Reader, The photographs presented below are representative of the sort of convictions that arise when representation, and representation alone, has the last say on the subject matter which it seeks to represent. The text which ensues is evocative of the relation that exists between what events and circumstances we experience in the world, and the bias of representation that presupposes and distorts our entire rationale in regards to what can be acknowledged as apparent, rather, signified by the inadvertently swayed, at times falsified, depictions of fragments presented as wholly conclusive. In the interest of such a phenomenon, to what extent, perhaps, might we veritably deduce a relation, or a premise, for the reasoning behind these misappropriated vessels of conviction? To begin with, a brief summary of the events documented in the supplemented photographs:
Fig. 1
A wave of national socialism which at first sought to emulate Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, under the gaze of an omniscient figurehead, whose taste in facial hair would forever render unfashionable what was once considered a pretty sporting moustache, and whose unforgiveable political agenda would forever tarnish the pages of history in the 20th Century – All this symbolised by an insignia baring its origins from the Orient, subsequently stigmatized by the Western World, adorning the imperial architecture that served as the backdrop to the events that surfeited a nation and its neighbouring countries to the brink of unrestrained war.
Fig. 2
The capital city of said nation, in ruins and partially ablaze, overthrown, and in some senses emancipated, by the Soviets, this time baring their own emblem: a scythe, a crescent moon and a worker’s hammer; reigning political symbolism over a conquered nation who prior to these moments had been emphatic patriarchs of the ideals which shaped the architecture around them, an instilled identification with their fatherland, now forced to surrender their already disheveled municipality and the little left of their fleeting pride to the likes of their communist counterparts.
Fig. 3
A wave of national socialism which at first sought to build on the brilliance of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, under the guidance of an exceptionally competent figurehead, whose political persona matched the ferocity of his brilliantly equipped and coordinated army, and whose ambitious political agenda would only be surpassed in the 20th Century by the likes of God’s Own Country (the USA – see Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6th-9th, 1945). All this symbolised by an insignia baring its origins from the Orient, subsequently feared by the Allied Western World, adorning the imperial architecture that served as the backdrop to the events that surfeited a nation and its neighbouring countries to the brink of unrestrained war.
Fig. 4
The capital city of said nation, in ruins and partially ablaze, overthrown, and in some senses enslaved by the Soviets, this time baring their own emblem of communist terror: a scythe, a crescent moon and a worker’s hammer, inflicting an air of tyrannous political hegemony over a courageous nation who prior to these moments had been relentless crusaders of the ideals which conditioned the state of the architecture around them, an intrinsic identification with their fatherland, now cajoled to concede their already battered municipality and the little left of their admonished pride to the likes of their autocratic counterparts.
Perhaps crucially what these examples demonstrate, besides being visual excerpts of the rise and fall of Nazi Berlin, is a phenomenon beyond the nature, and of the content to which they are so closely associated – such a phenomenon whereby architecture, lay and inanimate, objective in this respect as is a photograph, becomes the basis of political imposition in the foreground of civil unrest, and a moral platform in the wake of prosperity. Alas, these evidences are merely photographs, representations of an augmented reality as altogether biased as the accompanying descriptions of them, and up till now, even this text you have been reading. How so can something which, for all one knows, be both true and false at the same time? As if to say the tone of truth renders false the message reported by the original representation. How is it that anything other than exactly what is represented can be interpreted to varying degrees of accuracy when the representation itself is objective, static and unwavering, as in the case of a photograph, or a text, or an audio recording, or any other from of recorded material?
Fig. 5
To further understand these relations we might prefer to consider architecture and the people to which it is concerned as two mutually exclusive bodies, better illustrated in the figure above, whereby ‘architecture is not about the conditions of design but about the design of conditions;’ these ‘conditions’, as it were, being the vessel that allows for those separate bodies – static architecture and animate people – to coincide. The concurrence, of a ‘condition’ is an synergetic property which fashions any link that is to be derived between architecture, serving as a backdrop to the activities nurturing this occupation of social engagement, and indeed evental or cultural significance, as is portrayed in the representation of circumstances to which bias is ensuingly attributed. Invariably when we choose to represent an object, or a scenario, irrespective of the shape or form of said representation, we take a stance; we presuppose what can be acknowledged as a bias, which moulds the interpretative quality of the perception of whatever it may be that one has endeavoured to represent. This notion of presupposing a position on the event represented, presupposing our own standpoint, alludes to the dispute of questionable accuracy, or even uncertainty, in the truth of representation. Largely ‘because it is so central to our whole enterprise, the question of how we should represent the world has
usually been taken for granted. This fundamental level of argument concerns the issue of mimesis, the belief that we should strive to produce as accurate a reflection of the world as possible.’2 To give credence to the facet of truth in representation would be to associate a nature of realism to the task of comprising a portrayal of a ‘condition’, a mediation of a premise to, in this case, marry the body of architecture with the significance of those actions its enclosures facilitate. One might consider ‘realism as the ‘coincidence between a representation and that which a society assumes as its reality.’ However, for a society to maintain the illusion that its representations are natural representations it must conceal their historic specificity.’3 At the same time, it is perhaps important to note that ‘while we may not [often] see the difference between the world and our own representations of it… others, whose cultural site or point of view differs from ours, may see out discrepancies (though perhaps not their own) much more clearly.’ 4 It is precisely ‘this ‘invisible join’ between reality and cultural representations of it, which is so essential to the ‘natural attitude’ of objectivism and cultural reproduction,’5 whereby one might begin to establish the effect of bias associated with the ‘design of conditions’ from an architectural standpoint as opposed to the ‘conditions of design’, on such grounds. It is one thing to acknowledge the representation or misrepresentation of circumstances past as potent to the constitution of historical truth or falsification, however, if one begins to examine an event as it unfolds, or at least in the context of its predisposed consolidation, one finds within this broad area of consensus, to which the sort of ‘events’ in question are depicted, the neutrality, or contrary sway of opinion, ‘is the result of psychological and social processes that lead to a situation in which the behavior of a public in regard to an issue is conditioned by his [or her] expectation that other members of the public hold similar attitudes on the same issues.’6 The final representation, or premise for popular conviction, often 2
Introduction: Representing the Place of Culture, Place/Culture/Representation, 1993, edited by James Duncan and David Ley, p. 2 3 Duncan and Ley, p. 4 4 Duncan and Ley, p. 4 5
Duncan and Ley, p. 4 The Public Opinion Process, W. Phillips Davison, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1958), pp. 91-106, Accessed: 18/02/2015
6
stems from a process, which ‘involves the formation of individual attitudes and opinions… and inter-group communication,’7 in effect meaning vast majorities of people are condemnable for whatever ‘truth’ in representation transpires in the wake of any such event. The power of representation in actuality lies within the means of representation. Primarily one is concerned with the medium of photography, which places its author directly at the helm of those circumstances relative to representational subjectivity. Considering ‘a photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more preemptory rights– to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions.’8 Notwithstanding, even ‘after the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed.’9 The inherent quality of photo documentation to render an air of significance to an otherwise insignificant occurrence exhibits the might and readiness of this form of representation to persuade and influence the sentiments of an indifferent audience, not presupposing indifference because such an audience are none the wiser or merely uninterested, but more owing to the fact that the presented documentation is finite in its manifestation of representation. For the photograph merely ‘implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.’10 The nature of the camera is such that it presents a cropped perspective of the scenario to which its subject matter is engaged. It ‘must always hide more than it discloses.’ 11 Evidently, almost no one documenting an event ‘takes the same picture of the same thing, [so] the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image [yields] to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an 7
Davison, pp. 91-106 Sontag, p. 11 9 Sontag, p. 11 10 Sontag, p. 23 11 Sontag, p. 23 8
evaluation of the world’ 12 from said individual’s perspective, which is largely true not just in the practice of photography, but also extends to any manner in which a subject is represented in any form other than its original. Consequently, ‘through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage… Reality as such is redefined–as an item for exhibition, as a record for scrutiny, as a target for surveillance.’13 This brings us back to the consideration of architecture and the people, to which it is concerned, being two mutually exclusive bodies, sharing only a common factor of the ‘event’, the interaction generated by the latter of the two bodies within the court of the prior; as well as the photographer who in his or her own right functions as an event within said event they are photographing, though far removed, and to some extent extraneous from the event since ‘photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention… The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.’14 The relationship between this duality of coexisting circumstances ‘moves beyond the question of power, beyond the question of whether architecture dominates events or vice versa. The relationship, then, is as symmetrical as the ineluctable one between guard and prisoner, hunter and hunted… Only when they confront each other’s reality are their strategies so totally interdependent that it becomes impossible to determine which one initiates and which one responds,’ 15 whereby it is the photographer’s representation that is determinant of the conclusion which is to be drawn in the midst of such circumstances. Disregarding the notion of representation and considering for a while only the context at the crux of said device, ‘when spaces and programs are largely independent of one another one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another,’16 therefore, despite being a mutually exclusive body, the ‘social relevance and formal invention [of architecture] cannot be dissociated from the events that “happen” [within] it.’17 This is to 12
Sontag, p. 88 Sontag, p. 156 14 Sontag, p. 12 15 Violence Ritualized, Architecture and Disjunction, 1996, Bernard Tschumi, p. 127 16 Tschumi, p. 127 17 Tschumi, p. 139 13
say, the manner in which architecture relates its cultural significance, other than the initial purpose for which it was conceived, stems from the subsequent misuse or abuse of the aforementioned architecture. The phenomenon is such that ‘architecture and events constantly transgress each other’s rules, whether explicitly or implicitly. These rules, these organized compositions, may be questioned, but they always remain points of reference. A building is a point of reference for the activities set to negate it. A theory of architecture is a theory of order threatened by the very use it permits. And vice versa…’18 This concern is of paramount consideration before we even ascribe our own positions, or obscured gaze, to the consolidation of an established opinion in any embodiment of mediated representation.
On the sentiment and transpired value of representation: There is a loss of intimacy or, in Heidegger’s words, the “loss of nearness” between person and person. The world is being rendered, and appears, increasingly meaningless, lacking real human significance, while architecture, just as much as contemporary man and society at large, seems more and more incapable of coming to terms with the nature of our human condition, unable to derive a meaning for human existence.19
18
Tschumi, p. 132 Toward an Architecture of Critical Inquiry, Botond Bognar, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 43, No.1 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 13-34, Accessed: 18/02/2015
19
If the maxim above is considered rational and within reason, one might argue that there can be no absolute representation, nor resolute in-bias to which an event is relayed after its original conclusion, allegedly due to the fundamental notion that one only knows ‘history in the same way that Kant says we know nature; the [interpreter’s] understanding, like the physicist’s, forms an “objective” truth to the degree that is constructed. The objective element is only one aspect of a coherent representation which can be indefinitely corrected and made more precise but never merges with the thing in itself.’ 20 To regard an artifact of representation as factual, or a given, would be to denounce the curatorial element of documentative representation to which we are already at present accustomed. Instead one might like to think of any final body of representation as a composition constituted of strands, or vectors of truth and unwitting ignorance, ‘which are traced through [a] dense whole of facts [having] already distorted the original reality in which everything is real.’ 21 Inadvertently and somewhat ironically, through the mere act of representation alone, we have already misrepresented and falsified the thing or event which we originally intended to delineate, both in our representation and subjective interpretative qualities as autonomous individuals, which begs to question if indeed, even before or without representation, anything, or any significant occurrence, can exist from a unanimous and infallibly objective standpoint, not just as a manner of speaking but in what we perceive as fundamental to our real, tangible existence. Consequently, ‘historical consciousness is caught in this indefensible paradox: fragments of human life, each of which had been lived as an absolute and which are in principle concealed to the disinterested onlooker, are brought together in the imagination in a single act of attention, compared, and considered as moments in a single developmental process,’ 22 whereby we subsequently derive our formative views and conclusions as to the authenticity, or significance, of summarily evidence put forth before us. It seems we are but pawns in an age of sentiments governed by the need ‘to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs.’23 We are a society who has long since preferred ‘the 20
The Crisis of the Understanding, The Primacy of Perception, 1964, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, p. 193194 21 Merleau-Ponty, pp. 193-194 22 Merleau-Ponty, p. 202 23 Sontag, p. 4
image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”– while being aware of doing just that’24. Photographs ‘have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and are themselves coveted substitutes for [the] firsthand experience’25 which proliferates a thin veil of perception that has in a sense, and in its own right, become the standard by which to judge a reality whose intersubjective perimeters are indistinguishable from the medium that so often defines it. None the less it appears still that architecture continues to fulfill ‘its own architectural task, one that is inseparably connected with a critical approach to the existing society and culture,’ 26 one whose relation is still governed by the design of conditions, as opposed to the conditions of design, despite ‘the external reality of man [still being] at odds with man himself.’27 Needless to say, ‘it is precisely the interpersonal – and intercultural – nature of the [photographic medium] which poses a challenge to mimesis, since a ‘perfect copy’ of the world clearly is not possible if the interpreter is present’28 and unable to dissociate his or her gaze from that which they photograph, a bias inescapably a part of the craft of photography, and ultimately the bane of all representation.
My warmest regards,
24
Sontag, p. 153 Sontag, p. 153 26 What is Architecture The Name of Today?, Petra Ceferin, Log, No. 19 (Spring/Summer 2010), pp. 728, Accessed: 18/02/2015 12:19 27 Bognar, pp. 13-34 28 Duncan and Ley, p. 3 25
Image Bibliography: Fig. 1 & 3 Adolf Hitler at 50: Color Photos From a Despot’s Birthday, April 1939 | LIFE.com, http://life.time.com/history/adolf-hitler-at-50color-photos-from-a-despots-birthday-april-1939/#4, Original caption: ‘The Ost-West-Achse (East-West Axis) in Berlin, site of a massive rally and parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.’, Accessed: 01/03/2015, 14.37 Fig. 2 & 4 https://obsidianraine.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/fall-ofberlin.jpg, Original Caption: N/A, Accessed: 01/02/2015, 15.38 Fig. 5 Advertisements for Architecture, 1978, Bernard Tschumi