A Note on Photography and the Simulacral

Abstract

In 1983 French television launched Une minute pour une image, a program conceived and directed by Agnes Varda. True to its title the show lasted just one minute, during which time a single photograph was projected onto the screen and a voice-over commentary was spoken. The sources of these reactions to the given photograph varied enormously from photographers themselves to writers like Eugene Ionesco and Marguerite Duras, or political figures like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or art critics such as Pierre Schneider to a range of respondents that one could call the man-on-the-street: bakers, taxi drivers, workers in a pizza parlor, businessmen. This very gathering of response from a wide spectrum of viewers, including those who have no special expertise in either photography or the rest of what could be called the cognate visual arts, in its resemblance to an opinion poll and its insistence on photography as a vehicle for the expression of public reactionthis technique was a continuation, whether intentional or not, of a certain tradition in France of understanding photography through the methods of sociology, and insisting that this is the only coherent way of considering it. This tradition finds its most lucid presentation in the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who twenty years ago published his study Un Art moyen. This title uses the notion of moyen, or middle, to invoke the aesthetic dimension of both middling or fair as a stage between good and bad, and to mean midway between high art and popular culture; it also employs moyen to call up the sociological dimensions of middle class as well as distributed middle or statistical average. But before looking into Bourdieu's argument about this art for the average man, it might be well to examine a few samples of Varda's photographic showcase, to which public response was vigorous enough to warrant a morning-after publication in Liberation, where each day following the transmission the photograph was reproduced, its commentary forming an extended caption.