The Two Authenticities of The Photographic Media

Abstract

dramatic episode in a recent court trial in Los Angeles has made us explicitly aware of the juridical, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of authenticity in the use of the photographic media. videotape taken of the action of four white police officers who had stopped and manhandled a black motorist was used as evidence to show whether the police had used unacceptable violence or whether behavior was appropriate to what duty required. During the trial the truthfulness of the tape was challenged because it had been modified by such means as slow motion and stop action. This had been done to inform the jury most clearly of the decisive facts. The same modifications, however, were challenged because they changed decisive qualities of the crucial event. motion minimizes the violence. In the real world, a faster blow is a harder blow; a slower blow is softer. ... Slow motion also makes the beating seem less real and more fantastic.' Stop motion also broke the dynamic impact of the action, and the removal of the soundtrack diminished the presence of the event even further. Quite apart from the political drama of the trial, the episode could not but remind us of an ambiguity that has plagued the aesthetic and epistemological theory of the figurative arts. To the extent that the arts were representational, they aspired to a faithful rendering of the facts of reality; but in order to make images comprehensible to the human mind they had to select and shape and organize the material taken from reality-they had to find and impose form. By doing so, however, they had to partially reshape the facts of nature perceived by the eyes. Hence aesthetic theory had to put up with a compromise. Another way of putting the problem is to say that the figurative arts are always dealing with two kinds of authenticity. They are authentic to the extent that they do justice to the facts of reality, and they are authentic in quite another sense by expressing the qualities of human experience by any means suitable to that purpose. The latter, the aesthetic function of representations, is greatly helped by the former, which offers recognizable images of creatures and objects. But the latter hampers rather than supplements the former: the fancies and liberties of the human imagination are anything but authentic when taken as documents of physical reality. This dilemma was sharpened by the advent of photography. The mechanically obtained pictures revealed more clearly than the handmade images of artists ever could that when the imitation of nature was taken literally it could not fully meet the requirements of art in its usual sense. In his Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire had published a section on Le Public Moderne et la Photographie, where he praised the ability of the new medium to serve the sciences and the arts, but only as their very humble servant without any further pretenses, just as the printing press and shorthand have neither created literature nor added to it.2 But he warned against the popular craze for photography as the ideal fulfillment of what painting had always aspired to. A vengeful God has answered the prayers of this multitude; and Daguerre was his Messiah. The competition between the two aspirations of authenticity has characterized Western figurative art ever since antiquity. On the one hand, great painters were praised for imitating nature so perfectly as to deceive humans and animals, and the sculptor Pygmalion's ivory statue was suitable to be transformed into a real woman.