• 1 Funding for this article was provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of th (...)
• 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Claude Lefort, (Evanston: Northwestern (...)

If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been “worked over,” that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both “subject” and “object,” both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them. Seeing, speaking, even thinking (with certain reservations, for as soon as we distinguish thought from speaking absolutely we are already in the order of reflection), are experiences of this kind, both irrecusable and enigmatic.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty2

• 4 Ibid., 15.

3What is key in Lessing’s deliberations is not just the observation that one must capture or freeze the subject’s expression at a specific moment, but his emphasis on the temporal precision required by the decision. The fruitful moment should thus be distinguished from the culminating moment of the action.4 The latter intensifies the pathos of the experienced suffering or joy to such a degree that no room is left for the imagination: the depiction is frozen in its literal form. The fruitful moment, on the other hand, allows us to read into the corporal expression of the depicted figures with the simultaneous use of our sight and imagination, the fluid combination of which reveals to us the desired depiction of emotions. This, however, places us simultaneously in two points in time: the one in which the experienced affect is the strongest, and the one we actually see once it is limited, but which can thus refer to our imagination of what just happened. The right way of depicting emotion, the choice of the fruitful moment, thus relies on the true art of skillful delay, the capturing of the moment that unfolds immediately after the culmination, when its traces are still legible, but it is no longer directly present.

• 6 Martin Jay, “Photography and the Event,” in Double Exposure. Memory and Photography, ed. Olga Shevc (...)
• 7 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, (...)
• 8 Jacques Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité (Montrouge: Bayard), 117.
• 9 Ibid., 117.

6One could say that the story of the relationship between photography and text is marked by the rhythm of repeated moments of particular intensification, real events that redefine their mutual connection. The category of the event – a concept important to the leading 20th century philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and Alain Badiou – is, as Martin Jay writes, essentially a phenomenon “possessing a multiple time […] preserving traces of an unfulfilled past or signaling the emergence or at least the promise of a radically new future.”6 In the context of the relationship between different media, an event can mean two different yet not necessarily exclusive instances. First, it is a kind of breakthrough in the social, political or individual sense, that forces those attempting to react to it to conceive of a new type of connection between the photograph and the text, and thus it demonstrates to them that in their desire to remain “faithful to the event,”7 they can no longer persist in the configuration that existed previously. Second, it is the shift in the model of visual and textual constellations that can itself become the event, as it commands us to think differently and establishes new structures of understanding and perception. In his criticism of the somewhat lofty vision of the event as a form of absolute difference that requires a radical conversion, Jacques Rancière states that this view imposes a “certain identification scheme; it creates something like a group of specialists, people capable of recognizing what is and isn’t an event.”8 He adds: “For me, the possibility that an action, a walk along the street, a glance through a window, the screening of a film, people going out onto a boulevard, or a performance will be become an event is not subject to axiomatization.”9 This means that not only is the event contingent, but particular ways of speaking and looking (and their articulation) change as they are influenced by the event, and can even become events themselves.

• 10 See Hubert Damisch, Ciné fil (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 113–145.

7These two visions of the event – something that is beyond capturing and something that emerges from its transformation – need not be mutually exclusive, which in turn means that each historical breakthrough, including those pertaining to the relationship between the arts and different media, should be viewed as a veritable node of possibilities, breakthroughs, challenges and configurations. In his recent comments on Lessing’s famous essay, Hubert Damisch admitted that its lasting validity entails the need to formulate a new theory of nodes (noeuds) which – in analyzing specific depictions and historical artifacts – would be preoccupied primarily with the codependencies between affect, the body and modules of representation, or, in his own words, “dispositives.”10 It is only through the use of such a “node topology” that we can demonstrate, for instance, how individual affects, visual and textual sensibilities, and the history of photography and literature converge at a particular moment in history.

• 11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill an (...)
• 12 Ibid., 80.
• 13 Ibid., 85.

8The discrepancy between Lessing and Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the moment of intensified vision can be applied to the discussion on the ontological status of photography. On one side of the argument would be all of those who see the photograph as an extension of reality, a mere representation of its traces that in no way distorts what it depicts. As Roland Barthes writes, succinctly summing up this tradition of thought, the noeme of photography is “that-has-been.”11 What this means is that “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”12 This is why, to Barthes, the essence of the photograph “is to ratify what it represents.”13

• 14 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard Un (...)
• 15 See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer (New York (...)
• 16 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 51.

9But there exists another, equally strong tradition that sees photography, from its very inception, not as a perfect imprint of material reality, but as a kind of fundamental forgery of the human experience. To put it in more exact terms, it is the precision with which a photograph reproduces reality that makes it a tool for the mortification of that which, unavoidably, is not fully defined, literal and mechanical in our experience of the world. Among the supporters of this critical stance is Siegfried Kracauer, who argues that what every photograph essentially depicts is a past that was never there, i.e., one that cannot be recalled. It is a segment of a past reality that has been reproduced literally, but by doing so, it violates the rules of human memory. Memory, Kracauer writes, “encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps.”14 But this discontinuity is a product, rather than a symptom, of memory. Gaps in memory are necessary if we are to remember anything at all, if – as Kracauer believes, undoubtedly following in the footsteps of Bergson15 – we always remember that which is currently relevant and useful to our own lives. Yet this also means that the fragmented tissue of our memory, like our own lives, is in a permanent state of motion, and is capable of dynamizing the past by repeatedly juxtaposing its recollections with our current situation. Photography, on the other hand, retains an accurate trace of a specific and random image of reality, thus blocking this motion and so, from the perspective of memory, it seems nothing more than an “assemblage of garbage.”16

• 17 Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” in Photography Theory, ed (...)
• 18 Quoted in Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Te (...)

12In other words, a photograph’s potential eventful moment can be extracted precisely by the fact that the image is always accompanied by language, with which it constantly reckons and with which it shares a more or less intimate relationship. Thus the noeme of photography would not be “that-has-been,” but a silent question that one must answer without the aid of a script. And while most answers will take the banal form articulated by Barthes, in no way does this invalidate the potentiality contained in that moment. It is simply an attempt to answer the question of what we experienced, how we want to remember it, and what rules will govern its recording in the log of our entire experience. The relationship between the photograph and language is thus never an exclusive relationship between two media, but a node of existential, ethical and political dilemmas. When a photograph touches upon something that is particularly resistant to being inscribed in this context through the use of the language at our disposal, there emerges an opportunity for a true event that transforms our understanding of the world, precipitating a new way of explaining it in one, intense moment. If, as Thierry de Duve proposes, “with photography, we have indeed the paradox of an event that hangs on the wall”17, then this event binds the photograph with that which is external to it, thus reconfiguring the forms of our experience. This coexistence between language and the photograph was once aptly described by William Saroyan, who said: “One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words.”18

• 19 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (L (...)

13These reflections on the photograph’s fruitful moment find a certain echo in an idea developed in recent years by Ariella Azoulay, who envisions photography as a space in which a kind of civil contract is entered into and renegotiated. In her writing, the Israeli scholar makes a distinction between “the event of photography” and “the photographed event.” While the latter is simply a fragment of reality captured on film, the former is a kind of configuration of different elements that constitute the very action of taking a picture. These two dimensions are never wholly separate from each other, obviously, though the discourse of photography has often omitted the event of photography and focused instead almost exclusively on the photographed events. But as Azoulay argues, “every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer.”19 In other words, every photograph depicts not just a certain fragment of reality, but also, indirectly, the very event of its creation: when, why, by whom and in what circumstances it was made.

• 22 Ibid., 89–90.
• 23 Ibid., 90.
• 24 In addition to her theoretical analysis of this situation, Azoulay continues to work on the archive (...)

16Yet Azoulay recognizes, and even emphasizes, the fragility of both the civil contract offered by a photograph and the citizenship that it can grant to the expropriated. Photographs depicting the pain of people who have been stripped of their rights and exposed to suffering can themselves become persecutors, while the act of taking a picture can certainly prolong and intensify the humiliation of those depicted in the image. The potentiality of the civil contract nevertheless persists, Azoulay says, despite photography’s entanglement in the mechanisms of power and exploitation: “Even when this encounter occurs under the difficult conditions of distress or disaster, when a threat looms over or has already caused harm to the political space, as a space of plurality and action, the act of photography and the photographs it produces might, at least potentially, restore it.”22 And as long as the photograph exists, the groups and individuals depicted in it, even those who are excluded from or victims of the social hierarchy, can demand their rights and express their own suffering and aspirations. The fragility of the photograph’s civil contract, its incessant oscillation between actual violence and potential solidarity, reflects, in Azoulay’s view, the fragility of all social ties, and – we may add – that of the relationship between the image and the text, with all their historical implications. The photograph thus participates in history primarily by releasing the hidden potential of the present, which the image simultaneously binds to and misses. “The photograph,” Azoulay writes, “always includes a supplement that makes it possible to show that what ‘was there’ wasn’t there necessarily in that way.”23 Every act of photography renews the chance for a new configuration of the life of a community, a chance to remedy harm and to equalize opportunities. It assembles a certain constellation of people and things while preserving on the print the ever-real possibility of redefining their shared history and our perception of it through the photograph, inconsistent as this perception may be with the overt intentions of the image itself.24

• 25 Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 85–89.

17In her writing, Azoulay frequently emphasizes another historical dimension of the photograph, namely that of its social impact not just as a technological novelty, but as a new social practice or even, one might say, a new way of practicing that which is social. The very process of its invention was an indication of the fact that there was no single inventor behind the technology, nor was it restricted by intellectual property rights; rather, it was a discovery that opened a space for the shared use of images of our world.25 The ontology of photography, as Azoulay asserts, is thus necessarily a political ontology, or even – thanks to the impact photography has had on our communities by its very presence – an ontology of the political:

• 27 Ibid., 22.
• 28 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York P (...)

18The very practice of photography, its broad availability and democratic nature have changed the conditions of this coexistence to such a degree that it has become very difficult to discern between the dynamic of the civil contract of photography and the political dynamic as such. Our lives, Azoulay admits, is littered with potential events that reference the photographic contract: “In the contemporary era, when the means of photography are in the reach of so many, photography always constitutes a potential event, even in cases where the camera is invisible or when it is not present at all.”27 In other words, we now live in a world in which anyone can find themselves in view of a lens at any moment, and being-in-a-picture has all but become the kind of existentiell or coexistentiell that being-in-the-world was to Heidegger.28

• 29 See Bernd Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie: Ein Album photographischer Metaphern (Frankfurt: Suhrk (...)

19In the writings of Ariella Azoulay and in our own reflections above, an image of the photograph emerges as a nexus or node that links in itself diverse elements and distinct systems of experience. This image is not based on a simple referential relationship (successful or otherwise) between the picture and reality, but rather on a complex web of mutual connections and tensions between the photograph and the various dimensions of its exterior. Why then, instead of speaking of the print, the impression, the vera icon or, conversely, of the simulacrum and the shadow,29 do we not speak about photography in terms of a kind of nexus or node which collects, in a non-linear and non-hierarchical manner, entirely disparate systems into one image and then returns them in a similar fashion? In his well-known essay on the state of photography in an increasingly mediated contemporary world, John Berger evokes an image of the photograph as radiation that is closely tied to the memory and the laws by which it is governed:

• 31 Ibid., 64.
• 32 Ibid., 67.

22These two phases of the process by which a photograph is created and revealed constitute two inextricable elements of the same dialectic moment of a photograph’s radiation; they mark the pulsating rhythm of the image. This dialectic may correspond with the alternating movements of mortification and vivification, abstraction and realism, immobilization and dynamic movement, etc. Because of the dialectic nature of this nexus, not only can we not separate one moment from the other, but nor can one exist without the other. The photograph can only bring something to life (itself included), for instance, thanks to the moment of capturing and “annihilation.” Meanwhile the photograph itself always gathers things that are already entangled in its own independent dynamic, which the image attempts to record and capture to an equal extent. This radial dialectic of the photograph, its pulsating rhythm, also determines its historicity by the very nature of its participation in the historical process and its modus operandi therein. Finally, the dynamic nexus of contractions and expansions, centripetal and centrifugal movements, and the tying and untying of the bundle of elements demonstrates how photographs are related to other areas of our experience and to other media. Thus if John Berger argues in his essay that “the aim must be to construct a context for a photograph,”31 a context made up of words or other photographs, he does not articulate a task that could be the realization of some concrete movement for the improvement of photography as much as he names an ever-present dimension of the dialectic of the photograph: “Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.”32 This radial system exists and is an inextricable part of how a photograph works, even if, as Berger rightly observes, it does not make itself apparent in particular historical moments.

• 35 Quoted in Hunter, Image and Word, 68.
• 36 Olivier Lugon, Le style documentaire. D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920-1945 (Paris: Éditions Ma (...)

The deep financial crisis of the 1930s affected not just the foundations of the lives of broad social groups in the United States, but it rattled the very framework of their world, casting doubt on the basic system of coordinates that allowed them to navigate that world. These circumstances required completely new forms of description, the establishment of new institutions and the redefinition of the social contract that lay at the foundations of the American state. Meanwhile in the aesthetic sphere, the Great Depression undoubtedly sparked the need, as Malcolm Cowley observes, for a “new art, one that has to be judged by different standards.”35 This art was the documentary, a genre that experienced intense growth on both sides of the Atlantic precisely in the 1930s. In the words of Olivier Lugon, author of a book that explores the “documentary style” that enjoyed great popularity following World War I: “the documentary marked a return to reality, a kind of challenged posed by the street in response to the pressure of the political and social events that enlivened the era. […] It was not about a shift from one aesthetic to another, but about rejecting all manner of formal exploration and focusing instead on testimony and political activism.”36 The photograph thus became a tool that enabled one to depict society, with all its complexity and divisive conflicts, and to open up new perspectives on other forms of art.

• 37 See Lugon, Le style documentaire, 119. Regarding the work of the FSA, see Sidney Baldwin, Poverty a (...)

25The documentary movement in the United States won the support of an enormous patron in the field of photography: the Farm Security Administration, an official government institution created as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The agency, which operated from 1935 to 1944, was of course not tasked with promoting the art of photography. Its purpose was to save American agriculture by providing subsidies, supporting cooperatives that were hardest hit by the crisis, and starting new ones. The FSA was headed by the economist Rexford Tugwell, whose main goal was to lift part of the US economy from its knees and to protect farmers from the most dire effects of the Depression. Among the divisions that comprised the institution was the Historical Section, headed by Roy E. Stryker, whose tasks included promoting the agency through photography and, more importantly, documenting the sheer scale of the crisis and its social fallout for members of Congress and the general public. The section employed some of the country’s leading photographers, providing institutional and financial support to such famous figures as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein.37

• 38 Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1 (...)
• 39 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day, (New York: Museum of Mod (...)
• 40 See Jacques Rancière, Courts voyages aux pays du peuple (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
• 41 Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (San Bernardino: ReadaClassic.com, 2010).

26The photographers employed by the FSA were thus tasked with depicting the suffering and poverty of American society to those who did not want to see it, but also to legitimize the actions of the government, which was making an effort to remedy the tragic situation. Photographs thus became “powerful agents in the awakening of social conscience,”38 while their style could be described using simple slogans: “to persuade and convince.”39 The work conducted by the photographers, whose cameras documented the poverty of the farmers and their homes, the ongoing racial segregation, the social and class conflicts, etc., was a kind of “short voyage to the land of the people”40 – one initiated and repeated by the government – in search of a new embodiment of the democratic subject that would emerge from the ruins of the old system. Their task was thus not to produce mere propaganda, but to include hitherto overlooked parts of society in the political community. The idea was to document how society’s “other half lives,” in the words of Jacob Riis, a pioneer of photojournalism who explored the world of New York’s lower classes in the 19th century, writing about them and documenting them with his camera. “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat”41 he wrote. The work conducted by the FSA was intended to change that, to a certain extent, by forcing one half of society to look at images documenting the lives of the other half and, in result, to accept the New Deal, which laid out the rules of a new social contract.

• 42 Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed our Life (New York: Abbeville Pub (...)
• 43 Lugon, Le style documentaire, 368.

27The entire undertaking was of course based on the belief that photography had the capacity to alter people’s sensibilities, to directly influence not just their senses, but also their consciences. “Those who saw the suffering of others would immediately be compelled to help them out”42, Vicki Goldberg wrote. One might say, referring back to Ariella Azoulay’s observations, that the work of the FSA is an example of how official government institutions can, for better or worse, take control of the civil contract of photography and order the inclusion of new social groups and new areas of life in the sphere of representation. On the one hand, the institutions provide official endorsement of a fundamental shift in social sensibilities, on the other hand, they inscribe an unpredictable and potentially unlimited community of “citizens of photography” into institutional politics, thus making the community subordinate to the state apparatus. From this perspective, the difference between the persuasive and historical dimension of this undertaking is blurred, because by giving a community an image of its history – as did Matthew Brady during the Civil War, or Lewis Hine in his portraits of immigrants arriving in America – one also changes the community’s image of itself very significantly. It is at once an act of historical documentation and political activism.43

• 44 See ibid., 132.

28Another aspect of the FSA’s work was the presentation of its photographic documentation in the press, most frequently in the form of prepared stories that combined photojournalism with traditional reportage. This was also the agency’s response to how the context of the use of photography was changing with the appearance of such widely-read illustrated magazines such as Life and Look44. This period marked the rise of another phenomenon that is of particular relevance to this discussion, namely that of books that combined photographs and literary texts as part of a single project. Such publications often used the archives of the FSA or photographers associated with the agency as a source of visual content. But as Hunter points out, this kind of connection between the text and the image greatly exceeded the limits of journalism and propaganda material:

• 46 Ibid., 70.

30One of the best known and most widely read books to come out of the efforts to combine photography and literary texts was the opus You Have Seen Their Faces, published in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and the writer Erskine Caldwell. Both were well known within their respective fields at the time: Bourke-White for her extensive photojournalism work in such famous magazines as Fortune and Life, and for her pictures illustrating the development of industry in the USSR; Caldwell for his novels depicting the problems affecting the American South, including God’s Little Acre (1933) and Journeyman (1935). The popularity of their collaborative book provoked much criticism, directed particularly at the exaggerated ease with which they combine image and text. Even Hunter – whose opinion of the authors’ work is generally highly favorable – points out the book’s numerous simplifications and the editorial pitfalls the pair succumbed to: generalization, excessive persuasiveness, and resorting to cheap effects.46 The objection against excessive attractiveness seems both unsophisticated and curious, particularly when leveled against books whose main purpose is not just to provide an argument or narrative, but also (perhaps more importantly) to produce a certain effect in the sensual as well as the intellectual and ethical sense. It appears that Hunter, in repeating the common criticisms of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s work, assumes that the book ought to be discussed in terms of documentary honesty rather than artistic attractiveness, which cannot be clearly separated from the attractiveness of its individual components.

• 47 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You have seen their faces (Athens, London: Brown Thrash (...)

31You Have Seen Their Faces deals primarily with the lives of the poorest Southerners, those making a living by growing cotton as sharecroppers. The idea is to juxtapose the historical and mythical dimensions of the South. On the one hand, the authors meticulously document the faces of their subjects, quote the stories they collected during their travels, and describe the social ties and economic problems in the region. On the other hand, they engage with the myth of the “Southern Extremity of America, the Empire of the Sun, the Cotton States,” in which a particular spot on a map, constituting (like any other location) a cluster of diverse phenomena and situations, is treated exclusively as “the Deep South, Down South; it is The South.”47 Instead of making a clear division between these two levels, the authors play one against the other, thus building tensions that serve to illustrate a certain truth.

• 48 Hunter, Image and Word, 73.

35The prosopopoeia of sorts introduced by the authors in the captions accompanying the images, in lieu of a traditional journalistic format, demonstrate that their goal is not to feign objectivity. On the contrary: it is their intention to break with the anonymity of documentary photography by resorting to extreme personification. They simultaneously undermine any illusions of authenticity with regard to the statements made by the people depicted in the images: “The legends under the pictures are intended to express the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals portrayed; they do not pretend to reproduce the actual sentiments of these persons” (p. X). Yet, if these words are in fact fictitious, it remains unclear whether we can believe the rest of the information supplied with the photographs, particularly the locations in which they were taken. Perhaps this is more of a reflection of the authors’ fantasies about particular Southern states than of the actual conditions in the region. But what matters more than the authenticity of the captions and their correspondence to what is actually portrayed in the photographs is perhaps their general effect, which Hunter described thus: “[…] the images invite language. Furthermore, the style of the invited language corresponds with what is depicted.”48

• 50 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Norton, 1977).

43These descriptions correspond not only with photographs depicting the religious ecstasy of a congregation, but also with pictures in which BourkeWhite portrays a preacher intoxicated by his own voice and gesturing like an epileptic or a hysterical woman at Salpêtrière hospital. The captions beneath the pictures read: “Hurry, folks, hurry! Getting religion is like putting money in the bank” and “We’ve got a first-class God.” (p. 34) By accompanying Caldwell’s critical analysis with pictures whose legends suggest that the religious ecstasy is also equivalent to the excitement of commercial trade (the captions clearly indicate that the slogans are advertisements), the authors allow us to treat the word “symptom” as an entirely serious symbol containing, in a condensed form, conflicting elements of experience, if only because, as Freud and others argued, it helps one suppress a desire while simultaneously evoking it.50

• 51 Sigmund Freud, “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks,” trans. Alix Strachey, in Sigmund Freud (...)

44Freud attempted to define the nature of a hysterical attack thusly: “When one carries out the psycho-analysis of a hysterical woman patient whose complaint is manifested in attacks, one soon becomes convinced that these attacks are nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected on to motility and portrayed in pantomime.”51 These hysterical movements and the intensification of bodily gestures that attempt to express something that cannot be expressed would serve as a fitting description of the essence of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s project, both in its socio-political or ethical dimension as well as the formal. Affects projected onto motility would correspond not only to specific, poignant poses by their subjects, but also to the radiation of photography and text, which are trying to produced a shared moment of intensity.

• 52 Margaret Bourke-White, “Notes on photographs,” in Caldwell, Bourke-White You Have Seen Their Faces, (...)
• 53 This approach was, to a certain extent, shared by Charcot and his collaborators, who “documented” e (...)

45“The women waving hymn books were rushing up and down the floor in such a state of hysteria that several times I was nearly knocked over and the camera almost jarred out of my hands.”52 Bourke-White thus describes her encounter with the intensity of the symptom embodied by religious women in the South. These words aptly convey her approach to the portrayed phenomenon. She certainly does not behave like a disinterested researcher documenting, for the benefit of science, the symptoms of a disease while hiding her own dominance behind a shield of seriousness and the objectivity of academic processes.53 After all, she holds in her hand a small camera that protects her from nothing, though it may enable her to capture the moment of intensity in its culmination. It is then that we discover the fact that the subjects of the book nevertheless “are still people, they are human beings” (p. 48), and the task of the authors is to extract a trace of that humanity, even if it is found in the bottom of a pit of squalor, mired in recurring symptoms of helplessness and escapism.

• 55 Ibid., 53.

47A successful hunt sometimes resembles a kind of ruse used to steal the likeness of those whom one photographs. Bourke-White frankly admits that she owes most of her success in this field to the fact that the farmers in the South had never been photographed before and thus did not know how to challenge the artists about what they were doing.55 The search for a spark of humanity is certainly not without a bit of violence on the part of the authors, but its source is not, in this case, their desire to objectively record the symptoms of a social illness, but rather to capture them in their own, unique dynamic.