75 | 2001

FRANZ SCHULTHEIS

Pierre Bourdieu: Objectification as a Profession

Even photography-lovers with little interest in sociology will most likely be familiar with Pierre Bourdieu thanks to his investigation of this “illegitimate art” that has already become a classic. But the fact that he took up the camera himself in order to back up his ethnological field studies in Algeria in the early sixties with the aid of photographic testimonies is largely unknown. Only a few of these several hundreds of photos were published on the cover of one or the other of Bourdieu’s works, albeit practically unnoticed by the public. When, during the course of a conversation on the Algeria studies, mention was made of the photos dating back to this period, the spontaneous curiosity soon turned into a project intending to present this as yet unknown facet of Bourdieu’s ethnology to the public; an idea that Pierre Bourdieu initially viewed with some scepticism as he did not want to see the artistic-aesthetic quality of his photos overrated. To put it in terms of the theoretical tools of his trade, he was probably wary of the phenomenon of “transformation” or transubstantiation, according to which by virtue of social magic the symbolic capital attached to the name of the producer passes seamlessly to his product, consecrating it. However, first and foremost these photos from Algeria constitute important primary ethnographic material which, according to the rules of qualitative social research with regard to identifying and securing relevant traces and testimonies of a foreign social world, has the same cognitive value, for example, as observation records or statements made by ethnographic informants. The photographic material, then, must not be viewed and interpreted detached from the specific cognitive interest upon which the selection of motifs, the respective angle, the inclusion of context in the composition of the picture, and thus the construction of the object to be recorded itself, if we wish to avoid subscribing to an ahistorical aesthetic purism, ignoring the context-specific social significance and political dimension of these pictures. These pictures were already “framed” and dated because of the conditions in which they were made and they are entrenched in a clear socio-historical context, aiming to document – in Bourdieu’s own words: to objectify – this context in a specific way. If Bourdieu has long preferred the concept of “participatory objectification” instead of the usual concept of “participatory observation” to describe his own idea of field research, this preference assumes even greater consistency in view of the analogy emerging now between the photographic and sociological view: in both cases the aim is to lend the supposed uniqueness of a subjectively experienced moment the character of a permanent and intersubjectively accessible mnemic trace, a “testimony” as Bourdieu will say four decades down the road in his famous study “The Weight of the World”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 3–7.

FRANZ SCHULTHEIS

Pierre Bourdieu, Interview. Photographic Testimonies of a Declining World

F. Schultheis: In view of what you have said about the way you conceived and took these photos, I wonder what might be an adequate form of reception and presentation. The aim is to forge a link between the ethnological aspect of your observations – in many of your books you talk about your beginnings as a self-taught sociologist and ethnologist – and these photos, that show many objects of your research. It seems reasonable, then, to link these two aspects directly. But at the same time, one shies away from doing so because, at first glance, this would be the most obvious, simplest procedure: let’s just look for descriptions of situations in your texts that remind us of what is in the photos.

P. Bourdieu: One of the things that interested me most in Algeria is what I called the “economy of poverty” or the “economy of slums”. I wanted to see how people managed to survive at all, but also, above all, how they managed to survive socially without being dishonoured, excluded, etc., by inventing some kind profession, for example, that kept them from being unemployed. A lot of the photos are precisely about this: it is about all these hawkers and street vendors, it is about these people who peddle a motley collection of items spread out on the ground. I also found this interesting in terms of aesthetics because it was a very Baroque scene, things you don’t usually see, and the compositions were quite incredible. This is the difference to a professional photographer who might have taken photos there: a butcher with his big triangular stands and cuts of meat hung up looks picturesque, this is a typical motif for a photographer, it is ideally matched to his idea of something painterly and exotic? But what I had in mind was the site plan of the market, just like a village or a house has a site plan with a specific structure, and I wondered whether I would find this same structure in the markets. And indeed, the site plan of the market was essentially a reproduction of the structure of Kabylian contrasts, for example with butchers, i.e. people subject to public contempt, in one corner of the market. This arrangement was by no means coincidental, but rather corresponded to a social hierarchy.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 8–14.

MAREN LÜBBKE

Ulrike Lienbacher: The Real and its Double: The Body

VOLUNTARY SELF-CONTROL?
The twenty sheets of her latest work show figures – strangely bent bodies – whose heads have been “cleanly” severed by cutting off the appropriate edge of the picture. These headless and thus, so to speak, deindividualised bodies are not situated in any defined setting. Only parts of the wall in front of which they appear to be set up and parts of the floor on which they stand, lie, squat or kneel indicate, when compared, that the photos were taken in different rooms. At very first glance, the poses assumed by the bodies appear strange, rigid, oddly artificial, and in some cases comical. At second glance, however, the figurations appear rather conventional and thus familiar, “normal” again. For these models, posing in front of the camera, are trying to imitate pin-up poses, as the title of this series –”Pin Up Übungen” (2001) (Pin-up Exercises) – also suggests. According to Lienbacher, these enactments were modelled on a book of pin-up pictures, some from the forties, but looking at any magazine – or perhaps one’s own family album – would probably unearth similar poses, too. This rapid change of perception from “strange” to “familiar” alone illustrates that our body language is subject to a common ordering schema; in a kind of voluntary self-control we organise our body in its modes of expression down to the fingertips. Whereas Sanja Ivekovic´s “Double Life” was still concerned with female self-designs, that continuously confirm the symbolic and social positioning of women in society by dint of referring to the way they function, in her work Lienbacher goes one step further by (ostensibly) referring to the fundamental critique of categories of identity formulated by Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity published ten years back. Then, Butler set out to show that cultural gender is “performatively enacted signification […], one that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings.” Thus – in greatly abbreviated terms – Butler proposed making gendered meanings implausible in the performative play. The transformations that the body has since undergone and which equally concern the transcending of gender roles – seized on by the powerful illusion machinery of the mass media and, in a reversal of thrust, now socially standardised, regulated and controlled once more – give rise to doubts as to the subversive force of politics of performance as Butler envisaged it, making it appear questionable from today’s point of view. Precisely because the body has (until now) remained subject to the process of naturalisation and (cursory) internalisation of its (now changing) surfaces. Lienbacher’s work deals with these changing surfaces, constructions of the body, its translations into images that solidified its object status. But with her work, Lienbacher also calls into question the seemingly secured gendered meanings by also elevating the male body to a theme of her investigations. Albeit in order to show that this body has by now also relinquished its subject status to some extent due to the fact that it seems to be largely adjusted to the conventional pattern of the traditionally female structure of representation in terms of the economy of its gestures.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 15–27.

KOBENA MERCER

African Photography in Contemporary Visual Culture

African photography came into global circulation during the Nineties. Contemporary audiences have been introduced to a range of photographic practices as a result of several large-scale exhibitions, including “In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present” (see CAMERA AUSTRIA 56/1996, p. 97) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 1996, “L’Afrique par elle-même” at the House of European Photography in Paris, 1998 and “Africa by Africa” at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, 1999. The work of Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso has received widespread attention as a consequence of the image flow associated with the production of these exhibitions. Indeed, as well as creating new sources of visual pleasure, the stylistic features surrounding the distinct “look” of African photography raise new questions about understanding the cosmopolitan character of photography’s history. This overview reflects upon the contrasting approaches in curatorial selection and examines the motivations of the underlying research paradigms, revealing significant differences of emphasis in the way that African photography iswritten about and brought into discourse. According to the Roman scholar Pliny – “exAfrica semper aliquid novi” – that is to say, there is always something new out of Africa. The sheer wealth and variety of the photographic materials which have now come to light would appear to confirm this ancient insight. The second of the three exhibitions, published in English as the Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, was truly breathtaking in its historical scope. Showing studio portraits from Zanzibar, Dakar, Lagos and Capetown from the 1890s to the 1920s, as well as photojournalism and press agency reportage from the 1950s and 1960s, and concluding with art photography from the African diaspora in African American, Black British and Latin American contexts, the evidence suggests that what is “new” about the history of African photography is that it is as old as the history of photography in the West!

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, p. 28–37.

YILMAZ DZIEWIOR

Marcel Odenbach: Presentiments from the Viewpoint of Memories

Marcel Odenbach’s interest in colonial and postcolonial conditions can be traced back to the seventies, i.e. to the beginnings of his artistic activities. The concept of his three-channel installation of 1973 – as yet unrealised – entitled »Sich gegenseitig den Boden unter den Füßen wegziehen – oder da gibt es eine Hoffnung, dass Rache süß sein könnte« (Cutting the ground from under each other’s feet – or there is hope that revenge could be sweet) comprises a combination of pictures of the porcelain figurine of a “Moor” with quotations by Leclerc expressing racist prejudices about exploited native inhabitants. In this work, for the first time Odenbach employs traditional African music as an acoustic accompaniment. The artist contrasts these impressions with pictures of Schloss Brühl, superimposed with portraits of its builder, Elector Clemens August. As a comment, Odenbach opted for excerpts from a monograph on the monarch which affirmativelydescribes his mania for luxury and pomp. Odenbach himself interprets the work as an examination of stereotyped ideas of uncivilised and civilised life. Four years later, in 1983, he begins his video “Die Distanz zwischen mir und meinen Verlusten” (The distance between me and my losses) with someone leafing through a book, pausing at a page with a picture of an American Indian. The verses from Schubert’s Erl King, initially sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, are followed in the course of the video by music from Burundi, returning to Schubert’s Erl King shortly before the end of the tape. The video ends with the final words from the Erl King “the infant was dead”. The series of staccato images and actions that appear at this point, which in some cases – due to the black bars inserted – can only be recognised in parts, are too heterogeneous to create a stringent, unfolding narration. Scenes from a gay porn film, the artist’s hand holding a knife or playing with other objects, soldiers in action, excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia”, create a hybrid narrative structure that eludes any causality. Upon closer analysis, and with knowledge of the biographical references, the viewer can interpret the images, which at first glance do not seem to fit together, as an expression of Odenbach’s interest in his own cultural, sexual and bourgeois socialisation. Even the African music can be traced back to an actual autobiographical occurrence as the video was made after one of the artist’s first trips to Africa. We could cite a number of other earlier works by Odenbach which focus intimately on cultural differences and the definitions of power linked to them. This is also worth mentioning because it illustrates the fact that his interest in the social and political importance of national and ethnic identity is not a new phenomenon but rather that it is rooted deep in his work. Often it forms the matrix against the backdrop of which other topics such as sexual, social or cultural difference unfurl.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 38–49.

AXEL ROCH

Herwig Weiser: Heavy Metal

When a DJ presents to his cult community a remix of sounds pressed on vinyl by the industry, or when an MC preaches with his voice a higher message, at least as his title — Master of Ceremony — would suggest, the synthesis that evolves for the listener is an “Audio-Vision” in the true sense of the word. Those who view and hear Herwig Weiser’s “zgodlocator” installation experience a similar divinatory message. A few controllers, buttons, in the first version a matrix of on/off switches and a keyboard interface constitute the interface for an audio-visual enactment of two interfering heterogeneous surfaces: a desert-like landscape of electronic sand and an oleaginous liquid. But “zgodlocator” does not present stored sound or spoken voice but rather the matter of electronic storage media itself as techno-granules capable of being modulated.
The architectural starting point of the “zgodlocator” installation is a storage unit for electronic media: the “hard disk”. Unlike a record, as mass-produced by the industry, a hard disk consists of magnetic input/output media and a magnetic liquid: a ferrofluid. A hard disk works in the micro range at such high speeds that only ferrofluids can make the mechanical components of the electromagnetic storage unit resistant to ageing. The electromagnetic properties of this fluid give the oily surface an appearance of dynamic depth by means of an electromagnetic field generated from outside. “zgodlocator” presents the material of electronic storage media as a dynamic, deep surface, as a short-term memory. The computer with its storage media such as the hard disk is not ªhard´ at all, but rather dynamic and fluid. In this way, “zgodlocator” gives media theory food for thought. We are in the process of saying goodbye to the computer as a storage medium, instead highlighting its nature as a dynamic process. Electronic media need not be described as the dead spaces of an archive, but are equally enactments of electronics themselves, being as they are an event of temporal, intensive experience.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 50–56.

DAVID ROBBINS

Paul Druecke: Party Platform

In 1997, Milwaukee artist Paul Druecke began going door-to-door requesting casual photographs of social occasions: mementos of fleeting moments of human contact and emotional minutiae – that look, that embrace, that laugh, that sigh, the crazy mood in that American basement on that ancient Saturday night – embedded in time and abandoned by the flow of time. Every one of us having worked in this radically democratic form and preserved examples of our efforts, Druecke knew that the source material he sought was, putting it mildly, inexhaustible. To lend structure to the enterprise, echoing democracy’s “one person, one vote” credo he initiated a policy limiting willing contributors to a single photograph. Structure determined, his search expanded. He told his friends about his project. They told theirs. As of this writing, word of mouth has delivered to his project nearly six hundred photographs. At its simplest level, “The Social Event Archive” is a straightforward salvage operation. Photographically arrested moments of life-flow are rescued from the pathetic, buried-in-a-shoebox, lost-in-the-attic fates customarily assigned them. Introduced into the “Archive”, these souvenirs of different eras, locales, and gatherings are immersed again in a flow; as in the life-procession the photos bear witness to long ago, one moment is succeeded by another. Revived fragments of assortedlife-narratives convene, cross-reference each other, strike up conversations. (As are we, they’re all in this together). This time around, though, the sequencing is impersonal: “Photographs are archived in the order received”, the project’s no-nonsense guidelines announce. Its structure, together with the distancing effect inherent in voyeuristically gazing upon the personal lives of total strangers, keeps the Archive from collapsing under the weight of a surfeit of poignancy. The “Archive” is a platform, not a play or pageant; any narrative dimension that an individual viewer reads into the collection is actually self portraiture. Sentiment’s loss is, however, accuracy’s gain. “The Archive’s” structure yields a more exact parallel to our experience of time. Babies, deaths, the cockeyed caravan in between – scenes depicting these are dispersed throughout, recur without pattern, repeat with new player’s more like life.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 75/2001, pp. 57–62.