I've started reading Susan Sontag's "On Photography" - a bit late coming to this one I admit. No comment so far but it got me back thinking about photography and it's uneasy relationship with "art".

It also coincided with me having a look at images from Critical Mass - a sort of competition that for better or worse sets the scene for some of the trends in the Art Market when it comes to photography.

Here is one of the finalists for example.

Now to my way of thinking, irrespective of the message whatever that is, this first image could have been done equally well as a painting. The link with what I would call photography is tenuous because it is not necessary.

In this famous photo by Dorothea Lange - which is not without some controversy of it's own according to Sontag - the opposite applies. If you created this as a painting you would be laughed out of the salon, though it might find it's way onto a chocolate box.

These sort of thoughts are one way I approach some photographs, especially if I find it difficult to understand them.

I should hurry to add that this second photograph is NOT part of the Critical Mass submissions - at least I assume not.

Ha - well I was going to talk about vernacular photography, but before I did, I remembered this blog post. You may already know it, and it's pretty funny, but the most interesting thing about it is when you take all the photographers names away, and then go back and see if the comments are all still so funny. That then is the tenuous link with the title of this post. What if we "found" some of these photos in an old cardboard box somewhere - or any famous photos....

Actually it's just as well I made this detour because I still haven't figured out this vernacular photography thing or where I stand on it. That doesn't normally stop me though....

A couple of  posts ago I  described how my attempt to separate photographs from non-photographs was doomed. However since photography started people have been trying to cleave it down the middle. The early days of the genre were characterised by duels between the "realists" and the "pictorialists". This is still one of the main arguments when trying to pin down photographs.

The second chapter of Edwards book is titled "Documents and Pictures" and goes into some detail about the history and preoccupation with this theme. A document describes and a picture romanticises, one is factual, the other creative. Well, not quite. I think Willy Ronis once said that photography was closer to literature than to painting. He was on the realist, documentary side of the argument. Jeff Wall would be on the other.

The famous curator John Swarowski tried to refine this division by saying photographs were either "windows" or "mirrors". It seems to me though that this is just restating the same argument. The window shows the subject (document) and the mirror reflects the artists ideas and intentions.

Both of these avoid the obvious point that documents, whether written or photographed are always selective on the part of the creator, and in doing so can be just as representative of the other side of the argument

I have seen the term "indexical sign" linked with photographic images before, but the contexts have always been difficult and I never had a clue what it meant. Steve Edwards "Photography. A very short introduction" explains rather nicely what it's all about. Rather he doesn't explain what it's all about, but he lets us in on why this term and the whole business of semiotics has a bearing on photography. This is one of the joys of books like this - they are not "dummies guides" and they are not "encyclopedias" - they give you enough information to get started, and open doors into the subject which you can choose to open and explore if you wish.

The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did a lot of work on the study of signs or semiotics. His basic premise was that all communication is carried out by what he called signs. (things that signify something). The whole business of semiotics is very complicated, and from what I can gather academic opinion is divided about it, as with many philosophical ideas that try to be objective about the human condition (how can we be?).  So I'm not going into that, and please, all the real philosophers out there - excuse my minimalist description of the subject. The application of semiotics to photography, as described by Edwards, is instructive. A much diluted version of Pierce's ideas can be expressed thus. Signs can be characterised by three distinct components, which may all be present in varying degrees depending on the sign.

Iconic signs in some way resemble what they signify - a pictogram for example. (In the computer age we are all familiar with icons). Symbolic signs represent the object they signify by some kind of a priori knowledge or convention. All language is composed of signs which are symbolic. The word "rainbow" signifies a rainbow, but unless I know the word it means nothing. Similarly a white flag is a symbolic sign by convention. It's fairly easy to see how these characteristics of signs can be applied to photographs. The third component is the indexical sign. This is a sign that is either made by the object it signifies, or somehow or other signifies the existence of the subject. A common example is a footprint. A sound uttered by a person would be an indexical sign, but also symbolic if it was interpretable by language or convention.

Edwards rightly points out the unique correlation in a photograph between iconic and indexical components. When we start thinking about the philosophy of photography, or ontological concerns such as "what is a photograph", these concepts can be useful. Not because they help categorise an image, but just that by thinking in terms like this we may arrive at a better way of rationalising our own ideas about a photograph, or photography in general. If we are concerned about the difference between analogue and digital images, or whether a photograph mirrors or represents reality, it is obvious that the idea of an indexical sign can be quite fruitful. At least I'm beginning to find this so.

I don't yet have a full grasp of this topic, so I'm not going to cut myself off at the knees by trying to apply these new found concepts in a practical way here, but I have a feeling that they will be helpful in the future. I'd be interested if anyone else has ideas about the subject - and also if I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether.

In the last post I described how I quickly became disillusioned with my attempt to charge like a white knight through the ranks of images, casting "photographs" to the right and "non-photographs" to the left. One of the books I've been reading recently is Steve Edward's "Photography: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2006)". If I'd read the first paragraph of his preface a while ago I'd have saved myself a lot of bother.

He writes:

"I must have been mad to agree to write this book; not least because the combination of 'very short introduction' with 'photography' seems like an oxymoron. The three or four standard histories of the medium are all huge volumes. The problem is simply that photography runs in all directions, permeating diverse aspects of society. Indeed it is difficult to find an area of modern life untouched by it."

Crucially for me he then goes on:

"The critic John Tagg once suggested that there was no single characteristic, or practice that represented the fundamental essence of the medium. Trying to account for photography as a whole was akin to attempting a history or a museum of writing: all that could be done was to trace the uses of photography (or writing) in the institutions in which it was put to work - the law courts, medicine, advertising, art and so forth"

Amen.

The book presents an excellent foot up for anyone wanting some ideas about how to start exploring the subject, history and philosophy of photography. It's a good series from OUP - not a "dummies guide" or "bluffers guide" but true introductions to weighty subjects by experts.