A Japanese couple, their bride's maid, and photographer, walk through an afternoon rainstorm on the shore of Lake Louise in Canada's Banff National Park yesterday.
Ritualized activities are deeply embedded in human behavior. Although originally used to describe a religious or solemn ceremony, the term ritual today has taken on broader meanings. For the past 150 years, the photograph has played a critical role in creating and maintaining social interactions.
Rituals consist of both technical and social considerations that govern attitudes and behaviors in front of as well as behind the lens of the camera.
Social relationships between photojournalists and subjects constitute a complex symbolic universe of visual rituals. According to Erving Goffman (1967) rituals impinge “upon the individual in two general ways: directly, as obligations, establishing how he is morally constrained to conduct himself; indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound to act in regard to him” (p. 49).
Goffman's ideas are important to consider at a time when photography is undergoing increasing scrutiny and reflection. In photography, extending Goffman’s model of interaction ritual to human visual behavior provides a richer context for evaluating professional conduct and ethical behavior.
Social relationships between photographer and subject are constantly mediated by the expectations and obligations of the individuals involved in the interaction.
Digital photography changes the dynamics of social interaction and human experience in many ways. Among the most obvious dynamics emerging from the use of digital photography is ability to review and share images immediately after capture. Photography may still be a "get-what-you-see" process" but digital photography allows for immediate and repeated corrective processes that were unavailable with film photography.
The rituals in digital photography extend the potential of social interaction beyond what we have been familiar with in film photography. Photographic digital rituals, however, remain situated within cultural practices that symbolically reorganize sensory experience.
The picture still fixes a moment in time, but digital photography appears to extenuate and expand on social rituals both in the capturing of the image as well as in post production processes.
The characteristics of digital photography eliminate sequences in the ritual process of image production. With digital photography the traditional “liminal” period of the latent image—one that transforms the subject into a negative and then back into a positive print—is altered.
Symbolically, the liminal period granted the photojournalist a
greater degree of autonomy from the subject. Anthropologist and artist David Tomas
(1982) describes this process as the “rite of separation” which is
marked by the boundaries of “electromechanical mediation and
optical-chemical consequences” (p. 8).
Historically, the ceremonial ritual of separation in photography
consisted of two distinct rites, the capture of an image in a
viewfinder followed by processing and development in the darkroom.
Therefore, the symbolic transformations of reality occurring between
the subject, photojournalist and viewer correspond to face-to-face
interaction rituals on one hand, and optical-chemical processes on the
other hand.
The ritual interactions of social relationships formed by the use of
the digital camera may be very similar to those encountered with users
of the SX-70 Polaroid camera. With the elimination of the liminal
period in digital photography the ritualized interaction of separation
between the photographer and subject also changes.
As previously noted, this dynamic imposes some challenges to the
photographer’s epistemic autonomy in capturing and processing images.