Photo Credit: Cynthia J. Edmonds
The idea that intimacy can transcend the aesthetic qualities captured in a picture in order to tap into a viewer's emotions suggests that human judgment is sometimes more rash and reactionary than logical.
Yesterday, I misrepresented research being conducted by Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, John Ibson. According to the author of Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, his investigation involving historic photographs of men shows that the pictures suggest less about sexuality and more about intimacy between men, which in today's culture, seems all too often misconstrued as homosexuality. "The everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects," Ibson notes.
For Ibson, "Photographs usually provide wholly inadequate evidence about sexuality. It's intimacy, not sexuality, that I believe the photos display, though I do try to explain the history and consequences of the assumption so often made nowadays that intimacy between men, in photographs and elsewhere, is a sign of gayness."
Ibson's perspective become especially salient as we come to understand how the signification of an image changes over time depending on the cultural values and social tastes of an audience. In other words, it seems easy to jump to conclusions when looking at two men showing signs of intimacy in a picture.
Historically, pictures of "unselfconscious physical closeness" between men in the 19th century was not uncommon, but as the 20th century progressed distancing and stiffness of pose emerged.
In a recent article for American Sexuality magazine Ibson observes:
The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
So what can pictures tell us about each other? What does intimacy between people in a picture suggest beyond the physical closeness of the moment when the shutter was released?
Clearly, human beings disclose themselves to others in different ways according to societal norms. There is, as Erving Goffman points out, both front stage and back stage behaviors in which people function. As the camera fixes, frames, and freezes a moment in time, human behavior may intensify, i.e., hamming, mugging, or clowning for the photographer.
In our photojournalism course we have been exploring interaction rituals between photographer and subject. The students must photograph people that seem different than themselves. The exercise, therefore, is to help students understand "difference" in the pictures they make. Students are asked to examine some of the preconceptions and prejudices they may hold of people that appear different to them.
As student Cynthia Edmonds observes:
This country is so politically correct that one must be careful not to offend another. More than the action of approaching a stranger to ask for a photograph, it is the fear of misrepresenting one’s intentions that makes this assignment challenging.
However, it is only when the photographer actually approaches the “other” he or she realized that there is, in fact, no “other” in existence. Whether the person has different colored skin, different shaped eyes, or is of a different generation, they all have something in common: they’re strangers.