Like any tool or technology, photography can be used to empower or to coerce. But unlike other technologies, photography expresses a lasting byproduct beyond the original click of the camera. Photography is a ‘trace-producing’ technology. Even when ‘framed’ the image continues to face us, soliciting our questions and promising revelations. If technology, as Heidegger argued, could be conceived as a revelation, photography is the ultimate embodiment of the technological promise ‘to reveal’, to bring forth. Here lies its staying power, its productive, anti-essential essence. What the photographic trace brings forth is the materiality of the world and the spatio-temporal cleavage expressing a historical relation to that materiality. For this reason, photography complicates any attempt to discipline it or wield it as a weapon.
Photography as Power: Dominance and Resistance through the Italian Lens explores photography's complex relation to power within the context of modern and contemporary Italian history and culture. The collection opens insightful conversations on photography and propaganda, draws on original research, and maps new objects of study, such as Martina Caruso's photography of the Resistance, or Pasquale Verdicchio's politics of the selfie. The topic is timely and touches on crucial theoretical and methodological questions. Regrettably, the volume is weakened by a lack of proofreading and careful oversight of the translations.
The book is divided into three sections, each exploring a theme through key historical moments. ‘The National Body and Its Others’ focuses on the use of photography in nineteenth- century anthropology and social science, as well as colonial war photography, to enforce national identity. ‘Images of Power and Propaganda’ maps the evolution of visual propaganda from the First World War to contemporary political self-promotion. The last and longest section, ‘Activism and the Image of Resistance’, reflects on photography as counter-power from the Resistance and 1970s activism to the present.
Photography as Power is a compelling title, but one that begs a pointed theoretical reflection. David Forgacs’ introduction frames the volume's understanding of photography as a social object that moves in a political power field. The book's aim, as the editors explain in the preface, is to explore ‘the dual role of photography … as instrument of power … and as a tool for resistance’ (p. xii). Along with Lacan and Foucault, the main theoretical point of reference is Judith Butler's analysis of photography as a ‘structuring scene of interpretation’ (p. xiii) – a framing of what the going social norms deem representable. While cogent, such a purely discursive approach has unwanted consequences: understood as a passive tool, photography itself recedes from the interpretive scene. Barthes and Sontag, two theorists of photography quoted in the volume, while well aware of the fields of power surrounding the image, stubbornly hold on to the photographic event, confronting the nature of photography's own evasive, yet inescapable, power. The essays in this collection respond unevenly to this challenge.
Maria Grazia Lolla and Nicoletta Pazzaglia perform compelling analysis of how in post-unification Italy social ideologies used photography to construct national identity. Through Butler, Pazzaglia focuses on photographs of women in mental institutions and prisons to show how Lombroso's anthropology framed deviancy. Certainly, the woman made blurry by her refusal to stand still in front of the camera is held in the vice of a photographic pose by power. At the same time, through the posthumous life of photography, this anonymous woman materially and metaphorically outstrips the interpretive limits of nineteenth-century anthropology, and of twenty-first century theory as well; Pazzaglia acknowledges but fails to engage the power of the image to exceed the frame.
In all photographs, we face that manifestation of contingency that Dai Vaughan described as ‘the escape of the represented from the representational act’. Even if staged, the world depicted in photographs maintains an element of rawness and excess, what Barthes described as the ‘third meaning’, the detail that escapes cultural coding. Accepting the photographic invitation to enter, in Barthes’ words, ‘crazily into the image’, photographic interpretation needs to start from this excess that disrupts and therefore expands our understanding and ability to ‘theorise’ – that is, to see.
The visual apparatus of the book is new and compelling. Nonetheless, the photographs included in the text often lack either explicit analysis or, on the contrary, extensive ekphrasis stands in for them. This unevenness betrays a methodological uncertainty in the way cultural studies and history approach photography. In part two, Gabriele D'Autilia's essay well illustrates this uncertainty. Relying on a quantitative study of private and official photography, D'Autilia explores how the First World War's revolution in experience and perception gave rise to ‘a new optical power’. Then, seemingly contradicting his premises, he concludes that what distinguishes war photography is uniformity, propaganda unifying the visible into a cliché. But the story is more complex. A striking image, which D'Autilia displays without engaging, both confirms and contradicts his analysis: the formally beautiful and terrifying photograph of a soldier looking at the camera while holding his murderous fists (grasping a garrote?) on an enemy corpse shatters the monotony of the cliché and, evading the goals of propaganda, hits us with the reality of the new war experience.
The second section on photography and propaganda points out the need to reflect on the way authoritarian power relates to modern media. The intrinsic nature of modern optical power (think of photojournalism or personal photography) is fluid and diffuse and thus profoundly challenging to violent ideologies. Marco Andreani shows how Fascism, through a systematic containment, sought to reduce photography to a mere document, the ‘incontestable’ proof of the staged accomplishments of the regime. Relying on an original analysis of photographs, documentary production and exhibitions, Andreani brings to the fore how Fascism's use of photography as a ‘maxim’ to uniform the world to its tunnel vision is ultimately unsuccessful.
The third section on photography as counter-power is the one that most consistently engages the materiality of the photographs. Christian Uva offers an informative account of the political photography of the 1970s, while Nicoletta Leonardi's enlightening study of Mario Cresci's early work maps its multisensory approach to photographs. ‘Counter-power’ aptly describes the political dimension of the work of photographers like Cresci, Tano D'Amico and Letizia Battaglia (analysed by Luana Ciavola), but, like the word ‘resistance’, it implies a reactive and derivative status. What these images show is that photography, even if in a dormant form, holds its own power in a form perhaps purer than that of force: the potentiality for vision and understanding.
At its best, Photography as Power breaks away from the binarism of its subtitle to reflect on photography's own intrinsic power. Despite its apparent narrative, ethical, or semiotic weaknesses, photography is not a passive pawn. It might be speechless, but it is hardly silent. As a trace of material reality, photography outlives power, and in this resilience lies its power, what Susan Sontag defined as the historical force to haunt us.
