Image Studies and the Sociology of Images: On the Persistent Problems of Collection and Comprehension
Everything is Image. Exemplary reflections on the reception of the “image” as constitutive of past history. Image: A page from the ‘Poesie-Album’ of Farangis, an partial entry by Kurt B.
Image Studies and the Sociology of Images: On the Persistent Problems of Collection and Comprehension
Highlighting a few crucial aspects
As far as Image Studies and the Sociology of Images are concerned […] I find this approach somewhat insufficient: when image corpora are surveyed and enclosed within a documentary framework, the conditions of their emergence and transmission ought, correspondingly, to be rendered locatable—situated, as it were—on the very maps that claim to organize them.
What we call image-scientific inquiry seems, in its outcomes, to diverge almost paradoxically from the empirically conceived accumulation of data it often presupposes in its simplest form. And I am left to wonder how this divergence comes about.
Some find the image-scientific approach to the historiography of National Socialism overly elaborate, even “excessive,” and would prefer to let the “image” remain, more or less, simply an “image.” Yet for historical analysis, it is precisely the comprehensive unfolding of the medium that proves indispensable.
An omission of social and political factors as contextual background, and of their broader implications within a macrocosmic frame, constitutes, for instance, a failure that would be impermissible in an image-scientific analysis. A mere reference to large historical datasets cannot suffice to lend credibility, for no genuine insight has been achieved beyond the bare fact that rough data about an image provide a few points of orientation.
Such omissions can be avoided by:
- a) first clarifying the mode of political interpretation – how certain mechanisms functioned, and why they did – thereby also determining the focal points of inquiry. It must likewise be made explicit what cannot be accomplished within the scope of a given survey or analysis;
- b) ensuring that the vantage point from the period in question, or within the events under examination, becomes legible in its multiplicity of perspectives.
A linear history with a fixed and self-evident single point of view cannot be assumed without integrating the observed perspectives of the actors and subjects involved. A bird’s-eye view must itself be made transparent, for image description is not an objective process but one already guided and delimited by the boundaries of perception and understanding. The significance of the image, within its own sociological and social function, must therefore not be underestimated as a factor that permeates the entire field of analysis.
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A striking contrast emerges between a methodologically reflective, interdisciplinary study of images – one attuned to context, power relations, and the logics of representation – and, on the other hand, research projects in which the act of collection itself takes precedence over the far-reaching contextualizations that image analysis requires. Such cataloguing projects operate in the mode of quantitative documentation rather than that of image-scientific inquiry.
They collect data without clarifying its epistemic status and thus risk reproducing precisely the kind of distance that a critical image science seeks to overcome through the possibilities of reconstruction and the creation of image-sociological cartographies. Especially when it comes to sensitive subjects, this becomes fatal:
- An archive of horror is thereby created – inevitably so – yet without any explicit understanding of how and why these images came into being, whose “gazes” they reproduce and disseminate, what function they served (intentionally or unintentionally) within the machinery of violence, and what secondary effects they continue to exert today – such as retraumatization, heroization, or the visual continuity of power.
- What appears to be ‘scientific neutrality’ is often merely the outsourcing of ethical and political responsibility into a supposedly objective form of documentation.
My sister’s research, in fact, emerged precisely from such concerns, from the question of how these very problems might be addressed. We must confront this kind of emptying-out in radical terms. The photograph, understood as a socio-historical event rather than as an object, demands a great deal of contextualization. To apprehend the contexts that relate the microcosm to the macrocosm, within the image as well as within the medium’s own historical condition, marks the point of departure from which we should, at the very least, begin to think.
Narratives of experience, histories of ideas, cultures of memory, and interpretive frameworks of action – all these factors render images complex and multilayered witnesses of their time. To engage with all that is at stake here is not, as some might be tempted to claim, “excessive,” but simply a more intellectually honest undertaking.
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