a thousand words

“Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence.” -Roland Barthes

WOF Papers, Alaska & Polar Regions Archives, UAF.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider the above. A composite image, each half depicting an alpine glacier slung between two peaks, slinking down from the icefield above. An implicit but powerful visual logic is at work here, causing us to assume that the image on the left shows the glacier at an earlier time. It is the same logic underpinning advertisements for hair growth stimulants and waist slimming potions: before and after. Reading such images requires no conscious effort on our part, they are immediately evident as little stories: once upon a time there was more ice, then there was less. It is as if the ice were speaking for itself.

Today, the ice seems to have a lot to say. Accompanying discussions of anthropogenic climate change, such images operate as visual confirmations of the cryosphere’s response to global warming. It is as if we are on trial for altering the world’s climate and repeat glacier photographs are witnesses for the prosecutor.

I am not interested in commenting here on their use as evidence for, or confirmation of, anthropogenic climate change. I take that as a given. The nature and extent of glacial recession since the 1970s (or 1850s if you prefer) suggests very strongly that the ice is not receding because of natural fluctuations. The question for today is: how do repeat photographs operate? What are the sources of their rhetorical efficacy? Are they really worth a thousand words?

Susan Sontag famously argued that photographs do not convey knowledge but can only confirm or deny through, often through emotional persuasion. Understanding, according to her, requires delving beneath the surface of things, yet it is precisely surfaces that photography trades in. Even if objects are magnified to an unusual degree, as with Edward Weston's voluptuous still lifes of vegetables, photography still remains on the level of the superficial. It shows us the world, but refuses to explain it. Whether or not you agree with her, Sontag reminds us of how much the viewer brings to the interpretation of photographs. In the case of glacier photographs, we bring our knowledge of unstable Antarctic icesheets, years of record-breaking global temperatures, the struggles of Inuit communities in a melting Arctic, and the maddening fracas that is climate politics. Those who have gazed over seemingly endless névés bring to such photographs a poignant blend of regret, heartache and frustration, perhaps best described as an impotent awareness of finitude. The snows, it turns out, may not be everlasting after all.

Photographs are limited by their instantaneity. A single photograph, as a snapshot of a moment —a memento mori for an instant— must be synchronic; understanding takes place over time: it must be didactic. But what of our repeat photographs? Each enfolds at least two moments in time. Perhaps they are better candidates for conveying knowledge.

Before we can assess their capacity for providing knowledge —and what knowledge that might be— we must address the prior question of their functioning. Repeat photography depends on an interlocking of the image’s form and the viewer’s mode of seeing. The tendency to read from left to right is a culturally-informed tendency which, once established, implies movement through time. When we read a story we expect the plot to progress through time as our eyes move across and down the page. If a person wanted to depict change over time through images, in our culture it wouldn’t do him or her much good to place the prior image on the right. Viewers would infer change in the opposite direction.

Images: Jerome Bon (2008) & Jerzy Strzelecki (2000).

Order matters; but it is not the only necessary element for the functioning of repeat photographs. Consider this second composite image. There is not enough similarity between the two to suggest any obvious relation. The first composite image operates as a repeat photograph because certain common features suggest that it is the same, or very similar, landscape in each. The element of difference is just as essential, for in difference lies change. The slight modifications in snow cover, the distribution of vegetation, and the position of the ice’s edge are the signs by which the viewer registers that change has occurred. Edward Tufte, the versatile political scientist, refers to this precise admixture of similarity and difference as “the smallest effective difference.” Of course, not all difference in a series implies change. In Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series each image of Ms. Monroe differs from the others but only by the hand of its creator for artistic effect. Not all changes in a series indicate the passage of time. As saavy viewers we can usually distinguish between depictions of change over time rather than alternative symbolisms or other modifications. But not always, and therein lies opportunities for deception.

So ice does not speak for itself. In the simple act of seeing viewers put words into its mouth. And viewers are not the only ones contributing assumptions to a photograph. Every photograph results from the efforts of some one or many individuals, who leave traces of themselves: their perspectives; intentions; unconscious biases; sense of the beautiful; hope for their work. Not every photographer of glaciers sets out to document fluctuations of the ice. Each has worked under a wide range of conditions and been motivated by various reasons. Some have been tourists, others scientists; and their products were born of desires and concerns of their day, not ours. Repeat glacier photographs are windows onto the past through which, using the tools of history, we may espy the ways people have approached the ice since its documentation began in the nineteenth century.

But much remains unsaid. Unaided, photographs cannot tell you why the ice melted, nor can they indicate their own typicality (do other glaciers look the same?), and they cannot tell you what will happen in the future. Photographs were born in the past and live, like the undead, in the present. The future is not their within their purview.

To Be Continued.