The Theatre of Photography: an interdisciplinary duologue

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the opposition of our title: this text, in the form of a duologue, is also a meeting between photography and theatre, a vantage point from which certain conceptual frameworks can be challenged and even collapsed. In the domain of theatre, one hears often of artifice, authenticity, likeness and liveness. Theatre, from the conceptualisation of naturalism in the nineteenth century to the challenges posed by performance art in the twentieth century, struggles with media (despite the eclecticism of its own technological apparatus), sometimes seeking distance from them. Photography studies, meanwhile, has often emphasised the possibility or impossibility of veracity, the truthfulness or deceptiveness of photographs, with performance seemingly offering one escape route… This duologue seeks only to cast light on certain crossings inside the theatre of photography, envisaging future dialogues between media and across disciplines.

Full text

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Sens
Public, 2019
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des
services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique
d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/
Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit.
Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de
l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à
Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche.
https://www.erudit.org/fr/
Document généré le 8 juin 2020 05:50
Sens public
The Theatre of Photography
an interdisciplinary duologue
Joel Anderson et Wiebke Leister
Écrire les communs. Au-devant de l’irréversible
2019
URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1067430ar
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1067430ar
Aller au sommaire du numéro
Éditeur(s)
Département des littératures de langue française
Découvrir la revue
Citer cet article
Anderson, J. & Leister, W. (2019). The Theatre of Photography: an
interdisciplinary duologue. Sens public. https://doi.org/10.7202/1067430ar
Résumé de l'article
Nous prenons comme point de départ l’opposition du titre : ce texte, sous forme
de dialogue/duologue, est également une rencontre entre la photographie et le
théâtre, un point de vue privilégié permettant l’interrogation et même
l’effondrement de certaines grilles conceptuelles. Dans le domaine du théâtre,
on parle souvent d’artifice, authenticité, vraisemblance, et « liveness ». Le
théâtre, à partir de la conceptualisation du naturalisme à la fin du
dix-neuvième siècle et jusqu’aux défis de la performance au vingtième, semble
lutter contre les médias (malgré l’éclecticisme de son propre dispositif
représentationnel technologique), cherchant parfois à se situer en dehors
d’eux. D’autre part, les études photographiques soulignent souvent la
possibilité ou l’impossibilité de la véracité photographique, les sincérités ou
tromperies des photographies, d’où la « performance » semble parfois
proposer une issue… Ce dialogue se contente d’éclairer certains croisements au
Théâtre de la Photographie, afin d’envisager de futurs dialogues entre les
médias et les disciplines.

The Theatre of Photography
an interdisciplinary duologue
Joel Anderson, Wiebke Leister
Publié le 20-05-2019
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA
4.0)

Résumé
Nous prenons comme point de départ l’opposition du titre : ce
texte, sous forme de dialogue/duologue, est également une rencontre
entre la photographie et le théâtre, un point de vue privilégié per-
mettant l’interrogation et même l’eondrement de certaines grilles
conceptuelles. Dans le domaine du théâtre, on parle souvent d’artice,
authenticité, vraisemblance, et « liveness ». Le théâtre, à partir de
la conceptualisation du naturalisme à la n du dix-neuvième siècle et
jusqu’aux dés de la performance au vingtième, semble lutter contre
les médias (malgré l’éclecticisme de son propre dispositif représenta-
tionnel technologique), cherchant parfois à se situer en dehors d’eux.
D’autre part, les études photographiques soulignent souvent la pos-
sibilité ou l’impossibilité de la véracité photographique, les sincérités
ou tromperies des photographies, d’où la « performance » semble par-
fois proposer une issue… Ce dialogue se contente d’éclairer certains
croisements au Théâtre de la Photographie, an d’envisager de futurs
dialogues entre les médias et les disciplines.
Abstract
Taking as a starting point the opposition of our title: this text, in
the form of a duologue, is also a meeting between photography and
theatre, a vantage point from which certain conceptual frameworks
can be challenged and even collapsed. In the domain of theatre, one
hears often of artice, authenticity, likeness and liveness. Theatre,
from the conceptualisation of naturalism in the nineteenth century
to the challenges posed by performance art in the twentieth century,
struggles with media (despite the eclecticism of its own technologi-
cal apparatus), sometimes seeking distance from them. Photography
studies, meanwhile, has often emphasised the possibility or impossibil-
ity of veracity, the truthfulness or deceptiveness of photographs, with
performance seemingly oering one escape route… This duologue seeks
only to cast light on certain crossings inside the theatre of photogra-
phy, envisaging future dialogues between media and across disciplines.
Mot-clés : théâtre, théâtralité, intermedialité, traduction, spécicité du
médium, médiation, liveness, performance, performativité, photographie de
théâtre, dispositif
Keywords: theatre, theater, photography, theatricality, intermediality,

The Theatre of Photography
translation, medium specicity, mediation, liveness, performance, performa-
tivity, theatre photography, apparatus
3

Contents
Intermedial translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Medium,Media............................. 8
Remediation............................... 13
Liveness................................. 17
Performativity ............................. 20
Apparatus................................ 24
Bibliography .............................. 25

The Theatre of Photography
Joel Anderson Wiebke Leister
Intermedial translation
(WL) The question of what is “essential” or “specic” to a given medium
has been addressed in many ways. In contrast to some of these, we are keen
to characterise possibilities relating to how theatre and photography can
be brought together not only by means of documentation or reproduction,
but where theatre and photography become methodologies for one another’s
making and understanding, where an action is staged for the camera, where
photography is part of a scene or is crucial to how it is constructed.
Our duologue on the Theatre of Photography focuses on those intersections
between photography and theatre, taking their multiple encounters as an
opportunity to rethink the often overused or misconceived concepts of “per-
formance” in order to consider an exchange of ideas between photography
and theatre by asking what we can learn from their close association.
Barbara Cassin stresses in her Dictionary of Untranslatables that the term
“to translate” refers to a passing from one language to another (from Latin:
“traducere”) as a way of leading-across that describes a passage or a trans-
mission (2014, 1139). We are interested in this sense of “bringing one to
the other” as means of visual translation, potentially arriving at a hybrid
construction that is considered less of a “thirdness” between the elds, and
rather an attempt to think about the dialectical encounters between theatre
and photography. Just as theatre can be still and photographs can con-
vey a sense of movement. Our approach therefore includes how both may
function as contexts or methodologies for each other, and moves beyond con-
5

The Theatre of Photography
ventional distinctions between “staged photography” (as constructions to be
photographed) and “theatre photography” (as documents of a performance).
Accordingly, we are interested in acts of translation between dierent media,
translating from event into image, remediating from the position of photogra-
phy into theatre, and back into former or dierent media states, as practices
of re-writing their intermedial and interdisciplinary aspects. In addition to
the key concepts of the performative, the theatrical and the photographic,
other terms – like the framed and the staged, the pro-photographic and the
non-diegetic, the event and the institution – continued to come into play,
alongside ideas relating to gesture, stage, apparatus, situation, documenta-
tion, construction, re/enactment and re/presentation. Hoping to eventually
arrive at a dictionary of photo-theatric terms in context, we were keen to
extend our dialogue to others1, to discuss the relational gap between theatre
and photography from dierent perspectives2.
(JA) Our task here is to stage a dialogue. Of course, this might resemble
a dialogue between theatre and photography, but – although we as scholars
might represent theatre studies and photography studies – we are not seek-
ing necessarily to assume these institutional or disciplinary roles, to occupy
entrenched positions, reinforcing the stability or knowability of each eld.
Rather, we aim to use the dialogical form to explore some of the notions
that each of our disciplines brings to bear on the subject of authenticity and
articiality and to use this form to posit how an encounter between photog-
raphy and theatre challenges some of the notions at play in both disciplines,
thereby oering a nuanced form of interdisciplinarity.
In considering intermediality with or within theatre, certain questions arise
as to whether theatre is a medium, and to what extent, and as to whether
theatre mediates and is mediated. Indeed, we cannot speak with condence
of theatre and media, since theatre is surely a medium, an instance of me-
1Indeed, this approach can be evidenced in our recent edition of the journal Photog-
raphy and Culture: starting from several network meetings with interested collaborators,
we published ve essays by other pairs of theatre-photography-authors engaging in the
proposed experiment of co-writing in various forms, not only a methodology for dierent
approaches to writing but also for thinking about the relationship of photography and
theatre (Anderson and Leister 2018).
2Allsopp and Williams (2006) compare their approach, among others, to an open-ended
“Lexicon of contemporary performance” with “Fragments of The Intersubjective Ency-
clopaedia of Contemporary Theatre” (1994).
6

The Theatre of Photography
dia. Such an idea seems credible; certainly, if we follow McLuhan’s broad
notion of media as “extensions”, we are likely to consider theatre as a means
of communication, a communicative technology, a vector, distributing and
circulating. As such, theatre would need to be dened in terms of its partic-
ularities in comparison with other forms of media, perhaps with newer ones,
like photography.
Involved in the task of examining the relationships between media is resisting
the urge to posit one as enjoying critical authority or dominance over the
others, and to avoid imagining any medium to be knowable or pure; any
theory of intermedia, examining the relationships between media and the
ways in which they occupy one another’s locations and logics, must also
quickly nd that the media were always already interacting and were never
entirely autonomous.
(WL) Are we therefore assuming that today’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity
and the post-medium condition have overturned modernism’s conception of
medium-specicity? Jan Baetens describes how the paradigm of opposing
the spatial construct of the picture with the temporal entity of the text has
led to a “literary turn” in the photographic discourse. This had the eect of
turning photography’s recent understanding of itself as an interdisciplinary
discourse back into what is eectively a mono-disciplinary, text-led approach
– which not only reintroduces an essential dierence between time-led and
space-led practices, but also risks the very basis of interdisciplinarity.
How then do we approach photography and theatre as one continuum that
allows them to contain each other? Beatens suggests introducing a “meta-
interdisciplinary” viewpoint that avoids power relations between disciplines,
simply because “disciplinary approaches engaged in interdisciplinary discus-
sions are often not interdisciplinary themselves” (2007, 65). This aims to
form new relationships as “an attempt to speak nevertheless” (2007, 69–70),
relationships that remain plural rather than attempting a total synthesis, and
that are able to address specic inter-art phenomena while simultaneously
allowing some space for contradictions to co-exist.
7

The Theatre of Photography
Medium, Media
(JA) In an interview taking place very near to the end of his life, Roland
Barthes suggested that his monograph Camera Lucida was participating in
a “theoretical boom” (1980, 1235), with photography, at the time more than
a century old, seemingly receiving sudden critical attention. Notable within
this “boom” is a recourse to theatre as a means for understanding photog-
raphy, in Barthes work, of course, but also in that of the contemporaries he
mentions.
Theatre does sometimes seem at odds with certain habitual understandings
of a medium, through its hybrid constitution as much as by way of the limita-
tions of its procedures. Certainly, theatre can seem distant from the notion
of “the media” (referring to new technologies and/or the “mass media”). In
stage performances, from classical to contemporary plays through to dura-
tional performance art, for example, information is not necessarily eciently
delivered, at least not to the assembled audience, who will have to wait
(for the twist of the denouement, or indeed for Godot) or who, through the
dramatic irony of witnessing messages transmitted either to the wrong recip-
ient, too widely, or lost in the very process of transmission, merely witness
a certain circulation of information. In some stage work, theatre becomes
machine, or else seeks to exit the machine; theatre images take shape before
audiences used to a glut circulating on screens. In such works, the uncer-
tainty and ineciency of theatre’s modality contrasts with mechanisms of
high-speed reporting and near-instant communications; the slow-paced ac-
tion, or frozen tableau vivant, and the slow emergence of meaning onstage
counter and confound televisual repetition and ow.
Much discussion around theatre in relation to media is organised around
the encounter between the two. This discussion plots theatre’s shifts (for
better or for worse) in contact with technologies (always already “new” ones).
Frequently, scholars are concerned with how theatre and performance adapt
themselves (by way of appropriation or resistance) when met with media, as
in some postdramatic theatre, or immersive performances embracing the fact
that the theatre is now one of the only places where mobile telephones cannot
be used (of course, some works have incorporated the smartphone into the
apparatus, too).
8

The Theatre of Photography
(WL) Conceptions of the “photographic” refer to plurality, demonstrating
that there is no such thing as one “photography” but rather many “pho-
tographies”, which are inherently interdisciplinary and intermedial, made
up of many elements that expand its concepts and that are part of its own
dierent ways of coming-into-being and contributing to all sorts of photo-
graphic cultures – including social, historical and political circumstances,
cultural production, aesthetic discourse or philosophy, in installation and in
other forms of dissemination or circulation; be it in dierent contexts and
for dierent receptions, as a discursive system and as an event, as image
and object, process and interpretation, theory and practice, medium or tech-
nology, instrument or record, artistic expression or commodity (Tagg 1988,
143). Similar to theatre, photography is never a singular medium. It refers
to a range of practices and institutional spaces that give the context in which
the meaning and status of a particular photograph or performance can be
interpreted. We are therefore keen to tease out a “theatric” mode and to
emphasize its intermedial and interdisciplinary aspects3.
In the mid 19th-century, in the early days of photography and electricity, the
neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne – together with the younger brother of the
famed Parisian photographer Nadar – managed to photograph eeting facial
anatomy, even though contemporary exposure times would have been far
too slow to capture any form of immediacy. But Duchenne overcame these
obstacles of time and involuntary body movement by using a low voltage
current to activate the facial muscles and hold them in place for the duration
of camera exposure. This allowed him to isolate and visualize the facial
muscles, and name them after their functions (the muscle of joy, the muscle
of pain), obtaining an iconographic scale of emotional expressions.
Alongside the main Medical Section, he also included an “aesthetic section”
in his 1862 book The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, in which he
not only corrected the expressions of classical sculptures, but also engaged in
illustrating emotive characters from famous plays from an “aesthetic” point
of view. For instance, he illustrated Shakespeare’s “Lady Macbeth” and her
muscular expressions induced with electricity to act out the varying intensi-
ties of the “expression of cruelty”. Describing his process: “The facial expres-
3Barthes develops the term “lmic” in his essay “The Third Meaning”, wherein the
stilled image of a lm conveys an obtuse meaning that cannot be described, “where lan-
guage and metalanguage end.” (1977, 64–65)
9

The Theatre of Photography
sion of this young girl was made more terrible and more disgured than even
in Plate 82 by the maximal contraction of this little muscle, and we need to
consider it as principle and true agent of the aggressive and wicked passions,
of hatred, of jealousy, of cruel instincts.”(Duchenne de Boulogne 1990, 122).
Figure 1: Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne & Adrien
Tournachon, 1854-56, printed 1862, albumen silver prints from glass nega-
tives, 28.4 × 20.3 cm.
Plate 81: “Lady Macbeth, moderate expression of cruelty”: “Lady Macbeth:
Had he not resembled // My father as he slept, I had done’t. [Macbeth, act
II, scene II]. Moderate expression of cruelty. Feeble electrical contraction of
the m. procerus (P, Fig. 1)”
Plate 82: “Lady Macbeth, strong expression of cruelty”: “Lady Macbeth:
Come, you spirits // That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, // And
ll me, from crown to the toe, top-full // Of direst cruelty. [Macbeth, act I,
scene V] Strong expression of cruelty. Electrical contraction of m. procerus.”
Plate 83: “Lady Macbeth, ferocious cruelty”: “Lady Macbeth - about to as-
sassinate King Duncan. Expression of ferocious cruelty. Maximal electrical
contraction of m. procerus.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The
Buddy Taub Foundation Gift, Dennis A. Roach and Jill Roach, Directors;
Harris Brisbane Dick and William E. Dodge Funds; and W. Bruce and De-
laney H. Lundberg Gift, 2013.
https://www.metmuseum.org (Public Domain)
In the tradition of pathognomy, Duchenne’s Mechanism assumed the face as
a legible mask and the photograph of facial expressions as equally legible
codes for inner states. Featuring the electrical probes clearly visible in the
10

The Theatre of Photography
faces of his sitter, Duchenne’s photography did not just record the body of
his model, but actively transformed it in the process of staging the relation
between emotion and expression. Engaging dierent levels of performance
and re-enactment, the resulting photographs bring together dierent stage
and studio conventions through the use of light, gesture, pose, and imaging
by electrical and photographic means. Circulating in various distribution
contexts, they also attempt to blur the boundaries between “aesthetic object”
and “scientic record”: as medical research, as atlas of emotive states to be
used by artists, as illustration of theatrical characters and as gallery artefacts.
As photographic portraits, they stress the varying degrees of collaborative
exchange between sitter and photographer in a performative setting.
In the winter of 1854-5, at the same time as working with Duchenne, the
brothers Nadar collaborated on a series of expression studies and body pos-
tures based on the commedia dell’arte character, Pierrot. With long expo-
sure times requiring immobility, Pierrot’s simulated movements are conned
to the shallow photographic space, his silent performance doubling the pro-
cess of still photography. It remains unclear whether Duchenne in some
way or other inspired Pierrot’s photographs, if the Pierrot-series inuenced
Duchenne’s experiments, or if the two were simply products of the same phys-
iognomic age. If anything, their close relation goes to show that performance
was not incidental to Duchenne’s experiments.
(JA) In an inuential article, Rosalind Krauss (1978) describes the spectral
gure of the mime Charles Deburau, as Pierrot photographed by Nadar4,
claiming that this image is a meeting of the mechanical imprint of photog-
raphy and the gesture of a theatre mime. While this inuential notion of
the imprint or trace has been challenged, perhaps most extensively by Joel
Snyder (for example, in 1980, 504–5), and certainly in terms of attempts
to thereby distinguish photography from other forms of picture-making, we
should focus here on Krauss’s distinction between the kinds of writing made
possible by the gure of the miming body and by photography; Krauss is
attentive to the notion of writing present in the word “photo-graphy”, and
she seems to suggest that the collision of temporalities of the trace prepares
the ground for a citational space. Krauss observes in Nadar’s photograph a
meeting of representational modes, the gestures traced by a mime and the
4A more in-depth and nuanced consideration of this corpus can be found in Rykner
(2015).
11

The Theatre of Photography
Figure 2: Nadar & Adrien Tournachon: Jean-Charles Deburau as “Pier-
rot Running”, 1854-55, Albumen silver print from glass negative, 26.5 x
20.8cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel,
2005. https://www.metmuseum.org (Public Domain)
12

The Theatre of Photography
traces recorded by a camera, and she suggests that this encounter is only
able to occur by way of a photograph. She writes: “the ultimate surface onto
which the multiple traces are not simply registered, but xed, is that of the
photograph itself.” (Krauss 1978, 45). Patricia Falguières (2000) also refers
to the mime appearing in early photographic experimentation in describing
the passage of subjects across the stage created by the chronophotographer,
Étienne-Jules Marey, in his research station in the late 1800s, noting the
meeting of photosensitive materials sequentially capturing the “purely ges-
tural and silent sequence of the mime”, calling this a gure a “white ghost”
(Marey 1894, 102).
Remediation
(JA) The theatre photographs of Josef Koudelka are at once the earliest
examples of his photographic output and the least well known. Scholars
and critics, in the numerous accounts of Koudelka’s life and work, give only
limited attention to these theatre images, making much of the photographer’s
resolute abandonment of theatre when he was forced to leave Czechoslovakia
after taking widely circulated images of the Prague Spring.
Koudelka, as part of dierent companies, photographed theatre productions
throughout most of the 1960s, notably including the work of director Otomar
Krejča. The nature of his role and of the activity of photographing theatre
begs questions around the status of theatre photography, which is often con-
ducted and conceived elsewhere as an activity of recording, situating theatre
photography within the Benjaminian notion of the reproduction of a work
of art. But where theatre is the object of the photographic lens, more nu-
ance might sometimes be necessary. At least linguistically, it is dicult to
conceive of the notion of “theatre photography”, as such a practice adopts
the slipperiness of the term “theatre”, referring, among other things, to an
activity as well as to the place where this activity takes place. “Photographs
of theatre” also poses a problem potentially as representation of a represen-
tation – we cannot be sure (if that is what is being demanded) what or whom
we are looking at, with, for example, the earliest “theatre photographs” be-
13

The Theatre of Photography
ing portraits of actors, often in role, rather than attempts to capture a stage
performance5.
Figure 3: Josef Koudelka: Czechoslovakia. Prague. 1966. Theatre Divadlo
Za Branou (Beyond the Gate). The Three Sisters, play written by Chekhov
and directed by Otomar Krejča. Magnum Photos.
Theatre photography, at least at the beginning in the mid-twentieth century,
is usually considered in terms of what Bolter and Grusin have inuentially
called immediacy, or transparent immediacy, whereby “the user is no longer
aware of confronting a medium” (2000, 24). But perhaps - and Koudelka’s
images seem instructive in this regard - theatre photographs also sit uncom-
fortably within this conception of the medium, and indeed might be located
across Bolter and Grusin’s triad of immediacy, hypermediacy, and remedia-
tion6.
5See my Theatre & Photography (Anderson 2015, 39–47), which gives an account of
nineteenth-century actor portraiture and of scholarly responses to this practice.
6Unlike “transparent” media that give us the impression of a direct viewing experience
as if seeing through a window (rather than looking at a representation), hypermedial
media redirect attention to their respective mediality. The viewer looks “at” not “through”
the medium and enjoys this medial awareness as a means of moving past the limits of
representation. “No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do
its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from
14

The Theatre of Photography
Koudelka, by his own account, was averse to any notion of recording or re-
producing theatre; he claims that, in photographing theatre, the one thing
he never sought to do was to record or document, stating that he was more
interested in another “possibility”: “to take the performance as an initial
reality and try to make something dierent out of it” (2003, 125). He iden-
ties the problem: “When [you] photograph the theatre,” he says, “you deal
with something that’s already done” (2007). His approach to achieving this
aim of treating theatre as a raw material relied on retaining his mobility as
photographer, photographing at times from the vantage point of a spectator,
but also from the stage, close to the actors and on selecting his own per-
spectives from within the frame of the stage. Koudelka’s practical method
appears even more unusual when we consider how he produced images in
the darkroom: using cinema stock, Koudelka would cut down his negatives,
eliminating large sections, and he would make enlargements from perhaps
very small pieces of lm. The process of making “something dierent”, as he
explains it, is thus a destructive act: the photographer sacrices the captured
image as a whole, emphasising a narrow area and thus pushing the photosen-
sitive materials to the point of failure, obliterating much detail in the nal
prints, creating areas of pure highlight or shadow, creating disembodied parts
no longer part of the actor’s body, causing the emulsion to surrender its grain,
often coating sections of an image with a fog-like overlay (Krejča 2006, 42).
As such, the photographs might be considered in terms of Bolter and Grusin’s
hypermediacy, as Koudelka’s method foregrounds the medium of photogra-
phy, thus situating his work within a certain photographic trend of the era.
But this also imbues the images with spectrality; they are “hauntological”,
in Derrida’s terms, particularly in the sense that Mark Fisher (2014) de-
scribes, whereby the signal/noise relationship is upended, unseating notions
of presence.
The images seem to bring elements into circulation that can be accounted
for only in terms of Koudelka’s avowed project of using theatre to make
photographs. The director Krejča (Koudelka 1993, 7) suggests that seeing
Koudelka’s images gave a strange sense of “reversal,” whereby he – the creator
of the stage work – started to doubt whether the images had been taken of
his production or whether they somehow (almost supernaturally) preceded
other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular
ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion
themselves to answer the challenges of new media.” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 15)
15

The Theatre of Photography
it, prompted it. As the images remediate, they unstage as well as restage
theatre.
(WL) The popular myths that underpin the many understandings of what
photography is today include all shades of “authenticity”, from “straight pho-
tography” to describing it as a “pencil of nature” or as a “message without a
code” that delivers “unmediated” imprints on the basis of being “transparent”
and “objective”, thus conveying “natural” signiers that “truthfully” record
what is in front of them - as if there wasn’t any distance between sign and
referent. What follows is an embrace of artice as a way of thinking pho-
tographs as constructed, cultural images with oating signiers that operate
on many levels of re/presentation. And since images continue to produce
their very own conceptions of “truth”, we should never forget that there are
indeed many indexical images that do not constitute likeness, while photog-
raphy stages many acts of mediation: from world to image, and from image
to interpretations.
Figure 4: John Hilliard: “Camera Recording Its Own Condition (7 Apertures,
10 Speeds, 2 Mirrors)”, 1971. Original study, silver gelatin photo on museum
board, 61x56 cm. Permission granted by the artist 01 03 19.
The dierent aspects of remediation can be observed in the conceptual work
“Camera Recording its Own Condition” by John Hilliard in which the hand-
16

The Theatre of Photography
held apparatus serves not only as a recording device but also as the central
motif. This expanded self-portrait of an artist scrutinizing the limitations of
his medium excels at turning the process of mediating photography’s medi-
ality into a performative image. The work consists of seventy photographs
that were taken by photographing the camera in a mirror with a range of
combinations of aperture and shutter speed. This results in a serial grid
of photographs in which only a diagonal line of prints appears “correct”,
while the opposite corners show prints of gradually changing settings, fading
into monochrome abstraction of either white over-exposure or black under-
exposure of the lm. A purposefully self-reexive gesture of reduction that
highlights the relation of negative density and print, performed by the in-
herent logic of the analogue camera in the form of a continuous spectrum
of possibilities. This visual system of spatializing the body of the image is
generated by systematically performing the camera’s mechanism as a way of
structuring the image plane, thereby producing an optical illusion.
Liveness
(WL) In the photograph “Boy at Circus”, the boy is captured by Weegee’s
camera while being captivated by a performance in the circus ring himself7.
He follows the spectacle from a distance, bridged by a pair of opera glasses
that bring him closer to the centre of attention. The binoculars blocking out
his eyes, leaning forward in suspense, his left hand supported by his knee, he
is not just a passive spectator but an engaged participant in the scene that
we, in turn, cannot see. Laughing openly, he does not know that he is an
observed observer.
Sitting next to a father gure, the boy’s forehead covers the man’s lower
face, while the boy’s upper face is covered by the opera glasses so that their
two faces almost read as one. Both gures wear seeing devices, making it
impossible for the viewer to see their eyes. Accordingly, the encounter with
the photograph ultimately becomes about watching, enhanced by the triangle
of sightlines operating within and beyond the picture, each intertwining and
extending their gazes beyond the other’s point of view. The boy’s laughter
is aided by a mechanical eye, just as the expressions of Duchenne’s model
7Weegee (Arthur Fellig): “Boy at Circus”, 18 April 1943. International Centre of
Photography / Getty images: online
17

The Theatre of Photography
were triggered by an electrical device: the former, to observe the performance
close up, the latter to create the photographic performance.
The boy’s prosthetic gaze draws a parallel between the hidden elements in
the image and its production: the absent circus scene seen by the boy with
hidden eyes, and the unnoticed photographer who depicts him with his face
equally hidden behind the camera, giving the image several layers of liveness:
the absent action in the ring, the depicted reaction of the boy, the constitutive
position of the photographer and, by extension, the image’s event and how
it communicates with me in the present. This ensemble combines dierent
time-zones and viewpoints that add up to more than a single here-and-now.
Part of the image’s photographic event are therefore not only the image-
immanent elements that relate to the actually depicted scene and how it is
interpreted, but also the dierent participants and o-frame agencies that
contribute to the changing situation of production and reception. The dier-
ent pro-photographic layers involved in the construction of a photograph of
this kind are described by Vilém Flusser in his essay “The Gesture of Pho-
tographing”, where he portrays the three inter-subjective elements involved
– the photographer, the photographed and the observer of the act of pho-
tographing – who all move around, inuencing and aecting one another,
thus creating the social circumstances that result in the photograph. Flusser
explains that “In fact, there is a double dialectic in play: rst between goal
and situation and then among the various perspectives on the situation. The
gesture of the photographer shows the tension between these intervening
dialectics.” (Flusser 2011, 79).
The description of the photographer and how he approaches his subject is
also reminiscent of me of the obsessive behaviour exhibited by the main pro-
tagonist in Italo Calvino’s short story “The Adventure of the Photographer”,
which maps the breakdown of a romantic relationship by photographic ex-
perimentation and objectication (1993).
(JA) Hayley Newman’s Connotations series draws on the longstanding re-
lationship between photography and performance art, and plays with their
close aliation. Commentary by the artist on each of the photographs in
the series states what is taking place in the photograph (for example, the
artist on the London underground wearing glasses equipped with a pump to
produce the eect of tears). Often the conceit of the image corresponds to
familiar notions of what kinds of acts are undertaken as performances, with
18

The Theatre of Photography
extreme physical acts including endurance, or acts of intimacy done in public.
The photographs invite the viewer to see them as documents of performances,
of something ephemeral that has happened and that has been captured by
the camera. The closeness of the link between performance art and photog-
raphy led David Briers (1986), to suggest that not having photographs of a
work of performance art had become akin to not having photographs of one’s
wedding. Indeed, the prevalence, since at least the 1950s, of photographs of
performances, arguably “documentary” in their style as much as in their in-
tent or use, points to the idea that photographs might be constitutive of
performance art: performance art could even be thus dened as that which
might be documented in photographs.
Newman’s work in Connotations emerges perhaps in response to such a con-
text, and is one of a number of challenges made by performance artists and
by scholars of performance studies, in particular during the 1990s to the desir-
ability or indeed the possibility of the documentation of performances, then
conceived as something ephemeral and eeting, and involving a limited num-
ber of participants in a particular place at a particular time. A key argument
of performance studies is made by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked (1993), which
suggests that documents of performances do not document performances,
further suggesting that performance resists participation in mediatization.
Philip Auslander’s Liveness (1999), on the other hand, seems to undermine
such claims that performance operates outside of media technology, pointing
out that the notion of “the live” can only be operative within recording (for
example, theatre would not be construed as having the particularity of being
live by those having not encountered recordings).
Newman’s images posit, or pose, recorded performances, leading to accounts
of the works as documenting imaginary performances, or situating Newman’s
work within the conceptual art genre. They posit the photographic viewer
as the spectator of performance and, like the celebrated Yves Klein image
“Le saut dans le vide,” but in a slightly dierent manner, they enable this
by means of doing away with the (idea of) the original spectator: for Klein’s
image, because the performance only “takes place” through a compositing
of photographs, and for Newman’s series through drawing attention to an
original performance in a way that undermines the photograph’s apparent
veracity and the veritable existence of any such event. The images strad-
dle the barrier between the performative photograph and the performance
document.
19

The Theatre of Photography
Performativity
(WL) The popular myths that continue to underpin many understandings
of the relationship between theatre and performance could be summarised
by statements indicating that “acting” is just fake (articial), while “per-
formance” is real (authentic), and that for this reason performance is never
“theatre” (rehearsed) but “live art” (actual). In this way, the earlier quoted
distinction between “staged photography” as construction and “theatre pho-
tography” as documentation seems to operate in similar terms.
In photography, we often speak of “performativity” if the scene exists only to
be photographed – as in Je Wall’s tableau images, in which the set is built for
the camera, purpose built in order to be seen from the photographer’s point
of view, while the models are directed with a clear consciousness towards the
borders of the image that they are about to become. Equally, Duchenne’s
“Lady Macbeth” and Nadar’s “Pierrot” are built around performative and
demonstrative aspects of the studio setting. In this context, all three elements
– the studio, the theatre and the gallery – are inherently performative, because
everything is constructed in order to perform for the camera8.
In comparison, clown image “Untitled # 425” by Cindy Sherman is perfor-
mative not only because it is staged to be photographed, but also because it
incorporates other levels of performativity involving the visual reference to
the clown performer itself: the hyperreal colours, the larger-than-life scale of
the image, the staging and framing of the gures, all gazing directly into the
camera as part of a digitally composed multiple portrait acted out by the
artist herself9. With an acute postmodern awareness, Sherman is not only
“clowning” the codes of the Clown, she is playing with our viewing conven-
tions and our archetypal images. She de-familiarises and subverts the idea
of the harmless joker up to the point where the image actually seems to turn
against the viewer. It invades our space, returning our gaze, while the laugh-
ter gets stuck in our throats, since we cannot laugh back at the depicted
8Iversen extends the denition of the “performative” from recording something preexist-
ing or pointing at something in the past, to using it as an element for analysis of what will
come or how we see the world after a specic encounter: “Photography is thus conceived,
not as a melancholic ‘that-has-been’, but more as a future oriented and interrogative”what-
will-be?” (Iversen 2007, 105.)
9Cindy Sherman: “Untitled # 425”, 2004, colour photograph, 182,9 x 236,2 cm. Copy-
right Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers and Metro Pictures. online
20

The Theatre of Photography
clowns to release ourselves from them (in a Freudian way) or to correct them
(in a Bergsonian way). Simultaneously, they seem untouchably safe in their
world, making us feel excluded and exposed in our own.
Framed by the three mocking rictus masks that ll the frame from both
sides, Sherman’s digitally composed image “Untitled # 425” also represents
a much smaller fourth gure hiding in the distance. Looking to the camera,
she inhabits the shy posture of a pigtailed schoolgirl, presenting her body
in prole (support leg, free leg). Triggering the nightmarish image of being
isolated and laughed-at, urging the viewer to identify with her, the image
merges the positions of the mocked outsider in front of the image with the
ridiculed outsider inside the image. Thinking back to Weegee’s “Boy at
Circus” it seems as if the stage was here been turned ninety degrees, now
mirroring a laughing audience while at the same time throwing its viewer into
an embarrassed and infantilizing position in the middle of the ring. Peter
Handke’s play “Oending the Audience” also springs to mind, using speech
acts and direct address to provoke some kind of Brechtian alienation eect.
Sherman’s display of theatrical methods is therefore far more complex than
most “staged photography” because it acts out dierent performative levels to
disrupt any unity of form and content. At the same time, the image includes
its own act of viewing, giving it the event-like quality of a live encounter that
is not only part of its construction in the studio, but also part of its agency
in the gallery space.
(JA) The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has for some years seemed keen to embrace
both photographic recording of performance and photographic performance.
We can trace his relationship with photography to his time spent in New York
in the 1990s, and to his later participation in a grouping of avant-garde artists
operating in a district of Beijing nicknamed “The Beijing East Village.” The
artists’ work was extensively photographed, primarily by two photographers,
Rong Rong and Xing Danwen, whose work seems committed to the idea of
recording one-o events often taking place before a small audience and in
necessarily private settings.
Ai Weiwei has, since his Beijing East Village experience, embraced work
where he is both photographer and photographic subject. Here we consider
his 1995 triptych “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”, consisting of a set of black-
and-white photographs. In the rst image in the sequence, Ai is holding an
urn, tilted to one side at shoulder level. In the next, his hands remain up,
21

The Theatre of Photography
Figure 5: Ai Weiwei: “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”, 2015, LEGO bricks
(from the original 1995 photographic triptych by the artist), 230x192x3cm.
Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
and he has dropped the urn, which is captured by the camera in mid-air. He
retains his position in the third image, in which the urn has hit the ground
and shattered, with the pieces scattered around his feet. Each of the three
photographs is framed identically, and in each Ai is looking directly into the
camera lens.
The triptych recalls the sequential approach of chronophotography, a scien-
tic means of capturing the phases of a movement, but also an aesthetic
technique of narrativization. Here, the title’s word “dropping”, depending
perhaps on whether it is taken as a participle or a gerund, might empha-
sise either the capturing of an event, a singular moment, an unrepeatable
action (aecting an irreplaceable and irreparable object), or the “dropping”
as performance done for the camera. Critical responses to this triptych have
focused on the way it documents the deliberate destruction of an artwork
and a timeless relic, the discussion thereby centring on iconoclasm, on con-
ceptions of value in art or the status of ancient relics tasked with representing
national heritage and history. The fact that this is a sequential image seems
to reinforce the possibility that it constitutes objective photographic evidence
and leaves little doubt that the urn is being “dropped” on purpose.
As well as being sold and exhibited as an artwork in its own right (in forms
including the lego version reproduced here), “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”
has also formed part of a gallery installation entitled “Coloured Vases”, in
which the triptych is hung behind a collection of vessels which Ai has dripped
in two contrasting colours of paint (recalling his painted Neolithic vases, a se-
ries bearing a painted Coca Cola logo; his act of painting vases and urns has
22

The Theatre of Photography
itself been photographed). Coating antique vases in paint has been labelled
a kind of vandalism, but the artist has been keen to instead identify a pro-
cess of modication through which the ancient objects are re-contextualized
and recirculated, rather than destroyed. The co-presence of the sequential
photographic backdrop and the similar painted vessels in “Coloured Vases”
seems to stage the constituent works’ play on temporality. The stakes of
this, and of the confusion the works stage between a documented past act
and a current performance, were perhaps revealed and complicated in one
notorious response to the exhibited work.
On 16 February 2014, a visitor to Ai’s retrospective installation at the Perez
Art Museum, smashed one of the “Coloured Vases”. Footage shows a man,
identied in the press as Maximo Caminero, picking a green-and-peach vase
from the plinth. A woman, presumably a security guard, is heard saying,
“Don’t touch!” just before Caminero drops the vase on the oor, breaking it.
He then stands for a moment, hands in pockets, looking up at Ai’s triptych
hanging on the wall.
Accounts in the press suggest that Caminero, who is himself an artist, was un-
aware of the provenance of the destroyed item (the Museum initially declared
its value as $1M), assuming it was a contemporary piece of decoration, rather
than an antique (Miller 2014). Elsewhere, Caminero claimed that his action
was a performative protest against the hierarchical nature and commercial-
ism of galleries and the art world, particularly with regard to the relative
treatment of local and international artists. He later wrote to Ai, describing
his act of “solidarity” with the artist, also suggesting that his action might
be instructive, and could deter Ai and others from damaging historically sig-
nicant items (Madigan 2014), a reference to the triptych. Considering the
damaged item less in terms of its symbolic value, and more as a piece of pri-
vate property, Ai, in a BBC interview, condemned Caminero’s act in terms
of his having deliberately broken something that did not belong to him, also
pointing out that his own destructive artistic acts took place “a long time
ago” (Jones 2016).
Oering another angle regarding his act, Caminero described “Coloured
Vases” as intentionally a “provocation” (Miller 2014), suggesting that his
act might be understood as a performance that was coherent with, and in-
deed prompted by, the triptych backdrop. This is a compelling point, if not
necessarily an advisable legal argument, since it suggests that his interaction
23

The Theatre of Photography
with the piece was consistent with the work on display, and that he was there-
fore guilty of responding to a step-by-step set of instructions, corresponding
as such to an ambiguity in the notion of “documentation” itself, which is et-
ymologically related to the idea of instruction, teaching, proof and warning,
and thus seems to point to something of the future as much as something of
the past. Photographs and video footage of the incident - which must have
appeared as evidence in the apparently successful case brought against the
perpetrator, show Caminero standing alongside the installation, joining it by
adopting the pose of Ai on the wall behind him, then copying his action, con-
stituting a following step, and another fragment of what we might venture
to understand as an interactive, durational multimedia performance.
Apparatus
(WL) So far, we have questioned the idea of a medium in relation to both
theatre and photography in favour of discussing their intermedial interac-
tions as part of what may potentially be considered the same discourse, only
looked at from dierent points of view. We have proposed denitions of live-
ness and performativity, suggesting that both theatre and photography are
institutional contexts that are instructive and contextual for their respective
productions. To conclude, we would like to introduce the framework of the
apparatus as a productive way of thinking the dialogical elds of theatre
and photography as things that frame and stage, a construction that recalls
equally the historical playhouse and the early Camera Obscura, which were
room-sized apparatuses.
By and large, tools, machines and apparatuses appear to have been invented
to “free” human beings from enslaving labour. Giorgio Agamben distin-
guishes between living beings and apparatuses in which human beings are
captured. But even though apparatuses seem to dictate and contaminate
human life, we cannot simply destroy them. We need to use them in a cor-
rect way, such that humans are not separated or estranged from themselves.
Agamben suggests that this could happen through “profanation”, which he
describes as a “counter-apparatus that restores to common use what sacrice
had separated and divided.” (2009, 19) So, what does this mean if we are for
ever subjected to the media apparatuses of photography and theatre?
24

The Theatre of Photography
In her essay on the post-medium condition of art, Rosalind Krauss expands
the specic denition of a given medium (i.e. lm) through the “compound”
idea of an apparatus, saying that the medium is “neither the celluloid strip
of the images, nor the camera that lmed them, nor the projector that brings
them to life in motion, nor the beam of light that relays them to the screen,
nor that screen itself, but all of these taken together, including the audience’s
position caught between the source of the light behind it and the image
projected before its eyes.” This produces a united viewing experience out of a
series of interrelated elements, revealing how viewers are intentionally implied
and physically invested into the work: “The parts of the apparatus would
be like things that cannot touch on each other without themselves being
touched; and this interdependence would gure forth the mutual emergence
of a viewer and a eld of vision as a trajectory through which the sense of
sight touches on what touches back” (Krauss 2000, 25), potentially opening
up an aective or even inter-corporeal relationship with the work.
As opposed to Barthes and Agamben, Vilém Flusser does not perceive the
experimental gesture of photography as a process of objectication, because
“one cannot take up a position without manipulating the situation” (2011,
83). On the contrary, Flusser insists that the photographer is an active
subject whose reective faculties are “a strategy and not a surrender of self”
to the rules of the apparatus. He sees photographing as a search for the
self (Flusser 2011, 85) and as a playing against the apparatus, which he
describes as the only freedom left to us in a post-industrial world because,
as he explains, “self-reection through a division of labour becomes more
collective and dialogical” (Flusser 2011, 88). And in this spirit, we propose
to further embed each other’s apparatuses and terminologies as a way of
testing new ground by performing the photographic conditions of theatre,
and the theatric conditions of photography.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Trans-
lated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. 1 edition. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press.
Allsopp, Rick, and David Williams. 2006. “Editorial.” Performance Research
11 (3): iii–v.
25

The Theatre of Photography
Anderson, Joel. 2015. Theatre & Photography. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Anderson, Joel, and Wiebke Leister. 2018. “The Theatre of Photography:
Dialogues.” Photography and Culture 11 (2): 121–38. https://doi.org/10.
1080/17514517.2018.1502970.
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.
London; New York: Routledge.
Baetens, Jan. 2007. “Conceptual Limitation of Our Reection on Photogra-
phy: The Question of Interdisciplinarity.” In Photography Theory, edited by
James Elkins. New York: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath.
New York: Hill; Wang.
———. 1980. Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography. Translated by
Richard Howard. London: Flamingo.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding
New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/
remediation.
Briers, David. 1986. “Photography and Performance Art, from the
Catalogue Photography as Performance, Photographers Gallery, London,
1986.” Photography as Performance: Message Through Object & Picture, 11
September-18 October 1986. Selected by Tony Aren and Maureen O. Paley.,
43–46.
Calvino, Italo. 1993. Dicult Loves. : Smog ; A Plunge into Realestate.
Sydney: Vintage.
Cassin, Barbara, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. 2014. Dic-
tionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Duchenne de Boulogne, G.-B. 1990. The Mechanism of Human Facial Ex-
pression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Falguières, Patricia. 2000. “Mécaniques de La Marche: Pour Une Pathé-
tique Des Images Animées.” In Un Siècle d’arpenteurs, Les Figures de La
Marche, 63–102. Paris: Musée Picasso, Antibes/ADAGP, Paris/Succession
Henri Matisse/Réunion des musées nationaux.
26

The Theatre of Photography
Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology
and Lost Futures. Hants: Zero Books.
Flusser, Vilém. 2011. “The Gesture of Photographing.” In Gestures, 72–85.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Iversen, Margaret. 2007. “Following Pieces: On Performative Photography.”
In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 91–108. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Jones, Jonathan. 2016. “Who’s the Vandal: Ai Weiwei or the Man
Who Smashed His Han Urn?” Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/feb/18/ai-weiwei-han-urn-smash-
miami-art.
Koudelka, Josef. 1993. Josef Koudelka: Fotograe Divadlo Za Branou 1965-
1970. Czech Republic: Divadlo za Branou II.
Koudelka, Josef, and Vicki Goldberg. 2007. “Josef Koudelka Interviewed
by Vicki Goldberg, Aperture, New York, NY 2007, 5 April 2007.” http:
//maxpasion.com/koudelka_talk.mp3.
Koudelka, Josef, and Hvížd’alaKarel. 2003. “The Maximum, That’s What’s
Always Interested Me: Notes from Discussions Between Josef Koudelka and
Karel Hvížd’ala in Prague, 1990-2001.” In Josef Koudelka, 122–43. Pragues:
Torst.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1978. “Tracing Nadar.” In Illuminations: Women Writing
on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, edited by Liz Heron and Val
Williams, 37–49. London: I. B. Tauris.
Krauss, Rosalind E. 2000. A Voyage on the North Sea : Art in the Age of
the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Krejča, Otomar. 2006. “Theater: The Experience of Theater.” In Koudelka,
41–43. London: Thames; Hudson.
Madigan, Nick. 2014. “Man Gets Probation in Attack on Ai Weiwei Vase.”
The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/design/
man-gets-probation-in-attack-on-ai-weiwei-vase.html.
Marey, Étienne-Jules. 1894. Le Mouvement. Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline
Chambon.
27

The Theatre of Photography
Miller, Michael E. 2014. “Miami Artist Destroyed $1M Ai Weiwei Vase
Because PAMM ”Only Displays International Artists”.” Miami New
Times. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-artist-destroyed-1m-
ai-weiwei-vase-because-pamm-only-displays-international-artists-6524159.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. London ;
New York: Routledge.
Rykner, Arnaud. 2015. Corps Obscènes Pantomime, Tableau Vivant et
Autres Images Pas Sages: Suivi de Note Sur Le Dispositif. Paris: Orizons.
http://www.harmatheque.com/ebook/9782336300214.
Snyder, Joel. 1980. “Picturing Vision.” Critical Inquiry 6 (3): 499–526.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343106.
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Van Kerkhoven, Marianne, ed. 1994. “Encyclopaedia.” In Theaterschift 5-6:
On Dramaturgy, 5-6:37–276. Kaaitheater.
28