Thus we can only ask whether Malcolm has placed Lee’s vision before us, or only her own?   Has she truly entered into dialogue with the text or imposed herself upon it; has she accurately defined the parameters of the text (for it is a mere supposition that the individual picture is here “the” text rather than the group of photographs taken by Lee of the tenant farmers of Hidalgo county now moved into government housing- surely the latter is truly the text, or itself perhaps a “chapter” in a story told by the FSA and or Russell Lee.  At the same time, to regard the photograph as a “fragment” as does Levine (1984) loses the sense of the wholeness of the photograph which may not stand alone in place of its larger context, yet clearly has a sense of a whole within, perhaps like a paragraph on a page, it is well finished, made whole but only as a part of a larger whole within which it is best understood).

            For Malcolm, the sight of a sock with such a huge hole in its side stands out, just as does the hairnet and unlaced shoes of the woman in the picture.  The black tapestry above is, itself, no doubt somewhat comic in light of her taste and experience.  But , on what grounds are we to believe that these are necessarily Lee’s responses and thoughts as well?  Lee had seen countless men women and children wearing socks in a wide range of dissolution, hairnets, and newspapers for wall-paper in shacks from Iowa to Texas.  Perhaps his vision, then, was different.  Perhaps it was no more than a reminder of where these people had come from, a story of triumph in which even the tapestry above (for who can look through the eyes of that 1939 tenant farmer and his wife and see it as they did at that particular moment?) was a mark of achievement, smaller but not unlike the large radio which represented a large investment (approx. $100)  at a time when farm owners in Texas averaged only about $400 per year in total income.  Little wonder that the radio takes pride of place, and that a quite valued decoration is placed above it.

            Tagg, on the other hand, searches below the surface of the picture for its "hidden" message, dismissing all else as subterfuge.  While Malcolm provides no significant contextualization in the events that were part of the New Deal nor the communicative/ propagandistic efforts of the FSA, and she presumes that the mind of the photographer is preoccupied with art deco and the plain, homey and poor life of the couple. Tagg, on the other hand, tends to reduce the photographer to a functionary with no apparent independent communicative intent, nothing that goes beyond its ideological functions. There is no need here to discern the photographer’s particular vision nor intent, for the power and unity of vision stems from the state.

            The diversity of views, the occasional photographs that Lee and other FSA photographers took that reflected critically on our capitalist system -most widely noted in the many pictures of road signs showing a luxurious life with travel by cars and trains, contrasted sharply with those below seeking shelter from the noonday’s sun or simply walking along the road - often with heads down, as if spirits broken by an uncaring society.  Even a cursory look at the work of Lee, Mydans, Rothstein, Shahn, Evans, Lange, Vachon, Jung, Delano and so on reveals different styles and different visions, different values, beliefs and perspectives. (Doud, 1963, p. 3)

            Still, a critique of ideology perspective points to the fundamental importance of the institutional function of the photograph in understanding how we see the image.  As Tagg writes, there is a "power to bestow authority and privilege on photographic representations" held by "certain ideological apparatuses, such as scientific establishment, government departments, the police and law courts." (160)

            Indeed, the photograph, for Tagg, is reducible to its ideological content and function:

            What I am trying to stress here is the absolute continuity of the photographs'  ideological existence with their existence as material             objects whose `currency" and  `value'   arise in certain distinct and historically specific social practices and are ultimately a    
             function of the state. [emphasis added] (165)

            Thus, for Tagg, the "true" meaning of the photograph can ultimately be read objectively, discerned by the piercing vision of the authoritative interpreter.  And, in spite of their sharply divergent readings, this faith is shared by Malcolm as well.

            Tagg’s analysis provides a valuable opportunity to critique what Gadamer identifies as a basic feature of the critique of ideology i.e., its lack of self-criticism.  That the photograph here is “ultimately a function of the state,” is difficult to reject in that the state paid for the project of which it was a part. Yet, this reduction misses much of the subtlety of individual works because of what might be termed a rush to reduce the actual and complexly human to a mere reflection of the author’s pre-existent thesis and accompanying assumptions. [Compare, for example, the Lee photograph of the Japanese evacuation with the anonymous government photograph commisioned in 1942:  Appendix A]   Are we really supposed to equate these two, the one poignant and reminiscent of Lee’s earlier work on farm families leaving Oklahoma, the other seeming stiffly posed, happy and gay?  Clearly, we cannot so easily dismiss the mind and vision, the being of the individual photographer.  Here, the rush to judgment has not allowed the full complexity of the original image to enter the mind of the reader.

            Ultimately, however, it is not only ideology critique - in any of its varied forms, nor aesthetic consciousness, but the whole of what Gadamer terms methodological consciousness that dominates humane studies today that is the concern of philosophical hermeneutics. As Habermas (1979) notes in his Laudatio to Gadamer  upon the latter’s reception of the Hegel prize of Stuttgart, both Heidegger and Gadamer:

            Are in agreement that the violence and exclusivity of objectifying thought thought correlates with the hpilosophical prominence
            of subjectivity, and under sujectivity both  understand a self=awareness becomes rigid, a hardened autonomy instrumentalized for
            the purposes of self assertion. (196)

            Indeed, every stance is based in an assumptive world, a tradition, which is the hidden horizon which grounds it and gives it meaning and which can never be fully brought to conscious reflection.  Thus, all understanding requires dialogue and proceeds dialectically in a never ending movement that constitutes history. As Gadamer writes:  “In view of the finite nature of our historical existence, there is, it would seem, something absurd about the whole idea of a uniquely correct interpretation.” (TM, 106)

DISCUSSION

            Gadamer's universalization of hermeneutics rests on a logical argument against the possibility of methodologically transcending
           the hermeneutic point of view: any attempt to do so is inconsistent with the very conditions of possibility of understanding: the             linguisticality and historicity of human existence. 

                                                                                    - J. B. Thompson (1990)

            Archives contain many interesting things, but Truth is not included among them.

                                                                                       - N. Partner (1986), historian

           Hermeneutics draws attention to the underlying themes and world-views implicit in our narratives, it participates in the analysis of those narratives , it challenges closure and the willingness to settle for something less than radical openness to dialogue.  It perennially asks us to examine the "world" in which our actions and decisions are understandable. It's thrust is ceaselessly downward in excavating the rationale behind what we do.  Yet it does not look to conscious reflection for a solution.  It denies the neutrality of self-reflectivity. 

             The critical moment in which we enter into dialogue with the world of the text allows us to tell a new and different story and bring about a new understanding.  As former Magnum photographer Robert Doisneau said in a 1977 interview:

            You have to let the person who will look at the picture...always walk along that visual path for himself.  We must always
            remember that a picture is also made up of the person who looks at it.  This is very, very important. Maybe this is the reason
            behind these photos that haunt me and that haunt many other people as well.  It is about that walk that one takes with the picture
            when experiencing it.  I think that this is what counts. One must let the viewer extricate himself, for the journey.  You offer the
            seed, and then the viewer grows it inside himself.  For a long time I thought that I had to give the entire story to my audience.  I
            was wrong. (Doisneau, 1979, 92-3)

            If, however, we conceive of our task as standing apart from an object to be understood at a distance from who and what we are in the fullness of our being- necessarily substituting a pre-defined mechanism or method as true guide to understanding, the text in its fullness becomes mute and understanding - always involving the whole of who and what we are- fails to occur. Thus:

            The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and is unaffected but as one who is united by a
             specific bond with another, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (See Hoy, 1988, ft. 11)

Understanding, then, requires the abandonment of the pretense of the self-sufficiency of self-reflexive consciousness, the isolated, knowing self.  It calls for risking ourselves, the "rightness" of our own world, our own self-enclosure.  We already have begun to understand the photograph when it first draws us into its world, at the moment before it first comes to our conscious attention. From this brief moment on, our reading brings to bear the whole of what we and in so doing, the photograph challenges us with its alterity, the voice of its world.  It invites us to open ourselves to the risk entailed in entering into conversation with another.  As Gadamer notes:

            All that is asked is that we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text. But this openness always includes our
            situating the other meaning in relation to the whole of  our own meanings or ourselves in relation to it.  (TM, 268)

            Photographic critics, such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, have held that the photographic frame constitutes an obstacle to our full presence to the world, an alienating presence which cuts us off from direct experience and involvement in our world.  That full presence, however, is already denied in self-consciousness itself.  The appearance of the photographic frame, on the other hand, as object of our direct awareness, holds a liberating potential from our everyday vision which is framed as well but by a horizon that is "ours" and thus, necessarily remains outside of our conscious awareness.  It is this frame which we cannot "see" and from which we have no distance that constitutes the real barrier to our full participation in "a" world of meaning.  It is, then, precisely because the photograph provides a "frame" that the frame of our everyday vision is challenged, brought to consciousness and a new understanding takes its place.           

            If we are truly to enter upon the path of understanding a photographic text, we must remain aware that full understanding is not an end state but a never ending journey which we are always already embarked upon. The insights which each of us brings to an understanding of a picture increases the fullness of our own being, but that too is an infinite process. Philosophical hermeneutics calls us to abandon what Gunn (1987) calls the “Culture of Critique,” as well as our near magical belief in the human sciences. It leaves us with tools less powerful and far more easily misleading than we had thought.  It throws into question as well our whole culture of expertise, replacing it with demands encompassing all that we are.  Understanding and dialogue can only begin from this point on.

             The photograph, finally, more than any other expressive form, places that peculiar character of human reality and understanding before us for it has brought to us a paradox, a challenge that defies our traditional terms of understanding:  it is part observed and yet part observer as well, it is impenetrable and flat - a flat death, as Barthes notes, yet seemingly full of life as well, always inviting us into the reality portrayed there as if frozen in time.  It is the very symbol of the unity of self and world that we are, slowed long enough for us to dimly perceive the finitude that it implicitly lays before us, the gap between what we are and what we would be and so, too, it always comes to us carrying some of life’s sting.

            The photograph, then, ultimately is not understood through distanced, objective analysis and dialogical and dialectical process denies that self-reflective consciousness is the key to understanding.  Understanding proceeds through a process of inter-active play in which the text holds primacy.  Thus, the text "reads the reader" that is, challenges his world of expectations as the reader "reads the text."  Meaning, here, only comes into existence at the reading/seeing site and is always an application to the historical moment. 

            Nevertheless, and this is perhaps the most fundamental hermeneutical insight, it is precisely in this way - and only in this way - that the world becomes accessible to us. So, too, hermeneutics demonstrates the breadth of dialogic partners necessary to understanding itself and our ultimate interdependence as meaning making beings.

NOTES

            Regarding the photograph as text, see V. Burgin, p. 144.  A text is here understood as anything that can be the object of hermeneutic reflection and anything that is exteriorized, fixed and has meaning. As Ricoeur writes: “any group of signs which may be characterized as a work - i.e., as constituted by composition, a genre, a style -may be viewed as a text.”  Taking it to its limit, the entirety of human existence becomes a text to be interpreted. (109)  Yet, the differences between types of texts can be just as important as the similarities.  See, for example, the excellent discussion, following upon Nelson Goodman’s earlier work Languages of Art (1976), in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology  (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1986, pp. 53ff.

            2.Dialogue" is the form which the dialectical process of history takes place.  It is "dialectical" in that it has the dynamic, productive character of the dialectic most closely associated with Hegel.  In dialogue, this character results from the always limited nature of human utterances.  Any statement made in human conversation tends to produces a second, complementary assertion which results in an enlarged capacity of human language to characterize the breadth of human experience.  Ontologically, to be dialogical is to be human. For an interesting contemporary discussion of these terms see C. Jan Swearingen's "Dialogue and Dialectic: The Logic of Conversation and the Interpretation of Logic," in Tulio Maranhao's (ed.) The Interpretation of Dialogue (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1990), pp. 47-74.

            3 In regard especially to the photograph, Roland Barthes writes in "The Photographic Message,"  The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation tr. Richard Howard. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), that it is a: "paradox which makes an inert object into a language and which transforms the non-culture of a 'mechanical' art into the most social of institutions." (p. 20)

            4 For an especially well argued presentation of the objectivist position, see Kendall L. Walton, "Looking at Pictures and Looking at Things," in Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and abstracting.  Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publ. Co, 1988, pp. 277-300.

            5 It is rarely understood that photographic film, framing, camera optics and mechanical or nor electronic shutters, require substantial alteration in order to mimic human vision.  Our vision, based upon hundreds of thousands of years of biological development and refinement is thoroughly conditioned to maximize the information value of our everyday vision. We automatically see selectively according to what the relative significance of whatever lies before our eyes seems to be.  This is largely an unconscious process over which we have relatively little control. 

            Such practices as burning in (darkening) and/or bleaching (lightening) certain areas of the photograph are time honored ways of visually mimicking this selectively of vision.  Typically, we do not even notice that work, as in photojournalistic photographs.  However, what is actually happening is that someone - unknown to us - is making decisions for us about the relative significance of what we are seeing is.  Similarly, the use of wide angle and/or telephoto lenses to exaggerate or lesson relative distances between objects in the scene photographed suggest relationships between objects or persons that normal, human vision would not suggest existed.  So, too, the shutter - especially in combination with the photographic format (frame) - suggests a completion or a totality and unity which then has a meaning or tells a story that may well be purely an artifact of the medium itself or a result of the intelligent use of those artifactual qualities to tell a particular story or to cast the information in a certain way.  These are only the barest minimum of everyday photographic practices that radically challenge any assertion of photographic objectivity in actual practice in our everyday life.

            6 Ansel Adams, The Negative, (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1981), p. 2.

            7 Throughout the text a distinction will be made between "the" world i.e., reality as it is in itself, unknowable in its totality, and conceptions or understandings of "the world," which are always "a" world.  "A" world is always partly thematized, the basis for practical action in the world.   It, too, however, is never fully cognicized.   It's "horizon" lies beyond human articulation at any one time.  It is typically that which is "known," or we have command over, and that which exceeds our knowing but still acts as ground of our actions, that we typically refer to as "the" world.  This is not meant necessarily to deny that there is a relation between the two.  However, the extent and nature of that relation is, ipso facto, unknowable. 

            Equally important, when we speak of the similarity between what we see in a photograph and "reality," we must recall that it is not "reality" in itself that we compare to the photograph, but our perception of reality. Regarding our lack of awareness of the interpretive qualities of perception itself see Bruce and Green, 1990; Gadamer, 1986; Wilding, 1983; Merleau-Ponty, 1964.

            8 Gadamer's use of the term "modern aesthetics" is adopted here and refers to western aesthetic traditions which adhere to a conception of aesthetics as an independent field of philosophy whose principal characteristics were first set forth by Kant (see below p. 41).  It should not be confused with the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century movements in art associated with the term modernism.

            *However, see the following works as raising the hermeneutic implications within social scientific fields and thus, bringing into question fundamental assumptions about the primacy of method, the interpretive role of the scholar, the dialogical nature of text-reader and so on:  William Outhwaite, New philosophies of Social  Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1987; Josef Bleicher, The Hermeneutic Imagination: Outline of a Positive Critique of Scientism and Sociology, London: Routledge, 1982; Tullio Maranhao (ed.) The Interpretation of Dialogue, Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago, 1990; Brent D. Slife, Time and Psychological Explanation, Albany: SUNY, 1993; Peter J. McCormick, Modernity, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art, Ithaca: Cornell, 1990; John C. Gilmour, Picturing the World, Albany: SUNY, 1986; Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked, Madison: Univ. of WI, 1989;  Robert Jensen, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogical Understanding, Theory and History of Literature Vol. 68,  Minn, MN: Univ. of  Minn., 1989; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1988; to name only a few.

            9 "Ideology" has a history of varied use and meanings.  Among 20th century authors, some - notably Lenin, Lukacs and (in some writings) Mannheim as well as a range of contemporary writers "from Martin Seliger to Clifford Geertz," (Thompson, 54) have held to a "neutral" definition where ideology refers to a set of ideas or beliefs of a class, society or other group without a sense of illusion . For Marx and Engels, ideology was an "upside-down version of reality," a set of ruling ideas of an epoch which are "`nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.'" (Williams, 155)  For contemporary "critical" conceptions of ideology however, to study ideology "is to study the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination." (Thompson, 56) It is in this sense that the term will be used in this text.   

        10 For an interesting and thorough analysis of this topic see Anthony Saville's The Test of Time: An Essay on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.)

        11 Richard Woodward, “Picture Prefect," Artnews, March, 1988, p. 168.

        12See as well Szarkowski's most recent volume Photography Until Now (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), notably his aesthetically oriented discussion of FSA documentary photography as style, an interesting contrast to Gadamer's depiction of style above.

       13 Misinformation and an ensuing discovery of requirements for both American and English copyright release made the inclusion of this photograph impossible in a timely matter. For a reproduction, see Szarkowski's Looking at Pictures, p. 123.

            14As Gadamer writes:

Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are magically transported for a time.  Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated experiences in the continuity of our own existence. (TM, 2nd rev. ed., p. 97)           

            15On Gadamer's particular understanding of "truth, note the following:

It is necessary to replace the notion of truth as conformity of proposition to a thing, with a more comprehensive notion founded on the concept of Erfahrung, that is, on experience as a modification that the subject undergoes when he encounters something that has real relevance for him. (455)

                  16 For a stimulating discussion of the range of contemporary photographic criticism as well as an intriguing exploration of a fecund typology for critical approaches, see R. B. Lockridge's "Representation Systems of Photographic Critics," in Journal of Communication Inquiry, Summer 90, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 5-24.

     17 For an account of the history of the Frankfurt School, see esp. Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social research, 1923-1950. (Boston: Little Brown, 1973).  For a contemporary perspective on Mass Media research in America from a viewpoint informed by critical theory see Hanno Hardt's Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History and Theory in America. (London: Routledge, 1992.)  Also, a brief introduction is provided by Grossberg (1984) and see Douglas Kellner's "Critical Theory and Ideology Critique," in Ronald Robin's (ed.) The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists: Studies on Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas.   (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 85-123.  Reflections on the nature of ideology, its current status especially in post-modernist, academic circles along with a strong defense of its conceptual value is presented by Terry Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction (1991).  See also Ingram's Critical Theory and Philosophy (1991).

            18 Thompson argues that false consciousness is not a necessary but a nonetheless actual accompanying feature of ideology. Similarly, Stuart Hall argues that such a concept remains implicitly necessary even, for example, in the work of Foucault. In an interview with L. Grossberg (1986), Hall argues:

First, let's take Foucault's argument for the discursive as against the ideological. What Foucault would talk about is the setting in place, through the institutionalization of a discursive regime, of a number of competing regimes of truth and, within these regimes, the operation of power through the practices he calls normalization, regulation and surveillance. Now perhaps it's just a sleight of  hand, but the combination of regime of truth plus normalization/ regulation/surveillance is not all that  far from the notions of dominance in ideology that I'm trying to work with....I don't see how you can retain the notion of  "resistance," as he does, without facing questions about the constitution of dominance in ideology.  Foucault's evasion of the question         is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position precisely because his resistance must be summoned up from nowhere." (48)

REFERENCES AND RELATED READING

Adams, Ansel. Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs. New York: Simon and  Shuster, 1983.

Adams, Ansel. The Negative. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1981.

Adams, Robert. Beauty in Photography: Essays In Defense of Traditional Values. New York:   Aperture, 1981.

Arnheim, Rudolf. "On The Nature of Photography." New Essays on the Psychology of Art.

Berkeley: University of California, 1986, pp. 103-114.

Arnheim, Rudolf.  "Splendor and Misery of the Photographer."  New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of
               California, 1986, pp. 119-122.

Baldwin, Sidney. Poverty and Politics: the Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North
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Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. "The Photographic Message." The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. Tr.
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Bauman, Zygmunt. Hermeneutics and Social Science.  New York: Columbia, 1978.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Photography In Print: Writings from 1816 to The Present.
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Berger, John.  About Looking.  New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Berleant, Arnold. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1991.

Bernstein, Richard J. "From Hermeneutics to Praxis." Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany:
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Bourdieu, Pierre. "Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic."  Analytic Aesthetics.  Ed.  Richard Shusterman.  Oxford:  Basil Blackwell,
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Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Tr. Shaun Whiteside.  Stanford: Stanford  University, 1990.

Boyne, Roy. "Interview with Hans-Georg Gadamer." Theory, Culture and Society. 5 (1988): 25-34.

Burgin, Victor.  “Looking at Photographs.”  Thinking Photography.  Ed. Victor Burgin.  Hampshire and London: MacMillan, 1982.

Chartier, Roger.  "Texts, Printing, Readings." The New  Cultural History.  Ed. Lynn Hunt and Alette Biersack. Berkeley:  University of
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Cottom, Daniel. Text & Culture: The Politics of Interpretation.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.

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Deely, John.  Basics of Semiotics.  Bloomington, IN: Univ. of Indiana, 1990.

Denzen, Norman K. Interpretive Interactionism.  Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol. 16.  Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989.

Dewey, John.  Art as Experience.  NY: Perigree Bks., 1980. (1934)

Dondis, Donia. A.  A Primer of Visual Literacy. MA: MIT, 1973.

Doud, Richard.K (1963) Interview with Roy Stryker. Unpublished transcript, Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution,
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Dreyfus, Hubert L.  Being-in-the-World: a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,

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