As these formalist ideals of beauty seem, in retrospect, linked to a certain historical mood, optimism about the modern age (the new vision, the new era), so the decline of the standards of photographic purity represented by both Weston and the Bauhaus school has accompanied the moral letdown experienced in recent decades. In the present historical mood of disenchantment one can make less and less sense out of the formalist's notion of timeless beauty. Darker, time-bound models of beauty have become prominent, inspiring a reevaluation of the photography of the past; and, in an apparent revulsion against the Beautiful, recent generations of photographers prefer to show disorder, prefer to distill an anecdote, more often than not a disturbing one, rather than isolate an ultimately reassuring "simplified form" (Weston's phrase). But notwithstanding the declared aims of indiscreet, imposed, often harsh photography to reveal truth, not beauty, photography still beautifies. Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is—beauty. (The beauty of the poor, for example.)
Weston's celebrated photograph of one of his fiercely loved sons, "Torso of Neil," 1925, seems beautiful because of the shapeliness of its subject and because of its bold composition and subtle lighting—a beauty that is the result of skill and taste. Jacob Riis's crude flashlit photographs taken between 1887 and 1890 seem beautiful because of the force of their subject, grimy shapeless New York slum-dwellers of indeterminate age, and because of the Tightness of their "wrong" framing and the blunt contrasts produced by the lack of control over tonal values—a beauty that is the result of amateurism or inadvertence. The evaluation of photographs is always shot through with such aesthetic double standards. Initially judged by the norms of painting, which assume conscious design and the elimination of nonessentials, the distinctive achievements of photographic seeing were until quite recently thought to be identical with the work of that relatively small number of photographers who, through reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera's mechanical nature to meet the standards of art. But it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography's democratizing of the notion of beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere. Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
For photographers there is, finally, no difference—no greater aesthetic advantage—between the effort to embellish the world and the counter-effort to rip off its mask. Even those photographers who disdained retouching their portraits—a mark of honor for ambitious portrait photographers from Nadar on—tended to protect the sitter in certain ways from the camera's too revealing gaze. And one of the typical endeavors of portrait photographers, professionally protective toward famous faces (like Garbo's) which really are ideal, is the search for "real" faces, generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially defenseless, the aged, the insane—people indifferent to (or powerless to protest) the camera's aggressions. Two portraits that Strand did in 1916 of urban casualties, "Blind Woman" and "Man," are among the first results of this search conducted in close-up. In the worst years of the German depression Helmar Lerski made a whole compendium of distressing faces, published under the title Kopfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces) in 1931. The paid models for what Lerski called his "objective character studies"—with their rude revelations of over-enlarged pores, wrinkles, skin blemishes—were out-of-work servants procured from an employment exchange, beggars, street sweepers, vendors, and washerwomen.
The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity between Avedon's fashion photography, which flatters, and the work in which he comes on as The One Who Refuses to Flatter—for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as an art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.
As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing, over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. ("Beauty will be convulsive," Breton wrote, "or it will not be at all.") Even the most compassionate photojournalism is under pressure to satisfy simultaneously two sorts of expectations, those arising from our largely surrealist way of looking at all photographs, and those created by our belief that some photographs give real and important information about the world. The photographs that
W. Eugene Smith took in the late 1960s in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata, most of whose inhabitants are crippled and slowly dying of mercury poisoning, move us because they document a suffering which arouses our indignation—and distance us because they are superb photographs of Agony, conforming to surrealist standards of beauty. Smith's photograph of a dying girl writhing on her mother's lap is a Pieta for the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy; indeed, the whole series of photographs are possible images for Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use—so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.