American Journalism

ISSN: 0882-1127 (Print) 2326-2486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uamj20

Visual Silences

Kent Brecheen-Kirkton

To cite this article: Kent Brecheen-Kirkton (1991) Visual Silences, American Journalism, 8:1,
27-34, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.1991.10731320

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.1991.10731320

Published online: 24 Jul 2013.

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VISUAL SILENCES
How Photojournalism Covers Reality
with the Facts

Kent Brecheen-Kirkton

THE VAST NUMBER OF IMAGES that can be claimed as part of

the body of work that we now refer to as photojournalism has
been accumulating for well over one hundred years. Photojour-
nalists have pushed into every nook and cranny of the world,
photographing in the most exotic places and the most significant
events. At times it appears that, with so many photojoumalists
at work, there is nothing in the world left unphotographed,
unreported upon. Yet, as we sift through those images that have
reached print, there are indeed significant areas in which photo-
joumalists have remained silent. Why this should be the case is
the subject of this paper.
A variety of frames offer a perspective on photojournalism,
and each offers some insight into the reasons why silences exist
in photojoumalists' depictions of reality. The most productive of
these frames extend from a recognition that photojournalism
exists within the confines of place and technology, and that it is
shap)ed and defined by social and organizational constructs and
goals. They reveal that the silences in photojournalism are the
result of technology, strategy, or epistemology.
Technological dependency and the need for direct access to
events have always restricted photojoumalists, and generated
the most obvious silences in visual reporting. Photographers
must be able to get themselves and their equipment to the scene
of the action and they must have materials sufficiently sensitive Kent Brecheen-
to light to render an image of the event. As equipment has Kirkton is an asso-
ciate professor
become more portable and materials more sensitive to light, the of journalism and
arena of reportage has increased. But because we have so often director of the
been enthralled by the images that photojoumalists produced, Center for Photo-
tournaiism and
we have not become aware of existing silences in visual report- Visual Hbtory
ing until new equipment opened new arenas. at California State

From the historian's perspective though, the silences become University-North-

ridge.
obvious. Even as Oliver Wendell Holmes praised Mathew Brady's
 28 AJ /Winter 1991

photographs as a stark witness to the Civil War and advised that

he "who wishes to know what war is, look at these series of
illustrations," we have come to understand a significant silence
in Brady's coverage of the Civil War.^ Brady and his photogra-
phers were restricted by the wet plate process to photographing
relatively still subjects that were close to his portable darkrooms,
which soldiers called "what's-it wagons." As we examine the
work of the team of photographers collectively known as "Brady,"
we see that they were unable to cover events as they unfolded.^
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What they provided us were portraits of the participants and

views of the aftermath of battles. Yet, in their day, the photo-
graphs were so remarkable that no one was aware of what was
missing.
Though Brady and his team of photographers were working
prior to the advent of modem photojournalism, the example still
holds. The invention of flash powder made it possible for Jacob
Riis to depict the poverty in the tenements of New
York, and the
invention of the halftone made dissemination of those images
economically feasible. The miniature camera in the hands of
Andre Kertesz and Dr. Erich Salomon opened whole new ave-
nues of exploration and led to the "candid camera" approach
that dominates contemporary photojournalism. We only have to
look to the pages of Life magazine for dozens of examples of the
ways in whach technological breakthroughs have made more of
the world visible to the camera. The universe from the depths of
the ocean to the surface of the moon and beyond has become
accessible to photographers. New technology has consistently
opened new areas of visual exploration. However, from a histo-
rian's perspective, we can also see that a lack of that self-same
technology has been responsible for significant silences in visual
reportage.
These silences are not strategic, for they result more from
limitations than from decisions. There are, on the other hand, si-
lences in photojournalism more properly described as strategic.
These are silences that result from the social and organi2»tional
constructs and goals and from the decisions they engender.
Let us consider for a moment the silences generated by an
adherence to the rules of good taste. What is not published in the
name of good taste ranges from the mundane to the socially
significant. I once worked for a publisher who was disgusted by
the sight of armpits and refused to see photos of them published
in his newspaper. Now, this is hardly a significant omission, but
it did lead to some rather boring coverage of basketball, and, in

fact, generated some letters of incredulity from our readers.

1. "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly 12 (April 1869): 11-12.

2. Several photographers, including Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gard-
ner worked for Brady documenting the Qvil War. However, since all of the
photographs were inscribed, "Photo by Brady," he, for years, received credit for
all of the work.
 Brecheen-Kirkton 29

There have been and continue to be some very significant

lapses in coverage of the day's events. One only need compare
the daily fare in Latin American newspapers to those published
in North America to see that violent death and dismemberment
is a common reality that Norteftos are not asked to confront. This
same distaste for graphic depictions of the gruesome aspects of
life has resulted in a sterilized image of war. This sterilization
constitutes, in the mind of many, a serious misrepresentation
that helps to perpetuate a romantic and heroic view of warfare.
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We should also include those other silences that result from

an adherence to good taste and are somewhat less obvious but
p)ossibly more important to our daily conduct and decision
making. Consider, for a moment, what silencing photographers
on the subjects of child abuse or drug abuse, for instance, has
done for the coverage of those subjects. Why would we choose
to restrict coverage to the more abstract realm of words? Why do
we choose to make such behavior more palatable? While the
reasons may vary and some publications may opt for the bolder
course in their coverage, the fact remains that good taste is often
invoked to silence the photojoumalist.
Experience in the newsroom as well as research into the
decision-making processes of editors tells us that one of the most
common reasons for avoiding depictions of gruesome reality is
that publications do not want to offend their readers (or adver-
tisers). This, clearly, is a euphemism for an important institu-
tional goal: to maintain or increase circulation in order to ensure
survival.
Indeed, the survival instinct (which must include an aware-
ness of cost efficiency and the bottom line) is often a factor that
limits visual discourse by restricting independent investiga-
tions. Coverage of the entertainment industry, for example, is
supplied without cost to the press by outside individuals and
institutions. Entertainers and their agents, who clearly have
vested interests, are as often as not the source for photographs
that appear in the entertainment sections of newspapers and
magazines. It is to their advantage to present entertainers and
the industry in a positive light. The publications, in turn, reduce
their production costs by availing themselves of the publicity
stills rather than assigning a photographer to the story. The
result is extraordinarily positive and glamorous, if somewhat
mindless, coverage of tf\e industry. To support this contention,
one only need notice the hew and cry which swirls around the
tabloids and the images produced by their paparazzi. "Legiti-
mate" photographers and publications are as offended by their
work as the entertainment industry and hero-worshiping
members of the public.
The extent to which individuals or institutions have been able
to silence the press in order to forward their own agenda has yet
to be determined. But there are historical examples of institu-
 30 AJ/Winter 1991

tions supplying large numbers of innages at no cost to the press.

Two such efforts involved agencies of the federal government.
The photographs produced by the Farm Security Administra-
tion photographers under the direction of Roy Stryker shaped
our image of the 1930s. That effort was part of a major, well-
funded, public relations campaign designed to garner support
for federal programs initiated by the Roosevelt administration.
Of the thousands of images that Stryker released for publication,
few or none contradict the notion that the people of the nation
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were desperate and that FSA programs were sorely needed.

The second example involves the War Relocation Authority
and the photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. The
WRA, for some unarticulated reason, decided to establish a
visual record of the internment camps. Lange, who had estab-
lished her reputation with the FSA, was among the first photog-
raphers hired by the WRA. Adams was hired a year later by
Ralph Merritt, director of the Manzanar Relocation Center.
As Karen Ohm denwnstrates quite convincingly, Lange's
images created a sympathetic portrait of the Japanese-Ameri-
cans who had been incarcerated.^ Lange left little doubt that she
found the whole situation to be a travesty of justice. Adams, on
the other hand, believed that the quality of a photograph "de-
pended on the photographer's ability to convey the essential
qualities of a subject through an aesthetic representation that
demanded perfect technique, a technique that was 'really more
an attitude than a connmand of apparatus and chemicals.'"* He
created a set of romanticized images that integrated individuals
into the awe-inspiring landscape of the High Sierra, and through
his assiduous application of aesthetic principles he elevated
both the individual and the environment. Adams left viewers
with the impression that the internees were flourishing in con-
finement. In fact, references to confinement were almost non-
existent in his work. Lange's images were effectively suppressed
while Adams's were given wide circulation by government
agencies through the media.
In such cases there is no pernicious attempt to silence photo-
journalists, per se. Those who have learned to take advantage of
the media's limits, supply images gratis in order to advance their
own positions or to dissuade media organizations from sending
photojoumalists to do their own investigation and reporting.
The quality and sheer number of images supplied make it
inefficient and unnecessary for the press to generate their own.
In so doing, the press creates a form of editorial silence, or at least
a partial silence, a silence of opposing views.
I have discussed the ways in which technology and access,

taste, and organizational goals have not only influenced cover-

3.Karen Becker Ohm, "What You See Is What You Get: Dorothea Lange and
Ansel Adams at Manazar," Journalism History 4 (Spring 1977): 14-22, 32.
4. Ohm, "What You See," 22.
 Brecheen-Kirkton 31

age but conversely created silences in visual reporting. Histori-

ans must be aware that these factors effectively determine what
may or will not be covered. There is, however a more pervasive
and significant reason for the silences in visual reporting. It
extends not from a strategy to suppress particular pieces of
information, but from an institutionalized epistemology. Since
its inception, photojournalism (as distinct from other forms of
photography) has incorporated into its language and methods
the tenets of positivism.
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In its strongest form, positivism denies the value of other

approaches by assuming that there is a realm offacts that is separate
from human perception. For the positivists, that realm determines
the one and only correct view that can be taken of reality,
independent of the process or circumstances of viewing. For
photo journalists, this belief is expressed as a quest for objectivity.
As one searches for the intellectual roots of photojournalism, the
language of positivism emerges, though oftentimes in a layper-
son's idiom. Over time, the positi vist perspective has insinuated
itself into the professional ethos and has served the industry
well. We hear it expressed in the connments of some of the earliest
as well as the now most important individuals in photojourna-
lism.
Lewis Hine extended the logical positivism of sociology that
he learned at the University of Chicago to his own photography.
He understood the power of a large collection of images, a large
data base, if you will, to reinforce his findings about child labor.
What Hine understood was that photography was perceived to
be a mechanical means of observing the world of facts, untainted
by human intervention. "The photograph," he said, "has an
added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found
in other forms of illustration. For this reason the average person
believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify." He also
added a disclaimer that recognized that the audience's faith was
generated from an accepted epistemological belief rather than
from a clear understanding of the inherent nature of the photo-
graphic process: "Of course, you and I know that this un-
bounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely
shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photo-
graph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of tiie truth,
to see to it that the camera we depend upon contracts no bad
habits."^
In reflecting on photojoumalism's formative years, Roy
Stryker, director of the historical division of the Farm Security
Administration, saw that epistemology very clearly. He recog-
nized that photography
was the perfect tool for the hardheaded positivism of
5. Lewis Hine, "Social Photography. How the Camera May Help in the Social
Uplift," in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven,
Conn.: Leet's Island Books, 1980), 111
 32 AJ/Winter 1991

the times —a synthesis of artistic and technical effort.

The photograph was a little window opening on
reality: it focussed attention in a sharply defined field
and cut out those elements which might tend to
confuse or unprofitably to broaden the inquiry. Un-
like painting, which was suspect as a part of organic
life and had, in those days, to invoke the science of
optics for public verification of some of its state-
ments, the photograph while dealing with the pro-
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nniscuous data of experience was itself a part of the

neutral and sovereign world of fact.^
The editors at Life magazine, while themselves accepting the
positivist conception of photography, also recognized that they
must commit readers to the same epistemology by directing
their reading of photographic images. Life held that a photo-
graph, unless adequately explained, may mean different things
to different readers depending on what they bring to it. Only
through the proper combination of words and pictures could the
implicit be turned into the explicit.
Sometimes an editor's attempt to treat a photograph as factual
reality may direct readers away from a readily available nonfac-
tual reading. A
most striking example of how the editors at Life
directed readers away from an alternative interpretation in-
volves the exceptional photo essay by W. Eugene Smith, "Span-
ish Village."^ One of the most memorable images in the group
was "The Thread Maker." This image has been described as
being "at once a village woman at work and an image haunting
and eternal as a drawing by Michelangelo of one of the Three
Fates."® Life's caption read: "A peasant woman moistens the
fibers of locally grown flax as she joins them in a long strand
which is spun tight by the spindle, then wrapped around it."'
That caption treats the photograph as a factual rendering of
reality rather than an occasion for aesthetic allusion.
Positivist epistemology continues to be reified within the
profession. Cutlines are written in first person, for instance, to
enhance the idea that the reader is viewing an unmediated
version of reality. The intellectual and political problems created
by such practices have been thoroughly explored by Stuart
Hall.^° For him, it is one of the ways in which newspapers repress
the ideological dimensions of photographs in order to pass them
off as literal visual-transcriptions of the real world.
Another way in which the industry proffers the idea that its
6. Roy Stryker, "Documentary Photography," n.d., Roy Stryker Papers, Photo-
graphic Archives, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky.
7. W. Eugene &nith, "Spanish Village," Lifo, 9 April 1951, 127.

8. Nancy Newhall, Aperture 1 (Spring 1952): 22.

9. Smith, "Spanish Village," 127.
1 0. Stuart Hall, "The Determinations of News Photographs," in The Manufacture

of News. Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media, ed. Stanley Cohen and Jock
Young (London: Constable, 1973).
 .

Brecheen-Kirkton 33

photographs are a direct, unmediated view of that realm of

reality is by controlling style. In news pictures, people are
consistently in focus, clearly identifiable, and almost always
photographed in a situation already defined as newsworthy.
The key figure is nearly always in the middle of the composition,
and the edges of the frame are unconsidered. Subtle or sophisti-
cated compositional techniques are virtually absent from news
pictures as are any other indications that would remind viewers
that the producer of the photograph is a skilled practitioner." In
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other words, the structure of news pictures is more like that of a

snapshot than any of the other forms of photography.
This snapshot ethos masks the role of the photographer in the
production of news photographs. The very naivete of the snap-
shot approach to making photographic images connotes hon-
esty because we assume that the naive are not equipped to be ma-
nipulative. This style of photography is so well established in the
public consciousness that it apf)ears to exist without human
intervention, and, unlike other styles, to be accomplished with-
out artifice or convention. Indeed, it is so common that it seems
"natural." By receding behind the style (working without appar-
ent style), news photographers produce images that have the air
of objectivity about them.
These procedures serve the photographers in much the same
way that the ritualized procedures of the newsroom serve the
reporter.^^ By working within these stylistic limits and by en-
couraging, even training, audiences to accept the implications of
the style, the profession is able to make truth claims, deflect
criticism, and reduce the risks of the trade. Indeed, photographs
are, as often as not, used to lend credence to the written word.
They demonstrate that, "we were there, so you can believe what
we tell you."
Positivist epistimology, then, is very valuable to the industry,
but it also engenders significant limitations or silences. Complex
issues are by their very nature abstract. They do not belong to a
separate realm of facts but are intimately tied to human percep-
tion. They are, thus, unavailable to a photographer whose work
is builtupon the positivist tradition. Scholars working in inter-
national and cross-cultural connmunication, for instance, are
acutely aware of the silences that follow from positivist assump-
tions about photography. Their research consistently draws
attention to the dominance of images that reduce cultures to
scenes of conflict, crime, or cultural celebrations.^'
11 Barbara Rosenblum, Photographers At Work: A Sociology of Photographic Styles
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978).
12. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of News-
men's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77 (Fall 1971):
661-79.
13.For a recent review of this material see Paul Lester and Ron Smith, "African-
American Photo Coverage in Lifo, Newsweek and Time, 1937-1988." Journalism
Quarterly 67 (Spring 1990): 128-36.
 34 AJ /Winter 1991

When we, as historians, confront the images of photojourna-

lism, we must be aware that there will be silences in the record.
Those silences imposed by technology and appeals to good taste
are usually not problematic because they are predictable. We
need only know the limitations of the equipment and materials
available to photographers in the period under study or the ethic
of the day, as the case may be, but the silences brought about by
the idiosyncratic actions of individuals working for news or-
ganizations are a different nutter. Their intrusion is often so
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subtle as to be undetectable on its face. The problem is further

complicated by the fact that for many years newspapers and
other publications of interest to historians did not identify the
sources of photographs. Here, historians must employ those
methods outlined by Richard Lentz elsewhere in this issue in
order to discover what is missing from the record. Such an
investigation should begin with the question, "Is there any
diversity in the depiction of the event under study that would
suggest that the images appear to be the result of an independent
investigation?"
Finally, we must deal with the institutional epistemology that
is the most important determinant of the press's visual report-
age. That epistemology generates the largest and most signifi-
cant silences and, more problematically, engenders an accepn
tance of its products as coverage of issues. In fact, news photos
can only deal with the observable events spawned by issues that
are beyond its pale.
The positivist conception of photography remains by far the
most commonly held one. It is very much in harmony with
Talbot and Daguerre's original conception and with current
usage. It is, in fact, so prevalent a conception that, on one hand,
it seems to need no discussion, and, on the other, it has controlled

and defined our research as effectively as water controls a fish.

For evidence, one needs only to note the plethora of articles over
the last few years that have attempted to explicate the problem
of photography's truth claims.^*
If we are to deal productively with the vast number of images

produced by photojoumalists, we must set aside the received

view of photojournalism and treat it as a culturally derived act
of communication. By treating photographs as products of social
institutions and practices rather than as aspects of reality, we
will enrich and enliven our understanding of those institutions.

14.See for instance Howard Becker, "Do Photographs Tell the Truth?" Afterim-
age 1 (February 1978): 9-13; Joanna Scherer, "You Can't Believe Your Eyes: In-

accuracies in Photographs of North American Indians/' Studies in Visual Anthro-

jmlogy 2 (Fall 1975): 67-79; and Sol Worth, Studying Visual Communication, ed.
Larry Gross (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).