Andreas Broeckmann, Rotterdam

Composite Subjects

Visual imagery is a subjectifying machine. Its percetion effects in the onlooker an 
experience that reaffirms a sense of self, generated in the fold that the image forms in 
its difference from the outside. The cognitive reworking of the image in relation to 
memory and corporeal experience affords the individual with a precarious state of 
disequilibrium between redundancy and difference from which subjecthood emerges.

Photography has been used to this effect from its inception. Fox Talbot's shelves, 
Daguerre's portraits, Fenton's reportage images exploit both the moment of recognition 
and of surprise, offering the viewer a screen for discovering him- or herself as that 
which is being constituted as a recognising, remembering, shocked subject.

The subjectifying force of the photograph is closely connected to its status as an indexical 
sign. It is assumed to form an immediate referent to a reality which has left a material 
trace on plate and print, and which thus brings the viewing subject into close contiguity 
with, as Barthes put it, that which has been. This belief is part of the phenomenology of 
the photograph rather than of its ontology, which means that the materiality of the image 
is secondary to the notions held of its production that co-constitute its meaning.

These observations have important repercussions for an analysis of the epistemological 
shift that might be detected in relation to the replacement of chemically and physically 
based, `analogue' photography, by digitally stored `photographs' and, more dramatically, 
digitally constituted virtual images and environments. My claim would be that there is 
no radical break here, but a reconfiguration of some of the elements that shape the 
related subjectifying processes. As a corporeally based, sensory experience, even the 
immersion into a virtual reality environment can be meaningful and contribute to the 
permutation of consciousness only in so far as it interfaces with the previously 
constituted sense of a material self.

Hearing and seeing, the two sensory experiences which appear to submit most easily to 
digitally simulated stimulation, are in fact disembodied experiences which transmit the 
point of inception of the subjectifying force into a virtual space outside of the body. Pure 
virtuality, however, is impossible both in physical and in digital environments. The 
body remains the shell which functions as the key interface, the sensorial and cognitive 
border at which the subject emerges or, as Zielinski has claimed, the border which 
actually is the subject.

The doubts about the referentiality of images are perhaps as old as images are 
themselves, and they have certainly held an important place in the discourses about 
photography. The belief in the photograph's indexical nature has at every moment of its 
history been complemented by critical views about its materiality, manipulability, its 
constructedness. In fact, this critical attitude towards the medium has in many cases 
informed the very practice of photographers who have used the productive dialectics of 
belief and disbelief to affirm or irritate.

The history of photography is rife with examples that could be drawn on to illustrate the 
present argument. I want to turn to Francis Galton whose application of photography 
underpins the fact that the problem in the usage of photography has often not been the 
truthful mimetic representation of reality, but the production of effective images that 
allow for more or less specific experiences in the viewer. Such experiences have been 
the aim of image production for many centuries, and there is little evidence that the 
basic parameters of the phenomenal force of images has changed, or that images in one 
medium have started to override those of other, earlier media.

The English anthropologist and social scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) may be 
most well-known for being the father of Eugenics, a movement that evolved in the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century when the results of physical anthropological research 
began to play an increasingly important role for devising policies for containing social 
problems. Galton strove to implement strategies for a racial improvement of the 
`superior' European nations like the discouragement of marriages between the 
`degenerate' urban poor, the encouragement of marriage and childbearing among the 
middle classes, or the prevention of `interbreeding' between different classes or races. 
(The concepts of eugenics have been sufficiently discussed elsewhere so that it seems 
unnecessary to repeat the obvious criticisms here, nor to add all the quotation marks and 
qualifications which would appear necessary in a late twentieth-century context.)

In order to visually illustrate his findings about the quality and the possibilities of 
engineering the racial constitution of the nation, Galton developed what he termed 
composite portraiture, a method that was simultaneously discovered by various 
photographers. From 1877 onwards, Galton worked on composite photography which 
provided mixed portraits through the superimposition of images of multiple individuals 
onto the same photographic plate. The result was a slightly blurred and `flat' image 
which, in Galton's words, "represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary 
figure, possessing the average features of any given group of men. These ideal faces have 
a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glances at one of them for the first time, would 
doubt its being the likeness of a living person. Yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it 
is the portrait of a type and not of an individual." (1883: 222)

Composite photography deliberately takes the portrait photograph away from its 
achieved individualising function, methodically turning it into a means of "pictorial 
statistics" which has to serve scientific and analytical purposes, rather than emotive 
ones. "The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being 
subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all photographic productions." (343) 
Galton acknowledges "errors incidental to all photographic productions", highlighting an 
awareness of the limitations of photography which was widespread among scientific 
photographers at the time.

The composite portraits did, however, form a serious aesthetical problem. Neither the 
photographers nor the sitters liked the straight and closely regulated, full face and 
profile images, which alone were appropriate for the composite technique. "In their 
design, the aesthetic and psychological wishes are likely to collide with the requirements 
of scientific usefulness. (...) The result is far from picturesque, and the souls of artistic 
photographers revolt from taking them. These accurate but unseemly portraits are, like 
the finger-prints, made in prisons." (7)

Galton was struggling with the social stigma of a specific type of imagery which was 
associated with notions of social and biological deviance. A fully surveyed society ready 
for strategies of racial improvement, however, was paramount to Galton's project. He 
therefore appealed to a new, eugenicist sense of aesthetic and suggested that families 
should have composite photographs made for decorating the walls of their homes. "The 
result is sure to be artistic in expression and flatteringly handsome, and would be very 
interesting to the members of the family. Young and old, and persons of both sexes can be 
combined into one ideal face. I can well imagine a fashion setting in to have these 
pictures." (362) A fashion though that, as Galton admitted, would not be easy to 
engineer. "I have made several other family portraits, which to my eyes seem great 
successes, but must candidly own that the persons whose portraits are blended together 
seldom seem to care much for the result, except as a curiosity. We are all inclined to 
assert our individuality, and to stand on our own basis, and to object to being mixed up 
indiscriminately with others." (13)

The preconstituted subject as the viewer of his or her own images, as well as the 
photographer as somebody who critically evaluates his own practice, are key players in 
the practical formation of iconic meaning. The recognition of the self in a portrait 
photograph and the conformity of the image production with the professional ethics have 
to be seen as a crucially problematic and productive instance in the imaging process. The 
epistemic force of photography is dependent on the emotive cognitive process which 
images trigger in the observer. In the case of scientific photography as Galton was 
practising it, the very notion of photographic objectivity rested on such parameters of 
subjective experience in that the latter determined the cognitive evidentiality of the 
former.

Galton's synthetic portraits formed semiotic matrices in which the perceiving subjects 
did not recognise themselves, quite the contrary, the latter affirmed their sense of self 
in difference to images that offered more disclaimers than proofs of identity. Thus, even 
synthetic images, whether photographically or digitally derived, can still afford 
subjectifying effects, without predetermining the vector along which the 
subjectification evolves. The spectres of subjectivity will continue to haunt even the 
most artificial of visual spaces as they are offered to the human sensory apparatus.

With regard to the extension of digitally constituted, perceptual spaces, the question 
arises as what we shall recognise ourselves or the world, and what the relationship will 
be between the perceptual arena and that which has preconstituted the perceiving 
subject. Materially determined conditions of image perception, such as the degrees of 
resolution, the altered spatial parameters of reception, and the inherent instability of 
the electronically derived image, suggest that subjectivity itself will change in relation 
to such images, just as much as it changed in the nineteenth century with the emergence 
of what Ulrich Raulff has called the homo photographicus.

The danger that we will all end up in purely virtual environments as `low-res subjects' 
is small. The recent Californian promise of a universal and meta-corporeal community 
of the mind that convenes in the immaterial domains of Cyberspace, human consciousness 
liberated from the constraints of flesh and restrictive social orders, appears as no more 
than an expression of utopian desire which has little reference and no consequence for 
subjectification to unfold its diagrammatic forces. For the practice of making images and 
creating experiential environments, the challenge seems to lie not so much in a 
radicalisation of the disengagement from physical reality, or the virtualisation of that 
which we are, but rather in a critical engagement with the border between virtual and 
actual, between apparition and experience, outside and inside, in short, with the border 
as the heterotopic site at which the subject is constituted in its instability and 
transversality.


Bibliography

John Perry Barlow: A Cyberspace Independence Declaration. (1996) URL: 

Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida. Paris, 1980
Foucault: Andere Räume. (1967) In: K. Barck et al. (eds): Aisthesis. Leipzig, 1990
Galton, Francis: Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London, 1883.
Félix Guattari: Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien, 1994
Raulff, Ulrich: "Image oder Das öffentliche Gesicht." In: D. Kamper, C. Wulff (eds): Das 
Schwinden der Sinne. Frankfurt/M., 1984
Siegfried Zielinski: Revue virtuelle. (1995) URL: 





Rotterdam 1996 (for catalogue Fototriennale Graz)