The document discusses John Tagg's argument that photographs are not neutral representations of truth or reality, but are highly coded and manipulated representations of power. Tagg asserts that the camera wields the power of the institutions and agents that deploy it, not power of its own, and that the photographs it produces stand as authoritative evidence or truth only to the extent guaranteed by those institutions. The document provides examples of photographs like "Migrant Mother" and "Flag Raising on Iwo Jima" to illustrate how photographs can be used to construct and naturalize particular political and social orders rather than objectively documenting history.

1. Tagg, John (1988)
“Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic
Records and the Growth of the State”.

2. The photograph, it seemed, could be:
Manipulated
And as
MANIPULATIVE
as any other form of representation.

3. Foucault
! "There is no power relation without the correlative
constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at
the same time power relations"
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, Random House: New York,
1977.
Power -> Knowledge -> “Truth”

4. ! “Photography as such has as no
identity. Its status as a technology varies
with the power relations which invest it.
Its nature as a practice depends on the
institutions and agents which define it
and set it to work”. (Tagg, 1988: 63)

5. ! “Like the state, the camera is never neutral… The
representations it produces are highly coded, and
the power it wields is not of the camera but the
power of the apparatuses of the local state which
deploy it and guarantee the authority of the
images it constructs to stand as evidence or to
register as truth” (Tagg, 1988: 64).
A machine is only as
truthful as the
hands that guide it…

7. Migrant Mother
By Dorothea Lange, March 1936

8. Susan Sontag, On Photography

9. Fleeing A Dust Storm

10. Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,
Feb 23rd 1945
By Joe Rosenthal

11. Sontag
“bureaucratic cataloguing”
Susan Sontag, On Photography,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New
York, 1977.

12. “Falsify Reality”
! Photographs do not detail history, however
they are to be studied as historical. It is in what
they “do and do not do, in what they
encompass and exclude” (Tagg, 1988: 65) that
establishes them as a subjective truth and
delivers an artificial order of life.

13. Ten years ago, an article in the magazine Whole Earth
Review predicted:
"the end of
photography as
evidence of
anything!"

14. Questions
From My Examples:
Is there a clear-cut definition of documentary
photography verses art photography,
photojournalism, or propaganda?
Does the fact that the FSA (Farm Security
Administration) was constructed as a government
funded program change these images from
documentary photography, art photography, or
photojournalism to propaganda?
Can you think of any other examples where
photographs were used as political propaganda
rather than representing the “truth”?

15. Bibliography
Tagg, John (1988), “Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the
Growth of the State”, in John Tagg (1993) The Burden of Representation: Essays on
Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 60-65.
Batchen, Geoffrey (1977), ‘Epitaph’ in Burning With Desire: The Conception of
Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 206-216.
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography", Penguin, London.
Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York:
Random House.