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Photography from West to East: Clichéd Image Exchange and Problems of Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
What are the preferred subjects of mass photography? We will not go far wrong if we hazard this reply: the Self and the Other. The popular practice of photography does not much go in for nuance: it has taken as its watchword the distinction between gens de Soi and gens de l'Autre which Robert Jaulin once used as the title of one of his books on ethnology. The self, that is, one's own, those close to one, familial space and the familiar space of identity and recognition. The other, in other words, strangers, the space of distant parts, and the space of displacement where tourism increasingly frequently leads the inhabitants of richer countries. Here, in the first space, one is among one's own kind, “among ourselves”, part of the same family through kinship or part of the same community through lifestyle and nationality; here, connivance rules, the unspoken word and the wink with the photographer who is “one of us”, and so one does not generally hesitate to expose oneself, that is, open up to their lens. There, in the second space, one is in a foreign country, amongst others, whose costumes and customs are photographed; there, the more polite rule of the smile and the presentation of the self for others holds sway, one is more engaged in the process of representation and adopts a pose for the photographer rather than exposing oneself to their lens. The most widely disseminated version of this dual polarity of popular photography is the souvenir photos of the family album, on the one hand, and the holiday photos brought back by tourists from their various excursions abroad, on the other; a version which illustrates one of the most spontaneously practised photographic montages, consisting of having oneself photographed in a distant country against a typical scenic background or emblematic monument of the country visited.
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References
Notes
1. Robert Jaulin (1973), Gens de Soi, gens de l'Autre (Paris, coll. 10/18).
2. Tintin, the famous strip-cartoon character created by Hergé in the 1930s, is another example of this. Remember that this was a case of a young reporter whose investigations always led him to a foreign land which provided an exotic backdrop for adventures in which the colonial spirit vied with the taste for travel. Among many other titles, note Tintin in the Congo (1930); Tintin in America (1931); Tintin in Tibet (1960); all Hergé's books are published by Casterman.
3. Roland Barthes (1980), La chambre claire (Cahiers du cinéma, Paris: Gallimard, Seuil), p. 28.
4. J.-P. Sartre (1943), L'Être et le néant, Le regard, 3. 1. 4 (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 310-64.
5. Michel Foucault has also demonstrated the part played by medical knowledge in the historical establishing of the gaze: see Michel Foucault (1963), Naissance de la clinique (Paris: PUF).
6. From the Latin indigena, literally "what is born in the country"; botanists in particular make a distinction between indigenous and exotic plants.
7. Pierre Clastres (1972), Les Indiens Guayaki (Collection Terre Humaine; Paris: Plon).
8. The title of a big photographic exhibition held in the 1950s and commented upon by Barthes in Mythologies (1957).
9. In French, the word designates the material image of photography and what in poetry and the plastic arts are called "commonplaces", that is, ready-made images.
10. As with the advertisement very familiar to the French proclaiming the merits of a brand of cocoa with the figure of a good-natured African.
11. Pierre Loti (1996), Madame Chrysanthème (Paris: Kailash Éditions), p. 188.
12. André Rouillé (1990), "Japon, observatoire de la photographie", La Recherche photographique 9 (special issue on Japan).
13. On this historic point, see especially Koji Taki (1990), "Analyse d'une photographie politique: portrait de l'empereur", La Recherche photographique 9 (special issue on Japan); (1991), "The setting: nineteenth-century Japan"; "Early photographic techniques and their introduction to Japan", Souvenirs From Japan: Japanese Photography at the Turn of the Century (London: Bamboo Publishing).
14. Pierre Loti (1996), p. 112, refers to the very widespread practice in Nagasaki of sticking a photograph onto a visiting card.
15. First published in instalments in the newspaper, Le Figaro, then in book form in 1887. Puccini took it as the inspiration for his opera, Madame Butterfly. A naval officer, Pierre Loti first stayed in Japan in 1885, then a second time in 1900-1901.
16. Loti (1996), p. 36.
17. See, among other works, the photographs from the Schilling Collection reproduced in, Souvenirs From Japan.
18. See the photographs in the Schilling Collection: Souvenirs From Japan.
19. (1991) Souvenirs From Japan, p. 79.
20. Ibid., p. 14.
21. See Thierry Liot, La maison de Pierre Loti à Rochefort, 1850-1923 (Éditions Patrimoines Média). Although the Japanese pagoda that Loti had rebuilt in his house at Rochefort has disappeared today, one can still see the Turkish interior there.
22. For this point, see Souvenirs From Japan, pp. 21-6.
23. Théodore Duret (1878), Les peintres impressionnistes (Paris: Librarie parisienne). Théodore Duret stayed in Japan from the end of 1871 to the beginning of 1873 when he came to know the country's art; see (1900), Livres et albums illustrés du Japon réunis et catalogues par Théodore Duret (Paris: Editions Leroux).
24. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1952), Race et histoire (Paris: Gonthier/Médiations).
25. An allusion to the slogan, "You dreamed it, Sony did it!"
26. Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987), L'image précaire (Paris: Seuil).
27. Roland Barthes (1980), La chambre claire.
28. Reproduced in part in Souvenirs From Japan.
29. For aspects of Japanese photography since the Second World War, see especially (1990), La recherche photographique 9.