An essay I wrote for my MA investigating the gaze and how that plays out in Thomas Struth's beguiling photograph...
The primary concern here is not the photograph of Thomas Struth, nor the painting of Gustav Caillebotte, but rather the web of complexities of looking this imagery weaves. Diving deep into Struth’s photograph to first discover the looking of the characters in Caillebotte’s world, one in which looking was central, is where the unpacking will begin. Baron Haussmann’s regeneration of Paris led to the city street becoming a new social space; open to the gaze of the modern man, the flâneur, as he strolled about this new modernity. The gender issue of the place of woman in this new society will also be explored through the work of Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock. Caillebotte’s painting was first looked at in exhibition in the late 1800s, then was not displayed again in public until the 1950s. Social history and Jaques Lacan’s psychology give insight into the significance of looking at Caillebotte in these different worlds. If this crossfire of looks wasn’t complex enough, Thomas Struth’s photograph of two women looking at the painting in situ at the Art Institute of Chicago adds another layer to this already multifaceted looking exchange. Considerations, through the work of Roland Barthes and Hubert Damisch are given in relation to looking at Struth’s image as a photograph, to reveal the interaction of the audience with this artwork.
Diving deep into Struth’s photograph- Looking in Belle Époque Paris.
The Belle Époque is the period from about 1860 to the beginning of the First World War and refers to a France, Paris in particular, occupied by the wealthy bourgeoisie as they attempted to reach to social standing of the aristocracy they aspired to. It reflects the glamour, opulence and greed of a generation who saw the industrial revolution, heyday of the dance hall and the Haussmannisation of Paris. This is however, a ‘romanticised’ view of the period, which was only named so in retrospect, to refer to the Paris in the good old days before the horrors of war.
It was also a world in which social class and adhering to the correct behaviour was paramount. As art historian specializing in this period, T.J. Clark comments ‘what mostly impresses the observer is the sheer density of signals conveyed and understood, and the highly coded nature of the conveyance’. Haussman’s redesign of Paris at this time had made the streets wider, more open and an arena for the visual exchange such as had not been seen before was thus made available. The street was the gateway to all this exhilarating city had to offer; it held the doorsteps of the cafe concerts, the dance halls, the bars, and indeed, the brothels, and was the most important visible space of the new French capital. The city was, according to T. J. Clark in his richly detailed exploration on Impressionist painting, The Painting of Modern Life, ‘something made to be looked at - an image, a pantomime, a panorama’.
The visual treats were not on offer to everybody though, only the gentlemen of the respectable classes were free to feast upon the optical banquet set out. Of all the social symbols, the simple act of looking was a loaded gesture in the Belle Époque. Charles Baudelaire wrote, in 1863, The Painter of Modern Life, which explains the lifestyle of the modern man, the ‘man of the world’ and how he is free to look in modern Paris. He is the flâneur, able to stroll freely about the city, drinking up the atmosphere and looking at the bright new world around him. ‘The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito’. His freedom in looking comes in the sense that this world, for him, was a visual delight with salons and dancehalls geared towards his pleasure. Baudelaire saw the painter as the quintessential flâneur, ‘darting onto his sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago he was directing towards external things’. Janet Wolff criticises the experience of the modern life put forward in this explanation as it excludes women. There is no flâneuse. The experience of the modern as freedom in the city to partake in transient realms of capitalism, socialism and powerful economy, describes the modern experience of men only. Women can, of course, partake of life in the city, but only in the position of ‘the prostitute, the widow, the old lady, the lesbian, the murder victim, and the passing unknown woman’. They are not really free to look as the male flâneur does; they just appear solely as ‘subjects of his gaze’.
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94) was very much a gentleman of this new world and painted, as the modern painter should, subjects from his own direct experience. Paris Street; Rainy Day (fig. 2) with its profound perspective and rigid linear composition reflects the open, carefully negotiated streets of Paris, but in particular, Caillebotte was interested in how people existed in the new Paris available to them. He saw the delicate social interaction and wished to present this in as much detail as the scene it was set in. As Julia Sagraves notes ‘Caillebotte chose to emphasize the sociality emphasised by the wide spaces’ particularly in his representation of the street.
Reconsidering the characters doing the looking in Caillebotte’s painting not only reaffirms the flâneur’s ability to look out openly into the spectacular modernity, it also questions the place of women in modern society. Whether consciously or not, Caillebotte has placed the lady, on the arm of his central male figure, in the tightest of spaces . Whilst he is free to look about his city, his partner is completely boxed in by him to one side, the wall of the building to the other, the umbrella (which the man controls) above and by another gentleman approaching her. Confined, her look is one of obedience towards her partner, leaving her open to the gaze of the approaching male and, indeed, the audience viewing the painting. She is caged in by the dominant male and his dominant looking. When the looking about the glorious city is revaluated in this way, as a powerful tool that gives men dominance over women, it is called ‘the gaze’. Feminist art history, provided here by Griselda Pollock, who claims ‘the flâneur embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic’ shows how looking in the Caillebotte painting not only represents freedom to do so in this visual metropolis, but indicates this was a vantage of men only.
This idea is not new: those living in the Belle Époque were fully aware of the powerful male gaze in the social spaces of Paris. Pierre-August Renoir (1841–1919) shows the myriad of opportunities accessible to the male gaze at the operas of Paris in his 1874 painting La Loge (fig. 3). Gazing out of her box at the opera, occupying a bourgeois social sphere, is the typical Parisian mistress accompanying a gentleman we can just see over her shoulder. She occupies the picture space, but does so passively. She does not meet the eyes of whoever looks at her. The lace neckline invites the male gaze from her face instantly to her chest, which has been decorated with flowers to further throw her to the lions of the male gaze. In the shadows of the arena, just over her shoulder, the attack can be seen from another perspective; the flâneur has his binoculars out and is waiting to pounce. To this, Tamar Garb comments ‘There is in these paintings no confronting gaze - at most we feel a coquettish awareness of being surveyed - there is no command of the space occupied. Rarely have women been more available’. Mary Cassatt’s 1879 response to this piece At The Opera (fig. 3) creates upset in this accepted looking exchange. Her chief figure, in a black mourning dress,
looks from the spectator into the distance in a direction which cuts across the plane of the picture but as the viewer follows her gaze another look is revealed steadfastly fixed on the woman in the foreground. The picture thus juxtaposes two looks, giving priority to that of the woman who is, remarkably, pictured actively looking. She does not return the viewer’s gaze, a convention which confirms the viewer’s right to look and appraise. Instead we find that the viewer outside the picture is evoked by being as it were the mirror image of the man looking in the picture.
In this, Pollock shows how the painting can force the viewer to take up a position which he does not want to in a gallery, completely outside of the social context in which his looking of this sort is accepted. The person staged outside of the painting is drawn into it and becomes part of the web of looking taking place. The woman’s unusual rejection of the male gaze, in her own active looking, trips the viewer up and causes confusion.
There is then a complex interchange of looks, gazes and glances in Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day. Stripped of its social context, can a painting such as Caillebotte’s still have impact upon its audience? In psychological terms what happens when art is looked at in the context of a gallery?
‘And what do audiences see in these vast compositions. They see the gaze of those persons who, when the audiences are not there, deliberate in this hall. Behind the picture, it is their gaze that is there’.
Jacques Lacan’s gaze is not the same as the powerful, erotic male gaze of the flâneur, it is a universal, gender-neutral shard of the human psyche, lurking in all interaction, waiting to catch you out, to trip you up. It is the uneasy feeling that comes from the realisation that you are being watched, as a mere object of the scene, rather than the subject in a starring role. The gaze is uncomfortable because the awareness of being objectified causes one to see oneself being watched from the view of another. ‘The world is all seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic - it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.’ In Lacanian psychology, the gaze begins in infancy with the mirror stage of development, where the infant realises it is a subject that can be seen. Only at this point of first realising you are seeing yourself when placed in front of the mirror, do you become aware of others seeing you. The ego is irreversibly damaged by this awkward feeling, one which reverberates through adulthood at various points of realising you are being watched, by catching yourself watching. ‘[T]he dependence of the visible on that which places us under the eye of the seer... is the pre-existence of a gaze- I see only from one point but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’. Lacan, like many others, believed that this self-referential behaviour continues throughout life so that the person presented is only ever constituted of behaviours they believe others want to see.
Writing in 1902, Charles Cooley presented a similar idea to this of the looking-glass self, the idea that we see ourselves in others, and it is this seeing that causes changes in behaviour.
“Each to each a looking-glass
Reflects the other that doth pass.”
As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. A self idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.
To Lacan however, it is not just the image of the self seen from the perspective of the other which has the self-referential gaze. The painting can also trip up the unconscious; it possesses the gaze. The example of Hans-Holbein’s The Ambassadors (fig. 5) is given by Lacan. On first sight, this image is a traditional portrait of learned men surrounded by the fruits of man’s labours: a globe and a compass representing power and travel, books and a lute showing that these are men of high culture. The rich detail and careful brushwork give this painting a stark realism which draws the viewer in. Then bam! The foreground of the picture is fully apprehended when those before it move slightly to its right. What has gone unnoticed, a smear in the foreground becomes a skull when viewed from the correct angle (fig. 6). The sign of mortality, man’s invincibility as presented in the painting, crashes heavily upon the viewer as they realise their own ‘nothingness in the figure of death’s head’. The subjectivity of the skull gives the picture the gaze. It creeps upon the unsuspecting and catches them out; in a moment, the image stares back and you see yourself seeing. ‘[T]his picture is what any picture is, a trap for the gaze’.
There is something irrevocably lost in the gaze. In all this looking, something slips away when what is sought out is found. The desire to see, to Lacan, the objet petit a. Between the eye and the gaze is desire, the desire to see, which is lost when seeing is achieved. Carol Mavor comments upon this aspect of Lacanian psychology in her own exploration of the senses, Odor di Femina. Here she discusses human action as loss from the body; the body’s waste dripping out. Every gaze that leaves the eye leaves a gaping hole which is filled up by desire. Even desire leaks from the body and is filled up by more desire. This is the objet petit a. In the field of sight, looks leave the body and the gaze is desired as it is lost: ‘desire only creates more desire’. This is how the painting traps our gaze, we desire to see it and so are tripped up when it looks back, a move within which comes the stark realisation of our own objectivity. To Mavor, ‘even when looking at a painting, we too are looked at from all sides, yet we are unaware of who is looking at us and from what point’.
Caillebotte’s painting has the gaze, the gaze to shock and affront its audience. The flâneur attending the Impressionist exhibition in 1876 would recognise the Paris Street portrayed as his own. The academic proportions of the image mean that the street would have extended from canvas almost to gallery floor allowing the viewer to see himself in the street, to exert his male gaze on the woman in the foreground. If he moves too far to the right however, the picture will snare him in its gaze. He is forced into the image to take up the position of the man almost cut from the picture on the far right, the man who is about to crash into the oncoming lady who was previously the site of his own gaze. In this instant, he catches himself looking at her, crashes into her and sees himself tripped up by it. It is an awkward moment of realisation of his very being: it is the painting’s own gaze acting upon him.
What of the audience almost one hundred years later, without the social cues in the painting being recognised? Can the painting still capture them in its gaze? It can, Lacan argues, by allowing them to see the painter through the laying down of their own gaze.
The function of the picture, in relation to the person to whom the painter, literally, offers his picture to be seen- has a relation with the gaze. This relation is not, as it might at first seem, that of being a trap for the gaze. It might be thought that, like the actor, the painter wishes to be looked at. I do not think so. I think there is a relation with the spectator, but that it is more complex. The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, may be summed up thus you want to see? Take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person whom this picture is pretended to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze.
Laying down the gaze, shaking off the image of yourself seeing, doesn’t stop you being aware of being in front of the painting in the gallery space, of being in awe of something original. It was this primal feeling of revering in front of great art that Thomas Struth sought to capture in his series of museum photographs.
Peter Schjeldahl in a review of Struth’s retrospective asks readers of The New Yorker ‘What's the point in looking at big photographs of people looking at big paintings in the Louvre or the Art Institute of Chicago?’
The answer can be found simply by looking at the museum series of photographs by Struth, which capture crowds looking in awe at classic pieces of art. Thomas Struth is a son of the Dussledorf Academy having studied under the direct teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Gerhard Richter; his work took photography from being simply a new technology to the realm of high art. His photographs have no particular continuing theme, rather, they map how Struth changes as a person and what interests him at the time. His major 2002-3 retrospective which toured a range of prominent American galleries showed his range of themes from city streets of New York to intimate family portraits. What these large scale photographic prints do have in common is that ‘his work allows the viewer to look at his or her world- its cities, people, culture and land- anew and in photographs of astonishing insight, of exhilarating seriousness in their commitment to art, nature and humanity.’
Art Institute Chicago II is typical of these museum photographs, capturing two women looking at Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting Paris Street; Rainy Day in the Art Institute, Chicago in 1990. What is most noticeable is the way the two women pictured arrange themselves in a mirror image of the characters in the painting as they negotiate the avenues of the gallery which open up right into the rainy Parisian street. Just as the streets in Paris lead the eye off, the painting is pictured in a position which shows other viewers of other paintings drifting off down other streets of the gallery. Positioned in a gallery looking at others doing as we do is an entirely voyeuristic experience. Being allowed to pore over the intimate relation of others and the painting they view gives Struth’s audience a privileged position in the web of looking which has been explored above. Or at least they do until we consider the medium of photography which allows this position.
Are Struth’s photographs originals or reproductions? Walter Benjamin discusses at length this issue and suggests that loss occurs between the original and any mechanical reproduction of it. ‘One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.’ Barbara E. Savedoff’s enlightening article Looking at Art Through Photographs goes beyond Benjamin’s research to suggest why the original artwork cannot be reproduced in terms of its uniqueness when looked at through photography. She provides the argument that whilst photography has aided the dissemination of artwork, it has replaced aura in the original with a ‘bogus religiosity’ as it suggests that the only value possessed by the original is that of material or monetary value. Savedoff accuses the reproduction of showing the original in a distorted light, from a fixed angle, with a smooth photographic surface and out of situ. ‘What has happened’ she argues, ‘is that photography has changed, perhaps irrevocably, the way we see paintings and sculpture and it is this fact which makes it so difficult to discover and appreciate the unique value of the original.’
Struth’s photograph does however transcend the photographic reproduction of painting. It is an original in its own right, a presentation of the intricate and complex web of looking, as explored in this essay. External to the visual labyrinth within Struth’s photograph is the very materiality of the photograph, the fact that it is also an object to be seen. Perhaps the greatest search to find the essence of the photograph in the twentieth century has been in Roland Barthes’ masterpiece, Camera Lucida. The ideas put forward by Barthes in this piece sheds light on the concerns associated with looking at photographs providing the final strands of understanding to the web of looking.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes was on an epic journey, albeit a seemingly fruitless one, to ‘find’ his recently deceased mother in a pile of old photographs. And as Barthes searches through the pile, the reader becomes irrevocably bound to his journey, his fruitless search. ‘The photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see’ . The photographer himself is irrelevant. What is important is the relationship between the viewer and the subject of the photograph: that which has been ‘shot’. Whether due to his enormous grief when he scripted the piece or otherwise, an immense melancholia shrouds Barthes’ work. The subject has been shot because there is always a connection between image, time and death in photography; what has been captured has gone. Your pocket money has been spent and the photograph is the receipt of the spending it; the experience is gone and the photograph teases you with the image of it. Death is the logical implication of every image, as what went before in the photograph is lost forever in reality. Subjects in photographs will die, only the shadow of their image remains. The photograph can move you back through time; it is the window to a different place.
All photographs have studium, the background of the photograph that gives it reference: the cultural, linguistic, and political information. The twin concept is that of punctum, but punctum is different to studium because it is unique, not just to a particular photograph, but to a particular interaction of a viewer with a particular photograph. It is a violent, bruising force that annihilates itself as a medium and transcends the objectivity of the photograph. For Barthes, this punctum can only exist in photographs, as unlike paintings, they capture an exact moment to show what was undeniably real. When Barthes finally finds the image of his mother, in the winter garden photograph, he is emotionally bruised by the punctum. To prove his point of the uniqueness of this experience between viewer and photograph, he denies us access to a reproduction.
Whilst Barthes’ denial of the skill of the photographer in the success of the photograph could be taken as insult to Struth, in this instance it is of great value to the discussion. One doesn’t have to agree there is punctum in Struth’s photographs: that remains between the viewer and the photographs. However, merely accepting that there could be punctum, shows how this photograph, as with Caillebotte’s painting, is active in the looking. It can look back at you so violently that, as Barthes puts it ‘is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises-me; is poignant to me)’.
Contemporary to Barthes is French historian Hubert Damisch. His short piece Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image, seemingly questions the idea of the photograph’s ability to hurt by playing out the ‘constitutive deception of the photographic image’. Damisch explains that photographs are the paradoxical image. In them you can see what is really there, but in the photograph it is not there: the photograph is just a physiochemical object. To Damisch photography is ‘an incomparable image which makes one dream of a photographic substance distinct from subject matter. The photograph is purely an object, despite what it shows being subjective content it its own right. It is agued here that this inaccessibility presented by Damisch offers a melancholic reading of photography. Denying access to that which it shows presents a longing for something beyond one’s reach. Similar to punctum, this longing can cause upset; it too can bruise.
And so back to the question posed at the start of this essay: what are we seeing in the Struth’s photograph, Art Institue of Chicago II? There is more than meets the eye in this photograph. By peeling back each layer, a comprehensive analysis of looking at art from Belle Époque Paris to the present day has been provided. Looking in Caillebotte’s painting is a fragile web of powerful gazes, whereas looking at this image in the gallery space is a surprising experience which leads to a horrible feeling of self awareness. Looking at looking at the Caillebotte through the lens of Thomas Struth represents a web of interpretation and personal interaction with a piece of art. . And at the core of this intricate web, the active nature of images has been uncovered: they have the power to look back at you, to bruise you, and ultimately, to force you to see yourself looking at them.
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