Ceiling as a Sky: On the Strange Meaning of Photographs

Visual Anthropology Diaries #4

 

What is a photograph?

A representation?

A trace?

A code?

A wound?

A terrain of power relations?

A relation?

 

In 2022, I shot on film for the first time. My first roll was taken in Burgas, one of Bulgaria’s largest cities on the Black Sea coast, shaped by maritime labour, the surrounding lakes and the everyday choreography of its harbour. I photographed myself, fishermen, ships and people across streets, carrying the roll around with a mix of excitement and anxiety. With film, you don’t immediately see what you’ve done and there is this productive gap of uncertainty between the act when you capture the ‘moment’ and the result.

When the scans finally arrived, I opened them the way you open a letter you have been waiting for, and slightly afraid of what will be inside. I moved through the frames quickly, with relief and disbelief that there was actually something there, and then I stopped. In one of the photographs, there were two people holding hands along a pier. Above them hangs what I first took for a dense, textured, almost cosmic sky. "Oh my God, this is such a weird, magical photograph", I thought to myself. The perspective made the ground feel like a corridor into unknown space, while ordinary life continues beneath it, like the quiet before a storm....The only problem was that I didn’t remember taking this photograph. At least not like this.

2022, Burgas. The Sky Ceiling

 Looking at it several times closely to understand what is going on, I soon realised this was the Sea Garden bridge were I took a series of photos of people enjoying their afternoon with a nice view of the Black Sea, only the photograph had been taken from the first floor of the constructuon, and the ceiling had slipped into the frame in such a way that it became a sky.

I have come back to that moment in my thoughts often, because it reminded me how strange photographs can be, and are in general. We capture a ‘moment’, but then it returns the world to us reorganised, and I do not mean only by the angle, frame, timing, light or by the camera’s own logic, but also the broader temporal and cultural logic of taking and seeing an image – and through the meanings we deposit into them afterwards. Film makes this especially visible because the delay between the shutter and the scan gives the image time to become strange and slightly autonomous. Not to add, you are no longer the person who pressed the shutter. The moment does not exist anymore, the person who took it does not exist, at least their version of that moment.

I begin this text with this short-lived ontological disturbance with a ceiling that became a sky through the very process of photography, to try to think about broader questions about what a photograph is, what the relationship is between the photograph and ‘reality’, what a photograph means, and where that meaning comes from.  In this week of my Visual Anthro Diaries, I’m thinking about these questions mainly with the help of semiotics, Barthes and MacDougall.

The "photographic paradox”

One of the problems with the ‘meaning’ of photographs becomes visible when we think about the relationship between photography and language, fundamentally characterized by a tension between abstract signs and indexical reality. In semiotic terms, language relies on a system of coded abstraction – a word like tree, for example, does not point to a specific tree, but compresses the concept of ‘a tree’. Photography, on the other hand, at least in early Western thought, has often been imagined and defined by its difference from language, characterized by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida as a "message without a code" – a seemingly objective, unmediated transcript of visual reality (Barthes 1981, Mitchell 1995, p. 281)

And yet, even Barthes cannot sustain the purity of this claim. The assertion that photography is completely free of codes gives rise to what he calls the "photographic paradox": the inescapable coexistence of two overlapping messages within an image (Mitchell, 1995, p. 284). The first is the denoted message (the presumably pure, uncoded analogue of reality), and the second is the connoted message (the cultural code, rhetoric, or the "art" of the photograph) (ibid.). The paradox comes from the realization that even a seemingly pure, denoted photograph never simply points to ‘reality’ and is always structured by connotation, as even the selection of the subject, the framing, the angles, or the lighting all represent a culturally coded ‘writing’ of the image (Mitchell, 1995, p. 284)

Seeing Images

This tension is further complicated by the modes we see and relate ourselves to photographs. Barthes describes two distinct dimensions of viewing. The first is what he calls the studium – the readable, culturally structured dimension of the photograph that evokes a "polite" or general interest (Barthes, n.d., pp. 26-27). It allows the viewer to process the image as a semiotic text based on historical, political, or social contexts, meaning the studium is ultimately always coded (Barthes, n.d., p. 51). In contrast, the punctum is the intensely personal, accidental detail that "shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces" the viewer (Barthes, n.d., p. 26). It is a stray, nameless feature that actively resists being coded or reduced to a linguistic formula. As Barthes notes, the "incapacity to name" is a symptom of this disturbance, demonstrating that the punctum operates in a silent, subjective zone – a private wound that language cannot capture (Barthes, n.d., p. 51).

In other words, while the studium points to the way we read images shaped by the cultural structure, the punctum is the way of seeing shaped by our own previous experiences and personal code. As the “productive gap” between pressing the shutter and later seeing, the punctum can be discovered belatedly, even revised later by memory. As he points, returning to a photograph can even sometimes lead us the realisation the punctum was something else than what we first thought (Barthes, p. 53). Looking back at my sky ceiling photo, the couple holding hands on the Sea Garden bridge, the pier and the everyday choreography around it, was the studium territory of the photograph as culturally familiar scene, where one read it though prefixed senses of social life, place, gesture and atmosphere. But the punctum can make an image leak beyond its borders, so that the photograph begins to generate an outside. Barthes calls this the opening of a “blind field” (pp. 57–59): a sense of life extending beyond the frame, when, for example, the ceiling “slips” into the frame and becomes a cosmic sky, a portal, pushing the photograph away toward a lived, speculative elsewhere.

Images and Power

Of course, it can be argued that such analysis risks turning photographic meaning into private affect that can’t be debated or methodologically reproduced. Furthermore, it can turn interpretation into a kind of aesthetic credential where one fixes on the idea that “I can feel what others can’t” which might sideline some ordinary, social reading practices. And more importantly, Barthes' ideas, although important and useful, lack attention to what photographs “mean” through text and institutional infrastructure. In other words, what remained underanalysed in his ideas it the relationship between power and images, or how meaning is produced by apparatuses and contexts, not mainly by the internal structure of the image or the spectator’s wound.

However, as Mitchell insists, the relation between photography and language is “a principal site of struggle for value and power” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 281). He complicates Barthes’ understanding by asking us to notice the very infrastructures through which photographs circulate, for example though captions that instruct us what we are seeing, layouts that orchestrate sequence and emphasis, editorial frames that assign moral positions, institutional archives that classify, and genres that pre-script what kinds of attention are appropriate.

For example, when I first shared the sky-ceiling photograph on my social media accounts, I leaned into my own punctum-reading of the image through the quiet-before-storm atmosphere imaginary and the sense of an aperture opening above ordinary life, and I captioned it: “What would you do if tomorrow was the end of the world?” In doing so, I was already re-routing it into a recognizable genre of the apocalyptic mood, the invitation to imagine an ending, offering viewers a frame for reading the image. Thus, putting text next to an image, for example in the genre of the photographic essay, becomes a medium where words and pictures either collaborate or resist one another to produce meaning.

Western Anxiety: Image as Illusion, Image as Truth

Understood as a mediated tool used either to construct social status, memory, or power, in these critical conceptualisations, the focus is on the non-indexical relationship between the photograph and ‘real’ world. This semiotic struggle reflects a deeper Western anxiety regarding representation, constantly oscillating between the fear of the image as a deceptive illusion and the reliance on the image as irrefutable proof (Mitchell, 1995, p. 283). The Western tradition often demands that photography function as a tool for ‘revelation and unmasking’, stripping away artifice to find an underlying truth (MacDougall, 2005, p. 169). Barthes insists that the true magic of photography lies in its status as a literal "emanation of past reality" or an unquestionable evidence of existence, while simultaneously admitting that the medium is inherently staged, composed, and culturally fabricated (Mitchell, 1995, p. 306). But what if the image is neither simply a culturally coded sign (studium) nor a private, isolating wound (punctum)?  Or what if it can exist beyond the embedded in power-relations?

Enter Photo Wallahs. “This is not a photograph”

In David MacDougall's documentary The Photo Wallahs we see a more different photographic world and visual culture where the obsession with purity is not central. On Gun Hill in Mussoorie, Indian tourists enthusiastically dress in the elaborate costumes of outlaws, Pathan tribesmen, or Arab sheiks to take pictures, and for them, the purpose of taking a photograph seems not to be to capture a raw, unmediated indexical truth. Instead, we see purposeful staging, a sort of ‘cosplaying’ where the camera is more of a playful instrument of joyous fantasy used to ‘acknowledge and enlarge’ the self. In the very opening scene, we see the artist Bishmber Dutt, who paints life-sized, hyperreal cutouts based on his clients' photographs. However, pointing to his work, he insists that ‘this is not a photograph’, it is rather ‘the product of the mind.’

In this sense, if Western culture was long obsessed with capturing ‘reality’, which is also reflected in the anxiety of Western theory preoccupied with questions about violence, truth and evidence, what we see in Photo Wallas, is a different occupation, one openly theatrical, where the purpose is not to capture the real world, but in fact to create another one. So while watching it, and then during our class discussion, I remember how I asked myself if  this whole conversation about  “truth versus manipulation’ even makes sense here. The image don Gun Hill does not carry this moral burden and how can it when it carries a radically different purpose – here the photo is a stage where you can be whatever you want, at least for this moment. It is a site of becoming.

So if the debate in European theory often wandered around the truth/illusion binary, Indian photographic practices effectively resolve this Western ambivalence toward the image by mimicking the indexical persuasiveness of a photograph without being strictly tethered to its literal evidence. MacDougall highlights how these images function as "signs and mirrors" that can either steal the soul through scientific objectification or expand the self through aesthetic transformation. Furthermore, in his later texts on the 'corporeal image' he writes that Images are encountered through bodies and move through social relations - they are handed to someone, displayed on walls, placed at your home (MacDougall, 2006). So here the idea of the meaning of a photograph is complicated as something that accrues in that circulation and  practices of living-with images.

Thick Photography and the Affective labour behind photography

Similarly, in her work with Yolngu communities’ media practises in Arnhem Land, Jennifer Deger shows that phone-made digital collages are acts of relational world-making wich encode dense layers of ancestral and kinship information (Deger, 2016). She coins the term 'thick photography; to describe how Yolngu use photo-editing apps to cut, paste, and overlay family photographs with digital 'make-up', such as vibrant colors, sparkling lights, and internet graphics. Interestingly, in this world, viual markers such as the color red, diamond patterns, or specific digital graphics like a green frog, function as a vocabulary that locates a person within their specific clan and moiety. Instead of viewing these digital interventions as fake, superficial, or immaterial, Deger argues that this practice creates a profound new kind of social and digital materiality. The mobile phone screen functions as a "membrane of luminous connectivity" that brings disparate family members, ancestral totems, and the deceased together onto a single, glowing surface. More importantly, Deger argues that this digital layering is fundamentally an act of affective labor that challenges Western photographic theory. Beyound the understanding of the photograph as a private, isolating wound like Roland Barthes’s punctum, here we see the application of glowing effects and vibrant colors is designed to incite warwuyun – a culturally specific form of active, focused ‘worrying’ or missing of a separated loved one (Deger, 2016, p. 120). The intense emotion of the image thus becomes a contagious, shared ‘social labour’ intended to comfort and bind the community in the face of profound loss (Deger, 2016, p. 126).

How Do We Read Images?

So what is a photograph? What does it mean? And how do we read it? A trace, yes. A coded object, yes. A wound, sometimes. A relation, always – between photographer and subject, between viewer and image, between an image and the visual culture that trains perception, between a moment and its delayed return. A lesson of the ceiling that became sky is that photographs return the world, and they return it reorganised. And this re-organisation, as much as optical, is also historical, cultural, affective, and power-laden. We look with the habits (or let's say habitus) we have inherited, with desires, theories, though the worlds we come from, though established institutional framings.

This raises a further problem for visual theory itself – how inadequate, and often Eurocentric, some accounts can become when used as a prism for thinking across different visual cultures. Are we already shaped by Western visual assumptions when we look at images? Probably. But Photo Wallahs illustrated how difficult is to treat photography as a medium with a single universal meaning. Because the same technology can work within radically different visual worlds, with different moral economies of truth, artifice, selfhood, and play. In that sense, the question what is an image? may actually be the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. It perhaps would make more sense to ask instead something like: what does an image do in a particular social world? What relations does it activate, what claims does it enable, what forms of personhood does it expand or constrain, what kinds of evidence does it promise, what kinds of feeling does it circulate? And finally: how are we trained by culture, infrastructure, and power to read images?

References

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

MacDougall, D. (2006). The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton University Press.

MacDougall, D., & MacDougall, J. (Directors). (1991). Photo Wallahs [Film].