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CUS0010.1177/1749975520910589Cultural SociologyRay

Article
Cultural Sociology

Social Theory, Photography

2020, Vol. 14(2) 139­–159
© The Author(s) 2020

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Larry Ray
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Abstract
Social theory and photographic aesthetics both engage with issues of representation, realism and
validity, having crossed paths in theoretical and methodological controversies. This discussion
begins with reflections on the realism debate in photography, arguing that beyond the polar
positions of realism and constructivism the photographic image is essentially ambivalent, reflecting
the ways in which it is situated within cultural modernity. The discussion draws critically on
Simmel’s sociology of the visual to elucidate these issues and compares his concept of social forms
and their development with the emergence of the photograph. Several dimensions of ambivalence
are elaborated with reference to the politics and aesthetics socially engaged photography in the
first half of the 20th century. It presents a case for the autonomy of the photographic as a social
form that nonetheless has the potential to point beyond reality to immanent possibilities. The
discussion exemplifies the processes of aesthetic formation with reference to the ‘New Vision’
artwork of László Moholy-Nagy and the social realism of Edith Tudor Hart.

Keywords
Metropolis, New Objectivity, New Vision, photography, realism and constructionism, Simmel

There is a long-running debate over realism and constructivism in photography, which

this discussion revisits through exploration of the interaction between social theory
and photographic aesthetics. Photography and sociology, as Howard Becker (1974)
noted, ‘have approximately the same birth date’ around 1839, when Comte first used
the term (sociology) and Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a
plate. Thus, positivism and the camera, as an instrument of recording the world, ‘grew
up together’ as John Berger put it (Berger, 2013: 81). However, both fields are

Corresponding author:
Larry Ray, University of Kent, Cornwallis, Canterbury, CT2 7NF, UK.
Email: [email protected]
140 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

embroiled in controversies over realism and, it is suggested here, these mirrored each
other at least during the formative interwar period. The politics and aesthetics of these
years are a productive ground for exploring the controversies over representation and
truth, indexicality and symbol, which vacillated between blurred movements of
abstraction and photographic realism. Modernism facilitated a new economy of the
senses in which vision was a medium of recognition but one challenged by forms of
abstraction which claimed to reveal non-representational truth. Martin Jay’s ‘crisis of
faith in optical empiricism’ in modernist culture (Jay, 1993) is echoed in Susan Sontag’s
(1977) critique of photography’s aestheticization of the world as privileging ‘images’
over ‘real things’, at least until she modified her view (Sontag, 2003). The argument
presented is that the issue is less one of vision vs. materiality so much as of the modali-
ties of the aestheticization of modern life and its constitution of the real. Georg
Simmel’s sociology of the visual is used as a vector for this exploration since, as de la
Fuente (2008) argues, his theory is unusual in its intersection of aesthetics and sociol-
ogy and treating aesthetics as generative of deep social phenomena.1 The works of
László Moholy-Nagy, reflecting Bauhaus experimental constructivism, and the social
realist photography of the German and Austrian workers’ photographic movements are
examined as examples of the ways in which contrasting aesthetic styles engaged with
the emerging social forms of cultural modernity. In relation to the latter in particular,
the photography of Edith Tudor Hart illustrates how, despite its aspiration to rigorous
objectivity, and critique of bourgeois aesthetics, this style also contained modernist
ambivalences and a distinctive stylization.

Photographic Representation – Beyond Realism and

Conventionalism
The photograph is ‘one of the most complex and problematic forms of representation’
(Clarke, 1997: 27) and its ambivalence has been noted in photographic theory. Its early
reception revolved around the (apparent) permanence of the image as opposed to the
transitory nature of experience; however, this relationship proved to be complex and
disputed, such that ‘for much of its existence photography has been riven by disagree-
ments about the nature, function and effect of the medium’ (Ainsworth, forthcoming).
Positivistic naturalism regarded the photograph as a mechanical copy of an external
scene requiring minimal human interference, so ‘photography affects us like a phenom-
enon in nature’ and gains its objectivity from its very production process (Bazin,
1960:13). Indeed, subsequent disputes about the truth value of photographic images,
such as that over whether Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ was ‘real’ (i.e. taken at the
moment of death) or was rather staged (a pro-filmic event), are significant in that they
demonstrate the proposition ‘that a photo may count as a lie presumes that it can or
should primarily count as truthful’ (Sekula, 1986). Similarly, truth-claims are central to
photojournalism’s mission, as Suzie Linfield claims, to expose violence, make it visible
and show us ‘a world unfit for habitation’ (Linfield, 2010: 33). In the late 19th century
Jacob Riis’s images were intended as instruments for social change and his How the
Other Half Lives (1971) was an early manifestation of photojournalism that documented
Ray 141

squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. Indeed, the genre of
socially committed realist photography, Peter Hamilton suggests, ‘gave a harder political
and documentary edge to the nouvelle vision, which had been emerging since the mid-
1920s as an antidote to pictorialism’ stimulating the ‘socially-aware photography’ of
Capa, Ronis, Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson (Hamilton, 2018: 15). The truthfulness of
the photograph was a claim central to social documentary, as well as to the photographic
and artistic movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit,2 which is discussed later in this
article.
One approach to this, which Hariman and Lucaites propose, is to regard photography
as doubly defined by its relation to reality and the imagination. Thus, while more or less
accurate and interpretive, and realism ‘has to be the first principle’, this cannot be with-
out imagination, which is an essential dimension of the image (Hariman and Lucaites,
2017: 58). This evokes the idea of photography’s ‘double indexicality’ suggested by
Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson that the photograph points indexically both to its refer-
ent and back to the photographer, thus mediating between the subject and the world
(Kelsey and Stimson, 2008: xi). The optic then has to have some purchase on the event
that a viewer can recognize while deploying a critical imagination that evokes the poten-
tial for social change. However, imagination takes us into realms of fantasy and the
unconscious, ‘the “inner illumination” which is a hallmark of suspicion of the visual’
(Jay, 1993: 108). Photography once promised to fulfil the Enlightenment dream of a
universal language unmediated by symbolic interpretation, but the messy contingency of
the photograph rendered this impossible. To the extent that photographs are ‘effects of
the radiations from the object’, they are indexical signs, whereas if they are symbolic
then they are governed by convention and rules. By the 1920s, aesthetically ambitious
photographers abandoned the painterly imperative and followed divergent paths – some
embraced pictorial rhetoric influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism (e.g. Man Ray) while
others (e.g. Eugène Atget) were closer to realist paradigms.3 In some of the so-called
‘iconic’ images of later decades, such as Nick Ut’s ‘Accidental Napalm’, the composi-
tional effects and aesthetics were important to finding audience reception (Hariman and
Lucaites, 2007: 171–207). However, while photographs under certain circumstances
help alert the public to ‘the truth of what is happening’, the idea of ‘utter truth’ confuses
possible levels of knowing (Berger, 2013: 70–71).
In some circles social realism became suspect and photographic movements such as
the Bauhaus-influenced Neues Sehen (New Vision) followed conventions of abstraction
(Edwards, 2006: 57 ff.), problematizing the idea of the representation of the ‘real’. Even
during the heyday of documentary realism, photography’s innocence was challenged, for
example by Siegfried Kracauer’s opposition to the Neue Sachlichkeit, which he criticized
as having a naive epistemology of ‘documentary illusion’ since, ‘[t]he truth content of
the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that
history has discharged’ (Kracauer, 1995: 55). This is compounded by overloading, since
‘[n]ever before has an age been so informed about itself . . . [but] [t]he assault of this
mass of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing aware-
ness of crucial traits’ (Kracauer, 1995: 58). Indeed, he said, photos ‘gobble up the world’,
creating a memoryless eternal present in which the photo captures a fleeting moment in
a way ‘reminiscent of the state of dreaming [Zustand des Träumens] in which fragments
142 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

of experience of the day confuse’ (Kracauer, 1927).4 Not dissimilarly, for Italian Futurists,
such as Anton Guillo Bragagila, the photograph appeared as a ‘pacification of life’ that
‘arbitrarily stopped time as an immobile representation of something that no longer is’
(Lista, 2001: 22).
Ambivalence and ‘ontological uncertainty’, as Michael Roth put it, arose further from
this tension linked to the way in which the indexical nature changes in relation to images
(Roth, 2009). On the one had there is the idea of the photograph as representing ‘how it
actually was’, as Walter Michaels says, a ‘certificate of presence’ offering the impression
of ‘touching the past’. Yet the photograph is not a ‘fossil’ (that is, a trace and record of
the past) but an ‘intentionally produced object’ (Michaels, 2007: 445). Roth argues fur-
ther that the desire for presence cannot be gratified because perception is ‘always invaded
by memory’ and the ‘photograph points to and accentuates this ambivalence’ (Roth,
2009). Again, Douglas Nickel argues ‘time is not a thing’ and ‘cannot be frozen’ but we
rather impute time to the photograph by interpreting tokens of its passage’ (Nickel,
2017). The photograph is then, according to this view of its ambivalence, the site of a
complex cultural and historical conjuncture that replicates many cultural meanings.
By contrast though, for Walter Benjamin the photograph’s very ‘freezing of time’ can
become a ‘revelatory moment’ (Hamilakis et al., 2009: 290), making its ‘situatedness’
and ‘nowness’ both an inevitable and positive feature, as a commemoration that enables
perception and memory. Similarly, for Barthes, photography is a ‘transparent envelope’
through which one can feel oneself to be in a prior time. ‘The type of consciousness the
photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a conscious-
ness of the being-there of the thing . . . but an awareness of its having-been-there’ and
this could never be repeated existentially but permits ‘that rather terrible thing . . . the
return of the dead’ (Barthes, 2000: 44). This is not so much a political as an affective
relationship though, since the punctum that pricks us is phenomenal and personal. The
photograph also ‘has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intrac-
tably a pipe . . . [it] always carries its referent with itself’ which suggests that the referent
is not external to the image (Barthes, 2000: 5).
Let us look at these controversies in the context of sociological understandings of
cultural modernity, particularly through the lens (so to speak) of Simmel’s sociology of
the visual. This begins by situating the photograph in the process of shock and unintel-
ligibility of the city as represented in sociological and cultural responses to it. Simmel’s
theory of social forms and aestheticization will be used to support the claim that the
image is a product of a process of social formation, that acquires a kind of autonomy, as
Adorno claimed, ‘Art takes on its own autonomous life beyond its maker . . . To make
things of which we do not know what they are’ (Adorno, 1984: 114).

Urban Crisis Of Legibility – Simmel, Social Types and the

Visual
Photography and sociology both explored the metropolis and ‘[b]y the end of the nine-
teenth century,’ says Peter Fritzsch, ‘Berlin provided a most congenial geography for
modernism’s fugitive forms’ (Fritzsch, 1994). This is reflected in Simmel’s classic
essay on the metropolis, described as an ‘ultimate statement’ and ‘ur-text for modernist
Ray 143

studies’ (Bistis, 2005). Simmel’s formulations stand at an important sociological junc-

ture. If ‘[t]he city is not a spatial entity with sociological consequences but a sociologi-
cal entity that is formed spatially’ (Simmel, 1997: 11), then space is filled by sociation
which can be visualized. Photography has a distinctive relationship with the urban
scene and the modern metropolis was photography’s initial cultural location, although
it also had an ‘anthropological’, colonizing gaze.5 Indeed, underlying both was a kind
of double colonizing: on one hand the imperializing and othering gaze of travelogues
(Moser, 2017) and, on the other, urban explorers like Riis discovering ‘exotic’ migrants
in New York (see Carrabine, 2012). In a Franco-German neologism, Benjamin wrote of
the Chockerlebnis, the shock-experience of modernity where we are jostled by street
crowds, the jolt of the machine and mechanized labour (Benjamin, 2003: 318). The
money economy’s establishment of universal equivalence and exchangeability had
enshrined an objective culture of impersonality that encroached on subjective life.
Simmel portrayed this in terms of an overloading of visual stimulation provoking
detachment and a blasé attitude, or what Paul Westheim, editor of Das Kunstblatt, called
‘image-weariness’ (bildermüde) (Westheim, 1932: 20–22).
However, modern life is in continual tension between individuation (saying ‘I’ to
oneself) and being drawn into external forms (Simmel, 1997: 77) the latter generating a
‘visual economy of repetition’ (Shinkle, 2004). The latter generated new representations
of social relationships, illustrated for example by the family album, which Philip Stokes
says is on the one hand ‘intensely boring’, but on the other is ‘one of the more compli-
cated areas of photographic representation’ (Stokes, 1992: 194). These offer a play of
individuality against collectivity, hierarchies, rivalries, marking solidarities and mapping
‘forms of the person’ (Stokes, 1992: 176–177) and as Sandbye (2014) suggests they cre-
ate history and make feelings emerge that might otherwise not be articulated. However,
beyond the realms of intimate relationships, anonymity and impersonality created a con-
sequent ‘crisis of intelligibility’, since ‘what cannot be read threatens’ and this uncer-
tainty called forth new forms of ‘reading’, as Robert Ray (1997) suggests. The search for
recognition in the metropolis had several manifestations. In literature, for example in EA
Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (2015; first published in 1840), an unnamed (hence anony-
mous) narrator ‘reads’ people passing by a coffeehouse window and becomes fascinated
by an unintelligible man whom he follows until exhausted, when he concludes that he is
a ‘type and genius of deep crime’ because of his inscrutability.
The problem of unintelligibility is also illustrated in the popular books on ‘physiog-
nomies’ (Henning, 2018: 110) that constructed social types intended to make urban life
more legible, to classify and stereotype strangers. Genia Katz (2015) sees these as a
response to the city’s perpetual transformation in which the cultural imagination is more
and more difficult to decipher, creating the need for inhabitants to ‘penetrate the myster-
ies of the urban space’ and, as Benjamin suggested, were intended primarily to provide a
simplified and reassuring image of urban reality. These were also a means of quickly
assessing the character of strangers in the dangerous and congested spaces of the 19th-
century city (Sekula, 1986). Edging closer to the photographic, Hans Ostwald’s
Großstadt-Dokumente of Berlin in the early 20th century has been described as having
‘photographic accuracy’ (Huber, 2005) while his preoccupation with marginality finds
echoes in Simmel’s portraits, such as the ‘Vagabond’.6 This style is not so removed from
144 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

that of photographers revealing the underside of the urban scene, such as Brassaï (Gyula
Halász) who stalked Paris, his images featuring night transport, graffiti, lamplighters,
dating couples and sex workers.7 Again, Weegee (Aurthur Fellig) was a voyeur of
extremes working in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1930s and 1940s who fol-
lowed the city’s emergency services, depicting realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury
and murder victims, muggers, traffic accidents.8
Simmel’s sociological style is often compared with Baudelaire’s flâneur, at one with
the novelist, photographer or essayist naturalistically but also voyeuristically recording
city scenes. However, although the visual is important for Simmel, he understood the city
as a sensory experience in which the object is made real by appearing to different senses
(Pyyhtinen, 2010). The ‘interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are character-
ised by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than of the ears’ (Simmel,
1997: 111), but this does not mean that the eye is the mirror of reality since framing and
selecting are unavoidable. Indeed, Simmel’s social form was a conceptual device for
capturing stylized everyday processes of becoming, in which nothing is trivial since
within each passing encounter we find the details of the totality of its meaning, like
Kracauer’s claim that the historical process is determined ‘in the analysis of the insignifi-
cant’ (Frisby, 2013: 6). For Simmel, the eye performed ‘unique sociological service’ and
mutual gaze was ‘the purest reciprocal relationship’ (Simmel, 1997: 111). The social
knowledge gained immediately in the glance requires full engagement in interaction and
openness of the self to the other’s vision. Every act of looking entails at least the expecta-
tion of meaning even if this is not necessarily fulfilled; yet the face is not easily read, may
or may not be revealing, and requires interpretation, as with any pictorial representation.
Moreover, sociability, as de la Fuente notes, ‘enters into a relation to external existence
parallel to the work or art and its relationship to reality’ (2008: 348).
Here we see a potential source of the ambivalence around permanence and fleeting-
ness in the image, since like Simmel’s forms, the photograph is an abstraction from the
formless flow of the lifeforce (Lebenskraft) which ‘[l]eft to itself . . . streams on without
interruption; its restless rhythm opposes the fixed duration of any particular forms
(Gestaltungen)’. Since we inevitably treat others ‘as if’ they were members of a larger
type or class and ‘are all fragments of the type we are’, the other appears as a distortion.
There is necessarily a process of Ergänzung, of supplementing, so that in ‘the picture that
one human gets of another’, fragments (like character traits and motivations) ‘are formed
into a whole by alter’s mental eye . . . of something that we never are wholly’ (Simmel,
1971: 356). This is always unstable though, so ‘[e]ach cultural form, once it is created, is
gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life. As soon as one is fully developed, the next
begins to form; after a struggle that may be long or short, it will inevitably succeed its
predecessor’ (Simmel, 1971: 376). Photographic movements attempted to break free
from the freezing of this flow – for example, Italian Futurism echoed Simmel in invoking
the ideas of Bergson’s lifeforce and Spencer’s principle of differentiation. Moholy-Nagy
saw photography, film and light as potentially making visible modernity’s challenge to
habits of seeing by transforming spatial experience (Tóth, 2015). This was about the
juxtaposition of time, the capturing of movement and change, against freezing images.
Seen in this way, Simmel’s social vignettes, such as the Pauper, the Miser, the
Spendthrift, and most famously the Stranger, were like the physiognomies, attempts to
Ray 145

render more visible the experience of inscrutability, and regain a grasp of a world in flux.
Simmel’s Stranger is within but also outside of their society, a spatial position that offers
insights otherwise unavailable. The sociology of the glance (der Blick) reveals social
structures in a fleeting moment, but the gaze is more than a look – it is a reflection of
those structures that photographers expose (Clarke, 1997: 146). The glance is ephemeral
and fleeting but the photo fixes the glance, rendering it at once constructed and like
social forms, a crystallization of interactions in time and space. Although social types are
described as ‘snapshots’ (Schnappschuß), the gaze fixes the glance in the portrait that has
been carefully constructed and is actually more of a Momentbild, with layers of light,
shadow and colour intensified into atmospheric, momentary images, sometimes verging
towards abstraction.
The photograph, like the look, however, is visual but not transparent. The dominance
of the money economy, as Marx’s ‘bewitched and distorted world’ (Marx, 2016: 894)
was the epitome of objective culture that increasingly eroded subjectivities. Indeed, the
photograph aims to reveal more than is immediately visible, as with Benjamin’s ‘optical
unconscious’, where ‘[i]t is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than to the
eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives
way to a space informed by the unconscious’ (Benjamin, 2015: 91). The photograph
could reveal ‘nearly invisible phenomena’ of repressed optical experience and the image,
like the phantasmagoria of capitalism, bypassed the conscious mind and appealed to the
unconscious. Thus, it was not so much photography’s indexical relationship to material
reality that was crucial but rather its proximity to fantasy and psychic structures of the
imagination (Smith and Sliwinski, 2017: 9). The aesthetic of landscape for example,
does not inhere in ‘nature’ but in the formal categories through which it is constructed
(Simmel, 2007). Photography then conforms to the genre of a ‘mood-image’
(Stimmungsbild) which alludes to an emotional atmosphere rather than providing a real-
istic or critical depiction (Buck-Morss, 1992). Intelligibility had morphed into stylistic
forms.
Simmel (1958) argued that the artistic image was autonomous from utility, and the
photographic image can be seen similarly, despite claims to realism and naturalism. Art’s
depiction of spatial organization differs from ‘real experience’ in that the former consti-
tutes a self-sufficient unity beyond reality and utility, from which an art form is detached.
Neues Sehen involved techniques such as unexpected framings, plays with contrast in
form and light, the use of high and low camera angles. Though sharing with Neue
Sachlichkeit a realist aesthetic, the movement favoured experimentation and the use of
technical means in photographic expression, defamiliarization of urban and rural scenes.9
The fluidity and fleetingness of the world, the experience of fragmentation, speed, traces,
time lapse was represented by increasing abstraction, in photographers such as Alfred
Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray. This transition from realism to abstraction, transpar-
ency and indexicality to illusion, contrasted with the realism of socially engaged photog-
raphers, but this was not necessarily a renunciation of engagement. Simmel (in for
example his essay on Rodin – Simmel, 1980) anticipated in some ways Adorno’s aes-
thetic theory that art that refuses instrumental rationality renders the world visible by
casting it in a different light – one pointing through the aesthetic experience to a radically
other world. As Adorno put it, ‘art criticises society by just being there’ since to lose
146 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

oneself in great works of art is to experience the ‘discomfiture, more precisely a tremor’
of discovery that the truth embodied in the aesthetic has real possibilities (Adorno, 1984:
346–347). For both Simmel and Adorno though, this is not a passive process but rather
requires the creative activity of the beholder to bring the form to fruition, even if for
Simmel this was more a psychological process than one involving public social interac-
tion (Cronan, 2009).10 He says, while the claim

that the enjoyer (der Genießende) repeats in himself the process of creation has some truth –
this cannot be done more energetically than by the imagination having to complete the
incomplete itself and push its productive movement between the work and its end effect in us.
(Simmel, 1902)

Constructivism and photodynamism were responses to the shock and unintelligibility of

the city while also announcing the impossibility of fixed meaning in photo artworks that
were mobile, decontextualized, polysemous and performative. These responses took
various forms. The Austrian photographer Heinrich Kühn conceived of the aesthetic as
an antithesis to the violence of the city and of art photography as a relaxant to calm the
modern subject’s over-agitated sensory systems. His experiments with blur and his pur-
suit of aesthetic autonomy were offered as liberation from the assaults of visual culture
and its ongoing demands on our eyes (Koepnick, 2011). Somewhat by contrast, Moholy-
Nagy’s Bauhaus Constructivism strove to challenge the literal world of surface appear-
ances, the rheme, and use the camera to reveal what is not immediately visible.
Moholy-Nagy saw constructivist art as ‘organizational’ where constructivism overrides
the subjective while also containing the utopian promise to improve human subjects
(Tsai, 2018). In constructivist photos there is a weave of time and space emancipated
from the world of mere appearances (Dant and Gillock, 2002) that aims to both familiar-
ize and defamiliarize. For example, in Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Berlin Radio Tower’ (Figure 1),
itself a symbol of new communication media, there is a play of angles, light and dark,
structure and shadow, and geometric lines of café tables below. The camera angle con-
veys weightlessness, the dematerializing of architecture, and suggests an ability to
become antigravitational, floating above the city. This was a celebration of modern, tech-
nologically mediated vision to break ingrained habits of seeing but which was also
mimetic of the movement of the machine in the imaginary of the image.
Taking these tendencies further, Futurist ‘photodynamism’ (in some ways drawing on
Moholy-Nagy) also attempted to represent the shock of movement in the city while tran-
scending photography’s freezing in time. Futurist photographers regarded the image as a
petrification and negation of sensation, arbitrarily stopping time as an immobile represen-
tation. Mario Bellusi’s project was a transcendental photography of movement, the rejec-
tion of museums and art as ‘communication’ to show the sudden gesture not continuous
movement, using photomontage to create images of urgency and movement – such as
‘Modern Traffic in Ancient Rome’ (1930. See Figure 2). This is described as a ‘visual
vertigo’ that rejects the photographic reproduction of things (Lista, 2001: 27). It creates a
‘photoscene’ through photomontage, overlaying multiple images to create a sense of
movement with no focal point, and which neither conforms to nor endorses the appear-
ances of the world. This image of photographic fragments attempts to debunk the idea of
Ray 147

Figure 1. ‘Berlin Radio Tower’ (1928) by László Moholy-Nagy, Courtesy of the Estate of
László Moholy-Nagy.

‘Rome the Eternal City’ and show instead the streets submerged in traffic, thus demanding
both that the photograph remain ‘faithful’ to the real while also transcending it.

Critical Aesthetics, Engaged Photography – Realism and

Formalism
The discussion now examines the work of constituting visuality within the aesthetics of
social forms and aims to illustrate the ambiguous autonomy of the visual form. However,
while Simmel’s aesthetic was about beauty and play, practical being transformed into
aesthetic stylization, critical imagery might become the ‘site of a terrain for us to make
things visible’ (Hellings, 2014: 4). Eamonn Carrabine notes in relation to photographs of
atrocity and injustice, that ‘human misery should not be reduced to a set of aesthetic
concerns, but is fundamentally bound up with the politics of testimony and memory’
148 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

Figure 2. ‘Moderner Verkehr im alten Rom’ (1930) by Mario Bellusi (Modern Traffic in
Ancient Rome) silver print 154 x 202 mm. Mart, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Somenzi. Catalogue
number: Som.VI.11.18.

(Carrabine, 2012). The aesthetic is then a terrain through which meaning and judgement
are contested and constructed, so that art is distinct from life but reveals its deeper layers.
The photograph is not simply a ‘trace’ or a copy but a social form embedded in cultural
modernity’s shock and movement. Cultural modernity entailed increasing symbolization
and abstraction, towards universalizing sameness, emptiness and anonymity, as opposed
to individualization and differentiation. The visibility/invisibility of the metropolis is
manifest in both socially-committed documentary photography with an aesthetic of
shock (Dant and Gillock, 2002), and abstract styles of detachment and lines of shape and
colour. While there was a fierce conflict between the abstract formalism of Neues Sehen
and political social realism, both implied a utopian vision and echoed modernist cultural
dilemmas. This section will explore these issues through the inter-war workers’ photo-
graphic movement and the work of Edith Tudor Hart, who though more realist than new
vision, aimed to challenge the way the world is perceived and embodied an aesthetic that
transcended utility.
There were intertwined political and aesthetic movements with layers of labour and
contestation involved in the reading of the image, and critical realism in photography
was a style of resistance to the blasé response to the overloading of stimulus. In this too
though, there was a tension between ‘straight photography’ and critique, in that the for-
mer was criticized as celebrating capitalist modernity by simply reproducing it, as in
Bertolt Brecht’s poem, with Neue Sachlichkeit in mind, ‘700 Intellectuals Worship an Oil
Ray 149

Tank’.11 In socially committed photography too though, tensions arose around celebra-
tion of modernity, nostalgic escape into nature, and realism vs. constructivist
abstraction.
Socialist photographic movements aimed to place social conditions under the
‘hard merciless light’ as Ribalta (2011) describes it, of legibility, but while affecting
practical political purpose, image-production also entailed aesthetic formation. The
distinction between rigorous objectivity and constructivist vision then was less clear
than is often suggested. Technological advances and enhanced capacities facilitated
new socialist and communist photo journals, and wider availability of cameras meant
that a working-class hobby could become a weapon. However, socialist photography
also strove to an autonomous social form defining its own aesthetic. The Arbeiter-
Illustrierte-Zeitung12 claimed the camera was an ‘objective observer’, but worker-
contributors were expected to have a ‘trained eye’ to understand complexities of
their material (Stumberger, 2001). Similarly, the Austrian Social Democratic maga-
zine Der Kuckuck, launched to celebrate ‘Red Vienna’ and printing 50,000 copies
weekly, combated the ideology of idyllic genre pictures and captivating landscapes
with documentary lives of the metropolis (Tsai, 2005).13 The journal attempted to
collaborate with its audience and held photographic contests to ‘reflect human life in
all its manifestations’, introducing a contest for ‘worker’s photography’
(Arbeiterphotographie). However, it was the task of the magazine editors to set the
terms of participation, and they regarded the workers as in need of training in photo-
graphic techniques. Siegfried Weyr, the editor of Der Kuckuck, writing in Der
Jugendliche Arbeiter (1931), argued that workers’ photography as a weapon
(Kampfmittel) had ‘not yet been realised’. Political photography is still ‘almost not
at all operating’ and, actually critical of social realism, ‘social photo reportage has
exhausted itself in shots of crippled beggars or miserable wretches searching rubbish
bins’. In relation to three photographs depicting different forms of the dignity of
labour (men shovelling earth into a cart, men and women working on ship and a man
at a lathe) he says that these are ‘technically quite successful’, and one, is beautiful
in showing ‘strong workers, in front of us in the play of sun rays, coping with the
clods.’ However, they look ‘posed’ (gemacht). The political photograph, he contin-
ued, is a social concept fusing images with ideas (Bilder und Ideen) and through
class struggle, the working-class photographer already has his object. This strategy
aimed to construct a new visual aesthetic from lived subjective experience while, as
Satterthwaite (2019) finds in Weimar photomontages, invoking a mythic narrative of
the modern individual who is at home in both the natural world and machine age.
Der Kuckuck’s stylistic sensibility included blurry landscapes, abstract and iconic,
impressionistic images in the manner of Neues Sehen. A photo (‘Halt!’) showing a
rectilinear railway signal and gantry dominant in the foreground, against a back-
ground of snow-covered rail tracks and grey buildings, is described as not only tech-
nically good but also ‘holds in itself the whole charm of the railway industry in spite
of trouble and danger for today’s workers who are indispensable to it’. ‘Realism’
then must be constructed, requires insertion in the relevant discourse where they are
subject to semiotic contestation, meaning-making and power.
150 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

The Social Realism of Edith Tudor Hart

Realist materialism is ambivalently embroiled with aesthetic social forms. The photog-
raphy of Edith Tudor Hart (née Suschitzky, 1908–1973) was influenced both by Bauhaus
and the Austrian worker-photographic schools, and informed by a realist aesthetic and
politics of class, exile and gender. A Communist Party activist (and sometime agent for
the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union, the NKVD14), her work exemplifies the
political programme of social realist photography. She was (what would now be called)
a street photographer of the poor and excluded in the metropolis, and women (and chil-
dren) frequently featured – of the 112 images in the Vienna exhibition catalogue, Shadow
of Tyranny, over a half depict (mostly working-class) women. Duncan Forbes sees in her
work a ‘grasp, perhaps more intuitive than theoretical, of the conditions of photographic
realism’ (Forbes, 2013a: 68). This echoes Barthes, perhaps, that the aesthetic image also
affords encounters not intended, controlled or even acknowledged by the photographer
themselves. ‘The ignition of this aesthetic affordance is always already present in the
things depicted—and brought forward not necessarily because the photographer intended
to do so but because of the photograph’s indiscriminating attentiveness to the surface of
things’ (Barthes, 2000: 49–55). Forbes further sees a social realism in her work that later
became ‘subjectified and mythologized’ in its rediscovery in the 1970s and 1980s when
it was removed from her critique and was placed within a nostalgic and voyeuristic treat-
ment of class relations. (Forbes, 2013b: 144). However, the mix of realism and aesthetics
in her work illustrates a more complex constitution of the process of composition.
In Dessau she was briefly at the Bauhaus school and published in Der Kuckuck, before
her exile in the UK in 1933 (Jungk, 2015). There she became a professional photojour-
nalist whose work was commissioned in publications such as The Listener and Picture
Post.15 Suschitzky’s time at the Bauhaus was important politically and aesthetically and
although she advanced an ethic of ‘revolutionary functionalism’ (Holzer, 2013) her pho-
tography exemplifies mixed aesthetics. Her social realism aimed to demonstrate antago-
nisms of class using techniques such as chiaroscuro, in which the figure-ground motif
(also favoured by Simmel) contrasts with a background pattern, creating both distance
and proximity (Davis, 1973). In her ‘Gee Street’ (Figure 3), the dramatic squalor of the
scene is greatly emphasized by the unusual angle from which the picture has been taken,
which affords a steep aerial vantage point. The scene is accentuated by the diagonal
design, especially that from top left to bottom right which divides the photo into dark and
light – the play of dark walls of the adjacent building against the texture and light of
washing hanging and the illuminated child looking up at the camera. There is the part
diagonal from the upper left to centre of the image dividing the rough brickwork from the
human subjects, so that the eye is drawn to them along the lines of light, while evoking
a sense of imprisonment within the walls that dominate the photo.
Holzer (2013) suggests that the angle of view in Gee Street was a matter of ‘conveni-
ence’ and that while Tudor Hart’s realist aesthetic followed ‘experiments with Neues
Sehen’ this kind of ‘formal gimmickry’ does not play a role in her documentary work.
But this perspective appears in other Tudor-Hart photos, such as Oxford Street (1936)
and Miner’s Cottages (1936), which suggests it is more of a lasting device. Her early
photo of the Vienna Prater Ferris Wheel (1931) that appeared on the front cover of The
Ray 151

Figure 3. ‘Gee Street’, Finsbury, London, by Edith Tudor Hart. Silver gelatine print from
archival negative. National Galleries of Scotland. Archive presented by Wolfgang Suschitzky
2004. © Copyright held jointly by Peter Suschitzky, Julia Donat and Misha Donat.

Listener on 16 May 193416 reflects Bauhaus style – taken from a high angle, lines of the
structure and mechanism divide the scene below into segments – people, cafes, white and
dark, tables and light, similar to Moholny-Nagy’s ‘Berlin Radio Tower’ or Tim Gidal’s
Pont Transbordeur, Marseille (1930).17 As with both of these, the camera is pointed verti-
cally downwards and the image is dominated by iron struts suggesting the domination of
structure and metal over humans. ‘Gee Street’ was often juxtaposed to her image of the
‘Poodle Parlour’ (Figure 4), featuring the indulgence of pets by the wealthy. The overt
message is clear – an indictment of the lavish comfort of pets of the rich contrasted with
squalid slum housing – but the photos reveal subtle differences. In ‘Poodle Parlour’ the
figures turn away from the camera, precluding reciprocity, although it is also a photo of
working women. It is the dog (actually not a poodle but a British Bulldog, perhaps sym-
bolizing the ruling class) that is the focal point of the image. In ‘Gee Street’, which is
almost certainly posed, the faces of children are upturned hopefully, while adults are
looking downwards towards the baby. For Tudor Hart, children represented a utopian
subversive potential of socialization through self-government and mutual discovery – a
152 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

Figure 4. ‘Poodle Parlour’, London by Edith Tudor Hart. Silver gelatine print from archival
negative National Galleries of Scotland. Archive presented by Wolfgang Suschitzky 2004. ©
Copyright held jointly by Peter Suschitzky, Julia Donat and Misha Donat.

society at odds with competitive egoism (Forbes, 2011). Gee Street was published (as
‘London Backyard’) in the widely selling 1939 Odham’s Press collection of The World’s
Best Photographs and the commentary was a powerful statement of social realist
photography:

Such photographs are social documents which it is impossible not to read. They make us aware
of the world around us and what is right and wrong with it, whether we like it or not. If it has
done nothing else, the camera has made the pleading of ignorance – the ostrich-like burying of
our heads in the sands of illusion – a very thin excuse (1939: 19).

This suggests that the photo is a transparent index, and, as Azoulay puts it, ‘magically speaks
to us’ (Azoulay, 2012: 25) but actually, it not only requires a spectator and critical public
(Hariman and Lucaites, 2006 and 2017) but also a performative spectator who looks at and
through the image. This seeing, as suggested earlier, is embedded in the visual culture of the
metropolis and participates in visual techniques and aesthetics of recognition, and it is the
capacity of the visual imagination to ‘see’ what the image might reveal.
Tudor Hart’s ‘Caledonian Market’ (Figure 5), which was first published in Der Kuckuck,
is one of several she took there. This market, by contrast with many others, was colourless
and devoid of romance. It epitomized the bleakness of London’s working-class districts,
the oppression of working-class women, the unemployed, and eccentric figures in a ‘malo-
dorous world’. The image poses not as poetic but as documentary; however, it raises ques-
tions about what we are viewing. There appears to be an argument. Is that anger or just an
Ray 153

Figure 5. ‘Caledonian Market’ by Edith Tudor Hart. Silver gelatine print from archival negative.
National Galleries of Scotland. Archive presented by Wolfgang Suschitzky 2004. © Copyright
held jointly by Peter Suschitzky, Julia Donat and Misha Donat.

odd expression caught in the middle of a lively exchange? The girl looks worried though.
There’s a sense of occasion from how people are dressed. It looks like a mirror initially but
the woman is looking into the next section of the space. The woman and man have eye
contact but the girl looks away. What is her relationship to either of them? The woman has
her arm through the girl’s – a grandmother perhaps?18 There is a woman spectator who is
wearing dark glasses, but spectating whom- the scene, the photographer or the viewer? Is
this a matter of style or is she actually a spectator, since it was common for unsighted peo-
ple to wear dark glasses? The foreground is out of focus and blurred, which is itself a New
Vision technique, but is this intentional and if so, what does it convey? These questions are
not answered; however, the image is not ‘functional’ but rather draws us in to make the
scene intelligible. The image positions the viewer at table height, as a participant or voyeur,
while the focus on the background accentuates the spatial relationships between the three
figures in the centre, defining a narrative plane. This incidentally illustrates Simmel’s con-
ception of the significance of even the most commonplace activities and their contribution
to the emergence of cultural forms, and the unity of nearness and remoteness in every
human relationship. In these photographs the visibility of the metropolis is multi-layered
and mediated by the semiotic work of contestation and interaction.

Conclusions
The debate over realism and constructivism is long-standing and it is suggested here that
Simmel’s sociology of the visual, though seldom referred to, is a powerful means of
154 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

linking social theory to exploration of the ambivalence of the image. The development
of sociology and photography in the period under discussion, in some important ways
mirrored each other and reflected ambivalences of cultural modernism. It has been sug-
gested that aesthetic photographic practices were embedded in issues of intelligibility,
urban shock, rapid movement and social distance. This situates the debates around the
veracity of the photograph in a wider social context since photography was a self-refer-
ential social form, in Simmel’s sense, defined by its aesthetic criteria of application and
social formation. It does not then have ‘revelatory truth’ but rather invites the viewer into
an imaginary visual relationship with the world. No mirror of the object, as some had
hoped, no more than is sociology, but rather a stylized, framed representation fixed in
time, even if this evokes a sense of ‘having-been-there’. However, this presence, the
temporal-freeze quality of the photo, was challenged on several counts. On grounds of
representation, Neues Sehen attempted to capture movement and temporality, for exam-
ple, through techniques such as multiple images and photomontage, or through the light
of inner experience of modernity through the underside of the surface of the visible
world. While with the New Objectivity the referent object was accorded priority, the pure
visuality of the New Vision dematerialized the object, which circulated through the aes-
thetic social form of the photographic. A further challenge to temporal fixing was appar-
ent in critical social realism, for example in workers’ photography, whereby representation
of the real was embedded in a utopian temporality – the implicit critique in the image
presaged a better society of the future. Interpretive meaning was then derived not from a
point in the past but from the future. In the very stylistic formal composition of Edith
Tudor Hart’s images there is an allusion to the possibility of an alternative, saner world
reaching beyond simple visual depiction and rendering her subjects visible in a way that
evokes solidarity. Workers’ photography demanded realism but mediated through aes-
thetic forms, which would connote more than was immediately visible. They sought
images constructed according to formal aesthetic principles that eschewed naïve realism
and reflected the ambivalences of cultural modernity of visible–invisible, blasé–engaged,
utilitarian–playful, subjective–objective. The photograph involves an uncertain mixture
of ‘the real’ in a loose iconic-indexical sense, coded convention, and the performative.
The power of the photograph as document then rests not in its ‘objectivity’ but in the
relationship between referential signs and social-aesthetic forms. Photography is in a
position to reduce or contain the ‘quotation from reality’ (to use Berger’s phrase). Thus
it ‘presents’, ‘represents’ and ‘performs’ in varying mixtures, is more rhetorical than
indexical, but its meanings crucially require interpretative semiotic work and are the
outcomes of contestation.
The discussion here has explored these issues with reference to examples of inter-war
photography. Edith Tudor Hart’s work is particularly important here in that it represents
the realist genre of street photography, that is, of candid, unrehearsed pictures of every-
day life. These generate snapshots of interactions, such as the Caledonian Market, that
offer intriguing narrative potential. These further draw on the ambiguity of the image, its
construction of its subject, and the meanings that derive from its aesthetic form. The
wider implications of this for visual sociology are that one should not assume the image
has a realist status as ‘evidence’ but is rather an imaginative and aesthetic construct pro-
duced through the media of form, light and composition. Thus, the social realist cult of
Ray 155

coldness belied both its aesthetic and the utopian criticism implied in images of inequity
and poverty. The ambiguity of the photograph can be read as capturing Simmel’s una-
voidable ambiguity of social life, into which it potentially offers rich insights. Indexicality
is a complex multi-referential process to be understood hermeneutically.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the following for their thoughtful observations and assistance with this article:
Alan Ainsworth, Maria Diemling, Phil Carney, Hannah Holtschneider, Dawn Lyon, Tim
Strangleman, and Rodanthi Tzanelli. I am also grateful for the comments from the anonymous
reviewers. Thanks are due to Hattula Moholy-Nagy for supplying the image ‘Berlin Radio Tower’
by László Moholy-Nagy; Peter Suschitzky, Julia Donat, Misha Donat and National Galleries of
Scotland for permission to use Edith Tudor Hart’s photographs here and the Museo di Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto for permission to use Mario Bellucci, ‘Moderner
Verkehr im alten Rom’.

Funding
Funding was provided by the University of Kent’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research Fund to pur-
chase copyright permissions for the images used here.

Notes
1. Following the distinction made by Gillian Rose (2014), this discussion is not an account of
the visual, in the sense used in visual research methods, but of how the social renders visuality
a mode of cultural construction of experience. It is further limited to lens-based work rather
than other opticless modes of image capture, such as animation, digital collage, pinhole pho-
tography, pictograms, computational photography and scanography.
2. Influenced particularly by the experience of the First World War, The New Objectivity (also
called ‘Straight Photography’) was ‘to see things the way they are’ (Otto Dix) and advanced
realism in defiance of trends towards abstraction and the subjectivity of early German
Expressionists (Fox, 2006). Sachlichkeit is not so much ‘objectivity’ as ‘thingy-ness’ invok-
ing a materiality beyond literal reproduction, such as Renger-Patzsch’s industrial images.
3. Nonetheless, the ‘documentary’ photography of Atget sometimes brought the surreal out of
the real while remaining indexical, such as ‘Men’s Fashions’ (1925) with multiple reflections
in a Paris men’s clothing shop window.
4. Kracauer saw in film two tendencies – ‘realistic’ (as in the Lumière brothers) and the ‘formative’
(as in Méliès).
5. Lombroso’s positivistic ‘criminal anthropology’ was based on an atlas of photograph-based
engravings, as well as anthropometric investigations (Tagg, 1988). The prisons and police
took up ‘identification’ photography as a way of keeping records. This involves a different
kind of social control than that of ‘power-knowledge’.
6. Ostwald has been described as ‘the literary flâneur whom Walter Benjamin looked for in turn-
of-the-century Berlin but never found’ (Fritzsche, 1994).
7. See for example http://www.artnet.com/artists/brassa%C3%AF/ (accessed 20 April 2020)
8. See for example https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/mar/31/the-best-of-
weegees-new-york-street-photography-in-pictures (accessed 21 March 2020).
9. Despite their different aesthetics the two movements could coexist as for example in Bauhaus
photography. Lucia Moholy’s photography of Bauhaus utensils and furniture gave the object
156 Cultural Sociology 14(2)

priority in line with the New Objectivity, by contrast with Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision con-
structivism. (Schuldenfrei, 2013).
10. Linking Simmel and Adorno is not fanciful but reflects a theme that runs through Lukács and
Bloch since, like them, Simmel hoped that art, as a mode of non-conceptual insight offering
snapshots of reality, might resist reification (Fuchs, 1991) and the overwhelming of represen-
tations prompting a blasé attitude.
11. For example, ‘Du Häßlicher/Du bist der Schönste/Tue uns Gewalt an/Du Sachlicher!’ (‘You
ugly/You are the most beautiful/Do us violence/You factual’) (Knopf, 2001: 144–146).
12. German Communist-supporting photo magazine published between 1924 and 1933 in
Germany and then until 1938 in Paris.
13. Founded in 1929 and affiliated with the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Der Kuckuck was
modelled in content and format on mainstream boulevard weeklies, but directed specifically
at a working-class public. It ceased publication when it was banned by the Austrian fascist
regime in 1934.
14. Her connection to the Cambridge Spies (especially Kim Philby) has attracted much attention,
especially from Jungk (2015) but the focus here is on her photography.
15. She was involved with the CPGB’s Workers’ Film and Photo League but unlike the German
and Austrian journals, this was short-lived. The idea of a British worker photography move-
ment is largely a creation of the 1970s under the influence of new radicalism following Paris
1968 (Forbes, 2011: 206).
16. See https://www.nationalgalleries.org/sites/default/files/styles/ngs-default/public/exter-
nals/46404.jpg?itok=UJBlVz2k (accessed 21 March 2020).
17. See https://www.1stdibs.com/art/photography/black-white-photography/tim-gidal-pont-
transbordeur-marseille/id-a_2632013/ (accessed 21 March 2020). Gidal (1909–1996) was
one of the founders of German photojournalism.
18. I am very grateful for Dawn Lyon’s observations on this photograph.

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Author biography
Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. His research interests include critical
social theory, postcommunism, the sociology of violence, Jewish studies and visual sociology.
Recent publications include Violence and Society (Sage, 2018 second edition), Boundaries,
Identity and Belonging in Modern Judaism (Routledge, 2016, with Maria Diemling) and articles
on Hannah Arendt, Marx at 200, and disputed Holocaust memory in Poland.