Laura Wexler, co-Principle Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project, has taught at Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Yale University. She was appointed Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Yale in 2002.
She served as Chair of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 2003-2007. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. Her current research centers on visual representations of the gendered politics of race in the United States and includes forthcoming studies of the writer Kate Chopin and the photographers Diane Arbus and Roman Vishniac. Now Prof. Wexler is a visiting teacher in the PKU-Yale Educational Program lecturing on the course “Photography and Memory”.
Jiang Miao and Huang Yuhan are English majors of Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Huang: Do you see photography as a gateway of researching into social problems like racism and feminism, or is it just significant in itself?
Wexler: Well, it’s a good question. I think the answer is both, it’s significant in itself as an art form and a form of communication, but my interest as a scholar is in how photography is evidence, how to use it as evidence, as document, as material for the writing of history and the understanding of society. That’s who I am as a scholar, so that’s what I’m trying to teach you in different frameworks, for looking at photography as historical work. But I would never say that it isn’t significant in itself, it’s just… that’s not what I’m interested in.
Huang：How do you come up with the idea of coming to China and teaching this course “Photography and Memory”?
Wexler: I always was interested in China, and I never thought I would have an opportunity to come, but Yale University has just started a very special little program and we have ten to eleven Yale students and three or four Yale faculty members to come, so they asked me if I would like to go and I sort of decided.
At Yale I teach a seminar about this. I’ve taught for many years a seminar which first was on “Photography and the Images of the Social Body”, then after 9.11 on the US, I changed the seminar to be about “Photography and Violence”, and look at the ways in which photography produces violence and helps us deal with violence. I’ve taught that for a number of years, and then I’m beginning to work in the field of memory. So I thought I would teach a seminar, which I’m particularly interested in teaching because I want the students to do these very active projects. It’s very hard with forty students in a room and to have them to be very active, that’s why “reading the album” project was so hard for me because I have all these thirty students there. It’s very hard to respond to all. But everybody works so hard and I wanted to respond. My boss wants it to be a lecture, at first I rejected, but he was right—it works wonderfully well as a lecture and allows more people to do it. My other course is a seminar on feminism. I thought it will work this way and they will be interested but they said “oh no, the Chinese students won’t be, and nobody will be interested in feminism”, which is of course absolutely not true at all.
Jiang: Actually, we are also studying feminism. It seems that you are quite sensitive to the changes of the society, especially as you mentioned, you changed the subject of your course after the 9.11 incident.
Wexler: I’m inspired by education that helps the students be part of the life around us and I don’t like to give people work that’s just busy work, I want you to do real work, real projects about real life. I feel very passionate about that and photography lets me teach in that way, because photography is so much about the world and our relationship to the world.
Huang: This is a book written by an American-Chinese photographer, Liu Xiangcheng, who edited the photos covering over 70 years of Chinese history. Similarly, Liu Xiangcheng took a photo of a man holding up a coca cola bottle. We see that the coca cola is a kind of symbol. In those ages, the images are not produced in large quantities and they are pictures of the common people. Does it mean that the photos of ordinary people have to be turned into a symbol in order to be remembered?
Wexler: Interesting. So the regular people can’t become remembered lest they become “the People”. And only “the People” may have a role in history. Maybe.
Jiang: Walter Benjamin values the “aura” in old photos because they were uncopiable. But in “Forget Me Not”, “to repeat sth is to declare it as coded, as sign”, and to codify the photo brings value. Is it the originality of photo or the copiable nature of photo that gives it value?
Wexler: Actually, Benjamin was writing while the Nazis were taking over Europe. Benjamin was a Jew, who fled from the Nazis and he committed suicide on the border, trying to get out of their reach. He is very upset by Fascism. He thought the Fascists were manipulating “aura”, and is writing against “aura”. He’s worried about the big political movements that mystify themselves. And Benjamin is a western Communist. He spent some time in Russia. He is saying what is very important about photography is that it destroys the “aura” of these larger-than-life political figures, and that we can use it against Fascism. That’s what he was interested in.
Jiang: At first I thought it was his nostalgia, but it’s not nostalgia, but a kind of against the reverence of “aura”.
Wexler: Yeah, that’s right. He’s against the reverence that politically can be very dangerous if you just blindly follow a charismatic leader. He thinks that being able to use the photographs to show many points of view of the leader or to diminish him or whatever, allows you to see him as a human and not somebody that you could blindly follow. So Benjamin thought that photography would destroy the “aura”. What we learnt after that is that photography doesn’t, it just put it somewhere else.
Jiang: Speaking of nostalgia, why do some master photographers insist on taking black-and-white photos instead of the color photos, what’s so unique about it?
Wexler: What do you think of it?
J: First I thought it is nostalgia, but later I think that the method itself is a part of the history already. What’s your idea?
Wexler: Yeah. When I studied photography, I was learning black-and-white, but that was in the 60s and 70s. And I think that there’s a quality to the black-and-white image, a quality of detail, a quality of removal. It just removes you a little bit from the distraction of color.
Jiang: The detachment?
Wexler: The detachment, yeah, that I value very much. It used to be that serious photographers didn’t want to use color, but that’s partly because that the color processes were not very good. What has happened since you all have been growing up is that color printing, film and shooting has transformed what it is like to make color images. Instead of being this sort of garish, spectacle that’s laid on to the structure of the world, now people are learning to work with color as an element of the world. I don’t think any longer that division still applies, but for a long time, most of the serious photographers refused to work in color. So it wasn’t for nostalgia, it was because of the incisive questioning of the look of reality was more powerful in black-and-white than it was in color.
Jiang: It’s more powerful. Is it an attempt to differentiate art from commodity, like the copies of Marilyn Monroe?
Wexler: Yeah, that’s interesting; absolutely there is the difference between advertising, which got more and more into color. And serious photography differentiated itself from advertising in that way would be one reason to. But I think that’s all changing.
Jiang: Speaking of changing, the interpretation of photos shifts in the course of history. In your book “Pregnant Pictures”(“Pregnant Woman” as a slip of the tongue), you mentioned that this genre of pictures have turned from an invisible social taboo to cultural icons, such as the nude pregnant Demi Moore on Vanity Fair. Before, these photos have a more significant meaning in helping the women to be self-conscious of their pregnancy. But as the celebrity women strive to imitate Demi and bare their pregnant bodies for the magazines, the photos shift their meaning. Should we protect the original meaning, or should we invite new interpretation? Does it mean that photography is only good at disclosing, but is a failure at constructing meanings?
Wexler: I think that where my own thought leads me is not the only way to see it. So I just want to say it before I say anything further. So it’s not “either…or”, it’s just that I’ve been interested in certain things. Other people would be very skillful talking about the other half. That book is actually not called “Pregnant Woman”, it’s called “Pregnant Pictures”.
The reason why the difference is important is that there is a meaning involved in that which means that the pictures themselves are full of meanings. So it’s not just about women who are pregnant, it’s about the reproductive technology is changing, the way people are forming families, the way people are getting pregnant with assisted reproduction, all of these are technologically very different from what things used to be. Just because most of us do the same old thing in the same old way, our very being is changed by the fact that we can produce pregnancy, we can produce fetuses in Petri Dishes. It’s changed the definition of human being.
When we wrote the book, my coworker Sandra Matthews came to me, and we thought one of the ways to know what the society is thinking is to look at the photographs that the society makes. Sometimes we can’t articulate what something means, what we can show what it means to us. So if we can’t quite yet understand what the social changes of the practice of pregnancy is, maybe our artists and the pictures we are making have something to tell us that we can learn from. So that was the purpose of that book.
That goes along with my whole dedication and my work by using photographs as an analytical instrument and as a way of digging in. So it’s not an “either…or”, and photographs make meaning. I’ve used the quote by Boudrillard for many times on the “simulacra”– a copy for which there is no original. In a word, the images are before the reality. We live in many ways in a world and the images proceeds us and we conform to be the images that we have. You can see this with femininity where you see photographs of what beautiful women are supposed to be like. So we make ourselves as much as we can look quite like those images. The form comes first, then us. The forms in our culture are often visual, in photographs. So the photographs are building our culture and we are filling it in. The photographs are very constructive as to what they produce. They are not innocent, they are not innocuous. They are very, very powerful.
Jiang: Do you think some of the photographers are trying to instill you with morality, the criteria of beauty, etc.?
Wexler: One of the things the photographers must have discovered is your pictures are about something out there, but as you look at the pictures, you learn something about yourselves, right? You learn: “Oh, this is the kind of thing I’m always doing”, “oh, this is something she always sees”, or “I did that again”. In other words, your pictures are as much about you as they are pictures of what’s out there.
Jiang: In this sense, it’s just like leafing through a family album, you see the pictures, and you see yourself. Mirroring.
Wexler: That’s right. What you see out there mirrors someone who sees. I once taught a seminar in which there’s a student who has been a photographer for years and she stopped taking pictures when she realized how much of herself was revealing in the pictures that she was taking.
Jiang: Self-exposure.
Wexler: That’s right. She then realized how much of herself was visible when she thought she was taking pictures of some other things. So I think people have all kinds of intentions. Some people become more and more conscious of how photography works, and these people get to say something. The more you know, the more you are able to have something that you can try to persuade. You can control, you can choose, you line up the sequence, you can display, you can shape this whole process, and you can communicate that way. Other people don’t have that fine sense of it.
Wexler: So about the question of should photography control or should it invent history. I don’t think photography has such power, I think it’s us that give photography the power. You can’t stop things from changing. What interests me is looking at what new is happening and understanding what human desires are behind the things that are happening. You can now take hundreds of digital photos and each one of them is not so precious as the old photos in the Daguerreotype in which there is just one image. It’s true that something is lost, but these hundreds of pictures are showing us our reality in a different way than just the deliberate, purposeful images. I think what’s important is not to stop that, but to understand its uses to make life more humane. If we have that capacity, what can we do with it? You can’t say “don’t do this”.
Jiang: As I remember, the printing business brought the Renaissance.
Wexler: That’s a good way of thinking about it. You weren’t going to stop the Renaissance. It brings many discoveries, including people who couldn’t afford to take the pictures can have them now. I was told that ten years ago I couldn’t come to Beijing and teach this course, because people wouldn’t have such easy access to photos, and it wouldn’t be so normal to be surrounded with pictures. And even now, some people don’t have photographs.
There’s been so much change in Beijing in the past ten years. Would we want to get back? I don’t think so. Do we want to make sure what we are doing? This kinder, fairer, and more humane society, if we can? That’s a task. So a photographer doesn’t have to be conscious of the photos as the old-fashioned way. Susan Mieselas was saying that one great difference is that now the photographers in the field now are shooting digital images and they are editing them right in the field. They are choosing and not even sending rolls of films to the editors of magazine. Then there’s no negative, so there’s no way reconstructing what happened during shooting and no way of constructing the decisions the photographer was making. That’s a huge loss for somebody like me who’s a historian. All of a sudden all the evidences are gone.
Jiang: So it’s all like perfect pictures. No process
Wexler: Exactly. Since I learn from the process, I’m gonna have a lot of trouble in the future figuring out how to learn from these these finished, perfect peeks.
Jiang: It’s just like in the old times, they ask people to pose, in a pretentious way to deliver the reality. It’s like invented reality.
Wexler: Yes, it’s invented in a sense that everything I saw was perfect. So it changes a lot. I’m interested in thinking what we gain and what we lose. I don’t think they are teaching students in Yale the old way of shooting pictures anymore.
Huang/Jiang: Thank you for your time.
Wexler: It’s been a pleasure talking with you two.
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