photography and visuality in the work of Wilfred Thesiger

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Goaman-Dodson, The work of Wilfred Thesiger captures a particular moment. Barthes calls this the punctum, bringing with it the associations of being pierced or wounded by a moment’s resonance. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the so-called Winter Garden photograph, showing his mother as a five-year-old. The image is not reproduced (and may not even exist), since its significance and meaning is entirely personal: I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of a thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, photogeny; but in it, for you no wound. (2009[1980]: 73) Even if we do not accept his interpretation of photographic truth, Barthes nonetheless draws attention to the importance of the photograph as memorial. Photography was for Thesiger above all a personal means of recording the places and people encountered during his journeys, and nowhere is this more evident than in his photo albums, which were put together with a great deal of care in order to create a narrative of each journey. While aesthetic considerations undoubtedly played a major part, I would argue that selection is also based on Thesiger’s personal sense of each photo’s punctum – as in the Winter Garden photograph, perhaps there is ‘no wound’ for us, but we can follow hints in the brief captions written on index cards and the descriptive accounts in his travel books. Indeed, it is the personal photo albums that constitute the most understudied part of the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. They foreground the materiality of the photographs themselves, a fact highlighted by recent studies (Edwards 2010). Though Barthes sees only the referent, I would maintain that it is the almost fetishistic resonance of the photograph itself – the material trace of the ‘desired body’ – that has the ability to wound. Arranged in these albums, the photographs in this most personal context function as what Mike Crang calls a ‘mnemotechnology’, a visual trigger for memory and narrative: ‘they serve both as landmarks of what is significant to the individual and as starting points whereby, no matter how conventionalized they may be, the viewer and owner can weave further stories’ (1997: 368). To return to Barthes’ argument, we cannot and should not speculate on the personal punctum of any given photograph. However, if (unlike Barthes in Camera Lucida) we accept an image’s intertextual link with other narratives and stories, we may be able to attain some sense of the photograph’s mnemonic function. An image in Thesiger’s album may not have a fixed meaning taken on its own, but the published and unpublished narratives built around the image can reveal 91
Goaman-Dodson, The work of Wilfred Thesiger to us something of the photograph’s resonance within personal memory. Conclusion This article has introduced questions of visuality as an important debate in how geographical knowledge is produced and communicated. Indeed, it has become something of a truism that geography is a particularly visual discipline (Rose 2003). In charting the rise of intellectual countermovements to the dominance of vision, I have been concerned with how these debates impact upon the study of visual cultures of exploration. I have used photography as a case study of how these discussions have played out. Images are vital in validating and communicating experiences of travelling and discovering new places, and photography – the ‘pencil of nature’ – soon established itself as the dominant medium because of its apparent truth-value. The camera became an indispensable part of the technological array of the explorer, a way of accurately recording unknown or unfamiliar places. The camera’s aesthetic possibilities were also harnessed, with commercial photographers carrying out expeditions for the primary purpose of producing marketable images of exotic locales. The anti-ocularcentric tenor of much critical theory led many to seize upon photography as the foremost example of a Western gaze that dominates and controls. The camera’s apparently dispassionate ability to merely reflect ‘what really happened’ occludes its active gaze, and makes the photograph’s ability to frame and control all the more insidious. Tagg (1988) drew upon Foucault to argue that the evidential value of photography was only produced by its integration within (often disciplinary) institutions. A Saidian approach has likewise frequently been applied to photographs of travel and exploration, and has been effective in revealing the cultural imperialism on which such images rested. However, there is tendency in this kind of approach to imply that photographic meaning is fixed within the image itself. This is an inversion rather than a challenge to a realist interpretation of photography – the camera always lies. As Pinney (2003) concludes, the very fact that we can read photographs differently, as expressions of imperialism or discipline, for example, suggests that we need a more nuanced and contingent idea of the meaning of images. I have argued in this article that the meaning of a photograph in itself is highly mutable, and is dependent on the context in which it is displayed and consumed. I have used Thesiger’s photographs to outline this argument. A photograph may be displayed in an album, a personal record of memory, a lantern slide, an institutional archive, or as a billboard in the Dubai metro, re- 92
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photography and visuality in the work of Wilfred Thesiger

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