The ‘other’ Europeans: the semiotic imperative of style in Euro Visions by Magnum Photos

From Humanism to Digitization: Magnum Photos and the Political Economy of Style

Euro Visions was proposed as a travelling art exhibition with multimedia elements, a book and an online archival collection. This project also marked the first collaboration between Magnum and the Centre Pompidou, an historical institution of European modern and contemporary art. These were all novel dimensions for an institution with a particularly well-established identity. As an agency founded by photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson and cooperatively owned by its member photographers, Magnum’s sense of ‘self’ is tied to an authorial conception of photography. The distinctive Magnum Photos style of photography and the agency’s name itself are highly regarded as a top quality brand in the global panorama of professional image-making and, in particular, photojournalism. At the same time, Magnum Photos prides itself on the diversity of its photographers’ individual styles (see Magnum Photos, nd: para 2).

With the advent of television earlier and the internet more recently, Magnum has had to adjust to a number of shifts in the political economy of news- and image-making and distribution. Most notably, there is now a tendency to position Magnum photographers’ work as art, an approach that used to be shunned by the agency’s members at large (Ritchin, 1989: 426). Since the 1980s, Magnum Photos has however experienced ‘the slow emergence of a new mode of postmodernist photography’ (Woodward, 2007: 11), which privileges expression, fragmentation and multiplicity of meaning over assumptions of impartiality and truthfulness. Arguably, Magnum’s increasing openness to ‘postmodernist’, or expressive photography is a self-conscious attempt to frame the work of its photographers in ways that may carry greater symbolic capital in the contemporary marketplace of images (see Bourdieu, 1991).

Historically, Magnum’s approach to photography is rooted in humanism, which established itself as ‘the dominant representational paradigm [sic] of illustrative reportage photography’ in post-war Europe and the United States alike (Hamilton, 1997: 76). Humanist photography ‘affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature’ (Lutz and Collins, 1993: 277) and, for this reason, often focuses on themes such as ‘family, community, comradeship, love, childhood, popular pleasures’ (Hamilton, 1997: 94). While Magnum photographers have been known for heroically documenting sombre events like wars, famines and disasters, the agency’s traditional visual style is grounded in humanistic principles, such as sympathy for a photograph’s subject and the overall celebration of human life.

For example, Robert Capa’s war photography is famously endowed with humanist values, as these are reflected in his sympathetic approach to the portrayal of soldiers in the battlefield. Furthermore, very early in Magnum’s existence, Capa enthusiastically initiated a collaboration with the Ladies’ Home Journal. The illustrated magazine commissioned him and other Magnum photographers to carry out the project People Are People the World Over, a series which showed families from different countries ‘as they went about their quotidian business and engaged in the common preoccupations of humankind’ (Morris, 2002: 114). People Are People the World Over is known as a key forerunner of The Family of Man, the humanist exhibition par excellence curated by Edward Steichen for the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

Another prime example of humanist photography within Magnum Photos can be found in the project that inspired Euro Visions – namely, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Europeans. For this project, which was first published in 1955, Cartier-Bresson travelled across war-torn Europe with the aim of portraying the ‘unquestionable family likeness’ (Clair, 1998: 6) of the countries that had been at war against each other. Through a decidedly humanist lens, The Europeans offered a visual approach to the daily lives of Europe’s dispossessed and working class that foregrounds these subjects’ most flattering expressions and dignified nature.

This is particularly evident in Figure 1, Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of a blue-collar worker on holiday. Compositionally, the main focus of this photograph is on the loving and playful exchange between the portrayed couple, which is carefully contextualized against the visual details of an everyday meal of bread and wine, and the simple surroundings of what is most likely a city park. Paired with the choice of a relaxed, joyful moment, the soft natural lighting contributes to the creation of a feeling of complicity in the viewer as well as a sense that the positive emotions portrayed in this image may be universal rather than specific to the portrayed subjects (see Hamilton, 1997: 101). Additionally, the depth of field situates the subjects in both a time and a place – a picnic in the park – with which any viewer may very well be able to identify.

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Figure 1.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, First paid holidays (France, 936). Courtesy of Magnum Photos.

In addition to being tied to growing anti-war and anti-fascist sentiment, the origin and development of humanism were deeply entrenched within mass culture. Magnum reportages profitably maximized on the popular and populist appeal of humanist images, which ‘could be sold to a mass magazine audience which, if not yet global, was at least very numerous (in its heyday in the late 1940s, each issue of Life was seen by 24 million people)’ (Hamilton, 1997: 144). It is perhaps in part because of its commercial success that humanism has, in most cases, become synonymous with realism and ultimately also good photojournalism.

Since the 1980s, however, the agency has placed increasing ‘emphasis on long-term documentary projects as opposed to daily news’ (Woodward, 2002: 93). Recently, with the controversial inclusion of more conceptual photographers such as Martin Parr, Magnum has decidedly opened up to the notion of documentary photography as art. Combined with the recognition that ‘a substantial amount of Magnum’s income comes from the sale of archived images’ (Murphy, 2007: para 4), this relatively recent acceptance of expressive photography has contributed to Magnum’s increasing reliance on thematic group exhibitions and books. In 2004, Magnum’s New York office hired a new director with the intent ‘to sell more pictures online while cutting costs and the agency’s longtime dependence on selling photos to primarily newspapers and magazines’ (Goldman, 2006: para 5). In recent years, Magnum has systematically worked to digitize the ‘approximately one million photographs in both print and transparency in the physical library’ (Magnum Photos, nd: para 2).

From its beginnings, Magnum Photos has continually changed its strategies for producing and distributing images, while also maintaining its mythological aura as an exclusive group of auteur photographers reporting on the world through a very specific, individual lens. Indeed, that this emphasis on the distinctive style or the ‘author-function’ (see Foucault in Rabinow, 1984) of its photographers is an effective branding strategy is suggested in this statement by Magnum photographer Paul Lowe, as cited in Hamilton (1999: 15):

The only way to survive as an agency is to be individual, to be a group who, like novelists, are authors who create their own view of the world. Corbis, Sygma, Reuters are producing the everyday news image, so what we have to do is be much more discriminating than that, and to say this is what our view of the world is, and if you are interested come with us: if not, and you want a general overview, go with anybody else. But we have to assert that we are authors as much as anything else. We are distinctive, we have our own vision of the world.

Magnum’s emphasis on the personal vision or authorial style of its photographers should be linked not only with the agency’s moral take on photography, but also and foremost with the development of strategies for distinction from other, competing outlets in an oversaturated global market of visual production.

It is in this context that Euro Visions was actively framed as a collection of the personal (and therefore neither didactic nor generalizable) perspectives of the photographers on the countries that they were assigned to document. In the introduction to the book accompanying the exhibition, curators Diane Dufour and Quentin Bajac write:

The rules were simple: rather than an exhaustive portrait of each country, which would have been pointless and unrealistic for an assignment as brief as this one, each photographer was to recount his [sic] experience of being in the country in question, with absolute freedom to explore as he liked. (Euro Visions, 2005: 12)

During the Warsaw press conference, Dufour also reiterated that ‘the project was not meant to draw a realistic or exhaustive picture of each country, it was more about conducting a personal visual experiment of each country’. Later, in her interview with me, she added that with Euro Visions Magnum ‘didn’t want to do something descriptive or illustrative’. Arguably, in the specific case of Euro Visions, this foregrounding of the ‘carte blanche approach’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 12) to portraying the new EU countries was also due to some objective limitations: most of the photographers participating in the project had never been to the countries that they were assigned to photograph, did not speak the local language and were only in the field for a time ranging between two weeks and a month.

In the official discourse surrounding the exhibition, the photographers’ status as outsiders in their assigned countries was elevated to an ‘aesthetic plus’, or an enhanced ability to let each photographer’s unique style or ‘vision’ come through. During the press conference, Dufour stated that the photographers’ status as observers and outsiders was ‘fragile but also provided original insights, more of a macro rather than a micro perspective’. This allowed each photographer to adopt ‘a different distance from the subject’, she continued, and therefore also to ‘go beyond the iconic expected clichés of each country’. Finally, Dufour described the overall result as ‘an implicit rather than explicit portrait’ of the new Europe. Paired with the project’s arrangement as a contemporary art exhibition, Dufour’s use of words emphasizing the relativistic and artistic quality of the exhibition (e.g. ‘original’, ‘different’, ‘implicit’) contributes to situating Euro Visions metadiscursively within those processes of aestheticization that are central to the contemporary global culture industry (Lash and Lury, 2007). I return to a sustained discussion of this point in the final section of this article.

My fieldwork and interviews with some of the photographers involved in the project provided further information on their role as outsiders and their related motivations regarding the choices they made while in the field. At the press conference, Donovan Wylie stated that his goal for the project was to record his ‘impressions of seeing something for the first time, noting how people dress, the colours of buildings, the surface of things’. In his interview with me, he expanded on his positionality as a photographer in different contexts:

In Northern Ireland, when I make work, I am very aware of the limitations of photography, but I know exactly what I am doing, and I know why I am doing it and I can go farther than I would have in Eastern Europe. ²

His work in Estonia was bound to be very different from his own individual projects. Wylie recognized that there were indeed significant constraints in his work for Euro Visions:

So yes, it was about being an outsider, and not having the language … that meant that I only worked with the surface. If I had the language, I think I would have done something very different. I think I would have made pictures that were almost like a diary, because I would have ended up hanging out with people and having a laugh.

Instead, Wylie created photographs of ‘40 Estonians going about their daily business’ (Crampton, 2005: para 11), which he shot from a distance without their being aware of his presence.

When I asked another photographer, Peter Marlow, whether his concept for the exhibition had changed over time, he gave me an answer that was very much in line with Wylie’s reflection:

I had done a project in Italy, in Lombardia, where I had taken people aged 30 and I thought that was an age group that was quite interesting, because they are kind of slightly in between being young and being old and a little bit neglected. So, I did a series of projects and the idea was to continue that idea in Cyprus, but also link it through with audio-interviews, and ask them the basic question about what they saw Cyprus in the future to be. And you know, as often happens with these things, it didn’t quite work out that way and I decided to just abandon that idea, because I was finding travelling around Cyprus just interesting enough in itself.

After I encouraged him to expand a bit on the reasons that led him to change his original concept, Marlow added:

It was also slightly about my attitude towards the people I met. I think when I first went there I didn’t feel very welcome, I felt like the next tourist who was gonna get ripped off.

If he had pursued his original concept, Marlow would have had to engage much more deeply with the locals, with whom he didn’t feel ‘very welcome’. Instead, in a way not dissimilar to Wylie’s, he decided to walk along Cyprus’s Green Line, the divide that cuts the island in two, with the Greek area on one side and the Turkish area on the other. There, he photographed landscapes and abandoned industrial or commercial spaces rather than people. As a way to further reinforce this sense of distance between the photographers and the countries they portrayed, in his interview with me Chris Steele-Perkins reflected on his motivations for photographing Slovakia: ‘I’ve travelled extensively, but I know more about Africa and Afghanistan than I know about Central Europe’. He then added: ‘Mainly it’s just sort of a blank space in my mind. It was an opportunity to fill in a gap, I suppose’.

The generalized status as outsiders experienced by these photographers was framed as a way to enhance their personal vision and therefore also give greater voice to their authorial style, rather than a limitation in the documentary value of their photographs. Martin Parr pointed out, however, that Euro Visions was yet another one of those assignments that allow Magnum photographers to support themselves while pursuing their own projects. With lighthearted cynicism, he added that this is the kind of ‘fabricated, invented exercise, which can generate public and private support’. ³ Therefore, Euro Visions should be seen less as a reflection of these photographers’ artistic vision and more as an attempt to market Magnum images in (highly aestheticized) ways that seem most viable and appealing in the contemporary marketplace.

In addition to changes in the political economy of visual production and distribution, Magnum’s ‘classic’ humanist visual style has become widely adopted by photojournalists and documentary photographers of all sorts. The issue of photojournalism’s changing role is so central to Magnum Photos that it was practically the sole focus of the debate between Magnum photographers and the public following the exhibition’s opening in Warsaw. On that occasion, Marlow commented that there has been an increasing ‘democratization of photography’. Wylie emphasized that nowadays documentary photography is ‘embraced by the art market’ and is ‘seen as sexy’. Along the same lines, during a workshop for Polish photojournalists, Wylie stated that the professional figure of the photojournalist ‘has moved to being more of an author’ in a way that is very similar to making a movie. Undoubtedly, photojournalism has long lost most of its news-making power, and Magnum Photos – an institution that has built its success on the ‘closeness’ and consequent ‘truth-value’ of its photography – has had to significantly redefine its role in relation to the marketplace of images. In light of these shifts in the contemporary marketplace(s) of photographic images and the exhibition’s metadiscursive framing, I now turn to critically examining Euro Visions’ key semiotic resources.

The ‘Other’ Europeans: Euro Visions’ Key Semiotic Resources

As I explained earlier, Euro Visions was influenced by Cartier-Bresson’s humanist project The Europeans. In his interview with me Parr pointed out that, instead, Euro Visions was a ‘mixture of old and new styles’, a combination of humanist and more contemporary or – in Wylie’s terms – authorial approaches. In their introduction to the exhibition’s book, Dufour and Bajac actively compare The Europeans and Euro Visions. What the curators choose to emphasize in the comparison between the two projects, however, is what they frame as an essential dissimilarity. In their words, Euro Visions as a whole is iconic of ‘the gradual disappearance of the humanist ideal that underpinned a particular way of seeing the world and, by extension, a particular conception of photography’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 11).

A humanist approach to documentary photography is characterized by visual resources – such as backgrounding, contextualization, flattering lighting and composition – that convey both a sense of historicity and sympathetic identification with the portrayed subjects (Hamilton, 1997; also, Woodward, 2002). In Euro Visions there are two main ways in which the work included in the project deviates from the humanist paradigm, which has been subjected to extensive criticism for its universalistic rhetoric (see Barthes, 1972[1957]; also Lutz and Collins, 1993) and, over time, has lost some of its cachet in the marketplace of documentary photography. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on ‘analytical’ portraits, which focus extensively on human subjects as ‘types’ rather than individuals engaged in contextualized everyday activities. On the other hand, there is a repeated juxtaposition of indicators of a local culture and economy, and global (especially commercial) processes. As a member of the audience at the Warsaw public debate noted, this juxtaposition often results in portraying the new EU countries as ‘lagging behind’, or conversely completely giving in to the ‘growing standardisation of everyday life extending from dress habits to urban landscapes’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 12). In both cases, a sense of historicity and a sympathetic point of view are replaced with decontextualization, repetition of details (e.g. people’s clothing, demeanour, expression) and overall analytical detachment.

In Euro Visions these deviations from Magnum’s ‘classic’ style were most often framed as an added value in terms of the photographers’ own artistic vision. In addition, the discourse surrounding the project revolved around the changing role of documentary photography and this focus was framed, in Dufour’s own words, as an opportunity to question the ‘efficiency and limits of photography to represent reality’. However, as I demonstrate in the next two sections, the key semiotic resources that are at work in these images are rather generic and, in fact, in line with corporate styles of visual communication. As an outcome, visual content such as any given country’s people and practices is ‘designed’ to come off as starkly other.

This notion of ‘othering’ is rooted in an understanding of identity as a fundamentally relational construct, and of visual communication as a power-laden site for the textual (re)production of identities (see Said, 1979; Hall, 1997). As Stuart Hall (2003: 37) states, the visual imagination of Europe’s ‘liminal edge’ is also and foremost a way to consolidate an understanding of Europe’s centre and unity. In the particular case of Euro Visions, it must be noted that these images of the ‘new’ Europeans were taken by a group of Western European, and for the most part British photographers with very little or no previous first-hand knowledge of the cultures and societies that they were commissioned to portray.

Moreover, while the exhibition was shown to the inevitably limited audience of few ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ European locations alike, Euro Visions images are globally available through the commercial outlet of Magnum’s online archive. Finally, Magnum Photos is an authoritative, global(ist) institution of visual communication with headquarters and creative roots in centres of symbolic and economic power such as London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Hence, the images included in Euro Visions may be a site for the communication of the ‘new’ Europeans as significantly different, or ‘other’, through some of the same ‘understandings or strategies for describing human differences’ which ‘have helped create and reproduce social hierarchies’ via mediated communication (Lutz and Collins, 1993: 3).

To understand how these images may work to other the new EU members through given semiotic resources, it is useful to make an analytical distinction between the visual ‘content’ and the visual ‘treatment’ of an image. As Floch (2000[1995]: 18–19) explains:

A particular visual treatment can constitute a definite secondary system of elaboration by taking particular content units and reorganizing them to produce new associations and, hence, a new meaning [signification]; a meaning, moreover, that is more profound than that afforded by their representational (or figurative) aspect alone.

In other words, representation may be equated with the people, objects and settings included in an image, whereas the ‘visual treatment’, ‘feel’ or ‘look’ of an image may be defined more specifically as design (Aiello and Thurlow, 2006).

From an analytical standpoint, then, representational resources ⁴ are more properly related to the ‘raw’ material or the ‘primary or natural subject matter’ (Panofsky, 1970: 53) of visual communication, and design resources are the more abstract principles used to ‘arrange’ or style a given set of representational resources (Aiello, 2007). In Euro Visions, there are semiotic resources that are tied to the realm of ‘representation’ and that are highly specific, as they pertain to particular characteristics of the people and places portrayed. These representational resources are however ‘designed’ through semiotic resources, such as typing and juxtaposition, that contribute to decontextualizing while also foregrounding specific traits. I return to a discussion of the critical implications of this dialectic between (specific) representational resources and (generic) design resources in the final section of this article. In the next two sections, I offer a detailed analysis of both typing and juxtaposition in light of this analytical distinction and relationship between representational and design resources.

Typing

In his work on representation, Stuart Hall (1997) refers to the distinction between types and stereotypes as a device to examine images of black people across historical times and cultures. A type is ‘any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded’ (Dyer, 1977, as cited in Hall, 1997: 257). On the other hand – and on the basis of types – stereotypes go a bit further, as they ‘get hold of the few “simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized” characteristics about a person, reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them, and fix them without change or development to eternity’ (Hall, 1997: 258, emphases in original). Across Euro Visions, there is a tendency to present series of ‘postmodernist’ – rather than more properly humanist – portraits which appear to catalogue and organize subjects according to key ‘traits’ or attributes. These attributes are foregrounded and made generic in the process of stylization and repetition of similar images. As a key semiotic resource, this approach to portraiture may be best defined as typing. In typing, there is no significant degree of exaggeration or even simplification of the traits that are foregrounded. What is significantly simplified and overall stylized are other aspects of the image, or ‘connotators’ like background, depth, light and settings (Barthes, 1977[1961]) so as to foreground characteristics that seem worthy of scrutiny and cataloguing. Obviously, typing is in no way an innocent practice, and indeed stereotyping cannot happen without it. However, unlike stereotyping, typing originates from an analytical – rather than overtly reductionist – approach to portraiture.

For example, when I asked about his approach to photographing and selecting images for his Euro Visions series, Wylie told me that, of the hundreds of images that he had taken in Estonia, he decided to include only those that ‘had nobody in the background and with a flat light’. In the end, the number of images that fit these criteria came down to approximately 40. Wylie explained that in order to increase each image’s flatness, he put a longer lens on his camera, which also enabled him to photograph people from a distance (and unbeknownst to them). He said that he did this ‘so the emphasis would all be on the person, but you do get a sense of the environment’. He also added that ‘with the flat light you see more, everything is clear, everything is presented’, and elucidated that he ‘didn’t have more people in the picture, because it would become too anecdotal, you wouldn’t look at the picture, you would start asking questions’. Ultimately, Wylie emphasized, ‘I simply wanted to take descriptive photographs that showed you what people look like, how they’re dressed, etcetera’ (see Figure 2). Referring to his approach to composition (i.e. flat light, one person only in the frame, nobody in the background) he went as far as to conclude, ‘I framed it in a neutral way, because I presented it as a fact’.

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Figure 2.

An image from Donovan Wylie’s series of street portraits of Estonians. Courtesy of Magnum Photos.

While Wylie’s comments here resonate with his insights into his own and other photographers’ relationships to their subjects and opinions about the role of documentary photography in contemporary times, they also point more specifically to some of the visual resources that he – very deliberately – mobilized. His work in Euro Visions is a prime example of what Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) term ‘analytical visuals’, which they define by some of the same characteristics outlined by Wylie in describing his choices. An analytical image ‘serves to identify a Carrier and to allow viewers to scrutinize this Carrier’s Possessive Attributes’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 89). In other words, analytical images are designed to bring out the most essential (in terms of the image-maker’s goals) identifying traits of a given subject. For this reason, analytical visuals are also the outcome of a series of choices aimed at reducing life-likeness – or modality – in representation. Visually, this is achieved by ‘taking away’ rather than adding details pertaining to depth, light and shadow, tonal distinctions and background information (p. 88).

Most strikingly, Wylie’s images of Estonia – or better, of Estonians – correspond almost point by point to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s definition of analytical images. While in these images, modality is high by virtue of photographic representation, Wylie purposefully removed details that add to the realism and narrativity of the photographic medium. To this end, he intentionally mobilized several of the semiotic resources that are central to analytical images. Each image in Wylie’s series is identically formatted, with each subject photographed individually in a full-bodied frontal pose. The background of each of the images only varies by degree: every participant is photographed in a pedestrian setting, and while this occasionally changes (from an urban to rural setting, for instance), these changes appear slight in light of the overall focus on the ‘possessive attributes’ of each individual subject. By eliminating an emphasis on background or setting, Wylie’s images encourage the viewer to focus on the attributes of each subject, whether it is the mode of dress, gender, ethnicity or age of the person portrayed.

In this sense, Wylie’s images are not dissimilar from image-bank images, which are most often aimed at communicating types by means of decontextualized activities and settings and the foregrounding of typical attributes (Machin, 2004). Just like image-bank photographs, Wylie’s portraits aim to constitute ‘the “unmarked”, and therefore also the most elementary option in the visual system of representation – a visual “this is”’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 91). This very matter-of-fact quality – as in Wylie’s pretence to present his photographs in a ‘neutral’ way and as ‘facts’ – is what makes these images so generic in their stylization of actual and specific individuals, and therefore also highly evaluative rather than ‘factual’.

This aspect is only reinforced by the serial repetition of these portraits, which are designed to differ only in terms of the subjects’ possessive attributes (e.g., long blond hair vs short grey hair; jeans and sneakers vs brown trousers and brown shoes). These attributes, however, can be very similar across portraits, and thus also outline a practical phenomenology of what Estonians of different ages and genders look like. Furthermore, these photographs lack any additional piece of information about the portrayed subjects, as Wylie limited himself to captioning his photographs by using the name of the town in which they were taken.

Another example in this regard is Lise Sarfati’s series of portraits of Lithuanian teenagers. These were projected in a loop with a soundtrack of the subjects’ names whispered by the subjects themselves, but edited to be uttered randomly and overlap – thus making the names in themselves incomprehensible to the viewer/listener. While Sarfati’s backgrounds have much more ‘texture’ than Wylie’s, her images still manage to be analytical. In most images, teenagers are portrayed inside an empty, dilapidated, and seemingly abandoned school. At times, they are portrayed in domestic indoors as well as supermarkets and urban outdoors very similar to those seen in Wylie’s work. With their arms at their sides and their gaze directed at nothing in particular within the frame, Sarfati’s subjects do not stand out for their narrative engagement with their surroundings (Figure 3). In a way, in her images the backgrounds become possessive attributes – and, I would argue, possessive attributes of Lithuania as a whole – in their own right: chipped paint on walls, outdated fixtures and furniture, derelict buildings, stark neon lights and grey and out-of-focus urban streets. These stand in contrast with and perhaps emphasize the young person’s own attributes, especially in terms of (comparatively much more ‘modern’ or ‘global’) hairstyles and attires. ⁵

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Figure 3.

A still from Lise Sarfati’s slide show at the Warsaw exhibition.

It is also worth mentioning that neither Wylie’s nor Sarfati’s images are designed to address the viewer directly by means of a direct or ‘demand’ gaze. In these images, the subjects – whether posed or not – show an indirect gaze, which contributes to a feeling that ‘here the viewer is not object, but subject of the look, and the represented participant is the object of the viewer’s dispassionate scrutiny’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 119). In other words, the photographed subjects are ‘offered’ to the readers ‘as items of information, objects of contemplation, impersonally, as though they were specimens in a display case’ (p. 119). In this sense, the relationship between subject and viewer is one of unfamiliarity rather than the intimacy of a ‘demand’ photograph. While an indirect or ‘offer’ gaze contributes to the general design of an image as analytical, this does not mean that analytical images cannot include direct or ‘demand’ gazes. I return to this point in a moment.

Along the same lines as Wylie and Sarfati, although with a strikingly different visual outcome, Alex Majoli presented a multimedia installation integrating several portraits with views of the Latvian winter landscape. Majoli used black and white, which in the classic humanist style of photojournalism has been historically associated with heightened realism. However, his use of black and white is of a very different kind. His portraits are hardly portraits at all, especially in humanist terms. Rather, they are designed to have very specific features of a person’s face quite literally emerge from a pitch-black backdrop (see Figure 4). Meanwhile, these features are never quite disentangled from the backdrop’s chiaroscuro. In this case, not only is the portrait completely decontextualized through the lack of a ‘setting’ or background information, but the sketched rather than detailed features that emerge from the chiaroscuro become associated less with a specific individual and more with a generic mood or state.

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Figure 4.

One of Alex Majoli’s images of Latvia in the Magnum online digital archive.

Finally, in relation to the genericity of these images, the representation of too much or hyper-realistic detail, rather than very narrow or absent detail, may work similarly to stylize an image so as to type its subjects. Specifically, the inclusion of much of the same kind of detail both within an image and across images in the same series (not unlike in Wylie’s series of both different and similar outfits, ages, demeanours, etc.) may work to provide an analytical approach to portraits. There are images, such as Carl De Keyzer’s portraits, that may look very detailed and specific in some ways even though they are not contextualized, for example through a detailed background or a narrative approach to composition. In his Euro Visions display, which included a variety of framed photographs, De Keyzer also included an LCD projection of a number of single portraits, which were all framed as close close-ups. The large format of each portrait yielded extremely sharp detail, which was enhanced by the bright and colour-saturated LCD projection technology. The portrayed subjects’ freckles, thick eyebrows, blue eyes on dark complexions, dyed hair, heavy make-up and facial hair were emphasized, and with them the ‘mixing of cultures, a blending that you can see in the physical diversity of the population’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 162). Everything else, however, is quite literally left out of the frame. Just like the portraits examined earlier, these are analytical images as they have very minimal background or setting detail and lack ‘a vector (narrative process)’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 89). These images also address the viewer directly by means of their subjects’ ‘demand’ gaze, thus making their analytical purpose ‘more interactional and emotive than representational’ (p. 89).

While almost all Euro Visions photographers included portraits in their series (more properly humanist in cases such as Zachmann and Franck’s work), photographers like Wylie, Sarfati, Majoli and De Keyzer most obviously mobilized an analytical approach to portraiture. Lutz and Collins (1993: 97) trace the role of portraiture within the humanist paradigm as one characterized by a dialectical relationship between individualism and universality. The portrait, they claim, ‘allows for scrutiny of the person, the search for and depiction of character’ while also ‘stripping away culture and leaving the universal, individual person’. In this regard, they also emphasize the othering ability of this genre, which ‘constantly threatens to be absorbed into a taxonomic outcome’ (pp. 97–8). Evidently, in Euro Visions, portraits are not limited to the representation of ‘a fragment of a person’ (p. 97), namely a person’s face. Not unlike the more traditional portraits examined by Lutz and Collins, these images are indeed designed to draw out only possessive attributes of given subjects, be it their clothing, gender, or age – without, however, defining the portrayed people by the addition of their names or personal/social history. ⁶

Juxtaposition

In addition to an analytical approach to portraiture, in Euro Visions visuals pointing to industrial decay, economic depression and provincialism/parochialism often stand in contrast to visuals emphasizing processes of globalization (e.g. tourism, commerce, real estate) or evoking a globalist aesthetic. As I mentioned earlier, most of the images that deviate from the humanist paradigm are also analytical in nature. In this sense, they are not narrative as they are not designed around vectors suggesting (the potential for) development. Instead, Euro Visions often mobilizes a juxtaposition of representational resources that stand in a quasi-binary opposition, but that also simply seem to exist and ‘be’ side by side – a clash of parallel states.

According to Lutz and Collins (1993: 74): ‘juxtaposition produces the “third effect,” or new meanings evoked in viewers by seeing two photos side by side’ (p. 74). As Burgin (1982: 143) explains, however, this ‘third effect’ can be achieved both ‘within a photograph and between different but adjacent photographs’. In either case, juxtaposition is a semiotic resource that relies on a more or less implicit comparison between different representational resources by means of a particular visual arrangement. As an example of juxtaposition across photographs, Marlow’s display for the exhibition was a grid composed of approximately 100 square images. In presenting his work, he did not provide a ‘step-by-step narrative’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 16) or even a storyline based on the Greek–Turkish conflict in Cyprus. From his images – which were displayed without any captions – there is no way of knowing if the shot was taken on the Greek or Turkish side. In addition, both in the exhibition and in the catalogue, the grid-like arrangement of images is not based on narrative or even thematic contiguity. Most likely, Marlow arranged the images according to the chronological order of the towns and localities that he traversed (e.g. Nicosia, Pafos, Agia Napa), as is suggested by captioning at the end of the book.

Quite unlike a ‘classic’ Magnum photo-essay, this arrangement results in almost antithetical images next to one another. For example, on the one hand, Marlow photographed some of the most luxurious tourist resorts and hotels on the island. On the other hand, he captured the vestiges of British colonialism as well as the UN-run no man’s land between the Greek and Turkish sides, with images of minefields, and abandoned houses and businesses. So, images of the deserted Turkish village of Androliku (which villagers had to flee in the midst of the 1974 military coup) sit next to shots of a luxury resort’s swimming pool by the sea. And again, photographs of minefields and former British prisons can be perused alongside images of brand-new tourist resorts and real-estate advertisements. Likewise, throughout the exhibition and across the work of different photographers, images of this kind were displayed next to or across from each other. On several occasions, juxtaposition plays out within a single image, rather than across adjacent images. As an example, Bruno Barbey’s image of a beach in Bulgaria (Figure 5) offers a stark opposition between the English sign promising ‘massage’ and a barren beach. Likewise, in several Euro Visions images, English-language signage regarding commodities such as leisure, real estate and fast food is often juxtaposed with less than alluring environs and infrastructure.

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Figure 5.

An image from Bruno Barbey’s portrayal of Bulgaria. Courtesy of Magnum Photos.

Based on this analysis, the ‘third effect’ here seems to correspond to a certain degree of ‘recognition’ that these new EU countries have not had the opportunity (or perhaps the willingness?) to develop harmoniously. As a result, derelict landscapes and provincial attitudes coexist and at the same time clash with the ruthless agenda of global capitalism. In Euro Visions, there seems to be very little identification with either end of the juxtaposition, but rather a critique of both modes of existence. In addition, there is obviously an aestheticization of both modes, which we were also able to savour in Wylie’s and Sarfati’s juxtapositions of ‘global’ fashions and ‘dated’ or ‘Eastern Bloc’ textures and modes of dress. This tension between the portrayal of these massive traces of the new Europe’s past and globalization also contributes to aestheticizing both the former and the latter. In doing so, it exoticizes these new EU countries as living repositories of a ‘regressive’ history that is now automatically replaced by commercialism.

In aestheticizing the tension described earlier, there is also often an effect of irony. This occurs especially when juxtaposition is found in the relationship between the portrayed subject and the ‘language’ mobilized to portray it. In relation to this last point, Burgin (1982: 144) explains that ‘the “photographic text”, like any other, is the site of a complex “intertextuality”, and overlapping series of previous texts that are “taken for granted”’. These previous texts, he continues, ‘serve a role in the actual text but do not appear in it, they are latent to the manifest text’. In this sense, he claims, ‘photographic imagery is typically laconic – an effect refined and exploited in advertising.’ Burgin’s insights into the intertextuality and laconic nature of photographic imagery are perhaps best used to examine Parr’s photographs juxtaposing highly local and, by globalist standards, somewhat ‘ugly’ consumer goods with a recognizable, though latent, globalist commercialism.

For example, Parr photographed a bowl of orange soup with a dark sausage floating on top (Figure 6) using hyper-saturated colours, very rich grain and an ‘objective’ camera angle, as if this image were to be included in a glossy magazine or commercial catalogue (see Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). He photographed an orderly stack of cheap tartan slippers (Figure 7) and three rows of wild berries in plastic containers over a patterned plastic tablecloth with the very same choices of colours, grain and angle. These high-resolution, high-colour saturation close-ups of modest goods with a distinctive Eastern Bloc ‘flavour’ (something like visual clichés) are immediately recognizable as the kinds of image that could be found in corporate advertising. As Kress and Van Leeuwen explain, print advertisements always foreground the product (vis-à-vis the narrative built around it or the copy) by means of some of the very choices that we find in Parr’s shots, including a ‘sharper focus’, ‘more saturated and differentiated colours’ and, overall, a ‘higher modality’ for the ‘picture of the product itself’ (p. 159).

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Figure 6.

One of Martin Parr’s photographs of Slovenia as shown in Warsaw.

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Figure 7.

Martin Parr’s photograph of Slovenian slippers. Courtesy of Magnum Photos.

In Parr’s images, then, the clash – the juxtaposition – is between clichéd signifiers of (post)communist, Eastern European life and the ‘emotive resonance’ (Machin, 2004: 327) of globalizing corporate imagery. Machin explains that it is ‘emotive, “sensory” truth’, rather than naturalistic or empirical truth, which may matter most in visual imagery tied to certain forms of advertising. Especially in relation to products appealing to the senses (e.g. food), ‘images will be less realistic, but this time not because of a reduction, but because of an increase in the use of the means of visual representation: uncannily fine detail, richer colour, a deeper perspective’ (p. 327). The outcome of this juxtaposition of resources is what Parr himself defines as ‘visual puns’ (Euro Visions, 2005: 173), or images that play with the different meaning potentials that are generated by the juxtaposition of representational resources which are seemingly at odds. I would conclude that this practice of looking may further reinforce the othering and overall exoticization of this new Europe, while also providing the (Western European) viewer with generic and easily recognizable resources for the (pleasurable) consumption of these images.

Designing Difference: The Semiotic Imperative of Style

In his interview with me, Parr concluded that being a Magnum photographer is ‘a professional job’ and Euro Visions ‘is not a phenomenal show, it’s a professional assignment’. Certainly, except for Mark Power who went on to work on a long-term project about Poland, Euro Visions was by no means central to any of the photographers’ individual work. Despite the art exhibition format, Magnum’s partnership with the Centre Pompidou and the sleek presentation of the book and publicity alike, Euro Visions was not at all an endeavour characterized by an in-depth, personal artistic exploration of a subject or issue. Rather, it was a short-term group assignment aimed at having a product delivered by a given (and tight) deadline. ⁷

In Euro Visions, signifiers of ‘high culture’ and ‘art’ were combined with signifiers of photojournalism and documentary photography (e.g. the ‘classic’ or humanist style) as well as expressive markers pointing to ‘new’ and ‘unconventional’ styles of photography – namely, through key semiotic resources such as typing and juxtaposition. This composite of signs and, more specifically, styles was then metadiscursively framed as a collection of personal visions of the new Europe. Especially in relation to those cases where the ‘rules’ of the humanist style had been most obviously broken, Magnum Photos discursively ‘upped’ and even fetishized the notion of individual style. ⁸

This move is in line with contemporary processes of aestheticization. As Lury (1996: 191) posits, ‘the art-culture is an important site for the development of consumer culture’, in the sense that ‘the use of cultural goods’ has become ‘a model of consumption for other goods’ (p. 226). Euro Visions fulfils this aestheticization and mobilization of ‘high’ culture and, in particular, contemporary art as a means to be successful in the global marketplace. However, this may in fact also entail a negation, rather than an affirmation, of originality and personal vision (Jameson, 1991: 17–18). Lash and Lury (2007: 215) argue that what matters most in the contemporary global culture industry is differentiation or distinctiveness, as this is realized through style. As they write, ‘distinctiveness – as the mark of a style or a look – is the basis of value in the contemporary regime’. The metadiscursive and visual emphasis placed by Magnum Photos on the individual styles of Euro Visions photographers, then, should be also and foremost ascribed to the inscription of the agency’s mission and identity into a political economy that calls for a trademark ‘style’ as a form of branding – and therefore also distinction from other, often competing, visual production outlets (see Lash and Urry, 1994).

For these reasons, contemporary communication may very well be characterized by an increasing commodification and overall consumption of style(s). Far from being ‘just’ a marker of a distinctive individual identity, style has quite literally become an overarching semiotic resource and structure for the strategic performance of prized identities (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006; also Cameron, 2000) – as, for example, in the now widespread neoliberal practice of self-branding in communicative contexts ranging from reality television to Web 2.0 (Hearn, 2008; Marwick, 2010). Magnum’s aestheticization of style in Euro Visions through metadiscursive and semiotic resources alike is equally inscribed in neoliberalism. It is in this context that Euro Visions is designed to appear as a celebration of difference, both among the new Europeans and the photographers’ authorial styles. However, it is in fact a vehicle for the reinscription and reproduction of a specific and exclusionary version/vision of European identity as well as the recontextualization of corporate styles of visual communication.

In this article, I have examined the nexus of these two critical dimensions through a sustained analysis of key semiotic resources. I have explained that these resources, which I named typing and juxtaposition, deviate greatly from the normative humanist paradigm of photojournalism and documentary photography. While the humanist paradigm may have become established as the classic style of photojournalism and documentary photography, the ‘new’ or ‘unusual’ style expressed by semiotic resources such as typing and juxtaposition can be strategically ascribed to the photographers’ individual styles. However, from a close social semiotic analysis, it becomes evident that both typing and juxtaposition are also entrenched in the reproduction and recontextualization of generic, corporate styles of visual communication. While typing is a design resource that highlights specific individual attributes to ‘produce’ types (of people, place, customs, etc.), juxtaposition relies on the ‘third effect’ (or sense of estrangement and implicit comparison) derived by placing ‘exemplary’ instances of globalizing and local representational resources side by side.

Machin (2004: 325) argues that there are ‘three key aspects of photographic genericity–decontextualization, the role of attributes, and the use of generic models and settings’. He then explains that ‘the photographic image is not necessarily restricted to capturing specific and unrepeatable moments’, but it can in fact be ‘generic, denoting general classes or types of people, places and things, rather than specific people, places and things’. In stock photography, both representational and design resources are selected for their lack of specificity – although, naturally, any model or prop will also be a concrete ‘object’ or ‘token’ in real life. In projects like Euro Visions, however, photographers work with highly specific representational resources, in particular the people and places that they portray. It is precisely because the representational resources at hand are highly specific that style, as it is realized by given design resources such as typing and juxtaposition, becomes all the more visible.

The recontextualization, into the documentary realm, of design resources that are usually found in corporate imagery contributes to the foregrounding of style as the distinctive feature – and symbolic currency – of a project like Euro Visions. In addition, because much of contemporary art has notoriously borrowed some of its key aesthetic tropes from popular and consumer culture (Machin, 2004), this work of recontextualization also carries the symbolic capital associated with contemporary high culture (which is also deliberately emphasized in the metadiscursive treatment of the exhibition). Arguably, however, this ‘predominance’ of style colonizes and exoticizes the portrayed subjects (both people and places) so as to confirm, rather than dispel, stereotypes and ‘orientalist’ views of the new Europe. In ‘designing’ these subjects by means of the analytical detachment and strong binaries or clashes that are usually mobilized in the generic visual claims of corporate imagery, these photographs scrutinize subjects for the appearance of their difference (presumably from ‘us’ Western Europeans) and divide landscapes into dichotomies such as, for example, provincial/Americanized, hyper-rural/hyper-touristic, derelict/inauthentic, with no apparent room for a middle ground.

Tellingly, these visual claims also lend themselves particularly well to classification and tagging in Magnum’s online archive. In the age of global image banks, and with the increasing digitization and online availability of the Magnum Photos archive, both typing and juxtaposition also become especially expedient semiotic resources. This is thanks to their ability to deploy generic traits that may however be attached to highly specific individuals and places – and, in Euro Visions’ case, even nationalities or the ‘new’ Europe as a whole. For example, some of the portraits that I examined earlier were tagged with categories such as ‘boredom’, ‘sadness’, ‘solitude’, ‘moody’ as well as ‘jeans’, ‘man – 25 to 45 years’ or ‘teenage girl – 13 to 18 years old’ (see Figure 4). In combination with the key visual resources examined earlier, these linguistic categories most often evoke a mood and affect that, although blunted by the sleek design of the images themselves, point to a depressive, dreary outlook on the new Europeans. Through tagging, specific individuals and places are made to fit one or multiple generic categories (for example, both a ‘globalized’ teenager in jeans and a ‘sad’ Lithuanian) which then in turn may be used to label them and the cultures/nationalities to which they belong.

As of 2010, the Magnum online digital archive included 686 images from Euro Visions, available for licensing. In the years to come, these images are bound to reappear in a variety of publications (e.g. print magazines, books) as well as corporate campaigns, for purposes that transcend the art exhibition format or even the photographers’ personal take on their subjects. In the last analysis, then, Magnum Photos is not simply a group of auteur photographers devoted to utterly personal and independent takes on documentary photography. It is also, and most importantly, an exclusive and globally influential institution of visual production, which is also clearly situated within the workings of the contemporary global culture industry.

In this context, style is not simply an individual set of markers or, as the Russian formalists put it, a system of expressive markers which are independent of tradition (see Todorov, 1965). Rather, style is a semiotic resource in its own right which is mobilized as currency in the global market of symbolic exchange (see Van Leeuwen, 2005). Ultimately, as a global institution and as a brand of visual production, Magnum is also increasingly implicated in the development and worldwide circulation of generic styles of visual communication (see Machin, 2004). Perhaps most importantly, as a global institution of visual production that has been mythologized as the epitome of ‘good’ documentary photography, the images produced by Magnum Photos also contribute to the production of – collective and transnational – knowledge or ‘truth’ about their subjects. In this sense, not only does a project like Euro Visions work to other its subjects by means of pre-existing notions about countries from the former Eastern Bloc and the margins of Southern Europe (see Said, 1979) but, in doing so, it also contributes to (re)producing a limited and exclusive definition of what it ‘takes’ to be a European. That it was ‘styled’ to fit into the contemporary art exhibition genre and that its limitations as a documentary project were in fact turned into assets in terms of the photographers’ own artistic vision and stylistic traits makes Euro Visions a perfect example of contemporary processes of aestheticization – which are at the heart of the neoliberal restructuring of identities and social relations in the service of global capital.