Can you portray an institution the way you portray a person? Can you reinvent and reconstitute a genre to create the possibility of a new artistic approach to the world? – Sergei Tretyakov, one of the most influential authors of the Soviet avant-garde, did just that when he proposed a new form of the novel in his 1929 essay ‘The Biography of the Object’[1] – a literature that places things, rather than individual heroes, at the centre of the narrative. The modern world, as Tretyakov insisted, cannot be understood from the perspective of a single person. It is impossible to convey economic processes, social interactions, and the entire sphere of production from the perspective of the individual. If one were to follow objects, starting from raw materials and proceeding to the goods making their way through the world, then human relationships with all their points of contact and conflict between people would also emerge more clearly.
Sophie Huguenot’s book, TELEVISION: A photographic essay on the staging of the news 2011 – 2019, presents just such a complex portrait of the news service of the Swiss Francophone broadcaster, Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS). Her photographs portray an institution that is itself constantly producing images – or more precisely, news in the form of the moving image. Sophie Huguenot captures the transformation of this institution over a period of nine years, during the transition from analogue to digital media which profoundly altered the conditions for the production and distribution of the daily news. Her shots reveal the intertwining of two public spheres. At the centre of her images is the more readily visible sphere of production shared by a group of people who are ‘making television’ together – their workaday world, their various tasks, their interactions in front of and behind the camera. On the periphery, however, her photographs also thematise the public sphere of the media that television represents – the tremendous distributive power of this media infrastructure, which disseminates one and the same image to hundreds of thousands of screens.
Can the complex social reality of institutions even be captured in photographs at all? Bertolt Brecht expressed justified doubts about this in an essay from 1930: ‘The situation has become so complicated because the “simple reproduction of reality” says less than ever about reality. A photograph of the Krupp [Steel] works or the AEG [Turbine Factory] reveals almost nothing about these institutions. Reality as such has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations, the factory, for example, no longer discloses those relations. So, there is indeed “something to construct”, something “artificial”, “staged”’. [2]
These oft-quoted lines have typically been understood as evidence of Brecht’s fundamental mistrust of photography as the ‘simple “reproduction of reality”’. But they can also be read as an aesthetic mandate: for a form of photography that is not finished when the pictures are taken, but which in turn seeks a medium, a ‘stage’, in order to ‘construct something’. It is not the individual image, but rather a series, a sequence, the medial montage of various segments of reality – ‘something “artificial”, something “staged”’ – which can visualise those complex social constructions that constitute the essence of institutions.
The photo book is a suitable medium for this endeavour. The aesthetic position Sophie Huguenot takes up with her work can be more clearly understood by placing TELEVISION in the context of other photo books and reading it as an instance of a new genre: Photo books as portraits of institutions. Two examples should make the outlines of this nascent genre emerge more clearly: Timm Rautert’s Im Krankenhaus. Der Patient zwischen Technik und Zuwendung. Bilder aus dem Alfried Krupp Krankenhaus [In the Hospital: The patient between technology and care. Pictures from the Alfried Krupp Hospital] (1991) and Gilles Raynaldy’s Jean-Jaurès (2015), which shows the everyday life of a Parisian school.
‘The hospital as a huge organism with its thousands of people and the almost unfathomable number of machines and devices – this perspective remains inaccessible for most people. The patient only ever encounters a small part of the reality of the hospital. They experience only what happens directly around them and to them: the examinations in the individual specialised departments, the conversations with doctors and nurses, the care and therapy. Within these confines, they experience the tension between technology and care.’[3]
Since the institution of the hospital is a composite, the camera gaze directed at it must also be composed of many different perspectives. This attitude underpins Timm Rautert’s use of images Im Krankenhaus. The volume was the last book project of the graphic designer Otl Aicher, who died in an accident while working on the book in 1991. Aicher founded the Ulm School of Design with his wife Inge Aicher-Scholl, the architect and artist Max Bill, and others in 1953. More than anyone, he anchored the spirit of the design school in the everyday visual history of the old Federal Republic. Aicher and Rautert had already collaborated before, in 1987, on the volume Das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester [The Berlin Philharmonic][4] – which in many of its formal decisions can be seen as a prototype for Im Krankenhaus. Evident in both books is a new idea of the lively interplay of text, photography and design. To describe them as photo books may fall quite short, as Timm Rautert’s photographs stand in close relation to the text on the page. The images are embedded in a four-column page grid that repeatedly gives rise to new constellations of text and image across the double pages, in which visual fact and sociological interpretation, concrete situation and theoretical exploration of the real are closely interwoven.
The first section, which describes the more than 100-year history of the Essen hospital complex, is followed by fourteen short chapters that capture the hospital through the stories of seven patients and six essays about specific instruments and devices – the MRI scanner, the bed, the central laboratory, the scalpel, the clinical thermometer, and the syringe. These in turn are followed by a double-page spread listing all the professions required to run the Alfried Krupp Hospital, and the book concludes with a sociological reflection by Wilhelm Vossenkuhl entitled ‘People in the Hospital’.
In contrast to these varying types of text, Timm Rautert’s photographs assert a high degree of continuity: the pictures, which are all in black and white, are mostly taken from a medium or close-up distance, with the camera focussing equally on the people, the situations, the medical interventions, and the instruments. It is characteristic for the form of the book that it is the variation in the types of text, in particular, which create an oscillating movement – a permanent shift in perspective: a biographical sketch is followed by a short essay on a single medical instrument, the situational descriptions of a reportage alternate with theoretical reflections, a narrative from the perspective of an individual patient appears alongside a text that describes the hospital as a service organisation in which financial constraints must not be pitted against medical and human considerations.
While in Im Krankenhaus, the fault lines between the different perspectives are primarily created by the text, in Gilles Raynaldy’s Jean-Jaurès it is the individual photographs themselves – or more precisely: their different visual modes of expression – that are brought together by the book into a stimulating montage.[5]
Between 2009 and 2011, Gilles Raynaldy photographed the course of the school day at the Jean-Jaurès secondary school in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris. In the arrangement of the series, the French photographer alternates between black-and-white and colour, portraits, architectural photographs, still lifes and situational observations. He shows students and parents, the staff, the work of the teachers – their authority, their routine, their exhaustion. He finds images that portray puberty, friendship, rivalry, love, exclusion and boredom. To bring an ordinary, everyday quality to the sequence of images, Gilles Raynaldy draws on the cyclical structure of time in the school year. The book begins with the start of the school year in late summer and ends with the exam period before the long holiday. Pictures showing the schoolyard at different times of the year lend rhythm to the sequence of images and at the same time provide the viewer with a point of reference for the experiences they themselves associate with the institution of school.
In TELEIVISION Sophie Huguenot contrasts short and long periods of time. The hectic hustle and bustle of the newsroom captured in her images is juxtaposed with her patient production of the image with an analogue large format camera. She pits the rapidity of change in current events against a long-term event that refuses the logic of fleeting news: namely, the transformation of the production environment in a television studio over a prolonged period. Former editor-in-chief of RTS news programming, Bernard Rappaz, sums up what is conveyed by these photographs of his own day-to-day work in the newsroom: For over nine years (!) Sophie Huguenot chronicled the admirable struggle of a newsroom that was constantly in the eye of the storm: the digital tsunami, the existential battle over public service funding, news fatigue and, last but not least, the decline of traditional media.’
The appropriate format for this work was developed through close collaboration with the book designer Nicolas Eigenheer. The layout is serene. Sequence follows sequence, with a rhythm created by white space. The texts are placed at the end of the book. Thus, after the visual reading, a second pass through the book can begin which provides even more precise contexts for the images and opens up different perspectives on the image sequences.
Like Sophie Huguenot’s Television, Im Krankenhaus and Jean-Jaurès also place the viewer the position of a second-order observer. Leafing through the pictures, you realize how someone can, in the truest sense of the term, ‘work out’ what an institution is by photographing it – the coexistence and collaboration of a large number of people, their shared everyday life, their various positions and roles, their conflicts and compromises. And the portrayal of an institution always has an emancipatory aspect too, as it presents the viewer with a multiplicity of inside views, not just the narrow slice of reality that the patient, student or television viewer gets to know. The book makes the impenetrable reality of the institution more transparent.
[1] Sergei Tetriakov, ‘The Biography of the Object,’ October, vol. 118, Fall 2006, pp. 57–62.
[2] Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’, in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 147–99. Author’s note: Silberman’s translation is slightly altered here to render the last word of the quote as ‘staged’ rather than ‘imagined’, as this is a more accurate translation of Brecht’s original term, ‘gestellt’.
[3] Im Krankenhaus. Der Patient zwischen Technik und Zuwendung. Bilder aus dem Alfried Krupp Krankenhaus, photos by Timm Rautert, contribution by Regine Hauch and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, design by Otl Aicher and Hans Neudecker (Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1993), p. 25.
[4] Das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester, photos by Timm Rautert, texts by Paul Badde, Ulrich Borsdorf, Peter Cossé, M. O. C. Döpfner, Winfried Fest, Joachim Kaiser, Sabina Lietzmann, Jutta March, Yehudi Menuhin, Albrecht Roeseler, Manfred Sack, Karl Schumann, and Wolfgang Stresemann (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1987).
[5] Gilles Raynaldy, Jean-Jaurès (Paris: purpose éditions, 2015)