Interpretation of the Thousand Words a Photograph is Worth: Exploring a History of Male Friendships 

Ryan Patrick Krueger

There is a lack of affection displayed amongst men in contemporary photography. Upon it’s spreading, photography was seen as the accurate representation of the truth. Photography appeared to provide a window into the past, and photographs commonly became used as evidence (Sontag 1977, 3-5). According to Sontag, photography is a form of “acquisition” (Ibid. 6). A photograph becomes part of certain knowledge systems, categorized and archived starting from family photographs up to police, political and scientific usage (Ibid. 6-10). Photographs are the archive in which the historian investigates the past. We have used the photograph for decades as a major source of information by which we interpret social histories (Wells 2000, 53).

We cannot look at a photograph of two men in a moment of closeness without assuming that this depiction is an accurate representation of an embodied homosexual individual. Has a history of male intimacy existed and if so, where and how do we see it? To claim an archive of images as homosexual erases a history of intimate male friendship because of the way we understand the hetero/homo dichotomy within contemporary society. We need to claim a photographic language when archiving images of intimate male friendships to deconstruct the hetero/homo dichotomy within our contemporary society. An analysis on the history of photography reveals a challenge facing the history of male friendships: photography is a grammar we cannot control. Rather we can claim an individual language on the photographic image. We might not be able to see together how images of men show affection or intimacy in a similar way.

Men were not always afraid to be physically affectionate with one another. Affectionate feelings weren’t strictly labeled as sexual or platonic (Besen-Cassino 2006; Ibson 2006). Male friendship transformed during nineteenth and twentieth century Victorian mortality. Part one of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction explores the rise of discourse on sexuality during the nineteenth century Victorian regime. Foucault begins looking at the seventeenth century prior to the Victorian bourgeois. Foucault states- “Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies “made a display of themselves.” (Foucault, 1978, 3). Men went from having intimate friendships to avoiding too much emotional bonding over the fear of being called gay. Foucault follows “The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parents’ bedroom.” (Foucault 78, 3) It would be outside of this standard that one would be repressed from normality based on sexuality.

Epistemology of the Closet, author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pressures the roots of the modern homo/heterosexual dichotomy. The most important distinction in the introduction from Sedgwick’s is the forced opinion that homosexuality is solely a speech act. That is to say that one is not a homosexual unless one declares, “I am a homosexual”(Sedgwick 1990, 3-5). The way in which language is utilized by labeling itself is a major emphasis for Sedgwick. For instance, homosexuality is a loaded term according to Sedgwick, “… it has always seemed to have at least some male bias –- whether because of the pun on Latin homo = man latent in its etymological macaronic, or simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surrounding it (Sedgwick 1990. 17).” Furthermore, the term “gay” produces mixed results. Sedgwick uses the example that some women call themselves “lesbians” and don’t identify at all with the term “gay” while other women identify as “gay women,” disassociating from the term lesbian. This produces the argument of linguistic conflict that Sedgwick points to as just another problem in the long line of problems related to the modern binary opposition that is homo/heterosexual (Sedgwick 1990. 17-18).

John Ibson’s book, Picturing Men, accounts for the documentation of intimacy between men from the nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. Ibson’s book showcases 142 photographs of men in a moment of intimacy with other male subjects. The sexuality of these couples are open to speculation, even if one cannot be certain that the images are men attracted to other men. The lack of intimacy amongst men in the contemporary American society, according to Ibson, is a new development in creating a history of male friendships (Besen-Cassino 2006, 194-195). In line with Ibson, David Deitcher’s book Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together reproduces hundreds of never-before-published photographs dating from the rise of photography in 1839. Deitcher addresses the ambiguity of portraits representing an intimacy between men from the perspective of a gay man. Dear Friends investigates the social conditions that made these photographs possible and examines both their abandonment and retrieval from those who cherish them as rare historical visual evidence of love between men. (Deitcher 2001, Intro).

Roland Barthes contributed to the criticism on photography. In his text Camera Lucida Barthes states that a picture is not so much a solid representation of ‘what is’ as ‘what was’ and therefore ‘what has ceased to be’. (Barthes 1981, 4-7). It does not make reality solid but serves as a reminder of the world’s inconstant and ever changing state. Camera Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society. (Barthes 1981, 8-10). As Picturing Men from Ibson is in a similar line of inquiry, Deitcher and Ibson are in exploration of examining the history of male friendship with photography as archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Both Deitcher and Ibson stress the loss of closeness between men and the representation of male friendships in contemporary photography.

Furthermore, It is to note that we cannot claim a language for unknown subjects as a solid representation of anything homo/hetero when we see photographs of men experiencing a type of closeness, from a contemporary lens viewing the past and present. This is because of the ambiguity of the photographic language. It is the way in which we project our subjective experience onto photographs that we control the way in which we understand and learn from the photographic image itself. If we claim photographs of male intimacy as “gay” the status of such photographs would stay “gay”. We want to believe the photograph as truth. If we claim a language on sexuality onto images male intimacy we begin to construct a gay history- not a history of friendship rather a history of subjects based on sexuality. We are then at a loss for the history of male friendship.

“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. “ (Sontag 1977, 5).