The Evidence of Sight: Immediate Recognition versus Discursive Excavation

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests that very few photographs, if any, provide us with reliable likenesses..  At best, an image may capture the “air” of someone or something.  While Barthes points to the limits of what we might call the metaphorical approach, most historians tend to cling to the notion of “likenesses,” to the idea, in other words, that a photograph provides evidence by showing us what the past was really like.  Treating images this way allows them to be used as illustration, but rarely raises new questions or discovers new answers.  However, a photograph can be approached not as metaphor, but as metonym, as being a shard from some past network.  Recreating these networks and trying to see the images not with our own eyes but with the eyes of others (the eyes of the dead) is difficult and sometimes impossible.  However, in lucky circumstances, some notion of how photographs were seen in their own time can be recovered.  Treated in this way, although the image itself may itself become more opaque to us since we cannot trust our own eyes, it may also illuminate the social and political structures that existed in the period under consideration.  In other words, used as points of entry into past networks, photographs can serve as fragments of a whole no longer visible.  This paper explores both metaphoric and metonymic approaches to photography, focusing on Japan after World War II, most especially on the work of Hayashi Tadahiko (1918-90) and Kimura Ihei (1901-74).