Translated by Anne Halley
Human beings, unlike animals, live in societies that are constantly changing. Thus people develop, adjusting to their changing conditions, and subjected to more change in their environment than other living beings. Man has always had to solve the problems of his changing environment. The intelligence, which distinguishes man from animals, made him their ruler. He recorded his first victory over the animals when he invented the first tool.
Language too may have developed out of human need. The growth of language implies an enormous strengthening and clear consciousness of social drives, and is itself a powerful means of establishing social cohesion. The formation of social groups may have given rise to the first verbal communication, which we call dialect. Social thinking and its accompanying language were encouraged to spread by the dangers to which human beings have always been exposed.
Communication by signs became necessary because people who were separated in space and time needed to maintain connections between individuals, groups, and times, and sound was still fugitive. Picture language existed before the written word, and primitive peoples used pictures to bridge the gaps in time and place. We have proof of this from the Ice Age, the period of the cave dwellers, the ancient Egyptians, the Africans, etc. In its beginnings Christianity also used picture language to promulgate and teach the word of Christ. Once a child has begun to have ego-consciousness, his conception of objective reality can be stimulated and developed with pictures.
Pictures and sounds are the only possible means of communication for illiterates; pictures are also the best way to communicate useful or persuasive information to the masses of people; pictures inform more quickly than written words and are not limited to a single group or by a language boundary. We all know how impressive a picture can be — whether it be amusing or serious.
The invention of photography returned our attention to picture language; today the language of pictures has become a popular means of communication, unlimited by language barriers, as so must be. Today with photography we can communicate our thoughts, conceptions, and realities, to all the people on earth; if we add the date of the year we have the power to fix the history of the world. I should like now to begin with some examples.
Even the most isolated Bushman could understand a photograph of the heavens — whether it showed the sun, the moon, or the constellations. In biology, in the animal and plant world, the photograph as picture language can communicate without the help of sound.
But the field in which photography has so great a power of expression that language can never approach it, is physiognomy, which we will discuss more especially in the second half of this lecture. Our eyes convey to us an external image of the objects around us, and our intelligence assimilates the visualized objects to make concepts and create our inner world, which we then interpret according to the most diverse principles. Thus we arrive at distinctions between good and evil as well as between human and animal; we recognize danger and we experience beauty or ugliness or fear. With photography we are in a position to reproduce all such experiences and to make ourselves understood in that way. We can mention the continuous photograph, or film, by means of which we have learned to know the most secret processes in the life-cycle of plants. With photography the popular expression — “someone can see the grass grow” — has become a reality. By means of photography we have already begun to record all the phases of human growth — from germinating cell to death.
In my last lecture I mentioned the cooperative work of scientists in observatories, who have taken approximately 20,000 photographs of the heavens from 18 observatories for our total orientation in the universe. In this case the photograph speaks the universally under stood language of a high culture; the photograph would speak a different but equally expressive language if the film camera were set up and simultaneously activated in the 365 unemployment bureaus which exist today in Germany alone. If we photographed the people there, fit our results together, and labeled the whole with the date, 1931, the tragedy of our photographic language would be understood by all present and future human beings without further commentary. No language on earth speaks as comprehensibly as photography, always providing that we follow the chemical and optic and physical path to demonstrable truth, and understand physiognomy. Of course, you have to have decided whether you will serve culture or the marketplace.
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I want to cite a further instance. The newspapers are now preparing the populace for a coming bestial war in which poison gas will be used; they recommend gas masks to protect the civilian population’s lives. To photograph an infant wearing a gas mask, instead of at its mother’s breast, and to label the photograph as from the twentieth century, would be sufficient. The photograph would not only fix and hold fast history, but would express the whole brutal, inhuman spirit of the time in universally comprehensible form.
I don’t, of course, mean that the recreation of life and death, descriptions and experiences, is the sole province of photography. Such a statement would be presumptuous and mischievous. That words and the written language can recreate experience has long been established fact. But with the advance of civilization verbal expression has become progressively more complicated and abstract, until more and more knowledge and intellectual training is needed to understand it. In contrast, photography has the advantage of being instantly and immediately perceptible.
In our age of intellectualism, literary work becomes increasingly directed to the interests of an intellectual upper class, while a photograph adjusts without trouble to the capacities of the broadest, intellectually least trained masses of people. I believe we can say that no national language anywhere could function as universally as photography, or could have greater significance. Because it can be universally understood, photography — as image and film — is already first among picture languages for the masses of people of the world.
For instance, it is the universal language in which reportage brings us events more powerfully than words can. The print-runs — in the millions — of illustrated newspapers demonstrate this factual though of course such papers speak their own language in their own special way. The so-called “language of deception” — or diplomatic language — can be imitated easily by photography, and imitated so well that the written word fades before it. For instance, in the World War, I saw a photograph picturing a German soldier cutting a French child’s throat, and more photographs of that kind. They were so . . .[Here, a line of the original typescript is missing] . . . But the message of the photographic image was effective: with that evidence the French people took a make-believe manual construction for an image of reality.
In addition to what I have already described, I should mention that in photography we have a medium for every kind of expression. We can tell the truth or we can spread lies; we can spread the language of all life and being from country to country and from person to person. Photography’s universal comprehensibility erases the boundaries of language. I hope this short discussion has shown the importance of photography as a universal language. Photography should become a field of study in schools and educational and cultural institutions, so that the light and the shadowy side of its use is understood; for besides its enormous importance in demonstrating truth, photography makes very dangerous kinds of deceptions possible. It can not only enlighten the people, but also cause terrible confusion.
My photographic work — “Human Beings of the Twentieth Century” — which I began in 1910 and which contains approximately 500-600 pictures from which a selection — “The Face of the Time” — appeared in 1929, is basically a declaration of faith in photography as universal language; I attempted to arrive at a physiognomic definition of the German people of the period by means of the chemical and optic, historically developed methods of photography — that is, by the creation of images through the use of light alone.
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We can now move to the second part of my lecture, which will deal with physiognomy in photography. And what do we mean by physiognomy? More than anything else, physiognomy means an understanding of human nature — that understanding which nature imparts freely to human intelligence, although perhaps more to some people than to others. It will be necessary here to give some examples.
When we meet a person for the first time we get an impression — that he is good or evil, that we feel attracted or repelled, that we feel spiritual kinship or do not. Such responses are the result of in born feeling. Children have this feeling and even animals have the instinct for such judgment. Almost all women have it, although it exists less often in men. But the man’s intellectual predisposition, in contrast to the woman’s emotional one, can develop the feeling to a special and heightened capability of great sharpness and exactness.
All things that happen have their appearance, or “face,” and an event’s total appearance is its physiognomy. The ability to judge physiognomy can be inherited; it can also be developed by education. We know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions, and we recognize people and distinguish one from the other by their appearance. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled, for life leaves its trail there unavoidably. A well-known poem says that every person’s story is written plainly on his face, although not everyone can read it. These are the runes of a new, but likewise an ancient, language.
The human eye’s glance belongs to physiognomy: we know that a look is more quickly understood and more persuasive and makes a stronger impression than a word, because we can repel or attract another person with a single look. Popular wisdom says, One look will tell me where I am. Popular wisdom also asserts that some people have special power in their glance — that is, they have the evil eye. Wilhelm von Humboldt states that occult effects of that kind are not based on simple superstition, but on perceptions of truth. Today they are confirmed by hypnosis.
The individual does not make the history of his time, but he both impresses himself on it and expresses its meaning. It is possible to record the historical physiognomic image of a whole generation and — with enough knowledge of physiognomy — to make that image speak in photographs. The historical image will become even clearer if we join together pictures typical of the many different groups that makeup human society. For instance, we might consider a nation’s parliament. If we began with the Right Wing and moved across the individual types to the farthest Left, we would already have a partial physiognomic image of the nation. The groups would divide further into subgroups, clubs and fraternities, but all would carry in their physiognomies the expression of the time and the sentiments of their group. The time and the group-sentiment will be especially evident in certain individuals whom we can designate by the term, the Type. We can make similar observations about sport clubs, musicians, business and the like organizations. The photographer who has the ability and understands physiognomy can bring the image of his time to speaking expression.
I also want to give a negative example. If we photograph a contemporary person in antique or medieval or Victorian dress in his own milieu, the photograph will be unable to express even a modicum of reality: the twentieth-century person will always impart his own speaking expression to the photo. Thus we see that the human being leaves his own mark on his time, and thus the photographer with his camera can grasp the time’s physiognomic image. Not only a person’s face, but his movements, define his character. It is always the photographer’s responsibility to stabilize and record characteristic movement, which will then express physiognomy in a single comprehensible image.
If we ignore the higher powers for the moment, we can say that man shapes the world’s image and inhabits the foreground of all events. Then — when we have described human physiognomy — we may move to the human being’s world, that is, to the works of men. We can begin with landscape. Man puts his own stamp on the landscape with his works, and thus the landscape, like language, changes in accord with human need; man often modifies the results of biological evolution. Likewise, we can see the human spirit of a particular camera. It is the same for architecture and industry and all other large and small human works. The landscape within a particular language boundary expresses the historic physiognomic image of a nation. If we expand our point of view beyond such boundaries, we can arrive at a comprehensive vision of the nations of the earth, in the same way that the observatories arrive at a complete image of their observed heavenly universe. We can arrive at a total vision of the people on earth — a vision which would be of enormous importance to our understanding of humanity.
We must finally expand our discussion to include the relation of photography to art. I shall make this clear by making a central distinction: one may press a button, or one may take photographs. Pressing a button implies that one relies on chance; taking photo graphs means that one works with forethought — that is, tries to understand a scene, or to bring a conception out of its beginning in a complex of ideas into finished form. If we are successful photographers we reach that goal.
The camera does not determine the quality of photographic work, any more than canvas and paint make a painter, not to say, artist, or a block of stone and hammer a sculptor. On the other hand, the creator depends on his material, and one cannot be a photographer without a camera. The fields of painting, music, architecture, sculpture, literature, photography, technology, mathematics, etc. exist and their accomplishments, the works, teach us the languages of their practitioners.
Our discussion of photography should lead us to conclude that photography is a special discipline with special laws and its own special language. By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world. We can influence all humanity with the expressive possibilities that photography as a universal language possesses. Thus I conclude my general remarks on photography. . .