Anna Backman Rogers

1. Taous R. Dahmani: Where does your interest in images, still and moving, come from? Can you tell us about your first enthusiastic reaction to a photographic work? 

Anna Backman Rogers: 

I think I was likely quite a strange child. I was obsessed with any film that was in black and white for a while and loved the Laurel & Hardy, Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films (although something about Keaton’s face did then and still does make me feel very sad). Later on, I loved Hollywood musicals, especially those in Technicolor, but my favourite film was Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which I watched every Sunday morning with a chocolate sandwich until the fatal weekend during which my grandpa recorded the cricket over it ! I loved Moira Shearer and all of her clothes in that film. I mean, visually, it’s a complete feast for the eyes. I remember always finding the central dance sequence pretty scary, though. I still think it is amongst the most evocative and beautiful scenes rendered on film. When I was a teenager, I think I churned my way through most of what we now not-so-fondly refer to as ‘the canon’. There was an excellent performing arts library where I lived and I borrowed about five videos from there every week : I discovered Ken Russell this way….all I will say is bloody hell ! I also remember being completely overwhelmed by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. 

I honestly cannot say where any of this fascination with film came from. I’m an only child and I think films offered access both to an imaginary story world and license to use my own imagination and I could deal with loneliness in this way. I think this is quite a common experience, actually, if one thinks of the ways in which cinema can build both cult-like and affective communities. I think I’ve always ‘directed’ stories in my head and I’ve got a riotous imagination as a result, although I think I’d make a terrible film director in actuality : I’m much better off as a film scholar. At school, the subject I enjoyed the most was English Literature because of the emphasis placed both on the form of language and the ways in which stories function through symbolism and allegory. I think this really fomented my passion for film further because film is not a medium that I think should be read literally, but rather metaphorically. I think I started to think about film critically when I was a teenager because literature kind of gave me both the tools and the permission to do so. So I think I already knew, in my heart, that thinking and writing about images would be my path in life. I studied philosophy for my undergraduate degree and I think this has also had a profound impact on the way I read images. I was lucky, in retrospect, to be able to combine all of these facets in my MSc and PhD because I was allowed to deepen this approach to reading images and that has formed who I am as a scholar. I’m also lucky enough to work in Sweden where this kind of perspective and specialism has been encouraged from very early on in my career and feminism, generally speaking, isn’t something people are scared of.  So, this is to say that I’ve lead a life informed by images – in a deliberate sense - from a very young age and I don’t think it’s happenstance that I’ve ended up in this profession. I feel incredibly lucky to get to do this for a living. It’s a real privilege.

My interest in photography came later or, rather, as a result of my obsession with film. An immediate, but perhaps facile, example would be my fascination with certain film stars. I think I read every biography of Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly when I was a teenager ; in my early twenties I was besotted with Jean Seberg and Mia Farrow (which lead to poor judgement on my part for a number of years in the haircut department). Looking back, this wasn’t so much about their performances on screen as it was about the images used to shore up or create specific personae. I think I wanted to know, deeply, what lay behind those images. In some sense, I wanted to understand what those images were being put in service of and, thus, what they signified – why it is that women, in particular, are made to bear the burden of iconicity. I wouldn’t have articulated it like this at the time, of course. But I think this gap between cinema and life and how we constantly seem, unconsciously perhaps, to mistake one for the other is what interests me and why that can - and does – often lead to ethical bankruptcy. So, I think some of those iconic (approximately in the religious sense), flattened-out, highly-aestheticised images of stars would have been the first photographs that drew me in and captured my imagination. I should also say that I’ve grown up watching Kirsten Dunst on screen. I think her face is incredibly enigmatic and can register doubly. She embodies so much ambiguity and instability on screen that only certain directors have managed to harness this to full effect. I think she has her own particular genius, which is only starting to be recognised. There are photographs taken of her that I love - the spread from Dazed & Confused in 2004, and especially pictures taken by Corinne Day, Sofia Coppola and Yelena Yemchuk – which I think capture this quality about her so well.

In terms of specific photographs though, I remember seeing Nan Goldin’s The Hug in the Metropolitan in New York in 2002. That felt like a freight train hitting me. First : it’s pretty big and that matters just in terms of your encounter with the image. Second : it’s both incredibly striking and, for me, sinister. I don’t think I ‘read’ it as a tender embrace, but rather as something that contains potential violence (for me it’s the photographic equivalent of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day). It’s not clear, I think, what kind of complex dance of attraction these two are involved in. I loved the title because its seeming simplicity or clarity belies what it is going on in the image, for me. The first photographic book I bought was Corinne Day’s Diary. I got it with my pocket money. I knew about her work because I subscribed to British Vogue for about ten years when I was growing up (unhealthy, but as it turns out, useful in terms of my career now). So I had seen her photographs within the magazine and I loved those images she made of Kate Moss that were so controversial (more on this later), but Diary is this incredible and sort of devastating record of the parallel life she was leading during that particular moment in London. It’s a loving testament to all her friends during this period, many of whom were on drugs or in poverty at the time. I think I was really interested in this woman who was working to create these highly specific images for her day job as a fashion photographer, but at night was documenting the lives of her friends who were wholly set apart from that world. That was what made her amazing within fashion photography : that she could retain this element or kernel of painful reality even if it was transcribed or subsumed within fantasy. I think this is what people objected to in her images, actually : that she refused to be shamed or made abject and she brought this into a world that exists in flagrant denial of human bodies.  I remember there was also this image of her going in for surgery in a hospital in London because she was diagnosed with a brain tumour during that period (and she died of it eventually). I was so in awe of and so upset by that image. I wondered how she was able to hold it together to have it taken : to expose her vulnerability in that way. But I think I understand that impulse or need to document some of the most devastating events of one’s own life: to exist both inside and outside of something so traumatic as a way of creating both a holding space to process trauma and, in a way, to dissociate from it. I think it’s the first image that affected me on a really psychological level and I think it remains a very rich image for me because of it: a sort of memento mori; I also seem to think about this image every week because my mum died of a brain tumour in 2011 and the way in which she coped with that illness (the effects of which are truly horrific) and the way in which she died, taught me so much about bravery and how life is really short in reality and you don’t leave this world having done all the things that you hope for. I look at Day’s image very differently now as a result : I see it as a determined act of courage or as an insistent act of pushing back against death through work. So that image of Day in her hospital bed is kind of a personal talisman for me. I think art can help us to cut through a lot of bullshit precisely because it can be brutal and uncompromising and can even make us feel really bad. I think it’s interesting that the two photographers that affected me the most in my adolescence and early adulthood are kind of related or imbricate. I see Goldin and Day as exploring very similar territory : the ways in which people survive life, how they manage to keep on keeping on, and the ways in which people build communities in the face of relentless difficulty. There’s such beauty there. I like the ethical confrontation that these images force, too. 

In terms of a similarly visceral encounter, the first time I saw a photograph by Francesca Woodman, I was changed incontrovertibly. In all honesty, I’ve not been the same person since. This would have been in my twenties and it was definitely in Edinburgh because I was doing my PhD at the time. I actually had no idea about her really tragic death then, so I didn’t read what she was doing as some rehearsal for an act of disappearance. Subsequently that entire way of looking at her work has really made me exceptionally cross, I have to say. In fact, beyond it being yet another example of the many ways in which we misconstrue all women’s work as a manifestation of some intensely narcissistic impulse (let me just call this out as, once again, that boring old chestnut - misogyny), her own family and friends have said that, in retrospect, the clear warning sign was that she stopped taking photographs altogether before she died. That is, making art was synonymous with drawing breath for Woodman. Anyway : I digress. I was really drawn to this young woman who could in her nakedness be perceived as exposed and vulnerable (and yes, again, narcissistic), but who actually gives nothing away in terms of herself. I think she likes to play a trick on her viewer here, too. Some of the images are really small in reality. In a gallery space, she draws you right in and you have to look at the image at close range : and yet despite feeling like you’re being asked to look in microscopic detail, nowhere will you find this ‘person’ you are looking for – and directly at - in the image. She’s an artist of displacement and dissimulation, but not a ghost (that would be an insult to Woodman, I reckon). Rather, it seems clear, her project is precisely the formation of subjectivity in dialogue with an ‘other’ – whether that is the photographic apparatus or an imagined viewer, but it’s not autobiographical in any sense either. It also seems that, at such a young age, she already understood that the nature of any kind of photographic subjectivity is both highly constructed and elusive (I think she deliberately plays on self and persona in terms of, for instance, her use of masks made up in her own image). And this is especially political because she photographs herself as a woman; this is why I see her as confrontational – that she is saying that her subjectivity belongs to her only and cannot be taken or evacuated. In short, she refuses to be the ‘mirror’ for any ‘man’ (in the broadest sense) – for me, that is what the image after this title is about. I think my ongoing work on Woodman has also drawn me to reading the work of Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke in a similar vein. But with Spence and Wilke, I’m especially interested in the ways in which they documented their own illnesses as a slow slide into death. I guess, this goes back to my first encounter with Corinne Day. I think all of these women are/were incredibly brave as artists. Visionary, uncompromising and un-swayed by the really silly things that, inevitably, people have said about their work – mostly because they are women and we are all still governed by misogynist assumptions with regard to art that centres on women’s bodies, especially if that work is actually made by women ; I don’t know whether I’m angered or amused by the frothing lather people work themselves up into over women who make work about women’s bodies. It’s utterly ridiculous and totally confusing, but mostly really embarrassing. Apparently things are changing – or so I am told.

2. Taous R. Dahmani: Today, what does it mean to be an art historian and commentator of the image? What role or place should the teaching of the visual matter have in our society? 

Anna Backman Rogers:

I’m sorry to say that I am of the view that despite living in a cultural moment that is utterly saturated in images to the point of literal and metaphorical exhaustion, we are seemingly increasingly stupid when it comes to reading those images. I think we all like to think that we are the singular, wise person who exists outside of this paradigm (of this ideology) and can see things for what they ‘truly’ are or represent, but this is, of course,  a nonsense and quite impossible : I think we can just be smarter and this entails accepting that we are all cultural dupes, to varying extents, in this world. That is what I will say first and foremost, but this also entails a responsibility to improve at this game, in which we are players, because the stakes have been raised lately and not for the better. This is why I think Guy Debord’s work is having a bit of a cultural resurgence right now. I know there’s some debate about whether his work really can be extended to the seemingly endless digitalisation of everything, especially with regard to social media, but I think his work is both prescient and useful in terms of thinking about the spectacle as a relation of power ; that is, we now find ourselves at a point in history in which power (proper) and representational power have coalesced so tightly that it’s very hard to work against the grain of the image. It’s terrifying to me how this recuperation of ‘reality’ so to speak into appearance has resulted in a culture in which reality, representation and appearance are tantamount to the same thing. In this environment, we need to become so much smarter about reading images. I remember when I went to university to do my undergraduate studies, nobody was being advised to take Media Studies : it was perceived as a soft choice that wouldn’t get you very far in the world. Yet now, it’s one of the few disciplines that could actually help us unpack how on earth we ended up in a world with that man in the White House : something which The Simpsons predicted ! This is a long-winded way to say that the spectacle has now become, in its purest form, power. It is capital at a degree of abstraction as such that the image comes to function as a relation of power and mediates relationships between self, other and world. It’s become globalising and totalising and this is really dangerous.

There is also a lot to be said of the ways in which women’s bodies are increasingly specularised and de-materialised within this. So whilst I think this state of affairs is all-round bad news for everyone : I think it is especially impactful on young women. I am especially reticent with regard to images being characterised as ‘empowering’ : for whom is this empowering ? who created it ? is it being used to market or sell something ? what cultural values is this image aligned with ? Social media has become a pervasive and pernicious tool with regard to, in particular, casting young women as the ideal agents of late capitalist consumerism – and all under the name or seeming aegis of feminism (which in this context is really just neo-liberalism and we all know that and need to stop pretending otherwise). The wave of mental health issues this has unleashed is both unsurprising and symptomatic. We really need to wake up to what is going on. Maybe I’m just too old to ‘get’ all of this now : but I really am not sure that anything subversive is being enacted on social media (Facebook is doing an excellent job of destroying democracy). I don’t believe we are ‘in control’ of our own images  or identities: I think we’re all steadily barrelling down the path of becoming ideal late capitalist subjects urged on by post-feminist tenets of self-actualisation and a myopic notion of individuality (which we all know can be harnessed politically to shift blame onto individual subjects instead of the egregious corporations truly responsible for this mess in which we find ourselves) – and all of this is mostly expressed through consumerist choice (that watchword of post-feminism co-opted from feminism proper). We’re not playing the system: it’s playing us.

3. Taous R. Dahmani: Film studies have been central to the elaboration of feminist theories of photography, the two mediums are closely intertwined. In 1975 in her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term male gaze (the act of depicting women from a masculine, heterosexual perspective) debunking patriarchy in visual studies. You regularly collaborate with Mulvey discussing and shaping notions that help better understand women image makers such as female gaze, or female authorship and female agency. Considering Photo Oxford 2020’s theme ‘Women & Photography. Ways of Seeing and Being Seen’ what role theory might play in the experience of the photographic image? In other words, what place these notions could have for people visiting exhibitions, discovering a new body of work or just for any interaction with an image in our daily life? 

Anna Backman Rogers:

I think these theories are the tools for unlocking how images come to work on us. We are not sovereign, consistent, exhaustive and self-defining subjects : we are mediated subjects (cultural dupes). I’m not saying anything new here, but it does bear repeating. I think theory has a role in waking us up to this fact. It’s interesting that Mulvey’s central arguments have never ceased to be controversial. I’ve been teaching on Mulvey’s (in)famous 1975 article for well over a decade now. It’s an absolute staple of any introductory course for film or visual culture and I doubt highly that any student could leave a humanities-based 101 course having either not read it or having not heard of it. It’s been quoted and misquoted and mis-attributed by celebrities (thanks, Kim Gordon) and misconstrued. Mostly it just gets applied badly by a lot of people in a really clumsy and literal fashion, but this is no reflection on the brilliance of Laura’s contribution (although we are often left to mark the resulting essays). Rather, I think it’s a testament to the continued relevance of her actual argument. So much so that it’s become part of popular culture (Mulvey is name dropped on Parks and Rec). Often, I’ve noticed, people talk about the male gaze, but don’t mention Mulvey. This is just to say it’s part of our cultural currency. I think it’s a pity that its legacy sometimes tends to overshadow Laura’s other work which is truly exceptional : Death 24 X A Second is, in my view, the greatest book written on film as an art form.

When I started teaching on feminism and Mulvey’s article, I laboured under the startling, but perhaps understandable, misapprehension that it might be the psychoanalytic framework with which the students might take issue (and I can confirm that at best they tend to see it as dated, and at worst they tend to pour excoriating hatred onto Freud and Lacan without having read either in any detail), but actually it is the main arguments that many (mostly boys, it must be said) seem to get inexplicably cross and offended over. I’ve been reported for teaching feminist propaganda in the classroom, preaching women’s ideology, discriminating on the basis of sex (against men) for teaching on this article. And yet, anyone who has their eyes even half open towards the outside world knows her cardinal thesis to be true : because this remains the world in which we live. Actually, when I first met Laura back in 2012 we pretty much both agreed that things have gotten far worse with regard to representation of women’s bodies in visual culture at large : a situation only exacerbated and amplified by digital technology. I think to argue anything else is rather naive, I’m afraid. 

I’m also a big fan of Claire Johnston’s essay ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’. It’s received neither the attention nor the traction of Mulvey’s essay, but I think she makes some incredibly important and salient points with regard to why positive representation alone isn’t enough and never will be enough (because that was, partly, what the feminist debate was centred on at the time of its publication). I think Johnston has a really sophisticated understanding of the image as a tool of ideology. I mean, she says it : 

‘clearly, if we accept that cinema involves the production of signs, the idea of non-intervention is pure mystification. The sign is always a product. What the camera in fact grasps is the “natural” world of the dominant ideology - Women’s cinema cannot afford such idealism’

She doesn’t brook a conception of the image as in any way, shape or form, ‘realistic’ but precisely as a creation, as a product, which can and does manipulate our perception, our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others and the wider world. This is the sort of thing about which we cannot, as she says, afford ‘idealism’ because, historically, many of us have been and remain on the losing end of that equation. Images are tools of power. These articles present that argument clearly and, yes, vehemently, because their cause was deeply political and they could not afford to waste time – and in all honesty, I don’t feel we have time to waste either. A lot of these scholars were also working on the fringes of academia. I really wish for a resurrection of that kind of politics of the image, to be honest. We need it badly. Judith Butler has lately written on feminism as a form of coalitional politics and community building and this I think is incredibly important in terms of the future of feminism as a politics and ethics. We need to reclaim radical feminism from atomising notions of individualism and exclusion.

I also, inevitably, think of John Berger who argued that men look actively, but women have a far more complex relationship to the gaze and to their own image. They are both inside and outside of it for Berger : both agents and objects and keenly aware of their currency as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ - as Mulvey puts it. Francesca Woodman, in fact, is the perfect artist to dramatise this ! Berger was also attuned to the gendered hypocrisy in all of this. Essentially, that men paint images of women in the nude because that’s what they want to look at and then they place a mirror in her hand and call the picture ‘Vanity’. I don’t think, fundamentally, this has changed : it informs our cultural discourse entirely and explains the continually misogynist reactions to work made by women. I teach a lot on Griselda Pollock’s work in this regard, too. I know there’s a lot of talk about selfie culture being a reclamation of female agency etc and an assertion of control over one’s own image and, to a certain extent, I can see all of that, but images don’t exist in hermetic isolation. They are part of continuous forms of circulation and exchange in an endless chain of signifiers (of which we are not in control) and they often are literally traded for currency in a patriarchal culture (again : Debord). Anyone who has had their image co-opted and used against their own will understands that this is precisely a form of (more-often-than-not gendered) violence. I think sociologists have lately described selfie culture as the male gaze 2.0 and I would tend to agree, to be honest. I’m sure there are fitting counter-examples : in fact I commissioned a bunch of essays on this for our second book on female agency and the documentary image and I am particularly intrigued by Amalia Ulman’s projects in this regard, but I remain, essentially, sceptical about such gestures. I think patriarchy is real, it exists and we don’t know the half of it yet. I’ve not got any time for idealism and utopian thinking on this score and I regularly bore my wife to tears with this argument. But: misogyny is running rife, globally, in every sector of society currently and it’s getting worse. Anyone who thinks this isn’t a battle for human rights is mistaken.