In the previous article on hermeneutics and reception aesthetics, the starting point was a seemingly harmless question: how does the meaning of a work of art actually come into being? The work itself brings something to the encounter. The artist brings something. And the viewer does not arrive mentally naked either. Experiences, knowledge, memories, cultural ideas, expectations and prejudices stand before the image alongside them. All of this comes together, and somewhere within this somewhat untidy mixture emerges what we later call the meaning of the work.
For my own work, however, this question has a very concrete side. In photographs showing nude women, the word pornographic occasionally appears. Sometimes obscene is added, presumably because one piece of heavy artillery is not always considered sufficient on the battlefield of cultural criticism. Both terms are remarkable because they initially sound like objective properties of the image: the image is pornographic. The image is obscene. Full stop. Case closed.
But is it?
This time, I do not want to answer that question. Quite the opposite. We will deliberately make things more difficult for ourselves.
So let us imagine a small exhibition. One of my photographs hangs on the wall. Black and white. A nude adult woman. You do not need to know anything more for the moment. Perhaps even that description is already too much, because the instant you read the words “nude woman”, some sort of image has probably already formed in your mind. Congratulations: reception aesthetics has begun before you have even seen the photograph.
A young woman is standing in front of the picture. She looks at it for a while, frowns and finally says: “That is pornographic.” After a short pause, she adds: “And obscene.”
I am standing nearby. Under normal circumstances, this would be the moment when the photographer steps forward and explains what he intended. Artists are rather fond of doing that, especially when the audience has the friendly insolence to see something other than what was intended. This time, I say nothing.
Instead, we invite a few people who have thought far more intensively about what actually happens between a work and its viewer: Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Stuart Hall, John Berger, Laura Mulvey and Lynda Nead. The fact that some of them would now have certain biographical scheduling difficulties in attending such a gathering may be ignored. This is a thought experiment. For a few pages, art theory may rise above the usual limitations of space, time and mortality.
One note in advance: the following conversations are, of course, not historical quotations. I am allowing the figures named here to ask questions derived from their theoretical approaches. The wording is mine; the underlying ideas belong to people who have thought about these matters rather more thoroughly.
Hans Robert Jauss asks about the baggage we bring with us
At first, Jauss is not particularly interested in the image. He is interested in the young woman standing before it. His concept of the horizon of expectations describes, in simplified terms, the framework within which a person perceives a work. Nobody looks without preconditions. Previous experiences, education, social norms, cultural habits and images already encountered all influence what we recognise in a new image and what appears familiar, unusual, beautiful, disturbing or offensive.
Jauss might therefore ask: Why do you call this image pornographic? What have you seen before that allows you to apply this category? What ideas do you associate with a nude female body? When did you learn to distinguish between a nude, an erotic image and a pornographic image – and who taught you that distinction?
He might go on to ask whether the same nudity would be perceived differently in a museum than on a website. Whether a nude body carved in marble would provoke a different reaction. Whether it would matter if the image were a hundred years old. If the person depicted were eighty. If a man stood there instead. If the photograph were by a world-famous female artist.
And finally: are you really seeing this image for the first time – or are you looking at it through hundreds of other images you have already seen?
The young woman could answer.
For the moment, we let her remain silent.
Wolfgang Iser wants to know what is not actually in the image
Wolfgang Iser is particularly interested in what the recipient adds. In his view, a work of art does not simply transmit a fully completed meaning which the viewer merely has to receive. Perception is active work. We connect clues, fill gaps, establish relationships and construct meaning from them.
Standing before our photograph, Iser might therefore ask: What sexual acts do you actually see? Which of them are genuinely present in the image? Which have you added yourself? What intention do you attribute to the woman depicted? What intention do you attribute to the photographer? And where, precisely, are these intentions visible?
If a hand rests on a hip, when does it become a sexual gesture? If a woman looks directly into the camera, does that signify seduction, challenge, self-assertion, indifference or something entirely different? If the body expresses tension, is that tension sexual? Or does it become sexual only through the viewer?
Perhaps one of the decisive questions already lies here: Can something that is not depicted at all still become an essential part of what we see?
Stuart Hall asks about codes
With Stuart Hall, a term appears that sounds more technical than it really is: code.
Here, a code does not mean a secret numerical key or a computer program. A cultural code is a system of learned meanings and conventions. Over the course of our lives, we learn to understand certain signs, gestures, objects, colours, bodily postures or visual forms in particular ways. A red rose can signify love, black can signify mourning, a white dress innocence or marriage. A direct look into the camera can, depending on the cultural context, be read as self-confident, aggressive, intimate or seductive. These meanings are not contained within objects like chemical ingredients. They are socially learned and shared – sometimes quite consistently, sometimes in radically different ways.
The same applies to the representation of the body. Certain poses, camera angles, garments, lighting situations or gestures have, over decades, repeatedly been associated with sexuality in fashion, advertising, cinema, art and pornography. They can therefore carry a sexual code today even when neither photographer nor model consciously intends sexuality. Conversely, the same signs can mean something entirely different in another context.
Hall spoke of encoding and decoding. Anyone who produces an image uses such cultural signs, consciously or unconsciously. The viewer subsequently reads them – but by no means necessarily in the same way. A photographer may use a pose to express vulnerability, while a viewer interprets it as a sexual invitation because of previous visual experience.
Hall might therefore first ask me: What did you intend to encode? Physicality? Vulnerability? Power? Fear? Dignity? Sexuality? Something else? Which means did you use? Which pose, which light, which framing, which tradition of nude photography? And which codes might you be using without even realising that you are using them?
Then he would turn to the young woman. You decode this image as pornography. Why? Which signs in the image lead you to this reading? Are you using the same cultural code as the photographer – or a different one?
And then things become uncomfortable for both sides. If photographer and viewer assign different meanings to the same visual signs, who has the authority to establish the correct meaning? The artist? The audience? Art history? Society? A museum? Instagram? An algorithm?
Or is there such a thing as one correct decoding at all?
John Berger looks at how we see
John Berger would probably not begin by asking whether the woman is nude. He would be interested in how we see her. In Ways of Seeing, he examined in depth how women have been represented in European art history and for whose gaze those representations were produced.
Standing before our image, Berger might ask: For whom is this woman naked? Is she an acting person within the image, or something intended to be looked at? Does she possess a presence of her own, or does she exist primarily for the gaze of the viewer? Does she present herself – or is she being presented?
He might ask whether the image needs her beauty. Would the photograph still work if the same pose were adopted by a body that our culture does not define as desirable? What would change? And why?
Then he might turn to the young woman: When you say that the image is pornographic, do you experience the woman depicted as a sexual object? If so: did the image make her one, or did your gaze?
And naturally he would then look at me as well: Mr Photographer, are you certain that you did not construct that gaze yourself?
At that point, the room would probably fall silent for a moment.
Laura Mulvey looks at the camera
Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is actually concerned with cinema. Her questions about gaze, power and visual pleasure can nevertheless be applied very productively to photography.
Mulvey would probably examine the camera. Where is it positioned? Which parts of the body does it emphasise? Which does it allow to disappear? Where does the light guide the eye? Is the person depicted perceived as a human being, or fragmented into individually attractive areas of the body? How important is the face? Could it be removed without substantially changing the meaning of the image?
These are uncomfortable but important questions. A photographer can treat a person respectfully and still create an objectifying image. Good intentions have no magical effect on composition.
Mulvey might continue: Does the female body become a spectacle here? Or is the woman using her body as a means of expression? Can these two things be clearly separated at all? Can an image sexualise even when no sexual act is depicted? Can an image show a nude woman without sexualising her? And can a viewer sexualise a representation that was not itself sexualised?
Eventually, a question would arise that is particularly uncomfortable for artists: Can a photographer be convinced that he is presenting a woman as a subject while his visual language nevertheless turns her into an object?
That is probably not a question to answer too quickly.
Lynda Nead wants to know where the boundary was drawn
With Lynda Nead, the word obscene becomes particularly interesting. In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, she examines, among other things, how cultural boundaries arise between acceptable representations of the female nude, sexuality and obscenity.
Nead might therefore begin by looking not at the woman but at the frame surrounding the image. Not only the wooden or metal frame on the wall, but the social one. When does a nude female body become art? Who decides? Is a museum enough? Is a famous name enough? Is it enough for the work to be two hundred years old? Does a nude body become more respectable if painted in oil? What changes when it is photographed?
Why do we draw a boundary between the nude and pornography at all? Which formal characteristics determine that boundary? Which social ones? Which moral ones? And do these boundaries remain unchanged over decades?
Then Nead might turn back to the young woman: You used the word “obscene”. What exactly has been transgressed here? An aesthetic boundary? A sexual one? A moral one? Your personal boundary? That of your family? Your generation? Your culture? And if another person draws the same boundary somewhere entirely different, who possesses the correct map?
Perhaps this would lead to an even more fundamental question: Do we need the category of “art” in order for certain forms of nudity to become socially acceptable? And if so – what does that say about the body?
Or about us?
Now the questions turn towards the photographer
Up to this point, I could feel relatively comfortable as the photographer. After all, we have spoken at length about what the viewer brings to the image: horizon of expectations, cultural codes, personal experience, social ideas about nudity and sexuality. One could simply lean back and say: You see, my images are not pornographic at all. The problem is sitting in front of the picture.
Unfortunately, Berger, Mulvey and Hall are still in the room, and none of them seems inclined to let me escape quite so elegantly. So now the questions turn towards me. Why do you photograph nude women? Why women? Why nude? What meaning does nudity have within your visual language, and why would the same statement not work equally well with clothing? When does the body become a means of expression for you, and when does it become an aesthetic object? And can you actually recognise that distinction in the finished image – or do you merely believe you can because you were present during the shoot and know what you intended?
This makes matters more uncomfortable. The photographer’s experience during the creation of an image is invisible to the later viewer. The viewer knows nothing of the conversation with the model, the atmosphere of the work, the trust, the agreements, the history behind a pose or the reasons for a particular gesture. The viewer sees only the image. A respectful collaboration can therefore theoretically produce an objectifying image, just as an entirely respectful and equal collaboration can result in an image that is perceived from outside as provocative or sexualised.
Then there is the question of power within the image. Who determines the pose, the light, the framing, the selection and the publication? To what extent does the person depicted actively shape the image? When does the photographer observe a body, when does he use it as a means of expression, and when might he merely use it as form? Is there even a reliable boundary between these possibilities in the finished photograph?
And finally, one particularly uncomfortable question remains: If I myself see no pornographic content, does that prove anything? My own intention is, after all, only one of several levels from which meaning can emerge. I may know why I created an image. I can explain the ideas behind it, the symbolism I intended and why a certain pose was chosen. But it does not follow automatically that precisely this meaning is clearly visible in the image.
Perhaps the image functions differently from the way I believe it does. Perhaps it contains cultural codes I myself failed to notice. Perhaps a viewer reads something into it that I never intended and that is nevertheless formally present in the photograph.
Or perhaps not.
That question, too, will remain unanswered here.
And now back to the young woman
She is still standing in front of the photograph. By now, she may be slightly annoyed. After all, she merely wanted to say that she finds the image pornographic, and suddenly she has to deal with six theorists, decades of art and media theory and a photographer who is no longer entirely entitled to feel secure either. Such are the unfortunate risks of an ordinary exhibition visit.
So we give her the floor once more. She looks at the image and says: “I still think it is pornographic.”
She is entirely entitled to do so. Her perception is real. If she experiences sexualisation, transgression or obscenity when looking at the work, the photographer can hardly explain to her that she does not experience those things. Perceptions cannot be abolished by majority vote or by an artist’s statement. But the existence of that reaction does not automatically mean that her interpretation is the only possible or necessary description of the work.
Nor is my statement that I did not create pornography sufficient. The artist’s intention is not a judicial ruling either. Neither artist nor viewer possesses sole authority over the meaning of a work. The image stands between them and brings with it its own formal structure: light, pose, framing, gesture, composition, materiality and cultural references. Meaning emerges somewhere within this triangle.
And so the image remains on the wall, and we remain standing before it. Perhaps that is exactly where things become interesting.
So where does the pornography reside?
In the depicted body? In its pose? In the camera? In the light? In the framing? In the photographer’s selection? In centuries of visual traditions? In a cultural code? In the gaze of the viewer? Or in our social ideas about what a nude female body is allowed to be?
Perhaps the real difficulty already lies in the fact that we speak so casually of “the pornography in the image”, as though it could be located somewhere like a physical object. One could point to a particular part of the body, mark a section of the photograph and say: there it is. But apparently it is not that simple. The same pose can be read in one context as erotic, in another as vulnerable, in a third as a classical nude and in a fourth as pornographic. The image itself does not necessarily change. The context and the viewer do.
So when does nudity become sexual? When does sexuality become pornographic? When does pornography become obscene? And who is allowed to draw these boundaries? Would your answer be the same if the image were hanging in the Uffizi? If it had been created in 1890? If the woman were eighty years old? If the person depicted were a man? If the photographer were a woman, or if the person depicted had pressed the shutter herself?
Would your perception change if you knew that the image was by a world-famous female artist? What if you believed it was by an unknown amateur? Would you look at it differently in an art book than on Instagram? Would exactly the same photograph suddenly seem more pornographic on a pornography website, even though not a single pixel had changed?
Does the location therefore change the image – or merely the way in which we are prepared to read it?
There is no quick answer here either. Context is not merely packaging. A museum, a website, a book, a gallery or a pornography platform already gives the viewer clues, before the act of viewing even begins, about what kind of image they expect to encounter. That brings us back to Jauss and his horizon of expectations, to Hall and his cultural codes, and to the more fundamental question of whether we can ever look at an image entirely free of prior assumptions.
I will not answer these questions. That would be a rather peculiar conclusion to an article about reception aesthetics. Jauss asks about your horizon of expectations, Iser about what you yourself add. Hall asks about the cultural codes that are produced and read. Berger examines the relationship between viewer and viewed, Mulvey the power of the gaze and the camera, Nead the boundaries between the nude, sexuality and obscenity. And the photographer stands beside them and has to submit to the same questions.
In the end, perhaps there is less certainty than there was at the beginning. The young woman still considers the image pornographic. The photographer still does not. Both perceptions exist. Neither disappears merely because the other has been expressed.
The image itself remains silent.
Perhaps that is wiser than all of us.
Literature and Further Reading
Hans Robert Jauss: Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Particularly relevant is his concept of the horizon of expectations and the question of which cultural and personal preconditions a recipient brings to a work.
Wolfgang Iser: The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Iser examines the active role of the recipient in the creation of meaning and the gaps that are filled in during reading or perception.
Stuart Hall: Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973. Hall’s model of encoding and decoding explains how cultural meanings are produced and can be read differently by different recipients.
John Berger: Ways of Seeing. BBC/Penguin, 1972. Particularly relevant is Berger’s examination of the female nude in European art history and the question of the gaze for which women were depicted.
Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18. Mulvey’s analysis of gaze, gender, power and visual pleasure focuses on cinema but raises highly relevant questions for photography as well.
Lynda Nead: The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. Routledge, 1992. Particularly relevant to the question of how cultural boundaries between the artistic nude, sexuality and obscenity are created and transformed.