photographies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20

SEEING DOUBLE: THE SUBJECT OF VISION IN LEE

FRIEDLANDER’S SELF-PORTRAITURE

Surya Bowyer

To cite this article: Surya Bowyer (2020) SEEING DOUBLE: THE SUBJECT OF VISION IN LEE
FRIEDLANDER’S SELF-PORTRAITURE, photographies, 13:3, 323-339

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2020.1779791

Published online: 11 Aug 2020.

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Surya Bowyer

SEEING DOUBLE: THE SUBJECT OF VISION IN

LEE FRIEDLANDER’S SELF-PORTRAITURE

American photographer Lee Friedlander’s photographs are often deemed to be, unreadable.
This critical assessment of his work is principally based on his manipulation of reflection,
framing, and superimposition. This essay takes these manipulations as its subject. I suggest one
method of reading the unreadable, focusing particularly on two self-portraits: Tallahassee,
Florida 1969 and Madison, Wisconsin 1966. My approach weaves together the ideas of
Jacques Lacan and Homi Bhabha. In the first section, I place Lacan’s concept of the stain into
dialogue with the recurring appearance of Friedlander’s own shadow in his self-portraiture. In
the second, I bring Bhabha into conversation with Lacan, showing crossovers in how they
conceptualise reflections. I argue that Tallahassee and Madison visually articulate these
crossovers. In the third, I use Bhabha’s concept of doubling to approach the two photographs’
delineation of the Lacanian gaze. In forging links between Friedlander, Lacan, and Bhabha,
I propose two complementary ideas. The first is that Friedlander’s photographs help to
illustrate commonality between Lacan’s and Bhabha’s work. The second is that Lacan and
Bhabha help us read Friedlander’s often perplexing self-portraits. By expressing an absence of
the self, these photographs comment on the impossibility of self-portraiture.

What makes these two photographs (Figures 1 and 2) so difficult to make sense of, so
disorienting?1 Perhaps the first culprit to consider is the illegibility of the space repre­
sented in them. Roswell Angier’s comments on Madison, Wisconsin 1966 (Figure 2) are
equally applicable to Tallahassee, Florida 1969 (Figure 1):

The markers that usually let us make sense of spatial relations — foreground and
background, inside and outside — have collapsed. We cannot see what is
actually inside, behind the window display. Our minds may tell us that the
sunlit street behind the photographer, and the photographer himself, are reflec­
tions of what is outside, but they appear to be inside, behind the window
display.2

photographies, 2020
Vol. 13, No. 3, 323–339, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2020.1779791
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
324 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Fig. 1. Lee Friedlander, Tallahassee, Florida 1969, gelatin silver print, 1969. Museum of Modern
Art, New York. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Fig. 2. Lee Friedlander, Madison, Wisconsin 1966, gelatin silver print, 1966. Museum of Modern
Art, New York. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In both photographs, the window’s semi-reflective surface collapses the distinction

between what is on either side of it. That which is visible through the window and
that which is reflected by it are superimposed on to each other. Angier is not alone in
finding Friedlander’s use of windows disorienting. Ian Jeffrey, in his Concise History of
photography, speaks of Friedlander’s photographs generally as being:
 SEEING DOUBLE 325

relatively hard to read in that they, like those of William Klein in the fifties,
feature reflective and semi-transparent surfaces; they are both mirrors and
windows at once, complicated by pictorial insets.3

In collating mirror image, window-framed image, and other images (or “pictorial
insets”) such as the photograph of the woman (Figure 2), Friedlander’s photographs
exhibit a busyness of composition that is difficult to immediately comprehend.
Both Angier’s and Jeffrey’s comments, in expressing a captivation (and confu­
sion) with the form of Friedlander’s work, fall in line with the appraisal found in
Mary Warner Marien’s Cultural History of photography: “Friedlander obscurely hinted
at a story, only to fall back on an exercise in camera vision”.4 Notable also is the
recurrence of the assessment of Friedlander’s work as “hard to read” (Jeffrey), lacking
the “sense” to be intelligible (Angier), or here operating “obscurely”. Liz Wells et al.,
in stating Friedlander’s photographs are “full of visual ambiguity”, express another
iteration of this sentiment.5
All four of the texts I have quoted above avow to be histories of and/or
introductions to photography. In tracing the entries on Friedlander found in these
texts, my aim is to show that his work is often regarded as unreadable. In what
follows, I wish to suggest one method of reading the unreadable. My approach
weaves together the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Homi Bhabha. It is my dual hope
that their ideas provide a method for reading Friedlander’s work, and that
Friedlander’s work provides the loom that holds together warp and weft.
Charles Shepherdson provides a warning for those who move Lacan’s ideas out of
the realm of psychoanalysis. He argues that the theoretical specificity of Lacan’s work
is “eroded in the very course of its reception”, and refers to the various fields to
which it has been applied as “disciplinary lens[es]”.6 I must admit that I am indeed
following on from those who, in relation to Lacan’s work, have “neglected its clinical
dimension”.7
I have two counters to Shepherdson’s remarks. The first is that most of the work
I use comes from Seminar XI and deals largely with the analysis of vision and
representation.8 The second is that my use of the mirror stage rests on Lacan
describing it as “an essential […] relationship” between subject and image.9 Given
this essentiality, and given my analysis of Friedlander is grounded in vision and
representation, Lacan’s work is apposite. Moreover, throughout my essay I stress
that the links I draw, not only between Lacan and Friedlander but also between
Bhabha and Friedlander, are metaphoric in nature. Insofar as both terms in
a metaphor retain their own specificity, a metaphoric relationship does not lead to
an erosion of the terms from which it is formed.
I am by no means the first to draw links between Lacan and Bhabha. Anthony
Easthope reads Lacan’s work in direct opposition to Bhabha’s, at least in as far as
Jacques Derrida’s understanding of presence and difference influences Bhabha’s
work.10 Yet the Lacan-Bhabha link has usually been drawn in terms not of difference
but rather of Lacan’s influence on Bhabha’s thinking. Priscilla Netto, in a study of
“visibility practices of postcolonial Singaporean multiculturalism”, notes “Bhabha’s
discussion of the production of the colonial stereotype” owes a debt to Lacan’s mirror
326 PHOTOGRAPHIES

stage.11 I shall draw a similar link, yet I am as interested in the productive differences
and variations between Lacan’s and Bhabha’s thought as I am the likenesses.
Netto is not alone in her approach of bringing together these two thinkers in an
explicitly postcolonial context; David Vilaseca takes Lacan’s exegesis of Hans
Holbein’s The Ambassadors and uses it to read the postcolonial as the skull in what
he calls “the picture of all modernist discourses”, while Kate McInturff “attempt[s] to
test the limits of the usefulness of psychoanalysis in postcolonial theory”.12 This essay
differs from these thinkers insofar as it uses Bhabha (and Lacan) in a context which is
not principally postcolonial. It asks two questions posed by Edward Said in 1982 (and
used by McInturff as a framework): how far can an idea or theory travel? And might
its foreignness in this new context be illuminating?13
In his essay “Looking at Photographs”, Victor Burgin sketches some initial links
between Lacan and Friedlander. Burgin notes that in the photograph Hillcrest,
New York 1970 Friedlander uses the conventional full-frontal perspective which we
associate with looking at ourselves in the mirror. However, Friedlander’s use of this
perspective is not straightforward: he disrupts it in a number of ways. First, the
reflection is fragmentary, being bisected in half by the frame of the mirror. Second,
the photograph “generates a fundamental ambivalence” in that “there is no evidence
(such as the reflection of the camera) to confirm whether we are looking at the
reflection of the photographer or at that of some other person”. Burgin’s analysis then
turns Lacanian: he argues that as a result of this ambivalence, the figure in the
photograph has the status of both the “self” and “other”.14
Burgin also notes the “ambiguous figure/ground relationships” in Hillcrest,
New York, which subvert “the vanishing-point perspective system” that we have
come to expect in photographs.15 For Burgin, this perspective system helps position
the viewing subject in relation to the photograph:

Whatever the object depicted, the manner of its depiction accords with laws of
geometric projection which imply a unique ‘point-of-view’. It is the position of
point-of-view, occupied in fact by the camera, which is bestowed upon the
spectator.16

In other words, conventional photographic representation requires that the “stage of

the represented (that of the photograph as object-text) meet the stage of the
representing (that of the viewing subject) in a ‘seamless join’.”17 In Hillcrest,
New York, this join is disrupted.
Burgin’s analysis, with its focus on the photograph’s fragmentary full-frontal
reflection and ambiguous treatment of depth and perspective, is pertinent to
Tallahassee, Florida 1969 and Madison, Wisconsin 1966 (Figures 1 and 2). Yet before
he can unpack the implications of Friedlander’s dismissal of the “seamless join”
between points-of-view, Burgin moves away from Hillcrest, New York. He leaves the
issue tantalisingly open. Towards the end of his essay, he justifies this decision:

To remain long with a single image is to risk the loss of our imaginary command
of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right —
the camera. The image then no longer receives our look, reassuring us of our
 SEEING DOUBLE 327

founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze, confirming its

allegiance to the other.18

I will remain with Friedlander’s photographs longer than Burgin does, and risk the
loss of my imaginary command of the look. In so doing, I hope to reach a clearer
understanding of how Friedlander disrupts conventional photographic representation.
My reading of Friedlander’s self-portraiture is formed of three sections. In the
first, I place Lacan’s concept of the stain into dialogue with the recurring appearance
of Friedlander’s own shadow in his self-portraiture. In the second, I bring Bhabha into
conversation with Lacan, showing crossovers in their approaches to reflections. In this
section I return to the two photographs above, showing how they visually articulate
these crossovers. In the third, I use Bhabha’s concept of doubling to approach these
two photographs’ delineation of the Lacanian gaze.

Self-portraits, stain-portraits

What does it mean to make a self-portrait? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
lists the now usual sense of “portrait” as a “drawing or painting of a person, often
mounted and framed for display, esp. one of the face or head and shoulders. Also, an
engraving, photograph, etc., in a similar style” (n. 1b). To this it adds as a subsidiary
definition: “A statue (full size or as a bust)” (n. 1 c). From these definitions we gain
the sense that the head and shoulders, and particularly the face, are central to the
portrait. In some senses, then, the two photographs above (Figures 1 and 2) appear
not to be portraits. In both we are denied a view of Friedlander’s face.
There is another sense of “portrait” listed in the OED: “Something which
represents, typifies, or resembles the object described or implied; a type;
a likeness” (n. 2a). Though now rare, does this description not seem appropriate to
Friedlander’s work? For while we cannot see his face in either photograph above
(Figures 1 and 2), we cannot deny that the figure in both resembles him. He is
“implied”.
Wells et al. take interest in the role of Friedlander’s figure in his photographs.
Let us revisit their statement from above but this time consider the sentence in its
entirety: “Lee Friedlander could make a series of photographs full of visual ambiguity
and allow his own silhouette to fall across his subjects to celebrate his shadowy
presence on the scene”.19 Wells et al. provide us with no more of an explanation of
what it might mean to “celebrate” one’s “shadowy presence” in a photograph. Yet the
basic account in this statement is accurate: Friedlander’s shadow often falls across the
subjects in his photographs, implying his presence. How are we to read such
shadows?
Curator John Szarkowski suggests we do so metaphorically:

Friedlander’s own face […] or even his full figure […] or some other thick or
thin slice or suggestion of him should perhaps not be regarded as a description of
his true character, or his person, or even his public persona, but simply as a kind
328 PHOTOGRAPHIES

of identifying mark—something similar to a signature, or a fingerprint, or a royal

seal, that indicates that he, Friedlander a reliable witness (like Kilroy) was
there.20

What are we to make of Szarkowski’s metaphors? The insistence of the phrasing —

“identifying mark”, “a signature, or a fingerprint, or a royal seal” — demands we take
note. But take note of what? I would like to propose we take Szarkowski’s metaphor
somewhere he — probably — did not intend.
Before we do so, let us first turn to what Friedlander has to say about his own
work: “These self portraits […] happened as a peripheral extension of my work”.21 It
is notable that he does not use marginal or secondary or any other word which would
transmit a similar meaning, but rather lands on “peripheral”. With this word choice,
one thinks of peripheral vision. It is a fact of our visual faculties that once we choose
to look directly at something, it is necessarily no longer located in our peripheral
vision. For something to be in our peripheral vision we must see it obliquely.
Given these connotations, one might read “peripheral” here as appropriate not
only to the type of extension Friedlander’s self-portraiture forms in relation to his
other work, but also to the composition of the self-portraits themselves. As Wells
et al. note, when Friedlander captures on film his own figure it is often in the form of
a shadow which creeps up from the bottom of the frame, either entering from or
staying within the periphery of the image. These, I suspect, are some of the “thin
slice[s]” Szarkowski speaks of. There are many photographs by Friedlander which
feature his own shadow in this way, for example New York City 1966, Southern United
States 1966, and Minneapolis, Minnesota 1966. In each photograph, Friedlander’s
shadow rises from the bottom edge of the picture, infringing on its ostensible
focus. Friedlander says of this infringement: “I was finding myself at times in the
landscape of my photography. I might call myself an intruder […] my presence in my
photos was fascinating and disturbing”.22
In Friedlander’s comments there is an echo of Lacan: “And if I am anything in the
picture, it is always in the form of […] the stain, the spot”.23 By “picture”, Lacan is
here referring to that which is seen by someone who is engaged in the act of looking.
“The picture”, he says, “is in my [or anyone else’s] eye”.24 An example of the “stain”
of ourselves on the picture might be those occasions on which I catch a glimpse of my
nose out of the corner of my eye — in my periphery — which, to use Slavoj Zizek’s
explanation, “throws the harmony of my vision off balance”.25 In seeing it, I realise
I cannot see myself as others see me.
While Lacan is here speaking of our faculty of vision, his language is enticing.
Might we not apply his idea of the subject only ever existing as a “stain” in the
“picture” to, well, a literal picture? Lacan does just this, taking Hans Holbein’s The
Ambassadors as an illustrative example. In his reading of the painting, it is only when
one turns around to leave that the significance of the angled skull becomes clear. We
must look at it obliquely. For Lacan, this literal blot, or smear, or “stain”, reminds us
that our vision can never be total.26
To this list — skull, blot, smear, stain — I would like to add another term:
shadow. Or, to be more specific, the way Friedlander “finds” his own shadow in these
 SEEING DOUBLE 329

photographs. In its superimposition on the focus of each image, the shadow reminds
Friedlander of his own position in relation to these foci. It approximately replicates
the form of his body, and in so doing reminds him of the shape of that which he
cannot see — himself. Given this, is it surprising that Friedlander understands his
stain-like presence as an “intruder” which he finds both “fascinating and disturbing”?
Does this not seem a perfectly appropriate response to being reminded that one’s
vision is incomplete?
In mapping this initial dialogue between the work of Friedlander and Lacan, I hope
to have elucidated the way Friedlander formulates a sense of the stain in several of his
self-portraits. In what follows, I shall return to the two photographs from this essay’s
opening, finding again that Lacan’s work provides a fruitful exegetical frame of refer­
ence. Yet, as shall become clear to the reader, this dialogue is missing a component. To
begin to identify this missing component, let us now turn to missing persons.

Mirrors and missing persons

To see a missing person, or to look at Invisibleness, is to emphasize the subject’s

transitive demand for a direct object of self-reflection, a point of presence that
would maintain its privileged enunciatory position qua subject. To see a missing
person is to transgress that demand; the ‘I’ in the position of mastery is, at that same
time, the place of its absence, its re-presentation.27

In the above lines, Bhabha speaks of a coloniser looking at a subaltern but seeing only
a missing person. The absence of the person from the coloniser’s vision reveals that
this act of looking is driven by a desire for self-reflection which consolidates the
coloniser’s privileged position as the subject who does the looking at the subaltern,
who is the object of both vision and self-reflection.
The lines form part of Bhabha’s exegesis of a poem by Adil Jussawalla. Key to
Bhabha’s exegesis is proving the suitability of Jussawalla’s poem as a framework for
understanding a certain kind of looking — Bhabha takes the particular situation from
Jussawalla’s work and uses it to uncover a more general experience of the subaltern
in relation to the coloniser.
But what if we re-read Bhabha — or, rather, mis-read him? Might something
productive come of this? One might first note that from the lines quoted above, there
is no sense that Bhabha is speaking specifically of a coloniser and subaltern: the lines
mention only a “subject” and “object”. Elsewhere in his analysis, Bhabha is specific
with his language, speaking of “the woman migrant”, the “diaspora”, “the postcolonial
bourgeoisie”. The (post-)colonial context of his analysis is often unavoidable. But not
here.
Might it not be entirely an act of misreading, then, to take the process Bhabha
lays out in these lines — of looking and (not) being looked at — and examine their
suitability to other, non-predominantly (post-)colonial contexts? In case the reader
still considers this a discourteous misreading, I would like to identify a resemblance in
Bhabha’s thinking here to what Lacan calls specularization.
330 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Lacan suggests that children between the ages of six and eighteen months
undergo a process of development whereby they recognise an external image of
themselves in a mirror and/or in their interactions with a primary caregiver. He
speaks of a “transformation that takes place in the subject when [s]he assumes an
image”.28 By presenting the child as a unified whole, this reflected image “symbolizes
the mental permanence of the I”.29 Lacan would go on to assign importance to the
mirror stage not only with regard to a child’s early development, but also with regard
to a person’s continued construction of their own subjectivity. He states it is:

a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has

historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development
of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with
the body-image.30

In this “second place” we see the sustained importance of the reflected image to the
subject, in that the subject is constituted by its own self-objectification through
continually seeing or imagining itself as a unified whole.
To explicate specularization another way, I thus might write that the subject
demands “a direct object of self-reflection, a point of presence that would maintain its
[…] position qua subject”. Put this way, it becomes clear that Bhabha shifts Lacan’s
specular framework on to a new object of study — relations between coloniser and
subaltern — and argues that colonisers use subalterns as body-images from which to
constitute their own subjecthood.
Yet central to Bhabha’s reframing of Lacan is the notion that this process of
subject sustainment becomes “emphasize[d]” only when it fails. Much like the United
States housing bubble, it is only when processes fail that they become visible. It takes
a recession to reveal bad banking practice.
Let us return to the two photographs at the start of this essay. What do we look
at when we look at these self-portraits? The shop-window, as much a provider of
one’s reflection as a tool for surveying a shop’s wares, takes centre stage in both. In
both we are offered a reflection of Friedlander. But in both this reflection is
incomplete. In Tallahassee (Figure 1), part of this incompleteness stems from us
only being able to see Friedlander’s head and shoulders. Yet the more unexpected
incompleteness stems from the camera obscuring a view of his face. The photograph
presents us with a conventional portrait framing — the photographic equivalent of
a sculpted bust — but undercuts our expectations by denying us the one thing central
to any portrait: the face. In the trophy which covers it, we can just make out
Friedlander’s reflection, transmuted by the trophy’s shape into a strange, narrow
figure. His face has become a thin line. The framing in Madison (Figure 2) is more
complex. Here we can see more of Friedlander’s body, but again his face has been
obfuscated, this time cut off by the top edge of the frame. A ghost-like shadow of that
which is missing — his head — uncannily rises from the bottom edge. As if to
emphasise that which is missing, the shadow falls on to a photographic portrait of
a woman. Her eyes stare out at us as we view what is ostensibly a self-portrait of
Friedlander.31
 SEEING DOUBLE 331

In both photographs, then, we are offered views of a reflection, yet both

reflections feature an absence of that which we expect them to transmit.
Friedlander might be said to be “missing” from both, at least in as far as his
likeness is concerned. The self-reflection has failed in the terms laid out by
Bhabha. It has also failed in Lacanian terms, in that the specular image is not
that of a unified self. The two photographs explicitly and playfully deny any sense
of unity in the body-images they present. In so doing, they each portray a missing
person.
Yet to read these two photographs in this way is to do them a disservice. They do
not solely formulate the self-reflection process that is established by Lacan and
extended by Bhabha. There is more at stake here. Ian Jeffrey hits on a key issue,
even if he does not loosen its knottiness:

Friedlander’s sustained concern has been with ‘vantage point’ […] Choice of
vantage point allows the artist to declare a personal way of seeing which prevails
even in the most unpromising terrain.32

Perhaps it is true that Friedlander declares a “personal way of seeing”. But if we are to
accept Jeffrey’s comments in relation to Figures 1 and 2, it is important to clarify that
in both photographs Friedlander has chosen not one “vantage point”, but two vantage
points. To put this another way, in both cases the photographs have been taken not
with the camera placed against Friedlander’s eyes but rather with it placed against his
chest. This means that each photograph’s obfuscated view of Friedlander’s reflection
is taken from a vantage point which is explicitly not Friedlander’s own. These two
vantage points — the camera’s and Friedlander’s — are explicitly non-coincidental.
Friedlander does not see the mirror images that are captured in the photographs —
does not “see a missing person”.
This “gap between the self as experienced and as performed”, argues art
historian Ben Street, “is where the friction of the greatest self-portraiture lies”.33
In the next section I will examine the implications of this gap between what
Friedlander would see in the window and what we see in the photograph. To do
so I shall return to Bhabha and Lacan, finding further dialogues in other areas of their
thought.

Splitting, doubling, and the gaze

I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is
outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the function that is
found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines
me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is
through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects.
Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is
embodied and through which — if you will allow me to use a word, as I often
do, in a fragmented form — I am photo-graphed.34
332 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Lacan locates the gaze “outside”: as that which determines us as seen. It is thus
distinguishable from the look or eye, in that the look/eye refers to a single subject’s
act of looking. Lacan maps both in a series of diagrams. He situates the gaze and the look
at opposite ends of the diagrams, and thus at opposite ends of the field of vision. The
gaze is located at the same site as the object of vision. Art historian and theorist Kaja
Silverman, in her exegesis of these diagrams, suggests that the object may be conflated
with the gaze “on the basis of what might be called the spectacle’s [object of vision’s] ‘lit
up’ quality”, through which it “looks back at the viewer”.35 The look, on the other hand,
necessarily stems from the geometral point — the site the subject occupies. Thus the
gaze is situated at a site which is, necessarily, there-where-the-subject-is-not. As the
gaze, from this position, is always spectating the subject, it follows that the binary of
spectator-spectated is a fallacy: the subject is usually both at once.
In the lines that open this section, Lacan’s language is distinctly photographic.
The person seen is “a picture” and is “photo-graphed”. How seriously should we take
his language here? Silverman gives us a paradoxical answer by “taking Lacan’s allusion
to the camera much more seriously than he intended”.36 Silverman justifies doing so
by combining Jonathan Crary’s historical account of the rise of the camera in
Techniques of the Observer with Lacan’s “transhistorical” model of the field of vision
to argue that “the camera has been installed ever since the early nineteenth century as
the primary trope through which the Western subject apprehends the gaze”.37 She
goes on:

Not only does the camera work to define the contemporary gaze in certain
decisive ways, but the camera derives most of its psychic significance through its
alignment with the gaze. When we feel the social gaze focused upon us, we feel
photographically ‘framed.’ However, the converse is also true: when a real
camera is trained upon us, we feel ourselves subjectively constituted, as if the
resulting photograph could somehow determine ‘who’ we are.38

However, elsewhere she notes the gaze “issues ‘from all sides,’ whereas the eye
‘[sees] only from one point.’ […] The gaze is ‘unapprehensible,’ that is, impossible to
seize or get hold of”.39 How do we reconcile these two statements? How can the gaze
be “unapprehensible” yet apprehended by us — and at that, apprehended by way of
something that is held, that is “trained upon” people by other people?
Perhaps no reconciliation is needed. Silverman is careful in the terms she uses to
present this alignment. Let us take two illustrative examples:

the camera is the primary metaphor for the gaze40

to represent the gaze as a camera41

Silverman’s analysis thus rests on the camera functioning as a metaphor or represen­

tation of the gaze, not on it being the gaze itself. As the gaze is not apprehensible, it
can never itself be completely located, isolated, or seized so that we may analyse it.
As such, explorations of it are always exercises in metaphor: they never touch on the
gaze itself, having instead to settle for its representations.42
 SEEING DOUBLE 333

Might the camera as metaphor for the gaze be a useful method of reading
Friedlander’s photographs (Figures 1 and 2)? Silverman’s assessment of Lacan as
“strenuously” insisting “upon the disjunction of camera and eye” (Threshold 137) seems
also an apt description of these two works.43 The camera is markedly disjointed from
Friedlander’s eye in both. Yet in extending the metaphor on to Friedlander’s work
we encounter a problem. Lacan suggests the gaze, while not being equivalent to any
person or persons, might be said to be “the presence of others as such”.44 Silverman
extends this point to her metaphor, speaking of a “camera trained upon us”. What
happens when the camera is trained by the very person that it frames? In this reflexive
act, does the metaphor still hold?
To attempt to answer these questions, I would like to turn to another moment in
Lacan’s explication of the gaze and use it as a way into an area of Bhabha’s work:
“You never look at me from the place from which I see you”.45 What if we take the
I/me and the you in this formation and apply them not to two subjects, but to the
same subject? I never look at myself from the place from which I see myself. This, at first,
sounds rather absurd. Let us return to it after having moved briefly to Bhabha.
Bhabha speaks of the subaltern as existing in “a space of splitting”, in that they
desire “to occupy the master’s place while keeping his [or her] place in the slave’s
avenging anger”.46 However, as this necessitates being in two places at once, and since
the subaltern does not desire to only have half of themselves in both places at once,
this splitting is really “a doubling”. What is particularly pertinent about Bhabha’s
thinking is that he speaks of this doubling as an “image of being in at least two places
at once”.47 The process is reliant on the subaltern seeing themselves in two places at
once. Here, place is for Bhabha a key method of understanding identity, in that this
process of doubled seeing is how one holds two “image[s] of identity” at once.48 The
type of doubled seeing Bhabha is outlining here is not, of course, an entirely literal
one — we cannot literally see ourselves in two places at once. At least two solutions
to this non-literality present themselves. The first is that the subject sees themselves
in their mind’s eye in at least one place that they are not (with the other place either
being literally seen or also imaginatively seen). The other is that the subject sees
themselves in both places but does not do so synchronically.49
In this section of The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses the writings of Frantz Fanon
and Adil Jussawalla to examine the more general (yet still historically specific)
relation between subaltern and coloniser. However, insofar as Bhabha’s work here
is grounded in the analysis of vision and representation, it should be more widely
applicable to other media and time periods. Or, if any such attempts to make
Bhabha’s ideas travel are deemed by the reader to be an affront to the specificity
of his work, it is my belief that something productive may result from this affront. To
return to the question posed by Said: might an idea’s foreignness in a new context be
illuminating? It is with this understanding of Bhabha’s work that I would like to take
his concept of splitting/doubling and apply it to Friedlander’s self-portraits, hoping in
the process to show that the metaphor of camera as gaze need not fail when the
camera is wielded by the very person it photographs.
In taking these photographs, Friedlander sees two “image[s] of identity”. The first
is the reflection of himself that he sees in the window from his point-of-view.
334 PHOTOGRAPHIES

The second is the reflection of himself that he captures with the camera and sees in
the resulting photographs. The first is literal and the second is — returning to the
two solutions above — both imaginative and non-synchronous with the first. It is
imaginative insofar as Friedlander would have had to, when taking the photograph,
imaginatively see himself, visualising the framing that results from his positioning of
the camera. It is non-synchronous insofar as Friedlander is only able to actually see
himself from this place once the photograph has been taken and the film developed, at
a time when he is no longer seeing his reflection in the window from his own point-
of-view.
In this way, Friedlander’s photographs engage with Bhabha’s concept of doubling.
Yet they also modify Bhabha’s conception of the images which result from doubling.
From Bhabha’s original “image of being in at least two places at once” we arrive at:
images of being from at least two places at once.50 Now we may return to my
reformulation of Lacan: I never look at myself from the place from which I see myself.
Friedlander does not look at himself (represented in the photograph, from the
camera’s point-of-view) from the place from which he sees himself (reflected in
the window, from his own point-of-view).
Through this process of doubling, Friedlander’s photographs are able to stress the
fact that we are all always both viewer and viewed, even though they only feature
a single person. To put this another way, it is by way of doubling that these
photographs are able to formulate — quite without the “presence of others” —
the presence of the gaze within the visual field. As the gaze is “unapprehensible”, it is
important to maintain that this formulation is a metaphoric one. One of the gaze’s
defining features is that whenever we search for it, it eludes us. We thus must settle
for its representations.

Unreadable differences

What should we make of the two “image[s] of identity” which result from this
doubling? The first “image” has resonances with Lacan’s specularization — a subject
sees a reflected image of themselves that is both themselves and other. The second
has resonances with Bhabha’s missing person, with an object of self-reflection being
absent from the subject at the time of reflection. As such, both “image[s]” express an
absence of the self. Paradoxically, Tallahassee, Florida 1969 and Madison, Wisconsin
1966 also draw attention to the self which has authored them. One key reason the
camera has become, to requote Silverman, “the primary metaphor for the gaze” is
because it is an authoritative form of representation.51 When looking at
a photographic image, we often do not give thought to, or perhaps even forget,
the person behind the camera. Not so with these two photographs, in which
Friedlander forces us, in a subtle yet emphatic manner, to consider the photographic
image as explicitly authored.
Bertolt Brecht’s description of epic theatre might just as well be applied to
Friedlander’s photographs; in both, the viewer is “no longer allowed in any way to
submit to an experience uncritically”.52 Part of Brecht’s understanding of what
 SEEING DOUBLE 335

constitutes “uncritical” viewing rests on a singularity of perspective, in that traditional

theatre encourages the viewer to “look neither right nor left, up nor down”.53
Indeed, a singular, fixed perspective is precisely what these two photographs by
Friedlander deny. They do so by capturing their subject from a point from which he
does not literally see himself, and in the process they emphasise a distance between
perspectives. Or, to quote from Walter Benjamin’s exegesis of Brecht:

distances are created everywhere which are, on the whole, detrimental to illusion
among the audience. These distances are meant to make the audience adopt
a critical attitude, to make it think.54

Many of the “distances” in Brecht’s epic theatre stem from the actor “appearing” on
stage “in a double guise”: the actor “who is showing does not disappear” in the role
“who is shown”.55 The Friedlander of these photographs may not be on a stage, but as
he stands in front of these shop windows he is simultaneously the person “who is
showing” and “who is shown”. As such, Stephen Unwin’s assessment that this double
guise requires actors in the epic theatre to have “a kind of double vision” is a fitting
description of Friedlander as he sees his reflection in the window and imaginatively
sees himself from the camera’s point-of-view.56 As I have argued above, the self in
these two self-portraits is doubled yet absent. The effect of this double vision is thus
that the photographs affirm their status as authored by the person they represent
while simultaneously insisting on their own deficiencies at representing the self. In so
doing, they comment on the impossibility of self-portraiture.
Let us return to Friedlander’s comments on his photographs:

At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time

passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add
a giggle to those feelings.57

In this essay, I have tried to understand where the “fascinating and disturbing” aspect
of Friedlander’s presence stems from, and have also suggested a few “other ideas”.
Yet in forging links between Friedlander, Lacan, and Bhabha, this essay has not one
but two intertwined goals. The first is that Friedlander’s photographs help to
illustrate commonality between Lacan’s and Bhabha’s work. The second is that
Lacan and Bhabha help us read photographs which, while lauded, have so often
been appraised as unreadable.
I have stressed on various occasions that the links drawn in this essay are
metaphoric. As a comparative method, metaphor relies as much on difference as it
does on similarity, even if the latter is usually taken as central. That the two objects
are strictly not the same is fundamental to any metaphor’s workings. In Said’s words,
“no system or theory exhausts the situation […] to which it is transported.”58 As
such, even though this essay suggests a reading of Friedlander’s photographs grounded
in their resemblance to the work of Lacan and Bhabha, within this reading a space of
difference remains. It is perhaps here that Friedlander’s work retains the
336 PHOTOGRAPHIES

inexplicableness stressed by the critical voices collected at the start of this essay.
Reading the unreadable does not annihilate it.

Notes
1. For photographs, I follow the titles as they appear in Friedlander, Self Portrait.
Differences in titling can be found in some gallery listings for the works, with the
most common difference being a comma placed before the year. Given
Friedlander’s involvement in putting together Self Portrait, I take the edition as
the authority on this matter.
2. Angier, Train Your Gaze, 18.
3. Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History, 216.
4. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 349.
5. Wells et al., Photography: A Critical Introduction, 121.
6. I am applying Lacan’s work to a literal lens — Friedlander’s. Shepherdson, Vital
Signs, 8 & 2.
7. Ibid., 2.
8. While I shall refer to it as Seminar XI throughout this essay, the title of the edition
I cite is The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis.
9. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” 14 (my emphasis).
10. Easthope, “Homi Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity,” 147.
11. Netto, “Politics of Vision,” 84 & 70.
12. Vilaseca, “The Ambassadors goes to Manila,” 78; McInturff, “Dark Continents,” 9.
13. Cited in McInturff, “Dark Continents,” 11–12. McInturff is referring to Said,
“Traveling Theory.”
14. Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 150.
15. Ibid., 150.
16. Ibid., 146.
17. Ibid., 150.
18. Ibid., 152.
19. Wells et al., Photography, 121.
20. Szarkowski, “The Friedlander Self,” n.p. (The edition this essay is found within,
Self Portrait, is not paginated.)
21. Friedlander, “Introduction,” n.p.
22. Ibid.
23. I say echo because although Seminar XI was first published in 1973 (three years
after Friedlander’s introduction), the text is taken from a series of seminars which
began nine years earlier. Lacan, Seminar XI, 97.
24. Ibid., 96.
25. Zizek, Looking Awry, 114.
26. I have deliberately avoided using Lacan’s term the gaze in this section. While
Lacan’s understanding of the stain and Holbein’s skull is rooted in his theory of
the gaze, in this section of my essay the gaze itself is not essential to the scope of
my analysis. I explore the gaze in my later section “Splitting, doubling, and the
gaze.” For Lacan’s passage on Holbein’s painting, see Lacan, Seminar XI, 88–89.
 SEEING DOUBLE 337

27. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 67.

28. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1–2.
29. Ibid., 2.
30. Lacan, “Ego,” 14.
31. The photograph’s categorisation as a self-portrait of Friedlander obliterates the
presence of the woman. She remains, at most, an anonymous interloper. The
white man overshadows the black woman. There is fertile ground for an analysis
of Madison, Wisconsin 1966 which explores the power relations that constitute
race, especially given Bhabha derives his theory of the missing person from the
relationship between coloniser and subaltern. Given my focus on how well
Bhabha’s ideas travel, such an analysis is sadly outside the scope of this essay.
32. See note 3 above.
33. Street, “Power of the Self-Portrait,” 32.
34. Lacan, Seminar XI, 106.
35. Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan,” 293.
36. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 134.
37. Ibid., 131 & 135.
38. Ibid., 135. Although unfortunately beyond the remit of this essay, a question
which arises from Silverman’s analysis is how people felt the gaze before the
advent of cameras. What metaphor would those people have used to apprehend
it?
39. Here Silverman quotes from Lacan’s Seminar XI. “Fassbinder and Lacan,” 277.
40. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 135 (my emphasis).
41. Ibid., 136 (my emphasis).
42. Saper makes a similar argument in relation to the gaze itself only ever being
missing from an artwork, even if the artwork shows the gaze working. See “A
Nervous Theory,” 33–52.
43. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 137. Silverman also attaches this assessment
to Crary and Harun Farocki, with the latter’s film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des
Krieges forming the object of study in her Lacano-Crarian analysis.
44. Lacan, Seminar XI, 84.
45. Ibid., 103.
46. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 63–4.
47. Ibid., 64.
48. Ibid.
49. The splitting of the subject crops up in Lacan’s Seminar XI, but in a manner quite
different to how Bhabha formulates it. Lacan speaks of a “splitting of the being
[…] between its being and its semblance, between itself and the paper tiger it
shows to the other”. Seminar XI, 106–7. Although Lacan does not clearly define
the middle structure in his diagrams (the image/screen), Silverman and others
have read it as this “paper tiger” — in other words the “semblance” or image of
ourselves that is seen.
50. There are suggestions of this modification elsewhere in Bhabha: he speaks of the
subject being “seen, from where it is not,” a statement which strikes me as an apt
description of the camera’s role in these photographs by Friedlander. Bhabha, The
Location of Culture, 47.
51. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 135.
338 PHOTOGRAPHIES

52. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 110.

53. Ibid., 72.
54. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 38.
55. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 243.
56. Unwin, Complete Brecht Toolkit, 49.
57. See note 21 above.
58. Said, “Traveling Theory,” 242.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Mark Hewitson and Reinier van Straten for shaping my understanding
of Homi Bhabha, to Jann Matlock for introducing me to Kaja Silverman’s work, and
to Ashley West for initiating my fascination with Friedlander’s photographs all those
years ago. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
I would also like to thank Rebecca Robertson at Fraenkel Gallery for speaking to Lee
Friedlander on my behalf and for organising the reproduction rights for the two
photographs which are central to this essay.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Surya Bowyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-8784

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Surya Bowyer is a writer and researcher based in London. Between 2018 and 2019, he
taught as an English lecteur at Sorbonne University’s Faculté des Lettres. He holds a
bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oxford and a master’s degree in
European Culture and Thought from University College London. His research interests
include representations and how they work, the relationship between word and image, and
the history of media.