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Bourdieu Peasant and Photography 1 PDF
Bourdieu Peasant and Photography 1 PDF
graphy
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 601–616[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050701]
hierarchical and closed society in which the lineage and the ‘house’ have
more reality than the particular individuals who compose them.
Photographic images entered peasant society very early, long before the
practice of taking photographs. They were introduced by the people of the
bourg as everything predisposed them to play the role of go-between
between the peasants of the outlying hamlets and the city. Their use rapidly
became mandatory, especially on the occasion of weddings, because they
came to fulfill functions that pre-existed their introduction. Indeed,
photography appears from the very outset as the required accompaniment
of the great ceremonies of familial and collective life. If one accepts, with
Durkheim (1995), that the function of festivals is to revivify the group,
one understands why photography should be associated with them, since
it provides the means of eternizing and solemnizing these climactic
moments of social life wherein the group reasserts its unity. In the case of
weddings, for example, the image that fixes for eternity the assembled
group or, better, the assembling of two groups, takes its place in a neces-
sary way in a ritual whose function is to consecrate, that is, to sanction
and to sanctify, the union between two groups through the union between
two individuals. It is no doubt no accident that the order in which photog-
raphy has been introduced into the ritual of ceremonies corresponds to the
social importance of each of them. The oldest and most traditional usage
of photography, explains J.-P.A. (born in Lesquire in 1885), is the wedding
photograph:3
The first time I attended a wedding ceremony where photographs were taken
in front of the church must have been in 1903. It was the wedding of a
countryman who had relatives in town, that kind of thing. The photogra-
pher made everyone take their places on the steps of the church, there, and
some were seated and others were standing behind them. He had set things
up, with benches, with covers so they wouldn’t get their clothes dirty. There
were no cars then yet, but he had come with a car. People talked about that
a lot. The groom was an ‘American’ [a local emigrant to America], L., from
the Ju. family, a great family, who married the heiress from the R. family. It
was a great wedding, what with him coming from America. He would go
around with a little mare, a gold chain on his waistcoat. That was the first
occasion I remember, perhaps there were others before, but that one really
made a splash! The very old folks had never seen that kind of thing before,
no. . . . Later, the photographers came forward of their own accord when
they knew a wedding was in the offing. . . . They were the ones presenting
themselves, the families didn’t have to ask them. Nowadays, people call them
in. But it really took off after the Great War, from 1919 onward. The habit
of going to Pau to get their picture taken dates back from this moment. . . .
It’s the photographer who would come on, who offered his services.
604 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)
Otherwise there are those who would not have called him in, maybe. But
once he’s there, they don’t dare say no. Nothing is too expensive on that day.
The wedding photograph imposed itself as obligatory so rapidly only
because it encountered its social conditions of existence: expenditure and
extravagance are part of festive behaviors, in particular the ostentatious
outlays that no one can avoid making without derogating honor.
These pictures, in the early days, the photographer would go round to see
who wanted some. He would collect the names and he sent them afterwards.
You had to pay in advance. Oh, it really wasn’t that expensive. It was two
francs per person. And nobody dared refuse. And then they were glad to
have it in their home after the wedding. The gentleman bought the picture
for the lady, it was the thing to do, on a day like that. (J.-P.A.)
The group photo was compulsory, anyone who didn’t buy it would pass for
miserly (picheprim). That would be an insult to the folks who had invited
you. It would show a lack of regard. At the table, you’re in everyone’s sight,
you can’t say no. (J.B.)
Buying the photograph is a tribute paid to those who made the invita-
tion. The photograph is the object of rule-governed exchanges; it enters into
the circuit of mandatory gifts and counter-gifts to which weddings and some
other ceremonies give rise. Being an officiant whose presence sanctions the
solemnity of the rite, the official photographer may be shadowed or
seconded by the amateur photographer, but he can never be replaced by
him.4
It is only around 1930 that photographs of first communions began to
appear while photographs of christenings are even more recent and rare.
For the past several years, some peasants have taken advantage of the
photographers’ presence at the agricultural shows to have their picture
taken with their livestock, but these are a rarity. For christenings, which
never give rise to big ceremonies and only involve close family members,
photography remains exceptional, but the first communion gives many
mothers an opportunity to have a picture taken of their children:5 one
cannot but approve of a mother who acts in this manner, and ever more so
as the importance of children in society increases. In the old peasant society,
a child was never the center of attention, as is the case today. The major
festivals and ceremonies of village life were essentially adult events and it is
only since 1945 that children’s celebrations (Christmas or First
Communion, for example) have become important. As this society devotes
more attention to children and, by the same token, to women as mothers,
so the habit of having the children photographed is reinforced. In the photo
collection of a smallholder of the hamlets (B.M.), portraits of children make
up half of the post-1945 pictures whereas there are hardly any (three, to be
Bourdieu ■ The peasant and photography 605
precise) in the collection for the years prior to 1939. In those days, one
photographed mostly adults, secondarily family groupings combining
parents and children, and only exceptionally children on their own. Now
the opposite is the case. But the photographing of children is itself to a large
extent accepted because it has a social function. The division of labor
between the sexes gives the woman the task of maintaining relations with
members of the group who live at a distance, starting with her own family.
Like letters and better than letters, photographs have a part to play in the
perpetual updating of mutual acquaintance.6 It is customary to take
children (at least once and, if possible, periodically) to visit kin who live
outside the village, and in the first instance the wife’s mother when the wife
comes from outside. It is the woman who initiates these journeys and who
sometimes undertakes them without her husband. Sending a photograph
has the same function: through the picture, one presents the new offspring
to the whole group that must ‘recognize’ him or her.
In this regard, it is understandable that photographs should be the object
of a reading that one may call sociological and that they are never
considered in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or
aesthetic qualities. The photographer is assumed to know his craft and one
has no basis on which to make comparisons. The photograph must simply
provide a representation sufficiently faithful and precise to allow recog-
nition. It is methodically inspected and observed at length, in accordance
with the logic that governs the knowledge of others in everyday life: through
the confrontation of knowledges and experiences, one situates each person
by reference to his lineage and, often, the reading of old photographs takes
the form of a lecture in genealogical science, when the mother, the specialist
in the subject, teaches the child the relationships that link him or her to each
of the persons pictured. But, above all, one inquires to know who attended
the ceremony and how the couples were made up; each family’s field of
social relations is analysed; one notes absences, as indicators of quarrels,
and the presences that confer honor. For each guest, the photograph is a
kind of trophy, a sign and source of social significance (‘You are proud to
show that you were at the wedding,’ says J.L.). For the families of the
newlywed and for the couple themselves, it testifies to the rank of the family
by recalling the number and quality of the guests: the guests of B.M., son
of a ‘small house’ in the hamlets, are mainly relatives and neighbors, the
selection principle being traditional, whereas in the wedding photo of J.B.,
a well-off inhabitant of the bourg, one sees the work and school ‘mates’ of
the groom and even of the bride. In short, the wedding photo is a veritable
sociogram and it is read as such.
The photographing of major ceremonies is possible because – and only
because – such pictures capture behaviors that are socially approved and
socially regulated, that is to say already solemnized. Nothing may be
606 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)
value of his heritage. In such cases, he betrays the peasant tradition but he
remains a peasant. Moreover, moral condemnation can take the guise of the
skepticism of the technician and of the man of experience: the sanction of
the enterprise will be found in its own results. In any case, because he runs
the risk of failure or ridicule, the innovator commands respect.
By contrast, the community experiences innovation that it suspects to be
shorn of any rational or reasonable justification as a challenge and a
disavowal. This is because, in the manner of a gift that excludes a counter-
gift, ostentatious behavior, or behavior perceived as such, puts the group in
a position of inferiority and can only be experienced as an affront, with
everyone feeling assaulted in his or her self-esteem. In that case, reproof and
repression are immediate and merciless. ‘What is he playing at? Who does
he take himself for?’ As a sign of status, photographic practice can only be
seen as expressing an effort to rise above one’s rank. This will to distinguish
oneself is then countered by a reminder of the common origins: ‘We know
where he came from.’ ‘His father wore clogs!’11
A frivolous luxury, the practice of photography would for a peasant be
a ridiculous barbarism; to indulge in such a fantasy would be rather like a
man taking a stroll along with his wife, on a summer evening, as the
pensioners of the bourg do:
That’s fine for vacationers, those are things of the city. A peasant who would
walk around with a camera hanging over his shoulder would be no more
than a failed monsieur (u moussu manquât). You need delicate hands to
handle those things. And what about the money? It’s expensive. All that
paraphernalia costs a bundle! (F.M.)
Associated with urban life, the practice of photography is apprehended
as a manifestation of the wish to play the urbanite, to act the part of the
gentleman (moussureya). And so it is seen as a betrayal of the group by a
parvenu. ‘S’en-monsieurer’ (literally, to ‘en-mister’ oneself, en-moussuri’s in
Béarnais) is a twofold offence against the fundamental imperatives of the
peasant ethic. It means in effect standing out by disowning oneself as a
member of the group and as a peasant.12 One admits of the true urbanite,
who is a complete outsider to the group, that he takes photographs because
that is part of the stereotyped image the peasant has of him. The camera is
one of the distinctive attributes of the ‘vacationer’ (lou bacanciè). Peasants
will indulge the latter’s fantasies, with a touch of irony, by taking up the
expected pose, in front of the yoke of oxen, thinking: ‘These people have
time to waste and money to squander.’ There is much less tolerance toward
natives of the village who return from the town, and still less toward inhabi-
tants of the bourg who are suspected of taking up photography to give
themselves the air of city-dwellers. In other words, what is refused is not
photography in itself; as the whim and frivolity of an urbanite, it suits
Bourdieu ■ The peasant and photography 609
Even the posture that the peasant adopts in front of the camera seems to
express peasant values and more precisely the system of models that govern
relations with others in peasant society. Individuals generally present them-
selves face-on, in the center of the picture, standing and full-length, that is
to say at a respectful distance. In group photos they stand close together,
often with their arms over each other. Their gazes converge on the lens so
that the whole image points to its absent center. When a couple is portrayed,
they hold each other by the waist in an entirely conventional pose. The
norms of conduct in front of the lens sometimes rise to consciousness, in
positive or negative form: a member of a group assembled for a solemn
occasion such as a wedding who adopts a casual posture or fails to look
Bourdieu ■ The peasant and photography 611
straight at the camera and to take up the pose is the object of disapproval.
He is, as the phrase goes, ‘not really there’.
To take part in a photograph is to grant the testimony of one’s presence,
which is the mandatory counterpart of the tribute received in being invited;
it testifies that one values the honor of having been invited to take part and
that one takes part in order to give honor.14 How would the arrangement
and posture of the participants not be marks of solemnity? No one would
think of infringing upon the photographer’s instructions, of talking to his
neighbor, of looking elsewhere. That would be a breach of propriety and
especially an affront to the whole group and, first and foremost, to those
who are chiefly ‘honored on that day,’ the bridal couple. The proper and
dignified stance consists in standing up straight and looking straight ahead
with the gravity that befits this solemn occasion.
It is not unreasonable to think that the spontaneous search for frontal-
ity is linked to the most deeply embedded cultural values.15 In this society
that exalts the sentiment of honor, dignity, and responsibility, this closed
world in which one feels at every moment and without escape the unremit-
ting gaze of others, it is important to present the most honorable image of
oneself to others: the fixed, rigid posture, of which the soldier’s ‘standing
to attention’ is the limiting case, seems to be the expression of this uncon-
scious intention. The axial image, conforming to the principle of frontality,
offers an impression that is as clearly readable as can be, as if one worried
to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion. The same intention manifests
itself in the embarrassment felt by the photographed subject, the concern
to rectify one’s posture and to wear one’s best clothes, and the instinctive
refusal to be caught in everyday dress, doing everyday things. To take the
proper pose is to respect oneself and to ask for respect. The subject offers
the viewer an act of reverence, of courtesy, that is governed by convention
and requests the viewer to obey the same conventions and the same norms.
He ‘faces up’ (fait front) and asks to be looked at frontally and from a
distance, this demand for reciprocal deference constituting the essence of
frontality. The photographic portrait thus performs the objectivation of the
self-image. As such, it is simply the limiting case of the relationship with
others.16
Everything takes place as if, by obeying the principle of frontality and
adopting the most conventional posture, one sought to take charge, insofar
as is possible, of the objectification of one’s own image. To look at the other
without being seen, without being seen looking and without being looked
at, to ‘steal a glance’ as the phrase goes, and, moreover, to photograph them
in that way, is to steal the other’s image. By looking at the person who looks
at me (or photographs me), by arranging my posture, I offer myself to be
looked at as I want to be seen; I give the image of myself that I intend to
give and, quite simply, I give my image. In brief, faced with a gaze that fixes
612 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)
and immobilizes appearances, to adopt the most dignified, the most sober
and the most ceremonial attitude, to stand stiffly upright, feet joined
together, arms flat by the sides, in the manner of a soldier standing to atten-
tion, is to reduce the risk of awkwardness and clumsiness and to present to
the other a regulated, prepared, primed image: to give a regulated image of
oneself is a way of imposing the rules of one’s own perception.
The conventionality of the posture and dress adopted for photographs
would seem to derive from the style of social relations fostered by a society
at once hierarchical and static, in which the lineage and the ‘house’ have
more reality than the particular individuals who compose them, defined as
they are essentially by the groups they belong to,17 where the social rules
of conduct and the moral code are more manifest than the feelings, the wills,
or the thoughts of singular subjects, where social exchanges, strictly regu-
lated by consecrated conventions, are enacted in dread of the judgment of
others, under the gaze of a collective opinion quick to condemn in the name
of norms indisputable and undisputed, and are always dominated by the
concern to present the best possible image of oneself, the one best conform-
ing to the ideal of dignity and honor.18
Solemnization, hieraticism and eternalization are inseparable. In the
language of all aesthetics, frontality expresses the eternal, by opposition to
depth, through which temporality is reintroduced. In painting, the plane
expresses being or essence, in a word, the timeless (see Bonnefoy, 1959). If
an action is depicted within it, it is always an essential movement,
‘immobile’ and outside of time; it is – the words themselves say it well – the
equilibrium or poise of an eternal gesture, like the ethical or social norm
that it embodies: spouses standing with their arms around each other
express in another gesture the same meaning as the joined hands in the
portrait bust of Cato and Portia in the Vatican.
Popular photography eliminates the accidental or the aspect, which, as
a fleeting image, dissolves the real by temporalizing it. The ‘snapshot’, the
picture ‘taken from life’ – which is the expression of a worldview born in
the Quattrocento with perspective – cuts out an instantaneous slice into the
visible world and, petrifying human action, immobilizes a unique state of
the reciprocal relationship between things, and arrests the gaze on an imper-
ceptible moment in a never-completed trajectory. By contrast, the posed
photograph, which only grasps and fixes figures who are settled, motion-
less, in the immutability of the plane, loses its power of corrosion.19 Thus,
when they spontaneously adopt the arrangements and postures of the
figures of Byzantine mosaics, the peasants of Béarn who pose for a wedding
photo seem to want to escape the power that photography has to de-realize
the world by temporalizing it.
Bourdieu ■ The peasant and photography 613
Acknowledgements
This article is the translation of Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu, ‘Le paysan
et la photographie’, Revue française de sociologie, vol. 6, no. 2, April–June
1965, pp. 164–74. It is published here in English for the first time by kind
permission of Jérôme and Marie-Claire Bourdieu and the journal. The section
titles are by the translators.
Notes
1 This article presents, in a provisional form, documents and data that were
also used in part in a book published simultaneously, Photography: A
Middle-Brow Art (Bourdieu et al., 1965).
2 Lesquire is the pseudonym of the isolated village in this mountainous region
of southwest France near the Spanish border where Pierre Bourdieu spent
his childhood years. It is the site where he carried out fieldwork on gender
and kinship relations among the peasantry in 1959–61 and subsequent
years, in parallel to similar work among the Kabyles of Algeria [translator].
3 J.-P.A., 85, a widower with a primary school education, lived in the bourg
at the time of the study, but he had spent all of his youth in a hameau.
Interviews with him alternated between French and Béarnais.
4 The photograph marks the transition from religious ritual to secular ritual,
the wedding party; it is taken on the doorstep of the church.
5 As at wedding parties, here too the photograph takes its place in the circuit
of ritually imposed exchanges. It is added to the ‘memory image’ that the
child brings to relatives and neighbors in exchange for a gift.
6 The sending of photographs that follows a wedding generally triggers a
resurgence of correspondence: ‘The “exiles” ask that the couples featured
on the photo be identified, especially the youth of whom they’ve only
known the parents’ (A.B.).
7 ‘No, the photographer never takes pictures of the ball. That has got no
value in people’s eyes. I’ve never seen any’ (J.L.).
8 Similarly, among the photographs displayed in the villagers’ homes, one
often sees the annual photo of the rugby team, lined up in a formal pose,
and only very rarely shots of them in action, which are relegated to the
‘photo box’.
9 Most of the more recent photos in B.M.’s collection were taken by
amateurs. Some of the pictures of B.M.’s wife and daughter were shot
during visits to his wife’s brother’s wife (who lives in Oloron, a small town
about 80 kilometers away), on the occasion of the market or the fair: the
children are lined up at the front and the adults stand behind them. As for
the other amateur photos, like the one just described they were taken
614 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)
during the visit by the brother-in-law from Paris. Four of them stand apart,
at first sight: those that show B.M., in front of his oxen, his goad on his
shoulder, and his nephew in the same posture. Are they actual snapshots
of everyday life? In reality, they are posed and allegorical: on the one hand,
the little Parisian, playing at being a peasant; on the other, not B.M. as a
singular person but the postcard-picture of Béarn featuring a peasant
leading his oxen, his body upright, his beret aslant over his ear, his agulhade
on his shoulder.
10 The major common room, the kitchen, receives only an impersonal decor-
ation, everywhere the same: the charity calendar from the postman or the
fire brigade and colour prints bought in Pau (the closest city, a dozen miles
away) or souvenirs of a pilgrimage visit to Lourdes.
11 ‘He wants to take photos! He’s becoming a real mister (s’en-monsieure),
isn’t he! Soon he’ll be taking pictures of the pigs and the pigsty.’ ‘He’d do
better to change his plough and that wretched pair of cows he’s got to
plough with!’ ‘A gadget like that, and with that lousy suit!’
12 This explains the ambiguous attitude of the peasant towards the civil
servant employed in the bourg. On the one hand, as the representative of
the central administration and trustee of governmental authority, he is
imbued with respect and consideration. But, on the other hand, the man of
the bourg is truly the bourgeois, the man who has deserted the land and
broken or disowned the bonds that tied him to his original milieu.
13 Most of the peasants who were questioned on this mentioned relatives who
have taken up photography since they left the village. But a peasant who
sees the sister or cousin, son or brother, who left to work in a factory,
coming back with a camera, is justified to associate photography with the
shift to urban ways. That being so, far from enticing him to imitation, such
examples, even when they concern close relatives, only confirm his convic-
tion that photography is ‘not for us’.
14 ‘If you attended somebody’s wedding and you didn’t go for the photo,
people noticed that. You weren’t in the group, they said that M. wasn’t in
the photo. They reckoned you slipped away, and it was taken badly’ (J.L.,
to her husband, in the course of an interview).
15 Among the Kabyles, the man of honor is a man who ‘faces up’, who holds
his head high and looks others in the face, with his own face uncovered
(Bourdieu, 1965).
16 Photography is the situation in which the awareness of one’s body-for-
others reaches its highest acuity. One feels subjected to a gaze and to a gaze
that fixes and immobilizes appearances. [Trans.: On the social bases of
bodily embarrassment among the peasants and its structural consequences,
see Bourdieu, 1962, excerpted in this issue as ‘The Peasant and his Body’.]
17 It is not uncommon for a younger son who marries an eldest daughter
and comes to live with her parents to lose his surname and thus to be
Bourdieu ■ The peasant and photography 615
designated only by the name of his new house. [Trans.: Kinship relations
and the reproduction of lineage hierarchy in Béarn are discussed at length
in Bourdieu (1990[1980]: 147–61).]
18 Wilhelm Hausenstein (1913: 759–60) brings to light the connection
between the frontal view and the social structure of ‘feudal and hieratic
societies’.
19 Once again, an exception is made for the children, perhaps because change
is their very nature: where the aim is to capture the ephemeral and the acci-
dental, photography is suitable since it cannot snatch the fleeting aspect
from irrecoverable disappearance without constituting it as such.
References