Robert Hariman

Dark Embodiment: The Photographic Silhouette as Rhetorical Form

The silhouette is a visual figure that exemplifies key features of how gestures and other forms operate as means of communication. Through the reduction of information, it activates formal responsiveness including typification, resonance, and uncanny combinations of fit and enigma and embodiment and abstraction. Its communicative value is demonstrated through use as a medium for public advocacy and as a technique in photojournalism. It provides a basis for reflection on important topics in rhetoric, including authenticity, adaptation, trope, and the public

Keywords

form, gesture, photography, photojournalism, resonance, silhouette, Siluetazo, typification, uncanny

Artikeln

Ingår i: Rhetorica Scandinavica 84, 2022
Abstract s V · Artikel s 5-22

https://www.doi.org/10.52610/YOVY4132

Om skribenterne

Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, 0000-0003-2570-2888

.

Fulltext:

The silhouette is a small technique of visual representation, a somewhat antique popular art, and part of the iconography of contemporary public culture. Defined as the opaque outline of someone or something against a contrasting background, silhouettes can be found in grade school art classes, small town museums, amateur photography workshops, advertisements, product logos, signage, and social movement protests. Many are dark figures against a lighter background, and some are light on dark. Silhouettes are humble images, characte­rized by their relative lack of information, yet they also can be a bit precocious, demonstrating technique, dexterity, or cleverness for its own sake. Above all, they are generic: even when denominating an individual, they are an exercise in pattern recognition, and they fall far short of the distinctiveness, richness, skill, or status of a fine art.

Given their limitations in light of the incredible capabilities of digital image technologies, one might wonder why silhouettes persist. Formerly high-cost values such as resolution and color now are cheap, so why continue to remove those features that personalize and engage? Facial expression, bodily characteristics, and fa­shion are major sources of meaning and significance, so why replace them with a blank outline? Under what circumstances does the empty bodily form of someone or something become the most important means for visual communication? More generally, might a small, popular visual technique, one pitched toward gesture, gene­ric recognition, and formal appeal, reveal some of what is hidden in the sha­dows of the art of rhetoric?

This article attempts to trace an outline of the silhouette as it can be a rhetorical form. Such consideration includes identifying its formal operations, communica­tive functions, media interactions, and public use. Although silhouettes are produced by everything from children’s scissors to atomic bomb blasts, my primary reference is to the use of the figure in photojournalism and public protests. These are the essential media and events within public culture, and where one can see the form taken to a high degree of artistic and political impact.

The Media and their Histories

The silhouette and photography also have intertwined histories and characteristics. The first silhouette probably was in the late 17th century, and by the early 18th century it was a popular art enjoyed across all levels of society, with a range of materials from paper to ivory (Knipe, 2002; Rutherford, 2009; Vigarello, 2016). Its popularity will have benefitted from the advantages it had over painting and sculpture: it re­quired less skill, took less time, and was much less expensive. It also could be reproduced more easily, and even had indexical capability: silhouettes could be produced by tracing machines. “Like the photographic media that would eventually eclipse it, the physiognotrace produced what was viewed by many to be a pure act of mechanical mimesis, an image practically unaltered by human hands” (Shaw, 2005, p. 34). Even so, “because hand-cutting was a necessary part of their creation, physiognotraced profiles also retained what Walter Benjamin would term an aura of individuality” (p. 34). That appealing combination could not last, however: “not long after the 1839 public announcement of its invention,” photography “dealt a deadly blow to the silhouette industry” (Knipe, 2002, p. 208). As a popular art, silhouettes may have been one expression of public interest in a more democratic optic and also paved the way for photography’s rapid uptake. With the displacement, the silhouette became a vernacular craft and design technique, and also a stylistic figure within the ascendent medium of photography.

Photography has become an important public art in part due to its focus on the body. Both photography and the body are capable of compelling public statements, and a focus on bodily representation exemplifies important features of each medium: like the body, photography is indexical, particularistic, immersed in vernacular life, possessing a fleeting eventfulness, and presented for public viewing and judg­ment. Both become caught in complex problems of generalization regarding questions of social identity, solidarity, and action. Embodiment and photography are deeply intertwined in every aspect of private and public life.

Recent theoretical work on photography has emphasized its capabilities as a public art (Hariman and Lucaites, 2016, Miles and Welch, 2020). By recasting its aesthetic qualities, not as documentary liabilities, but as productive means for public communication, this shift in perspective encourages reconsideration of a wide range of rhetorical techniques constituting public culture. These include devices that might seem inferior according to documentary criteria, such as the silhouette. By examining this figure, one can discern distinctive features of formal appeal, not least as they are used to feature embodied performance. In addition, both photography and bodily performance prove to be grounded, not only in their particularity, but also in abstraction, imagination, and an aesthetic of saying more with less.

One might wonder why the photography would include silhouettes: isn’t that going against the grain of the medium and its history? Popularity and commercial success were votes for greater detail, not less; for textured detail, not blank space; for light, not darkness. Novelty retains its cachet, of course, and the inversion of light and dark, visible and invisible, then becomes an arresting gimmick. “Silhouette photography” is a niche market and a study in conventional iconography where the range of inventiveness runs from A to B. Eloquence always includes common techniques, however, and includes mundane usage and mediocre invention among its kin. What matters is that there are photojournalists who create silhouettes to show what the medium might otherwise obscure. By capturing shadows or underexposing figures against a lighter background, the skilled artist inverts more than light and dark or foreground and background: instead, one begins to see formally.

Examples come from across the spectrum of events and concerns: shadows of those waiting in line at a polling station; a soldier and his captive doubled by their shadows on a wall in Afghanistan; a woman stepping into a large metal and glass atrium in Toronto; a man walking down a bombed street in Aleppo; a boy playing at the beach; monks profiled against an orange haze. (These and similar images are available at the blog Nocaptionneeded.com by searching for “silhouette.”) Such images are fragments, not narratives, and images that withhold as much as they depict. They are like poems, if one accepts that “The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully” (Stevens, 1972). By withholding information in an al­ready nonverbal image, they thwart conceptualization, and yet they also invite it by replacing particularity with outlines, shapes, or schemata. They also are continuous with other examples of found patterning and machine surveillance, including ­images on the walls at Hiroshima, fossils and other tracings of natural phenomena, and X-rays and images from other scanning technologies. Another substitution has occurred across this found genre: history is not erased, but its eventfulness is trans­posed into a more static frame, one that is not universal but that may resist the continuing displacements of time almost successfully. Perhaps we are being invited to see more slowly. If so, the means for doing so will involve the formal operations of the figure.

Formal Features of the Silhouette

Although a small, simple, and obvious device, the silhouette exemplifies complex formal operations that reflect core elements of human cognition. Silhouettes are themselves forms, in several senses of the term: the visible shape or configuration of something; a particular way in which a thing exists or appears; a type or variety of something; a printed document with blank spaces for information to be inserted. A silhouette of a bicycle presents the shape of the machine, its particular appear­ance, and type, to which the viewer might add an experience of riding, owning, ­sharing, losing, or longing. To see a silhouette is to see the form of something, first and foremost.

The key to this transformation from someone or something to its form is the explicit subtraction of information. The silhouette of a person provides an outline (usually a profile of the head) that one rarely would notice otherwise, while removing much of what one would notice: skin, hair, and eye color, facial features such as eye width or dimples, skin tone and texture including wrinkles, scars, or other marks, and makeup, tattoos, jewelry, and clothing. This considerable reduction in information seems to contradict a basic principle of communication: one tries to get more into the channel, not less; to optimize message content, rather than let the receiver fill in the blank. It is, however, a basic feature of formal representation and reception, which always involves “smoothing,” a technique now familiar in data ­display and essential for featuring any pattern (Humphreys-Owen, 1968, p. 12). Whether looking at a waveform, fractal array, organization chart, or bicycle frame, one “naturally” edits the edges to emphasize the pattern; by contrast, zooming in on the particularity of the individual thing risks losing the pattern.

What characterizes the silhouette from many other formal devices is that it foregrounds the subtraction of information. The result is to shift attention, much like a figure-ground shift, from content to form, detail to outline, referentiality to part-whole relationships. One is being cued to see the image as in outline, as a form. One immediate result is that the subject now is defined primarily by its internal relations: of front wheel to back wheel, or of soldier to captive, or of monk to ritual. The subject, and now merely its image, becomes a composition, and thus perhaps capable of providing whatever knowledge becomes available on those terms.

One type of knowledge that becomes available is knowledge of the type. By subtracting most of the individuating features of a person, the silhouette highlights some other features such as stance, gesture, or relationship to others nearby. By redefining the person as a form, that “thing” becomes typified: balletic or burdened, haughty or humble. Less information, less resemblance to the individual, but now a disposition or condition emerges. Various artistic techniques suggest some of the range, as when cartoon characters’ intentions, roles, or traits are depicted through their shadows—say, when a cat has the shadow of a lion—or when past authors are shown via silhouettes—as with Jane Austin (Unknown, 1800-1815), whose silhouette can only be identified by inference yet becomes emblematic of her historical period. In a photographic silhouette, an individual child becomes Childhood or Play or Imagination, and can be seen in relationship with swings, waves, flowers, or other forms, including the forms of war and oppression.

By replacing the specific individual with a more generic shape, the individual is partially erased, but the image—and spectator—is oriented toward a more general circumstance or condition. Thus, the silhouette as a whole is essentially a gesture. Gestures are culturally specific—some of those identified meticulously by Quintilian, for example, are meaningless today (Quintilian, 95/1979, XI.iii.92-106)—and yet they suggest universality because of how they rely on a sense of visual form. The gesture within a silhouette has a double effect, as formal aptitude is activated by the composition as a whole and enhanced further by the salience of the gesture relative to the rest of the outline. By adding information to a message that already has been stripped of information, the gesture becomes the message. Like the rest of the silhouette, however, the message is essentially formal: a channel for sharing energy and meaning within an ecology of images.

Form and Phenomenology

But to what end? Form involves a strong sense of self-reference: it is recognizable and meaningful because of how it is self-completing, relatively autonomous, auto­poetic: “whereas an image implies the representation of an object, and a sign signifies an object, form signifies only itself” (Focillon, 1989, p. 34). A form can carry other meanings, of course, but it exists through self-reference: a star sign (say, on a tank) refers to the sign of the star while it also may designate the professional mili­tary and the nation, e.g., according to convention and color. The silhouette of a woman may refer to a specific person (Jane Austin, say), but only while being recognized as a coherent outline (of a woman). To get a sense of the process, one only has to violate it, as with cubist rearrangement of the parts to disrupt the conventional sense of the whole. There are very few cubist silhouettes, however, and photojournalism has to be conventional in respect to prevailing norms of realism, propriety, respect, and so forth. One might conclude that an explicitly formal technique such as the silhouette would be quite limited in terms of rhetorical effect: it could be an assertion of simple presence, formal integrity, or some general condition, but it would not drive artistic experience or political decisions.

The silhouette can be an example of mere formalism, but it also demonstrates why form can be as important as information or affect when trying to effect change. At least two functions follow closely on the formal operation of withholding information to emphasize pattern: disruption and resonance. The first of these may surprise, given the conventionality of an antique popular art, but in the right hands the opaque body does disturb perception and response. The silhouette is explicitly both present and absent, showing something that both is and is not there. Although residing in the familiar world—and depending on legibility in terms of setting, fashion, stance, and gesture—the taken for granted foreground of experience has been ­erased. Although reduced to sheer form—and to a fundamental process of cogni­tion and a basic social code—the image becomes rich with implication well beyond the specific event. One is both not seeing and seeing, which becomes a hermeneutic for the rest of the composition: what is no longer evident and what is being shown? What is being subordinated into invisibility, and what distinctions and what co­herence are being brought into definition?

Thus, the silhouette, although a singularly flat or empty image, disrupts conventional image processing. This disruption is so reliable that a methodology has been suggested for qualitative research: “silhouettes analysis produces an alienation effect that disturbs practiced viewing habits and assumptions,” e.g., in order to identify danger points in interactions between the elderly and their built environment (Höppner, 2021, p. 1). It also is evident from the occasional use of the reverse sil­houette, in which the figure is filled with light against a darkened background: seeing becomes somewhat estranged, the relationship between foreground and background is now unstable or indeterminate, and ordinary things can seem to be too close or too particular. Or, to revert to dark figures as they were silhouetted in film noir, what could be ordinary encounters become shrouded in mystery or menace. Whether a small shimmer in the experience of a paper cutout or the drama of an existential encounter, the silhouette works by introducing explicit instability or indeterminacy into reception.

Likewise, image production and spectatorship also are foregrounded: artistry is evident, not hidden, and the viewer becomes aware of the act of seeing, for that is what is being partially blocked. The image is both more still, recessive, or even serene than it would be with (the distractions of) color, texture, expression, etc., but it evokes a more active spectatorship, an invitation to enter into the image. The first impulse is to peer into the darkness; when thwarted, something else happens. What that is, is not captured by a single word; imagination, projection, identification, affinity, engagement, resonance, and other concepts each capture some of it. I will use “resonance” as an umbrella term, in part because it is less familiar than the others, and because it resonates with other concepts in the discourse of formalism.
Although he doesn’t use the term “resonance,” Scott McCloud’s discussion of the design elements of comics explicates the complex process of reception that occurs when visual information is withheld. McCloud defines cartoons as an art of “amplification through simplification” (McCloud, 1993, p. 30), and then contrasts rela­tively realistic and relatively abstract depictions. Individual comics and many other media arts and artists are distributed across that spectrum, but the key to comics is the simplification: say, of a face to two dots and a line within a circle. McCloud notes that the first difference is a gain in universality: the more abstract face could be said to describe more people. That might be bought at high cost, however, if something else didn’t happen. McCloud adds in the innate capacity to project the facial form (to see it in electrical outlets, for example) and the visual asymmetry of social interaction (you see others’ reactions but not your own). His key inference is that “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face—you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon—you see yourself.” Thus, “the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled” (p. 36, emphasis in original). This combination of projection and identification is most salient in childhood but remains fundamental to adult media use.

It has additional functions as well. Following the realism-abstraction distinction, which he also defines as the realm of the senses and the realm of the concept, McCloud claims that the more simple drawings are, the more suited they are to featuring concepts rather than particularity and “the beauty and complexity of the physical world” (p. 41). This claim obviously provides a basis for generalization to other arts or media, but McCloud features other lines of development, notably, that the simplified art can amplify an interior world (the one not seen directly), and that interiority is extended from persons to things. Thus, a simplified world can “pulse with life,” so much that “inanimate objects may seem to possess separate identities so that if one jumped up and started singing it wouldn’t feel out of place” (p. 41, emphasis in original). This animism is a good indication that the imagination is being ­brought into play, which involves changes in agency. McCloud notes that the less realistic character is less likely to be seen or faulted as a messenger, but the result is not to elevate the authorial power of the cartoonist. The meaning also depends on viewer investment, a relationship mimed when agency also is being extended from humans to the objects around them. (The classic cartoons of film and television make the most of this capability.) In any case, the explicitly simplified image becomes a reliable conduit for imaginative and affective projection, while pulling the viewer into a space that is thoroughly resonant.

Instead of being grounded in indexical particularity—this individual, in this ­place, at this moment, in this manner—the comic or silhouette invites the viewer into a resonant space in which shape, stance, gesture, relationships, and analogies are the primary basis for connection, interpretation, and extension to other situa­tions. That simple sense of resonance may be one of the primary appeals of the silhouette. One doesn’t have to know the child, the woman with the umbrella, the birds on a wire, or the boat on the water. The world is at once both sensate (because visual) and conceptual (because figural yet abstract). Thus, disturbance and resonance are two sides of the same coin. The slight dislocation from ordinary perception is almost like sounding a tuning fork for another frequency. Selective amplification, projection, identification, and emotional and imaginative engagement then articulate along that dimension of response.

As these processes are identified, it might seem that silhouettes are distinctively clear means of communication, once one is using the right code. Their utility in sign­age would be exhibit A, and the widespread conventionality of the popular art form follows not far behind. As a technique within theatre, film, and photojour­nalism, however, a much richer mode of formal meaning emerges. The clue that another level of experience is involved comes from the fact that an artful silhouette can seem uncanny. The image doesn’t push one deep into an uncanny valley—­which can be an experience of extreme discomfort—but it does get close to the edge. The silhouette is both there and not there, a specific individual (the person traced) and an anonymous figure (the visible outline), a sensate thing and a concept.

The term “uncanny” has a dual reference: it was developed in German psychology and popularized by Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1919/2001), and it has had a second life in robotics and artificial intelligence. In both cases, the general interest is in a change in affect that occurs when something is at once familiar and strange. Sil­houettes have to be familiar enough to be recognized on the basis of minimal information, and they are strange because they withhold the information that would limit reference to a specific person or object. If McCloud’s theory is correct, they also are uncanny because they invert you and the other: when looking at the (emptied) figure of another person, you are seeing the conceptual schema that suffices for self-reference when communicating. Seeing a silhouette then is somewhat like unexpectedly seeing one’s reflection as if it belonged to another person—except that one is seeing another’s reflection as if it were oneself.

Fit and Enigma

This sense of being on the edge of an uncanny valley (but not in it) is only the clue; the process to be discovered is that form works through a dialectic of fit and enigma. Form produces a paradoxical combination of what can be evidently seen as right and what lies beyond knowing. On the one hand, a sense of form is highly evident when something fits perfectly into a pattern. That pattern might be a musical ­theme, cabinet joint, narrative arc, or tea ceremony. On the other hand, form can be alluring—and satisfying—because it seems to represent what can’t be seen or known directly, what can only be felt or given abstract description. One senses the forces that produce the ocean wave, or the poetic meaning just beyond rational comprehension. Thus, form is equally appealing as both a perfected thing and as an outline in a fog; as something uniquely in place yet having unknown extension. This paradoxical articulation of fit and enigma operates at all degrees of scale.

Henri Focillon captured this dialectic by observing how “form is surrounded by a certain aura: although it is our most strict definition of space, it also suggests to us the existence of other forms. It prolongs and diffuses itself throughout our ­dreams and fancies” (Focillon, 1989, p. 34). (He also could have said “resonates.”) The shape, outline, pattern is at once the primary thing—it is what has been selected and amplified in perception—and it is not only one thing. Every form has to be an example of other instances of the same. There cannot be one wave, one spiral, one image of branches etched against the sky, except as it would be a unique, singular object; to have the form of a wave, spiral, or tree, the form must be both there and elsewhere. So it is that mental projection of form is so strong that it supplies forms where none in fact exist (apophenia, pareidolia). Those errors apparently are the cost of being able to see form at all; because our brains are not perfectly synchronized with all patterning in the world, they have to be able to project in order to capture some of the patterns. Art then can be understood as an intensified practice of generating forms to discover forms as they are more deeply present in nature and the human world (Cassirer, 1944). Equally important, the extension beyond what is present or known is inherently not defined, measured, or limited. Formal specificity is mirrored by a highly asymmetrical sense of what might be.

The silhouette, and particularly as it is used within visual art and advocacy, draws on this dual articulation of shape and aura, instance and extension, presence and absence, familiarity and strangeness, assurance and danger, knowing and in­tuiting, understanding and mystery, fit and enigma. The silhouette’s explicit withholding of information activates both poles of this dialectic. One has direct perception of a pattern, and because the pattern is a tracing, a sense of fit between image and reality. But one clearly does not know all that is visibly absent, and the fit could be with a code, role, attitude, or intention that also is hidden. The silhouette presents both a complete pattern (the self-contained form) and an aura of the unseen, unsaid, undefined, and extended—that which lies beyond the immediate context or classification system.

This may be one way in which the silhouette is a gesture: it is a fragment that evokes a sense of affinity or connection with other people and objects, but without having to signify a specific whole. Instead of narrative, the singular figure; instead of a mentality, the darkened interior; instead of singularity, resonance. When the silhouette is set within a photograph, the combination of conceptual and sensate realms can capture a great deal of complexity while still withholding the experience of closure that would be supplied by habit, convention, and ideology. Instead, the image can set up powerful reverberations, for example, between people and the material environment, between one scene and a social problem, between one event and a call to moral and political obligation. Such a photograph could combine the strengths, and minimize the weaknesses, of both realism and abstraction. Specific, forensic detail would be available, but without being mired in particularity and so easily disregarded for want of generalization. Conceptual meaning and explanation would be articulated in respect to the material conditions, but without loss of emotional engagement.

Form and Political Action

This theoretical possibility has been realized in public art and advocacy. The most direct example was the use of silhouettes by the human rights movement that challenged the dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83) that murdered about 30,000 people. The protest movement began with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who would hold up photographs of their children who had been “disappeared” by the regime. Those photographs breached the conventional distinctions protecting the reign of terror: making private suffering public, and individual suffering collective. This re­alignment of the public culture away from state secrecy and silent terror was then amplified further by the Siluetazo, a series of protests built around the display of silhouettes to represent the victims. An additional substitution reflected the difference in media specificity: whereas the photographs had an indexical relationship to the dead, the silhouettes were made by tracing protestors. The dead did not need to have left a trace, while the missing individual body acquired collective presence.

By placing these silhouettes throughout the public space, the movement gained power precisely because of how the images were typified. Indeed, the Mothers pointed out that there were not photographs, or sometimes any specific identification, for all those who had been destroyed, and so images were made for those who had not been documented. By using the same image repeatedly (stenciled, and anony­mous masks also were used), the abstract subject included not only an individual who had been destroyed but any such victim of state terror. Equally important, it also included all those bonded together in the act of bearing witness. “A journalist wrote that the silhouettes ‘seem to point from the walls to those who are to blame for their absence, silently demanding justice. Through a scenic effect, the families, the friends, the portion of the public that reacted to it and those who were taken away appeared together for the first time’” (Longoni, 2010, p. 11). And another internal wall was breached: “The silhouettes made evident that which the public opinion ignored or would rather ignore” (p. 11), breaking the habit of silence that also is one of the effects and requirements of a repressive regime.

Although the Siluetazo emerged in a moment of exceptional intensity and of artistic, movement, and national convergence, the technique proved useful in other contexts as well: “unplanned siluetadas (the public use of silhouettes) took place without any direct links to the original event” (p. 11). One reason for this “indeterminacy” (p. 14) and portability will be how the silhouettes brought to any protest a sense of the uncanny. Instead of perfectly capturing the specific historical context—the Mothers, in the Plaza, in 1983, etc.—the silhouettes were described in terms of how they were unsettling, magical, eerie. They haunted the public space and reversed the terrible logic of state action: instead of taking the living to hidden places of torture and death, the images restored the dead to public life. This restoration is built into the artistic process: “silhouettes, hands and masks fuse in the transference between the demonstrators and the disappeared. They share the constructive procedure of the body of the demonstrator put in the place of the missing body. They share a common act (both intimate and collective), a performative or even ritual act that involves a commitment of the body, the decision to put one’s self in the place of the absent one, lending him or her a breath of life” (pp. 15-16). This decision in making the image may be reflected in spectator response: as McCloud noted, the empty interior of the image invites strong, intuitive identification.

Thus, successful advocacy strategies were marshalling the formal affordances of the “empty” image. A dialectic of fit and enigma created a critical space for public thought: the image does and does not correspond to any one person, and so it asks, what beyond the individual is being represented, what silence is being exposed, what system is being challenged? This radical openness invites a different kind of closure from the conventional responses that are maintained by the usual order of things in the public realm: artistic realism supporting official narratives supporting institutional authorities supporting hierarchies of power. Instead of “signing off,” that is, scanning and moving on as one does with advertisements, architecture, monuments, and other signage, the silhouette disrupts, mystifies, and engages. And instead of individuating response, “the distinctions between the socially allocated roles of the artist, the activist and the spectator were radically undifferentiated, not just through the simple participation in somebody else’s initiative, but by turning everyone into a ‘maker’ of a common imaginary” (Longoni, 2010, p. 14). At this point, the silhouette converges with photography as a visual democratic art capable of projecting and channeling the “voice” of the people.

Silhouettes, Photography, and Photojournalism

That somewhat Romantic aspiration is only one function, even if fundamental for art and advocacy that works against violence and suppression. When the silhouette is a photographic technique, one can discover additional artistic range and rhetori­cal power. Several posts at the blog Nocaptionneeded.com provide examples of what can be done in the right hands. When interior darkness is coupled with the play of light, the scenes of everyday life can become luminous (Hariman, 2010). Whether looking at silhouettes of a child at the beach or adults in a public space, conventional scenes become slightly alienating and yet alluring—in a word, enigmatic. Thus, the image can recast familiar figures and scenes to evoke a mood—more specifically, a mood turned toward reflection on a theme.

The silhouette, like the shadow, can be a found object and, with that, another occasion of capturing more than one sense of the unseen (Hariman, 2015). The photograph of a child in a suitcase, caught in silhouette by a police scanner while being smuggled across a border, converts a strange event into a found critique of how the bare life of migration exists at the intersection of economic, political, and technological forces that are remaking the modern world, perhaps as a world defined more by darkness than enlightenment. Against this catastrophic background, the photographic silhouette can include a shift in modality from realism to allegory, and from documentary to philosophical witnessing. When a lone, darkened figure walks slowly through the blasted cityscape of Aleppo, an uncanny mode of being emerges: neither the specific individual person nor Everyone, and fusing victim and spectator (Hariman, 2014; Hariman and Lucaites, 2016, pp. 223-225). Although still a record of a specific place and time, the silhouette’s disruption of the realist aes­thetic creates a second dimension to the image, a resonant openness to additional codes and comparison that are not locked into that one historical context. An image at once embodied and abstract can activate a humanism that comes directly out of the existential trauma that is both recorded and displaced by media and political institutions.

Thus, the silhouette’s negative embodiment suggests how abstraction can play a significant role in documentary photography. (Its role in fine art photography is not in dispute [Rexer, 2009].) Abstraction plays an important role in public culture—not least through concepts such as the public, the state, equality, and justice—and in ethical response. Yet abstraction also enables objectification, stereotyping, and other pathways to violence. Photography as a public art is caught in the corresponding dilemmas of representation: for example, between being too close for ethical reflection or too distant for ethical engagement (Silverstone, 2007, p. 47). Likewise, photography’s realism can confront systems of indifference or denial, and yet it can be rebuffed because its particularity provides little basis for generalization. None­theless, great investment has been made in photography’s ability to show how the material conditions of ordinary life are visibly embodied (Roberts, 1998). This documentary focus then leaves the heavy lifting of generalization to other media: the photo-essay, narrated film, or critical commentary.

The silhouette offers another answer to this problem. Clues are provided by the slightly uncanny effect that comes from its activation of a phenomenology of fit and enigma. Drawing on Freud’s essay on the uncanny, one can identify several operations that lend themselves to abstraction or at least to unexpected extensions across conventional categories or one’s sense of scale. The uncanny begins as a hybrid of the familiar and the strange, or the visible and the hidden: one sees what usually is not seen (one’s unexpected reflection in a window) or what usually is either recognizable or illegible but not both. This hybridity can be due to and facilitate categori­cal inversions, especially of the animate and inanimate and the intentional and automatic. It also is activated by the doubling or repetition of an image. (From ghost photography to the incessant citation of Walter Benjamin’s essay on technological reproduction, this recurrence of the same obviously has been a source of great anxiety in the history of photography.) At this point Freud suggested a return of the repressed, but his more general suggestion may be more apt here: the uncanny weakens the distinction between reality and the imagination.

Each of these operations is evident in the silhouette and amplified by its use in a medium of reproduction. The silhouette is a once familiar and strange, the bodily outline recognizable while interior meaning now is hidden. The result is both animate—the human face or expressive stance—and inanimate—the tracing and blackening. It also is both intentional—someone made and often posed for the image—and automatic: an outline that can be reproduced easily of a bodily form that was available largely independent of individual volition. Most important, perhaps, the body is doubled: both a body and the form of the body, both the individual and an anonymous facsimile of the individual. This doubling and its implication of compulsive repetition (enhanced by the medium of photography) allows projection from the individual to the type to an enigmatic realm of signification that can include both reality and the imagination. Response follows the same path: just as the bodied is emptied, so one can enter into that space; the bodily form invites the spectator’s subjective investment, an uncanny haunting that is also a familiar way of seeing.

By doubling the specific person as a blank, bodily form, the silhouette creates an uncanny hybridity of the particular and the abstract. It is both and neither of these two modalities of representation; as such, it exemplifies the uncanny nature of form. It also is inherently open to alterity, plurality, and changes in scale. Whether a child at the beach or the existential subject walking through a bombscape, the documentary silhouette is a representation of a specific moment or encounter, but also of other children, beaches, liminal moments, and other witnesses to other wars and other catastrophes. As noted before, it is a mixture of sensate and conceptual awareness: one is seeing, not thinking, and yet seeing an outline—seeing in outline, as if thinking. The silhouette can’t be fixed, as the doubled image is no longer one thing (if it ever was) in one place and time; it is a form lifted out of that emplacement. Yet it is still a specific thing—the image of a boy at a beach, rather than the concept of youth or play or liminality or beauty—and an indexical trace of that specific boy; it is a material form that can’t be changed.
Thus, the photographic silhouette can activate a distinctive intentionality grounded in its formal composition and specific medium. Vered Maimon, in her study of the early photograph (and particularly the botanical images that captured natural form, as if in silhouette), provides a vocabulary for uncovering this way of seeing. Following Deleuze, Maimon identifies three levels of photographic repetition: reproduction of the same, without distinction; distinction within the category of the same; distinction that exceeds categorical placement to produce “an abstract yet actual diagram of growth and change” (Maimon, 2015, p. 146). Thus, “the early photographic image came to embody, materially, formally, and conceptually, not the visible ‘table of things’ but the invisible potential forces of ‘life’” (p. 147). The effect was somewhat uncanny, and for good reason, as inanimate form now channeled animate life, and the fit between image and thing evoked enigmatic extension into future conditions of growth and change that were themselves visible instantiations of natural processes. The image—say, of wild fennel (Talbot, 1841-42)—was both exact and general, particular and abstract, a singular form but no form is one thing. Although long since pulled into a discourse of documentary realism that minimizes this formal intentionality, photography still can access it. The silhouette is one means to that end.

This intentionality need not be dramatic: ordinary photojournalism can use it on behalf of conventional stories, say, when silhouetted hands at an outdoor concert channel summer entertainment, popular culture, and the economy opening up again. The ordinary, however, is the home of the uncanny and the enchanted (Cavell, 1988; Bennett, 2001, p. 4), and standard images can be examples of how form works. Thus, the intentionality of a silhouette carries distinctive relationships between subject and object and between object and concept. These relationships have been explored by Ernst Cassirer, who, following Kant, held out for a transcendental schema that would be neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective, and that would be both conceptual and sensate. Without having to go that far, one can observe the remarkable affinity between organic form and a formal disposition of human intelligence: we delight in observing form, are driven to reproduce it for its own sake, and project it when it’s not present. This formal transformation doubles as a partial shift from sensate to conceptual resonance and sets the conditions for engagement with the image.

This second shift is only partial, moreover, because the object-concept relation­ship is being changed as well. Roland Barthes provides the best hint with his definition of form as what is “between the thing and its name” (Barthes, 1986, p. 234). Theodore Adorno’s “Essay on Form” is the best guide. Adorno contrasts the genre of the essay with more scientific exposition as part of his critique of the “ontological dignity” of the concept (Adorno, 1991, p. 10). By denying the correspondence of concepts and the objects to which they refer, Adorno opens the door to thinking past the limitations of any system of classification in order to discover the excess of meaning obscured by that system. Thus, the essay, like other fragments and gestures, becomes a composition that doesn’t depend on a definition of identity or totality, but instead can respect mediation and discern how something exists by virtue of its relationships within a field of constitutive forces.

Adorno is writing about writing, however, and the relationship of his philoso­phical claims to visual media remains undefined (which he would appreciate). One might consider, as an example, how the silhouette works in much the same way as the essay; indeed, how it works by denying the ontological dignity of the visual. In place of indexical, realist correspondence between object and image, the image of the object becomes opaque, an affront to visuality. And, of course, enigmatic, immediately suggesting that there might be something beyond what would have been seen that is yet to be seen. Instead of the visual being equivalent to the surface of the world, it now is obscuring some of those surface features, but only to suggest that they were obscuring something else: an excess of meaning, an extension of the scene, deeper resonances within a force field. Or something as simple as seeing yourself in the picture: not them, but you; there at the beach or concert or wildfire or war zone; not absent and distant but present and needing to engage.

Rhetoric’s Silhouette

One should beware of overgeneralization regarding any figure, much less using it to say something about rhetoric writ large. The silhouette does gesture toward several fundamental topics in the rhetorical tradition, however: these include authenticity, adaptation, trope, and the public.
Authenticity has been a theme since Plato’s encounter with the sophists, not least in his critique of writing in the Phaedrus. Plato recognized that rhetoric profoundly destabilized authenticity, that is, the value of being what one appears to be. This deconstruction occurred because the sophists were showing how authenticity could be produced, copied, and reproduced by disseminating the copies. Reality and appearance, the social self and the true self, and other foundational distinctions became fused with a critique of rhetoric. The Phaedrus also provided a program for salvaging right relationships with reality and others, including attention to form, ethics, and reflection on one’s medium of expression. A similar problem emerged in the twentieth century, captured in Adorno’s critique of authenticity: once acknowledging the horror wrought by modern civilization, “authenticity” had to be exposed as a dangerous lie leading to violence, while a more humble authenticity in art (and speech) would have to resist illusions of integrity, register profound alienation, and suggest a utopian possibility beyond both the pure fungibility of commodity exchange and cults of exclusion (Jay, 2006). In these classical and modern iterations, the key to both exposing and salvaging authenticity is found in understanding processes of formal reproduction.

Although a small figure, the silhouette provides a near perfect example of how artificial imitation can produce a second order authenticity. The silhouette’s uncanniness—and especially when used to confront regimes of power—produces the “shudder of alienation” (Jay, 2006, p. 28) that exposes modernity itself, and yet also offers a moment of identification and solidarity. As Nicholas Royle notes, the uncanny refers to what should have remained hidden but came back, and to what is elusive, yet to come back (Royle, 2003, p. 31). For example, what had been repressed in social discipline or suppressed by a regime, and the ideals and knowledge needed for change. Likewise, the silhouette establishes the authenticity of an experience, appeal, type, movement, or ideal, not in the thing itself, but rather through processes of imitation and repetition as they can be found, used, examined, and otherwise taken up in ordinary social practices. Articulating enigma and fit, fit and enigma in obvious patterns of reproduction, the silhouette exemplifies how authenticity should be valued only as it is obviously unstable, relational, and incomplete. The choice is not between authentic and rhetorical speech, identity, or community, but between different modes of (rhetorical) reflection.

A key difference between mechanical duplication and ethical practices of reproduction is the role of adaptation in the process, and, of course, the adaptation of discourse for persuasive effect in varied situations is a foundational theme of rhetori­cal study. Again, the silhouette provides a basis for reconsideration, in this case, of how adaptation can work in tandem with exaptation (Roderick, 2021), ­which is the evolutionary process by which forms acquire utility beyond their original (one might say, “authentic”) role. Thus, fit need not be pregiven or intended, and we might “think of fitness as itself an emergent phenomenon” (p. 403). Sil­houettes exemplify such a process as they have migrated across different media to serve very different functions, as when the decorative craft became a resource within documentary photography and social movement advocacy. Because it is such an explicitly formal device, the silhouette also raises important questions about how given forms might contain latent resources for adaptation in future environments, and how formal innovation might precede social, political, or ecological needs. Instead of seeing it as an antique, one can ask how the silhouette ­might be a form for the future. A future, say, where human selfhood need not be authentically genetic, or where forms for sustainable living can only be imagined in outline with the rest depending on political imagination, experimentation, and resonance.

That context would include attention to the role of figures, schemes, tropes, or other techniques as means for transformation, and here also the silhouette has something to offer: it can extend current understanding of the stylistic figure of enigma within the history of rhetoric. As Eleanor Cook has noted (Cook, 2001), the enigma for the most part has been catalogued as a small figure involving only a temporary lack of knowledge: an explicit puzzle, as if the answer is in the back of the book. She also notes, however (and chiefly in Augustine), a more expansive definition that includes the unmeasurable, unknowable realm (e.g., of God). By tying enigma with the uncanny in formal effect, I have been suggesting the availability of the larger register. One might discern also an incarnational logic: seeing the large in the small, the holy in the ordinary, and a negation (emptiness) leading to openness (freedom). Any actual silhouette may seem a long way from Benjamin’s messianic moment, but it also might suggest a formal pathway for that act of imagination. More directly, the silhouette provides a good example of how figures can scale up or down for persuasive effect and the production of cultural recognition and knowledge. The figure can refer to an individual, a type, a common humanity or existential crisis, or a realm beyond our knowledge or control. It also can narrow attention, focus on the gesture rather than the narrative, and turn an aspiration or social problem into a puzzle to be solved, a blueprint to be followed.
It does so, moreover, in public and by addressing the viewer as a public spectator; in private life, we don’t often have relationships with shadows or other anonymous figures. Its use within photojournalism is characteristic, as the photographic prac­tice and the formal device each constitute the stranger relationality that is fundamental to public life (Warner, 2002, pp. 74-76). A public exists only when associ­ation with strangers is (most of the time) typical, non-threatening, and unrestricted: e.g., in a coffee house, at a concert, at a mall, on public transit, in a public square. Such publics are coeval with the democratic state and market capitalism, while also being separate social formations and sources of meaning. They are sustained in part by public arts such as photojournalism. The photojournalistic silhouette is the perfect stranger, familiar in outline but unknown otherwise. The open accessibility of the photograph becomes compromised by the opaqueness of the image, but that reduction amplifies the basic functions of photojournalism as a public art, in­cluding figural enactment of abstractions and nonthreatening association with strangers bound together by media circulation. If “the public might be said to be stranger-relationality in a pure form” (Warner, 2002, p. 199), the photographic silhouette might be the pure expression of that form.

Not even the silhouette can save public address from its basic paradox of representation: the public sphere must be abstract (not embodying any one social group) in order to be public, and yet embodied (and so evoking social identities and ex­clusions) in order to have the audience uptake essential for political effectivity (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007, pp. 42-43). Silhouettes, like other public images, are caught in that paradox; they are abstracted bodies or embodied abstractions, but always at a cost. They still have one shape and not another, invite projections and prescriptions regarding who and what should be normative, and can be either emblematic or seen as no more than small tracings of single things. What they also offer, however, is a rich and strange dimension of rhetoric: an art, and experience, that is by turns embodied, abstract, performative, conceptual, reduced, amplified, and otherwise a formal engagement more visual than verbal and more resonant than direct. This may be a more common dimension than is supposed, and with its own disposition toward eloquence. Thus, one might appreciate a public image precisely because of how it is a gesture both individual and typified, present and not present, familiar and uncanny, empty and evocative.

References

Adorno, T.W. (1991). The essay as form. In R. Tiedemann (Ed.), Notes to literature (Vol. 1) (Trans. Nicholsen, S.W.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Barthes, R. (1986). The responsibility of forms: Critical essays on music, art, and representation (R. Howard, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Cassirer, E. (1944). An essay on man. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cavell, S. (1988). The uncanniness of the ordinary. In quest of the ordinary: Lines of skepticism and romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226417288.001.0001
Cook, E. (2001). The figure of enigma: rhetoric, history, poetry. Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 19, 349-378. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2001.19.4.349
Freud, S. (2001). The ”uncanny”. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), An infantile neurosis and other works, Vol. XVII: the standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (pp. 217-252). London: Vintage. (Original work published in 1919.)
Focillon, H. (1989). The life of forms in art. New York: Zone Books. (Original work published in 1934.)
Hariman, R. (2010). Silhouettes of abundance. No Caption Needed. January 11, https://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2010/01/silhouettes-of-abundance/
Hariman, R. (2014). Humanity among the ruins. No Caption Needed. April 2, https://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2014/04/humanity-among-ruins/
Hariman, R. (2015). Crossing the border to the 21st century. No Caption Needed. May 13, ­https://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2015/05/crossing-the-border-to-the-21st-century/
Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J.L. (2007). No caption needed: Iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J.L. (2016). The public image: Photography and civic spectatorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Höppner, G. (2021). Silhouettes analysis: a posthuman method for visualizing and examining the material world. Qualitative Research, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999015
Humphreys-Owen, S.P.F. (1968). Physical principles underlying inorganic form. In L.L. Whyte (Ed.), Aspects of form: A symposium on form in nature and art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jay, M. (2006). Taking on the stigma of inauthenticity: Adorno’s critique of genuineness. New German Critique, 2006, 15-30. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-003
Knipe, P. (2002). Paper profiles: American portrait silhouettes. Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 41, 203-223. https://doi.org/10.1179/019713602806082575
Longoni, A. (2010). Photographs and silhouettes: visual politics in the human rights movements of Argentina. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 25, 5-17. https://doi.org/10.1086/657458
Maimon, V. (2015). Singular images, failed copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the early photograph. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816694716.001.0001
McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics: The invisible art. New York: HarperCollins/William Morrow.
Miles, M. & Welch, E. (Eds.) (2020). Photography and its publics. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003103721
Quintilian (1979). Institutio oratoria (H.E. Butler, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Original work published ca. 95 CE.)
Rexer, L. (2009). The edge of vision: The rise of abstraction in photography. New York: Aperture.
Roberts, J. (1998). The art of interruption: Realism, photography and the everyday. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Roderick, N. (2021). Form from form: the case for exaptation in rhetorical genre evolution. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 107, 398-417. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.1983193
Royle, N. (2003). The uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rutherford, E. (2009). Silhouette: The art of the shadow. New York: Rizzoli.
Shaw, Dubois. (2005). ”Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles”: silhouettes and African American identity in the early republic. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 149(1), 22-39.
Stevens, W. (1972). Man carrying thing. In The palm at the end of the mind: Selected poems and a play by Wallace Stevens. New York: Random House/Vintage.
Talbot, W.H.F. (1941-42). [Wild fennel] [Print]. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, United States. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/285922
Vigarello, G. (2016). The silhouette: From the 18th century to the present day. Trans. Augusta Dörr. London: Bloomsbury.
Warner. M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49
Unknown (ca. 1800-1815). [Possibly Jane Austin] [Hollow-cut silhouette]. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., United States. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00229/Possibly-Jane-Austen