Blake Stimson. The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. 220 Pages.

Blake Stimson's The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation concerns three photographic essays: The Family of Man (1955-1965), The Americans (1958), and Bernd and Hilla Becher's careers-spanning photographs of industrial architecture (1957-2007). For Stimson, these photo essays produce an affective relationship with their viewers that draws from the modernist ideal of the universal subject. The formal and material characteristics of the photo essay, Stimson contends, simultaneously create a physical momentum between individual photographs and a psychological movement in the viewer as he or she comprehends and identifies with the content of the images while turning the pages of a book or walking through an exhibition. Stimson uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “pivot subjectivity,” in which an individual's experience of his or her own body serves as a filter through which all external information is understood, as a model for the phenomenological experience of moving from one image to the next in photo essays. Stimson extends Merleau-Ponty's pivot metaphor to include the shift in the 1950s from modernism to postmodernism and from a pre-World War II national subject to a post-war consumer/citizen.

Stimson identifies two polar interpretations of the “social anonymity” created by an excess of images in postwar American culture: the loss of social identity and the embrace of images by advertising culture. He proposes an alternative position from which interpretation can swing between these two poles. In The Pivot of the World 's short prologue, Stimson outlines his understanding of political subjectivity as an individual's ability to identify with a nation-state, and his project's relevance to discussions of post-war nationalism. Stimson's model of political subjectivity borrows from Albert O. Hirschman's concept of self-interest, a synthesis of reason and passion guarding against an excess of national sentiment that can lead to totalitarianism.

In his introduction, Stimson explains how photography – and the photo essay in particular – presents a medium through which a viewer can experience political subjectivity. He suggests that the diffuse global dissemination of photographs produced a post-war myth of nation in which national belonging was no longer particular to the nation-state (20). Stimson coins the term “photography's nation” to describe a population or group brought together by the shared experience of identifying with images. The introduction ends with a discussion of the formal characteristics of serial photography in relation to single-image photography and film, arriving at an analysis of the Danish-American photographer's photo essay How the Other Half Lives (1890) as a precursor to the political subjectivity in The Family of Man , The Americans , and the Bechers's photographs.

In his first chapter, Stimson moves beyond the now-familiar critique of The Family of Man 's role in American cultural imperialism, instead analyzing how the images in the photo essay were able to persuade its audience to identify with a sense of self that was not constructed against an external enemy. Stimson characterizes the reception of the exhibition by its audience as narcissistic. The lingering threat of nuclear annihilation, Stimson argues, provided a tense counterpoint to the joy and life portrayed in the photographs; in the audience's identification with the images, all difference is collapsed. The individual photographs were “placeholders,” empty signifiers that disallowed historically or politically-specific identifications, while simultaneously creating an emotionally-charged and narcissistic viewer-object relationship.

Stimson's second chapter proceeds from a standard interpretation of Frank's The Americans as a “personal artistic vision,” calling attention to a shift in documentary photography from “reportorial to expressive . . . metonymic to metaphoric” (106). However, while much critical opinion cites The Americans as a radical departure from previous styles of documentary photography, Stimson suggests that Frank's work in the mid-50s was instead a negotiation between the modes of documentary photography and subjective art. Stimson finds a sense of “anguish” in Frank's photographs, which he attributes to Frank's dissatisfaction with the way photography maintains a divide between photographer and subject and between individual experience (of the photographer) and the social world (107). Frank's chosen genre, the road trip, provides an alternative or escape from the opposition between photographer and object of study, as the “road” visually leads the viewer out of photographic space and into the phenomenal world. If The Family of Man produced an ability to identify with all of its photographs' subjects, The Americans prevents identification with any of its subjects, pushing the viewer out of photographic space and back into his or her phenomenological experience.

The book's third chapter discusses the Bechers's photo-documentation of industrial architecture as a “grammar,” a material expression of social relations in the modern period (143). In this chapter, Stimson examines how the composition and content of the Bechers's photographs are able to bring modernist ideals – albeit failed or abandoned ones – into conversation with contemporary ideas about political subjectivity (144). The Bechers's accumulation of images of “anonymous structures” (for Stimson, industrial architecture is functional and, thus, has no regional styles) creates an archive that, Stimson suggests, emphasizes aesthetic variation and does not promote any particular political agenda. Much like Stimson's argument in his first chapter, he suggests that the aesthetic pleasure of recognition stemming from the familiarity of the Bechers's images produces an affective experience of collective belonging (164).

The Pivot of the World 's epilogue, ominously titled “Art and Objecthood,” brings Stimson's borrowed pivot metaphor into conversation with the neo-avant-garde, in which art and life came together in the viewer's experience of self-reflexivity. Stimson makes a distinction between the pivotal subjectivity that allowed the viewer to experience “photography's nation” and the self-reflexive subjectivity generated by neo-avant-garde artworks, which, Stimson argues, did not lead to any experience of collective belonging, rather, becoming mired in arguments of identity politics. For Stimson, this focus on the individual's experience of the artwork can only be an exercise in phenomenology; in contrast, the pivotal subjectivity found in the photo essays of the 1950s used phenomenological experience to create collective belonging. Stimson ends by suggesting that identity politics are no longer useful, proposing the sense of collective belonging in “photography's nation” as an alternative model with which to understand the individual's relationship to society.

Stimson's conclusions about the legacy of the neo-avant-garde and the possibilities of “photography's nation” are too hasty. “Photography's nation” suggests a model of collective belonging that assumes universal access to society. While Merleau-Ponty's classic explanation of the phenomological subjectivity in The Phenomenology of Perception describes the subject's experiential memory of the physical body, Stimson applies Merleau-Ponty's model of pivotal subjectivity to an ideal viewing subject unmarked by memories and past experiences of his or her relationship to society. For Stimson, the phenomenological exercises inspired by neo-avant-garde viewer-object relations lead to a critique of this kind of universal subjectivity. The importance of this critique is not lost because it has been sited in discussions of identity politics; rather, Stimson's dismissal of the utility of identity politics is symptomatic of a larger academic reluctance regarding the still-unanswered questions posed by the critique of universal subjectivity.

The Pivot of the World is a study in audience reception, not a stylistic or formal anaylsis of photo essays. As such, this book shares an interest in community formation through art with contemporary community-based and participatory art practices. However, The Pivot of the World differs from these contemporary models because it addresses the formation of a national community made of individual – but universal –subjects who experience belonging through visual identification. As an historical example of a way to experience national belonging, the pivotal subjectivity of “photography's nation” is interesting and insightful; however, its application to the contemporary moment is limited by the omission of racial, class, and gender differences from the position of the viewing subject.