The staged tableau

Photography spent its first century apologising for not being painting, and its second century discovering that the apology had been unnecessary. The tableau is where both phases are visible at once.

A tableau photograph is one that presents a scene rather than a moment. Figures are placed in relation to each other. The setting has been built, borrowed or chosen. The light is doing something light does not do on its own. The print is large, and it asks to be looked at the way an altarpiece is looked at, from a standing position, over minutes rather than seconds.

The Victorians built them out of pieces

The technical constraints of the 1850s made a single-exposure tableau nearly impossible, so the ambitious photographers built theirs from parts.

Oscar Rejlander exhibited The Two Ways of Life in 1857, an allegorical composition assembled from more than thirty separate negatives and printed at a size that required two sheets of paper joined together. Henry Peach Robinson, who learned the method from him, produced Fading Away in 1858: a young woman dying in a chair, family arranged around her, the whole thing combined from five negatives and none of it a deathbed.

The point of these was frankly social. Photography wanted to be taken seriously as art, and the way to be taken seriously in 1857 was to produce a picture with a moral subject, a lot of figures and a considered composition. The combination print was a technique invented to satisfy that ambition, and the ambition is the interesting part. From the beginning, the photographers who wanted the most out of the medium reached for the form of a painting.

The modern version reversed the argument

When the tableau returned in the late twentieth century, it had stopped apologising.

Jeff Wall began making large backlit colour transparencies mounted in lightboxes in the late 1970s, using a display method borrowed from advertising to present pictures at the scale of history painting. He has described part of his practice as near documentary: scenes he genuinely observed, then reconstructed with people who were not there, built again so that a real thing could be looked at properly. Mimic, from 1982, is the standing example. The event was witnessed. The photograph was made.

Gregory Crewdson took the industrial logic further. Beneath the Roses, produced between 2003 and 2008, was shot in small American towns with crews of film-production size, streets lit as though for a night exterior, for pictures containing one or two silent figures. Cindy Sherman had already run the reference in the other direction with the black and white photographs she made between 1977 and 1980, each one composed to look like a still from a film that does not exist.

None of these pretends to have caught anything. That is the reversal. The Victorian tableau staged a scene and hoped you would accept it. The modern tableau stages a scene and makes the staging the subject.

Why the form suits pictures of power

A power relation is not a moment. It is an arrangement that persists, with rules, positions and a history, and moments are a poor way to describe it.

The tableau can describe it because the tableau composes. Two figures can be placed at a considered distance. A height difference can be built rather than found. Light can be assigned deliberately to one body and withheld from another, which is a decision about who the picture belongs to, not a report of where the lamp happened to be. Everything this site’s reading method tests for is available to be set rather than observed.

The same logic explains why the most convincing screen treatments of the subject are constructed rather than naturalistic. The Duke of Burgundy is a sequence of tableaux: a repeated domestic scene, restaged with variations, filmed in a house that exists nowhere. The repetition is only legible because each version is composed to be compared with the last.

The cost, which is not small

Every person in a tableau is there because somebody put them there.

This is the form’s real liability, and it is more serious with this material than with any other. A picture about who holds authority over whom, in which every position, every angle of the head and every square inch of light was assigned by one person off camera, is enacting the thing it depicts. The composition can be as sympathetic as you like to the figure at the bottom of the hierarchy. That figure was still placed at the bottom by the author of the picture, and was placed there again on the next take.

The studio tradition has the same problem in weaker form, because a single figure against a plain ground is at least only being asked to hold a shape. The tableau asks for a scene, and a scene means a role.

There is no way out of this through technique. There are only two partial answers. The first is scale of admission: a tableau that shows its own apparatus, or is so obviously constructed that no viewer could mistake it for evidence, has at least declined to launder its authorship. The second is what the picture grants the subordinate figure once they are in position. A tableau that gives that figure the light, the centre and the outward look has used the author’s power to hand some of it back, which is the only form of restitution the medium offers.

Reading one

Look for the seams first. Where is the light coming from, and could it? How many sources are there, and would a room contain them? Is the depth of field consistent with a lens or with a decision? Then look at the distances between the figures, because a tableau’s distances are always exact and always meaningful.

Then ask the question the form makes unavoidable. If everybody in this picture was placed, what does the placement say the photographer thinks is true? The answer is usually more candid than anything the photographer has said in an interview.

The purest case is the one with nobody in it. A still life is a tableau reduced to its minimum: no performers, no direction, nothing but objects that were carried to a table and set down in an order somebody chose. The study Keys on velvet is arranged that way, and every question the form raises survives the removal of the figure. Something was placed. Somebody placed it. The picture is asking to be read as a scene, and it has not caught anything at all.