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Social Semiotics
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Camera as sign: on the ethics of

unconcealment in documentary film
and video
a
Garnet C. Butchart
a
Department of Communication, University of South Florida,
Tampa, FL, USA
Published online: 31 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Garnet C. Butchart (2013) Camera as sign: on the ethics of unconcealment in
documentary film and video, Social Semiotics, 23:5, 675-690, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.740205

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.740205

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 Social Semiotics, 2013
Vol. 23, No. 5, 675690, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.740205

Camera as sign: on the ethics of unconcealment

in documentary film and video
Garnet C. Butchart*

Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

(Received 10 November 2011; final version received 3 September 2012)
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When we look at a documentary, what do we see? Probably not the apparatus that
gives us images to view. If we did, then perhaps questions about the ethics of
documentary cinema would be easily answered. The goal of this article is to
broaden the moralistic purview of image ethics debates with a semiotic
phenomenology of the visual mode of address of documentary. I describe how
‘‘doubling’’ and ‘‘redoubling’’ the visual mode of address undermines the
authority of documentary and helps to overcome debates about two main ethical
issues  participant consent and the audience’s right to information. Unconceal-
ing the viewpoint of documentary also broadens media ethics debates by bringing
attention to the implied viewer, asking of it to reflect on the consequences of the
communicative act of looking. Examples of widely available documentary film
and video are discussed.
Keywords: documentary; ethics; film; semiotics; phenomenology

Let us recall for a moment that exquisite little book devoted to the topic of visuality,
documentation, and the conscious experience of memory  Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography, by French semiotician, Roland Barthes (1982). Most
scholars recognize the centrality of this text to contemporary theories of representa-
tion and to the esthetic analysis of photographic images. However, few scholars have
paused long enough to consider what is, to my mind, one of the more important
questions about this famous book: Namely, what does Roland Barthes see when he
looks at his photographs?
In his review of Camera Lucida, Michael Halley (1982) argues that part of what
Barthes sees when he looks at his photographs are his fingertips. This may sound odd
today, due to the dominance of digital media  we don’t often hold photographs in our
hands. But, as Halley points out that is precisely what Barthes was doing while he
wrote that slim book not so long ago. Barthes looks down at a photograph cupped in
his hand. Barthes sees the image presented by it. But also, along its edges, he sees his
fingertips. That is not all. Barthes also sees that his fingertips are pointing back at him.
Seeing this, Barthes recognizes that a selection is being made. And it is the
process of selection that occupies much of his discussion. Barthes selects this photo,
and then another, followed by another. As he sifts through his photographs, he
decides that some of them are just ok (this is the category of the ‘‘studium’’); whereas
others, or, this photograph in particular, wounds him. ‘‘It disturbs me,’’ Barthes says

*Email: butchart@usf.edu
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 676 G.C. Butchart

(1982, 99). In doing so, that photograph belongs to the category of the ‘‘punctum.’’
The categories are famous.
But if we step back from Barthes’s description of each photograph, as well as the
description of the two categories through which he makes sense of them, and if we
step back from all of the secondary literature that has been written about these
categories, then perhaps what we might recognize is the extent to which Camera
Lucida is, in fact, a discussion about the process of selection and its conscious
experience  an experience (which defines photography and the photographic
medium in their essence) of attending to phenomena in the visual field, of imagining
them, taking hold of them in a way that is peculiar to the agent who is making the
selection. What Barthes offers us is, in other words, a semiotic analysis of the
existential experience of visual communication.
Remarkably, it is in the appearance of his fingertips pointing back at him from
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the edges of the photograph cupped in his hand that stirs Barthes to address directly
what he is doing to begin with. We recall from his ‘‘meditation’’ (the book’s subtitle is
Reflections on Photography) that Barthes is searching for a particular photograph  a
photograph of his mother that might correspond to the image Barthes has of her, an
image as he remembers her. This is, or course, the famous ‘‘Winter Garden’’
photograph. In doing so  and here is the important point  Barthes filters his
collection. He attends to his photos, then to the image of his mother that only he can
‘‘see.’’ Beginning with a photo before him and tracing it back to his conscious
experience of what it stirs (a tender love of the mother), Barthes undertakes a kind of
memory work, looking to his photos to find pictures that may or may not be
adequate to the images held in memory. And as he sifts through his collection of
photographs, Barthes selects only a few for inclusion in the now famous book, selects
them for us as objects of a narrative that was itself subject to the process of editing.1
Now, does Barthes talk about the processes that contribute to the editing of the
collection of photographs that, in the end, he offers us to see? Not directly.
Remember, Barthes is trying to retain the memory of his mother  to hold onto it. It
is that experience, and his description of it, that makes Camera Lucida such a
touching little book. Remarkably, what we find on close inspection of the images is
that hands and fingers are repeatedly addressed throughout Barthes’ discussion.
Specifically, the photos that move Barthes the most (the ones he selects for
reproduction in the book) are those in which fingers appear partially concealed.
Take another look. We see a finger covered by a bandage in the photo of two dwarf
children (1982, 50); fingertips are concealed by dirt under the fingernails of the boy at
the center of the William Klein photo (46); fingertips are cut off by the edge of the
frame in the Mapplethorpe self-portrait (58); and in the photograph by Nadar,
entitled, The Artist’s Wife (Or Mother), a finger is concealed by the mouth into
which it is inserted (68). There are others. But most importantly, in the photograph
of the little girl at the end of the book (which some scholars argue is the real Winter
Garden photograph) (104), the index finger of one hand is concealed in the grip of
the other  ‘‘as children often do,’’ Barthes says (1982, 69)  a sign of timidity, in this
case, in front of a camera.
Holding photographs in one’s hand may be a thing of the past. But that certainly
does not mean that hands and fingers today are obsolete. To the contrary, they are
essential. Hands hold cameras, phones, and other personal communication devices,
while fingers push buttons. Fingers are the source of a command that initiates a
 Social Semiotics 677

signal telling a device to register an image of the world (to take a picture). With the
pervasiveness today of touch screen technology, fingers are requisite  they scroll,
enlarge, and reduce those images. They are the medium through which we touch
images that touch us. Photographs and photography today may be mostly digital, but
isn’t that the point? As Bill Brown reminds us in his article, ‘‘All Thumbs,’’ the
‘‘digital age is [the] digital age’’ (2004, 435).
I begin with this scene  of an author who gazes upon images of others only to
find (parts of) himself staring back  because it captures (depicts, demonstrates) the
focus that I want to bring to the topic of ethics and documentary filmmaking.
Typically, when the topic of ethics is raised in the context of mass media (and
particularly, in documentary studies), the focus is usually on moral issues and
attitudes. However, I want to take a step back from moral discourse and focus
instead on what is, to my mind, the deeper problem about ethics in documentary;
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namely, the relationship between an image-making apparatus and its world viewed.
In the pages to follow, I will discuss how the ethics of documentary deserves our
attention for the reason that it is a privileged mode of seeing and storytelling. It is by
the sheer act of documentation  the opening and showing of a world  that ethics
appears in this context as a topic for discussion in the first place.
To be sure, documentary filmmaking also accomplishes a kind of memory work.
If it has an essence, that is probably it. ‘‘To document’’ means to survey and to teach
(to imagine), to inscribe (to trace), to retain, and thereby, not to forget. Documents,
like memories, can be lost. But forgetting is a much different story. In this context (of
documenting and of forgetting), judgment will have been made about what is, in fact,
worthy of being remembered, what is worthy of being attended to, imagined (and/or
pictured), included on record, archived, and perhaps, being put on display (shown,
for the purposes of being seen)  judgment, in short, about what is worthy of being
held. However, with regard to the memory work accomplished by documentary
filmmaking, what often slips out of view or, what can be lost on our perspective, is
the work of documentation, the very practice and conscious experience of surveying,
picturing, tracing, storing, arranging, showing, looking, and seeing. Documentary
mediates a world: It looks, sees, records, and shows. In its showing, audiences are
given a story to see. The relation between phenomena, their documentation, and
perception of the document, legitimizes raising the question of ethics because it is a
relation in which the production of knowledge about the world is at stake. A
filmmaker looks onto a world, and shows a world: The camera sees and, with the
push of a button, a selection of the world is given to view.
The objective of my discussion is to ask that we do not forget about documentary
filmmaking, and I ask this as a matter of ethics. For when we talk about ethics in the
context of documentary, the object of our discourse is precisely a process, the process
of making images, whether we see this process or not. The telling of a story in
documentary is itself a story to be told. I wish to ask if it, too, can be documented
and, in that sense, held onto, remembered, rather than remain out of view, as if the
telling of a story were somehow transcendent to the story told, as the latter unfolds
on the screen. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on what I call the visual
mode of address of documentary filmmaking. The visual mode of address  its
technologies and creative enterprise  is usually forgotten, is it not, in our experience
of looking at (being absorbed by) images? For that reason, I will show how the ethics
 678 G.C. Butchart

of documentary may benefit from turning its eye to the visibility of its own practice 
to its exposure.

Documentary and its ethics

Elsewhere I have written in detail about ethics and documentary (Butchart 2006), so
this time I will summarize only briefly the central ethical issues in the documentary
enterprise. The main ethical issue in documentary cinema is the relation between
filmmaking/filmmaker and two specific groups  first, the participants in a
documentary film; and second, the audience of documentary cinema. The relation
is triadic. A filmmaker teaches an audience about participants/subjects. Correspond-
ing to each group (audience and participants) is an ethical challenge consistently
faced by the filmmaker. First, participants must have an opportunity to give consent
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to a documentary project. The ethical issue here is to inform participants of the

intentions of a filmmaker, to offer sufficient knowledge about the project so that
participants may consent to it, or not. The ethical objective in this case is one of
disclosure. Second, audiences have a right to be informed (or at least a right to hear)
about issues that affect them. The ethical challenge is to strive for fairness in
documenting issues of public concern rather than mislead audiences. This ethical
objective is linked to the fact that most audiences hold documentary cinema to the
ethical standards of journalism  like news gathering and its reportage, audiences
typically believe that documentary film and video perform a ‘‘truth-telling’’ function,
and so, the ethical challenge here is, again, one of disclosure.
Now, although the majority opinion of scholarship devoted to the topic of
documentary filmmaking ethics over the past decade is that disclosure in this context
is nothing short of a ‘‘moral obligation,’’2 the difficult question remains nevertheless:
Who is to judge? How does one know when one is being ethical? Well, what we do
know is that it is extremely difficult for public policy-makers to regulate for morality,
good taste, and accuracy in media.3 In the absence of any enforceable moral code
(beyond obscenity laws), filmmakers must make their own ethical decisions  they
are by far the best judges of their own practices. But what are those practices?
Documentary filmmakers do something. What do they do? Obviously, they make
images. And those images tell a story. What legitimizes raising the question of ethics
is, to be sure, the process of making images. By focusing on image making as a
process we may better recognize why ethics in documentary filmmaking is a semiotic
problem  and not exclusively a moral problem. This is the main intervention I wish
to make into the problematic of documentary filmmaking ethics.
By ‘‘semiotic’’ I mean to invoke two basic senses of ‘‘representation.’’ First, is the
sense of representation as inclusion. In the context of image making, inclusion raises
a fundamental question: What is being filmed? (What is included in the frame?)
Second, is the sense of representation as showing. In the context of image making,
showing raises the following key questions: How is the content of a film depicted?
(What is offered to view? What is being said by the image?). Representation as
showing is a matter of signification  a problem of communication. With these two
basic senses in mind, a semiotic perspective helps draw attention to the practical and
pragmatic aspects of documentary filmmaking ethics. That is, it helps us to focus on
documentary filmmaking as a kind of work, or process, by grounding analytically the
question I posed a moment ago: Documentary does something  what does it do? It
 Social Semiotics 679

tells stories, yes. But the important answer is that documentary makes images of
others, hence the ethical imperative of participant consent. Also, these images
communicate to viewers, hence the ethical imperative of informing rather than
misleading audiences about issues that affect them the most.
A semiotic perspective (rather than a moralizing perspective) will help guide the
discourse on documentary ethics to images themselves. It offers a crucial corrective
to contemporary debates about the morality of image making by calling attention
not only to the fact that images show  images appear to be seen, giving us
something to look at  but also, that images are monstrations. Because viewers see
what film or photography shows (what is given to look at), the sense made of any
image (its conscious experience) is always open. Once made, images can become
monstrous  they have the power to take on (or, to be invested with) meaning beyond
what was intended by its maker. They have the power to move viewers, to entertain,
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and even to disturb the viewing experience. It is in this sense that we can say that
images live  images are alive (Mitchell 2005). Because image making is a privileged
act, the properly ethical question to consider in this context is not ‘‘what is right,
wrong, good, or evil’’ about images. Rather, ‘‘what do we see?’’ Or, a propos the
ethical challenges of documentary outlined above, ‘‘what is concealed?’’
In short, ethics remains a question in documentary filmmaking today precisely
because this enterprise participates in the process of semiosis  documentary produces
knowledge about the world in visible form, and presents it to audiences. However, as we
know, the appearance of the visible is also a portent of that which remains concealed.
For that reason, and with our eye on the semiotics of documentary, we can begin to
explore a set of practices for the ethical production of images. Specifically, I will
discuss how documentary can actively acknowledge how its acts of disclosure
(revealing, bringing to visibility, showing, remembering) are also, in part, acts of
concealment (hiding, storing, deleting, and perhaps even forgetting). The ethical
practice of documentary that I have in mind amounts to a decision made by a
filmmaker to reveal the intentionality of the image-making apparatus  a decision to
unconceal the privileged place of its hiding between a world that gives itself to be
seen, and the world shown by it through images on-screen. I call this practice an
‘‘optical ethic’’ devoted to exposure of the visual mode of address of documentary
cinema as it mediates between reality and the real.
The visual mode of address of documentary can be approached via what
communication scholars call ‘‘semiotic phenomenology.’’ Semiotic phenomenology
is a philosophical paradigm devoted to critical examination of the conscious
experience of signs and codes of human communication. According to Catt
(2011), one of this paradigm’s most important scholars, semiotic phenomenology
is the synthetic logic of semiotics (Piercean) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty
and early Foucault): ‘‘Semiotics specifies what we have in common  signs and codes
 and phenomenology specifies the uniqueness of our personal experiences of those
signs and codes. Signs consist of perception-expression doublets and mediate all of
human experience as codes, or systems of signs that are unfailingly accompanied
with rules for their use’’ (132). The goal of semiotic phenomenology is, in short, to
examine, and not to presuppose, the experience of communication.4 In cinema
studies, the main advocate of semiotic phenomenology is Vivian Sobchack (1992,
2004). Her classic discussion of the ‘‘address of the eye’’ of film emphasizes the link
between signs and codes (the language of images) and the embodied experience of
 680 G.C. Butchart

cinematic viewing (phenomenological perception). She establishes the formal

equivalence between the intentionality of perception and the conscious experience
of looking in cinema. Intentionality of the visual mode of address in cinema is the
key feature uncovered by Sobchack’s semiotic phenomenology  the activity of
interaction between the appearance of images (signs in the visual field) and the
manner in which viewers position themselves (and are positioned) to receive and
become aware (through reflective attending to the lived sensation) of those
appearances. Semiotic phenomenology offers a frame for discussing semiosis in
documentary, the ‘‘existential conjunction’’ (Sobchack 2004, 87) of screen images
and their phenomenological experience by viewers.5
For the purposes of my discussion, the main components of the visual mode of
address in documentary are as follows: (1) the technologies used to capture and
imprint images of phenomena onto film stock or a digital storage device (i.e. motion
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picture cameras); and the employment of these technologies (the intentions of a

filmmaking apparatus reflected in the composition of a motion picture; that is, acts
of looking, pointing, recording that give us a world to see); (2) the synthesis of the
images created by these technologies and their perceptual acts (ordered and
assembled in the editing process, guided by an editor and/or several editors); and
the exhibition of those images (i.e. through a projector or other expressive device
onto a screen); finally (3) the conscious perception and embodied sense-making of
film by audiences (i.e. one’s awareness of viewing images). The visual mode of
address fixes the conditions of possibility for image making and the conscious
experience of image viewing. It is the mode that looks, records, and communicates a
world onto which viewers gaze and through which viewers are guided (and
sometimes ‘‘moved’’) in the experience of what appears to view.6
Although what is shown by a semiotic phenomenology of the visual mode of
address may appear obvious at first  namely, that documentary looks, records, and
makes images that have impact, all from a certain perspective  it also deepens our
awareness of concealment as the main point of ethical concern in this image-making
enterprise. It adds to media theory a new perspective on how and why ethics remains
a topic of debate in documentary for the reason that the visual mode of address is
often excluded from the visible content of most film and video. Audiences are shown
a world through documentary, but rarely do we get to see the apparatus through
which that world is given for us to view. As Ellis (2009) says, ‘‘a screen is a means of
display but also of concealment. Behind the screen lie the mechanisms that bring you
the pictures and the sounds, concealed by the very thing that they bring into
existence’’ (68).7 As viewers we are not often aware of the intentionality of the
address  rarely do we get to witness the decisions made to record certain
phenomena over others, decisions to compose scenes in specific ways, to place the
camera here rather than there, and so on. What grounds the practice of documentary
 its visual mode of address  is often concealed from our field vision. As I will
demonstrate, a semiotic phenomenology of documentary draws attention not only to
how the experience of viewing in cinema is structured, but also what can be done to
call its relational structure into question.
To be sure, even if audiences know that there is more to any story than what is
given to view, documentary film and video, like messages, still do not appear out of
nowhere. They are the products of conscious activity tied to the experience of a
filmmaker and an image-making enterprise. It is for that reason, as I argue below,
 Social Semiotics 681

that the ethics of documentary can be understood semiotic-phenomenologically as

part of a practice of unconcealment, a kind of ‘‘truth telling’’ if we accept that the
only truth in documentary filmmaking is the visual mode through which its images
are produced, delivered, and consumed. If we agree that the disappearance off screen
of the visual mode of address hides the process of looking, composing, showing, and
sense making (semiosis, the phenomenological experience of signs), then we may
broaden the conversation in media theory by examining how the ethical challenges of
documentary filmmaking may be addressed in the very same manner through which
they first emerge  addressed visually, cinematically, semiotically.

Camera as sign
How can an optical ethics of documentary filmmaking be accomplished? How can its
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semiotic work be unconcealed (rather than forgotten) as a mediate between the world
and the experience of viewing it on-screen? Answer: Turn the camera into a sign, a
sign of what is usually left unseen in the image-making process. Doing so draws out
the properly ethical question of documentary filmmaking: Namely, what can a
camera do?
In what follows, I discuss how a camera can show itself, at the place where it
typically conceals itself, by including itself in what it shows. In this discussion, my
focus is on mainstream documentaries widely available on television, DVD, and/or in
theatres at film festivals, documentaries characterized by the interview style and the
use of illustration to tell stories about topics of modern social life or human
experience that have broad appeal. My goal is to emancipate media theory broadly,
and documentary theory in particular, from the discourses of morality by drawing
attention to the semiotic ground of the ethics of image making. It is not my intention
to intervene into disciplinary debates about image-making practices specific to
ethnography and the production of video in anthropological research. However,
although I do not address ethnographic film and video specifically, my discussion of
reflexive image-making techniques is nevertheless complimentary to scholarship
devoted to the politics of ethnographic representation and the production of
researchable footage in anthropology.8 For more detailed discussion of ethnographic
film, see MacDougall (1970, 1978), MacDougall et al. (2001), Nichols (1997), Ruby
(2000) and the ‘‘moral obligations’’ of ethnographic filming, Nunn (2010) on recent
examples of participant-generated video art; and Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009a,
2009b) on ‘‘observational cinema’’ as experimental anthropology.
To begin, there are two main techniques through which the visual mode of
documentary’s address can be exposed  two modes through which the camera
becomes a sign of the privileged place from which it sees and shows us a world to be
viewed. The first is what I call doubling the visual mode of address. By ‘‘doubling’’ I
do not mean duplicating and thereby reinforcing the viewpoint of the filmmaker.
Rather, by doubling the visual mode of address what I mean is putting that address
into view  exposing it, in part  by addressing it directly. The visual mode of address
is doubled when the perspective given to us by the documentary (the address that we
are asked to occupy in order to ‘‘see’’ what is on-screen) is returned by a second
address. This second address is, literally, a look that looks back; it is a look that looks
at us looking at it. When audiences are shown this look, the visual mode of address
 682 G.C. Butchart

that had remained unseen becomes visible, seen in the form of its double  a return
address that appears on-screen.
There are many ways in which the visual mode of address of documentary may be
doubled, but I will mention only three. First, the visual mode of address may be seen
as having been doubled whenever participants on-screen look directly into the lens of
the camera. This can occur during an interview, for example, when a participant
visually addresses the camera (looks directly at it) and not the interviewer/director
who usually remains hidden off screen. Second, doubling the visual mode of address
occurs when a participant verbally addresses the presence of the camera. We see this
when a participant asks if the camera is on or, more often, by requesting that the
camera be turned off. Finally, the visual mode of address is doubled in participant-
generated films, where participants are engaged in the making of the documentary
within which they appear. Here, we see scenes recorded by participants themselves, or
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participants interviewing participants about their participation, the work of the film,
the presence of the camera, and so on.9
In each case, viewers need not actually ‘‘see’’ the appearance of a movie camera
on-screen. It is in the ‘‘look’’ of the other (the address) that looks back at us looking
at it that the viewpoint of the camera signifies  what is signified by the look doubled
back is the privileged position of a scopic machinery between a world and a world
pictured for audiences to see on-screen. A basic example of doubling is seen in the
American documentary Grizzly Man (Herzog 2005). On the one hand, the visual
mode of address is doubled in this film when its protagonist, Timothy Treadwell,
speaks directly into the video cameras that he takes with him on his journeys and
points at himself. Treadwell worked alone, his subject was himself (and the wild
bears), and he was responsible for his actions and whatever risks he took. On the
other hand, the address of the camera is also doubled in this documentary when we
see unedited footage of Treadwell falling out of the image that he had carefully
developed of himself as the sensitive, reasoned, bear expert. What is intriguing about
Grizzly Man is that the exposure of its visual mode of address makes it impossible to
determine whose story is being told. What viewers ‘‘see’’ of Treadwell has been
authored, in part, by the director. Herzog acquired over 100 hours of Treadwell’s
footage and reduced it to a 90-minute feature. Audiences are witness to background
footage that Treadwell may not have wanted exposed, such as the key scene, used as a
turning point in Herzog’s film, of Treadwell positioned at water’s edge, cursing at an
imagined audience behind his camera. Still, we can never be sure that these scenes
were meant to remain concealed  they live on after the death of the agent that
initially brought them into being. Presented to us in a kind of ‘‘after life’’ by Herzog,
the elaborate illusion of the documentary process is put into question.10
The second mode through which a camera is made a sign of its image-making
practice is by redoubling the visual mode of address. I call it ‘‘redoubling’’ when a
filmmaker returns his or her own address, when we see the viewpoint of documentary
addressing itself. To be sure, the act of looking (seeing, recording, showing) is an act
of power, and image-making technologies (photography, film, video) are often used
to validate the authority of the viewpoint that employs them. However, redoubling
the point of view from which one looks may be understood as a sign that an image-
maker has reflected on his or her position in the process of making images,
demonstrates awareness of the implications of this process by putting the authority
of that position into view, exposing it on-screen. This is key: To redouble the visual
 Social Semiotics 683

mode of address is to unconceal the work of image making, to present a self-

conscious viewpoint exposed to itself, hence to audiences, as a presence to be
scrutinized. If it is unconcealed by an act of redoubling, documentary’s visual mode
of address will appear as an act of seeing that sees itself seeing, shows itself seeing
itself in the story it tells.
The most obvious example of redoubling the visual mode of address may be seen
in documentaries about the making of documentary, when movie cameras along with
the activities of movie making appear on-screen and/or as part of the story being
told. Classic examples are the Russian documentary Man with A Movie Camera
(Vertov 1929) and Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch 1960). In both films, the director
appears on-screen with his cameras and crew engaged in the image-making process.
The intended effect is to unconceal the process and illusion of film (audiences
become agents in the production as we get to witness the ‘‘man with a movie
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camera’’). More recently, in Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2010), viewers are
shown scenes of the activity of video recording, the editing of footage, and we are
witness to discussions about the challenges and practice of making the documentary
that unfolds before us on-screen. In each of these examples (spanning an 80 year
period), what is exposed by redoubling the visual mode of address is the fact that
documentary is never exactly factual but is instead part of a creative process of
composition, and that knowing where to look is always in the beholder’s eye.
Redoubling can be seen most clearly in cases where a filmmaker reflects on the
authority of filmmaking to constitute a worldview. A clear example is The Law in
These Parts (Alexandrowicz 2011), a Jerusalem International Film Festival award-
winning film about the law imposed on people of the occupied territories in Israel
and the legal experts who designed it. In this film, we see footage of the staging of the
film set, the seating of participants prior to the interviews, the presentation of
evidence to be discussed, and the projection of clips from other documentaries as a
backdrop to the set. We also hear the filmmaker off screen reflect on the power as
well as the limits of the story his film is about to tell. In a voice-over, the director
says: ‘‘I present the rulings and historical events as I understand them. In the world
of the film, I rule on what reality is.’’ He even admits that the film cannot, and will
not, show all of what was said in the interviews conducted: ‘‘I decide what parts of
the conversation to show, and what not to show,’’ he says. ‘‘All the information comes
from me.’’ Undermining the authority of documentary by exposing the hidden place
from which knowledge about the world is produced (the viewpoint concealed behind
the images it shows), this documentary shows us not only how the law, as written, is,
like the writing of history, a matter of perspective (how one sees a world), but also, it
shows us how the practice of documentation  the recording, from a certain point of
view, of statements, testimonies, orders, verdicts, as well as images, both moving and
still  has, like the reading of law, the power to shape how we think about reality.
To summarize: Doubling the visual mode of address shows us that the world of
appearances cannot simply be mirrored, as if phenomena appear to us already
loaded with significance. In the appearance of a look doubled back, a world seen has
the potential to show itself as more than the picture of it that appears on-screen. By
exposing the look that looks at its world, a documentary itself may appear partially
blinded or, at least limited in its ability to make total sense of a world that shows
itself by giving itself to be seen. The return address puts the practice and authority of
documentary directly into question. Next, redoubling the visual mode of address
 684 G.C. Butchart

accomplishes an unconcealment of the limited ability of documentary to present a

world that presents itself to be seen. Redoubling is the sign of admission that the
work of documentary is always a matter of perspective. An optical ethics of
documentary admits to the limits of its appearance of knowing-where-to-look by
putting into view, and into question, the process of looking, recording, arranging,
and showing. It is an ethics of story telling about a story being told.

Significance of an optical ethic

Doubling and redoubling the visual mode of documentary’s address significantly
complicates our conscious experience of looking at images and undermines
assumptions about valid forms of representation. This practice helps us to see how
the production of visual media is contingent on interpretation, the experience of
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sense-making. It demonstrates the fact that documentary is art, not journalism,

despite its claims to the real and its reliance on conventions of objectivity to ensure
its authority. An optical ethic draws our attention to how an image-making
apparatus disappears (hides itself, cannot easily be seen) behind what it gives us to
see. It offers a critical strategy to bracket moral discourse in order to focus instead on
the semiotic ground of image making. For those reasons, an optical ethic offers a
unique approach to thinking concretely about the main ethical challenges of
documentary filmmaking outlined at the start of this discussion.
First, participants may benefit directly from the ethics of doubling and redoubling
the visual mode of address. By addressing the presence of the camera, visually and/or
verbally, the filmmaking apparatus appears unconcealed and the ethical demand of
disclosure is satisfied. Even if the camera does not appear on-screen, it is disclosed
nevertheless by the look of a participant, and the constituting power of its viewpoint
is thereby undermined. To be sure, although images may appear fixed in time, once
participants are allowed to be seen addressing the address that addresses them (rather
than deleting those scenes in which this occurs in order to maintain distance and
objectivity), then when viewers arrive later to see those images, the look of the other
will be there already to meet them. Staring back at the one who stares ahead, viewers
will be arrested in the viewing experience, and the privilege of our capacity to look will
appear in question. In so doing, the power of the camera itself to look and to
represent, which often remains concealed by what it shows and, for that reason,
supports the claims of objectivity of documentary, will be exposed, unconcealed and
undermined by another that addresses the address of the viewing viewer.
In this way, an optical ethic makes the conditions possible for participants to
appear above the status of victim in which they are often shown in documentary. An
optical ethics offers a concrete alternative to the tendency of documentary
filmmakers to draw attention to moral issues in a way that can lead to the
moralizing evaluation of human difference, as we see in film and video that inspects
subjects of cultural difference, poverty, and trauma. The replication of images of
ridicule and/or suffering we often see is clearly not a matter of ethics in the sense
outlined in the present discussion. Instead, what motivates that enterprise is the
power of images to fascinate, and perhaps to ‘‘wound,’’ but ultimately to entertain
and thereby to generate profit from their exhibition. Alternatively, if the subject of
documentary appeared on-screen engaged with the address that addresses her,
thereby challenging her subordinate position as seen, and in so doing, asking
 Social Semiotics 685

documentary to call into question the privilege of its own position, then what we
would see more often is an agent of cinema. Doubling and redoubling the visual
mode of address, an optical ethic would result in the depiction (the showing) of
strong participants whose significance in documentary appears not in the form of
differences offered as a resource to legitimize the moralizing authority of a look that
may come to see those differences as its disturbing and inferior opposite, but as
participants whose appearance constitutes the address that addresses them  agents
whose interruption of the image-making process significantly undermines its power
to depict reality.11
Second, audiences may benefit from the practice of doubling and redoubling to
the extent that these imaging techniques help fulfill whatever expectation there may
be for the ‘‘truth-telling’’ function of documentary  but they do so semiotic and
phenomenologically. By exposing the visual mode of address, that which can be
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known about the truth of what is seen will be known insofar as the only truth to be
seen is the position of the viewpoint behind the image given to be seen. On the one
hand, in the appearance of a look that looks back (doubling), viewer attention is
drawn to the voyeurism of looking that is typically ignored as we consume images. It
puts into question the tourist fascination that documentary often encourages in
viewers. Doubling helps us to ‘‘see’’ the camera ‘‘as a medium through which
knowledge is produced, represented and negotiated and through which the ‘selves’ of
both [filmmaker] and informant are perceived’’ (Pink 2001, 24). On the other hand,
the point of view that turns itself on itself (redoubling) may increase audience
awareness about how the image-making enterprise of documentary is, in large part,
sustained by commercial motivation. As we have seen throughout this discussion,
doubling and redoubling the visual mode of address demonstrate the basic idea that
documentaries do not mirror the world, but rather, they tell stories about it, and the
best stories, at least for commercial purposes, are typically those that compel viewers
to look rather than to question opinions and challenge assumptions. Cultivating the
capacity of audiences to be skeptical of mass media (by exposing the image-making
process) remains crucial as a point of balance to commercial media outlets whose
motives are usually not to inform audiences but to maintain a favorable environment
for the sale of merchandise. When the commercial motive is acknowledged, moral
accusations of misrepresentation or distortion of information in documentary
become much more difficult to sustain.12
Once our eye is better trained on the semiotic source of image making, and the
phenomenological experience of looking at images, what may appear more fully
revealed is, first, that documentary is an image-making enterprise, not a truth-telling
enterprise. Documentary filmmaking mediates. Second, seeing documentary as a
mediate of what passes from real to representation, the next insight of a semiotic
phenomenological perspective is that the documentary enterprise always makes
images from a certain viewpoint. Documentary filmmaking interprets the world. The
content of documentary (its image signs) is inseparable from the conscious
experience of agents responsible for the work of looking, recording, composing,
and showing, as well as financing the project. Third, semiotic phenomenology adds
to our understanding of the impact of images that show themselves. It helps us to
recognize that viewers experience those images materially, consciously, and whose
sense of those images will be based on lived experiences brought to the visual
encounter. In this sense, analysis of documentary ethics benefits from a perspective
 686 G.C. Butchart

that sees images as having a life and power to move us. Extending beyond the intent
of the agent that brought them into being, images gain significance in our conscious
experience of attending to them. For that reason, we see how audiences, too, have a
role to play not only in the interpretation of stories told in documentary, but also by
informed judgment of best ethical practices of image making.
What is to be made of the view that would be exposed by an optical ethic? In
what way is the documentary filmmaker to benefit (if at all) from an ethic of
unconcealment? To be sure, bringing the visual mode of address into view frees the
documentary filmmaker from charges of bias or of distorting ‘‘facts.’’ Once it
appears on-screen as a sign of the knowledge it produces, the visual mode of address
may be regarded as a witness*but not an unmotivated, detached, and neutral
witness. Far from it. It appears as a witness on ‘‘tainted ground’’ (Arnett 2011). The
documentary filmmaker is a limited witness (not an unreliable witness), one that tells
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only part of a story, and whose role in telling the story is exposed. For example, in his
reflexive discussion of the relation between filmmaker and participants, MacDougall
(2001) makes a crucial point about the perception of image-makers working alone
with small, digital cameras, rather than with multi-person film crews and multiple
cameras. Images generated by filmmakers working with one personal camera are,
MacDougall says, ‘‘associated with the idea of images ‘‘for us’’ rather than ‘‘for
them’’,’’ and when working alone the filming process is experienced as less intrusive
because ‘‘the filmmaker is seen to hold less of an advantage and is more exposed and
vulnerable’’ (17).13 From this perspective, what may be seen in the composition of
images (beyond the content of those images) is the appearance of a world that shows
itself by giving itself to be seen. In that sense, the documentarian’s freedom to make
images may be more justified for the reason that composition and reconstruction,
rather than objective fact-finding, are all that can be claimed by the documentary
enterprise. Because filmmakers employ technological means to accomplish percep-
tual practices, an optical ethic in this context would be restricted neither by an
ideological imperative (i.e. the demand to employ conventions of objectivity, as if
these were a guarantee of accuracy), nor would it be constrained by moralizing
judgment (i.e. whether or not a camera ‘‘lied’’). Instead, and based on the perspective
above, when the question of ethics in documentary is raised, a specific documentary
may be evaluated for the degree to which its mode of address is brought to form,
where the camera becomes a sign of what it gives to be seen.

Conclusion
When Roland Barthes wrote his touching little book on photography not so long
ago, photographs had been commonplace for well over 100 years. Today, digital
video recording devices are nearly commonplace, and the production of moving
images that tell stories about the world have been emancipated from traditional
institutional contexts of production, exhibition, and the restraints of funding 
image-making devices are affordable, images can be edited with ease, and freely
distributed to sites for millions to see. To be sure, we are not all filmmakers, but
increasingly we have the technical means to contribute to the depiction of reality.
What I have offered in my discussion is a basic orientation to the ethics of image
making, a guide that might deepen understanding of the practical implications of
making, sharing, and viewing images of ourselves and others.
 Social Semiotics 687

My objective has been to call attention to the process of image making, not
simply the content of images, and to consider in theoretical terms how process is
anticipated (framed) by documentarians, entered into, negotiated, maintained and/or
altered in the image-making work. Thought about process is crucial to documentary
theory for the reason that it is properly ethical  it is thought about what is known,
what is not known, what might become known, and how to make the conditions
possible (an open process) for the not yet known to emerge. As an attempt to
encourage thinking about process (i.e. what compels a documentarian to make
images; what political, esthetic, or communicative work is intended by a project; and,
how does a documentarian perceive his or her role in building knowledge), the
present discussion adds to scholarship on media ethics by shifting perspective from
the text in its tension with reality, and bringing focus to the point of view of image
making and the embodied experience of sign perception. Being less concerned with
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what images mean, and more concerned with what can be learned about the relations
enabled and constrained by the practices of documentary, I have shown how an
optical ethic returns us to the semiotic locus at which the question of image ethics at
first appears  the gap that hides between the visible and the machineries of its
capture.

Notes
1. Notes originally excluded from Camera Lucida have recently appeared (30 years later) as
the content of his latest, posthumously published book (Barthes 2010).
2. Discourse about morality saturates the essential readings in documentary studies. For
example, see Gross, Katz, and Ruby (2000), Rosenthal and Corner (2005), Renov (1993).
3. Media policy is unable to provide regulation that the United States Food and Drug
Administration (USFDA) and the Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP)
provide for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to protect human participants in the
production of knowledge. For detailed discussion, see Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan (2012,
71111).
4. ‘‘Rather than presupposing forms or contents of conscious experience as cognition or
physicality, we employ semiotic phenomenology to interpret constitutive consciousness in
the becoming of the sign’’ (Catt 2011). Key texts in semiotic phenomenology include
Lanigan (1988, 1992, 2010), Catt (2003, 2011), Eicher-Catt and Catt (2010). See Catt and
Eicher-Catt (2012) for an essential review of semiotics and communication scholarship.
5. According to Sobchack (1992), semiotic phenomenology can be used to show how film is
as much a visible object as it is a viewing subject, an ‘‘expression of experience by
experience,’’ competent in ‘‘perceptive and expressive performance equivalent in structure
and function to that same competence performed by filmmaker and spectator’’ (22). Her
analysis of the situated, embodied, and implied context of viewing shows us how film is
more than a static container of signs  it traces a trajectory of interests and intentions
across the screen and establishes a viewpoint (an address) from which viewers engage
appearances phenomenologically, a material and embodied experience of signs.
6. Emphasizing the visual mode of address compliments what Nichols says about the ‘‘voice’’
of documentary. As he put it recently: ‘‘Speaking, giving voice to a view of the world,
makes possible the necessary conditions of visibility to see things anew, to see, as if for the
first time, what had, until now, escaped notice’’ (2008, 78). The crucial difference between
vision and voice is, of course, viewers cannot reply to a documentary in the way that they
can look at it and, as I will argue, be unsettled by the encounter.
7. Similarly, Nichols (1997) has written about an ‘‘absent subject’’ in documentaries that
attempt to examine how what is seen is affected by what cannot be seen.
8. MacDougall (2001) defines ethnographic film as being ‘‘uniquely suited to analyzing
visible cultural forms, the immediacy of individual experience, human relationships with
 688 G.C. Butchart

the material world, and social interactions in all their evolving and multivalent complex-
ity’’ (15). His acknowledgment of the unavoidable ethical tensions involved in
documentary practices, broadly conceived, is pertinent to the present discussion. He
says: ‘‘Film-making is, by its nature, intrusive. We constantly have to judge how what we
film will affect those whom we film  and act responsibly towards them. This is not simply
‘‘media ethics,’’ as it has sometimes been called, but ethics tout court’’ (25).
9. Examples of participant generated films include the classic British documentary 28Up
(Apted 1985) and its sequels, the American documentary Capturing the Freidmans (Jareki
2003), and the Israeli documentary Mostar Round Trip (Fisher 2011), films in which
participants address filmmakers about the work of documentation.
10. Sobchack (2004) examines the materially embodied effect of the on-screen gaze in its
‘‘looking back’’ as a haunting reminder to viewers of the immanence of death (94).
11. For more detailed discussion of television documentary see Winston (2000).
12. Digital interactive documentaries help to counter the passive experience of watching by
requiring audiences to make decisions at regular intervals about pathways in the narrative
and to select supplementary material to view along the way (moving and still images, as
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well as other content pertinent to the story, such as maps, letters, newspaper articles,
contracts, blueprints, etc.). Two exemplars of interactive documentary are Bear 71 (Allison
2011) and Welcome to Pine Point (Shoebridge and Simons 2011).
13. When working alone, turning the camera on oneself can appears as a more authentic
mode of capturing dialog with participants, reducing the distance between them and the
filmmaker, and integrating the viewer into the conversation. An innovative documentary
produced by a filmmaker working alone is Think Popcorn (Geva 2004).

Notes on contributors
Garnet C. Butchart (Ph.D., Massachusetts) is Assistant Professor, Department of Commu-
nication, and Affiliated Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies,
University of South Florida, Tampa, USA. His research in semiotics, phenomenology, and
psychoanalytic theory of communication has appeared in Semiotica; Communication, Culture
& Critique; Communication Theory; Canadian Journal of Communication, and elsewhere. He
has lectured on documentary cinema and ethics at the Jerusalem Center for Ethics and has
served on the jury of the Israeli Documentary Cinema Awards at the Jerusalem International
Film Festival. He is co-editor of Philosophy of Communication (MIT Press).

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Films Cited
28Up. Directed by Michael Apted. Manchester, USA: Granda Television, 1985.
Bear 71. Directed by Leanne Allison. Montreal, Canada: National Film Board, 2011.
 690 G.C. Butchart

Capturing the Freidmans. Directed by Andrew Jareki. Santa Monica, USA: HBO Documen-
tary, 2003.
Chronicle of A Summer. Directed by Jean Rouch. Paris, France: Pathe Contemporary Films,
1960.
Exit Through the Gift Shop. Directed by Banksy. Marlow, UK: Paranoid Pictures, 2010.
Grizzly Man. Directed by Werner Herzog. Santa Monica, USA: Lions Gate Films, 2005.
Mostar Round Trip. Directed by David Fisher. Tel Aviv, Israel: Cinephil, 2011.
Think Popcorn. Directed by Dan Geva. Tel Aviv, Israel: JMT Films, 2004.
The Law in These Parts. Directed by Ran’an Alexandrowicz. Tel Aviv, Israel: Liran Atzmor,
2011.
The Man with a Movie Camera. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Russia: VUFKU, 1929.
Welcome to Pine Point. Directed by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons. Montreal, Canada:
National Film Board, 2011.
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