Speaking the Album
Langford, Martha. ‘Speaking the Album: An Application of the Oral-Photographic Framework’ Locating Memory: Photographic Acts ed. by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) 223-246
[...] attention to the photographic album since the mid-1960s can be said to constitute in itself a model ‘thought community’, an idea of album sustained by interdisciplinarity.
In this marriage of sociology and social history, the typicality of the album is often stressed as a function of its collective authorship – compilation by agreement, rather than individual authorship.
Historiographers and photographic theorists follow suit, speaking of the family album, rather than the mother’s or the aunt’s memoir of family life.
When it comes to the autobiographical album, many sociologists and psychologists take the position that albums encode memories, or camouflage them behind social rituals or psychological screens.
Indeed, some photographic theorists have argued that the construction of alternative realities is the personal album’s main function.
pp.223-224
Sociologists acknowledge the mysteries of all personal documents, advising that albums are virtually useless unless examined in the company of their compilers, or at least with members of their circle, who can interpret the social arrangements and signs.
p.244
On the basis of these encounters, they report that photographic albums preserve a wealth of stories – photographic memories that are revived in the telling and can be preserved on tape. But anthropologists, folklorists and cultural theorists add a certain complication, stating that no recounting of an album, however close to the source, should be considered as fixed because individual and collective life-stories evolve over time, depending on the storyteller and the listener.
Suspended Conversations argues that the photographic album can nevertheless be understood by recognising its original function as a mnemonic device for storytelling and situating it in the realm of orality.
The oral flows from anthropology, ethnography, psychology, folklore, linguistics and literature, and is condensed in an illuminating study by Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy.
p.245
There are striking similarities between what Ong calls the ‘psychodynamics of orality’ and photographic experience, beginning with the evanescence of sound and photographic instantaneity, and continuing in the album’s predictable patterns of content, structure and presentation.
In an oral culture, tellers and listeners need memorable and accessible recitations. Variations on narrative tropes, rather than novelties, work best – they are readily recalled by the teller; they stick in the listener’s mind. Such formulaic images should be simple, casting individuals and scenes in perfect clarity.
Translated to the contents of photographic albums, we observe patterns of social and physical types. This is the well known levelling effect of the carte-de-visite - kings, tradesmen and exotic human specimens photographed in the same style and placed in the same album.
This effect is perpetuated in the snapshot – there is significance beyond habit in its compositional clichés.
Repetition is another mnemonic fixative. Albums are full of repetitions: situations are revisited or recreated with slight variations; actual images are often repeated in different arrangements.
In oral compositions, patterns of organisation are driven by the need for repetition; formulas are not only typical, but are recycled within the same recitation.
For photography this means copious, comparative description: albums show us the same things from many angles; we also see the same angle on many things.
The syntax of an oral composition is additive. Likewise, a photographic album fits together like a kit of parts by systems of association that tellers and listeners know well and readily supply during the album’s presentation.
Oral recitation, or storytelling, follows the rules of performance. Empathy and participation are essential, the performer and audience surrendering to, absorbed in, the pooled experience of the community.
p.226
[In oral cultures] The past must be viable in the present, for the purpose of storytelling is to keep the community alive. What this means for the album is a shift from the absolute solidity of material culture to a state of in-between, fully realisable only in performance.
The album is a meeting place, not an encyclopedia. When we sit and look at an album together, we do not necessarily look at every image. As we converse – as we tell the album’s story to each other – we glide over certain images, and linger on others.
[Langford discusses three stages of a process of interpreting a family album]
pp.226-227
Stage three then explored the compiler’s expression of autobiographical and collective memory through image selection, annotation, organisation and presentation. Respecting the compiler’s choices and trying to understand them, then working imaginatively to narrate their presentation, brought out the performative aspects of the album, thus restoring its original function of keeping memory alive in the present.
p.227
In broader terms, the study proved that images selected and organised in anticipation of storytelling preserved visual memory in a framework of oral consciousness.
[Langford's] challenge was to commit more fully to ‘the psychodynamics of orality’: by shifting the focus of inquiry from identification (the detective-work of naming and listing) to process (looking and talking); by really changing one’s habits of attention to make orality and photography – the oral-photographic condition – the nucleus around which other states of awareness and epistemological projects would be grouped.
Photographic theorists do not live in an oral society, nor is the photographic album a pure product.
The photographic album is a syncretic object, its narratives of life-stories, both transitory and inscriptive. Removal from the private sphere to a public collection tips the balance towards inscription by cutting the performative cord. Most attempts to read this alienated object, and here I mean literacy in the broadest sense, have led us to consider the album as a closed text.
[Langford will discuss an anonymous album from the McCord Museum]
p.228
Our methods of classification, the habits of literacy which bias interpretation, lead us to make lists. In oral societies, as Ong stresses, there is no such thing as a list, and when we look at an album we can see why.
What the list [captioning compiled by acquiring institution] preserves with authority is the justification for the acquisition, which is the anticipated use of the album.
This album, as described, fits within the collective memories of the communities for whom the McCord Museum has traditionally mattered and functioned as a meeting point.
pp.228-234
[Langford describes her process of interviewing five women about the album]
p.234
[...] all five of the respondents had memories ‘in common’ with the compiler: their empathy emerged in digressions, in question directed at me.
p.235
Conducting these interviews, the most curious thing to me was a pattern of what one might call ‘a will to separation’. In constructing a family for the child, all family arrangements were entertained save the one closest to the respondent’s own.
As the youngest in a family of four, separated by a gap of six to ten years from the siblings I adored, I felt that the compiler’s situation was different from mine; I had my own explanation for the older girl posing with Dad: she was certainly not his daughter.
pp.235-236
In short, our responses were guardedly empathetic: faced with this hypertrophic ego, none of us was prepared to surrender our own inner child, or the uniqueness of our adolescent experiences. Neither was our compiler: the album was in fact the inner child’s preserve.
My meetings with women over the album, their efforts to extract the compiler’s identity, and the nuances that they brought to their performances of the album when asked to tell it as a life story, forced me to consider my own visual habits and blind spots.
[Langford discusses threes images from the album in depth]
p.237
Just as the girls were once photographed by elders, the teenagers photograph one another, often holding cameras. Photography is the coin of the affective realm: photographs are comparable in this respect to valentines or autographs.
How does an awareness of the compiler’s process shape our understanding of this album? By attending to the disparate sources of the photographs, we become conscious of the compiler as a highly specialised curator of photographs and photographic experiences – we look at a composite version of her life that she has arranged to create certain effects and contain certain messages.
In terms of photography and photographic experience, the breakdown of the album into the various streams of production, and the recognition that clusters of photogenic events and places – holidays, camp, graduation – have been successfully combined into a first person narrative of fourteen years, exemplify the workings of memory, and our ability to rehearse its processes through collective photographic reception.
p.238
Conversations about the album flow naturally from the means of its creation which are themselves a composite view from distinct social and psychological perspectives.
[Discussion of adolescence]
p.240
Repetition is a very strong factor here. The ending rehearses the poses and motifs of the beginning, and yet there is a sense of incompleteness, a curtain pulled down over the uncertain future.
[Langford goes on to relate information about the life of Margery Paterson, the album's compiler, who developed tuberculosis after high school]
p.242
Margery Paterson’s album teaches us a simple lesson, one that is hard for institutions to absorb. There is no such thing as a family album, but only personal albums concerned with, or situated within, a particular configuration of family and community.
In this case, we have an album formed in parallel with or quite possibly influenced by, early twentieth century theories of female adolescence – its socialisation and its control. But this is only the first level of instruction.
pp.242-243
For Margery Paterson’s album also insists that, if our interest in collective memory is genuine, we are going to have to attend to Maurice Halbwachs’s essential definition: ‘While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember’.
Suddenly, we have an album that spotlights the conditions of girlhood and adolescence from the perspective of a young woman exiled by her illness, and photographically reliving the freedom and promise of her younger years. An application of the oral-photographic framework restores Margery Paterson’s agency, gives her back her voice.
Filed under: Edited Books, Essays, Familial relations & Photography, Family album, Found photographs, Identification & Photography, Martha Langford, Memory & Photography, Memory and reconstruction, Memory Objects, Narrative & Photography, Observer & the Photograph, Orality & Photography, Performance & Photography, Personal Responses to Images, Photography as Historical Witness, Storytelling, Vernacular Photography, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Snapshots
Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Snapshots’, Photographies, 1:2, 121 – 142, 2008.
[...] it could be said that snapshots are to the history of photography as photography is to the history of art; each represents a significant threat to the stability of its host discipline.
[Batchen describes three vernacular photographs]
It’s been said that Americans alone take about 550 snapshots per second, a statistic that, however it has been concocted, suggests that the taking of such photographs might best be regarded as a neurosis rather than a pleasure.
What should a history about the snapshot look like, be like, sound like?
But perhaps we should turn this problem around and look at it from the other side: the snapshot, precisely because this is the most numerous and popular of photographic forms, represents an interpretive problem absolutely central to any ambitious scholarship devoted to the history of photography.
Oblivious to the artistic prejudices that still guide much of that scholarship, family photographs challenge us to find another way of talking about photography, a way that can somehow account for the determined banality of these, and indeed most other, photographic pictures.
But to find that “other way” we are first going to have to displace, or at least complicate, existing models of writing about the history of photography.
[Batchen discusses written histories of photography]
These accounts established a coherently linear narrative occupied by a canon of photographic artists and master works drawn almost exclusively from Europe and the United States.
“A History” soon became “The History” and this has meant that a modernist art historical discourse, with its narrow emphasis on avant-garde practice and aesthetics remained the dominant way of talking about photography’s history throughout the twentieth century, whether this “talk” took the form of books or exhibitions.
Moreover, most photographs are actually about conformity, not innovation or subversion. So they don’t readily fit the usual art historical narratives.
If you examine cartes-de-visite portraits or snapshots or wedding pictures, to name just a few of photography’s many neglected genres, you’ll discover that each example captures a unique pose, even if that pose obediently repeats a million other, very similar poses. They are all the same, but they are all also just slightly different from each other. If we’re going to consider all of photography in its history, we will need to develop a way to deal with this visual and political economy of “same but different.”
A normative history that privileges avant-garde practice, even those practices that at some point contested the establishment of their own time, is still a normative history.
What I’m suggesting here is that we need an avant-garde approach to history, not another obedient history of the avant-garde.
To reiterate: the problem I have with our existing, standard histories of photography is not just a matter of content (of what’s included or excluded from that history). My concern is with the mode of historical discourse itself, and with the conceptual infrastructure on which this history is built.
How do you write a history for something that escapes easy definition, has no discernable boundaries, and operates on the principle of reflection (how, for example, do you separate a photograph from what it’s of or from the unfolding context of its reception)? How do you invent a voice (or voices) for this history that can speak to photography’s emotional effects as well as its physical and formal characteristics and economic and political ramifications? How can you speak of and from a local position and yet encompass photography’s global reach and its multiple expressions of cultural difference?
These questions collectively constitute the problem that now faces us; the need for a systemic transformation of the way the history of photography is represented such that this history can, for the first time, engage with photography in all of its many aspects and manifestations.
[Batchen discusses recent writers and scholars on photography]
This [Batchen's] history necessarily features practices involving collective hands and/or now-unknown makers (many of them women), thereby displacing the biographical and phallocentric bias of most current photographic histories.
But principal among Visual Culture’s dangers, apparently, is its affinity with “anthropological discourse” and therefore with an analytical relativism that erases cultural and temporal specificities. [According to Hal Foster]
[Discussion of Hal Foster's arguments about a 'posthistorical reduction']
Anthropology has traditionally looked at such activity as something that has utilitarian value. Images are created for some purpose. Images do things. They are social objects, not simply aesthetic ones. They are meaningful only when seen in relationship to a wider social network of beliefs and practices, economies and exchanges. As a consequence, I would argue that this view has so far enhanced, rather than reduced, an emphasis on the specificity of social context, and a sensitivity to the complications, ethical and otherwise, of writing in the face of difference.
Although Foster worries about the prevalence of the “disembodied image” within Visual Culture, scholars trained as anthropologists who consistently write about photography, such as Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Pinney, have in fact insisted on a close attention to the materiality of their objects of study.
It is hard to deny that the “ethnographic turn” in Visual Culture encourages a skeptical attitude to the notion that there is “a sexuality” or “an unconscious” that somehow transcends the specificity of its historical circumstances. If there are many photographies, then, it follows, there can also potentially be many sexualities and even, perhaps, more than one unconscious.
The editors of October rightly feel that art history itself is at risk here and for some reason want to defend it, thus reinforcing their own continuing alliance with ruling-class values and interests.
But it’s precisely because I feel that history does indeed matter, and that an art history of photography is now so inadequate to the task at hand, that I gravitate to the still-open range of possibilities signified by Visual Culture.
For me, then, Visual Culture promises, not an alternative to our current ways of understanding the history of photography, but an eruption within that history which threatens to totally transform its existing parameters.
[Batchen asks how the snapshot can be incorporated into the histories of photography]
[...] the advent of digital technologies means that this kind of photography [snapshots] has now taken on an extra memorial role, “not of the subjects it depicts, but of its own operation as a system of representation”.
This suffuses snapshots with the aesthetic appeal of a seductive melancholy, whatever their actual age or the particularities of their subject matter. Certainly it’s hard now to see these rectangles of gelatin silver or vivid color, with their white edges and glossy sheen, except through a distorting haze of modernist nostalgia.
Urging women to become the family’s historian, Kodak aggressively associated the snapshot with memory and loss, and with specifically middle-class values and sentiments, and insisted that photography be regarded as an essential part of everyday life. This is certainly an important story to tell. But surely it’s not the only one.
[On a recent surge in the publication of books of snapshots]
Are these publications a tribute to the snapshot, or to the sharp eye of their collector/curator? Are they exercises in photo-history, or just in art appreciation and pseudo-morphism? What do these publications actually tell us about the snapshot as a cultural or social phenomenon or even as a personal experience? Answer: very little.
What they do tell us quite a lot about is the continuing influence of a certain kind of art history on the study of photography. More particularly, they imply that the making of value judgments – in Foster’s view an activity that separates art history from Visual Culture – is an appropriate way to go about making sense of snapshots.
[Batchen discusses Other Pictures and Photo-Trouve]
A representative history of the visual culture of photography has to acknowledge and account for boredom and ubiquity, the medium’s most abiding visual qualities.
Any study of the snapshot worthy of the name must surely address itself to the dynamics of this contradiction (boring picture for me, moving picture for you) by way of a theory of photographic reception. This means looking more closely at the relationship of the snapshot to a network of expectations and obligations extending far outside the picture itself. In short, it will mean having to consider the snapshot photograph as both a complex social device and a personal talisman, rather than simply as a static art object.
[On the vernacular photographs reproduced in the essay] We don’t know these people, and probably never will. But we can still imagine the scenario that has led to these moments, for this is an experience we have all shared.
As a collective activity of picture-making, snapshots show the struggles of particular individuals to conform to the social expectations, and visual tropes, of their sex and class; as I’ve already suggested, everyone simultaneously wants to look like themselves and like everyone else – to be the same but (ever so slightly) different. Before all else, snapshots are odes to conformist individualism.
Snapshots thereby work to reconcile personal and mass identity. But this social imperative still doesn’t entirely explain why we find our own snapshots to be so moving, given their otherwise low-brow aesthetic qualities.
Maybe we have to ask whether the relative lack of imagination shown in these sorts of photographs in fact shifts the burden of imaginative thought from the artist and subject, where historians usually seek it, to the viewer, who is invited by such pictures to see much more than meets the eye.
Certainly, when I examine a snapshot of a loved one, I see how they once looked, but I also project how I feel about that person onto the picture. The snapshot conjures how they were then and how I am now, in the same all-encompassing look.
[The materiality of the photo] It’s a reminder that snapshots could potentially be reproduced in large numbers but in reality they are often unique images. Such deformities are also a reminder that these pictures were once regularly touched by their original owners.
Snapshots are touchable objects but they are also often prompts for speech. The subjects of these snapshots were once named aloud, talked over, joked about, libeled and ridiculed, reinterpreted and contested in oral exchange. Snapshots were rarely contemplated in respectful silence and nor should they be now. But what is a snapshot when it has been rendered mute?
What else do found snapshots have to tell us, beyond the sad fact of their own death as meaningful personal artifacts?
Well, they might also be regarded as a collective declaration of faith in the midst of an increasingly skeptical, secular world. Like every photograph, the snapshot is an indexical trace of the presence of its subject, a trace that both confirms the reality of existence and remembers it, potentially surviving as a fragile talisman of that existence even after its subject has passed on.
It is the need to provide witness to this existence – to declare “I was here!” in visual terms – that surely drives us to keep on photographing, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the picture that results.
We have to have them (to know we have them), but we don’t necessarily have to see them. The irony is that we take photographs in order to deny the possibility of death, to stop time in its tracks and us with it.
But that very same photograph, by placing us indisputably in the past, is itself a kind of mini-death sentence, a prediction of our ultimate demise at some future time. It certifies times past and time’s inevitable passing. Every snapshot, no matter what its subject matter, embodies this paradoxical message, speaking simultaneously of life and death.
[On Bourdieu] Among other things, he points out that family snapshots can be taken with any sort of camera, and that, equally, a snapshot camera can take a variety of kinds of picture; what makes a snapshot a snapshot is its function, not its pictorial qualities, and this function is determined by the network of social relationships of which it is a part.
[On snapshots] We have to have them (to know we have them), but we don’t necessarily have to see them.
This influential essay – part autobiographical novel, part philosophical rumination – is also an account of photography in which the snapshot experience is, for once, given a central role.
I have argued elsewhere that Camera Lucida, with its carefully calibrated choice of illustrations, its peculiar temporal convolutions, its supplementary logic, binary terms, and inverted layout (a layout in fact borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 “Little History of Photography”), offers an historical view of photography that is deliberately structured like a photograph.
In short, the book seeks to tell us certain things about photography by itself becoming photographic, by giving us a specifically photographic experience.
Like Benjamin before him, Barthes burrows into the very flesh of photography by allowing his text to take on many of its most salient attributes, such as the play between negative and positive that is at the heart of most photographic practices.
Abandoning chronology as an organizing principle, he looks primarily at ordinary photographs, rather than masterworks, opening up the entire field of photography for examination and eschewing any reliance on art historical prejudices. Aiming only to be representative, rather than comprehensive, Barthes even proffers the possibility of a history based on just one (unseen) photograph.
In short, the analytical approach demonstrated by Camera Lucida produces a history that is actually about photography, not just of photographs.
Barthes thus does something that none of these other histories of the snapshot has dared to do – he describes the essential snapshot, but does not make it visible, demanding that we do that work for him in our mind’s eye. As a consequence, infinity and zero – every snapshot ever taken and this evoked, but forever absented one – are made to turn in on each other without pause.
Using Camera Lucida as a possible model for another mode of historical accounting, I have proposed we adopt a similar sort of analytical oscillation to the one found there, a back and forth between whatever orphaned examples of snapshot culture we encounter in the world and our own prized photographic reliquaries, between cliche and sublimity, sameness and difference, truth and fiction, public and private, infinity and zero, without letting either term ever rest on its laurels.
For it is surely only here, here within the unstable spacing of this kind of oscillation, that a truly photographic history for the snapshot can plausibly be staged.
Filed under: Analogue - Digital, Anonymity/Authorship & Photography, Camera culture, Familial relations & Photography, Found photographs, Geoffrey Batchen, Identification & Photography, Indexicality & Photography, Memory & Photography, Memory Objects, Narrative & Photography, Observer & the Photograph, Photographies, Photography's Art History, Photography's Materiality, Vernacular Photography, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
The Distribution of Photographs
Flusser, Vilém. “The Distribution of Photographs” pp.49-56 in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2005)
p.49
Nature as a whole is a system in which information disintegrates progressively according to the second law of thermodynamics. Human beings struggle against this natural entropy not only by receiving information but also storing and passing it on – (in this respect they differ from other forms of life) – and also by deliberately creating information.
This specifically human and at the same time unnatural ability is called ‘mind’, and culture is its result, i.e. improbably formed, informed objects.
The process of manipulating information – called ‘communication’ – is divided into two phases: In the first, information is created; in the second, it is distributed to memories in order to be stored there. The first phase is called ‘dialogue’, the second ‘discourse’.
p.51
The camera creates prototypes (negatives) from which as many stereotypes (copies) as one likes can be produced and distributed – in which case the concept of the original, in the case of the photograph, has scarcely any meaning anymore.
As long as the photograph is not yet electromagnetic, it remains the first of all post-industrial objects. Even though the last vestiges of materiality are attached to photographs, their value does not lie in the thing but in the information on their surface.
This is what characterizes the post-industrial: The information, and not the thing, is valuable. Issues of the ownership and distribution of objects (capitalism and socialism) are no longer valid, evading as they do the question of the programming and distribution of information (the information society).
Until photographs become electromagnetic, they are a connecting link between industrial objects and pure information.
p.52
In the case of the photograph [as opposed to objects like shoes or furniture], the information sits loosely on the surface and can easily be conveyed to another surface. To this extent, the photograph demonstrates the defeat of the material thing and of the concept of ‘ownership’. It is not the person who owns a photograph who has power but the person who created the information it conveys.
It is not the owner but the programmer of the information who is the powerful one: neo-imperialism. The poster is without value; nobody owns it, it flaps torn in the wind yet the power of the advertising agency remains undiminished nonetheless – the agency can reproduce it.
This obliges us to revalue our traditional, economic, political, moral, epistemological and aesthetic values.
Electromagnetic photographs, films and television images do not illustrate the devaluation of the material thing nearly as well as photographs attached to paper in the old-fashioned way.
pp.52-53
In the case of classical photographs, there are still valuable bromide prints – even today the last vestiges of value attach to the ‘original photograph’ making it more valuable than a reproduction in a newspaper.
p.53
Like all apparatuses, the apparatuses of photograph distribution also have a program by which the program society to act as part of a feedback mechanism. Typical of this program is the division of photographs into various channels, their ‘channelling’.
In theory, information can be classified as follows: into indicative information of the type ‘A is A’, into imperative information of the type ‘A must be A’, and into optative information of the type ‘A may be A’. The classical ideal of the indicative is truth, that of the imperative is goodness, and that of the optative is beauty.
This theoretical classification cannot, however, be applied in practice [...] nevertheless, the distribution apparatuses practise precisely this theoretical classification.
pp.53-54
Thus there are channels for supposedly indicative photographs (e.g. scientific publications and reportage magazines), channels for supposedly imperative photographs (e.g. political and commercial advertising posters) and channels for supposedly artistic photographs (e.g. galleries and art journals).
p.54
Of course, the distribution channels also have borderline areas, in which a particular photograph can slip over from one channel to another. The photograph of the moon landing, for example, can slip from an astronomy journal to a US consulate, from there onto an advertising poster for cigarettes and from there finally into an art exhibition.
The essential thing is that the photograph, with each switch-over to another channel, takes on a new significance: The significance crosses over into the political, the political into the commercial, the commercial into the artistic.
In this respect, the division of photographs into channels is in no way simply a mechanical process but rather an encoding one: The distribution apparatuses impregnate the photograph with the decisive significance for its reception.
Photographers are involved in this encoding. Even at the time of taking photographs they have their eye on a specific channel of the distribution apparatuses and encode their images as a function of this channel.
The symbiosis, characteristic of taking photographs, between camera and photographer is mirrored in the channel.
pp.54-55
For example: Photographers take photographs for a specific newspaper because the newspaper allows them to reach hundreds or thousands of receivers, and because they are being paid by the newspaper; in this, they act in the belief that they are using the newspaper as their medium. Meanwhile, the newspaper is of the opinion that it is using the photographs as an illustration of its articles in order to be able to program its readers, that accordingly photographers are functionaries of the newspaper apparatus. As photographers know that only those photographs that fit into the newspaper’s program will be published, they attempt to fool the newspaper’s censorship by surreptitiously smuggling aesthetic, political or epistemological elements into their image. The newspaper on the other hand may well discover these attempts to fool it and publish the photographs anyway because it thinks it can exploit the smuggled elements to enrich its program. And what is true for newspapers is also true for all other channels.
p.55
Every distributed photograph allows photography criticism to reconstruct the struggle between photographer and channel. It is precisely this that makes photographs into dramatic images.
It is positively disconcerting how often standard photography criticism does not read off from photographs this dramatic confusion of the photographer’s intention with the program of the channel. Photography criticism habitually takes it for granted that scientific channels distribute scientific photographs, political channels political photographs, artistic channels artistic photographs. In this respect, the critics function as a function of the channels: They allow them to vanish from the receiver’s field of vision. They ignore the fact that the channels determine the significance of the photographs, and thus they give support to the channels’ intention to be invisible. Seen in this light, the critics collaborate with the channels against the photographers wanting to fool the channels.
pp.55-56
We are dealing here with a collaboration in the bad sense, a trahison des clercs, a contribution to the victory of the apparatus over the human being. This is characteristic of the situation of intellectuals in post-industrial society, in general. The critics, for example, ask questions such as ‘Is photography art?’ – as if these questions were not already being answered automatically by the channels concealing this automatic, programmed channelling and making it all the more effective.
p.56
In the light of standard photographic criticism, photographs get an uncritical reception and are therefore able to program the receiver to act as if they are under a magic spell; this action flows back in the form of feedback into the programs of the apparatus.
Filed under: Analogue - Digital, Content vs Materiality of Photographs, Context and photography, Criticism of Photography, Images and reality, Mechanical Reproduction, Photography's Materiality, Vilém Flusser | Leave a Comment
Mask as Descriptive Concept
Price, Mary. ‘Mask as Descriptive Concept’ The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 117-133
p.117
[...] what Barthes and other writers have done is to bring within the range of possibility an acknowledgment on the part of the rest of us that what they have discovered and named must exist for us too. They cannot name our precise wound; they can only name their own; but we may now with tentative assurance begin to understand what their use of their photographs was. They have invested photographs with meaning; their language directs us to the idea of unseen truth in the photograph.
Awareness of metaphor in the use of mask, even the most literal, is almost irrepressible in the case of the photograph as opposed to painting.
pp.117-118
The reason for the difference in our regard lies in the notion of the photograph as a transcription of the real, the photograph thus becoming itself the mask concealing what is behind it and thwarting confrontation with the real.
p.118
[Price discusses Barthes's use of Avedon's photograph of William Casby]
p.119
This photograph suggests a mask because it looks like one.
The position vis-a-vis the viewer is as if the head were pinned on a bare wall at eye level. The mask is the “essence” of slavery because, according to Barthes, it is “the product of a society and of its history.” In less exalted prose, the more appropriate word might have been “typical,” and Casby’s photographed face-mask might have represented the type, slave.
p.120
Barthes is using “mask” in the large sense of that disguise inherent in the process of making a photograph. The removal of what might well go back to Lucretius to name, the film or skin of appearance, creates a mask by the act of removal. The photograph is the film or skin of appearance. At the very least it calls attention to the fact of being a mask (transcribed from reality) by removal.
In addition, the removal of the mask not only certifies its existential “maskness” but because it looks exactly as real objects look, or as we have learned to see them, the mask is taken as true depiction of those objects.
pp.120-121
Once again, the reason we take it as true depiction is that the photograph bears a strict and necessary relationship to its source in the visible world.
p.121
This way of using mask is very like the use of the word veil before photography was invented. It is an acknowledgement that perception is imperfect, lack of epistemological certainty is the norm; we always envision as we see. The emphasis is on the impenetrability of the particular, the individual. With a shift of emphasis, the individual can represent a type (for example in the photographs by August Sander or Sir Benjamin Stone).
The other, literal, use of “mask” is the particular face-covering that conceals what is behind it when it is attached to the face by ties behind the head or hooks over the ears or when it is more substantially made to fit over the entire head and sit on the shoulders. By metaphoric extension it is the literal covering that conceals anything.
Barthes has invested mask with both the literal and extended metaphoric meanings.
Mask is a concept often used about photography and photographs; one meaning may be dominant, but all possible meanings are implicit unless the definition is expressly limited.
[Price discusses Walker Evans's 'Subway portraits' taken by a concealed camera]
Here the outer appearance is taken as mask of the true inner being, a mask wrought by the will of the person who displays it but a mask penetrated by the photographer, or, as [James] Agee suggests, dropped by the subject.
The photograph has removed and preserved the “film,” which is the photograph.
pp.121-122
In Barthes’s discourse it was thought of as the removed mask. In Evan’s subway photographs, however, the suggestion is that Evans has been able to surprise the subjects without their usual masks, without their conscious presentation of self. They are stripped of properties, personal context, and private setting. They have no names, past , or future. Their exposure without masks reveals macabre isolated individuals looking at nothing. Yet if they have no pose (are unaware of the camera), they have stubborn individuality.
p.124
Another kind of mask occurs in an Arbus photograph called A house on a hill, Hollywood, CA. 1963, in which a pure facade, visibly supported behind by a strutwork of scaffolding, is silhouetted against a mackerel sky lit by a setting sun.
The facade is a mask with nothing behind it. It is a Hollywood structure made to give the illusion of a house, but the photograph, by including the supports in the rear, deliberately exposes the elements of the illusion, destroying one effect to create another.
Arbus’s total acceptance of the wounds both inflicted and endured by humans is illustrated in photographs that display the wounds as if they were the norm, creating a disbalance between mask-photograph and reality-wound. But is nature also complitious? One seems to be asked to lie in wait with Arbus until the veil is rent for a second and the trauma both of nature and of person is exposed. the visual affect , however, is not of complicity but of indifference on the part of nature.
Nature is both removed and awesome and yet can be made to stand still for a picture in which it will suggest the impersonality of the natural world.
p.133
Richard Avedon and his models tend to know who they are. How they are is the modern question. Photographs are less an answer than a reflection of the questions, a way of resisting the flux of time so as to contemplate the questions.
Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Books, Images and reality, Mary Price, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
The End, Secular Aura
Price, Mary. ‘The End, Secular Aura’ The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 173-177
p.173
Each of the metaphors used, whether the term is aura, mask, or language, illuminates the idea of the photograph.
Benjamin, Proust, Musil, and Barthes, as well as Keats with his negative capability, are all saying, in individual poetic and imaginative modes of expression rather than philosophic (aesthetic or logical) modes, that certain perceptions are originally oblique and private; they retain a penumbra of mystery and are conveyed to others in the languages of the imagination.
p.174
The aura of photography is the aura of the very temporality Benjamin recognizes in photography, the aura of reality, contradicting his first premise, that the phenomenal world does not have aura.
The aura of reality: no matter what the culture, intentions, predispositions, deceptions, or philosophical beliefs of the photographer, the camera, in some fundamental sense, does not lie.
Distortions and even ineptitudes are registered in a sane, optically logical system that can be understood. When the photograph shows a bowed side of a building, or a building prenaturally big at the bottom and small at the top, the viewer does not for an instant imagine that the structure curves or leans in that way but does not doubt for an instant that there was a building in front of the camera.
The viewer must interpret where interpretation will disclose the original state of affairs to good purpose.
p.175
In still photographs, the act of preservation, the historical seizure of the object in the moment, is itself both a tribute to worth and a defining factor in establishing worth.
Factual information about the contexts of photographs, about the persons, places, and circumstances involved in terms of both individual and society, will contribute the innumerable particulates that help constitute the secular aura of the subjects of the photograph.
Interpretation is necessary for the viewer. It is not accumulated documentation alone that constitutes aura, for after the critical process of gathering and offering the facts comes the language of interpretation itself. Looking, thinking, discriminating, and expressing characterize the investments in the language of secular aura.
Secular aura, as well as the traditional aura of the sacred, has to have something real to associate with itself. It cannot just float around like smoke.
Creations of the hand and mind which shape the world by art are admirable in invention and execution, yet at the same time a stubborn residue of skepticism exists about formulations that contradict or weaken apprehension of the world as real and solid outside the self. This skepticism is not appropriate for photography because the photograph must be imprinted with what has been presented to the camera; it must literally receive something physical from out there, if only what can be described as interrupted light.
This is the factuality of the photograph. The photograph authenticates the objects. The objects authenticate the photograph.
p.176
To condemn photographs as trivial on the grounds that they lack the shaping power of imagination is to emphasize the threat of irrelevancy, to insist that only contingency governs choice of subject from the world of possibilities.That is one absolute. The other end of the continuum is the view that the photographer exercises such choice and discrimination that his work on paper has been entirely invented. Stated so, both are obviously false, yet often photographs are judged with implicit reference to one or the other.
[...] the answer to what [a photograph] means may be attempted even in the absence of other specific knowledge. Every bit of knowledge is useful, and every attempt at making a meaningful interpretation is useful. But some interpretations are more interesting than others, and among the most interesting I find those of writers who imagine a meaning.
p.177
Photography is essentially a way of making the world look back at the viewer.
The fascination of photographs consists partly in the knowledge that peering into a photograph, studying it closely, will result not in finding ideas but in recovering what may be identified as reality; then in an instantaneous process ideas will be constructed to account for the reality. Ideas may exist already prepared to seize the appropriate visual conformation. Research into who, what, when, where, how, and why might provide valuable information, but just as in the case of the sociological information about the Hill/Adamson photographs, the answers to these factual questions may not account for the interest of the photograph.
The secular aura of the photograph is constituted by investment and endowment, just as the aura of the sacred object is constituted.
Overlapping descriptions from different sources, words recognized as accurate in naming the qualities or depictions of the secular object, will establish the secular aura. The individual figure, photographer or viewer, enters a looking-glass land with eyes wide open, but cannot immediately interpret what he sees. To photograph is one way of arresting time in order to contemplate.
Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Archive & Photography, Identification & Photography, Images and reality, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Mary Price, Memory & Photography, Personal Responses to Images, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Metaphor
Price, Mary. ‘Metaphor’ The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 134-149
pp.134-135
Before photography, according to Ivins [William M, Ivins, Jr.], the syntactical analysis of a picture preceded the handmade reproduction, which became a symbolic representation of its original. references for reproduction are the woodcut, etching, or lithograph that reproduce a work of art. But the reproduction of the work of art by means of photography becomes equivalent to the reproduction of the syntaxless world of real objects in any photograph.
p.135
A picture is seen first as a whole and then analyzed in any order of parts, unlike the sentence in which each word has a place, in which the order of words may have meaning, and in which every part is related to a whole statement unintelligible until the sentence is completed. Verbal statements, Ivins reminds us, can be exactly repeated, but until the invention of photography visual statements could not. His use of the grammatical term syntax is a metaphor for the ordering of parts.
p.136
The point to emphasize is that photography as language is either a metaphor (a comparison) or it is nonsense.
p.137
[Price discusses Berger's opposition of painting and photography, and reproduction of paintings]
p.138-140
[Price discusses photographic 'metaphors' - the mirror, skin]
p.141
The imagined retention of an image, that is, the memory reenacted , preceded the the possibility of securing an actual image.
Just as you cannot step in the same river twice, so you cannot take the same photograph twice, and for the same reason. That which may seem the same is different precisely, even if not only, in being literally different in time.
Benjamin calls this recording of objects “the perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory”, which, “encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of the imagination.” Volitional memory, as Benjamin uses the term, is conscious memory. But it is not only that which we wish to remember; it is our identity as well as our past; it is the extent of experience and learning and the limit of self-knowledge. When a record of a particular state of affairs, say a photograph, is accepted as evidence that such was the state of affairs, flexibility is reduced or corrected, and there is little play of memory as invention, fancy, or even recovery.
Memory plays an important part in Benjamin’s metaphor of aura [...] Benjamin’s ostensible purpose in elaborating the metaphor of aura is to reinvest original works of art with aura and to strip aura from the upstart photography. I now wish to claim boldly that aura is a concept applicable, despite Benjamin, to photography.
Despite Benjamin is only partial truth; although Benjamin denies aura to the photograph, the language of his description of actual photographs tends to supply it. The aura of photography consists in more than a century and a half of recognition, familiarity, and incorporation into culture; articles of clothing have as much as that.
pp.141-142
The aura of photography becomes manifest in figures of speech in which two aspects are assumed. One is the existence of the external world which is registered by means of the camera and film. The other is the puzzle, mystery, and magic of such registry.
p.142
To imagine that an object returns a look is to activate the memory of what has been forgotten and distant from consciousness, so that, according to Benjamin, the volitional memory is not the whole of memory.
pp.142-143
The reciprocity of the relation between object and conscious (volitional) or unconscious memory can be expressed in various ways, but Benjamin is intensifying the connection between object and response by insisting that the investment of the object is first an act by the responder and then by virtue of that investment, which creates aura, exists as an entity capable of returning the glance.
p.143
The metaphor is complex; in this expression of it, the object invested with aura need have no intrinsic value, or no reference to systems of value outside the intensity and expansive power of personal response. It need not be a work of art. One such object is the madeleine that released Proust’s memory.
An object that is a work of art also has an aura. This time, instead of being the activator to an individual memory, it is the historical tradition, the cultural memory, in which all can participate.
The idea of investment is continued through all the uses of aura. Furthermore, in Benjamin’s continuing explanation, not only objects but words have an aura, which neatly moves the argument back to the question of language.
pp.144-145
Benjamin’s conclusion is that “if the distinctive feature of the images that rise from the mémoire involontaire is seen in their aura, then photography is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of the ‘decline of the aura’” The photograph has no aura itself; it can have no tradition, no place of being, no associative thickness, and individually it can have no history in Benjamin’s view. The fact of reproducibility, understood as vitiating or even entirely dissipating the aura, means there is no unique object for the accumulation of associations.
p.145
The photograph has contributed, according to Benjamin, to the decline of that great nebula of association, inheritance, investment, or endowment, emanating from object and word, the aura.
[Price discusses two examples of aura]
p.146
[Price discusses Benjamin and Baudelaire's 'unreturned glance']
The figure of the broken glance between one person and another, the glance directed like a beam but received nowhere, is, for Benjamin, a figure of man’s disconnectedness, illustrating the social alienation he believes characteristic of modern society.
In a passage from Proust, a surprising reversal occurs in the metaphor of interaction between object and viewer: “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them.” Instead of an object’s losing an invisible layer, it gains an invisible layer, again the accretion of memory, history and tradition that Benjamin calls aura.
p.147
The image of the past must be imperfectly understood, ambiguous, and indeterminate in order to sustain its constant renewal; the photograph, depicting some aspect of the past which is both evidenced and determined by the existence of the photograph, falsifies it in fixing it because such fixing is partial and limiting. The frame excludes more than it includes.
pp.147-148
[On the shock as discontinuity between object and gaze, breaking the aura]
The shock is individual, wounding, and isolating; man is no longer able to assimilate the world around him. The world changes so rapidly, and crowds man so closely, buffets him with so much information, that it constantly distracts him from that wholeness achieved in an earlier age when objects had auras.
p.148
Even before the data has so piled up, all the time knowledge was proliferating, man was peering at the world with the same old eyes and processing information in the same old brain. Man’s eye and brain never comprehended the whole of the world.
What there is to be known has grown so great in range and so specific in detail that we seem to know less simply because what there is to be known has increased so much.
Invention of the several parts of the photographic process was participant in the disastrous proliferation of those inconsequential bits of information. The camera records an instant, a fragment of time. The camera is a factor isolating, perpetuating, and conveying a moment of shock according to Benjamin.
Against the world’s increase in speed Benjamin wished to oppose and praise the slowness of tradition, the stillness of revered objects, the quiet of expectations daily fulfilled.
p.149
Benjamin turns the word aura in his writing as if he were turning a crystal ball, intent on the image forming within the center but speaking from various points of view in turn, none of which excludes the others, each of which in turn, and finally simultaneously, illuminates the center that holds them all at once.
Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Books, Criticism of Photography, Image Proliferation, Invention of photography, John Berger, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Mary Price, Mechanical Reproduction, Memory & Photography, Time and photography, Walter Benjamin, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Danger
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Danger’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 47-59
p.47
It is because the question of reproducibility extends far beyond the realm of art that it raises the possibility of the democratization of death. Not only does technical reproducibility change our relation to death, but the incursion of the technical media into our everyday life introduces us into what Jünger calls, speaking of technology in general, “a space of absolute danger” [In Of Danger]
This danger can be registered, according to Benjamin, in the reproducibility that transforms us into a recording apparatus.
p.49
The techniques of reproduction, Benjamin suggests, disperse the unique occurrence of the artwork into a mass whose reproduction sets it into circulation and motion. No longer to be understood in terms of the traditional values of singularity and originality, this mass artwork now belongs to a network of unforseeably mediated relations that, encountering a recording apparatus, comes to itself as a reproduced mass.
What links the artwork to the masses – or the making of films to the formation of masses – is that both have their origins in techniques of reproduction. They are both produced, that is, according to the structure and operation of technological reproduction.
pp.49-50
Benjamin’s interest in the production techniques of film and photography corresponds to his conviction that what takes place on a film set or in a photography studio is related, if not identical, to what takes place outside this same set or studio: the emergence or mobilization of images.
p.50
Jünger reads the pervasive violence of technology in the transformation of humanity into a new type of technologized, functionalistic human beings. The features of this transformation, he suggests, are legible in the increasing uniformity of social life, the technologizing of the everyday world, and the growing militarization of society.
For [Jünger], war not only names the central experience of modernity; it also plays an essential role in our understanding of technological reproduction in general and of photography in particular.
p.51
Pointing to the mass of archival photographic material given to us by the war, Jünger evokes the relation that for him exists between war and photography. We could even say that, for this aesthetician of war, there can be no war without photography.
Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, German and English bombers dropped incendiaries both to trace bombing areas and to light up nocturnal targets.
To say that there would be no war without the production of images is to say that there could be no war without the flash of the camera. In the experience of the German light-wars, the technology of warfare comes together with the techniques of perception.
p.52
Linking war to photography and weapons to images, Jünger argues that modern technological warfare gives birth to a specifically modern form of perception organized around the experience of danger and shock.
Identifying the contemporary zone of danger with the realm of technology in general, he claims that a modern type is arising in response to “the increased incursion of danger into daily life”., whose aim is to develop an anesthetized relation to danger: “If one were to try to describe the ‘type’ that is emerging today, one could say that its most striking characteristic is the possession of a ‘second’ consciousness. This second, colder consciousness is indicated by the ever more marked ability to see oneself as an object.” [from Photography and the 'Second Consciousness']
p.53
The technologies of perception, Jünger suggests, facilitate the reproduction of a kind of accord or consensus among the masses. This consensus signals the objectification of our views of the world, our transformation into things that can no longer experience pain.
Like the artificial eye of the camera, whose gaze stands “outside the zone of sensibility”, our manner of seeing neutralizes what it sees and thereby brings it under the understanding of photography. If photography is indeed a “revolutionary” fact, it is because it has turned the entirety of the world into a photographable object.
For Jünger, however, the technical media and photography are also a means of disciplining the masses.
In particular, the disciplinary function of the technical media works to distract or disperse the masses - to take them away from themselves in order to prevent them from experiencing pain directly.
The numbing effect of the media is linked in Benjamin and Kracauer to the distraction and dispersion that characterize our response to film.
p.55
[...] in an age whose signature is total reproducibility, Jünger tries to envision an idea of a modern community, a return to the logic of togetherness inscribed within the values of Gemeinschaft that, remaining faithful to the new demands of this technological era, can be mobilized in order to give direction and form to the contemporary masses.
For Benjamin, it is precisely this mobilization – one that, expressing the truth of the masses, gives them a figure or form – that lies behind the fascist mobilization of masses.
p.56
What makes a mass masslike, Benjamin explains, are the techniques of reproduction and photography that enable a mass to see itself in the face – to see itself looking at itself – as if it were looking in a mirror. If fascism works to allow the masses to view themselves according to the laws of self-reflection, if it wishes to give a face to the masses by means of the media, Benjamin claims the masses can never be given a face.
The contrast between Jünger and Benjamin here could hardly be more striking. If Benjamin notes that Baudelaire’s mass has neither a face nor a gaze with which it might see itself looking at itself, it is because he wishes to write against the fascist formation of masses. He wants to interrupt a mobilization of film and photography whose aim would be to give the dispersed and distracted masses not only a face but also a form and a voice.
p.57
Although we could say that there are many relays between Jünger’s thoughts on photography and those of Benjamin - they each claim that the experience of photography involves an encounter with danger and shock, that technology in general has brought us nearer to death, that every document of civilization is touched by a certain barbarism – Benjamin meets Jünger’s desire for total mobilization with an insistence on immobilization, his desire for expression with an interest in what remains expressionless, his wish for community with the dispersion of community, the aura with the aura’s disintegration, and the giving of a face with what never has a face.
pp.57-58
That fascism names the filmic and photographic mobilization of the identificatory mechanisms of the masses means that there can be no politicization of the human face that does not belong to an ideological combat zone.
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, Personal Responses to Images, Politics & Photography, Walter Benjamin, War & Photography, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Politics
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Politics’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 44-47
p.44
What is at stake in the question of technological reproducibility – in the question of photography, for example – is not whether photography is art, but in what way all art is photography.
For Benjamin, as soon as the technique of reproduction reaches the stage of photography, a fault line traverses the whole sphere of art: photography transforms the entire notion of art. The presumed uniqueness of a production, the singularity of the artwork, and the value of authenticity are deconstructed.
By substituting a plurality of copies for a unique original, technologically produced art destroys the very basis for the production of auratic works of art – that singularity in time and space on which they depend for their claim to authority and authenticity. Every work is now replaceable. The changes in the technical conditions for the production and reception of art constitute a break with tradition that effectively removes the previous ritual or cultic bases of art and facilitates the predominance of the political function of art.
p.45
If politics, however, fascist no less than communist, depends on photography and film’s capacity to exhibit and manipulate bodies and faces, then all politics can be viewed as a politics of art, as a politics of the technical reproduction of an image.
[discusses fascist regime with regards to art/photography]
[...] the entirety of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay can be read as a critical response to the fascist effort to mobilize works of art – including photography and film – toward both the production of an organic community and the formation of this community (the German people or nation) as a work of art itself.
pp.45-47
Benjamin’s insistence on the disintegration of the auratic character of the artwork, for example, belongs to his effort to deconstruct the values of originality and community at work within the fascist program of self-formation and self-production.
p.47
To the extent that the essence of the political is to be sought in art, then, there is no aesthetic or philosophy of art that can undo the link between art and politics.
Whereas fascism aestheticizes politics, Benjamin wishes to politicize aesthetics.
Filed under: Photography's Art History, Walter Benjamin, Mechanical Reproduction, Politics & Photography | Leave a Comment
Reproducibility
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Reproducibility’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 42-44
p.42
[Benjamin] suggests that technical reproducibility can only be understood by considering the historical relations between science and art – especially in terms of their relation to the historical conditions of production and reproduction.
[..] Technical reproduction is not an empirical feature of modernity; it is not an invention linked to the so-called modern era. Rather, it is a structural possibility within the work of art.
p.43
[citing Weber ...] What interests Benjamin and what he considers historically ‘new’, is the process by which techniques of reproduction increasingly influence and indeed determine the structure of the artwork itself [...] – or even, of our existence in general.
For as we know, every moment of our life, of our relation to the world, is touched directly or indirectly by this acceleration, an acceleration that had already prepared for the coming of the camera – where replication and production tend to merge.
Indeed, the technology of the camera also resides in its speed, in the speed of the shutter, in the flash of the reproductive process.
An instrument of citation, the camera here cites the movement of lightning, a movement that never strikes the same place twice. In the same way reproducibility has always reproduced itself, but never in an identical manner.
There can be no understanding of photography without a thinking of the relation between photography and the history of technology. This is why technology can never simply clarify or explain the photographic event. This is also why the age of technological reproduction includes all history.
Filed under: Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, Invention of photography, "We live to be photographed" | Leave a Comment
The World is a Fabulous Tale
Lomax, Yve. ‘The World is a Fabulous Tale’ Writing the Image (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000) 54-65
P.55
For Plato, true philosophy did not tell tales, but poetry, on the other hand, could be accused of spinning stories foreign to truth. Plato’s line, so I’ve heard tell, is that true philosophy rises above the charms and double-dealings of rhetoric; it neither tells tales nor practises the art of persuasion. The task of philosophy is to safe guard the truth from tall stories and the fabrications of fiction, which are the source of error, lies and illusion. The gates of Plato’s ideal city are shut to those who spin yarns and tell tales: the poet is banished and fiction is relegated to the other side, opposite the truth.
Truth/fiction: a line is drawn and fiction is excluded from entering truth’s domain.
The line in the middle comes to mark the place of the other with a loss or lack. B becomes the minus, the negative of A. And so the story goes on: difference is the lack of identity, fiction is the negative of truth and abstraction is the minus of reality.
p.56
Traditionally, truth is to be ‘right’, When truth is missing there is ‘wrong’ and according to this logic, fiction (as the minus of truth) becomes open to the accusation of illusion, falsehood and lies. Yet it seems to me that before we can tell the truth we have to tell the fiction. Before we can tell the same we have to tell the difference.
p.57
I have heard it said, often enough to become somewhat of a commonplace, that we live in a world of images. I have heard it said that we live in a world where images are posted everywhere.
In the late twentieth century, on planet Earth, we heard of a discovery: nothing solid or substantial stands behind the surface of the image. This discovery, which perhaps is neither so new nor so very extraordinary, finds that we earthlings can no longer be sure of a singular reality which comes before and remains outside of the image, appearance or sign.
One of the theories we hear is that a real world is not waiting ‘out there’ to be reflected, represented or captured by the image. The very idea of an independent reality is thrown into question and things can no longer be proven in quite the same way.
Indeed it has been said that behind the photograph there is no essence – of truth, reality or referent – which provides its origin and point of return.
p.58
One of the stories we hear, one of the theories perhaps we fear, is that the real world is a fiction.
One tale that may be told is that the very idea of some thing coming before and remaining outside of the surface of the image is only an effect of the surface itself.
From such a story told, the theory may unfold that we live in a postworld. We may easily agree that we live in a world where everything comes after. Indeed, we may agree that we live in the world that is without origin.
And as this theory unfolds, the story may be told that having nothing before we are only left with fiction and image, only appearance and sign.
In the beginning, the image.
Gone is the referent which came before and was the past of the sign. Gone is the prior reality which stood steadfast and remained independent of the image. Gone is the essence which waited to be discovered whole behind the front of appearances. The singular truth is fallen, anteriority is no more and gone is the unity of the one.
Hearing that we are left with just images or fictions, just abstractions and signs, it is easy to conclude (once again) that something is missing, something is lacking, something is not.
p.59
Without reference to depth beyond, signs only dance with other signs, images only refer to other images.
And I must say that I am not astonished at all to hear the pronouncement that if there are only signs and surface effects then the referent, along with the real world and the documentary photograph, is no longer, is no more, is dead.
The twist in the tale of this loss is not just that the logic should call for us to pronounce the loss of the real world, the death of a referent which authoritatively came before , but also that it first requires us to agree that the real world or referent was really ‘that’ and only that.
Abracadabra: deny the presence of something, say that it is no more, and then we come to affirm its presence, albeit absent.
I may say that the referent is only an effect of representation, only an effect of the sign. Yet glory be, the more the referent’s anteriority and authority is denied, and the more this is lamented as a loss, the more forcefully its presence, albeit absent, is affirmed.
The referent is dead: long live the referent. Oh! the world is a fabulous place.
There is yet another story which I have heard told, a tale which is somewhat more lengthy. In unsettling the one and the other, such that we become unsure which is ‘either’ and which is ‘or’, the line in the middle begins to gather momentum. The story here is that the line in the middle picks up speed and whilst doing so turns into a stream. In this tale a stream flows and gnaws away at its two banks; it picks up speed in the middle and carries away the one and the other. Here we have a stream – a line and a middle – which is without beginning or end. Here we have a stream – a line and a middle – which is without beginning or end.
p.61
M is for middles and many things. M is for the many stories and meanings that may be told. That we are neither one thing nor the other, that we are neither inside nor outside but somewhere between, may soon become a tale of numbing neutalisation. Indeed, the story may be told that indifference infects the land. All too quickly the line in the middle turns the land to sand and we become lost to the perpetual shifting of the bleached white sand.
Rather than turning all to desert sand, the unsettling of binary difference may turn into a tale of implosion. The story here is that the line in the middle mixes up the one and the other to such an extent that the very difference between the two inwardly collapses.
p.62
The relationship between one and the many ceases to be that of an opposition; the issue of difference has taken quite a different slant. That we may speak of a singularity is not a matter of seeking an inside and outside, a text and a context, a center and circumference. For in this tale we are in the world, indeed worlds, of networks and nodal points. And with this sort of milieu we shall never arrive at a thing-in-itself which has intrinsic properties independent of its environment.
Things turn out to be inter-connections between things which in turn are inter-connections between other things. yet these ‘lines’ (in the middle), these interconnections shall never lead us to an all-knowing Theory of Everything. There is always an element of uncertainty; these lines and connections rarely proceed in a straightforward manner. Any one con-nection may produce a multiplicity of effects – a multiplicity of other connections, other lines.
And here we require prudence: how will one line affect others? In this tale emphasis is put upon considering others; as the philosopher might say, ethics is given priority over epistemology and ontology.
In this tale where we are always enetering things in mid-flow, I hear that no one thing can assume the determining part, the cause or the origin.
For in this world it turns out that any such cause is already affected by other things.
Knowledge is not such a proclamation of certainty – I know that I know! – but more, as I heard from a Hebraic tradition, an understanding that any interpretation is provisional and open to alteration and re-interpretation. Any theory, any story, or indeed truth, is that which could always be otherwise.
p.63
‘So,’ the child remarks with zest, ‘maybe I shan’t be speaking of a loss of an independent real world or telling tales of the death of the referent. Perhaps I shall say that the existence of an independent real world is one story amongst others. As for apples and images – well, I might just tell the tale that with both ‘things’ and ‘signs’ (both nature and culture) we always start in the middle and that in so doing the question of the referent, its absence or presence, becomes more a question of connections, of effects and affects.
Filed under: Books, Context and photography, Image Proliferation, Images and reality, Storytelling, Time and photography, Yve Lomax | Leave a Comment
Photographic Archives
Bezencenet, Stevie., Bresheeth, Haim. ‘Photographic Archives’ Photographic Practices: Towards a different image ed. by Stevie Bezencenet and Philip Corrigan (London: Comedia, 1986) 61-64
p.61
The problem is that this multiplicity of imagery [found in private and public archives] is often not accorded any significance and consequently not ‘mapped’. Such a process involves an attitude, before anything else – one which recognises the value of so many diverse images and how they can be made more meaningful, accessible and useful.
The task of redressing the historical balance is not only one dealing with an elitist and distorted view of facts and events. It mainly has to deal with a much greater vice – that of omission, of an absence.
pp.61-62
As opposed to the privileged, mainstream historian, who is privy to the various research collections and institutes, government reports and documents, supported by a lavish academic back-up system – the socialist/feminist historian is face with a job more akin to a social archeologist. The evidence and material have to be ‘dug out’ of numerous and diverse sources, ranging from the popular press, invitations to meetings, personal accounts in letters and interviews – the list is endless.
p.62
In this context, the use of photography offers both vast potential and enormous problems. The use of visual mass media like photography or film records of specific political events, debates and development (of the type not likely to be kept by the dominant media) is of crucial value to the continuation and furtherance of class/gender struggle. This type of evidence and analysis is a way in which the past is made real for a social grouping – history is made our own, and we are offered a place in it which we can understand and criticise.
This raises, in turn, a serious problematic for the photographer/activist in this area of ideological struggle and cultural confrontation.
What is required from us is a different, critical approach towards the image as evidence – a process of interrogative ‘reading’, where the assumed ‘facts’ within the image are investigated in terms of our own knowledge and experience. We need to be critics at the level of the status of the individual image, as well as the whole process of constructing the past. Whether by amassing an alternative version of events with images, or whether we create strategies for ‘re-reading’ existing ones – the role of photography in the retrieval of our past is a vital one.
The construction of history using a patchy and arbitrary collection of images as the basis for theorisation and analysis is clearly inadequate. What is necessary is the committed, long-term organisation of historical pictorial statements, through a process of consolidating and improving radical historical research/action archives. In this struggle, the options of the future depend on a well-documented and analysed past – this investigation and mapping of history is a form of socialist movement.
pp.62-63
Activities ranging from postcard collection to sessions demystifying cameras, lectures and seminars, publications and exhibitions – all these have contributed to the building up of far more than just another archive, or a photographic picture library for activists to use. The combination of recording and analysing, teaching and theorising, has created a tradition of an alternative use of photography as history, and of the history of photography.
p.63
For such a system to thrive and be continued, this individual effort has to be supplemented by a political system of links to the labour movement, so that the long term of the project is protected.
[discussion of Manchester Studies Archive]
p.64
[discussion of the Consett Photo-Archive and the Beaford Archive]
Like Consett and others, [Beaford] also commision new work, so that the archive becomes a live and growing resource with the potential for investigating relationships between the past and the present and working through the implications of that.
Documentary imagery is the basis for most of these archives and it is not necessarily exciting visual material. The strength and dynamic of this imagery is based upon its informational and revelatory function, rather than its aesthetic one. However, in order to survive, most of these archives rely partially or substantially on subsidy from the State, whose criteria is frequently measured in terms of ‘creative photography’. In order for these projects to be protected, it is necessary to use them continually, thereby demonstrating their importance for our heritage.
Filed under: Archive & Photography, Community/Participatory Photographic Practices, Essays, Haim Bresheeth, Photography as Historical Witness, Politics & Photography, Stevie Bezencenet, Vernacular Photography | Leave a Comment
Coleman, A.D. ‘The Hand With Five Fingers: or, Photography Made Uneasy’ The Digital Evolution (London: Nazraeli Press, 1998) 81-85
p.82
Up until 1888 – that is, for the first half-century of the medium’s existence – anyone who wanted to make photographs had to practice photography.
p.83
George Eastman changed all that, permanently, when he introduced the first Kodak camera in 1888. ‘You press the button, we’ll do the rest,’ read the slogan under which is was advertised.
Not only did this make it unnecessary for the camera user to process his/her own film and make his/her own prints, it actually made that impossible, at least at first: the film for this camera initially was such that amateur processing was impracticable.
Historians of photography are prone to celebrating this a triumph. I’d suggest that, in fact, it was in another sense a setback of major proportions. This was a time when a continually widening segment of the public was acquiring craft expertise in the first democratically accessible visual communications system. The Kodak No. 1 – by appealing to people’s capacity for laziness – allowed the ‘luxury’ of foregoing any study of that craft.
By permitting camera users to remain ignorant of the processes they were employing, this [Kodak's] approach to photography remystified the medium – made of it a prototypical ‘black box’ – right at the juncture when its demystification was underway among the population at large.
[I consider this a setback] because the camera is, on at least two levels, an instrument for the control of perception. Not only does the user employ it to tame and organize visual perception, but through its structure the originators of the camera and their descendants – those who design the cameras, films, and papers of our time – dictate how we will see.
p.84
The only truly effective way to come to an understanding of the degree to which ‘the medium is the message’ in photography is to study the medium itself – that is, the process of production. Only in that fashion can one discover the medium’s inherent biases – the kinds of ideas and information whose transmission it facilitates, the kinds that it inhibits or obstructs.
Globally, there is now an enormous population of camera users, only a tiny fraction of which actually practices photography.
Social historians of the far future will find it astonishing that in a culture which produces billions of photographs annually much of the population still believed that cameras take pictures, that photographs don’t lie, that seeing is believing.
They’re ideas of which an entire culture could be disabused by a widespread emphasis on media education.
The relationship to photography that this [photographic] industry promotes is one of rampant, event literal mindlessness. How else can one explain the fact that at least two major manufacturers are advertising their wares with slogans promising ‘decision-free photography’?
p.85
Decision-free information? Decision-free perception? Decision-free self-expression? Decision-free communication? By their nature, such acts cannot be decision-free – at best, the decisions they involve can be deferred, left in the hands of others.
The phrase ‘at best’ assumes, of course, that the avoidance of decision-making in a positive goal in life.
When did the premise of our public discourse change so drastically that ‘freedom from decision’ ceased to be a totalitarian threat?
Media education, including a study of photography [...] is an oppositional force, an embrace of decision-making, difficulty, uneasiness.
Filed under: A. D. Coleman, Books, Camera culture, Image Proliferation, Images and reality, Invention of photography, Medium Specificity | Leave a Comment
Uses of Photography
Berger, John. ‘Uses of Photography’ About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2009) 52-67
The speed with which the possible uses of photography were seized upon is surely an indication of photography’s profound, central applicability to industrial capitalism.
It was not, however until the 20th century and the period between the two world wars that the photograph became the dominant and most “natural” way of referring to appearances. It was then that it replaced the world as immediate testimony.
It was the period when photography was thought of as being most transparent, offering direct access to the real: the period of the great witnessing masters of the medium like Paul Strand and Walker Evans.
It was in the capitalist countries, the freest moment of photography: it had been liberated from the limitations of fine art, and it had become a public medium which could be used democratically.
pp.52-53
Yet the moment was brief. The very “truthfulness” of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photogrpahic propaganda.
p.53
In the first period of its existence photography [...] was an implement. Now, instead of offering new choices, its usage and its “reading” were becoming habitual, an unexamined part of modern perception itself.
The invention of the lightweight camera [caused] the taking of a photograph [cease] to be a ritual and became a “reflex”.
p.54
What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do, is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists.
p.55
The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind’s eye, the faculty of memory.
Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. They offer appearances – with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances – prised away from their meaning.
Photographs in themselves do not narrate.
Compare the exposure time for a film with the life of the print made, and let us assume that the print only lasts ten years: the ratio for an average modern photograph would be approximately 20,000,000,000: 1. Perhaps that can serve as a reminder of the violence of the fission whereby appearances are seperated from the camera from their function.
The private photograph [...] is appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it.
A mechanical device, the camera has been used as an instrument to contribute to a living memory. The photograph is a momento from a life being lived.
The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience
p.57
It is because the photographs carry no certain meaning in themselves, because they are like images in the memory of a total stranger, that they lend themselves to any use.
Has the camera replaced the eye of God? The decline of religion corresponds with the rise of the photograph. Has the culture of capitalism telescoped God into photography?
p.58
Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned.
If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgement, into the rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered, and condemnation is close to being forgotten.
At first, the secularisation of the capitalist world during the 19th century elided the judgement of God into the judgement of History in the name of Progress. Democracy and Science became the agents of such a judgement.. And for a brief moment, photography, as we have seen, was considered to be an aid to these agents. It is still to the historical moment that photography owes its ethical reputation as Truth.
During the second half of the twentieth century the judgement of history has been abandoned by all except the under-privileged and dispossessed. The industrialised, “developed” world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility.
pp.58-59
Such opportunism turns everything – nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics – into spectavle. And the implement used to do this – until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone – is the camera.
p.59
The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgement are also lost to us. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
p.60
Is there an alternative photographic practice?
Today no alternative professional practice (if one thinks of the profession of photographer) is possible. the system can accommodate any photograph. Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future. This future is a hope which we need now, if we are to maintain a struggle, a resistance, against the societies and culture of capitalism.
In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives on in an ongoing continuity.
The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.
p.61
Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments.
It is just possible that photography is the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved. Such a memory could encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity. The distinction between the private and public uses of photography would be transcended.
p.62
The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.
The task will determine both the kinds of pictures taken and the way they are used. There can of course be no formulae, no prescribed practice. yet in recognising how photography has come to be used by capitalism, we can define at least some of the principles of an alternative practice.
For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.
p.64
What makes these photographs so tragic and extraordinary is that, looking at them, one is convinced that they were not taken to please generals, to boost the morale of a civilian public, to glorify heroic soldiers or to shock the world press: they were images addressed to those suffering what they depict.
The alternative use of photographs which already exist leads us back once more to the phenomenon and faculty of memory. The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with word, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.
Normally photographs are used in a very unilinear way – they are used to illustrate an argument, or to demonstrate a thought which goes like this:
———————————>
Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event.
\ | /
\ | /
- – - – - - + – - – - – -
/ | \
/ | \
p.65
If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory. We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is.
[Berger cites Brecht, and applying his thoughts on acting to photography]
pp.65-66
Such a context replaces the photograph in time – not its own original time for that is impossible – but in narrated time. Narrated time becomes historic time when it is assumed by social memory and social action. The constructed narrated time needs to respect the process of memory which is hopes to stimulate.
p.66
There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it.
p.67
A radial system has to constructed around the photograph so that is may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.
Filed under: Books, Camera culture, Essays, Image Proliferation, Images and reality, John Berger, Memory & Photography, Narrative & Photography, Photography as Historical Witness, Vernacular Photography | Leave a Comment
Back to the Future
Photographer Irina Werning meticulously recreates family and vernacular photographs with the original subjects, years older.
Fascinating, on many levels.
It would be interesting to know how the participants felt during the reconstruction…
All Photographs © Irina Werning. Click to see the full size images.
All Photographs © Irina Werning
http://irinawerning.com/
Filed under: (re)constructing photographs, Irina Werning, using found photography | Leave a Comment
Eternal Return
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Eternal Return’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 31-44
p.31
There can be no passing moment that is not already both the past and the future: the moment must be simultaneously past, present, and future in order for it to pass at all.
p.32
The constellation of figures that Benjamin sets into motion here – eternal return, stars, death, crisis, image, phantasmagoria, and progress – is inscibed within the name that he associates most closely with the possibility of a revolutionary dismantling of the notion of progress: the name of Auguste Blanqui.
Blanqui develops his theory of the eternal return from his interpretation of celestial bodies and stellar formations.
Turning to what he calls ‘the theater of these grand revolutions’ in the skies (L’eternite par les astres, 34), the great revolutionary of the nineteenth century argues that – given the infinity of time and space in the universe and the finite number of elements that can be combined – all the possibilities of the world are repeated endlessly an infinite number of times and in an infinite number of places throughout the universe.
p.33
The stars that compose Blanqui’s universe exist only because of an infinite process of repetition and reproduction. There is nothing in this universe – no star, comet, meteorite, person, thing, or event – that does not begin in this movement of eternal reproduction. This is why we can say that the universe in its entirety works like a gigantic photographic machine.
[Blanqui's] discussion of the reproducibility of the universe in throughout cast in a photographic language that focuses on the questions of repetition, reproduction, images, negatives, originals, copies, translations, death, and mourning.
p.36
Although Blanqui states that this process of reproduction is an exact one, he at the same time suggests that what is reproduced is exactly the process whereby what is reproduced is also altered.
The most exact reproduction is therefore the one that reproduces reproduction rather than the matter or event being reproduced. Or rather, the matter or event is reproduced, but only as an altered reproduction.
Like a photograph that is repeatedly circulated and recirculated, ‘each of us has lived, lives and will live without end, under the billion forms of alter ego.’
The earth, he adds, is like the composite of an entire collection of photographs. It is destined to be this composite of an entire collection of photographs.
This photographic cosmology – nothing less than a photographic history of the world, or rather, a genealogy of the media of photography – may be properly characterized as catastrophic, however, since this revolution of the heavens takes place in relation to the most disastrous event of all: the disappearance of the stars. All stars, Blanqui writes, are always in the process of vanishing or fading away.
p.37
Like a photograph, the diminishing light of the stars is a commemorative sign of what is no longer there.
We could even say that the photographic dimension of this universe can be registered in its structure as a work of morning. If the photograph requires the possibility of mourning, the universe of the eternal return – in which there is nothing that is not already passing away, that is not eternally running down and in decline – begins in bereavement.
p.38
Blanqui suggests that, within this work of memory, the stars gather together the moments of the past, present and future in view of an overwhelming catastrophe: the threat of a total annihilation of light that would leave in its wake an eternal darkness.
p.39
It is because Blanqui’s universe is perpetually in the process of transformation that he can offer an account of the transformation of life into death and death into life.
[...] in this universe of permanent catastrophes – in which there is one catastrophe after another, but in which each one is already a repetition of the one before it – there is no thought that is not touched by both life and death. This is why Blanqui organizes the enigmatic and catastrophic structure of the eternal return around the birth and death of stars. If what is sealed within this return is not only the intersection of life and death but also that of all of the doubles at work within the cosmos, it is because it tells us what is endlessly photographed and printed by the enormous camera that Blanqui’s world is.
What is photographed each time, what returns in a photograph, is the reproductive mechanism at the heart of an eternal return. What gets photographed is what eternally comes to pass – simultaneously what passes away and what survives this passing, that is, passing itself .
pp.39-41
As Blanqui notes, ‘The universe is at the same time life and death, destruction and creation, change and stability, tumult and repose. It knots and unknots itself endlessly, alway the same, with beings always renewed. Despite its perpetual becoming, it is clichéd [that is, stereotyped, plated, imprinted, turned into a negative] in bronze and incessantly prints the same page. In its entirety and in all of its details, it is eternally transformation and immanence’.
Like the stars, Blanqui suggests, we too are ‘frozen in place’ within the movement of this history (L’éternité par les astres, 39). We might even say that Blanqui’s conception of history belongs to this history of arrest – both his own and the one that, like the head of the Medusa, freezes the moment of history into an image.
p.42
The movement of history that emerges from this principle of reproducibility names the immobilization that, like the photographic apparatus, seizes the thing or event in the process of its disappearance. The world of the eternal return is a world that incessantly fixes and returns to the event of a vanishing, and what vanishes in this return is not only the finite subject matter before the cosmic camera in which the world begins but the possibility of returning itself. A return without return, Blanqui’s eternal return tells us that the photographed, one photographed, can never return to itself – it can only appear in its withdrawal in the form of an image or reproduction.
Filed under: "We live to be photographed", Books, Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Time and photography | Leave a Comment
Sometime(s)
Lomax, Yve. ‘Sometime(s)’ Writing the Image (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000) 77-87
p.78
Is there any one thing that makes photography whole? Does photography have an essence? For me it isn’t a matter of setting out to find the very interior of photography and despairing when I never reach that centre; it is not a matter of authenticating, in some way or another, the essentially photographic. For me it is a matter of exteriority in the sense of asking: with what does photography connect? What sort of relations are made? The one thing I would contend is that nothing is fixed, no matter what buildings or ‘centres’ we may erect or occupy, as regards photography. I would question not only the idea that photography is merely a vehicle but also the idea that photography possesses a territory which we must depend and war over. To me that is an exclusive practice. Photography is mixed up with all sorts of things: law and order, the family, the medical professions, the artmarket. Photography is involved in a diversity of practices, stories and theories. There is painting in photography. There are words in photography. There is sexuality in photography. There is money in photography. There are a host of different “photographies”. When we start with photography, we are already in the middle of quite a few things. Indeed we may argue that there is no such thing (in itself) as Photography only photographies.
p.79
Whether or not we are a physicist, philosopher, politician or curator of photographic exhibitions, there may well be a time when we consider a thing or body – which may be a photograph or ‘living being’ – as an assemblage of interactions or relations.
When I take a walk in a forest I am not merely an natural observer: I enter into composition with the forest. Ther forest with all its variety of relations, affects me as I affect the forest. Where does the forest end and I begin?
I may say that an individuality is formed between me and the forest, yet this individuality, this forest-human, isn’t a case of the human projecting itself, its humanity, onto the forest and making the non-human the same as the human.
To take a walk in the forest is perhaps to open ourselves to the idea that the different individualities we compose, the different relations which compose ourselves, may partake of the non-human.
Contrary to a once-popular belief, the photograph is not the epitome of neutral observation. The observer may be quietly taking photographs in the forest and thinking her or him self quite neutral, yet as quantum physics tells u, the observer always participates within and affects the observed. To photograph is to affect.
p.80
The photograph is 5 o’clock in the afternoon: I may stress that no matter how neatly framed and hung upon the white walls of a gallery, no matter how isolated it may appear, an image is always to be found in the midst or interactions and relations.
p.83
For what seems like an eternity I have heard it said that today we are completely surrounded by images from which there is no escape.
Now, we may well join in with the chorus of voices which chant the line that an original reality can no longer be found outside of and prior to images representations and signs. [...] Devoid of any fixed reference to an origin, the image appears to refer only to other images. Yes, we may agree that this condition constitutes a crisis: images have ceased to represent (if indeed they ever did) and no longer can we say for certain what reality is.
Until we are blue in the face we can bemoan a ‘crisis of representation’. Or, we can ask the following questions. Of what is an image capable? What can it do? With what does it interact? What relations are involved? What possibilities does this image open up or close down? Here we would not define photographic images in terms of (so-called) documentaries or fabrications, fact or fiction, realist or abstract, but rather by what they can do, the affects of which they are capable.
To ask of what an image is capable is to partake of the idea that images are immersed in a changing state of affairs – not images of the world, rather images in the world.
pp.83-84
[The] image is not the passive receptacle of truth because it is something else – it is an object in the world that works, functions, makes connections, ‘affects’. It is a phenomenon of and within the material world; a site of actions and relations. The image simple exists, much as any other object with no special privileges. Once this is realised the image no longer poses a paralysing epistemological dilemma, but rather presents a possibilities of practices as diverse and potent as all the work images can do in the world.
p.84
The photographic image is a site of interactions and relations; this we may agree, yet let us not assume that these relations will be seen within the image. Listen, listen, there is always more than meets the eye. The relations with which an image is involved exceed the image; a photograph can never show it all. The visual image opens onto all sorts of relations yet these may not be given necessarily to sight; to see is not necessarily to know. That these relations often elude the eye may prompt us to say that they are imaginary or abstract. However are we to assume that the imaginary or the abstract doesn’t affect, that no effects or meanings are produced? The most seemingly abstract can teem with meaning.
Any single image has the potential to involve us in quite a few things, quite a few stories and times.
Sometime simultaneously concerns that which has happened and that which will happen. A photographic image, we might say then, hold the potential to involve both past times and future times.
p.85
We may say that with any single image there is always more than one time, yet are we to make a return and attempt to string together upon a single time all these different times?
The electronic and informational network spread over the earth gives rise to a global capacity for memorizing which must be estimated on the cosmic scale, incommensurable with that of traditional cultures. The paradox implied by this memory resides in the fact that in the last analysis it is nobody’s memory.
Filed under: Books, Content vs Materiality of Photographs, Image Proliferation, Images and reality, Memory & Photography, Time and photography, Writing/Literature & Photography, Yve Lomax | Leave a Comment
Stars
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Stars’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 26-30
p.26
Benjamin not only associates stars with a photographic language that focuses on the relations between light and darkness, past and present, life and death, reading and writing, and knowledge and representation – motifs that all belong to the history of photography phenomena – but he also links them to the possibility of mimesis in general.
p.27
Like photography, stars are therefore another name for what makes similarity possible, for the process of mimetic reproduction.
This is why, even if “we no longer possess what once made it possible to speak of the similarity that exists between a star constellation and a human,” we can still register this mimetic faculty within language and writing.
Benjamin here suggests that the event of the perception of similarity – an event which emerges with the suddenness of a flash of lightning – is unable to hold this similarity fast; he adds that the astrologer who wishes to read the flash of the stars, who tries to register the event of similarity, becomes part of the flash that enables similarity to occur in the first place.
p.28
The emergence of an astral image, like that of the dialectical image, happens not only with the flashing perception of similarity – that is, the transformation of luminous points into a constellation – but with the identification between reader and image. This identification suggests that the constellation already demands a mode of reading. Or to be more precise, reading – and therefore the possibility of knowledge in general – begins in the reading of the stars.
This light, which in a flash travels across thousands of light-years, figures an illumination in which the present bears within it the most distant past and where the distant past suddenly traverses the present moment.
pp.28-29
The emergence of the past within the present, of what is most distant in what is closest at hand, suggests that, like the flash of similarity, starlight appears only in its withdrawal.
p.29
It also suggests that the star constellation is another name for the experience of aura. Like the photograph which presents what is no longer there, starlight names the trace of a celestial body that has long since vanished.
If the task of criticism, like that of the photographer, is “to set a focus,” Benjamin tells us that is is at the same time an act of mortification. [...] the idea, the star, and the work of art can only be revealed in their deaths.
The effort to bring the idea or the work of art to light – like that of trying to bring the star into the day of history – can only remove them from the night to which they belong and that makes them what they are.
To say that the history of photography begins in the interpretation of stars is to say that it begins with death.
Filed under: Melancholy/Death & Photography, Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Lightning
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Lightning’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 21-26
p.21
Linked to the flashes of memory, the suddenness of the perception of similarity, the irruption of events or images, and even the passage into night, Benjamin’s vocabulary of lightning helps register what comes to pass in the opening and closing of vision. It tells us what brings sight into writing.
Related to the Hegelian lightning bolt that gives birth to the image-structure of a new world, the Hölderlinian lightning that speaks the divine language of the gods, and the Nietzschean words that come in the form of lightning, the lightning that traverses Benjamin’s writing also comes as language.
p.22
Lightning signals the force and experience of an interruption that enables a sudden moment of clarification of illumination. What is illuminated or lighted by the punctual intensity of this or that strike of lightning, however – the emergence of an image, for example – can at the same time be burned, incinerated, consumed in flames.
Not only is the writing-that-lightning-is immolated at the very moment of its emergence, but the illuminated objects of its reflections go up in flames in order to make reflection itself possible. The truth-content of any given reflection can only arise, that is, with the destruction of what the reflection seeks to understand.
Remaining faithful to the work’s secret, truth reveals its inability to present itself, to be presented. We could even say that truth means the making of ashes. That there can be no truth nor photography without ashes means that, like allegory, both take place only in a state of decay, in a state that moves away from itself in order to be what it is.
Like the photograph that is no longer before us, truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longer present.
p.23
LIfe is enigmatic because it comes with death: there is no life that is not already dying, that is not already consumed by the flame in which it is sealed.
This is why we say that there is no photograph, no image, that does not reduce the photographed to ashes.
p.24
If the critic distinguishes between the past and the past as it has been experienced, he or she also suggests that what has been experienced of the past is far less then the past itself. The enigma of life therefore names both the enigma of death and that of memory.
Mobilizing the figures of lightning, writing, and the turning of pages in the direction of an understanding of life that begins with a departure from life, Benjamin suggests that a life measured by memory is lived not in the present but in a text.
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Memory & Photography | Leave a Comment
Inscriptions
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Inscriptions’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 18-21
p.18
The prevalence of techniques of reproduction within the field of photography, for example, makes it possible to replicate any given negatives an indefinite number of times.
This capacity for reproduction and circulation undermines the notion of an artwork’s singularity, what Benjamin calls its “cult value”.
In so doing, it “detaches” the artwork from the history of a tradition that has always privileged the artwork’s uniqueness, that has always valued the concepts of genius, creativity, and originality.
Rather that be defined by its “cultic value,” the artwork is now characterized by its “exhibitional value,” by its ability to circulate and to be exhibited.
p.21
For Benjamin, the lesson inherent in the authenticity of the photograph is the link between the photograph and writing, between photography and the prevalence of inscription.
[In "The Author as Producer"] There, arguing that the photographer must learn how to underline his image with a caption that gives it revolutionary value, he suggests that this demand can be made more forcefully only when writers break through the “barrier between writing and image” and “start taking photographs”.
Filed under: Books, Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Translations
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Translations’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 15-18
p.15
The disjunction between a photograph and the photographed corresponds to the caesura between a translation and an original.
[...] in order to be faithful to what is translatable in the original, the translator must depart from it, must seek the realization of his task in something other than the original itself.
p.17
The task of translation is not to render a foreign language into one we may call our own, but rather to preserve the foreignness of this language.
If languages remain foreign – to other languages and to themselves – it is because, unfolding in time, and according to heterogeneous and discontinuous paths, they change incessantly.
Like the image that always flits past cognition, language eludes the grasp of the translator.
If an original can only live on in its alteration, it is no longer alive as itself but rather as something other than itself.
p.18
[...] like the photograph that names both the dead and the survival of the dead, translation names death’s continued existence. The original lives beyond its own death in translation just as the photographed survives its own mortification in a photograph.
If the task of translation belongs to that of photography, it is because both begin in the death of their subjects, both take place in the realm of ghosts and phantoms.
Filed under: Melancholy/Death & Photography, Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, "We live to be photographed" | Leave a Comment
The photograph
Flusser, Vilem. ‘The Photograph’ Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) 41-48
There cannot be black-and-white states of things in the world because black-and-white cases are borderline, ‘ideal cases’: black is the total absence of all oscillations contained in light, white is the total presence of all the elements of oscillation.
p.42
‘Black’ and ‘white’ are concepts, e.g. theoretical concepts of optics. As black-and-white states of things are theoretical, they can never actually exist in the world.
Grey is the colour of theory: which shows that one cannot reconstruct the world anymore from a theoretical analysis.
Long before the invention of the photograph, one attempted to imagine the world in black and white. Here are two examples of this pre-photographic manicheism: Abstractions were made from the world of judgements distinguishing those that were ‘true’ and those which were ‘false’, and from these abstractions Aristotelian logic was constructed with its identity, difference and excluded middle. Modern science based on this logic functions despite the fact that no judgement is ever either completely true or completely false and even though every true judgement is reduced to nothing when subjected to logical analysis.
The second example: Abstractions were made from the world of actions distinguishing the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ and religious and political ideologies were constructed from these abstractions.
p.43
Black-and-white photographs belong to the same sort of manicheism [as social systems], only they involve the use of cameras. And they too actually function: They translate a theory of optics into an image and thereby put a magic spell on this theory and re-encode theoretical concepts like ‘black’ and ‘white’ into states of things.
Black-and-white photographs embody the magic of theoretical thought since they transform the linear discourse of theory into surfaces.
Many photographers therefore also prefer black-and-white photographs to colour photographs because they more clearly reveal the actual significance of the photograph, i.e. the world of concepts.
It looked as if photographs first abstracted the colours from the world in order to smuggle them back in. In reality, however, the colours of photographs are at least as theoretical as black and white.
The green of a photographed field, for example, is an image of the concept ‘green’, just as it occurs in chemical theory, and the camera (or rather the film inserted into it) is programmed to translate this concept into the image.
p.43-44
It is true that there is a very indirect, distant connection between the green of the photograph and the green of the field, since the chemical concept ‘green’ is based on ideas that have been drawn from the world; but between the green of the photograph and the green of the field a whole series of complex encodings have crept in, a series that is more complex than that which connects the grey of the field photographed in black and white with the green of the field. In this sense the field photographed in green is more abstract than the one in grey.
p.44
Colour photographs are on a higher level of abstraction than black-and-white ones.
What is true of the colours of photographs is also true of all the other elements of photographs. They all represent transcoded concepts that claim to have been reflected automatically from the world onto the surface. It is precisely this deception that has to be decoded so as to identify the true significance of the photograph i.e. programmed concepts, and to reveal that in the case of the photograph one is dealing with a symbolic complex made up of abstract concepts, dealing with discourses re-encoded into symbolic states of things.
p.45
[...] there is no satisfactory solution to decoding. One would be drawn into an endless process since evry level of decoding would reveal another one waiting to be decoded. Every symbol is just the tip of an iceberg in the ocean of cultural consensus, and even if one got right to the bottom of decoding a single message, the whole of culture past and present would be revealed.
In the case of the photograph, this descent into infinite regression can be avoided, however, since one can be satisfied with recording the encoding intentions at work within the ‘photographer/camera’ complex.
Reduced to basic elements, photographers’ intentions are as follows: first, to encode their concepts of the world into images; second, to do this by using a camera; third, to show the images produced in this way to others so that they can serve as models for their experience, knowledge, judgement and actions; fourth, to make these models as permanent as possible.
p.45-46
In short, Photographers’ intentions are to inform others and through their photographs to immortilize themselves in the memory of others. For photographers, their concepts (and the ideas signified by these concepts) are the main raison d’etre for taking photographs, and the camera’s program is in the servoice of these raison d’etre.
p.46
Likewise reduced to its basic elements, the camera’s program is as follows: first, to place its inherent capabilities into the image; second, to make use of a photographer for this purpose, except in borderline cases of total automation (for example, in the case of satellite photograph); third, to distribute the images produced in this way so that society is in a feedback relationship to the camera which makes it possible for the camera to improve progressively; fourth, to produce better and better images.
In short: The camera’s program provides for the realization of its capabilities and, in the process, for the use of society as a feedback mechanism for its progressive improvement.
As mentioned previously, there are further programs behind this one (that of the photographic industry, of the industrial complex, of the socio-economic apparatuses), through the entire heirarchy of which there flows the enormous intention of programming society to act in the interests of the progressive improvement of those apparatuses. This intention can be seen in every single photograph and can be decoded from it.
pp.46-47
Every single photograph is the result, at one and the same time, of co-operation and of conflict between camera and photographer.
p.47
Consequently, a photograph can be considered to have been decoded when one has succeeded in establishing how co-operation and conflict act on one another within it.
The task of photography criticism should therefore be to identify the way in which human beings are attempting to get a hold over the camera and, on the other hand, the ways in which cameras aim to absorb the intentions of human beings within themselves.
p.48
If photography critics do not succeed in this task, photographs remain undecoded and appear to be representations of states of things in the world out there, just as if they reflected ‘themselves’ onto a surface. Looked at uncritically like this, they accomplish their task perfectly: programming society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras.
Filed under: Camera culture, Criticism of Photography, Images and reality, Vilém Flusser | Leave a Comment
Mimesis
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Mimesis’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 13-15
p.13
The forgetting of the photograph’s ghostly or spectral character, of its relation to a death that survives itself, corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as “the decline of photography.”
p.14
What is surprising is that photography’s decline does not coincide, as one might expect, with a decline in the technical efficiency of the camera or in its capacity to register what is photographed. Rather, it corresponds to the technical refinement of the camera’s performance.
Advances in the photographic apparatus, in the optical system formed by the lenses that transfer photographed images into an image recorded on a plate or film, and, finally, in the chemical process whereby the object of the optical system is revealed, seem to make possible a coincidence whereby the object of the optical system is revealed, seem to make possible a coincidence between the moment of the act of recording and the moment of the referent.
Yet it is precisely the conviction in this coincidence, in the photographic possibility of faithful reproduction, that for Benjamin marks the decline of photography.
[...] the photographic light that “overcomes darkness entirely” fails to illuminate the photograph, and fails precisely because it forgets what a photograph is, because it dissimulates the photograph’s inability to represent.
p.15
The decline of photography names the photograph’s own decline, its movement away from the schema of mimetic reproduction. It suggests that the most faithful photograph, the photograph most faithful to the event of the photograph, is the least faithful one, the least mimetic one – the photograph that remains faithful to its own infidelity.
Immobilizing and interdicting the passage between the photograph and the photographed, the decline of photography names both the involuntary conjuring of a distance, of an aura, and the forgetting of this ghostly emergence.
The photograph, the medium of likeness, speaks only of what is unlike. It says “the photograph is an impossible memory”.
Because this forgetting is inscribed within every photograph, there is history – the history of photography as well as the history inaugurated by the photograph.
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Images and reality, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Stillness Becoming
Friday, Jonathan. ‘Stillness Becoming: Reflections on Bazin, Barthes and Photographic Stillness’ Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image ed. by David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton: Photoforum; Photoworks, 2006) 39-54
p.39
Long before the invention of cinema, for example, photography was associated with stillness in a way that other pictorial media were not.
The stillness of these [pre-1890] photographs is conditioned by the need of their subjects to position themselves so as to remain motionless for anywhere between twenty seconds and two minutes, imbuing the image with subtle signs of self-imposed avoidance of natural motion, such as the stiffness of posture characteristic in many early photographic portraits.
Indeed, from our position in an age in which the cinema is a mature medium, it can be hard to shake off the conceptions of photographic stillness that define this property in relation to cinematic motion and to recover what stillness might have meant before the advent of cinema – and indeed what it might mean when freed of cinematic ways of thinking about photography.
p.40
If the notion of photographic stillness does not have its sense in contrast with cinematic motion, there must be some other dynamic dimension to underwrite its meaning.
p.42
A crude phenomenology suggests events flow toward us from the future, through a very brief present of immediate consciousness, into a past less distinct that the future, but not much so.
No one denies that photographs give us information about the past, but that does not distinguish photographs from a host of other records of events now past. But for many theorists, photogrpahs are a unique kind of historical record because they enable spectators to make perceptual contact with, or otherwise have made present to them, objects in the historical past.
The idea that a picture preserves a long past temporal now of objects and people that continue to persist in that now, but through the medium of photography also exist in our temporal now, suggests that photography is a very odd mode of representation.
p.44
[discusses Bazin's comparison of still and moving images]
The photographic extraction of being from flow of events and the fixing of it into an image makes the temporal connection between the now of the photograph and all subsequent nows exceedingly complex.
If by contrast we do not conceive of the photograph as extracted, but rather as the limit or origin of a chain of events, the relationship of the photograph to time is far less complex, being connected simply to the time of its genesis.
p.45
There is a very real sense in which Bazin’s favouring of cinema over photography with regard to realism boils down to some perceived advantage of preserving a portion of being in the movement of its becoming.
[discussion of rivers in relation to an object that is in constant state of flux, hence always becoming, but is always identified as the same object, i.e. Thames]
p.46
Whatever it is that underwrites the Thames’ persistent identity through time is the being of the object, which is a fundamental ontological category introduced in contrast to, and defined in terms of the movement of, becoming.
The history of attempts to explain an immutable being that persists through mutable time displays a remarkable degree of inventiveness on the part of philosophers. With some degree of simplification, we can divide the accounts into two sorts.
First there are those that posit an objective or real existence of some entity, substance or essence that persists and is divisible because outside the ordinary conditions of time and space.
Second, there are those that explain being psychologically, in terms of powers, operations, or structures of human mental and linguistic capacities.
We have seen enough of Bazin’s account of photographic stillness to see that he conceives of this quality as contributing to the photograph’s place within the order of being rather than becoming. The photograph enables the phenomenological being of its subject to persist through time without being subject to the mutability of becoming.
p.47
[...] this is psychologised by Bazin, in the senses that, first, it is the conclusion of a phenomenology that seeks to identify what a photograph is by careful examination of how it presents itself in the experience of human beings. Secondly, what a photograph is in experience is in large part the product of a deep unconscious need in mankind to erect defences against the passage of time, the decay and death that is its effect, and very conditions of existence within relentless becoming.
Where photography often gains in intimacy as a result of its stillness, duration and movement in cinema are prone to smoother [sic] its subject matter with expectation.
p.48
Everything that exists does so in time including those things that our psychological constitution and imagination render to understanding and experience as existing in stillness outside time.
To help us overcome the primitive psychological need that Bazin posits, and thereby the manifestation of this need and its satisfaction in the imaginative association of the photograph and inaminate being preseved through time, we need only remember that photographs are pictorial representations that – like every other material object – travel through time and are therefore subject to inevitable change.
We might put the point here in the form of Heraclites’ well-known aphorism: you can never encounter the same subject matter of a photograph on two separate occasions. Photographs may change over time at a rate of nearly glacial slowness, but they like everything else are in the flow of becoming.
The passage of a photograph through time and the physical changes that it undergoes constitute a very different kind of ‘movement’ than that associated with the perception of motion in the cinematic image.
The ‘movement’ of the photograph consists of changes to the photograph as a material object that stands in a certain kind of pictorial relationship with a once real object situated in historical time.
pp.48-49
These effects of time on the actual photograph may have so far proved negligible for photographs stored in ideal conditions, but pigments fade and materials decay such that time will always have a slow but inexorable effect upon them. Transforming material photographs into digital image files offers a further dematerialised existence, but of course all photographs are fated to slip into non-existence and be forgotten at some time in the near or distant future.
p.49
More importantly, what the photograph is a picture of changes over time, though this is not to deny the referential nature of indexical photographic representation. The referential or denotative aspect of the pictorial relationship is fixed, but the sense, or connotative aspect of the photograph changes as the meaning and significance of the real objects the photograph represents change in meaning and significance over time.
We can only understand and react to photographs from our position in the her and now, and this too changes over time, both individually and collectively.
pp.49-50
[Discusses Barthes's references to cinema and photograph]
pp.50-51
Time can have its effect over what human beings believe a photograph depicts, and over the connotative meaning of the subject matter, but the indexicality of photographic representation forever links the image with a particular cause and this remains impervious to time as long as the sign survives.
p.51
The unchanging photographic reference to its original cause, [that-has-been] to the temporal limit of the photograph’s existence, the starting point of its becoming, provides us with a conception of photographic stillness very different to that formulated in contrast to cinematic motion.
Photographic stillness fills the image and displays itself as unchanging pictorial reference to its originating cause, and thus photographic stillness is not, as Bazin would have us believe, the enfeebled lack of something cinema possesses.
Stillness, so understood, can and does enter into our experience of the photograph. To be struck by this stillness is to be struck by the unchanging persistence of the photograph’s pictorial pointing to its own cause.
pp.52-53
[more on Barthes from CL]
p.54
Astonishment and horror are two of the classic characterisations of the experience of the sublime, and [...] it is worth observing that there is a very great deal in Barthes that is suggestive of the experience of photography having the quality of the sublime – a quality, which, of course, is notoriously difficult to put into words.
What happens at the death of the last person who can identify, and through that identification care about, the human subject of a photograph? This too is a kind of decay, but more powerful than the erosion of the material photograph, and typically more rapid. If there is something of a resurrection in photography it is both precarious and ultimately doomed.
While the photograph hangs on, remains with us still, pointing unceasingly to its origin at the temporal limit of its existence, it displays its stillness becoming. It displays, that is, its paradox and its pleasure, its astonishment and its horror. Its stillness makes us giddy; it is a stillness that is sublime.
Filed under: Content vs Materiality of Photographs, Digital Impermanence, Edited Books, Essays, Indexicality & Photography, Jonathan Friday, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Moving Image & Photography, Observer & the Photograph, Personal Responses to Images, Photograph as object, Photography's Materiality, Pointing & Photography, Time and photography, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
The photograph and les temps
Lomax, Yve. ‘The photograph and les temps‘ Writing the Image (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000) 121-134
A body can be anything – an animal, an idea, a body of sounds, a mountain, a liguistic corpus, a child, a photographic body of images or a wind. A body, we might say, is never separable from its relations with the world.
It is the affects that bodies have upon one another which come to constitute the photographic image or indeed make the child. It is the relations entered into which come to define a body.
[...] have our Western bodies become so accustomed to following a single linear time that to intuit a multitemporality seems a little difficult? Yet as our bodies enter into different relations and changing contexts, perhaps it is not so difficult to accept that a body is of all times.
p.122
[refers to Barthes's and other writer's ideas that a photograph freezes time]
It seems to me that we have become fixed upon fixing the photograph as a segment of frozen time.
The idea that the photograph is a segment of immobilized time seems to exhibit all signs of an idee fixe.
An idee fixe is by definiton an idea which has become fixed, immovable; by definition there is no movement or warmth towards other ideas. There is no thinking that things could be otherwise..
What sort of touch makes a fixed idea warm to other ideas? I don’t have an exact idea of what the requisite touch would be; like a love that comes upon one when least expected, perhaps it is all a matter of being taken by surprise.
p.123
I had been considering the idea that any single photographic image has the potential to priduce a diversity of effects, that more than one story/time can be told. Sometimes a laughter effect. Sometimes an economic story…
I began thinking that with any still photographic image there isn’t just one time, on the contrary there is a plurality of times, not all of which are happy to consort with each other. The picture was becoming more turbulent than I had expected. Different cultural times. Different social practices of time. Different models and images were competing with each other. Circles. Lines. Spirals. Jewish time. Christian time. Islamic time. Capitalism’s time. Animal times. Clockwise time. Asking ‘what is the time?’ suddenly took a different slant. What conception of time has imposed itself as the one and only time, the correct time, by subbordinating and negating other times.
p.124
Questioning the idea that the photograph immobilizes time, and equally concerned to ask if one conception of time imposes itself as the only one, I began to consider the idea that time flows.
p.124-126
[discussion of changing understanding of time since Ancient Greeks]
p.127
It may well be said that it is a Western myth that time flows the same, universally. Yet would we agree that such a myth is purely innocent? I cannot help but ask if this myth, this deeply ingrained conception of time, has not been part of Western culture’s drive to universalize itself, to make its world view the only world view. To make, that is, its conception of time the one and only time to the detriment of others.
Snap: I may not be able to photograph it all, but the idea of a universal present allows me, for a moment,to envisage the ‘universe as a whole’.
A planet spinning.
A bee humming.
A worm dying.
A human sighing.
I think of these lines and the individuality of their times and I ask myself: could it be that the [Einstein's] Theories of Relativity took up with the question, is time one or multiple?
pp.128-130
[discussion of Michael Tournier's novel Gemini]
p.130
In French, and other languages derived from latin, time and weather are ‘one and the same’.
The very idea of the photograph freezing time may be said to be a myth, yet perhaps this myth recognizes, if only in a glimpsed manner, that the photograph has as many times as les temps of the weather.
[frozen/frost, still moment/still air]
p.131
Perhaps it is a myth that time ‘itself’ flows and an illusion that the photograph freezes this flow.
p.132
Most certainly, a life time can be divided into points. Yes, one can always proceed in this manner. One can go from point to point and determine from this procedure a succession of distinct segments. Chronology proceeds in this manner, as does often the writing of autobiographies, and the sequences of family snapshots albums.
My life is never at a certain point, and the photographic image is a body which is continually becoming. To speak of points or segments in time is to concede to the language of geometry and to spatialize time. Perhaps, in doing so, we come to miss the time of our lives.
Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Books, Family album, Storytelling, Time and photography, Writing/Literature & Photography, Yve Lomax | Leave a Comment
Re-visions
Lomax, Yve. ‘Re-visions’ Writing the Image (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000) 15-27
How can I speak of just one history. And anyway, who has the singular authority to say, with all certainty, that there is one story which is, legitimately, the authentic one. I find that one is already many: re-visions in the plural.
Re-visions: a re-making, a making in the sense of a fictioning, something which is constructed. Aren’t we remaking the story each time we tell it? The original, that which is assumed to come before, to be primary: isn’t it already a fiction?
A fracture appears in the seemingly smooth and transparent surface of the photographic image. The fracture (or is it a cut?) draws my attention to the photographic surface; no longer can I look through the photograph as if it were a window, a pane of glass which unobstructively allows a view outside to shine inside; to be plainly and truly seen.
There is a fracture, there is a crack: the window can no longer pass unnoticed. I notice that the window and the view ‘outside’ no longer appear as if they are both on the same plane.
p.17
There is a fracture: the question of rhetoric interrupts the smooth and transparent surface of the photograhic image. A fracture. A break, a crack or perhaps a cut. I think to myself: the photographic image is not a literal representation of reality, the scene is more marked by metaphor than it would seem.
I can no longer overlook he photographic surface. I become aware that the photographic process comes in between, that it intervenes, that it stands in the middle. In the middle … the mediate … the medium … the signifier … the means … mediation. I become aware that the window frames, as it were, constructs, the view seen. Quietly I ask myself: as the spectator am I also framed?
p.18
No longer can I be sure that the image seen will allow me to go ‘outside’ of myself and return to myself, as if I were looking in a mirror. A mirror which seems to return an image of my whole self.
In 1976, Victor Burgin writes:
The first requirements of a socialist art practice is that it should engage those codes and contents which are in the public domain. These present themselves, and thus ideology, as natural and whole; a socialist art practice aims to deconstruct these codes, to unpick the apparently seamless ideological surface they present.
p.22
I construct images. I cut up images. I make assemblages. I make many cuts. As I cut it is revealed that behind one image there is but another image. One representation but refers to another. The situation appears open-ended. The line is the middle, the mediate, the narrative, appears to continually break into another line and I never come to find tha which can be called whole. As I cut it is revealed that there is no proper literal truth which has been masked by the image’s front. Behind the photographic surface there isn’t a sure and whole reality, a substantial depth.
[refers to Lacan]
The issue of the mask, the front of the facade, of that which comes between, becomes suspect. I ask myself: if the mask is removed and it is revealed that there is nothing behind or underneath, except perhaps for another mask, then surely the mask becomes questionable as a mask? Or, is the mask brought into play to cover up for the absence, the lack of, a basic reality – the absence of that presence which had been assumed to be behind, prior, to representation’s front. Am I to lament a loss?
[talks about simulcrum, Baudrillard and religion, possible link to Flusser?]
p.23
There is no essential presence yet is this to be swapped for an essential absence. What is the difference?
p.24
My god! how much longer will we allow ourselves to be tyrannised by the fear of the loss or lack of that which makes us a whole presence?
How strange this story seems. It seems that we are caught up in a scenario where we feel the lack of absolutely nothing. I ask myself: if you say you’re a woman, what have you to lose?
I play upon the difference between the photo and the graphic. I play upon the difference between the surface and the depth. I play upon the difference between the photo and the text. I bring text and image together. I keep them apart. A ‘correct’ way can no longer be assumed. I experiment. I do not know in advance what the outcome will be be.
p.25
If there is no place where we may oppose or resist a position without being touched by that position, if there is nothing behind the mask, front or facade of the image, if one representational part breaks into another, then are we now completely and totally framed? Am I to say that all is now totally ideological?
If both sides of the frame (of representation) are posited in one and the same instance, if there is no beyond where things can present themselves ‘unframed’, then the frame begins to warp. Like wood, the frame – the line in the middle – begins to break up.
pp.25-26
Yet, this isn’t a question of a lost and ulocatable reality, nor is it a question of fragmentaion, of a whole that has been shattered to bits; rather, a question of the movement of lines which by way of their partiality continually break and make another line. I ask myself: isn’t reality a fiction, which is the say a line which is made and which can be broken?
p.26
Science is never a matter of literal facts. Think of its metaphors. Think of its rhetoric. Think of those particles which are fictioned, invented, by such names as ‘strangeness’, ‘charm’ and ‘beauty’. No longer can it be assumed that reality is waiting to be seen, seized and possessed – to be captured.
p.27
We can no longer represent the world in the way that we thought we could. Is there one single image which can represent the world? All those films, videos and photographs are not ‘windows on the world’ (even though they may play at being such windows); they don’t represent the world; they form involvements. Images play a crucial part. Images do change the world.
To interpret the world, to perform the rhetorical exercise of naming things is, in a sense, already to transform it. Nietzsche teaches, if anything in Ecce Homo, the rhetorical nature of the world and the capacity of rhetoric to change it … To debunk rhetoric because it is inauthentic, insincere, a pose and act, is to overlook thefact that the concept of authenticity is itself a rhetorical act. Every pose, even the poseof authenticity … poses something. Every act acts, even if it is only to pose itself as an act. The actor always performs, although you may not know it until later, until after the sun has gone down.
Filed under: Images and reality, Observer & the Photograph, Personal Responses to Images, Photograph as object, Photography's Materiality, Yve Lomax | Leave a Comment
Ghosts
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Ghosts’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 11-13
p.11
Like an angel of history whose wings register the traces of this disappearance, the image bears witness to an experience that cannot come to light.
Although what the photograph photographs is no longer present or living, its having-been-there now forms part of the referential structure of our relationship to the photograph. Nevertheless, the return of what was once there takes the form of a haunting.
Suggesting that it is from the ghost of Atget that we will be able to make innumerable, poetic prints of Paris, Desnoes [Robert Desnoes, 'Spectacles of the Street'] here evokes the irreducible relation between life and death that structures the photographic event.
p.11-12
We could even say that the lesson of the photograph for history – what it says about the spectralization of light, about the electrical flashes of remote spirits – is that every attempt to bring the other to the light of day, to keep the other alive, silently presumes that it is mortal, that is is always already touched (or re-touched) by death.
p.12
The survival of the photographed is therefore never only the survival of its life, but also of its death. It forms part of the ‘history of how a person lives on, and precisely how this afterlife, with its own history, is embedded in life’. [quoting Benjamin]
In photographing someone, we know that the photograph will survive him – it begins, even during his life, to circulate without him, figuring and anticipating his death each time it is looked at.
Filed under: "We live to be photographed", Books, Eduardo Cadava, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Photography as Historical Witness, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Mortification
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Mortification’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 7-11
p.7
The incunabula of photography – its beginnings, its childhood, but also its burial place, its funereal plot its relation to printing and inscription flashes the truth of the photo. This truth says, if it can say anything, that what structures the relationship between the photographic image and nay particular referent, between the photograph and the photographed, is an absence of relation, what Benjamin calls [...] ‘ a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings’.
Rather than reproducing, faithfully and perfectly, the photographed as such, the photographic image conjures up its death.
p.7-8
Reading against the grain of a certain faith in the mimetic capacity of photography, the photographic event reproduces, according to its own faithful and rigorous deathbringing manner, the posthumous character of our lived experience.
p.8
The experience of our relation to memory, of our relation to the process of memorialisation, is not at all accidental: nothing is more characteristic. We appear to ourselves only in this bereaved allegory, even before the moment of our death.
Subjects of photography, seized by the camera, we are mortified – that is, objectified, “thingified”, imaged.
We need only know that we are mortal – the photogrpah tells us we will die, one day we will no longer be here, or rather, we will only be here the way we have always been here, as images. It announces the death of the photographed.
p.10
['Man withdraws from the photographed image'] The withdrawal to which Benjamin refers here is not an empirical withdrawal, but rather a withdrawal that is fundamental to the temporal structure of the photograph. There can be no photographed without the withdrawal of what has been photographed.
A small funerary monument, the photograph is a grave for the living dead. It tells their history – a history of ghosts and shadows – and it does so because it is this history.
As its own grave, the photograph is what exceeds the photograph within the photograph. It is what remains of what passes into history. It turns in on itself in order to survive, in order to withdraw into a space in which it might defer its decay, into an interior – the closed off space of writing itself.
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Memory & Photography, Observer & the Photograph, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Origins
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Origins’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 5-7
p.5
Photography prevents us from knowing what an image is and whether we even see one. It is no accident that Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘A Short History of Photography’ begins not with a sudden clarity that grants knowledge security, but rather with an evocation of the ‘fog’ that he claims surrounds the beginnings of photography – a fog that, although not so thick as the one that shrouds the early days of printing, nevertheless serves as an obstacle to both knowledge and vision.
p.7
This inaugural haze, this luminous mist – a figure Benjamin often uses to allegorize the atmosphere within which memory works – covers nothing that we might understand or encounter in memory. Immediately different from itself, always taking another form, the fog spreads its mist throughout the essay, and in so doing interrupts the dream of knowing and seeing that structures the history of photography, that informs the desire of the photographic event – even before it begins.
If a fog encircles the childhood of photography [...] it is in part because, as in the experience of the photograph, it is as if we cannot see a thing.
In the twilight zone between seeing and not seeing, we fail to get the picture.
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Invention of photography, Photography as Historical Witness, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
{rowan lear} findings- “Lots of barbed wire entanglements” : tiny portrait of young woman
- Children playing cricket
- Squinting boy holding dog with lead
- Woman standing in kitchen, hiding behind wooden boardImage © Craigmillar Archives Trust
- Two girls and two boys, standing beside field of cowsImage © Craigmillar Archives Trust
- Woman in dress standing by building at end of driveway
- Two prints of portrait of boy with shirt and jacket
- Young girl with hat and doll sitting on chair in garden
- Landscape with tree nursery/orchard
- Man playing on ship deck under lifeboat with woman reading
- Two (twin?) boys in matching clothes standing in field
- Young man with hat and pipe standing against corrugated metal wall
- Island from sea
- Man with hat on donkey
- People standing in archway
- Man, woman and two boys paddling in water
- Two men on side street with steps
- Two women standing with twin boys and carrying girl
- Man and three women sitting on grass under trees
- Village, trees and valley
- {writings}
- Let us tell the stories of the dead 21 January 2012
- This is a photograph 10 October 2011
- My brother’s photograph 22 April 2010
- Not my mother’s album 2 February 2010
