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tags: Photography
NOTE
I find myself disagreeing with parts of this book more than Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography - Barthes. Still there is merit in probing what I feel.
In Plato’s Cave
Insatiability of the photographing eye…
Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
But, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
The first photographers in 1840s had only inventors and buffs to operate on them. Since there were no professionals, there were no amateurs either.
Photography grew in tandem with tourism. Large number of people regularly began to travel outside of their habitual environment for short periods of time. Photographs would offer indisputable evidence that a trip was made, fun was had.
Thought
There is always the possibility to lift your adventure from others. Pretending to be in one place, and taking just someone’s record of a day at a location and saying it is your own. There is such noise and overphotographing that it seems undetectable to a degree, especially for a one off. Especially when the unique trip is in itself a challenge, each location serving as a host to the same obvious shots of the same obvious subjects.
The person who intervenes cannot record. The person who is recording cannot intervene.
Between and a photographer and subject, there has to be distance.
Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that is as automated as possible, and ready to spring. There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. The transition of the gun safari to the photograph safari.
Thought
Watching the adaptation of Hear No Evil one of the leads has his hunting prey in the crosshairs. He is unable to take the life of the deer. The antagonist states it doesn’t matter, it was the hunt that provided him the thrill.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects are touched by pathos. All photographs are memento mori. To take one is to participate in the subject’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs attest to time’s relentless melt.
Photography implies that we know the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Mallarme: everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today: everything exists to end in a photograph.
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
In photography’s early decades photographs were expected to be idealized images. 1915 Edward Steichen photographed a milk bottle on a tenement fire escape. Since there ambitious professionals have steadily drifted from lyrical subjects, exploring plain, tawdry or event vapid materials.
Whitman proposed “each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty”, so it becomes superficial to single out some things as beautiful and others as not.
rel: Camera awareness
rel: Lag
Most Arbus pictures have the subjects looking straight into the camera. This often makes them look even odder, almost deranged. Brassai denounced photographers who try to trap their subjects off-guard, in the erroneous belief that something special will be revealed about them. Arbus wanted her subjects to be as fully conscious as possible, instead of trying to coax her subjects into strange positions, they are encouraged to be awkward (that is to pose). Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves.
In the normal rhetoric of the portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness and the disclosure of the subject’s essence. That is why frontality seems right for ceremonial pictures (like weddings, graduations).
Related to her suicide:
What is most troubling about Arbus’s photographs is not their subject at all, but the cumulative impression of the photographer’s consciousness: the sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. She was not a poet delving into her entrails to related her own pain but a photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that are painful.
Reich says a masochist’s taste for pain does not spring from a love of pain but the hope of procuring, by the means of pain, a strong sensation: those handicapped by emotional or sensory analgesia only prefer pain to not feeling anything at all.
Melancholy Objects
rel: Surrealism
Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.
That photography is the only art that is natively surreal does not meal however that is shares the destinies of the official Surrealist movement. Things like Rayographs are only marginal exploits in the history of photography.
rel:Picture doesn’t do it justice
Surrealism lies in the heart of photographic enterprise: the in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive - the more authoritative the photography was likely to be.
Surrealism always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal than an object which virtually produces itself, and with minimum of effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it? It is photography that has been shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet as the epitome of the beautiful.
rel:Difficult Devices
The Cameraman - Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage - by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.
The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down or captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of the Surrealistic counter-culture and middle-class social adventurism.
Poverty is no more surreal than wealth; a body clad in filthy rags is not more surreal than a principessa dressed for a ball, or a pristine nude.
La Jetée - is the tale of a man who foresees his own death, narrated entirely with still photographs.
Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world, rather than to try to change it. Photography operating within the terms of the Surrealism sensibilities suggests the vanity of even trying to understand the world, and instead propose we collect it.
Nobody every discovered ugliness through photographs. Nobody exclaims, “Isn’t that ugly. I must take a photograph of it.” Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is “I find that ugly thing.. beautiful.”
Thought
I’m not sure about this.
It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. rel:Picture doesn’t do it justice
Thought
There is something to this though. That ability, and desire to share a photograph of a moment, in our current state of technology, deprives you of that moment. In the most obvious example, viewing a concert through your phone’s recording screen. I say this current moment, because I’m not beyond believing there can be some kind of passive recording device that you’d just review photos from.
But I’m also mixed on this opinion, as discussed in The Zen of Seeing - Frederick Franck actually seeing can be augmented behind the camera frame. With your mind towards a photograph, you see a picture where you might not (this sad plant, this sunlit moss).
People have fear of camera, not because of feeling of violation but they want their idealized image. They feel rebuked when a camera doesn’t return an image of them more attractive than they really are.
Heroic vision opened up by new model of freelance activity, searching for striking images. Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals - a corner of the material reality that the eye doesn’t see at all or cannot normally isolated; or the overview, as from a plane - they are the main targets of the photographer’s conquest.
Photographers found that as they more narrowly cropped reality, magnificent forms appeared.
On photographic subjects of landscapes etc, encroaching of painters: Daguerre never conceived of going beyond the naturalist painter’s range of representation, while Talobot immediately grasped the camera’s ability to isolate forms which normally escape the naked eye and which painting had never recorded. Photographers joined the pursuit of more abstract images, featuring dismissal of the mimetic as mere picturing.
Duchamp and the retinal art. Intensive seeing seems closer to modernist poetry than to painting. Painting has become more conceptual, poetry has more defined itself as concerned with the visual.
because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted.
Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning, can reveal truth. But partly because the photograph, is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context which shapes whatever immediate - in particular political - uses the photograph many have is inevitably succeeded by context in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant.
The Image-World
Thought
This is amazing.
Balzac had a vague dread of being photographed. His explanation: every body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films… Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from an apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object - each Daguerrian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach and use up one of those layers of the body which it focused.
Fox Talbot called the camera “the pencil of nature”
Few people in society share the primitive dread of cameras that comes from thinking a photo as a material part of themselves. But some trace of magic remains: for example our reluctance to tear up or throw away a photograph of a loved one, especially someone far away or dead.
It’s common for people who are caught up in a catastrophic experience to say “it seemed like a movie.”
As the taking of photographs seems obligatory to those who travel, the passionate collecting of them has a special appear to those confined - either by choice, incapacity or coercion, to indoor space. Photograph collections can be used to substitute word, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.
A photograph can be a starting point of a romance.
Melville’s Pierre, the hero championed voluntary isolation
considered with what readiness now, the most faithful portrait of any one could be taken by the Daguerreotype, whereas in former times a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental aristocrats of the earth. How natural then the inference, that instead of, as in old times, immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce. Besides, when every body has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all.
Just as a photograph is too little in a mass society, a painting is too much. The nature of a painting, Pierre observes, makes it
better entitled to reverence than the man; inasmuch as nothing belittling can be imagined concerning the portrait, whereas many unavoidably belittling things can be fancied as touching the man.
Quotations
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied. - Julia Margaret Cameron
I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases, but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing.. the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! - Elizabeth Barrett
To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly. - Nietzsche
I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph - Man Ray
Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles. -Frederick Sommer
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer - Dorthea Lange
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. - Garry Winogrand
With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken - formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same - so that we shall only need one portrait. - Kierkegaard (1854)