‘..I DID NOT ESCAPE, OR TRY TO ESCAPE, FROM A PARADOX: ON THE ONE HAND THE DESIRE TO GIVE A NAME TO PHOTOGRAPHY’S ESSENCE AND THEN TO SKETCH AN EIDETICSCIENCE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH: AND ON THE OTHER THE INTRACTABLE FEELING THAT PHOTOGRAPHY ESSENTIALLY (A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS) ONLY CONTINGENCY, SINGULARITY, RISK: MY PHOTOGRAPHS WOULD ALWAYS PARTICIPATE, AS LYOTARD SAYS, IN “SOMETHING OR OTHER”:
Roland Barthes concerns of a photographer relate to the idea of presentation specifically in the producing of a photograph; the spirit of photography, if you like, is to take something immediately visible and translatable and present it in a unique (or perhaps not unique) perception. That is how we immediately perceive a photographic image, as something translatable from our common experience, taken from a ‘reality’ accepted. As Barthes sees it, the photograph is divided between the ‘material essences (necessitating the physical, chemical, optical study of the Photography)’and the ‘regional essences (deriving, for instance, from aesthetics, from History, from sociology)….the anticipated essence of the Photograph could not, in my mind, be separated from the “pathos” of which, from the first glance, it consists. I was like that friend who had turned to Photography only because it allowed him to photograph his son…..not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think’. The camera allows a means of exploring the essence of an experience; forming a trace of the moment.
This moment, once there but gone forever, becomes trapped in time and space. Photography is no more presenting a ‘real’ experience than any other product of contemporary visual culture, for the real experience is abstracted by social, personal, historical (etc) factors although, by its nature we expect an element that we understand, something resolutely within our world of experience affecting our senses. The connections we make through images that are (almost) familiar render our experiences closer; our memory is brought to the immediate present, the trace of history is suddenly in the now, muddling the original memory. I could suggest that the photograph is shrouded in notions associated to the ephemeral, in the sense of holding a moment, and by it’s reproducibility as a medium. Several of the artists here consider their position as an image-maker calling to question the assumption that the photographer has the ‘power’ to turn what they ‘see’ into a ‘mental object’. The practice of using a camera, of taking a photograph, is also analysised through different processes highlighting that, although the image is constructed through process and materials, inevitably there is a vulnerability associated with the photograph (2) Through this exhibition one can ask at what point is the photograph a presentation of the everyday, a document of the fleeting moment forming something representative, other than an art object. One could ask, to what extent is the photograph presenting the ‘readymade’?
In response to Derrida’s theories, Christopher Johnson suggests that technology can be seen as the determining question of modernity (3); Language is unquestionably and inevitably linked to the way we construct thoughts, and thus technology is representative of a way of shared thinking, for we can not separate technology from the language of experience. As Johnson goes on to say, ‘our collective representations encourage us to separate and distinguish between the living and the dead, the biological and the technological, the essential and the artificial, and in each case to subordinate the second term to the first.’ What he goes on to argue is that we have ‘habitually’ framed or divided and by considering a definition of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, we can adjust and rethink this context (Ibid, see page 55). Johnson’s experience is interesting if considering the technology of photography, prompting to ask where the technology begins and ends. The notion of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ becomes blurred in a discussion of representation. The photograph is both transparent and non-transparent when interpreting what we see, thus determining it’s output in constant negotiation as to its presence in time.
The process of photography is well documented, but how can we rethink it in the context of an exhibition with so many artists who choose to use photography as a basis for the production of an object, many of whom rejecting the photograph as per se, taking elements of the process of production as theme or form in a new dialogue with art-making? The word ‘photograph’ comes from the Greek (phos) ‘light’ + (graphis) ‘stylus’, or (graphê) - ‘representation by means of lines’ or ‘drawing’, or ‘drawing with light’. In the Crypt gallery, one is constantly negotiating their movements in a darkness, associated with notions of the building and what it stands to represent here and now as well as historically. Others have explored the theme of taking a photograph, when the meaning of small everyday moments are expanded through suspension in time and thus human, emotional experience becomes entwined in the scientific nature of the photograph. Spaces associated with historical events challenge perceptions of objective experience, which seems pertinent in an exhibition presented in the burial space of a church building.
These artists have come together through a photography course, while the outcome of their experiences makes it impossible to identify a common sense of what the photograph is, activating a discursive response to the nature of presenting or rather tracing spaces around us and our experiences that infiltrate our being. By considering and reusing methods of producing images, several of the artists explore the concept of what makes a photograph, while the nature of the photographic image and the idea of authenticity are intrinsically linked and perhaps pushed forward further in the discussion of contemporary art practice through accepted uses of photography. As Susan Sontag explains, the photograph has a powers distinct from other image-systems in that it is not purely determined by the image-maker. The result comes out of an optical-chemical or electronic process (4), while remaining sensitive to a judgment that is in contact with a sense of what is reality, thus it’s perception is also determined through the close connection between the physicality and psychology of perception. The issue of ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ come to the foreground here through the challenges some artists here make to the concept of looking at photography to ‘lead the corpus (I need) back to the body I see.’ (5)
‘A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.’ (XI) (P.254: Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin)
Photography has been used as a medium for documentation, but this freezing of the trace of the past is always associated to the thinking and thus the language of the contemporary. Thus once the image is produced, it’s durability rests on its ability to remain in the conscious of a society. Thus it could be argued that the image maintains an essence of text, a language of images if you like. One can consider Derrida’s ideas surrounding speech and writing, the former supposedly presenting a transparency in its presence, while writing remaining as an absence or perhaps untruth in the need to interpret. (6) These ideas of language, text and speech relate to understanding the perceptions of an image. Just because the photograph appears to present a ‘reality’, we cannot be sure of what that reality is. The mark it leaves can be read as textural, the trace of an idea rather than a reality. Ideas of documenting and maintaining an image, be it historical, social (surveillance for example) etc, shift constantly in a time of advance technologies. The photograph is a medium capable of splitting time into present and past, a present that passes and a past, which is preserved (7). Birnbaum, when discussing chronology quotes Husserl and Bergson in suggesting that temporality is the most basic level of subjectivity (8). ‘The first kind of memory, of the most recent past, Husserl calls retention; the second we are continuously split between several “tracks” of awareness: we live in perceptual presence-which is built up by impression, retention, and potention (expectation) – as well as in the recollected past. In addition to this, other form of awareness, such as empathy and imagination, make the machinery of consciousness even more complex.’ We are in a state of “temporal polyphony” and the structures of subjectivity allows for the many flows of awareness (9).
This condition is played out through the performance in taking an image, the self-portrait and the relationship with the subject, be it human or not, the physical world is affected by differing notions of perception and phemonological understanding; the personal and public and the question as to whether the artist can determine the way the viewer interprets what they see; another concern in photographic discourse. Further to this, we could consider as artists in this exhibition have, the nature of the form itself. Our brains connect to our vision recording moments in time, often as short sequences of film, pointed by specific memories of taste, colour, touch, words said and those forgotten or not said, the materiality of sound, acting as moments captured by a photograph. But these moments can become blurred, transferred and transformed determined by our current understanding of past experiences. By negotiating techniques the artists often return us to the foundation of photography as an art form, be it through the investigations of artists like those of Man Ray, where the line between photography, painting, drawing and sculpture became blurred into an experience of perception to the real and artificial meaning of representation. The photograph becomes a ‘selective interpretation’ (10).
Here is a group of artists working with the medium of photography; artists who have come together to form a collective where themes and processes come into contact but practices remain distinct.
Such an exhibition highlights the varied approaches to the medium of photography rendering the photograph almost obsolete through conceptual aims and creative processes found within this exhibition. Some artists have responded to the space, specific or otherwise, while others have continued works in progress or have used this as a way of showcasing work previously unseen. Ultimately, what this exhibition presents is an idea of contemporary art practice now and through the medium used; 17 expressions of documenting, holding, and negotiating an experience in our time.
- Rebecca Harris
Footnotes:
1) Barthes, R, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography’, Vintage, London,1993 ed (first published by Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1980), p.20-21
2) ‘While painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers is not a generic exception…Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.’ (p.6) in Sontag, S, ‘Susan Sontag on Photograph’, London:Penguin Books, 1977
3)‘...technology has always been (in different ways) the determining question of humanity, of the human, of becoming-human or ‘hominization’ (p.54), Christopher Johnson, in Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone ed., Derrida’s legacies: literature and philosophy, Routledge, London, New York, 2008, p.54 – 65.
4) As Susan Sontag outlines, ‘Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one, the workings of which will inevitably be modified to provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real.’ (p.158), Sontag, S, On Photography, London: Penguin Books, 1977.
5) Barthes goes on ‘ A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (…), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (..): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (…), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.’ (Barthes, R, Camera Lucida, p. 4 and 5).
6) Derrida, J, ‘Of Grammatology’, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967. English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. A corrected edition of the translation was published in 1998.
7) Deleauze, G, ‘Cinema 2: The Time Machine’, Trans H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p.81
8)Birnbaum, D, ‘Chronology’, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005. P. 36-37
9)ibid
10) Sontag, S, ‘On Photography’, p.6
