It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited word of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of any generality (but not outside any transcendence).[1]

On my first day in Dublin, I stood in the front square in Trinity College and admired the bell tower. Erected in 1853, the looming campanile is the symbolic heart of the college. As I watched tourists walk through the front arch of the college, few could resist the temptation of taking a photograph of that piece of architectural brilliance. This particular tower is one of the prime attractions of the college and its image is one I was already familiar with. From tourist brochures to the vast archives of the Internet, the Trinity bell tower is one of the most recognisable structures in Dublin. The obvious question that arises from this is why one feels this compulsive need to take a photograph when that particular image is already available. Is it because human beings have a constant need to reproduce the physical, an acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one’s participation in “being”? These are some of the questions that my essay will attempt to address while suggesting that the very large body of amateur digital photography that is in existence today both creates and is created by a new sense of aesthetics in photography. At this juncture, I would also like to point out that any classification in the realm of photography could, at best, only be an approximation. I will structure my essay around Roland Barthes’ seminal work, Camera Lucida.

The mimetic tradition is one that has been practiced and theorised upon over many, many centuries. From the earliest cave drawings, human beings have attempted to describe their surrounding world. All portrayal requires a system of signs. As we know, much of our history is recorded through the written language; old paintings and sculptures give us a fair idea of our past. However, with these, we deal only in approximates. Natural languages are subjective. Bakhtin distinguishes between the human sciences (language) and the exact sciences. He writes:

The exact sciences constitute a monologic form of knowledge: the intellect contemplates on a thing and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here—cognizing (contemplating) and speaking (expounding). In opposition to the subject there is only a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived and cognized as a thing. But a subject as such cannot be cognized and studies as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic. Dilthey and the problem of understanding. Various ways of being active in cognitive activity. The activity of the one who acknowledges a voiceless thing and the activity of one who acknowledges another subject, and the degrees of this activity. The thing and the personality (subject) as limits of cognition. Degrees of thing-ness and personality-ness. The event-potential of dialogic cognition. Meeting. Evaluation as a necessary aspect of dialogic cognition.

The human sciences – sciences of the spirit – philological sciences (as part of and at the same time common to all of them – the word).

Historicity. Immanence. Enclosure of analysis (cognition and understanding) in one given text. The problem of the boundaries between text and context. Each word (each sign) of the text exceeds its boundaries. Any understanding is a correlation of a given text with other texts. Commentary. The dialogic nature of this correlation.

The place of philosophy. It begins where precise science ends and a different science begins. It can be defined as the metalanguage of all sciences (and of all kinds of cognition and consciousness).[2]

To extend his viewpoint on the inter-subjectivity of the human sciences, the pen and the paintbrush require the human mind to process what is seen; they require imagination. As Bakhtin would argue, all language is subjective; the written records that we have can never contain objective history. Thus no act of recording, whether with the pen or with the paintbrush, can ever be said to be true accounts of our past or our present. In essence, it is a difference between the human sciences and the exact sciences; while the human sciences deal in approximations, the exact sciences deal in absolutes and have very finite answers to every question. Forms of representation vary: the letter-writer contemplates the present and writes into posterity while the painter condenses the duration of the painting into one perfect image; a certain temporality can be sensed in these acts of recording. From the beginning to the end of the enactment of memory, a change occurs in what is being reproduced; it remains an approximation of the real. Each word that we use has contextual meaning and often more than one. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the invention of the photographs appeared to solve this issue to a great extent. The photograph captured what the eye saw with incredible accuracy. It surpassed the painting in the level of detail and authenticity embedded in the paper. Even with the long exposure times required in the early stages of photography, the accuracy with which the surroundings could be captured was nothing short of a miracle. Over the next hundred years it developed to the point where the physical could be captured in an instant with the click of a button; for once, it could even capture even what the naked eye would find difficult to register. The photograph became a document of history, a record of our past, a document that could capture the real in an objective. This movement from painting to photography is not merely an exercise in capturing greater detail but is an attempt at establishing a certain sincerity in the portrayal of the physical. Benjamin discusses a time where technology allows the mechanical reproduction of art[3]; it is a unique moment in history where the task of the tool has been overshadowed by the machine:

For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.[4]

As technology evolved, it became increasingly easier to take photographs. In the present day, digital photography allows almost an unlimited number of photographs to be taken with next to no real skill. The camera is a machine; it allows us to reproduce the physical in its pristine form. The machine repeats the task of the tool. Technology is not an assemblage of machines but a condition within which we reside. Since the invention of the digital camera (and with it, digital photography) we have moved from mechanical reproduction to technological reproducibility. The difference is a subtle one – from the possibility of mechanical reproduction, we have arrived at a point where the reproduction of the physical is a necessity; the photograph has become an appendage to memory, a certificate of validation, a re-affirmation of the ‘I’ and a constant reminder of our existence.

The photographs that intrigue me are the ones taken in our everyday lives. The internet is a large archive of these fragmentary memories made possible by technological reproducibility. Every day, 250 million photographs are uploaded on Facebook;[5] these are snapshots – moments trapped in time for posterity, taken by amateur photographers, such as myself. These photographs betray a certain necessity that is born with the advancement in technology – the need to record every possible moment that we consider important to us; technology allows us to preserve these moments for later reflection. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida writes:

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its Indefatigable expression. In order to designate reality, Buddhism says sunya, the void; but better still: tathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so; tat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo! but says nothing else; a photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically, it is wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is the weightless, transparent envelope. Show your photographs to someone – he will immediately show you his: “Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child,” etc.; the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look,” “See,” “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language.[6]

The relationship between the Object, the Spectator and the Operator is key to our understanding of this deixis. We, the spectator, who witness these photographs, can only have an approximate understanding of the image. It is the operator, or the photographer who has true understanding for he possesses contextual knowledge. Every photograph is a moment suspended in time. Let us consider a photograph, for example, ‘Tank Man’ (1989)[7]; for someone who does not know this photograph, it is the picture of four tanks, in a single file, on a broad road and a man standing in front of them. From the photograph it is not possible to say whether the tanks are in motion; one cannot guess the identity of place; the man in the photograph has no identity and at best his intentions are a conundrum. For the photographer, Jeff Widener, it records a certain moment in history. For others, it is perhaps a photograph of hope. The meaning within the photograph is only derived if we know the context in which it was taken; and again, it is subjective.

It is this photographic moment that is of interest to me, which will also lead us into the question of deixis. For Benjamin, the photographic moment is the moment of crisis; all history is packed within that moment and can be unpacked with analysis. For me, the photograph cannot record history but can only bear witness to it. By itself, the photograph has little meaning. The objects portrayed in the photograph, if not familiar to the spectator might make itself emotionally unavailable. Our familiarity with the index[8] or with the events that precede or follow the moment captured in the photograph, determine our interest in them; it is once we place the image within our memory that the photograph makes sense to us. The photograph as a document, as a record, can only exist in inter-play with its contextual information. The knowledge derived from the photograph is different for the operator and the spectator.

Certain details may “prick” me. If they do not, it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally. In William Klein’s “Shinhiera, Fighter Painter” (1961), the character’s monstrous head has nothing to say to me because I can see so clearly that it is an artifice of the camera angle. Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was for me (here, quite elementary); but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens together (New Orleans , 1973), the deliberate (not to say, rhetorical) contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps that of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not sstrictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it is not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object as the same time as the total object (how could Kertesz have “separated” the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?). The Photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading—what he is giving to me.[9]

The image gives history its authenticity, while the contextual knowledge gives the photograph its meaning. In A Little History of Photography, Walter Benjamin writes,

One thing, however, neither Wiertz nor Baudelaire grasped and that is the possibilities which lie in the very authenticity of photography. This authenticity cannot forever be circumvented by the reportage of cliche which forms only verbal associations in the reader. The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture transitory and secret pictures which are able to shock the associative mechanism of the observer to a standstill. At this point the caption must step in, thereby creating a photography which literarises the relationships of life and without which photographic construction would remain stuck in the approximate. Not for nothing have Atget’s photographs been compared with those of a scene of action. But is not every corner of our cities a scene of action? Is not each passerby an actor? Is it not the task of the photographer — descendant of the augurs and the haruspices – to uncover guilt and name the guilty in his pictures? ‘ The illiterate of the future ‘, it has been said, ‘ will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot? Such are the questions released by the historical tensions of the ninety years’ distance which separates us from the daguerrotype. It is in the irradiation of these sparks that the first photographs stand forth with such unapproachable beauty from out of the darkness of our grandfathers’ days.[10]

The explosion of digital photography has brought into a focus the element of time in a new way. As amateurs, we click photographs to capture the most fleeting of moments. The referent in the photograph is no longer limited to the physical object but also the time at which this photograph was taken. Thus the indexical relationship of the photograph can be said to be with the physical object portrayed while the iconic relationship is with the time at which the photograph was taken. A Marxist reading would see that the abundance of existing photographs devaluate the image and the form; the physical object is no longer unique; the Trinity bell tower already exists as a photograph. It is the time at which this photograph was taken, that is unique, and will always be so. Thus, in a sense, it is the particular moment as experienced by the operator that is being photographed, as it is with the object.

The need to record creates a new aesthetic and the advancements in technology produces an inherent desire to reproduce the physical. Our understanding of this need can be traced to the relationship between the private and the public. As Barthes contemplates in Camera Lucida, the photograph existed as a private object, meant for a time when one is alone, to look and reminisce:

The reading of the public photographs is always, at bottom, a private reading. This is obvious for old (“historical”) photographs, in which I read a period contemporary with my youth, or with my mother, or beyond, with my grandparents, and into which I project a troubling being, that of the lineage of which I am the final term. But this is also true of the photographs which at first glance have no link, even a metonymic one, with my existence (for instance all journalistic photographs).[11]

For me, the digital photograph no longer exists for reflection. Perhaps it is simply the very large number of photographs that one accumulates over time that makes it impossible to sit down with one specific moment and reminisce. The digital photograph exists for the present, as a re-affirmation of the self. As the private explodes into the public, the publicity of the private or what Barthes terms as a new social value reaches new heights. As the private is consumed by the public and as social media websites like Facebook, Google+ and Youtube seep into our everyday lives, the private is not snatched away from us; we willingly share our private lives with the world. (This leads to a more complex argument where, as Althusser would say, we are willing colluders in our oppression; for the sake of this essay, I will not engage in this debate.) Barthes’ discomfort on this subject is made clear in the following lines:

…since the private is not only one of our goods (falling under the historical laws of property), since it is also the absolutely precious, inalienable site where my image is free (free to abolish itself), as it is the condition of an interiority which I believe is identified with my truth, or if you like, with the Intractable of which I consist, I must, by a necessary resistance, reconstitute the division of public and private: I want to utter interiority without yielding intimacy.[12]

The digital photograph betrays this intimacy as the public consumes more of the private. The more we share of our intimate selves, the more we blur the divide between the private and public. From being a record of our past, the photograph becomes an identity of the present existing as much for us as for the rest of the world to see; digital culture sees voyeurism and exhibitionism as mutually complimenting entities. Another question that is raised in this discussion is whom the photograph and the objects within the photograph belong to. Raymond Williams traces the ownership of land to a primitive communism:

It is retrospect as aspiration, for such an idea is drawn not only from the Christian idea of the Garden of Eden – the simple, natural world before the Fall – but also from a version of the Golden Age which is more than that of a magically self-yielding nature. This version is based on the idea of a primitive community, a primitive communism…This is a fusion of ideas of the self-yielding earth and a conscious community of property and purpose.[13]

The digital landscape is common property at the outset. A hundred photographs of the Eiffel tower would not make it any less beautiful. In one sense, the digital landscape is equally self-yielding for all who choose to represent it. Again, a hundred photographs of the Eiffel tower do not devalue the structure, but it does affect the photographic form. The excess of production, as typified by digital photography, leads us to question the value of the form itself. Thus it is the photographic form that becomes the affect of possession and not the object represented. The affect of possession is found in the pleasure derived from investment. It is the photographer’s investment that gives the photograph purpose and in turn makes it unique, and hence property of the photographer. The exclusivity that every photographer craves is not found in the object but in the investment that the operator makes in each individual image and not necessarily in the object represented.

“The disturbance is ultimately one of ownership. Law has expressed it in its way: to whom does the photograph belong? Is landscape itself only a kind of loan made by the owner of the terrain?”[14]

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton explores why tourists are driven to photograph ceaselessly popular sights en masse and – particularly in connection with natural beauty – takes photographs to own it[15]. Photography becomes a way of possessing the beauty of the scene and the simple act of taking the photograph – rather than necessarily viewing it afterwards – is the driving force. For the landscape to be a loan, there needs to be an agreement between the owner of the land and the photographer. In the large majority of cases this permission is not acquired (though in some countries it is now mandatory to seek permission before photographic an individual or even private property) and the photographer steals a part of the digital landscape. As ‘the camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture transitory and secret pictures,’ we arrive at what might be termed as the ‘magpie effect’. The large collection of photographs available on the internet, is mostly taken without consent. In fact, photography relies on secrecy to capture physical. This secrecy allows the photographer to be invisible and thus take a more accurate and real representation of the world. Theft can also be seen in a different sense: do we steal from the past to predicate the future? In some cultures, photography is seen to be a form of sympathetic magic attributed to the theft of souls. In fact, Barthes deals with a similar anxiety when he remarks:

“…Death must be somewhere in society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.”[16]

Once photographed, we metaphorically derive our existence within the space of the photograph. Though this dependence is an imaginary one, we experience it with an anguish of an uncertain filiation: a question of whether the image generated will be a “good” one, perhaps one with a thoughtful expression. Barthes sees the photograph as the advent of ‘myself’ as the ‘other’: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. This duality makes the one photographed neither the subject nor the object but a specter experiencing a micro-vision of death. These anxieties, as expressed by Barthes, become the base on which this large collection of digital photography is based. If Barthes is concerned about being ‘turned, ferociously into an object,’ the digital photograph thrives on this particular ability; the ability to crystallize time and preserve oneself forever in the present is a particularly important aspect in our study of the need to record the present. This uncertain play of life and death is mused upon by Derrida in his writings on the photographs of Jean François Bonhomme. He considers if the imminence of what is due for death suspends the coming due, as the epoch of every photographer does, it signs at the same time the verdict:

He bears in advance the mourning of Athens, for a city owed to death, a city due to death, and two or three times rather than one, according to different temporalities: mourning for an ancient, archaeological, or mythological Athens, to be sure, mourning for an Athens that is gone and that shows the body of ruins; but also mourning for an Athens that he knows, as he is photographing it, in the present of his snapshots, will be gone or will disappear tomorrow, an Athens that is already condemned to pass away and whose witnesses have indeed disappeared since the “shot” was taken; and finally. The third anticipated mourning, he knows that the other photographs have captured sights that, though still visible today, at the present time, at the time this book appears, will have to be destroyed tomorrow. A question of debt or of necessity, a question of economy, of the “market,” all the sights along these streets, all these cafes, these markets, these musical instruments, will have to die. That is the law. They are threatened with death or promised to death. Three deaths, three instances, three temporalities of death in the eyes of photography— or if you prefer, since photography makes appear in the light of the phainesthai, three “presences” of disappearance, three phenomena of the being that has “disappeared” or is “gone”: the first before the shot, the second since the shot was taken, and the last later still, for another day, though it is imminent, after the appearance of the print.[17]

The permanence of the photograph is counter-balanced by the fragility of the physical in a Keatsian universe. Photography steals from the present to predicate the future; the three temporalities of death in the eyes of photography is suspended even though the indexical parent is gone – the assertion of the future is made in the present within the photograph.

Bakhtin in Toward A Philosophy of the Act, makes three claims regarding the uniqueness of one’s participation in Being: in the first instance he states that the self both actively and passively participates in the Being[18]; in the second instance he states that the uniqueness of the self is given but it simultaneously exists only to the degree to which the self actualises this uniqueness; and in the last instance, Bakhtin states that because the self is actual and irreplaceable it must acutalise its uniqueness. The strongest reasons for the need to record can be found within the ambit of these three statements. Because the self actively and passively participates in the Being and because it exists only to the degree to which the self realises its uniqueness, the photograph becomes documentary evidence of this unique existence. The entire mimetic tradition can be seen to be a reflex of the actualization of this uniqueness. The photograph as a document and as a record holds a certain sincerity that other forms of mimesis cannot provide. In a photograph, the operator and the subject are equally validated; the one who is being photographed has been lodged in a particular moment in time for eternity while it is the vision of the photographer, the image of the world that he wishes to capture that has been preserved. The movement from the possibility of mechanical reproduction to the necessity of technological reproducibility is at the same time an affect of technology and the need of the subconscious to validate the existence of the self.

The politicization of art finds its fullest form today. In his writings, Benjamin states:

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements.[19]

But, what of photography? The digital photograph is both the original and the copy at the same time; it does not have a unique existence. The ‘aura’ of the photograph is contained within every copy of that image. In it inception, photography was limited to those who could both afford the machine and know how to operate it. For Benjamin, art exists only for the elite. Technology, as Benjamin argues, has seen art move from a very specialized field to a very public domain — a movement from fascism to communism:

This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.[20]

Today, we encounter a paradoxical situation. Technology is the product of a capitalist society. The large corporations that manufacture cameras rely on a consumerist society to sell their products. With each new model, the level of skill required to take a photograph is reduced. If with an older film camera, one needed to have a basic understanding of aperture settings and shutter speed, the newer digital variants are programmed to make all the necessary calculations by themselves; the operator merely needs to point at the object and press a button. With each successive model, it becomes easier to capture the moment. Each successive model is advertised as a “better” machine to take a “better” photograph. As we respond continuously to our perception of what is “pretty”, we create for ourselves a paradigm within which the new aesthetics of photography are born. These aesthetics do not rest on our conventional notions of beauty but on a need to reproduce the physical. We have reached a point, where the professional photographer and the amateur are separated not by skill, but by need.

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot—or will not—achieve mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the noeme of Photography.[21]

Citations

[1]Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, tr. Richard Howard. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 97.

[2]Bakhtin, Mikhail: “The Problem of Speech Genres”, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, tr. Vern W. McGee. University of (Texas Press, 1986) 161.

[3]Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations. Tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968) 4.

[4]Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography”, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings & Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) 253.

[5]Parr, Ben. “Facebook by the Numbers” Mashable. Mashable. 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.

[6] Barthes 4-5.

[7]Widener, Jeff. ‘Tank Man’, 1989. Photograph, colour, The Washington Post, 1989.

[8] Peirce, Charles Sanders. Pierce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics. Ed. James Hoopes, (The University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 239.

[9] Barthes 47.

[10]Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography”, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings & Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) 257.

[11] Barthes 97-98.

[12] Barthes 98.

[13]Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1973) 42.

[14] Barthes 13.

[15] Barthes 92.

[16] de Botton, Alaine. The Art of Travel. (Pantheon, 2002) 264.

[17] Barthes 41.

[18]Derrida, Jacques. Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Francois Bonhomme, Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Fordham University Press, 2010) 27.

[19]Bakhtin, Mikhail. Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov. (University of Texas Press, 1993) 43.

[20]Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations. Tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968) 234.

[21] Barthes 99.