Time/Phenomenology Wednesday June 15, 2005
I’ve seen it described in logarithmic terms, how with advancing years time appears to accelerate. As a child summer holidays seem to last forever, and we remember them fondly as idyllic moments. As an adult we map and order our lives not in relation to weeks, or seasons, but in relation to multiple years and a future we instinctively realise will slow down as it speeds up, where we will experience diminished energy like a wind-up clock losing its power. Ten years ahead, and the lifestyle and financial planning it requires, eventually becomes what we think about.
How magical it is when we first discover photography as a child, when we appreciate in the simplest way, that we have somehow captured and memorialised the pet cat, the birthday party, the view from the window or the springtime tulip. We know those moments are transitory, even with the different appreciation of time characteristic of childhood. How delightful then to freeze those moments forever, using photography as an extension and amplification of our phenomenological life.
The fragility and tenuous nature of our life, of human experience, is I think at the heart of photography. We are vulnerable, and happiness lies in the precarious. Wonderful as they are, those early summer holidays do not last forever and our adult nostalgia is partly a regret, that life since then has never been the same. There are no long, halcyon and carefree phases of life – and what happened? Time passes – what some philosophers have described as the fourth dimension – and our relationship to and experience of this dimension changes. Hopefully, an increasing experience of this dimension coincides with an accumulation of wisdom. But that’s not always or necessarily true; a few decades of living – or more – is not an automatic qualification for a mature understanding of life.
It is the precariousness of life, the beauty of the ephemeral, that only photography can save. A painting, sculpture or movie can record and reflect a refracted part of life as much as a photograph, and in some respects more comprehensively. But the creativity of those other forms, the relationship to life, time and reality, is substantially different. I walk around London, or the Lake District, immersed in and participating with transitory phenomenological impressions that I record with a camera. Photographic creativity happens in a fraction of a second. Its brevity paradoxically amplifies and solidifies exactly those infinite configurations of human experience, one of those passing moments like millions of others, and allows you to stop the temporal flux, the impermanent and un-catch-able procession of the fourth dimension, and say: look! Photography is thus grounded and embedded within life, with a logic and rationale no other art form shares. It is inherently phenomenological. The camera is the perfect apparatus for phenomenological insight.
Jacques Henri-Lartique is one of the best examples of this quintessence of photography, his vast archives inspired by the delight and appreciation of amusing, pretty, and always passing moments of time. He started taking pictures in his childhood, loved it immediately, and continued to love and proceed with it in much the same way as he did as a boy, for his entire life. France is proud of his work, documenting as it does a bygone era. Cartier-Bresson was also inspired by the capacity photography has, to perceive and capture decisive configurations of aesthetic composition and human experience. Ansel Adams laboured hard to obtain his technically masterful images using large, heavy and cumbersome equipment, carrying it into remote mountainous areas few people had seen. We now live in photographically saturated times, confronted with images produced for all conceivable reasons: political, documentary, commercial, artistic, explorative and conceptual. The result is the ‘magic’ of photography is forgotten or ignored. Contemporary theory rarely considers the intrinsic phenomenology of the art as I’ve described it here because it’s an obvious subject, overlooked in relation to the sophisticated ideas of current academia with their ideological, postmodern, structuralist, de-construction perspectives. The interpretation of photography has become enormously complicated, corresponding to the complicated and problematic world we live in.
But I’m not sure this complexity is qualitatively intrinsic to photography, an art that rests on a fundamentally simple premise of passing time, an appreciation of arbitrary selective moments otherwise lost in time, and a technology that allows a unique exploration of this phenomenological experience. If you compare a self-consciously contrived photograph typical of contemporary ideas with an Ansel Adams landscape, what is common to them both? They are both photographs, so there must be a common ground. A Jeff Wall photo, for example, is quite similar to a theatrical or cinematic set. The people are like actors, and the scenery is a mise-en-scene, in that respect no different from film. And yet it is a photograph, just like Adams’ work is a photograph. Thus, two radically different aesthetics must be semantically and inherently linked, and that link derives from the medium itself, and what its inherent qualities are. What differs, between a Wall and an Adams image, is that the former is preoccupied with aesthetic ideas that are not intrinsically or qualitatively related to the medium it uses: photography, and its phenomenological basis. Which is not to suggest that one is superior to the other, or that contemporary work is not interesting, but to propose that the philosophical value of photography – such that incorporates any photograph – is evident with an Ansel Adams landscape, and not in a Jeff Wall composition.
Refrences: a typical Jeff Wall photo, that was artifically staged
your work in just fantastic, specially in phenomenology.
— maryam fayyaz · Aug 16, 09:00 PM · §
— James Lomax · Nov 4, 02:26 PM · §