Love, Proust, Etc Wednesday August 3, 2005
I was in the room, or rather I was not in the room since she was not aware of my presence…of myself…there was present only the witness, the observer with a hat and a travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible…I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing room which formed part of a new world, that of time, saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom did not know.
Marcel Proust: Remembrance Of Things Past, I, 814-815
People like quoting Kahlil Gibran’s idea that love sets everyone free, written in his famous book The Prophet. Marcel Proust’s understanding is embedded in more sober human relations. We also trap people we love in masks of frozen interpretation, through which their warm truth rarely penetrates. “Sometimes”, sang The Hollies, “All I need is the air that I breath and to love you”. Or as The Beatles said, “All you need is love!” There’s no doubt the world needs more of it but it’s not always such a simple delight, embedded as it is in complex human psychology.
Memories of people often have a photographic tinge where we remember snapshots, moments, isolated and selective incidents around which webs of meaning float nebulously. And as Proust suggests, perhaps all our perception is like this: relative and personalised, and never clear or absolute. It’s how we function as emotional human beings, the resolution – hopefully – found in the capacity for a more transcendent communication where two people acknowledge they are both trapped, a subject related to the forgetting or ‘transcendence’ of ego.
This psychology is partly my motivation for photography, as a form of psychological investigation. I know my perception is limited, like everyone else’s. My life is a scrapbook of glued-together images, that fill and shape my autobiography. I’m not interested in narcissistic exploration like you see in the work of photographer Jo Spence, which I find indulgent and ridiculous. I’m alert to the symbolism and psychology of my photos, but always in relation to aesthetics. “Beauty is truth”, said the poet John Keats.
Photography amplifies and extends my perceptions. When I capture a beautiful scene or interesting moment, I am released from my subjective limitations. The half-awake, half-formed impressions that occupy my mind are focused. For that moment, I transcend the habitual where “in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible”. That’s astonishing, wonderful prose from Marcel Proust, who was popularised a few years ago spawning self-help psychology books based on the ideas in his famous novel: Remembrance Of Things Past, “À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu”, or as it’s sometimes translated, In Search of Lost Time.
Paradoxically, the detachment of photography can assist our understanding, because it is slightly removed. You see this in Henri Cartier-Bresson: his work is infused with a feeling, an atmosphere, that suggests a deeply humanistic appreciation of life. Photography critic Susan Sontag believed the camera was an aggressive device, making you into a rifleman or voyeur. There’s no doubt you can have that attitude, and the excess of the so-called paparazzi is well known. However it doesn’t have to be like that. Photography can be a poetic activity, searching for a wider meaning that releases you from the confines of personal subjectivity.