Shock Photography Thursday June 14, 2007
Part 2 of 3
1 here
Every picture is taken from a temporal flux and created, according to Barthes in his book Camera Lucida, with regard to the poignancy of mortality. He famously pondered this in relation to his recently deceased mother and the unsatisfactory nature of his picture: there she was, but neither alive nor properly represented in the image. Photography is a kind of ‘shock’, in the sense in which it captures a concentration of information we would not normally experience; it both ‘expands’ and holds still what is normally transient and thus less impressive. In that respect, it alters our perception with a surprising amplification of meaning through optical or technological means. In his book Illuminations, theorist Walter Benjamin uses the term ‘optical unconscious’ referring to optical or visual phenomena we would not otherwise see, without the photographic means. This links conceptually with the Freudian idea of the same name; in both cases, we have an implicit bed of information accessed only indirectly. Proust makes some observations about photography in a similarly psychological way: the narrator sees his grandmother, while recognising he has never seen her – only the psychological image he’s invented:
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
With both Barthes and Proust we see a rumination on the nature of image, memory, photography, and social recognition. No photography properly captures even a fleeting moment of personhood and every portrait is a poignant evocation of its simultaneous limits but the attempt, nonetheless, to defy this. In that respect, its ‘shock’ corresponds to its curious ambivalence. Proust develops his point a stage further, suggesting that even normal perception is like this: we carry psychological images of other people, with an unstable correlation to reality. Close relationships allow the greatest possibility of knowing someone but as Proust notes with the beloved grandmother, even they are clouded over: we see what we want to see, or are capable of seeing, and it always falls short. In relation to photography, Benjamin takes an even more pessimistic view suggesting
Invention of the several parts of the photographic process was participant in the disastrous proliferation of those inconsequential bits of information. The camera records an instant, a fragment of time. The camera is a factor isolating, perpetuating, and conveying a moment of shock (Illuminations: 148).
This makes a substantial contribution to fragmented consciousness where
Man is no longer able to assimilate the world around him. The world changes so rapidly, and crowds man so closely, buffets him with so much information, that it constantly distracts him (148).
For Benjamin, the instant-shock characteristic of photography is emblematic of a cultural and perceptual problem. Sontag expanded on this theme, arguing that photography is a limited resource for understanding being essentially tautological in the same way Daniel Boorstin defined the pseudo-event: “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (On Photography: 16). Then, if we bring in someone like Jean Baudrillard, the photographic skies darken even further: photography distracts us and dilutes if not prevents understanding, and is part of a cultural simulacrum which for the US in particular is the way the world is perceived. Simulation is all we have, and the reproductions of ubiquitous photography are a substantial part of this deteriorated consciousness. Art has a presence in time and space and thus aura and authentic value, unless it’s easily reproduced and then “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics” (Illuminations: 218). For Benjamin distraction and concentration are polar opposites, one better than the other, and photography fits the former and is “political” consistent with a Marxist production-line analysis (photography theorist Villem Flusser has to more to say about the latter in his Towards A Philosophy Of Photography). Photography is predicated on reproducibility and is enacted through fragmented technological means having a subsequently fragmenting effect on our consciousness. Your ‘labour’ is controlled, defined and ultimately exploited by a mechanical process: you yourself become machinic, consistent with Heidegger’s notion of technological determinism.
And yet, in some respects at least photography is capable of revealing meaning in a uniquely useful way. In Camera Lucida, Barthes considers the difference between the moving and still images and says he prefers the latter because it allows greater possibilities for thinking. A moving picture or film carries you along its own narrative trajectory making you a passive spectator; a similar point can be made about the current digital trend for what’s being called ‘interaction’, which is an oxymoronic obscuring of semantic and phenomenological reality: you don’t ‘interact’ with a video game or web site, you react to it along predefined point-and-click pathways: not interactive, but reactive. This would be a relatively minor contention were it not for the fact that the notion of ‘interaction’ has such a pervasive place in contemporary digital culture. And photography, interestingly, stands at a mid-way intersection between old-school chemical craftsmanship and some of the most advanced computer code we’ve yet seen: the images are not animated, but the algorithms and calculations in both digital cameras and Photoshop have their own subtle power in relation to colour, shade and shape whereby optical complexity is translated into mathematical terms.
Benjamin also comments on cinema, suggesting “in a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film” (Illuminations: 171). Like Barthes, he dislikes its technology and related aesthetic, quoting Duhamel as saying “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”, continuing himself with:
The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind (231-2).
This unusual objection would have few adherents today although I suggest its basis, of how film is based on shock from which comes the impossibility of independent individuated thought, is refreshingly astute. We’re now so used to the medium we no longer have such reservations, but I can imagine if one didn’t have the more typical fascination with film when it first appeared, one might have felt overpowered by it and thereby dislike it. As a medium it can either enrich or deaden depending on its content. However the means by which it works, and what its perceptual effects are, have a further importance.
And Benjamin went even further, mixing up his criticism of technology to include even the telephone, alongside film and photography:
Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were…Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. (171).
Referring to Baudelaire again, Benjamin says
Photography should be free to stake out a claim for ephemeral things, those that have a right to a ‘place in the archives of our memory’, as long as it stops short of the ‘region of the intangible, imaginative’: that of art in which only that is allotted a place ‘on which man has bestowed the imprint of his soul’…the perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of the imagination…The crisis of artistic reproduction which manifests itself in this way can be seen as an integral part of a crisis in perception itself (182-3).
Unlike a considered and developed piece of art, a snap shot lacks resonance, power and meaning. And yet Sontag herself while criticising photography, provides us with a supremely powerful example of how shock, which Benjamin decried, can be disturbingly but undeniably useful: the moment when she first saw photographs of the holocaust, she describes as follows:
One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation…a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after…When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying (On Photography: 20)
This is very similar to the experience of the photographic punctum as described by Barthes, who uses terms like ‘prick’ as a way of describing shock, as opposed to the ‘studium’ of banal imagery which provokes no thought, dialectic or impact. The horrors of Nazism, and the holocaust in particular, were a cultural ‘shock’ from which we have not entirely recovered. Like Sontag I too recall the moment in my education when I discovered that such things had been done, that human beings were capable of such things, and it largely revolved around photographs of Jewish people being treated worse than animals. As with Sontag, it was a moment when “something broke” in me that has not and never will properly heal: this is the world we live in. This is what people can do. Photography then, while it can be compared disfavourably in relation to the aura-building trend of art, has a different mode of resonance with unique capacities of its own that require a different kind of analysis in which the factor of ‘shock’ is implicated.
In part 3 of this essay I’ll consider the music of jazz in relation to ‘shock’.
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