PHOTO
GRAPHY
IS
HISTORY
After the violent modern torrents, we are squelching and wading, hands and arms akimbo for balance, in the swamp of technical images. That is, there is no more flood, no progression. If the growths and trees are culture and ideology, and if the resourceful ground makes the very material conditions for human survival, then the steady, translatable substance of relative fluidity or ooze that is the dirty water, the muck, the slick, which seeps & sucks & volumizes, are made of those technical images — the photographs, the visual media, the interactive screens, the sonic registrations, the decaying and corrupted records of modern inscription devices.
Dry and wet are no longer operative terms, perhaps. More likely, it is crust and oil, like Bitumen of Judea spilling from the bottle, exposed and hardened by the sun’s radiation. The illegible early experiments of Nicéphore Niépce (responsible for the first permanent camera image and its necessary caption), and the dark, crackled paintings of Théodore Rousseau that can never be restored without annihilation, are both asphaltic photography. They are products borne of oil, crust, and light.
Oil paintings are beautiful, yes, but the social media image of a painting included in Instagram “stories” is one variant of the muck, only visible in the shimmer of a grease slick akin to the surface of a pre-photographic work produced as tableau, as larger-than-life history painting. Théodore Géricault’s canvasses are reference point, the pinnacle being the Raft, in which “the ferocious emergence of the people” is fashioned into art, as Jules Michelet wrote. These large framed screens we see in the background of the villain’s lair in a recent popular film, John Wick 4. This fragmented view in cinema points to a larger problematic in the relations between an older medium and the modern form of photography. The only possible way to view these gargantuan canvases absent their oily highlights is through painstakingly choreographed and adjusted documentary images, made by skilled photographers and held as property by museums, organizations, foundations, corporations, private collectors, investors. The connection made between the eye and an image of a painting seen on a screen, and the connection made between a customer and a product ordered and delivered, are indistinguishable, because the muck now suggests paintings and products, ideas and events, for ready consumption in the guise of learning. Surface and light, then light and surface, made recurrent through material and bodily connection between humans and an apparatus of connectivity so large that it has come to stand in for modern technology’s conquest of the social world.
Writing this in 2023, the billionaire egotists’ wonky debut of AI is a part of my general but not acute anxiety for the future of the image, I confess. A nightmare deferred, held back only by the power of labor, or, the only power that matters. AI proponents (those who’ve compartmentalized their humanity, who make up new types of humans that make no sense, who are decision-making embodiments of unchallenged stupidity and monetized brain-rot) proselytize what is an excessively complex simulation of Jean Arp’s foolproof method for composition – rips and drops and intuitive connections, plagiarized from the world. The Dada version of automatic writing made to answer the automatism of industrial processes that increasingly managed modern life. The free automatism of language, image, and sound is the great discovery of the historical avant garde, one that rivals but never outmatches another colossus, that of Jazz. Only, to generate a new “automatic” composition using AI requires the resources of a small country, enabling the run and return of inhuman calculations over our heads, resulting in images and texts that are terribly mid or kitsch. As of now (and forever), they are interesting in the way they demonstrate AI’s Pentecost. The debut takes the shape of the virtual expropriation and development of the “the uncanny valley” for the content factory farms of the future. In contrast, it may have only taken a good meal and a stiff drink to fuel Arp’s unassuming images of chance elevated to the judgment of art.
To adopt an ecological, geological, eschatological perspective that expands the scale away from the long durée to the long haul of the now (the ends of humanity as an inchoate material fact, or, what the Anthropocene identifies for me), this muck of technical images, whose types include photographs, projections of light on to or through screens, the microchip’s photolithographic processes condensing code at inhuman rates, is a radioactive pollutant that will outlast us. A pollutant of the image world, endless threads of serial and sequential effects like so many corn byproducts on the processing line, all of which urgently require so much more description and so much less interpretation. “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere,” writes Sontag in 1966, “the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.” After us, after our world, and the meanings excavated in the mind of interpreters that give rise to our world as “this world” or that, we will leave a smattering of remnants that evidence the existence of those remarkably intelligent, gleefully perverse, highly emotional, and explosively violent human animals. This is to imagine a humanism located in an inevitable era without the human. The muck may disintegrate into dust without the connections of the power-grid, without microchip processing plants, without lasers, without electrical power, without laboratory chemicals, without the necessary salts, or silicon or cobalt or silver or sulfites or cyanides, extracted by hard labor and mixed by capable hands, without eyeballs, without receiving minds, without conscious bodies gifted with considerable powers of description (strong), and overinflated powers of interpretation (weak).
Some of the muck may survive the breakdown of its elemental makeup to provoke encounters in the future, hopefully in a cave where a curious scholar in Planet of the Apes finds evidence of a past humanity’s humanity. But this is borrowed fantasy – a good one, as current ideas go. (And this is in spite of the film’s atavistic view of race in the context of Brown v. Board of Education, and released in the year of barricades and assassinations, 1968). Science fiction of this stripe also tracks with a more longstanding violent dream that dominates the imaginations of the elite: to amass wealth, to suck up brainpower and resources and public funds for pet projects, to engineer spaceships designed to leave billions behind, to find what we already have here on terra firma: the constancy of death. Bring us back to photography, an image of death extraordinaire.
The photographic image of a bare foot in the sands of Inani Beach is an image of life. So is the image of feet and hands in the sands of Fort Clarence Beach close to Kingston, of Cannes, of Ka’anapali in Maui. The complementary nemesis is the desired / desirable image of rigid, lifeless toes resting on the sands of Mars. Let the Soviet cameras abandoned on Venus and the American cameras exiled on Mars attest to this inanimate truth of what lay beyond our changing atmosphere (inoperable equipment and the absence of life).
There is no planet of the (bored) apes except our own, obviously. It is all the more likely that the swamp of dry microchips, plasticized gels, & wet paper (amid the oil we’ve extracted from the earth to transform it) will encounter a fungal spore that’ll attach itself, grow inside & around so many parts. What is missing? Us, the readers, the bodies being photographed and shown photographs. There is no more us. In writing about technical images, in the age of the technical image, in our image world, we have to envision a world without readers, a solarized community without ears, fingers, eyeballs, or minds as we know them through history, a world that is not the product of our current media conditions by which we determine life and death, event and aftermath. This is an image of the world the internet doesn’t quite know how to serve up in some figment or fragment of the now (the advertisement, the report of a deadly shooting, the music video debut, the summation of an online controversy, the dashcam evidence of war crime). It’s an understatement today that it is powerfully difficult to conceive of an after-internet, a postdiluvian recession that is not also the ends of humanity. (Mark Fisher phones in the warning with his Capitalist Realism, perhaps.)
What would we know about this future? Perhaps it is useless to envision a far future or an ancient, pre-photographic past. How can we write the history of our own epoch, for the pig whose snout and tongue happen to find a foreign recording device in her living space? How do we describe to this pig, what the camera recorded as it fell from a person’s hands out of a flying plane? How do we tell her of how the camera, twisting in meteoric heat in its resistance to air and gravity, inscribed a frame-rate hallucination of land and sky together in a synthetic after-image, before the apparatus cratered itself into the mud, its lens pointed to the atmosphere from which it came? How do we, as cameras and humans burdened with the action of photographing and being photographed, tell of the sky to an animal who cannot look up? Which frame rate is most suitable for a pig’s receptive eye and curious mind?
Hegel died in 1831, before the announcement of photography eight years later in Paris. Like the pig who found the camera in the muck, Hegel didn’t know shit. He couldn’t see the sky. Explain the technical image to his unilluminated, unphotographed corpse, as well as to the microbes & metastasized crustacean forms of the future. Don’t explain it to Marx, since he made a photographic negative of Hegel for his own purposes. Don’t explain it to those who live in the technical image’s orbit, either radical (those who need photography but describe it dispassionately) or conservative (those who mourn the passing of an art). They people the same world of the technical image as we do. Enlightenment philosophers were smart in a pre-photographic way, which makes them all the more ignorant of our plight and joy. They were idiot engines of abstraction, whose thoughts cut trees and filled libraries. Describe a Gameboy to the modern troglodyte Kant. You can’t. He was never photographed, thus he was never bathed and seared in light like everyone we know, the blind and the seeing. Everyone after 1839 had to come up with new methods, new practices that employed the power of new material facts, the first material facts of modernity in the form of technical images: photographs, telegraphic linkages, half-tone screens, gramophones, motion pictures, cathode ray tubes, atom bombs, closed captionings, car dashboard displays, the little square cursors programmed to frame data-rich faces in real time registered and networked from cam feeds, armed drones. These are the conditions for life in our time in history. As stupid as it sounds, history cleaved itself into periods of the unphotographed and the photographed, and any next phase is after humanity’s lease.
Photography is history.
This statement, of radical periodization, of temperate substitution, and what meaning I hope to give such a syntactic unit, is likely to be colored by the previous paragraphs. I understand history through photographs, because I’ve done so before and those who have read my written attempts at history have concurred that it resembles a history of a kind, an art history. But these are but the conceptual fine threads bracing the gaps between the spring-loaded circles of historical time, which is a good image by Hegel, if also a pre-photographic one. (It’s like a spring shutter fitted irreverently into a pre-photographic camera obscura.) Other writers call it “living in history.” A tautology may be necessary: photography is history because we live in history, experience history, redefine history, recognize our own historical conditions in the making by reading and rereading the account of events and their attendant fictions in a shared past or in a tumultuous present. And history, or the attendant historical consciousness in bloom, is a psychic world of pain and pleasure for those who might also diagnose themselves with another condition: critical consciousness, the mode that has become democratized and, in tandem, violently distorted in the age of the internet utterance.
The radical pairing within critical consciousness is that of depression and anxiety, the admixture of which is a randomized reconfiguration of two mid-century texts that are structural support for my writing here: the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s various analyses of Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I, and Walter Benjamin’s ekphrasis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Panofsky wrote his lifelong analyses of this impressive print image’s code, its ledger of symbols, only to resolve and conclude that the image depicts the artist’s own melancholia, a deposit of that person’s occupation of history in sixteenth-century Europe. Benjamin describes his illumination, in looking at a steady face engraved by Klee, as to what truth this face sees that we cannot: history is a trash heap of terrible proportions, and we should be upset about it. (Benjamin's specific reading has become something of an anti-progress meme; Panofsky's erudition keeps him from turning into the same.) This might be seen as a mere doubling of depression to those who’ve read both (the Venn diagram is missing). Anxiety comes in their combination, in the conduct of comparative analysis, in an attempt to merge them into the coherence of argument, and to describe this coherence with vigor. This is my algorithm, useful either to a degree or in the abstract. As an algorithm, author and reader can simply claim to ignore it since it is automatically delivered and received as a singularity.
History in its sunset era is a force, like the internet, like photography, like video, externally administered on our beings, an allergy test delivered by conditions of existence and accidents of birth. Marx said something like this in one of the better manifestoes out there, even charting a means to make history.
Doubt, and the obsession with it, is the prism for this kind of writing, associated with the moderns. Doubt is the individual-to-universal refraction point for light that separates the image of the world from the world. It is a theology of the material fact, and I am one of its most radical adherents, to the detriment of my mental well-being. I once told a therapist in 2014 “doubt is a critical faculty,” as if using Kantian lingo would make her understand. I admire so much that she did not accept my claim in our session.
Photography is history.
To pare down an already spare sentence into some of its fibers and frays, the correspondence here is simply [concept is (also) concept], or perhaps [one concept = another concept]. With a priority of emphasis on the first concept, we can label photography as the subject, then the object as history, unless, that is, we want to reverse anything.
A grammatical test, one of supreme annoyance. ‘Where are my cigarettes?’ ‘Those are they, right there.’
In a way, photography’s belabored discourse of its sign function as “index” – like a footprint, like smoke, like fossils, like today’s natural catastrophes and their human causes – helps us see it as a reversible equation. One, a matrix for causes that are planned or programmed, the other a substrate for effects that linger. The equation is contingent on our everyday experiences with photography, as well as with a generic, operative sense of causality. The event of the recording of a photograph is followed by other events that activate, or even “actualize that which is reproduced,” as Benjamin writes of modern media’s bracketing of life. A proper name when uttered proximate to a photographic inscription of the same named personage (or any personage, really) becomes an act of substitution more psychologically real and sustained, that any analogy outside of photography cannot withstand comparison. Even a true believer laying hands on a holy text and announcing “This is God,” a necessary utterance of everyday faith, has to have signed their non-discursive, deictic lease over to the protestant call of “This is my Aunt Carol” when accompanied by a finger tapping an image.
Q-anon belief in the continuing life of JFK, Jr., is wholly contingent on his publicly photographed body, reproducible images of which cast him as a healthy, living white scion of privilege. A conspiracy of life first introduced not by the mysterious Q but by the following letter R, JFK, Jr., is a saintly representative for those who prostrate themselves to the idol of American exceptionalism and its confused political theology. The son of a dead president died, but his photographs are forever contained in the present tense for them (with apologies to Barthes, the photograph for the Q lot doesn’t signify “this has been” but “this is” or, even more dangerously quixotic, “this will be”; in presentism there is little distinction between this tense and its anterior or perfect variant “this will have been” since making a fantasy of the present or past into a future event is, well, desire incarnate). This present tense image becomes active and then predictive, as if Christological interpretations enlarged their frame of application to all photographed bodies. “He is missing” becomes “he will return.” This is a sharp facet of neo-feudalism’s fomenting iconic theory: the genetics of a dynastic, divine right for history’s erstwhile winners (an ignorance of history’s function as elegy for the human), a magic that is read, or captioned, on the surface of bodies cloaked in light. (The overdetermined Great Man narrative of history only muttered out the side of Hegel’s mouth, but picked up by the supremacy lot, is missing those persons, those pre-photographic heroes. Instead of Great Men, we have photographs of them.)
The photographic icons of Pope John Paul II, desaturated by years of sun in the dusty windows of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, have more in common with my Aunt Carol’s picture, or with the late JFK II’s publicity shot, than the Byzantine icons of Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. That is how history works, through the limitations on concepts and comparisons that betray our present nervous occupations and obsessions. Let it be so. However, photography as a historical concept, and the photograph as an historical object (the latter the target of theoretical interest that permits the “indexical” to flourish) may not allow for such easy substitutions in the twenty-first century. In our vulgar, marvelous lives within the visual, we can understand how we encounter such substitutions, however intellectually challenging or logically disastrous, in any and all utterances of the present, from financial software programs to VR experiences to dissertation chapters to gallery PR to social media posts to the White House press briefing room.
Thought, however, is sculpture, as Beuys put it. Artists do this sometimes. The artist I studied for the dissertation scribbled something analogous. “The artist is a daguerreotype,” written by a student painter taking notes on paper, from about 1843. Joseph Beuys, a teacher, and Charles Nègre, a student, were separated by a full century. They speak of the same world of the technical image, and let utterances spew forth in response. Both were, to use a neologism of the internet culture wars, Meme Lords. Again, Hegel knew nothing about the power of these substitutions. Photography did this irreparable thing to the expression of the idea.
Photography is history.
“The past is a foreign country” a writer claims, which compels his protagonist (and reader) toward a kind of consciousness. The ideologies of national and imperial literature indeed warp minds and souls (the cult in culture), fashioning others separated by the vicissitudes of shared knowledge and the cruelties of access, by invisible lines of space separating nations and cultures, by the powerful social managements of class, race, and sex, by the policing of bodies and the uninterrupted stream of discourse that follows those bodies around like so-many data points. When I chew on it, photography-is-history is not necessarily a photography of history. No, what matters here is reportage and commentaries, journalism’s descriptive sentences are photography’s elder sibling (the story, the post, the caption, the statement, the screed, the conspiracy theory, the communiqué). Photography was conceived with commentary; talk gave it its power. The first social commentators on urban types in new cities called their prose morsels by visual names like sketches, caricatures, physiognomies, and, for a brief time after photography’s debut, they wore the label daguerreotypes. Digestible, textual images of a new, photographable society that required descriptive typologies. “A word is an IMAGE,” says a wall facing the train tracks in Rochester, NY, where Kodak came to signify both invented word and industrialized image.
In the history of word and image, the shift from physiognomy (a junk science) to photography was nasty and, to put it mildly, patently ridiculous. Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen and Käsebier’s pigment print The Red Man attest to the uneasy mixture of both of these modes in the later nineteenth century. One is an aesthetic text (by an avant-garde anti-Semite, no less) on the limits (and strengths) of that residual pseudo-science of rapt attention to facial form that served as a vehicle to communicate the foundational myths of analyzable social, sexual, and racial difference. The other is a result of an indiscriminate regime of record whose value (showing a body as a body, not a type, not a symbol) is as illuminated by the platinum print as it is impoverished by the racist caption (it is not a title, it is a caption).
Offshoots and trunks made of this debate between physiognomic thinking and photographic inscription nonetheless continue to be felt strongly and quite miserably among the Anglo pundit class today, or, by any ethno-nationalist hack finding success across global media, who succumbs to persecution where there is none photographable nor historicizable. Their claims to a superficially open politics divert attentions away from their abhorrent beliefs in self and supremacy. They keep their prized cranial calipers in the bottom drawer of their heavy wooden desk – both heirlooms of yore. This is a nemesis, to be sure. One often feels compelled to think such reactions through, in order to combat the neo-feudal nightmares that our present dreams up for us. The instrumentalization of the body by the American race scientist (Dr. Louis Agassiz is the tragedy to Dr. Charles Murray’s farce) is also a photography, albeit with a faithless ignorance of its radical factuality – of its being a frame of fact, a type of fact, and not an illustration for a readymade interpretation of the world. Let us return to the material fact of the photographic output. Let’s return to the present utterance of photography-is-history, review the substitution of analogy, look back to recognize our own surrenders (numerous) to the formidable hair shirt of the image world. The past (our past) is a photograph, and it is only foreign to the illiterates and cynics and bigots among us.
Photography is history.
A writer can imagine an audience or an individual reader, but doubt intervenes with frequency, with shock and severity. Hence, one liberating consequence of writing for the kudzu of the thirty-first century is that doubt can be concentrated on a place that is firmly within the province of imagination, in the mode of (historical) science fiction. World-building praxis, directed to produce a history and a photography that an eyeless audience of oxygen machines and underground tactile networks can understand. Of course, this is toying with an impossibility. A writer’s reader is more often thought up from the seat of anxiety, or, if you’d like to know, from feelings of inadequacy (professionalism) or persecution (punditry). But this is a valuable tactic – that of modern self-criticism – and it is a pre-requisite for any critical mode of writing.
A frustrated reader (a type, a “someone” I invented to get mad at) may identify this as a manifesto of photographic pessimism, or just career-crisis gobbledygook. Despite its accuracy of this label, pessimism – the expression “it’s over” – is but one dimension of the title sentence. The fear is real and felt, that photography is no longer seen as itself, as photographs, as emanations of the referent, as Aunt Carol, but as manipulatable, falsifiable, computable data points in the configuration of a privatized hell of one’s own circumstances (the black box of the smart phone is the micro; the imperial dominion of global capital in the hands of the few is the macro).
As I return again from this everyday despair, I must argue for the merits of “doing away with” and “getting rid of” in the study of things one loves that are no longer the same as before. This is what the left identifies with the deployable (not deplorable) phrase “dustbin of history.” One such dustbin we should recognize is the very concept of photography itself, that homogeneous ideality, the modern version of what Gisèle Freund deemed “photography, properly speaking” demo’ed at MoMA and every museum since, with an attitude of art. To accept this photography’s death is the recognition of a sadness, a grief, a brutality, a squishy humanism in the process of decomposition. But a dead thing still needs and begs description. A fallen tree long deconstructed by woodpeckers, termites, and mushrooms is nevertheless a surface of sight and a deposit of time. Let us describe these dead things to recover their lost potential as broken cudgels that mash the human with history. A dead politics can be politicized once more.
Is it Art or is it Photography? A remainder-bin of a question that Benjamin tried to kill, only for it to become the eternal return in college classrooms and art competitions and online forums. Through institutional pedigree, the object of photography was declared dead in 1989, in celebration of 150 years in the hands of its makers in spite of its discursive heterogeneity. This came about with a new wedge in discourse, no longer of physiognomic interest on its surface. At that time, it was the handwringing redefinition of analog (or chemical) photography against digital (or coded) images. Steve Sasson is our novel Niépce. Over the twentieth century, photography became an object of scientific, artistic, historical, and theoretical inquiry. In 1989 the discourse went live, seating itself among postmodern debates in the academy and the museum, amid the “End of History” rhetoric perpetrated by bloviators and apologists of Neoliberal love. Personal computers were built, designed, marketed, and the material world changed. Photoshop debuted in 1990. Pixels are but shadows. With Vilèm Flüsser, I deploy “technical images” here to encompass the onset of the digital age and what is also the age of photography that envelopes it, intersects with it, envisions it. Photography is the technical image, the image type that governs the age of technical images. My reasons are to ensure that we speak of (not from) the present as well as of the photographic past. Another claim from the outland: we are not individuals, neither users nor programmers. As part of history, we are but photographed. We occupy history alongside our heterodox technologies of light. The postmodern condition is neither an absence of the rigors of philosophy and art, nor the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history,” as Fukuyama wrote. If this is the case, then why does history still appear as afterthought to neoliberal life? Second Nature strikes again, and we are forced to wear its hair shirt and to betray our own displeasure and alienation with the image world.
Capital may relegate old technologies, old ideas of material relations, old practices of alignment to the dustbin of history, but we cannot afford to imitate such moral crimes. The old cameras and their products are fetishes from the past, whose secret history of luminous inscriptions are essentially responsible for our own ubiquitized image world, which animates our physical environment and cuts through our consciousness.
To look at an old portrait of an ancestor in the era of hoop skirts à la Siegfried Kracauer writing about his grandmother’s carte de visite image, one also sees a cyborg heir has made it into the frame (it is the frame). The vintage family photograph is ancestor to the seemingly borderless oozy flow of utterances, images, and videos registered and/or projected through shimmering films, skins, speakers, and screens marketed by Apples, Googles, and Samsungs and made in sterile serfdom. The frame is not only the photograph, but the writing about the photograph. (I will never know what Kracauer saw, only what he wrote in 1928. His invocation of a photograph of a stern, stiffly dressed relative likely exists out there. Without accompanying image, however, I forever envision it “as photographed” which is oddly enough.) And not only the picture, its descriptive textual frame, but so many other things that can be associated to this image through history’s persistence: the ground glass of the camera in the portrait studio, the sitter’s presentation of gender and class worn on the body, the hollow signs of dynastic wealth (desks, curtains, balustrades) strewn about the studio to harken to a pre-photographic past that looks refreshingly stupid in all types of these images. Akin to a tourist trap picture of a family in an open barrel dropping from the top of Niagara Falls, the carte-de-visite portrait is a studio product to record one’s belonging to something real, something achingly visible, yet frustratingly incomprehensible for many viewing the ordinary image: a community of souls.
If a portrait of Kracauer’s grandmother, whose tones are suspended in photo-catalyzed silver molecules glued together in a veneer of egg white (albumen) can be regarded next to today’s digital selfie posted online for friends and followers, the comparison allows us to view the complex “warehousing of nature” that photography promises to its willing and unwilling adherents, as if dispassionately to no end other than an occupation of history. As Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote in 1857, contemplating her dip into the oily image world that binds her with us, “no photographic picture that ever was taken, in heaven, or earth, or in the waters underneath the earth, of any thing, or scene, however defective when measured by an artistic scale, is destitute of a special, and what we may call an historic interest.” To find such images for study, one need a warehouse inventory that, while containing and organizing history, hides a history of its own – The Archive, for those iconoclasts who still use the general term to mean the conduit force for power relations (as iconophile, I am not compelled to join).
The internet companies now house and maintain the larger warehousing-of-nature campus, but our exposure to its photographic contents in the algorithmic era are the result of programmable means to restyle information as content tailored for personal consumers, to parcel out value as a number of eyeballs, to monetize tiers of access to the very same warehouse holding humanity’s records, whose volume still grows by the technocratic commitment to accelerated automation. The move toward Second Nature in industrial capitalism might as well be reframed as a photograph of nature. What form does this next phase take if not an excessively complex coded file – a digital token – that affords a risible guarantee of property and ownership? If photography is dead property, then let us dig it up and steal it back in trespass. Let us reclaim its indiscriminate means for the production of history.
Tempting to assert here, as corollary: fuck the internet. But this is like saying fuck photography, and I cannot stomach it. I’m more tempted to say fuck video, as it carries with it the antithesis to the integrity of the statement photography is history: video is the imminent now. This is a virtuality too powerful. I am not strong enough to parse its regime of virulent immediacy and affect. I am only strong enough to invent a nemesis in it. The stillness of death is better without the unending transit of the dying on a playback loop. One sees video, but can one read it without photography? To write any history of video, I look at photographs, I describe video photographically (it is photographic while also being a linear scroll, a technology of presence in time). The doubt in photographs is legible, criticizable. The doubt in video is displaced elsewhere, and I cannot locate it in history. This limitation is either mine (my finitude) or video’s (my nemesis, my symbolic negative, a projection I maintain as I write).
Photography is history.
A guarantee, not a solution: that photography has a history, and this history has nothing but photography and whatever phenomenon it happens to record. Through the constitutive emphasis on event (event of record, event of human action), photography amasses a history that must be described as at once photography and history. Humans – those persons that occupy history – are present in every photograph like the boulders and chain-link fences and crime scene tapes and coffee mugs and ruined temples that make their way into the image. My fear, is that this pedantic screed will be seen as facile, as stupefying as some photographs can be. What I happen across daily is the abundant evidence that there are those who look at photographs, at a body in photographs, and do not recognize it as belonging to the modern world. To an uncritical mind, these bodies are the ones that do not matter, the ones we already left behind.
An aside that I’ve considered all too much. Let us put aside the dream of a history of photography (or a History of Photography) as having any semblance of separateness. It is no discipline nor should it be, only a materialist dilettantism that proves essential to scholars and gearheads alike. Amateurism is good, actually, and it does not need sanction by meritocrats and technocrats in the university to be considered as such. In fact, the narrative myths of technology, of its transition from material production to magic playthings, are better off outside the academy, since that is where they do the most horrid damage.
In the wake of our age defined by the ends of history, the livings through history, the consciousnesses of history, the ignorances of history, the disciplinary defundings of history in the name of austerity, it is crucial we divine our place in history through material facts, through the actual impressionist glue that affords a picture of society and our own instantiation as social beings. Photography provides a malleable, fictive modernity, one overshadowed by our real experiences with modernity as an unceasing muck one is forced to wade through to discover human connection. What connection can photography provide us, through its variegated fictions? Robert Frank’s repulsive image of “human mayonnaise” comes to mind, hauling the interstitial everydayness of human lives into the lights and darks of a printed book. Darshan is another, more spiritual practice of this, on a mass scale. On a small scale, the deployment of the personal photograph in all manner of protest today also enables some small resistance to video’s recycling of death, its playback record of corporeal punishment meted out to those who occupy history. The surface and materiality of social bonds, currently in exile by our stagnant circumstances, must be given a chance to return. And with that sense of return (a sense of belonging, a recognition of the power of exile and of how we humans weaponize it), we must describe the image of history all the more vociferously.
Photographs are material facts, yes, but their position in analysis is so tenuous, their products so disposable, so blippable in the age of video that they become infinitely valueless and also, the only signs we have to offer the faithful whose existence is this time, this place, made by uniform boxes and apertures that Roland Barthes understood as “clocks for seeing.”
Photographic images are evidentiary crutches, ideals of unmatched access to the light of the past that compel us never to read them, never to see them as registrations of an event that is wholly autonomous and radically contingent to a concept of time and place that is seared into the image, yet whose value is entirely dependent upon the reading of this event (the taking of a photograph) in association with other events that history foments in the past, and in our present imagination. This is a start, to come to photography not as an objective form of record defined and redefined by practices and institutions, nor as an aggressive weapon subordinate to hegemonic power and its tabulating and typifying of human bodies. No, it is an historical image, an image of history, an image not of types but of the resistant bodies that occupy history, images of us in our history as we move together, body and image, at a slowly melting pace.
Photography was the first technical image to scar the earth, and relegated the so-called Enlightenment to the province of metaphor. Those oozing bodies (sovereign selves) and minds (the sloughing excess of human activity, of text and of discourse) searching caves within caves within caves, unwittingly following Plato in one of two directions: further underground or farther outside into bare fields of illumination. Today, there is no difference between the cave and the sunlit expanse beyond. This is not to say that we, today, are the enlightened ones, bathed in the rays of universal gnosis. Rather, we are only illuminated impassively on the same photographable planet.
FIN