symbolreader

Camera obscura, image via Wikipedia

It is easy to romanticize the dawn of photography (literally “drawing with light”). I am not pretending I understand the technical intricacies of the entire process but I am drawn to the alchemical feel and terminology of the first photographic experiments. Apparently, it all started with “sun drawing” or heliography. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first permanent photograph of the image in a camera obscura (“dark room”). Niepce partnered with Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype – a process which involved fixing images on a silver-plated copper sheet. The next phase in the history of photography was the calotype (“beautiful image”) invented by Henry Fox Talbot. This process utilized a silver salt solution, which made paper sensitive to light. As a result, multiple positive prints were able to be reproduced from negatives. But maybe it all started much earlier – with the Neolithic cave painters, who may have observed the camera obscura effects on cave walls. At least, this is a controversial theory put forward by one Matt Gatton (http://www.paleo-camera.com/ ). Whatever the truth may be, it can be safely asserted that the earliest uses of camera obscura always involved the interplay of darkness and light. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle observed how during a partial eclipse of the sun light that was passing through a small opening in a dark chamber produced an image on the opposite wall. Right until the 16^th century astronomers had only this technique to make solar observations without causing damage to their eyes. In his essay “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,” Roland Barthes wrote: “It seems that in Latin ‘photograph’ would be said ‘imago luci opera expressa’; which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted,’ ‘mounted,’ ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light.”

Subject worth of daguerreotype

As every art form, also photography has offered us a new way of glimpsing the eternal. However, already at its advent there appeared critics who saw its dangers. Notably, Charles Baudeleaire, a prominent objector to middle-class values, did not welcome photography. He did not mince words in the review of the Salon of 1859: “From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A mad­ness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers. Strange abominations took form.” Exactly same words could be used to describe the aggressive predominance of narcissistic images flooding us from every direction nowadays. Susan Sontag, in a brilliant essay “On Photography,” argues that nowadays photography is used by most people as “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Family albums achieve the same purpose as portraits of royalty in times of yore: they are there to immortalize, to build a monument, to assert one’s public stance. Yet, much as they want to preserve the moment, photographs deal with Death, says Sontag:

 “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. … All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another’s person (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, …, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor – all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”

Christmas Morning, c.1933, Harlem New York. photo by James Van Der Zee

Barthes goes further by claiming that “however ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it… Photography is a kind of primitive theater, …, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”

Noh masks, via https://whatwhileweslept.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/onward-to-oxford/

Sontag compares the camera to the gun, taking a picture to sublimated murder. How so? The camera trespasses, violates, intrudes, presumes, exploits and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate(s).” It turns people into “objects that can be symbolically possessed.” The same can often be said of tourist photography, which lays claim to a foreign space and attests that good time was had indeed:

 “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. … The method especially appeals to people handicapped by ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using the camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun.”

Barthes wonders whether a photographic image can ever capture the profound self. He concludes that “: ‘myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and ‘myself’ which is light,  divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, ‘myself’ doesn’t hold still, giggling in my jar…” Soulful photography, the one that captures the profound and ineffable, is extremely rare but possible.

A series of portraits of an artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by James Van Der Zee

A camera, as Sontag put it, can be “the arm of consciousness.” We are anaesthetized nowadays by a proliferation of images showing both beauty (or just prettiness) and atrocity. Can we still be pierced or arrested by a photograph, though? Can it touch us “like the delayed rays of a star?” asks Barthes, and writes further:

 “Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka;· and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’”

The laughing Kafka

It is the invisible that makes photography into art, what we may see when we close our eyes. The last word belongs to Barthes:

“Always the Photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence reaches down into the religious substance out of which I am molded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos [made without hands]?”