I wonder if photography has any relationship with reality at all. Or whether this thing that emerged out of the same Gothic imagination shared by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker has not actually achieved a more far-reaching, far more ambiguous mythological function, as an agency of forgetting.
I sometimes regard this process – photography – as one of devouring
the real, of destroying it utterly, and then, from its atomised components,
reconstructing it as a trophy. Photographer as taxidermist.
For time is the most real component of reality, and, whereas memory contains
time, the photograph can only demonstrate its suspension. In any photograph
– in particular, a photograph of a person, but this applies as much to
a photograph of a rock, or a tree – the discomfiting volatility of life,
of actuality, of timelessness, is substituted with the beguiling stability
of temporal suspension – the frozen moment. There is no circumstance
in the natural world in which such a stilling of activity does not indicate
death. ‘Frozen’, in this sense, is quite inappropriately descriptive,
since there is no question of the photograph ‘thawing’, of returning
its subject to the time-continuum from which it has been extracted.
And yet the experience of scrutinising a photograph, generally speaking, is,
far from being morbid, one of delight, stimulation, inspiration, curiosity,
amusement, alarm, disgust, nostalgia, pity, awe, anger – is, in other
words, confirmatory of a sense of being human, and of being alive, not least
through the delusion of possessing something, and therefore being in control
of that something. What that something is represents a preferred, simplified
digest of reality, something more in the nature of a faire-oublier
than of an aide-memoire.
A photograph is a singularly insignificant event, containing little information,
if any at all, worth speaking of. Those events – and they are legion
– which defy verbal description are no better served by a picture, much
as the prevailing anti-literate, pro-imagistic orthodoxy would persuade us
otherwise. The cliché of the logoclasts – that one picture is
worth a thousand words – is, it ought to be recalled, nothing more than
a contentious joke (a quintessentially Chinese joke) aimed at the calligrapher
– remember that a Chinese word is a picture – who spent a very long
time indeed in constructing a thousand words.
And yet…..and yet…..