Photography
The modern indifference on the part of many to God can be traced as much to a device such as the camera as to any spiritual sloughs. To seize the perishable moment, the available yet impossible essence of transience, what we live in yet cannot hold and to transform that time into an image, is both god-like and mundane. The furniture of physicality in all its infinite dimensions—a coffee cup, the Grand Canyon, a naked woman—does little more than reassure and sustain the busy head capturing that physicality. Every homage to the world at-large is, at the same time, a homage to the self that holds the camera. This is not so much bad faith as no faith at all. People have a power they never previously had.
The camera (now ubiquitous thanks to the i-phone) offers the chance to make a moment exist for something like forever and thus turn time into framed space, the invisible into the visible. As in legends, this power comes with a price: those endless images, as they offer access to a putative permanence, create a barrier between the individual and what Geoff Dyer has called “the ongoing moment.” Life becomes a photo-op. The camera becomes an instrument of ontological verification: “I exist and this world outside of me also exists.” The pagan response to the menacing Word is the comforting idol of the Image. Words must always wrangle with imagination, the letters and their sounds summoning up some often connotative entity, but images seem irrefutable.
One of the modern demons is self-consciousness, the feeling that one is neither necessary nor sensible. As the camera offers for our inspection the dross of moments, it soothes this unsettled feeling. There is no need to make a metaphysical fuss. All the picnickers are smiling before returning to their hot dogs and potato salad. As it dangles around a person’s neck or resides in a pocket or purse, the camera is a tell-tale sign: mind at any moment may seize matter. As the camera may reside in a phone/computer, it becomes an accessory on the level of a flashlight or a pocket knife, an aid of sorts a person carries around, something common and utilitarian.
As an art, photography has the power to enter moments and subject them to thought. It’s literally a heady conceit. The plainspoken quality of photos, their unabashed straightforwardness, masks the complexity of their tasks. There is, to cite only one aspect, the conflict between the endurance of material realities—buildings, rocks, cars—and the transience of human beings living their perplexed lives. Whenever a person and a material reality are situated together some collision is occurring, which may be mild as an innocuous backdrop for a portrait photo or tense as a jumble of people crossing a city street. Always a question presents itself: What does one thing have to do with another? The people crossing the street may not know one another but in the photo they have a new relationship—being together in the photo. Then there is the street, the cars, surrounding buildings, pigeons, trash cans. Casual drama is everywhere. The riot of juxtaposition never stops.
However quickly the photo is taken (and many photographers shoot rapidly) photography remains a meditative art. “Here is the world. What does your little capturing device have to say about it?”: an overwhelming question to which the great photographers answered with heroic pluck. Practitioners such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Vivian Meier, to name a famous few, were among the truest philosophers of modern times. They understood how pitiful and peremptory a photo is beside the enormity of life but did not bow down. They accepted that a photo is an act of persuasion and a photographer, as an arranger and composer, is a rhetorician. The immediacy of a photograph is not steeped in sincerity, however much feeling the photographer may have for the subject. The machine does what it does and creates more distance than it bridges. The distance is melancholy but necessary. The photo travesties solidity.
Native Americans who consider cameras to be spirit thieves may seem quaint, but to my mind tribes such as the Hopis show a profound sense of how fragile human distinction is. To make a replica is to diminish the original, which becomes one of many. The welter of circumstance and history that accounts for anything being here is reduced to its peremptory, visual presence. The photo may seem an acceptable substitute before which actuality vanishes. Matter is overvalued and soul, that precious, animating intangible, is discounted. If you need a machine to insist that you exist, you are in trouble.
As images proliferated in modern times, it became easy to take them for granted. One can only holler “Look” so many times before others stop looking. We see, as we move about within our days, but what we notice is different from what we see. The clamor of competing images that accompany the text in most magazines or that greet the user of the Internet is relentless. Advertising uses such images as a convenient shorthand, but we may forget what the longhand was, that braid of conflicting feelings and thoughts that signals most human occasions. “You want to buy me” is a very simple message. When such images become a realm in their own right, a drastic reduction has occurred. Creators of propaganda in modern times understood this well. It hasn’t been hard, for instance, to sell wars.
Modern times have created more of just about everything. Can reality be cheapened? A great photo manages to hone reality until there is some essence that never would have revealed itself. The photo need not be spare but the essence remains. Most photos have no intention of discovering such essences. They simply call attention to whatever is at hand. Instantly, they evoke memory. Whenever a photo vanishes, I can imagine that time sighs—one less testimony in the docket of eternity.
“Instantly they evoke memories”—another aspect of photography—and I know it’s not the subject of this essay—is the “deferred,” as opposed to “instant”—power of the photograph to evoke memories, or even, in a way, create them. For instance, a photo of a largely forgotten time or place or ancestor. And then, some of the characteristics of photography as captured in this essay come (emotionally) into play. Come to think of it, maybe that, too, is a subterranean subject of this essay.