Frame 8

The Photograph—Fact, Facsimile or Remnant?

When you take a photograph, how do you use it? Once we aim the camera, push the button and look at the screen to see if we are satisfied with the image, how do we engage with it? I’m interested not in a premeditated image, but in one that is taken on an impulse, or one that records a moment at an ongoing event (wedding or party or the like).

What meaning does the image hold for us? Is it a fact of our life, a memento that jogs a memory of a happy time or amazing circumstance, or a souvenir of our need to record? In our momentary desire to capture that, which is before us, does the activity of picture taking remove us (emotionally if not intellectually) from the very thing that we are attempting to record?

  

This leads us to a thought that Roland Barthes put so eloquently concerning the nature of the photograph as mere facsimile. The representation on the surface of the paper is not the event, the person or place. The photo can only function as a reminder. Hence, the photograph lacks the electricity of the experience that made us want to take it. It becomes a translation of that moment, whether of the object photographed, or the feeling that we experienced at the time we took it. It occupies a type of phantom zone in our life—a thing, but not the thing.

  

If this is so, then is a photograph only a remnant of memory? Whose memory? What is your relationship to the object seen on that piece of paper or on that digital screen? If the image doesn’t relate to your life, do you care about what you see?

I’ve looked at many images shown to me via a cell phone camera, flitting from one tiny picture to the next with the flick of a thumb. It’s a new technologies version of the interminable slide show of a friend’s vacation. Roman villas, Adriatic sunsets and Greek columns that are meaningful in some way to the picture taker, but are so tedious to us, their captive audience. We can understand what we see as the images scroll by, but we have no real relationship to them. They are bereft of importance and meaning, because they aren’t our memory.

  

We come around, full circle, to that vexing question about what the photographs recorded on all those memory cards mean. How do they relate to the experience that made us want to memorialize them? What do they mean to the people we show them too? And ultimately, what do they record—a fact, a facsimile or a remnant?

Tell me what you think

Frame 8A

Addendum:

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang publishers, New York, 1981.

One by Ken Ohara reprinted in 1997 by Taschen press and is unfortunately out of print, but find a copy if you can. Ohara's work is about identity and the cover of One is the picture opposite the picture of the camera. Ohara's work is great and you should take a look at it on the web. Unfortunately, it appears that at this time he doesn't have a web site, but there are a lot of images and information on him.

Frame 7

Who is This, Anyway?

What goes on in your imagination when you look at an anonymous photograph? Neither you nor I know who is in this picture, but because it’s an image of a woman placed in an interesting background we may begin to conjure up a story about her.

What does this photograph say to us? Although we obviously have no connection to her, the story behind why and where it was taken may pique our curiosity. We may flip the picture over, hoping for a note or name on the back. We know she existed. She was at this place, but why and with whom? This is one of photography’s great gifts—the image on a photograph is or was a representation of reality. (I’m talking about un-manipulated photography in this instance.)

Other forms of artistic representation, paintings, for example, are a reconstruction of the real. A painting results from an interpretive process that deals with the interaction of mind, hand, paint and canvas that is beyond the casual act of recording a person or place. When we look at a painting we also look at technique, at surface.

But a photograph’s only requirement is for us to point a camera and push a button. What is left to the viewer is to recognize what is in the picture. The narrative of a photograph overwhelms technique and surface. Photos invite us to make up our own story. We think of them fundamentally as a documentary, recording device/activity. The photograph encourages us to surmise.

This is true even if we have taken the image ourselves. A photograph is a representation of an occurrence; it is by its nature an artifact of the past. We may or may not remember the circumstances of a particular image: who was outside the frame of this picture; when precisely the button was pressed; we may not know some of the people in the photograph; what was going on at the time; why that person had a specific expression.

Our false memories of that moment may fill in some of the answers, making us unsure if what we remember is right. Time is erosive. All that we may know is that we took the photo, or did we give the camera to someone else to take a few pictures at the party, hmmm…? 

Yet we can still construct a satisfying story that suits our vague memory of the why, how and when, can’t we? We have the evidence, this photo. We know we were there. We know we took some of the photos. Though which ones (a pertinent question, especially if we had been drinking) did we take? The story we think we remember becomes our representation of the “facts,” which is a representation of the image in the photograph, which itself is a representation of a moment in time—which are all cut loose from the moorings of reality. But, we have this photo. What does it mean? What story can we concoct? Is it true? In the end, does it matter?

Tell me what you think

Frame 7A

Addendum:

Scan and place anonymous photos of people, events. Concoct a story about the image.