This
is a key issue concerning any theory of photography or film. I think Flusser is
making a very strong point in this excerpt, one that is mostly overlooked in
theories on photography. As he explains, consequently, 'He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots
photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera. These
instructions grow more and more simple as more and more technology is applied
to the apparatus. This is the essence of democracy in a post-industrial age.
And this is why the snapshooter is unable to decipher his photographs: he takes
them to be images of the world which have been produced automatically. This leads
to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are
capable of deciphering them. No one believes that it is necessary to decipher
photographs because everyone believes that he knows how to make them.' (1)
In
my opinion, this is one of the major reasons why photography and film remain
such opaque media: it seems as though everyone who works with these media is
able to understand what is happening; apparently, what exactly a photograph or
a film is, is all too clear, and therefore it is difficult to have a critical
attitude towards these media. It is because of this that these media often are
regarded as superficial. Yet, again I agree with Vilém Flusser, it is important
to decipher photographs or films because, as Flusser puts it: 'one task of a critical attitude towards
culture is to analyse the restructuring of experience, knowledge, evaluation
and action in order to see how it has become composed of a mosaic of clear and
distinct elements, as well as to seek and find these elements in every
phenomenon of our culture. Such a critique of culture will show that the
invention of photography is the point in history at which all cultural
phenomena begin to substitute their linear structure of gliding along for the
staccato structure of programmed combining.(...) Such a critique of culture
will show that the camera is the ancestor of all apparatus which now lay claim
to making our existence automatic, everything from our external gestures to our
internal thoughts, sentiments and desires.'
(2)
And
to add to this, the role that photographs and films play in our society can be
described as being of major importance. Not only are they easily available to
everyone, but they also play an important role in every part of society. A
critical analysis of photography and film is therefore anything but
superfluous.
To
quote Flusser again: 'It is difficult to
decipher technical images, because they are apparently in no need of being
deciphered. Their meaning seems to impress itself automatically on their
surfaces, as in fingerprints where the meaning (the finger) is the cause and
the image (the print) is the effect. It seems as if the world signified in
technical images is their cause, and
as if they themselves were the last link in a causal chain connecting them
without interruption to their meaning: the world reflects sunlight and other
forms of light which are then captured on sensitive surfaces - thanks to
optical, chemical and mechanical processes - and the result is a technical
image. It thus seems as if they exist on the same level of reality as their
meaning. It seems that what one is seeing while looking at technical images are
not symbols in need of deciphering, but symptoms of the world they mean, and
that we can see this meaning through them however indirectly. This apparent
non-symbolic, 'objective' character of technical images has the observer
looking at them as if they were not really images, but a kind of window on the
world. He trusts them as he trusts his own eyes. If he criticizes them at all,
he does so not as a critique of image, but as a critique of vision; his
critique is not concerned with their production, but with the world 'as seen
through' them. Such a lack of critical attitude towards technical images is
dangerous in a situation where these images are about to displace texts. The
uncritical attitude is dangerous because the 'objectivity' of the technical
image is a delusion. They are in truth, images, and as such they are
symbolical.' (3)
This
is a point that can be illustrated in many different ways. First, I would like
to reiterate Flusser's ideas (in the above-mentioned excerpt), this time in the
words of a filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovski. In The
Sealed Source he states, 'A
'paradoxical experience' is caused in the perceiver of a photographic image.
Let us compare this with painting. There always exists a certain distance
between the painting and the perceiver, a conditioned distance that presupposes
a certain respect for the depicted and that makes him realize that the painting
is an - understandable or not understandable - image of reality. No one will
think of identifying the painting with life itself, even though one can say
there is a 'resemblance' between the representation and reality as such. Only
with film (- and photography - M.K.) the perceiver never loses the feeling that
everything that is seen on the screen (- photograph - M.K.), has really
happened.' (4)
To
show the difference between the attitude of the perceiver of a film or a
photograph with the attitude of the perceiver of a painting, I want to quote
Nelson Goodman from his book Languages of
Art. Here he writes, 'Seeing a
picture as a picture precludes mistaking it for anything else. In looking at
the most realistic picture, I seldom suppose that I can literally reach into
the distance, slice the tomato or beat the drum. Rather, I recognize the images
as signs that work instantly and unequivocally without being confused with what
they denote.' (5)
Now
this is valid for painting as well as for film and photography, and yet there
is undoubtedly something paradoxical in the experience of these images because,
in a strange way, the fact is that while you cannot literally reach into the
film or photograph, still the experience you have is very authentic. According
to Tarkovski, this is so because the perceiver 'Often judges a film or a photograph according to the laws of 'real
life' and with it he replaces, unknowingly, the laws that the author used while
making the film, by the laws that have shaped his everyday life-experience. And
this is what causes the 'paradoxical experience' in the perceiver.'
What
Tarkovski describes as 'the laws that the
author used while making the film' can be called 'the pictorial mode ', and
this is present also within photography. So to consider that film or
photography are merely an automatic, passive registration of 'the world out
there' is, in my opinion, a misconception.
This
idea is affirmed by Svetlana Alpers in The
Art of Describing, in which she writes, ‘ The ultimate origins of photography do not lie in the fifteenth-century
invention of perspective, but rather in the alternative mode of the north. Seen
this way, one might say that the photographic image, the Dutch art of
describing and Impressionist painting are alle examples of a constant artistic
option in the art of the West. It is an option or a pictorial mode that has
been taken up at different times for different reasons.’ (6)
Even
so, the question remains as to why, with photography and film, it is so hard to
see that they are symbolic images. What Goodman has to say about 'realism' is
interesting in this context. He writes, 'Practice
has rendered the symbols so transparent that we are not aware of any effort, of
any alternatives or of making any interpretation at all. Just here lies the
touchstone of realism: not in quantity of information but in how easily it
issues. And this depends upon how stereotyped the mode of representation is,
upon how commonplace the labels and their uses have become. Realism is
relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given
culture or person at a given time. Newer or older or alien systems are
accounted artificial or unskilled. This relativity is obscured by our tendency
to omit specifying a frame of reference when it is our own.' (7)
In Languages of Art, Goodman quotes
Melville J. Herskovits description of
the attitude of a culture ignorant of photography, towards a photograph; he
writes, 'More than one ethnographer has
reported the experience of showing a clear photograph of a house, a person, a
familiar landscape to people living in a culture innocent of any knowledge of
photography, and to have the picture held at all possible angles, or turned
over for an inspection of its blank back, as the native tried to interpret this
meaningless arrangement of varying shades of grey on a piece of paper. For even
the clearest photograph is only an interpretation of what the camera sees.'
Still,
for some people this is not sufficient evidence for considering that
photography (and also film) is of a symbolic nature. They claim that a
photograph (or film) is different from other images because it is always
attached to its referent. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (8) , is especially convinced of this. He states, ‘A specific photograph, in effect, is never
distinguished from its referent ( from what it represents ), or at least it is
not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent ( as is the case
for every other image, encumbered - from the start, and because of its status -
by the way in which the object is simulated )(..) By nature, the photograph
(..) has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and
intractably a pipe. It is as if the photograph always carries its referent with
itself. (..) The photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose
two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both (..)
I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real
thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which
has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs
which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often
‘chimeras’.
Contrary to these imitations, in photography I can
never deny that the thing has been there.
In
short, Barthes claims that, whatever the photograph shows and in whatever way
it was taken, it is always invisible: it is not the photograph that one sees,
but rather the referent. This again shows the problematic relation between the
photographic medium and reality. In this respect I do not agree with Barthes
because, to my opinion, he does not focus on what is specific to the
photographic medium (or film), but rather he compares the photographic image to
the traditional image. He thus works with the conditions that are valid for
traditional images, but those are not necessarily exactly the same for
technical images. When comparing the photographic image to the traditional
image, it may seem at a glance that the referent is more directly linked to the
photograph/ film. However, in a photograph or film this link to the referent
can be very indirect (similar to the traditional image), because perceiving a
photograph or a film requires an ‘attitude of perceiving’ that is based on the
conditions of a technical image. Flusser writes: ‘photographs are complexes of symbols which signify abstract concepts,
they are discourses which have been transcoded into symbolic situations.’ So
in a way what Barthes says about the referents of discourse (chimeras) seems to
be similar to the referents of the photograph or the film. To explain this
further, I would like to quote Flusser again: 'Early photographs were black/white, unmistakably attesting to their
origins as being abstracted from some theory of optics. With the progress of
another theory, chemistry, color photographs became feasible. It appears as if
early photographs had extracted color from the world, and that subsequent
photographs were able to re-introduce color to the world. In fact, however,
color photographs are at least as theoretical as black/white photographs. For
example, the 'green' of a photographed lawn is an image of the concept 'green'
as it occurs in some theory of chemistry (say, additive as opposed to
subtractive color). The camera (or the film fed into it) is programmed to
translate the concept 'green' into an indirect and roundabout connection
between the photographic 'green' and the green of the lawn 'out there', because
the chemical concept of green is based on some image of the world 'out there'.
There is, however, a very complex series of successive coding processes between
the photographic 'green' and the green 'out there', a series which is more
complex than the one linking the photographic grey of a black/white photograph
with the green of the real lawn. The lawn photographed in color is a more
abstract image than the lawn photographed in black/white. Color photographs are
on a higher level of abstraction than black/white photographs. Black/white
photographs are more concrete, and in this sense are 'truer' than color
photographs. Or the other way around: the 'truer' the colors of a photograph
become the more mendacious they become. They hide their origins as theory more
effectively. What obtains for the colors of a photograph also obtains for every
other element in the image. They are, without exception, transcoded concepts
pretending to have impressed themselves automatically on surfaces, concepts
pretending to come from the world 'out there'. It is precisely this pretence we
must decipher if we are to discover the true meaning of photographs, that they
are programmed concepts, or if we are to show that photographs are complexes of
symbols which signify abstract concepts, that they are discourses which have
been transcoded into symbolic situations.'
(9)
Based
on my own experience as a maker of technical images, I would agree with
Flusser's arguments. This is precisely what I experience while working with
these media - that I am dealing with mendacious media that pretend to come from
the world 'out there' and yet they consist of very complex series of successive
coding processes. As Flusser continues, 'In
order to be able to select the camera categories as they are inscribed in the
camera itself, the photographer must 'regulate' the camera. (...) There can be
no such thing as a naive, unconceived act of photographing. A photograph is an
image of concepts. (...)
To 'make photographs' in the sense that is meant here,
is to search for undiscovered possibilities within the camera program - in
other words, to search for images as yet unseen, for informative, improbable
images. Basically, the photographer - meant here in the strictest sense - tries
to establish situations such as have never existed before. He does not look for
these situations in the world 'out there': that world is nothing but a pretext
for the establishment of such 'improbable situations'. The photographer looks
for them not 'out there', but within the virtualities contained in the camera
program. In this sense, the traditional distinction between realism and
idealism is overcome by photography: it is not the world 'out there' which is
'real', nor is it the concepts 'in here' within the apparatus program; what is
'real' is the image as it comes about. The world and the apparatus program are
but premises for the realization of photographs, they are virtualities to be
realized in the photograph.'
To
go back to Barthes' argument that the photograph cannot be detached from its
referent: on the basis of the above-mentioned arguments of Flusser the referent
turns out to be merely a premise. And therefore the connection to the referent
is indirect, not direct, although it might seem so. According to this,
photography (and also film) is a coded process and a pictorial mode: the
photographer searches, for the undiscovered possibilities in order to arrive at
unseen images. From this point of view the act of photographing or filmmaking
is closely related to other pictorial modes or ways of expressing.
On
this basis, I consider what Lévi-Strauss wrote about painting to be also valid
for photography and film: (..)’ The
painter is always mid-way between design and anecdote, and his genius consists
in uniting internal and external knowledge, a ‘being’ with a ‘becoming’. (..)
The process of artistic creation therefore consists in trying to communicate (
within the immutable framework of a mutual confrontation of structure and
accident ) either with the model or with the materials or with the future user
as the case may be, according to which of these the artist particularly looks
to for his directions while he is at work. (..) On a different plane we
therefore find once more this dialogue with the materials and means of
execution by which we defined ‘bricolage’. The essential problem for the
philosophy of art is to know whether the artist regards them as interlocutors
or not. (..) No form of art is,
however, worthy of the name if it allows itself to
come entirely under the sway of extraneous contingencies, whether of occasion
or purpose. If it did so it would rate as an icon ( supplementary to the model
) or as an implement ( complementary with the material worked ). Even the most
professional art succeeds in moving us only if it arrests in time this
dissipation of the contingent in favour of the pretext and incorporates it in
the work, thereby investing it with the dignity of being an object in its own
right.’(10)
In
my opinion, this clearly shows how the traditional media are in fact closely
related to the technical, in the sense that they both have to look for
undiscovered possibilities in order to arrive at unseen images which succeed in
intensifying reality without making conceptual simplifications or deductive
generalizations. As Ernst Cassirer wrote in An
Essay on Man:
'Language and science are abbreviations of reality; art
is an intensification of reality. Language and science depend upon one and the
same process of abstraction; art may be described as a continuous process of
concretion. In our scientific description of a given object we begin with a
great number of observations which at first sight are only a loose conglomerate
of detached facts. But the further we proceed the more these individual
phenomena tend to assume a definite shape and become a systematic whole. What
science is searching for is some central features of a given object from which
all its particular qualities may be derived. If a chemist knows the atomic
number of a certain element he possesses a clue to a full insight into its
structure and constitution. From this number he may deduce all the characteristic
properties of the element. But art does not admit of this sort of conceptual
simplification and deductive generalization. It does not inquire into the
qualities or causes of things; it gives us the intuition of the form of things.
But this is too by no means a mere repetition of something we had before. It is
a true and genuine discovery. (...) We may have met with an object of our
ordinary sense experience a thousand times without having ever 'seen' its form.
We are still at a loss if asked to describe
not its physical qualities or effects but its pure visual shape and structure.
It is art that fills this gap. (...) The form of things as they are described
in scientific concepts tend more and more to become formulae. These formulae
are of a surprising simplicity. A single formula seems to comprise and explain
the whole structure of our material universe. It would seem as though reality
were not only accessible to our scientific abstractions but exhaustible by
them. But as soon as we approach the field of art this proves to be an
illusion. For the aspects of things are innumerable, and they vary from one
moment to another. Any attempt to comprehend them within a simple formula would
be in vain. (...) The artist does not portray or copy a certain empirical
object, what he gives us is the individual and momentary physiognomy of the
object. He wishes to express the atmosphere of things. Our aesthetic perception
exhibits a much greater variety and belongs to a much more complex order than
our ordinary sense perception. In sense perception we are content with
apprehending the common and constant features of the objects of our
surroundings. Aesthetic experience is incomparably richer. It is pregnant with
infinite possibilities which remain unrealized in ordinary sense experience. In
the work of the artist these possibilities become actualities.' (11)
In
conclusion, to say that the photograph (or the film) is equal to its referent
and therefore it is the referent that one sees and not the photograph (or the
film), is a common mistake concerning notions of photography (and film).
Through practice the symbols have become so transparent that we are hardly
aware of any effort, of alternatives, or of making any interpretation at all.
Still, although it seems with photography and film that there is a direct link
to reality/ the referent as such, as in cause and effect, in truth these media
consist of very complex series of successive coding processes. According to
this there can be no such thing as a naive, unconceived act of photographing or
filming. The uncritical attitude towards technical images is dangerous in a
society where they play such a major and important role; dangerous because the
'objectivity' of the technical image is a delusion. They are in truth images,
and as such they are symbolic. Anyone who is unaware of the coding processes
within photography or film and is therefore unable to decipher them, is in a
way an illiterate, and as such is only reproducing commonplace camera memories.
text and photographs:
Marie-Thérèse van de Kamp ©
Quotes
1.
Vilém
Flusser: 'Towards a Philosophy of Photography', 'European
Photography', 1984; pp. 41, 42,43
2. id. p. 51.
3. id. p. 10.
4. Andrei Tarkovski: The
Sealed Source (Dutch transl. 'de Verzegelde Bron'), Historische
Uitgeverij Groningen 1984; p. 173.
5. Nelson Goodman: Languages
of Art; Hackett Publishing Company, inc, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1976, pp.
34, 35.
6. Svetlana Alpers: The
Art of Describing. London: Murray, 1983, pp.244
7. Nelson Goodman: id. pp. 35,
36.
8. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida, Vintage edition,
1993, pp. 5, 76..
9. Vilém Flusser: id. p. 30.
10. Claude Levi Strauss: The Savage Mind . Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd., London 1966, pp.
25, 27.
11. Ernst Cassirer: An
Essay on Man; Yale University Press 1977; pp. 148, 149, 150.
