I recently re-read this brief text, which I wrote as an introduction to a set of essays on photography published by a small London-based press in a limited edition of 300 copies. It seems to me to say some useful things about the treachery of images—and, more generally, of any act of representation—which is why I thought it worthwhile reproducing here. For Nicolas Rothwell.
Li’l Wallet Picture
Introduction to Kyler Zeleny (ed.), Materialities. London: Velvet Cell Pocketbooks, 2016, 9-17.
Craig Campbell’s essay “Writing Light on Ashes” opens with a striking illustration of how disembodied the photographic image can become. Looking at photographs taken many years earlier during his fieldwork in South America, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was left with “the impression of a void, a lack of something the lens is inherently unable to capture.” Far more affecting were “his journals soaked in creosote, the smell of which instantly transports him to another time,” because “faint as it now is, this odor … isthe thing itself, still a real part of what I have experienced.”
Campbell takes this Proustian moment as the starting-point for a critique of the limits of any representation. However much they may resemble one another, he insists, the photographic image is not the thing itself. What Roland Barthes calls the “referent” of a photograph—the unique, unrepeatable moment in time and space that is captured in the click of a camera shutter—is always past and gone. It is not there. “Looking at photographs,” Campbell writes, “is usually about looking past the author, through the photograph and the plane of the image to the sensuously inscribed referent; looking past the materiality of the thing before you to that which once was.” The materiality of the thing before you—the thing that is there, whether it be the polished metal surface of a daguerreotype, a glass-plate negative, a strip of celluloid film, a print in a family album, a Polaroid, a reproduction in grainy newsprint or a high-gloss magazine, a slide projection on a wall, a computer screen—gets lost. All we see is the image. In Barthes’ words, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”[1]
In his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” cited here by Kyler Zeleny, Walter Benjamin numbered photography among the techniques of “disenchantment of the world” his compatriot Max Weber had identified as an inescapable part of the modern condition. From the moment that an image could be captured by the camera and infinitely reproduced, Benjamin argued, the original lost its aura. Seeing a reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” on an IKEA poster on a living room wall is not the same as standing beneath the canvas in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. The argument applies to the relation between any photograph and its referent. “Even the most perfect reproduction,” Benjamin writes, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
All photographs dematerialize their subjects, substituting a disembodied image for what once was in a definite there and then. “Overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction,” photography erodes “the authority of the object.” This partakes in a wider modern “sense of the universal equality of things” for which nothing is sacred and everything is banal. In this respect photographs manifest “in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics.” The illusory concreteness of the photographic image crystalizes the false promises of modernity. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction,” writes Benjamin, but the image is not the object whose place it has usurped.[2] As Susan Sontag puts it, “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence,” a chimerical manifestation of something that is no longer there.[3] To capture something through its image is a spectral possession that covers up a real lack—the lack Lévi-Strauss instinctively felt on looking at his fieldwork photographs.
Roland Barthes agrees that “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once; the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” But he draws a very different conclusion from Benjamin. Far from disenchanting the world, he sees photography as the source of a new enchantment in which the camera seemingly arrests the flow of time, beaming us back, again and again, to what once was. Campbell quotes a famous passage from Camera Lucida:
In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This … in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression.[4]
Because of this unique relation to a singular time and place that is irrecoverably past, aura attaches to the photographic image itself. Every photograph is a memento mori, “the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been‘).[5] Photographs have their own aura and their own pathos. They work their magic precisely through reproduction.
For this reason Barthes regards the photograph as something that resists Benjamin’s modern subordination of the particular to the general, the concrete to the abstract, the individual to the mass. Unlike drawings, paintings, or lithographs, the photograph is not a simulation of what it depicts but an object that directly carries its trace within it. However a photograph was composed, lit, shot, developed or printed, what it depicts was oncethere and then. “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent within itself … at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb,” he writes.[6] It is this connection to “the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real” that gives the photograph a unique authority as a document. So powerful is this aura that it rubs off on Gregory Crewdson’s staged surreal scenes in American small-town landscapes or Joan Fontcuberta’s faked records of fictitious geographical exhibitions.[7] They seem real because they have been photographed. The camera even spawned a hyper-illusionist movement in painting, known—without irony—as Photorealism.
As an ethnographer interested in using the camera in social scientific fieldwork, Jon Wagner is less concerned with “the evocative or expressive power of photographs” than their ability to provide “accurate recordings of culture and social life.” He rejects the idea that photographs can “speak for themselves,” stressing the importance of knowing the provenance of an image if it is to have any evidential value. While photographs may play an important role in his research, that role is illustrative. The core of his paper is a detailed comparison of two studies in which he was involved at Twin Rivers, NJ in 1972 and Thousand Oaks, CA in 2012, which respectively used film and digital technologies. He demonstrates that these “contrasts in materials and technology shaped not only the kind of photography we practiced … but also the kind of inquiry this photography could support,” with digital cameras and software allowing “new forms of photographic analysis” that “we could never have imagined in the earlier study.” Although Wagner espouses a traditional notion of documentary photography, what this fascinating exposé of the material processes of generating, classifying, analyzing and deploying photographs in fieldwork reveals is just how much images that purport to document culture and social life depend upon—and vary with—the capacities of the technological apparatus used to record and represent it.
The other contributors to this book work with found images rather than constructed archives. Kyler Zeleny ponders “a collection of 484 banal and aging Polaroids” of “another man’s life,’ which document “his friends and family in familiar poses, their birthdays, drinks, pets, laughs and private spaces.” Unlike Wagner, Zeleny believes that “This mosaic of images stands as witness to past happenings” even if “the actual site of experience and type of experience is unknown or unknowable.” Although he is ignorant of the provenance of these images, he nonetheless insists on “the importance of the physical photograph as a testament, a show of occurrence, a happening.” There is much to be gleaned, he maintains, from examining family albums as material objects that have “weight and tactility” (and smell of “damp, rotting card—the scent of the past”). His Polaroids have unglued backs, rips in the frames, cracks in the emulsion, “holes from tiny nails, surface scratches, dust, gunk (and perhaps even blood?).” Does excessive wear indicate that a photograph was “toted around as a prize object,” or that it was of insufficient importance to be taken care of? I imagine the Polaroid in Guy Clark’s song “My Favorite Picture of You” was pretty careworn.[8]
Zeleny suggests that the content of the images in a family album is often the least interesting thing about it, since they are mostly “predictable poses of predictable events”—weddings, vacations, graduations. What is not there—pain, sickness, disappointments, death—is at least as revealing.[9] This theme is taken further in Erik Kessels’ essay. The Dutch photographer relates how he set out to challenge the tyranny of “laughing faces and endless images of ‘perfection’” in family albums by interrupting “happy photos” with “family disputes, boredom, zits, dirty dishes, illness, birthdays gone wrong” and “the long stretches where we don’t record our families: the spikes and troughs of our interest in each other.” The results are hilarious (“Soon, I had a collection of black eyes and bloody noses and a new way of bonding with my children”)—as well as disturbing. “The feedback from publishers was that the topic was “too sensitive” or “not quite right for us,” revealing our “neurotic” attachment to the image in place of theobject. Family albums, writes Zeleny, are self-censoring narratives that “act as mirrors for how the family wants to be captured more often than acting as a real reflection of the family and the majority of their lived lives.”
This brings to mind Milan Kundera’s observation that “Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.”[10] If Kundera is right then history, the collective memory writ large, involves forgetting on a grand scale. The materiality of the thing before Craig Campbell was thousands of glass-plate negatives from the early days of Soviet cultural-construction in Siberia, “all prominently marked by manipulation, damage, and degradation.” Far from “capturing” the series of events we identify as history, they depict “the dense and particular wealth of ordinary life; the irreducibly deep and strange, the impossibly complex dynamism of humans, plants, animals, projects, aspirations, weather, obligations; life as it is lived, not as it is written.” Resisting the archive-based narratives—counter-narratives as well as official histories—that have disciplined and domesticated the past, bringing it closer in the same way as IKEA does Picasso’s “Guernica,” every one of these negatives is a “relentless indication of specificity,” a punctum that may blow apart the studium through which we make history legible.
Description is but another form of representation, and one that ethnographers and historians are equally prone to confuse with the thing itself. “Photographs consistently threaten meaningful narratives that they are often employed to illustrate,” writes Campbell, functioning “as documents of witness and presence [that] drive a critique of mundane particularity into fields of representation which so often efface the everyday and the ordinary.” For me, that is their singular virtue.
[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000, p. 6.
[2] All quotations from Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968, 217-252.
[3] Susan Sontag, On Photography. New York: Rosetta Books, 2005, p. 12.
[4] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4.
[5] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
[6] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5-6.
[7] See for example Gregory Crewdson, Beneath the Roses, New York: Abrams, 2008; Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, Fauna, Seville (Spain): Photovision, 1999.
[8] Available on a 2013 Dualtone album of the same title. “L’il Wallet Picture” is the title of a song on Richard Buckner’s 1997 Fontana album Devotion and Doubt.
[9] One “family album” that fractures all these conventions, not mentioned by any of the contributors to this book, is Nobuyoshi Araki’s profoundly moving Diary Sentimental Journey, Tokyo: Shinchosha Company, 1991.
[10] Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, 128-9.
Camera lucida 
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