Piles of Reality
With 100.8 billion and counting, the dead will always outnumber the living. With 12.4 trillion and accumulating, the number of photographs outnumber the dead.
Look around you and take count of how many photographs are staring back at you. There isn’t a wall (even ceiling) in the metropolis that doesn’t have the image of some person or object plastered all over it. And most of these pictorial plots of land, usually reserved for advertising, are rarely static. Next week the photograph of some other person next to some other object to be advertised will appear on the platforms of the London Underground or any other flat vertical surface across the planet.
But this isn’t an attack on marketing, an endeavour which has become humanity’s magnum opus. Instead, it’s a question of how much dismemberment can reality (whatever that even means anymore) endure. Imagine a large pile of bricks. Your job is to remove bricks from the pile one at a time and make a new heap next to it. At what point does the first pile stop being a pile and the second one starts? Here the pile of bricks is reality and the act of moving them is photography.
The notion of a single all-encompassing reality seems like fool’s talk by now. Multiverse theories aside, there exist as many realities as there are atoms in a universe. To experience any of these realities you need their point of view because existence is simultaneously something to be experienced and the way to experience it. This is where the camera trips on its laces and falls flat on its face. It doesn’t subscribe to the polyvalence of being but believes in a collapsed and homogenous flatness. Any subjectivity in the image is imparted by the photographer. To the dead eye of the camera, the entire universe is nothing but material.
Each time a photograph is taken, it may seem like reality is being reproduced, but it’s actually being shifted as well. Less so shifting the subject into the photograph than displacing its validation into the picture. The ferocious accumulation of photographs is essentially trying to fit two universes in the space of one. And once critical mass is reached – which happened with the public adoption of the internet – that’s when the shifting happens. Though the “real” and the photograph can co-exist, they can’t both receive validation. Hence a frantic pick-n-mix ensues where certain realities are deemed valid while in other cases the photograph trumps the real thing. All matter is increasingly at the mercy of the photograph not only because we use images to refer to our experiences, but we also use them to comprehend that which surrounds us. Doesn’t the popular saying go “pics or it didn’t happen”?
All infinities are endless, but some infinities seem to be bigger than others. Photography constitutes one of those bigger infinities because it creates space in and out of nothing. I’m not talking about the physical photograph made out of atoms, but the representationthat it holds. So when you take a photograph of a house, the picture isn’t just a representation of the physical house but also represents that house being built out of a pile of bricks in the bendy and boundless metaphysical real estate of photographic reality. Representation is a fickle and tricky thing because it isn’t just a reflection of itself but of everything adjacent to it. To represent something is to place it in a convoluted totality of its appearance. In which case the photograph of that house I was talking about won’t simply erect one house, like-for-like, in the photographic liminal, it will excavate the plots of land and prepare huge piles of bricks which will be reserved for the construction of all other possible houses that look like it.
Through the camera, we’ve built a photographic civilisation which outgrows and outnumbers our exploits on this planet. It’s only a matter of time before our frequent visits to the world of images turn into permanent habitation. And when all of humanity is eventually wiped out, we’d be leaving behind not one, but two cold, dark, and empty worlds.
