Traumatised Cameras
“I know that of all the gory and heart-wrenching scenes I had already photographed that morning, this dead baby was the image that would show the insane cruelty of the attack… But the light sucked." - Greg Marinovich
Nothing really captures, with as much incongruity and brevity, the deadpan and hellishly perverse humour which comes from violence arrested before the camera and sentenced to stay forever on death row in the photograph quite like Greg Marinovich’s recollection of coming across a dead baby with a blade plunged through its skull in South Africa. This was during a particularly violent period (1990-94) in the country when supporters of the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party ran amok in the streets, armed with whatever weapons they could get their excited hands on, and clashed head-on.
“What!? Dead babies? On camera? Outrageous! What otherworldly sick rubbish are you talking about?” is what any half-sane person would be thinking in their erratic head right about now. But let me assure you that the spectrum of grotesque violence witnessed by the camera goes a lot further than stills of deceased infants. I’ll also assure you that photography and violence have been in bed together since long before the tumultuous conflict in South Africa or any other instance of modern warfare for that matter. Well… when one takes into account that violence has been an integral and inextricable part of photography since its rapid and near spontaneous invention in 1839, these two entities become less like passionate lovers in bed and more so conjoined twins attached by their heads.
As obvious as it may sound, those violent tendencies of image-making which your humble narrator refers to aren’t the early uses of the camera in a medical setting to catalogue and study our insides. Rather, this is something inherent in the nature of photography itself which can’t - and shouldn’t be - removed lest the medium dematerialises instantly.
But before we venture any further, let's ensure we’re all on the same page and no one is fuzzy on the mechanics of the ramble you’re about to foolishly venture into. What - from the tone and vocabulary of this techno-philosophical downward spiral – may sound like an excoriation of photography, isn’t. Those extra-natural processes of image-making are violent just like a wild animal trying to survive is violent. It is in their nature to be so, but that certainly doesn’t make them evil. Where to a starving shark anything which bleeds is food, the voracious camera is far less picky. To it everything is food. So, words like “violence”, which can go and spawn such terms as “aggression”, “force”, “brutality”, “savagery”, or “assault” shouldn’t be construed as “evil”, “cruelty”, “wrong”, “villainous” or “nefarious”. The rest is fair game.
The common saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. This has applied perfectly to the camera, like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be slotted into place, because every succeeding iteration of the camera isn’t an attempt to fix any fundamental flaw in its design but to enthusiastically leap towards naked vision seen through the eyes. There is a clear ascendancy through the history of the camera where every year the new supers the old, steady developments through film cameras until they reached their apotheosis only to be supplanted by digital (but only half so because film still retains a foothold over its own aesthetic validity), after which it was an unstoppable climb up the infinite ladder of frame rate and resolution until what the photographer sees out of the touchscreen of their high-end camera is the exact reproduction of their vision.
Nothing is being fixed here, only inexorably improved.
And I sense the day vision and photograph become identical twins isn’t far, then truer confusion would be found nowhere other than the simple act of opening one’s eyes. What then? Does the image become the overseer of sight? Will we pass the torch of vision onto the numerous pixels which extend further than the respectable limits of our eyes? The process is already underway because through photography, that which expertly eludes our naked eyes suddenly becomes trapped in the corner with its hands over its genitals in shame and humiliation.
The homo sapiens as a species reached a point long ago where their ambitions far exceed their physical capabilities. Everything since has been a desperate yet dexterous venture to overcome our biological limitations by passing our perception onto our creation. Our new and omnipotent eyes have imaged the tiniest particle to the largest structures of this here cosmos. They’ve also allowed us to target with pinpoint accuracy where a drone should drop off a bomb or where a missile should strike at any point across the planet. There really is no war without photography because without the camera all our deadly machinery would be as useful as erectile dysfunction in the middle of passionate sex.
But enough about the military-industrial complex. Those references to violence are still too obvious and trite. What I’m suggesting here is that the camera as an entirety is a traumatised machine. We have made it see far too much. Even those newborn cameras which have just been taken out of their boxes are made to look at things which they have no say or desire in. We’ve taken away the lens caps and forced it to stare at the most blinding lights and into the blackest recesses of the cosmos and everything contained within it, including that much-hated piece of life that calls itself humanity. Its PTSD (perpetual traumatic stress disorder) is doomed to be intensified with every press of the shutter release across the universe.
What other behaviour do you expect from something that has become so unglued by the things and events it has witnessed apart from total unconscious neurotic disorder? Normalcy? That was lost the moment the first picture was taken. And good riddance, because a whole lot of good “normal” did anyone.
But before you start pulling out the electrodes to give photography a long session of electro-convulsive therapy in a futile attempt to cure it of its inoperable trauma, let’s first imagine what a world “cured” of images would even look like.
The Image constitutes a language in itself which is governed by a visual grammar of colours, lines, composition, and in many cases, even text. Without this language, the eyes are mute.
In this image-void world you see but you don’t apprehend. The objects that lay in your vision seduce but never allow any intimacy. A society without images entails a double blindness, on top of our clueless blundering through life as a species, to not have images as referents to reality we are at the mercy of our own ignorance. This would not have been true of a society before the camera but one which has enjoyed the luxuries of it most certainly will feel like they’re living without a vital organ. Images erased from the DNA of society will have the same effect on the eyes as gibberish has on the ears. A beautiful sunflower will become just a beautiful sunflower removed from the system of other beautiful sunflowers, isolated and unable to reference itself to the network of beauty which has established itself among all sunflowers.
If that sounded like nonsense to you, let me decrypt that a bit. Any attribute whether it be beauty, decrepitude, or violence exists in a totality of itself. They form a vast connection with every instance of their happening. Our memories can only do so much of the work of holding as many examples of the multitudes of all possible qualities that can be attached to objects as possible, all fighting each other to be held by our recollection. We’re beset on all sides, every day of our lives, by the most profound stimuli. Without the image to confer and compare all these singular contrasts of reality, we’d be completely lost in the riot of our own memories.
A world without images would be to face the ceaseless assault of multiple realities on our perception without the shield of reference and familiarity. We’d be in raptures every time at the most basic and simple of sights, like the sumptuous architecture of a church or the arcipluvian rays of a sunset piercing through a castle of clouds, such extreme possessions of bliss that we’d never get anything done.
Everything in moderation, even moderation itself.
The Image pervades all aspects of reality on Earth. We make sense of the world around us through those pictorial overlays we imbibe upon our surroundings. And it’s not as if the camera can claim all the responsibility. From the very first cave paintings to African wood carvings from aeons ago to the Renaissance to post-modernism to the sneaky graffiti tagging of a group of teenagers on the side of a London Underground train to a 10-year-old girl drawing with chalk a hopscotch grid on the pavement, humanity has been making images to comprehend, cope, characterise, and crystallise the world they live in since long before the photographic process. The camera was just the final crack across the face of an ever-weakening dam which held back a prodigious river from reality, a body of water whose every molecule is a blank slate to replicate and reproduce the entire cosmos upon. That final fracture was too much for the wall to bear and there came a-flooding an eager infinity upon the land.
Enough words have been used up to illustrate the incomprehensible world we’d be stumbling about if the image weren’t a part of human nature.
We humans just can’t contain ourselves when it comes to our dealings with our surroundings. That appetite for expansion is insatiable, and we’ve seemingly given ourselves all the justification to do as we please to the environment. And what happens when we’ve driven the boundaries of our soulless settlements to the very outskirts of physical space? We make more space.
With every picture taken we flatten, excavate, and fill more plots of land in the endless real estate of the celluloid film and digital screen. The latter far more so in its expanse than the former, as I can foresee a point in time where film stock will either become obsolete or we’ll run out of materials to manufacture more – so Kodak and other film manufacturers should crazily breed their golden geese while they’ve still got them. Meanwhile, the digital screen will outlive most organic life on this planet. That screen itself is also just a transient phase in a long and bewildering evolution of stuffing an image into non-existent space. It’s anyone’s guess what the screen’s successor will be; holograms that steadily grow from 2D projections to 3D presences which we would eventually be able to interact with? Brain implants that can project images right over our vision which will by some terrific neuroscientific leap allow us to, at some point, physically extract memories from deep within our minds and have them at our mercy like a piece of video before an editor? All of which sound like science-fiction talk which is of no good to me here so let’s leave all of that for another time. By virtue of its virtuality, the pixel image is orders of magnitude more modular and flexible than its analogue and relatively stable counterpart too, editable down to the finest pixel.
We’ve already begun the construction of entire worlds and whole lives in the extra-physical real estate of the Image, and we will eventually come upon a point when our frontiers in the bustling limbo of the Image will outgrow the fruits of our expansion on the Earth, the Moon, and whatever other celestial body that is doomed to experience human presence. I suspect that point where the scale of reality tips isn’t too far ahead of us.
And I mean why shouldn’t it? With all this untouched virgin “land” for us to conquer and dump the valuable detritus of our lives into, who wouldn’t make it their mission to inflate into this infinity much like the universe is into nothingness? At least no natives are being slaughtered during the colonisation of this place…
Something else we humans just cannot control is our fixation to bear witness. Since the first people left their home in the trees and started treading the land indefinitely on their hind legs, we’ve been, and continue to be, captive to a discombobulating array of sights which pull us towards them in every direction. Marvellous and horrid, extra and ordinary, trite and transcendental, beautiful and bloody, we’re descending a bottomless fractal of such sights and we just can’t avert our eyes. Because to witness is, in one way, to own. By seeing we take possession of the object by keeping it in our memories, either to age and distort with the person or to be thrown into the incinerators of our forgetfulness altogether depending on the significance of the memory to the person.
But this won’t do. Memory is far too volatile, and it takes no more than a day for the disfigurement of a recollection to begin. We require something more rigid and concrete, something which will keep the reproduction of the sight arrested in time and space. Something like a photograph.
Through a seemingly throwaway background monologue in Gaspar Noe’s Vortex (2022) a psychoanalyst or psychologist, I don’t precisely remember, rambles about the nature of traumatic memory, stating something along the lines of a traumatic memory, unlike progressive memory, is unable to break itself free from the obsessive restrictions of the mind and remains rooted, unmoving and unchanging, to the spot in the absolute nightmare of their clarity. Each time the recollection of the traumatic event intrudes on our consciousness it is as if we’re reliving that which haunts us. Parallels between this mental mechanism and the nature of photography fling themselves at us with caution thrown to the wind. Given that the photograph remains unmanipulated, the world and contexts around it may and will change but the fundamental image stays static and calls forth either a recollection or speculation about the moment it was taken.
Now consider all that we have made the camera witness.
In its most productive use, we apprehend reality through the lens to comprehend it. Micro and telescopes fulfil the same purpose, just in different realms. Without the camera, scientists across all fields of knowledge must rely on the questionable powers of recollection to study the phenomena they hunt for with the zeal of a hound sniffing out a hare. Our great leaps forward would be crippled to the stumbling of a drunkard.
At its most depraved and perverse, the camera not only bears unflinching and dissociated witness to violence and its aftermath but also becomes a tool used for the production and dissemination of such grotesqueries. And with such freezing clarity too. “Hunger looks like the man that hunger is killing” writes Uruguayan essayist, Eduardo Galeano, in response to the photography of Sebastião Salgado who based his work around the peasants, poor, workers, refugees and famine victims of the Third World. The nature and effects of harm only become comprehensible when seen enacted upon the canvas of the human body. A disembowelled body exists only as an abstract picture inside our heads comprising of some pinks and a lot of reds but when a photograph of an actual human being with their intestines splayed out of their belly sits before our eyes, those formless abstractions suddenly become horrifyingly concrete. No more solid pinks and reds but gradients between the many hues of those deadly tones which stare back at us. This remains the reason why the photograph is powerfully effective at depicting human cruelty.
The camera has witnessed just about every way harm and pain can be inflicted upon the human body and the landscape. Flesh has been hacked, twisted, ripped, broken, and eviscerated before the gaze of the camera innumerable times over. In the words of German cultural critic, Siegfried Kracauer “the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her. The photograph annihilates the person.” His insistence is as much about the diminution of depth and material surface as it is about the violent denomination of limbs. Same goes for the Earth, the camera has witnessed some of nature’s wildest moods as well as the destruction wrought upon the land by human hands (the two aren’t unrelated either); bombings, demolitions, wildfires, excavations, and omnipresent pollution. The camera has seen it all, and with each succeeding exposure to such devastation without any transience, unable to have a psychological breakdown on account of no psychology because we only passed on perception to the device, the camera’s trauma towers all the way to infinite derangement. These machines become wrapped in nihilism, with a taste for flesh, and all the light which enters their lens becomes tainted with aeons of barbarity. And all of this is driven by the photographer safely peering through the visual shield of the viewfinder.
Needless to say, the intentions of Taliban extremist fools hacking away the heads of infidel dogs in front of a camera are an entire world apart from those of a war photographer tooling through the wastes of a genocide or battlefield and photographing, without preference for dead or alive, those this injustice has wronged. Some horrible images are way more useful to us as a society than others and I’m sure you can work out by now which ones they are. However, this doesn’t change the fact that images of violent destruction of both humans and the world they inhabit are whizzing back and forth across the planet almost every single day. If it isn’t admonishing documentation from the pit of a warzone somewhere on the other side of the continent, then it’s homicide detectives and coroners photographing the corpses for forensic purposes.
And in each case, there’s a camera having its apertures coaxed open to feast its squeaky clean eye on that which requires seeing without conscience or consciousness having to carry it around like a stone in its shoe. In witnessing the terrifying array which spans the capability of human evil, the camera comments without speaking. Without once opening a mouth it doesn’t have, photographed brutality and horror become a signpost of how low we’ve sunk as a species. Much like the skeletons of dead mountaineers used as morbid signposts along the route of some prodigious rock. These images show us our failings and limitations in the form of all those uncountable corpses we’ve left in our wake towards a mirage. “You did this” the photograph would say had it possessed a mouth. It would then follow with, “What are you going to do next?”, at once a call to action and consternation over whatever evil we might unleash next. Our irreversible moral failures are hung out to dry in the photograph, blood-soaked laundry which no amount of washing and wind will clean. As spectators and audiences of these crimes against humanity, we’re – depending on the empathic capacities from person to person – put in the uncomfortable position of reflection and finding within the mess of horrible emotions that are bubbling to the surface any flash of reconciliation. But nothing truly useful can be found apart from an impotence that says, “We must be better.” Well goddamn! Why didn’t we think of this before?! Except we did, and nothing came out of it because the same reaction is always repeated. After enough utterances of “we must be better” it begins to painfully dawn on the person that personal agency is inequitable to collective agency. To want to change the world you need a lot of people on board who are willing to lay down their lives, if need be, for whatever cause you think might fit the world better than the loose-fitting skin it currently wears. To further muddle matters, everyone has their own visions of utopia which they’d like seen realised, so good luck finding those who share the same terminus for the world as you, or even remotely similar. In the face of such a herculean endeavour collective laziness sets in and the work of the many is left to the tireless few who keep on fighting. And therein lies another soundless utterance in the photograph, one that spells out our incompatible desire to change, one which lacks action. The butterfly effect loses all meaning here because no exponentially grown hurricane born from the flap of a butterfly’s wings will manifest on the other side of the planet if the damn thing is swatted to death by apathy.
We live in a democracy of brutality where obscene acts of craziness – their representations and the means to enact them – are readily available at our fingertips (especially in some countries more than others, I’m looking at you USA and the Democratic Republic of Congo). It would be naïve to say that there isn’t a burgeoning circulation of imagery which represents the more fucked up side of humanity, and these currents aren’t in remote and obscure corners of access like the Dark Web either. The suffering from far-off places, beyond our spheres of awareness, is brought on a plate right before our eyes. Not a day goes by without some civic insanity or other making its way, through the photograph or talk about some photograph one of your friends has seen, into your private bubbles. Yet after this visual and bloody repast, we’re able to consume more the next day.
Before you perk up and say that it’s because we’re desensitised to such imagery and that we are no longer capable of feeling any empathy for others, let me assure you that we’ve always been desensitised, and most people feel little to no empathy for the suffering of others they don’t personally know. Which is why no lessons from history are ever learnt and fascism is allowed to perpetuate despite the rising tide of protest against it. To say we only recently lost all sensitivity to the victims of the intolerable horrors is to suggest, according to photography writer Susie Linfield, that there once existed an era when we wore our hearts upon our sleeves and were highly sensitive to whatever happened to our fellow humans. A Golden Age of empathy and kindness, if you will. And unless my grasp on history is waning due to brain damage, I don’t recall any such period where a population of saints and good Samaritans walked the Earth. We’ve always been deeply flawed and that won’t be changing any time soon. And don’t go blaming photography for it either, if anything the rapid and ever-present gushing of pictorial violence from inaccessible parts of the world makes us all complicit in the knowledge of unforgivable crimes taking place. No longer can one say, “I didn’t know this was going on.” The camera and its innumerable spawn have rid us of our ignorance and all the harrowing stuff it shows requires us to respond in some way, whether it’s reflecting inwardly about it and possibly forgetting all about it or getting out of your chair and doing something about it.
Where the real problem lies is in our refusal to confront and address the inherent evil nature of our species. That stuff is just far too heavy for the average person who is unable to find the time or desire out of the entrapment of their routine. Most people can’t afford another mental breakdown. Serotonin is lower across the board. Why bring yourself down with these agonising reminders that you belong to a species of sick murderers? It becomes a psychological and social imperative to absolutely avoid all contact with the fact. But I, perhaps wrongly, suppose that after the first crippling wave of psychic collapses and nervous breakdowns once admitting to yourself that you are but one cell in an evil, raging cancer eating away at this planet which doesn’t deserve such illness, there would be a lot more agency and productivity among people who will become more aware of the rubbish heap of a society they’ve created for the express purpose of exploiting one another and then finally, themselves.
Everything from the blissful and terrifying infinity of the cosmos to a plate of fettuccini alfredo to a daughter’s first steps to a dazzling kaleidoscopic sunset to the movements of an atom to a human being blown to smithereens and, of course, the countless selfies, all of these the camera has seen whether it likes it or not. But is consent even a matter of issue here? If you were to ask a camera’s permission each time a photograph needed taken, first you’d be put in a straitjacket, and secondly, the entire endeavour of photography would turn into an experience similar to travelling in a bus during a traffic jam as it lurches uncomfortably forward, inch by inch, bestowing the same movement on everyone aboard. In case I made that analogy too convoluted, the traffic jam here is the halting moral debate between the camera’s conscience and the photographer.
Alright, so let’s not ask the camera for permission. Point the fucker at everything and shoot away. Go nowhere without one in your pocket lest you witness some sight, bedazzling or otherwise, which you deem worth capturing but not remembering. The intense beauties and horrors of being alive are overwhelming, ever-present, and often intermingling. Some are so great that they carve their impressions onto the core of one’s memory. But behead memory! It isn’t good enough. Why take the chance of relegating something so monumental to the uncertain flux of memory when it can simply be photographed in static haven? What if the thing isn’t there tomorrow, or even an hour from now? And with all the things on my mind, I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold onto the ineffaceable.
There are not grains but great rocks of truth up in that unmoored ramble about that unconscious desperation held by any population who has swallowed up the camera and assimilated it in their essential biology. Not just a prosthetic to memory, photography has become an inorganic replacement to memory where the bottomless and multi-coloured camera roll, which digs deeper than the bedrock of a phone or computer’s storage with the help of the cloud, chock-full of moments - meaningless and significant - double up as a system of recollection orders of magnitude shareable than whatever images the brain can throw up. Don’t give the camera all the credit here because its status as the New Memory was propelled to supernal heights once the camera and social media went symbiotic. In this society which we’ve built upon the bones of those the white man has deemed the losers of history, there is no terminal velocity, just endless acceleration and an impending eternal burnout. Contrary to Einstein’s Special Relativity, when a society attains such blistering speeds, time is no longer an everlasting universal constant but a scattered and fleeting residue, vulnerable to evaporation.
Unhinged sociological jabbering aside, the notion of unstoppable flux is entirely true, even on a physical level. Everything before our eyes is disappearing, some faster than others. They either meet their departure from appearance through nature or by human hands. Therein could lay a possible explanation behind the vapid desire to photograph every little nugget of reality. Preservation. It’s not so much an act of cryogenically freezing the object in the photograph to halt its demise as it is to surgically remove its brain and keep it suspended in a jar of fluid. Not the object or sight in its entirety lives past its physical disappearance, but a sliver, an essence of its presence.
To take a picture of a serene landscape that might be turned into a multi-storey car park in a few months or a plate of avocado and toast with poached eggs that will shortly be eaten is not only preservation but possession as well. Much like portraits and still-life paintings commissioned by people to capture not just the representation of themselves and the object but their stature which afforded them the means to get such paintings made, photography entails a similar act of ostentation, albeit a more democratised and instant one. Except here the object being photographed becomes the actual symbol of status. Experiences which require a certain entry that can’t be afforded by all basically ask to have their pictures taken and flaunted around. Don’t we all carry around the inalienable right to the rest of the world, or at least those parts of the world that haven’t been claimed already? No one really owns nature, and that plate of avocado brunch, well you just paid for it with your own money, so why should you not keep it longer than intended? Because once it’s gone, how can you really claim that you owned it in the first place? To this end, a large bulk of the content on social media then becomes nothing more than a feverish collection and exhibition of totems and virtual trinkets of things long gone. Susan Sontag put it slightly better than I when she wrote that “photography is the inventory of mortality.” A cursory scroll down a person’s social media profile, bursting with disparate moments from an irretrievable past, assumes the same dust-filled air of an antique store.
And the camera isn’t afforded the same forgetfulness as we humans are. Our memories are a bit like bowls being filled with water, once they reach capacity new water pushes the old water up to the surface and out of the bowl. Meanwhile, the camera possesses a memory more like a black hole, a bottomless void that can hold all of reality yet make nothing out of it. The camera equalises and balances. For every pretty thing photographed, there exists in some other corner of the world its exact horrible antithesis before the camera. Everything that finds itself before the camera’s lens is treated – by the camera itself – as an equal. You can see this indiscriminate representation manifest itself nowhere better than the internet, a place where all images are treated equally. There exists no such thing as a visual hierarchy. No one picture is more powerful than the other. Whatever personal reactions an image may invoke are well… personal. Even doctored images are accorded the same rights as ones untouched. This comes from a pervasive uncertainty about the photograph’s provenance and veracity, so everything is treated as both truth and lie simultaneously. It’s Schrodinger’s Cat of authenticity.
So what does the camera do with a mind that is expansive and clueless? Nothing, because it can do nothing other than what is required of it.
As I sit here and write this in a cramped little pub on Camden Road, I count in the small room no fewer than five cameras. Not counting the ones I see out on the street. Two more just walked in. The ferocious pace at which cameras have reproduced in the last century will put any rabbit or protein cell to shame. There isn’t a place in a metropolis where you won’t find a camera staring down or up at you. They’re hooked up in every corner of every wall, up every lamp post, pointing in every possible direction at airports and train stations to eliminate blind spots, showing you your own reflection at supermarket checkouts when you pay for a block of cheddar and half a kilo of tomatoes, driving through the streets on the dash and bumpers of cars as they ensure they comply to the limit lest the speed cameras snap a picture of their number plate and send them a speeding ticket. In every nook and cranny of the developed world, there is a camera steadily watching our frantic blur of movement.
The ubiquity of these artificial eyes is autocratic, because what else do you associate a CCTV camera with apart from control and authority?
These eyes never sleep or even wink and their incessant gaze has turned us into a self-policing mass. We watch our behaviour under the assumption that we’re being watched, even when there’s a possibility we aren’t. Foucault’s panopticon has been suffused into the architecture of daily life.
I despise authority more than the next person, but can you imagine what sort of nameless hell would break loose if these cameras weren’t around? Without the knowledge that the law (whatever that even means at this point) is watching us through the eyes of a multitude of cameras, all our criminal desires would break to the surface of our behaviour and a riot of crime would ravage society – more than it already has at all levels. The reason why many people won’t go out and strangle those who have wronged them is more out of fear of being caught and punished than it is out of any consequences on their personal morality. Any stain on one’s conscience can be cleaned after a while, but years in prison or on death row is one experience that evades reconciliation. And the illimitable cameras make sure that we don’t feel tempted to slice people’s throats over the tiniest of infractions.
But surely we reached a point long ago where we had enough CCTV cameras littered in the world to ensure upstanding citizenry? Why do they continue to grow like weeds? I propose that the overabundance of cameras has something to do with the changing nature of seeing itself.
With every picture snapped on a Polaroid, each rolling second of a CCTV camera in a corner shop, and every planetary orbit of a military satellite scanning the surface of the Earth, reality is filtered through the lens and transposed into a proto-virtual universe. Not fully virtualised and no longer actualised either. It's far too obvious where this digital resting place of the world is. In storage. Memory (not the one in your head). Archives. Folders and files. With the obviousness of its virtual state, I won’t dispense too many words on studying it, but what I will say is that the digitised pieces of the photographed and videoed world altogether make up a universe in themselves. Just try to image the ceaselessly unfurling camera roll of every phone on the planet, all the images stored on every computer, the boundless archives of taped footage from all the CCTV cameras making sure you don’t get up to no good, the galactic flow of pictures across the internet. An arcipluvian kaleidoscope of 1s and 0s. As the cosmos exists in the velvety darkness of space, so does it too on a network of computers and a constellation of hard drives and solid-state storage. And the camera acts as a bridge, a wormhole if you will, to this digital mirror dimension. It not only accesses but also dumps more of the world into this virtual limbo. And we require more entries into this swiftly expanding image-verse. Hence the cameras.
Try to think of something physical, anything, banal or beautiful, bizarre or boring, it doesn’t matter. Now wonder whether it’s been photographed or not. Chances are it most certainly has. Things in our reach and those beyond, from the far reaches of the observable universe to the inside of our bodies, all have been eyed up by the camera. Far from being just reproduced in the photograph, everything has been a trifle beautified because anything which gets captured in the variable rectangle of a frame will immediately take on in our minds the air of an image - a representation, a scene, a simulacrum - rather than the thing itself. Good, for the camera has no delusions of replication. But with how much physical matter has been regurgitated through the photograph, the very act of seeing has become hyperinflated and the visual has taken a dizzying plunge in value. From being a reference tethered to the realities around us, the camera and its spawn have cut themselves adrift and occupy their own metaphysical space, complete with a centre of gravity.
If what I’m saying here sounds like supreme jabbering then Sontag’s words might back me up here when she wrote, “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and realism.”
A symptom of the weakening integrity of seeing can be found in the courtroom. Put an eyewitness account of a crime and its CCTV footage next to each other and see which one incriminates the culprit quicker.
With the value of the optical world under a pallor of extreme confusion and an unceasing flow of visual currency it is absolutely no surprise that in an image-choked world, the real thing is being ditched for its representation. Why shouldn’t it as well? A photograph is easy, cheap, and direct. Why ever go out and seek stuff when you can simply see them in a picture? Want to see a sunset at midnight? Google it. The bottom of the Grand Canyon? Screw flying all the way there, Google it. A view from the top of a mountain? You know where to go. But anyone who has seen any of those things for real, or absolutely anything else caught in a photo, knows that the image only entails one sense out of the five which make up the actual experience.
The reason why the camera is unable to recreate no more than, max, two senses is as much to do with its current technological limitations as it is with its traumatised nature. Inherent in its operation is the process of flattening. I’m sure one can already figure out that the flat surface of the photograph which eliminates all semblance of contour or depth (not to be confused with depth of field) in the subject is a product of this, but another quality which gets steamrollered is distance. Any space between the lens and the subject is impermissible otherwise it can’t be held in the thinness of the image. Once the photons which previously hit the subject enter the lens and roll around on the celluloid or sensor, the interminable distance between the camera and subject completely collapses. Theoretically, if the subject were to change states, I don’t know melt or move or whatnot, in between the tremendously minuscule timespan it took for the light reflected off the object to reach the camera, that impossibly sudden change would not register in the photograph, and even if the camera managed to capture any part of the subject’s betrayal to stillness, it would appear as a ghostly disembodiment. So far it seems like this flatness in the camera’s illimitable offspring is indefinite – flat images viewed on flat screens or projected onto a flat surface are no less flat than they’re doomed to be – unless through some technological necromancy we’re able to view the image emancipated from the crushing weight of their own thinness. 3D holograms perhaps? Still, we’ll leave the speculation to science fiction.
If the camera has such an effect on space, what is its effect on time? No, please humour me for a moment. Space and time are in a union most loyal and unbreakable so why mustn’t there be any crossover? Just as space, I propose that time too has experienced a springy compression where each moment becomes the nexus of all the moments which came before. I’ve already dispensed enough words further back on how photography is an exercise in preserving that which is disappearing and has disappeared. With millions of images of things and places that are no longer with us floating around the image-verse, past, present, and future are no longer compartmentalised categories but emulsified liquids in a mixing bowl. As the meta-representative capacities of a photograph are infinite - in that one can take a photograph of a photograph endlessly, much like the infinity window when opening a screen sharing or recording software while your screen is being broadcasted - its reach through both space and time matches that infinity. After all, as a medium reliant on light, its abilities are predicated upon the indestructibility of the photon.
Photography is essentially an honest medium. Where the manipulation, deceit, and stigma come in is when it is doctored through human intervention. To edit an image is to give it facial reconstructive surgery without any anaesthetics or painkillers. And this sort of brutal operation is performed on photographs countless times every day. Retrospectively and in real-time. Any predatory outcome of photography hinges upon the predator who presses the shutter release and molests the scene with their gaze. Because the photograph is the product of a marvellous synthesis between the camera, the photographer, and the subject. Each is a dependant variable where the slightest shift in one will dramatically alter the outcome. Two people using the same camera to photograph the same object will make two completely different photographs. It is the docility of the camera which permits the photographer to aim its eye at whatever they please. Paradoxically this submission is equally a result of its blighted trauma as it is in the desire to bear witness – whether for itself or us – to the indescribable beauties and horrors of a world in eternal malfunction.
