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February 27, 2009
Many have argued that the realist movement in painting (eg.,Gustave Courbet) is related to a positivist aesthetic which is grounded in the appearance of the camera. This aesthetic rejects the imagination as nonobjective and prone to falsification because o fits subjectivity. The camera describes what one sees--the actual or the historical as presence. It is documentary evidence purporting to provide truth in the form of enlightenment about specific material histories. It threatens the supposed desire for truth in painting. This is standard art history account.
Deleuze and Guattari accept that the photograph is rooted, a territorializing record of a material and fixed moment. They oppose maps to photographs and urge us to to make maps not photographs.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Young Street Car park, 2009
Yet the camera frequently produces a blurred image (a ghostly shape) that contains speed, movement and displacement within the stasis. The ghostly shape is the ghostly presence. Hence we have the imprecision of representation: we have obscurity not enlightenment. A camera obscura. So photography immaterializes or deterritorializes of hard objects and material objectivity.
Rather than being rooted, a territorializing record of a material and fixed moment of a set of phenomena, photography is a continual re-mapping of that history and its ghostly other.
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so photography promises us access to presence only to deny us?