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June 19, 2009
Lay Flat: Remain In Light is an American print publication devoted to promoting the best in contemporary fine art photography and writing on the medium. It is edited by Shane Lavalette, and Chicago-based photographer Karly Wildenhaus and its online presence is links to the work of those photographers featured in Lay Flat.
Interestingly, Lay Flat includes texts, one of which is entitled The Crisis of Experience. It is written by Eric William Carroll and is concerned with the relationships between direct experience, memory and the act of photography. Carroll says that:
Mary Ann Doane notes how time, through photographic and cinematic technologies, has become atomized. This in turn allows for a more rapid consumption/experience of time, while simultaneously preserving minute details—what Doane refers to as the contingent. As a result, the photographic archive falls back onto itself in a great irony—everything is being saved (whereas previously the archive was a place for things of value/worth) and yet our experience of time is so fast we rarely have a chance to revisit our recordings. It is the great catch-22 of photographic technologies. We spend time and money archiving our lives, only to find out that either we don’t have time to revisit them, or the technology we saved them on has become obsolete. It is a bittersweet irony that photography’s supposedly essential drive is to preserve, when in fact the technology that is driving photography is producing material just as ephemeral as the moments it claims to record.
I don't know what Mary Ann Doane has written on photography and the crisis of experience in modernity, as her work is primarily concerned with film and gender. A latter text is concerned with temporality, contingency, and the way that time became intimately allied with its new technologies of representation (photography, cinema) and their relationship to archivabiltiy and storage. The paradox for Doane is that temporal continuity is conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images.
Carroll's argument here is unclear. Maybe the tacit argument is something along the lines that what is archived is not so much a material object as an experience – an experience of the present. Is it a problem that photography is producing material just as ephemeral as the moments it claims to record?
Firstly, "record" or "document" is misleading. It implies from the subject as disembodied objectivity of the “classical” disembodied monocular gaze situated outside the scene it surveys (ie., Descartes) to an embodied subject with the capacity to manage and interpret modernity's influx of images, its constant flows of commodities, money, signs. Secondly, photography in the early 20th century has represented means ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’, and these ephemeral images were often linked within a series or book in order to step beyond the ephemeral.
What then is meant by the 'crisis of experience' in relation to the act of photography changing experience? Carroll says:
The ‘crisis’ here that Barthes, Doane, Stewart, and to some extent, myself, are trying to argue, is that a photographer, in choosing to document an event rather than participate in it without a camera, is trading her subjective memory of the experience for a photographic/material one. The problems arise when the photographer attempts to revisit the experience, but is only left with a longing nostalgia for one of several reasons; A.) The tempo of our lives has increased to such a speed that one cannot spare time to revisit the documents, so they sit in a box in the attic B.) The photographs in the box will most likely fade and the memory cards that the images are stored on will become obsolete in a matter of years and C.) If time is found and the images are still viewable, re-visitation of the photographs recall only the absence of the ‘original’ moment—its unrepeatability—of which the image is only a quotation.
We do have the binary opposition between pure, unmediated experience and representations such as writing and photography. I would have thought that the act of photography was part of the experience as well as a fragmentary interpretation of events and objects. That experience is mediated by a particular culture frame and a history of images.
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I glanced through Eric Carroll's blog--AMP and came across a link to Ian Aleksander Adams who had wrtten an article in the latest issue of Ahorn Magazine. Adams is concerned with direct experience versus taking a photo.