|
April 9, 2010
Siegfried Kracauer in his essay Photography in his The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays highlights the contingency of modernity whose dominance becomes most evident in photography.
He explores the prevailing conceptions of photography's relationship to instantaneity and to the photographic image as the record of a brief and transitory moment in time---what he calls the flow of life. The characteristics of photography are 'record and reveal physical reality', to lay stress on ' fragments rather than wholes', and its inevitable incompleteness.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, 2010
Kracauer's argument is that in eschewing significance--- the fullness of a life lived in its proper history--- in favor of an adherence to a spatial or temporal continuum, photography attains "a mere surface coherence" . Its telos becomes that of sheer accumulation, coverage, the saturation of detail devoid of the coherent meaning associated with history itself. Photography simply captures a moment, a specific configuration in time and space which lacks necessity. The photograph can only offer a trace of what has been.
Kracauer sees the photographic inscription of contingency as the "go for broke game" of history. Photography provokes a confrontation with the meaninglessness of contemporary society; it is a "secretion of the capitalist mode of production." just as capitalism is haunted by the logic of its own self-destruction, photography is capable of flaunting the logic of a world deprived of meaning and thereby instigating a new organization of knowledge.
|
A standard argument is that though cinema is technologically and aesthetically dependent upon photography, ultimately it is seen as ontologically quite distinct.
The differences between the two mediums appear as stark and
absolute: on the one hand, with film we have movement that not only is present but also lends to the image a 'presence' that is associated with life; and, on the other hand, with a still photogaph we have a moment frozen in time and an immobility that is lodged within an ever-receding past thai can only testify to an absence that carries with it the spectre of death.