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December 14, 2010
A lot of critical commentary on photography is about its ending, end or its inscription by death. Photography is typically construed to be about likeness, to produce a likeness; our habitual reliance on its capacity to document is one example of this presumption.
Despite its well known capacity for distortion, the photograph's power to describe lets it be taken for a mirror. This understanding of photography, which used to be hegemonic, is coming to an end, even though some have faith in photography as an objective record of the world out there.
In Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red in Postmodern Culture E.L. McCallum addresses on version of what this end might be:
Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out, "analogically bound to the referent," it faces a challenge in the digital age when the photograph "can always /not/ be the direct effect of the referent on sensitized paper" ....The change from emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink fundamentally what photography might be. Can we compare image pixels to those that comprise words? The change in medium raises the question of whether there is a change in the photographic relation as well: would photography no longer work through analogy, or for that matter through the contiguity of the negative and the printing paper? These questions push us headlong into the theory of digital images.
I've never been persuaded by the direct referent argument that we need to rethink the ontology of photography because photography is dead. Photography was always an interpretation of an event or scene not a reflecting mirror, and the referent though important, was not the source of photography's capacity to represent. Secondly, the technology of photography has changed since it was invented in the 19th century. Digital is the most recent technological shift; one that replaces the film negative with pixels and the darkroom with computer software.
Susan Sontag who disputes photography as interpretation, had a different version in On Photography (1977) of the end. She claimed, in criticizing our photophilia that turns everything eventually into an image, that "all photographs are memento mori". Presumably, she meant a genre of artistic creations that share the same purpose of reminding people of their own mortality. Not all contemporary photography is about skulls and bones suggesting our death.
McCallum goes on to say that some of the most widely read photography theory today focuses on death as the way of figuring ending in a photograph:
remarking on a photograph of himself in Camera Lucida (the book he wrote after the death of his mother), Roland Barthes tells us that "death is the eidos of that photograph"... Even critics who do not explicitly link photography with death tie it to implicitly deathly things: Andre Bazin, for instance, after suggesting that "the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor" in all of the plastic arts....goes on to claim later that photography in particular "embalms time".... Eduardo Cadava's more recent reading of photography in the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him to attest that "photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification". Geoffrey Batchen reveals that the link might reach back to portrait photography's earliest days, when subjects' "heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal device to keep them steady for the necessary seconds. Photography insisted that if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual photograph, one first had to pose as if dead" ...; even so, "photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an intimation of every viewer's own inevitable passing"...
The assumption here is that time as key to photography's inscription or linkage with death---eg., the stopping of time in the still frame when compared to motion in film.
The photograph both perpetuates a moment or event beyond its time and indicates the absence or displaced trace of the depicted. So we have the interplay of presence and absence.
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the 'death of photography' generally means that film-based photography is definitely dead.
Its not of course, as you can see from the various film groups on Flickr.