Scripting the Photographer: from the Notebooks

“It’s more likely that we take pictures in order to come closer, yet again, to an unsolved contradiction: the desire to ‘photograph’ something lying beyond the jurisdiction of the eye – and likewise beyond light, shadow, chemistry, polygraphs, time, memory, hope, etc.; something that preceded by a vague certainty that this ‘future’ image (not yet extant) has already been thought, already been in the mind, yet without a concrete ‘image’; the act of manipulating physical substances (such as glass, plastic, metals), distributed in time and shaped by the logic required for the execution of an ‘intention,’ is in fact a method of ‘visually’ demonstrating this ‘mental figure,’ which itself asserts the reality of one’s own existence whenever it becomes necessary to make such an affirmation, or else repeat it – which affirmation and/or repetition are, perhaps, ideal, tautological rituals that don’t derive something from something else but merely change one’s perspective.  When ‘experiencing’ or ‘studying’ a photograph, however, one is, in fact, less inclined to start an investigation, to engage in an aesthetical einfuhlung, into the simultaneity of absence/presence.

“What we want, simply, is to study ourselves through photographs, ourselves looking out onto the field of depiction; and our desire to conclusively combine the outside view with the inside is like bridging ‘tomorrow’ with ‘yesterday,’ deleting the space ‘in between,’ which is of course impossible, since we can exist only in this ‘between.’  In our desire to overlap these concepts – we are caught ‘between.’  The present will never be ‘complete.’  The figure of death doesn’t clarify a thing, no matter how many times it’s exposed.  One hardly ever succeeds in even grasping a simple feeling of empathy.

“Every photographic attempt to capture a wedding, vacation, funeral, statue, roof, bed, etc., etc., etc., is yet another meaningless attempt to convince ourselves that we exist.  Unfortunately, we are never wholly convinced.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Images are not everything, but at the same time they manage to convince us that they are.  There is a peculiar tendency of images to absorb and be absorbed by human subjects in processes that look suspiciously like those of living things.  We have an incorrigible tendency to lapse into vitalistic and animistic ways of speaking when we talk about images. ..In its most extended sense, then, a picture refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance…it is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality.  To get the picture is to get a comprehensive, global view of a situation, yet it is also to take a snapshot at a particular moment…”

-W.J.T. Mitchell-