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Friday, 22 April 2011

Extracts From 'About Looking' by John Berger

(p.54, 55) 'What served in place of the photograph; before the camera's invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.
"Proust somewhat miscontrues that photographs are, not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement."
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera lens and the eye both register images - because of their sensitivity to light - at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do, is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps for ever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this; except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.
I am not saying that memory is a kind of film. That is a banal simile. From the comparison film/memory we learn nothing about the latter. What we learn is how strange and unprecedented was the procedure of photography.
Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. They offer appearances - with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances - prised away from their meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions. "And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand." Photographs in themselves do not narrate. Photographs preserve instant appearances.
There are photographs which belong to private experience and there are those which are used publicly. The private photograph - the portrait of a mother, a picture of a daughter, a group photo of one's own team - is appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it. (The violence of the removal is sometimes felt as incredulousness: "Was that really Dad?")'

(p.56) 'Nevertheless such a photograph remains surrounded by the meaning from which it was severed. A mechanical device, the camera has been used as an instrument to contribute to a living memory. The photograph is a memento from a life being lived. The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience. If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger. The violence is expressed in that strangeness. It records an instant sight which about which this stranger has shouted: Look!
Who is the stranger? One might answer: the photographer. Yet if one considers the entire use-system of photographed images, the answer of "the photographer" is clearly inadequate. Nor can one reply: those who use the photographs.'

(p.57) 'It is because the photographs carry no certain meaning in themselves, because they are like images in the memory of a total stranger, that they lend themselves to any use.'

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