We exist in time. Not as discrete snapshots. One of the difficulties of photography is to capture in a single frame what is part of a stream of consciousness. This idea has bothered me for a long time and it feels like a failure that photos aren’t part of the stream of consciousness.
What makes us self aware is the continuous existence of our consciousness. Even though we don’t really know well what consciousness is from a biological viewpoint, we know from a thought viewpoint what it is: it is the fact that we think (dixit Descartes, one of my favourite authors when I was a teenager). That thought is continuous. And even though we might not pay attention, let our mind “go blank”, or sleep, the conscious act always exists. That constant flow of consciousness forms a stream that is our life.
When we witness events, they are part of that stream because we are their witnesses and they become part of our history. These events have a past, a present, and a future, and we follow that arrow of time with them. This is fact what defines time: events have causality and that sets the direction of time (as in quantum physics events can theoretically go both ways).
But a photograph only captures a single instant that lasts a few milliseconds, a snapshot, an isolated fraction of time. It breaks the stream. The instant loses its past and its future because it is not recorded in the photo and the non-photographer-viewer has no way to access it.
That is in part why holiday or travel photos can be so bad and boring: I have memories of slide projection evenings with acquaintances of my parents’ when I was kid. They were so boring! These people telling us about places we’ve never seen and most likely will never see, but showing us only some images of them, often without much context other than it was in such or such a place.
When we travel, time and events become more important than usual. We purposefully arrange our time and try to maximise how we use it. We try to cram as much as possible in the duration we have because that time is precious and rare. Travel photos, more than any other kind, capture ongoing events, ongoing places, that are part of your travel time, but without the other instants of that travel. They’re not art and they don’t make sense to those who weren’t there.
Why should we care? Because as photographers, we’re in essence witnesses of the world. The act of showing a photo to a stranger who wasn’t there at the time of conception is an act of transmission of that witnessing. If the image makes no sense because it is out of context, the activity fails and we might as well not show the photo to anyone.
There are of course ways to try to demonstrate that passage of time in photographs and place them within their context. For example with long exposures, blur, movement, sequences of images. Also composition, arrangement, choices of scene, colour, textures. Well used, these visual cues can anchor the image in time and provide an explanation of the before and the after. Then the images become both representation and perception.
Take Capa’s ultra-famous image of the Normandy landing soldier in the sea.
It was obviously taken in the heat of the moment. I doubt there was a lot of thinking around the pressing of the shutter. Capa went with the feeling. It’s super grainy, not sharp, technically meh. You can’t blame him, everybody was getting shot at and people were dying. You do what you can within the flow.
But the result, whether by chance of not, does work and is part of time: the photo has motion blur from right to left, i.e. the direction of the soldier. It shows the splash of the soldier in the water and his struggle to move against the resistance of the water and the softness of the sand with his heavy backpack. It is framed to show the beach fortifications in the middle ground that the soldiers had to navigate and a ship in the very background. And that’s how we get the placement of the image within the stream: we can tell, even though we weren’t there and we see no other photo of that scene, where the soldiers are coming from, what they’re doing, what they’re experiencing, where they’re going, and we can infer what happened next. Even though the image is a snapshot in time, it brings its history with it.
Of course we’re not all Capas. Very few of us are. We’re not in the right place at the right time (who would want to be there?), we don’t have an inherent feel for what happens around us, and we don’t have the ability to capture it in a meaningful way. So, most of the time, when we take photos, we fail in our endeavour. We produce images that will be meaningless to strangers and at best will be examined as an artistic exercise purely on their pleasing appearance. This is what happens on IG, X, and other social media and that is why these images only get a fraction of a second of attention.
I sound very negative. Some of the time, I don’t think of those things and I’m happy to snap away without worrying about how the resulting images fit in my stream of consciousness. But some days, I think about it and I find it overwhelming.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Theory #PhotographyTheory