Photography History and Theory: Time-images (Reading Response 5)

Emerling opens the final chapter of Photography History and Theorystating that images are envoys and messengers which create spectators and consumers.

“Consumption and forgetfulness go hand-in-hand (165).”

Ontology can be defined as the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence. Emerling argues that ontology is never thought of before the encounter with the photograph. Photography forces the viewer to think differently and interpret and translate signs as “images-of-thought.” John Beasley Greene argues that descriptive photographs (those which are formalist/Modernist) do not evoke the psychologic and emotional responses from a moment in time. Instead, Greene thinks that photography has the power to evoke a presentaesthetic experience, not merely a representation of the past. Temporality is a force created from not a picture, but an image. Carleton Watkins says, “Creating an image means to actualize the inhuman vision of the camera, presenting us with an image of time that confronts us with a perception we have never and could never have…a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up two distant or contiguous points…a line of time…that emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain autonomy…can breath and have a life of its own.” In essence, photography does not exist as purely an index of a memory, but it exists as a way of connecting the past to the present and inspiring new thought about continuous historical threads. Photography creates new sensations of the future, proving a timeless and present meaning from memories of the past.

“[Photography is] a monument that doesn’t commemorate or celebrate something that has happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event (169).” “The sense of an image is not its meaning or positionality. It is an encounter with a time-image that has nothing to do with moments or eternities. Images move and as such they move us (169).”

Emerling divides photography in terms of time into snapshotsand time exposures, considering that both exist within any image. A snapshot describes a quick semi-automatic photo taken as a moment in time. A time exposure, on the other hand, is thought to be “capable of extracting from the moment (the lived) the as yet lived.” The temporality folded between the two distinctions held within each photograph represents the balance between inner and outer worlds, according to Cartier-Bresson. De Duve creates another duality contrasting photography as both evidence of an event and an aesthetic picture, each referencing to an external reality. The photograph’s semiotic structure is then both superficial and referential. One is reality-producing, while the other is simply reality-produced. Snapshots prove to be inaccurate representations of time as they are discontinuous. Time exposures revive memories and depart reality from the referent. Emerling repeats these two concepts throughout the chapter in varying terms through varying theorists.

Walter Benjamin describes a new relation between past and present as “what-has-been.” His primary concept related to time is citation. Citation reads history and renders it, opens it to the what-has been. Not a recollection or summary of the past, photography acts like an analysis, a renewal of what-has-been, but what has never been written. Photography acts as a way of regaining time, reliving time—not the same way again, but new and connected to the present. Proust takes another angle on the subject, describing photography as creating an essence. Not made of individual, discrete experiences, but a multiplicity of open duration, images present time as overlapping and asymmetrical fragments. Images are untimely forces. They force us to think, to look, to interpret. We encounter the sign and seek truth within the force of time. 

The chapter ends with discussion of Barthes’ Camera Lucida.Barthes’ theories again bring back the same idea with differing terms and angles. Barthes’ concluding thoughts, however, bring back the conversation to the desire to signify at all. Critical practice is all about the relationship between the image and the photographer. What the photographer says through the image and what the image says through the photographer overlap and interact. Flusser relates the photographic act to the human intention, representing the different between traditional imagery and conceptual intentional work. By considering the relationship between the subject, the camera, the photograph, the photographer, and the spectator, the artist can ensure that they are not under the magic spell of representation (a concept that goes back to Plato), but a instead a reality of openness and truth.

Is there a solution to prevent artist's and viewers from being caught under the "magical spell" of representation?