#photography.press

[aamjp]

Narrative authority

Hegel suggested that societies become modern “when news replaces religion as out central source of guidance and our touchstone of authority” (ii, 31)

“The news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality [...] but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes”. (43)

Black and white and re(a)d all over

“In its stoking of our fears, the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective. (49, my paintings have no narrative or spatial perspective)

News photography comprises images of corroboration and revelation. (111)

Linguistic turn and revival of narrative in history writing

“These writers know that no event, however shocking, can ever guarantee involvment; for this latter prize, they must work harder, practising their distinctive craft, which means paying attention to language, alighting on animating details and keeping a tight rein on pace and structure. In certain situations, creative writers may even choose to sacrifice strict accuracy”. (82)

“[George] Eliot went on to note, ‘Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy readymade...; but a picture of human life such as an artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’.” (86)

The Wicked Bible

“The only honest purpose of unearthing and publicising error is to make it less prevalent. (65)

Quotes

Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas. “The news had [...] armed stupidity and given authority to fools”. (70)

William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

[aamjp]

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Part One.

2 The Photograph Unclassifiable

By nature, the Photograph [...] has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. (5)

5 He Who is Photographed 

Photography transformed subject into object (13)

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture. [... The] Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject. (13-14)

7 Photography as Adventure

I quote Sartre: "Newspaper photographs can very well 'say nothing to me.' In other words, I look at them without assuming a posture of existence. Though the persons whose photograph I see are certainly present in the photograph, they are so without existential posture, like the Knight and Death present in Durer's engraving, but without my positing them. Moreover, cases occur where the photograph leaves me so indifferent that I do not even bother to see it 'as an image.' The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special· intentionality. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either." 

17 The Unary Photograph

News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is not necessarily tranquil). In these images no punctum: a certain shock — the literal can traumatise — but no disturbance; the photograph can ‘shout’, not wound. These journalistic photographs are received (all at once), perceived. I glance through them, I don't recall them, no detail [...] ever interrupts my reading”. (41)

22 After-the-Fact and Silence

“The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” (53)

Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). (55)

23 Blind Field

Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what l add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there. (55)