{"id":158,"date":"2011-07-21T15:39:03","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T15:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=158"},"modified":"2020-01-08T14:05:02","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T14:05:02","slug":"the-photographers-part","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=158","title":{"rendered":"The Photographer’s Part"},"content":{"rendered":"

[The text first appeared as part of \u00a0issue 10 of \u00a0Flusser Studies <\/em>(flusserstudies.net), November, 2011]<\/p>\n

Near the beginning of his justly celebrated essay Camera Lucida <\/em>(Barthes 2000),<\/em> Roland Barthes introduced a means of breaking the whole vast topic\u2014photography-\u2014into parts.\u00a0 He proposed three figures: the photographer (Operator<\/em>), the one being photographed (Spectrum<\/em>), and the viewer (Spectator<\/em>). In keeping with the phenomenological purpose that informs this essay (arguably more palpably than in others of Barthes\u2019s writings), these figures stand for three potentially distinct aspects, or forms of consciousness of photography.\u00a0 Barthes declared himself unable, on the grounds of insufficient experience, to enter into the first figure\u2019s position, that of the photographer.\u00a0 He did have experience of the second\u2014he had been photographed.\u00a0 His comments from this standpoint seem largely to confirm a view from the third position, however, namely that of the writer and reader of the essay, a receiver, judge, categorizer who is affected\u2014or not\u2014by photographs.<\/p>\n

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Near the beginning of his still under-celebrated essay \u201cDie Geste des Fotografierens,\u201d \u2014\u201cThe Gesture of Photographing\u201d \u2014 (Flusser 1991), Flusser, too, proposed to consider his topic through three figures, and in keeping with the phenomenological shape of his thought at all points, these three present potentially distinct ways of being conscious of photographing: the photographer, the photographed, and a third figure carefully observing what the first two are doing.\u00a0 As in Barthes\u2019s essay, readers \u201csee\u201d the events mainly from the third position, that of the writer-observer. But Flusser and Barthes are not actually writing about the same thing.\u00a0 As Barthes is looking at photographs, Flusser is looking at photographing<\/em> (the word is a gerund, marking an activity rather than a thing), a visible gesture<\/em>.\u00a0 Flusser was hardly any more an actual photographer than Barthes was.\u00a0 But by framing his topic as a gesture, a particular kind of movement between states of consciousness and states of affairs, Flusser was able, in a way no other writer on photography has been, to take the photographer\u2019s part.<\/p>\n

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Virtually all of the voices that have substantially shaped contemporary photographic \u201corthodoxy,\u201d not only the historians, but critics, including Benjamin (1968), Barthes (1981), Sontag (1978), even Szarkowski (1966;1978) \u2014an accomplished photographer\u2014wrote <\/em>as a receivers and judges of photographs, from the position Barthes designated the Spectator.\u00a0 Flusser did as well at some points, notably in Towards a Philosophy of Photography <\/em>(Flusser 2000, 60). But even there, he provides space for a movement of thought, a potential shift or expansion of consciousness beyond that position. There is a passage in which he reflects on a photograph of the war in Lebanon, for example (Flusser 2000, 60). Flusser anticipates readers\u2019 likely conclusion that the image has an ideological significance, then goes on to question the adequacy of any photograph to the construction of ideologies on the grounds that ideologies require linear, rational thought.\u00a0 He proposes instead that the photograph has a magical effect and draws an irrational response, probably below conscious awareness, that it suggests powerful, dangerous forces that need to be appeased (All of this would seem to be what Barthes set aside under the term studium<\/em>, the ordinary perception and understanding of a photograph that anyone might have.).\u00a0 Flusser opens two distinct positions to the reader, that is, two that Flusser himself seems fully capable of appreciating, of temporarily sharing, even as he moves into yet another position, critical of the first two.\u00a0 In fact Flusser\u2019s writing, in the \u201cGesture\u201d essays and elsewhere, could well be understood as \u201cshots\u201d of specific objects in particular circumstances, views that not infrequently overlap, or show the same object from a very different angle, at a different scale, or in a set of relationships that may appear \u201cinconsistent\u201d with other shots, although in the context of photographs, alternative standpoints are more likely to draw positive commentary than a charge of inconsistency.<\/p>\n

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Flusser\u2019s voice is distinctive among serious writers on photography in many ways, but I think above all for its recognition of the photographer as the writer\u2019s peer, as someone who, like a philosopher, searches for a position with respect to objects in the world, tests it, perhaps returns, changes again.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Gesture of Photographing,\u201d he quite explicitly compares the movements of a photographer around a chosen subject to \u201cmoves\u201d of philosophical thought around a chosen object, that is, the setting up, testing, choosing from among various possible positions, points of view — the process any one of us might use to reflect on ourselves in relation to the world.\u00a0 He concludes that photographing is a gesture of seeing, what the ancient Greeks called theoria<\/em>.\u00a0 Only for the really ancient Greeks, the visible gesture would have to have been speech, and for the slightly less ancient Greeks, writing; only we have the option of transforming, or translating the gesture without recourse to language\u2014through the gesture of photographing.<\/p>\n

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Flusser does not explicitly say whether or how the images \u2014 photographs \u2014 that result from the gesture of photographing resemble more conventional written or spoken philosophy.\u00a0 In fact such a comparison would be inconsistent with his whole position with respect to photography.\u00a0 For such a comparison could only be made from the standpoint of the viewer (Barthes\u2019s Spectator<\/em>) regarding an object.\u00a0 Flusser rather treats it, as he treats any form of communication, as a distinctive gesture, gestures being\u00a0 configurations of material and movements through which thoughts move from inside to outside, from internal consciousness to perceptibility to others.\u00a0 He further sees each specific configuration\u2014writing, drawing, filming, etc., as decisively shaping and limiting what can be thought in and through it.\u00a0 Photographs are acknowledged to share certain features with writing\u2014particularly the stabilizing and preservation of a conceptual \u201cmove,\u201d a thought, so that it can returned to some consciousness\u00a0 (not necessarily the photographer\u2019s own,) in some other time and place. He recognized the \u201cSprunghaftigkeit,\u201d (roughly, the \u201cby-fits-and-starts-ness\u201d) of photography, for example, the alternation of reflecting and recording, thinking and action, as common to all communicative gestures, including his own writing practice.<\/p>\n

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In Camera Lucida<\/em>, Barthes repeatedly lends photographs a voice of resonant, authoritative assertion: this has been<\/em>. The verb is present perfect: like a word in a sentence, the photograph has a place a continuum, a position in a linear chain of events.\u00a0 Flusser knows, acknowledges this way of understanding photographs:\u00a0 \u201c\u2026 Most of us (including most photographers) are still caught up in historical, progressive, enlightened consciousness,\u201d (Flusser 2002, 129), that is, an understanding that events have causes and effects, that the chain potentially stretches from the past moment of the photograph into the present.\u00a0 But he begs us to see photographs differently, as coming from, operating within a quite different universe, one more like a vast play of chance than an orderly chain of events. Photographs are, he says, realizations of specific possibilities within the camera\u2019s program.\u00a0 Sometime he refers to them as projections into the future, sometimes as ritual instructions.\u00a0 Inasmuch as language remains serviceable at all for the purpose, Flusser\u2019s photographs would not say \u201cthis has been\u201d; perhaps they would speak in the future conditional: \u201cIf this is possible, I must\u2026\u201d And yet it takes a Spectator to make such an observation, to pursue the differences between the ways photographs encode relationships in space and time and the very different ways such relationships can be ordered in a sentence.\u00a0 Flusser probably would not have been very interested.\u00a0 Rather than the differences between things\u2014even complex things like sentences and photographs; he reliably sought more exciting and potentially creative dialogues between gestures, responses, modes of awareness,.<\/p>\n

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Flusser\u2019s writing on photography is dispersed in multiple sites in multiple languages, diverse in its contexts, quite probably contradictory and, as always, frustratingly undocumented. And yet all of these seem like trivial objections in light of<\/p>\n

his singular gesture of reaching out, as a writer, into the photographer\u2019s universe,\u00a0 acknowledging a world on the other side of a viewfinder and its value, in fact its critical importance to all of us.\u00a0 This theme of year\u2019s annual meeting of the Association for Photography in Higher Education (APHE) was \u201cThe Burden of Photographic Theory.\u201d It is an obvious reference to John Tagg\u2019s important work (Tagg1988), but also an expression of frustration.\u00a0 For this is a community of educators who keep trying to introduce theoretical texts, in my view written almost entirely by Spectators, to young photographers who do not, on the whole, identify themselves as Spectators.<\/p>\n

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This year, as Flusser would have turned 90, we have no doubt advanced further toward the universe of technical images he forecast in the 1980s (Flusser 1985).\u00a0 Perhaps the young photographers are displaying, as he would have predicted, a growing impatience with writing as such, a tendency to find critical thought alien and irrelevant, a preference for surface over depth.\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 But it seems at most part of the issue.\u00a0 In my experience, young artists and photographers will read and write critically if they can grasp the terms of engagement, if they can \u201ctranslate\u201d the writer\u2019s situation into the conditions in which they themselves are living and working.\u00a0 Flusser\u2019s texts, in themselves, rarely provide this: they are always very clear, but nevertheless very succinct and abstract, requiring some effort to fill in a working context. Still, in contrast to the many deservedly-respected, foundational texts that construct our current understanding of photography, Flusser opened a new channel to photographers\u2014a channel through which to speak and listen, or more exactly, to see and picture their gesture as theory.\u00a0 Flusser has given no more than a sketch, a suggestion that such a gesture of translating could, should, go both directions, between verbal and visual universes. The rest is up to us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Barthes, Roland (2000) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography<\/em>, London: Vintage. First published as La Chambre Claire<\/em>, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1980.<\/p>\n

Benjamin, Walter (1968) \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction\u201d 217-252 in: Illuminations<\/em>, New York: Schocken.<\/p>\n

Flusser, Vil\u00e9m.1983. F\u00fcr eine Philosophie der Photographie<\/em>, G\u00f6ttingen: European\u00a0 Photography.\u00a0 Translated as Towards a Philosophy of Photography<\/em> (2000) London: Reaktion<\/p>\n

Flusser, Vil\u00e9m.1985. Ins Universum der technischen Bilder<\/em>, G\u00f6ttingen: European\u00a0 Photography.\u00a0 This is forthcoming in my translation as Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.<\/p>\n

Flusser, Vil\u00e9m.1991. \u201cDie Geste des Fotografierens,\u201d 127-150 in: Gesten: Versuch einer Ph\u00e4nomenologie<\/em>, D\u00fcsseldorf and Bensheim: Bollmann Verlag<\/p>\n

Flusser, Vil\u00e9m. 2002. \u201cPhotography and History,\u201d 126-31 in Writings<\/em>, Andreas Str\u00f6hl, editor, translated by Erik Eisel, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press<\/p>\n

Sontag, Susan (1978) On Photography, London: Allen Lane.<\/p>\n

Szarkowski, John.1978. Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960<\/em>, New York: The Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n

______________ .1966. The Photographer\u2019s<\/em> Eye<\/em>, New York: The Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n

Tagg, John (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories<\/em>, Houndmills: Basingstoke: Macmillan Education<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[The text first appeared as part of \u00a0issue 10 of \u00a0Flusser Studies (flusserstudies.net), November, 2011] Near the beginning of his justly celebrated essay Camera Lucida (Barthes 2000), Roland Barthes introduced a means of breaking...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":1070,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-158","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/158\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}