None of this is possible without photography’s first and most important promise. Writing a letter in 1843, Elizabeth Barrett “long[ed] to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases—but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!” With the daguerreotype and the photograph, what was or would be gone could now be taken with you, saved from the corrosive accumulation of years and the unreliability of memory. Perhaps photography, as a technology and a medium, is haunted by death because it tried, arrogantly, to refute death’s claim on memory.
Though of course, as Guibert observes, there is a tendency for certain photographs to “quickly turn yellow and crack around the edges whenever they’re exposed to light or handled too often (after a while, light always revenges itself for having been taken prisoner—it gathers itself back).”
With this refutation of death is an assumption or declaration of accuracy, of exactness. Daguerre’s invention was “not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature,” he told his investors, but a way to give nature “the power to reproduce herself.” Not only can an image of a thing live forever, but its image can live faithfully. Despite nearly two centuries of manipulation, staged photographs, alterations, “deep fakes,” and other infidelities entwined with photography since its inception, there remains the naïve assumption, so easily disprovable, that what we see in a photograph is somehow true, or at the very least truer than what is remembered or narrated.
At the time I am writing this, a search for the #nofilter hashtag on Instagram returns 266,415,808 images. Many are landscapes. Some are close-ups of flowers, trees, or handfuls of beach sand. Few are selfies. Most are sunsets, an event that occurs every day on earth. In the standard sunset photograph—a genre of its own—the horizon is centered vertically, an equal field of murky land or water below a mirrored quantity of murky sky, and that brilliant wound of color scratched through the middle. It’s the color, I think, that people find so hard to believe, and what they ask us, through their photographs, to believe along with them. What #nofilter promises, ostensibly, is true colors, or verified colors. This happened we understand when we see #nofilter; or, in a more familiar phrase: This is a true story—a desperation particularly apt for the least realistic, least honest, least literary, and most photo-centric of all platforms.
Of course, even those real sunsets are filtered. The scene’s selection as a photograph, as well as its frame—the edge of what we see—create a narrative of boundaries: this is what was seen, and that is whatever wasn’t photographed. All photographers make decisions. “Every time we look at a photograph,” writes John Berger in Ways of Seeing, “we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.” Not only is something taken into the future, but everything else is left behind—this is the grammar of the photograph’s frame. The ubiquity of #nofilter exposes the preserved moment for the idyllic lie that it is: an artful re-creation. Similarly, its very deployment—going out of one’s way to promise that this, right here, is a faithful token of reality—contaminates the image with an expression of selfhood; it tells the viewer the story of just how badly the photographer wants to be believed.
Instagram, as a social phenomenon, not only betrays the photographic desire for fidelity, but its unique braiding of fascination with anxiety in capturing moments in time. With an increasing variety of filters and aspect ratios, Instagram’s daily upload of ninety-five million images preserves and remembers ninety-five million different moments in the lives of over a billion active users. When launched in 2010, Instagram’s only aspect ratio was a perfect square, similar to the Polaroid and Kodak Instamatic formats of the 1970s. In 2016, the design collective Canva found that, after Clarendon (“an all-purpose filter that brightens, highlights, and intensifies shadows for color that pops”), the most popular Instagram filter is Gingham: “a nostalgic choice. Once reserved for videos, this vintage-inspired photo filter lets Instagram users evoke the past.”
Outside of Instagram, photography’s fetishistic relationship with the past is just as prevalent. In one professional photograph, we see a Spanish Gothic cinema house, its frescoes dripping from the ceiling, the intricate carvings that frame the screen crumbling onto the floor. In another, someone’s abandoned apartment, the kitchen cupboards leaning on their countertops, a small unsmashed television resting on a cheerless laminate table. The walls look as if they could be violated. In other images, warped mansions sink into overgrowth; a shattered greenhouse becomes a garden’s mausoleum.
The sensibility of decay is nothing new, but in Yves Marchand’s photographs of Detroit and in Matthew Christopher’s Abandoned America series—particularly in their widespread presence on Tumblr and Pinterest—we talk about these photographs as a new genre: ruin porn. But as Sontag writes, the photographer Clarence John Laughlin was summoning ghosts in the 1930s with his pictures of “decaying plantation houses of the lower Mississippi, funerary monuments in Louisiana’s swamp burial grounds, Victorian interiors in Milwaukee and Chicago.” As an endeavor in “extreme romanticism,” Laughlin’s work hints, too, at a form of “relic making.” There is nothing scientific, Sontag says, about the American photographer’s ongoing project of documentation. Photography’s effectiveness “depends on its steadily enlarging the familiar iconography of mystery, mortality, transience”; however, this “mournful vision of loss” comes to warp our vision of the past so severely that it reverberates all the way into the present, into this very moment. Photography “offers instant romanticism about the present. In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it.” To snap a photo is to instantaneously condemn a thing, even a person, to what is no longer.
In 2004, the E! network launched The Soup, a half-hour recap of pop culture events from the previous week. A harbinger of “In Case You Missed It” clip-based media consumption, The Soup managed to portray last week as though an era long past, worthy of nostalgia. Fawning over moments, a lot of what might have escaped notice became enshrined in pop culture (including, most famously, Whitney Houston shouting “kiss my ass” at Bobby Brown). The Soup created content out of other networks’ content—a proto-meme sensibility.
In October 2015—only two months before The Soup went off the air—Twitter launched its “Moments” feature, a customizable tab that functions as a newsfeed or collection of current events, including awards ceremonies, noteworthy deaths, album releases, political news, or les scandales du jour. Unlike Twitter’s list of trending topics, these moments do not appear as an ongoing, constant stream of tagged tweets about a unifying event. Instead, a Moment appears as a clean, easy-to-read headline with a brief explanation and a large, professionally shot accompanying image, much as one would see on a news website. Twitter encourages you to tweet about this moment and share it with your followers, which wouldn’t be so troubling if most of these moments did not appear from verified (read: official, authoritative, organized, corporate) sources. These moments are sponsored snapshots of information events. At any given time of day, opening the tab is akin to perusing an online photo album: we flip through these images of culture and select what we wish to spend more time studying, more time internalizing, more time remembering. Just look at everything that happened today, one might sigh, marveling at how much simpler life was at seven o’clock that morning before the world continued to complicate itself. Every day, we are invited to see how information ruins our innocence.
A recurring complaint on social media is the relentless flood of news (time) and the wish to escape it (death). The drive to narrate, to make meaning, is obfuscated by sheer volume. It’s no wonder, as Sebald writes, that Barthes saw in the “man with a camera an agent of death.” In our consumption of images, each moment ebbs away like a drop of blood dripped from our veins into a vial, frozen for some
future study.
On a personal level, Twitter extends this capability for the creation and curation of moments in its users individual lives. This seems like Twitter’s version of Facebook’s ambiguous “life event.” On both platforms, users have the ability to author and publish the moments in their timelines that they wish followers or visitors to notice, to see before all others. This, our moments say, is what I want you to know and remember about me. Displayed as they are on our timelines or profiles, these moments become—like their less personal counterparts of cultural information—images in and of themselves. These once dynamic parts of our lives, lived out in time, lie down flat and become tradable, consumable, sharable, and—of course—deletable. Like the cultural prescriptive memory that encourages us to never forget Matthew Shepard or 9/11, our personal galleries of life-images—our individually curated histories—demand that visitors, be they friends or strangers, never forget the sponsored self we believe (or wish) ourselves to be. In many articles targeted toward Instagrammers, users are advised to keep a close eye on the look of their profile—if the tiles of images complement or clash, if they flow like an elegant fabric or overwhelm like some grandmother’s hideously patched quilt. An aesthetically pleasing history will, it is assumed, invite more followers.
Cantilevered opposite these aestheticized personal pasts, of course, are equally fussed-over futures. Up until recently, the most common form of images most people in capitalist nations came across every day were advertisements. Berger, in Ways of Seeing, calls them “publicity images,” which “must be continually renewed and made up-to-date.” Yet as saturated as we are by advertisements, “they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and they always speak of the future.” Just as a photograph entombs a moment of time and clips the past from the present, the publicity image, Berger says, “is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be” (emphasis mine). In a consumerist culture, we curate the images that excite our desire to spend money to become someone else, even if it’s only our past self we sentence to envying who we may become.
Berger’s ideas center upon literal, paid advertisements (Ways of Seeing was published in 1972), by which he meant magazine ads, television commercials, radio jingles, billboards, product packaging, etc. There was no social media, strictly speaking, in the seventies. However, he does mention a personal custom that anticipates certain platforms:
Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and are all more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant.
If this sounds like Pinterest, Tumblr, or Instagram, it should: it serves a similar purpose. Before the internet, we collected these images, cultural and personal, as a way to remind ourselves of what matters to us, what is important, what we want to remember. In office cubicles, employees still hang calendars full of photographs of landscapes, of cities they’ve never visited; at home, a newspaper clipping on the fridge might remind us of a vacation we’d like to take, a book we’d like to read. Surrounding oneself with images is a form of aspiration; just as we define our lives by the gallery we curate of past images, we survive on the breath of our future selves, what we might become. Introducing this concept to social media, where a following can witness our aspirations in aggregate (scrolling through our tableau of desires) or in real time (liking and sharing these images as we post them), is a way of broadcasting our own personal publicity campaigns: this is what I’d like to be.
Naturally, just as we tend to learn from and copy one another in our methods of curating, even policing, our images of the past, so too do our public aspirations—our vision boards—cross-contaminate and homogenize desire. A friend or stranger might share a photograph of some country cottage, a fire kindled in a large stone hearth, a book spine-up on the arm of a chair, a cup of coffee on a side table with one hyper-contrasted curl of steam; until now, you might have thought your ideal life would be spent at the beach or in a Parisian apartment, but now this cottage, and others like it, could become a lifestyle to chase. Reproductions of works of art shared to social media timelines become advertisements for styles of life: I wish I was as cultured, as familiar with art, as you, or I wish I traveled to faraway museums as often as you. Even the image of a Facebook friend—one you might well have seen in person yesterday—getting dinner at a restaurant becomes an image of publicity: the glamour of wanting an experience you aren’t having, not to mention the little kernel of consumerist shame that you weren’t asked, that you weren’t good enough, to join.
In short, we have learned to present ourselves as images, to see one another as images. On social media—the primary method by which most people in capitalist nations experience one another every day—we are discontinuous with ourselves and with others; our friends resemble a catalogue of images to consume, reject, or discard. As images, any pretense of meaning vanishes from our lives. Crushed between the immense visibility of an aesthetically pleasing, deeply curated past and future, the present is becoming an infinitesimally smaller and smaller moment in time, and yet here, in this virtual blink of an eye, is the entire weight of our agency as human beings. We are holding our individual wills in a container of time almost impossible to perceive, impossibly small. No wonder Barthes—and Guibert, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus and so many others—saw, in such seeing, so much death.
In this capitalism-of-seeing, confined to near immobility between past and future, we rob ourselves of the consciousness that human beings exist continuously in time, and that our beliefs, opinions, desires, and deeds shift accordingly. The photographic ethos encourages a split—that whoever or whatever we’re seeing is somehow separate from us; but in a world where anyone can be transformed into an image, there is no split: we are all the image and its spectator, and we owe it to one another to be watchful.
At the close of On Photography, Sontag conjures the metaphor of conservation: “If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.” Azoulay answers Sontag’s call by changing the verb. To watch invokes a lapse of time. It is to accept that every image of a person you encounter, no matter how flat or reduced or airbrushed, is or was another human being existing in time, complete with aspirations, faults, guilt, talents, loneliness, and terror.
Photography is a technology—which is to say, it’s not a weapon. It’s not, in a strict sense, Barthes’s “agent of death,” even if it does trade in images of death. Even if it does promise, in some way, to bring something of its subjects into a time they cannot follow. Photography is hardly the first technology to promise transcending the boundaries of one’s own life—of reaching beyond the “brief crack of light,” as Nabokov called it, “between two eternities of darkness”—and, of course, hardly the last. Yet there remains something about it that most of us, including those who surveil themselves with thousands of photographs every year, are unable to see.
In her essay “Kim Kardashian West Is the Outsider Artist America Deserves,” Laura Jean Moore describes how female self-portraiture “upends historical norms of female representation and power, and places the power of depiction squarely in the hands of the subject.” In assuming herself and her life as a subject, “Kardashian West is part of an established legacy of female artists and writers who have created art from the realm of the intensely personal and confessional.” Via Instagram, Kardashian West narrates her self in carefully selected images with total artistic agency. Her story is one of empowerment, beauty, and—strangely enough, via a distortion of the self—self-acceptance. (Naturally, she rarely mention
s the immense, uncirculated stockpile of wealth and resources that enable such self-acceptance, nor how much capital and labor is expended by her and her employees to arrive at such selfies.)
Kardashian West’s photographic project seems an inversion of Cindy Sherman’s, who has long suppressed the personal and the confessional despite her physical body being the subject of almost all her work. In “A Piece of the Action: Images of ‘Woman’ in the Photography of Cindy Sherman,” Judith Williamson argues that Sherman adapts the traditional uses of women in art, journalism, and advertising as divining rods for dominant societal narratives: “An image of a woman’s face in tears will be used by a paper or a magazine to show by impression the tragedy of war, or the intensity of, say, a wedding. From the face we are supposed to read the emotions in the event.” In Sherman’s Film Stills project, Williamson says, “the very reference to film invites this interpretation. Film stills are by definition a moment in a narrative. In every still, the woman suggests something other than herself, she is never complete: a narrative has to be evoked.” Instead of highlighting how narrative can imbue a self with agency, Sherman’s oblique personae are deprived of agency. The women in her photographs are victims of narrative, used in someone else’s story.
In Fetishism and Curiosity, Laura Mulvey suggests that each of Sherman’s images is “a cutout, a tableau suggesting and denying the presence of a story . . . The Film Stills parody the stillness of the photograph and they ironically enact the poignancy of a ‘frozen moment.’ The women in the photographs are almost always in stasis, halted by something more than photography.”
So how do we watch a photograph that is subverting the invitation to watch?—that is predicated on our desire to find a narrative, and to thwart it? In a 1983 interview with American Photographer, Sherman observed the uncanny confusion many felt in experiencing her work: “Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.” Sherman’s Film Stills, perhaps more than any other photographic series, illustrates the temptation to project a narrative upon an image. As a consequence, it reveals, too, just how easy it is to lose oneself in that image—to erase oneself with a story that isn’t your own.
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