Photoschade, an Essay by Arthur Ovanesian and David Garyan

Photo by Arthur Ovanesian

February 1st, 2023

Photoschade

an essay by Arthur Ovanesian and David Garyan

“It’s strange. I look so different here.”

Photograph.

Have we misread it?

The product of the phenomenon that creates a record of the past, captures history in the frame—with what appears to be unremitting truth and accuracy.

But what if the photograph is a vain (hopeless? self-centered?) attempt to retain what could never be—because it was never meant to be—held in unmandated suspension? Does the photograph rescue memories from oblivion, or does it in fact lead them there?

The French philosopher Roland Barthes believed that photography irrevocably implied death because “it records what was there and is there no longer” (Eliza Richards, “‘Death’s Surprise, Stamped Visible’: Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Civil War Photography,” 13). We, however, have been given to assume that what has disappeared in the physical sense can now forever stay unchanged simply because it has been photographed. In this sense, the photograph claims to resuscitate the past, but in reality, most of what it does is connected to death. Thus, what we would like photography to do is not recovery of moments (i.e., exact replications of reality, which would be impossible, precisely because reality is a sequence of moments, whereas the photograph is merely one moment—supposedly suspended in time).

Since photographs cannot offer the so-called recovered moments, we attempt to use them to relive instances as they were originally experienced. Yet it is not clear whether that desire is good for us, mainly because it is based on an unconditional trust that photographs will accurately represent what we felt at the time. The very desire to discover the original experience inside a photograph can become openly harmful because it is, in fact, an unfulfillable fantasy. Why? Repeated viewings of the image destroy the sequence of moments surrounding the “one” instance captured in the photo, to such an extent that the individual abandons the interpretive fluidity around the entire event in favor of the coveted initial sensation offered by the supposedly stable photograph. You want what the photograph claims it can give you: the authentic memory of the past stored within. But the photograph has no memory to begin with. All it can do is testify to the disappearance of things around the moment it has captured—the gloomy, inscrutable twilight that settles over what has been.

There are four words related to photography whose definitions clash internally with one another (much like photography, in a real sense, opposes itself to memory rather than enhancing or facilitating it). These words are “mold,” “quick,” “specimen,” and “negative.”

Emily Dickinson, nineteenth-century American poet, was once asked for her portrait by someone she knew. She wrote back refusing, stating that, “could you believe me—without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well? It often alarms Father—He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest—but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor.” The words “mold” and “quick” stand out in this passage. “Mold” refers here to the photographic image; it’s the ‘material’ which has the power to preserve, and yet this very material is also an agent of deterioration. In other words, Dickinson argues that whatever superficial preservation photography gives us, its real nature lies simply in erasing the photographed subject and replacing it with the photograph—that is, the photograph becomes the new subject. This contradiction is for Dickinson what informs the entire medium: to mold the image, but the image itself begins to suffer from mold. How and why does the image begin to “mold?” Because the photograph becomes the object of attachment, while the person fades into the background: a kind of idolization, if you will, the consequence of which is that the person suffers an implicit death and can no longer be brought back—a photographic acknowledgement, yielded by the photograph itself, of loss and departure. The same is true of the word “quick.” “Quick,” according to one scholar, referred to “any substance which increased the sensitivity of the light-recording compound and thus very materially reduced the time of the exposure in the camera” (Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889, cited in Richards, “‘Death’s Surprise,’” 18). It eased the process of taking a photograph, but it also expedited the very erasure of identity that photography sought to capture, because the “living essence, or “Quick,” of the pictured subject fade[d] even faster than the picture” (Richards, “‘Death’s Surprise,’” 18). The photograph is produced more quickly, but even faster is the loss of the reason, the essence, that informed its taking in the first place. The living essence is emptied out, and what remains is a slain presence, or an animate absence. Photographs without reasons or essence—and, by implication—without people in them either.

Instead, Dickinson would like to see her loved ones “believe her without” (to use their memory in order to visualize her, because the alternative entails losing both the person and the ability to recall them). Photograph means “sun picture,” but its ultimate effect is to lead people into darkness. The photograph occludes memory because it already preconditions the mind by way of looking at the image. More genuine memories might be displaced and cast aside, because the photograph makes a totalizing claim to truth, while your memories cannot do so. If all this seems harsh on photography, it is only because we all lack the recognition that “we photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.” It is to avoid having to do the critical work of remembering, calling back to mind the possibilities of the past and confronting its attendant ambiguity (for the past is never something to be wholeheartedly embraced or totally rejected). It is not for nothing that an individual in one of Dickinson’s poems found themselves startled, because they could no longer distinguish: is your memory the photograph, or is the photograph your memory? Is there even a difference? This is what concerned Dickinson, and it is indeed no small worry.

Walt Whitman, also a nineteenth-century American poet, offered interesting insights about photography as well in his 1882 autobiography, Specimen Days. Whitman was interested in the simultaneous potential and limitations of photography, in the sense that he would put words to photographic use, seeking within them an illumination of the “relationship between the positive identity represented and the means—call it the negative—of its representation” (Sean Meehan, “Specimen Daze: Whitman’s Photobiography,” 481). Delving into those means was for Whitman the first step in overcoming the limitations of photography (better elucidating its real nature), because the first and most important point to grasp was the following: all that the “negative” (the means of representation, whatever they may be) had to offer were “glimpses.” Glimpses, because, obviously, memory cannot remember everything, but more because, even if it could, no moment can ever be recovered fully—the reality of its having vanished is already past restoration. By having words do the job of the camera, Whitman reveals those aforementioned limits of representation in their fundamental nature. He evokes photographic images in our minds of things he “wish[es] he could convey”; for instance, the creases and bloodstains of his Civil War notebooks (Whitman, quoted in Meehan, “Specimen Daze,” 483). This already is a demonstration of the vulnerabilities of photography: how can it be that an image is evoked that one wishes could be conveyed? A photograph would, therefore, obviously be no more successful in evoking the departed feeling of the photographer than a writer wishing to communicate an emotion he felt long ago, and perhaps even less. In both cases, the reality refuses totalized representation.

Whitman’s glimpses are the “specimens” indicated in the title—the parts that Whitman hopes might put readers within view of the whole: out of reach, but able to be comprehended in some sense. “Specimen pages,” as stated by one scholar, “best represent the type of war they portray by reproducing some of the actual traits of the physical specimens that the war produced…the text remembers by gesturing toward what can no longer be restored…whether reproduced in writing or seen firsthand…specimen cases are primarily visual representations, as the etymological ‘spec’ of the word specimen (Lat. specere: to look at or behold) would suggest” (Meehan, “Specimen Daze,” 484). The representation that is based on specimens would by necessity be incomplete, but the whole point is that a complete story can be incompletely told, leaving the reader with enough of a feeling to understand what it is the writer wanted to share. Authentic, but incomplete: you understand what I wanted to share. Here at last the limitations of photography are overcome: revealing through words that its truth claim is partial. But, having consulted the word for guidance through the mist, and mystery, known as the photograph, we get closer to a resolution. The “negative”—the renunciation of the notion that there can ever be a complete representation of the truth—to arrive at a “positive,” a more faithful rendering of it.

Reading photographs—for the photograph is the word too, enigmatic though it may be—involves acknowledging the unfulfilled certitude of the medium. It acknowledges it by itself. Hence people’s visceral reactions at times to photographs of long ago: “it’s strange. I look so different here.” Strange—as if almost to say, I’m unrecognizable to myself. And so, we have to ask: when we stare at a photograph, what is it that stares back at us?