The same thing happens to us. With every new selfie we take, every group shot or passport photo, our lives become arranged into a chain of images, a history that is quite different from the one we tell ourselves and want others to believe. The line of was-and-will-be, a compendium of single moments, poses, mouths open to speak, blurry chins, none of which we chose ourselves. Balzac foresaw some of this and refused to have his photograph taken, reflecting that each new picture removed a layer of balzac, pared it away, and if you let it happen, soon nothing would be left of you (or what would be left was only a puff of smoke, the vegetable heart, and the very last layer, the thickness of a death mask).
The mechanics of photography never intended to preserve the essence. The project of photography better resembles those time capsules intended for our descendants, or for aliens from outer space, filled with evidence of humanity: an anthology of our greatest moments an attempt to define ourselves through our civilization’s crowning achievements — Shakespeare/Mona Lisa/cigar, or penicillin/iPhone/Kalashnikov. They remind me of Egyptian burial sites, expanding suitcases stuffed with life’s essentials. If we imagine our descendants or the aliens to be curious, and this curiosity to be unlimited by time, then it will only be satisfied by a bank of infinite images, a cupboard where everything is packed away, every last person’s every last moment. And if this terrifying documentary mass could be gathered and kept ready for use, it would hardly be different from the incomplete but ever-increasing mass of data kept somewhere in the shapeless pockets of the atmosphere and called into being by the twitch of a computer mouse.
Photography observes change first and foremost — and always the same change: growth becoming dissolution and disappearance. I’ve seen a few photography projects that have documented change over decades, they flash up on social media now and again, giving rise to a bittersweet tenderness, and the almost improper curiosity with which young, healthy people regard a future that hasn’t even dawned for them yet. A young Japanese man takes a photograph of himself with his young son. Time passes, the boy is one, four, then twelve years old, then twenty: it’s like speeded-up film — we watch one being fill with life, as a balloon fills with air, while the other being diminishes and creases; its light gutters. Or another: Australian sisters who take a picture of themselves every year over a period of forty years in the same room, same spot, and in every picture they age a little more, slowly resigning themselves to aging and to those tiny visible signals of their eventual demise. In this sense at least, art’s endeavor is diametrically opposed to photography: any successful body of text is a chronicle of growth, a thing that is not completely in line with the parallel chronology of the appearance of wrinkles and pigmentation spots. Photography is less compromising: knowing none of this will survive, it makes its best attempt at preservation.
I’m talking about a particular kind of photography here. It’s no coincidence that it’s the most widespread, tracing its chalk circle around both professional photojournalists, amateurs with their mobile phones, and much that lies between these extremes. These photographers (and their viewers) are united by an unwavering belief in the photograph as document, witnessing reality, grasping it as it really is, without any kind of literary ornamentation: a rose is a rose is a rose. Art photography, in its aim to bend and reconstruct the visible world in the name of individual perception, interests me only at those points when reality unintentionally overcomes intent, flattering the viewer who notices the seam: the rough boots peering out from underneath the carnival silk.
The claims, if not the actual possibilities, of documentary photography are extraordinary: to see and hold the existing and what has existed — a task perhaps reserved for the Being who conservat omnia, as it says on the gates of Fontanny Dom in St. Petersburg. Still technology makes its best efforts; it shaves off time’s natural build-up of lint — and there are many mansions in its virtual house.
Many of the qualities of the camera induce a sense of dumbfoundedness. You might say it gives us a reason to quote a person, an animal, or an object as a single entity, as a unit of text — stripping reality of its little halo of signifiers, and at the same time ignoring the signified entirely. The camera places an equals sign between person and image for the first time — all that’s needed is enough images to complete the outline.
A century or so ago, the portrait was exhaustive proof of a person’s life, and with a few exceptions, the only thing you left behind. The portrait was the event of a lifetime, its focal point, and the very nature of the craft demanded the participation of both artist and sitter. The phrase “everyone has the face they deserve” was a literal truth in the age of painting; and for those whom class gave the right to be remembered as a singular face, that was the face of their portrait.
Or perhaps, even more importantly, the face on their correspondence. The greatest part of any legacy was textuaclass="underline" diaries, letters, memoirs, and the balance between the textual and the visual shifted only from the mid-nineteenth century onward, as the pile of photographs accumulated. These presented themselves to the memory not as “me, as I am,” but “me on Saturday in my black riding habit.” The number of photographs a family owned depended solely on their financial means and their social position, but even my grandmother’s nanny, Mikhailovna, had three photos in her keeping.
The old lady of painting (for brevity’s sake that’s what I’ve named the ability to depict the living, by one’s own hand, in any medium) is haunted by the impossibility of resemblance, and yet she becomes increasingly obsessed by the task of producing an exhaustive image, but a single image; an exact image, but an image that does not resemble the sitter; to present to the sitter in his concentrated form, not him-now, but him-forever, a bouillon cube of his vital parts. This is what lies behind the stories about Gertrude Stein becoming with the years more and more like her portrait by Picasso, or the story about Oskar Kokoschka’s subject, who (it is said) subsequently went mad and came to look exactly like his image.
We are the permanent subject of the old lady’s interest, and we know all too well that in place of resemblance she sells us a horoscope: a template interpretation, and we can either agree with it — the mirror flatters me — or refuse it. Once the photographic image appears, Madame Bovary is free to say c’est moi for the first time, as she picks out the most attractive of the thirty-six negatives. Life offers her a new mirror and it reflects fervently, demanding nothing, insisting on nothing.
Painting and photography go their separate ways at this point. One rushes to its inevitable end, its dispersal, and the other toward its vast proliferation. When the inheritance is divided up, one gets the house and garden, the other gets a pig in a poke. Martha takes reality, Mary is left to talk in the language of abstraction and installations.
With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity. It’s as if the waste chute in a building has been blocked off and all the trash just keeps piling up forever. There’s no need to save film, just press the shutter release, even the deleted pictures remain in the computer’s long memory. Oblivion, the copycat of nonexistence, has a new twin brother: the dead memory of the collector. We look through a family album with a sense of affection — it contains a little, perhaps just what remains. But what should we do with an album containing everything, without exception, the whole disproportionate volume of the past? Photography is directed at an endpoint, where the volume of life fixed in images is equal to the actual length of life. The printing press keeps turning, but there are no readers left.