I imagine the piles of images. Huge diggers shovel at them, scooping all the waste into their buckets: the underexposed pictures, the duplicates and triplicates, the tail of an out-of-frame dog, a picture of a café ceiling taken by mistake. We get a vague sense of the vast mass from social media, where thousands of mediocre pictures are posted, pinned like butterflies with “tags.” For these images the future is just one more cemetery, a huge archive of human bodies we know nothing about for the most part, except that they existed.
This immortality is terrifying, but even more terrifying is the fact that it is imposed on you. What photography now registers is nothing other than the body of death: the part of me that has no personal will or choice, which anyone can claim, which is fixed and preserved without effort. It is the part that dies, and not the part that remains.
In the past immortality was a matter of choice, though you could reject it and choose what everyone was offered as a matter of course: “to be laid in a narrow cell forever.” Now that forever narrow cell of “Gray’s Elegy” has been withdrawn and we have accepted the impossibility of simply disappearing. Whether you want it or not, you are facing the strange extension of your existence, your outward form preserved for all time. All that disappears is what made you yourself.
It is a luxury permitted to very few to vanish entirely, to disappear from the radar.
You step into another photograph, it is as inevitable as stepping out into sudden summer rain. Who will actually look at all these images and when will they do it? Our outward form is scratched from us by a thousand CCTV cameras at stations, streetcar stops, in shops and underpasses — like the fingerprints left everywhere by humanity before forensics were invented. It has no alphabet, only the new (old) multitudinous nature of leaves in a forest.
Since we began recording and archiving sound, the unreproducible has disappeared from life. How Mademoiselle George acted on the stage and how Angiolina Bosio sang was described to us, and demanded time and passion of the curious: you had to imagine, flesh it out, recreate something in your head. Now there is nothing between you and what has been. The longer we keep recording the more people will fall into the zone of the undead. Their physical form keeps on walking and talking, their earthly voice resounds whenever you want it to. They still have it within their power to charm, to arouse desire, or to disgust (the body and the name separate, like film credits). The culmination of this is pornography from the distant past, nameless dead bodies performing their mechanical duties long after their owners are ashes and dust.
Still, the physical body cannot be handed down in this way — it carries no caption with its name and description. It has no distinguishing features. It is divested of all memory retrospectively, of any trace of what has happened to it: its history, its biography, its death. This divestment makes it obscenely contemporary. The more naked it is, the nearer it is to us, and the further from human memory. We know only two things about these people: that they are dead and that they had no interest in bequeathing their bodies to eternity. What once had a basic function, like the sparkwheel of a cigarette lighter, rotating between desire and satisfaction without any wish to become yet another memento mori, continues to function like a mechanism. But on this occasion, for me at least, it is a mechanism for compassion.
All the laws laid out by Barthes and Kracauer are in operation here. The punctum (a reproduction hanging over the bed, long black socks drawn up the skinny calves of a man) wants to be an alphabet, wants to turn events into a history — in this case to recount how time is constructed, its tastes and its sensitivity. But in fact all we see is the nakedness, which unexpectedly proved to be their last nakedness: these people, their thighs and potbellies, the mustaches and hair fringes of a time when they were contemporary, are left to the mercy of the viewer. They have no names, no future. All of it came to an end in the twenties-thirties-forties, those decades that still lie ahead of them. We can stop them in their tracks, speed them up, make them start over with their simple activities, again and again they’ll lift their former legs and arms, and lock the door as if they were all alone and still alive.
A Russian collector bought a box of family photographs in Sri Lanka; they impressed her in some way, so much so that a year later she returned to buy the whole archive, and began a search for the vanished family. She even found documentary traces of them, although none of them had lived into the new century. She then did everything she could to give them the strange immortality sometimes possessed by objects that have lost their owners. What was it about the photographs that made them stand out from the common crowd? Perhaps that which sets the museum exhibit apart from its more ordinary siblings, a subtle quality that gives it the right to preferential attention. None of the photographs in the archive (the father Julian Rast was a professional photographer) serve the utilitarian purpose of the mere preservation of existence. A visual perfection gives each image the magnetic and enchanting sheen of an exhibit: a family in the snow under the pine fronds; a child on a sledge with a baby faun; bathers; horse riders; German shepherd dogs. All the pictures look just like film stills and the viewer is drawn in, waiting for the scene to change and new scenes to appear, he needs to find out what happened to the subjects of the photos.
There is such injustice in the way that people and their portraits cannot escape an immediate and basic inequality: the difference between the interesting and the not so interesting, between what draws our attention and what doesn’t. Everything is in silent sympathy with the tyranny of choice, always on the side of the beautiful and the charismatic (to the detriment of everything that has no claim on our attention and so remains on the dark side of this world), especially our bodies with their entirely pragmatic agenda. Our preferences have nothing to do with age or upbringing, even three-month-old babies vote for beauty, health, and symmetry.
And this is unjust. Just as the dictatorship of the viewer or “watcher,” with his unfounded demands on the image, is an unjust one. The word “watcher” in Russian has a second, less obvious meaning. In the language of prisons, camps, and the criminal underworld, known by a significant proportion of all Russian-speakers, the watcher is the one who sets the rules and makes sure the others follow them.
So perhaps we could characterize the relationship between the watcher and the photograph, the reader and the text, and the viewer and the film as small episodes of power, like ticket sellers in the museum halls of random access memory. Both the rules and how they are followed depend on this relationship, but let’s not pretend that the “watcher” is a righteous judge. His rules and his choices are not God-given, they are human. Worse than that, they are criminal. He is intent on the acquisition/absorption of the foreign body: his taste is based on the rights of the strong when surrounded by the weak, or the living when surrounded by the dead (who are deliberately denied all their rights).
Maybe that’s why I love photographs that need no interlocutor and have no desire to engage with me. They are, in their own way, rehearsals for nonexistence, for life without us, for the time when the room is no longer ours to enter. A family is drinking tea, the children are playing chess; the general bends over the map; the baker’s assistant lays out the cakes — and we can satisfy our ancient and enduring desire to gaze into every one of the windows of the house of a thousand windows. The point of this dream is surely to be someone completely different for a short while, to escape ourselves. Most old photographs can’t answer this need — all they can do is insist upon their own integral selves. Their identity is theirs, but this world is ours.