If a picture paints a thousand words, then a photograph, it seems, is a window; where a replicated image, painted, can be perceived as more transparent, more realistic, than the written word, a photograph, capturing an event as it was at the time, or so it seems, is ever closer to the allusive grail of truthful representation.
And so the photograph occupies a strange place in contemporary culture, being used almost everywhere. Growing stronger with the rise of the Internet, social networking sites have given a further importance to the phenomenon of the photograph.
Myspace, which focused partly on blogging, and partly on pictures and messaging, has been superseded by Facebook, the clue in this case being in the name; blog posts and comments, whether minimal or substantial, are often imputed by the sharing of photographs on the site, and the suite of photos attributed to each person, their face-book - due partly to the popularity of the site and to its structural design - becomes the fulcrum of an individual's online identity.
With Facebook membership now exceeding 200 million, and users sharing a plethora of photos daily, the ascendency of the photograph is all too apparent. How, then, has the photograph come, over other mediums, to represent a more truthful sense of reality?
The Painter and the Photographer: A Matter of Time
By the very nature of the act of painting, the painter has always occupied a position of relative artificiality. A painting cannot capture a moment, a split second, it can only seek to represent a moment; true, a painter might paint over several hours, what feels to its audience like a moment – Las Meninas by Diego Velàzquez is a perfect example – but the creation of this representation of a moment occurs over a much longer period of time than the moment it is designed to represent.
The photograph, with its snapshot ability to record any moment almost immediately, can be seen as an improvement on this process; capturing the scene that it wishes to portray and being able to provide a representative object essentially instantly, the photograph has the ability to match in process, the time taken for the moment to be experienced.
It is easy to see then, how photographs have come to symbolise a closer synthesis of representation and reality than that of the written word, or of the painting. Its ability to capture the moment in the time it takes for the moment to pass, makes it in some way a more accurate picture of events.
Creating an Artificiality with the Camera
What this point does not consider, though, is the artificiality of the moments that the photographer might capture, and the matters of intention, form and equipment that might alter the relationship between representation and reality, as captured by the camera.
To return to the Facebook motif. A vast proportion of ordinary photos - which for a great many people become primary reference points for past events - are staged photographs. Like the painter with his models, the photographer has the power of the pose, and is often very enthusiastic about using it.
Like the painter, too, then, the photographer is one who takes a moment and creates something artificial with it; the posed photograph - the portrait, the head shot, the smile – are not representative, in themselves, of events, they simply capture the precise moment of the pose, which is not necessarily in thematic relation,with the rest of the moments that precede and succeed it.
And yet, the photograph comes to represent these precedents and successions.
Effects of Intention on The Truthfulness of Representation
The person with the camera is in this case subject to certain claims of authorial intention, making the photographer much like the writer. They are willing the moment that they capture, and, though it is a more accurate representation of that moment, perhaps, than the same moment from that of a painter, they too are agents of creation.
If the editing of photographs and the affect of equipment, like that of the paint and the paintbrush, are also included, it is easy to see how photography is no closer, in essence, to a truthful representation of an event than the writer or painter.
The Photograph: Another Medium, Another Art
Of course, what has been said here does not discredit the idea of photography; clearly, its ability to represent its material in real-time gives it a certain, original mimesis. Simply, it serves to highlight, in brief, some of the issues that affect photography, like other forms of art, in each composition.
It must be remembered that a photograph is not a memory, but a representation of a memory; it is not a window, but the representation of a window; it does not tell a story, but represents an image that might influence the telling of a story.
Chris Woolfrey - Writer.
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