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Transcript of Simulacrum - Photography
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M a t h a y a s | 1
Sabeena Mathayas
Professor Baidik Bhattacharya
M.A. English 2011
Hans Raj College, University of Delhi
28 March 2011
2660 words approximately
Simulacrum
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain
relation to the world that feels like knowledgeand, therefore, like power. A now notorious first
fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to
have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern
organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it
into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge
people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a
person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like
paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so
much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. "In Plato's Cave," On Photography, Farrar, Straus
(1977).
Edward Saids Orientalist discourse organized and elaborated the modern parameters of
representation and knowledge as the elemental characteristics of the construction of a colonial
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order not just through the ideological (dis)orientation toward a global economic-political order
but also through the imbricated arrangement of idiom and imagery that organized and produced
this political reality. Expatiating this through the features of essentialism (unchanging racial or
cultural essences) particularly in opposition to the west and an otherness marked by
fundamental absences (of reason, movement, order, democracy etc) further registered and
reinforced the distinctive definitions that marked the mastery of the colonial world in cultural
documentary.
The resultant plethora of knowledge and forms of knowledge creation that accompanied the
unabated Western expansion since the sixteenth century accorded a need to address and
translate the problem of incommensurability by finding common denominators between
disparate modes of knowledge both within and between societies and cultural traditions. It
involved an understanding of the world as a coda of images and objects whose very
organization was believed to evoke a larger meaning or reality. Conditioning these perspectives
were the platforms of exhibitions, museums, memorials, media and technology which worked
within the ironic duality of creating palpable distinctions between subjects and objects in
themselves and their meanings, what Heidegger called dis-positions and being seen as a
natural progression toward a universalizing cultural historiography.
This intizam-al-manzar aconstitution of a massively effective organization of viewsacross
imperialist narratives, geopolitical spaces and positions was reinforced by the simultaneous
emergence of photography; itself a operating with a conflicted dependency on technology,
discourse and institutional authority for validation. But due to the indexical empirical quality of
the medium, the gaze was a scientific, objective medium of record; the assumption being that
the camera didnt lie and photographers merely documented what they saw. But photographs of
empire did not simply deliver information; they communicated and translated the colonizing eye,
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domesticated landscapes, translated, unknown spaces into familiar scenes Photography
became the inalienable tool to collect the world.
The documentary photograph today has evolved from a collector to an assimilator. Under the
overriding rubric of Globalization, it caters to the generic contemporary term s referent of the
meta-narrative of homogenous and interconnected ideologies, policies and practices supporting
trans- and supra- national flows of capital. This paper attempts to explore traditional theories of
documentary photography as it conditions perspective through the creation and sustenance of
myth and cultural emblems leading up to simulacrum that has overwhelmed a direct relation and
recognition, of and with reality. On challenging the assumed role of the photograph as indexical
evidence and as a modest witness, especially in the documentation of war, the new single
epidermis of world civilization is rendered a shallow veneer, concealing a variety of culture, of
peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which
in a sense, lie beneathit.
I.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious
impulses.
Walter Benjamin (18921940), German critic, philosopher. repr. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, sect. 13 (1936)
Walter Benjamin breaks the photographic medium away from the debates of art, mimesis, style
and content and provides a socio historical perspective in his essay A Little History of
Photography. Embedding the photograph firmly within economic, social, technological and
political practices, he describes the creation of image worlds within a photograph crediting it
with the potential to open the optical unconscious of the viewer and in so doing, open the doors
to a reform of perception that might lead to social change.
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The beholder feels an irresistible compulsion to search a picture for the tiny spark of
contingency, the here and now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared through the image-
character of the photograph, to find the inconspicuous place where, within the essence [Sosein]
of that long past minute, the future nests till today For it is another nature that speaks to the
camera rather than to the eye; other above all in the sense that a space informed by human
consciousness gives way to one informed by the unconscious
The examination of photography as the representative form of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth
century marks the shift attuned to collective concerns and collective power. In confronting the
polemical issue of art as photography and photography as art, Benjamin pointedly notes that
freed from political and social interest, photography becomes creative and serves only to
confirm things as they are. In truth, photographys claim to be art was contemporaneous with its
emergence as a commodity. Photography could not only represent commodities, it could
reproduce and disseminate their representations to ensure market circulation turning segments
of the field of optical perception into saleable commodities. These segments in the perceptive
field did not have to be an object in the physical sense of the term; it could be a concept, a
belief, a practice or a way of experiencing the world. Benjamin believed that the hidden capacity
of photography lay in its power of association in its performative, sensory ability to establish
and embody realityand possibility. Perhaps it is this aspect that lent a political emergency in
Benjamins attempt to develop something like a media theory in the 1930s.
If fascism could aestheticize politics and even war, communism was bound to respond by
politicizing art.
Carrying the performative effects of photographic practice to an extreme, the post modernist
notion of simulacrum becomes particularly significant. In the stage of production, photography is
determined intrinsically by three factors: the photographic equipment itself (the camera, the
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viewfinder, the lens, the editing technology etc), the discourses that support photography and
contextualize them and the institutions that employ and deploy the photographic equipment and
the discourse surrounding it, thereby legitimizing the image with its authority. In essence the
continuous interaction of these factors constitutes the photographic episteme the horizon of
influence that determines a photographers situation, function and perceptive capacity. But this
also comprises a crisis of representation with the gaze bound to and within a prescribed set of
possibilities and embedded in a system of conventions and limitations. The photograph could
therefore only work as a subordinate to the reifying process operating through a reinscription
of established modes of thinking, drawing from a cultures archive of myth and canonic genres
and dependant on analogies.
Consequently, the late capitalist age is the age of simulacra addicted to images, stereotypes,
pseudo events and spectacles. The question is not one of preferring representations over
realities as much as it is the transformation of reality into representations; a set of discourses
without the idea of a referent.
Additionally the arrangement of photographic imagery in post modern hyperspaces
architecture characterized by vast compartmentalized yet homogenized zones linked with
disembodied globally operating corporate networks inspire both pleasurable awe and
disorienting vertigo. These consumptive spaces are extensions of a cultural insularity which
dissolve the critical distance required for perceptual analysis a walling-in of discourses and
optical conscious. This distancing from experience and its mediated representation that is
complicated in war photography and its function in national identity and memory.
II.
We often photograph events that are called news, "Cartier-Bresson told Byron Dobell of
"Popular Photography" magazine in 1957, "but some tell the news step by step in detail as if
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making an accountant's statement. Such news and
magazine photographers, unfortunately, approach
an event in a most pedestrian way. It's like reading
the details of the Battle of Waterloo by some
historian: so many guns were there, so many men
were wounded - you read the account as if it were
an itemization. But on the other hand, if you read
Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, you're inside
the battle and you live the small, significant
details... Life isn't made of stories that you cut into
slices like an apple pie. There's no standard way of
approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation,
a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality."
Like all narrating industries the press too reports
events within an enduring professional and bureaucratic system. Its practice of telling stories
serves as education, as a validation of culture, as wish fulfillment and as a force for conformity.
Reports differ from the experiences of the ones whove suffered and the description is often
what editors hope will suit the preferences of their readers. The use of documentary
photographs in the press does not try to alter conventions so much as to serve them. What
distinguishes documentary from fiction is the way that viewers read and engage with the texts
and images, the assumptions they make about them and what they expect from them. It feeds
other kindsof knowledge; and is most likely to appeal to a presumed consensus of national
identity. The role of the press and the function of photojournalism was to address and confirm
the beliefs of the general public itself a fiction used by journalists to describe their audiences.
Figure 1: Robert Capa International Center of
Photography
FRANCE. Arras. March 23rd, 1945. An American
Parachutist preparing to board the plane for the jump
across the Rhine River.
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An emblematic image of the
Spanish Civil war was
Robert Capas Falling
Soldier or Death of a
Republican Soldier
reputedly taken at the
moment the subject was
shot. The debate
surrounding the
contentious image
concerns its authenticity. Staging the kind of thing that happens in battles undermines the
credibility of documentary photography as a source of indexical evidence about events. The
photograph though gruesome contributes to a sense of war as sacrifice. It proposed that the war
remained an arena of individual honor and bravery and in the furthering of the cause, soldiers
died quickly but aesthetically. Images of the glories of war did not simply reveal a higher ideal of
civilization as intended but also hinted that the management of war was firmly established. The
archaic forms and idealization remain potent in war publicity, designed to produce the particular
knowledge that feeds nationalism and encourages viewers to be sanguine about mass murder.
In themselves, photographs have no identity. They are meaningful only as currency: the value of
images to stand as evidence or register a truth depends on the authority of those who deploy
them and guarantee their authenticity. The material facts of war can stand as evidence only by
studying how photographs are usedas evidence. The problem of photographic evidence rests
not on a natural or existential fact but on a social, historical process.
Figure 2: Robert Capa International Center of Photography
SPAIN. Cordoba front. 1936. Death of a Loyalist Mil itiaman.
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of terror and death forces us to recognize that no one nation stands alone: one nations history
always entails the perspective of others. German historian Michael Geyer portrays the
commemoration of death as work on the bond of human solidarity, mindful of a genocidal past,
and insists that this commemoration is a necessary element in the renewal of historical
consciousness. By this light, national identity and representations of that identity in photographic
exhibitions will necessarily engage other nations and other images from around the world. In
this sense, there can only be one story.
But it is important to stress that neither photography, not national identity, nor time is a stable
element. Photography can chronicle public time, refer only to private memories, or suppress
temporality in favor of strict formalism. Collectives, national and otherwise, can share global
chronologies and structures, or they can mark their differences in time and form. Time can serve
as the denominator of national development or it can be excluded from accounts of national
essence. Stable definitions of these elements are possible only in particular circumstances
where ideology deftly masks its own assumptions. The triangulation between photography,
national identity and time is what makes photography exhibitions charged with possibilities and
their curatorship a political as well as aesthetic act.
Afterword
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making processa process
based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were
madeconstructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudesbut
photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.
Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925), French photographer, critic. The Photographer's Eye, introduction,
Museum of Modern Art (1966).
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Review: Postmodern Culture: The Ambivalence of Fredric Jameson; Author(s): Vincent B.
Leitch; Source: College Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2, Cultural Studies: Theory Praxis Pedagogy
(Jun.,1992), pp. 111-122; Published by: College Literature
Photography, National Identity, and the "Cataract of Times": Wartime Images and the Case of
Japan; Author(s): Julia A. Thomas; Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5
(Dec., 1998), pp. 1475-1501; Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the
American Historical Association
Review: War, Photography and Evidence; Author(s): John Taylor; Source: Oxford Art Journal,
Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), pp. 158-165; Published by: Oxford University Press
Anthropology and Mass Media; Author(s): Debra Spitulnik; Source: Annual Review of
Anthropology, Vol. 22 (1993), pp. 293-315; Published by: Annual Reviews
Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action; Author(s): R. Srivatsan; Source: Economic
and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 11/12, Annual Number (Mar., 1991), pp.771-773+775-
777+779-781+783-788; Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Modern Witnesses: Foreign Correspondents, Geopolitical Vision, and the First World War;
Author(s): Matthew Farish; Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New
Series, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2001), pp. 273-287; Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The
Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
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