Photography in the Age of Abundance
Many things in life cannot be explained — they merely happen as time unfolds. From a very young age I have been an observant person, always aware of my surroundings, even when the tinniest of details had changed (“when did they paint that wall?”, “when did that cupboard get there?”, …). On road-trips, I would amuse myself gazing out the window, as if it were the premiere of some blockbuster. As I got older and started getting a better grasp on reality, my interest on the visual converged onto an object that could help bring about my own perspective: the camera.
It all started with disposable cameras and my parents constantly asking me not to finish the roll too quickly, as I would usually do, and the results were as expected (mostly out of focus shots from random things). Then we moved to the digital age, portable cybershot cameras that are now back in fashion — being trigger happy wasn’t a problem anymore. Finally, I got my first DSLR, a Canon Rebel T3i, which was when photography started turning into something more than just a hobby. During these formative years, I was learning all about framing, and the technical aspects of what I could do with the camera. I owe much of this knowledge to my fondness for motion pictures, which led me to a two-year intensive Film course that was offered at my high school. I was privileged to have a professor that not only taught the technical aspects, but also how meaning and color were conveyed through images, among many other things.
I truly became a Photographer only after going to NYU to study communications. I was exposed to a plethora of theories and perspectives that I wasn’t aware of. Things that were once second nature had finally come to the forefront and, with that, a new relationship with the art form. I now understood the implications of photography and what it meant to take a picture. That being said, the following are the principles that shape my relationship with my work.
One of the fundamental works for my practice is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. “a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives… And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (Barthes 9). The uniqueness of photography, then, is this ability to shoot the moment. “First of all I had to conceive, and therefore if possible express properly (even if it is a simple thing) how Photography’s Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often ‘chimeras.’ Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality, and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a photograph (we are not yet speaking of film) is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography” (Barthes 77).
Photography, then, is a unique art form as it solely relies on reference, that which undeniably “has been there.” Historically, society’s perspective on the value of art has relied heavily on its conception: context and purpose.Walter Benjamin criticized this very aspect of art on his notorious essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “As we know, the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals—first magical, then religious. And it is highly significant that the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words: the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art always has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however meditated it may be, is still recognizable as secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty” (Benjamin 105). For Benjamin, one of the quintessential aspects of an artwork is its aura, which refers to the unique quality and authenticity that surrounds an original work of art, representing its historical embeddedness, connection to its creator, and specific context of creation. However, Benjamin argues that with the advent of mechanical reproduction techniques, such as photography and film, the aura was diminished, or even lost entirely. Mechanical reproduction, thus, turned art into a mass-produced commodity, detached from its original cultural and historical context. “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this the unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history of which the work has been subject” (Benjamin 103). Benjamin wrote his essay in 1935. Technology has come a long way since then to the point that we now live in the age of abundance. As Guy Debord predicted on his work The Society of the Spectacle from 1967, “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (Debord 1), and photography played a major role in this.
With the advent of mass media, society’s relationship with art has changed dramatically. Cultural movements, such as Pop Art, emerged precisely to challenge this misconception of the value of art from its uniqueness. Although Benjamin criticized value in mass reproduction, he also acknowledged how value would change with the new means of production: “To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, on can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense” (Benjamin 106). It is precisely, for this very reason that I personally do not believe in limited edition prints—as that is a fallacy. The authentic photograph only exists on the very moment that the shutter is released and the sensor of the camera is exposed, the memento mori as Susan Sontag perfectly puts it on her essay On Photography. “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (Sontag 15). After that, the image is then imprinted onto a digital file or film. One could potentially argue that there is such thing as an original photograph in film, but that would only be the roll itself, which has no value if not amplified. This argument, thus, puts polaroids as the most authentic of photography’s forms, as both the film and the amplified image are the same—and the image cannot be altered. Now, in the digital realm, files can exist on so many places simultaneously that it is impossible to even consider the existence of an original. Moreover, both digital and film photographs can be edited before being amplified. The same process that an image would undergo when developed in film, can now be done digitally. Tweak exposure, shadows, colors, and many other aspects (originally, dodging and burning). Photography is really a two-fold process. You take the picture, it is recorded, and then you must develop it, adjusting the light and color settings to your liking. A single photo, then, can be printed multiple times using different color settings on each edition.
The value of photography, thus, doesn’t emerge from limitation, but rather through its reference, and how the photographer has chosen to capture it. Roland Barthes elaborated on two concepts to help us identify value on photographs: First is studium, which is “is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, ‘politeness’) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions and establish and animate his practices, but to experience them ‘in reverse,’ according to my will as a Spectator” (Barthes 28). The “second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Barthes 27). Getting to experience the intention of the photographer and the ‘accident’ of the picture is where lies the true value of photography. Endless prints cannot take that away from any photograph, rather they add even more value to it, as it becomes embedded on the minds of many people.
In 1977, Susan Sontag already had a much clearer grasp that the aura had become irrelevant to photography: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing being photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.(…) 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” (Sontag 4). This quote speaks directly to the essence of my photographic work. I may have specific projects, intentions, but really what I’m doing with my camera is collecting “miniatures of reality” where I see beauty. Beauty not being necessarily something that is pleasant, as there are many beautiful pictures that depicts sadness, even atrocities… Beauty in the sense of aesthetic and stories that must be told. I go about my life and photography is a part of it.
From a young age until this day, I’ve been collecting memento moris in the form of photographs. The framing, studium and punctum give each photo a unique visual aspect and is what distinguishes a great photographer’s visual language. However, at the end of the day, beyond the aesthetic, intrinsically, time will add more value to a photograph than anything its author purposefully could have done. Since the aura of an artwork relies on some sort of ritual, in a photograph the aura is really the referent that is trapped in a moment. The context of the photograph and the technology used to capture the image stand the test of time. As Sontag puts it, “a photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art” (Sontag 21). Nowadays, the number of photographs taken each year is growing exponentially. Nonetheless, only images deemed valuable are widely reproduced. By its essence, a successful, beautiful photograph will want to be circulated as much as possible—and that is the pinnacle of photography in the age of abundance: being abundant.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. Print.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Print
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. Print.
Luiz Felipe Vidigal 