05 > 06.2006
The photograph works
How does a photograph work on us? What makes a photograph work? To answer these questions we could, of course, lose ourselves in paying due attention to the formal properties that make up the framed image. We all know that these properties have a job to do. After all, we are taught how to look from an early age, maybe even from the moment that we, as infants, learn to focus the eye. As young children we quickly hone our visual techniques in order to distinguish near from far, to make the crucial separation between the known and unknown, to understand the difference between parent and stranger and, finally, to recognise our own image. In short, the ways in which we look teach us how to åbeπ in the world. This is the eyeπs lesson, and as I indicate above, in understanding this, it is easy to forget that the eye, in turn, has to be schooled.
Perhaps, we should always begin, in order to answer the question of what åworksπ, to focus on what the eye is drawn towards. For example, how colours are juxtaposed, how we focus on those instances where movement is implied and where, perversely, the photographπs very stillness seems to drag our attention into a disturbing speculation. And yet, in photographs that åmove meπ (isnπt this the work of photography?), I am always aware that my return to the informed and taught ålookπ does not explain why I find an image affecting. Indeed, the photographπs power to move might, in fact, be based on its ability to resist surrendering everything it offers up to the eye; that something in the photograph escapes the taught look out of which the world is constructed.
In my encounter with Nathalie Harbπs highly playful photographs, which make up this exhibition, I am conscious that in an immediately recognisable photographic landscape ≠ a fortress by the sea, a television set, a man with provisions crossing a field, a figure reclining by the roadside ≠ something else, beyond recognition, is taking place. As I linger on each of these arresting images, I am struck by the fact that these photographs seem, in the instance of my looking at them, to be both familiar and unfamiliar, to be, at the same time, identifiable and elusive. I am aware, of course, that they are staged, or at least based on the prescription of instruction. She begins by inviting the participant to imagine, for example, a colour, a place, an object, and from these starting points the image is constructed. In this sense, I am able to detect a dramaturgy, a structuring that is the basis of all theatrical forms of representation. And it is apposite to recall that Roland Barthes describes photography as a form of theatre in his wonderful work, Camera Lucida, published in English in 1972. In this book he makes a distinction between what the photograph orders as meaning (the studium) and what disturbs the very dynamics of meaning making (the punctum). The studium is based on the ordering principles of the known, and the punctum prises apart the known into mis-, or un-recognition. The punctum is that which troubles (åpricksπ) the eye. What I find fascinating about the photographs in this exhibition is that Barthesπ concept of misrecognition seems to occur, not as a result of a disturbance of the aesthetic properties that make up the photograph, but rather as a direct product of the many narratives that they seem to provoke. In short, they stimulate the punctum of my imaginative response.
Take, for example, the photograph of the white television set that sits, switched off, on a sideboard. Placed against the television are models of semi-naked men, who appear to be posing at each other. Here the obscene nature of the televisual image, based on the fact that television now invades all aspects of our daily lives, providing a pornography that spans not only human sexuality but also how we eat, die and live daily, is playfully exposed as I envisage these figures åperformingπ on the screen. Of course, these performances are left to my imagination and, if I were to describe them, they would undoubtedly reveal a great deal about me. But isnπt this the joy that our speculation on these photograph produces, the ecstasy of imaging ourselves in the scene?
This is the adventure, to borrow again from Barthes, that particular forms of looking produce. He writes, ≥The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in ålifelikeπ photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure≤ (Camera Lucida, page 20). Here we come close to beginning to understand how the photograph works. It works if it puts our imagination to use; it works if something of our self is lost in our encounter with the photograph; it works by continuing to put us to work. This is the restless and endless process of speculation that takes place when the mind tries to settle its way of looking. We could call this process storytelling: the internal process that is the work of thought itself.
Andrew Quick Lancaster University