Yellow No. 8, Spring 2009
Iterability–the ability of writing to mark language in such a way so that the writer’s words, if not his or her intention may be repeated through reading–is related to but not necessarily bound by the authorial context.
J. Derrida, Limited Inc.
I want to apply this idea to the visual artist. By substituting photographer for writer and image for language and viewer or observer for reader, one may begin to understand the artist’s context as bound by his or her experience while in many ways overlapping the contextualized experience of a viewer.
The photographer engages in encoding an image, marking that image as a form of text within the trace of contextualized experience that come full force from personal, social and cultural, as well as temporal, historical or static remembered past or projected future. The trace of creativity, of image making, is, in this sense, enclosed within the very act of image making and is a response-able transaction between the photographer and the pixels recorded at the moment of exposure that lead to a potential iterability in the observations of a viewer.
There is, however, a wide gulf that exists between the contextual experiences of the photographer making an image and the potential contextualization of that image by an observer. The gulf is at once temporal, random and ideocentric to the viewer. Once an image is made, printed and made ready for viewing, there is absolutely no guarantee that the image will be viewed by anyone. The printed image is merely potential. Suppose, for example, that I decide to look at Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941,” an image made by Adams in 1941. Also assume that I have not seen this image ever prior to the moment I decide to look at it in 2009. For me as an observer, the image has held nothing but potential for around 68 years. The image created by Adams reflects the ideocentric context of the photographer and is strongly influenced by the trace experience of the photographer but the gulf of 68 years between creation and viewing contains nothing more that potential for transmitting something of Adams’ vision to me as an observer. Potential is the temporal aspect encoded into the image created by the photographer.
The very fact that I decide to look at this image or that the image crosses paths with me is an event so random as to defy all odds. It requires both presence and luck. There can be no other explaination for the exposure of one or another image than that. The probability that one will see one image over any other is increased by the popularity of the image. In the case of Moonrise, the image is well known and so it is more likely that I will somehow or another be exposed to the image but there are no guarantees. Unless I am exposed to that image my own ideocentric contextual trace experience will not be triggered so as to be able to construct anything of the intent of the photographer or my own interpretation of the image.
While an image is available but not being seen that image is static, on the shelf, without the ability to be responded to. In some sense the static image is a prime example of an object in historical time. If existential time is partly defined as that time in which one is able to respond, to be response-able, then historical time may be defined as that time in which the object has lost the ability to respond. The photograph is produced as the response-able act of the photographer but the photograph on the shelf, the static object, carries with it only the ability to be responded to by an observer. The gulf between the photographer as creator and the observer or viewer as re-creator is one of status, the status between active and static and back to active once again. Once produced the photograph as text can only be static. The response-ability of the photographer is encapsulated as a prior act by the photograph itself. Once viewed, the static photograph becomes the tool for the viewer’s response-able transaction with the static object in order to encode the trace of experience obtained through the viewing of the image.
The Yellow No. 8, Spring 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
