Marsh Fog at Sunrise ~ Fall 2009
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Arnold Newman
An illusion of reality? Arnold Newman is on the right track. Another way to look at this idea is that the photograph is a supplement for the origins it is attempting to capture. If the natural world exists, an ontic question bordering on the metaphysical, it is always already not present. When witnessed by a human being what remains is a trace, neither the world itself nor the complete remembrance of that world, the trace lingers to suggest temporality. When a photograph is made a brief flash of time is captured, freezing an instant, 1/500th of a second for example, thereby creating an artifact of the encounter with the infinitely brief existential moment. The photographic image acts as a supplement for the trace or, perhaps, the existential moment, being neither the moment itself nor the trace but acting to link the two in a tangible, interpretative manner by the creation of an artifact of that which is always already not present.
The moment the shutter is released, light floods the digital sensor (or film) creating an image potential that, once processed and shared with others, acts as an interpretative aid to both the object of the photograph, the always already gone present, and the remains of the moment, the ever diminishing trace. The photograph made by one photographer, however, is as unique as one’s fingerprints or DNA. No two photographers can or even would make the same image even if they could share space at the same existential moment. The image, in this sense, acts as a bridge between the perceived moment and the photographer’s remembered perception. As the image is processed, the horizons of the moment and of the photographer, as artist, merge to create the image one chooses to share with the world.
The image in this post, like every other photograph made, is not real in the sense that it does not re-present the existential moment, the moment that inspired this image in the first place. It is not real in the sense that it captures a temporal exposure of that which is an always already gone present. It is not real in the sense that it reduces the three dimensional world into two dimensions thereby flattening perception. It is not real because it crops out of the image those elements that do not contribute to composition, a (mostly) conscious choice made by the photographer’s creative process at the moment of shutter release. The photograph presents an illusion of reality, a supplement to reality, a reminder of a present moment long disappeared as filtered through the creative processes of the photographer both at the scene and during post-exposure processing. The photograph, in this sense, becomes a personal statement into a brief moment in the lived experience of the photographer; an artifact of frozen time itself frozen into a constant image available to re-present that which can never be fully re-presented.
The Marsh Fog at Sunrise ~ Fall 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
