Rock River Autumn Morning ~ Fall 2009
What popular audiences insist on interpreting as photographic truth is always something constructed by the photographer, it is the photographer’s own truth and not some universally applicable one.
Dave Lee
I would not go so far as Dave Lee by arguing that a photograph re-presents the photographer’s truth as an absolute function of the notion of truth. Rather, I want to argue that the image a photographer chooses to show re-presents nothing more than a single possible construction chosen on one single occasion, one from infinite possible constructions, that satisfies some impossible visual desire, if only for the moment, for printing, for re-presenting, a visual image for public consumption. The image, in this sense, says more about the photographer and the choices made than it does about the object being photographed. In this sense, then, the photographic image re-presents a conditional truth, one subject to re-vision at some later time.
An observer looking at the image, viewing the work of the image maker, engages in a slightly different creative process as one stares at the image. The stare, in this case, is a gaze that rigorously interrogates the image rather than lazily looking at the image. In the interrogation one’s gaze, one’s stare, engages in the always already impossible task of constructing meaning from the two dimensional space contained within the four corners of the image itself. Deprived of origins, a viewer must stare in a response-able manner, opening one’s horizons to the narrow limits of the image while imagining a world beyond before returning to the phenomenological and the construction of meaning. To do otherwise, to only look without rigor, is to make the image into an idol, to idolize the image as an ideal of origins, to assume a rendering of the original as truth. That would be a horrific error.
The viewer’s gaze allows one to construct a personal meaning that is bound by the rigors of the image re-presented by the photographer. The process of constructing meaning on the part of the viewer is one that is reciprocal between the viewer, the image, and the photographer. The process of creating the image in the first instance is also reciprocal but only between the perceived origins, the photographer and the completed print. In the end, the print serves as the connection between the origins, the photographer and the viewer. That being said, once the print is made available for a viewer’s gaze, the real process for construction of meaning returns to the print itself and the lived experiences of the viewer.
The Rock River Autumn Morning ~ 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.
