Watchtower at Desert View ~ Winter 2010
Still images do stay with us and particularly if we have a long time to look at them, and if they get repeated. That kind of reinforcement really burns something into the mind and that’s what happens with photographs because they are infinitely reproducible, they are infinitely reproduced!
Vicki Goldberg
Before photography there was only memory to make impressions on one’s mind. There was the place and, if one was fortunate enough to see such a place, there was a trace left behind of a continuum of exposure to the infinitely brief moment that began to fade only moments after it was imprinted somewhere in one’s mind. Existence is brief and one’s exposure to existence is even briefer. What appears as a lifetime is a series of trace impressions, some stronger than others and some that simply disappear.
Photography changed all that. Certainly the process of acquiring trace memories has not changed. One sees something and a trace is imprinted. The photographic image, however, like the printed word, allows one to return again and again to the image in order to reinforce the existing trace. The photograph is an artifact of its very origins. When one looks at a photograph of some place, one is embedding a trace of the photographic image and not of the place of origin. The photographic image is removed from its origins in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the photograph compresses four dimensions into two. The photograph is a flat simulacrum of the world that once existed but is no longer. The photograph is, perhaps, a permanent record of the trace of vision captured by a particular photographer at a particular time and place.
The photographic image, as a reproducible, contains a mere trace of the place of origin. a trace that can not nor will not ever be repeated with exactitude. But the image itself may be reproduced any number of times so as to provide a broad audience for an artifact of a place of origin. I have, for example, never been to Paris yet, through the eyes of Eugene Atget I have come to know Paris, or at least a version of Paris that was recorded by Atget as reproduced by Berenice Abbott. This exposure does not take the place of a trip to Paris yet it embeds the knowledge as told by a set of artifacts about a place that once was in a way that makes it all seem so real. The photographic image is, in this sense, one level removed from the place itself, a step away from that which is and is always already replaced by the next moment, yet presenting a permanence that belies its own transitory origins.
The Watchtower at Desert View ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
