October Update
It’s a busy few months. Hello, world, again: hello photography.
I scrolled through my Instagram today. A black and white blurry picture appeared on my feed. A man leaning against a rail, backdropped by a city skyline, bare-chested and relaxed, stood posed, looking down to the left. I swiped right and the next photo showed the exact same moment, unblurred. No change in body, no change in facial expression, no change in framing at all: a man frozen in two of the same photos. A post-processing blur, or the fact of a photo re-fabricated, crossed my mind and stuck, like an offense. I think, now, about photography.
I’ve been taking pictures along the lines of a documentary project. One is a picture from a point and shoot camera designed to hang off a keychain. The image quality from keychain camera is nearly unintelligible in good conditions; entirely abstract in bad conditions; and in many cases its photos do not, without knowing what they are beforehand, easily refer to the world. So, one picture for the project, in the sequence of three pictures, is a cluster of pixels from the keychain camera. And that’s all it is. That’s all it reads to be: squares printed too large. The next two images, arranged in sequence, are the “same,” with progressively higher quality from different cameras, so that you can see that the form of pixels from the first keychain camera image resemble the others. That this is all a similar moment reaching different technologies, and even the boxy picture of ambiguous pixel-art forms is still a photograph.
The blurry photo of a posed man from Instagram offended me because it is a violation of the “indexical” quality of photography, or its ability to point to a world. Although it maintains its reference to reality, the physical “impression” that it carries, the medium’s mark from being a photograph, is misconstrued. The photo was not blurry; the light did not hit the sensor that way; the look was achieved in post-production. The picture showed its manipulated hand. But the blurry pixel art from the keychain camera does not perform the same action, despite not resembling a photograph, because its “indexical” quality is intact: it looks like a photo from a particular camera. The world reaches it, and we, through the photograph, somehow have access to that world.
As I drove, I began to think of this sort of sanctity or purity in photography. That by maintaining integrity of the light-as-it-hit-the-sensor; or the light-as-it-hit-the-film; we are allowing the world to reach the photo. We allow the world out-there to reach our own. To take that and distort it is a difficult thing to bear: one man, I heard once, called it “insincere.” Whether something (without other photos to compare it to) is truly a photograph may be out of our reach, but I am beginning to believe that a photo’s indexicality is what makes it so precious: indexicality is, for me right now, the most photographic quality of photography.
I just watched a video on Rinko Kawauichi. She wants to find something beautiful in the world. As a way of thinking about what she wants to see, or why she’s living, she takes up photography. Photography has to do with existence; photography has to do with life.
I like to imagine that life reaches her through the camera. She edits her photos expressively, for color (I imagine). But her editing is only in order to express the life that reaches her.
I am reading more or less these days; I am looking at photos. I am taking either more or less photos: life has been a bit of a haze. If I want to work with photos, I must let them speak for themselves (I told someone the other day that I must become a photographic minimalist, like Uta Barth). “The best thinking about the medium comes from photographers taking photographs,” someone said once, somewhere, I paraphrase (probably from a Queer Photography book). I am reading Mark Sealy’s Decolonizing the Camera, which I should have read years ago. I should attach some images.