Ignaz Cassar, of The SIP grant winners
The essay brings together the figure of the photographer with that of the psychoanalyst by tracing their work with and through latency. Both photographer and psychoanalyst expose something latent in their work: the photographer through dealing with images that are yet to be revealed; the analyst through dealing with signs that are yet to be brought into a relief of signification. Appearing in either field, the latent finds its conceptual bearings in different contexts and by different means. This essay contends that latency forms a transdisciplinary modality, running across fields that stage its effects in dissimilar ways. By stepping outside the need to establish something analogous in latency’s operation across the fields of photography and psychoanalysis, we discover what is proper to photography: the play of certainty and doubt around the production of images.
Apertures: Weakening Images
Alain Fleischer, Le regard des morts
Image is Courtesy of Ignaz Cassar
To open this text, and to leave it open, we begin with an image. The above photographic image traces more photographic images. Scores of photographs float in trays that remind us of those used in darkrooms to process the prints according to the principles of classic photographic craft: three “baths” turn a latent impression into a visible photograph – develop, stop, fix. The image has appeared. Photographic education still likes to anchor students in this three-step operation, even though with the beginning digitization of photography in the 1980s “darkroom photography” has rather become a rarity.[i] Technological nostalgia might be one way of explaining the photographer’s fixation on processes that have hardly any techno-economic validity or practicality in today’s terms. Nonetheless, the survival of this “redundant” photographic process, which is now differentiated as “analogue”, works in support of a certain photographic pedagogy that could be said to be operating around a belief in “knowing the basics”.[ii] Such pedagogic approach claims the hand-crafted photograph as a model through which to follow the developmental stages of the photograph. Still, there is something of interest for us in sticking to photographic tradition that is beyond historical nostalgia and the ideals of pedagogy: that is how the drawn-out process of accomplishing the image, culminating in the work of photographic development and its ritualistic bathings, builds up a momentum of expectancy that indexes the photographer’s desire to see the image. Here, memories may resurface of that first photograph having come into sight in the darkroom. On the other hand, whose memory could recall the first digitally processed photograph?[iii]
Time was that photographers had to wait for their images. Then, photographers took images that they, in fact, could not verify. Taking an image revealed to them, first of all, nothing. All they could see was the images they had imagined to see. What the photographer captured remained just that: captured. For hours, days, weeks… Impressed on film, plates or other light-sensitive matter, the photographic image would affirm itself only after some time.[iv] In the meantime, however, it was hidden, invisible, latent. Digitized photography, on the other hand, has compressed the course of the image’s emergence into instances of seconds and less.[v] Indeed, thanks to real-time rendering, the taking of a photograph is itself based on an already displayed image, presenting the image to be taken as image. Even now, the act of taking an image has been profoundly reconfigured, from a practice that geometrically frames the subject through the viewfinder to a practice that points out the subject through the intensities of the images on display. Whereas digitized photography may no longer perceptibly suspend the image in latency between its capture and development, effects of latency come to bear in the digital storing of the image and the moment of its visualization. Latency has not, therefore, been dispensed with in digitized photography.[vi] The immediacy of digitally stored images and their potential visualizability may be customarily assumed just as information technology may promise us its reliability, yet in actuality the visual reconstitution of the image should not be taken for granted.
Regardless of the ways in which the photographic image becomes suspended in latency, it is its suspension that allows us to think about the extent to which the photographer is invested – economically and libidinally – in the emergence of the image.[vii] This essay, then, proposes a search, that is, a search for the space of an image the appearance of which can be neither guaranteed nor predicted; an image, if it is an image at all, that resides in the space-time between image capture and its appearance. Taking up this lead, the following sets out to proffer a space in which to explore the temporalities between “impression” and “expression”, two terms that remain charged with particular connotations in both photography and psychoanalysis. In juxtaposing these two fields, the text traces “latent images” that are engendered in the operations of both photographer and analyst, staking out the concerns that they may have for the latent. Albeit dealing in essence with different matter, the analyst with words, the photographer with pictures, they come to sustain an investment in and concern for a modality, which they come to hold, in fact, in common – latency.
If we have put into words so far some of the changing technological facets of photographic image productions, then it is an apt moment to return to our image. What has been printed on this page could be seen as a typical example of the increasingly hybrid state of photo-technological images of our times, bringing about not just a challenge to the categorization of images, but also structural contact points between “image” and “information”.[viii] Our illustration, for example, is the outcome of a stilled image, extracted from a DVD, leading us back to more images that make up this installation: black-and-white images that are photographic enlargements of photographic images of faces. Their eyes stare at us. Their gazes reach us – gazes emanating from photographic prints that are resting in trays, submerged in their baths, suggesting the development is still in progress or might have just been completed. We do not know for sure.
The laboratory aesthetics of Alain Fleischer’s installation Le regard des morts leave us uncertain about the state of these images. It is the supplementary work of documentation that establishes the faces to which we hold on as those of soldiers of WWI – photographic prints, however, we are informed, that have not been chemically fixed.[ix] We imagine how the faces of these soldiers might slowly lose their recognisability. Like memory, these images flash up but cannot be kept forever. The photographer has not fixed the images so as to let them move, to let them move beyond the images they were destined to be. A photograph that is not fixed cannot remain in the visible. As such, these images, once developed, have seen the light but were not strong enough to withstand it. Fleischer’s images are situated at the threshold between appearance and disappearance. Phenomenologically – and contrary to the teleological techno-logics of photographic practice – the images might be about to appear or disappear. In these trays, photography presents itself as an activity that is not only concerned with fixing (the “capture”) or the fixed (the “image”); instead, photography presents itself also as an activity that is concerned with its own instability by circumscribing “the latent” in a tangible form.
Fleischer’s photographs bring the image into movement, a movement that has been stabilized by the long awaited innovation of chemical fixation. The history of photography, so appropriately for a history, begins with the fixing of the photograph. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce who, we are told, was the first one to do so in 1837 and finds himself thus also inscribed in the opening sections of most photo-historical accounts. Anything before this moment during which images began to write themselves is largely viewed through the photographic lens of pre-history. The photographs of this pre-history are still very weak materials, fragile beings that could only tolerate weak candlelight. In “Early Researches in Photography”, Henry Fox Talbot, the other famous apprentice of early photography, is puzzled by this instability:
Thus I expected that a kind of image or picture would be produced, resembling to a certain degree the object from which it was derived. I expected, however, also that it would be necessary to preserve such images in a portfolio, and to view them only by candlelight; because if by daylight, the same natural process which formed the images would destroy them, by blackening the rest of the paper.[x]
The unfixed photograph is weak; it fades quickly.[xi] My opening photograph has put an end to Fleischer’s weakening images. Fixed again, it has preserved them. As such, my “illustration” can be interpreted as symptomatic of my own insecurity to bypass the image. I could not abstain from it. As if I would suggest: better an image than none; better an image of latency than one in latency. Wishful images.
[…]
This essay is published in the journal Photographies Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 12-36. We invited Ignaz Cassar to share this version of the work in order to further the discussion of the concepts emerging from our upcoming event: The SIP Re/View #2: W.G. Sebald
Notes
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the two reviewers for their engaging readings of the manuscript and the advice imparted. Special thanks to David Dibosa for providing the fine words that ensured the essay’s smooth beginning and ending. Aspects of this work were presented at the conferences “Trauma and the Sublime”, University of Swansea, Wales (2008), “21st Century Anxiety”, University of Nottingham, England (2008) and “The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture”, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic (2009). Translations are mine unless stated otherwise. The completion of this essay was generously funded through the research program of the Shpilman Institute for Photography.
[i] According to The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography “[e]lectronic still photography began with the introduction of the Sony video still camera called MAVICA, an acronym for magnetic video camera. Announced on August 24, 1981, it was to be several years before Sony delivered a professional camera called the ProMavica.” Leslie Stroebel and Richard Zakia, eds, The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography (Boston and London: Focal Press, 1995), p. 243.
[ii] On the aesthetic implications of the technological shift towards digitization and its effects of differentiation vis-à-vis the (re)construction of the “analogue”, see the collection Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen et al. (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997).
[iii] In Copy, Archive, Signature, Derrida draws attention to the increasing semantic weight of the term “process” due to the reconfiguration of photography – and potential replacement – by information technology. What in the past has been distinguishable as “development”, such as the different stages of development of an image, is now dissolving into a constant processing of data, which is already under way when the image is taken; or as Derrida puts it, a process that “would begin before what is referred to as processing. This is, in fact, the term used in English for the development of the photographic negative and of the image, view or ‘shot’ thus taken – and the process of this processing has never had to wait to begin.” Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography [2000], ed. Gerhard Richter, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 11.
[iv] The history of photography tells of Salomon Andrée and his photographs which, taken in 1897 on his ill-fated expedition to reach the North Pole by balloon, are a striking case of the photograph’s extended, and potentially indefinite, period of latency. “Thirty-three years after the crash of the balloon in the Arctic and the subsequent death of Andrée and his companions, the films were discovered in the ice. When developed they revealed astonishing images of the tragic expedition.” Brian Coe, The Birth of Photography: The Story of the Formative Years 1800-1900 [1976] (London: Spring Books, 1989), p. 81.
[v] I employ the term “digitized”, which I consider preferable to “digital” in that it conveys a layering of technological protocols inherent to photography, therefore avoiding the misleading impression that the “digital” of the digital camera would have replaced the “analogical”. Rather, as Claudio Marra convincingly shows in L’immagine infedele, the digital camera produces “a representation in digital form out of an analogical signal […]. Technically speaking, digitized photography exists but not digital photography. It could seem a mere play of words but it is not so, because the two expressions entail quite different significations. To simply say ‘digital photography’ is as if we intended that the digital is photographic […], that the digital is the photographic act, but the things do not stay in this way because the act remains in essence analogical […].” Claudio Marra, L’immagine infedele: La falsa rivoluzione della fotografia digitale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006), pp. 56–57.
[vi] André Rouillé is to be credited for this useful articulation concerning the change in taking an image, that is, from a practice structured by abstract geometry to one by phenomenological intensities, which he outlined in his presentation “Y a-t-il une actualité de la photographie?” at Espace En Cours, Paris, 5 November 2010.
[vii] Herve Guibert’s short story Ghost Image profits precisely from the photograph’s extended phase of latency and the expectation of its image that such engenders. Aiming to create a definitive portrait of his mother, the son photographs her at home and swiftly moves on to develop the photographs in the bathroom. Yet since the son had not attached well the film in the camera, he had photographed, it turns out, “nothing”: “Blank, the essential moment lost, sacrificed. It was the opposite of awakening from a nightmare: the development of the film was like awakening from a dream-session, which, instead of being wiped away at once, becomes, with the reality of the absence of an image, a nightmare-session rather than a dream-session.” Hervé Guibert, Ghost Image [1981], trans. Robert Bononno (Copenhagen and Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer Books, 1998), p. 14.
[viii] What is at stake in the shift to the digital is, as Peter Lunenfeld has argued, “the composition of the output, which has shifted from the discrete photograph to the essentially unbound graphic. It is here that the ‘revolutionary’ shift can be located. The ‘unique’ is now forced to merge, even submerge, into the overall graphic environment. There formerly discrete photographic elements blend even further into the computer’s digital soup of letters, numbers, motion graphics and sound files: what is crucial is that all of these and more are simply different manifestations of the data maintained in binary form.” Peter Lunenfeld, “Digital Photography: The Dubitative Image”, in Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 55–69 (p. 59).
[ix] For accompanying documents of Alain Fleischer’s work Le regard des morts and its realization in different installations, see the exhibition catalogue La vitesse d’évasion (Paris: Léo Scheer/Centre Georges Pompidou/La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 2003). The version in this essay was realized in the framework of a public commission for the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the armistice of 1918. It was presented in Arras in 1998 and comprised four hundred photographs of faces of soldiers of all nationalities who died on the battlefields of WWI.
[x] Henry Fox Talbot, “Early Researches in Photography” [1877], in Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Mike Weaver (Oxford: Clio Press, 1992), pp. 45–55 (p. 46).
[xi] Talbot’s observations on the vicissitudes of fixing a photograph warrant further attention. In The Pencil of Nature he writes: “The process of fixation was a simple one, and it was sometimes very successful. The disadvantages to which it was liable did not manifest themselves until a later period, and arose from a new and unexpected cause, namely, that when a picture is so treated, although it is permanently secured against the darkening effect of solar rays, yet it is exposed to a contrary or whitening effect from them; so that after the lapse of some days the dark parts of the picture begin to fade, and gradually the whole picture becomes obliterated, and is reduced to the appearance of a uniform pale yellow sheet of paper. A good many pictures, no doubt, escape this fate, but as they all seem liable to it, the fixing process by iodine must be considered as not sufficiently certain to be retained in use as a photographic process […].” See Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature [1846], in Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Mike Weaver (Oxford: Clio Press, 1992), pp. 75–103 (p. 81).
