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The image merges with the world, caring nothing for good and evil, or for good and bad photography. Ultimately, of all the discipline’s massive output there remains only the relevance of stories and their persistence in our memory. Photographic narratives are there. Whether amateur or professional they are close reflections of life; commentaries that are usually conventional, but sometimes surprisingly rewarding as chronicles and as history. |
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“There are no salient facts and even fewer decisive moments in a photograph.”
The image merges with the world, caring nothing for good and evil, or for good and bad photography. Ultimately, of all the discipline’s massive output there remains only the relevance of stories and their persistence in our memory. Photographic narratives are there. Whether amateur or professional they are close reflections of life; commentaries that are usually conventional, but sometimes surprisingly rewarding as chronicles and as history. And even when, so often, the images mean nothing to us, they never stop emitting signals. Everything is worth keeping: after all, they are talking about us. The photographic narrative is irresistibly universal; who cares if it is so often trivial, it is always more than just a pointless repetition of something that happened.
There are no salient facts and even fewer decisive moments in a photograph. The image communes with the world and has nothing to do with true or false, with truth or lies. The sententious shutter- clicker in search of precision or absolute accuracy will never know what people are about. All his striving to demonstrate the laws behind the functioning of things and societies, all his claims to be portraying the milieux that govern the individual and society, produce at best series of studies and classifications, rational propositions that have more to do with botany than plausibility. The photographic narrative owes just a little to observation, but is of no help in understanding events. From the cradle to the grave, all photography does is remind us of the eternal return. Every individual repeats and relives the biographical experience for himself. The images of his predecessors and contemporaries are not a usable asset.
The descriptive method, with the boredom it generates, omits something that a minimum of closeness to oneself can teach: a photographic narrative of whatever kind is the product of a different reality.
The sole truth of photography–of all photography–resides in its ability to disrupt our habits; for it renders us more beautiful, immortal, godlike, and clairvoyant. But do we really want to understand images? Their components scroll by leaving us incapable of discerning any underlying idea. The photographic image has no illusions about the world: it parodies totality and entertains itself with loss. ideas emerge shattered by the endless narrative fractures that series create. Cartesian consistency is the notable absentee from photographic structuring. Meaning is not revealed at the end of the narrative: it infiltrates it, moves through it and sometimes gets lost in it. Yet the image’s argument is not illogical, even if the action has vanished and the people seem elusive. That’s the great thing about stories whose message takes on all sorts of contradictory forms.
