I think about photography itself as a language. Like any language, it has its various dialects and accent.
Alec Soth (Carroll, 2018:73)
Photography is a hybrid process of creating an image, its collaborative action is more elaborate than turning a thought into speech. As discussed in a previous post, photographers are by definition cyborgs; the product of a cybernetic union of the corporeal and enigmatic scientific endeavours. Our vision is developed, realised and enhanced by our accord with not just language but also mechanical and digital technology. Lens’, sensors, shutters, eyes and fingers. This combination works together to create and disseminated photographic images into the chaos we inhabit. Whatever the whys and wherefores we advance for choosing this particular biomechatronic method of communication, a photograph is still a pattern of thoughts, defined by language and its creator, translated into and image by the creator and their camera, and then translated back into a different spoken language for consumption by the viewers thoughts. Rather than being able to transcend spoken language it would appear communicating using photograph in a way that is tied to language and has become exponentially more complicated as extra layers of translation have been introduced. These extra layers invite additional confusion with regard to not just language but semiotics, as in order to be effective they are both reliant on the cultural synergy between the photographer and viewer. Photography, from this point of view it would seem, is not a simplifying medium, but in fact the opposite. Is it then inevitable, as the Professor of English and art history, W.J.T Mitchell suggests (2005:105), that we lose of control over an image we make the moment the shutter is pressed? That ‘for better or worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the values consciously intended by their makers, but radiate new forms of value formed in the collective, political unconscious of their beholder’.
Michael Foucault makes the following observation, where substituting ‘painting’ for ‘photography’ addresses the problems of bridging verbal and non-verbal communication:
‘The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vein that we say what we see; what we say. And it is in vein that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax’ (Foucault, 1994:9)
The problems for photography do not end with the complexities of language but continue, as touched upon earlier, into what we perceive to be the very nature of reality. A passage from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (2005:18) succinctly outlines what is at stake:
‘And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I can feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes – how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.’
From an empirical perspective; our pictures can only be interpreted in an alternate reality to the one in which they were created. Be it the one that belongs to someone else viewing the picture at a particular time, or by ourselves, any time after the photograph was taken. We are infinitely, inescapably and continually inhabiting a new reality – realities that are defined empirically by special relativity and quantum mechanics. Reality then exists in an infinite amount of possible states (Greene, 2012) across an infinite time scale. Philosophically speaking, all of what we perceive can be doubted (Russell, 1998 1-6). We can therefore safely say that the world that each of us perceives differently in our own minds, the truth, a universal reality or any other postulation imbued in an image for another’s understanding is nothing but a chimera that is positioned only a step away from a Berkeleyan denial of Matter altogether (Berkeley, 1996). This Will-o’the-wisp is still, to many photographers, what a Siren’s call is to a sailor; something insatiable. Except that instead of being drawn to wreck, many photographers still subscribe to an outdated positivist compulsion to describe the camera in their hand as an independent ’recording and exploring instrument’ (Kracauer, 2014:63). These assertions are demonstrably false and contribute to a photographic illiteracy, as old as the medium, that is still widespread today (Scott, 2017; Kracauer, 2014:74). Alternatively, a statement acknowledging that their work is what they perceive to be reality, truthful or objective would be beneficial to the universal understanding of photography. But this rarely happens, as many photographers are keen to avoid this recognition, as it would represent an admission that their promise of communicating unequivocal facts and truths in this medium is nothing but ghost milk.
As truth is measured by reality, our perceptions of reality will define our appraisal of truths presented to us. We are therefore stuck in what, the American Philosopher, Ralph Barton Perry calls the egocentric predicament (Kitchel, 1918: 330-331); where our closest contacts with reality are just mental representations that are defined by the language we speak and conceptual scheme we have adopted. ‘We can never get at the thing apart from the Ego and the cognitive relation between it and the thing. We can never consider an object at all without getting into some kind of thought connection with it’ (Kitchel, 1918: 330). This world that each of us perceives differently in our own minds has been called the Phaneron and is described in detail by Harvard University’s Charles Sanders Peirce (1931:284). It is ‘the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not’. As we head towards the subjective idealist view of the world, promoted by George Berkeley, where nothing exists before it is perceived. A junction appears between this thinking and Quantum Mechanical conception of the Superposition Principle that allow an electron, or any subatomic particle, to be in an infinite number of places at the same time until it is observed. Essentially the reality of the particle is intertwined with the act of its perception. As a consequence, it would be onerous to reach a conclusion about reality that is not solipsistic, when proving an existence outside of the mind is so elusive. So, if nothing else, we have the Cartesian Cogito to thank for recognising that maybe there is one truth in the universe and that is the truth that we at least exist in our own minds.
I have already touched upon notions of reality, perception, truth and language. And after reading W.J.T Michell (1994:281) – who has observed that ‘the relation of photography and language is a principle site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity’ – I would like to look into these concepts in a little more detail. In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (b.1872-1970) (1998:1) has observed that ‘in daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe’. Russell goes on to give his own example that relates to the colour and shape of a table viewed from different angles, I would like to give an alternative example that is a little more relevant to the themes of my research:
If you were to experience something but could not understand or express the experience with words then you would not be able to describe your experience to other people, subsequently no one would ever be able to know what you experienced. If this was true would it also mean that you could not understand the experience yourself? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (b.1889-1951) has proposed the following metaphorical thought experiment in this book Philosophical Investigations (2009) in which he suggested that we imagine a group of people who all have a box, inside each box there is thing that everyone calls a Beetle. However, in the context of this though experiment no-one is allowed to look inside anyone else’s box, they can only look inside their own and they are only allowed to talk about what is inside their box. So, the question is, can anyone ever know if anyone actually has a beetle in the box? Any can anyone know what anyone else’s beetle actually looks like if they do. Everyone can of course describe what is in their box, but they can only describe what is in their box using words that are shared and universally understood by the members of the group, which in this case is ‘Beetle’.
According to Wittgenstein, the thing inside of the box cannot be meaningfully talked about using the word Beetle because no one can ever confirm what anyone means by beetle. As a result, the word ‘Beetle’ can only mean the thing that is in the box but doesn’t and cannot necessarily describe the thing that is actually in anyone’s box. The analogy is used to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in our minds, things like smell, love or happiness and so on are things that no one can ever communicate sufficiently to share and reveal their experience to others. I can never see your ‘Beetle’ and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the ‘Beetle’, the word has to be a word that everyone understands or can be taught for the word to have any meaning. For Wittgenstein language is entirely social and therefore contingent. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument and proposes that no language is understandable if it is solely to one individual rather language is only formed through shared use among the community of others. Thus, the sensation that something might exist exclusively to oneself, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. So, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we do, even if everyone experiences it with the same words, we can only ever assume. Everyone is therefore living in their own interpretation of reality that is impossible to share using language.
But what if we can offer a rebuke to the existentialist Albert Camus (b.1913-1960) (2005:9) who said that ‘Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying’ and use photographs to aid or replace communication through a spoken language? Can we be less vague and transcend the limitations of absurdity and the metaphysical mind that Camus sees as ‘irreducible’ to get to the truth of what we think we want to say? Could a photograph go further and communicate one’s experience of emotions more effectively than spoken language? Can a photograph even act independently of spoken language? Perhaps it can even act as intermediary for an alternative method of human interaction; human limbic resonance?
It appears that I am not alone in the photographic world in following Camus; The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) (2019, 4-5), addresses meaning and value here:
‘Photography doesn’t have that kind of worship-y, religious-like value attached to it—photographs don’t have that value as single, crafted works of art. As long as you don’t convince yourself that they do, you can just press the shutter button then a photograph will result from that, no matter what ups and downs you’re going through. This is entirely theoretical though… If there’s no meaning to photographs after all—or rather, to life—then that’s all we have left to do anyway, isn’t it.’
Cloaked in the façade of road trips and the concept of pan-humanism, the photography in this master’s project sees the emergence of nihilistic existentialism as the veridical inspiration & subject matter. It is not a diaristic documentation of a sublunary journey; the places photographs are taken are concomitant to the cause as the journey is in actual fact a personal and metaphysical one, undertaken and shared as a reaction to the bite of this nihilistic existentialism affliction.