Reflections on Photography

After the discovery of the third dimension in painting came a second, silent discovery, of the fourth dimension, time. The ancient genre of portrait painting quickly gave way to genres developed through the brand new techniques developed in Italy and the Netherlands through the 16th and 17th centuries, where a single instant was frozen in time in the same form as photography, preceding photography. In previous art, the goal of the painting (or woodcut or drawing or etc) was always to represent more than simply an instant, to show a holistic image that cuts across time by showing multiple events on one continuous plane, the whole of the narrative being rolled out to be shown at the same time, as in the Bayeux Tapestry. With the discovery of the third dimension and all its attendant realisms (lighting, perspective, size, texture, etc) came the silent and slow discovery of the third dimension’s ability to operate in the fourth as well, capturing a scene in its motion, thus capturing a scene situated in time. Just as realism itself was perfected with the invention of the camera, so was this, with the camera being perfectly able to capture a scene in the single moment, a frozen being, which is always, forever, perfectly being as it can suffer no change or alteration forward or backwards.

This work of being which emerges from the hand of the creator is now forever severed from the creator. It has been born and frozen while its creator and subjects move on. To be able to return to the image or to go inside the image is to enter a location where at minimum, time has been shifted back, if not stopped all together. The Painted Worlds of the Souls series and the levels of Mario 64 both show this, with their worlds being contained and still, frozen as a moment that is forever cycling through prescribed motions, with time only marked by the subject entering it and modifying events. When Max Caulfield enters her polaroids in Life is Strange, she returns to that moment, the exact stage of motion all things were in when they were frozen into an eternal moment of being in the photograph. The photograph freezes a moment but is fleeting forever from both sides of the camera which created it. The both sides is vital, as the photograph sits between, the photographer and the subject, or the creator and the world which is captured, both of which are moving in time and captured to a single instant of being in the photograph.

This entity, between subject and object, when divorced from both, is hereby capable of communicating with both. The choosing of what is shot declares the movements of the creator, the position of all subjects declares the world around the shot and both directions of investigation can be taken by a reader from the frozen entity. Through this, the entire network of interconnected systems which make both creator and world appear are unveiled in examination. In this way, photography, in freezing time, in fact creates more time than the traditional style of timeless composition did, where the frozen moment implies time far beyond would could ever be grasped by a creator attempting to put it all onto paper. The weather extrapolates to a year of patterns of rain and sun and wind, the grass and ground to eons of geologic time, the composition to the entire story of the creator’s day and week and month, and etc. The aforementioned frozen worlds, entered through paintings all show this, Life is Strange and its timeline-switching, Souls and Mario 64 with their contained worlds.

Working backwards is of course possible as well. Richard Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America performs this, reverse photography where all details of creator and world are laid out, leading into the central image “Trout Fishing in America”, the details all spiraling again and again to that one phrase. In working backwards, Brautigan is able to explicate what only occurs in the unconscious of a photograph. In doing so, Brautigan reveals the nature of the “natural” and “artificial” distinction and its inherent instability in comparison to the creator/world distinction. In Brautigan, the artificial and the natural meld seamlessly, with the two being treated as unified as one half of the details moving into “Trout Fishing in America”, with the other half being the “I” who speaks through the text. The human is as alienated from the natural as the industrial and vice versa, with both acting as the world and thus one in the same. Codependant on each other and out of control of any one individual person, the distinction is revealed to be meaningless as the world speaks for itself in separation from any creator which may seek to inflict meaning upon it.

With this model explicitly drawn so as not to divide the world, the model that’s been created is one of a presence and absence, in both directions, where the world makes the creator by the absence of the world and the creator makes the world by the absence of the creator. The only thing which separates the two is the ego being capable of distinguishing itself from the world around it, thereby creating this division at all. The ego must eventually come to recognize itself as having frail boundaries, which shift and grow based on conditions. The final understanding of this is to understand the ego itself as being placed only in the moment itself, with the ego of the past being made by its world and the ego of the future being made from the past, and finally the ego of the present being made only by the past, including the ego of the past. The ending is to realize the unity of the self with the world, with the ego only being preserved in the momentary experience. It is through this momentary experience that the ego is capable of being, just as a photograph is being, a single instant, forever.