-Caesar Romano
The photographic image has long been treated as a direct and literal representation of reality. [SLICE] explores the nature of truth within the photographic image. It questions and distorts our reliance and assumption on the truthful and unbending nature of the mechanically produced photograph.
In our everyday life we interact with the photographic image, we use it to tell us about the world, to report on events, times, space and locations inaccessible to us. We hungrily consume the photograph in order to learn, to discover, to seek out, the “truth” of a situation.
But how do we feel when this truth is distorted, warped, bent or even horrifically misused. How does this change the nature of other photographs that we view? Do we question what it is we are seeing in a photograph anymore? Are we happy with the notion that what we see may not be what actually took place? With so much visual stimulus persistently bombarding us in contemporary society it seemed critical for [SLICE] to explore the constantly shifting nature of truth within the image.
As Andre Bazin notes in The Ontology of the Photographic Image(i) , the photograph provides us with a “…hallucination at the same time as it delivers fact.”(ii) The photographic image offers the viewer a slice, a frozen moment of the real, delivered to us as a tangible object, something that can be held in our hand, pinned to a wall or stuck in a book. However, the event depicted by the image is something that does not exist in that same time or space as the photographic print itself.
In [SLICE] the figure within the images is caught in the middle of a sudden movement, frozen forever in that split second of time that it takes for the camera’s shutter to fire. This figure acts as a metaphor for the isolation and removal from time and space that is inherent in every photograph, this hallucination that Bazin speaks of and what Barthes calls “madness”(iii). Through the use of this figure and the ambiguity of its presence in the images [SLICE] makes the viewer question exactly what it is that they are seeing and their assumptions of the photographic image. It creates a paradox, questioning and commenting on the power of truth at the same time.
[SLICE] does not attempt to make a judgment or final decision on the outcome of the nature of truth within the photograph, for that would be impossible and recklessly self-limiting. Instead, it is intended to make the viewer explore, discover and question their ideas about reality within the frame and the long held perceptions of the photograph as an indexical signifier of truth.
(i) Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” (1967) in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 242.
(ii) Kriebel, Sabine T. “Theories of photography – A Short History” in Photography Theory Edited by James Elkins 17-19. New York: Routledge, 2007.
(iii) IBID
1 comment:
excellent statement alex. a couple more references if handy(cut directly from my essay):
"In Camera Lucida, Barthes sees photographic time as a linear structure. To the subject of the photograph, death is implicit; the end is inevitable. The photograph rests in the space between what has been and what will be"
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard. pp 57
"We can start to understand reality in a new way, unpack the world as it is presented to us through a lens, screen or image. As Sugimoto says 'The human eye, devoid of the shutter, is essentially a camera with long exposure.'"
Hasegawa, Kanae ,Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time
"If truth is a value, and the existence of time itself is questionable, what is there for us to pin point as the correct way of representing what is ‘real’? An image, whether still or moving, can only ever be a representation; it is never the actual thing it is depicting, never the actual event that took place. The only actuality to which the image can be assigned is its indexical factor; that it is no more ‘real’ than the silver emulsion on paper, or the pixel on a screen. Thierry de Duve describes this analysis of the photographic image as becoming a ‘semiotic object, abstract from reality’, and no longer anything more than the resemblance of the event and a ‘representation of time in the now.’"
de Duve, Thierry, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox” (1978), in David Campany, The Cinematic, pp 52-61.
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