Post 1 - Capturing Time and Psychological Power

In this week’s readings there are two recurring themes that particularly stand out: the human frustration towards capturing a moment in time, and the power photography has over the human mind.

Before photography, all picture-making was inherently the result of the intervention of a human. Bazin argues that with photography came what he calls the “psychology of the image”. This is an idea that photography has an undeniable force, which makes humans believe what they are seeing in a photograph, no matter what. In A Little History of Photography, Benjamin also talks about something related to this. He mentions how “the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never have”. He is acknowledging then how photography, because of its innate technicality and “un-humanness” has a deep, psychological effect on us. Benjamin goes deeper into explaining this effect when he states that photography “fills you with an unruly desire” to know the actual truth behind this image. “In spite of any objections”, as Bazin puts it, as humans in this specific society we are sociologically conditioned to believe that what is in the photograph is in fact “the object itself”. This comes from the condition that between this representation of reality and reality itself there is nothing but a “nonliving agent”. Photography’s shock potential is so great, that it could potentially “paralyze the associative mechanisms in the beholder” (Benjamin). As Benjamin also points out, “so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed fidelity to nature” that it became an unquestionable source of truth in our minds.

This “nonliving agent” has, therefore, satisfied since its inception the omnipresent human necessity to capture time itself. Again, this necessity is embarked by the authors in their pieces. Bazin mentions it since the first paragraph, where he explains how mummification in Egypt satisfies the intrinsically human need to conquer the passage of time. He then goes on to talk about the “resemblance complex” that has haunted art since the Renaissance, product of an “obsession with realism”, as he calls it. Photography then comes in with an “irrational power” to make us believe it, because it “embalms time”, unlike art, which “creates eternity”. Benjamin says also, in 1930, that “ every day the need to possess the object in close-up in form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative”. Here he is not only acknowledging the existence of this human need, he is granting it severe and increasing importance. With photography easing this human frustration, and given it’s “natural alliance with the mob”, it was bound to become not only heavily popular, but also massively influential.

In other words, the magic and power of photography lie in our own mind. If, as Kracauer says, art has, since the Renaissance, had an interest in being faithful to nature, then photography has relegated that interest. Artists, “freed form the resemblance complex”, turned their interests around into exploring the media as a means and an end at the same time. Why? Because that is how photography eases the human frustration of the need for realism: not in the actual product, but in the way that product was achieved (Bazin). It is difficult then not draw a parallel here between the conception of photography and its regelation of realism in painting, and the start of formalism and conceptual art, the exploration of media as a means and end.