Post #2 - Kracauer's Photography

“That the world devours them is a sign of the fear of death. What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.” (p. 59)

Recurring throughout Kracauer’s article is the idea of loss. Whether in death or history or meaning, Kracauer is trying to express his frustration with what he perceives as photography’s inability to show the “true essence” of the photographed object. I also found it interesting that he repeatedly casts photography as this cold means of representation by the wintry diction choices he makes (e.g. “The blizzard of photographs…” (p. 58) and “In a photograph, a person’s history is buried under a layer of snow.” (p. 50)).

I find myself unable to be persuaded by Kracauer’s argument that a memory image serves as a better representation of an object than a photograph. Rather, I found myself confused, as his article seemed to go against my practical reasoning. To me, a photograph serves as an aid to my memory whenever my memory cannot remember exactly what something looked like. I know my memory is imperfect so I don’t trust it. On the other hand, the photograph remains unchanged and so it seems to me to be a true, accurate representation. Yes, I know there are touched up photographs and so I’ve been trained to skeptically view the “beautiful” pictures of people on the covers of magazines, but that’s just one exception. I don’t look at the pictures I take of my family and think they aren’t a true representation of my loved ones. But elements of these touched-up photographs seem to be what Kracauer wants. He wants photographs to be more artistic and yet he doesn’t consider photographs to be art.

Kracauer seems to criticize photography for making him infer and speculate about the life of the object. Yes, the photograph is only capturing one specific moment in time, but that is also part of the appeal when one stumbles across an old photograph, at least for me. When looking back at photograph of myself from elementary school, I think: What was I doing? What was I thinking? Who knew that back then this is how I would grow up to look now? Although Kracauer praises a painting for being more subjective, I point out that one can be left wanting to be knowing more after looking at a painting as well. Thus, going back to the quotation I started this post with. In the last sentence of that passage, Kracauer claims that we are actually succumbing to death with photography. Since this goes against how I view photography’s capabilities, I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on that sentence in discussion tomorrow.