Week 1: Notes on The Photograph as Commodity and Photographic-Filmic Temporality

Two concepts from Batchen's Burning with Desire emerged for me as precursors to a pair of separate but intertwined ideas incorporating the theory of the photograph with economics and film. Batchen cites historian Malcolm Andrews' explanation of the widespread use during the period in question of such rhetoric as to "fix" as signifying "a 'predatory, acquisitive instinct…” that 'leads in one direction to landscape as a commodity'" (94). Just as a general “modernity” is shaped by (and shapes) the rise of capitalism and is dominated by capitalist modes of economic production and exchange, so is the aesthetic and intellectual world supported by that economy. This is fairly obvious. However, what photography provided was the immediacy of its ownership and production; it was and is the paragon of capitalist industry and production--an art that could be done (eventually) easily, cheaply, and by anyone. However, this need for immediacy or "modern time anxiety" (93), as posited by Batchen, also reflects a sort of climactic modernity and capitalism. One of the defining factors of early modern, Western society, in association with the artistic, humanistic, and political achievements of the Renaissance, was an increasing quantification of daily life. An increasingly capitalist mode of economy required a rigid temporal structure, and the general human conception of time became heavily determined by business needs. Batchen and other writers’ conception of photography as thematizing, representing, and/or imprinting time itself demonstrates the obsessive importance of modern peoples with quantified life and time in relation to economic practices, standards, and socialities. “Modern” people needed a medium about, composed of, and capturing time, and photography satisfied that desire.

Something else about Batchen’s emphasis on the temporality of the photographic process/art captured my interest. Beyond the photograph representing an imprint of time or an image /mirror of time and history themselves, the actual photographic process, the process by which one takes a photograph, is inherently defined by and defines the expenditure of time. However, this temporality of experience seems almost more important or more intrinsic to photography’s later offshoot: film. Film is the constant (or as close to constant as a finite series of images can create) expenditure of photographs throughout time to create a moving image. Both the process of film projection and photographic production rely on expenditure of time and the experience of that expenditure. In this way, temporality and the experience through time are inseparable from photography and film and characterize the defining features of these mediums.

What Thom Andersen’s film Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer does is to connect this temporal order of photography and film through the mediating/mediated form of zoopraxography. By presenting through film a medium that incorporates the filmic and the photographic but occupies a problematic and undefined space in that binary, Andersen relates the temporal order/conceptualization of the mediums whilst demonstrating the fundamental progression of motion in relation to time that defines film but fails in the photographic. In a way, Andersen relives the expenditure of time experienced in Muybridge’s capturing of the photographs and events in replaying/reconfiguring/re-presenting them as another sort of film; a half-film within a film (the documentary), a series of mediated representations and a complication/problematization of the boundaries between mediums.