In Spite of All

In this week’s book, Images in Spite of All, Georges Didi-Huberman proposes different approaches to photography that are greatly pertinent to the central theme of our class: memory, history, and ruin. He illustrates this with the four photographs proceeding from a camera smuggled into Auschwitz, and he starts with ruin. The first thing a photograph ruins is the limits of the imagination. Before these photographs started out, the Final Solution was unimaginable. It was a reality that only existed within the self-contained universes that were the labor camps, and nowhere else. From an opposing perspective, the photograph ruins secrecy and subtlety. The Nazis were fixed on eliminating the slightest trace of their project, and it was because of four small pieces of film that it was reproduced in all different varieties for centuries to come. The camera snatched parts of that reality, it took their secrets from the Nazis. In this sense, then, photographs also create a history of the “indescribable”. As Didi-Huberman puts it, it “captures the most indescribable moment”, and then leaves us with the potential to make it proliferate as we wish. Didi-Huberman says that the Nazis deconstructed even the language of their predecessors, and virtually scarred it for eternity. However, reality and its representation can’t be destroyed. Photography then creates an immediate, indestructible memory, and that is one of it’s most important characteristics. In the sense that photographs are all archives, however, they are always a sad history, as the photographs from Auschwitz exemplify. Photographs are a history of obliteration, of something that doesn’t exist any longer. Nevertheless, there is somewhat of a hopeful side to photography. It creates an “imaginable possibility”, which in turn creates memory. In other words, photographs create an option in our minds, an alternative, an “imaginability”, if you will. Ultimately, they create memory, and that certainly, cannot be destroyed, because what we have in our minds is far more powerful than any physicality. The photograph channels and promotes the creation of memory, thanks to what Didi-Huberman calls an epidemic power. This characteristic of photography means that after its socialization and the creation of the imaginable possibility, it is not ignorable as a phenomenon amongst people and their perspective. On this note I end, with a final observation: the photographs from Auschwitz made it to the mainstream media in spite of all the obstacles, limitations and hardships they endured. This points to something very great: the fact that photography carries intrinsically a possibility of hope, and that is likely the key characteristics to the importance it has gained in our society.