Troubling

The Photograph as Paradox, Thierry De Duve’s essay for this week’s readings, proposes a particularity about photography that I find very pertinent for this class, considering its central theme of memory, history, and ruin. After reading the essay there is one general, virtually undisputable conclusion: photography is always troubling. De Duve divides photography into a paradox between the Snapshot and the Time Exposure, the superficial and the referential, being traumatic or manic-depressive. At this point it is important to outline the differences between each of these categories. The superficial and the referential refer to the connection with the object represented in the photograph. The superficial is about how the photograph is an icon that represents something, it is purely aesthetic and imagistic. The referential on the other hand, is a term used to refer to the indexical relationship between the photograph and its object. There is a physical relationship between these, thanks to the action of light on the substances the film is coated with, and this is a referential relationship. The referential photograph is a reality produced, or well reproduced, on the paper. Contrarily, the superficial series would be an image produced, an icon, as previously stated.

All the contradicting and conflicting aspects of these different categories could be explained in detail, but the for the sake of length I won’t get into that. The final point would be that within one single photograph there coexist many different possibilities of it’s existence and explanation. There might be a snapshot that conveys a whole life (like Barthe’s Winter Garden), while still capturing a fleeting instant. This photograph would also be referential, in that it has a physical connection with its object, but at the same time superficial, because it’s the last image of this object as it was, an icon. In any case, the photograph is always divided; never complete, always destroyed or deconstructed.

Another sense in which photographs are always troubling is that they are either traumatic or manic-depressive. De Duve says that snapshots always create a trauma within the mind because they pose an indestructible problematic: that of never being on time. The viewer is never on time to do anything about the action, always too late to help out, or too early to avoid it. Time exposures, on the other hand, are always troubling in the sense that they elicit manic-depressive responses in viewers, because they become the object of obsession, particularly in the process of mourning.

On a final note, it is worth mentioning that Mary Anne Doane touches on this in her essay The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity. She mentions that a photograph is not only indexical in its bond with reality (as a footprint would be), it is also iconic at the same time, because of its inherent similarity with the object it portrays. This is yet another example of how photography is torn between belonging to different categories and series, and how all these possibilities always coexist, and not necessarily peacefully. Ultimately, this is what results in a photographic trauma, an inherent disconcertion within every photograph.