"Migrant Mother", California,1936. Wikicommons/ Dorothea Lange.In a world where the selfie has become ubiquitous and where images constantly drift past our line of vision, it seems reasonable to wonder if photographs matter. Thanks to the advent of the smartphone, we can all be photographers. This technological dexterity serves to remove whatever trace of the magical there remained in photography against the grain of modernity’s emphasis on rationality. There was a time when a photograph was an event. When the sitter surrendered to timelessness for an instant and when the photographer, in a representative act that sought to capture experience, demonstrated the alchemy of time and place. All that has long since changed.
Photography in the digital era exemplifies modernity’s narcissism and unstable fluidity. In entering the muddy waters of the ordinary and the everyday, it risks anonymity, even irrelevance. This may fundamentally alter the place of photography in our world, but it does not in any way lessen it. Against the grain of a surfeit of the visual and in the face of a surplus that threatens to obscure it, the photograph has shifted to assuming a vernacular that speaks of, and to, the world around us. In so doing, we constitute ourselves via the image as much as through experience. With the ambiguity and ambivalence that has always been part of this medium, images both make up the everyday as much as human subjects do and, simultaneously, announce the uniqueness of the everyday. Yes, most images sorely lack punctum – that ability to pierce the viewer and leave an imprint that Barthes wrote about – but to imagine the world devoid of images is also to imagine the world halved through the loss of its reflection in the mirror. It is to imagine the world halved again by the closing in of horizons of memory and possibility, and halved yet again by the loss of the face of the other. It is to imagine a world unable to progress due to the breakdown of a vital medium that helps us make sense of reality, or even just glimpse it perhaps, through representation.
