PHOTOGRAPHY
Author: Meghan Howell
When I visit a place, I become obsessed with taking photographs. They are the carcasses I haul back with me, triumphant. The trophies I mount on my wall. Such spoils, it seems, must come with a price. Is the landscape altered by the image I carry with me saying “This is the place, it is beautiful”?
Baudelaire allows for photography: “Let it hasten to enrich the tourist’s album and restore to his eye the precision which his memory may lack; […] Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins”[1]. (I do not wish to misrepresent Baudelaire; for he hated photography with a passion.) Perhaps these implicit claims of immediacy and of furnishing memory make photographs all the more ripe to harbour falsehoods about a place. When a place is gone, all we will have to know it by are photographs. But the camera is an instrument used by the photographer. It is aimed and manipulated by a partial being to disrupt and isolate what she sees before her. For how can a photograph claim to reproduce the reality before us and yet still disappoint? Benjamin says about film that “the apparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure […] This equipment free aspect of reality has become the height of artifice”[2]. Unlike in a theatre, there is no standpoint from which the viewer may ascertain that what she is seeing is illusion.
Accordingly every place that I have photographed becomes either dystopia or utopia. With a camera affixed to my eye, did I really see at all? Take for instance la Habana, a place which still lives curiously in the past, but which longs to change. It is already unrecognizable in my photographs.
Double exposed,
disembodied,
discoloured,
damned,
and distant.
