On Walter Benjamin (Part III)

In my mind the most striking point Walter Benjamin makes in his essay “A Short History of Photography” is the discussion of how photographs capture the future.  Benjamin notes that when we look back at photographs we view them in the context of all that has happened since they were taken.  The photograph forces the viewer to find “the indiscernible place in the condition of that long past minute where the future is nesting.”  I find this a very exciting idea.  Each photograph captures a moment but at the same time the futures of every person or object in the image.  Viewed this way photographs become animate objects, collecting the lives and stories of their subjects.  For example, Annie Leibovitz’s photograph for Rolling Stone of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken the day he was killed is now viewed in the context of his final hours, making it even more powerful.  The photograph of a young Bill Clinton meeting President John Kennedy seems to hold the potential of the future.  The subjects of these photographs are unaware of their futures and as viewers we now hold an exciting power over them.

In this way photographs age just like their subjects. Humans age constantly, and just as someone will never be the same age as when their photograph is taken, a photograph can never be read the same after its moment of conception.  It seems also in this context that the loss of a unique photograph is more than simply the loss of a photographic object.  Instead it is the loss of everything collected by that photograph – everything that has changed since the moment it was taken.  On the other hand a photograph can even outlive a human.  Photographs whose subjects have since died can change with (and change) our perception of the deceased.

It is impossible to make a photograph of any time but the present.  From this follows that each moment not photographed is lost to our transient memories.  But this idea has the possibility to incite dangerously random picture making.  Photographs made for no other purpose than to record moments in time have saturated our modern world.  And while all of these photographs hold the potential to become significant in the future, I would argue that the profusion in their numbers somehow lessens that power.  If everything is recorded, then each of those future-significant moments is reliably recorded as well.  And with this comes a loss of magic.  Gone is the possibility that some of those past moments were not recorded, and live on only in our minds.  But more importantly, gone too is the idea that perhaps, in that long past instant, something in the photographer’s unconscious gave him or her the impulse to see into the future, into the time when that instant would become significant, and to take the photograph.

TMW

Advertisement