Making Contact: The Photographer's Interface with the World

The photograph below, of a young man screaming into a microphone was taking with a 35 mm camera. It is dark, it is a little blurry and unclear about what is going on in the background, but the specific moment that is captured is clearly an energetic one. The passion in the singer is obvious, and the darkness of the photograph gives a feel for the venue the musicians were playing in.  

Alternatively, the photograph of the two musicians shown below was taken with a digital camera in an environment that is not clearly depicted. There is less of a connection to these musicians and while it could have something to with their complacent demeanors, it has more to do with the reality of the image itself. The image on the left is the original photograph before the color was removed; the image was cropped and sharpened, and the contrasts and brightness were enhanced.  

The understanding of photography, and the patience that it requires to shoot the right roll of film, with the right lighting, the right speed, and overall, the right camera is a more complex process than the selection of a digital camera that has automatic settings and produces photos that can be fixed instantly on a computer. Furthermore, the process of developing film in the dark so the negatives are not damaged, the printing on photo paper with an ultra violet light to which your eyes slowly adjust, and the correct mixing of solutions for the image to appear on paper and remain permanent, is again, a more complex process than the loading of photos onto a computer and the automatic filing that is done in a photo program.

Susan Meiselas’ heartbreaking photograph, Soldiers Searching Bus Passengers, Northern Highway taken in El Salvador in 1980,25 shows the consequences of war with the careful composition of shadows. The shadows are a subtle depiction of the terrors of war, but the obvious division of shadows represents the separation of soldiers and passengers. While the shadows shrink towards the top left corner of the image, the cluster of soldiers in the bottom right corner show just enough shape to make out one soldier crouched with a gun.  The reality of the situation is clearly shown even though the image is composed of shadows; even without details showing us the fear on the passengers’ faces, or the defiance in the soldiers’ eyes, the photograph captures the intensity and dangers of that moment. Because Meiselas took this photograph in 1980, there is no doubt she was using a manual camera which in turn, makes the photograph significantly more powerful; it is understood that this image, captured by a traditional camera, has not been altered to look more dramatic and in fact, presents the truth.

The convenience of a digital camera makes it a popular item for consumers, but the personalization of the manual camera brings aura to the traditional photograph. This image manifests the consciousness of the photographer. The fact that it is not a digitally captured image that was edited and refined later makes it much more powerful. If this photograph were digital, the aura would be immediately destroyed because it would be less believable.

Benjamin discusses how photography exemplifies the loss of cult value of the work of art as exhibition value became increasingly more important. And yet, the earliest photographs are portraits attempting to capture the faces of loved ones. They maintained their cult value because they contained the aura, the sense of presence, of the absent subjects. Although that moment in the subjects’ life will never be experienced again, its capture by the camera allows for the aura to persist.

Barthes believes certain photographs (particularly of deceased loved ones) have a lasting emotional effect because of the connection between the specific time when the photograph was taken, and the death of the subject of the photograph. An image has the ability to capture a fraction of a second, but the image survives even after the subject has passed away. While Benjamin argues that the aura of a work of art is eroded by mechanical reproduction, Barthes use of photography to hold onto his mother’s essence: “the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”26 When someone dies, it is a common experience for the surviving friends and family to weed through collectables and photographs, in effort to both celebrate the life of that person and to mourn their death.

Photographs move us backwards through time, which enables us to cling to little pieces of history that we cannot bear to let go of. It is often a trying process to rifle through photographs after someone you love has died, but it is an active part of grieving. After my cousin passed away in 2006, I immediately buried myself in photo albums in desperate attempt to hold onto what I could of him. Similar to Barthes settling on a photograph of his mother as a young girl, I felt finally found a photo of my cousin when he was about four years old. My brother, hardly smiling, is standing closer to the photographer than our cousin, who is smiling with his tongue visible as though he is saying “La,” the way toddlers often do. Despite his living another twenty years after this photo, and despite the fact that I was not yet born when the photograph was taken, the innocence and playfulness in his face is a perfect depiction of how I remember his true character.

Because photographs are physically handled, they are as important as objects as they are for what they show. It puts my mind at ease to keep photographs of the friends I have recently lost, in my wallet and around my room. Keeping a photograph nearby gives me a physical connection to someone I otherwise can no longer have any physical connection to; without these photographs, these people would only be memories. In a sense, I am holding onto these images as “evidence” of their lives, and our friendships that are now in the past.

The materiality of a photograph completely changes with digital photography because the physical contact that we have with photographs ceases to exist. Because the digital camera transfers large groups of images into a computer at one time, they are put into an electronic file and usually set aside to hardly look at. When a digital image is printed out and put in a wallet, the image fades quicker than a traditional photograph, and moisture in the air causes the colors to run. The photographic object that Barthes’ holds to bring the essence of his mother back into his own life is no longer real, thus the aura of a photograph is completely destroyed by digitalization. There are new digital frames that store hundreds of images and can be set to display a new photograph every hour, or day. The process of selecting an important photograph to frame and keep on a mantel or night table has disintegrated into electronic photo albums that can be loaded onto the Internet and forgotten about. The authenticity that Benjamin talks about with reference to a work of art includes its history as an object with its material decay and history of ownership. Digital images do not experience a unique history, but traditional photographs are framed, organized into albums, and passed along to family members and friends. The authenticity of a photograph is maintained in its traditional form, but dies in digital.

Benjamin is not the only critical writer to pursue the topic of photography, but it can be argued that he essay is the most influential. His essay was not strictly observations and criticism about art in a mechanical age, but can be read as a prediction of how mechanical production and technological advances would affect the arts during the times to come. While he mourns the loss of aura in a reproduced work of art, Benjamin is also looking towards the future and the potential progress in the arts. In “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin uses a Klee painting of the Angel of History to symbolize the connection between experiences in the past, and the progressions in the future: 

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.27

Though in an essay separate from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” this analysis of Klee’s painting illustrates how advances in technology may destroy the aura of the work of art, as we know it, but new possibilities become available that were inaccessible before.

"Aura." Def. 1. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008. Merriam-Webster Online. December 2008. .

"Authentic." Def. 1. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008. Merriam-Webster Online. December 2008. .

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang: New York, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter. “Illuminations.” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Chicken Books: New York, 1968. 217-251.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books: London, 1972.

Kreis, Steven. “Karl Marx.” The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. 1996. The History Guide. 30 Jan. 2008. .

Leslie, Esther. "Walter Benjamin." The Literary Encyclopedia. 7 July 2001. .

Leggat, Robert. “How Photography Began.” A History of Photography. 1997. Robert Leggat. 23 Sept. 2008. < http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/>.

Meiselas, Susan. “Soldiers Search Bus Passengers Along the Northern Highway.” Image Ref.: PAR51818. Magnum Photos. 1998. . 3 Dec. 2008.

Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Routledge: London, 1996.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador: New York, 1977.

1.) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., (New York: Schenck Books, 1968), 224.

2.) Robert Leggat, “The History of Photography,” http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/, 2 Dec. 2008.

3.) Op. Cit., 217-218.

4.) Ibid, 218, 220-221, 224. 

5.) Leggat, 2 Dec. 2008.

6.) Benjamin, 219.

7.) “Aura,” (2008) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura, 2 Dec. 2008.

8.) Op. Cit. 221.

9.) “Authenticity,” (2008) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authenticity, 2 Dec. 2008.

10.) Benjamin, 220.

11.) John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (London: Penguin Books, 1972) 24-5. 

12.) Op. Cit., 223.

13.) Benjamin, 221.

14.) Benjamin, 224-225.

15.)Ibid.

16.) Benjamin, 224.

17.) Leggat,

2 Dec. 2008.

* Though Benjamin is specifically referring to a movie cameraman, the same can be said of a photographer as both use a camera in their field of art.

19.) Benjamin, 233.

20.) Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 4.

21.) Ibid, 11-12.

22.) Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 5.

23.) Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida—Reflections on Photography,” Trans., Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 5.

24.) Sontag, 5.

25.) Susan Meiselas, “Magnum Photos,” http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/, 3 Dec. 2008.

26.) Barthes, 4.

27.) Walter Benjamin, “A Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., (New York: Schenck Books, 1968), 257.