The enduring image

Cottage in Northern Iran

Our mind works with images. Images today are the primary means of understanding the world. Text, or even speech seem mediated, subjective and drawn out. The impact of an image is immediate. We feel free to draw the conclusions we want and easily forget the photographer and photo editor are no less selective than the author.  A photograph can provoke a sense of familiarity and intimacy with the subject matter that only personal experience can contend with. As Susan Sontag remarked “Photography makes us feel the world is more available than it really is.”

Photography is dangerously beholden to the external attributes of its subject matter. In comparison, other visual arts (even film) and text seem so much freer to convey the spectrum of human experience without being anchored to a given time or place. This is why a special trust is accorded to photography which will, for its part, tend to rest again and again on the surface of things...

Yet we feel we have penetrated beyond that. It's true we have developed a tremendous skill in decoding, drawing conslusions from what we see "in" the photo. We can often date, place, understand the purpose and symbolism, classify the genre and gage the impact on others.

But decoding is not penetrating and suggesting isn't saying. Outside the poetics of mood and the suggestiveness of symbols, there's something distinctly slippery and seductive about photography. It is more photography that penetrates us than the other way round. Our resistance has gradually been worn down and we have given photographs the authority to act as a substitute for real experience.

For the instant emotional kick, the power of dislocation to another bright set of possibilities, nothing can beat it.

Our impression of a place we have not focused much attention on but just know of vaguely can often be no more than the sum of the photographs we have seen of it. If we’ve seen just a few photos or a certain type of photo – these will carry enormous weight in forming our outlook. One or two extra photos can tip the balance and create an entirely new one. When I try to examine carefully what my impression is of say Laos, South Korea or any place I know relatively little about, its alarming to sense how artificial it is.

It seems the frail rims of our knowledge are cluttered with such fanciful borrowed imagery, little photographic placeholders marking the existence of uncharted territory that is often accepted as the territory itself!

At their best images are a kind of interface, a way of managing our most visceral, emotional understanding of the world, otherwise they are a screen, that conceals reality whilst posing far too convincingly as a representation of it.

We live in 2 principal modes today, active mode and spectator mode and spend for too much of our time in the latter, interested in the surface of things or interacting with reality with a complacency fashioned by the spactator mode. This means a passive, expectant, entitled disposition. Engagement is optional and there's a cool, contextualised, category-filled way of perceiving things, that shrinks from the violence of uniqueness.

The special trust accorded to photography combined with its pervasiveness has a cumulative effect, that of upholding a fear of the world. Clearly the excellent war reporters and those who document catastrophes cannot be blamed for the invasion of their images on our consciousness. But the mass of images creates a pyramid-like hierarchy of place. Surveying the world from our mind's eye - as we move away from the familiar big city apexes of 'civilisation' - the world according to images gets nastier, hungrier, more dishevelled and disaster prone and we feel grateful for the comfort and security of our sofa. The avowed purpose of images to bring the world closer is reversed, and the final result is back to the old chestnut: US and THEM. I wonder how much these reporters, seeing the result, feel any sense of responsibility for reinforcing a polarised view of a world that doesn't exist and have a desire to correct this somehow. As we move, hopefully, into a new era of personal responsibility, this may happen.

Images have as much distorted the world as they have revealed it to us. So the cure for the distortions of perception created by images is - more images! One can start to see a scenario where new generations of images correct the harm done by the previous generation and so on ad infinitum. As people begin to think more strategically about the consequences of their actions and appreciate the interconnectedness of things, image producers and publishers too might follow suit. I wonder also what people do to keep a corner of the mind free from the image's enduring power to validate or co-opt personal experience.