Just Because the Sky Has Turned a Pretty Shade of Orange and Red Doesn't Mean You Can Simply Point a Camera and Shoot ... Or Does It?

Golden sunset and red sunrise over Harold Hill 

(SA / Dec 2022) 

 

 

I. 

 

For many serious photographers, these two snaps taken from my bedroom window - a golden sunset and a red sunrise - constitute perfect examples of cliché. 

 

That enormous numbers of people enjoy looking at such pictures doesn't alter the fact that images of dusk and dawn have virtually zero aesthetic value; their mass production and popularity only confirming their banality. 

 

As one commentator notes: 

 

"Their very ubiquity is what seems to repel; photography has tainted what it sought to cherish through overuse. It miniaturises natural grandeur and renders it kitsch." [1]

 

If you're a reader of Walter Benjamin, you might explain how mechanical reproduction devalues the aura - by which is meant something like the uniqueness - of an object or event [2]; if you're a fan of D. H. Lawrence, you'll probably start shouting about Kodak vision and how this prevents us from seeing reality, just as cliché inhibits the forming of new perspectives [3].  

 

Now, whilst sympathetic to both of theses authors, I also want to be able to take my snaps and share them with others in good conscience. And so I feel obliged to challenge those who are hostile to photography per se - even if, on philosophical grounds, I share their concerns.

 

And I also feel obliged to challenge those who are dismissive of certain genres of amateur photography - pictures of flowers, or cats, or of the sun's risings and settings - out of cultural snobbery; i.e., those who sneer at aesthetically naive individuals and speak of the wrong kind of people making the wrong kind of images.

           

 

II. 

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the Marxist academic, writer, photographer and curator, Julian Stallabrass, who is interested in the relations between art, politics and popular culture and who sneeringly entitled a chapter of his 1996 work on the widespread popularity of amateur photography 'Sixty Billion Sunsets' [4].

 

As Annebella Pollen notes: 

 

"Stallabrass's denigration of mass photographic practice is based on what he perceives to be its overwhelmingly conventionalised sameness (unlike elite art practices, which are positively polarised as avant-garde, creative and distinctive)." [5]

 

In other words, because Stallabrass sees every sunset photograph as essentially the same, he dismisses them all as "sentimental visual confectionary indicative of limited aesthetic vision and an undeveloped practice" [6]; in other words, stereotypical shit. 

Unfortunately, this attitude is echoed by many other critics and theorists convinced of their own cultural superiority. If you thought postmodernism did away with such snobbery, you'd be mistaken - which is a pity. 

 

For whilst I may agree that just because the sky has turned a pretty shade of orange and red one is nevertheless required to do more than simply point a camera and shoot in order to produce an image that is also a work of art, there's nothing wrong with just taking a snap and plenty of snaps have genuine charm and, yes, even beauty. 

 

In the end, even a bad photograph can seduce and what Barthes calls the punctum - i.e., that which is most poignant (even nuanced) in a picture - is often the failure, fault, cliché, or imperfection. Perhaps, in this digital age of imagery shared via social media, we therefore need to rethink what constitutes a good or bad photograph.    

And, ultimately, Stallabrass is simply wrong: no two sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same and no two photographs of sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same; there is an eternal return of difference (not of the same or to the same). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', eitherand.org - click here. 

 

[2] See Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935), which can be found in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (Bodley Head, 2015).

 

[3] See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Art and Morality' (1925), which can be found in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161-68. 

 

[4] Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, (Verso, 1996). 

 

[5] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', op. cit.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

 

Miley Cyrus Meets Roland Barthes

Miley Cyrus by Cheyne Thomas / V Magazine 

I'm not a great fan of the 22 year-old American performer Miley Cyrus, but I am very much taken with this snapshot of her in a bathtub currently doing the rounds on social media. 

Why? Because, in Barthesian terms, it strikes me as a genuinely erotic photograph which produces the key element for disturbing the more general field of interest or studium. That is to say, the picture affords that which projects out of the image like an arrow and pierces me as viewer with a certain poignant fascination or delight. This is what Barthes terms the punctum. He writes:

"Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium." [27]

I know exactly what he means: when one glances casually at the many images of Miss Cyrus available online, one feels at most a rather flaccid degree of vague desire; she's alright, but, in or out of her clothes, it makes very little difference. There's no real surprise or delight; I might like the pictures or find them interesting, but I do not love them.  

This, in fact, is very often the problem with pornographic images; they are too homogeneous or unary. That is to say, they transform reality without making it vacillate. The erotic photograph, on the other hand, is a pornographic image that has been fissured and which gives us troubling details and untimely objects to distract our attention from the otherwise banal and exclusive presentation of sex. 

These supplements are what seduce us and they are often contained in the picture purely by accident (they attest neither to the photographer's intent nor technical ability). Often, we cannot even say what it is that arrests our gaze and constitutes a punctum: "What I can name cannot really prick me", says Barthes [51].

And so - returning to the above photo of Miss Cyrus - I'm not entirely sure what it is I find so captivating and loveable about the picture; is it her eyes, the position of her arms, the towel on her head, the bracelet, the smallness of her breasts, the stick-out ears, or is it the soap bubbles?

"The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. ... Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum." [51-3]

Miley looks so lovely and fresh-faced, so innocent and defiant in her nakedness, that it's distressing to realise at last that there exists another type of punctum - one not of form, but of intensity and which is related to time. For no matter how young and vital the subject, every photograph tells the same story: she is going to die. 

That's the final challenge of every photograph: however brilliantly they seem to capture the moment and the excited world of the living, each picture contains the imperious sign and certainty of future death. They excite our fascination and our desire, but, ultimately, they make us want to cry ...      

 

See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000).