What is it that we see when we look at a photograph - is it metaphor or mirror or window?

It was Barthes who raised doubt about the photograph as 'a-thing-out-there' - "a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see..."

What is it that you are actually seeing when you look at a photograph?  And is the experience one in which metaphor operates?   Is the photograph a metaphor, a mirror, a window, a 'selection that changes 'reality' ' - or all of these?

I suspected that photographs can't be metaphors, or if they can they are different to say metaphor in poetry.  Does the difference lie in the fact that our appreciation is language-dependent when encountering images as well as when hearing or reading a poem? 

I wonder if all photographs are simply the evidence of the looking that another human being did. 

As such the act of looking at/reading another person's photograph's is an act, more or less successful, of empathic or compassionate understanding.  Instead of walking in another person's moccasins we are looking with another's eyes.  No more no less?  I am partly motivated by the feeling that the theory of art photography is becoming impossibly complicated.

In searching 'are photographs metaphorical?' I immediately came across an article by Jane Ford about the contemporary photographer William Wylie HERE

Jane Ford's article opens with;

Unititled, 2000.
Photo by William Wylie.

Making a photograph is symbolic. It is a representation, and in that, it stands for something,” William Wylie said. “The picture you create is not the same as the thing you photographed.

“I want the reverberation of the photograph, as an image of a subject that matters, to expand out to all aspects of our feelings and experience.” 

In his work, Wylie focuses on themes and issues of landscape and place. His recent book, “RiverWalk: Explorations Along the Cache la Poudre River,” documents the last undammed river in Colorado. For more than four years Wylie chronicled the changing light along the 150-mile river, which runs from the Continental Divide to the Missouri River. At one point he spent 12 days hiking the entire river with his tripod and camera searching out and photographing areas that are often overlooked by the casual observer.  The opening of Jane Ford's article HERE

The phrase that leaps out to me is the last undammed river in Colorado.  It is like the story of the death of the last wolf.  Who is damned in the damming?  Where will nature flow? etc.  

William Wylie is also a member of the art faculty at the University of Virginia.  His portfolio is HERE

This is a photograph from Wylie's series Stillwater;

Copyright William Wylie

I guess for the purposes of this appreciative article the words 'rock, water, light, flow' came to mind.  But, had I 'switched off' left-brain thinking, could I just have sensuously luxuriated in the feel of the light on the water, and the feeling of mega-powerful mass from the water?   And the strength of the rock in parting the water and maintaining its integrity - though eventually it will crumble.  The tonal-mass of the water reminds me of Roni Horn's photographs of the River Thames and Joshua Cooper's photographs of water.  (So what?)

I chose the photograph because of its simplicity and because it is so evocative of many readings of Japanese and Chinese, and Western, statements about human experience and the metaphor and archetypes of those philosophies.  A couple of examples of language-dependent metaphors, that inevitably condition the eyes with which I/we read a photograph, will suffice for now.

My two favourite haiku;

Shiki, Masaoka. (1867-1902).

The summer river:
although there is a bridge, my horse
goes through the water.

-0-

A lightning flash:
between the forest trees
I have seen water.

Or the famous saying by Heraclitus; You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. ( It seems he said many other wise and beautiful things relevant to al the themes raised here, such as; Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.)

For me, iceberg-like, metaphor is one-tenth common understanding - this is 'a rock and a river' - boom-boom, it is named.  But the 9/10 below the surface is the subjectvity operating from the infinite particularity of each person's life-experience.

But perhaps in the case of (art) photographs the position is reversed. The 'infinite mystery of particularity' is what is immediate.  Photographs are not bits of the world, they are windows through which to cast light around the inner cave of being.  In which case photographs are very powerfully metaphorical - or at least they are triggers in the making of metaphorical meaning.

More spiritually each image is a gateway to the Infinite - some photographers create better gateways than others.

We are language-dependent, and culturally-dependent in our reading of photographs.  It is a vast sea of largely unconscious language-knowledge that is evoked by an image.  Sad-to-say we could not read fine photography without language-based cultural consciousness.

The key question is not Where is photography going?' but 'What changes are taking place in the activation of human consciousness as we encounter photographs now at the end of the 21st century's first decade?' 

Do we have to have a newer, better support language to prevent an impossible labyrinth of critical theory.? If art is confused and confusing is it not because of the talents of young artists but because of the non-sense and lack  of common-sense clarity by those who create the critical context in which artists function.  My 'safe harbour' is always re-newing our basic humanity.  We always were, are and will be creatures defined by our caring, our creativity and our criticality - experienced in various forms of community.

That is also my answer to those post-modernists who say there is no grand theory anymore.  Yes there is, and it is the same as its always been - its the story and grand theory of being human - in the world - with others.

-0-

Posted via email from sunwalking's posterous