"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Dec 14, 2010

A sidereal commentary on the post before it

I want to write, "the camera is inherently fascist" and mean it, without any self doubt. But, I know the formula has neither truth, nor style; it is instead unceremonious, and ugly. The camera, a tool, has no unmovable use or value. In this, it resembles the gun. Like the gun, the camera does have a primary use. A design. Both tools fix in place a human body, or a slice of environment, or the movement of light and metal, or the perception of a moment, and alter not only perception, but memory.  Like the gun, the camera extracts. The gun extracts death, and injury, and submission. The camera extracts fame, and time itself. It seizes a moment and makes it available for any use, so long as it lasts.

A painter converts raw materials - turns pigments and paints, fabric and her own effort, the food she has consumed and the air she breathes, her sleep or lack of sleep, her memories, the materials made by other human hands - into an image, which some might call art. In capturing an image in her own effort, in her labor, the painter creates. She makes. It may suck. It may fail to communicate. It may fail the artist's own expectations. But it remains labor. A person shapes herself in order to shape the medium and the materials into a new thing, a thing which did not exist before she finished it. A thing now part of the world, if only for a moment.

The camera also produces an image, but the labor happened elsewhere. The camera, a commodity, also commodifies. A person using a camera must still eat, sleep, sit up night after night with insomnia, shit and walk and find the right balance, or imbalance, of light and background. But the labor, the immediate labor of the moment of capture, is itself alienated. Foreign hands made the mechanism, others made the tool. The painter may not fashion the brush, or manufacture the paint - but brush and paint alone will never an image create.

The camera, on the other hand, doesn't even need a single human hand. Its operator can program it, place it, and walk away. Can line a bank ceiling with them. Can hang one on a street light, or in the dwindling wild, to capture the pathetic mating rituals of birds almost gone extinct. Even with one in hand, the moment of capture requires only a single actual investment of labor - to push a button and freeze an instant of the world.

The camera extracts. Like the gun. Or the tank. Or the oil drill. The painter must labor her art, must experience it. She cannot remain separate. The cameraman must separate himself. He has no choice. The moment of extraction divides him from the image he produces, because he doesn't actually produce it. He steals it. The cameraman extracts images by fixing them, and at the point of extraction produces a consumable commodity. A face. A mother and child. A wandering dust wurm of motherless orphans. A player in a game. The face of a prince, the hands of an anonymous model, the grimacing glare of a president's wife. Extracted for consumption.

I attempted to imply all this when I wrote about disaster porn produced out of the suffering of Haitians, almost a year ago:

"Actually pornography - the prurience of the concealed angle, the alleged objectivity of the camera lens, the incipient fascism of predetermined experience, the glee and horror of commentary and condemnation."

 The camera can only extract.

Thankfully, Lewis Lapham manages to say it better than I (h/t Marisacat):


"...The historical variables testify to the presence of the constant, which is the human hope or dream of immortality, but they don’t account for the broad-spreading glory that disperses to nothing. That achievement was reserved for the mechanical genius of the twentieth century that equipped the manufacturers of celebrity with the movie camera, the radio broadcast, the high-speed newspaper press, and the television screen. The historian Daniel Boorstin attributed the subsequent bull market in “artificial fame” to the imbalance between the limited supply of gods and heroes to be found in nature and the limitless demand for their appearance on a newsstand.

Perceptions of the world furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic, employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The camera sees but doesn’t think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the object of its affection doesn’t matter; what matters is the surge and volume of emotion that it engenders and evokes, the floods of consciousness drawn as willingly to a blood bath in Afghanistan as to a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else..."

That is the end game of corporate fascism. To extract the self from the body itself.

9 comments:

Randal Graves said...

Jeez, now I feel bad for turning that squirrel in my front yard into a tool of fascism. Heh.

There's a widespread belief that an inherent 'truth' resides in the camera, that whereas art is the product of someone trying to make a point wherever on the political spectrum, the camera is a documentary agent with no agenda.

Jack Crow said...

So many line up photos, so many errors. So little truth.

almostinfamous said...

The painter must labor her art, must experience it. She cannot remain separate. The cameraman must separate himself. He has no choice. The moment of extraction divides him from the image he produces, because he doesn't actually produce it. He steals it. The cameraman extracts images by fixing them, and at the point of extraction produces a consumable commodity.

just wondering if you would extend the same criticism to the people who coat their own glass plates in a dark room, process daguerrotypes with mercury vapour, create their own cameras, pinhole or otherwise, or is this limited to the combined gifts of Sir William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadward Muybridge, George Eastman Kodak and their successors?

the depression of the shutter is merely the first part of a far longer process in the emergence of an image, which is ultimately a 2-D translation of a 3-D moment.

Lapham's comment: The camera sees but doesn’t think...learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else

would be better summarized as 'a picture says a thousand words'* - the trick is in getting it to say the right words, and in the right order depending on what it is YOU are trying to say. it is, as you mentioned, a tool...


* yea yea, it's a marketing slogan, but has a few grains of truth hiding in it.

almostinfamous said...

There's a widespread belief that an inherent 'truth' resides in the camera, that whereas art is the product of someone trying to make a point wherever on the political spectrum, the camera is a documentary agent with no agenda.

there is, but i find it's dissolving rather quickly in the age of photoshop.

Jack Crow said...

ai,

I would not include someone who manufactures his or her own camera.

but the camera itself would still function in the same way.

Would that be different without capitalist commodification?

That is the question.

Respect,

Jack

Peter Ward said...

But perhaps the defect of capitalism is that we don't include those who labor in the production of a camera as participants in the "art" not the tool itself. (And isn't the conception of the artist alles allein a bit absurd given all the previous "labor", say Renaissance Perspective, that went into the work?)

I'm not saying photography qualifies as art, merely doubtful of the standard being used to make the determination.

Jack Crow said...

Peter,

I've an unvoiced objection to the cult of the artist - as an all-by-himself. You've put it better than I.

Respect,

Jack

almostinfamous said...

the modern camera is a love-child of capitalist technology and the desire to make art 'easy'(you have to realize that people were using camera obscuras to paint long before John Herschel discovered the light-sensitivity of silver-halides) and has evolved, along with capitalism over the century and a half that it has been around(paintings have been around since early man discovered pigments).

it is, in a way, a hybrid, and i do not see a way to decouple the modern process from capitalism since it requires the economies of scale created by commodity capitalism to function today. does that mean a return to using hand-made cameras etc, possibly.

but it will forever remain a bourgeois occupation because honestly, it takes a lot of silver grains to make an 8x10" photograph and silver isn't exactly cheap to find.

Jack Crow said...

ai,

we run parallel

respect,

jack