We are asked to consider the statement by Bourdieu that "in conferring upon photography a guarantee of realism, society is merely confirming itself in the tautological certainty that an image of the real which is true to its representation of objectivity is really objective". We have to presume that the translation is an objective rendition of the original and not, as one would suspect given the clumsiness of the statement, a best guess.
A tautology generally refers to a statement where the words repeat elements of the meaning already given. Often used in a pejorative sense to describe statements that are said to be true simply because the same statement is repeated twice in the argument. However the fact that someone uses a tautological argument does not make that argument false - it could equally be true there is just no way of deciding from the statement itself. There is a further use of the term in logic where a statement is always true when it takes the value true for all combinations of values of its components. I presume that Bourdieu was using it in the first way in the above statement based solely on the context.
The more that I read this statement the less sure that it has any meaning at all. It seems to say something profound but on closer examination this is not the case. It is difficult to agree or disagree with the statement because it has no meaning. Bourdieu offers no reasoning for his statement nor what he means by 'society' and on what basis he ascribes such beliefs to that 'society'. More importantly he appears to assume that there is a 'real' that is capable of being photographed and perhaps this is the fatal flaw in what he says. There is no 'real' that would be universally accepted even if it exists because we interpret the information being provided to our senses in a unique way. The way that I see a scene is different from how my companion sees that scene although we may use the same or similar words such as 'building' or 'tree' in our discussion of what is before us. What we cannot discuss is the subtleties of colour and light that reflect from the objects.
The more specific we become the less likely that we will agree even assuming the scene remains unchanged throughout our discussion. If we are looking at the Sacre Coeur in Paris it is highly probable, given its size, that we will view it a bit at a time and create within our mind a whole picture. What we notice and see as important to the whole picture and therefore retain will depend very much on our individuality and pre-conditioning. If we have previously been told of the many vendors that offer their wares we are more inclined to see and include them. Whereas our partner who has been told of the figures that surround the structure or the difficulties of creating the overall shape will pay particular attention to those elements. Both views may be 'true' to that individual but are they true to some objective reality that exists separate from or senses? I would suggest that there is no objective 'real' out there and that what we 'see' only exists in our minds.
If this is the case then how can a mechanical object such as camera capture an image? In one sense it does not capture an image what it captures is varying amounts of light and stores them on some medium such as film or a digital sensor. Even this capture is proscribed by the designers of the camera and the capturing medium. There are severe limitations imposed by the technical constraints of the materials available and so the engineers have to settle on a compromise that they hope will produce an image that is acceptable to a large number of people. The compromises continue when the captured light levels are transferred from the storage medium onto a system that is viewable by a human being. Again best guesses are made and although modern technology offers a wider range of choices than say glass plate negatives there are still limitations.
Once a viewable image is created then we return to the same situation that existed between the real time viewer and the object that he/she was looking at. We interpret what we see. A photograph is no more than coloured or monochrome dots on a piece of paper or a computer screen. It is incapable of conveying meaning. What we 'see' is once again an individual reaction and interpretation. We are not seeing something that is objectively 'real' and indeed I would argue that there is no such 'real' object.
The early belief that photography in some way was 'real' was because of its relatively instant capture of a moment in time, the lack of any noticeable interpretation by an artist and the seeming consistency between photographs of the same object at different times. Our greater awareness of the limitations of photography and the more overt interpretation of any scene both within the camera and any subsequent creation of a viewable image now means that the most common reaction is to assume that in some way the image is 'false'. Of course if there is no reality then there can be no falsity.
No comments:
Post a Comment