Following this logic, every method of recording is an interpretation of reality, but while a map and writing use learned social conventions to represent their subject, a photograph can communicate through visual instinct. Possibly because of this, in addition to capturing the specific – acting as testaments of past events or freezing moments in time – photographs can also hold the elusive quality that resides in the atmosphere or in the spaces between the objects in the frame. Certainly, a photograph is always a partial truth, even when un- manipulated in post-production. Just as language shapes what we mean when we speak or write, the camera lens will physically distort reality, magnifying, blurring and cropping the scene. Of greater interest, however, is the additional bias of the individual viewing the photograph that deepens its ambiguity. In semiotic terms, Rosalind Krauss notes that a photograph is an index: when we look at a photograph, we see the forms within the frame, but we also make a chain of associations unrelated to those forms that we draw from our personal histories and that influence our perception. In spite of technical or psychological distortion, a photograph’s ability to evoke this automatic chain of thought implies that these images have still maintained some facet of the real to resonate with our unconscious memory. 3
This aspect of photography, layering our personal memories with what we see before us, resembles how we subjectively experience lived space through our preconceptions. Space itself is not fixed, but fluid, susceptible to numerous perceptions and expectations; though a photograph captures a single place and time, its significance can also extend beyond this literal record. Photography’s strength when documenting space stems from the viewer instinctively adopting the camera eye as if it were their own. The complexity of a place can be exhibited in all its unedited glory and immediately understood by the viewer as how this place would look in person. Seemingly insignificant details that might be eliminated during a simplification into drawings and maps remain present in a photograph. These details act as potential memory triggers that would allow the viewer to acknowledge qualities of a site beyond its measurable features. Roland Barthes referred to this detail as the punctum : something in a photograph that directly but inexplicably pierces the viewer. 4 The challenges lie in the desired degree of trust and control: whether the photographer has successfully distilled the essence of a place into a single frame and whether the viewer will glean the anticipated response. True representation is, of course, impossible because reality remains outside the grasp of language. Recognising the limits of each medium, a combination of writing, mapping and photography collectively provides the most accurate representation by offering a flexible expression of space. c
4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . New York: Hill and Wang, 1981
3 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985. p 115
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Jessica Craig
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