death of the photographer

Written originally for the TUPF.

The French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote the essay “Death of the Author” in 1967 in which he proposed that the original intent of the author in his or her writings did not matter, and that the reader’s interpretation was the only thing that ever gave writing meaning. The implication is perspective changing. Although Barthes focused on literature, the underlying philosophy can be (and arguably has been) adapted to anything man made. Photography as an art form has not escaped this fate. The last decade has perhaps been the most cataclysmic in terms of changes in the medium. This is particularly noticeable in the consumerist hodgepodge that is the city. And although the proliferation of increasingly cheaper and more accessible cameras is nothing new (as evidenced as far back as the Kodak Brownie), I would argue that there has not been a point in history when photography has been more accessible, cheap and ubiquitous as it is today. It is so simple, so portable, and ultimately, now embedded in such a necessary device. Equipped with a camera phone, everybody is a photographer. The urban landscape has become flooded with amateur shutter-bugs who snap and click at every inclination simply because they can. This has created a common repeated criticism I have heard within photography circles: that technology, having become cheap and commonplace, has created art that is also cheap and commonplace. Browse almost any Twitter feed and you see an accompanying Instagram account flooded with pictures that seemingly lack rhyme, reason or any premeditation. The idea of ‘saying something’ has apparently become co-opted by the idea of ‘showing anything,’ as snapshots of things as arbitrary as a hamburger and fries are posted, but with a sepia filter to assume the look of something non-trivial and deep. As Barthes would argue however, who’s to say what has meaning and what doesn’t?

I love the city. Having lived in it all my life, in all its kinetic energy, to see that chaos captured perfectly still in a photograph is the oddest, most visually striking thing to me. I took the above photo downtown in some park, exact location forgotten and irrelevant. I wanted to capture a sense of that aforementioned frenetic “motion.” Passing a playground with children and parents and animals bustling about, it occurred to me that this little playground ecosystem was like a microcosm of the city energy that I wanted to capture. I set a relatively high shutter speed, threw a stick in the direction of some pigeons, waited for some motion, and clicked the shutter. I was quite pleased with the result and showed a few friends. Their interpretations of the shot surprised me to say the least. There were notions of nostalgia. There were interpretations involving the simplicity of childhood, and the loss of that serendipitous joy in the park. There was an interpretation that focused on the haphazard ordering of structures and subjects in the picture, claiming an endearing “symmetrical asymmetry” was present. Some loved the birds in mid motion, while some found the black-and-white in a scene that was typically portrayed very colourfully to be unsettling. Still, some found absolutely no meaning in the photograph at all. Having gotten the interpretations of close to twenty-some people, it occurred to me that similar themes kept reoccurring: that of nostalgia and simple joys of youth. These were things that resonated with people the most across the board and it is noteworthy that these elements were completely absent from my original intent. In that same token however, they’re also much more profound, and upon personal re-evaluation of the photograph, oddly, I found them to be much more fitting as well. What does this say about the actual proprietors of a photograph’s meaning?

The urban landscape is synonymous with multiple interpretations and dualities. The lights of a city street corner for example may represent warmth in an otherwise cold world, or indifferent man-made artificiality eclipsing the natural starry sky. The above photograph is of a dreary street corner on Toronto’s east end. It was taken on an evening testing out my newly handed-down flash-bulb and more specifically, it was the last photograph taken that night, when the battery of the bulb had already burnt out and all that was left to illuminate the otherwise all black canvas were the street lights. Truthfully it was an accident (though one I particularly like). Friends’ perceptions of the photograph range from it being the unfocused P.O.V. of a drunkard, to it raising a feeling of fear, unease, and/or nihilism. And once again, there were central themes throughout: coldness, isolation and loneliness. Like with the first picture, it is interesting that across many interpretations, several key feelings resonated even without the photographer’s cueing or hinting at them. It is as if my original intent (or admitted lack of it) could not stop the picture from becoming what it was ultimately meant to be. Perhaps there is something in the aesthetic formation of a good image that captures specific feelings that escape any presupposition and planning.

In the age of Instagram picture saturation, perhaps the photographer’s lack of purpose in taking a picture isn’t a problem. Perhaps the conclusive message of a photograph is something that can be completely detached from whatever the photographer’s intentions (or lack of intentions) happen to be. And as a habitat of mostly man-made structure in itself, the very city to me is Barthes’ idea actualized: edifices and objects that offer themselves to a multitude of perspectives and comprehensions. With every new picture I now take in it, I pause to consider whether I unknowingly pulled things unexpected from that floating ether of meaning, birthing the formation of ideas that I didn’t even know existed.

star gazing

The universe is a thoroughly stupefying place. Two nights ago, a friend and I took time off from our regularly scheduled nothingness in exchange for a more elevated form of nothingness. She and I escaped the urban sprawl, lied down amidst the shadowy blanket that surrounding brush provided, and looked up at the night sky. For the first time in almost a decade, sky-watchers that night were able to see all five naked-eye planets together. That is, the classical naked-eye planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - would be appearing together during a single night; a phenomenon that hadn't occurred since 2004. As Geza Gyuk, an astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago describes, "it's a bit like looking at an astronomy class in a nutshell."

It was both a humbling and elating experience. To think our ancient ancestors had looked up in wonder at the same sparkle laden quilt and since then have derived everything from stories of both grandeur and superstition, to Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference, to the models to explain the approach and reproach of the ocean's tides (yes, you CAN explain that), to the Galilean grand revelation of Heliocentrism - all from the acknowledgement of celestial bodies. And to think that with the same evolutionarily derived pair of eyes, homosapiens of yestercenturies saw the same sights, but thought very different, very untrue things. That perhaps the moon was some heavenly godly beacon, or perhaps, akin to the Greek's Selene, a godly entity in itself. That the darkness all around us that night was due to Ra's defeat by the atramentous Set. Perhaps they thought that our own lives up to and including that night were simply a soul's dream, a passing test by some indifferent 'greater-than-us,' and not, as much neuroscience now shows, a very real and beautiful corporeal reality, and one that we had both felt and shared in, not because of any calling or binding destinies, but just because we could.

Our ancestors, in their first clumsy attempts to describe the truth of nature, created stories to (erringly) explain away the mysteries. They were wonderful stories, but only that. And when others searched and found with greater precision more approximate truths, instead of accepting or rejecting them based on the merit of evidence, we xenophobically shut them up. And why wouldn't we have? It is something of great fear and apprehension to have your whole planet destroyed. Every time a new theory enters into the aggregate social mind and an old one is thrown out, the Earth is reinvented. And humanity, in its macroscopic infancy, reacted with all the harshness, confusion and trepidation that a child would when told Santa Claus didn't exist... and I shudder at the thought of what this scorned child has done with armies at its disposal. What a display of ego and ignorance is the presumption that "I know everything." What an ugly, yet necessary, stage of growth it was to believe in things without any substantiation.

In the 18th century, a period called the age of enlightenment occurred, one that accompanied the scientific revolution. It was characterized by the intellectual movement that advocated and encouraged reason rather than blind faith. Philosophers such as Nietzsche felt that the relatively new scientific method explained natural phenomena without supernatural intervention, thereby denying the need for a god. In one of his later works, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' the titular character in the fable proclaims almost psychotically, "God is dead, and it is we who have killed him." With the admittedly relieving but ultimately limiting psychological distortion of 'faith' poetically downed, a new resolve began to emerge - one that still fearlessly searched for answers but did so with an honest gait; with a love for truth. In the words of John Locke, "one mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." In this way, humanity had begun to shed its childlike phobia and ego, and instead had vulnerably accepted its ignorance. And though undoubtedly with some uneasiness and dissonance, had begun the long path to maturity and actualization of potential.

Still, embers of bronze-age barbarism and cowardice are left to be snuffed out. Today, just as the belief of Iraqi nuclear weapons prompted the United States to go to war, the belief in a god (perhaps fear of such a being) is the sole reason many people do many things (at best unnecessary and at worst fatal). Like current pop culture icons, the Christian god and his all time best seller have been the fuel for an entire multi-billion dollar industry (for centuries). The rich, poor, and the marginally insane all benefit by catering to the faithful legions. Hollywood churns out a ceaseless series of biblical “reenactments”. All of them are instant box office hits that fatten the already obese wallets of the wealthy. In the troubled corners of the world, millions of statuettes are fashioned from mud, then painted by feeble hands in the likeness of a virgin mother and her son. They are then sold off to rich tourists by many poor laborers of the third-world. Some people just sell grilled cheese Jesus sandwiches for $ 28,000 on eBay, to help other people feel like they are in touch with the eternal one. Not to mention the so-called "pro-life" activists bombing doctors' clinics, and countless deaths over essentially variations of the argument of who's deity is more peaceful.

When my friend and I looked up at the stars two nights ago, I saw them not as heavenly personages imbuing cosmic "luck" depending on the arbitrary day of my birth, but rather as the light remnants of gravity-held luminous, tremendous spheres of plasma, originally lightyears away, and thousands of years gone... probably. I posit that it is only in that great admission that "we do not know for sure" that relevant answers will be found, and I revel in our slowly emerging admitted collective ignorance.

As the night progressed and we watched on, I wondered what star gazers in a thousand years time would be thinking of as they watch those twinkling specks that, both poetically and technically, maybe existed only yesterday.