Content provided in partnership with

Carnal Knowledge - artistic expression through photography

Art Journal, Spring, 2001 by Geoffrey Batchen

Let's begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

As everyone knows, photography has long been privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by it. Photographs are primarily designated as indexical signs, as images "really affected" by the objects to which they refer. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes speaks of the "stigmatum" of the "having-been-there" of the thing photographed, as if the photograph has been physically bruised by a subject whose image now offers a kind of braille for the eyes. The peculiarity of its production is, Barthes says, what enables the photograph to fetishistically guarantee something's erstwhile presence in space and time. But it also helps establish a special relationship between photography's subject and ourselves. "The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.... A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed th ing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed." [1]

So photography allows an imagined exchange of touches between subject, photograph, and viewer. However, photography's indexicality is not simply a matter of touch. For what makes photography compelling as a sign system is the motivation of its images as much as their causation. As C. S. Peirce himself makes clear in his discussion of indexical representation, "psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity." [2] And it is surely this invisible, hard-to-define psychological dimension that so preoccupied Barthes in Camera Lucida (and Walter Benjamin, too, in his description of aura as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be" [3]). To repeat: photography has never provided us with the truthful appearance of things, but it has guaranteed, through the magic of contiguity, the possibility of a direct emotional empathy across an otherwise insurmountable abyss of space and time. Contiguity, the condition of being in contact, is what can give any sign in the presen t a direct association with another sign in the past, and it is precisely this temporal and historical connection that provides photography with its uniquely "carnal" knowledge of the world.

Many contemporary artists are now stressing contiguity in their work. In Shared Fate (1998), for example, British artist Cornelia Parker borrowed the actual guillotine used to behead Marie Antoinette in 1793 and sheared its blade through a number of common household items--bread, newspapers, playing cards, a necktie, shoelaces. As her title suggests, these otherwise ordinary objects now share a fate with one of the great historical figures of the French Revolution, cut as much by the weight of that knowledge as by a metal blade. For this reason, the titles are important to all of Parker's work. "I think in a way the label, the title, liberates me quite a lot. It allows the material to be transformed beyond recognition, without having to give up its history." [4] Parker's art is about the conjuring of these sorts of troubling transformations, about bringing us into contact with an historical presence we are asked to feel rather than simply see. To paraphrase Barthes on photography, she also shows that contigu ity is something I add to the work and which is nonetheless already there.

Australian artist Anne Ferran engineers a similar conjuring with her 1998 photographic contact prints of nineteenth-century garments from Sydney's historic Rouse Hill estate. Clothing is a physical memory, an imprint, a second skin to the body that once wore it. So these photograms are traces of the body twice over, imprints of imprints. Hovering in a surrounding darkness, the garment-images softly radiate an inner light, the residual filaments for a century of absorbed sunshine. Raising the dead via the magical medium of photography, Ferran transforms history into a seance, into a direct communion of past and present. When I try to reflect on these images the two things I keep coming up with are these: on one hand the obdurate barrier, like a high wall or a range of distant mountains, of short memory/thin skin; and on the other the longing to close the gap, recover the past, cross touch with sight, or lose them in one another, to press up close to things, cloth against paper, skin against skin." [5]

If we were to treat the work of our artists as a kind of collective cultural unconscious, then we might see in these manoeuvres some palpable anxiety about contiguity's future. And indeed, it is precisely a capacity for visual continguity that is now under threat as the photographic image is irresistably transformed into a continuous flow of electronic data. Where photography is inscribed by the things it represents, it is possible for digital images to have no origin other than their own computer program. These images may still be indices of a sort, but their referents are not the objects they picture but rather electronic flows, differential circuits, and abstracted data banks of information (information that includes, in most cases, the look, if not the epistemological substance, of the photograph). Where a photograph compels by way of "the condition of being in contact," by promising a dynamic temporal depth beneath its calm, static surface, digital images fascinate by overtly abandoning any such claim; as images they are content to be nothing but surface. Psychologically speaking, the digital has no haptic purchase on history and declines to proffer the substitution-anxiety of the fetish. This is why digital images remain untroubled by the future anterior, the complex play of "this has been" and "this will be" that so animates the photograph. Digital images are in time, but not of time.

Carnal Knowledge - artistic expression through photography

Art Journal, Spring, 2001 by Geoffrey Batchen

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts