With the coming of the technological era, photography has been translated from analog to digital, enabling people to capture moments with ease. Due to its prominence, primarily nowadays to millennials who are fond of posting photos in social media, photography has been reduced to merely showing off or sharing experiences with people. Even during the early times some philosophers have already argued that photography’s ease of postproduction which is afforded by digitalization has already undermined its epistemic privilege with respect to other forms of arts such as painting.[1] Nevertheless, photography remains to be an art in itself, in virtue of the creative process the photographer and the subject of the photograph undergoes.
Contemporary photography acts like an open space which brings with it the freedom of thinking, particularly in enabling a person to perceive reality with the use of his memory and imagination. These two ways of perceiving reality (memory and imagination) are recurring in photography.[2] It sparks a kind of visual thinking wherein the person looking at a photograph is given the freedom on how to perceive reality based on how he sees the photograph. As a matter of fact, a photographic image has turned up to be a crucial factor of our visual memory, as it has the potential to save ruins and antiquities, to evaluate unknown territories, and to reveal identities. Particularly it has the capability of sending us to the idea of the survival of the past, and the immortalization of an event.[3]
However, photography must not only be reduced to its product which is the photograph itself, but other elements are also crucial in the understanding of its process. The elements of photography include the photograph or the product of the photographic process, the photographer who is in control of what happens to its product, the subject of the photograph, which includes its model or central object and the background, and the photographic equipment which is the medium that comes between the photographer and the spatiotemporal context or scene. In here we focus on the three elements of the photograph, the photographer, and the spatiotemporal context or subject of photography. In particular, we look at the relation of the photograph and the context or subject to time, and the photographer to agency, time work, and sacred time.
Contemporary photography acts like an open space which brings with it the freedom of thinking, particularly in enabling a person to perceive reality with the use of his memory and imagination.
Photography, or the process of taking photographs, captures and freezes time. Throughout history photography has played a large part in preserving and documenting events for the purpose of retelling stories for future generations. Photography, and its product, therefore captures and freezes time. As a certain moment in time is captured behind the camera lenses, that particular moment stays there forever and one can go back in time just by looking at that photograph. As the action encapsulates the present in a tangible form of a photo, it preserves that particular moment in the past, for the purpose of reminiscence in the future. In this way photography manipulates and encapsulates the three elements of time.
A photograph immortalizes a certain moment and in particular it puts the spatiotemporal context or subject of the photograph in the past into the present. As argued by Chira, “the photographic image has the power to miraculously transform the past and the present from the perspective of a future.”[4] For instance we take as example a photograph of a graduation ceremony. Although the ceremony has occurred in the past, it continues to be in the present as long as someone looks at that photograph and actively perceives this reality in his/her memory and imagination. Eventually, it also travels toward the future so long as the photograph continues to exist. In this way, that certain event in history achieves infinity; a particularly moment in the past which is well-preserved in time, that continues to occur in the present through the tangible photograph and the intangible memory for those who were involved and imagination for those who weren’t. However the event in itself will never by perfectly replicated even through memory. Certain elements in that event will forever be forgotten, while some will continue to remain.
While photography has the ability to transcend time, there remains a lot of limitations as to the extent of how much it is able to preserve given the elements present in that photograph and what remains in the memory of those people in the photograph and of those of the photographer.
A photograph immortalizes a certain moment and in particular it puts the spatiotemporal context or subject of the photograph in the past into the present.
Photography’s relation to time also extends to its relation to religion. Christianity encapsulates time in one moment as it believes that Christ has come down to earth, but will come again. This is expressed in Christianity’s memorial acclamation during the Eucharist and its belief in the trinity, which speaks of the same god which existed in the past, occurring in the present, and will be coming back again in the future. Buddhism also relates itself to time in its belief of the karma, wherein the actions of one in the present (and eventually the past) affects the future.
Meanwhile, photography also contains these three elements of time through the process of reminiscence. According to Chira, “recollection [in photography] is not the representation of something that existed, because the past of this particular “existed” is, in fact, the present. The past is not summed up by what would once have been present; it coexists with itself permanently as present.”[5] In here we see that reminiscing the past does not particularly bring us to the past, but instead the past now happens in the present. Through photography, certain events in the past continue to coexist in the present through the process of reminiscence; and in particular this process of remembering is made even more accurate as photographs show the exact spatiotemporal context of the past. It puts that context of the past forever still inside the boundaries of that photograph.
Moreover, Chira also states that photography embodies a privileged tool for the experience of temporality. In this sense temporality, as defined by Heidegger, is a process with three dimensions which form a unity.[6] Time should then be grasped in and of itself as the unity of the three dimensions (or “ecstases” as called by Heidegger) of the future, past, and present. Accordingly, photography therefore embodies temporality, just as the belief of the trinity in Christianity and of karma in Buddhism.
Can we therefore say that just like the concept of god, photography is also the opposite of time? Although photography and religions are completely in a different field of thinking, we can say that in one way or another, photography can act as the opposite of time in such a way that it encapsulates the past, the present, and the future in one entity – which in this case is a photograph.
Through photography, certain events in the past continue to coexist in the present through the process of reminiscence; and in particular this process of remembering is made even more accurate as photographs show the exact spatiotemporal context of the past.
Aside from embodying temporality, photography also embodies and exercises the photographer’s agency. Photography as a hobby is considered as sacred time because it is a creative process and it exercises one’s agency during the process of taking the photograph. Contrary to the old notion that the “ideal photograph cannot be representational art because it fails to represent its subject in the aesthetically relevant sense of completely expressing its maker’s thought about it”[7] as compared to other forms of art such as painting or sketching, Shusterman argues that even from the experience of “deeply felt and focused communicative expression structured through the mise-en-scene of the photographic process, the photographer already achieves a form of aesthetic experience. Moreover, photography requires a skill and talent of putting together relevant and harmonized elements within the boundaries of a photograph. However, this performative process does not necessitate a certain level of technicality, as anyone who is in possession of any photographic medium or camera can go away with taking pictures, which whether as a hobby or as a professional job, still has the capacity to encapsulate and manipulate time with the photograph. Particularly Scott Walden has emphasized that “the mentation of the photographer is very much involved in the formation of a photograph, at least insofar as he or she makes decisions about where to point the camera, when to trip the shutter, which lens to use, and so on”. [8]
In this way we see how photographers exert their agency in the process of having full control of what and what not to include in his photograph. Photography, as already pointed out, then acts as an open space which brings with it the freedom of thinking for the people looking at the photograph, and most especially for the photographer who performed the process.
As a creative process, photography also has the potential to express pleasantries and atrocities. In this way photography manipulates and encapsulates the three elements of time in its attempt of creative expression. This freedom of expression manifests a person’s agency through time work, which is the ability to manipulate time and go beyond the boundaries of neoliberalism. In photography, you can capture anything, and this product (photograph) potentially expresses a genuine representation of the present, without obscuring whatever neoliberalism might want to hide.
PH103*
References:
[1] Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, “Introduction: Photography Between Art History and Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry 38.4 (2012), 688.
[2] Adrian Vasile Chira. “The Ternary: Photographic Image – Temporality – Becoming,” REVART: Specialized Review Of Theory & Critique Of Arts 20 (2014). Humanities International Complete, 6.
[3] Chira, “The Ternary: Photographic Image – Temporality – Becoming,” 41.
[4] Chira, “The Ternary: Photographic Image – Temporality – Becoming,” 41.
[5] Chira, “The Ternary: Photographic Image – Temporality – Becoming,” 40.
[6] Simon Critchley, “Heidegger’s Being and Time: Temporality,”
[7] Costello, “Introduction: Photography Between Art History and Philosophy,” 683.
[8] Scott Walden, “Transparency And Photographic Contact,” Journal Of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 72.4 (2014): Academic Search Complete, 365.
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