FNA Presence Documents

[continued] When will the photographic window open to the landscape of truth?[i] It is in a moment of danger that the indexicality of the photograph goes beyond form, the image becomes an index of death. It is this shadow of death, looming over the event, that binds the image maker and the subject in the instance that the camera shutter clicks. Every portrait, or rather, every image produced under such conditions, needs to be also an image of the self, a self-portrait. It is only when the photographer and the subject share the same position within (and not vis à vis) the event that the distance between spectatorship and participation would elapse and the picture taken will be also the picture of the photographer him/herself. The photographer is commonly known to bear witness to the event, but this act of witnessing carries with itself the now-forgotten meaning of the word witness: martyr. In Waiting for Tear Gas, referring to similar concerns Allen Sekula writes “The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-photojournalism: no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence. ” The photographer becomes a part of the crowd, moves with the crowd and shares their position. The image and the event become parts of a single entity, not one the documentation of the other. The photograph becomes the event.

The moment of danger, seized in the photographic frame, also severs the ties between the photograph and the history of photography. As such the image does not signify a canonic progression of a formal dialectic, it will be a primal image, stripped from ontology, an image (as Benjamin puts it) “identical with the historical object.” In the period between the invention of photography and the introduction of snapshot, photography appropriated painterly aesthetics and established its position regarding the history of art. It is within these aesthetic conditions that the notion of a defining image [of an event] was produced. This defining image lends itself to the established aesthetic categories and systems of evaluation that preside over art history.

It is only through a rupture between the photograph and its history that the historical moment could be seized and preserved in one unique image. This image, unburdened by the history of its medium becomes free from the chain of signification, the image ceases to be a text, and without the mediation of meaning, the subject and object will coincide in a “dialectical image.” Here, the photograph (technical image) becomes an image, as in the image before the era of art, an image emptied of words.