Behind much of the amateur camerawork and stills being put out there on a number of platforms such as Flickr, DeviantArt, Facebook, and trust that the amount of transference from computer to computer alone is voluminous, is sentiment. Photography is, after all, a form of ownership.
letters snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way... Logically, these boards should replace museums. (Berger 1972)
And ownership is merely a step. Curation has become commonplace, and as John Berger suggests, each board in each room can be its very own museum. The individual, with all the developments in lenses, compact lighting, digital capture and interfaces of the camera, has taken hold of the reigns of the formation of his or her own visual landscape. This landscape, this language of images varies from person to person because it has been sifted through, and with photography, sometimes even filtered or fixed. The power of choice has created taste-makers out of willing and capable individual. And these choices are driven by what this new creator-curator deems to be of worth, things that are so charged with emotion, with nostalgia, with links to one’s personal history that it deserves being owned, being kept after all the time that has passed. The question now though is if these images turned artifacts translate to even just a semblance of nostalgia or sympathy with the originator when shared to other people, as is done so wildly on the Internet.
Here is a collection of eight candid portraits from a set of more than twenty, ones that I took over a span of an entire year. These are members of my different social circles, not necessarily the ones I am closest to, have particular affection for, or despise but friends nonetheless.
In each of these pictures, there exists an occurrence between two people. A solemn conversation may have taken place; a joke was handed and maybe a laugh was given in return. This moment may not be splendid or even an inch out of the ordinary but, for some reason, it was worth the snapshot. The importance sits beneath the plainness of the scene. But is this importance given at that exact point in time communicated to viewer now?
First and foremost, the physical manifestation of these images must be scrutinized. The photos came from a FUJIFILM Instax S7, an instant camera that harkens back to the time of the Polaroid. The shutter briefly allows just enough light to hit the film loaded in the camera. This begins a series of chemical reactions on different layers that are each sensitive to a certain color. (Harris) The output is a physical copy of the picture, all done in a matter of minutes. And yet here they are, scanned and uploaded, arranged to fit the text and the project. If I post these stills online, it may be projected on a massive number of screens. They may even be downloaded and ownership will be split among every single person that does so. Berger highlights that given new technologies allowing for larger availability of images, especially those of paintings, the meaning is detached from these paintings as meaning becomes transmutable. (Berger 1972) Because these images can be transmitted to a number of people, whether legally or illegally, they become subjected to the phenomenology and creative will of these individuals. These portraits may no longer depict the essence of a situation but are framed for whatever purpose of the individual: cut-and-paste art project, voyeuristic satisfaction, strange collection, or some other. The duplicability immediately distorts the meaning of these photographs.
In the case of my own pictures, I myself, the photographer, as viewer, perceive these photographs as from before. Their original context of human contact is replaced by everything else that explains it. Of course, with Berger’s own analysis, the image comes before the knowledge, before all other explanation. (Berger 1972) But the portraits themselves frame only the face. Sentiment here comes firstly from recognition of the person and not the depicted situation. And given that few will be able to recognize the faces in these portraits, and that the situation within the picture hardly elaborates the event, meaning is distanced once more, doubly removed. Taking all of these into consideration, including its reproduction and divided sense of ownership, a photograph from its conception has its meaning partially or fully stripped away. Hardly anyone will understand the friendship embedded in these pictures. People may suppose it and even see it, but to comprehend what that friendship meant then and there would be doubtful. True, this case may not hold for pictures that were taken without any desire of personal affect. Professionalizing the industry will have its own connotations, one that may even have a keener sense of meaninglessness. But for the amateur it holds: with photography, meaning changes and realities are born. But is that necessarily a terrible thing to behold?
(Rupert IV A. Bustamante)
Sources: Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing. London, Great Britain: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972. p. 7-32. Harris, Tom. “How Instant Film Works”. Science -- Innovation. How Stuff Works. 06 Dec 2012. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everydayinnovations/instant-film.htm> Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects”. On Photography. Electronic edition. New York, United States of America: RosettaBooks, 1973. p. 39-64.