The photographic image
I’m currently caught in a fascination with the photographic image.
For Georges Didi-Huberman the image offers an amalgam – the visible conflated with the illusive; a site of confusion, revelation, and thought in action. It has a richness of content words cannot, offering neither pure illusion, nor the entire truth; a tantalising glimpse into the real.
Images lie, but not all the time and not about everything.
They demand a gaze that is exhaustively critical to explore their potential. Records of the past don’t give fixed meaning but offer an interpretation under perpetual re-construction. The researcher weaves what they learn into things they already know to construct, if possible, a rethought history. So knowledge develops as it is cross-checked and montaged with other archives.
For Didi-Huberman isolated words and images have little impact but, force them together in montage and, at the point where they jostle and collide, new words and images erupt – involuntary thoughts made manifest. These outbursts have sufficient power to tear images apart, driving them from the illustrative towards thought, reflection, imagination and creation. This renders them readable; anything we contemplate remains indecipherable and insignificant until I establish an imaginative and speculative relationship between what I see and what I know. Within this experience, the image is an occasion for a performance; our quasi-observation of the events it depicts allows us to shift from an act of seeing into one of interpretation. I may choose to take possession of the image, transforming it; from ‘…the partially remembered time of the visible into a reminiscent construction, a visual form of haunting, a musicality of knowledge.’ (1)
Didi-Huberman perhaps doesn’t tell me anything, subconsciously, I didn’t already know, but I recognise some reflection of the way my mind works when sifting and organising the vast amounts of data and images it encounters. Montage excites because it cuts clean across spatial and temporal continuums and creates new associations; it empties meaning from familiar situations only to explode into strange new alliances allowing, as Didi-Huberman expresses it, the image to touch ‘…a real that reality itself kept veiled from us.’ (2)
At the end of the day, every image we see forces us to make choices – whether to ignore or absorb it and perhaps make it part of our personal knowledge, or whether to accept it as a ready-made solution or to force it ask questions and, potentially, trigger us to act.
(1) Didi-Huberman, 2008, p.138
(2) IBID, p.176
Bibliography
Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2008). Images in spite of all. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Shane B. Lillis.
