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Extract from Images Ever to Be(at) Text? The book as post-photographic and post-digital medium, 2019
In L’ombra della scrittura (The Shadow of Writing), Ferdinando Amigoni talks about the incursions of photography into the pages written by some literary authors of the twentieth century. Amigoni analyses different writers, fascinated by photography to the point of using it, as a metaphor, to comment on or enrich moments of their novels. Focusing on the work Invito a una decapitazione di Nabokov (Invitation to a beheading of Nabokov), he highlights how the Russian writer, more than his other colleagues, had, already from the choice of some titles for his works, an idea of the act of writing very similar to that of painting or taking a photograph.(1) And in fact the Russian writer speaks of his novels as imaginary paintings that he sees and that he only later makes concrete on paper, moving in the space of the book without a precise order and occasionally leaving empty spaces, which memory fails to fill, just as the experience of reality takes place through the eyes and memory. Amigoni also points out how Nabokov, fluent in three different languages, also claimed not to think in any specific language but to think in images. It would therefore seem possible to hypothesize that images, as well as icons or signs, are able to transmit information in the same way as words and articulated texts. However, the doubt remains as the context of a “linguistic turn in favor of the visual”,(2) those empty spaces of memory, of which Nabokov speaks, can instead become spaces of misunderstanding and uncertainty, problematic for a univocal understanding.
Regarding images and their actual clarity, Vilém Flusser in Into the Universe of Technical Images, writes that technical images are imagined surfaces, adding that, “all technical images have the same basic characteristic: to an in-depth analysis they are surfaces imagined as a result of the computation of particles, be them chemical or technological”.(3) Flusser argues that the images produced by man are different from objects, which they also represent because they do not have a physical essence of their own and that indeed they are not actually of the images but “symptoms of chemical or electronical process”. He still writes that “technical images are only images at all if they are seen superficially. To be images, they require that the viewer keep his distance”, (4) then proceeding with a rather tight critique of what he actually means when he speaks of image production, and comparing the act of photographing with that of writing. For Flusser, whoever creates images is in reality only the last piece of an automated process made possible by the machine, a superficial and without depth gesture, very different according to the philosopher, from the act of writing:
The inquiry into visualization, therefore, needs to be transferred from the gesture of the one who presses the buttons to the consciousness of the envisioner, as I tried to do with regard to writing with a typewriter. And there we found that the gesture of pressing buttons is the same in both cases but that envisioning requires a different consciousness. For this is about opaque apparatuses, not transparent machines. Envisioners do not stand over apparatuses the way a writer stands over a typewriter; they stand right in among them, with them, surrounded by them. They are bound much more tightly to the apparatus than a writer to the machine. Envisioning is far more functional than writing texts. It is a programmed procedure. When I write, I write past the machine toward the text. When I envision technical images, I build from the inside of the apparatus.
This condition depends on two factors. First, envisioners press buttons that set events into motion that they cannot grasp, understand or conceive. Second, the images they visualize are produced not by them but by the apparatus, and, in fact, automatically. In contrast to writers, envisioners have no need for deep insight into what they are doing. By means of the apparatus, they are freed from the pressure for depth and may devote their full attention to constructing images. A writer must concern himself with the structure of a text: for letters; for the rules governing the order in which the letters must appear (orthography, grammar, logic); and for the phonetic, rhythmic, and musical aspects of the text. A large part of his creative, informative achievement consists of his handling of these structures. With the envisioner, it is completely different: he controls an automatic apparatus that brackets all of that out for him so that he is able to concentrate completely on the surface to be envisioned. His criteria as he pushes buttons are therefore superficial in two senses of the word: they have no connection to the more profound craft of constructing an image, and they have no concern with anything beyond the surface to be produced. […]
We are about to reach a level of consciousness in which the search for deep coherence, explanation, enumeration, narration, and calculation, in short, and historical, scientific, and textually linear thinking is being surpassed by a new, visionary, superficial mode of thinking. (5)
Flusser’s thought is quite clear and leaves little room for, so to speak, optimistic interpretations, although the approximate comparison between the production of images and writing risks being almost physiologically, and therefore unfairly and unfavorable for the former. To corroborate the pictorial idea of Nabokov’s writing we could in fact quote John Berger, who analyzing the image as a document in Ways of Seeing writes that:
No other kind of relic form or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect, images are more precise and richer than literature.(6)
The comparison between image and text is therefore strongly bound to the point of view from which they are analyzed. However, it is useful to stress further here the way in which Flusser talks about the creation of images, and their use, that is, as an operation devoid of complexity and depth, in a superficial word. Consequently, even the images produced in this way are superficial, or better: “technical images are only images at all if they are seen superficially. To be images, they require that the viewer keep his distance. ”(7) The images we use and those we produce exist only if you look superficially. If today’s language, therefore, needs neither the voice nor the writing it undoubtedly needs the eyes. For an audience addicted to digital communication, which in order to survive requires more speed than depth, and despite their visual complexity, compressed images have become a new, unpredictable and unreliable alphabet. “Reading by images” is not in fact a simple and controllable process. We have superficial images and at the same time visually complex and difficult to translate, we would say ambiguous. There is a rather concrete risk, given the difficulty of deciphering the message and the superficiality involved, of not being able to fully manage even the images we create ourselves. As we saw in the first chapter, the fundamental quality of compressed images is their immediacy. Who suffers the consequences is precisely the man/user, who is unable to interpret this constant flow because there is no possibility of stopping it and therefore of perceiving its existence in the present, much less in the past. In a condition where man is unable to frame himself in a wider historical system, the already shaky alphabet of images as messages risks becoming completely useless for man, if not for ethically questionable purposes, therefore harmful.
The current interaction between images and human beings will lead to a loss of historical consciousness in those who receive the images and, as a result, also to a loss of any historical action that could result from the reception of the image. (8)
If images act as signs, we should admit that each image is a single sign, understood by Barthes, who takes up Saussure, as the union of meaning and signifier. (9) But images, unlike the word, are much more open to interpretation. different and divergent, and therefore itself possibly erroneous, precisely because their meaning is not clearly decipherable, except in the case in which the person viewing the images is not the same person who translates them, as we have seen with Nabokov. And even in the latter extreme case, the word is still essential in order to access the meaning of the images, in this case mental. It is actually almost impossible to attribute a unique meaning to an image only through its signifier, and Barthes himself is rather skeptical about the possibility of arriving at a “language” of images that is global and recognized because it is a complex system difficult to consider autonomously from the Language, semiologically understood as the language minus the word. (10)
All this clearly does not exclude that images are able to communicate: Fontcuberta himself speaks of post-photography as a new universal language with a now predominant role given to the massification of images. According to the Spanish photographer, in a society where images are omnipresent, therefore no longer luxury objects but signs, it is necessary to endow single images with meaning, also by virtue of their (im)probable victory over words. If by forcing Barthes’s theory we wanted at all costs to attribute to an image the same role that is attributed to the word, we could say that from all the images it is possible to give life to a new language, precisely in Barthesian terms. However, it would be a language in which the signifier is so complex that it cannot make the meaning univocal, and therefore, as already mentioned above, all in all, it would be a language that, despite its wide diffusion, would remain useless for the purpose of communicating without the risk of misunderstanding.
On the other hand, incidentally, no language is in essence free from misunderstandings. The same Arabic-Indian mathematical notation, the greatest example of a language that aims at the total absence of ambiguity, is not based only on the uniqueness of meaning of the signs, but also and above all on their position. This aspect suggests that, in the construction of a language, the relationship between a sign and what it means can be enriched with apparently further elements in a decisive way, elements that can be linked to actual use: the fact that the positional notation functions horizontally is related to the way in which it is commonly spelled in the West: theoretically it could also have been used vertically. For this reason, returning to compressed images, it might be worth investigating how we use them.
I would like therefore to return to the question that I asked myself in the motivations of this text regarding the photographic book, about why today's visual artists and photographers, but also curators and writers, choose to use the photographic book as a medium. Its structure, based on what for centuries has organized verbal language in a coherent and visual form, (11) helps us in the development of complex thinking; at the same time, it is a by-product of the post-digital and photographic condition, which is part of a wider panorama, in which the problem of simplifying the message resulting from the use of images as a language cannot be underestimated. In a certain sense, the photobook is, therefore, a meeting point between these perspectives, without being completely reducible to just one of them and indeed, it is precisely in this apparent contradiction between the fragmented superficial instantaneity of the compressed images and the articulated concrete stability of the book-form that forms its horizon of meaning. The omnipresence of compressed images makes the photobook a familiar medium for very different types of users: in this way, a potentially negative factor for the survival of the book and printed photography ends up contributing decisively to a renewed interest in this. which is real and tangible, but also antique and vintage. In a society that increasingly tends towards the complete evanescence of things, the need for the individual is to return to making use of tangible objects, which do not neglect the tactile dimension.
This attitude, which in the arts takes the name of digital post, should not be understood as the rejection of everything new or digital per se, but as the need to understand, criticize and re-propose what the digital meta medium, (12) the computer, is able to reproduce. The computer is able to incorporate both old and new media: the post-digital assumption is to look at what is produced in a critical way. The term, which in art indicates an analytical approach to the aesthetics of things, once again brings us back to the purely visual dimension. This time, however, the reasons are different because it is digital, with its natural immateriality, that incorporates every pre-digital medium, proposing an intangible version but only readable by the eye. Not having the ability to really be any media, but only to simulate it, digital is understood as sterile. Hence the need for the digital post with the dynamics connected to the concrete dimension. The analysis of dematerialization calls into question a further aspect that characterizes the photobook, namely the importance of the support in its definition. The photobook is actually an excellent example of how form and content are neither independent nor divisible elements, under penalty of the loss of what it essentially is. It follows, among other things, that in order to understand its developments and possibilities, the photographic book should be considered as belonging to a disciplinary context undoubtedly deriving from photography, where it is instead inserted for convenience, but still endowed with its own autonomy. The images, as well as the words, are in fact potentially able to convey any content.
If the book cannot be reduced simply to its sheer textual content, but it is necessary to keep in mind how this content is made concrete, in the same way, we should not consider the photographic book only from the point of view of images. Clearly, as mentioned in the third chapter, word and image are not completely superimposable. The first has in fact the ability to abstract from the object sphere and to reach a degree of detail unthinkable for the second; the latter, however, is able to communicate what is inexpressible, due to its natural superficiality as Flusser claims or due to its inevitable ambiguity. This dichotomy shows once again how the photographic book is actually an expressive medium that does not end in its constituent components.
1. Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov, Invito a una decapitazione (Milano: Adelphi, 2010).
2. Ferdinando Amigoni, L’ombra della scrittura: racconti fotografici e visionari (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), p. 73.
3. Flusser, op. cit., p. 33 (translated by the author). Flusser talks about technical images without distinguishing between images produced and displayed analogically or through a screen.
4. Ivi, pp. 34-35.
5. Ivi, pp. 37-38.
6. John Berger, a c. di, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London: British Broadcasting Corporation & Penguin Books, 1972).
7. Flusser, op. cit., p. 35.
8. Ivi, p. 60.
9. Roland Barthes, Elementi di semiologia, a c. di Gianfranco Marrone (Torino: Einaudi, 2002).
10. Ivi, p. 17.
11. Let us just think of the fact that the sacred text of the most widespread religion in the world is literally called "books".
12. Domenico Quaranta (op. cit., p. 48) talks about digital meta medium translating what the engineer Alan Kay wrote in 1977 about the ease of the computer to simulate any other media through electronic computing.