After we received a lengthy training in the procedure of rowing (this is
not a leisurely activity: one must row actively for the entire trip), we
were launched into the rapids. The raft occupants -- about 8 of us --
began paddling furiously. We rounded a corner and were presented with
the most spectacular view; at this point, the photo-woman, her mouth
agape, suddenly dropped her oar and lunged for the cooler. Wresting the
camera from the baggie, she stood up in the whirling raft, positioned
the viewfinder in front of her eye, and was promptly knocked into the
water.
The coupling of viewfinder and eye was to be achieved at the expense of
all "natural" conditions - and technology has the effect of washing-away
one's immediate surroundings, leaving one, in fact, deceived - and the
denial of this coupling is nothing short of taking away a natural right,
the right to bear camera. How convinced would we be of the virtual
condition if we accessed it on a roadway in front of a speeding truck?
Reality smacks. There is an impact here which goes against the
"seamless merging" of the real/virtual so celebrated by the marketplace
and the technophile. It's the nightmare of mobile computing; one is
nowhere, really, outside the site of collision, which shouts "HERE!"
The photo-woman was promptly retrieved from the water. The camera, on
the other hand, had met its match: it bobbed for a few moments and then
was sucked under by the powerful current (the agent that ultimately
"took" the picture). The woman was devastated -- now she only had an
image. Firmly installed back in her seat, emulsion side up but only
semi-coherent, she gazed longingly along the surface of the water,
looking for a floating glint of reflective metal, hoping it would catch
her eye.
Another raft occupant had the foresight to bring a New Waterproof
Camera, which he now brandished gleefully, snapping up some of the best
views. Each time he would aim and snap, the photo-woman would squeal
with pleasure. Her eye became focused on him; she was concerned that he
get the best shots possible. She began directing him. There! Take
this one! There! That! She pointed, flailed her arms about
(thankfully, she had been stripped of her oar, when it became apparent
that she would do more harm than good with it) and gestured frantically
in order to communicate place, time, and framing. She wanted her vision
to be aligned with the camera through this man, so that an appropriate
picture would be produced. No matter that she wouldn't have the picture
in her possession, or even see it at all (she did not even know this
man!). The important thing was that the *picture be taken,* that it
*exists*, somewhere, somehow. Because otherwise, all is "lost": all
you have is an image of a picture that could have been.
The photo-woman, of course, became increasingly frustrated, because this
man was not getting the right shots. And after his initial burst of
enthusiastic shooting, he had now put the camera aside in favor of
first-hand experience (as such). The woman was completely incapable of
this kind of direct interface. (I am not exaggerating at all, by the
way; this is all true.) She became completely distraught. She became
obsessed with the camera that now lay beside the man's feet. Her
commands unheeded, she now cast a possessing gaze upon it. Her look was
split between the actual views around her and the view of the
camera-conduit. I remember trying to distinguish those looks (the look
of desire, of need, of possession) and their objects (in terms of a
reality-fetish spectrum; which was which?) as we were catapulted down
the river in this floating vehicle.
We rounded a corner and were afforded an astounding view. The man,
overcome with the exhilarating activity of the rapids and the excited
rush of spray and spirit, had no interest whatsoever now in taking
pictures. The camera remained parked at his feet. The woman, realizing
with panic that the best view would now remain uncaptured and therefore
unrealized, was unable to contain herself any longer: she lunged across
the raft like a football player, snatched up the camera, and took the
picture.
I wanted to relay this story in order to discuss the difference between
pictures and images. It seems that the image is that which binds: it
is a formation that can't be reduced to a snapshot. The picture,
however, can: it is a "capturing." The above story is an image until
one MTVs it. I'm thinking now of Serge Daney's distinction. The
picture - which for him is "the visual" - is full of itself, fat,
colonized through and through. There is nothing left. (And the music
video is a good example.) The image, on the other hand, always holds
out, always eludes capture.
The tourist snapshot and the postcard are both pictures, seeking to
"capture" the conditions of travel and to mark a presence T/HERE.
Showing the picture to others, or sending it in the mail, one points to
the picture, indicating that that is ME, THERE (as HERE). It is similar
to the pointing-actions of the photo-woman above, who so desperately
wanted this placing/insertion. Both the snapshot and the postcard are
presence-markers of a travel-trajectory. They each have different
conditions of production; as Brian notes, the snapshot is a personal
representation of a vision; it miniaturizes a panorama and makes it
transportable, reproducible, for someone else -- a family back home --
to see. The postcard is purchasable as already complete, taken by
someone else to represent a place for large numbers of people. The same
"vision" is sent home by many. But they're both ways of inserting
oneself into a readymade backdrop: tourist snapshots are usually
comprised of friends and family members standing "over there" against a
scenic background (how many times have you been told by a camera-wielder
to "go stand over there"? and you do, like a prop), and postcards are
ways of inserting oneself into a scenic background by scribbling "I was
here" on the back. On the former, one pastes in one's body (as in
Photoshop); on the latter, one writes, in effect, ME - -> HERE. You may
have to do a little bit more work on the postcard, looking at both sides
at once, and in that sense it would be more imagistic, because you
project the place where picture and presence-inscription meet, and that
can be slippery. Is that the place where the camera-woman above tried
to insert herself before she slid out of the raft?
But it's not an image really, in its fullest sense. Travel pictures are
often filled with the most banal cliches, no matter how they are
generated and distributed. The snapshots that people take mimic
postcards; they are colonized by the views of that reproducible vision.
Postcards and media images reproduce and circulate (and to some extent
enforce) the conditions of viewership, circumscribing the conditions of
"viewing." They *train* the eye. The snapshot is obedient, while it
opens/marks, in de Certeau's sense, a tactical space (and in this sense
it's two-sided, like the postcard, leaving a space between larger force
and local practice). These pictures are the "commodified counterparts"
that one drives - and is driven - to achieve.
They're part of a loop, a circuit (Daney calls it "the visual"). Is it
the visual that is reproducible, or the postcard? Maybe it's the visual
that's commodifiable, the picture its stand-in or marker.
Perhaps, then, it is the image that "holds together" the fragmentations,
generating a crossformat coherency. It is a site of struggle, where
determining force meets local practice. The image shuttles its agents
about; the picture - linked to the visual, linked to visual technology -
puts them "in place." The first is mobility (conversion), the second,
tourism (location). The first binds, but its elements always elude its
grasp; the second says I=HERE. The question is, how do these "face" the
market?
As Brian says, commodity representations "serve not to bind together the
urban but to fragment it across a vast network of urbanisms." Do they
also bind in terms of their function as impulses -- objects that one
endeavors to achieve (possess, interpolate oneself into)? They create
desire to get THERE, and that binds together in/habitants in
transport-formations, in an urban realm whose very condition is that of
vehicularity.
I don't know how all of this fits together. Right now there is just the
image: the photo-woman, in the raft, propelled down the river, seeing
through the conduit of other agents, giving hand and arm indications of
framing, orientation, position (insertion), and direction that resemble
those of an air-traffic controller or traffic cop, in anticipation of
the markers, the pictures. No matter that they exist only virtually, or
that she wouldn't possess them.
>So where would these take us? To imply that the image can be studied >through the language of class politics, cultural diversity, and corporate >control may sound tempting, but in the end it seems to suggest that the >urban is no greater than the image. And to suggest that the urban can be >analyzed with a language of the image is to directly make this reduction. >I do think that the 'hybrid coherencies' represent an interesting aspect of >this development, but it is important to assert the fundamental >differences between the mechanisms of the image and those of urban. >The urban of course offers its inhabitants the politics and operations of >physical space; the image, those of a controlled two-dimensional >spatialness.
Very well said. But which realm is more "political"? and regardless of
how we would agree to situate "the image", would it necessarily be
two-dimensional? Could it even be more "spatial" than the physical?
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