Death

A feeling closely related to the one about snapshots and the poignancy of past lives—so closely related that I think it is really just a different attitude toward the same thing—is the Barthesian cliché about photography and death. A photograph of someone is incontrovertible evidence that they lived. But, since the photograph is also a technical trick, seeming to arrest what we know can never be arrested, we think immediately of the incontrovertible fact that they died. (Or will die, supposing they are still alive.) The formulation is not general enough: Barthes’ idea would also apply to sound recording or handprints on cave walls or any other way people have of memorializing themselves that we would say is some sort of physical registration of reality; to use the jargon word, it would apply to all “indexical” traces of human bodies, as against painting, verbal description, etc. At the same time Barthes wants to make it overgeneral: he goes on to say that any photograph (even one that doesn’t show a person) makes him think of death because—I am connecting a few dots—any photograph shows something that’s gone, even if just a moment, which in turn makes him aware of the passage of time. But the effect seems much weaker if the subject is not a person. The death of a moment or a thing, even an animal, just isn’t as deadly as the death of a person. So if the proposition is that photography is sort of macabre, it works best for photographs of people. I buy it—once you see it you can’t make it go away. There is a subtle morbidness to a photograph considered as a record of a human existence. A photo of someone is like an embalmed body: we’re not fooled, and in fact the unnatural preservation only emphasizes the death underneath. And snapshots in particular? A friend said, after glancing through some of my photos for a few seconds, “Oh! These people are all dead.” A snapshot of someone is even more morbid than a professional photograph, because it is closer to the ground: we see in it incontrovertible evidence not only that someone lived, but of someone’s life actually in the process of being lived at some vanished moment. And the artlessness of snapshots makes us feel at some level that their evidence is better still. Snapshots are laden with death in another way. Snapshots probably arrive on the market and land in our collections because someone died. In most cases I think it’s likely that everyone died. Family photos are precious, and it would take some catastrophe or general extinction to scatter them. I’ve mentioned those people who hate what we do—who are outraged by some moral trespass buried in the enterprise. I believe the feeling is: by buying and selling what might almost be considered pieces of the snapshooters and their loved ones, we are messing with their whole lives. We are doing something ghoulish, practically like dealing in people’s teeth. I have no wish to say it isn’t so, though again the idea leaves no room for aesthetic discrimination and thus neglects much of what drives us. (Needless to say, that point would hardly cut any ice with one of those people who hate what we do.) Is this image a photograph? It is an image of an image, a chemical burn-in created by the decades-long contact of a snapshot with the back of a cabinet card. You might argue that any non-digital photo is a species of chemical burn-in, formed from another image—the negative. And every jpg in this blog is an image of an image, if not an image of an image of an image. All that is true, but this somber chemical shadow is undeniably an extra step away from the original event. Whatever it is, it seems a bit more deathly even than other snapshots. Why is that? It would be a different matter if I also had the original photo that cast the shadow. As it is, this ghost of an image is all that remains to tell us that these people ever were. Just how near a thing it was is reinforced visually, by the fragility of the image: we realize automatically that we almost didn’t know about two lives and deaths. And: its fortuitousness, vagueness, and anonymity all warn us about what else we don’t know, all tell us plainly that armies of people lived and died without our being aware of even this much about them.

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