The Fascinating Image

Extract

By its very structure, the objective image tends to establish a new rapport between man and the world. One can hardly, if at all, speak of “image” in connection with photography. Originally the word signified: imitation, copy. The image which imitates the world remains distinct from it. In a drawing, faithful though it might be, there is always a distance, an interval between the object represented and its plastic transcription. This distance disappears entirely in photography. There, the image coincides so much with the given data that it is somehow destroyed as an image. It is this very data, magically repeated, covering the surface of the paper or of the screen with its presence, its double, so to speak. The photographic image is no longer a copy, but a statement of the world itself expressed in it, a simple opening into the world.

In the plastic image, either painting or drawing, the world was denied. I mean denied not in its forms or colors, but in its very essence, denied insofar as it was the world. It was a world trans-posed, trans-figured, abstracted from that exteriority in which it is displayed as the world. A world in which man made his mark by interpreting it in plastic terms. Van Gogh's Orchard is a picture before being the representation of an orchard. Man can gaze upon it as on a beautiful creation in itself, added to the world, and if subsequently he is referred to a real orchard, the spectator will discover it with Van Gogh's eyes, through the transfigurating vision of the painter. The image traced by man's hand acts as a transmutation: it appropriates the substance of the world in order to integrate it into the human domain. In a second phase, it shapes the world to our visual taste. The revolution accomplished by photography, on the contrary, depends on what the world henceforth predicates—in its autonomy and difference—in the very image which man forms of it. Where once there was an exercise of power, now there is nothing but submission. Photography is the total effacement before the real with which it coincides. It is the world as it is, in its immediate verity which it reproduces on paper or on the screen. It confers upon it, as it were, a second presence, effacing itself insofar as it is an image in order to be no more than a field open to this presence, repeated each time. To the denied world of plastic representation, there consequently succeeds the world affirmed as pure in itself, established in its difference before the observer. The objective image makes possible the paradox that the world unveils itself as it is in itself, pro-nounces itself, if I may say so, prior to all human language. Up to then, it was manifested as a world only via the mediation of the observer. It was the “given” matter of an observation: that of the man who simply was orienting himself or contemplating, or the creative gaze of the artist. In the photographic image, the world somehow precedes this observation: it determines its content, imposing a vision. The traditional schema is reversed: from pure matter to a discourse, the world becomes itself a language and “accosts” man in this language. The relationship between man and the world, summed up in classic vision, becomes, via the interpretation of the twin-image, a sort of relationship of the world to man.