[PHOTO] "Why photography matters"

[rfmcdonald]

Open Democracy's Parvati Nair writes, in the context of online documentary photography of immigrant women in Barcelona, about the importance of photography in our late modern early 21st century. Nice essay, nice project.

In a world where the selfie has become ubiquitous and where images constantly drift past our line of vision, it seems reasonable to wonder if photographs matter. Thanks to the advent of the smartphone, we can all be photographers. This technological dexterity serves to remove whatever trace of the magical there remained in photography against the grain of modernity’s emphasis on rationality. There was a time when a photograph was an event. When the sitter surrendered to timelessness for an instant and when the photographer, in a representative act that sought to capture experience, demonstrated the alchemy of time and place. All that has long since changed.

Photography in the digital era exemplifies modernity’s narcissism and unstable fluidity. In entering the muddy waters of the ordinary and the everyday, it risks anonymity, even irrelevance. This may fundamentally alter the place of photography in our world, but it does not in any way lessen it. Against the grain of a surfeit of the visual and in the face of a surplus that threatens to obscure it, the photograph has shifted to assuming a vernacular that speaks of, and to, the world around us. In so doing, we constitute ourselves via the image as much as through experience. With the ambiguity and ambivalence that has always been part of this medium, images both make up the everyday as much as human subjects do and, simultaneously, announce the uniqueness of the everyday. Yes, most images sorely lack punctum – that ability to pierce the viewer and leave an imprint that Barthes wrote about – but to imagine the world devoid of images is also to imagine the world halved through the loss of its reflection in the mirror. It is to imagine the world halved again by the closing in of horizons of memory and possibility, and halved yet again by the loss of the face of the other. It is to imagine a world unable to progress due to the breakdown of a vital medium that helps us make sense of reality, or even just glimpse it perhaps, through representation.

[. . .]

Images today still retain something of that aura that made the topic, if not the subject, memorable. More to the point, the visual has become a key instrument in mediating the world around us. It is as vital as language itself, and equally potent in symbolic significance. Furthermore, in the same way as the self now engages with the selfie and evolves through and around it, so do images provide us with a means to navigate social contexts and engage with them. We, as photographers, are also our own subjects. We have become the other who occupies the space of the frame – the other whom we cannot distinguish ourselves from, but whose image spurs us on to negotiate the complexities of time and place.