Where I live there used to be a photographic processing factory, the largest in Australia, so I am told. I know this because Mrs. Harper, who lives down the street at no. 12, keeps a photo of the old factory on her wall. ‘To keep the history alive,’ she says. But the photo and the building appear dead to me: heavy, motionless, stubborn[1] — devoid of people, and even of trees.

It’s a large, modern building, with a row of very old cars parked out the front. The building was destroyed long ago and, apart from Mrs. Harper, few people seem to remember it at all. The photo haunts me. It’s a piece of a forgotten past hanging on the wall — and now in my memory. It seems to hint that there is some funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world.[2] This photo, taken in the ‘fashion days, everything black and white, glamorous and cold, is a memory that belongs to a different time. No one takes photos anymore (not humans, anyway).

Around my home all the street names reference a history of photography: Spectrum way, Focus Drive, Aperture Street, Red Box Street, Camera Walk, Rouse Street, Snapshot Drive. All these words tell me nothing about photography — how to take a photograph, what photography is, or what photography does. So I’ve started collecting photos, trying to understand. There aren’t many around but I’ve found some in collector’s shops and junk shops. This collecting is a bit like uncovering an inventory of mortality.[3] Some of the photos are spellbinding and I feel an irresistible compulsion to look[4] at them again and again.  I’m starting to feel like I’m living inside someone else’s past. Could there be a link…between photography, madness, and something[5] more frightening that has long since been forgotten?

Last week I visited the State Library Archives because they have lots of photos of that old building, the Kodak building, and some of them do have people in them —well, men anyway. I found one photograph that also includes a woman but there was no information about who she was.

Looking at these old photos makes me feel like the little, tiny faces of the people in the pictures can see out at me.[6] Most of them are black and white, but even the colour Kodak photos, which have a lovely golden glow, feel a bit like looking at the return of the dead.[7] I am surrounded now by photos of what is dead, what is going to die.[8] I guess photography had something to do with resurrection,[9] but these days we keep the stories of the dead alive through conversation and song. This link between photography and death haunts all the photographs of people[10] I find. I’m beginning to think it’s impossible to look at a photo and not see encroaching death, and these photos too begin to haunt me.

At the SLA I’ve learned that Rouse — J.J. Rouse — was the name of one of the two men who started the original company Baker and Rouse Australia Laboratory, which they later sold to the American-owned Eastman Kodak.

Sell outs.

Rouse was the business side of the company while Baker — Thomas Baker — stayed up all night making the dry plates covered in their fine layer of silver salts for capturing light. Those glass plates sound exceptionally fragile, and I like the fact that they were used right up until the end of 20c to photograph the stars: images of pure light.

I don’t know what Baker did wrong that there’s no street named after him.

Back then, in the 1880s, when they started their company, it took a long time to take a single photograph. The really early photos, from the 1830s look like well-drawn or painted portraits[11] and I read that, sometimes, to ensure the necessary long exposures in the open, they even staged them in cemeteries where nothing could disturb concentration.[12] That’s creepy. But the photographs were valued as unique copies and…were often kept in cases like jewellery.[13]

It took nearly 100 years, but when cameras and film became lighter, cheaper, more accessible, photography exploded. Everyone, it seems, had a camera, and photography was soon subjected to our human compulsion to generalise, to gregarine, to banalize.[14] People began to see through their cameras instead of their eyes.

In other words, people forgot how to see.

The reign of silver halide photography didn’t last much longer, only about another 50 years. Once everything became distributed, the change was swift. Digital photography snowballed in the distributed age as a collective habit, but, ironically, there was really nothing collective about it. Despite all the sharing, our vision turned increasingly inward and we seem to have been oblivious to the insidious shame of photographing, above all else, ourselves.[15] I guess this can be seen as the logical conclusion of the industrial process and impatience with reality[16] through which the photograph was stripped of its value; an inclination…to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it.[17] No need, anymore, for Mr. Baker and his beautiful glass plates.

There must have been something enjoyable about taking silver halide photos, because some people kept doing it even after the digital revolution. Not many, though. I saw a report saying that, in 2017, 1.2 trillion photos were taken around the world. Most were digital — so easily created, so easily erased. Our portable, transferrable memories; the moment made eternal.[18] But that kind of memory can so easily be hacked. And eternity is... incalculable.

The age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public.[19]

A digital photograph, held (as if by magic) in the cloud, is too near eternity, too far from physical reality, for its existence, its function, to be fully conceivable. It’s not really Kodak’s fault, but when the company did its patent purge in early 21c in a desperate attempt to save itself, it sold us all to the multinationals – our privacy and our memories. All those Kodak moments.

In each photo I come across I feel compelled to look for the tiny spark...of the here and now, with which reality has…seared the…picture.[20] Yet throughout the age of photography, as the practice of touching up or doctoring the image became widespread,[21] photography’s link with reality became increasingly strained and it became impossible to claim with any certainty that what you saw in a photograph had indeed existed.[22] Photography became so many “performances”,[23] embodying the fictions we wanted to believe.

Theatricality became our preferred version of reality.

But reality cannot be denied, it simply changes; and in changing, so much stays the same. With its pretence of preservation and Edenic illusions, in the end — like a kind of primitive theatre[24] — photography did nothing to obscure the reality of our mortality. It revealed only, with increasing clarity, that we know ourselves to be hiding from this reality, this truth, and that we know this through the labour of trying to forget it.[25] The fiction as such became unsustainable;[26] people began to look away.

I wonder how many people noticed when that old Kodak factory closed down in 2004. The new houses were all built between 2012 and 2017, but not many people lived here then. I found a collection of photos taken at that time and it looks, not quite like a ghost town, maybe like an empty film set — empty in the manner of a flat which has not yet found a new occupant.[27]. Repetition makes them eerie — even the gardens have matching trees, all grown to the same height.

Collecting these photos, I am compiling an image of the past, fastened down, like butterflies,[28] and while it is good to collect things, … it is better to go on walks.[29] These photos seem to be a way of collecting while walking, so I walk around, holding them up in front of buildings to see if they match. I discover one of my own house.

I stick the photo on my wall.

It’s so unfamiliar, so strange in the immediacy of that long-past moment.[30] But small fragments of my house are recognisable; the future … inserts itself and, looking back, I …rediscover it.[31] Did the photographer know she was photographing a disappearing world?[32] Seeing backwards in time like this, I suddenly understand how the difference between technology and magic is entirely a matter of historical variables.[33] Walking with these photos carries me back to somewhere in myself.[34] I can almost hear the photographic mechanism, …

… krzk,

… krzk,

… as though cameras … were clocks for seeing,[35] and it makes me understand the word ‘place’ as a verb rather than a noun … which exists in our doings: walking, talking, living.[36]

For weeks now I have been carrying these photos with me, like injuries of time,[37] feeling a closeness with this photographer — her walking, her camera. She gives me vision in a way that all our 21c optics cannot, and I feel myself passing beyond the unreality of the thing represented,[38] entering into the object[39] until I confront … the wakening of intractable reality.[40]

Perhaps, beyond the hacking and the theft and the identity probes, what people fear is photography itself — its madness.[41] I am confronted, in every photo, by my ‘self’, my own being: I am alive here and now;[42] and the fact that I am here, looking at this photo, is the underlying truth about photography — that it had the beholder in view from the first — that can no longer be denied.[43] I must accept some responsibility in what I am looking at.[44]

And suddenly I feel that all photography, all of time, is here and now, reminding me and reminding me that time is; that there is destruction but there is also light. As I awaken to this awareness of time — indifferent, insistent time, to which we all must succumb — I see that, across that spectrum of light and dark, this is what human beings are capable of doing.[45] The photos whisper to me: Don’t forget.[46]

I put the photographs down and go for a walk.

Notes

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard, Vintage Books, London, 2000, p.12

[2] Barthes, p.5-6

[3] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Books, London, New York, 2008, p.70

[4] Walter Benjamin, ‘A short history of photography (1931),’ in Screen, volume 13, issue 1, 1 March 1972, p.7

[5] Barthes, p.116

[6] Benjamin, p.8

[7] Barthes, p.9

[8] Barthes, p.117

[9] Barthes, p.82

[10] Sontag, p.70

[11] Benjamin, p.17

[12] Benjamin, p.8

[13] Benjamin, p.6

[14] Barthes, p.118

[15] Benjamin, p.18

[16] Sontag, p.65

[17] Benjamin, p.20

[18] Sontag, p.65

[19] Barthes, p.98

[20] Benjamin, p.7

[21] Benjamin, p.18

[22] Barthes, p.82

[23] Barthes, p.32

[24] Barthes, p.32

[25] Jeff Wall, quoted in Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008, p.12

[26] Fried, p.341

[27] Benjamin, p.21

[28] Barthes, p.57

[29] Anatole France, quoted it Chatwin, Bruce, The Songlines, Vintage Books, London, 1998, p.174

[30] Benjamin, p.7

[31] Benjamin, p.7

[32] Sontag, p.62-63

[33] Benjamin, p.7-8

[34] Barthes, p.40

[35] Barthes, p.15

[36] Simryn Gill, quoted in Michael Fitzgerald, “Against Blankness:  The Inhabiting Spaces of Simryn Gill,” in ArtAsiaPacifc, Issue 82, March/April 2013, [online] available from: http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/82/AgainstBlanknessTheInhabitingSpacesOfSimrynGill, [accessed 11 October 2017]

[37] Sontag, p.69

[38] Barthes, p.116

[39] Hilla Becher, quoted in Fried, p.22

[40] Barthes, p.119

[41] Barthes, p.118

[42] Barthes, p.84

[43] Fried, p.26

[44] Jean-Marc Bustamante, quoted in Fried, p.20

[45] Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, St Martins Press, New York, 2003, p.115

[46] Sontag (2003), p.115