The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the non-filmic nature of this authority, lead me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it. Photography’s deeply rooted kinship with death has been noted by many different authors, including Dubois, who speaks of photography as a ‘thanatography’, and, of course, Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida bears witness to this relationship most poignantly. It is not only the book itself but also its position of enunciation which illustrates this kinship, since the work was written just after (and because of) the death of the mother, and just before the death of the writer.
Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished. Strictly speaking, the person who has been photographed – not the total person, who is an effect of time – is dead: ‘dead for having been seen’, as Dubois says in another context. Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness, at every age, our own ageing. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Photography has a third character in common with death: the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time – unlike cinema, which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life. The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later. Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own loss. I will add that in life, and to some extent in film, one piece of time is indefinitely pushed backwards by the next: this is what we call ‘forgetting’. The fetish , too, means both loss (symbolic castration) and protection against loss. Peter Wollen states this in an apt simile: photography preserves fragments of the past ‘like flies in amber’. Not by chance, the photographic art (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.
[…]
Sociologists and anthropologists arrive by other means at similar conceptions. The funeral rites which exist in all societies have a double, dialectically articulated signification: a remembering of the dead, but a remembering as well that they are dead, and that life continues for others. Photography, much better than film, fits into this complex psycho-social operation, since it suppresses from its own appearance the primary marks of ‘livingness’, yet nevertheless conserves the convincing print of the object: a past presence.
All this does not concern only the photographs of loved ones. There are obviously many other kinds of photographs: landscapes, artistic compositions, and so forth. But the kind on which I have insisted seems to me to be exemplary of the whole domain. In all photographs, we have this same act of cutting off a piece of space and time, of keeping it unchanged while the world around continues to change, of making a compromise between conservation and death. The frequent use of photography for private commemorations thus results in part (there are economic and social factors, too) from the intrinsic characteristics of photography itself. In contrast, film is less a succession of photographs than, to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph’s power and action.
Christian Metz, Photography and Fetish (1985). Reprinted in “The Cinematic” by MIT Press, p. 126-128
