Cathy Haynes on Taking Pictures

Some of us hate having our photo taken. For the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) the discomfort of having this daguerreotype made by Nadar must have been particularly acute. According to Nadar, Balzac believed that physical bodies are made up of spectral layers; the camera captures a person’s image by removing one of these layers and transferring it to the photograph. One too many portraits, goes the theory, and you fade away altogether. How bizarre Balzac’s theory seems now. And yet is there a glimmer of truth in the idea that photography could rob us of something essential?

 

My phone tells me I’ve taken 400 photos in the last two months. Clearly I didn’t miss a thing, from the launch of an exhibition to the opening of a packet of crisps. But can I tell you precisely what’s in these pictures? I probably have a decent recollection of about five without looking. I’ve got to such a trigger-happy state that a photo no longer becomes the souvenir of a larger memory. Instead my electronic album is becoming a terrifyingly erasable annex of my brain. I’m in danger of running down my memory by over-reliance on my camera.

 

I could lay the blame entirely on digital culture. But the recognition of the power of photographs to become a substitute for memory and experience is not new. No doubt it’s a significant reason why the Victorian thinker John Ruskin chose to champion drawing just when it seemed to be being surpassed by photography. The vitality of drawing, for Ruskin, is in its process regardless of the product. ‘Now, remember,’ he told his drawing students, ‘that I have not been trying to teach you to draw, only to see.’ And through seeing, to carry a recollection of what we see that enriches us through the rest of life. So I’m reclaiming my memory. No more photos for me for a while. I’m taking up a pencil.

 

Cathy Haynes is a founder faculty member of The School of Life and Curator for Art on the Underground. www.cathyhaynes.org 

Image: Daguerreotype of Balzac by Nadar, 1840

Comments

[Leif Frenzel]

Nice post.

I think the observation about something like pictures becoming a weaker replacement of memory and experience can be traced even further back: in Plato's Phaedrus there's a similar point made about writing (274c-275b). Socrates even says there that "writing shares a strange feature with painting [and we might add: photography]. The offspring of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words." (275d)

Real experience requires interaction with what you experience. You can have that with the thing you photographed, but not with the picture only, afterwards. If one misses the chance to really experience and only takes a quick photo, then one ends up with a weak substitute, just as you describe it.

[m]

aaah but you are talking about 'digital' pictures. Taking film photographs is quite a different matter. Firstly the photos can take weeks or even years (I've got a huge backlog!) the images frequently are quite different from your memories - if you can remember taking then!