Chris Bailes

Thought Paper

Selected Thoughts on Cadava’s Words of Light

 

In Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light:  Theses on the Photography of History Cadava presents a collection of theses that attempt to make sense of the nature of photography and the photograph as it relates to capturing a historical moment.  He considers Benjamin’s thoughts written during the height of Nazi power on the revolutionary potential that photographs have when used by fascist regimes to portray a historical model as if to apotheosize the object in the image.  Photographs lend themselves well to influencing social and political forces which in turn initiate a new thinking and reassessing of values, particularly aesthetic values such as “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery…” (4).  The photograph has the power to define history and this power must be wielded with responsibility; and one must not neglect his duty to think or else they may become the puppet of a regime, explains Cadava (4). 

 

Cadava, further echoing Benjamin, addresses the necessity for the existence of an image as the first and fundamental material of all philosophy.  He explains that God first gave Adam photography and thereby the ability to acquire knowledge.  Thenceforth, humankind has had the ability to perceive and philosophize through the use of reflection, and speculation which strives for, and can result in, lucidity(5).  This is a view that was popularized by Locke’s postulation of a tabula rosa, but can be found dating back to ancient Greece.  In this view it is only through simple ideas, i.e. base sense perceptions, that one can proceed to develop more complicated thoughts and accumulate a sense of history.  Cadava returns to this theme later as he employs thoughts from Bergson who complains that a world he is trying to fix is continuously vanishing because it is based on images based in our perceptive faculty.  Perception, or photographs, cannot “give us what is before the camera or the eye” (91).  As we attempt to recall a past perception, the object, although it may be reconfigured in our minds, is never actually grasped in any real way.  Furthermore, Bergson says that perception remains a ‘hallucination’ and a ‘mirage’ that doesn’t belong to the realm of knowledge (95).     

 

Cadava continues by suggesting that the photograph mortifies the moment in which it is taken and is thus also a mortification of the image which it captures.  The photograph creates a separation between the moment in which the photograph is viewed and the moment in which the photograph was taken.  By viewing the image on paper our absence is implied and “it allows us to speak of our death before our death” (8).  By having ourselves photographed we become objects to be viewed and no longer subjects that are viewing, in regards to the photograph.  Thus we get a glimpse of our own death and legacy since this is how we will be experienced by others upon our departure.   

 

Similarly, history requires something in the present to fade into the past, i.e. die, and in the process leave traces of itself that continue to live on as images or thoughts.  Thus in this sense photographs give us history; moreover, they can give us nothing other than history since after the moment a photograph is taken a new moment arises and the old one is now ‘dead’ or passing away (128).  

 

As a point of further consideration it might be interesting to discuss the apparent contradiction between Cadava’s (or Benjamin’s) Lockean claim that light, or perception, is the beginning of knowledge and philosophy and Bergson’s claim that perception doesn’t belong in the realm of knowledge.  Can these two views be reconciled or do they represent two opposing schools of thought?  Furthermore, to what extent can a perception or photograph reach at a reality?  Can a historical photograph have any claim representing this reality? 

 

 

Anne Fritz

Position Paper

Eduardo Cadava, excerpts from Words of Light

 

Cadava writes, “there has never been a time without the photograph, without the residue and writing of light”(5).  The physical process of activation-by-light that is photography is taken as light-shining and absorption;  light has always been transmitted; only fix as a stabilizer has been missing at points.  Cadava draws us to a parallel within Bergson between the eyes of a human perceiver and a camera.   He states,“that there is a duration to perception means that the eye is both open and closed”(95).  The closing of opened eyes allows for the creation of an afterimage;  this afterimage clarifies for Cadava the nature of perception in the face of technical reproducibility.

 

For Bergson, perception and memory are knotted into what may as well be an indistinguishable lump;  photographs cannot reproduce the past because perception and memory do not separate out(96).  According to Bergson, “there is for us nothing that is instantaneous.  In all that goes by that name there is already some work of our memory”(95).  Counter to the belief that perceiving equals knowing, Bergson envisions perception instead as a magnet of “memory -[images]”96;  Bergson’s “memory-[images]” actually take on the active role of inserting themselves into any perceptions they are able to interpret.  Neither memory nor perception may be experienced in pure form(96); photographs, as “snapshots of perception” may thus “trace…their relation to the past” but cannot offer the past to their viewers. 

 

This inability to fully offer is referenced by Cadava when he writes, “…in the experience of the photograph, it is as if we cannot see a thing.  In the twilight zone between seeing and not seeing, we fail to get the picture”(7).  For Benjamin, this twilight zone is a “fog”(5) which “serves as an obstacle to both knowledge and vision”(5).  Simultaneously, we are granted by Benjamin’s photograph the opportunity to experience death.  Photographs objectify their subjects;  we realize through photographs the very reality of our eventual deaths, with the images themselves serving as remembered future mournings(8).  “Photographs bring death to the photographed”(10). 

 

Photography, as representative of technical reproducibility, does not merely alter our relationship to death, but transforms its recipients into recorders which are eventually transformed, through this very recording process, into a “reproduced mass”(49).  Mass movements  for Benjamin originate from the same mechanisms of technological reproduction as provide us with films and photographs; a mass sees itself through technological reproduction as if in a mirror, yet remains faceless(56). 

 

Where light has always been transmitted, its playing back in the form of photograph “interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, one that spaces time and temporarlizes space”(61).  Photography’s establishment of time as temporal actually allows for the beginning of history itself, the very history which then witnesses the appearance of the image(63).  Because photographs speak as death itself, they are simultaneously alive and dead and thus offer an inhabitable gap.  Cadava quotes Benjamin to state “living means leaving traces”.  What are these traces that are left?