Why do we look at photographs

The Princess and the picture

Why do we look at photographs? Sometimes the reason is the moment they capture. A family reunion, a meeting of world leaders, snapped the way we mark a child’s height on the wall. The shake and smile genre. But this is not all. We do not treasure a picture (or find it compulsive) merely because it reminds us of a particular moment—like the best paintings, photography is less often historical than essential. What we value in portraits and landscapes is the quintessence of the subject: the green and pleasant land of England, the splendour of the old establishment, the singularities of Rembrandt’s old women—the way that oil and canvas can be made to look so very, very much like a duck. Rather than “dark nationalism” or political mendacity, what we really see there is history staring back at us like the fowl’s beady, glass-clear eye. Too often, pictures are too clear for comfort.

Pictures capture something true, something relatable, some essence of a person, a situation, a moment, a time, which we cannot wholly reconcile ourselves to now. They send us in search of lost time, making the past look, as Philip Larkin said, smaller and clearer as the years go by.

So, when your iPad shows you reels of underlit, oddly framed pictures from 2013 when you visited an old pub, or sprawling pictures of your family during the pandemic, or that rare candidly-casual shot of grandmother and grandchild, it matters less whether the picture commemorates a birthday or a random moment, and more that the picture recalls a mood, a dynamic, a feeling that memory alone cannot recreate. It is the closest our own self-consciousness can come to the feeling we get when we listen to our favourite music. Ah! Yes! This moment in my life! I love this bit! I love it when it changes tone like that! If only she wasn’t dead! Look, look at the way we smiled!

This accounts for the tragic nature of photography, too. At home, we have off-guard quality of nostalgic, sentimental snaps; abroad there is the undeniability of the American flag being raised at Iwo Jima, the child walking out of a napalmed village, an innocent martyred at Tiananmen Square—thus we know the pity and the terror of the twentieth century like we know no other century. No matter how partial, how selective, how momentary a photograph is—no matter how framed—it captures a glimpse of physicality, mood, vibe, in a way that words cannot. The earth seen from space needs no caption.

Today, though, photography lies.

Popes wear puffer jackets and the Princess of Wales has children who can contort their fingers like something out of a low-grade movie. But like the fairies who were interposed into hoax pictures a hundred years ago (or that once popular genre, churchyard ghosts captured by the photographer lurking behind a tombstone), true photographs (family days, office days) often present something more idealised than real. We believed that then, we felt it on that day: but we were not like that always. The blatant lie, as it always was, is caught. We know who smiles and who is a smiling villain; fakes do not last long. We worry more about what faked pictures might do in the future, not what they have duped us on so far. The Princess of Wales’s mistake was not to doctor her photo but to leave traces of her work.

We know, all too well, that even the most fidelious image is a fake in some ways. The past is no longer real, the moment was never going to last. The excesses of postmodernism lost their grip on the culture because we know that facts are real. But we also know historical painting represents, it does not display. And even though a photograph displays, it does so for a shutter-snap-second. We are quite used to the idea that pictures approximate reality. They have no smell, no sound, no temperature, no inner life. What they get is the essence of the moment. No more.

Thus, when old pictures of our children appear on our phones, we are struck by the essence of personality—the wide-mouthed laugh, the friendly eyes. But also by the distance. By the immediate quality of change. No philosopher can express the paradox of the way our past self both is and is not our current self with the vivacity and clarity of a photograph. Strange to think how real these people were, and yet how hard it is to summon them again. The Faust story is compelling not because we all want to make a pact about our immortal selves, but because we know we cannot. If we want the photograph to be real, we must reinvent it, relive it. 

Photographs taunt us with the idea of the past—those were the days, we can see clearly now that they are gone. And seen clearly, the past, we think, can be gotten beyond. So it is with political images. Photographs can capture not just the facts but the spirit of an event. A news report is enough to tell us the flag was raised or the throat was split. History worked perfectly well on the basis of speech and writing for many centuries. But the first time we see a picture (even moments after the event) we react as if to say—in shock or poignancy or indignation or horror or joy or bemusement—did this really happen? 

Whether it is your aunt’s birthday or the cosplay coup in Congress or the gross terroristic defilement of the Israeli people or the atrocities in Gaza, we see the picture immediately and it asks, Was this the truth? Can this have been? The wild perplexity of life is expressed in many different ways—what happened so recently and was so real and is in some sense still carrying on, is fixed, now, in this picture; and pictures are the least forgettable form of communication. Those people seem so clear, so simple, so real.  The truth about Israel and Gaza is complex, but what happened, in many ways, is not. It has the clarity—and horrible confusion—of an image. Was this the truth? Can this have been? 

Our anxiety, therefore, about faked images—the modern equivalent of painted-over portraits and warts left out—is not just that they will conceal the truth, or falsify it, but will also reveal it unwittingly. A rush of online videos and photographs becomes undeniable, as does the sense of wonderment—can this have been real? The Pope never wore that puffer jacket, but his willingness to speak at the edge of doctrine is what created that image. The outrage about the Wales’s photograph being tampered with arises from a repressed awareness that what we often demand from celebrities is not the truth, but the filtered truth. Tell all the truth but tell it framed. A fake is sometimes quite easily spotted, and then it speaks volumes.