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.
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