It seems almost obvious to state it so explicitly, and yet, when one does so it opens up a field of reflections which seems to have been little explored in our popular discourse of late – The Image of a thing and the Thing itself are not the same thing.
When I put it to you in such a plain and unadorned fashion, it must seem almost to go without saying. But has there not come to be some confusion in recent times on this subject? In the past several decades, the profusion, indeed the total overflowing of the image into the larger cultural space, has changed our relationship to it. It is at once more dubious and worthy of suspicion and more more unquestioned and unassailable that it was in the past. We take it for granted that an image proves a thing to be true – “I’ve seen it with my own eyes” – and yet we are also cognizant of the increasing ease with which digital images, now the strong majority of images being created, are manipulated, remixed, and recreated. We know this, and yet we will ourselves to forget it. This should not come as so much of a surprise given that the willful suspension of belief is fundamental to our interaction with other visual media such as movies, television, plays, and the like. We have acquired the habit, and it has become a difficult one to break. But I am giving you the conclusion without first laying out the premises.
Take for instance the above photograph (which I call ‘Plant and Shadow-Plant’). It is obvious that the plant which the photograph depicts is separate and distinct from the shadow which it casts in strong light. No one would ever mistake their own shadow or the shadow of some external object for the object which casts the shadow. And a shadow might seem in many ways distorted or different from that object as well. No one would suspect them to have exactly the same shape or size. Even one’s everyday experience is enough to disprove such a supposition. Does not a similar relationship exist between the photograph and the subject in the world which is imaged in the photograph? In fact even the process of its creation is similar. Both the photograph and the shadow appear to us as a depiction of an object which is more or less complete to our own perceptual experience, but which must always be, due to its very nature, subject to doubt and to some degree of separation from reality.
But the photograph is itself also a shadow. The image as a whole, as it were, is no better than a shadow of an object solidified in silver halide grains, or perhaps worse, in pixels, an even more ethereal and insubstantial reflection. The photograph taken on traditional media (film, glass plates, the silver gelatin which coats photographic paper, etc.) retains in some sense a corporeality. It has a shape and a form itself. It can be handled and it can be located as an object in physical space (what then of the digital photograph, which possesses no such definite physical attributes? Where does it exist, if indeed it exists at all? And yet it seems it must have some existence, formally if not materially). In some sense, the reality of the analog photograph, which takes as its substrate a bit of acetate transparent base or rarely a thin glass plate, seems more assured. But even then, it seems impossible to deny its reflective and referential character. It is derivative by its very nature. One knows this because it must be such given the process of its creation. One knows that it is, at its most fundamental material level, a solidified and fixed arrangement of silver, which took form after first being exposed to light and then submersed in various chemical baths to reveal and make permanent the latent image. The process itself reveals it as being not the object, but its inverse. It is appropriate that the finished form of the photograph as it appears on the film before printing is termed the negative. It is the inverse of the thing which it depicts. What is black is white and what is white is black. This is materially as well as metaphorically true. And there is a certain honesty in this. The analog photograph doesn’t claim to be anything other than what it is – a reflection reproduced in a solid medium of a thing which is necessarily absent (and it is in this sense that Barthes discusses ‘the return of the dead’ as a constant element in photography) as soon as soon as it has been captured there, for the moment depicted has thereafter passed away into an irretrievable history, leaving only a trace of silver.
This essentially referential, reproductive quality of the photograph is easily forgotten in favor of its symbolic function. It exists always at two levels – it is at once this concrete being and the thing which it represents, interpreted as we like. In just such a way as the signifier and the sign are both the same and different from one another, the photograph and its subject have between them a semiotic relationship which brings them perilously close together without ever making them the same. There remains always a gap between the two which prevents them from meeting on the same level in any way except conceptually. The photo cannot be mistaken for the object and vice versa. This seems as obvious as it is to say a thing and its shadow cannot be confused. Yet this confusion seems possible when we look at a photo, and when asked what it is, reply “a plant” without recalling fully that we must reply “a photo of a plant”. In ordinary life, this seems a forgivable omission, and yet in our thinking, it seems an increasingly dangerous one.
As I stated at the outset, to declare this and describe it in such direct and explicit terms seems almost unnecessary – because it seems ridiculous to think of anyone mistaking his own shadow for himself. And yet this seems to be increasingly a danger which is posed to us by the world in which we exist. The Image, because of its ubiquity and profusion has overstepped its bounds with us. It now has its say far too much in our own perceptions of reality, and we confuse the conceptual and the material for one another. We live our lives more in the realm of the simulated and the imaged, and less in the realm of the senses and direct sense impressions. The image has begun to take the place – perhaps it has already done so completely and we are not yet fully aware of it – of the things in the world which it formerly claimed to represent. In this way, an inversion of place has been performed. Reality itself now appears to us as merely the shadow of the Image, and the world of images and representations seems to us to be the more real of the two. It is as though we had inverted the usual relation between object and image to such an extent that we moved thereby out of our own perception of the real an firmly, perhaps irretrievably into the realm of the phantasmal and the imaginary.