The Camera is God
Discover more from Alex Wright Writes
"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it. I am now free of human immobility. I am in perpetual motion. I approach things, I move away from them. I slip under them, into them. I move toward the muzzle of a race horse. I move quickly through crowds, I advance ahead of the soldiers in an assault, I take off with airplanes, I fall on my back and get up at the same time that the body falls and gets up. This is what I am, a machine that runs in chaotic maneuvers, recording movements one after the other, assembling them in a patchwork. Freed from the constraints of time and space, I organize each point of the universe as I wish. My route is that of a new conception of the world. I can make you discover the world you did not know existed.”
—Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye Manifesto
"These images that yet / Fresh images beget"
—T S Eliot, The Waste Land
Riffing off Vertov, the mechanical eye has become even more omnipresent than he says, because we're cyborgs now, which means we have cameras attached to us at all times (don't pretend your phone is not a part of you as much as your kidney is, because it is; this is why you say that you are online and not that your phone is online; if a phone is online alone in the middle of a forest, its screen muted battery-saving-mode grey, who will hear you scream when you fall?) but we also — and this is crucial — think in the language and currency of cameras, in the lingua franca of images, so we are cameras, too, in the modern sense, snapping image after image never to be looked at again, storing high-res snaps in our camera rolls, which will never be seen again.
Take a picture and say that you have taken it. I just took a picture of you. The verb is intriguing. You did not say, 'I made a picture of you'. This is because photography is acquisative by nature. To take a photograph is to possess a representation of another over which they have no control. A power dynamic in a shutter-flash, enacted in a nano-second. We know, of course, that the image of the person and the person are not the same, as much as we know that our idea of that person is not the same as anyone elses, and so before we even introduce cameras into the equation we know that the self undergoes a kind of mitosis at the point of, during, and after an interaction. Memory and perception afford a kind of temporary immortality, but the catch (there's always a catch) is that that immortality will not be experienced by the remembered. Let us be sure, though, that the remembered will take on a life — many lives, in fact — beyond their corporeal self, and they will have no control over this.
Cameras stretch this idea to snapping-point. The same logic applies: something is captured and made inaccessible to the original. Even if you take a selfie, you are greeted with a version of yourself you can never quite understand. In physical terms, this is not a you you'll ever be able to experience, but it is not a 'you' anyone else will be able to experience, either. It will take on a life of its own. Like a memory, it will be subject to all manner of distortions and narratives beyond your control. Cropped, filtered, recoloured, repurposed: in reproduction, any original sense of self will gradually fade.
But you photograph, because you are God now. But you are not the only one. All are gods. And you know this, with a blow of disappointment. You might have apotheosised, but so did everyone else. You are still not special. So you photograph yourself, again and again, hoping that this time — maybe, just maybe — you will ascend.