7. André Bazin, “Ontology of the photographic image”
“In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic
arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned
out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art.
Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that
satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with
realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to
an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast
a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor in the
transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a
physical process (photography will long remain the inferior of painting in
the reproduction of color) ; rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit,
in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical
reproduction in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is
not to be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.”
8. Walter Benjamin, “A short history of photography”
“It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera from the one
which addresses the eye; different above all in the sense that instead of
a space worked through by a human consciousness there appears one
which is affected unconsciously. It is possible, for example, however
roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, but it is impossible to say
anything about that fraction of a second when a person starts to walk.
Photography with its various aids (lenses, enlargements) can reveal this
moment. Photography makes aware for the first time the optical
unconscious, just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual
unconscious. Structural qualities, cellular tissues, which form the natural
business of technology and medicine, are all much more closely related
to the camera than to the atmospheric landscape or the expressive
portrait”.
“At the same time photography uncovers in this material physiognomic
aspects of pictorial words which live in the smallest things, perceptible yet
covert enough to find shelter in daydreams, but which, once enlarged
and capable of formulation, show the difference between technology and
magic to be entirely a matter of historical variables”.
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16. Gardner:
“There is undeniable evidence that all that can be photographed has
necessarily a physic nature. Nothing more subtle can print a sensitive
plate. For instance, the supposed photographs of spirits imply the
supposition that such spirits have adopted a certain degree of
“materialization” before the “shape” could get printed, even in the most
sensitive film. Notwithstanding, far beyond of the reaching point of our
visual perception, there are wavelengths that we can’t see. So a
photographic objective can capture a variety of stars that no human eye
was able to see looking directly in the sky, there exists a whole variety of
living creatures whose bodies are so slight, subtle for us that they are out
of our field of sensitive perception. Many children and mediums can see
them, and hence our tradition of fairy tales, all of them based in actual
facts that we will be able to prove henceforth”.
