I just finished reading Amy Leal’s Chronicle piece on spirit photography, “Bringing Out the Dead,” and it was quite evocative. Leal makes it clear that photography has always negotiated an interesting tension between strict indexicality (as a semiotician might put it) and spectacular artifice.
Leal invokes theorist Roland Barthes and his contention that there is a “terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.” Barthes offered up one of the most mystical musings on photography’s power — even as he further canonized the medium’s claim to self-evidential and transparent “proof,” authenticating “what was there” over and against mere “representation.”
Barthes famously distinguishes between the studium (what a photo “objectively” reflects about any conspicuous social/cultural landscape) and the more romantic and subjective (and privileged) punctum, which Barthes likens to a wounding (a pricking) of the viewer by the invisible (and repressed) “signified” of all photographic images: death itself.
In many ways, according to Barthes, all photographs, no matter what they ostensibly depict, are spirit photographs. They show us death, the dead — ourselves as always already dead. They represent visual archives of our own existential ephemerality.
Barthes wants to have it both ways: photographs as magical and mundane, fanciful and factual. Photographs depict “what was” and “what will inescapably be.” Even though this conceptualization traffics (at least partially) in realist assumptions about photography’s ontological accuracy, it is that same capacity, Barthes claims, that allows photographic images to signal beyond what they depict to our own pending doom. Looking at photographs, for Barthes, means seeing ghosts, seeing our own death, no matter what the studium of the picture ostensibly reflects. It is always us watching our own death, like that time-traveling guinea pig in Chris Marker’s film-short “La Jetee,” the one who, as a child, is haunted by images of his adult self being murdered, images that he can’t get out of his head, even before he finally deciphers them — and just a little too late for his own salvation.
Leal’s piece only mentions Barthes in passing, but it does a nice job explaining and historicizing photography’s powerful hold on our collective imagination. Given the ubiquity of digital photography today, have we just found more high-tech ways of capturing nightmarish fears of our own ultimate demise?
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users BigTallGuy and h.koppdelaney)
