Download Suggestions of the real

Suggestions of the real
He arranged the edge so that you could clearly see two halves of
photographs from different newspapers that in the bundle happened,
by chance, to fit together. In fact he reopened the package a
little so that a bit of shiny pasteboard would stick out, the
fragment of a torn enlargement. He turned on a spotlight; he wanted
it to be possible to recognize in his photograph the half-crumpled
and torn image, and at the same time to feel their unreality as
casual, inky shadows and also at the same time their concreteness
as objects charged with meaning, the strength with which they clung
to the attention that tried to drive them away. 1
When it comes to trying to assert reality, comparing space
with a photograph seems entirely unfair and even unwarranted.
But as photography’s verisimilitude is called into question
time and again it seems that we must apply those rules to the
still space and inadvertently everything else as well. When we
see a photograph we are aware of the resemblances with the
physical materials that we see in front of us. They resemble
so many of parts of our own perceptions that they often get
filed away under the same categories as the mental images and
therefore become part of the archive of abstractions and
impressions through which we discern our truths.
The photographic image alludes to a familiar reality,
making it possible to (re)visit places we actually have never been.
The space in photography, apart from the obvious lack of spatial
depth, pictures the elements of the room only as fragment, and a
chemical one at that. It is an image born from machine, or as Vilém
Flusser calls it a technical image, the apparatus, ‘structurally
complex but functionally simple’.2 A machine we are, according to
him, not in charge but at the mercy of.
When looking at the photograph we imagine beyond the frame.
In buildings we see beyond the doors, anticipating the spaces behind
it. We imagine so many things other than the picture bestows. We can
sense the coarseness of the textures or the warmth of the light,
thereby calibrating the object, the surface or the touch no longer
needs to be real. The images we impart is what makes is most evident
not the illusion of the photograph or the sense of our touch.
The photographic chamber of the eye
records bare painted walls, while an electric light
flays the chromium nerves of plumbing raw;
such poverty assaults the ego; caught
naked in the merely actual room,
the stranger in the lavatory mirror
puts on a public grin, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.3
Bishop Berkley, firmly believed in the immateriality of the world. He proposed that all things were products of the
mind.4 But he did not deny existence of things perceivable and therefore not denying humanity its experiences and
objects but he rejects the idea of the existence of corporeal substance,5 suggesting that we only exist in the mind
that perceives them. Gilles Deleuze (not an immaterialist) speaks of things being made of event and relation. He
tells us that ‘purely actual objects do not exist’ and that ‘Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of
virtual images’.6 They are actualised by us, as the thing has ‘nothing but the virtual as its subject’.7
How far can we stretch our imagination? Can we actually conceive nothing to be real and simultaneously everything to
be? We can’t sit without knowing the chair is safe to sit on but at the same time seem content continue to live
lives based on ideas, and conjecture.
If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it
impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our
ideas. Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or external
things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be
themselves perceivable or not? 8
The function of photography still holds the convincing
illusionary ability, it is a powerful device, and even though we
tell ourselves it is only a picture, we assume a position in
which we think we are able to differentiate this truth from the
one manifested in the so called real world. The photograph
simply alludes to a proof, letting us think we are correct in
our numerous assumptions.
It is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human,
stamping it with his seal... The mind that aims to understand reality
can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought....
That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates
the essential impulse of the human drama.9
Can a room, like the photograph, equally be evocative of time other than
the one we imagine ourselves to be in? Does architecture always refer to a
past as it builds upon its ideas, its materials and responds to actions of
that past? The architect Jean Nouvel10 calls rooms that bring to mind bygone
eras, virtual spaces, as they trick us and disrupts our presupposed
notions, mental images and memories. The reflective nostalgia, the kind
that ‘cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporal space’,11 has
more ability to influence our perception of the world than any painting,
photograph, space or computer generated image ever will. He speaks of
trickery of the eye used in design. We find it easy to believe that the
photograph deceives us as it is a technical image, made by a machine and
are unreliable, but maybe so are our buildings, our eyes, our minds, our
words, and our science; maybe we like to be fooled, perhaps we gather that
somewhere within all the trickery we can discern the truth of it all.
Perhaps it is not about the unearthing of illusions, but about the
investigation into the notion of the attainability of truth.
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves (Adventures of a Photographer), Mariner Books, 1985 page 235
Vilém Flusser, Towards the Philosophy of Photography, London, Reaktion Books, 2000. Page 57
3 Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (Tale of a Tub), New York, Harper and Row Publishers, 1981 page 24
4 Not as A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication (chimeras) but as highly functioning skills of making connections, anticipation and adapting.
5 Physical material having form and weight under ordinary conditions of gravity, the stuff of things
6 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (The Actual and the Virtual) New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, page 148
7 Ibid, page 148
8 Bishop George Berkley, Philosophical Writings, Cambridge University Press, 2008, page 85
9 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and other Essays, New York, Random House, 1955. page 13
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Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The singular Object of Architecture, London, University of Minnesota press, 2002, page 6-8
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books, 2001. Page 49