10 October 2009
on failure, distilled
As the story goes, William Henry Fox Talbot sought to invent Photography because he couldn’t draw. Having failed at making a decent landscape using the camera lucida, he wished to get Nature to “paint itself”. Through years of trial and error, Talbot managed to produce some of the first lasting photographic images only to have his singular discovery trumped by the superior work of a better-funded Frenchman. As he raced to show his earlier discoveries, he was thwarted by minor mis-steps and a summer of bad English weather, and barely eked out some flawed and faded photographs in time. Nevertheless, this was the birth of the Art.
If Photography is born from failure, then surely it must have always carried failure in its genes. Even as it laid claim to representing nature more perfectly than ever before, many of its earliest critics noted the odd and empty world of the camera, or the deathly pallor and embalmed stare of its once-living subjects. As the technology grew faster, better and more detailed, the technological advances of Photography were matched by greater critical and philosophical concerns over its connection (or lack thereof) to Truth and Reality, and its further political uses in the world. To many it was a Science not an Art, and represented the Death of Painting, the End of Art, and the rise of a frightening Modernity.
Despite the ever-increasing challenges to its claim on truth, Photography still manages to hold onto its privileged position in representing the contemporary experience, perhaps even more so by its unique connection to Failure. What better way to express a growing disconnection to the natural world? When the Modern photographers aimed to distill Photography to its essence, they inadvertently latched on to exactly the way in which photographs failed in their initially stated purpose, to show Nature as it was. The tiny rectangle of the world caught on the film plane was judged only as Composition (all the better if tilted or skewed…) That miniscule slice of time captured by the shutter became “The Decisive Moment”.
But no matter how much we know about the failure of Photographic Truth, a gut feeling confirms the photograph’s tenuous connection to its referent. A photograph of a dead body simply feels different than a drawing of one. That unavoidable sense of “that was there” makes even false magic tricks seem possible, and the missing figure so much more the greater loss. Even Talbot’s little stained scraps of paper – the ghosts of his home and garden – contain a bit of time preserved, not just gone. That early Photography was Photography born whole, just baby steps from drawing, yet already the perfect medium through which to show a very real sense of loss, absence and indeed Failure.