The Tyranny of the Real

Here’s a thing - analogue photography is now, finally completely free of its shackles as a purely mechanical means of recording ‘reality’, in that it is now an ‘art’ medium (also finally) in itself: that [recording] rôle has been taken up, to an extent, by digital image-making. The one-to-one analogue of the photographic image that Roland Barthes argued (incorrectly) was purely denotative in nature in his essay “The Rhetoric of the Image”, now sits on the other side of the fence, alongside painting & sculpture. The recent rise in interest in chemical photography has been accompanied by a corresponding paradigm shift in how the medium is viewed and used.

This is interesting on several fronts. Whilst the film-bound image always had that element of being a direct analogue of the scene captured, it also carried with it a layer of connotation, just as did any other visual recording modus operandi. Indeed, much manipulation has always been possible in darkroom technique or even in the camera itself when framing and taking the shot: all of which, along with the cultural associations and contextual information running alongside the image itself, serve to fix the image as symbol rather than ‘pure’ representation.

In any case historically, photography in its earliest guises was seen by its practitioners and consumers alike as being precisely akin to drawing and painting: portraits being considered as ‘likenesses’ or ‘interpretations’ of the subject portrayed: some photographic artists employing deliberately painterly techniques and aesthetics, and seeing themselves in the same light as the more ‘traditional’ plastic arts. It was really only with the rise of photographic ‘accuracy’ through technical advances in lenses and chemistry deep into the twentieth century, that its ‘documentary’ aspect started to hold sway: photographers were now able to capture an image in a tiny fraction of a second, with dimensional and tonal accuracy and dependability. 

In any case, where is there now a purely denotative recording medium? In Barthes’ terms no such thing exists or ever did; the world of analogue photography is now subsumed into the general activity of image ‘making’ and digital photography itself can’t claim to be directly denotative of its subject matter: there’s just too much hardware and software intervention between shutter-click and recording for that, let alone the manipulation that is possible using modern phones, cameras and software, post hoc.

It would now seem that Marshall McLuhan’s earlier analysis was much more prescient than that of the illustrious M. Barthes: the medium really has become the message to use McLuhan’s well-used catchphrase: in fact, it could have been coined exactly for the current world of smartphones, Instagram and selfies. I now know I was right to argue against the Barthes stance in my degree thesis back in the seventies; although my supervisor and I were in a minority of two to suggest such a thing back then. The freedom from the constraints of ‘the real’ allows photographic artists to employ the media available however they choose and to whatever end they desire; be it documentary or abstract in nature: not before time, in my book.