Damisch Five Notes

Five Notes for a
Phenomenology of the
Photographic Image *
HUBERT DAMISCH
1. Theoretically speaking, photography is nothing other than a process of

recording, a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of silver salts, a stable image
generated by a ray of light. This definition, we note, neither assumes the use of a
camera, nor does itimply that the image obtained is that of an object or scene from
the external world. We know of prints obtained from film directly exposed to a
light source. The prime value of this type of endeavor is to induce a reflection on
the nature and function of the photographic image. And insofar as it successfully
eliminates one of the basic elements of the very idea of "photography" (the camera
obscura, the camera), it produces an experimental equivalent of a phenomenolo-
gical analysis which purports to grasp the essence of the phenomenon under
consideration by submitting that phenomenon to a series of imaginary variations.
2. The reluctance one feels, however, in describing such images as pho-

tographs is a revealing indication of the difficulty of reflecting phe-
nomenologically-in the strict sense of an eidetic experience, a reading of
essences-on a cultural object, on an essence that is historically constituted.
Moreover, the full purview of a photographic document clearly involves a certain
number of "theses" which, though not of a transcendental order, appear neverthe-
less as the conditions for apprehending the photographic image as such. To
consider a document of this sort like any other image is to claim a bracketing of all
knowledge-and even, as we shall see, of all prejudice-as to its genesis and
empirical functions. It therefore follows that the photographic situation cannot be
defined a priori, the division of its fundamental components from its merely
contingent aspects cannot be undertaken in the absolute.
The photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a
product of human labor, a cultural object whose being-in the phenomenological
sense of the term-cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and
from the necessarily datable project in which it originates. Now, this image is
characterized by the way in which it presents itself as the result of an objective
* First published in L'Arc (Paris), 1963.
71
process. Imprinted by rays of light on a plate or sensitive film, these figures (or
better perhaps, these signs?) must appear as the very trace of an object or a scene
from the real world, the image of which inscribes itself, without direct human
intervention, in the gelatinous substance covering the support. Here is the source
ofl the supposition of "reality," which defines the photographic situation. A
photograph is this paradoxical image, without thickness or substance (and, in a
way, entirely unreal), that we read without disclaiming the notion that it retains
something of the reality from which it was somehow released through its physio-
chemical make-up. This is the constitutive deception of the photographic image
(it being understood that every image, as Sartre has shown, is in essence a deceit).
In the case of photography, however, this ontological deception carries with it a
historical deceit, far more subtle and insidious. And here we return to that object
which we got rid of a little too quickly: the black box, the photographic camera.
3. Niepce, the successive adepts of the Daguerreotype, and those innumer-

able inventors who made photography what it is today, were not actually
concerned to create a new type of image or to determine novel modes of
representation; they wanted, rather, to fix the images which "spontaneously"
formed on the ground of the camera obscura. The adventure of photography
begins with man's first attempts to retain that image he had long known how to
make. (Beginning in the 11th century, Arab astronomers probably used the camera
obscura to observe solar eclipses.) This long familiarity with an image so
produced, and the completely objective, that is to say automatic or in any case
strictly mechanical, appearance of the recording process, explains how the
photographic representation generally appeared as a matter of course, and why
one ignores its highly elaborated, arbitrary character. In discussions of the
invention of film, the history of photography is most frequently presented as that
of a discovery. One forgets, in the process, that the image the first photographers
were hoping to seize, and the very latent image which they were able to reveal and
develop, were in no sense naturally given; the principles of construction of the
photographic camera-and of the camera obscura before it-were tied to a
conventional notion of space and of objectivity whose development preceded the
invention of photography, and to which the great majority of photographers only
conformed. The lens itself, which had been carefully corrected for "distortions"
and adjusted for "errors," is scarcely as objective* as it seems. In its structure and
in the ordered image of the world it achieves, it complies with an especially
familiar though very old and delapidated system of spatial construction, to which
photography belatedly brought an unexpected revival of current interest.
(Would the art, or rather the craft, of photography not consist partly in
allowing us to forget that the black box is not "neutral" and that its structure is
not impartial?)
* The play here is on the French word for lens: objectif.-ed.

72 OCTOBER
4. The retention of the image, its development and multiplication, form an

ordered succession of steps which composed the photographic act, taken as a
whole. History determined, however, that this act would find its goal in reproduc-
tion, much the way the point of film as spectacle was established from the start.
(We know that the first inventors worked to fix images and simultaneously to
develop techniques for their mass distribution, which is why the process perfected
by Daguerre was doomed from the very outset, since it could provide nothing but a
unique image). So that photography's contribution, to use the terms of classical
economy, is less on the level of production, properly speaking, than on that of
consumption. Photography creates nothing of "use" (aside from its marginal and
primarily scientific applications); it rather lays down the premises of an unbridled
destruction of utility. Photographic activity, even though it generally takes the
form of craft, is nonetheless, in principle, industrial; and this implies that of all
images the photographic one-leaving aside its documentary character-wears
out the most quickly. But it is important to note that even when it gives us,
through the channels of publishing, advertising, and the press, only those images
which are already half consumed, or so to speak, "predigested," this industry
fulfills the initial photographic project: the capturing and restoration of an image
already worn beyond repair, but still, through its physical nature, unsuited to
mass consumption.
5. Photography aspires to art each time, in practice, it calls into question its
essence and its historical roles, each time it uncovers the contingent character of
these things, soliciting in us the producer rather than the consumer of images. (It
is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is possibly the
first image Nicephore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of the camera obscura-a
fragile, threatened image, so close in its organization, its granular texture, and its
emergent aspect, to certain Seurats-an incomparable image which makes one
dream of a photographic substance distinct from subject matter, and of an art in
which light creates its own metaphor.)

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Five Notes for a

1. Theoretically speaking, photography is nothing other than a process of

2. The reluctance one feels, however, in describing such images as pho-

3. Niepce, the successive adepts of the Daguerreotype, and those innumer-

* The play here is on the French word for lens: objectif.-ed.

4. The retention of the image, its development and multiplication, form an

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