Opening speech for the exhibition ‘You Made Me Love You’, April 2014
Title: “Photographer and Model: A Voyeuristic Danse Macabre Above the (Ab)yss of Death”
Text: Dimitri Goossens (original text in Dutch)
Intro
“Larvatus prodeo”….. “Like an actor I step forward masked, masked onto the stage of the world.” Descartes understood this well. The philosopher has a role to play. Masked with and by his role, he has to unmask. The unmasking of presupposed truths, dogmas, opinions. Why does the philosopher then slip into a role? Because this unmasking can be dangerous, painful. By unmasking, the philosopher wounds his audience. He keeps stinging them like a horsefly stings a horse (sic Socrates). But every unmasking, discovering, or “unconcealing” is at the same time a covering-up. By speaking, the philosopher discovers, he unmasks, but at the same time covers other things by remaining silent about them.
Photographs too unmask and cover up at the same time. They let something flare up while also causing it to congeal at once… freeze… mummify.
The photographer unmasks. And covers up at the same time. Mummifies. Silently they speak.
The silence and stillness of the photograph are at least as harrowing as speech.
In this masquerade of discovering and covering up, Descartes’ quote shouts something at us. The need to stay out of the line of fire. The need for an invulnerable position in that fragile and breakable game of discovering and covering up.
The philosopher does not want to appear before the inquisition (as Descartes did not want to), and the photographer, too, always remains somewhere out of the line of fire.
Somewhere? Where then? Nowhere.
The mask and the photographer share a blissful starting point: watching unwatched. “A view from nowhere.”
It is a gaze belonging to potentially everyone and no one at the same time.
The photographer is, like the masked figure, a present absence. A God’s eye view: invulnerable.
Whose gaze is it, that of the photographer or of the masked figure? Rob Mellink? Jan Hoek? Iztok Klančar? Welmer Keesmaat?
You? Dimitri Goossens?
Does an unwatched watcher really stay out of the line of fire with the one being watched, the photographed subject as trophy?
Do you know who I am? Do I know who I am? Do you know who you yourself are? Isn’t the façade simply a new mask?
To what extent are we really the human being we ourselves are? Dumbfounded? And naked? Or am I now provoking you too much, dear listener?
Am I now risking exposing myself too much? Your inquisition? You can of course always put on your own mask: Facebook. Or your own grimace, should it become too painful, or too revealing a comedy.
Act 1: The photographer as divine undertaker
Every photograph is a corpse. A remnant of a moment that has passed. A cadaver.
But at the same time, if it is a portrait, a self-cadaverization or mummification of the person portrayed.
This makes the photographer a kind of divine (because a present absence) undertaker. He wraps himself in silence and tries to blend into the scenery, delivering pictures of the sitter offering themselves up: photography as “self-killing” and the photographer as an acceptable “serial killer”? Allow me to elaborate on this unmasking further through the thinking of, among others, Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot.
a) Photographs as micro-experiences of death and transience
The “ghost” of objectification
Roland Barthes points to the fact that the person portrayed, in posing for the photograph, to some extent becomes a cadaver or remnant of themselves. We objectify ourselves so that the camera can make an image-object of us. We feel ourselves slide from subject to object. We are no longer fully subject, giving ourselves a pose or adopting the pose desired by the photographer, but neither are we fully object.
An image is not an object. It is not “there,” does not remain “there.” The image is not identical to its carrier. The carrier is a ground from which the image performs its magical effect. The image “haunts.” In this process the person portrayed can start to feel themselves become a “ghost.” A mummy. It is a “having-been-there” that comes to haunt us in the here and now as a remnant.
In this sense, every interplay between photographer and photographed subject is, according to Barthes, a micro-experience of death. What is this ghost that looks at us from the portrait?
It is at once what the photographed subject believes themselves to be, what the photographed subject would like other people to believe they are, who the photographer believes the subject to be, and who this photographer wants to use to display his art. It is thus a putting of subjectivity at stake.
Barthes characterizes the photographed subject as “Spectrum” (spectacle and spectre at once). With “spectre” he points to the fact that the person in the photograph “was there” in that moment in the past, which can never be relived. He/she comes to haunt us from that past; even the photographed subject themselves, no longer the person they once were, sees their own “ghost,” or the mummification of themselves.
Sacrifice of subjectivity
This process of self-cadaverization or mummification, reinforced further by the fact that we adopt a pose for the photographer, is in yet another sense a micro-experience of death. We sacrifice ourselves to the camera and the image. The photographer thus becomes almost a high priest and the photo a trophy of a sacrifice. Or is it rather a trophy of the hunt? Photographs, “taken” — or “shot”?
Our clothing is largely our mask. By clothing ourselves we lay claim, according to Sartre and Georges Bataille, to our subjectivity. We experience our physicality as “having-a-body.” Tattoos too fit this perspective. We embody ourselves, creating an image of ourselves that we wish to present to others. From this viewpoint, undressing — whether forced or voluntary — becomes a sacrifice of that subjectivity. A forced sacrifice or a self-sacrifice. This is how Sartre and Bataille sketch it.
What is at stake in nude photography could thus be described as a play between the photographer as a high priest or undertaker who witnesses a subject sacrificing its possibility of having-a-body in favor of being-a-body. We risk the possibility of transcending our mere physicality, the fact that we are a body.
So far I have highlighted that in photography a micro-experience of death and transience is at play. The image “haunts” us from the past as a mummification of an irrevocably passed moment. At the same time, in the case of nude photography, it often seems to be about “hunted game.” With the difference that here the trophy has offered itself up. Has bared itself and thereby risks becoming mere flesh. But in the photograph it is not only a micro-experience of death that is felt. To the photograph itself also clings a (grave-)abyss.
b) The photograph as gravestone
It is not only the photographed subject who is reduced to a ghost, a mummy, or a cadaver. The photograph itself is also a remnant, a cadaver or corpse of a “having-been-there.” A forever irrevocably lost moment. The cadaver or corpse assaults our sense of place and time. And so does the photograph.
Placeless
Just like a corpse, it is a presence that is neither “here” nor “elsewhere.” It is a presence that reveals an absence, and thus tears a hole, or a “rupture,” into our “lived world.” Just like a cadaver, these photographs make a connection between “here” and “nowhere.” This “hole-” or “rupture-effect” of the photograph means it also “grips” its place. While at the same time being placeless, since it is a “nowhere,” a vanished moment “behind the world.” They grip their place and simultaneously undermine the very possibility of a place.
They thus hold us above an abyss as ground undermined, a feeling of homelessness.
Timeless
At the same time the photograph assaults our sense of time. Photographs are a snapshot for eternity. At once past and forever “now.” They try to freeze the passage of time, and through this attempt the transience of time breathes into our face. In that sense they are ambiguous. We try to stop the passage of time and are thereby constantly reminded of unstoppable, fleeting time.
In the attempt to grasp, we miss, or “shoot past,” the very thing we want to grasp.
Where does this paradoxical impossibility inherent to photography come from?
It is an impossibility inherent to every image that represents.
To every image that represents, the (grave-)abyss clings.
Words for image or sign carry transience or death within them. Imago is the name for the death mask made of the deceased. Figura also stands for “ghost” or “phantom.” Idol also means the spirit or soul of the deceased that detaches itself from the cadaver. The Greek word for sign is sèma. Is it coincidence that this word also stands for “gravestone”?
The representing image, and thus also the representing photograph, traces back to the gravestone as perhaps the oldest form of representation (re-present-ing). The gravestone stands for what it contains, the grave-ground itself. The gravestone is a sign that refers to itself, to its own marker in the ground. The gravestone points to something that is only present in and through its sign. Before that gravestone points to something outside itself, this sign first and foremost points to a disappearance. To an absence.
Thus the absence that death in itself brings about, as a tear in experience, belongs to the ground of images that depict, represent, something. To represent ultimately means to make something absent present again. The gravestone was perhaps the first to do this. It opens up the possibility for every other image as representation.
Every image or artwork that represents thus fundamentally carries that absence/presence for the sign, the gravestone, within itself.
The image served, fundamentally, as a healing for an experience of absence, of nothingness that comes to tear, to wound, our experienced world… death.
But it is no unambiguous healing, no simple protection.
The making-present-again, the representing, always continues to carry that absence within itself.
To every photograph, therefore, the (grave-)abyss remains clinging.
A photograph thus forms a halt, for a halt is a stop in time and place.
But at the same time, because of its placelessness and timelessness, the photograph also attacks that very possibility of a halt.
An impossible halt, then, like a gravestone, always pointing to an absence within its presence.
Around these photographs we often develop all kinds of exorcising rituals, as around a gravestone: commemorating, laying out in museums or exhibitions in a kind of consecrated silence. Museums and exhibitions, in short, as new churches or morgues, with the photographer as a kind of divine — because unwatched-watching — undertaker.
Quote, Régis Debray: “Gods do not take photographs….. only mortals photograph.”
Act 2: The ‘tearing’ gaze as (a)ground for the photographer
Rob Mellink: “I have seen an enormous number of c$@*%, tits… but I remember none of that. Those gazes, I remember. That’s what I was concerned with.” (Antwerp, Café van Opera)
This statement unmasks the fact that the analysis must not limit itself to seeing a photograph as a mere gravestone that tries, in an impossible way, to cover up an absence and transience. Another impossibility can be discovered in this “covering-up” — one that has nothing to do with the nature of the medium, but is rather intrinsically bound up with the representation of persons in the image.
It concerns the abyss that opens in a tearing of the photographic gravestone through the gaze. And that gaze which works to tear is not the gaze of the photographer. That one is safe, hidden behind the camera.
The photographic gaze is the power-gaze of the voyeur.
The “God’s eye view” that sees without itself being seen. He remains out of the line of fire.
The human being is not only a physical being in the sense that he is a body, but also a metaphysical being in the sense that he not only physically is his body but also has it.
We are a body and have a body at the same time. The photographer has the opportunity to switch off, or bracket, the fact that he is a body, is flesh. He can indulge in an almost metaphysical position of merely having his body, without having to let it be physically, visually objectified by the other or through the image.
This is the position of the voyeur: not having to be your body, unobjectifiable, having it only as subject.
The photographed subject, especially in nude photography, risks being objectified into mere flesh.
The trap of being merely a body lies ready. And so the physical-metaphysical abyss of physicality that everyone feels within themselves (being a body and having a body at once) seems to polarize in the relationship between photographer (having a body) and photographed subject (being a body).
But the objectifying character of the photograph “tears.”
The image does not remain safely there; the photographer, as unwatched watcher, is not entirely out of the line of fire.
Suddenly that human gaze is there. And where the voyeuristic position of the photographer is truly a weapon, the gaze of the photographed subject is one too. It tears the gravestone of the image.
It makes the image leap up, rise from its carrier — it does not remain there.
It creeps under the skin, and in complete silence that human gaze speaks.
The human face carries, according to philosopher Levinas, one great message: extreme vulnerability. That is why we often disguise, mask, cover, adorn, or surgically alter our face. In passersby who, due to circumstances, often do not have this option (the detained, the prisoner of war, the homeless person, the beggar), this vulnerability shows itself all the more strongly through the face. People find it hopelessly difficult to accept their own face, or the questioning gaze of the other. In the first case you look straight into your own vulnerability, and in the other case that gaze of the other makes an appeal to you. It is a demand to take responsibility, toward your own vulnerability or that of the other. A flight from that wearisome responsibility lurks in looking away or ignoring. We then act as if we ourselves are invisible (again, not being watched). Or even switch off that gaze that makes a vulnerable appeal on us, by blindfolding the hostage. Reducing him or her to mere flesh and nothing more.
Levinas sees, in this face of the other that in all its vulnerability makes an appeal to me, an irruption of God.
It is, according to him, God who speaks through the vulnerable face of the other.
Does the voyeuristic photographer still remain out of the line of fire? Or does an abyss now open up for him in an assault on his detached voyeurism? An abyss that paradoxically opens precisely in the closing of the photographic distance. And above all: on which side of the camera does the “God’s eye view” now sit?
Epilogue: The photograph as (grave-)ABYSS and its (a)WOUND(er)
The tension between the voyeuristically tinted position of the photographer and the photographed subject can find a resolution — the grave-ground clinging to the photograph can be fruitful — if there is an eye for the fact that in the word “grave-ground” [grafgrond], hidden within it is not only the word “abyss” [afgrond], but also “ground” [grond].
The abysmal experience of vulnerability that the photographer undergoes through the gaze of the other can be a new ground. A basis for discovering a photography that, as in this exhibition, leaves room for human vulnerability, that raises the question of that vulnerability and humanity. Whether by sitting close to the skin and, in that process, exposing more of yourself as photographer, or by letting the model go more freely and letting their vulnerability take shape.
Thus, around this kind of photograph, a wonder grows that is not for nothing built around the word “wound” — a wonder that leaves that wound open. The wound is the vulnerability that tears the gravestone-aspect of the image, and out of which our humanity can blossom, can flare up.
