On day one we talked about photography as an idea--as forming and fixing a picture according to the geometry that structures monocular vision. It is important for us to remember that the invention of monocular perspective wasn't simply the result of a stand-alone desire to make a picture based on visual experience, but a matter of artists trying out mathematicians,' cartographers,' and surveyors' techniques for their own jobs. Once its principles were united, and painters began to adopt it (their clients increasingly demanded it), perspective depiction eventually became synonymous with Western peoples' mental image of the word "picture." But by the time photography came along, in a similar science-meets-art kind of way, a picture might represent aspects of vision other than monocular perspective, like irrational aspects of visual experience (the afterimage, memory, the behavior of light in ultra-short durations of time). Photography, then, may have been a new medium, but in some respects embraced characteristics of vision that were somewhat passé.
As we learned yesterday though, it also displayed novel pictorial characteristics that amazed the world--most notably, its incredible amount of incidental detail, a boon for nerds and a quagmire for aesthetes. Photography, despite its desaturation of the visible world, described more visual detail than our brains could ever notice in an "instant." Aesthetes, including the photographer Peter Henry Emerson, proclaimed that a photographer wanting to use his machine to make art could not let the machine record just anything artful, because it would be lost amidst a forest of detail. Instead, the photographer would have to organize the incredible amount of detail into a compositional hierarchy so that the eye would be able to see what was most important clearly. If photographs were going to be appreciated as
pictures, and not just as astonishing records of space, then photographers would need to clean up the mess of the world, just as painters had always done, while also taking advantage of their medium's descriptive superpowers.
Thus we discovered that while all photographs may come about from the same chemical process, this hardly means they communicate the same way. Each gives its information to viewers differently. This should not surprise us, but given the number of critics who make general claims about the ontology of photography, one would think that all it takes to get to the bottom of what photography is, or does, or means, can be grasped by a feat of intellect. I would hesitate to do this with regard to any medium, let alone photography, but the philosopher Martin Heidegger seems eager to do this with the very entirety of art. While this may seem the most foolhardy thing (philosophers for a long time have written overgeneral treatises on "Art"), Heidegger makes a novel contribution to our idea of art, and of truth, by considering the work of art's relationship to the world and earth at large.
As you probably noticed, though, Heidegger's a super traditionalist--he loves the empty Greek temple and romanticizes the starving peasant, and his notions of "world," "earth," and the "origin" of art are derived from what in 1935 would have been his imagination of the distant past. Today we have ourselves a very difficult task, then. We consider photography to be art. Heidegger gives priority to the beliefs of historical peoples, which we are; he's down to say there were gods in the temple, but he doesn't speak of his own people. I imagine that Heidegger would dodge the question of whether photography can be art; there's a reason why he doesn't offer too many examples. But that will be our task today. First, let's go over what Heidegger does.
At the outset, Heidegger tries to ground us in his terminology. Since "art" is certain but nebulous concept, Heidegger begins by simply differentiating it from other things. In this initial section, he calls objects "things" because he wants us to understand that objects exist in the world regardless of our concern for them, a point the word "thing" makes better than "object." "Thing-in-itself," by extension, means something more than "object-in-itself," since the latter is nearly a contraction in terms--an object is always already an object "of something." Having done that, Heidegger goes over three ways that thinkers have tried to account for the essences of "things."
The first way has been to define a thing by stating its properties--by making a declaration about it, and seeing if it fits it. Heidegger thinks there's a problem with this method of getting to the thing's essence because it forces us to see the thing in an artificial context, that is, in the terms and structure of the declaration we make about it. Our statements can be true or false, but they won't get us to the thing-ness of the thing. They will only get us back to our original proposition.
The second way has been to understand the thing's thing-ness as the sum-total of our sensations of it. that is, not to limit the thing to our statements about it, but to keep our mouths shut and bask in it. There would seem to be nothing wrong with this, but Heidegger manages to find something--things rarely show themselves to us all at once, and even if they did, this would not get us close to their essence. Again, we would limit the thing's thing-ness to our own consciousness.
*Note* The "thing-ness" of the thing is basically the same thing as the "essence" of the thing in Heidegger's way of speaking. But what is the thing-ness of the thing, its essence, in Heidegger's mind? This is an important and difficult question, particularly because it isn't clear that our language really allows us to answer it. It's safe to say that every thing has a different essence--it has to--and for Heidegger, the essence of any thing, or any being, remains concealed from us 99.9% of the time. When it is at last revealed, at a time not of our own choosing, but by chance, a result of our being in the right mood, the right place, the right time, the essence of a thing overwhelms us. We don't get to know what a thing means, for essences are never meanings. The essence of any thing is its utter and absolute singularity as a being in the world, a realization that happens as if a miracle.
The third way, a more promising way, has been to understand the thing as an inextricable combination of matter and form. At this point Heidegger introduces a new distinction--"mere things" and "equipment." Mere things are pieces of matter, things that have form but only by default, and not by the intention of a human to form it for use. The block of granite, for instance, is a "mere thing." Heidegger says that the matter-form concept does not get us to the essence of mere things because their form simply refers back to their matter. It is therefore useless to pursue the distinction.
With equipment, however, the matter-form interpretation is *nearly* perfect. When we step back and think of equipment, like the shoes in van Gogh's painting, we take in their matter--their leather, their dirt, their metal. Leather dirt metal. Earth, and flesh. And this taking-in of the fact of matter is possible because it this fact has come out of concealment--it had been concealed by the form of the shoes, what makes them useful as equipment. We realize that matter and form are in strife--a push-and-pull, a give-and-take, between the sheer materiality of the shoes, and the concept that formed them. For Heidegger, the problem with the matter-form interpretation is that when you try to strip away the equipment character of the shoes to get to their thing-ness, you end up stripping away something essential to them as things. You can't strip away their equipmental character and somehow retain a notion of their form distinct from that of mere things' form.
Equipment is very important for Heidegger's thinking because using equipment is what puts us in our world most deeply. Being in the world, really being in the world, is for Heidegger not something that happens when we step back and think about it, but when we're in the zone, when we're completely engaged in a particular task at hand. When the peasant's boots sink into the dirt as she carries a few potatoes back to the house, her feet are protected from the stones, but she doesn't think about this; she makes her way towards the house, thinking about anything but her shoes. But it is in this way that the shoes thus place her in her world, by being reliable as equipment, by directing her thoughts to tasks at hand. The moment she thinks "I am so lucky I have shoes" the shoes at that moment cease to be equipment, and the woman is pulled out of her world just a bit.
So what about art? Well, for Heidegger, artworks don't put us in the world the way equipment does, they "set up" the world in our imaginations. Moreover, by giving us this unique relationship to our world, in which art can put the world in our minds, art allows us to fathom something else--the earth that allows our world to exist at all. The artwork sets up the world and sets forth the earth. In the case of the Greek temple, it sets up the world of the Greek people by bringing the gods there. At the same time, its stonyness it also sets forth the earth, the fact that matter in its totality shelters the world. As Heidegger says, the world is always present with us, not as a thing, but as a unity of things and ideas--culture and nature together, as we engage with both at once--but the earth is always hidden from us when we're most profoundly in our world. The earth shelters us and makes everything possible. Yes, the earth is matter, but it is so much more. It is the fact of matter's existence at all, and the totality of all matter. This is rarely, if ever, fully available to our consciousness. For Heidegger, the work of art makes this truth possible. As he says, the work lets the earth be an earth, and the work of art is the only thing that can put this idea of the earth in our imaginations.
How does the artwork do this if it's just as much a part of the world as anything else? Well, it does this by holding steady before us, like the earth itself. It remains a thing, matter formed by concept, like all other things. But because it sets up a world, not just allowing us to focus on a task at hand, it allows us a much deeper relationship to matter than equipment does. Artworks put the world into our imaginations, whereas equipment falls away and allows us to focus on a task that puts us most completely in our world; the farther we our in our world, the more distant it is in our imaginations because we're so engaged in with a tiny part of it. When our imaginations can briefly hold in the world, we can briefly get a sense of earth, the totality of matter that allows for the world to exist, and exist in the form it does.
Okay. Now this is perhaps possible to understand when looking at the Greek temple, or at van Gogh's shoes. Color and pigment and paint and ground-up rock set up the world of the peasant woman, albeit for us, and not really for her. But what about in photography? As we have seen, the material of photography is comparatively ephemeral. And a photograph can be on glass or projected on a screen or be silver or be on salt or something incomprehensible like silver salts. It is not even clear that it is matter at all in this very digital projection. Thus two things are clear to us. If Heidegger is describing something essential to every work of art--he actually says great art, but we'll leave taste aside for now--then photography cannot be art at all. This would be a view that's not really in step with our world. Either that, or else it requires us to think about the earth and the world a bit differently than even Heidegger does.
Let's say that photography can be art. If so, it sets up our world. Perhaps it doesn't set up our world the way the greek temple does--it doesn't serve as a place where the gods show themselves to us, where the village comes to see itself as a village, but these aren't really properties of our world anyway, and this is not how the world "worlds" through van Gogh's painting. His painting of the peasant shoes, by virtue of its particular aesthetics, and because it was formed by a person in the world with matter from his earth, allows that world to be set up.
For van Gogh, the task is not to describe the shoes in space, but to evoke with every brushstroke their being worn, and wearing down. Usually we think of multiple brushstrokes comprising one detail, but van Gogh uses one for each detail of decay, and the bent form of each stroke both has and represents the character of worn-downness. These brushstrokes, in conjunction with their overall horizontal direction in the painting, the picture's insistence on the shoes over the space, and even the shoes' slight off-centeredness in the frame, a subtle but influential feature, work together to invoke the never-ending process of wearing that happens to all things, not least is the person who wears them.
But photography can also set up a world. Below is a picture of peasant shoes--sharecropper's boots, actually--that Walker Evans made in 1936, just one year after Heidegger gave his lecture. Evans's picture, albeit more reticently than van Gogh's, sets up a world in our imaginations.
For Evans, the task is
necessarily to describe shoes in space. In fact, his camera does this so well that we see past the desaturation and right into the picture's space: the dirt
is real, and the shoelaces
are real. It would seem almost that Evans is merely describing what's there, with no better judgment or skill than you or I might have mustered. This is not true, but it is, actually, precisely the point. The picture
seems to be authored entirely by photography; the boots' realness in our imaginations, and the distance they seem to be away from us, are qualities that we feel belong to them, because the photograph
is made from them, from their energy. The truth of the picture is that these shoes simply are, and in this sense, it is as Heideggarian a photograph as one could ever imagine. Evans leaves the shoes to stand alone on dirt. By isolating them on the earth they walk on, Evans allows the world they hold together as equipment to become real in our imaginations. By choosing exactly the right angle, the right light, the right shoes, and the right amount of dirt, he creates a picture that, incredibly, leaves us to wonder about nothing more than the austerity of the shoes' existence. Indeed, the picture seems incapable of rewarding other thoughts. The shoes simply are.
There are many other aspects of this photograph, actually (the orientation of the shoes, the flatness of the tones, the width of the frame) that play crucial roles in helping the photograph to set up the world it does--indeed, change one and the picture might "fail." This is to say that the world brought forth by this photograph is held up by a tension, like a guitar string perfectly in tune, and able to go out of tune. There are many photographs that have come to stand for what we think of as our world, even if they're merely fragments of the whole thing. They can serve the same function that painting can this way, or sculpture, or poetry. Just like van Gogh, Evans' photograph, by virtue of its unique aesthetics, and because it was formed by a person in the world with matter from
his earth, allows that world to be set up.
But Heidegger's claim that the work lets to earth be an earth is a little bit harder to understand with photography. And thus my controversial claim, which you are free to disagree with if you like: photography does indeed let the earth be an earth, but like the meaning of the word "picture," the word "earth" now encompasses something more than it did for Heidegger. The earth that photography moves into the open region of a world and keeps it there is an earth whose matter has an historical character: it shelters our world and arrives through science as the harnessing of energy. For those of you familiar with Heidegger's thought, this sounds like a very un-Heideggarian claim to make, for Heidegger believes that science--or rather, technology--keeps us from the truth of the earth by causing us to think that the earth exists as matter ready-at-hand for our use. But that's not what I mean. The science that produced photography essentially changed our way of thinking about our earth, partly into something for us to use, whose properties we needed to unlock, but also as something that was also in the process of becoming. Photography is absolutely the product of science, and it is the product of an artistic tradition, but in my view of Heidegger's thought here, the former does not preclude it from being the latter.
The matter that exists in the age of photography is set forth by photography itself, by the strife that exists between the earth in the age of science and the world that the products of photography display. There is, indeed, no photography without the earth, and no pictures without a world. To the extent that photographs can become pictures--that their details, all incidental, can be formed into something we can understand as a picture, something that might, if great enough, set up the world--then a photograph can do, albeit differently, the things van Gogh's painting does. But it does something else, if we permit it to. It reveals another truth: a part of earth that was actually unavailable to the Greeks, as far as art goes--energy. Heidegger talks of a strife between the earth and the world, but he never talks of this strife changing either of them--this is not strife, this is not a give-and-take, a push and a pull, a dialogue. If the strife between them continues, then photography continues it anew. This is one way in which we might consider photography a new medium.
