Photography, spilling into language

"Nemet-Nejat says the excess of light in 19th Century photographs, over which the photographers had limited control, is their ‘constant source of power’. The glow is something ‘the medium can not completely hold or integrate’. The glow causes ‘a blurring, a failure creating an excess of sadness, turning the photographic object, a piece of paper, like a bottle, holding the light of a hundred years ago, into an object of meditation on time, on mortality, the sadness of light surviving the object from which it emanated, the image, in this production of excess, turning, spilling into language.’...

If I hadn’t have noted these quotations in my Moleskine, I might well have forgotten them. The book, once devoured, would have been returned to the pile of other books waiting to be read and re-read, and I would have only this vague recollection of having been moved and impressed by an idea, soon forgotton, that spurred me on, helping me to say what I need to say, still unsaid.

Yet also, I feel that the notebook slows me down, defeats the apparent pleasure of reading, which is to read, to move forward today unhindered by questions, by doubts and by a third thing for rhetoric’s sake. Thinking, reflecting, writing, are perhaps excesses of reading. It spills into more language."

Steve Mitchelmore

Visit, "This Space: The Fire's Blog"

Image: ABF

Comments

[Chris Meisenzahl]

This got me wondering, will traditional photography be cool and "retro" in a decade or two as fountain pens and mechanical watches are now to some?

Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

[Hayden]

The idea that images can spill into language conjures concepts (or non-concepts) of deconstructionist thinkers such as Derrida. I am researching presently Derrida's writings about silent words - tacit speech - and Foucault's examination of differance, in relationship to photographic images. Where, if there is any, a conceptual basis for the visual language - in the way images may be understood as texts - to express thoughts with the use of a silent language. The expression of different meanings and their power structures and struggles in society. It is commonly held that the written word has an instant authority over the spoken. The photographic image, once a spectacle for truth, a lawgiver, has been challenged and subverted by the digital age. Where now does the photographic image stand in a social power struggle?The political use of photographic images is also very important to examine along the same lines. Just as the American Government during the Vietnam War used language to disguise the truth while the journalistic images told another story, now current governments embed photojournalists and arrange particular symbolic visual acts to fervour popular support or tell a story/narrative. viz a vi The collapse of Saddam Husseins stature in Baghdad.