Quote Response

In the excerpt from Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction, he refers to photography as “the greatest disaster of the twentieth century,” the danger being that the “distorted and perverted world of the photograph” will be taken to be the only real one. He uses his relationship to photographs of his family as an example, explaining that he treasures the memory conjured by the images rather than the “distorted” representations themselves. To an extent, I identify Bernhard’s fear that the record will replace that which was once recorded. We live in a world that produces cameras with viewfinders on the same side as the lens itself, encouraging the bent-wrist self-portrait that is so common, it has been named after the social networking site that once encouraged it. While MySpace has become hideously passé, my generation has not forgotten what it taught us: to be obsessed with how we represent ourselves. But isn’t that what a self-portrait really is, a controlled representation of oneself? Every artist who has created a self-portrait has made the choice whether or not to represent themselves honestly. The problem that photography presents, what Bernhard calls “distortion and perversion”, is that the camera, not the artist’s hand, makes this choice. With knowledge of such a machine, the viewer assumes that the image before them is an unaltered replica of whatever was in front of the camera at the time the photograph was taken. However, as Bernhard recognizes, this is an impossibility. A photograph flattens space and captures time. The camera condenses a three-dimensional experience into a two-dimensional object. Bernhard seems to find the capturing of time more unsettling, specifically when it comes to portraits. When photographed, people become “pathetic dolls…brainless and repellent.” They are stripped of all movement, depicted without breath. There is no evidence of the warmth and personality that distinguishes them from an inanimate object. This is where Bernhard finds the true perversion. For him, photography is the creation of an object without, unlike a painting, any human evidence of the person who made it and fails to recognize the humanity of its subject. It is an inhuman art.

I am not as repulsed as Bernhard. I am not even sure that I am repulsed at all. I do, however, believe that there is danger in trusting the photograph as a substitute for reality, especially in the age of such weapons as Photoshop. I think that a photograph should be viewed as what it is: an object and an image. While there is definitely some allure in it’s likeness to reality, nothing beats the real thing.