The snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time... the photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood... Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate and thus is protected against its own loss... Not by chance the photographic act (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.
Mueggler的書是越讀到後面越精彩 一本歷史人類學的專著對攝影本質的討論也如此深入
1. a developing relationship with the earth as a social being
2. this relationship, forged from movements of feet over the earth and eyes over texts -- experience and archive
3. How are human persons shaped by the earth? This is one way: in its capacity to hold together diverse names, stories, histories, and experiences, the earth makes possible unlikely collaborations and convergences of the deeply sacred nature of a place. In such convergences, our divergent pasts languages, and senses of life and sociality impinge upon each other.
Mueggler太厲害了。。
He was making an equation, simple enough: experience becomes archive; archive orders experience. Perception makes the earth into paper; paper makes the earth social. He wanted his pen, his camera, his compass, to be conduits for this simple reciprocal exchange, nothing more. As he walked further into Yunnan, the chaotic sociality of flowing excreta, crossed gazes, and heterogeneous voices exploded about him. He found a way to use this exchange to remake the earth as a stage, a geometric reordering of social experience. He joined his pen and camera to his gramophone, creating lines of force to redirect gazes and voices, compelling them into a one-to-one correspondence with his own gaze -- into the same reciprocal exchange toward which he had been working all along.
I argued that, faced with the sense that his body was not his alone, that it was given him by the gazes and voices of others in which his own gaze and voice had its origin, Rock found a way to make a virtual body, composed of camera and gramophone, raised above the slime of normal social exchange on tripods and packing cases. In this dream of a last project, the nib of his pen, the lens of his camera, the point of his compass were to be the flesh of exactly this kind of virtual body, interposed like a completely transparent membrane, without substance or character, between earth and paper. A membrane around which this creation organized itself.
Not a new thought at all: each step, as it moved his body over the earth, should generate a paper road, of words, images, and charts.
p290
All were vehicles for this open, moving, living process of using bodies and their technological extensions to generate words, images, lines, and texts from the earth; of folding them back into the earth; of making them part of the shape of the earth that is experienced by other bodies, other eyes and cameras, ears and pens. In the end, this is what I wish to name when I say earth. For this living, social, creative process is what the earth has always been, ever since humans first began to walk over the land and speak to it.
引自 The Book of the Earth
