Imagining the Image: Photography, psychoanalysis and the affects of latency

Abstract

This essay brings together the figure of the photographer with that of the psychoanalyst by tracing their work with and through latency. Both photographer and psychoanalyst expose something latent in their work: the photographer through dealing with images that are yet to be revealed; the analyst through dealing with signs that are yet to be brought into a relief of signification. Appearing in either field, the latent finds its conceptual bearings in different contexts and by different means. This essay contends that latency forms a transdisciplinary modality, running across fields that stage its effects in dissimilar ways. By stepping outside the need to establish something analogous in latency's operation across the fields of photography and psychoanalysis, we discover what is proper to photography: the play of certainty and doubt around the production of images.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two reviewers for their engaging readings of the manuscript and the advice imparted. Special thanks to David Dibosa for providing the fine words that enabled the essay's smooth beginning and ending. Aspects of this work were presented at the conferences “Trauma and the Sublime”, University of Swansea, Wales (2008), “21st Century Anxiety”, University of Nottingham, England (2008) and “The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture”, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic (2009). Translations are mine unless stated otherwise. The completion of this essay was generously funded through the research programme of the Shpilman Institute for Photography.

Notes

1 According to The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography “[e]lectronic still photography began with the introduction of the Sony video still camera called MAVICA, an acronym for magnetic video camera. Announced on 24 August 1981, it was to be several years before Sony delivered a professional camera called the ProMavica” (Stroebel and Zakia 243).

2 On the aesthetic implications of the technological shift towards digitization and its effects of differentiation vis-à-vis the (re)construction of the “analogue”, see the collection edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen et al., Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age.

3 In Copy, Archive, Signature, Derrida draws attention to the increasing semantic weight of the term “process” due to the reconfiguration of photography — and potential replacement — by information technology. What in the past has been distinguishable as “development”, such as the different stages of development of an image, is now dissolving into a constant processing of data, which is already under way when the image is taken; or, as Derrida puts it, a process that “would begin before what is referred to as processing. This is, in fact, the term used in English for the development of the photographic negative and of the image, view or ‘shot’ thus taken — and the process of this processing has never had to wait to begin” (11).

4 The history of photography tells of Salomon Andrée and his photographs which, taken in 1897 on his ill-fated expedition to reach the North Pole by balloon, are a striking case of the photograph's extended, and potentially indefinite, period of latency. “Thirty-three years after the crash of the balloon in the Arctic and the subsequent death of Andrée and his companions, the films were discovered in the ice. When developed they revealed astonishing images of the tragic expedition” (Coe 81).

5 I employ the term “digitized”, which I consider preferable to “digital” in that it conveys a layering of technological protocols inherent to photography, therefore avoiding the misleading impression that the “digital” of the digital camera would have replaced the “analogical”. Rather, as Claudio Marra convincingly shows in L'immagine infedele, the digital camera produces “a representation in digital form out of an analogical signal” (56). “Technically speaking, digitized photography exists but not digital photography. It could seem a mere play of words but it is not so, because the two expressions entail quite different significations. To simply say ‘digital photography’ is as if we intended that the digital is photographic […], that the digital is the photographic act, but the things do not stay in this way because the act remains in essence analogical” (57).

6 André Rouillé is to be credited for this useful articulation concerning the change in taking an image, that is, from a practice structured by abstract geometry to one by phenomenological intensities, which he outlined in his presentation “Y a-t-il une actualité de la photographie?” at Espace En Cours, Paris, 5 Nov. 2010.

7 Hervé Guibert's short story “Ghost Image” profits precisely from the photograph's extended phase of latency and the expectation of its image that such engenders. Aiming to create a definitive portrait of his mother, the son photographs her at home and swiftly moves on to develop the photographs in the bathroom. Yet since the son had not inserted the film in the camera properly, he had photographed, it turns out, “nothing”: “Blank, the essential moment lost, sacrificed. It was the opposite of awakening from a nightmare: the development of the film was like awakening from a dream-session, which, instead of being wiped away at once, becomes, with the reality of the absence of an image, a nightmare-session rather than a dream-session” (14).

8 What is at stake in the shift to the digital is, as Peter Lunenfeld has argued, “the composition of the output, which has shifted from the discrete photograph to the essentially unbound graphic. It is here that the ‘revolutionary’ shift can be located. The ‘unique’ is now forced to merge, even submerge, into the overall graphic environment. There formerly discrete photographic elements blend even further into the computer's digital soup of letters, numbers, motion graphics and sound files: what is crucial is that all of these and more are simply different manifestations of the data maintained in binary form” (59).

9 For accompanying documents of Alain Fleischer's work Le regard des morts and its realization in different installations, see the exhibition catalogue La vitesse d’évasion. The version in this essay was realized in the framework of a public commission for the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the armistice of 1918. It was presented in Arras in 1998 and comprised four hundred photographs of faces of soldiers of all nationalities who died on the battlefields of World War I.

10 Talbot's observations on the vicissitudes of fixing a photograph warrant further attention. In The Pencil of Nature he writes: “The process of fixation was a simple one, and it was sometimes very successful. The disadvantages to which it was liable did not manifest themselves until a later period, and arose from a new and unexpected cause, namely, that when a picture is so treated, although it is permanently secured against the darkening effect of solar rays, yet it is exposed to a contrary or whitening effect from them; so that after the lapse of some days the dark parts of the picture begin to fade, and gradually the whole picture becomes obliterated, and is reduced to the appearance of a uniform pale yellow sheet of paper. A good many pictures, no doubt, escape this fate, but as they all seem liable to it, the fixing process by iodine must be considered as not sufficiently certain to be retained in use as a photographic process” (81).

11 The work of repression aims at avoiding the unpleasing effects of the wishful impulses of the primary processes, which contradict the secondary, “purposeful” thinking: “Among these wishful impulses derived from infancy, which can neither be destroyed nor inhibited, there are some whose fulfilment would be a contradiction of the purposive ideas of secondary thinking. The fulfilment of these wishes would no longer generate an affect of pleasure but of unpleasure; and it is precisely this transformation of affect which constitutes the essence of what we term ‘repression’” (Freud, “The Psychology” 604).

12 Laplanche and Pontalis go as far as privileging the latent content as the “correct” version of the dream. “The manifest content […] is as it were the abridged version, while the latent content […] which is revealed by analysis is the correct version” (235). The “correct” speaks here, rhetorically at least, of the analyst's overinvestment in the latent content of the dream which, at the same time, gives potential ground to justify the interpretive attempts of an analyst — after all, what would the analyst do without the incorrect version?

13 In psychoanalytic terminology, “condensation” is not to be understood as “summarization”. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis caution that “[c]ondensation should not, however, be looked upon as a summary: although each manifest element is determined by several latent meanings, each one of these, inversely, may be identified in several elements; what is more, manifest elements do not stand in the same relationship to each of the meanings from which they derive, and so they do not subsume them after the fashion of a concept” (82).

14 This is Kaja Silverman's term to describe the work of the analytic process, turning the manifest content into the more abstract dream-thoughts (12).

15 For a photo-scientific theory of the latent image, see Tadaaki Tani's Photographic Sensitivity: Theory and Mechanisms, notably the chapter “Mechanism of Latent Image Formation” (81–110).

16 In “Notes on Afterwardsness” (260–65), Laplanche coined the English neologism of “afterwardsness” (après coup in French) to render more clearly the various meanings inherent in the semantics of Nachträglichkeit, which can be divided into three groups: 1) “further”, “secondary” or “added later”; 2) a temporal forward-movement from the past to the future; 3) a temporal retro-movement from the present to the past.

17 In forming a loop, the latency period engenders an amnesic suspension by blanking out what brought us into the suspension: amnesia erases the early Oedipal struggles and the urges of infantile sexuality. Yet towards the end of “Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex”, Freud also speculates about other chronological routes of latency: “I have no doubt that the chronological order and causal relations described here between the Oedipus complex, sexual intimidations (the threat of castration), the formation of the super-ego and the beginning of the latency period are of a typical kind; but I do not wish to assert that this type is the only possible one” (179).

18 Derrida writes: “The alterity of the ‘unconscious’ makes us concerned not with horizons of modified — past or future — presents, but with a ‘past’ that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence” (“Différance” 21).

19 The impossibility of integrating the event into the work of signification is what certain theorizations of the photographic image share with the topology of trauma and its paradoxical temporalities. For a discussion, see Ulrich Baer's Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.

20 I borrow this apt term from Griselda Pollock. Note that “relief of signification” is both a psychosomatic relief (like a “sigh”) of being able to articulate and put into words what found itself in repression but that such a relief can only come about through the actual material relief of the signifier within an economy of the spoken word (41).