The Image in Transit
Whether they use a slow shutter speed, a wide-angle lens, or shoot from far above or far below, the photographer cannot escape the predicament of capturing a moment. They work relentlessly towards the definite, even from the vaguest of intentions, because the context of its creation ceases to be the perceived signified the moment the viewer lays his eyes on the picture on the screen, or, less commonly today, the print. It enters an infinitely complex palace of constructed meanings that even complete abstraction can no longer evade. This is not only to speak of the circulation of digital media and the general impossibility of verifying the authenticity of a still image, but also to the seemingly worn-out nature of the theoretical approaches themselves. Examining conventional street photography today, we find a plethora of implicit attitudes that have evolved from the medium’s early stages into the 21st century. Chief among these is the documentary impulse—the belief that by freezing a passerby in a moment of perfect geometry, a fleeting daydream, or even in the midst of a perfectly mundane activity, we are approaching some kind of truth. The variety of techniques available today is too numerous to count, forming the axiom that the desired truth is implicitly monolithic and vaguely psychological in nature. The praiseworthy photograph, therefore, creates a tension between the technical aspects of composition, like focal length and subject, and some interior state to be located in the eyes of the subject, as in a smile, the absence of a smile, their gait, their level of engagement with their surroundings, etc. Yet there is no honestfreeze frame, a pinpointed facial expression or bodily stance that expresses the totality of a person one has never seen before and may never see again. One state of mind is always transitioning into another; in fact, there are no distinct states, just an ongoing process. The brain of the commuter, having just exited the tram, is already going up the stairs, entering the next connection, perhaps unaware of the body. Yet this freeze frame is what continues to be expected from a photograph.
The often-replicated photographic cliché of busy crowds at Shibuya Crossing employs slow shutter speeds to blur the movement around a sharp subject, thereby imposing the idea of an amorphous blob around a legible individual. Alternatively, the whole crowd turns into movement; the possible observations here are self-evident: in the hastiness of rush hour, the uniformity of working life, the photographer reiterates a politically defanged trope of beauty in the mundane, of escapism in creativity, in which we merely have to turn our noses upward and see the sun between boxy high-rise buildings. What is often missing from these imitations is the play with legibility, the viewer’s instinct and desire to resolve the frame into movement, intention, or emotion. The readability of a face or crowd is either total or altogether impossible; the photographer’s overbearing presence in their work is articulated in the aesthetics of blurred lines, the accomplished neatness within the chaos, and, often most noticeably, in the highly strategic placement of the camera. To think of another example, it is easy to conjure up in one’s mind the image of an elderly man, taken by a street photographer in New York, perhaps sitting outside a bodega, staring into nothing in particular, with one or two contextual items or people in the background. There is the rough texture of the weather-worn skin, sunken eyes with crow’s feet, and a bottle appears magically in the left hand. We can smell the stifling air and the sweat on the man’s neck and shoulder as he leans listlessly in his white plastic chair.
The image is compelling precisely because its subject likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the viewer. He is simply there, defined in impossible detail, suggesting an interior life full of hardship and memories the viewer can well do without and comfortably leaves to the realm of somebody else’s imagination, the crucial point being that the mere suggestiveness of these ideas is sufficient to satisfy a carefully constructed set of self-images that remains unthreatened by the attempted totality of the person on display. At the same time, however, these self-images cannot assume too great a specificity in order to maintain coherence from the greatest number of possible viewpoints. Subjectivity becomes a panopticon that constructs specificity, but is answered only by an outward-looking assumption of the fictional mundane we find in many examples of contemporary street photography. In this way, technical decisions in the making of a photograph become the result of accounting for absolute coherence. The final image, then, is the externalised expression of deeply rooted assumptions about the subject in relation to the world around it.
Another example of this: a man in business attire crosses a nondescript crosswalk. The exposure is dramatic with high contrast, deep blacks, and lifted highlights, emphasizing the steep angles of the urban cliffs all around. Slightly off-center, the man is fortunately caught mid-stride in an intense light beam from a reflecting window entering the frame from the top right. There are many ways to describe such an image and even more possible technical executions, but I am not interested in the merits of a fictional photograph. However, certain assumptions enter the mind almost immediately: we are likely to think in the visual language of the canonical greats. We assume the dramatic look to be evocative of an urban condition, steeped in restlessness, with glimpses of humanity in the mechanical aspects of everyday life, completely anonymous, before we have formed a single conscious thought about the image. The man crossing the street is minding his own business, looking down, probably lost in thought. The light beam naturally evokes a spotlight; we are led to wonder what the man could be thinking about. Yet the inherited context of the image already invites certain interpretations over others, not because of the actual work of any photographic inspiration, but because of the conventionalised discourse around them that has found its way into the image. To call such an image 'vaguely derivative' is not merely to criticize its lack of originality, but to recognize how perfectly it satisfies the panopticon of contemporary taste, delivering a predictable, safe fiction disguised as street-level reality.
Yet street photography offers us moments of intense recognition when the self does not immediately insert its contents into a fictional biography, whether one ascribes it to the photographic subject or personal circumstances. There is no such thing as the mundane, especially not in the setting that proclaims it the loudest. Recognition here is situated between the excessively codified and the unfamiliar, the other and the uncanny; its precondition dictates that it is neither. However, the wish to reveal something special in the commonplace often implies its own system of thought: by relying on the worn visual language, namely the psychological split between the conscious and the unconscious mind, photographers affirm even more strongly the wish for the mundane. Here we can employ the language of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Studium constitutes the culturally determined response to a photograph, the punctum the detail or moment puncturing this median visual hermeneutic. Only the latter creates an acute, more intense meaning, yet in the examples above, we greatly diminish the chances for this moment to occur. The image is not robbed of its specificity because this task would simply be impossible, but it suggests a limited interpretive horizon in which the accident is either discouraged or framed as a certainty. We are looking at a yearning work that disavows its own lack.
Which works may escape this limitation and evoke a moment of recognition? Have we not, in outlining the possible circumstances for it to occur, committed ourselves to the same margin of error Freud attempted to square in the interpretation of his own dreams? That his method survives less as science than as a way of reading, a grammar of depth beneath the surface that the culture absorbed and ceased to question, is precisely the point at which the conventionalised photograph inherits the Freudian gesture, treating the face as a dream-text to be decoded and glossing over the seams where the decoding is not discovery but construction. In the work of Alexey Titarenko, we may find a helpful example. Take, for instance, this long exposure from the St. Petersburg metro in 1992: seen from afar, the crowd suggests only collective movement, and the railing in the foreground and the buildings behind visually and contextually ground the viewer. Yet the railing does far more: we readily perceive individual hands gripping the weathered metal, attached to almost legible heads and faces. A forlorn pair of shoes sits on the stairs to the right. We are no longer distinguishing between particles and waves, but come to understand them in unison. The viewer may know the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the food shortages, yet to me, the moment of recognition lies between the established context of the image, the composed stream of people, and the abstraction of human beings themselves. His series City of Shadows is generous in these productive ambiguities without being vague; we are looking at the fall of an empire, but also an obituary overflowing with life. We are stopped short of interpreting an arbitrary glance framed by the certainty of humdrum urban life and asked to perceive hands, silhouettes, and movement as both abstraction and meaning. The result is the punctum, a deep-seated response within me that I can and cannot articulate.
The dominance of the definite in photography may find its reason in the Western world having developed, in lieu of meditation, sustained and complete mental diffusion as its opposite. Underneath the advertised claims to reclaim attention spans, regain agency, and progress the self lies the creeping suspicion that, corresponding to enlightenment, there is a point of no return for total diffusion of the mind, a state receptive to every thought and rumination. Whether or not this state exists should be of the same interest as the existence of hell to a theologian. The evidence to prove this is not only present in the photographs themselves, but in the conspicuous absence of emotive behaviour of countless millions flowing through the arteries of the city, as if proclaiming to be no more than a blood cell on a round trip. Not being taken at face value is the commuter’s worst nightmare, because that is all they need to be. Their journey is a scientific paragraph, a declaration of intention (I am going to work), a discussion of evidence (I am in no particular mood, perhaps tired, most likely bored), and the return to the door one used to enter the carriage (I am leaving with indifference). This performance, of course, is too solemnly descriptive to be accepted on its own terms simply because it is performative even if true. There is a level of fatigue to the display of weariness itself, the awareness that non-interaction can never be complete when one is on camera.
What matters here is less the actual public appearance of the individual and more the satisfaction with the illusion; in fact, the lack in the appearance is the implicit modus operandi of the seller. The reasons for this are more intricate than the crudeness of capital. As famously laid out by Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, there is a distinct tension between intention and the desired result, namely the goal of passing real or imagined social checks. The person who acts under the eyes of an observer is disadvantaged by the observer’s acuity in detecting these efforts. It is easier to point out a mediocre actor than to become one. These processes are also occurring with the mere possibility of observation in public. The marketing department of an orange juice company will not, in its wildest dreams, aspire to elicit an emotional reaction from a commuter on their way to work; they merely hope to etch a tiny memento into their unconscious mind when faced with a choice of similarly appealing options in the supermarket. The desire to stand out is simultaneously experienced as an individual and a collective imperative, pervasive to the point of affecting the central nervous system and political organisation alike.
In this manner, the mechanisms of the market reciprocally shape the subject and our cultural life. We may readily believe this dynamic to be insidious, repelled by our own entanglement, yet in the subject, this already belies inner acceptance of identitary categories as static, transferable assets. Instead, we can understand this as an inarticulated absence, a crisis without a name, mainly because it is essentially spiritual in nature. The overdetermined subject cannot find refuge in simplicity nor in eclecticism because both are the products of the same assumption, inherited from an ‘overready subjectivity, inadequate as soon as articulated’ (Barthes, 18). The reason I locate this crisis in modern street photography is that the excessively visual here meets the weight of the unutterable. On the other hand, we feel the overbearing possibilities of the studium exceeding the subject’s ability to respond to them. Wherever we cannot commit ourselves to be ‘pricked’ by the image, we feel that we have to carefully construct our answer, but in practical terms, often react intuitively from a seemingly overcrowded visual past. When seemingly everything has already been said and done, we enter a paradox in which complete volatility is equal to inaction and stillness. Both perceive the ‘brutality of fact’ in opposition to the self. As a result, one perceives a photograph as a potential threat, the payoff being the defusion of the conflict at the heart of subjectivity. The man at the New York bodega comforts us because we know everything and nothing about him, and the composition dissuades us from investigating further. While the response to the image is a mediated one, we find satisfaction in the roundabout way of reaching our conclusion as our very own.
In public transportation, overflowing vitality meets the death of the finality in the destination; we move from one fixed location to another while getting ready to switch codes, and our fixedness becomes porous. Unavoidably, the subject manifests into this void, whispering, screaming, or mute, and disappears again. But in the tram, I am not looking at the eyes that looked at the emperor; I cannot reasonably claim anything at all. I am looking at the idea of not knowing.