The Aura of Our Mechanical Arts
The Aura of Our Mechanical Arts
Arthur Aghajanian
On Film Photography & Walter Benjamin
“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.” — Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Teacher: Life is fleeting, like a passing mist. It is like trying to catch hold of a breath; All vanishes like a vapor; everything is a great vanity. — Ecclesiastes 1:2 (The Voice)
In one way or another, any serious discussion about our fascination with images draws me back to the work of Walter Benjamin. In his influential essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) Benjamin explained how original works of art possess an aura; a presence in time and space that mass-produced imagery lacks. In a time when art and culture are increasingly digitized, Benjamin’s ideas about aura raise important questions about the relationship between technology and human experience.
I’ve found over time that my orientation to Benjamin is helpful in thinking through a variety of specific issues related to digital society and its emphasis on speed and reproducibility. Benjamin even helps with questions around the meaning of the family snapshot, which has been complicated in a society where family and social relations are commodified through reality television and social media.
On a recent afternoon, I found myself musing on the popularity of digital sharing and the way we publicize images of family, when I remembered a group of photos of my own that were taken during my first years of life. I anxiously exhumed the album containing this treasure from a packed hallway closet. Then, as I leafed through miniature prints documenting my infancy, I discovered an ironic reversal of Benjamin’s idea: That under certain conditions, modes of mechanical reproduction may also possess an aura.
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Many have reacted to the rise of digital technology and the attendant dematerialization of culture by seeking out physical objects, particularly handmade ones with authentic qualities (Benjamin wrote that aura emanated from authenticity). Nostalgia often accompanies such efforts, as seen in the mass harkening back to retro technology like flip phones, vinyl records, and even typewriters. More than merely promoting nostalgia, certain images, existing as objects produced through outmoded technology, can function in their authentic capacity (and resulting aura) as invitations to spiritual contemplation; an avenue that promises a return to the real.
A printed photograph is an object that carries an image in its skin. For those who print their own images, the concreteness of the photograph is easy to appreciate. My first serious efforts with photography were in art school. Making prints from film negatives was physically and materially more intensive than projects I undertook for any of my courses in drawing, painting, or graphic design. The black and white photos my classmates and I developed in the campus darkroom were the products of an arduous, exacting material and chemical process. Bringing an image to life was a rich sensory experience. Spooling film onto metal reels in the darkroom, I’d feel the film’s texture against my fingers—thin and smooth but also slightly slippery from the emulsion. Softly clicking as I’d wind it into place, I’d feel its tension as I guided it onto the spool. In the close quarters of the darkroom, the acrid aroma of fixer mingled with the sweet tang of developer. As we would scrutinize contact prints, experiment with exposure times, and bathe paper, nothing was predictable. Submerging the light-sensitive paper into a pool of developer, I’d hold my breath and wait. Like a ghostly apparition, a slice of the world would slowly appear.
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To one degree or another every photograph from my childhood and family history is a personalized sacred object; a spiritual memento. Benjamin argued that the images produced in modern culture, increasingly widespread through the advent of the printing press, lithography, photography, and film, led to distraction. That contemplation, which requires attention, isn’t possible when we’re overloaded, provoked, and incited by images from every direction. Now consider the staggering acceleration of image production since Benjamin’s time! Yet when I retreat into silence with these old, mechanically produced images, I am drawn deeply into their world.
It matters that the personal connection and emotional resonance that makes old family pictures meaningful is experienced through an obsolete form of photographic printing, one that cannot be replicated. Delicately holding these prints between my fingers, I wonder at the miracle of their survival despite the decades. Having been shot on film and developed on paper, these images are fundamentally different in nature from the images we take of ourselves and our families today. In the era prior to the widespread use of digital cameras that began when I was a young adult, flipping through the cardboard pages of a family photo album approached the singular experience of art that Benjamin was referring to in his essay. It was to contemplate a unique object and to be transported beyond yourself.
Perusing old family photo albums causes me to slow down and become more attentive to the way I absorb images. As I turn the pages, feeling their rough texture, the familiar and comforting sound of rustling cardboard mixes with a faint crackling as the cheap plastic sheets overlaying the photos come unstuck from one another. There’s a subtle resistance to each tattered page which adds to the anticipation of the next glimpse into my past. I notice the slight creases, stains, and various marks that have accumulated over time, giving each album its own character.
In part, family photographs are heirlooms, recording a history of relationships as they change hands and travel across generations, families, and places. The fragile materiality of photographs from my childhood emphasizes the transience of what’s pictured: the people and things I’ve held dear. But as objects with a history I can feel—fingers tracing contours softened and frayed with time, they also invite contemplation. In this way I equate them to liturgical objects.
Although frozen in emulsion, these images can mediate presence the way icons do. Each time we dig out an old album, flip through its half-remembered treasures and nurture our intimacy with what we find there, we’re enacting a ritual that evokes reverence, wonder, and even gratitude. Just as a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace, the images that touch us most deeply speak to the sacredness of life. When I commune with family pictures, I’m not simply being nostalgic. I am acknowledging a love greater than myself, one that sustains all of us.
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The images we interact with today have changed drastically in nature: now we save them into digital folders or upload them into the cloud. Endless storage capacity produces a glut of images, making it harder to differentiate the ones that matter from the ones that don’t. Digital images don’t tend to stick to us due to their fleeting nature. Ironically, given their nearness on our phones, neither do they accompany us through life. No sooner are they taken then they are shared. Then, scrolled, tapped, and forgotten, they’re rapidly absorbed into the swarm of data stored in our devices. Pictures of our loved ones and friends become interchangeable with the other images we’ve accumulated and quickly lose their importance. It’s not that we don’t care about our pictures, it’s that there’s always another that can easily improve upon or replace it. These images don’t hold the impact nor the place in our lives of old prints because they are endlessly repeatable.
The digitization of the family snapshot contributes to the construction of our public persona, which is a projection of desire fueled by a sense of lack. Our images of family are now self-consciously outward looking rather than inward facing. The smartphone camera is ubiquitous, and every image it captures is fodder for some segment of an ever-expanding mediascape that promises we’ll be noticed, recognized, validated by others. The private occasion of looking at family photos has been subsumed by the public act of self-aggrandizement. We have the public in mind when we produce and disseminate our family pictures on social media, and strategize our “sharing” for maximum impact.
Our images mediate reality, influencing how we act and what we believe. Worship of the commodity image is a form of idolatry, most clearly seen in the way consumer desire leads to a distorted form of spirituality. Sacred images, however, help us to recognize the ultimate reality of the divine as well as the interconnectedness of all sentient beings, whether directly pictured or loosely associated. In this sense, the sacred image or object is one that awakens us to who we are, not who we wish to be. The sacred image is a vessel that invites us into a relationship with the divine. This means that it must promote silence, stillness, and solitude in its presence. In addition, the sacred object prompts acts of deference such as careful treatment and rituals that acknowledge its importance. My old family pictures fulfill the role of sacred objects in these ways. Yet such an invitation to reality goes largely unnoticed in a society transfixed by the spectacle of digital images.
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In my ruminations on the theological implications of the family photo, I found myself revisiting a work I had been introduced to in my later art school days as a graduate student. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, first published in French in 1980, remains one of the most important books of criticism on photography, and high on the reading list for students of visual culture. A deeply personal work, it explores the emotional resonance of photography in ways that touch upon the medium’s sacred qualities. Though Barthes resists delving into the spiritual implications of his ideas in much depth, his use of religious language throughout the book—which is essentially an extended meditation on the nature of the photograph—provides a helpful guide for those of us who seek to recognize God’s hand working in the midst of our cultural production.
Barthes' writing becomes more personal in the second half of the book as he reflects upon an old print of his mother as a child, what he calls the Winter Garden Photograph. This image captured what for Barthes was the essence, or “eidos” of photography: what he referred to as the Real and the True. In the secular reception (literary and cultural criticism, philosophy) of Camera Lucida, Barthes’ use of these terms could be frustratingly vague. Looked at from a religious perspective however, things come together rather clearly. I know because I’ve had an analogous experience with photos that include a deceased parent, the difference being that it was my father whom I had lost and that his death had occurred when I was young. Also, my images were neither forgotten nor unfamiliar. Rather, owing to insights gained through ongoing spiritual practice, I one day found that a set of photos I had lived with my whole life had become newly illuminated.
In Camera Lucida Barthes distinguishes between two elements in a photograph: studium and punctum. The studium hearkens to Barthes’ semiological work. It is the system of signs in a photograph that carry historical, cultural, or social meanings. Those elements in the photograph which can be named and understood. The punctum is that which will “...break (or punctuate) the studium.” It is a detail in the photograph that unexpectedly pierces the spectator’s inner being: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” The snapshots of my childhood speak emphatically in both ways.
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A number of years ago after a trip to my mother’s home, I brought back a dozen photographs from a formative small blue album. Most are of me, in my crib, stroller or baby walker, but a third include my dad. He’s a young father, an immigrant, posing proudly with his first child in a world that was new to both of us. I assume it was my mom who took these photographs. They have the feel of a mother’s adoration. The colors have become slightly faded and the locales are vague: an apartment balcony, a local park, my dad and I on a sidewalk somewhere by a line of parked cars. The prints are small; roughly two and three-quarter by three and three-quarter inches, including a border on which the month and year of printing is stamped—all made in 1969. Subtle details hint at the era: style of clothing, cars, and baby gear. These connotative and denotative aspects make up the studium of my pictures. They evoke nostalgia and make me curious. What was I like at that age? What kind of man was my father? What were our lives like as a young family living in the Washington, D.C. area amidst the civil unrest that characterized the period?
So where is my punctum to be found in these little gems? It can, after all, only be mine, as the punctum is always subjective. Contrary to Barthes, who locates a punctum in specific details, I find mine in the unity of what I’ve here described: the vulnerability of both the subjects pictured and the print itself. The infant/toddler, young father, and photographic print taken in by a single glance and held in my heart. Even when out of sight for years at a time, the impact of these images has remained with me.
Image and material are fused to create sacred objects that have miraculously survived over decades as small, fragile pieces of paper, presenting fleeting moments in the life of an innocent child and a slender young man. Each aspect of these objects is an embodiment of life’s transience, like feathers on the wind. I’m reminded of the teacher’s words in Ecclesiastes. He compares life to vapor (the Hebrew word is hevel), but many versions of the Bible translate hevel as the word “meaningless.” Of course, life isn’t meaningless. Like vapor it’s transitory, and the evanescence of the photograph mirrors this truth.
Barthes characterizes the Real, as well as the Truth of photography, as ungraspable. As he writes of how a photo mediates presence, he muses on the themes of time and death. Both of these are underlying themes in the book of Ecclesiastes. Photographic images appear like apparitions, congealing on photo-sensitive paper, an ephemeral object, bound to decay and disappear with time. Among the images Barthes includes in Camera Lucida is Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph, The Terminal, New York. In it, steam rises off horses as a horsecar driver waters them down on a freezing-cold day. The horses seem to dissipate like hevel. All is vanity because nothing of this world is permanent.
As the family snapshot transmits the presence of an absence, it awakens love, thereby absorbing us into the continuum of the Real. This Real is what Paul Tillich called “the Ground of Being,” a metaphor for God. Love is the shared reality of God. Interestingly, Barthes describes the punctum’s effect on the viewer in terms of grace. He writes of it as a gift of sudden awareness, an enlightenment, and how the photograph resurrects the people and places of our past. As grace is the outpouring of God’s love, when we’re open to it we may indeed be “pierced” with sudden awareness. From a contemplative perspective, brought about by quiet reflection on humble objects, the invisible movement of grace becomes visible.
Arthur Aghajanian
Writer & Educator
Arthur is a Christian contemplative, essayist, and educator. His work explores visual culture through a spiritual lens. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Radix, Saint Austin Review, The Curator, and many others. He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Visit him at imageandfaith.com
Photography by Rachel Claire
