Invisible Photography

Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida[1]

Unlike painting or sculpture, mediums in which we can clearly see (in most cases) the shift between world and re-presentation, we rarely notice the media of a photograph; the frame (paper or screen) does not break the ‘reality’ of the image. 

Naples, Italy 1960

For example, in the work surrealist-cum-photojournalist, Henri Cartier-Bresson, we marvel at the 'decisive moment' he is able to capture rather than the literal 'nature' of the photograph: light captured through a lens, impressing itself through bits of chemical and metal solution.

Photographs ‘annihilate’ their medium; they are no longer the sign, but the thing itself.[2] A photograph is an image of what never really was, yet the essence of the photograph is to “ratify what it represents,” certificating presence, and authenticating the existence of a certain being (whether photographer or photographed).[3] The photograph is not of a subject, it becomes the subject, the being/the moment it has captured. 

Montmartre, Paris c.1931

When reading a photograph we give primacy to subject and narrative over form and media. We take for granted that it is, like any other art form, a construction after nature, not nature itself. As the medium of photography finds itself based more and more in the virtual, its medium becomes invisible. Photography becomes reality.

Mexico, 1934

The aesthetic action of the 'click' is subjective, filling the photograph with its captor’s presence and authority. The purpose of photography is to dominate what is seen, within a frame, controlling its fleeting existence. Presuming invisibility, we permit the photograph to frame our perception of reality.

For more on Henri Cartier-Bresson, check out this amazing exhibit at MoMA. And incidentally, I had no idea Cartier-Bresson knew Barthes, but I should have. . .here is his portrait of the author:

Barthes, 1963

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[1] Barthes, 6.

[2] Ibid., 45.

[3] Ibid., 85, 87, 107.