In his position on photography, Carles lies perhaps halfway between the Barthes of Camera Lucida and the Sontag of On Photography. Barthes famously claimed that "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable, but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs." Carles traces a similar argument when he declares: "H8 our evolving society. Wish we could just live in our ideal vision of the future, but never forget the chill vibes of the past…
H8 how technology makes information/mp3s more accessible, but ‘cheapens’ moments that we once thought were meaningful."
Photography seizes upon experience and paradoxically drains it of its ontology; it becomes less real for being photographed, a kind of rough draft or dress rehearsal for the image, which supplants it as the real artifact. Technology colludes with capitialism in reifying experience in this fashion, as Carles notes. It decries the "notable" -- not our own aesthetic or emotional response to events. We take photographs to have meaningful experiences; the camera becomes the prerequisite. Meaningful experiences cannot occur outside the image medium. Experience is an image. Carles notes, "basically ‘photographs represent memories. Indie album covers are photographs that represent moments frozen in time, kinda like pictures.’" But photographs and memories are only radically equivalent when the mediated level of experience is immanent and not transcendent, when it can no longer be determined as preceding or following the Event, as such. Is a moment "frozen in time" still a "moment", epistemologically speaking? What sustains the difference that allows memories to remain only "kinda like pictures." How can we preserve the distinction, in the face of a betraying "indie" aesthetic that seeks to efface the difference? Indie appropriations of photos no longer permit images to bear witness; instead they falsify the self. "Do u just want to live a life of leisure without any modern technology, just capturing moments with vintage cameras?" Carles taunts. Of course we don't; the proposition is self-falsifying. The vintage appearance of the image with which we delineate our leisure does nothing to exempt it from the teleological critique of technology. "Capturing moments" still tears apart the integrity of the ego as it is embedded in time-space.
In elucidating this position, Carles clearly has in mind Sontag's assertion that "as photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure." But the indie aesthetic extends that space of insecurity to the whole of everyday life. In one of his quintessential argumentative moves, Carles leaves the crux of argument open-ended, both unstated and overdetermined:
S000 crazy how we live in a modern world with hi-resolution cameras, butThe point: there is no "but"; there is only "but"; there is no "but"....
It can't be resolved for or against the contradiction, Carles shows, just as images themselves can't be resolved or synthesized with memories even as they appear to produce them. Images help us remember only to dent the possibility of memory. We have always never been here before.
Flanges
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