14 September 2010: "Pitchfork writes article abt how bands take lofi photographs to brand themselves as ‘vintage’/authentic"

This post is about the trouvaille. Carles seizes upon an essay at the popular bastion of online music criticism, Pitchfork (p4k), to elaborate several of his own theses with regard to the ever-evolving artistic medium of photography. "Modern humans associate ‘vintage looking photographs’ with authenticity," Carles states, and then proceeds to examine some of the ramifications of this condition, namely the radically contingent aspect of both the photographic image and the experience of personal authenticity, which is in danger of being less a lived experience than an artfully procured or manufactured product akin to images contrived to elicit a nostalgic response to false or nonexistent memories. We become nostalgic for a lost authentic self that in fact is in the process of being made and consists of nothing but manufactured nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to be backward looking when it is in fact a projection into an impoverished future devoid of new ideas or the potential for progress. Carles asks: "Is it more alt to look like ur from the past instead of from the future?" Of course, the answer he implies is "both at the same time."

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, but

The 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.