Photographs by Robyn Stacey
The caress seeks what is not yet, a “less than nothing”, closed and dormant beyond the future, ... dormant quite otherwise than the possible, which would be open to anticipation. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
It is all too easy to conceive of the moment of photography as that instant precisely between Life and Death. According to such a view, the click of the shutter separates Life (the world in all its plenitude, motion and sensation) from Death (the realm of nothingness, loss, stasis and distance). It marks the point where the present is frozen into history. The practice of photography here, is like enacting a premonition of a death which awaits all - unknowable (though certain) and yet still to come. Of course, it is Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida that has most elegantly assured the predominance of such a view, if not actually managing to convince of its truth:
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly “alive", of which the Photographer is in a sense the professional ... For Death must be somewhere in a society ... perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.1
With each little death that is the photographic image, comes the reminder that the subject is becoming an object, morbid and fetishised. As a record of what has already happened, the image assumes a necessary disconnection from the experience of the present. Paradoxically, life's little distractions are never properly preserved by... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Untitled, 1987. Cibachrome, 50.8 x 60 cm.
Untitled, 1987. Cibachrome, 50.8 x 70 cm.
