Images as Actors in History

Michael Kimmelman visits an odd photography exhibit in Paris called "The Event: Images as Actors in History." The exhibit is like an iPhoto slide show, a grab bag of images from unrelated events: the Crimean War, the introduction of paid holidays in France in 1936, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the attacks on the World Trade Center, and, apparently without any intended irony, early aviation. Kimmelman describes the exhibit as "stylish despite making no immediate sense," so he takes in the exhibit on its own  haphazard terms. He  lingers on a 1909 photograph of the French aviator Hubert Latham sitting on his demolished monoplane as it floats in the English Channel. The aviator calmly smokes a cigarette next to his fuel tank while awaiting rescue. Kimmelman likes this kind of art of chance, but it's the more staged photographs of the Crimean War that speak more directly to the role of photography in the construction of historical events.

The British photographer Roger Fenton was part of the band of Crimean War photographers who took the first battlefield photographs. We're now used to the strangeness of images from warfare. For us shock and awe is white tracer bullets shooting across green night vision images of a Middle Eastern city. As Kimmelman notes, the early photographs from the battlefields must have seemed similarly strange. The "[m]ute, bloodless scenes of moonlike panoramas" could not be recouped into heroic narratives. Kimmelman says, "photographers replaced grand synthetic historical pictures with more faithful views of what was actually happening on the ground. War didn’t make sense. It was random, piecemeal. Photography suited a dawning truth." Events were now real in a way they hadn't been before, and consciousness itself was changed. Kimmelman says, "The Crimean War helped usher in the age of modern consciousness."

Kimmelman doesn't specify the nature of this new consciousness, but one could argue that photography changed people's relation to death. We look at Fenton's shot of soldiers sharing a bottle of wine and see an image that is composed like a painting, but we're prompted to speculate which of these men died in battle, and which limped home to die later. The ridge cutting across the image protects the soldiers, but also blinds them to the forces arrayed against them. The enemy could appear suddenly over the ridge at any moment. This strange image is one of those photographs Roland Barthes would call "mad images, chaffed with reality." We look at this image with a certain anxiety. It's a moment of repose framed by violence and death. We can't recuperate it into a history lesson or spin out an interpretation of an encoded text like we can a painting. Photograph is inherently violent because, as Barthes put it, "it fills the sight by force, and because nothing in it can be refused or transformed." Every day we see images of Jarheads trudging through some blighted Iraqi city, and we know to see them as noble soldiers caught in a futile war. They're risking death so that we don't have to. But Fenton's photograph is something else entirely. A glimpse into a long vanished reality, Fenton's photograph is as unintelligible as our own death.