Visions of a Nomad

For Roxana:

I think the best photographs I've seen are by Thesiger. The question remains: do nomads have photographs, images? Is this not, precisely, Guenon's point: those who live in time, the city dwellers, are forever trying to 'stabilize' themselves by the monumental or the fixing of time. Cain and Abel...

Crossing Tower Bridge every day, I invariably came across Japanese tourists and it was always the same story: this obsession for recording the moment. I felt like saying, for fuck's sake, why don't you just enjoy the time you have with your loved one at this place. Christopher Booker was right: after the 1970's: conservation. But let's be more specific...

'There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus.'

Photography, it was thought, would offer 'direct access to the real' -or at least a trace of it, like a footprint.

Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Consciousness. Yes. On the screen, the surface. To be aware of being seen. I think this is why Muslims (or at least the dougal) don't like photographs.

Here it is Roxana:

Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles ; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world that denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.

'What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection ("the mind's eye")..it removes appearance from the flow of appearances..[when ] only that which narrates can make us understand.'

[Public] photography offers information severed from all lived experiences.'

'Has the camera replaced the eye of God? The decline of religion corresponds with the rise of the photograph. '

One wonders just how much of the trace of religion passes over into the modern period without us knowing it. But certainly the aniconism of Judaism and Islam is relevant here: only God knows our true name, the spirit cannot be captured, frozen. The nomadic vision is an ongoing moment. Movement and stillness. A broken circle.

God judges us, and this is the same as saying He remembers us or forgets us, sees us in the right light.

'The industrialised, 'developed' world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility. Such opportunism turns everything-nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics-into spectacle. And the implement used to do this -until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone-is the camera.'

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9/11: "I thought I was watching a movie"

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The spectacle and capitalism! De Bord! showmanship. That's what it's all about. Display. Instead of actually living life, quiet reflection, a real dialogue, conversation, we have this atomisation, fragmentation. Like the quote out of context: the overturning of authority, the dissolution of experience, ..everyone wants to be seen or be an i-reporter...the disappearing world (Adam Smith was right here: trinkets and baubles, illusions and deception sustains capitalist development). Blogging and the Internet: same thing, isn't it?

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But here's the dope:

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A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers) . The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.

----quotes from J. Berger and Susan Sontag