MEDIA
 

ENTITLED OPINIONS (ON LIFE & LITERATURE)

REGARDING THE UNCANNY POWERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

April 17, 2013

Conversation with Robert Harrison, Stanford University
(radio program on KZSU station & podcast)

Harrison and Herzog discuss the cultural transition to digital photography and Herzog's penchant for a ghostly or alchemical – or even sacramental – approach to rendering images. Herzog usually works with pre-digital cameras, where latent images are transformed into visible images with emulsions in a darkroom. 

The two discuss how many cultures have believed that photographs steal the soul. Have millions of digital images eroded meaning from places and people? Walter Benjamin said that photography is one of the most powerful instruments of desacralization of the world, so Harrison and Herzog discuss the over-familiarization of images of landscapes and objects, in an era when we live in oceans of images.

Herzog argues that the images capture the "inner state of being" of the photographer: “Five photographers are in a trench, they pop out, they take a picture of the same event, they pop back in. They come out with completely different images. Remember the picture of the naked girl at the napalm bombing during the Vietnam War? It's Nick Ut's very famous iconic image. On that bridge stood half a dozen photographers, including a photographer from the New York Times who was far more famous at the time. None of them produced images that stuck with us. They were shooting at the same time with the same group of Vietnamese running towards them. This is an extraordinary and fascinating aspect of photography.” 

Quotes

“About five billion people who have cellphones can produce fairly competent images. They're okay, but okay is not enough.”

“The procedures that I work with go back to the dawn of photography, but not for sentimental reasons. It's just because they're better. … The possibilities are enormous. When I see an image come through in my developer, it stuns me every time. It's the stuff of magic.”

“We are three dimensional creatures. We don't have the companionship and camaraderie with files, with zeroes and ones. Even when you see an image that is perfectly perfect, which is very high-resolution digital, there is something about it that doesn't speak to us.”

“One of the reasons that I use all these complicated technologies and techniques and large-format cameras is because I want to take special care. It should not be offhand, it should not be careless how I photograph.”

“The mystical part of it is not only that mechanically I can reproduce the astonishing likeness of the world, but also mechanically I can reproduce how I feel, how I see the world. … It not only registers the event, but the photographer's inner state of being.”