A beautiful death — Rosangela Rennó

It is true that photography as such will not die as a result of the conversion from analog or chemical photography to digital imagery, for in fact photography (or at least, “the photographic” (1) has along history been both an agent and an object of modernization, and has gone through a significant number of technological revolutions that have redefined its practice and social implications. However, it would be mistaken to deny the truth of our feeling of loss for the film and the optical camera, the experience of developing with chemical fluids and the referent of the negative. If we stop to consider it for a moment, the traditional cameara is in the single technological gadget that we have truly mourned with the end of the 20th century. Nobody seems to shed tears for the passing of the typewriter, the demise of the magnetic tape, or the possible obsolescence of filament bulbs. Certainly we fear the possible substitution of books printed on paper for the evanescent characters floating on a screen, and a segment of the market has made every possible effort to keep alive vynil as a specialized musical record for connoisseurs and discjokeys. Despite quickly joining the race for increasingly more powerful digital cameras, with more and more megapixels, there seems to be a honest lament for the death of photographic culture or the institution. Even for those who argue for the continuity of photography across its different technological regimes the collapse of the classical technologies of the camera and film suggest a turnover of of our concept of photography. Or to be precise, as Geoffrey Batchen rightly argued back in 1999, with the end of the classical photographic devices we suffered both an intellectual and libidinal crisis:

In any case, even if we continue to identify photography with certain archaic technologies, such as camera and film, those technologies are themselves the embodiment of the idea of photography, or, more accurately, of a persistent economy of photographic desires and concepts. (2)

On the one hand, to be sure, the birth of analogic imagining produced an epistemological conondrum: the advent of what W. J. Mitchell calls the “age of electrobricollage”where the divide between artistic creation and objective indexical record has broken down, and creating photographic looking images without recourse to the camera had become possible. By becoming an art of depiction and invention instead of objective record, a matter of rigurous technical skill rather than of a certain control on the contingent, photography would have infected itself of same disease had brought up the death of painting, a loss in general cultural authority. (3) But along with becoming just another means of visual producing rather than the purveyor of visual truth, photography has also lost its allure value. Without a material support due to its de-materialization, deprived of the expectation harbored through the time the image was merely “latent” on the photosensitive emulsion on film, perpetually indetermined in terms of size, contrast, and even colour due to the versatility of computer postproduction, banalized because of its availability, the photographic object is not anymore a priceless unique marvel that carries on a piece of paper or a silver plate a glimpse of what is distant. Circulating through the internet or projected on the ghostly appearance of the screen like a TV or cinema apparition, a digital photograph can not be owned and treasured. Pure information does not rise to the level of provoking fetishism.

Rosângela Rennó was not prompted to devise The last photograph due to the abstract threat of the takeover of the digital revolution but because of a sudden economic turn: the commercial decision of large photographic corporations to accelerate the demise of traditional photography and embrace the change of media. The industrial transition was, indeed, a matter of the production of artificial obsolescence: by stopping the production of photographic paper, multinational companies brought analog photography to an end in terms of the mass market playing their bets at the gains coming from the sudden technological reconversion. Embeded obsolescence is, of course, a major signature of the new economy of photographic desires and concepts.

Humanity and the mechanism

Rennó’s Last photo series is a constant reminder of the importance that the specificity of the negative and the camera had in our the first two centuries of mechanically reproduced images. In fact, one of the most moving aspects of the whole project is the way Rennó makes us aware of the different sensibility involved in the visual behaviour of each camera, and the importance that the format and color temperate of each kind of film had in the character of photographs. One could say, in fact, that if Rennó chose to display this work as a series of dyptichs involving both an enlargement of the last photograph produced by a photographer in Rio de Janeiro, and the cancelled camera used in each take, it was to emphasize the kinship between the mechanical device and the qualities of the image, to highlight the textures and effects that are bound to be irretrievably lost with the arrival of the pixelated record.

Each of the 43 sets in the series is, in fact, a demonstration of the “personality” granted to a certain combination of camera and film: the grain and colour of a 110 film minolta, with its shadowy average focus, will never compare with the speed and intrusiveness of a 1980s Canon AE1, or the richness of hues and tones of a panoramic made with a 35 mm Ricoh. Certainly her project involves a cross cut of carioca photographers, a review of the visual imagination and the understanding of the local identity of photojournalists, commercial practitioners and artists. Nonetheless Rossângela Rennó has granted the camera bodies she collected, repaired and handed in to her collaborators, a starring role that is validated in their exhibition along the images, like museum specifimens. Those cameras appear as corpses of a bygone cultural and industrial era, where the finest clockmaking craftmanship and miniature electronics allowed us a maximum control of the exposure of extremely photosensitive material.

Rennó’s consideration for the historical meaning of this cameras (some of them proud Brazilian examples that pay hommage to the attempt of the periphery of building an independent industrial power) is by no means excesive. These instruments are major carriers of aesthetic and social values, deeply involved in the affective significance of photography. In this the market and the high brow photographers used to agree: camera formats and film involved different forms of perception (4). There was always a certain fetishism around the camera brands: they provided an object of identification, if not a part of our body and seses, that practically fused with the name and legend of the photographer. After discovering the Leica in Marseille, Henri Cartier-Bresson came to describe it as an “the extension of my eye”, and thus turned into a prosthesis of his own body he was never to depart from it (5). In the same manner, kept on promising the amateur that the increasingly automatic mechanisms would be so integrated to them that they would practically fuse with him, an idea that found its perfect embodyment in Andres Feininger’s portrait of the Photojournalist (c. 1955) whee the two eyes of the photographer are substituted by the lens and viewfinder of a Leica, transforming the camera into an industrial mas. But such fantasy was also pervasive among the popular fantasies of the medium. Minolta ads in the 1970s extolled “you are the camera and the camera is you” (6), whereas Zen philosopher of the camera, Robert Leverant , would practically argue that the photographic camera was the passage between the interior and exterior self aimed to restablish our mystical relationship with the universe.

The traditional camera itself involved a way of seeing that can’t be just as easily discarded with the arrival of the uniform standards towards which digital cameras strive. The differences of optics, contrast and temperature are not a matter of aesthetic decision or the photographer’s “style.” They depended on the “body” of the camera, and the chemical nature of each film. They were characteristics related to the material conditions of each instrument, that soon will stop being part of our experience of the world to become a purely technical expertise of museum curators and restorers. Very much like the different textures and shades produced by different etching techniques, the demise of the negative will make the appreciation of different films and camera eyes an esoteric and archaeological knowledge.

A better afterlife

One of the most sentimental elements of the experience of modernity lies in the fact that once a technology becomes obsolete it gives way its innermost humanity. What once proudly appeared as a supernatural being invested with powers well beyond the intellectual powers of the layman, finally renders itself as a product of ingenuity and labour, which even seems touched with the illusions and sufferings of its former owners (7). Worn out, in this case, means emotionally charged. When it becomes part of history every technological marvel mutates into an example of kitchen science. At the same time the machine frees its ghost, and therefore suggests the sensibility of its maker.

This is the reason why old cameras appear as emotionally charged as a the face full of wrinkles of an old gentleman or lady, to the point that even the smell of machine oil is able to trigger a sense of distinction. This general phenomenon is particularly poignant in the case of cameras because one of the main tasks of photographic records is to provide of material for the future longing for everyone’s “better” past. In any case, an old camera (very much as an ancient typewriter) become a double witness of a bygone utopia. Every camera collection is, in that sense, a collection of dead eyes.

Useful clichés to remember

To photograph the Christ of Corcovado in Rio is to fell pry of a cliché. With hindsight it is possible to see to which extent A ultima photo involves a witty game with stereotypes. First, of course, that apart of England and France, Brazil is one of the mythical birthcraddles of the art of fixing shadows: it is well known that Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence was the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, and the first to coin the term “photography” in 1824, a decade before John Herschel (8). It is more than fitting that one should also record photography’s brazilian death. Besides, there is the country stereotype, Stefan Zweig fixed in the title of his book of 1941: Brazilland of the future (9). It is not entirely without irony that photography that was, both, one of the most important agents of modernization and a witness of the crimes of modernization, would finally end trampled under the feet of modernity. Finally, there is the simple issue that each photograph, as the result of an endlessly reproductible negative, was a cliché of sorts. I do not know if it is still correct to call digital images clichés as well.

The death of a metaphore

It is through the obsolescence of language that we are forced to notice the collapse of a cultural setting, for worldviews fell apart when words become meaningless and empty. I had a glimpse of such an experience a few months ago, when teaching an introductory class in the art history masters in Mexico city with very young students, most of them born in the 1980s. I was discussing the relationship between modern and contemporary artworks and the social system aludying to the metaphor of “the negative” when I felt an uncomfortable silence. I had the slightly paranoid feeling that at least some of my listeners were unable to follow my reasoning. I tried to bridge the misunderstanding, explaining them the way photographs were taken in the analog era: the mistery of the latent image, the excitement of the magical development of a print under the red glow of the safety light, the wealth of information lying in the microscopic details of a take, which is implicit in the concept of the optical unconscious. In short, I made sure that at least this group, who came to age with the new century, will be able to understand Blow up’s critical importance. But deep inside I had a feeling of having witnessed a catastrophe, the end of an important part of my own world. I felt melancholic and lonely like the day I read amongst the text labels of an exhibition of Mexican engraver Leopoldo Mendez, a couple of entries to explain the viewers what “socialism” and “communism” meant.

Of course I ought to have known that Museums were ossaries of nightmares and dreams. I could not help thinking that there ought to be a kinship between certain forms of mass reproduction and forms of social imagination. To which extent modernity´s utopianism, as long as its distrust on appearances, contained the experience of the dark ghostly shadows formed in the surface of glass or film and their peculiar oppositional semblance to appearances? How could notions such as the “dialectical image” or “negative dialectics” could survive the oblivion of such a powerful referent of the inversion of our perceptions?

It is probably to be expected that that the demise of classical chemical/analogic photography will bring cultural challenges well beyond the unceratinty around the truth value of digital image production, the crisis of the photographic index and the blurring of the virtual and the documentary. The texture of a way of experiencing the world and our memories is being transformed for the sake of a new industrial standard that does away with the concept of a fixed shadow or materialized memory, simply because digital information is entirely indifferent to the nature of its carrier. It is not only that the digital image does not seem to be affected by entropy, as long as we keep on migrating a file from one computer to the other. Digital information is not anymore inscribed in any recognizable surface. What would it mean to think the world without the awareness of the materiality of the recording implied in the scratches on LPs and shapshots, and the cracks of oil paintings?

Last sight

It does not really matter if it was Rosângela Renno’s intention or if it was simply an unconconscious side-effect of the atempt to stage the death of photographic medium: each of the cameras Renno lent to Rio de Janeiro photographers to memorialize the passing of analog image making experienced a merciful last rite of sorts. When commissioning 43 professional photographers to portray the Christ the Redeemer of Corcovado (1931) Rennó did not only signalled the paradoxical status of an image that is both the symbol of a city and visual commodity whose control is still disputed between the Cathoclic Archidiocese of Rio and the heirs of french sculpture Paul Landowski (10). Beyond pointing out the untenable copyright claims around a public monument that is practically impossible not to get into frame of if taking a snapshot from any point in the city, Rennó made each photographer perform some sort of last rite. That each of this mechanical-optical devices has been made to see the effigy of Christ for the last time, before being blinded for ever covering with silver paint the inside of its lens puts in practice the ideal of a romantic death (11) where the person dying fixes his or her glance in a crucifix in advance of the delights of sharing eternal life with the redeemer. It is as if the Corcovado himself would be revalidating the promise made to the good malefactor from the top of the cross: “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise”(12). Condemned to regress to become a mere camera obscura, displaced by a new form of reproduction, Renno’s cameras are resucitated just once to lay afterward like dead cold fish, their eyes clouded by a silver barrier, one-eyed monsters put to sleep under the vague hope of becoming at least objects of contemplation.

1. This distinction between photography and “the photographic” is a significant element of the discourses about digital photography: “The digital image ahhinilates photography wile solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.” (Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”in: Liz Wells ed. The Photography Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, p.241. Available online: http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html) “Insofar as digital images reproduce the characteristic features of an image made with a lens and a film plane (and most do), they remain photographic”. See alsoSteve Edwards, Photography. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.136-137).
  2. Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age”, in: Carol Squiers, ed., Over Exposed.Essays on Contemporary Photograpy. New York, The New Press, 1999, p. 19.
  3.   William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, Mass.-London, England, The MIT Press, 1992, p. 6-7, 16, 20.
4.   There is no question that a 4x5 or 8x10 view camera calls for a diferent kind of ‘seeing’ than a hand-held 35mm camera. Ideally, a photographer develops apersonal style and works with a camera format that complements it. But a photographer who uses several camera types will often find that his very perception changes when he is carrying a small camera instead of a large one, and viceversa.
  5.   Henri Cartier-Bresson, in: Susan Sontag, On Photography, Sixth Printing, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978. p. 185.
  6.    Ibid. p. 186.
  7.   The traditional photographic image once represented the inhuman, devilish objectivity f technological vision. Today, however, it looks so human, so familiar, so domesticated - in contrat to the alienating, still unfamiliar appearance of a computer display with its 1280 by 1024 resolution, 32 bits per pixel, 16 million colors, and so on.” Lev Manovich, Op. cit, p. 242.
  8.   That Hércules Florence’s story has become standard in the introductory books on photography is a significant step in the change of our cultural genealogies. (see: Eduards, op cit., p. 72, 78.
  9.   The title of Zweig’s hopeful view of Brazil of 1941, written under the hopeless conviction that Europe would soon fall completely into the hands of the Nazis. (Stephan Zweigh, Brazil land of the future, New York, Viking Press, 1941, p. 4.
  10.   Fabio Cypriano, “In the name of the Father. Monument turns 75 with parternity still under discussion”, in: Rosângela Rennó, A última foto, Sao Paulo, Galeria Vermelho, 2006, p. 83-84.
  11.   See: Philippe Ariès, El hombre ante la muerte, trad. Mauro Armiño, Madrid, Taurus, 1983, p. 358.
  12.   Luke, 23:43.

MEDINA, Cuauhtémoc. A beautiful death: On Rosângela Rennó’s Última foto. In Prefix Photo #17, 2008, pp. 18-31.