Batchen on Photography

A few semesters ago, I took a class on “The Archive”, and how its particular form impacts our understanding and knowledge of the past. A section of the class focused on photography. We talked about the role photographs play in history, how they became accepted as absolute proof of an event (unlike paintings before them, and digital images after). However, Batchen adds a new twist to this idea.

Batchen starts by addressing this widely accepted notion, that photography found cultural success because of its natural ability to capture a completely truthful picture. But he goes deeper than that, explaining that a photograph is able to forever etch something’s existence onto the world. Even images that have been manipulated start at a point of real existence. We may see photographs of people or things that are no longer found around us, but that can be certain once existed in the space we now inhabit. Even now, when we can no longer be sure of the integrity of any given image, we can believe in the original existence of what we see, although we must take its apparent truth with a grain of salt.

Furthermore, Batchen talks about the fine line photography walks between life and death. In one sense, a photograph of a deceased loved one retains his/her memory and keeps their presence alive. On the other hand, a photograph signifies, inherently, the stopping of time. It captures a moment that will always exist in the past, never to exist exactly that way again. Photography supplies us simultaneously with a sense of “this will be” and “this has been.” Being the extremely complex medium that it is, photography will never truly be replaced with newer technology. Like the content it produces, it will always be and will have been.