Photography & The Uncanny

Photography & The Uncanny
Preface

This study of photography and the uncanny is intentionally concerned with the medium of photography as its subject; it does not look at specific photographs. Necessarily, it makes many assumptions, not least to speak of 'photography' as a universal, which is 'improbable', "a photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically, it is wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is the weightless transparent envelope."¹

The interest came from reading Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and realising that there was a point of convergence with The 'Uncanny'²: I felt that the one somehow informed the other, intuitively concluding that I felt photography to be 'uncanny'. This essay attempts to theorise that intuitive conclusion, and to investigate how photography can be interpreted as an 'uncanny' medium. Freud's essay only discusses the realm of experience and that of literature, that is there is no consideration of the 'uncanny' in other artforms. Likewise, Barthes does not mention The 'Uncanny', though this does make its presence felt underlying much of his discussion of the Photograph concerning Death. Here was the initial difficulty (in gaining a consensus): only Iverson³ actually uses the word 'uncanny' in the same breath as 'photography'; however there seemed to be no consideration of photography and the 'Uncanny'. Much had to be inferred and assumed: the uncanny often appeared to be implied in such discussions of the psychology of photography yet never stated as such. Thus it became an exercise in pushing my assumptions of what photography is ("the This"⁴), and how it can be understood as 'uncanny', how the one and the other converge, and where this leads.

The attraction of photography I had realised, though never so clearly, so lucidly expressed, was the object's (the photograph's) "too close presence"⁵ to the subject, simply that a photograph, the Photograph, is uncannily real.⁶

I had begun by looking at photographs that appeared to me to be at the edges of photographic discourse, specifically at Witkin, and Arbus, but also Atget and Hans Bellmer, the photographs of which seemed to have an undefinable quality in common, and I felt that perhaps this undefinable quality could be 'the uncanny'. Soon, however, I realised that maybe the Photograph itself is uncanny. Once this realisation had been reached and under tentative analysis seemed to hold up, I had to change my approach to the subject, given that I would no longer be dealing with specific photographs, but rather with a theory of photography itself.

One : The Uncanny

The initial editorial footnote to the translation of Freud's essay Das Unheimliche, is as follows:"The German word, translated throughout this paper by the English 'uncanny' is 'unheimliche' literally 'unhomely'. The English term is not, of course, an exact equivalent of the German one".⁷ This is an important fact to consider in a reading of the essay: the subtle delicacies of meaning are easily distorted in translation, and in a work specifically about how a word can embody such an exact and definite emotion as Freud's Das Unheimliche, there is a danger of losing the sense of the subject. Fortunately, as Freud gives a brief notation of how 'unheimlich' is translated into other languages, it can be seen that the English word 'uncanny' is close to encompassing all the "shades of meaning" of 'unheimlich' (he states that, in comparison, "the Italian and Portuguese languages seem to content themselves with words which we would describe as circumlocutions"⁸ ). Therefore a potential difficulty of understanding is avoided, and as it is established that the English 'uncanny' does have an approximate similarity in meaning to 'unheimlich', it can be assumed that a translation of the text will function adequately without any need for recourse to the original text.⁹

Freud's own apologia at the introduction of the essay undermines its own importance,"It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling",¹⁰ suggesting that the 'uncanny' is only an incidental concern to psychoanalysis, whereas later approaches have implied a repositioning, emphasising greater importance to the subject, "the pivotal point around which psychoanalytic concepts revolve."¹¹

By locating the 'uncanny' within the realm of aesthetics, as broadly defined, Freud appears consciously to remove it from the central concerns of psychoanalysis. Therefore it may be appropriate here to locate the 'uncanny', the return of the repressed in an unfamiliar guise, particularly with relation to death (as the other epitome of uncanniness, castration anxiety, does not easily fit within the subject here of photography), to the subsequent development of Freud's theories. Hal Foster's account of this in Compulsive Beauty is clearly articulated, in relating how the concept of the double as the uncanny harbinger of death, and of the gaze as a castrative threat "suggest why the uncanny produces anxiety"¹² :

For Freud the evocation of these two repressed states, castration and death, epitomises the uncanny. Yet for a long time (at least six years since Totem and Taboo [1913]) he could not grasp the principle at work in these strange returns of the repressed, the dynamic of these repetitions.
Obviously it was not that of pleasure (at least as heretofore conceived), to which the psyche appeared to be pledged.Whatever it was it held the key not only to the uncanny, but to a new conception of desire and sexuality, the unconscious and the drives.¹³

Thus at the time of writing The 'Uncanny' (1919), Freud had yet to understand the dynamic of the unconscious that led it, apparently wilfully, to disrupt and threaten the stability of the conscious - which the anxiety of the uncanny demonstrates - as, previously conceived, it was pleasure that appeared to be the guiding principle governing the unconscious, and such disruptions seemed to be in opposition to this. Freud had to go 'beyond the pleasure principle', to create a new dialectic theory, introducing the Death Instinct, as the Thanatos to the Eros of the pleasure principle.¹⁴ Laplanche and Pontalis elucidate the reasoning behind Freud's theoretical creation of the Death Instinct, which has relevance to the uncanny:

...there is the need to give some consideration to the appearance, at very different levels, of repetition phenomena [...] which are difficult to account for in terms of the search for libidinal satisfaction, or as a simple attempt to overcome unpleasantness. Freud sees the mark [...] of an irrepressible force which is independent of the pleasure principle and apt to enter in opposition to it.¹⁵

In approaching the 'uncanny', Hal Foster's synopsis¹⁶ is particularly lucid and straightforward:

...the uncanny for Freud involves the return of a familiar phenomenon (image or object, person or event) made strange by repression. This return of the repressed renders the subject anxious and the phenomenon ambiguous and this ambiguous anxiety produces the primary effects of the uncanny: (1) an indistinction between the real and the imagined [...] (2) a confusion between the animate and inanimate, as exemplified in wax figures, dolls, mannequins and automatons [...] and (3) a usurpation of the referent by the sign or of physical reality by psychic reality...

As a reference point for his essay, Freud mentions the only precedent he knew of, a paper by Jentsch¹⁷. From the references in the text it can be concluded both that Jentsch took different points of emphasis on the production of the feeling of uncanniness, and that he, as far as Freud is concerned as a psychoanalyst, did not reach a convincing enough hypothesis which explained the reasons for certain situations creating the feeling known as 'unheimlich',

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty...

...it is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation 'uncanny' = 'unfamiliar'.¹⁸

Following Freud's reasoning it can be seen that Jentsch's conclusions are not insightful enough: it is quite possible to be faced with a novel and unfamiliar situation, to be intellectually uncertain, and yet not to have the feeling that something is 'uncanny'; beyond the unfamiliarity there needs to be some obscured element of the once familiar. Freud's essay thus begins by surpassing the conclusions reached by Jentsch.

If Jentsch's hypothesis of that which creates the feeling of uncanniness is applied to the subject of photography,some inadequacies become apparent. It is perhaps quite true that photographs offer an 'unfamiliar' and 'novel' perspective of reality; however it is rather more debatable that there is an "intellectual uncertainty" surrounding photography. Given that photographs are so very capable of creating ambiguity in so many different forms, this still cannot be precisely equated with intellectual uncertainty (perhaps more accurately an aesthetic uncertainty). Therefore, as this is an unsatisfactory definition (there is a possibility that an individual photograph can give an implication of intellectual uncertainty, but whether photography as a medium can be said to do so is more difficult to discern), it is necessary and desirable to look beyond Jentsch for a definition which can be applied in a more lucid argument if photography is to be considered as 'uncanny'.

Two: Photography & The Uncanny

The uncanny is a latent presence in photography: thus whereas not all photographs (by any definition) appear uncanny, there is within the nature of photography as a medium the very criteria necessary to construct it as 'uncanny', as defined broadly with reference to psychoanalysis. Perhaps due to the photograph's ubiquity, its uncanny nature has necessarily become subsumed into a general accepted acknowledgment of its strength in its representation of reality; otherwise it would be appropriate to question this ubiquity. If the photograph was to create 'anxious ambiguity' quite consciously, its unthinking use would need to be controlled; however there is a certain understanding reached about its 'reality' that renders its uncanniness neutral and ineffective (within most common uses). This is not to say though that its definition as being uncanny is also reduced to be applied only to those examples outside of the common usage of the medium,¹⁹ specifically as in journalism and advertising, where its form as a representation of reality is required to be as untroubling and as conforming as to not disrupt the reading of its content. Rather, a more cautious approach might consider that indeed its uncanniness is repressed. It is, according to Barthes, "experienced with indifference":

Society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. To do this it possesses two means.
The first consists of making Photography an art, for no art is mad...
...The other means of taming the Photograph is to generalise, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness.²⁰

As Freud describes the 'uncanny' as 'frightening' ("that class of the frightening..."²¹), it may appear too extreme a term to apply to photography. Some photographs, with regards to their subject, may be considered frightening, but as a a medium it would not be recognised as such. This rationally would appear to hold true on a conscious level. However, if instances of the examples Freud gives as being 'uncanny' are related to the medium of photography, tracing the parallels between the two, a consensus can be reached. Freud's initial example of something which is uncanny is taken from a quotation of Jentsch, that of the automaton ("doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate"²²). The camera itself is an automaton: a machine that sees and creates pictures. It is an automatic eye, and one that manages to usurp, in certain aspects, the supremacy of the human eye. Thus photography has an objectivity, a veracity, conferred by the camera's 'automatic' status. Its objectifying gaze can be seen as becoming uncanny: it reduces events, situations, subjects - reality itself - into an image, an inanimate object, this being created from an original animate. Here it may be useful to note a distinction between photography and the cinema, to relate how the two can be separated as different mediums, and to intuit as to why photography is the subject here. Cinema has the ability to create uncanny feelings due to its nature as a fiction²³, but this is apart from its nature as a medium, which is not inherently uncanny, at least as is here understood with regards to photography. A photograph is an object²⁴, whereas cinema is an experience, and more importantly as to how it is read, it is an experience with absolute limits within time, while a photograph can be considered to exist both within and without simultaneously. Certainly, both the photograph and cinema rely on the same optical-chemical basis - "after all, a film is only a series of photographs"²⁵, but it is a sequence moving so rapidly that each individual frame can no longer be held, to which end it operates in an entirely different manner to the single static image: importantly so, as Metz quotes Peter Wollen, "Thus on one side [photography has] "a free rewriting time"; on the other [cinema has] "an imposed reading time".²⁶

Thus the camera's mechanical (re)production means that it is uncanny in how it creates, yet is only a machine - a machine functioning as a creator - an inanimate object which is somehow animated by its purpose. There is only a certain amount of directed control the operator of the camera has over the photograph (from which stems the argument of photography's status as a art, which is directly linked to its democratisation), which gives the apparatus a life of its own.

The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature...[it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.²⁷

A further example of the uncanny according to Freud is "the idea of something fateful" which is related to the principle of the 'omnipotence of thoughts'²⁸, though here it has more relevance to an aspect of the practice rather than to the medium of photography, and, albeit loosely, it does serve to enlighten a certain ill-defined area, that best described by Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous term, 'the decisive moment'. Perhaps merely indicative of the chance element in photography (though 'objective chance' is a contentious phrase), it may be construed here that something is beyond the photographer's control. In waiting for the 'right' moment, a fortuitous instant when a certain compositional balance (or imbalance) is achieved, and a 'readymade' picture presents itself for the taking, it is implied perhaps that the photographer has an unconscious knowledge that, intuitively, an equilibrium will be reached somehow, and a picture will 'happen' (beyond the photographer's control, and regardless of whether the picture is actually taken or not). Thus, loosely, chance becomes fate and the concept of the omnipotence of thoughts is touched upon.

In relating photographic chance to the idea that photographs can be found objects, 'unpremeditated slices of the world'²⁹, 'chance' becomes a false definition if the concept of the compulsion to repeat is applied. The found object becomes the lost object regained: "an unconscious compulsion associated with a real event is seen instead as a real event that produces an unconscious effect"³⁰; found objects are found precisely because they are (unconsciously) looked for. A found object can therefore appear uncanny due to being familiar to the unconscious mind, being actively sought, but unrecognised in its conscious aspect - the return of the repressed.

If "the shadow and the mirror image are the obvious analogues of the body"³¹, according to Dolar's reading of Otto Rank's The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, than perhaps this could be extended to include photography too, another of "its immaterial doubles, and thus the best means to represent the soul"³². There are numerous anecdotes from the early history of photography where in 'primitive' societies photography was feared as 'stealing one's soul'³³, and it is precisely this, that primitive beliefs, surmounted by rational thought, are still present in residual unconsciousness, and these, when touched upon, cause feelings of uncanniness. Further, "the shadow and the mirror image survive the body due to their immateriality - so it is that reflections constitute our essential selves"³⁴, and a photograph is in a sense a shadow or reflection, captured by a lens and projected onto a light- sensitive surface. If the photograph is here identified as a form of the double, Dolar's discussion of this example of the uncanny through Lacan's concept of the mirror phase throws up some particularly interesting diversions - even more so if the parallels are considered between the mirror's reflection and the photograph of the self. Seeing, not as one sees oneself, but from an objective positioning, from outside of oneself - as in looking at photographs of the self - can become an uncanny experience:

But imagine that one could see one's mirror image close its eyes: that would make the object as gaze appear in the mirror. This is what happens with the double, and the anxiety that the double produces is the surest sign of the appearance of the object[...] Here the Lacanian account of anxiety differs sharply from other theories: it is not the anxiety of losing something (the firm support, one's bearings, etc.). On the contrary, it is the anxiety of gaining something too much, of a too-close presence of the object.³⁵

Seeing photographs of the self is a specific instance of this: undeniably many people are uncomfortable with the photographic image of themselves (and this is not necessarily due entirely to individual vanity). Perhaps this aspect of the photograph, by the nature of its veracity - by removing subjective vision - instill an ego-less mode of seeing, in which the stripping of identity produces the very anxiety of the uncanny.

This is a specific relation of the double to the photograph as regards subject: it is possible to extend this consideration of the double beyond this to the medium of photography itself. Freud, too, makes use of the double as a source of the uncanny, referring to Otto Rank's connection between the 'double' and reflections, shadows, spirits, "the belief of the soul", and "the fear of death"³⁶. Rank stipulates the double's original function as being an "energetic denial of the power of death", and the concept of the immortal soul being the first 'double' of the body, which according to Freud sprang from "the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of primitive man"³⁷. This phase having been surmounted, the 'double' is symbolically inverted and becomes "the uncanny harbinger of death"³⁸. Freud also relates the 'double' to the facility for self-observation and self criticism, putting what he describes as the 'critical agency'³⁹ against the ego, thereby giving the old idea of the 'double' new meaning. The quality of uncanniness therefore

...can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.⁴⁰

Thus the repressed returns as the uncanny.

Separating the 'double' from death (to which it seems quite inextricably linked), initially, for the purpose of analysis here, it is easy to construct photography as an example of a form of the 'double', broadly defined. In this sense it is "a usurpation of the referent by the sign, or of physical reality by psychic reality"⁴¹.

Photography is a double of reality; it reproduces reality with a certain objective exactitude: it is a transparent sign in semiotic terms, a 'natural' medium which facilitates a reading of the signified, most often without drawing attention to its status as a signifier. To emphasise its transparency: that which is photographed is seen through the photograph. It could be said that this reality is seen not by looking at the photograph for itself, but rather by taking the photograph as becoming that which it would represent⁴². Paradoxically this informs it as an object: photographs are rarely (consciously) considered to be mere representations, with the limits that this definition implies, but more as embodying a certain essence of the very reality represented. Reality and representation are generally considered to be mutually exclusive, contrasting one with the other, and so the collapse of the two into the photograph is significant. Barthes makes the distinction that:

...photography's Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call photographic referent not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers, but to the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.⁴³

...Barthes tends to locate the photograph's uncanniness more in its insistence on the referent. The object is not just represented as in a drawing or a painting - rather it clings to the photograph in a disconcerting way.⁴⁴

One principle difference between photography and the cinema (while both depend on the same optical-chemical basis) is how each mode is approached in context: the cinema is most often accepted as fiction, the "imaginary referent, [while] the real referent is felt to be dominant in photography."⁴⁵ Apparently straightforward, the semiotic reading of photography and the cinema is a little problematic in that, in semiotic terms,

...both modes of expression are fundamentally indexical [...] Pierce called indexical the process of signification (semiosis) in which the signified is bound to the referent [...] by an actual contiguity or connection in the world.⁴⁶

However, if both are indexical, they are not read in the same way. The imposed narrative of the cinema, implied in any series of successive images, means that "the unfolding as such tends to become more important than the link of each image to its referent";

Photography on the other hand remains closer to the pure index, stubbornly pointing to the print of what was but no longer is.⁴⁷

Essentially therefore both are positioned as having the same semiotic relation to reality, that both the cinema and photography can be interpreted as 'doubles' of the real, but their respective modes of consumption mean that cinema is affective in a different way to photography, and that the photograph's uncanniness goes beyond its relation to reality in semiotic terms. The photograph's indexical nature means that it is a reality (in itself) that exists within reality, and complicating this, existing within a separate time: the photograph is necessarily the past existing within the present. Photography therefore appears to distort concepts of reality and time, the photograph being both an instance of (stopped) time, the past, existing within the continuum of the present, and the conflation of the past and the present can produce an unnerving effect. This is most explicit with reference to the photographic portrait, with relation to concerns of death, the conferred immortality of the photograph and its contrasting status as a memento mori.

Three: Photography & Death

The nature of the photograph's uncanniness ultimately resides in and revolves around death. The relation of the photograph to the double, and of its confusion of reality, and time within reality, all inform this. Much of Barthes' narrative in Camera Lucida is concerned with the relation of the photograph to death, and its implications.

Barthes reaches a striking realisation in his discussion of the semiotic nature of the photograph. He asserts its veracity: "Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence,"⁴⁸ that, whatever meaning may be constructed from a photograph, something has necessarily been 'fixed' by the camera, something was evidentially there⁴⁹. Barthes extends from this that due to its optical-chemical genesis, the gaze is 'touched' by "the body of the photographed thing"⁵⁰. By this he takes it that, due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development, that there is a tangible link from what was photographed, something "that has been", from the photograph as object, through the action of light, "radiations that ultimately touch me," to the gaze: "the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star."⁵¹

It is precisely due to the very reality of this - the certainty of an existence within the past, and therefore that it is the past, that photography becomes inextricably bound with Death: and in its totality and completeness of capture, it is "an asymbolic Death"⁵². Iverson's reading of Camera Lucida throws up some very apposite comments which can be directly applied here, that

The nature of the medium as an indexical imprint of the object means that any photographed object or person has a ghostly presence⁵³, an uncanniness that might be likened to the return of the dead.⁵⁴

In discussing a photograph of Lewis Payne (from 1865 by Alexander Gardiner), in his cell awaiting execution ("this will be and this has been,"⁵⁵), Barthes describes this as a perfect concept: that of an anterior future, that is a future that is already a past, and this future is death. Returning to the subject of his book,

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder[...] over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.⁵⁶

This realisation is according to Barthes "more or less blurred" in modern photographs, but is acute in historical examples -"there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die."⁵⁷ By this measure, that photography is "an elegiac art"⁵⁸, the photograph has become the modern memento mori: the concept of time for the human subject/object ultimately resolves itself in Death.

The cinema does not convey the same metaphorical meaning as photography; it is not analogous as regards death: "in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and remained there forever[...]; but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole..."⁵⁹

Yet the cinema has a power which at first glance the Photograph does not have: the screen (as Bazin has remarked) is not a frame but a hideout; the man or woman who emerges from it continues living: A 'blind field' constantly doubles our partial vision⁶⁰. Now, confronting millions of photographs,[...] I sense no blind field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond.⁶¹

The manifestation of death is uncanny -"many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death..."⁶², primarily, considers Freud, due to the fact that "our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death."⁶³ Death is the ultimate incarnation of the abstract that is the uncanny: both undeniably familiar, and undeniably repressed. Thus, the photograph presents this, Death (as repressed, in an unfamiliar guise); implicit in the nature of photography as a medium, yet rarely explicit in photographs as an actuality, that it is the embodiment of the uncanny.

Conclusion

It would appear that, according to Mladen Dolar, what is to be understood by the term 'uncanny' has arisen through the rationalisation of thought following the Enlightenment, that before this historical change the uncanny was bound up within the belief systems of society, and as such was not a separate phenomenon (from any other inexplicable occurrences), which had yet to find a scientific theory. Dolar links the appearance of the uncanny with modernity itself, that what would now be considered uncanny had been "assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place in the symbolic..."⁶⁴, and, as such, after the Enlightenment, with the commonly accepted value that everything was or could be somehow explicable to scientific, rational theories, "the uncanny became unplaceable; it became uncanny in the strict sense."⁶⁵ Thus

There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity.⁶⁶

It is appropriate then that the photograph, as a product of modernity, as an invention facilitated by science, should be so affected by the uncanny. As Barthes discusses, it is not so for other (older) forms of representation: the photograph becomes paradoxical. Unlike other art forms there is no mystery concerned with its generation, its inspiration, yet, and perhaps informed by the perfunctory nature of how simple it is to 'point and click', the photograph seems even more intangible as an object.

This is perhaps an underlying factor in the compulsion at work in the taking of photographs, as there is an undoubtedly compulsive nature to the act ritualised within different contexts, as a record, as evidence, as an exposition of something⁶⁷. The word 'taking' to described the action of obtaining a photographic representation is telling - photographs are not 'made' but 'taken' - an acquisitive act. Evidently 'taken' from reality, the compulsion is to stop a moment of time (to stop time itself): that is to capture an image of someone, something as it exists at that particular instant. Essentially there is an implication in this action of an attempt, a desire to negate the effect of death, but effectively this hastens it, multiplies it, every photograph being an unconscious reminder of death (being, like the double, an uncanny "harbinger of death");

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intently) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.⁶⁸

Nicholas Middleton 1996

Bibliography