Time-images

Jae Emerling's final chapter focuses on the photograph's ability to transcend the limitations of time and its unique ability to retain a sense of life through its paradoxical existence.

As mentioned on page 167, "a temporal sensation traverses space," which I think attributes directly to  the idea that the photograph retains the capacity to open a pathway towards the future with what is past. The created images transmit the sensations that epitomize what occurs within them. Photos act as the vessels through which we can create the future through the past, in other words, they give us an opportunity to experience the possibilities from what is gone forever.

"The act of recollection is not about what actually occurred, but about what remains 'as yet unlived' in the past, that is, open to the future" (Emerling, 177).

Additionally, creating an image actualizes the "inhuman vision of the camera," which allows us to confront a perception that we alone cannot experience or recognize (Emerling, 167). This assertion acknowledges the photograph's capacity to simultaneously be alive and dead, meaningful and meaningless, but never natural or passive. It is a medium that surpasses normal human capacity through its frozen depiction of what once was because its "presentation of stillness has no equivalent in human vision, let alone memory" (Emerling, 175). The still image grants us with a viewable receptacle through which we are freed from our human restrictions and given an opportunity to discover and explore what would normally be out of reach.

Though images possess this imbedded potential, it is also the responsibility of the viewer to accept the challenge posed by the image and to subsequently analyze even those components which already seem to have a recognizable meaning. This is where the distinction between signs and objects comes into play; "we recognize things but we never know them" (Emerling, 182). If we allow ourselves to succumb to the pleasure of simply drawing subjective associations between signs and objects, opting for reminiscence rather than discovery, we miss the unique opportunity of the image.

"What a photograph thinks is not what it says" (Emerling, 188)

"Whereas signs are read, images encounter us. An image comes from without, comes toward us, and forces us to think" (Emerling, 182).

"For Proust, essence is not 'the seen ideality that unites the world into a whole' but it is 'an irreducible viewpoint that signifies at once the birth of the world and the original character of the world.' This 'character' is that the world does not exist for us; there is no image of the world as such; the world is not the gestalt of innumerable viewpoints. Essences open only through art" (Emerling, 184).

"The whole was never whole; it was never one but was always, in advance, a multiplicity" (Emerling, 185).

Since interpreting signs alone cannot lead us toward the full entirety of the photograph's prospect, it is also important to recognize that the image itself is a fragment of the whole, never a totality. The living image gives the virtual "a body, a life, a universe," a "life higher than the 'lived'" that is "neither virtual nor actual" but "possible, the possible as aesthetic category" (Emerling, 190). I understood this to mean that though the image's very nature inevitably hinders its own potentiality, it is through its very existence that its 'higher life' can be, because it is up to the viewer to recognize and distinguish what lies beyond its 'body.'

If we were to distinguish the distinct experiences one can have with an image, studium refers to a general, enthusiastic commitment, whereas the punctum "reveals the ontology of photography" (Emerling 188). It is highly important to distinguish between and engage in both approaches because through these recognitions the viewer can separate what is initially perceived and what these perceptions allow us to discover.

"A punctum is the point at which the contradiction reconciles itself: the essence and uniqueness of photography is its contingency, not only its dependence on time but its existence away from time as something both 'past and real.' Its essence is its 'real unreality'" (Emerling, 188).

Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography provides further points that take the photograph's ontology into consideration. Flusser asserts that "every single photograph is the result, at one and the same time, of co-operation and of conflict between camera and photographer," which calls into question the implications of this interaction between humanity and technology (Emerling, 193). Is the camera itself exerting control over the photographer, and to what extent? Does it redirect the photographer's intentions, or is it the photographer who succeeds in utilizing the camera for their own intentions? These questions push the reader to consider the "way in which cameras absorb the intentions of human beings within themselves;" they force viewers to question the extent of a photographer's freedom. To me, this signifies that our own agency, something we usually trust and rely on wholeheartedly, is no longer reliable when interacting with the photograph. It is the inability to synthesize human and technology that challenges us to consider the roles that each component plays in such a seemingly straightforward practice; to recognize the inefficiency of our current understandings will let us challenge our thoughts so that we can acknowledge the pathways that photography has opened for humanity.

Thierry de Duve asserts that "an image requires language to be applied to it in order to be read. And this in turn demands that the perceived space be receptive to an unfolding into some sort of narrative. Language fails to operate in front of the pin-pointed space of the photographer" (Emerling, 175). Do you think this implies that our dependency on spoken language to communicate consequently limits us in our efforts to truly understand the photograph?