I’m not a determinist. Certainly I’m not a technological determinist. Cultures imbue technology with assumptions. Those assumptions are not inevitable. They are also not universal.
The assumptions built into the modern camera come from people who built cameras. Renaissance perspective is an obvious example. That’s a technical aspect. Cultural aspects are also plentiful. The idea that the natural world can and should be represented at all is another assumption that is not shared universally among humans. Calvinists and Muslims would certainly have disagreed — imagine a camera built in their cultures. The idea that film should be designed for reproducing light skin rather than dark skin is a similar cultural assumption. But what if “Shirley cards” and “China Girl” leaders had been created by South Asians or East Africans?
I say this to say that almost nothing about photography and photographic history was inevitable. With photography as by far the most pervasive art in contemporary life, it behooves any caring citizen to “unpack” those assumptions of which most people are barely, rarely aware. As AI manipulation becomes the default visual image, it seems a good time to raise those questions publicly.
This picture has been in my brain for a few years. There’s no date on it.
The verso seems only to contain the batch number 051B, but with the photo in my hand I can hold it at an angle and see the faded, famous 3-line “Kodak Velox Paper” inscription. The square format and the paper almost certainly date this photo in the 1950s. The shadows are short, and suggest this photo is near midday.
I like the broad white zigzag diagonals that bind this picture’s composition. Everything in the picture — the lines, the bright whites, the high contrast between the black wheels and sunny pavement, points the eye to this strange sight that takes up the middle ground and foreground of the picture: the naked chassis of an automobile.
Chassis, engine, wheels — and that’s about it. One can’t call this an automobile, as it’s pretty unlikely to be mobile. Yet this was a common enough sight in the 1950s. This was the peak decade for hot rod car culture.
Hot rods are an indubitable American pastime. Originating in the 1930s, the scene received an incredible boost from an unplanned source: World War Two.
After the war, America was a newly prosperous society in many ways. Its emphasis on new technology and its beginning suburbanization called to new and old both to replace everything old in favor of The Modern. As a result, many old American cars lay abandoned around the country. As young GIs returned from the war with mechanical skills learned in the military, they saw the old first- and second-generation cars like the Model T and Model A and decided rather than spend a couple thousand dollars, they could spend a couple hundred and cobble the parts together themselves into a new Frankenvehicle. And with the new suburbia offering dead streets and space away from crowded cities, there was ample opportunity to test the mettle of their new contraptions on the road.
This was far from a rare activity. Anyone who’s ever read Archie Comics or watched Riverdale is likely familiar with Archie’s jalopy, a 1916 Model T that he converts into a hot rod. Magazines and TV shows everywhere also covered the phenomenon. The National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) was created about the time of this photograph, in fact, to get hot rod cars off the streets and onto race tracks.
This naked chassis in the picture is undoubtedly about to become like Archie’s jalopy. The owner would probably remove the engine to replace it with a fancy new V-8, alter the transmission with an adaptive bellhousing and fine tune the drive train. Goodness only knows what the frame would turn into, or what seats would be used in the cabin. Whatever it became, it was likely to be a deeply personalized machine, a moving version of the art of handicraft.
With that much emotion tied to the automobile itself, it makes sense that one would photograph this naked and helpless baby version of the once and future king of the road. One could then look back on it as in a family album, the way people look at old pictures of infants to see how far they’ve grown up.
Along with the “I was there” photograph, this is probably the other most likely trope in photography: the wistful memorial. No one will question it. Does anyone question a baby picture?
Maybe people should.
Within the frame of the picture itself, what really exists? Assuming that the picture is unmanipulated — an assumption one should always question these days — is this supposed to be objective evidence? If so, what does it prove?
These are really basic questions, so basic one might consider them disingenuous. But I am not simply being polemical. I am suggesting that the picture contains no memories at all. Memories are something the viewer brings to the photograph. The person who made this photograph would be able to say far, far more about it than I could on a personal level. That person could fill in the history of where/when the picture was made, how the chassis arrived there, whose house it was, what happened next to the house, the owners, the car, the grass, the neighbors…
If the picture truly contained those memories, I should be able to fill in those details myself. Yet I cannot. I have no idea whatsoever about any of those things except some guesses about the technical equipment and the time. So why does Kodak say that photography preserves your memories?
Photographs are not memories. They are prompts. When memory is sufficient, any prompt will suffice. Anyone who’s ever had to look through a friend’s blurry, improperly exposed photos and listened to them rave about the time and place and feelings they had when the photos were taken has experienced this firsthand. It doesn’t matter that the photograph is dreadful. It is sufficient to send a person into reverie.
This might sound problematic or coarse, but it is almost exactly the same issue raised by Minor White in his discussion of photographic Equivalents:
Equivalence is a function, an experience, not a thing. Any photograph, regardless of source, might function as an Equivalent to someone, sometime, someplace. If the individual viewer realizes that for him what he sees in a picture corresponds to something within himself—that is, the photograph mirrors something in himself—then his experience is some degree of Equivalence.
White, “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend”, PSA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 17-21, 1963
and again:
Actually one of the safer identifying marks of the Equivalent is a feeling that for unstatable reasons some picture is decidedly significant to you.
Minor White/Walter Chappell, “Some Methods for Experiencing Photographs“
The danger of this is approach is that it treads dangerously closer to psychology than to applied science, much less “art.” But that is the nature of photography. The apparent absence of a human hand in the creation of an image leaves a viewer with an initiative. Because painting, sculpture, and the other classical and lively arts show a human hand in their manufacture and delivery, one tends first to consider the human element beyond oneself and rely upon preestablished categories of artistic experience – whatever those are. With the apparent absence of such a human hand, one is much more inclined toward pure subjectivity, to ignore completely that an image is human in origin but instead to refer to it as an autonomous, detached thing. That “detachment” in photography is why people call it “objective” and use it as “evidence” — because it is untampered. Nevermind the human behind the camera. But it’s also what gives rise to Equivalence.
As AI-generated imagery takes a further and deeper hold through its commercial dissemination on social media, the human hand is even less obviously involved. No one even had a camera or a paintbrush to use when making it. Instead it draws upon a repository of already extant images, which are combined by a process over which the user has even less control than in photographic printing.
What becomes of the wistful memorial trope, or the “I was there” trope in such an image world? Since the human user is unlikely to have been anywhere near the original points of creation, or the source materials from which the repository is built, there can be no personal reverie from a prompt. The best one can manage will be “This reminds me of…”
Apparently, that will have to do.
