Lost in the Funhouse

At the turn of the century, when the camera was still a relatively novel instrument, and its products seemed to have done what no painter, sculptor, writer, or dramatist could do before--capture reality without distortion--Marcel Proust wrote about the objectivity of a picture:

In the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate that has watched the action, then what we shall see in the courtyard of the Institute for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over.

You can never be sure if Proust thought photography was objective, if the various interpretations of the Academician are related to a spectrum of possible actions and those are depicted absolutely realistically, or to a number of possible conclusions drawn from the same picture. Proust was wordy anyway, but he might have meant that people looking at a photograph are also caught up in a kind of drama, and each person has a different idea of what will assist the action of his or her own life, and they latch onto the details in a picture accordingly.

"A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist." This is what an arrogant leech-upon-artists-type says in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And it's a measure of his pretension that he thinks a picture of the corner drugstore down the street, a store you might pass every day, couldn't have any "dignity." But in the novel, his contemporaries nod in assent, and Proust himself might accept this sentimental notion.

If a photographer takes a picture of people at a fair, say, then he's captured something that couldn't be reproduced in tme. Ever. The people at the fair may still exist, the fair itself comes every autumn, but something appears in those photographic images that can never be seen again. And it's not exactly "a reproduction of reality" either.

There's no peripheral vision, there's no movement. What after all, you might ask yourself, are all of these people looking at? The boy in the plaid coat is looking at something on his face--his teeth it seems, (maybe he's appalled by his braces), the woman next to him is looking at something outside the frame. What could it be? Can you say this is a faithful reproduction of reality if you can't even tell what people are looking at? Not the woman who looks shocked by something outside the picture, the same picture in which an Indian chief seems to be saying "Stop all of this craziness," and a girl is sticking out her tongue.

Not in a picture of the Great Pink Snail where a couple is peering through a wicker-basket fence at some person, or thing, or phenomenon you will never know of.

The crowd picture seems the best for capturing the immediacy of a fair; and you might say this is real, this is what a fair is like. But all the people are stopped dead in theeir tracks; a woman has her eyes shut in perpetual anger, but this is a joyful event.

They aren't real, none of them, and maybe nobody knows what it is the pictures have trapped. The easter eggs made of alumnium that look like walnuts, the other figurines on top of roofs in a picture of a family at the fair, Uncle Sam gesturing to the thin air next to a telephone pole, all of these attest to the madness of this world, the sheer absurdity. So you might as well sit back and enjoy the symmetry of the boy and his mother on one side and the bush and its shadow on the other; or become disquieted by the rough curve of the Great Pink Snail's pond and the parallel curve of the fence. Or cry when you see the lovers in front of the Rabbit house, if while sharing in their intimacy, you have none of your own.