The Way of the Image
To state the obvious, an image is not the same thing as what’s in the image. I can’t find shade from a tree in a film; I can’t talk to the people in a tv show. Which means we all know that there’s such thing as an image that’s different from an image-of (image of a person, tree, sky, car…). Art lives precisely in the terms of relation between the two: between the valence of what’s there and how that’s processed, digested, and metabolized into something else. I look at two examples that deploy wildly different tactics: Harmony Korine’s film, “Spring Breakers”; and Richard Avedon’s photographic portraits.
Seeing Seeing, or Image as Metabolism
We often talk about taking pictures. The suggestion is that the camera grasps, taking possession of something in the world: it takes what’s there — your friend, the sunset, a dog — and puts it here. It’s a cool conflation of sight and touch that would please the great French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues that to see something is to palpate it. (I love the word palpate — and, as I’m no medical doctor, I don’t get to use it very often. Except when I write about Merleau-Ponty.)
But what is it that’s being taken? The presumption is that the stuff of this world is self-evident, a given: I take you and put you in my picture. The fact is, however, that nothing is simply what it is. What I am to you is quite different than what I am to my son, my neighbors, people I’ve never met, my mother. Merleau-Ponty argues that a thing-in-itself, if we feel the need to even talk about such a thing, is that which is seen from all possible perspectives at the same time. A thing is one thing that is many things.
Looking at a cow, one might see divinity, food, a sign of human cruelty, of a rural past, as a pastoral idea, as a funny meme, as an adorable face you want to smooch. That mechanism of perception and sense making—that is, eyes plus thought and all that that entails such as history and culture—is a function that determines which aspect of the cow we see. And what is an image if it’s not precisely that: a mode of seeing.
When we look at an image of a cow, we don’t see a cow. We see the seeing of a cow.
I therefore want to suggest a different image of image making. Rather than a photographer taking a picture of the world, a photographer consumes the stuff of this world and metabolizes it. Just as we metabolize food—breaking it down, processing it, shitting it out, turning it into fat deposits and energy—an image digests and distributes a thing’s possibilities, amplifying this, muting that. An image, then, is not capture as much as it’s inflection, a metabolic function transforming what’s there into something else.
Image & Image-Of
An image, then, has at least two components. There’s what’s there, what’s in the image—our cow, your sweetie, a sunset. I want to call this the image-of. I use that term rather than, say, the subject of the image because we don’t see the subject per se. We don’t see a cow, your sweetie, a sunset. We see something that has already become something else that is neither “real,” nor image. It’s the potentiality of the subject before it’s metabolized.
And then there’s the image which is at once harder and easier to see. It’s easy because, well, it’s right there. But it’s harder because it’s a how more than a what, a process more than a thing. The thingness of the image is what hangs on the wall or is posted on some social media platform. But what I’m calling the image is an algorithm, a sense-making formula that processes the world like this. Like what? Like that image on the wall.
Think of it as style. How do you know an artist’s style? From their artwork, of course. And yet if we stopped there, it would mean we’d never be able to identify a style as all we’d have are images—this one and that one and this other one. Style is a function that, in conjunction with a conspiracy of hardware and software—of stuff and processes—produces those images. Such is an image: it is a way of consuming the world.
What we see on the wall, or on our phones, is a calculus of relations between the valence of the image-of and the metabolism of the image. It’s why some people are troubled by cinematic violence, even when it’s highly stylized. When they see Vincent Vega shoot Marvin in the face, all they see is some poor guy getting his head blown off. Others, meanwhile, see the image, the way it takes up the image of violence with a mixture of joy, humor, and cool, turning the violence into something else entirely.
Many directors—Godard, Kubrick, Terry Gilliam—decry Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, considering the image-of to be so grotesque that no one should even try to metabolize it. The valence of the Holocaust is too strong. Which is not to say that the Holocaust can’t be the subject of a film. But like Tarantino’s camera in Reservoir Dogs that turns away from the ear being cut off, those films come at their subject indirectly—Claude Lanzmann’s Shoa, Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Louis Malle’s Au revoir, les enfants. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not. My point is that the image is always a relation between image-of and a metabolic function we call an image.
Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers”: A Pornography of the Image
Harmony Korine’s delirious, delicious Spring Breakers operates with a complex, beguiling relation between the barely clad bodies on screen—the image-of—and the movie itself, the image. As a quick search reveals, this has spurred a distinctively polarized view of the film. I’ve written about why I love it so much and its vision of a delirious cinema…but that is neither here nor there (though it’s a good essay I wrote, I gotta say). I’m not interested in whether you like the film or not. I’m interested in its strange terms of operation.
The film opens on a Florida beach filled with college students in bikinis and bathing suits, some topless, as they drink, wrestle, feel each other up, smile, flip the bird—all while Skrillex screams from the speakers. It is downright Dionysian, a veritable bacchanalia.
But then there’s the image we’re seeing. We don’t just see these bodies; we see the filming of these bodies. In that opening scene, the camera moves relentlessly as the scantily clad nubile young people address the camera, breaking the fourth wall. The camera will never have been voyeuristic. Which is to say, we don’t just see images of “sexy” bodies, we see images of these bodies being filmed. And being filmed in such a way that what we see is no longer simply bodies on the beach: we see a relationship to those bodies, a particular metabolism at work.
The film is decidedly not pornographic in the traditional sense in that it’s not trying to get you hard and/or wet (and my guess is very few viewers enjoy it that way). What we see is not prurient but rather is a posture, a positioning, at once critical, disgusted, enthralled, intrigued, dismayed, and confused by this grotesque American ritual of spring break. Korine no doubt could have made a reserved documentary critique but he does something much more interesting. Rather than quashing the erotic charge and debauchery, Korine channels it, taking advantage of its valence while shifting its meaning.
And yet the image is sexy. I, for one, am turned on—by the film, not by its image-of. In a kind of Jujitsu move, Korine leverages the pornographic possibilities, hedges the power of the erotic, channels that distinctive drive we all know into the body of the image, lending it this voluptuous intensity, this remarkable charge of titillation. It’s a nifty move, taking up the valence of the pornographic in order to channel it into something else. (Gaspar Noé’s Love metabolizes the pornographic, as well, but quite differently; he wants to get you sexually excited while layering in an austere, if maudlin, emotionality.)
Spring Breakers is indeed absolutely gorgeous. There are of course any number of beautiful image makers throughout the history of cinema such as, say, Terrence Malick in The New World. Malick’s images are breath taking, exquisite. But they’re also chaste, ponderous, religious. Korine’s, on the other hand, are DayGlo confection. They hit us in our teeth rather than the soul (Malick) or in our special private places (pornography). If it didn’t confuse matters, I’d say that Korine gives us a pornography of the image as distinct from the pornography of human beings.
Richard Avedon’s Portraits: Affirmative Redundancy
We all have hundreds of pictures we’ve taken with our smartphones. These images are necessarily a positioning, necessarily a metabolic performance. In the overwhelming majority of these photos, however, we get the metabolism of Apple’s programming meeting the art programming of our culture (or, rather, the conspicuous lack thereof) meeting the practical and cultural demands of social media. In most cases, the metabolism of the photographer is nearly absent, at best.
Before you’ve even picked up your phone, the images you make have already been predominantly determined. As we scroll through IG and the other apps, it’s hard not to note the similarities between them. They are, for the most part, all cliché, dead on arrival, of interest only to friends and families. When people love love love the cute bird, the silly shenanigans, the funny kid, the hot girl, they don’t love the image. They love the image-of.
Now take Avedon’s portraits. These are not a smartphone’s presentations of faces in his life. As with Korine in Spring Breakers, Avedon declares his images as images, often leaving the metadata in frame. They are not the photojournalism of, say, Dan Weiner (my namesake! no joke!) but are conspicuously contrived studio pictures. Avedon declares, in no uncertain terms, that we’re seeing images, not faces. Or, perhaps better, we’re seeing a seeing of faces.
Unlike Korine, Avedon’s metabolism is not at odds with his subject. On the contrary, he loves these faces, a love we feel, a love we see. And yet he does transform them into something other than the face of a particular person. His portraits take up a face but leave the “person” behind. He gives us the Face as distinct from your face.
What’s so intriguing about the face is that it is at once aperture and image, camera and screen. The metabolism is there—its programming—but only indirectly, a dropped third term that is nonetheless always present. When I look at Avedon’s image of James Baldwin, I don’t just see Avedon seeing Baldwin: I see Avedon seeing Baldwin seeing the world. We see a seeing of a seeing.
Avedon’s portraits don’t give us a person’s ego. They give us the impersonality of human life, of the Face, of how it is itself so much stuff, a metonymic sign of a person’s metabolism, of how that person takes in the world and plays it back. But what’s so magical about his photographs is that while he strips away ego to give us the face as raw material, his images aren’t cold. In making the face impersonal, he clears away the obscuring ego, making his images warmer, more intimate, transforming each face into something more profound than a a so-and-so: this living, vital slice of the universe.
Avedon’s portraits are a redundancy that doesn’t resolve in futility but its contrary: life amplified, stripped of all the silly ego nonsense of the subject to become something more beautiful, more powerful, more profound. It is to become Face as camera and image, simultaneously. In Avedon’s point of focus, we are all image and image maker at the same time.
