Images of unphotographability

Sometimes when I am standing on the beach, staring out at the ocean, watching waves roll in, I will become moved with an inarticulate sense of the sublimity of it all, and then, if I have my phone with me, I will take a picture like the one above. It’s not that I think there is anything especially photogenic about the moment; the sublime is sublime because it exceeds representation, defies it, confronts our puny understandings with phenomena we can’t fully assimilate. It’s more that I want a way to punctuate my contemplation and bring something that I sense should be limitless and eternal — awe in the face of the natural forces that exceed this world — to a tidy conclusion. Once I take the photo, I can pretend that it will go on meditating on the infinite while I switch over to check my fantasy baseball stats.

Since photography is no longer constrained by the material limits of film, the act of taking pictures seems liberated from documentary purposes. They are not saved for special occasions and can’t mark special occasions in the same way. The images don’t have to turn out. I take pictures of the ocean not to see what the ocean looked like but to express my mood at that moment in a gesture, to modulate it, to tell myself I am having a subjective experience, an encounter with reality, that I want to put a frame around and set aside. But I probably won’t ever want to look at it later. My images of the ocean are supposed to save me the continued effort of looking, both then and now. The objective version of the experience, in what the image visually depicts, is irrelevant at best.

I wonder if people photographed the eclipse for similar reasons. One could begin to fall into the bottomless well of contemplation about the significance and fragility of our place in the universe, or one could take a picture to stand in for that idea, to have something more practical to do. It’s not like the image itself will be compelling in its own right.

As this Fast Company article on how to photograph an eclipse (and probably hundreds of others just like it) points out, “afterwards you may find that those pictures don’t measure up to your expectations, experiences and memories of viewing the eclipse.” But isn’t that true of almost anything you might photograph for the purposes of documenting how special the experience was? Most of the specialness rests in how one had to be there, experiencing it. While everyone wants to see an eclipse, no one really wants to see your picture of an eclipse, including yourself.

It feels metaphorically appropriate to suggest that eclipse photos capture something that isn’t actually documented in them. Perhaps we photograph such things to deliberately disappoint ourselves, because the disappointment is what reinforces the feeling that what we did, what we photographed, really was special. If the photo did more than inspire nostalgia it would threaten to supplant or invalidate the original experience, which anyone could then replicate simply by doing an image search. Our “expectations, experiences and memories of viewing the eclipse” don’t really have all that much to do with what an eclipse looks like.

Like any other tourist photo, eclipse photos are mundane and superfluous in and of themselves, but they still feel obligatory to take and thus become an image of the obligation. Our expectations include taking photos of our experiences because that is how we know they are experiences as they are happening. It is also what everyone else is doing. The photos represent the photo-takers’ capability to conform, to be normal, an accomplishment conveyed by the utter familiarity or predictability of the image. We use our phones to take something that seems rare or singular and make it into something extremely ordinary. The phone allows us to subordinate the event to our desire to belong. The more useless the photo is, the more it confirms that we are on the inside of a shared vision, and not looking at things the wrong way.

Viewing the eclipse was a conspicuously collective experience, available to everyone in the right geographical area just by looking up. This piece from The Conversation claims that it “is the kind of event that brings people together, and the shared experience continues long after the eclipse ends through photographs that serve as memory markers and tangible proof that you were there to witness the eclipse. And even though many of us might end up with similar photographs, there is something significant about so many people taking pictures of the same event.” But the article frames that significance in some deeply obvious ways: Taking a photo proves we were there and gives us a connection to history.

It feels like there is more to say: The authors of the Conversation piece only dare ask at the end whether photography can do more than document facts and instead convey feelings: “Could the act of sharing our eclipse photographs provide a point of fusion between providing evidence and these less tangible — but equally valid — moments of engagement?” The answer is undoubtedly yes: Sharing images provides “evidence” of an “engagement” with an experience. To frame it as “fusion” is to erase the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, and between individual and collective subjectivity that the images concretize without resolving.

Taking a picture of the eclipse denotes our individual participation in the collective; the action marks our having been part of the group without dissolving into it. One puts one’s own subjective point of view on a shared moment without seeming to defuse the collective. None of that is directly evidenced in the souvenir image, which is insignificant and redundant as an objective documentation of empirical reality. But it is part of the nostalgia such images evoke: an intimation of a utopia in which people are individual and collective subject at the same time, without either eclipsing the other.

The fact that scientists can predict and explain eclipses and make them camera ready seems to contradict the experience of viewing them. As an eclipse occurs, it’s hard not to imagine a pre-scientific world in which they would come upon us by surprise and be truly terrifying. They bring us back to an experience of myth, or rather they make us feel nostalgic for myth, as if we don’t currently live in and through ideology but in a world of clear facts and lucid explanations. Photography is a model for that fantasy of an enlightened, disenchanted, fully rational world; it purports to produce documentary facts, to immediately duplicate the real. It supports the illusion that we’ve left the world of myth for modernity.

But it still seems deeply, pointedly irrational to photograph an eclipse. It is an effort to photograph a ghost, a rumor. Part of me wants to argue that there is some sort of atavistic counter-mimesis at play in photographing an eclipse, a desire to “save” the sun as it becomes obscured and thereby express a kind of delusional mastery over cosmological processes. Photographing an eclipse could be seen as a ritual act of supplication, a gesture to placate the indifferent gods that set the skies spinning. Once photography seemed magical because it could passively inscribe reality and reproduce it; now we demand a different magic from it, it must do something else to still seem powerful. Photos cease to be documents and become prayers.

A picture of the eclipse places the photographer paradoxically in the time before photography, not because of what it depicts but because it is a souvenir of that momentary intimation of the era of myth, when reality and experience were supposedly untroubled by mediation and everyone lived in the shared, immediate presence of being. It doesn’t matter that that feeling doesn’t look like anything, that it is unphotographable in its essence. The eclipse photo is a picture of being afraid of the dark.