A photo can’t be tragic. A painting can’t be tragic. It is these two facts that make both tragic.
This is not double speak. Post Structuralism, through writers such as Baudrillaird, has put forward a convincing, if slightly melodramatic and abstract, argument for the continued detachment of society and the individual from reality. Reality is dying, it has been murdered. Marxist thinkers such as Guy Debord in his ‘Society of the Spectacle’ pin the blame directly to the technological revolution. Debord cites television as central to a paradox which allows us increasingly frequent and direct access to suffering across the globe, but conversely and increasingly detached emotion reaction to this reality. When we are flooded with live images of others suffering its emotive value becomes bankrupt. What more we are viewing it at an increasingly detached vantage point, which allows us to express idea of grief society expects but not have to deal in the direct sensations.
The problem has got more pressing with the rise of the internet. I have access to a network of information in a variety of formats which is growing exponentially. I am simultaneously more connected and detached to notions of present suffering than ever before.
This condition is unique to us and mirrors neatly the manner in which tragedy manifests itself in photography and painting. A painting or a photograph of a dead body is not tragic. A photograph of a dead figure, if we trust it to be ‘real’, is an image which has been derived directly from reality. A painting of a dead figure may not be real, but a good painter can use all his powers to stage an image which evokes all the drama and pathos of a real dead body. Yet in neither case is it the real thing.
The photograph is an analytical deconstruction from reality. It may have come from a true event but it is now detached. We have decontextualsied, paused it, stripped it out of its causal and spatial context. We can feel sympathy for the figures pictured and even for the loved ones and family of the dead figure. Yet empathy is harder to come by.
In the painting however direct the sensation feels or the sense of loss and pain generated may seem, we are always aware it is not real. Painting is stuck in a constant crisis where the painter and the viewer can strain as hard as they like for a sense that what they see is a real event, real people in real space, yet we are always aware that it is an illusion. Due to this the emotions evoked in us will always be at one step removed.
It is this inability of an image to allow us direct excess to an actual event and the connected emotions that triggers something real. It is tragedy at one step removed.
