The photographic non-act is a short essay, originally in French, published by the philosopher Henri Van Lier in 1982.
Henri Van Lier begins his essay by limiting the analysis to black and white photography.
For him, the Latin languages are appropriate when dealing with painting, sculpture or architecture: for these arts consider signs that refer to forces or substances. This arrangement of signs is realized by man in what can be called “the act”, associated with intentions.
However, for Van Lier, recent processes (such as photography) do not adapt well to this linguistic structure.
Impression, indices and index
For Van Lier, the photography is not a graphie. A graphie supposes the participation of the man and his intentionality, however, for Van Lier, the photography is a “graphie of and by the light” (l.34), and in this sense the photography does not constitute an “act”.
Van Lier thus proposes the following definition for the photograph “photochemical imprint of a volume of distant and localized light sources” (l.43).
These imprints can eventually be captured as indices (referring to objects or events)
Index -> is a sign / designates in the strict sense / indicates in the strong sense
Elements that can (possibly) constitute indexes: framing / choice of focal / exposure time.
Indice -> are not signs, but physical effects perceived as such / does not designate in the strict sense, but signals / indicates in the weak sense.
Van Lier indicates that the sign has a referent, whereas the index can only be referred to afterwards, from outside.
An “act” develops among the signs that it constructs, signs that aim at referents, the whole associated to an intentionality. However, the photographic imprint-index involves less control and decision (one can deduce that Van Lier attributes to the photography a kind of functioning that can be more or less autonomous).
Van Lier then postulates that photography is not an “image” either, because the notion of image implies imitation and thus refers to the act of sculpting or drawing. He advises to avoid the word “image” when dealing with photography, as well as those associated with the image: metaphors and metonymies. He proposes to use instead the “indices of similarity” and “indices of contiguity”.
In an analysis of the technical characteristics of the photographic device, Van Lier establishes a difference between the photographic index and the data proper to the human perception. For the author, photography does not offer an experience comparable to that of perception, and in this sense, photography constitutes a “non-scene”. (And this, unlike painting, theater and sculpture).
Frame-index and frame-limit
The frame is for Van Lier one of the elements that can constitute an “index” in the photograph. The frame, deliberately chosen, and thus associated with an intentionality, can constitute a sign: It is thus called the “frame-index”. In a general way, any photograph has a frame (a spatial limit), intentional or not: it is the “limit-frame”.
In relation to the frame-limit, Van Lier indicates that, even when there was no intentionality, the presence of the limit (frame) makes the space tense, curve, intensify, thus producing “perceptual field”.
When it comes to intentional photographs, Van Lier differentiates between “tourist framing”, which is established according to the intention to encompass the subject/s to be photographed. This type of “index frame” (tourist frame) is for Van Lier assimilated to the “boundary frame”.
The more discerning photographer, on the other hand, can use a “strolling” framing. Indeed, the photographer goes with his frame through the visual field, until the triggering, the shooting, occurs: “something is tense, perhaps deflagrated”. This type of “frame-limit” eliminates the “frame-index”.
Exemplifying Robert Capa, Van Lier describes another type of frame-limit, resulting from a framing sensed by the photographer, which captures an action in the film. This type of process is reminiscent of Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment. The shot does not however represent a photo of an event, it is an event.
Reality and and the real
The photograph highlights the differences between reality (interpreted as the real when it is reseized by a system of signs) and the real as that which escapes reality itself (something which is before or after the conception of reality). (Van Lier illustrates with the photograph of the Winter Garden: “The smile has been, and is no more” (the reality). “The print has been, and still is (the real)” (p.5, l.21).
Among this real provided by photography, there are facts that have to do with science (Muybridge’s horse, the ocean floor, etc.). The knowledge, on the other hand, deals with the reality. Science, can sometimes confuse knowledge. The photography comes therefore also to support this distinction between the knowledge and the science.
This extrapolates to the idea of Cosmos-World. The photograph brings back to us an imprint of the Universe, and not of the Cosmos-World (the universe seized in reality). The Cosmos-World implies an order imposed by reason and its system of symbols, whereas for the Universe (the real) the notion of order has no meaning.
With regard to the capacity of photography to deal directly with reality and with science, Van Lier attributes it to the link between photography and the physical constants “c” and “h”. Indeed, these two constants, which emerge from the intimate nature of reality, find their declination in the photographic print, which captures the light rays (constant ce of the speed of light), thanks to the silver grain that acts as a quantum (constant h of Planck).
The Non-Mastery
Of the functioning of photography in relation to reality and the real, Van Lier proposes a hierarchy of initiatives:
- Photography as a technical process (link with the physical constants c and h / photography that brings data from the real)
- The photography as Spectacle of the natural or cultural.
- The photography of the “Photographer”. (which is, compared to the painter, the architect, the sculptor, in a situation of non-control).
Different uses of the photography:
- Scientific, pragmatic (pornography, advertising, fashion)
- Sentimental use (Barthes)
- Artistic use (daily art, confirming the codes, extreme art, subverting them)
- Testimonial use.
Beyond the acts and intentions of the photographer, the photograph benefits from a certain independence of functioning, depending on its reception. The intention of the photographer can be moved at the time of the reading. And it is the testimonial reading of the photography that imposes itself.
Faced with the difficulty to describe the approach of the photographers in front of the photography, Van Lier evokes the possibility to group the photographers according to schools (ref. Brodovitch). This classification could be structured around a refusal of any human act, because photography is always inhuman.
For Van Lier, photography is the most philosophical object (because it proposes radical questions: reality/actual, actual/possible, event/eventual, index/index, etc.).
Van Lier presents photography as an element that destabilizes man, who can only feel comfortable in contact with signs. But photography evolves with the signs, between reality and reality.
It is a question of a “photographic repression”, which touches particularly the Westerners, anxious to remain as “subjects to the principle of our acts”.