This is What a Photograph is ~ Flowers for the Dead…An anthology is Oliver Hockenhull’s feature length essay on mechanically recorded images, both still and moving, and their effects on our sense of time and our relationship with death. He uses his own family photographs and the role they play in his understanding of family history as a starting point for his macroscopic exploration of humans and cameras. This exploration is poetic and associative rather than historic and sequential; the images and ideas roam through the entire photographic era, seeking connections. A key visual motif throughout the film is a circle or sphere, variously seen as an eyeball, the field of vision, a breast, a womb, or the earth. The motif returns in many forms. Edward Weston’s circular lens cap, removed from his camera, magically becomes a photographing robot, capturing dunes on a Martian expedition. Photography is a means of exploring, conquering, owning the unknown, and Hockenhull compares it to the development of aviation, another technological advance that altered our visual relationship to our world.
The screen is filled with an abundance of photos, from Hockenhull’s family snapshots to iconic images, like Alberto Korda’s shot of Che Guevara. Hockenhull unleashes his formidable skills as a manipulator of moving images upon these photographs, shaping a constantly shifting array of beautiful moments: colorizing the photos, animating and deforming them, combining them, and using AI manipulation. This flow of shifting imagery constitutes a parallel voice to that of the narration. The verbal strand and the visual strand intermingle in complex counterpoint. The images do not usually serve as illustrations of ideas in the narration; they make their own, independent form of argument through purely visual means, often demonstrating our complex, multi-layered responses to photographs more viscerally and fully than language is capable of doing.
The style is aphoristic rather than discursive, and is generously sprinkled throughout with quotations such as Wim Wenders’ observation that "every photograph is the first frame of a movie.” The film places an emphasis on Nadar, the most aphoristic of photographers who write. These quotes are the philosophical equivalent of snapshots: arrested moments of thought, isolated from a flow of ideas. Gradually, these observations link together into deeper investigations of photography as a means of confronting death: war photography, occult attempts to photograph spirits, 19th century portraits of the deceased. The voiceover narration alternates between a woman’s voice and a man’s, as if Hockenhull were jointly telling the story along with his mother.
The camera, the magic box that seems to arrest time and extend a single moment into eternity, is seen as a key element in our modern understanding of both birth and death. He refers to a popular 1940s Kodak camera as “a simple but mysterious coffin that turns moments of time into images of recollections.” Hockenhull expands his observations of photos of his mother to observations about the human use of images as an escape from time and mortality.
The film turns towards the 19th century obsessions with photographing occult phenomena, and with photographic portraits of dead people. The invention of photography unleashed a longing to use the camera to connect with unseen worlds. The camera gives the illusion of the mastery over the flow of time. The ability to stop time implies the ability to gain access to eternity while still alive. At the same time, the belief that photographs constitute scientific proof meant that they could be used to validate occult beliefs.
An interesting section meditates on the shroud of Turin as a precursor to trick photography. Although the authenticity of the shroud is continually contested, the legend is that a divine emanation caused the image of Christ to be imprinted on cloth, which Hockenhull expands to the idea of photography offering, through a kind of trickery, an experience of the transcendence of death through the capturing of light. It’s a trick, but it’s not a trick. Light, the energy captured in the matter of film emulsion, is the essential force that links time, space, our bodies and minds, and the universe. It’s no wonder that people see photography as a spiritual technique.
In a section that draws together the advent of the nuclear age with the dawn of television, Hockenhull meditates on the images of mushroom clouds as a permanent part of the media landscape of our time, and therefore of our contemporary consciousness. We see old black and white TV footage of the bombs on a period 1950s TV set, presided over by a shrine to Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of the Global Village. Thanks to the bomb, we are forced to contemplate not merely our own death, but the death of everything.
One particular aim of the film is to re-examine where photography is now, on the cusp of the AI era. AI is ushering in a world where “photographic” appearing images can be conjured at will, altering our view of photographs as evidence of truth. “Reality is starting to feel queasy about itself. It is approaching the immediate realization of thoughts.” The gap separating inner from outer reality is narrowing. We see various examples of AI stills and animations woven into the texture of the film. Hockenhull emphasizes that AI compositions, no matter how fantastic or abstracted, are ultimately derived from camera images, and therefore from nature, an observation equally true of all visual abstractions.
In a world dominated by images, we confront what Hockenhull refers to as “the disappearance of matter.” While listening to these observations, we are looking at a rocky seascape, populated by human figures which are decomposing into pixels and scan lines. When people spend most of the day looking at screens, they begin to treat everyone and everything as if it were simply another web post designed for their temporary distraction, and meant to be clicked away as soon as it becomes boring. As Hockenhull points out, this leads to cultural insanity.
Hockenhull observes the pernicious political effect of a culture of images: “social change is replaced by a change in images.” The primacy of representations of reality over reality itself is, generally, a movement away from the real, towards the consensus image of reality. This leads not only towards contemporary tribalism and conformity, but the willingness of most people to believe utter nonsense, as long as it is the nonsense everyone agrees on.
Towards the end of the film, mesmerizing sequences of images and hypnotic music meditate on the notion of “flowers for the dead,” by combining textures of flowers and flesh. These images undulate gently, textured with photographic grain. Flowers are used in profusion at funerals as a kind of mask: when confronting the terrifying reality of mortality, our first impulse is to try to prettify what we are seeing. Hockenhull recalls being overwhelmed, at the age of six, by the smell of lilies at the funeral of his aunt, whom we first see in a snapshot as a flower-picking girl of 17. But flowers are equally emblems of the ephemeral nature of life and of beauty, a way of bringing down the intensity of our grief and our terror into a more contemplative, aesthetic realm. The photo album of all we have lost stimulates more wistfulness than hysterics and agony.
This is What a Photograph Is, despite the maximalism of its title, doesn’t really aim to systematically cover everything that can be said on the subject. Hockenhull knows his subject in great depth and detail, and he has many important insights into the effects of the camera on our minds and our lives, but he approaches his exploration in a profoundly artistic, meditative spirit. Over the course of the film, we feel his attention and awareness spreading outwards, making points of connection between the many outward manifestations of the changes wrought by photography. Equally artistic is the meticulousness with which he shapes the film, both visually and verbally, finding concrete form to express the flow of his ideas. As a result, the viewer is invited along for the ride, able to partake in the same intellectual and emotional excitement as more and more pieces of the picture link up, forming a coherent image, like photographic grains coalescing into a breathtaking landscape.
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