Becoming The Spectre In The Spectacle
The Age
Saturday January 10, 2009
There is something uncanny, and even soul-taking, about being unwittingly caught in other people's photographic imagery, writes Kate Holden.
TODAY, in the centre of Rome, I watched a young man. We were surrounded by grandiose ruins, sumptuous palaces, picturesque pigeons; but he aimed his big fancy camera at the ground and took a photograph of the plain black cobblestones. Click. One picture of shiny stones. Click. Click. Click. He had a look of the most ferocious concentration on his face. He was so conspicuously serious I nearly took a photo of him myself. But as it happens, I too was taking a photograph of the cobbles, to remember where my feet had trod.You see people taking photos of everything here. The cobbles. The guttering in via del Moro, the windows of a house. The Colosseum, of course, the Forum, a hundred church domes. The sunset, the sunshine, the shade. The pigeon poo.Even in the depths of winter Rome is strewn with tourists, all wandering, exclaiming, marvelling and incessantly inhaling the city through the lens of a camera. They bring out matchbox-sized magic boxes with which to sip the essence of the place, or they wrangle enormous sleek black contraptions of impressive techno-machismo.Another solemn young man carefully laid his tool for essence-capturing on a ledge and, rigid with tension, took a trial picture of an entirely ordinary night-time street. His girlfriend hovered adoringly. "Try again. More to the left. With the super-phaser-infra-biotic lens. No. No. Try the macro-hieratic-focus. Oh, perfect!" Michelangelo putting the finishing touches on the Sistine Chapel could not have had a more enthralled audience. The photo was taken, after at least 50tries; the girlfriend was amazed; the moment was complete. Digital files can be erased so easily - girlfriends matter, though he'd hardly heard her for the last 15minutes. The street was still dark as they walked away.Funny things, them newfangled camera thingies. It seems impossible to live without one - certainly, to travel without one. People take it seriously. If I don't capture it, I can't believe in it. Anxiety! A traveller on his or her one and only visit to Rome seems feverishly compelled to document every moment, every gelato eaten in front of the Pantheon, every gloomy chapel fresco and playful fountain and silhouetted umbrella pine. And every impatient Age columnist hurrying past, her shadow interfering with the composition, her face scowling peevishly in the background of, I estimate, at least a hundred million photos on computers all over the known world. This is a city, I confess, where one rapidly tires of hesitating to cross a prospective camera shot, and storms through regardless. Cameras cast their predatory gaze every which way. Down by the Colosseum they make a positive net of invisible sightlines; the air of StPeter's piazza is spangled with them as much as spray from the beautiful fountains.How is it possible? That I, inadvertently I assure you, can be simultaneously present on all those hard drives, blogs, projections on living room walls, and Flickr pages and yet here, real and oblivious? The French philosopher Roland Barthes famously remarked on "that terrible thing that there is in every photograph: the return of the dead". Well I'm not there just yet, but there is something uncanny, soul-taking indeed, about being unwittingly caught in other people's imagery. We make spectres out of spectacles.The other night I went to see the New Year's Eve fireworks from a piazza. Vast crowds, splendid display; and the air above our heads crammed with the bright view-finders of cameras held aloft: a different kind of illumination. How to capture the spirit of exhilaration, of anticipation and a thousand people screaming with appreciation of light that flickers and then is gone?It's a wonder Rome has any essence left, after more than a century of this siphoning through lenses. But, of course, it's endlessly beautiful, endlessly elusive: that must be why we chase it so eagerly with the barrel of a lens, like prey. And yet, of course, no one can document, capture, film every part of this city or any other. There is a particular tower I love, on which, very high up and mostly unnoticed, a niche holds the ghostly head of a Roman maiden - a prophetess, a sphinx, an aristocrat? - who looks out over the river with curdled marble eyes. She is too high for my camera focus to reach; I've searched the internet for an image in vain; she gazes upon us, but we can't ever properly look at her. I love photographs, but sometimes, even with a magic box, we can't quite properly catch the real enchantment of this world. Perhaps it captures us instead.NEXT WEEK ROBERT DREWE
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