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Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive

“natural magic”, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy’ (original emphasis). Driven by the desire for holding onto the instant of a shadow appearing, Talbot unconsciously links the birth of photography to the foundational myth of Western figurative representation narrated by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia: a young woman of Corinth outlining her beloved’s shadow projected on the wall by the light of a lamp, in the attempt to alleviate the pain caused by his imminent departure – a ‘foundational myth’ of photography also explored, for example, by Victor Burgin (‘Shadows, Time, and Family Pictures’ in Situational Aesthetics, 1996) and Geoffrey Batchen (Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, 1998). Bailly lingers extensively over this brief but significant quote throughout the book, extracting an ontological principle from it. The shadow, being less a spatial projection than a temporal appearance – ‘the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting’, as Talbot wrote – becomes a cipher for the photographic art. What appears on the sensitive paper, in fact, is not the re-presentation of reality but, more precisely, a detached shadow of instantaneous appearance: ‘A photograph, which can seize a shadow, is itself like the shadow of the instant it seizes’, writes Bailly. Photographia, ‘drawing with light’, would then be, more appropriately, skiagraphia, ‘drawing with shadow’. A fleeting instant is crystallised forever in an image by the photographic process. But what this image indicates is not so much immobility as the fugitive nature of the real. The paradox of photography testifies to an absent real. The destiny of this art is that of registering the immediately vanishing projection of an instant. It is then just a short step from the spring sun of the English countryside to the lethal sun of the Japanese cities, despite the century that actually divides them. The catastrophic nature of the photographic art – salvaging an instant while at the same time pointing at its inevitable disappearance – is embodied in the upsetting phenomena accompanying the nuclear bomb’s detonation. It is reality itself that becomes a sort of photographic event by means of a radioactive flash that imprints the shadows of its subjects on the sensitive skin of the world, in the very moment in which it erases them once and for all. Certainly – one could argue against Bailly – with respect to Talbot’s natural vision of photography, the photographic effect of the nuclear explosion seems to depend on a different agent: it is humans who, even if unknowingly, produce a sort of photogenic drawing; it is humans who, in a way, retrieve the pencil that Talbot had left in the prodigious hands of nature. The metaphoric link here stretches almost to the breaking point. Nonetheless, the power of Bailly’s montage of images remains untouched, and the magical quality of photography is retained also in the Japanese views, even if in the eerier form of an atrocious cancellation: did not, in fact, Balzac notoriously fear – as Bailly reminds us in the concluding pages – photography’s capability of stripping away the outermost layer of a person? Does not the flash of the atomic explosion – this is Bailly’s question – provide a kind of radical foundation of this dread, akin to the ones often reportedly expressed by ‘primitive’ peoples? In the end, the montage of ladders and shadows suggests that photography ‘always has death in sight’. Like a memento mori, in the images captured by Talbot at the joyful dawn of photography speaks a premonitory oracle. Photography, one could say with Bailly – and with Roland Barthes before him – is nothing but a relic of the real.