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The ritual of photography

In 1908 Arnold Van Gennep published his now classic The Rites of Passage. The book proposed a unifying theory for a certain class of ceremonial rituals. These rituals that accompany a person's or group's 'life crises' or social transitions were termed by Van Gennep 'rites of passage'. Some examples of such rites are birth, puberty, marriage, and death, and more generally the movement from one social category to another. According to the theory, these rites are characterized by three successive and distinct moments in 'ritual time'. These moments provide a symbolic bridge that permits the transformation or transposition of the subject from one social category to another and they simultaneously buffer the existing social fabric from the consequences of these crises. The rites function to recognize these abnormal conditions and thus to integrate the abnormal into a normally recognized sequence of social activities. Based on a diagram by Edmund Leach (1976: 78), these rites can be presented as in Figure 1. The first transition is the rite of separation. It is constituted by the symbolic behavior signifying the transition from the secular and profane world of the social group to an abnormal and therefore sacred condition opposite from, and contradictory to, the common set of cultural conditions providing for social cohesion. This second transition or period of transformation, the bridge between the subject or group's previous and subsequent status, is the period of ritual metamorphosis. The conditions of this stage are opposite from and therefore sacred, dangerous, and unclean when compared with normal social conditions. Not only is it metaphysically abnormal, but also the territory or location on which the transformation takes place is sacred and outside of society. Victor Turner (1972) has termed this stage 'betwixt and between', neither one nor the other, a state of nonbeing, death, or nothingness. In this marginal state the subject or subjects are considered to possess little of their former or later attributes. When the desired symbolic transformation has taken