POP 2 (2) pp.

272282 Intellect Limited 2011

Philosophy of Photography Volume 2 Number 2

2011 Intellect Ltd Photoworks. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.2.2.272_7

Camera Interiors
Mervyn Arthur

Mervyn Arthurs Camera Interiors

Andrew Fisher Humboldt University and Goldsmiths College

Each image in the series Camera Interiors depicts the inside of a large-format analogue camera.1 More specifically, one sees the space that separates lens and film, which normally remains from the viewpoint of its function a dark chamber. These are spaces designed to facilitate making something visible, and, insofar as they do this, they must remain invisible. Together, they foreground a celebrated space of photographic possibility: the cameras machinic core and one of its most resonant metaphors. Photographing these interiors displaces their function. It opens the innards of the black box to its own procedures and reasons, means and ends. The resulting images gesture at their own possibility. They point both directly and obliquely at what they are and how they came to be. They are direct because you see precisely what the title promises and oblique because the way they show this amounts to an occlusion. Historically, discussions of photography have made much of the peculiarity of the photographs surface, which tends to be effaced in the apparently direct visual encounter a photograph offers with the thing it depicts. Normally one ignores the material characteristics of tone, colour and texture as

1.

This is a revised version of a text originally published to accompany Mervyn Arthurs Camera Interiors in the exhibition catalogue East International, Norwich, 2009.

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one looks through the photograph to grasp what lies beyond it. This has come to be thought of as photographys ostensive character, likening its mode of seeing to the gestural and situated significance of a pointing finger or to a demonstrative utterance that indicates nothing more than this or that. The paradox of the photographic, famously, is that its gesture towards this here is displaced in both space and time. The fact that photographs point those who look at them towards things from different times and in other places is obvious but, nonetheless, strange. Arthurs Camera Interiors explore this strangeness. It is striking how much variation there is between the different interiors depicted in this series, and how their individual treatment compounds tensions between photographys informational, aesthetic and associative aspects. Some have metallic surfaces bearing numbers, letters and scratches: marks and signs of their production, use and repair that beg at least at first a readerly mode of attention. The smooth white walls of others, patterned with structural ridges and enigmatic bulges, sometimes punctuated by the red dots of aperture covers, are more emphatically aesthetic. What they describe lies compounded in the pleasures of the surface. Other chambers provoke more explicit metaphoric associations, such as backstage at the theatre or in an empty cell. Yet others evoke a generic sense of an intentionally structured space, the precise operation of which remains ambiguous. At a more general level, the relationship between individual images and the series as a whole elicits reference to figures such as the camera obscura, pre-dating its photographic cousin by some centuries as a material precedent and much used metaphor for reasons power of survey and control over the visual world. Perhaps, also, the serial accumulation of these more modern chambers, linked as they are to technical, psychical, historical and pictorial antecedents, encourages association with the old mnemonic strategy of archiving facts in the rooms of an imaginary palace, so that their retrieval might be achieved at will by mentally retracing ones steps through its interconnected rooms. But where does this associative journey leave ones idea of image and memory if, as in the present case, these chambers and the facts one puts into them are indistinguishable? For all these variations and the multiple associations they evoke, the structural elements revealed in these images walls, plates and hinges, ridges, holes and the materials that cover them are set within a space of roughly the same depth, seen from only slightly differing viewpoints and having, crucially, the same function. Given the logic of the series, another camera was necessary to make visual access to this space possible. One after the other, this and then that connection emerges between chambers as each is displaced into view, so to speak, by the invisible space necessary to another cameras functioning. However, they were by no means as simple to produce as their form and clarity of conception might suggest. Their making involved as much emphasis on post-production as on the capturing of images. Their laborious process of construction ends in photographs that point, in an only apparently straightforward way, towards central concepts that shaped a certain stage of the photographic apparatus, and in so doing, they trap ones gaze in the shallow space that lies at

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the core of all photography. Photographic ostension is turned upon itself, rendered implicit at the moment of becoming explicit. We see what is pointed out and can enjoy looking at it and thinking about it, perhaps sliding off into reverie on this basis. Yet all of these pleasures, thoughts and dreams are framed by an uncompromising displacement. The functional solidity of the walls to which these photographs point provokes but literally also excludes all of the other things, people and places, ideas, desires and revelations that this space of photographic possibility might otherwise present. This brings to mind Vilm Flussers reflection on Walls in Things and Nonthings. His riff on this theme sees walls as possessing an opaque ambivalence that presents one with a terrible choice: either to proceed outwards to conquer the world and lose myself in the process or stay inside to find myself but thereby lose the world (Flusser 1993: 30). His self-consciously sketchy perspective ranges over the magical ambivalence of ethical, aesthetic and religious standpoints suggested by such enclosures and exclusions, and then suspends consideration of these. Out of this eccentric phenomenological reduction emerges a sense that the asymmetry with which walls divide an immediate environment from what lies outside their bounds renders the world existentially ambivalent. In this context, walls do speak, but reflection on the fact clarifies nothing about my condition, rather, it informs me about the inexplicability of my condition (Flusser 1993: 32). Given that this is one of a series of reflections through which Flusser seeks to distinguish the meaning of things like walls from the nonthingly character of phenomenologically ungraspable apparatuses, it resonates with Arthurs Camera Interiors. They too treat the camera as a thing that can be opened up, so that one might view its concrete meanings and confront its existential ambivalence. But what if one also follows Flusser in thinking of their maker and their viewers as functions of this apparatus, whose world and its representation however attenuated are schematized a priori according to thespatiotemporal categories of the camera? Then these photographs would not just suspend the space of photographic possibility, illuminating and flattening it, so as to hold it up and point it out to us. Their occlusion of the world that photography normally shows also provokes the photographic apparatus to speak of our entwinement in its own condition.

Reference
Vilm Flusser (1993), Dinge und Undinge: Phnomenologische Skizzen, Verlag, Mnchen: Carl Hanser. Andrew Fisher has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 8, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 2, 2007.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 7, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 3, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 5, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 6, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 9, 2008.

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Mervyn Arthur, Camera Interior no. 4, 2008.

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