Project Research

In order to gain a deeper understanding of how I could depict the invisible with the use of photography through my project, I have looked at a few key theories that are relevant to the theme of my project.

The first and the base theory that I have considered as a part of my research is Questioning the everyday by Ben Highmore.

In his theory Ben suggests that “we all share a condition where our consciousness can be undermined by our unconscious” He states that “For Freud and Marx, the everyday is both real and unreal, both actuality and the disguise of actuality, the everyday is not as it appears. Or rather behind or alongside or underneath the appearance of everyday life lies another actuality”. This very phrase is exactly something that I would like to depict through my project, that there is a subtext behind our everyday actions that drives us do things in a certain way.

“Everyday life is hiding our real nature, the unconscious can be seen only in glimpses. In a repressive realm that censors the unconscious, it suddenly makes its presence felt. It’s all about underlying structures and latent contents” (Highmore). According to Freud’s psychoanalysis theories, our dreams are a sure way to access the true hidden wishes of our subconscious that are often being repressed in our everyday lives due to the society norms.

My initial idea was to incorporate Buddhist Noble Truths as a framework when attempting to depict the duality of our everyday. I have looked at The variety of religious experiences by William James in my research in order to gain a deeper understanding of the topic.

 

Another famous religious theory is the Numinous by Otto Rudolf.

For Otto, the numinous can be understood to be the experience of a mysterious terror and awe and majesty in the presence of that which is “entirely other” (das ganz Andere) and thus incapable of being expressed directly through human language and other media.

Photography and the optical unconscious – Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski

“The photographic image is specular and speculative”, it exposes all to occur in the events that are too sudden, too minute or too subtle to be directly observed. Following Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the optical unconscious, Hayes puts emphasis on the psychoanalytic dimensions of the moment that a photograph is produced, relying on the camera’s ability to capture fleeting or microscopic events. In Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Little History of Photography” he underscores the importance of the camera’s mechanical operations, using the snapshot, slow-motion film, and the microscopic photograph to argue for the mediums ability to reveal occupancies that would ordinarily pass unnoticed in human vision. Despite our efforts to control what photography captures, it doesn’t conform to the will of the subject or operator, containing within it the “tiny shark of contingency” which draws us to its images. “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible. though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.” For Benjamin it is not the moment of production, but the subsequent moments of developing and looking at photographs, that reveal these new structural formations.

For Freud what is bracketed out in the appearance of everyday life is a forceful realm of desire and fear that can if unchecked, burst through the propriety of daily life. For the most part ‘culture and society’ can be understood as the name given to the checking and censorship that manages the troubling presence of these drives. Propriety and etiquette (the protocols of everyday life) instil a form of life ‘safe’ from untrammelled desires and murderous lusts. The everyday becomes a repressive realm that censors the unconscious.