ANDREAS FEININGER

Andreas Feininger, The Photojournalist (Dennis Stock), New York, 1951.

Afterimage by Duncan Wooldridge:

This is an image that keeps coming back to me; it comes out of nowhere, resurfaces; it always feels relevant. The photograph was made by Andreas Feininger and is called The Photojournalist. There's some debate about when it was taken: many examples are dated as 1951, whilst MoMA has a print with a subtly different point of view which it dates to 1955. Pragmatically, exact dates don’t matter in this image that much – it’s not an image of an event - but imaginatively it feels fitting: it’s a strange document, an image of someone who a viewer might think is a time-traveller, before Chris Marker’s La Jetée. But it's also a portrait, an image of the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock. It is a document with one foot in fiction, a bit post-human. And it makes me think about what photography does.

Because of its ambiguity, several ideas bounce around. The most immediate is seeing and thinking about the activities of the photographer. This much is immediately visible: how the camera mediates (obscures and also complicates) the photographer’s relationship to the world. It’s surprising: we see the photographer, but there’s an imbalance or a merging with the machinic, with the apparatus in the foreground. Of course, this is often how it is – the photographer says they step back for the photograph to function as truth. But here the photographer’s way of looking is shaped by this object that they’re seeing through, they are transformed by it. And in case we forget, we’re seeing them with a similar device. Feininger would also build his own cameras, so he’s conscious of the act and the construction, and so should we. How do we recognize what’s happening in an image? That the picture is not just a window; but a vision, a translation, an act of looking shared with us? That’s another thing.

The next is its strangeness, the light and shadow, the shroud of the cap. The who of the image: even if we have no access to the knowledge that it is Stock who Feininger is photographing, there is the title, The Photojournalist. Anonymised, an archetype ‘The photojournalist’. Is the photojournalist human? Are they like us? It seems to be posed as a question. As we look to the eyes, we have two optical devices: the lens and the scope on top of the camera in their place. The two ‘eyes’ are not the same. They’re a pair, interrelated, but not identical. Equivalence or balance is complicated. For me, this is telling about an important relationship we should have with photography—it’s not exact reality, but a negotiation with it, a very contingent and powerful one.

The fictions I enjoy aren’t fantastical or detached from the tangible. I’m interested in that kind of Jose Saramago or Clarice Lispector sense of something happening, becoming. In Saramago that is "what happens if the world was different in just this one respect?"— what are the consequences of subtle shift? What moves our position, our way of seeing the world? This image lets us think approach those concerns, even if this pushes up uncomfortably against the photojournalist’s conventional claim to objectivity, to reporting. Maybe that’s because the old fact and fiction duality just isn’t working anymore.

Astill from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, 1962.

As a document with one foot in fiction, we can expand our perspectives. Stock is photographing us with a rangefinder camera, probably a Leica. And we can see that he is seeing us through a scope or viewfinder that sees a different world. The rangefinder, as opposed to a single-lens reflex, has two positions: one position from which the camera operator sees, and a second which is the view that is exposed onto film. The machine and human operator see differently. Though the camera and viewfinder are configured to minimise the disconnect, a difference can be seen under careful observation. It’s called parallax. I’m interested in parallax as the actual and poetic optical event that is happening here, in this portrait and in fact in all photographs. Stock is looking through the scope and seeing one thing, and the lens is seeing another. This opens up a potentially radical possibility: photographs can modify the world. They are showing us emergent possibilities, for good and for bad. This allows us to think about how the world is given form, in-formed by our looking. Just think how much the world been changed by the presence of photographs! Has the time-traveller returned to remind us?

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.