Imitation of Life

Photography unravels the fabric of reality—but it also spins authentic yarns.

Parallelogram, by Drew Douglas.

PART I: Myth Mages

‘In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognise illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.'

—Evan Walker, The Physics of Consciousness.

Society has conditioned us to regard the camera as a Cartesian instrument. An objective witness of the real, an inviolate testament to the truth of a particular moment. Chemically conceived in an instant of elemental union, carried to term in the amniotic fluids of developer and fixer, delivered in a darkroom, its progeny apparate as mechanical records emancipated from human intervention, perfectly adhered to the originating referent. Produced, as André Bazin declares in The Ontology of the Photographic Image, ‘automatically, without the creative intervention of man.'

This conception miscarries: in actuality, the subjective, selective human agent is integral to the process. As John Tagg makes plain in The Burden of Representation, 'the camera is …