The Voice at 3 AM

Photographs construct an illusion that is too potent, that builds too convincing a reality. At no point in life do people exist as they do in a photograph. Photographs excise a person from time and perspective. The photographic image generates the illusion of an objective reality to which every person belongs. 

People are aware, of course, of photographic fraud. Photoshop or similar software can alter an image, and the importance of captions is largely understood. These caveats, though, reinforce the assumption that buried beneath technicalities is an objective truth, which the photographic image captures.

That this notion of an objective reality is an illusion does not make it any more fragile or any less important. As Baudrillard points out in The Perfect Crime, the only illusion is illusion itself. One perceives the "illusion" as reality, until one perceives another reality in which the "illusion" is explained. They do not coexist. These two realities are distinct states, and they are equally real.

The problem is that this illusion of an objective reality is unbearably convincing and frighteningly ubiquitous. Because it is grounded in the seen, the immediately visible achieves parity with the profound, the significant, and the true. This parity leads to confusion, leads to identity, leads to the elevation of all things seen to a status that they do not merit.

People respond to this elevation in a number of ways. There is the simple conversion, the unexamined acceptance of this new truth, to the visual as objective reality. There are those who are conscious of the process and of their own acceptance of this progressively dominant paradigm. And, there are those whose existing belief structures are threatened by the new reality. They don't understand the change, its nature, or its causes, but they intuitively recognize its threat.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen" (Heb 11:1). What then, is the value of faith in a world that no longer requires evidence of things not seen, a world that no longer seeks meaning in the unseen? The imaginary, the metaphysical, and all non-visual arts are equally at risk.  The inadvertent hegemony of the photographic image strips the poet and priest alike of power, but it is the nature of Art to find holes in the order of things, holes through which to push and wriggle, and eventually bloom. Art will find a new shape in a new place. Poetry and language will endure. Religion, though, is the order of things. Religion was reality.

It is under threat, and those who cling to it grip all the more tightly because they are no longer capable of belief. Belief, faith, in its purest sense requires one to value the unseen. They don't. They think like everyone today thinks. They think visually, objectively. They believe in the "real." For them faith is a way of transforming the unseen into the seen. This horrendous transformation not only fails to translate religion into something that can endure in contemporary society, it create an internal conflict which they've externalized with signs, and rallies, and explosions.

While the nature of contemporary reality and the status of religious fundamentalism cannot solely be laid at the feet of the camera, which winks sheepishly atop its tripod, it is culpable enough that, perhaps, we could all stop snapping photos with our cellphones every time we drink the same thing in the same bar with the same people.