The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Three photographs of dancers backstage in Chinatown, bodies caught in that liminal space between the real and the performed, and Barthes sitting there like some existential sniper waiting to blow your comfortable relationship with reality clean out of the water.
That bit about “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time”: that’s the whole goddamn hustle right there, isn’t it? These LINES Ballet dancers in their rehearsal gear, caught in some alley or backstage nowhere, they’re not actually there when you’re looking at the image. They’ve already moved on, sweated through another rehearsal, gone home, lived entire other lives. But the photograph insists, with the stupid, mute insistence of all photographs, that this happened. That this precise configuration of light and muscle and urban grit actually existed in space-time.
It’s the same brainfuck you get when you’re looking at any documentation of the ephemeral. Dance, music, performance: they’re supposed to disappear. That’s the whole point. They exist in this ecstatic present tense and then they’re gone, leaving nothing but memory and sweat stains. But the photographer shows up like some vampire, trying to trap the thing that was never meant to be trapped, creating this “bizarre medium” that’s simultaneously a lie and the only truth we’ve got left.
Those dancers in Chinatown, bodies torqued into these impossible geometries against fire escapes and graffitied walls: the photograph says “they were beautiful” but really it’s saying “they were beautiful and now they’re gone” and really really it’s saying “you weren’t there, you missed it, and this image is both your consolation prize and your punishment for not being present when it mattered.”
The hallucination isn’t that we see them. The hallucination is that we believe we know them, that we participated in something just because we witnessed its ghost. Barthes knew: every photograph is a kind of evidence at a trial we can never attend, testimony about an event that’s already been buried by time. And here we are, staring at these dancers, chafed by reality, trying to resurrect something that was already dead the moment the shutter clicked.