"Photography doesn’t exist." by Gilles Amalvi

1.
Photography doesn’t exist. No image you are going to see can be called “photography,” and even less, “dance photography.” Fortunately. Dance photography is extremely boring. A photograph of dance, that’s the camera being activated just at the right moment. What is the right moment? That’s the moment where the audience thinks, “there, now, the photographer is going to take a picture.” It never fails. Click. In any case, a dance performance which provokes “there, the photographer is going to take a picture” is a bad sign. The sign of a successful photo. Click. That’s the sign of a failed dance. A failed dance is danced as if it were captured in a photo. A successful photo is taken as if it captured movement. Click. For real. As if dance (a dance photograph). As if landscape (a landscape photograph). As if face (a portrait photograph). The photograph is always make-believe. That’s also why it doesn’t exist.

2.
It’s time to ask: why bother calling an exhibition PHOTO if photo does not exist? First, “photo” does not mean “photo,” only light. In Greek. In the beginning. Like in the word “photon.” No one has ever seen light. It’s light that makes seeing possible, Q.E.D. The term comes from Greek, but Greeks didn’t take photos: neither front views nor side views. On the other hand, the Greeks invented democracy. In democracy, every citizen is equal to every other citizen. In photography, every thing is equal to every other thing. I can photograph a Picasso painting or my grandmother, a Rodin sculpture or a kitchen sink, an idyllic landscape or a urinal: it’s always a photograph. I can also photograph a photograph of a Picasso painting: it’s still a photo. It’s the same. Further, I can take a photo without photographing anything. Light is everywhere. Reality as a whole is photographable. Photography is democracy applied to vision. Therefore the Greeks did invent photography. They only needed to invent a device for recording light: the photographer.

3.
Who takes a photograph? The photographer? Or the photo-grapher? The device or the one who uses it? And what about the photograph? Is it an image of a thing or the medium of an image of a thing? According to its definition, the French term photographie has triple meaning. According to the Wikipedia.fr, it’s “the technique of creating images by recording light” [Eng. photography], “the image obtained using that technique” [Eng. photograph]. “More generally, it’s a branch of graphic arts that employs that technique.” Photographie indicates, in reality, three different things: a technique, an object, and an art. Not unlike the holy Trinity. A photo is an image which says: that thing is that thing. Not unlike Christ, in fact. Christ says: this is my body (while lifting up the host). The photograph says: this is a thing (while it’s a photograph). A photograph is never the thing it shows, but it is a thing. A thing that pretends to be another thing: that thing (even while it shares none of its properties). As a matter of fact, photography exists only in so far as it absorbs the qualities of the thing it shows in order to establish its own existence. The photograph is a vampire. Do vampires exist? That’s a whole other story…

4.
Photo, in Greek, means light. And light is like a body: it moves. What’s more, it moves very quickly. At the speed of light, Q.E.D. That is, by the way, why no one has ever seen light: because it moves at the speed of light. In order to able to see, photons must be in motion, and they move all the time, like bodies. Except in a photograph. In a photograph, light does not move, it is fixed. The body does not stir. It is still. As a corpse. One can therefore say of the photograph that it’s like a black hole or a corpse. It immobilizes the body. It absorbs light. It absorbs light reflected by a body.Can photography reproduce movement? Not really. But it tries. It acts as if. And to act as if, it can prolong the time of exposure. Then the body loses its contours, becomes blurry. In the language of photography, blurry = it moves. But it’s just an impression: the impression of reality on a photosensitive plate. Another solution is to multiply positions. Click, a photo. Another. Yet another, etc. If you set them side by side, you get chronophotography. If you place one after another in a book, you get a flipbook. If you arrange them one after another on a roll of film which you insert into a machine that scrolls through them mechanically, you get cinema.

5.
It’s time to ask: why bother calling an exhibition PHOTO in a museum called the Museum of Dance if the photo is incapable of reproducing movement? A dance that stands still, is it still a dance? Not really. For there to be dance, there must be space, body, and movement. In principle. Every solid body, with or without the action of light, may be danced. In principle. A body does not need light to dance. But it does need light to be seen dancing. A body that one watches dance is an exposed dancing body. Exposed to the gaze. The chemical process of photography, that’s an exposed photographic plate. Exposed to light. One calls “the time of exposure” the time necessary for the plate to be imprinted: no exposure, no photography. The dancing body, just like the photographic plate, needs to be exposed in order to produce an impression. And if PHOTO were the time of exposure necessary for photography to develop dance?

6.
Developing, exposing, printing, reflecting... Strange how words which describe photography are susceptible to the metaphor, to double meanings. Besides, it’s crazy what one can get out of a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. It’s time to ask: what if photography were a device for capturing discourse rather than light? A device for exposing the hole of the image and its incessant filling up by discourse? If I take a photo of a building, what can I say? I can repeat what the photograph seems to be saying: “this is a wall.” That’s not very interesting. But if I can say: “that’s the wall of my grandmother’s house.” Or yet: “that’s the wall of the oldest house in town.” Or yet: “that’s the first photograph.” Or yet: “that’s a luminous imprint incapable of signifying the reality that gets under your skin.”(1) I can say a lot of things: perhaps as many things as there are things to photograph. They proliferate. All reality is photographable. But we must not forget that any photograph of any part of the photographable reality may be made to say anything. It can make one dizzy. Perhaps the photograph is a device for poking a hole in the reality. A whole and a nothing: a black hole. And everyone tries to fill this hole with talk. With words, with names. That’s this, that’s that, that means this, that is called that. Photography: it seems as simple as that, but it’s a funny problem. A funny problem with language at the center.

7.
The truth is that photography rubs us the wrong way with its image paradoxes. With its as if’s. With its dialectic of presence and absence. With its “the photograph is a thing, but it’s neither that thing nor the symbol of that thing. It is something that points to the absence of another thing….” In so far as it is an image, the photograph in the end does no more than capture a tiny sliver of reality. How to make it release this fragment of imprinted reality? How to circulate it, make it move, make it speak? To what principle to expose it? A hypothesis: what if PHOTO were in fact the time of exposure necessary for dance to develop photography? What happens if one superimposes dance and photography? Dance expands to encompass things that were not “dance.” Photography squanders its images amid other associations or categories of ideas. At their intersection, there is exhibition. Exhibition organizes circulation, makes possible another economy of signs. Dance dispenses. Its “very object is dissipation.”(2) Photography preserves, hoards the reality. Exhibition functions perhaps as a table of equivalencies where dance and photography could exchange their properties, dislocate their meanings. Dance throws away the object of the photograph and says: go get it. The photograph fetches the object to dance and says: reality is called “come back.” In between, there is the exhibition PHOTO.

8.
So “photo” does not mean “photo.” PHOTO is the name of a problem which has to do with photography, dance, and exhibition, in so far as they are developed, as they reflect and mutually expose one another. As a matter of fact, a bit like “museum” and “dance.” In PHOTO, dance exposes photography (in so far as it doesn’t move). Photography exposes dance (in so far as cannot reproduce itself). Photography (in so far as it is ubiquitous) dislocates the exhibition (as a unity of place) which, in its turn, reflects the dance which (in so far as it dissipates itself) explodes the frames of the exhibition. I hope this is clear. Let’s give it a try. To photography, let’s say: “dance”! If it responds, “but I can’t ,” that means it’s clear-headed. If it takes a photograph of dance, that means it didn’t get it. If it makes a film, that means it wants to disappear. If it makes 50 years of dance,(3) that means that it begins to understand. If it replies, “it’s enough to say that I’m dancing,” that means it’s got it.

Gilles Amalvi

1. Catherine Perret, Pour une nouvelle poétique de l’exposition, Bruxelles, Éd. Complexe, 2001, p. 83.
2. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, p.?28.
3. Performance by Boris Charmatz, who reproduces the 300 photographs from David Vaughan’s book, Merce Cunningham, Fifty Years (Aperture, 1997).