Yusoff, K., (2007). Antarctic exposure: archives of the feeling body. Cultural Geographies, 14(2), pp. 211-233
An excerpt:
"Punctum and the photographic field
Beyond the photograph’s structural configuration as a historical marker, other expressive
traces can be followed. Against any reductive system of photography’s expressive
and critical language, Barthes argues in Camera Lucida that photography should be
explored not as a quest ‘but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe and I
think…’16 By exploring the expressive affect of the photograph, Barthes calls that
which wounds us in the photograph, the punctum,17 an unexpected prick of desire initiated
by the photograph, ‘which sometimes flashes across the field’.18 A bodily illumination.
The punctum of Ponting’s photographs is the visibility of difference between
the men, before and after their journey. The alteration between animates a profound
register of time’s passing through the body. Held in a space between the two photographs
are the ravaging effects of time and the Antarctic. This landscape of events separating
the two photographs seeps through a little hole19 in the haunted gaze of CherryGerrard.
Although Antarctica (as a visual event) remains outside the frame, their faces
point to the zone of inter-penetration of bodies and landscape. Their bodies became
photographs, even, overexposed by the landscape, the ice operating like a giant photographic
plate. Akin to the photographs left in the streets of Hiroshima, where the shadows
of the absent were burnt as a material trace onto buildings by the blinding light, their
bodies become the photographic medium. The self-possessed bodies of the first photograph
(Figure 1) are so much visibly older in the afterimage (Figure 2) than when they
started; the look in Cherry-Gerrard’s and Wilson’s eyes challenges Ponting’s lens (and
Ponting) to conceive of where they have been; the hardness of their faces compared
to the relaxed enthusiasm at the start of the journey; the blackened frost bitten hands all
testify to the ‘something’ that took place beyond the possibilities of this frame.
On the explorers’ return from the Winter Journey, Ponting said, ‘We had to excavate
them carefully [from their frozen clothing], and when finally exposed, their faces bore
unmistakable evidence of the terrible hardships they had endured. Their looks haunted
me for days.’20 Despite the shelter their clothing provided to the internal ablation, the
haunting of the landscape’s work remains in the punctum of their gazes. This landscape
viewed in the afterimage is not the same landscape that we see in the background
of the departure photograph. In the latter, the illumination of Ponting’s flash
allows the viewer to see into the darkness. Bowers, Wilson, and Cherry-Gerrard are
Downloaded from cgj.sagepub.com at Bar-Ilan university on October 19, 2016
haloed by the foregrounding flash light, eager to depart and nonchalant in the face of
yet another expeditionary photograph. Yet in the afterimage, the photographic invisibility
of the landscape is made visible through its visceral effects on the body of the
explorer. The body becomes a landscape of affect. Ordinarily, the photographic arrest
remains as an authentic marker long after the effects of landscape have passed into
less visible registers in the body, but the illumination offered in these photographs is
the visibility of both these exchanges.
Fields of light and fields of darkness
The photograph holds the explorers’ bodies there in that moment, as ghosts not yet
dead. In the case of Wilson and Bowers those bodies went on to die on the journey
to the pole; Cherry-Gerrard’s body was to heal and then break again, and again in
England, in ways less visible than the photograph could attest to.21 The photographic
afterlife of the now-dead points most directly to the exchange between language and
object that haunts every photograph. Only in arrest can vision realize its object. The
presence of exchange (between viewing and the impossibilities of that view) denotes
a photographic language that writes in light and darkness, to form the traces of a now
lost object. They are already dead, although the photograph gives us their survival. For
Benjamin, looking at a picture of a now deceased woman, he sees,
something strange and new…something that remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer…something
that is not to be silenced, something demanding defiantly the name of the person
who had lived then, who even now is still real and will never entirely perish into art. She is seen beside
him here, he holds her; her glance, however, goes past him, directed into an unhealthy distance.22"
great!!
ReplyDelete