Story: Photograph

This is a photograph that is also candid. He is in a Raffles Junior College school uniform that bears six creases, and his tie is loosened three inches from his neck. He is staring at something off-screen, but there is also a flicker of recognition, a fractional turn of his eyes, an instantaneous clairvoyance of a moment as it happens. I have snapped him in my white box just so, at this one particular instant where knowledge and ignorance are superimposed.

This photograph was taken four weeks after we first met. We are sitting in the MacDonalds near our school, and we are chatting, questions that have answers that are really questions. He is organizing his thoughts about me into an emerging structure, he is filling in elements and building or extrapolating a background that may or may not become part of the accumulating foreground. As for me, I already have my elements, my background, and my foreground – an entire composition that now only has a him-shaped hole. I am simply fitting him into my structure. Then as we talk and the void is filled with colors, something happens, and he turns away, and I have my photograph.

This is what it means then to take a candid photograph of a loved one – careful planning, and the ability to impose order and structure in a flash. But when I look at him now in his almost nakedness, there is something foreign about him. There is something that I can neither understand nor name, and that I want to tear down. But when I touch his face, my finger to his cheek, there is a barrier, glossy, indestructible. I cannot shred it without shredding my image of him. I cannot reach him either way.

This is why I have never spoken of him to my family, and why I never will. I am sitting at the dinner table with my family members, but I cannot allow those words about him to leave my mouth, because if even I cannot deconstruct my image of him into letters, imagine the total lack of control I would have over the pictures into which those words might assemble themselves in my family’s minds. I know of my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, I know how he sneaks into our house late at night, and I know how she sneaks out of our house to drive off with him on his motorcycle. My sister and I know of my mother’s lost prince, we know of her rare dreams about him, and we know that she keeps a yellowed photograph of him together with one of her radiant youth. My mother and I know of my father’s past infidelity, we know that they used to meet in cheap hotels, and we know it ended with a mistimed telephone call. My father knows of my dissolved infatuation, he knows something of a boy in a picture, and he knows this boy never appears anymore. I know, she knows, she knows, he knows – but the only knowledge that we have are of images, limited in their frames, and worse.

I sit at dinner and look at my sister, my father, and my mother. This should be the frame of a traditional family photograph, but we are each far across from the others, divided by chasms of the table. We are each thinking about a person, we are each of us a photograph, alone in the white borders of our knowledge, and they are each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table is a frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but in each of our totalities we are always an image of loneliness. And in his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that “an image falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person”. If we are each of us alone in a single and yet infinite photograph, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the scopes of our limited eyes?

Even when I am with my friends, I am also conscious of these peripheries of my vision. This is us now, sitting in the set of memory that is masquerading as a café. We are talking about the past, we are using all of the photographs in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of the photographs conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the intruding black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.

When my friends and I talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite opposing photographs, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in our personal photographs, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency”, and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph”, but if my photographs, as well as each of the photographs carried by each person here and elsewhere, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph, what chance do the seven of us here have, despite of our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially, but also temporally, and thereafter know the futility in this world of our eyes – that constant knowledge-seeking camera that is always thwarted by the superimposition of an obscuring lens.

But perhaps obscurity is the answer to this question, the peephole to knowledge. See this birthday of mine happen in reverse. Everyone, family, friends, all these disparate groups are gathered here in the distorting light of my many candles, each bestowing confusing light. The last candle lit is now extinguished, and what happens? Faces half-formed and indistinct disappear; features previously dancing in shadows slide into a uniform darkness. The next-to-last candle lit is now extinguished, and the same happens with new faces. Each candle lit is extinguished, one by one, until the very last, whereupon the room is plunged into blackness. But this darkness is different, because I know these people are still here.

Light is not illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering. Furthermore, sight is always deceitful in its composition and preservation of the photographs it takes. No photograph is also candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, and to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no knowledge is also enlightening, because enlightening knowledge is also a contradiction in terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection any two people can have, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.

Long before photographs came into popularity, painters knew this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers, but every single painting in this gallery is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance into intimacy. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism – all of the art in this gallery, even the relatively more factual representations of realism, seek to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. Magritte’s painting demonstrates this in content as in innate structure. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them in blackness into one. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way.

I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this, these precursors to men and women today who are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too, people who when they speak must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language of civilization that aspires to truth.

I take out my photograph of this boy I used to love, this photograph whose only real truth is not in its precision of lines and colors, but in his foreign unknowability, and in the barrier, glossy, indestructible. Ignorance is not the same as the knowledge and acknowledgement of ignorance. When we believe love to be transformative, we transform it, but when we know we have transformed it, we can begin to love.