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commercial, political, informational, etc.or because people have been trained to hunt for lost dimensions the second they see a photograph. The problem is acute in the realm of fine art photography, where we tend to overload photographs with ideas, meanings, and explanations in an effort to increase their artistic significance. In these respects, Baudrillards position seems right. But in his quest to liberate the photograph from its representational enslavement, Baudrillard gets hasty, not acknowledging certain exceptions to his claims. Accordingly, I want to suggest three counterpoints: 1) A photographs power is not always proportional to its purity. 2) Certain added meanings can support the photograph as a parallel universe, enhancing that universe rather than destroying it. 3) Violence against a photographs purity should not always be seen as violence against the photograph as a parallel universe. Consider this photo:
As we look at this picture, we can try to do what Baudrillard would want us to do. Its a difficult task, but with effort, we can begin to unlearn common ways of seeing and greet the photo as a pure appearance, a parallel universe, a depthless other scene. We can try to abstain from searching for lost dimensions, and forgo asking who, what, why, and when. We can try to let the photo affect us below the level of representation, in a strictly perceptual way. We can attempt to see the people, trees, and buildings as entities that dont exist anywhere else but in the photo. We can even strive to unlearn that the figures are people, trees, and buildings (or try to no longer differentiate them)thereby viewing the photo flatly, as though nothing were in relief and the scene were totally depthless. We can approach the photo without added meaningssuch as those we typically find in titles and captionsso that the appearance remains pure, and we see only what is there. But, as Ive suggested, certain added meanings can, at the peril of the photos purity, serve to enhance its power and standing as a parallel universe rather than diminishing it. For example, the picture I asked you to look at is part of a series by Mustafah Abdulaziz called Memory Loss. This title introduces an added idea, but this particular idea doesnt restore a lost dimension. On the contrary, it adds a dimension that was not inherent to the objects of the original scene. Viewed through the language of Memory Loss, the figures of the picture alter. They strike a pose. In my viewing: The people begin to look as though they are losing their memories. Then as though theyve lost their memories. Then as though they are trying to find memories that theyve lost. The rightmost figure looks as though shes inspecting the garden for clues, on the trail of the memories shes misplaced, but coming up with nothing, as she cant remember what shes looking for. The figure in the middle looks lost, as though shes forgotten where she is, unsure of what to do. Both figures look like sites, or loci, of amnesiaas though theres a void in each of them. The yard looks like a forgotten yard. The trees look like forgotten trees.
The place feels like a forgotten place. Seen in this way, through the added meaning of memory loss, the photo presents a scene wherein humans have lost their memory, searching for what theyve lost. Together, the title and the photograph invent a fiction, a particular parallel universe that the photo, as a pure appearance free of added meanings, could never have created on its own. This fiction produces a more powerful parallel universe than the photo produces on its own precisely because it comes close to representing reality, but warps it instead. It invites us to view human beings as human beings, but takes away something familiar: the experience of human beings as endowed with the ability to remember things. The title, in other words, takes advantage of the void left by the loss of dimensions, filling it with a fictional element that resists their full return. The scene stands close to, but still apart from, reality, and through this juxtaposition, intensifies our experience of the difference between the two. Whats more, the imprecision of Memory Loss, the lack of specificity with regard to whom, in particular, is losing memory, allows the idea to spill out and imbue the entire scene as well as its imagined context. The outcome is a surrealistic fiction, one that casts the world in a different, abnormal, obliviating light. Did this fiction, this parallel universe of memory loss, come about through a violence against the purity of the photograph? Perhaps it did. But the violence, in this case, was worthwhile.