Human beings inhabit in a time where the past, the present and the future enable them to hold together and formulate an image of themselves.
To live in a present which is further removed from the past and the future would be to live in a duration of utter superficiality. Since history concerns humans, and we are bound up with dreams of progress- i.e, becoming better human beings- the present of the time-triad cannot be understood as if ‘it is a matter of just spending our days” in the quotidian affairs of life.
Our present seems like we are disconnected from the past or as the word goes, gone by in time and which appears as no longer existing (our past is in lost time!) and simultaneously opaque to our future image of collective happiness. In the age of digital media every moment of living is spent as data in either looking at an image or making one; here the propensity is to convert each moment into a pathological moment of consumption. Summated over infinity, these moments coalesce into a habit of consumption.
As the images move at the speed of electrons, or maybe faster, we metamorphose silently into blind and unmoved consumers of such images sans any reflection on the repercussions these images may create on other people’s lives and deaths. In the circulation of images of every day, we are not only circulating a photo, or a video clip, a text or a small film, but also stereotypes, violence, egos, jargon, othering and judgements bordering on paranoia. We become agents of violence : in the dictatorship of images where it rules us, define us, moulds us, makes us too into an unmoved mover of modern myths created by a certain authoritarian power energised by an amoral capitalistic ethic.
Image Credit: Arun Vijai Mathavan
Since human beings are endowed with a power to see (and this means a power to create, judge, reflect, think, interpret, speak) along with these faculties of being a human endows us with a faculty of doubt as well. Without using our faculty of doubt that leads to critical thinking, we may end up being part of a social order where we act in pretentious ways because of imposed homogeneity : everyone does the same ; acts the same.
Looking at the conception of image in this paradigm of forced homogeneity, we see violence becomes the currency to perpetuate and forward hatred but also creates the raison d’etre, by way of idle conversations, to enable a social and political class to maintain power. The power over others is celebrated through the consumptive habit of spreading stereotypes, misogyny, misandry, class, caste and religious violence, and so on. This may lead to a derangement of senses where our faculties of rationality, thinking and acting may dangerously become numb. We are in a site of sightlessness. Once this sightlessness becomes the prime factor that dictates the masses, authoritarian character would overwhelm them in an artificially engineered blindness.
Image Credit: Surender Solanki
The conception that we must move and get along with the social order as it moves on in the name of ‘progress’ allows us to reflect on the notion of movement itself. Can we not create an aura of stillness, a static vision of deliberation, pause, reflection when we look at things, images, people around us? By this way can we stop ourselves from being a consumptive class that promotes multiple orders of power and authority?
We see a pattern of a unidimensional system where questions, protests, dissent are invisibilised by the algorithmic system of manipulation. Contemplating on the image, its intention, its meaning, and its destination would allow us to reflect on ourselves much more to think about a future?
What wish can one make to enable all of us move in alliance with history and nature? The law of the static in terms of looking at images, meditating, if practised can go a long way into making ourselves into thinking, reflexive individuals whose task is not only to make oneself but also to make a future which would involve us all as a community.. a community whose only truth shall be based on thinking as doubting, static vision and reflection, and thought of a coming future whose fundamental basis could be a search for images where we can all find truth and meaning at its centre.
As the Sufis say ‘When in chaos, resort to knowledge’. Photography is still a challenging medium because it holds a certain truth at the centre of its reflection. This idea of photography and a general making of images where everyone becomes a sort of producer of a certain aesthetic must be watchful towards governmentalising schemes so that a society can be imagined where people can remain autonomous, free and creatively capable of sharing knowledge.
We must make images, share them as our ancients used to gather around meals and feasts, music and dance to celebrate togetherness and living a shared life whose essence is communicating what we are and through the acts of what we bring to share. The ethics of infinite consumption (rather than finite consumption of capitalistic social order for ends of the profit) requires us to share those things dear to us, preciously made, that wouldn’t hurt, destroy or kill others in the act of our sharing which is also an act of infinite communication ; by way of ethics of sharing-heart, thought, food, speech, images for future happiness. Image is seeking the freedom to shout that “I was there. I am a witness.”
So once could say, whatever images we make, for history and posterity, it will become a judgement.
Image Credit: Surender Solanki
