Click, Click, Click:

What is our relationship to images?

The description on the back of Herve Guibert’s Ghost Image, a book on photography, mentions that it is a discussion of “his relationship to images.” Struck by the word relationship, I started to think about how we define our relationship to images or to text. Do I even spend long enough looking at something to form a relationship?

Being in a museum these days is an hours-long encounter with people using their cellphones to capture all the “important” images they walk by. The Mona Lisa! Click. The Rosetta Stone! Click. Water Lilies! Click click click. Sometimes that’s all they’re doing, aside from talk, talk, talking. I admit it: I’m turning into a cranky old person. Museums have always been a sanctuary for me, a place for a spiritual experience of art. Consumption and spirit don’t live easily side by side. Capitalism has taken over and now art is a consumable. If I can show I’ve consumed it, then that by extension validates my interior self, which otherwise feels lost and awash in information and imagery. If one can attach oneself to an image in a particular time and place, perhaps it will function as an anchor.   

For an image to function like this, though, it needs resonance, which means we need time with it. My students want to zoom through their work (or do it in class) to get it over with, so they can do other things. (What are those other things, I wonder? Working and sleeping, probably.) I spend a lot of time telling them (and myself) to slow down. Maybe the photograph of the painting allows them to look more closely later, at leisure, but if they are anything like me, it languishes on their phone, unloved and unviewed.

Guibert spends his second essay talking about taking a picture of his mother, the intensity of focus on combing her hair, putting her in a particular piece of clothing, seating her in the softening light. It is his relationship to her that allows him to capture her beauty—or so he thinks until he discovers that the film wasn’t loaded correctly, and he has captured nothing but a memory. But that memory, he points out—in which she is free and beloved, rather than tightly controlled by and for the father—has been created by his attention to her.

How do we rediscover that attention? Early in life, we are enraptured by newness: a glorious sunset is a surprise; the first hit of Aegean Sea air intoxicates; the first bite of chocolate cake creates a swoon. Later, it’s easier to skim over those experiences.

Maybe we need to find ways to validate the interior self that don’t have to do with consumption. When I was young, my mother suffered from depression. On Monday nights, when I had piano lessons, we would sometimes hit Dress Barn before I had to play for my teacher the pieces I hadn’t practiced nearly enough. I think shopping was my mother’s way of having a little beauty in a life that felt bleak. Maybe that’s what snapping a picture in a museum is, too: a way to have a little beauty in a life that feels increasingly bleak. Or maybe that’s just my fear talking five days before the election.

Thanks for reading.

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Events:

The final Writers in Conversation, featuring thriller writers Tessa Wegert and Elise Hart Kipness, will be held on November 20 at 6:30 PM at the Norwalk Public Library, One Belden Avenue, Norwalk, CT. All are welcome.

I’ll be participating in a book fair at the Westbrook Mall on Saturday, December 21, with a slew of other authors. Come do some Christmas Shopping with us!