Every Photograph Is a Small Act of Blasphemy

There is a reason the earliest cultures to encounter the fixed image so often recoiled from it as theft, and I do not think we have outgrown their instinct so much as anaesthetised it with familiarity. To hold a likeness that does not decay, that does not blink, that survives the very body it depicts — this was, for most of human history, not a technical achievement but a trespass. It said: I have taken what belonged only to time, and to God, or to whatever stood in God's place, and I have kept it for myself. Every photograph, in this sense, is a small, precisely repeatable act of blasphemy, and I have never been able to press a shutter without some residue of that original transgression moving through my hand.

Charles Baudelaire understood this with the fury of a man watching a temple looted, even if he mistook the thieves for vandals rather than heirs. Writing against the new industry in 1859, he declared, with the full weight of his outrage: "cette industrie, en faisant irruption dans l'art, en devient la plus mortelle ennemie" — "this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become its most mortal enemy" (Baudelaire, Le Public Moderne et la Photographie, 1859). He was wrong about the war. He was not wrong that a war was occurring, nor that something sacred was at stake in its outcome. What he could not have foreseen — what none of the nineteenth century's mourners for painting could have foreseen — was that the machine would not simply replace the icon. It would become one.

Consider what an icon actually is, theologically speaking, before we secularise the word into meaninglessness: not a picture of the sacred, but a controlled point of contact with it — an image whose making was itself a ritual act, hedged with prohibition, because an uncontrolled proliferation of the divine likeness was understood, correctly, I think, to be dangerous. The eighth-century Byzantine controversies over icon veneration were never really about aesthetics. They were about the terror of a copy that might carry too much of the original's power loose into the world, ungoverned by priesthood or liturgy. We have simply replaced the icon of the saint with the icon of the self, and removed every one of the old prohibitions, and I am not convinced this represents progress so much as an unsupervised multiplication of a force we no longer respect enough to fear.

Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, banished the painters and poets from his ideal city for a reason closer to my subject than is usually admitted: not because images lie, but because they succeed too well at a specific, limited kind of truth, at three removes from the Forms, and in that partial success they seduce the soul into mistaking the shadow for the substance it merely apes. He was writing about painted couches and imitated virtue. He would have found photography's claim to fidelity — its insistence that the shadow is not merely like the thing but causally, chemically, physically continuous with it — an even more dangerous seduction than the painter's frank artifice, because a photograph is far more convincing in its denial that it is only ever a shadow at all.

This is what I mean when I tell my students, only half in provocation, that we are a guild of unlicensed clergy. Every session I direct is, structurally, an act I suspect the eighth-century iconoclasts would have recognised instantly and moved immediately to forbid: a mortal likeness extracted from a living, changing, mortal body and fixed into a form that will outlast the flesh, without the consecration, the fasting, the theological supervision that once made such extraction a sanctioned rather than a stolen thing. I do not perform this ritual with less reverence for having removed its priesthood. If anything, the removal of the priesthood has made the trespass entirely mine to answer for, alone, each time the shutter closes, with no liturgy left to absolve me of what I have just taken.

Bibliography

• Charles Baudelaire, Le Public Moderne et la Photographie (in Salon de 1859), Revue Française, 1859.
• Plato, Republic, Book X, c. 375 BCE.
• On Byzantine iconoclasm: general historical record of the Second Council of Nicaea, 787 CE, and the eighth–ninth century Byzantine iconoclastic controversy.

— Luca