I Do Not Take Photographs, I Perform Exorcisms With Light

An exorcism, properly understood, is not primarily an act of violence against a demon. It is an act of naming — the ancient conviction, shared across an extraordinary range of ritual traditions, that a hidden thing loses a portion of its power over you the instant it is dragged into visibility and addressed directly, by name, in front of witnesses. I have come to think this is the truest possible description of what happens in my studio, and I no longer find the word "exorcism" excessive for describing it, only more honest than the vocabulary this industry usually permits itself.

Every subject who has ever stood in front of my camera has arrived carrying something unphotographed and unspoken — grief not yet metabolised, a fear about the body's failing architecture, a joy too enormous to have been said aloud to anyone, a rage that ordinary life offers no acceptable occasion to display. My work, as I have slowly come to practice it, consists of building a room controlled and safe enough that this hidden material will finally consent to surface, and then — this is the part indistinguishable, I think, from the old ritual — naming it, in light, in front of a lens, so that it can no longer operate on the sitter from the shadows where it had been hiding, unaddressed, doing its damage in silence.

Nietzsche, in a fragment as brutal as it is generous, gave the reason art exists at all in nine words I have never been able to improve upon: "Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen" — "we have art so that we do not perish from the truth" (Nietzsche, Nachlass, c. 1888). I take this literally, in my own trade, more literally perhaps than Nietzsche intended it for the arts he had in mind. Some truths a sitter carries are not survivable if simply stated in plain declarative prose across a therapist's desk or a confessional screen — not because the truths are too dark, necessarily, but because unmediated truth arrives with no aesthetic distance, no frame, nothing to hold while it is being absorbed. A photograph offers exactly this: a controlled frame within which an otherwise unbearable material can be looked at, held, even, eventually, loved, because it has been given form rather than left as formless dread circling the edges of a life. This, I believe, is the actual mechanism behind Nietzsche's aphorism, translated into the specific grammar of my own instrument: art does not deny the truth that would otherwise destroy us. It builds the one vessel narrow enough, and beautiful enough, that the truth can be safely poured into it and finally looked at, directly, without the whole structure of a person collapsing under the weight of what had, until that photograph, been permitted to remain unnamed.

Georges Bataille understood something adjacent to this when he insisted, across his writing on the sacred and on transgression, that certain experiences must be approached through ritualised violation rather than gradual accommodation — that some truths yield only to a controlled, deliberate breach of the ordinary protective boundary, never to patience alone (Bataille, L'Érotisme, 1957). I do not stage violations in my studio. But I do, deliberately, breach the ordinary boundary of composure that a sitter maintains in every other room of their life, because I have learned, over two and a half circuits of this world, that the image worth keeping is almost never the one taken before that boundary breaks. It is the one taken in the instant just after — when whatever had been possessing the sitter in silence has finally been called by name, into the light, where, like every exorcised thing across every tradition that has ever practised this rite, it loses, at last, its hold.

Bibliography

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (Nachlass), c. 1888.
• Georges Bataille, L'Érotisme, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957.

— Luca