Revelation Has a Shutter Speed

Every tradition of revelation I have studied shares one structural feature that theology rarely names outright: revelation does not unfold. It strikes. Moses does not gradually come to understand the burning bush over an afternoon of contemplation; he turns aside, and it is already alight, already speaking, already an event rather than a process. The sacred, in nearly every account we have of encountering it directly, arrives with something indistinguishable from a shutter speed — an exposure so brief that the ordinary organs of comprehension have no time to intervene before the image is already fixed, permanently, on whatever in us serves as the plate.

Walter Benjamin, writing in 1935 on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, offered a definition of the aura that I have carried with me longer than almost any sentence in philosophy: "eine einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag" — "a unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be" (Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1935). He meant this, famously, as an elegy — the aura, he argued, decays under the condition of mechanical reproduction, the Verfall der Aura that mass reproduction inflicts upon the singular original. I want to propose, respectfully, against him: what if the photographic instant does not destroy the aura but is the aura's native form? A unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be, is not a bad description of what happens in the twelfth of a second the shutter is open. Something far — the subject's entire unrepeatable history, everything that brought this particular face into this particular light — becomes, for that fraction of a second, unbearably near, and then the shutter closes, and the distance reasserts itself, and what remains is the print: a fossil of a nearness that has already receded back into its native remoteness.

This is why I no longer think of the decisive instant, as certain of my predecessors in this craft named it, as a merely technical achievement of timing. The theologian Rudolf Otto, attempting to describe the specific quality of religious experience in his study of the numinous, reached for a phrase that has haunted comparative religion ever since: the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that is simultaneously terrifying and irresistibly compelling, that overwhelms the one who encounters it precisely because it cannot be assimilated into ordinary categories of experience (Otto, Das Heilige, 1917). I recognise this mystery every time I have managed, against considerable odds, to make a true photograph rather than merely a correct one. There is a fraction of a second, in the right light, in front of the right face, when something arrives that I have not constructed and cannot fully account for — not because the technique failed, but because for one instant the ordinary distance between subject and image collapsed into exactly the kind of nearness Benjamin described as the aura's whole definition, and exactly the kind of overwhelming the numinous is said to produce in anyone unfortunate, or fortunate, enough to actually encounter it.

I do not say this to dignify my own craft beyond what it deserves. I say it because I think we have mistaken, in this profession, technical mastery for the entire task, when technical mastery is only the elaborate machinery we build in order to be standing, prepared, in the vanishingly rare instant when something arrives that no machinery could have summoned on command. The shutter does not create the revelation. It only, if we are patient and skilled and extremely fortunate, happens to be open when the revelation, on its own unownable schedule, decides to occur.

Bibliography

• Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1935 (rev. 1936).
• Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 1917.

— Luca