''The ontology of the photographic image'' – Andre Bazin (1945)

The ontology of the photographic image – Andre Bazin (1945)

Bazin argues that photography is the most important event in the history of the plastic arts because it has freed Western painting from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.
He looks back in time and argues that at the heart of the plastic arts there is a need to preserve our being beyond its physical existence. It is actually a primitive need to create something that endures your own life span.

In the origin of painting and sculpture might lie a mummy complex he claims. In Ancient Egypt the dead were embalmed to make sure they could take their bodies to the afterlife (the first Egyptian statue). To ensure afterlife, terra cotta statuettes were placed next to the sarcophagus, if the mummy would be destroyed, these statuettes could ‘go on’ instead. “This lays bare the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life.”

Later on this ‘magic role’ of the plastic arts has been relieved by society. Coming from a believe of the ontological identity of model and image, or the question of survival of death. The focus turned to a primarily aesthetic and symbolistic function. The latter came in the fifteenth century through the invention of the camera obscura by Da Vinci. The artist could now create the illustion of a three-dimensional space and therefore painting was torn between these two ambitions of the symbolic and aesthetic function.

With the invention of photography the image was for the first time, formed automatically. “This production of automatic means has radically affected our psychologoy of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of the transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”

Even though Bazin still kindof claims the objectivity of photography, he also says it can surpass art in creative power. “Surrealists didn’t consider his aesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. “

So now painting didn’t have a ‘resemblance complex’ anymore and the crisis of realism was kind of solved by photography as a sort of vingerprint of reality.
Painting became an ‘ersatz’ of the processes of reproduction. The photographic image freezes the object itself from time and space. It shares by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

“The photograph allows us on the on hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself.”