Bernard Noël
The Mental Camera
Knowledge accumulates. It does not address the question “What is thinking?” Instead, the photographer replies, tells me rather: What is seeing? and, if one looks at a photograph, from one question to the other it’s basically a resemblance establishing itself.
Why?
Because the photographic image shows us what we are continuously putting into our head: sights.
That which is before our eyes, and which we call reality, resembles what is behind them, and which we call mental habit (our visions are made from our sights). Only, our mentality chooses, precipitates, crystallizes, abstracts with such a speed that we forget the process. Before learning to speak, every one of us has seen. And it is from the gaze that the word proceeds.
From our visual relation with the world we infer the materials of our mental operations which, sometimes, are oriented toward consciousness, and sometimes toward thought. Watch a painter at work: the visible emerges from his hand, and one really feels that it enters his eyes and his hand accomplishes—in the volume of his body—a complete development.
The main invention of modern times is that of the photographic camera, of which the eye and the dark chamber comprise a machine analogous to the one, in our body, that develops the gaze in order to pensively transform it into metaphor or concept.
Starting from the camera, one can dream of other machines; for example a conjunction of camera and computer which would allow us to visually write with all the world’s images: those of culture as well as those of reality like our memory inseparably fuses them.
Photography proves that the camera captures the actual subjectivity of the gaze — or nothing. Hence the visible is the place where our mental offers itself to sight under the mask of an objectivity that the objective rightly denounces: from the visible the gaze creates its place of signs, and each photo is a signed gaze.
trans. Michael Tweed
pp. 74-6, Journal du Regard
© P.O.L. éditeur 1988.
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