Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory

12. Photo-Resemblance

12 PhotoResemblance Charles Grivel “Back! Hide yourselves in the broom closet! Put on a mask! Tear off your resemblance! I recognize you, the son of that man, you, the father of that son! Malevolent males. Psst! Psst! Glooh-ooh-glooh!” It is a lady who thus greets her husband and son. She had been calm for several days. The sight of her family increased her delirium. —Albert Londres, Chez les Fous 1 There is no photography, actually, but portrait.1 Whoever grabs a camera gets ready to portray. Widespread perversion: the photographer is recognizable (“identifiable”) in the picture he or she takes. This resemblance is an image, with a supposed referent. It also is an act, which is to say a take, a casting and retrieval , just as the fisherman casts the bait with a quick flick of the wrist and breaks the surface of the water. The photographer, miraculously, retrieves from the bottom of the abyss other fish than those expected. Others and more: 177 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in French; see Charles Grivel, “La ressemblance -photo,” in Revue des Sciences Humaines 210 (1988). galoshes, old meaningless debris, doubloons or treasure, reality’s rejects, that which does not figure, or badly so. I note that the paper thing called “portrait”possesses an imposing air: it faces, it represents a body (at least the central part of this body), it is calm (even in the height of fury), it is fixed (even in the apex of a jump), as hanging on that sensitive point from where identity apparently escapes and will be applied—where the I photographer pushes the release and poses. I think that is where the decent, dreamy, melancholic yet authoritative air of people whose pictures are taken comes from: we recognize that they recognize us. Our eye desires the necessity of resemblance : a portrait resembles by definition, it is that of which essence is missing, yet not, since the image it constitutes replaces what it represents and does not catch it (resemblance, by definition, comes from elsewhere). This image is and is not what it shows. That person is and is not his or her veritable portrait. What I see, by identification , is not in what I see. It sure does resemble him or her though. 2 Nothing resembles. A resemblance is a lure produced by the more or less eloquent effort to reinstate what would be at the source. The photographic portrait suggests the presence-there of the represented individual; it captures this individual. This also is why photography, from the moment of its invention, became so popular: the inexpert customers wanted to look at themselves, but they could only do so by similitude, in the name of parity, as though they needed the sanction of this fact to dare consider their own face, bear the horrific violence of its appearance, accept that the indubitable sign of their imaginary animal-being is passing from the inside to the front of the head. I would be who I am outside of the image. I would represent my primary civil status. My body shown to be ordinary would unite in itself all of the aspects one can possibly see of it (not do with it). This whole assimilating body upholds, for whoever orders his or her portrait, the face he or she will receive on paper. All of the mimicry and all of the faces justify themselves without contradiction within a homogenizing model of basic individuality. Everything will “resemble ” by necessity: photography, in this conception, intervenes secondarily: the model is brought to the photographer; how could one not feel repeated? Of course, resemblance escapes a simple requisition of the model by the support : in the face of my own image, a doubt overtakes me, an insufficiency hits me; this portrait of myself, I do not accept, I remonstrate; something falters in the appearance it offers: I am not he whom it represents. On this point, the anecdotes told by Nadar in his Quand j’étais photographe concerning the experiences of his first clients are conclusive. For example, the man who perfectly recognized himself in the picture of a person he was not, or the gullible provincial who asked the photographer to send him his portrait C.O.D. because he just could not go 178 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s to Paris to...