On Andre Bazin’s Photographic Image

Man wants indefiniteness and searched for it throughout the time. First way of reaching it was staying alive, however death was inevitable and man searched for an escape from it in order to feel better. It was a relief to know that a part of “you” will stay in life, in this world, even if you are gone. André Bazin shows this process of human by telling the origins of plastic arts. In time a change in medium happens from mummies to portraits, maybe because of the experience of mummies- which does not work actually as it does not preserve you well enough, whereas a portrait presents you young, powerful or beautiful as long as it is kept safe. Therefore the aim to make an image changed in time too. It is hard to disapprove the argument of Bazin about the Photography’s and Cinema’s setting free the painting from the chains of looking “real” or looking alike “real”. As photographic image, copies the world, images, human beings like the way they are seen to the human eye, the struggle to reach to the sameness in painting dissolved and it opened a very wide road to it, and also to art. And there comes the problematic issue about photographic image’s credibility as it captures the image of the objects, for instance in photography it captures a frame and in cinema it captures set of frames, which is seen as a portion of reality, life.

Even if Bazin criticizes photography for “not creating eternity, as art does, it embalms time rescuing it simply from its proper corruption” and hails cinema as the torch carrier of the tradition of reaching immortality through art; to give a consolation prize to it, Bazin claims that “Photography can even surpass art in creative power… photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it” and goes on saying that “it produces an image that is a reality of nature”. I cannot agree that there is a concept can be called as natural creation, as long as there is a human factor in it. There is a photographer behind that mechanical device; there is a construction of discourse trying to be made through the angle, with the lights, composition. Even if there is no photographer and there is no intention of creating something, even the camera falls from the sky and lands on somewhere randomly, it still captures the frame that it sees from the lens which creates its own composition itself with a meaning in it which directly comes from the human being that invented that device.