Found
by Colin Beattie
The finding of a photograph on the ground is a moment preceded by nothingness, from which everything may follow. Walking along in silence, one is attuned to the sound of the road, the color of the sky, the rollicking stream of one thought becoming another. Then, bursting like a flare into our consciousness—the moment of discovery.
Finding a photograph on the ground, beside a puddle, is not achieved through directed effort. There is no practice that can bring about such an event, nor repeat the effect once it has happened. Discovery is not an action, it is a condition of perpetual willingness and boundless enthusiasm.
One cannot say, “Today I will go out and find such-and-such.” Rather, it is required that at any moment, with regards to absolutely anything, one can say: “Such-and-such! Ah! Just what I needed!”
Chance discovery is an invigoration of our existence. The arbitrary event deprives us of our ability to respond according to habit, it forces us to directly experience the object of discovery, and in this moment we are truly capable of doing anything, seeing everything.
Phenomenology suggests that every occurrence is in fact the abolition of all that has preceded it—the present moment can only truly be defined as that which it is about to become. This is not to say every found photograph is a break with continuous existence. The finding of a photograph is a moment when our existence is simply, suddenly irrelevant, and the duration of this irrelevancy depends on the strength of our curiosity.
In one sense, all photographs are essentially found photographs. The shutter opens and closes, and though aimed at something in particular it enthusiastically accepts whatever the world might offer during that fraction of a second. But by aiming and operating the shutter, photographers hold a control over the event, giving it a square border and inhibiting their own ability to be taken by surprise. They are always present in their own photographs, even if they remain unseen.
The photograph on the ground, however, offers a brief release from the burden of selfhood. We discover the final result of a stranger’s focused attention, from which all explanation and context has been removed. We cannot move the frame of the image, or extend it in order to satisfy our curiosities. We cannot orient ourselves, but must instead accept the position of a photographer who is strange to us. By occupying this position we become strange to ourselves. It is a deeply unsettling release, and therefore one we are accustomed to correct immediately, choosing to turn away from what is truly strange before our curiosity leads us into dissolution.
With the elimination of selfhood comes the elimination of culpability—the finder is provided with an opportunity to exploit those societal regulations that artificially govern public interactions. The option to withhold empathy is provided, without the accompanying societal consequences. This new position allows found photographs to be collected and exhibited because they are “strange, hilarious, heartbreaking, and sometimes disturbing glimpses into someone else’s life.” As voyeur, the finder is able to indulge a more prurient, ruthless interest in others without directly exposing their own vulnerability to similar measures. Upon exhibition, transgressions either perceived or portrayed in the photograph are exposed to the corrective and corrosive laughter of the public, while the anonymity of the circumstances protect against any sense of nakedness or betrayal.
This outcome can be understood as the disavowal of both the undefined part of selfhood and the strangeness of the found photograph, a reassertion of habit and law. Disruption avoided, the world proceeds exactly as it had before the photograph was found, and in phenomenological terms nothing has actually happened.
This form of encounter with found photographs is widely published and replicated in the entropic discourse of our cultural industries, where the juxtaposition of object vulnerability and subjective superiority long ago became the sole operative mode in achieving audience passivity. It is, therefore, the task of those with imagination to develop alternative methods, grounded in human caring and a willingness to be altered by our course through the world.
Let us return to the moment of discovery, the terrifying release from our own selfhood, the seductive murmuring of the unknown, and the photograph held in our hands, perhaps a bit smudged with road-grime. Looking into the image, we are transfixed by a stranger’s perspective, overwhelmed by a rush of unfamiliar associations. The smiling sister in the photograph is not our sister. The warmth of her smile feels stolen, because it is not for us she smiles. In this position, we are not simply strangers but worse, we are thieves.
To mobilize our own discovery, and to open ourselves to the photograph’s real content, we must fall back on those sentiments that precede all human interactions. Though strangers, we can proceed as sympathetic human beings, and to see within the photograph the very obvious truth that it is not the unfamiliarity of the subjects in the photograph that repels us, but their proximity to what to us is most familiar. Thus it is not that we do not know this smiling sister in the photograph, but that we know her by a different face, a different manner. The chance introduction of a new person into a context we have already prepared is temporarily disconcerting, but by extending the breadth of our kindness to include these new faces, we share the position of the unknown photographer and experience directly the simultaneity of collective human existence. The moment of the photograph can now be experienced as a deepening of similar moments we have experienced in the past, a warm refraction of our own history in different shades.
If photographers always remain present in their photographs, they can solve this dilemma by realizing that all human beings are also present, in the same frame, with equal vitality though seldom with equal awareness. The truth presented by the found photograph is that the vast majority of experience is already familiar to us, regardless of our willingness to acknowledge this familiarity. It is a truth frightening in its implications for the merit of individual subjectivity but which nourishes a realization that our lives are shared not only by those we choose but by all those who might be introduced to us through the mechanism of chance, who all along have been awaiting our gesture of welcome.
2.
I found these photos as a roll of negatives lying in a puddle on a dirt road outside of the old city in Kashgar. The negatives had been out in the sun for at least a week, and the outer frames on the roll were completely bleached away by the sun. I checked to be sure there was a printable image somewhere on the roll, wiped off some of the mud, put the pictures in my pocket, and walked on. A few months later the roll surfaced from somewhere in a backpack, and I had them developed for $4.59.
My initial excitement for these photographs was the color effect produced when the film was distressed, stepped on by horses and ridden over by Kashgari commuters. I showed the pictures to some friends, who agreed they were very beautiful, and asked where on earth they had come from. Yet for my friends the interest extended no further. I had found an interesting print effect, and some exotic subjects, and once these aspects had been considered they were ready to move on to other conversation. I never lost interest in the color of the photographs, but what became most interesting to me about these photographs was how little curiosity they inspired.
In different ways I have encountered the same reticence towards information about foreign places with many of my friends in the Pacific Northwest. I believe it comes from having so little frame of reference that conversation about Central Asia simply cannot find a starting place, a trigger for shared interests. Coffee-table books and magazines arrive monthly offering the world in stunning photographs we can flip though when we are bored. The foreign, in practice, has become an ornamentation on the fringe of our own unconscious experiences. We often read a magazine and say to anyone nearby: “Now that is an absolutely amazing picture.” But it is rare that our curiosity is piqued beyond an interest in the surface effects of the photograph. In comparison to enormous photographs of wool-wrapped nomads trudging across the frozen steppe in Mongolia, this small collection of family portraits seems fairly unremarkable. There are no obvious points of curiosity, and the resources required access the real contents of the photograph (naiveté, empathy) are not resources we are encouraged to utilize. It is pleasing to realize these photographs were taken not far from the frozen steppes of Mongolia, that the people in these photographs almost certainly have cousins who might spend their summers on the steppe, living in yurts, herding sheep. Most pleasant, perhaps, is to acknowledge that these photographs could quite reasonably have been destined to be mailed as keepsakes to those same nomadic cousins who appeared a few years back in a photo essay for a large-circulation magazine.
I would hazard a guess that there are more photographs like this roll in the world than of any other sort. Millions and millions of birthday parties, picnics, reunions, afternoons at the park. In the age of personal cameras the activity of posing for and taking the photograph has become as revered as the final product, which, once relegated to scrapbook annals, must be replicated in the coming year. Posing for the family photograph gives us a chance to confirm our shared part in a temporal continuity extending from our common ancestors into the distant future. These photographs of ice cream-smeared toddlers and tipsy aunts have become essential aids in the recitation of our oral histories and family folklores.
When we speak of the democratization of media culture, we quickly come up against the uncomfortable truth that much of what will be produced in this new culture will lack the superficial values our tastes currently demand. The exponential growth in desktop publishing technology does not ensure a corresponding growth in the number of professional photographers and gifted novelists. Instead, it is quite possible that the dominance these media have held for the last century will be drained away as less proprietary forms of culture reassert themselves. In what appears to be a waning of the media economy, the family photograph emerges again as human beings looking back at themselves without artificial mediation. These are photographs not taken in accord with highly aestheticized depictions of life, but according to social relations that have always preempted our attraction to the spectacular.
After returning from much time in Xiniang, I was often asked what I thought of the popular notion that soon the Western economy would be surpassed by the Chinese economy. At the heart of these arguments is always a frantic pitting of the American middle class against the new Chinese middle class, who are depicted emerging from the long winter of communism to buy cars, houses, computers and to begin consuming global resources already stretched too thin by the excesses of our past two centuries. Released from fictional narratives of economy and nation, the real question being asked about China is, “Are they really like me?” If we weren’t being distracted by talk of a “threat” to our entitlement, we might see how much more we hold in common with these imaginary rivals than we are encouraged to believe. When looking outward in search of an opposite, we seek the exotic, the colorful, or the strange. We are connoisseurs of the artificial and the anomalous, and when encountering the familiar we must struggle with our own minds in order to truly see anything new at all.