Family Frames - Unconscious Optics, Seeing, Screens

I am still making my way through the book, Family Frames.  Its a very difficult book and I should no doubt have read a couple of other key texts before trying to tackle this one.  Although what it has done for me is made me very eager to go back and finish Sontag's On Photography which has sat languishing on my chest of draws for months abandoned a third of the way through.  I must also tackle Ways of Seeing,  I know.  Nevertheless, I am enjoying what I can in Family Frames and am intrigued and excited by unconscious optics.

Hirsh explains that we look at flat pictures which have the illusion of depth, that we see them through multi-layers of screens such as religion, culture, personal history, romantic illusions - but that photographs are a slice of an unconscious moment.  And being so offer up details we would otherwise not see.  I remember discussing how I am beginning to enjoy photography as it lets me know what is going on with me at an unconscious or semi-conscious level.  In the same way the minute physical details which can be seen in Muybridge's horses.  Photographs also show us the minute psychological details of our lives; thoughts, interests, moods.  Things that are wholly or partially hidden by consciousness.

Jung talks about becoming enlightened by making the unconscious conscious, and that includes becoming aware of the darkest aspects of ourselves.  Photography seems to offer a way of enabling that need.

I am also thrilled to read about screens.  When I started looking at different cultural childrearing practises I remember thinking it doesn't matter how many books are written about this methodology or that one - people will gravitate towards the ideologies that fit with their own personal outlook on life, be those outlooks conscious or otherwise.  Many of mine were not conscious when I first had a child.  I had a totally unrealistic view of who I am and was utterly uninformed and unaware about myself.  Having children unravelled and unearthed parts of me that I had no idea about, and I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised by some of what came to the surface but also horrified later by other less easy to live with aspects of myself.  Photography is doing the same thing.  And I am reading how photography is also looked at by individuals and societies through ideologies that are conscious and unconscious; screens.

"Looking occurs in the interface between the imaginary and the symbolic.  It is mediated by complex cultural, historical, and social screens."

However, she goes on to say;

"Photographs may capture some of this process, but, as the opaque and masked images of Luthi, Meatyard, and Sherman illustrate, they alone do not allow us to read its many dimensions."

This second sentence is important for me to remember in all of this.  My family narrative photographs may on the one hand be revealing for me (perhaps others too...) but they may also be frustratingly opaque.  I think I have set out to explore something about my relationship with my mother in those photographs and am certain what I have discovered is something I knew intellectually but couldn't see as have been looking through daughter's eyes.  The photographs on the one hand do indeed show me what I knew but couldn't see - and that's what makes me cry when I look at them.  But I suspect there is also much I cannot read, stuff that is hidden regardless of the camera's helpful trick of suspending moments in a frame.

I continue to read...

Other books that have been recommended are The Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz and Questions of Visual Pleasure by Laura Malvey, both of which look at Lacan's Mirror image and seeing ideas.  I am not sure whether to tackle these before I get that Sontag one digested!  However, I am keen to read her now which I wasn't before because it is dense, verbose and challenging in the extreme.

Quotes from Family Frames as before page 118.