One of the things that Latour does in Reassembling the Social is show that ‘the local’ is deeply ambiguous. This is nowhere more obvious that in photography, where, automatically, at least three loci are conjured into being by every photograph: 1) the locus of viewing, 2) the locus of taking-the-photo, and 3) the locus/loci IN the photo.
Consider this photograph:
When I took that photo I was standing at a certain place; at that time the locus of viewing (1) and the locus of taking (2) are/were the same. Now, of course, the locus of viewing has become many, each at the place where a viewer looks at the photo. The locus of the-taking, of course, remains unchanged.
But what about the loci IN the photo itself? The lamps were, say, 10 to 20 yards from me. The tall building to the left is the Goldman Sachs Building in Jersey City. It’s, say, between a half-mile and a mile from where I stood when I took the photo. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building (in the middle) would be, say, five or six miles away on the island of Manhattan. The clouds in the sky, how far away are they? And the sun, it is nowhere visible in this photo, but its existence is implied by the fact that the photo exists. For it supplied the light, the photos, which are the physical basis of the photo. It’s 93 million miles away.
Just where IS this photo? What is the locus?
In asking that question I don’t mean to be mysterious, or philosophically deep, or problematic. None of those things. The loci in question can be traced, at least in principle, in a fairly direct fashion. What’s important, at this juncture in our thinking about the world, is that the apprehension of the Latour Locus, if I may, be immediate and intuitive. One should not have to pull out the threads laboriously one after the other. Rather, one should intuit them immediately and be prepared to spin them out as necessary.
Here’s another example, one that’s ‘easy’ because there aren’t many objects in it:
The weed to the left was not far away at all, less than ten yards, and taller than I am as I recall. The trees? Call it 50 yards. But what does it matter if it’s 30 yards, or 70? After all, the moon is 183,000 miles away, reflecting light from the sun. In that context, what’s the difference between 30 yards and 70 yards? As they say in the mobster movies, fuhgeddaboudit.
Let’s change scale a bit. In this photo the iris is no more than a foot from the camera:
But where am I, exactly? Though I’m a short man, I’m not so short that I can stand beneath an iris and shoot up through it. I took that photo by holding the camera down below the flower, pointing up, depressing the button half-way until I heard the auto-focus ‘click’ into place, and then snapped the photo. My eye, thus, was several feet away from where my hands held the camera, which is not the most straight-forward way to shoot with a single-lens reflex.
What does that do to locus 2, the locus of taking-the-photo? In a deep way, nothing. Who cares whether or not my eye glued to the view-finder or not? I would think that, for 2, the important locus is where the camera is, not where the photographer’s eyes are, or his feet, for that matter.
Picky? Yes. It’s a picky business. But not problematic.
Then, of course, we have the out-of-focus background. The foliage to the left was, say, 7 to 10 yards away while the building in the background was perhaps 15 yards away. The entire compass of the loci in the photo (excluding the sky and the implied sun) is thus closer-in than in the loci summoned in the previous photos.
Finally, what I call a Malick, after the film-maker Terrence Malick. If you’ve seen his films, you’ve seen many shots of the sun shining down through the foliage:
While we know that the sun is quite distant, the fact that the sun is obscured by the foliage pretty much obliterates any sense of that distance. It becomes a mere intellectual abstraction, not a visible phenomenon. The only palpable distance is that of the foliage. The sun’s light becomes a diffuse luminous presence. That, of course, is aesthetics, not physics.
Finally:
Not only is the sun a luminous presence, but any visible distinction between matter and energy bleeds and dissolves about it. Ultimately they are the same, matter and energy, as Einstein has taught us. From that I derive a question which, in the annoying way of mathematics texts, I leave as an exercise for the reader:
Does this photograph thus dissolve the distinction between aesthetics and physics?
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