Many snapshot collectors
hold double exposures in special esteem. The feeling, perhaps, is that the
miraculousness of a good double exposure is the miraculousness of snapshots in
its most overwhelming, undeniable form. A good double exposure is an extremely
unlikely compound event, in which two separately recorded images are fortunate
enough, first, to be superimposed on film, and, second, to jointly create a
composite image with some kind of distinction. The snapshooter had nothing to
do with either step. The entire thing is an incredible accident, and we may
feel when we contemplate the result of it that we are really contemplating
something like fate (the impersonal forces that brought these images together)
and something like infinity (the absurdly small likelihood of their having been
brought together interestingly and the absurdly large number of pictures we had
to look through to find this one). And double exposures are not different in
these respects from snapshots in general. They are just more extreme. So, we
may want to believe, the double exposure is the epitome of the snapshot, the
snapshot sharpened to its sharpest point.
I am not really immune to
any of this. I agree that double exposures are snapshotty, very much within the
genre, and that they take something about snapshots to an extreme. I have many
of them, and I still buy them. Nevertheless, I find that a certain resistance
has set in. Are double exposures snapshot accident in its purest form? Or just
in its flashiest form? I’ve come to feel that double exposures are very often
just flashy.
It’s important to
distinguish two classes of double exposures, or perhaps they are more like
poles. In the more conspicuous kind of case, we are very
aware of the component images; they retain their meaning, so that when we laugh
(or whatever) at the whole, we are responding not just to the incongruity of
the parts, but to the incongruity between the incongruity of the parts and the
congruity of the whole. This kind of double exposure is a sort of randomly
produced photographic “exquisite corpse.” In a Surrealist composite drawing,
the expressive qualities of the draftsmanship are irrelevant, even distracting.
All that matters is the elements and their successful combination. In the same
way, a double exposure is all too often not expressive like a normal photo (I
hate the word “expressive,” but never mind). The parts don’t carry a feeling,
and the whole doesn’t have one either; that’s not the point of it. It is “good”
or “bad” depending only on the relation between the parts and the coherence of
the whole. A double exposure actually goes further than a drawing in that,
being a photograph, it’s supposed to be a record of something that actually
happened. Taken as a whole, the image flirts with reality: we know what we see
isn’t real, and yet there it is. Chance has produced an image—a photograph—of something that never was. But
as with an exquisite corpse, the greater the incongruity of the parts and the greater
the accidental perfection of the whole, the more we like it. We like it for its
shock value and for its marvelousness.
The problem for me is that I
am not interested in shock and I am not collecting marvels. I am using
snapshots for roughly expressive purposes: like anyone who is exercising some
sort of aesthetic judgment in choosing among snapshots, I am commandeering their
accidental meaning for my own ends. But what if they don’t have any? Double
exposures in this first class often resist being used the way I want to use
them. They tend to simply beat their breasts and brag about the implausibility
of their own existence. They overwhelm productive use—as opposed to mere
display—because they are all about themselves; they have no content apart from
the ability to inspire awe merely for having happened.
I compared double exposures
with “exquisite corpses.” Another (somewhat imperfect) analogy may help: a
double exposure is something like a visual pun. Both puns and double exposures are accidental layerings
of components that we are able to take advantage of; a pun contains two
meanings, a double exposure two images. Why is the pun “the lowest form of
humor”? Obviously, because it has no guts. We feel in some way that a mere
superimposition of meanings is not enough. Those stories that end with “we come
to seize your berry, not to praise it” or “pharaoh faucet majors” are truly
silly (at least unless we tell them with some sort of irony), because there is
no larger point. Who cares if these
words sound like those words? On the
other hand, Brando’s “hap-penis” joke in Last
Tango in Paris doesn’t make us groan in quite the same way, because it has
a context in the movie that takes it beyond mere verbal trickery. So there are
puns and puns. In somewhat the same way, a double exposure impresses us as a
fortuitous layering of images, but is often empty otherwise. “Wow! It looks
like she’s rummaging in his head!” Well, so what? That “Wow!” is an expression
of amazement that such a thing occurred at all, and I think that pretty much exhausts
what can be made of it.
The other kind of double exposure
simply creates an optical effect. It has no semantics, so to speak, no clash of
ideas; it gives us no women rummaging in men’s heads, no kids burying or
digging up their elders in the garden, but just an abstract design—some pileup
of bodies or faces, perhaps, or a shape, a composition. Pictures like these are
far easier to use, but I still often find them glitzy.
I want to stress that any
good snapshot is a statistical anomaly in precisely the same way as a double
exposure. Any good snapshot—though it’s just a scrap of paper!—will still make
the mind expand to meet those two big ideas that I called fate and infinity.
But it will have other properties, too. It will have content. In sum, double
exposures are very often less, not more, than other snapshots. Mathematics and
the stars are behind any good snapshot, but I’m not sure how much we can do
with a snapshot that is about nothing else.
Here are some double
exposures from my collection. I disapprove of many of them, including, I’m
afraid, the most stunning, “surreal” juxtapositions. But some do have a feeling,
or can be made to carry one in context—they are “expressive,” in my
terminology. The first example actually seems sort of demented. The ghostly
couple looming above the wilderness is one of several that achieve a certain
metaphysical grandeur. And an abstraction like the vortex of machine parts can
be made to bear some weight.
For more information on Joel Rotenberg, click here.
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