This one might be my favorite old paper — as I figured out how to integrate Harry Potter into class. i(heart) this one.  This is a musing on the photograph in conversation with Barthes’ Camera Lucida. - ali

Ecstatic

 “As always in the wizarding world, the photograph was moving;  the wizard,…kept winking cheekily up at them ….” – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The Photographs in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are magically alive: waving and smiling at the viewer, sleeping, primping themselves and carrying on the idiosyncrasies of ones character, as though imagination puts the wink back into image. The stillness of Muggle photographs are freeze framed in comparison, to the point in which Barthes assumes the photograph produces death in an attempt to preserve life. However this death creates a disparity between the image and the referent, in which Barthes’ velleity opts that the photograph shift with time in order to coincide with his ‘profound’ self but admits that the contrary must be said: “Myself never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn…, and “myself” which is light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, “myself” just doesn’t hold still, giggling in my jar: if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing!”  Yet, the mysterious stillness of a photograph can be as spellbinding as a wizardly mugshot.

Once a the  shutter is released, Barthes ascertains that the Photograph assumes the death of the referent: the moment before the fate-full click is no longer, the lasting image remains lifeless, and the only certainty concerning the image is it’s death. The Photograph appearing as if a frozen moment on paper, remains fixed and “dead” while attempting to preserve life, and apparently, the photograph has lost any dynamic of its own.  The still photograph reveals something as it existed, as it had been, a quality which Barthes attributes as “that-has-been.”  Generally speaking, that which has been, no longer is; yet the life that is preserved as an image, manages to reach us: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.  From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations, which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”  In a timeless manner, we meet that which has been.
 
Photographs offer a sort of resurrection by displaying “reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.” We amend the space between the photograph and us, when we look at an image; the adventure returns to the moment of the shutter release. While remaining present, we touch the image as it had been, yet as we are. It is as if there exists a loophole in time; as though we are on the brink of meeting another dimension, a dimension in which ‘that-has-been’ and ‘that which is’ intersect in a dynamic display. This is what Barthes calls the madness factor of the image, the hallucination that brings past time and real time together. Barthes elucidates that the photograph is “mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing, and which I shall call, in conclusion, the photographic ecstasy.” It is as though the duality of ‘that-has-been’ and ‘that which is’ joins in mystical union.  
 
Thus experiencing the photograph can be adventuresome. I revisit my photograph of a surprise snowy morning in the Utah backcountry often. I meet it with anticipation; my gaze with the photograph will transport me: waking up to the contrasting snow covering the red rocks of Escalante’s Coyote Gulch; from this spot the sights of the experience flood my mind’s eye: the snow falls steadily, and the cold dampness surges to my core. My mind trips on this photograph, the ecstasy lies in meeting that time and space once again, and yet, I remain under the cozy warmth of my blankets while my mind ventures. Much like the light of a star, the photograph is an “emanation of a past reality: a magic, not an art.”