Disconnected colonial landscapes in a pre-photographic era

Before the invention of photography and film, we got to know the world beyond our personal experience through the oral, drawn, painted and written descriptions of the explorers that went forth, and came back.  The communication between what was experienced via the explorer’s senses, and what was subsequently represented to the people, did not always match up.

See below the (bad quality) photograph I took at a British stately home, of a 17th Century colonial ink etching.

It looks as if the etching was made informed by an oral or drawn description.  Modern viewers of this 17th Century image understand the intention of what was represented, though are able to see how the memory of a palm tree and perspectives in the landscape does not quite relate to the actual.    It shows the slight disconnection between the representation and the real; the sign and the signified, creating a visual poetry rather than textual essay.  The broken link between the lived experience and the reproduction has rendered inaccuracies, inconsistencies, myths, assumptions, and an imagined ideal.  A (literally) captured land presented as an imaginary captured landscape.  The viewer thinks they know what type of land this is and approximately where it might  be, but if they went looking for it themselves they will never find it.  Not exactly.

The advent of photography added a seemingly comforting layer of visual truth, which satisfied the viewer as it spoke directly to the senses.  Arguably it comforted our most trusted sense; our eyes. 

http://www.oceania-ethnographica.com/archiveB001.htm
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Photography brought with it a perceived visual truth which made etchings (and other such crafts representation approaches) largely redundant as a source of news and events.    Photography brought a different type of myth into the world; an assumed instant (visual) knowledge that had to be proven false rather than proven true – thus images were accepted as true as a default, largely remaining unquestioned.  

Photography created myths that were easily accepted as ready packaged nuggets of truth.  Images presented alongside a single caption – a statement of ‘fact’ that tried to summarize and represent an entire anthropological monograph.

IMAGE + ‘ANCESTOR WORSHIP‘ caption = TRUTH. 

“The experts say it is so, so of course it is true.  Why question it?”

What photography gained in visual recognition it lost in textual nuance.  It gained scientific respectability but lost the creative poetry (of an etching) - lost only because viewers were not looking for it or even expected it.  When faced with a bold fact, there is little motivation to look for anything else, least of all visual poetry.  One has become instantly satisfied.  Comforted with a perceived stable knowledge.  The viewer thinks they know what is meant by ‘ancestor worship’ and approximately what it might entail, but if they went looking for it themselves they will never find it exactly.  Not what they imagined. 

Life is more complex and layered than a single photograph and a supporting caption.  The viewer of an etching knows that it is a mere representation of a real phenomena, thus trusts the gap between what is assumed, and what further needs to be known (by education and experience).  The viewer of an early photography (and arguably even now) collapses the disconnection between representation and reality.  We can see it with our own eyes, the caption providing the common sense clue.  The photograph + caption acts as an extension of our memory – we were never there yet still we have seen it with our own eyes.  

We trust it in a way we would never trust an etching.  The irony is that the etching is more truthful, as it pretends to be nothing other than a mere representation.  The photograph presented as fact denies its true nature – that of a captured scene – a voiceless glimpse, full of poetry.