The Dark Chamber

Can there still be a secret in photography? If everything is visible and feasible, if everything is pure smoothed-over surface?

And yet, it still exists: the dark chamber. It is not something material, but the spiritual space in which the essence of photography is hidden, and thus at the same time the riddle of the visibility of all things. In analog photography the clue to its meaning is much clearer than with digital: Think of an already exposed but not yet developed strip of film, which is still locked up in the light-proof interior of the camera. The image is still hidden in darkness, protected from any imaginable seeing eye or grasping hand. Opening the film to daylight would destroy the images’ very traces of light, over-exposing them and thus causing the image to disappear altogether.

This is a metaphor for an evidently invisible image, for an invisible icon, about whose existence we are quite aware without ever actually seeing it. If it is ever to be seen at all, then it would paradoxically have to become a visible image, a quasi-religious icon that gives us a glimpse of what is absolutely invisible.

Photography is an attempt to preserve this supposed paradox, i.e. the contradiction between visibility and invisibility in the image itself. The contradiction is not resolved, but rather creates a barely perceptible tension that permeates the picture space in its length, width and depth. Although the invisible cannot be depicted in this space, it shines and radiates in a mysterious way through the visible.

When this happens in photography, then the sight of the images leads our perceptive understanding to the forecourt and right up to the borders of the dark chamber, which is nothing and therefore can never be opened. Yet a kind of numinous reality, whose existence we sense in rare moments deep in our innermost selves.

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