Kracauer’s Spiritual Realism
Abstract
Using a passage on pages 19 and 20 of Sigried Kracauer’s first chapter in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, I show how the theorist paints a picture of a medium which emerges fundamentally from the ideas of realism – requiring truthful (yet subjective) documentation the world around us, in such a way that the spiritual nature of the everyday is exposed. Kracauer implements a historical argumentative approach, highlighting the ongoing divide between the realistic and personally expressive impulses in photography. He arrives at the conclusion that the medium of photography, as its core, uniquely values realism, but requires expressive selectivity. If the latter is used correctly, it enhances the work’s relationship to the real. The passage on pages 19 and 20 discusses the concept of endlessness in photography. In this passage, Kracauer reveals his philosophical basis for supporting realism by associating the endlessness beyond the frame lines to the endlessness of physical reality in its entirety. In doing this, he suggests that nature is infinite and spiritual (perhaps an extension of his Messianic Jewish faith). I go on to provide additional instances in which this spiritual perspective is expressed in Kracauer’s essay. Then, I look at how this understanding sheds light on other ideas and approaches in Kracauer’s essay, including the role that personal expression serves in relation to the documenting reality, photography’s multiple and ambiguous meanings as products of the endless, randomness of nature, his comparison to scientific inquiry, and perhaps, even the use (and later abandonment) of a historically driven methodology of argument. Kracauer’s discussion of endlessness and infinity serves as inspiration to artists who see potential in the everyday world.
In this essay, I attempt to reveal one of Siegfried Kracauer’s central philosophical inclinations by carefully examining the following passage in the context of his first chapter of Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality:
Third, photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes. A photograph, whether portrait or action picture, is in character only if it precludes the notion of completeness. Its frame marks a provisional limit; its contents refer to other contents outside that frame; and its structure denotes something that cannot be encompassed—physical existence. Nineteenth-century writers called this something nature, or life; and they were convinced that photography would have to impress upon us its infinity. Leaves, which they counted among the favorite motifs of the camera, cannot be “staged” but occur in endless quantities. In this respect, there is an analogy between the photographic approach and scientific investigation: both probe into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them. (Kracauer 19-20)
In order to do this, I will first summarize the work as a whole.
Kracuaer opens with an endorsement of the medium specificity theory, which is followed by stating his methodology for the essay: “the [specific] nature of the photographic medium” can be determined by identifying common topics of discourse across the history of photography (Kracauer 3). He then begins a discussion of such discourse occurring at the medium’s inception and at present, in which he describes two competing ideological approaches in photography: the “realistic” and “formative tendencies” (Kracauer 6-12). In the early days of photography, both sides believed that “photographs were copies of nature,” but the “realistic” camp valued the camera’s ability to accurately reproduce reality, while the “formative” camp valued more substantial creative input from the artist, resulting altered images, often imitating painting (Kracauer 6-7). Kracauer describes the current discourse as split along similar lines, with the realists warming somewhat to embrace some of the formerly “formative” understanding of expression, while the new formatives, the “experimenters,” maintained the greater participatory role of the artist, now creating non-representational images, often without a camera (Kracauer 8-12).
Beginning his discussion on what he believes the unique nature of photography to be, he abandons his historical argumentative framework in selecting realism as photography’s foundational approach, without clarifying its superiority to the formative approach. Following this line of realist-favoring thinking, Kracauer acknowledges the realist ambition of purity in observation, but quickly denies its possibility due to the human mind as mediating between reality and the photograph, which leads to his primary theoretical stance about the medium’s specific qualities (Kracauer 14-16). Photography is most effective when truthfully depicting reality (the “minimum requirement” and foundational property) while also leveraging the meaning-enhancing selectivity of the artist, to transcend this minimum requirement (Kracauer 13, 15). Ideally, the formative tendency helps “substantiate and fulfill” the “realistic tendency,” as “the photographer’s selectivity is of a kind which is closer to empathy [(the realistic)] than to disengaged spontaneity [(the formative)]” (Kracauer 16).
This dominant interest in reality, supplemented by selectivity, emphasizes a number of specific properties, including photography’s four “Affinities” (unstaged reality, fortuitousness, endlessness, and indeterminateness) and three “Appeals” (truthful documenting, revelatory function, and beauty), which together help paint a picture of photography as an art (or art-like practice) categorically separate from the traditional arts, as the human artist defers to the uncontrollable and random (Kracauer 18-22). This uniquely forceful contribution by an uncontrolled reality endows photographs with multiple meanings and opens the possibility for the artist to make new discoveries in a picture after having printed it (Kracauer 20-22). Kracauer denies “experimental photography” (often nonrepresentational) inclusion within “photography proper” due to its basis in the artist’s interests in personal expression over discovery in and depiction of reality (Kracauer 18).
I will now return to the original selected passage about endlessness (the third Affinity) in order to situate it in the context of the just summarized chapter. This portion of text expresses several primary values that Kracauer is arguing for in photography, and in doing so, reveals a deeper philosophical leaning that underlies much of the essay. At this moment in the chapter, Kracauer is extending the line of thinking from the first two Affinities (which are concerned with representing moments of chance appearing in “nature in the raw”) – the preceding sentence states “the medium does not favor pictures which seem to be forced into an ‘obvious compositional pattern’” (Kracauer 19). The endlessness beyond the frame that he describes is a relatively natural next step. Yet, in the latter half of the fourth sentence, Kracauer takes a much larger step by connecting this endlessness of the frame to an endlessness of physical reality as a whole. In doing so, he reveals a central feature of his realist philosophy, which has been hinted at consistently over his preceding pages: reality, nature, the ordinary world we live in is infinite, inexhaustible, awe inspiring, and therefore, spiritual, divine, and magical.
This outlook, which I will provide textual evidence for in the following paragraph, is personally compelling, but may be slightly incomplete. In his assertion that documenting “nature” as it exists to be the only path to the spiritual, he fails to acknowledge the randomness inherent in many material processes of artmaking and the potential problem with claiming that “nature” does not include human creations. Leaving these issues aside for a future essay, I will return to my position of appreciation and briefly point out that Kracauer’s philosophical basis for realism is also supported by two elements of his background. Both his earlier work a social theorist, interested in everyday phenomena, and his religious beliefs (Messianic Judaism, concerned with the prophesized return of God), may have encouraged a search for the presence of the infinite and divine in the world around him.
I will pause here to relay several examples of the spiritual or magical tone which are present throughout the essay. As early as the second page, Kracauer quotes Ruskin praising photographic realism: “…as if a magician had reduced the reality to be carried away into an enchanted land” (Kracauer 4). Later, in his discussion of current photographic discourse, Kracauer describes fondly the perceptive and perspective expanding impact of current realist photography, and critically, the experimental inclination to reject “the ‘wonders of the external universe’ in the interest of self-expression…” (Kracauer 10). Near the end of the essay, Kracauer quotes Louis Delluc saying, “This is what enchants me,” listing situations in which elements in a photograph are discovered well after the image was produced (Kracauer 22). Many other passages throughout the essay do not directly suggest the infinite but, if considered with this concept in mind, fit like hand in glove. One especially compelling instance occurs in discussing the empathic function of the photographer: “the photographer summons up his being, not to discharge it in autonomous creations but to dissolve it into the substances of the objects that close in on him,” (Kracauer 16).
Understanding reality this way, as something spiritual, magical, infinite, and possibly divine, it is easy to understand why Kracauer would favor realist ideology over a formative one. Why create fictions when the existing world we have right here is an infinitely deep well of beauty and potential? The book’s subtitle, The Redemption of Physical Reality, verifies this interpretation.
This understanding also helps clarify Kracauer’s central claim that it is through the combination of the realist and formative approaches, while maintaining realism as the foundation, that the photographer can project many of their “formative urges,” their dreams, through the infinitely deep channels of reality alone – because truth is beauty (Kracauer 7, 22). The infinite serves two roles in relation to the “formative urge” in endowing it with meaning and by inextricably binding it to the realistic duty of the medium. “In our response to photographs, then, the desire for knowledge and the sense of beauty interpenetrate one another. Often photographs radiate beauty because they satisfy that desire. Moreover, in satisfying it by penetrating unknown celestial spaces and the recesses of matter, they may afford glimpses of designs beautiful in their own right,” (Kracauer 22).
This understanding of reality also brings new depth to other photographic qualities that Kracauer mentions. For example, the three other Affinities – unstaged reality, fortuitousness, and indeterminateness – show additional layers of meaning in the context of the infinite and divine. Photography’s inclination to generate multiple meanings is also enhanced in this more expansive context. Further, in discussing the Appeal of beauty, Kracauer’s seemingly dogmatic insistence that “photographs stand a chance of being beautiful to the extent that they comply with the photographic approach,” appears much more agreeable when rephrased as: photographs are beautiful to the extend which they capture a portion of the infinite in reality (Kracauer 21). The passage from pp. 19-20 concludes by making one further connection – tying in the discovery-research-respect-empathy-exploratory quality of the realist approach of photography to the spirit of the infinite by comparing photography to scientific inquiry. Both are processes of discovery of new realms of the infinite (Kracauer 20).
This spiritual appreciation for realism may also have led Kracauer to opportunistically favor a historically led method of argument, as so much of the early discourse about photography focused on its strength in accurately reproducing reality. However, it also seems possible that this personal affinity for realism led him to abandon this same methodology when he needed to prove the objective superiority of the “realistic impulse” to the “formative impulse” (ironically, the crucial moment for this methodology). Perhaps he thought that by page 13, the reader had grasped the connection between realism and the infinite, greatly reducing the risk of abandoning his argumentative structure.
In this passage, strategically placed near the end of the work, Kracauer skillfully weaves many key ideas from elsewhere in the essay with a thread that discloses his spiritual basis for interpreting realism. Further, as discussed in the preceding paragraph, it hints at some of Kracauer’s logic in constructing his argument. For these reasons, “endlessness” (or at least its discussion in this passage) is perhaps the most salient Affinity in his entire theory and represents a meaningful perspective for artists who see potential in everyday reality.
Works Cited
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997, pp. 3–23.
