Photography and the Optical Unconscious Quotes

“It is a particular sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of another.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“The optical unconscious remains elusive. This concept is not something that is directly available to sight, but it nevertheless informs and influences what comes into view. By attending to this idea, one might become newly aware of previously unnoticed details and dynamics, as well as the material, social, and psychic structures that shape perception. In several of his books, the British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas described this disavowed dimension as the "unthought known." This refers to material that is either emotionally undigested or actively barred from consciousness." As Bollas teaches us, this "unthought" material is, in fact, an integral part of knowledge. And indeed, it seems photography may be one of the principal means to circulate this unconscious material that remains vexingly obscure. Like latent memories, details of photographic information snap into focus and become visible in unpredictable moments. As Benjamin put it, they"flash up" in moments of danger and desire - and they can quickly fade from view unless seized in a moment of recognition.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“Many childhood experiences remain unconscious. Further, when and if development does take place, what is remembered is actually something that went unobserved in the first instance. According to Freud, latent memories are constituted by what a child has experienced and "not understood," and indeed, "may never be re-membered.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“Freud proposes that the relation of unconscious memories to conscious perception is like that of the negative to the photographic print: "It has long since become common knowledge that the experience of the first five years of childhood exert a decisive influence on our life. ... The process may be compared to a photograph, which can be developed and made into a picture after a short or long interval." The powerful force of early childhood experiences remains latent and inaccessible, just as a negative can remain unprocessed for a long period of time before being made into a positive print.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“Repression works like the refraction of light as it passes from one lens (or psychic system) to another, thus distorting the image perceived in the mind's eye.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“photography can help us to grasp. The camera can capture scenes that pass too quickly, too remotely, or too obscurely for the subject to consciously perceive. By enlarging details, or by slowing down or stopping time, the camera pictures phenomena that the viewer has encountered and unconsciously registered but not consciously processed. This sense of the optical unconscious is not about making latent memory traces visible, however, but rather demonstrating the reach and complexity of unconscious perception,”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“Despite our persistent understanding of photographs as "copies of scenes, that is, as images of the past, Flusser argues, they are actually visualisations that concretize images out of myriad possibilities, and in this way, they direct the future.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“The photograph not only stops time, Benjamin argues, but also works to project the future out of the past. The photograph is a forward-looking document, so to speak, anticipating a future viewer who will recognise in it a spark of contingency that cannot be contained to one temporal moment. As Benjamin puts it in his "Little History of Photography": "No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“His (Benjamin's) dialectical image, like the stereoscopic image, is not part of the phenomenal world, but an image that is activated by present readers gazing upon the past. Again, it is not something that is directly perceptible (not reproducible), but only emerges in the imaginative interaction between reader and text.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“photography allows for slippages and resistances, forms of double mimesis, disidentification, and double consciousness that resist official, normative strategies of categorisation and containment.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious