Screening the subject.
Amelia Jones’ essay The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment (2002) develops an extensive argumentation about the image as an object, combining a death apparatus and lifelike experience. In the paragraph, “Screening of the object”, Amelia describes such a phenomenon as the relationship between the pose of death and the life-giving participation of the viewer, thereby she notes the contradictory process by which the object appears in the and as representation, especially in relation to the technologized and index field of photo printing. Jones connects our understanding of the culture of self-portrait with the theory of the incarnation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the screen, as an analogy of the picture, “the photograph is like the skin that envelops our corporeality in that it indicates or presupposes interiority.” (Jones 967).
The screen is a term used by Jacques Lacan, a psychiatrist who at one time reinterpreted Freud's work by including analysis based mainly on language to define “the site where gaze meets subject of representation” (Jones 957). According to Lacan, the screen is the intersection between the subject and the gaze, allowing a dialogue between different subjectivities.
The screen is also a mask. In self-manifestation, which is our embodiment of what we call our “individuality,” the subject, Lacan argues, “gives himself or receives from another something similar to a mask, a double, a shell, a discarded skin.”
Despite its effective provocation, Sherman's theatrical photographs do not strike me as much as Laura Aguilar's bodily scenery, which form a physical point of view. By physical, I mean that our interaction with photos is much more about our own bodies — as viewers, through the viewing experience..
During which we began to see that, since it represents not only the object, but also the object of creation, the photographic self-portrait reproduces this dynamic of the screen especially vividly. This indicates the paradoxical “death” and “life” of the photographic image and, therefore, in a broad sense, the simultaneity of absence and presence — the inexorable passage of time, turning all apparent presence into absence, giving form to a deep paradox of human existence.
The question of who is the “subject” in general, of course, never gets an answer, but is indefinitely postponed through the object — this is the great paradox that defines Derrida. Thus, developing Owens' observation, Sherman's repeated self-portrait images seem to confirm that, although at first glance both the mask and the screen imply photography as a place of stagnation, in practice they are passages where subjectivation occurs as a process through an “eternal return” through the other.
Citations:
Jones, A. (2002). The “Eternal Return”: Self‐Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(4), 947–978.
