Photography and Psychoanalytic Knowledge

My paper analyses the work of the internationally known Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella, with particular emphasis on her exhibition "Hypnosis". My purpose is to show that contemporary photographic art has an important connection to psychoanalytic theory. As a field of art, photography is new. However, it has been linked with science ever since it was invented. As early as the 19th century, photography became - by the side of the natural sciences - an important part of the budding human sciences, including psychoanalysis. Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot had thousands of pictures taken of hysterical people in the photographic laboratory he founded in the hospital of Salpêtrière. Charcot was a visualist who believed in what symptoms, gestures and postures can tell and registered what he saw in his theatre of living pathology. (Slides of these old pictures of hysterics and persons in hypnosis. If there is time, I will also show some slides and discuss briefly the work called Interim by artist Mary Kelly, in which she interprets Charcot's attitudes passionnelles.) Freud participated in Charcot's lectures and became at first interested in hypnosis as a therapy. But Freud was more interested in what is not seen or is only seen as holes. He began to study the psychic topography under the surface of the skin, where a visual study of the members of the body is unable to penetrate. He calls the unconscious "the other scene". It is a scene on which things are often left unrepresented. Photography has a strange power to speak about that which remains unspoken or unacknowledged. The concepts of "fantasme" and gaze developed by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan include not only the world of the imaginary but also the structural basis of its reconstruction. The gaze which is always outside seems to guarantee that there is more to see than what I see: the invisible returns from the world back to the subject, thus opening a state of visibility. In a photograph, we may be able to see how visibility becomes visible. (Slides of Kella's work.) Marjaana Kella's photographs of people in hypnosis bring out the conditions of visibility. These pictures do not register, as Charcot claimed the pictures he took of his patients did, but one can see oneself seeing and hear hearing in them. Loss of control, relaxation, a vague recollection and involuntary movements seem to imply a flaw or deficiency of some kind. But in fact they bring forth the structure of desire as well as various unreal objects, such as daydreams, phantasies, melancholy or shadows. In so doing the camera's eye acts as a special kind of memory and changes the nature of observed fact (Marjaana Kella's CV and photographs from the series Reversed http://www.galerie-poller.com/ > program)