S(H)IBBOLETH: CHEESE for a public bite
You have just arrived for one of those noisy weekend ceremonies,
dressed to be seen. And who is one of the very first to notice you? A
commercial photographer of no-fixed address, of course! Even if you have got
cartons of photographs at home, that doesn’t matter. Even if you have a library
of photo albums, well, that library needs fresh acquisitions. And you have to
help the photographer make a living from capturing your moments in history.
If the geographic setting is Nigeria, then there are armies of
them running after you, helping to build your importance. Your ego needs this
kind of massaging, badly. Or maybe, you dislike it, but you are trapped now and
cannot escape. Shots, shots, and more shots – as you disembark from your
automobile, as you walk majestically to greet other guests, as you shake hands
with or embrace the host, as you march into the hall, as you bend to pick your
falling accoutrements, as you take your seat and adjust your clothes, as you
rise and dance to the music of the day, as you take a sip of this and that, as
you attack the menu, as you laugh at the jokes, as you “spray” some money on
your host. It’s just a matter of minutes and your frozen images would be
displayed on the ground as the wares of the day. Or, they are enveloped
hurriedly and brought to you to see and pay for. More shots?
As a social ritual, photography comes with its own drama:
individuals are aesthetic objects that are located and arranged in space, made
to assume postures and looks. In those days, the ritual of arranging
individuals to be photographed used to be very elaborate and tedious: the
photographer, in the most dramatic fashion, arranges the individual and then
moves back to his camera housed in a shroud that gives it a more mysterious
outlook, and then runs back again to adjust a part of the person’s body or
costume. It is a series of goings and comings, of peeping and perfecting. And
then, CLICK; a blinding light, and the individual becomes a frozen image.
The group photograph is even more entertaining: there is the
celebrated individual in the centre – and then there are those to flank him or
her, the privileged few. Then there are the complements, those happy to be
allowed to stoop or squat in the front, very close – mind you – to the
celebrated centre.
OK, say CHEESE.
Those who feel that they should have been asked to stay in the
centre or close to the centre but have been left at the margins do not take it
kindly. Watch out for how they say their own CHEESE, or whether they say it at
all, when the group is invited by the photographer to utter the magic word.
By the way, some of us who are not lucky enough to have very
well-formed dentition may feel uncomfortable when photographers, in a desire to
produce full images of cheerful human beings, order us to say CHEESE before
photographing us. For one, many local people in my country have never seen
cheese and do not understand the link between being photographed and the
invocation of CHEESE. Indeed, some decades back, some very elderly people who
were amazed that the camera could create an image that looked exactly like the
object physically present, thought it was pure magic, and that the uttering of
CHEESE was a necessary incantation for the magic. Understandably, some refused
to be photographed, thinking that the replication of someone’s image was a
signal of the death of the original.
Were these local people alone in associating photography with
death? Not at all, Roland Barthes too, likened the moment of capture in
still-life photography to death.
Saying CHEESE in order to enable the emergence of a smiling
still-life image of oneself is almost like uttering the last word before moving
into another life. Incidentally, this last word makes one expose one’s teeth in
a desperate attempt to make one’s face speak another language. Photographers as
artists invent situations through their photographs, which is why they try
sometimes to make us assume particular postures or utter words that help our
postures to speak more eloquently.
The emergence of computer technology has further given the photographer
the opportunity to be more and more creative with photographs as modes of
speaking. These days when it is possible for a photographer to excise the bust
of a public figure and superimpose it on the body of a donkey, or to clean up
an image of a face terribly ruined by chicken pox, is the rhetoric of the
photographic image indeed not some cheese for someone’s bite?
