Crossing (photo essay by Bruria Hammer-Bleich)

“The photographic essay . . . give[s] us a literal conjunction of photographs and text– usually united by a documentary purpose . . .” (Mitchell 285).

In taking and arranging these photos, I was particularly drawn to Mitchell’s explanation of the photo essay as documentation. After being hit by a car on campus at the beginning of the semester, I was repeatedly asked, “What happened?”  The medics wanted to know, the police wanted to know, the family wanted to know. In the accident’s after-shock I needed to tell the story as much as the circle around me was curious to hear it. But each articulation distorted the story a little, shifted my memory until I did not trust myself to accurately convey my own experience. Unlike the fickle verbal account, the photographic record is immutable. Just as Mitchell argues, photography succeeds as a reliable documentation of the crash where no other recreation – not verbalizing, not showing my already deceptively healed body – can reach the same honesty of explanation.

The first and fourth photographs (the empty crosswalk and the blood splattered curb, respectively), evoke Barthes’s concept of “stadium.” They are the expected plot points, with predictable, accessible interpretation. The cultural need for dramatic narrative, from an ordinary start with a regular crossing to the exhilarating end with blood across the ground, are satisfied in these two. Daune mentioned a narrative of betrayal in the essay “the bold thick white dashes laid out in front of you outline a space designed to protect you and just moments later deceives its protective capabilities.” Photos one and four represent either end of this betrayal, with the perspective in the first still trusting of traffic law that ostensibly protect us, and the fourth photo a burst lip after the realization that arbitrary governance means little to a driver distracted.

Taking the second photograph (car speeding towards the crosswalk) reminded me of the observation in Another Way of Telling that photographs rely on only the single artistic choice of when to shoot and that their resulting pictures are  “therefore weak in intentionality” (Berger 90). According to police and witnesses, the reason I was hit had nothing to do with the way I was crossing, only with the way the driver who hit me was driving. Similarly, the attempts at photographing a car speeding into the crosswalk was entirely outside of my control. I had to wait, over and over and over, until a car that looked like the car that hit me came at the right distance at the right speed into the crosswalk. The reliance on random passerby traffic for my image undermines the ideal of the artist in charge of her creation.

For Barthes, “punctum” is significant because any person can look at any photograph and leave with a different trigger within the image that pierced them. But I wanted the third photograph (the image of the blurred tree) to have only one punctum. I retook the photograph until birds and sunlight and passing helicopters were all safely out of the frame, minimizing distractions from what the punctum is to me – the blur of the leaves against the sky. Dr. Jelen noticed that the image is an attempt at re-enactment of the accident, a return to the moment in which the force of the car flung me to the air, and I glimpsed a blurred sky and thought it would be the last thing I would see. To construct the photo so there can only be a single punctum is an imposition far beyond the bounds of what Barthes would consider appropriate; for the photographer to claim what the punctum has to be to the viewers would be a gross overstepping to him. But I took the photo anyway so that there is only the sky to see, and only the leaves to leave bruised by.

Will and Hannah commented on back shadowing in the essay. The impending doom of the first images has been realized by the last, an “image text.” For Mitchell, the connection between photo and written word is absolute but abstract; every photo has a written narrative and every written narrative an inescapable visual aspect too. But the montaged text of the police report is a literal containment of writing in photo. The report signals the realization of the essay’s earlier premonition, but also teases it – if the crash victim survived healthy enough to leave a recording of her story then what evidence remains of her trauma?