If we consider raw matter to be the tangible reality – we cannot assert that we are simply made of the ensemble of amino-acid, saturated fats, nitrogen and hydrated principles constituting the transitory substance inside the perimeter of our person. If reality – existing only for what we (each differently) perceive – is difficult to be determined, identity – often a convention – representing a partial aspect of reality is a far more ambiguous concept to define. Nonetheless reality of photographs is something (else) that we determine and may partly control. Identity – a character – is about perception: in photography reality is essentially the point of view upon it. In this sense it embodies the primeval essence of photography: the perception of phenomena’s multiple aspects and the expression of appearance. Beyond human identity, the degrees of the external “image” individuals project of themselves –the history of which have been so articulately presented by Benoit – there are several more approaches to be considered. We mentioned the identity theory: the figure of a curve line is one reality embodying and expressing a dual identity: convex on one side, concave on the other. Another example is the one about the multiple perception of substance’s essence: water for instance, being both transparent and reflective solid and liquid; light, the most mysterious, at the same time visible and intangible; the perception or sizes: we all remember having entered a room we perceived immeasurably vast, and finding it narrow and smaller one day not being any longer children, low and small on its horizon. The character, the aspect, the identity of things – brighter, darker; newer, older; smoother, rougher; bigger, smaller; near, far; transparent, reflecting; moving, motionless, dry, wet… – “is” only in relation to the conditions determining its perception. “Sky is not blue: sky is sky and blue is blue – nothing exists, everything is[1]”. I said previously that the identity is often a convention particularly and abstractly when we recognise it as collective. The political figures, flags of nations, the beliefs of religions, the belonging to human, ethnic or social groups, the slogans and mottoes of ideologies…, are conventions we call (identify) collective identity.
GF
From Encyclopædia Britannica 2010 (www.britannica.com)
Identity
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural iden·ti·ties
Etymology: Middle French identité, from Late Latin identitat-, identitas, probably from Latin identidem repeatedly, contraction of idem et idem, literally, same and same
Date: 1570
1) a- sameness of essential or generic character in different instances
b- sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing : oneness
2) a- the distinguishing character or personality of an individual : individuality
b- the relation established by psychological identification
3) the condition of being the same with something described or asserted “establish the ∼ of stolen goods”
4) an equation that is satisfied for all values of the symbols
5) identity element: Function: noun, Date:1902
an element (as 0 in the set of all integers under addition or 1 in the set of positive integers under multiplication) that leaves any element of the set to which it belongs unchanged when combined with it by a specified operation
- identity card, Function: noun, Date: 1900
a card bearing identifying data (as age or organizational membership) about the individual whose name appears thereon called also identification card identity card
- identity crisis, Function: noun, Date: 1954
1) personal psychosocial conflict especially in adolescence that involves confusion about one’s social role and often a sense of loss of continuity to one’s personality
2) a state of confusion in an institution or organization regarding its nature or direction
- identity matrix, Function: noun, Date: circa 1929
a square matrix that has numeral 1′s along the principal diagonal and 0′s elsewhere
- identity politics, Function: noun, plural but singular or plural in construction, Date:1988
Cf. particularism, Function: noun, Date:1824
2) a political theory that each political group has a right to promote its own interests and especially independence without regard to the interests of larger groups
- identity theft, Function: noun, Date: 1991
the illegal use of someone else’s personal information (as a Social Security number) in order to obtain money or credit
- additive identity, Function: noun, Date: 1953
an identity element (as 0 in the group of whole numbers under the operation of addition) that in a given mathematical system leaves unchanged any element to which it is added
- dissociative identity disorder, Function: noun, Date: 1993
Cf. multiple personality disorder, Function: noun, Date: 1901
a disorder that is characterized by the presence of two or more distinct and complex identities or personality states each of which becomes dominant and controls behaviour from time to time to the exclusion of the others and results from disruption in the integrated functions of consciousness, memory, and identity called also multiple personality dissociative identity disorder
- multiplicative identity, Function: noun, Date:1958
an identity element (as 1 in the group of rational numbers without 0) that in a given mathematical system leaves unchanged any element by which it is multiplied
- self–identity, Function: noun, Date: 1835
1) sameness of a thing with itself
2) individuality “self-understanding is the necessary condition of a sense of ∼ — J. C. Murray”
Function: noun, Date: 1614
1. a- total character peculiar to and distinguishing an individual from others; b- personality
2. archaic: the quality or state of being indivisible
3. separate or distinct existence
4. individual, person.
References
FICTION, LITERARY, SPECULATIVE
FERNANDO PESSOA – inevitable! – and his multiple heteronyms, possessing distinct biographies, appearances and writing styles; some of the most famous are:
- Bernardo Soares – Poet and prose writer, author of the fantastic Book of Disquiet
- Ricardo Reis – Poet and prose writer – author of Odes
- Álvaro de Campos – Poet and prose writer Collected Poems Vol. 2, 1928–1935
- Alberto Caeiro – Poet and master of other Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms
…And about 80 more among heteronyms and different characters
VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando
JORGE LUIS BORGES The Other – extract from The Book of Sand
FEODOR DOSTOEVSKIJ The Double
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The real life of Sebastian Knight
LUIGI PIRANDELLO The Fictions: The late Mattia Pascal; One, no one and one hundred thousand
MILAN KUNDERA Identity
ALDOUS HUXLEY The Doors of Perception
PHILIP ROTH The Human Stain
A.S. BYATT Possession
MARCEL PROUST La Recherche du Temps perdu
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
THOMAS MANN Doctor Faustus
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Faust
ALBER CAMUS The Foreigner
UMBERTO ECO Il Cimitero di Praga
CINEMA :
DAVID LYNCH Elephant Man
STANLEY KUBRICK Clockwork Orange
JOHN WOO Face/Off
SPIKE JONZE Being John Malkovic
PETER HOWITT Sliding doors
Christopher Nolan Memento
DOUG LIMAN The Bourne Identity
D.J. CARUSO Taking Lives
DAVID FINCHER The Game
VISUAL REFERENCES
Benoît Rivero on IDENTITY
Paris, 7th November 2010
The theme of Identity is one of the four pillars in the history of photography: – identity, memory, time, truth – and photography’s major question ever since. According to the Socratic injunction “Know yourself” (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnôthi seautón), the name is the first knowledge. Identity, in its past acceptations – was – the name: it evokes and essentially means, the name that parents transmits to offspring’s, to the posterity, and the descent. With the XIXth century – from 1839 precisely, the proclaimed date of the invention of photography –, identity is no longer simply a name – it becomes an image too. The individual states “I am myself, I identify with a name and – for the first time – I have a face. The mirror is until this moment the only way to develop one’s own awareness; but mirrors are in those days still very rare objects… A Scandinavian tale tell us – …One day an old fisherman wandering on the shore finds a strange object in the sand: a mirror, the old man has never seen one, he turns it into his hands and looks at it wandering what that could be – then seeing the image staring at him, exclaims – oh, that’s father! He takes home the object and jealously hides it into a box. From time to time in the evenings very cautiously and secretly he looks at it. Such strange behaviour slowly arouses his old wife’s suspicions. One night the man is already sound asleep, she seeks everywhere and discovers the hidden object. She carefully holds it in her hands and silently look at it, exclaiming on a sudden: – A woman, I knew it! Fortunately she is very old -. The French expression for looking at oneself is “se mirer”, literally, mirror oneself. Somehow photography is the end of the mirror: it allow us not only to see ourselves, but to hold the image intact and look at it for ever. Images that we can keep with us and carry them anywhere. What an exorbitant discovery for humanity! And that becomes today a global and diffused media. Thank to photography we (think we) may know ourselves, that means knowing our own image, furthermore, on account of such precious new connection established between the name and the face, we learn something – of ourselves and other’s identities. Yet such new meaning of identity becomes a way to control and govern people, as a new form of knowledge upon them and a way to enter into their lives… A miracle and a tool in the words of Bertillon[2] and Lombroso[3]. Identity in photography does not only means self-portrait, but also and more generally portrait. In the beginning people don’t make their own self-portraits, but posed – dressed up and polished – portraits stating the identity and projecting the appearance. Photography uniquely allows us to actually see ourselves: looking in the glass the eyes move continuously and we cannot see our glance, besides, sides and sizes are in a mirror always altered. On the other hand in the identity photographs (for instance) the image is condensed, and the eyes can perceive it immediately without wandering around. Nowadays seem to we owe several different identities: introducing a radical change in the perception of ourselves the most crucial is the one issuing from the digital world, the virtual identity, the avatar. The alter is an actual “figure” of ourselves somehow existing in the web’s sixth continent.
It is a fact that today a vats number of people around the world possess at least two identities: the one on the identity card and another in the network …and we assume that would mean to have two lives and have the possibility of being someone else in another universe.
Along a similar path we may evoke the contemporary trend of physical – face and body –transformation from make up to aesthetic surgery through biotechnological metamorphosis, and in contemporary art the body itself becomes the artwork.
In this sense we are today at an historical turning point: the two above mentioned phenomenon – virtual identity and physical metamorphosis – would probably at some point meet and join… It is an immense field of research as yet still widely unexplored and a new completely untold dimension. For all of these reasons we shouldn’t override the question identity arises today, both artistically and photographically. Dealing with this subject is a visual capital challenge that would require a deep insight to the problematic. Remind that human being is and has been constantly in seek for identity: there is an irreducible identity that makes us unique – it is a scientific and proved truth – but even that might one day be lost in the course of subverting all rules and laws of genetic, reproduction and way of appearing… Who may say perhaps some day we will find out infinite, multiple and reproducible identities.
BR November 2010
[1] J.L. Borges – The prism and the mirror – collected essays
[2] Alphonse Bertillon 1853/1914, who developed in Paris prison’s laboratories the first biometric scientific identification method.
[3] Cesare Lombroso 1835/1909: Italian anthropologist, whose studies on criminality were influenced by physiognomic.