Michael Haneke’s Cache and Panopticism
Panoptic Memory:
In his book The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio describes painter-photographer Edward Steichen’s renunciation of photographic pictorialism and his eventual embrace of straight photography – a direct result of his work in aerial surveillance during World War I. Using Steichen’s experience to illustrate the early-20th century tendency to equate photography with reality, Virilio writes, “the aerial photograph [came] to lay claim to a scientific objectivity comparable to that of medical or police photography. As a professional effort it was already nothing more than the interpretation of signs, the development of visual codes” (Virilio 48). The camera, according to Virilio, created a distance between the photographer and his subject; and in doing so, instilled a form of subjectivity more perverse than the painter’s (made so through its invisibility). He writes, “an aesthetic of disappearance had arisen from the unprecedented limits imposed on subjective vision by the instrumental splitting of modes of perception and representation” (49). Photography represented a mechanized art form – one in which the influence and presence of the photographer evaporated and was replaced by a veil of objectivity.
