Notes on David Levi Strauss essay: Belief and Image

Stefano Romano. Rome, April 2021

“The true mystery of the world is the visible.”
(Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”)

In a short essay, published two years ago, the poet and critic David Levi Strauss reflects on the reasons that lead us to believe in photographic images.

The book is a few pages and written in a simple way but the theme he deals with is absolutely fascinating to me.

I, therefore, want to share with you the pleasure I felt in reading it.

Also because I have always been interested, as a photographer, in the aspect of faith and how it declines in the various religions and in those who profess them.

In these pages I have repeatedly quoted the writings of Scianna, Barthes, Mormorio, and Fontcuberta on the philosophical aspect of photography; Therefore, I could not fail to be attracted by a book entitled: “Why we believe in photographic images.”

The heart of Levi Strauss's thesis is contained in the few lines reported in the back of the book:

“As history teaches, beliefs do not disappear, rather they are projected onto different objects: we no longer believe in gods or heroes, but in celebrities; we no longer believe in magic, but in technology. We no longer believe in reality, but in images.” (D. Levi Strauss)

The short essay begins with an analysis of the well-known formula “Seeing is believing”: believing and images share the same nature since the act of believing is already an image, and both are based on memory, sight, love, and the will.

“Memory, as we remember mostly through images and believe what we remember (not always to our advantage). Sight, because “until we see we don't believe”. And love, since the act of believing and that of loving sprout from the same seed.” (D. Levi Strauss)

We decide – here is the will – to believe in something, to accept it as truth.

As revealed by the analysis of the proverb “seeing is believing”, the first appearance of which seems to be in 1609 in a manuscript by S. Herward, in which it is reported as “Seeing is leeving.”

Leeving means to love, in its Indo-European root leubh, and in the Old English leof, today lief, which means “dear”, or “beloved”.

“Believing means having a heart. To believe is to love.” Levi Strauss writes.

Hence the close link between the act of believing, the image is seen, and love.

In the historical journey made by the great monotheistic religions, this bond becomes even more profound and problematic.

Because Jesus Christ was the image of God, just as the first man was made in the divine image. Fourth-century Christian theologians used the word image as a Christological term, just like Christ who was the image of his divine Father. This is why, for example, in Islam, any form of representation not only of God but also of humans is prohibited; certainly there remains an atavistic fear of transferring the worship of God from its supernatural entity to that reproduced in the image. Furthermore, since only God can create man, His human creatures cannot claim the right to do the same with their images.

Hence the bad consideration that photography has in some Islamic circles.

The essay continues by analyzing the various interpretations of photography made in the past centuries, from Barthes to Walter Benjamin. Above all, the delicate relationship between the image and its link with what it represents, its fidelity value, which changes from author to author.

But a lot has already been written about this.

Always a fascinating theme.

I experienced with my own eyes that photography is not just an index of the reality represented but that it is a symbolic sublimation, and I wrote about it here in the post on the portrait of a little girl that I gave to her mother in Bogor, Indonesia, and how her friends caressed that framed image while ignoring the real child at their feet. Ferdinando Scianna has written some of his most beautiful pages on this.

But it's in the last chapter that the book becomes intense and emotional.

With technological progress that has led to ease and an intensive multiplication of images, photographs have slowly vanished from their initial task of representing reality, both because in the continuous compulsive accumulation, they have been transformed from a trace to a mere stream, and because technical evolution has made their falsification easier.

But precisely this technological power cloaks the images with a strong apparent truthfulness, for which we abandon ourselves to our unconditional trust in them.

“What characterizes so-called advanced societies is that today these societies consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs”, writes Roland Barthes, quoted several times by Levi Strauss.

And we choose by an act of will to believe them.

“Like love: falling in love isn't exactly a choice, but at a certain point the will intervenes.

To believe in the world, we need representations of it and we need to be able to relate to them. I don't know with which technologies all this will happen in the future, nor if they will still have to do with photography, but there is no doubt that the secular faith in images, which has existed since the cave age, will play a decisive role.”

Levi Strauss concludes.

Perhaps the photographs will disappear but the desire that binds us to them will never run out.

The deep bond that binds seeing, believing, and loving is truly fascinating. That, etymologically, seeing is believing also translates into seeing is loving is, in my opinion, highly poetic.

And this then seems to be the lifeline of the images, their certainty of perennial existence, because we decide with our will to believe – and therefore love – in what we see, enveloping the images, and photographs, of that romantic aura that make them so dear to us.

The last section of the book is dedicated to a small anthology of quotes about seeing or photography.

I conclude by reporting one of my favorites and, of course, inviting you to find and read this little book.

“And undoubtedly our time [...] prefers the image to the thing,

the copy of the original, the representation of reality,

the appearance of being.

What is sacred to it is nothing but an illusion, but what is profane is truth. On the contrary, the sacred is magnified in its eyes as the truth diminishes and the illusion increases so that the height of illusion is also for it the height of the sacred.”

(Ludwig Feuerbach, preface to the second edition of “The essence of Christianity” (1843), quoted by Guy Debord in the epigraph to “The society of the spectacle”, 1967)

David Levi Strauss: “Photography and Belief” (David Zwirner Books, 2020)

Italian version