INTRODUCTION: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM HENRI VAN LIER

Jan Baetens
Geert Goiris

In our times of globalization, real-time communication, and increasing exchanges or
mergers between cultures and traditions, it would be an illusion to think that all texts and ideas exist simultaneously and can be accessed freely in the universal library of Babel, aka Google. The introduction of the star system in scholarly thinking, the permanently rebuilt and consolidated Chinese wall of language differences, the necessity of circulating theories in short-cut slogan form, and, last but not least, the need to calculate the use-value of a theory in terms of academic institutionalization, all these elements explain why some texts have been slow to emerge from their first intellectual environment and why it took more than 25 years to finally put at the disposal of the Anglophone reader one of the major reflections on photography that has ever been written. Henri Van Lier’s contribution to the field of photography – and probably to something that goes far beyond it – is comparable, in its scope as well as in its achievements, to the work of the five or six great theoreticians who are being quoted constantly by scholars and readers all over the world: Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, obviously, but also Walter Benjamin and André Malraux (yes, Benjamin and Malraux, despite the current but undeserved disdain for Malraux’s ideas on the
museum without walls), and, to a lesser extent for their main focus was not exclusively photographic, André Bazin and John Berger. In comparison with these authors, Van Lier is both analogous and different. Analogous, for he too is trying to sketch what he considers being the medium-specificity of photography. Different, because this fascination with medium-specificity does not prevent him for having an all-embracing view of the medium as well as of its position and function in human and social life. Much more than his fellow theoreticians, Van Lier succeeds in Philosophy of Photography in combining an astute sense of the detail (which he has developed extensively in his other book on photography, unfortunately not yet available in book form in English: Histoire photographique de la photographie1) with an extremely broad interest in the meaning of the medium for mankind (for Van Lier, photography is always analyzed in the light of a new discipline he coined as ‘anthropogeny’ and which studies the gradual emergence of what makes us human through the history of the species).
Moreover, having no particular institutional agenda to defend, Henri Van Lier is able to gather a wide range of disciplinary insights and questions – semiotics, history, aesthetics, and, why not, also philosophy – which brings his work close to that of another great ‘marginal’ thinker on photography, namely Vilém Flusser, whose book Towards a Philosophy of Photography (first publication in German: 1983) also took some time before getting translated in English. The editorial history of Philosophy of Photography is almost a novel in itself. It started as a series of lectures in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1981 (one year after Barthes’s Camera Lucida). It then appeared in the Cahiers de la Photographie in 1983, before being published as an
independent book in 1993, always with the same publisher, which unfortunately went bankrupt some time later. Philosophy of Photography continued its mythical but clandestine career until 2005, when it was republished by Les Impressions Nouvelles (which also offered a new public status to Histoire photographique de la photographie). It is now, finally, for all injustices come to an end, offered to a readership outside the Francophone world. On one point, however, the present edition is radically different from all the previous ones. For copyright reasons, it appeared to be impossible to reproduce in this volume the original iconography of Van Lier’s study, which combined a rich mix of (many) very famous and (a few) rather unknown artists. Instead of poorly reusing part of the original illustrations (which were just ‘illustrations’, i.e. images added in order to give a more visual turn to a theoretical argument, contrary to what
happens in Histoire photographique de la photographie, which is a set of close readings of specific photographs), it was decided to order a completely new set of illustrations, meant to be more than merely ‘illustrative’. Made by fifteen young photographers all trained by the Belgian photographer Geert Goiris, who devoted an open master class to Henri Van Lier’s work, all these images represent both an homage to the author of Philosophy of Photography and a timely exemplification of the usevalue of the ideas defended in the book. Each of the photographers has indeed attempted to suggest in his or her own image(s) the echoes which specific points of Van Lier’s work are able to create in the mind, the eyes, but also the hands of contemporary readers and viewers.

This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Research Platform for the Arts (OPK) of the Associatie KU Leuven, which also offered a grant to organize an exhibition and a conference around this publication. We are equally indebted to Geert Goiris, who initiated his students of Sint-Lukas Brussels to the world of Philosophy of Photography and whose commitment to this project has contributed largely to its success. Many thanks also to Monica Turci, Donata Meneghelli, Maria Giulia Dondero, Bernard Darras, Marc Lits, Gérard Derèze, Philippe Marion, and Bart Vandenbossche, who participated in various ways in the scholarly preparation of
the study of this book, to Rein Deslé and Joke Klaassen, who played a crucial role in the editorial process, to Aarnoud Rommens and Paul Arblaster, our translator and copy editor, and to Mieke Bleyen, the ever-smiling project manager of the whole enterprise. But the first and last person to thank is of course Henri Van Lier himself, whose enthusiasm, intellectual openness, and profound humanity have offered us not only a new way of looking at photography, but also many new ways of understanding the importance of photography in our daily lives. And as we hope to have made clear, this work is now only beginning…