This photo essay uses an extract from Albert Camus’ ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ to explore the paradox between our need to find meaning in life and the ‘unreasonable silence’ of the universe in response. From panoramic landscapes to intimate moments, Callaghan’s film prompts reflection on photographic practice as a kind of ‘absurd reasoning’, one that attempts to contain meaning by capturing an image in time while simultaneously attempting to free that image from its indexicality.
Unreasonable Silence, 5’45”, 2020
Concept & Editing – Joanna Callaghan
Music – Peter Coyte
Photography – Joachim Bergamin, Joanna Callaghan, Dante Bergamin Callaghan
Words – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942
Albert Camus’ ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, 1942
And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes – how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel ? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to an electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which the electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry : I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant ? You have already changed theories. So that science was to teach me everything and ends up in hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts ? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know anymore. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults ? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations.