Faithful and disappointing : reflections on the idea of Idola

Abstract

In this brief article, reviewing Dustin Cauchi’s photomontage Idola, photography is seen as a medium caught in the short interspaces between life and art. Prompted by Larkin’s poetic distillation of photography as ‘faithful and disappointing’, the nature of these idola’s (non)faithfulness to life are examined with thoughts of performative elements and deception, and the nature of these fidelities is explored. The idola are further considered as eide, ‘the presentation to itself of being or the thing’, or, as with Hegel’s definition of art, as a sensuous manifestation of an idea. It is in this disappointment that they are faithful, and the realisation of the problematic nature of the illusion of proximity/immediacy that lies underneath the surface of such photographic instances is given its due consideration.