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THEORY ON DEMAND
Proxemic Distance While Renaissance, as announced in Jan van Eyck, introduced a subject-defined space, the same space collapsed with Mannerism, in Parmigianino’s self-portrait. Subject-space will be squeezed even further with self-portraits based on lens technology, now allowing a voyeuristic insight into the scene, announced by the arm of Parmigianino’s self-portrait. Parmigianino’s arm, visible in the painting, emerges from his body and enters the viewer’s personal space, crossing the subject’s or Parmigianino’s reality onto our space as if he tries to test if we ourselves are real by touching us. Simultaneously, the personal space of Parmigianino is literally caught and framed in between his arm and his body. This long tradition that started with Parmigianino, in which we actually see the arm of the author inside the frame, is fully exemplified in self-portraits in which the arm is the only part of the self-representation, simultaneously closing us, the viewers, in the intimate body space of the author.121 This arm, that points back to the author of the material picture creator, is according to Paul Frosch ‘deictically indexical, inclusively com-posed, reflexive and reflex – alters and deepens the relationship between photographic mediation and the impulse to sociability.’122 That deictic arm shows that there is no one else in the place of the photographer, bridging the physical distance once reserved for two people in communication, thus – indicating the absence of the inter-mediator too. Such symbolic empty space, in which a subject is communicating with a missing photographer, is also visible in the iconic image of Josef Koudelka displaying the time on his clock, with his arm stretched inside the frame. The arm closes the space in front of him and us, the way we watch with him through his eyes. We, the audience, are participating in the empty streets of Prague, experiencing its strange quietness minutes before the Prague uprising in 1968. A similar position, but with a different effect, is taken in a series of photographs by Arno Rafael Minkkinen. His arm enters the viewing space of the photograph, producing a strange angle and positions in the landscape set in front. Occasionally it produces paradoxes of sizes, so his arm seems as the arm of a giant, changing the landscape, still having no political but rather aesthetical message, but also an ancient body measure of space. Contrary to Koudelka and Minkkinen, whose arms are real and deictic, there is on the market an artificial arm functioning as a selfie stick. Instead of a piece of metal, the author of a selfie holds a realistic cast of an arm that anticipates the viewer, symbolically dragging him inside the scene. The selfie produced is trans-personal, as the hand does not define a viewer more accurately, but there are constantly new visitors who are dragged into the scene. No more laying out a personal space, of the photographer, but a space of the person other than the author, present as an object put in the front, the arm suggests a mystic presence behind the picture, an invisible companion in whose place viewers find themselves, becoming at the same time photographers.
121 Jill Walker-Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 9. 122 Paul Frosh, ‘The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory and Kinesthetic Sociability’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1623.