Bourdieu and a Hasselblad

Photograph by William Anders, NASA, 1968

"It was the first time that people actually knew what the Earth looked like."

William Anders

Bourdieu refers to the "opposition" between subjectivisim and objectivism as dividing the social sciences and as being "the most fundamental, and the most ruinous." He goes on to say that both are essential, yet both offer only one side of an epistemology necessary to understand the social world.

I used a Hasselblad camera once - given to me on loan for 5 days and with one roll of film. It was an older model, heavy, and back when you used proper film and had to make each shot work. I loved it... the smell, the shape, the squareness of it. One of the pictures I took still hangs on my wall today. Mostly because of the special little person sitting on a picnic basket grasping a bear, giving me that look that I had grown accustomed to - oh do stop photographing me! But also because I can see the beauty of the Hasselblad lens coming through in the depth of the colours, the softness of the light... alas I didn't get the job - the photographer didn't even look at my photos - so to this day I don't know why. He did take his Hasselblad camera back though.

But I digress surely - what on earth (sorry, couldn't resist) does a Hasselblad camera have to do with Bourdieu?

Well, I had beeen pondering for some time Bourdieu's ideas on objective and subjective, and  happened to be reading Julian Barnes, Levels of Life. At the end of part one he refers to William Anders, a pilot on the lunar module, photographing a two-thirds-full Earth using a specially adapted Hasselblad camera. "To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock."

and in that moment, I understood.