Double Exposure

Memory and Photography

Olga Shevchenko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351521673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over the past decade, historians and sociologists have increasingly used visual materials, in particular photographs, in their work. This volume brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and media and visual scholars to articulate how photography, as a practice and as a visual medium, can provide insights into national memory, collective identities, and the historical imagination. This collection allows the reader to trace parallel conceptual developments occurring in the sociology and anthropology of memory and in the history and theory of photography, and to illustrate the unique "angles of vision" these disciplines offer. Photographic images commonly accompany historical accounts, from documentaries to family scrapbooks, and since the early days of commercial photography, pictures have been viewed as tools to capture memories. Later critical writing has challenged this equation by inverting it: photos, along with other archival practices, were often viewed as falling short of their supposed function as vessels of memory and at times even denounced as devices that distorted memories. How does photography participate in the formation and maintenance of collective identities and shared memory discourses, from the family to the nation? Furthermore, how can we begin to conceptualize photography's effects on the historical imagination of individuals and groups? Double Exposure endeavors to answer these questions by calling attention to the variety of contexts in which images circulate and to the narratives from which they spring and which they, in turn, shape. This is the latest volume in Transaction's Memory and Narrative series.

1

Memory and Photography: An Introduction

Olga Shevchenko

Williams College

What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.

—John Berger, Uses of Photography

To begin: a couple of snapshots.

One time a few years ago, while walking around Manhattan, I peeked into the window of a small photo printing shop located near the campus of New York University. Plastered above the counter was a poster featuring two versions of the same woman’s portrait. A smaller, black-and-white one bore visible marks of wear and tear. Its colors were faded, and the surface appeared as if it had been folded many times, with tape marks and creases running every which way. The second image was of the same portrait, but rendered in vibrant, perhaps even exaggerated color. Its surface was brand new and undamaged. At the top of the poster was the slogan: “Photo Restoration: as Vivid as a Memory.” In a smaller font, the advertisement outlined the details of the offer, which included not only the restoration of old family snapshots to their “original luster” but also ways of making them look “better than ever” through the elimination of tattoos, changes of or the addition or removal of other members.

A few months later, at a European conference on narrative and biography, I encountered a different juxtaposition of memory and photography when a Swedish sociologist of culture, Feiwel Kupferberg, described what he considered to be one of the most frequent misperceptions regarding memory—the assumption that memory works “like a camera, recording everything that it sees as photographs and then storing them in an album.”¹ In debunking this erroneous assumption, the talk meant to underscore the highly selective and malleable nature of memory, but in doing so, it made telling assumptions about photography.

These two small stories, and the tension between them, deserve attention. In the first, it is the photograph that fails, requiring additional labor so that the image can be brought back to the vividness of memory. In the second, memory is the unstable element in the equation, and photography offers the crutches for its inherent failings. Yet their disparity notwithstanding, there is a certain kinship between these two rhetorical moves: they both start from positioning memory and photography as an unproblematic, almost natural pair, even if only to eventually disturb this presumed assumption, each in their own way.

***

We are living today in a memory boom—or so thinkers from Pierre Nora to Jan and Aleida Assmann tell us. But we also live in a time of unprecedented media expansion, and the two trends are not unrelated.² New media technologies’ claims to a place under the sun are often couched in terms of their capacity to archive the present with even greater detail and, thus, to preserve the past for posterity. The promises of these technologies are not without their critics. In particular, numerous dissident voices—sometimes coming from new media gurus themselves, as with Jaron Lanier (Kahn 2011)—warn against overreliance on “prosthetic technologies” (Lury 1998), pointing that these, usually digital, media may paradoxically lead to a loss of control over personal as well as cultural memory.³

Although the intensity of the debates over the future of memory may be new, the problem itself is not. As David Lowenthal (1985) points out, the fears that writing would destroy memory were articulated in antiquity by none other than Plato (who, Lowenthal adds ironically, chose to document his fears in writing and even refused to allow oral poets into his Republic because of their reliance on clichés and repetitions). In this sense, Pierre Nora’s (1989) opposition between living memory and the dead “environments of memory” (or the milieux and the lieux de mémoire) has a venerable and very long lineage. The anxiety that technological innovations that pass as aides-mémoire might in fact threaten human capacity to remember is perhaps as old as technology itself.

Photography, the practice that is at the heart of this volume, is not merely one of many media of memory whose workings have been questioned in this way. It is also a representational practice that, from the time of its emergence, was accorded a privileged status as an indexical sign, something, in Susan Sontag’s famous terms, “directly stenciled off the real” (1977, 154).⁴ Indeed, the relationship between memory and photography appears to be both intuitive and essentially contested (and contestable). The language we use to reference the past is ripe with visual metaphors. We speak of images or snapshots of the past when we recreate memories, call especially vivid recollections “flashbulb memories,” and recreate elements of the past in the mind’s eye. The language of photography is similarly shot through with references to memory, not only in Kodak’s advertising campaigns (see West 2000), but also in popular discourse that is sometimes quite far from the modern memory industry. I once came across a makeshift photo album made in 1948 in the USSR by a technical school student who had just moved from his native village in the south of Russia to Rostov-on-Don. The snapshots he pasted onto the cardboard pages chronicled his life in the city, and they were punctuated by captions: “Memory of my friend Mitia,” “Memory of the students living together in the dormitory, 1948,” and even, in a later testimony of his upward mobility, “Memory on the motorcycle.”⁵

Yet the issue of the relationship between memory and photography is far more complex, and this ambivalence haunts the literature on photography. Although famously heralded early in its history as a “mirror with a memory” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1859), photography’s role as a perfect container of memories has been subsequently challenged by a number of authors who have pointed out that, in David Campany’s words, “the photograph can be an aid to memory, but it can also become an obstacle that blocks access to the understanding of the past” (2003, 124).⁶ The critique is perhaps most eloquently expressed in the writing of Roland Barthes, who stipulates in Camera Lucida that the poignancy of a photograph, its ability to stir and cause pain, are rooted not in the photograph’s bringing the past to life (“nothing Proustian in a photograph,” he insists), but rather in the image’s ability to confront the viewer with the realization that what she sees no longer exists. Later and more direct critiques further emphasized what David Bate (2010) calls photography’s “negative relation to memory,” by juxtaposing artificial mediated memories embodied in photo collections, archives, and monuments to popular memories that they are designed to supplant. The former, in Bate’s apt terminology, are taken to represent nothing but “a public ideology of memory,” that which ought to be remembered (but not necessarily what was).⁷ On a different plane, as Geoffrey Batchen’s (2004) work on personal photographs attests, the persistent references to remembering that surround photographs testify to the medium’s incapacity to do so in an emotionally satisfying way. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer come to a similarly reserved conclusion about memory and personal photographs, although for them the photographs do contain resonant emotional truths to their owners, failing, rather, as “limited and flawed historical documents, [that] promis[e] more than they can actually reveal” (2006, 229). Digital technologies and the increasing availability of cameras added new dimensions to the old debate. They further highlighted the malleability of photographic images and, at the same time, the ease with which they cross the line between the public and the private and, thus, shape not only personal but also cultural memory (as evidenced, among other things, by the circulation of the images from Abu Ghraib). Furthermore, in light of the fundamental differences between the analog and the digital medium, many commentators have justifiably questioned the appropriateness of subsuming both media under the same name, suggesting instead that the digital turn has ushered the modern world into a post-photographic (although not at all a post-memorial) era (Mitchell 1992).⁸

All of this raises intriguing questions for studies of photography and social memory, and, at a time of a simultaneous resurgence of interest in memory and in the visual across disciplines, it is a useful exercise to think them together, as this volume does. By bringing the scholars of memory and the scholars of photography together under the same cover, this volume seeks to illuminate not only the points of intersection between the approaches practiced by specific disciplines but also to illustrate the analytical tools and habits of mind that are specific to each—and to examine what all of them have to offer one another.

The injunction to think of memory and photography together also derives from the fundamentally mediated nature of memory itself. This point is obvious enough to the scholars of memory, but it does not necessarily serve as a starting point in media studies. Indeed, it is only possible to inquire into media’s effects on memory if one assumes that another, premediated memory could exist and serve as a gold standard against which its subsequent iterations could be contrasted.⁹ The problems of such a model are readily apparent. Not only are individual experiences inevitably refracted through linguistic, institutional, and cultural categories of perception (Schudson 1995) but also the way in which they subsequently are remembered and recalled are also subject to multiple layers of mediation through the properties of the situation, context, available audiences, group membership, and the like (Zerubavel 1996). This suggests that even individual, personal memories are social in the sense of being mediated through socially available channels and shaped in social contexts. The mediated nature of memory is ever more apparent when we look at the area of experience that is frequently referred to as “collective memory”¹⁰; that is, the realm of memories that are shared by members of various social groups, be it a tribe, religious community, or nation. A great deal of such collective memories is generated in the course of routine interaction, as individuals are informally socialized into the culture of their families and larger communities. Jan Assmann (1995) calls this type of memory “everyday,” or “communicative” memory. Another, more formal initiation happens as people partake in various forms of what Assmann calls “cultural memory”—the texts, rituals, and practices, the “store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiatiry” (1996, 130).¹¹ In comparison with the practices of communicative memory, cultural memory has a longer temporal horizon (extending far beyond the eighty or one hundred years that have comprised the immediate experience of living generations) and is more explicitly formalized and objectivized (as expressed in figures of memory—texts, rites, iconic images, monuments, etc.). In communicative and cultural memory, therefore, remembering is inconceivable without complex layers of mediation, both social (because what is remembered usually lies beyond the range of events personally experienced and as such can only be accessed through others) and technological (because the objectivation of memories occurs in texts and artifacts, including photographs, through which the past is accessed in the present). In place of memory as a disembodied mental image, one has memory that is materialized, objectified, and embodied. In other words, any notion of a premediated memory is a chimera, and there is no reason to expect photographic mediation, whether digital or analog, to be any more problematic than one that occurs through the medium of the written or spoken word.

Not only is memory mediated, it is also—and paradoxically—inherently unstable, situational, and intersubjective. We remember different aspects of the same experience when we recall them in different contexts, with different interlocutors, and in different points in our lives.¹² In this sense, to frame photographs as containers, vessels, or expressions of memory is to misconstrue memory by imagining it as a static thing to be contained and transmitted, rather than a practice to be enacted and performed variously in different settings. And, consequently, if in our analyses of photography, we find that images fall short of their function as memory vessels, this points to the need to re-examine the operating notions of memory with the same scrutiny accorded to photography.

The chapters in this volume all take as their point of departure an awareness of memory’s processual and mediated nature. Rather than choosing a side in the technophilic versus technophobic debate, or endeavoring to draw a clear line between memories that were or were not enhanced by photography, they treat photography as fundamentally constitutive of remembering in the modern age, asking instead, “Precisely how does photography matter?” In this, they follow in the footsteps of a range of scholars who interrogate the ways in which photographs of different kinds—ranging from anthropological images to family snapshots—variously encode, nurture, and at times obstruct particular visions of personal, familial, institutional, and national past...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Memory and Photography: An Introduction
• I Public Memories
• II Private Archives
• III Photographic Sociabilities
• List of Contributors
• Index