When I was a child, my parents - being
around the age that I am now, and just as inclined toward a similarly
neglectful attitude to record keeping – kept all of our family photographs in a
large, thick-sided cardboard box. This, in effect, was our family archive, or
at least was as close to a family archive as we are still to get. Within it
were kept every single photograph that my parents had ever taken since they had
been together. As a child this provided no end of fascination to me about the
lineage of my own family. From a very young age I did not feel that I belonged
in this world and the box of photographs, which was almost as high as me, this
archive, was all the proof that I needed of this…
Both of my parents are Scottish but my
paternal Grandmother is Italian so, when they first married my parents decamped
to Rome where my elder brother was born. There the three of them spent what I
can only picture as an edenic few years before they decided to return to grey
old Blighty and have me. I have never forgiven them for this. The point of this
is that by the time that I was barely eight years old I was already filled with
a sense of nostalgia caused by the photographs in the box for periods of time
and place that I had either not taken part in or not been cognizant of.
Strangely, one of the things that I enjoyed the most was delving into this huge
box in the hope of having my mother explain their connection to who I was and
how I got to be there. In this delving, my relationship to, and an empathy
with, my mother was formed. As Lorraine O’Donnell has stated: “Showing
photographs involves storytelling, another narrative act in which the family
makes its own history and image.”[1]
This connection between orality and
maternity was clearly something that I drew a great deal of comfort and
specific personal power from. The connection to a sense of history through
photography has remained one of the only constants in my life and as the
seemingly tangential threads come together in this form I am reminded of the
power of photography as much more than simply that of an image platform. The
photograph – as I shall refer to its many convoluted histories – can be at once
a Mnemonic device, an anthropological artefact, and a document as well as a
picture.
In this essay I will be discussing three
largely forgotten forms which photography has taken – the Daguerreotype, the
mourning, or post-mortem portrait, and the family album – to describe how a
photograph can be a record of the passing of time. This essay is primarily
about the many ways in which a photograph can be considered textual, but first
and foremost it is also an object which preserves a period of time – and the
people within it - forever.
I intend to give a short overview, given
the time allowed, of the ways in which a photograph can exist in the world as a
socially salient and material object, which, much like the concept of archives,
has a life-cycle of its own and carries “meanings [that] are social as well as
personal.”[2]
Elizabeth Edwards suggests that photographs “demand tactile engagement” and
that their materiality is central to the strength of power they have over
memory, saying that we need photographs that “can be handled, framed, cut,
crumpled, caressed, pinned on a wall, put under a pillow, or wept over”[3]
From the late nineteen seventies and
eighties, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the ways
in which photography has infiltrated the world as a social and cultural device.
Informed initially by the ‘material turn’ beginning in anthropology, the
subject of photography as social, cultural and mnemonic device is now
considered almost commonplace within the socio-anthropological framework.
Indeed, within the world of archive and museum studies it is now impossible not
to engage with the materiality of an object within ones research.
In the late 1970s and for most of the
1980s, a debate raged within the world of archives (at least in North America)
an records management, which centered on the best way to archive non-textual
documents within a record-keeping tradition. At this point Canada was a good
way ahead in its thinking around the idea of the
‘total archives’ project’ which considered the rather hefty task of documenting
all forms of records that made up the whole of history, not just those left
behind by its elite.
Terry Cook stated, at the time, that the
goal of total archives was “documenting all aspects of human endeavor at every
level of society irrespective of medium.”[4]
In theory this was all well and good for Canada but it was still rather behind
in the actuality of implementing these theories when it came to its record
keeping policies. Luciana Duranti identified the need for a series of
diplomatic terminology for image-based documents and other media but gave few
suggestions for how this could be done[5].
Within a series of articles published in
the Journal Archivaria, a number of
professionals, most of whom were employed within the Public Archives of Canada,
debated as to the best practice for the storage of non-traditional documents
as, up to this point, while many ostensibly agreed on the idea of total archives, the issue fell down upon the ways in
which these ‘new documents’ would be stored. At this point the Public Archives
of Canada departmentalised other forms of media. Were they to be considered as
traditional documents and stored alongside them or within separated divisions
according to medium?
Terry Cook, who became a sort of de facto
leader for those in favor of total integration, complained that the context of
an original document was lost once it was placed within the Public Archives of
Canada. Forms of media in the sense of “records resulting from modern mass
communication techniques”[6]
were considered to be of extra importance to the Cook side of the debate, but
when it homed in on photography it was considered only ’documentary
photographs’ to be of importance as they were considered “unproblematically realistic
and transparent carriers of “the past””[7].
Documentary photographs arere ‘evidential’ in nature and could therefore be
considered as documents of a sort, but what about other forms of photography
such as snapshots and the family albums that often hold them? O’Donnell asks
how a records form might reflect its meaning, going on to infer that the social
aspect of a photograph inform its meaning. So, where does that leave such
photographs as those found in a family album? They might not be considered as documentary
evidence, but they still constitute a document; of a life lived, of many lives
lived.
In the total archives debate argument, many
agreed that photographs possessed evidential over informational value, either
as documents belonging in provenance-based fonds or as artistic expressions of
their creator. As Elizabeth Edwards and others have pointed out, a photograph,
at various periods in the past, has acted as a form of cultural capital that is
transferred from person to person like a banknote in a form of social exchange.
Duranti, whose articles discuss the interrelationship of physical form and
intellectual content, refers to records as tangible physical evidence of a finite
activity such as a will or charter[8].
To conclude, Brien Brothman stated in his article some ten years later that the
argument largely centered around an ideological fixation on the linguistic form
of records, stating that for many historians and archivists “texts have a
primary rather than a collateral position in the discipline of history.”[9]
Around the same time, outside of
intellectual scholarly reflection, Michael Lesy was making similar
pronouncements in his book Time Frames, in which he simply interviewed the
owners behind family albums about the lives that they had lived, here the
evidentiary and the linguistic were on display within the book. At a time when
modes of culture and thought remained heavily departmentalized, Lesy combined
ideas based on the history of photography, sociology, and Jungian
psychoanalysis to form a multi-disciplinary reading of snapshot photography:
“... I’d claim that the use of
photographs as data was of the most remarkable importance for the humanities
and social sciences... that it was a thing made to achieve an end like a
letter, or to be an end to itself like a poem; that, in either case, it was
tangled within a whole culture that was itself pinned within a social
structure...”
Prior
to this Lesy had published his PHD thesis as the book Wisconsin Death Trip
which bore as its images prints made from nineteenth-century glass plate
negatives depicting the inhabitants around the area of Black River Falls,
Wiconsin between 1865 and the turn of the century. Lesy
originally conducted the research that became the book in the mid-seventies
when he discovered over five thousand collodian glass plate negatives
attributed to one photographer, a Mr. Charles Van Schaik, having literally
cracked under their own weight in the attic above the former studio. The heavy
glass plates bore the effects of their usage and, on a metaphysical level, one
could argue that they bore the psychical as well
as the physical imprint of the times in which they were made; the weight and marks of those
people existing in one of the coldest, barren parts of the United States in the
nineteenth century.
“Many
historians have become convinced that there was a major crisis in American life
[during this time], some have gone so far as to call it a “psychic crisis” and have attempted to explain its existence or, even more commonly,
to use the presumed existence of such a crisis as an explanation, for a wide
series of developments in American domestic and international political life”[10]
Prior to the introduction of Wet Plate
Colodion by Frederick Scott Archer, the earliest form of photography to reach
an international audience was the Dagguerrotype, made famous in France by Louis
Jaque Mande Daguerre and his co-inventor Nicephore Niepce and imported to The
United States where it was taken up principally along New York, Broadway with a
fervour so fierce it earned itself the name: ‘Daguerreotypomanie’. Taking after
the silhouette portrait and the physionotrace fashionable in France and England
since the late 1700s, it was partly a social necessity that the Daguerreotype
came housed within its own casing to keep the delicate surface from damage –
behind glass, held in place by pinchbeck foil and enclosed in a gutta-percha
hinged case with suede or felt lining. This created a sense of preciousness in
the Daguerreotype as both an image and as a physical
object. The resultant image, when made well, is astonishingly life-like, due to
a combination of the necessarily shiny surface and the razor-sharp focal range
of the lenses.
The uniqueness and the image quality of the
Daguerreotype gave it an almost holy aura that was intensely personal, moving
the press to dub it the ‘mirror with a memory’. The Daguerreotype invited
holding, caressing and speaking to, had a physical presence in the world and
were unique, so they had a direct indexical relationship with the sitter. As
Geoffrey Batchen put it, “as a footprint is to a foot, so is a photograph to
its referent.”[11] Roland
Barthe makes much of photography’s relationship to its sitter in his book
Camera Lucida. Getting closer to the metaphysical aspects of photography’s
power as a ‘certificate of presence’, Barthe states:
“The photograph
is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here…a sot of
umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze”[12]
This uniqueness of the object and its
direct indexicality, created an increased emotional tie to the image at a time
when death-rates, particularly in infants were high. In the United States particularly this created a market for
what is now referred to as mourning photography[13].
The commissioning of a mourning portrait could aid in the grief process so that
the image of the deceased would help the family members to move on. These early
portraits conveyed both a literal and a metaphoric impression that the deceased
was still within the family. A contemporary commercial practitioner wrote in
his memoir:
“Sometimes, and
at the suggestion of the family, I have filled out the emaciated cheeks of dead
people with cotton to make them look plump. The eyes are nearly always propped
open with pins or mucilage, but when people can afford to engage an artist it
is an easy matter to paint the eyes afterward.”[14]
Bazin, in his essay ‘The Ontology of The
Photographic Image’, states that once we made
representations of the dead so that the image would “help us to remember the
subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death.”[15]
In this respect, nineteenth century Americans sought to embalm the dead through
photography, maintaining the anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose set forth by
their ancestors.
In modern psychoanalytical terms normal
grief is typified by an ability to move on from the loss of a loved one and
develop a new life for oneself outside of that shared with the deceased. Freud
believed that “mourning has a quite specific task to perform: its function is
to detach the survivors memories and hopes from the dead”[16]
Whereas acute grief is described as an inability to disconnect oneself from the
dead ‘Love-Object’. Sometimes a fixation on a fetish object can occur and the
mourning photograph could serve as such in enabling a ‘turning away from
reality’ toward a ‘hallucinatory wish-psychosis’[17]
where the photograph becomes a fetishised replacement for the missing ‘Love-Object’.
The importance of touch as a part of the
grief process in Victorian mourning photography is not to be underestimated and
the need and ability for the mourner to hold and to touch these photographs is
central to their ability to console and this clearly helped in their becoming a
part of late-Nineteenth Century consumer life. “External symbols represented
the physical memory of the deceased, which was especially important in the
‘searching’ period of grief, following the shock of death’[18]
This “conduit of memory”[19]
is evident in certain Daguerreotypes, which show a family in mourning, holding
another Daguerreotype of a deceased family member, showing that photography’s
physicality stood as a totem of memory to many families. As Geoffrey Batchen writes, when we look at a photograph of a
family looking at a photograph, it is to “acknowledge their sustenance of
memory: someone may be gone but is certainly not forgotten.” The living want,
in other words, “to be remembered as remembering”[20]
This last point can also be applied just as effectively to family
albums, which serve for the modern family a similar job to the nineteenth
century mourning photograph. The tactility of the album invites us to sit
quietly with a book. The contemplation of the images produces emotions in us
but the tactility of turning the pages of a family album or scrapbook invites
us to engage with them physically. The action of turning the pages reveals new
images and invites us to explain each new image
as it comes. “We touch and are touched”[21]
One album in my personal collection is a
Victorian collection of snapshots taken around the 1890s through the turn of
the century. It is a small book with a purple felt cover and the word
‘memories’ embossed into it. Inside are around 4-6 albumen print photographs
per page – all feature the same child from a baby, held in her mother and
fathers arms, then images of her as a young girl and eventually a young woman
where - assuming she is married or
goes to university, the book finishes. One of the most striking aspects of this
album is its commitment to a simple linearity – one person, one life. Most
family albums and scrapbooks generally tend to be chaotic affairs, with images
placed seemingly at random and over vastly different years. What strikes me
about this album is the progressive logic of the images. Finally, one can
imagine that upon the girl’s embarking upon her own life, this album would have
provided a great deal of comfort for her parent’s whose source of joy and love
she must have been for them to produce an album so intense and yet so complete.
Conclusion:
From having a physical presence in the
world, to being a direct referent of the sitter – the photograph and the
collection are documents, recordings and objects in one.
Photographs
speak to us, they offer us comfort through memories as we hold them in our
hands and we speak to them in return. Lesy relates the mnemonic power of the snapshot to the petit
madeleine of
Proust’s Rememberence of Things Past in that on the surface they might seem as
“banal as a teabiscuit”,
but it is in their ability to conjure memories and a nostalgia for the past
that their strength lies[22].
In this sense, Snapshots carry with them the weight and cultural power of
Communion wafers, Sabbath candles or Eleusinian sheaves, in that they stand for
something more powerful than their materiality, yet we don’t think of them as
having the same rhetorical power[23].
These images have the ability to make us stop in our tracks as we recall a
scene from our past. The various forms that photographs take, as discussed here
- the Daguerreotype, the mourning photograph and the photographic album - all
reveal what Alfred Gell refers to as “a congealed residue of performance and
agency in object form” where we, as actors, hold the object, caress it and
speak to it[24]. We engage
with others and with our own past through the object. In this sense the photograph
has agency as an object and its social use is informed by this agency. The
visual experience of the possessor is informed in the way the photograph is
used as an (social) object. Its social use is as
important as any scroll or charter and should be thought of as equally
important to our notion of society in the modern age. They are records of the things that have happened to us and the people we are
connected to. In this respect a photograph is as important as a written
document, as it displays more information than mere text. Michael Baxendall
makes a similar argument for 15th century Italian paintings as
social documents, stating that “approached
in the proper way... the pictures become documents as valid as any charter or
parish roll.”[25] A photograph is an object first, and secondly it is a carrier of
information that gives us, based on our cultural understandings, information.
Thirdly, and most particularly, it is a mnemonic device, and a time-machine.
“Taken together
these approaches allow us to see the family photograph as a product of a
specific kind of technology lodged in a certain ideological system and as a
form of visual expression mediated through ideological rules of
representation…..The meaning of a record is determined by the social and
historical aspects of its form. Archivists must accept that the history of each
physical form is central to understanding the meaning of records, including
private records and records not based on words.”[26]
Bibliography
Alpers,
Svetlana, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Exhibiting Cultures. The
Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds.
Washington: Smithsonion Institution Press, 1991, pp.25-41
Batchen, Geoffrey, “Snapshots”, Photographies 1: 2, 121-142
Barthe, Roland, Camera Lucida, London: Vintage, 1993
Bazin, Andre, ‘The Ontology of The
Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4
(Summer, 1960), pp.4-9
Boon,
James, A. “Why Museums Make Me Sad”, in Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display,
eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Washington: Smithsonion Institution Press,
1991, 255-277
Bown, Nicola, ‘Empty Hands and Precious
Pictures: Post-mortem Portrait Photographs of Children’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14:2, 2009
Brothman, Brien, “Orders of Value: Probing
the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice.”, Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991):
78-100
Cook, Terry and Gordon Dodds; eds, Imagining Archives: Essays
and Reflections by Hugh A, Taylor, Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003
Duranti,
Luciana, “Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science”, Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989), pp.7-27
Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart; eds, Photographs, Objects,
Histories: On the Materiality of Images, Janice, London:
Routledge, 2004
Freud, Sigmund, ‘On Murder, Mourning and
Melancholia’, London: Penguin Books, 2005
Jay, Bill, ‘Momento Mori: Photographs of dead babies – the “positive” aspects of a tragic
subject’, http://www.billjayonphotography.com/writings.html
Kaplan, Louis, ‘The Strange Case of
William Mumler, Spirit Photographer’, Minneapolis
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008
Lesy Michael, ‘Time Frames’, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980
Lesy, Michael, ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’, New York: University of New Mexico Press, Random House Inc.,1973
Metz, Christian, ‘Photography and
Fetish’, October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp.81-90
Nora, Pierre, “Les Lieux de Memoire”, Representations 26 (Spring
1989), 7-24
O’Donnell, Lorraine, “Towards Total Archives: The Form and
Meaning of Photographic Records”, Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994): 105-118
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the
Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984
[1] O’Donnell, Lorraine, “Towards Total
Archives: The Form and Meaning of Photographic Records”, Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994): 105-118
[2] Holland quoted in O’Donnell, p.112
[3] Edwards, Elizabeth, Cited in Bown, Nicola,
‘Empty Hands and Precious Pictures…’ p.17
[4] “Archivists document the history of all
society, and not just its elite; archivists should acquire all different forms
of archival material; they should control the entire life cycle of records; and
they should create archival networks” - Terry Cook, quoted in O’Donnell, p.106
[5] Duranti, Luciana, “Diplomatics: New Uses
for an Old Science”, Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989)
[6] O’Donnell, p.107
[7] Ibid, p.107
[8] Duranti, “Diplomatics”
[9] Brothman, Brien, “Orders of Value: Probing
the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice.”, Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991), p.79
[10] Warren I. Susman in his introduction to
Michael Lesy’s ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’. Emphasis mine.
[11] Batchen, Geoffrey, ‘Ere the Substance
Fade’, in Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart; eds, Photographs, Objects,
Histories…, p.40
[12] Barthe, Roland, Camera Lucida, London: Vintage, 1993, p.80, my emphasis.
[13] It is also referred to variously as
post-mortem portraiture and memorial photography but here I use the term
mourning photography.
[14] Cited in Jay, Bill, ‘Momento Mori:
Photographs of…’ p. 5
[15] Bazin, Andre, ‘The Ontology of The
Photographic Image’, Film
Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1960), p.4
[16] Freud, Sigmund, ‘Totem and Taboo’ in ‘On Murder Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 65
[17] Ibid, p. 212
[18] Jalland, Pat, Cited in Bown, Nicola, ‘Empty
Hands and Precious Pictures…’,
p. 8
[19] Ibid, p.15
[20] Batchen, Geoffrey, Cited in Flint, Kate, ‘Photographic
Memory’, p. 3
[21] Bown, Nicola, ‘Empty Hands and Precious
Pictures…’, p. 20
[22] Lesy Michael, ‘Time
Frames’, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1980, p, 12
[23] Ibid
[24] Gell, Alfred, quoted in EE sound of
history, p.31
[25] Baxendall, Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, p.152. My emphasis.
[26] O’Donnell, Lorraine, “Towards Total
Archives: The Form and Meaning of Photographic Records”, Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994), p.113
