Let us tell the stories of the dead

21Jan12

Writing on and around Victoria Cheape‘s ‘Let the old dead make way for the young dead’, as exhibited in Streetlevel Photoworks, Glasgow, as part of Futureproof 2011. Words © Rowan Lear, 2011. Pictures © Victoria Cheape, 2011.

In an unobtrusive corner of the gallery, a quiet kind of immortalizing is taking place. Sixteen black and white prints hang in grid format, each reproducing the same oval-framed portrait of a young black man. From top left to bottom right, the images fade, until nothing can be seen of the old photograph. Victoria Cheape tells us she found the photograph in a WW2 archive at Glasgow Museums, in a box full of other unknown soldiers.

The young soldier looks sharply to the left and into the distance; he eludes my gaze and my understanding. Who is he? In whose army or country did he fight? What were his hopes, fears, ideals? He, like so many, is excluded from official histories, by dint of being unknown, on the wrong side, or simply one of far too many.

Slight scratches that scar each photographic print tear my attention from his scarred face toward the object itself. After noticing the marks, ‘I can no longer overlook the photographic surface. I become aware that the photographic process comes in between, that it intervenes, that it stands in the middle.’(1) What is the photographic process, which lies between myself and the soldier depicted? It is distancing: he is far away, in time – his strange headset would have me think, and in geography – the land around him appears to be desert or scrub. But we are also distant in that he is a flattened object and (I believe) I am living, breathing, human. If this is photography, then doesn’t it always produce a flattened, fixed perspective on something once living and breathing? Perhaps this is really the limit of photography, for it cannot reproduce a person, truthfully or otherwise. It is always simply an image, and perhaps it makes no sense to hope to learn anything from it? ‘I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface.’(2)

The surface of the images is important. While the photograph that is reproduced appears physically marked, Cheape’s images have smooth, flat surfaces. In fact, they resemble the digital image files that crowd our private computers and public archives. The lost photograph in the archive may become lost in the machine when ‘what were once three-dimensioned physical objects become one-dimensional and intangible digital surrogates’(3): when archives of the present switch to digital storage methods. The fading of the images may hint at the danger of relying on a virtual system to remember our dead. Digital decay is as possible as physical decay, and less retrievable.

The work also mourns the loss of the material traces of a photograph’s existence (scratches, tears, marks of handling) which give us so many clues to the life of the object and its viewers, and thus, its subject. ‘It is surely this combination of the haptic and the visual, this entanglement of both touch and sight, that makes photography so compelling a medium.’(4) Anyone who has ever found an old photograph or delved into a dusty archive will have experienced the uncanniness of holding photographs.

But significance is hard to obtain purely from physical interaction. As Cheape’s inquiry demonstrates, ‘archives always collect a bit too much: they must include things the value and meaning of which are not entirely known at the time of their archiving’(5). Despite the best efforts of museums and archives, photographs have long been too numerous for every one to be organised, categorized and made publicly accessible. Some, like this one, remain unsorted in boxes until their original context is lost. The archive is also always incomplete: a selection process has occurred many times over. This also determines which objects are deemed relevant to the contemporary visitor and put on display, which are chosen to be digitised, and which are the ones left in boxes. The archive is, like the photograph, an imperfect repository for knowledge and memory, both cultural and personal.

The title ‘Let the old dead make way for the young dead’ suggests that there are perpetual cycles of war, death, memory and photographs. But despite the solemnity of the work (a mood shared by other artists delving in the archive), Cheape actually presents the potential for breaking the cycle. An artist’s intervention in the archive can produce possibilities other than those grounded in an unobtainable historical accuracy. The work quietly pits the futility of photography as a medium of truth against its greatest power: its indexicality or ‘that-has-been’(6). A photograph may be deposited alongside many others, may lose its identity and context – but it remains a ‘certificate of presence’(6) of what was photographed. As long as the photograph survives, it can trigger new interpretations. The young man who fought is forgotten – but he was photographed, and therefore he lived.

I return my gaze and my attention to the soldier who stands before me. He probably did not imagine that his portrait would hang in a gallery and would spark ideas about the nature of photography. He may have died seconds after the picture was made. He may be still living. His story has yet to be told, imagined, dreamed. And this artwork, this photograph, this photography, has the power to trigger the telling of stories that conflate different times and spaces, utilizing memory and imagination. ‘Photographs so placed are restored to a living context: not of course to the original temporal context from which they were taken – that is impossible – but to a context of experience.’ (7)

Come, let us find photographs of the old dead and the young dead, and let us begin to tell their stories.

References

1. Yve Lomax. ‘Re-visions’
2. Roland Barthes. ‘Camera Lucida’
3. Joanna Sassoon. ‘Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction’
4. Geoffrey Batchen. ‘Vernacular Photographies’
5. Ulrich Baer. ’Deep in the Archive’’
6. Roland Barthes. ‘Camera Lucida’
7. John Berger. ‘Stories’

Filed under: Archive, Found photograph, Review, Stories   |  Leave a Comment

This is a photograph

10Oct11

This is my Grandma’s house in Devon. I think that’s one of my cousins with my Grandma’s dog Yarty. My brother and I used to go there in the summer when I was wee. We had a paddling pool in the back garden.

This is me with my dog Jane. My hair is really short because I asked Mum to cut it all off. I really thought that people would think I was a boy. Jane is just a puppy here.I got to pick her out of the litter and name her myself, which is why she has a strange name for a dog. Jane died about three years ago, and I wasn’t there.

This is my brother, with my parents new dog, Jed. Jed moved in when I had moved out so we never really became great friends. My brother lived in this house for a while after I left. When I went back I felt like a stranger. My family seemed to speak a new language.

This is a photograph. I found it in a charity shop. I don’t know where it was taken or who it is of. But I think its important.

Filed under: Found photograph, Identification, Punctum, Recognition, Reconstructing Memory, Stories   |  Leave a Comment

My brother’s photograph

22Apr10

I am sitting on the floor of a small room surrounded by hundreds of photographs. They cover the floor, the chairs, the table, the shelves, my bed. I have begun to mount them onto index cards, which has enabled me to begin to estimate how many I have. At the moment 400 cards have been mounted, and a scan of my surroundings: 5 albums, 4 boxes, 8 cellophane packets, leads me to believe that there are, at least, 1000 photographs in this room. But that doesn’t even include my own photographs, which (if I exclude those which have been produced for assignments or commercial purposes) must number around 200. And I cannot even comprehend the number of photographs stored on my computer hard-drive.

But this sheer number of photographs: surely it must become dull or repetitive? A photograph is a photograph. Many follow similar photographic codes and conventions, many depict similar events and scenes. But instead of tedium, I am struck by a panicked obsession with these objects. I simultaneously want to preserve them (mount them, box them, file them) and observe them (empty them from boxes, scatter them, re-categorize them).

I want to find myself in every photograph: find my mother, my father, my brother, my childhood friends. A minute ago, I suddenly envisaged a small black and white photograph, two children, a boy and a girl sat in a front garden, the girl is grinning at the camera, the boy gazing (affectionately?) at the girl. I began a frenzied search for it, flicking through the newly mounted prints (all 400), emptying the categorized bags of “Children outside”, “Boys”, “Girls”, and “Gardens”, digging through the boxes and albums. I didn’t find it. It struck me that no matter how well organized my archive of photographs may become, one or two photos will always manage to slip through, between categories, between the pages of an album.

Still searching, I started to think about how I should respond to this missing photograph. A photograph remembered on a whim: not mine, a stranger’s. I have no history attached to this photographic object. Am I remembering a photograph of myself and my brother? Or am I realising the lack of a photograph of myself and my brother, like this one? Am I responding to the realisation that I don’t understand what my brother feels toward me, has ever felt towards me? Did/does he love me, care about me, see me as an annoyance, someone to fight with, a bossy big sister, someone weak, or is he overshadowed in some way by me? Without the clue of a photograph in which he gazes at me, how can I begin to imagine (even though I cannot know) what he felt? Does this photograph just show me what I want to see? Or does it give me the option of a history that I can grasp: something I can work through, a chance to recall other memories and other photographs. Ultimately, am I searching for the opportunity to reconstruct my identity as a sister to my brother?

I have not found this photograph, but I shall keep looking and remember it. In my search I found another image which has struck me. A boy playing with  a dog. But I can’t remember my brother ever playing with our dog. Why not? Does he actually not like dogs? Was he bitten when he was young? Was it because I named our new puppy – did that make it (unofficially) mine and no interest to him? Or have I simply forgotten the times he played with our dog?

In this room of a thousand photographs, unexpected connections and associations form, and a kind of recognition occurs: a relationship built between my mind and the images, between memory and the memory of photographs. This is why photographs are not banal, as long as I can read identify my past (memory), my present (cognition), and my future (imagination) in these images.

At the height of my desperate scrabbling for the photograph of the boy and girl, I dug out Camera Lucida, and remembered Barthes’ final sense of urgency and despair and love, as he excavates his own photographic story. Of each of the images that affected him, he writes “inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image.” Looking for this photograph, I did not stop to consider that it was not mine and not important, “I entered crazily” into a world of my own making, the world of me and my brother and photographs of us, a world of memory and reconstruction.

Barthes compares this “photographic ecstasy” to its opposite, asking “Mad or tame? [...] Such are the two ways of the Photograph. The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilised code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.” I could organise and collate these images, make them manageable and amenable to whatever project they play role in. But to ignore the urge to scatter and disorganise, to search and look at, to write about, respond to and remember these images, is to deny the possibilities of photography itself.

Filed under: Archive, Collection, Photographic ecstasy, Recognition, Reconstructing Memory   |  1 Comment

Not my mother’s album

02Feb10

A few months ago, I began to compile an album of photographs – found photographs – with captions, and called it ‘Not my mother’s album’. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had begun at the same time, to create an album of sorts, in memory of her father (which I shall hereafter refer to as ‘My mother’s album’). Her work, now completed, is a narrative account of what she remembers of her father, punctuated by photographs of him and photographs of her family, and where they lived.

Her father has been dead a long time, long before I was born. He is rarely mentioned in conversation with my mother, similarly to other members of her family. I know now, from her book that he was adopted and had no family of his own, and my mother’s attempts to retrace them have not gotten far. My mother’s impulse to write his story appears to have been triggered by his anonymity and a fear that what she remembers will be the last trace of him and will disappear with her.

Her book tells his story from her perspective – what she experienced, what she heard, what she learned from others, and is told in her typically spirited style of writing. She remembers his habits, his moods, his kindnesses and unkindnesses. There are very painful moments: for example, she describes her sister (my aunt) constantly deriding his musical taste, while he remained silent but all the more desperate to gain her approval.  My pain from this I detect to be an identifying guilt, or a fear that I may have, at some point, done the same to my father. There is happiness: a period of time when my mother as a child shared the garden shed with her father, and each would work silently and separately on their inventions. These seem short-lived moments – but childhood is so short and changes so rapidly. His death, when it comes, is expected but seems to be over so quickly, leaving a poignant emptiness.

I cried when I read the book, and I cry when I write about it too. I recognise, of course, that my family will go the same way. My parents will die, and what I remember and what my brother remembers will be all that remain of them.

I have realised that memory is all that can survive. ‘My mother’s album’ cannot really be verified by any means. Her sisters, as she points out in the book, would have a completely different view of her father. Facts could be obtained, for example, who her father worked for, but there can be no way to substantiate my mother’s recollection of how he acted when he left for work or returned home. A story existed solely in my mother’s mind, but now has been written and materialised into a book.

‘Not my mother’s album’ is made up of collected photographs which, in some way, trigger memories or remind me of my mother and my relationship to her. Each photograph is accompanied by an extended caption which reads both to explain the photograph and describe an aspect of her personality or our relationship.

Reading ‘My mother’s album’, it struck me how insignificant the photographs were. It mattered that they were there, to qualify as triggers for her memory, but I paid far more attention to the text. When I told my mother, however, she said that it was because she didn’t have all the family photographs and thus couldn’t use as many as she wanted. But I wondered all the same, especially when reviewing my own album. In mine, none of the pictures are of people I know. Instead I identify with the photographs and recognise my mother in them. In my mother’s album, I don’t recognise the people in the photographs, not even my mother, and so they don’t puncture me.

Many of the captions I write in ‘Not my mother’s album’ are things I have never said to my mother and even now find it difficult to think of telling her. My own experiences of abandonment and my mother’s mental state, remain in my memory and to an extent, determine my actions but I would never directly talk to her about them. And yet in her narrative, she talks about her sister’s mental illness, implied child abuse, her self-destructive teenage years. Reading these things has helped me understand her, to know things that I already knew but had never been told – things that just aren’t spoken about.

My family are not exactly conservative and do speak openly with each other. Perhaps our silence is because my mother, my father, my brother and I are all, in some ways, very private people. But actually I believe that most families communicate in ways which are often unspoken.

My reflections on ‘My mother’s album’ and ‘Not my mother’s album’ has drawn some conclusions about how we should be using photographs. Firstly, memories, even painful ones, deserve to be written down and saved from memory’s eventual decline. Photographs act as a trigger for these narratives for the writer, and confirmation for the reader. But photographs are not explanatory and don’t tell stories themselves, and I don’t believe the photographs must represent exactly the events or people being written about. Secondly, perhaps there is another argument for the continuing construction of family albums: as a way to convey and explain things that are difficult to communicate directly. As I have learned from and found meaning in ‘My mother’s album’, perhaps my mother will do the same when I give ‘Not my mother’s album’ to her. Some things, incommunicable by speech, may be told through the meditative silence of image and text.

And finally, it would appear that the fearfully ephemeral and ethereal nature of memory necessitates their construction into touchable, physical objects like albums and books, rather than solely committed to immateriality on the internet, where they lose their context, tangibility and meaning.

Filed under: Family Albums, Identification, Materiality, Punctum, Reconstructing Memory, Stories   |  2 Comments