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.

'Let the old dead make way for the young dead' (installation view), (C) 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.

'Let the old dead make way for the young dead' (detail), (C) Victoria Cheape, 2011.

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.

'Let the old dead make way for the young dead' (detail), (C) Victoria Cheape, 2011.