Annette Kuhn, Kirstin McAllister Emiko, eds. Locating Memory: Photographic Arts. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. xiv + 285 pp. ISBN 978-1-84545-227-8; $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-219-3.
Reviewed by Christina Schwenkel (Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Presence and Absence in Image and Memory
This collection of essays brings a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the study of visual culture and its relationship to memory, representation, and, in many of the chapters, histories of trauma and violence. Exploring the medium of photography as a visual tool that invokes both memory and forgetting, the contributors pay particular attention to the afterlives of photographic images that travel through space and time to take on new and often contested meaning under new conditions of viewing. In addition, the authors explore their own fraught encounters with images, particularly of past suffering and loss, that continue to haunt and shape identities and subjectivities in the present. While the essays grapple with the limitations of photographic representation and the complexities involved in resurrecting and transmitting memory and historical "truth," they do so through diverse methodological practices, such as interviews and conversations, textual and image analysis, archival research, and personal recollection. The contributors draw upon a range of research sources that span numerous sites of memory, including but not limited to family photo albums, media images, photography exhibits, museums and art galleries, former landscapes of war, art performances, literature, and national archives. In their broad analytical engagement with literature on visuality, the authors develop varied (and at times divergent) theoretical approaches to the study of photography and memory that well reflect the interdisciplinary makeup of the volume.
The heavily illustrated volume is divided into three parts:"Identities" (part 1); "Dis/Locations" (part 2); and "Reframings" (part 3). These titles encapsulate core themes that surface in multiple ways in each of the essays, thus blurring the lines between these subject categories to produce a cohesive, dialogic collection of essays. In the introduction, the editors lay out the theoretical concerns that motivate the volume: first, the relation between vision, knowledge, power, and the gaze (engaging the work of Michel Foucault); second, feminist reflexivity and positioning of the self in relation to encounters with images (particularly in Holocaust scholarship); and third, the relation between visual technologies and phenomenology (drawing upon Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, among others). Unlike other edited volumes on photography and visuality, the contributors here are concerned not only with images as visual records that mediate reality and experience, but also with the specific settings and conditions under which images are made and viewed in shifting historical contexts that allow for new meaning, purpose, and practices of viewing.
Part 1 addresses identity formation and photographic representation. All three chapters in this section consider, to varying degrees, how hegemonic image production has silenced certain voices and experiences, only to be reclaimed through particular aesthetic expressions and practices of photographic self-representation. Andrea Walsh's engaging essay employs a postcolonial analysis of photographic works by two First Nations artists, Jeffrey Thomas and Greg Staats, both of whom critique the colonial and postcolonial production of images that essentialize "Indian" identity and connote cultural loss, assimilation, and homogeneity. Walsh first focuses on the images of Thomas, who has photographed his son over time in various postcolonial urban landscapes as he has grown. While Thomas leaves intent and interpretation open to the viewer, his work nonetheless makes a clear gesture towards First Nations experiences with a colonized past and present. The marked absence of bodies in Staats's landscape photography, on the other hand, clearly invokes the duality of loss and renewal, forgetfulness, and recollection--themes that emerge in many of the subsequent chapters. Walsh closes the chapter by arguing that an analysis of Thomas's and Staats's photography as either a reversal of the gaze or the production of counter-narratives would be simplistically read as merely engaged in reactionary politics. Rather, she argues that both artists reveal "new strategies of vision" (p. 50) and new forms of engagement with representations that speak to the entanglements of space, history, and identity.
The following chapter further explores the politics of history, identity, and place-making, though here the focus shifts from subaltern artistic production in contemporary North America to the production of a national photography archive in late-nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century England. Elizabeth Edwards examines in detail an ambitious project by the National Photographic Record Association to locate and document "English" customs and traditions thought to be disappearing in the face of rapid industrial modernization. Edwards situates the "salvage agenda" of the project historically amid larger historical-scientific trends and escalating middle-class anxieties over English identity. She demonstrates how the technology of photography, linked to positivist beliefs in photographic fact and the truth of representation, became key to forging "collective prosthetic memory" and to re-inscribing "Englishness" in history. As such, the project--which Edwards argues was ultimately a failure--actively discouraged image production driven by aesthetic practices and desires to represent the picturesque, and instead stressed the "factual" documentation of "real" lives and traditions as manifest in both local spaces and national sites of power.
In chapter 4, Kirsten Emiko McAllister journeys through family images recorded in Japanese Canadian internment camps during World War II. Although official policy generally did not allow personal cameras in the camps, some families managed to smuggle them in. The resulting visual history of internment differed considerably in both form and content from state-produced photographic records, which McAllister argues were used as a disciplinary mechanism to "construct and control deviant subjects" (pp. 82-83). The author's search for photographs made by the "deviant subjects" themselves took her to the Canadian National Archive and Museum, where she located only a few camp-era family portraits, a mode of photographic expression that had been a common and important signifier of Japanese bourgeois identity prior to the war. While family photography during internment demonstrates photographic practice as resistance and an expression of desire for social and familial continuity, it also reveals particular experiences of social death and alienation after enduring forced relocation and even family separation. The goal of McAllister's research, she makes clear, is not to produce particular photographic truths through the recreation of family narratives, but to examine the shifting and often ambivalent significance and resonances of "postmemory" passed on in photographs to subsequent generations.[1]
The four essays in part 2 explore photography as a vehicle of cultural and historical memory that shapes and is shaped by experiences with dislocation and displacement and desires for re-emplacement. A key concern here is the reanimation and resignification of photographs of trauma in new temporal and spatial contexts. In chapter 5, "Return of the Aura," Marlene A. Briggs examines the afterlives of photographic images of World War I and the reverberating effects of trauma on successive generations. While images from World War II have been examined in great detail (as two chapters in this volume attest), photographs of World War I have received less scrutiny. Briggs's theoretical positioning puts into dialogue Marianne Hirsch's idea of "postmemory" with Walter Benjamin's idea of the fading aura under conditions of mechanical reproduction. As the title of the essay suggests, the author reconsiders Benjamin's postulations and finds "aura" to be a vague and ambivalent term that eschews its shifting and "flickering" significance in certain photographs. World War I photographs of trauma, Briggs argues, continue to impact the work of certain postwar authors (second- and third-generation descendants) who remain preoccupied by the war and its representation. Such images continue to motivate, haunt, and inform the five writers who Briggs examines in her essay and whom she refers to as "belated witnesses" (p. 114). The ensuing tensions between distance and proximity to past suffering that allow for the resignification of memory ultimately dislodge prior meanings, such as heroism, that the photographs carried.
Chapter 6, "There Was Never a Camp Here," continues with the theme of secondary or belated witnessing and the transmission of historical trauma to successive generations, though here the focus shifts to World War II. Opening with a discussion of return to and recognition of past sites of violence, in particular WWII concentration camps "known" by descendants through stories and images, the authors, Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, recollect their journey to Vapniarka, Ukraine to locate a camp to which Hirsch's parents were almost sent, but spared. In their efforts to link memory to place, the authors are accompanied by a third traveler whose father had been interned in Vapniarka. Yet, their fragmentary constitution of postmemory, mediated by familial and cultural memory, leads to unforeseen difficulties as they rely on an old map and a photograph of a reconstructed model of the camp (based on the postwar memory of a detainee). These multiple layers of mediations form the backbone of the essay as the authors repeatedly encounter erasure and forgetting: no one remembers the existence of the camp, as the title implies). As the authors continue their search and eventually locate the remains of one building, they reflect on the difficulties of re-emplacing memory, and their decision to displace traumatic history by returning to the United States with a stone from the building that marked the now largely forgotten historical site.
In chapter 7, Andrew Quick, a British national, also journeys to a site of disconcerting "unfamiliar familiarity"--postcolonial Australia, a place he has never visited, though he recognizes the country through its palpable aura of British colonial influence. Using the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Michel de Certeau, and Jean-François Lyotard to think through the fraught relations between body, place, and representation, Quick leads the reader on a tour of a gallery exhibition displaying the provocative and politicized photographs of Willie Doherty. Like other chapters in this section, his discussion of Doherty's photographs engages the themes of memory displacement, fracture, and forgetting. In his images of the cityscape of Derry in the context of war in Northern Ireland, Doherty explores the relationship between landscapes of violence, space, and subjectivity. His attention to spaces of evacuated bodies "stripped of corporeality" (p. 158)--such as empty fields, desolate roads, deserted buildings, and abandoned paths--foregrounds the aftermaths of violence and the profound sense of emptiness that it leaves it in wake. For the author, who feels interpellated and yet disoriented by the images due to the connection to the history of violence his citizenship gives him, Doherty's work prevents him from fixing a gaze and attaining a clear and secure viewpoint from which to resurrect and reinscribe memory. The failure to remember, Quick argues, reveals the limits and weaknesses of photography as a mnemonic tool to invoke and simultaneously represent the past.
In chapter 8 Nick Kaye builds upon previous critiques of the documentary value of photography and challenges the reader to consider more carefully the limits of photographic representation. Not unlike the authors of previous chapters, Kaye situates photography in relation to the presence and absence of bodies in particular configurations of time, space, and place, though here Kaye is concerned with the incorporation of photographic acts into performance art in 1960s Europe and the United States. In his analysis of three prominent performance artists who experimented with photography as a performative practice, he explores the tension between the ephemerality of performance and the permanence of presence in photography. The fragmentary nature of photographic acts and their tendency to dislocate rather than rearticulate the past--what Kaye identifies as an act of photographic betrayal, drawing upon the concept employed by the French artist Daniel Buren--ultimately undermines the visual work of photography and the record it leaves in its place. While photographs may invoke past performativity, for both the artists and the author, their inherent partiality and "incompletions" (p. 198) ultimately signal the failure of memory and its role in effective documentation.
Part 3 further develops the theme of ambiguous and layered photographic meaning in new contexts of viewing. Here, however, the authors rethink dominant interpretive assumptions more forcefully than in the earlier sections--including their own. Concern here also shifts to viewer response and negotiation of photographic images.
In chapter 9, Patrick Hagopian shifts the analytical focus to war photography and the mass media, revisiting an old subject--the Vietnam War--through a fresh lens. Iconic images from the "celluloid war," over thirty years after the war has ended, continue to resonate and impact events in the present, even as they find new venues, contexts, and pathways of circulation. Comparing the moral and political significance of photographic images from the My Lai massacre of 1968 and images from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, Hagopian makes a novel contribution to the volume by addressing the political consequences of viewing. Images of immense suffering, he argues, not only substantiate truths about suspected crimes against humanity, but also, through repeated photographic "witnessing" of such events, engender awareness, concern, moral outrage, and often political action. Though not clearly articulated in the essay, Hagopian's analysis challenges controversial theories that link overexposure to images of suffering to desensitization or compassion fatigue by pointing to the power of photographic documentation to incite social and political change.
In the following chapter, Martha Langford turns to the archives and the examination of photographic albums to develop an analytical framework that she terms "oral-photographic." Family photo albums, she argues, are not unlike oral traditions: both are rooted in storytelling practices that unite groups of people through repetitive acts that reproduce and pass on memory. Moreover, photographic albums are understood not only through viewing but through engaged conversations, a hypothesis she tests with female research subjects. The author is concerned with interpretation and the ways in which viewers make sense of archived images that ultimately challenge how photographic albums are classified, listed, filed, indexed, and "objectively" described. In a methodological move that differs from the other contributions, Langford interviews five women to explore how their reading and understanding of an anonymous family photo album not only contradicts indexing practices at the archive, but also how their interpretation and the meaning attached to the photo album change when the identity of its maker is revealed, as well as the tragic circumstances concerning its creation and maintenance. The intensified significance of the photo album when its historical and social context become known raises the possibility that all interpretive knowledge of photographs is at best situated and partial.
In the concluding chapter, Jerry Zaslove and Glen Lowry transcribe their ongoing conversations about the conceptual artist Jeff Wall and four of his modernist photographs that explore the tensions between representation and viewing, memory and forgetting. Like other chapters in this book (particularly in part 1), the essay critically engages with and situates image-making within a broader political history of social change and social injustice by addressing and linking the displacements of historical colonialism with contemporary globalization and ongoing post/industrialization. Wall's psychoanalytical approach to photography as a particular kind of memory work speaks to the politics of constructing and viewing racialized and gendered photographic subjects through both the process and the product of photography. Not unlike other photographic works analyzed in the volume, Wall's images are also marked by the general absence or decentering of bodies, though in Wall's case, spaces void of bodies (or that contain a marginalized presence) reveal to the viewer the stark anxieties, disappointments, and inequalities that signify modernity for those whose labor and social death largely remains unnoticed, overlooked, or forgotten.
An extensive bibliography proceeds the final chapter, followed by brief notes on the interdisciplinary backgrounds of the contributors, who represent the fields of art history, anthropology, theatre, cultural studies, literature, performance studies, communication, history, and beyond. While interdisciplinarity lends itself well to the study of photography (and to theorizations of memory and visuality), other strengths of the collection lie in its methodological diversity and the multiple subject positions--artists, authors, and viewers--represented in the chapters. At the same time, the volume's sustained focus on western contexts privileges image-making in North America and Europe and comes across as somewhat limited in scope. Although several of the chapters do investigate and situate subaltern image production in relation to more dominant image ideologies and practices, the reader is left wondering about the relationships between photography and memory in non-western contexts. The focus on "the West" inadvertently reinforces a hierarchical dominance of photographic technologies in more developed, First World countries, which raises questions concerning the cultural and ethnographic specificity of the essays. The volume also lacks an index, which is disappointing given the broad theoretical paradigms and historical contexts with which the authors engage. This oversight, however, does not diminish the strong contribution the volume makes to rethinking the limitations and failures of photographic representation and to challenging our own interpretive assumptions driven by desires to see and read photographs in certain ways. Rather, as the volume makes clear in unique and varied sites of research, photographic meaning and memory, unstable and in constant flux, are marked as much by forgetfulness and absence as remembrance and presence.
Note
[1]. On postmemory and the transgenerational transmission of memory, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
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Citation:
Christina Schwenkel. Review of Kuhn, Annette; Emiko, Kirstin McAllister, eds., Locating Memory: Photographic Arts.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23823
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