Of History and Photography

OF HISTORY & PHOTOGRAPHY Before the invention of photography, reflections were the closest it was possible to get to a facsimile of the world. Other than in mirrors of glass or polished metal, or in sheets of still water, the capturing of a reflection remained an unattainable ideal. That this was an ideal is beyond dispute, since the purpose of the visual arts was for many centuries the achieving of the greatest possible exactitude in the imitation of nature. In Pliny’s famous anecdote of the painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, victory hinged on the fact that while Zeuxis’s painted grapes fooled the birds which flew down to feed on them, Parrhasios’s painted curtain fooled even his rival. For Pliny, the successful imitation of life appears to have been the sole measure of success; certainly no mention is made in the Natural History of any other desirable qualities. The interesting thing about the Zeuxis anecdote is the value it places on trickery. It is well known that mirrors are tricky and unreliable, and that reflections are treacherous. With time, we have come to realise that photography too is a treacherous and unreliable mirror, never more so than when it pretends to innocence. In this it resembles history, another kind of narrative which promises transparency and understanding but can never deliver anything more than a shifting, ghostly image of the past; and yet of course, human society can no more do without history than it can do without bread, since it is a society’s understanding of history – true or false – which informs its present and future actions. I emphasise that what matters is a society’s belief in a particular historical narrative; whether that narrative is true or false is in fact irrelevant. A case in point is that of the Palestinians, a people whose historical existence generations of Israeli historians have successfully disproved in a manner both rational and scientific. And yet of course the Palestinians are still embarrassingly present, awkward and demanding, brought to life by the very existence of their oppressors as though sprung from a sowing of dragons’ teeth. History, wrote Voltaire, “is but a tableau of crimes and horrors”, while George Eliot responded with the second of a pair of matched bookends when she declared that “the happiest nations have no history”. By one reckoning, the history of mankind is nothing more than an extended record of suffering. This idea, which is hardly original, has been expressed in innumerable ways, from the almost certainly apocryphal Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” to James Joyce’s elegant formulation, “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”. At a more basic level, it could be argued that history is an inevitable side‐effect of the perception of time: merely to be caught in the temporal flux is to experience historic time. For Heraclitus of Ephesus, no man could step twice into the same river, and he believed it was precisely this mutability which served as the world’s engine. In most senses of the term, however, history implies something more than just a sense of time passing: to become history, time needs a social as well as a temporal dimension. One man alone is inevitably doomed to lie outside history in a solipsistic vacuum, whether the mystic’s transcendental vacuum or the nightmarish solitude of the castaway; where two or more are gathered together, history comes into being. But how do most people, if they are not professional historians, actually perceive history, and in particular the great sweep of national and dynastic narrative which has been termed grande histoire? Not, certainly, in terms of the immensely complex web of social and political dynamics which attempt to explain such thorny issues as the origins of the Thirty Years’ War, the precise status of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, or the ownership of the Duchy of Schleswig‐Holstein. I suspect that our generalised perception of history consists, at gut level, of little more than a brightly‐lit series of tableaux vivants – still images of intense artificiality and dubious parentage which, like waxworks, stand in for entire civilisations in almost emblematic fashion. Depending upon nationality, background and education, the sources of these images may be literary, artistic, -1- filmic or traditional, but they inevitably end up in the spirit of those highly coloured French chromo‐lithographs called images d’Epinal. This mental and visual shorthand is hardly new, extending far back into the past to include history painting, commemorative sculpture and even ancient Greek pottery. For the literate Greek or Roman, the Trojan War could no doubt be mentally reduced to a couple of dozen formal representations familiar from the bold painting on red‐figure vases: Achilles sulking, the funeral rites of Patroclus, the death of Hector. Moving forward in time, other such conceptual snapshots might include the Spartans at Thermopylae binding up each other’s hair; a bleeding Caesar covering up his face in the Capitol; the death of Wallenstein; Marat in his bathtub; Napoleon crossing the Alps; the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava – so many sentimental, often grossly inaccurate and distorting images. What characterises all pre‐photographic historical representation is, of necessity, concision and stylisation. With the emergence of photography the opportunity was there for a quantum leap in the variety of scenes represented, an opportunity which was seized instantly and enthusiastically; and yet at the end of the day, the sum of photographic images which for most of us make up the twentieth century’s great moments is ludicrously small. Depending on one’s nationality, culture and pictorial sophistication, the Great Depression might be summed up by Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, World War II in Europe by Capa’s blurred images of the Normandy landings and Yevgeny Khaldei’s photograph of Red Army soldiers on the roof of the Reichstag, the war in the Pacific by the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the space race by Neil Armstrong on the moon and the Iran‐Iraq war by Henry Bureau’s image of an Iranian soldier in a trench beneath a spreading pall of smoke from burning oil wells. In Eyewitness, his apology for and celebration of ‘hard’ news photography as exemplified by a quarter‐century of the World Press Photo competition, Harold Evans called such significant icons a “key to total recall”, claiming that “[the] images of these 25 years of our history do not merely remind us of events. They each of them instantly carry us back into the very atmosphere of the moment, reawakening its emotions and its reflections”. But in fact, they don’t; the photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald’s death, of the corpse of Che Guevara, of the burning monk in the streets of Saigon, above all of that quintessentially sixties image, Eddie Adams’ photo of police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a suspect in the head, all now seem to refer back to nothing so much as themselves. If these are icons, then we read them as atheists read Christian icons, utterly divorced from their content. Reacting to this phenomenon, the German artist Joachim Schmid declared a moratorium on the taking of new photographs on both ecological and conceptual grounds, coining the motto “no new photographs until the old ones are used up!”. Schmid was also the inventor and sole employee of Berlin’s Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs; the institute in question has at various times been characterised as ‘fictitious’, ‘fraudulent’ or ‘spurious’, but the fact remains that it advertised its existence and purpose, that many people sent it their unwanted photographs, and that some of these were in fact reprocessed in Schmid’s own artwork. Extending Schmid’s methodology to photojournalism and, eventually, to the documentation of history is an intriguing thought, and one perhaps much less inherently impossible than might be suspected. The lavish iconography of the fall of the Third Reich which filled European newspapers on the occasion of the commemoration of VE Day was interspersed with news images of the strafing of Zagreb; despite the passage of half a century, there seemed little difference between two sets of images of civilians lying crumpled on the road in front of flaming vehicles or shop fronts. The issue here is not one of deliberate fraud but of the mechanics of casual perception: a small set of visual signifiers are obviously enough to identify and pigeonhole an image, even if it ends up in entirely the wrong pigeonhole after all. Nor is this reductionism the only, or even the worst, enemy to be faced by the would‐be historic photographic document. Far more insidious are the mutability, the falsity, the treachery of -2- the photographic image. Consider once again Dorothea Lange’s great Depression icon, the haunted features of the anonymous “migrant mother” and her children caught forever in the hopeless posture of heroes of an ancient Greek tragedy. In 1979, the American photographer Bill Ganzel published a photograph which he called simply Florence Thompson and her Daughters: the image of a comfortable middle‐aged, middle‐ class American lady surrounded by three well‐dressed, self‐assured younger women. Florence Thompson was, of course, Lange’s model, now no longer doomed and heroic but seemingly at peace in (and this is the really disconcerting part) a thoroughly petit bourgeois environment – Hecuba in retirement. After the shutter is depressed, life continues, even for people whose faces have become those of an icon. Is that, then, all that the photograph can offer history? On the one hand, a few worn iconic instants void of any real meaning, and on the other, a casual representational shorthand (native woman with a gun; wild‐eyed man in a turban; starving child) so vague as to successfully conflate decades and continents? There is in fact another way in which photographs – anonymous, even trivial photographs – can speak to us of a historical past, and that is by serving as raw material for an artist. Such use, whether we regard it as appropriation, co‐option or the most arrogant of thefts, is not one which could be extended any consideration in terms of scientific historiography, and rightly so; but what an artist can sometimes bring to such raw material is a kind of intuitive response leading, not precisely to understanding, but to an emotional and psychological insight. The key to the use of the photograph in this context is memory and its workings. As Max Kozloff has written, “photography is the most memory‐haunted medium we have”. By definition, every photograph preserves a fraction of a second of the past; it is therefore self‐evident that the relationship between the photograph and reality is mediated by memory. Every photograph which we shall ever see is inescapably a representation of the past; as such, it speaks to us through memory, and it may not be excessive to claim that whatever else they may be, all photographs are also meditations on memory. One of the most cogent explanations of the latent power of photography has been given by Christian Boltanski: “When I show a photo of a dead Swiss for example, you can say ‘Oh, it’s the truth. He was alive before, and now he’s dead.’ The photos have a kind of strange relation to reality that you can’t find in painting. What I really want to do is to transmit emotions, to make people cry, and it seemed to me that it is easier to work with reality than with invented imagery”. It is this relation to reality which gives photography its real charge, and in this relationship lies photography’s appeal to artists. Of course, every old photograph sooner or later acquires a powerful charge of nostalgia, and it is all too easy to make a work of art entirely parasitic on this ghostly pathos; at best, however, the recontextualisation of the original image which is the artist’s primary input (whether or not accompanied by other manipulations such as enlargement, fragmentation, textualisation etc.) gives it an impact far beyond that exerted by mere unfocused melancholy. Successful examples one could name range from Shimada Yoshiko’s etchings and installations based on wartime photographs, particularly of Japanese women in nationalist organisations, to Hannah Collins’ Evidence in the Streets, War Damage Volumes (1984) which consists of a giant cyanotype enlargement of an anonymous photograph recording wartime damage in a part of London where Collins used to have a studio. A particularly interesting application of recycled photographic imagery was Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip. Lesy had prints made from glass negatives taken by Charles Van Schaick, a Midwestern professional photographer working between 1890 and 1910, interleaving them with stories and news items taken from the local newspaper of the same period. Though the photographs in themselves are solid, competent work, they lack any spark of that personal vision which characterises the images of somebody like Disfarmer; in Lesy’s hands, however, they -3- acquire a dark power, communicating perhaps better than any analytical study the grimness and claustrophobia of small‐town life in turn of the century America. Leafing through Wisconsin Death Trip, it also becomes clear why, as Boltanski points out, such imagery could never be faked. It’s not just a matter of old‐fashioned dress; more important is the fact that the way people hold their bodies, the way they look at the camera, the very set of their faces – details far beyond the skill of any artistic director to recreate. “These pictures you’re about to see”, repeats Lesy, “are of people who were once actually alive”. Once again, the aesthetic and emotional imperative which demands a link with reality goes hand in hand with a demand for authenticity. And Lesy is necessarily aware of the crucial element in this form of alchemy, which is the transforming power of time: “What was strange was that in the seventy years between then and now – in that short time, in one lifetime, all of [Van Schaick’s photographs] were changed from the most ordinary records of the most ordinary events into arcane remnants, obscure relics, antique mementos”. In fact, one of the great truths confirmed by photography is that we can never recreate the past; photographic representation is a one‐way street. We always knew this, of course, but it was an intellectual knowledge at best; it takes the solid evidence of photographs to convince us of something which Hollywood still refuses to accept. If you look at a documentary photograph with any degree of seriousness, you are unlikely to be wrong by more than a decade or so in placing it, as long as the culture illustrated is reasonably familiar. Obviously, this is at least in part because superficial cultural indices change from decade to decade: clothes, hairstyles, cars, planes, advertising, architecture, even typography are good clues. So much is elementary; but what I am concerned by is that certain intangible something which makes the photographic representation of people change over time – not just clothes or hair styles, but something more elementary. It is this strange quality which tends to make a mockery of even the most expensive cinematic or theatrical attempt to conjure up the past; no matter how much money is spent, no matter how exact the backgrounds and the costumes, late 20th century actors still look like late 20th‐century actors, whether you place them in prohibition America or Victorian England. On reflection, I think that the answer lies partly in body language, the fact that people hold themselves differently; the very posture of an American in the 1870s is different from that of his great‐grandson. The other half of the answer is, I suspect, that people look at the camera differently, that their response to photography is different. That the context will have a direct effect on the representation of people is evident in the work of the Lithuanian artist Vytautis Stanionis, who has produced a series of bizarre double portraits using negatives taken by his father during the period 1946‐48. The explanation for the original negatives is that the portraits were intended to be used in the internal passports imposed on Lithuanians by their Soviet occupiers; because of a shortage of film, photographers were instructed to fit two people into each frame, which was then used to print two separate passport‐ sized images. The historical circumstances explain the strange, remote expressions on the faces of these people; as Peeter Linnap has written, “[They] have a look of death in their faces. The war in Europe may be over, but for the Baltic people it will continue for another half century... Both men in the photograph are absolutely alone with their sorrow, both governed by an inevitable fate which isn’t subject to their own will from this moment on”. The point here is that while these elements were always present within the negatives, they have only as it were come to light with the younger Stanionis’s rediscovery and recontextualisation of his father’s images. Peeter Linnap has himself produced an important work within this idiom, using photographs taken by his father‐in‐law during his enforced military service with the Soviet Army. Summer 1955 repeated these images of young Estonians in Soviet uniform posing with handguns on a sunny summer afternoon; in this new incarnation, their size, placing, relationship with each other and their audience, and above all, their exhibition in the context of a newly independent Estonia have -4- utterly changed their meaning and content. Resurrected from the oblivion to which they were doomed by their status as snapshots, Enn Kiiler’s images have moved from a personal to a public area of discourse; in the process, these humble photographic ghosts have acquired an eloquence beyond mere testimony. But if they are meditations on memory, photographs are also, inevitably, meditations on death. This is partly because the ability to travel in imagination from present to past cannot be divorced from that, more ambiguous, of projecting into the future; and the only thing we know about the future we know with absolute certainty, and that is the fact of our own impending dissolution. The other reason, of course, is that photographs are subject to a kind of temporal red‐ shift. Far from standing still, they recede from us at the speed of light; objects, landscapes and above all, faces vanish over the event horizon before the emulsion has even begun to dry. It has been claimed that photographs are a way of seizing and preserving time, of snatching something from the Heraclitean flux. But this is a delusion; nothing is as surely torn from our fingers by the rushing waters of Lethe as the photographs of our dead. This, I think, explains the elegiac nature of almost all old photographs: they are attempts at freezing the passage of time whose failure was preordained. © John Stathatos 2013 Lecture delivered at Kuressare, Estonia during the course of the 1995 Saaremaa Biennale, and subsequently at Jyvaskyla, Finland at the international symposium which accompanied the Lumo ‘95 International Triennial. -5-