The photograph as Externalization and Trace

Offprint from Cultural Memory Studies An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook Edited by Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York The Photograph as Externalization and Trace JENS RUCHATZ If memory is intrinsically social, as Maurice Halbwachs has pointed out, then the formation of any memory does rely fundamentally on means of exchanging and sharing knowledge (cf. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 132). It cannot do without symbols that represent or embody knowledge of the past and are capable of circulating in a social group. In other words, the extension and complexity of collective memory is to a large extent dependent on the available media. This contribution will take the case of photography to show how memory and media interact. 1. Externalization There seem to be two fundamentally opposed ways of relating media and memory: externalization and trace. Whereas the concept of externalization foregrounds the instrumental and social character of media, the conception as trace stresses the autonomy of media technology. Externalization is the established and, one could say, literal notion of media as memory: Accordingly texts or forms in one medium (or a medium as a whole) are related to human memory either as a way of storing its contents or as analogous in structure. Other scholars have suggested similar terms, such as “exteriorization” (Leroi-Gourhan 257) or “excarnation” (Assmann, “Exkarnation”), to discuss the merit of certain technologies to store information outside the human body that otherwise would have to be preserved neutrally or—more probably—forgotten. In their function of enhancing memory’s capacity, technologies of externalization follow and supplement the internal techniques of mnemonics. The affinity of memory and media has become manifest in a plenitude of metaphors which construe media as memory or vice versa. Regarding photography one cannot but quote the famous description of the daguerreotype, photography on a “silver-plated sheet of copper,” as “the mirror with a memory” (Holmes 54), which was coined in 1859. In Civilization and its Discontents Sigmund Freud (38) conceives technology in general as a cultural program that is aimed at generating “prostheses” in order to compensate for the deficiencies of human organs. From this perspective the camera and the gramophone come to be improved “materializations” of the human capacity to remember, both capturing fleeting sensations (for more such metaphors cf. Stiegler, Bilder 102-05). To the same 368 Jens Ruchatz extent that storage media have been compared or even equated with the functions of memory, the human capacity to remember has been understood through the metaphors that new media technologies offered. The Dutch historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma has shown how strongly the unavoidably metaphorical conceptions of human memory relied on the evolution of media technology: After the invention of photography, human memory “became a photographic plate, prepared for the recording and reproduction of visual experience” (120). Likewise, the expression “photographic memory” testifies to the urge to use media as cognitive models to understand the operations of memory. In addition to media and “natural” memory regularly being used to shed light on each other, the assumed affinity of media and memory also informs anthropology and cultural history. The French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, to give but one example (for more cf. Ruchatz, “Externalisierungen”), has shown the cultural evolution of mankind to be founded—substantially, even if not exclusively—on a history of media which permitted the formation of a “social memory.” Whereas animals could not transcend instinctive behavior, man could liberate himself from the biological memory of the species and externalize his “action programs” in the form of symbolic representations that render possible a comparison of different options for acting: Anthropological evolution is hence bound to the means that expand the amount of knowledge that can be simultaneously made available (Leroi-Gourhan 219-35). The transition from exclusively oral to literal cultures marks the beginning of the “exteriorization” of knowledge. Writing easily exceeds the limits of the brain as it allows for a preservation of experience and knowledge in a material form of virtually boundless capacity. All in all Leroi-Gourhan distinguishes five periods in the history of collective memory: “that of oral transmission, that of written transmission using tables or an index, that of simple index cards, that of mechanography [i.e., largely punch cards], and that of electronic serial transmission [i.e., modern computers]” (258). Human evolution is in this respect founded on a rapidly growing body of knowledge that soon requires innovative ways of ordering (libraries’ “index cards”), finally leading to the “machine brain” of the computer that, according to Leroi-Gourhan, threatens to challenge the human monopoly on thinking. The capacity of media to support or even smoothly replace the work of “natural” memory has frequently been called into question. In a famous critique Plato (274e-276d) opined that while writing could figure as an individual aide-memoire for a speaker, it could not aspire to act as communicative memory in itself (see J. Assmann, this volume). Paradoxically, the very same qualities that render technological storage a valuable sup- The Photograph as Externalization and Trace 369 plement to “natural” memory also distinguish it from the latter. Writing, on the one hand, stores information that can be read in contexts locally and temporally apart from its origin, thus inevitably changing the meaning, as Plato complained. On the other hand, every bit of information that is encoded in written form remains stable and—at least materially—forever unaltered, whereas in human memory old and new “input” coexist and interact, forming a dynamic, ever-changing context. It is obvious, however, that, if media kept information exactly like the human brain, there would be no point in using them. These objections, which distance the mind from its externalizations, are reflected more openly in the view of media as trace. 2. Trace If one takes into account that photography itself has been conceived as memory, it becomes even less comprehensible that it has only rarely figured in media histories of memory. Neither Leroi-Gourhan nor Assmann and Assmann pay tribute to photography’s significance. The periodization is usually confined to orality, writing, and print, concluding with the digital age. The media of analogous recording—most prominently photography, phonography, and film—are situated at the margins if included at all. This omission can be readily explained by the insight that photography is considered so radical an externalization that it stretches the concept beyond its limits. One could argue that not just the retention of knowledge, but also perception had been externalized, thus eluding human intervention in the whole process. French film critic André Bazin attributed to pictures the task of “mummification,” that is, the function of symbolically saving humans from death by immortalizing their appearance. Photographic media could lay claim to an increased power in recalling the past because the automatic formation of the picture omitted interpretation and therefore emancipated memory from subjectivity. According to Bazin “all the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence” (13). Likewise, Siegfried Kracauer has elaborated the difference between human memory and photographic records: Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum, memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation. (50-51) Manual modes of representation—writing, drawing, or painting—may increase a society’s or individual’s “storage” capacity, thus minimizing the 370 Jens Ruchatz need to single out what is worth keeping, but photographic exposure bypasses human intervention on all levels. This blindness to selectivity is the quality that the expression “photographic memory” means: a memory that does not filter according to relevance and retains even the apparently insignificant. In this respect, the photograph refers to the past not as externalization but as a trace (Ruchatz, “Fotografische” 89-92). Making sense of a photograph as a trace means to take it as evidence of what is shown on it and to reconstruct the situation of its origin. When a photograph refers to the past not as its representation but as its product, it functions more as a reminder that triggers or guides remembering than as a memory in itself. Because traces are taken to be generated unintentionally they are regarded as particularly authentic and trustworthy testimonies of the past. This stance has, however, to be qualified: As soon as a trace is identified as such, it is removed from the sphere of the authentic and displaced to culture. Traces are not defined as carriers of meaning from the start (as are convention-based sign systems like speech), but it nonetheless takes cultural knowledge to mark objects (for example, fingerprints) as meaningful traces. And even more: Although the production of traces is presumed to be devoid of cultural encoding, their “reading” is, as the word itself betrays, paradoxically an act of “decoding.” Even if the knowledge consulted to “read” traces is rarely ever properly conventionalized, the singular event that led to the formation of a particular trace can only be reconstructed by resorting to a more general knowledge, for example by reducing the singularity to typical and decodable traits. A trace remains “authentic” only as long as it has not been read. With regard to photography’s relation to memory the concept of the trace proves fruitful, as it points to photography’s specific temporality. Different from iterable conventional signs, a photograph refers to a particular and singular moment in time that is inevitably past when the finished print is looked at. Photography is as profoundly marked by this fugaciousness as it brings it to view. What is certified to have been present, but is no more, can be looked at as if it still was. According to Roland Barthes, photography brings about an “anthropological revolution in man’s history” because it gives not so much an impression of the presence of a thing but “an awareness of its having-been-there” (“Rhetoric” 44). This intricate mingling of past and present, presence and absence, distinguishes photography not only from manual ways of representation but also from the moving image of film, which, as Barthes contends, gives an impression of presence. Accordingly the photographic trace may be the only representation of an event that incorporates its absence. It is of course necessary to clarify that, if any photograph can be viewed as a relic The Photograph as Externalization and Trace 371 of the past, this mode of use does not prevail in all contexts: Photos in family albums are more likely to be seen this way than photographic illustrations in field guides or cookbooks, which are not meant to be viewed as singular traces of something particular, but as exemplary depictions that show a specimen representative of a class of things. Neither photography as a medium nor a single photograph can be tied down exclusively—or even ontologically—to one exclusive mode of signification. It goes without saying that every photo is not just automatically produced, but also subject to a number of significant decisions: The choice of the object, its framing and the moment of exposure, the use of a certain lens and a particular photographic material all shape how the picture will look in the end. The same holds true for the actions following the exposure, in particular the production of the prints. But all these voluntary acts only surround the moment of exposure when light forms the image on the film and the photographer cannot intervene (Dubois 47). Consequently any photographic picture consists to different ratios of a mixture of selection and accident, of significant and insignificant elements. Photography produces an exceptional class of traces, insofar as they are regularly and intentionally produced as well as conventionally recognized as significant and signifying: Photographs show—but do not explain—what has caused them. To clarify how photography acts as a sign it is helpful to take recourse to Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic distinction of signs (cf. Dubois 17-53): In this terminology photographic traces function as index—a sign that signifies by its relation to its origin—and the externalized and encoded messages as symbol—a sign that signifies by virtue of conventions. Somehow sandwiched between these opposites figures the most prominent quality of photography: As icons photos signify by similarity. The light that is reflected onto the light-sensitive emulsion delineates the objects in front of the lens in such a manner that no code is required to recognize them. More often than not two or more of these modes of signification combine when photographs are looked at: Before photographs can take on a symbolic meaning, for example, the objects in them have to be recognized by way of their iconicity. Likewise, trace and externalization do not necessarily exclude each other, stressing either the cultural or the technological aspect of a photograph. The concepts rather help to distinguish two modes of photographic signification that can be found even in the same picture. The difference between externalization and trace distinguishes two functions of medial artifacts that pertain not only to photography, but can—to a greater or lesser extent—be observed wherever media are used for retaining the past. In the following I want to take a look at the functions photo- 372 Jens Ruchatz graphs perform in processes of individual and collective remembering. It will be observed that private photographs tend to be used as traces, that is, read indexically, whereas collective memory favors photographs that support a symbolical reading and thus can be appropriated as externalization. 3. Private Photography Private photographs are expressly taken for the single purpose to serve as future aide-memoires (Starl 23). They address either the photographing individual him- or herself or the family he or she belongs to. This fact poses serious problems for the uninvolved observer. If private photographs, on the one hand, do not look personal or individual, but rather “interchangeable” (Hirsch, Familial Gaze xiii), the stereotypical mise-enscène and choice of subjects do not exhaust their meaning. They rather serve as anchors (Barthes, “Rhetoric” 39-41) and starting points for remembering what is actually not visible in the pictures. By applying the distinction of users and readers to private photography, Patricia Holland (107) has elaborated this observation. Users, the proper addressees of any given set of private photos, know the context of what is visible on a photo either from personal experience or from conversations with relatives or friends. By contrast, readers cannot penetrate the surface of the photographic image, because they have no access to this private knowledge, and therefore try to make sense of it by identifying the social codes that are present. The pictures then lose their specific meaning in favor of more general insights into social and cultural conventions. In his famous empirical study undertaken in the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu showed to what extent the practice of private photography is social. What are worthy occasions for photography (rites of passage like baptism or marriage, holidays, etc.) and how to frame, place, and pose a subject can be considered collectively pre-structured choices. “Thus when we photograph ourselves in a familial setting, we do not do so in a vacuum; we respond to dominant mythologies of family life, to conceptions we have inherited, to images we see on television, in advertising, in film” (Hirsch, Familial Gaze xvi). Private photography is obviously interspersed with and structured by social presettings. Photography-based private memory thus offers a perfect example for Halbwachs’s point that individual memory is social as it does rely on collective framings. When readers look at private photographs they generally take them as externalizations that betray the implicit ideologies and codings of collective memory. Users tend to see their own private photographs as traces that offer a material starting point for recalling what happened at the time The Photograph as Externalization and Trace 373 of exposure. For them the ideological side of their own practice will remain more or less obscure. Whereas readers will tend to break up a photograph into different layers of signification (framing, posing, etc.), users will more probably regard the photograph in its entirety as a trace of a past event. In the user’s eyes the main purpose of the photographs is to provide a kind of visual evidence that prompts and anchors acts of remembering. If photography’s iconic abilities may be supportive, in the end they are of only secondary importance. Even blurry, under-exposed or in other ways failed photographs can do service insofar as they are tied physically to the event that produced them (Starl 23). In order to establish a link to the past, photographs need not be accepted as externalizations of personal impressions. Private photographs may be experienced as such when they seem to agree with somebody’s very own impressions or perceptions—in short: when the likeness is considered striking. Photography’s ability to record events in bypassing subjectivity has, however, raised suspicion that it might not recall but rather replace lived experience. Barthes has pointed out that the photograph was “never, in essence, a memory,” but rather blocked remembrance and easily turned into a “counter-memory” (Barthes, Camera 91). By repeatedly using photographs to trigger memories, what is remembered mentally could converge with what is retained pictorially—if photographs are regarded as externalizations they would have to be internalized first. Photographic pictures have the power not just to prompt but also to redirect and change memories according to what is iconically perceived and indexically authenticated. In the private context photographs are used to intentionally retrieve memories. In the stabilized sequence of an album the pictures can form a kind of pictorial autobiography that its owners employ to ascertain their identity, the photographic narrative serving as material proof (see Straub, this volume). The knowledge brought to bear on private photographs may stem from one’s own experiences, but can also extend to the communicative memory of a family when it concerns familial events that happened before one’s birth: This second form of photographically founded recollection, which is neither autobiographical memory nor impersonal history, has been termed “postmemory” (Hirsch, Family Frames 22). 4. Public Photographs as Icons In contrast to private photography, publicly distributed photographs are usually produced for instant consumption. Only a very small fraction of the photographs published every year survive the time of their publication 374 Jens Ruchatz and enter collective memory—and they do so not due to the photographer’s intention, but by accident. Photographs that are collectively revered and memorized are usually called “icons”—icons, however, not in the Peircean sense, for photographic icons are characterized precisely by their bias towards the realm of the symbolic. Up to now the term “photographic icon” just designates pictures that attract strong collective attention and emotional reaction. It has yet to be developed into a clear-cut concept (Brink 232-38). Unanimity exists, however, that iconic photographs foreground symbolic values. If in principle photographs can claim “instant convertibility into a symbol” (Goldberg 135; also cf. Brink 15), the question still remains why some pictures do transform more easily into a symbol than others. There are at least three factors that support this conversion of a trace that refers to a singular event (confirming that it has happened) into a carrier of a cultural meaning: 1. It helps if the composition of a photograph corresponds with pictorial and rhetorical traditions, that is, when it can subconsciously be identified as an externalization of established modes of organizing collective knowledge (Edwards and Winkler 290-91; Bertelsen 85-89). Symbolization can, however, be taken too far. Roland Barthes (“Shock”) has argued that so-called shock photos fail to impress, because the photographer has too obviously taken the place of the recipients and inscribed his moral judgment into the pictures. Photography’s troubling ambiguities, due to the lack of a semiotic code in the trace, got buried under a superficial, speechlike message that could only be affirmed by the viewers. A successful photographic icon balances trace and presumed externalizations, so that the symbolic dimension appears to belong to reality itself: It shows that “life can surpass art” (Bertelsen 83). How important assumptions like these are is evident in the never-ending discussions of whether Robert Capa’s Death of a Spanish Loyalist or Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the flagraising on Iwo Jima were staged or not (Griffin 137-40, 143f.; Goldberg 144). 2. The presentation of photographs can downplay their reference to the particular events of which they are a trace. In a magazine or a newspaper, photographs can be accompanied either by a straightforward caption, stressing the indexical quality by detailing place and date of the exposure, or by a title that encourages an interpretation of a more general kind, which surpasses the concrete event presented in the photograph (Scott 46-74). The adoption of a press photo into collective memory very often goes together with the renunciation of exact captions (Wiedenmann 323-27; Zelizer 102-11). The Photograph as Externalization and Trace 375 3. Repeated publication automatically loosens the tie of a photograph to a specific point in historic time (Griffin 140). If it is continuously republished a picture is gradually depleted of its indexical reference to the particular event of its origin. It becomes instead linked more and more to its prior uses, turning into a sign that signifies by social convention. This process of abstraction and the canonization go hand in hand and mutually reinforce each other, because the more the unambiguous, symbolical meaning of a photo is consolidated, the more likely it is to be republished. In the end, a photo can turn into a visual token, a mnemonic, that stands for an event as a whole, a series of events or even a historical epoch, like Rosenthal’s photo of Iwo Jima for World War II in the Pacific (see also Erll, this volume). To what extent this picture has become conventional is demonstrated by its permanent appropriations in a range of visual media. Starting in 1945 the picture was published on postage stamps and posters; it was taken as model for the U. S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington in 1954, which pop artist Edward Kienholz complemented by a critical replica; it became the focus of the novel Flags of Our Fathers and Clint Eastwood’s film of the same title (Dülffer). It even cut the links to WW II and became a “visual ideograph” that could be adapted freely to other historical contexts, be it in editorial cartoons (Edwards and Winkler) or in a photograph of the New York firemen on 9/11. Photographs can become canonized as veritable lieux de mémoire that enter cultural memory, and end up in history textbooks (see also Hebel, this volume). Photo historian Vicki Goldberg has argued that photographic images increasingly function as summaries of complex historical phenomena, “partially displacing the public monument” (135). The prevalence of moving images has even strengthened photography’s importance, because the still image then renders the easily graspable version, as it condenses a course of events into one single moment (Goldberg 21819, 226). Whether and how the advent and success of digital photography will affect the connection of photography and memory remains a crucial, but to this day open, question. It is often argued that when the light-sensitive chemistry of traditional photography is replaced by digitized bits that can easily be manipulated one by one, photographs will no longer be regarded as traces, since their authenticity is fundamentally called into question. In the future it might happen that the iconic look of photographic pictures will be no longer be bound to either indexical authenticity nor an origin in a definite past, but to a temporally indifferent externalization (Stiegler, “Digitale”). Without the fundamental aspect of the trace that secured the 376 Jens Ruchatz temporal specificity of the photographic image, the salient position of photography in visual memory would be seriously endangered. References Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999. ––. “Exkarnation: Gedanken zur Grenze zwischen Körper und Schrift.” Raum und Verfahren: Interventionen 2. Eds. Jörg Huber and Alois Martin Müller. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993. 133-57. Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann. “Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis.” Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft. Eds. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt and Siegfried Weischenberg. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994. 11440. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Fontana, 1984. ––. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. 32-51. ––. “Shock Photos.” The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. New York: Hall and Wang, 1979. 71-74. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. 916. Bertelsen, Lance. “Icons on Iwo.” Journal of Popular Culture 22.2 (1989): 7995. Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Trans. of Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965. Brink, Cornelia. Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945. Berlin: Akademie, 1997. Draaisma, Douwe. Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Dubois, Philippe. L’Acte photographique et autres essais. Paris: Nathan, 1990. Dülffer, Jost. “Über-Helden—Das Bild von Iwo Jima in der Repräsentation des Sieges: Eine Studie zur US-amerikanischen Erinnerungskultur seit 1945.” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3.2 (2006). 7 Nov. 2007 <http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Duelffer-2-2006>. The Photograph as Externalization and Trace 377 Edwards, Janis, and Carol K. Winkler. “Representative Form and Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289-310. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1962. Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville, 1991. Griffin, Michael. “The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism.” Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography. Eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 122-57. Hirsch, Marianne, ed. The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1999. ––. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Holland, Patricia. “‘Sweet it is to scan …’: Personal Photographs and Popular Photography.” Photography: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Liz Wells. London: Routledge, 1997. 103-50. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” 1859. Photography: Essays and Images. Ed. Beaumont Newhall. London: Secker & Warburg, 1980. 53-62. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” 1927. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 47-63. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Plato. “Phaedrus.” Trans. R. Hackforth. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. 1961. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. 475-525. Ruchatz, Jens. “Externalisierungen: Gedächtnisforschung als mediale Anthropologie.” Handlung Kultur Interpretation 12.1 (2003): 94-118. ––. “Fotografische Gedächtnisse: Ein Panorama medienwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen.” Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität— Historizität—Kulturspezifität. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. 83-105. Scott, Clive. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion, 1999. Starl, Timm. Knipser: Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980. Berlin: Koehler & Amelang, 1995. Stiegler, Bernd. Bilder der Photographie: Ein Album photographischer Metaphern. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. ––. “Digitale Photographie als epistemologischer Bruch und historische Wende.” Das Gesicht der Welt: Medien in der digitalen Kultur. Munich: Fink, 2004. 105-25. 378 Jens Ruchatz Wiedenmann, Nicole. “‘So ist das, was das Bild dokumentiert, das Gegenteil dessen, was es symbolisiert’: Holocaustfotografien im Spannungsfeld zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Kulturellem Gedächtnis.” Die Medien der Geschichte: Historizität und Medialität in interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Eds. Fabio Crivellari, Kay Kirchmann, Marcus Sandl and Rudolf Schlögl. Konstanz: UVK, 2004. 317-49. Zelizer, Barbie. “From the Image of Record to the Image of Memory: Holocaust Photography, Then and Now.” Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography. Eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 98-121.