Exercise 3.3 – "Late Photography"

1. Read David Campany’s essay ‘Safety in Numbness’ (see ‘Online learning materials and student-led research’ at the start of this course guide). Summarise the key points of the essay and note down your own observations on the points he raises.

David Campany has republished this essay after the book he contributed became out of print but his essay is continues to be cited.

In the essay Campany talks about “late photography” describing it as photographs that have been taken after the event and after the scene has been captured on video, when the “hysteria” and “newsworthy” is over.

1. The digital age of video recording signalled the end of the “battle/war” photographer and photographers then needed to find a new niche.
2. The global, electronic and instantaneous images that circulated after the bombing of the Twin Towers were not felt to be right to record a lasting memory of the disaster.
3. Joel Meyerowitz was commissioned to provide a photographic record and Channel 4 made a documentary of his photoshoot.
4. “late photography” has various roles as described by Campany – “undertaker, summariser or accountant”.
5. There is an affinity between late photography and forensic photography rather than photojournalism. Late photography is static, straight, often sombre, with no people.It has a different relation to memory and history than other forms of photography.
6. Late photography is solemn, still and straight and rarely does it have people in it but it does contain evidence of their activity.

Campany discusses the differences between moving images, frozen image and their relation to memory. Whilst he says that late photography is different from a “spontaneous snapshot” and also it’s “relation to memory and history”. He describes the genre not as the “trace of an event but the trace of trace of an event“. By this he means that what we see in the images are “traces, fragments, empty buildings, empty streets, damage to the body and damage to the world”.

There seems to be an underlying discussion that suggests that the viewer needs to do relatively little to engage with the videos we see on television whereas with a photograph requires the viewer to analyse what is shown and then to make a decision about what the meaning of the subject.

By making the Channel 4 documentary, the media were telling the viewer that they are looking at static photographs of Aftermath by Joel Meyerowitz and not freeze frames of videos which Campany says form about 50% of the still images we see on TV.

Look at some of Meyerowitz’s images available online from Aftermath: World
Trade Centre Archive (2006). Consider how these images differ from your own
memories of the news footage and other images of the time. Write a short
response to the work (around 300 words), noting what value you feel this ‘late’
approach has.

The images are very different from the immediacy of the TV coverage of the event in that there was no going back, the images show the final clearance of the sight with large earthmoving machines and many workers sifting through the rubble. Whereas the initial coverage was more about the attempts at rescue, the feelings of the people at the sight, the audio recordings of messages being sent to relatives. They all evoked an emotion in me of sadness and helplessness. Aftermath for me left me feeling desolate. There was nothing anyone could do except to begin to understand the events leading to the attack and the inevitable tragedies that ensued.

I watched the Channel 4 documentary and remember thinking at the time that it was a strange thing to do when there was so much video coverage of the events. However, my memory now of the disaster is very different to the images presented of Ground Zero. I have an everlasting memory of the poor folk in the tower, shouting out of windows, recordings of their last messages to their loved ones. The brave Fire fighters trying desperately to help people to get out and my one memory that always jumps into my head when Ground Zero is mentioned is the person falling from the tower.

I also have some more personal memories. At the time my husband was working in Boston, he had returned home for a few weeks but his colleague and wife were still there and his colleagues wife was on her way back to the UK, booked onto the same airline making the same original journey. There were several hours before he found out that she was safe and actually on the flight before the one that flew into the towers. A close shave for her.

References

David Campany. 2018. Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of ‘Late Photography’ – David Campany. [ONLINE] Available at: http://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/. [Accessed 16/3.2020]

Joel Meyorwitz YouTube video (accessed 16.3.2020)