Exercise 3.6: ‘The Memory of Photography’

Read David Bate’s essay ‘The Memory of Photography’, available at:

[Originally published in Photographies. Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 243-257].

This was indeed a challenging essay and had me thinking in all sorts of ways about the effect of time, feeling and other influences that all contribute to how we remember something, just as Bates used Horatio Lord Nelson in describing the particular part photography played in the essay.

Bate calls upon the work of philosophers, literary critic Roland Barthes and neurologist Sigmund Freud amongst others, to describe how we interpret and remember images in photographic archives.  He argues that the photograph can trigger a story or event and describes this a “fixed and fluid: social and personal”, having no fixed point of reference.

Photography archives are another form which the human race has created to allow us to remember the past.  Quoting Le Goff from the essay these are libraries museums and archives.  Over time our perception, taste and attitudes change and with it our recollection of the period.  Bate, has added photography to the list as a “meta-archive”.  This is all very well but how can we be sure that the archive is a true reflection of the event.  How many war photographers have manipulated or staged the scene how many have removed or placed elements in the shot e.g Military History Now (2015) and The Commissar Vanishes  (1997 King D.).  Having said that writing can also be misleading and so the outcome is how we as viewers then make sense of the scenes using our memory. This view is similar to the view of Michel Foucault who complains in the essay that popular memory was being blocked and re-programmed and argues that “not everyone remembers visually and that memories are not necessarily experienced or were experienced in a different way”. He suggests that we no longer trust our memory as our own.

Photographs can take several forms to aid memory, they can act as mnemic, they can affect our perception of history and allow us to form the a view on  historical  representation and whilst photographs help us to remember the event or for a historical view they can also suppress our memory and what is described in the essay as  the difference between Freud’s “Artificial memory” and “Natural Memory”.

Bate continues throughout the essay to go back to his memory of a photograph of Nelson’s column by William Henry Fox Talbot.  He describes the construction of this and many such memorials during the Victorian period as an archive in themselves and a memory aid. However, the reason he returns to the image is because whilst reading a Susan Sontag novel he recalled a childhood memory.  Having been brought up in Portsmouth, home of Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory and having visited the ship in the Historic Dockyard where the spot where Nelson died was always pointed out he could visualise and reconstruct the moment where Nelson was shot and it is this memory that he involuntarily recalls when looking at Fox Talbot’s image. constantly being reminded whenever he and his family walked past. I found it interesting they way Bate links “one route back to photography” was to link voluntary and involuntary memory as argued by Proust and through this to the work of Roland Barthes linking his “punctum” to Proust’s “involuntary memory” (an involuntary response to a photograph, “studium” to voluntary memory where a photograph can evoke a reaction that surprises us and has  an involuntary effect.  He then links an “associative path” to a supressed memory.  I now think that I will now be able to increase my awareness of what will be influencing me when composing a shot.

References

Bate D. (2010). The Memory of Photography, Photographies, 3:2, 243-257, Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609 (accessed 21.4.2020)

King D. (1997) The Commissar Vanishes  New York, Henry Holt & Co. Inc.

Military History Now (2015) Famous Fakes — 10 Celebrated Wartime Photos That Were Staged, Altered or Fabricated Available at: https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/09/25/famous-fakes-10-celebrated-wartime-photos-that-were-staged-edited-or-fabricated/  (accessed 21.4.2020)