Photography
All photographs are memento mori.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography
Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die". It names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality. The phrase is given to a tradition in art that dates back to antiquity. In ancient Rome, the words are believed to have been used on the occasions when a Roman general was parading through the streets during a victory triumph. Standing behind the victorious general was his slave, who was tasked to remind the general that, though his highness was at his peak today, tomorrow he could fall or, more likely, be brought down. The servant conveyed this by telling the general that he should remember, "Memento mori." It is further possible that the servant said instead, "Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you'll die!", as noted by Tertullian in his Apologeticus.
The Puritans in Colonial America saw art as a large number of memento mori images. The Puritan community in 17th-century North America looked down upon art, because they believed it drew the faithful away from God, and if away from God, then it could only lead to the devil. However, portraits were considered historical records, and as such they were allowed. Thomas Smith, a 17th-century Puritan, fought in many naval battles and also painted. In his self-portrait, we see a typical puritan memento mori with a skull, suggesting his imminent death. The poem under the skull emphasizes Smith's acceptance of death. For more on this theme of momento mori go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jan/11/memoirs-of-the-artist/
WHAT DO I DO WITH A LIFETIME OF PHOTOGRAPHS?
If Time magazine's nine New York-based photo editors can sift through some 15,000 pictures a week, selecting about 125 for each issue,(1) surely I can sift through a lifetime of several hundred photos and select a few for autobiographical use? This task of being the photo-editor of my own life, would not be that difficult, but I question the relevance of the process and that is what I discuss here in this brief essay. My task would be partly to distance myself from my own love of photographs in order to reflect accurately on the images.(2) This business of reflection is critical. "Photography is a way for me to preserve the part of me that is only me," wrote Tipper Gore in her new book Picture This: A Visual Diary.(3) Yes, Tipper, but these photos are only a small part of me and a somewhat elusive part at that.
I have a 12 volume or, more accurately, 12 files/albums of photographic images beginning in 1908. At that time my mother was 4 and my father 18. The photos are arranged in various visual categories. I can place myself with the images in a sort of photographic archive. The photographs which flood my world as I gaze at this collection, and which I now can view with ease and convenience, provide me with a reality that, for the most part, I can no longer touch. There is a certain magic I experience as I look at these pictures in their quiet place on the bookshelf. They are, not so much a place of images as they are a place of thoughts or, perhaps better, a place of mnemonic devices. Their highest merit is their suggestiveness of a beauty, a character, a place, which the photo itself does not reveal but, as I say, suggests. It is as if a camera was nervously clicking over the surface of my life and the lives of my parents. My job now, it could be said, is to piece together, to paint, to translate from feeling to meaning and find some overall pattern in this kalaedoscope of images. It is as if, while the camera caught fresh moments of my life, my task now is to keep a freshness of vision as I write amidst a vast, a pervasive and immense incoherence, with impressions always outstripping my capacity to analyse the data. I need to possess a similar degree of sensitivity as the plates possess and the developing equipment that photography requires to record my own impressions of life.-Ron Price with thanks to: (1) Caroline Howard, "Photographers at Work: Picking Shots," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2002; (2) Jim Roberts, "Introduction: Imagistic Information," Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998; (3) Tipper Gore, Picture This: A Visual Diary, Broadway Books, 2004.
MY FAMILY PHOTO ALBUM
What I write below about the photo in a family album has implications for photo-journalism. In this 3rd millennium there has come into society both an image-glut and a print-glut and each of us has to deal with this reality in our own way. In 2011 I arrived at the age of 67 and my last particular photo album was becoming filled to its maximum intake. People in my world had begun to send me digital photos enough to fill this and future photograph albums to overflowing. Those who could afford it, and who had the interest, in the first years of this new millennium, had begun to make videos of their family/personal lives; still others had telephones with visual images of the person they were talking to. There were large screen TVs, computer monitors, CDs, mini-discs, indeed, a cornucopia of new technology that was making the old world of the photograph in an album, the idea of keeping even the digital photo in an album, somewhat passe even declasse. One rarely sees this word, declasse--acute accent on the last e--in literature these days, but it seems applicable here; it means lowered in social significance, relevance and standing, at least for many.
Time would tell just how I would respond to this change, this diversification, this amplification, in the technology of photography that had insensibly altered the rationale for the very existence of the old photo album. Photo albums had been delighting the eye, had been part of my memorabilia, for well nigh 60 years. As I write these words, one month before my 67th birthday, I have decided to continue to put digital photos in future albums on the same basis as those photos from cameras that I and my family have been doing since early in the 20th century. But I did not exercise this practice with much diligence. Instead, I simply kept a section of my computer directory for digital photos.
The above photo of my wife and I was taken in the autumn of 1999 in Perth Western Australia. The photo was taken in the first months of my retirement from full-time employment. I was 55 and my wife, Chris, 52. I was about to take a sea-change and move into a life of full-time writing.
The above photo was taken in 2004(circa). By then I had also retired from PT and casual-volunteer work and was able to spend, on average, 8 hours most days with: reading and writing, research and independent scholarship, publishing and poetizing. This photo of me at my desk is, therefore, apt.
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PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORABILIA
The following link provides a series of poems and essays on the photographs in my life, one of the central aspects of my memorabilia:http://bahai-library.com/price_autobiography_photographs_memorabilia
NOTE ON DIGITAL PHOTOS
By 2007/2008, as I inched my way annalistically/incrementally to the age of 65 and as my last particular photo album was becoming filled to its maximum intake, people in my world were beginning to send digital photos, enough to begin to fill this and future photograph albums to overflowing. Those who could afford it, and who had the interest, in the first years of this new millennium, had begun to make videos of their family/personal lives; still others had telephones with visual images of the person they were talking to. There were large screen TVs, computer monitors, CDs, mini-discs, indeed, a cornucopia of new technology that was making the old world of the photograph in an album, the idea of keeping even the digital photo in an album, somewhat passe even declasse.(1)
Time would tell just how I would respond to this change, this diversification, this amplification, in the technology of photography that had insensibly altered the rationale for the very existence of the old photo album. Photo albums had been delighting the eye, had been part of my memorabilia, for well nigh 60 years. As I write these words, eight months short of my 68th birthday, I have decided to continue to put digital photos in this and future albums on the same basis as those photos from cameras that I and my family have been doing since early in the 20th century. But I do this only on rare occasions since I am not now, nor have I ever been a seriously family and community photo-oriented person.
-Ron Price, 18/4/'08 to 18/11/'11 (1)one rarely sees this word, declasse--acute accent on the last e--in literature these days, but it seems applicable here; it means lowered in social significance, relevance and standing.
THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHS AND----THINKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHS
Go to these two links for starters:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/01/move-closer-please/ and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography
SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.-Vincent van Gogh, "Letter of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
"Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development," writes American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist Susan Sontag(1933-2004), "there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer. The photograph of a missing being touches me like the delayed rays of a star." Sontag managed to incorporate nearly everything that has been thought or said on photography into a free-flowing argument that would become one of her perennial themes: how photographs—and by extension films and television—those “clouds of fantasy and pellets of information” have become a “pseudo-presence” more real than the real itself in a world dependent on their production and consumption. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, Sontag had insightful things to say about photogrpahy.--Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
MY PHOTOGRAPHS
At the age of sixty-seven I now possess, as I have indicated elsewhere, a dozen albums of photographs of various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of my autobiography, any memoir. This essay, this part of a chapter of what is now a 2600 page memoir, tries to put all these photographs into perspective, tries to provide readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives hegemony in many ways to the visual. More generally, too, I provide in that part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director and script writer Federico Fellini(1920-1993) said about film could also apply to my photographs. "My films are not for understanding," said Fellini, "They are for seeing." This essay, though, is about understanding. For the artist at the AAForum, one of th emany photography forums I have joined in cyberpsace, I hope I provide some useful, some interesting, comments.
The French sociologist and philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer, Jean Baudrillard(1929-2007), is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Go to these two links for brief discussions of these fields:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
Baudrillard is often abused and is often amused. He also often confuses many a student who has had to study his writings in the last 40 years. Baudrillard said that "no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light and this light is the very imagination of the image. Baudrillard sees his photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible, as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph is never of any "real" world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially illusion.
MORE COMMENTS ON PHOTOGRAPHS
I certainly sense this as I look back over 100 years of photographs in my dozen albums, photographs of family and friends going back to 1908. Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of whatever type intended to elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. Many, I now, would not agree with this statement, but I think the statement offers some truth even to those who are inclined to disagree with it on an initial inspection. In an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality in many situations, photographic images of course still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment.
Photographs, so this argument runs, are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny, colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life and its tangential connections with the lady down the street, my mother or girl friend, or even that wondrous scene over there in those paintings. All of those portrayals of reality--relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness. Now that is an interesting point of view, but what does it actually mean?
The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag wrote that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialisation in all its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. What, I ask myself, is the semiological universe that is being called into play by such dissociated transmissions of affectivity in all these photos.
THE CULTURE OF IMAGE-GLUT
The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded most of my life.
This would be true a fortiori of the effigy. Of all the religious and artistic treasures which a visitor may see at Westminster Abbey, the collection of eighteen funeral effigies in the Museum which I saw in London recently is perhaps the most intriguing. Carved in wood or in wax, these full-sized representations of kings, queens and distinguished public figures, many of them in their own clothes and with their own accoutrements, constitute a gallery of astonishingly life-like portraits stretching over more than four centuries of British history. Can only the dead astonish us by seeming "life-like"? Is there something lifelike in this memoir of mine? Perhaps even the living can induce the uncanny effect of an effigy from time to time—but in print. Modern celebrities, of course, do this all the time and a whole industry has been created to cater to these ‘life-like’ forms and antics. We see them day in and day out if we look at TV, magazines, indeed, any of the print and electronic media. It is hard to escape them if we wanted to, of course, we could limit our contact with them.
The subject is interesting AND I HAVE MUCH MORE TO SAY--but I will leave it here for this my first draft of this page on the subject "photography."-Ron Price, Tasmania
