Exercise 3.6 : The Memory of Photography

The essay by David Bate was accessed from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609 using the OCA database.

We are asked to read the essay, make note of key points and consider research into areas that interest me. This is apposite, as p122 on the course notes refers to thinking about the critical review to be submitted for Assignment Four. One possibility (of two) is to consider some contemporary challenges and opportunities for Landscape photography presented by alternative media

The brief for Assignment Four is clear that the subject should be 'relevant to [my] own practice'; this subject will be relevant as post processing and use of smartphone photography are practices I adopt; in addition I would consider more forward-thinking ideas of how photography - specifically Landscape Photography - will change to embrace the fact that photography is just simply 'easier' in execution than it used to be, and, critically, how this pace of change has accelerated so fast that photography textbooks do not keep up. The subject has been discussed in books, but, in my reading, has not considered the most up to date technology.

How does this impact on The Memory of Photography? I would suggest in two ways:

• Firstly, Bate considers how photography is an 'external technology' that impacts on the psyche, quoting Benjamin and Derrida. This is an area that can be expanded to consider the work of Sherry Turkle on the social impact of contemporary technology: Alone Together as she calls it;
• Secondly, Bate discusses collective memory, specifically the significance of iconic public monuments and photographs.

Bate asks whether photography 'as a device for remembering' is impacted by the availability of digitil storage devices as a different from remembrance. He begins with Freud's quote that 'photography revolutionizes memory' - it democratizes and preserves it'.

Collective memory
 

Jacques Le Goff concept - modern collective memory manifested by public monuments and photographs,

Bourdieu (1990) commented on the family album: 'the truth of social remembrance'. In fact, it was part of his general theses of photography as a Middlebrow Art' more suited to the needs of the working classes than aspiring to the higher echelons of artistic practice, such as painting and sculpture. 'Without doubt', he continues, photography (and colour photography in particular) entirely fulfils the aesthetic expectations of the working classes'. 

Bate considers that the 'acquired characteristics' of a group or family photograph may apply equally to photographs produced by the state, media, arts, and independent social groups. There is a sense of unifying purpose represented by the collective image. This may apply also to landscape photography as manifested by the 'sense of place' - perhaps we can adduce a sort of 'acquired characteristics' from these too.

Meta-archive
 
Bate alludes to Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature and comments on on photograph taken of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, an example of the double 'device for remembering'.

Prosthetic memory

The camera as a sort of reprogrammer of memory (Foucault) - 'people not as they were, but as they must remember having been'. I am not sure about this - you could equally argue the opposite - an image does have an element of factual objectivity that later events and thoughts might wish to eradicate.

Mnemic traces

Freud discusses 'screen memory'. 

"Freud used the term "screen memory" to denote any memory which functions to hide  another, typically unconscious, mental content. Freud distinguished between three types of screen memory: those in which a recollection from childhood "screens" or conceals some event contemporary with it, those in which a later recollection stands for a memory of a childhood event, and those in which a childhood recollection represents a later concern." (Smith, 2000)

 Childhood memories are not therefore as straightforward as they might seem: there are several confounding factors in the background that cloud the memory. Photographs too can be screen memories - we cannot verify the original experience of the photograph 'but the image provides a scene in which we may bring voluntary (studium) or involuntary (punctum) memories to bear upon it.'

Bate gives an example of a photograph can be an 'empty shell' for a favourite story, claiming that he remembers being very interested in the Navy as a child so the finds the Talbot image evocative of his childhood, an involuntary reaction.

Photographs, Bate concludes, have a 'sharpness and innocence that belie meanings that have far more potential significance., they should therefore, 'demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie'.

The article led me to reread Bourdieu's article again, and also to read Martin Lister Photography in the age of electronic imaging, again considering the possibility of discussing further in Assignment 4. The essence is to challenge the view of childhood memories by the simple fact of accessibility - that democratization of photography as a simple, cheaper occupation open to all, and the prevalence of alternative socail media make the concept of 'childhood memories' as screen memories more difficult to understand in an imaging concept, partly because we cannot now even define what an image is; what is the reality behind the concept of the image as we can now have many alternatives. As with so much of photogpraphy literature, Bate wrote at a time before the internet; that changes a lot.

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) Photography: a Middlebrow Art (Polity Press) pp73-98

Smith, David (2000) The Mirror Image of the Present: Freud's Theory of Retrogressive Screen Memories. Available from http://www.psychoanalytischeperspectieven.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/screen-memories.pdf. Accessed on 8 August 2016