Exhibition dates: 18th October 2018 – 17th March 2019
Artists: Eero Aarnio | Jefferson Airplane | Michelangelo Antonioni | Richard Avedon | Günter Beltzig | Wolf Biermann | Big Brother and the Holding Company | Roman Brodmann | Pierre Cardin | Joe Colombo | Gerd Conradt | André Courrèges | Harun Farocki | Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Peter Handke | Haus-Rucker-Co | Jimi Hendrix | Helmut Herbst | Dennis Hopper | Theo Gallehr | Rudi Gernreich | Jean-Luc Godard | Gerhard von Graevenitz | F.C. Gundlach | Jasper Johns | Günther Kieser | Alexander Kluge | Yves Saint Laurent | Scott McKenzie | Egon Monk | Werner Nekes & Dore O. | Verner Panton | D.A. Pennebaker | Gaetano Pesce | Rosa von Praunheim | Paco Rabanne | Otis Redding | Kurt Rosenthal | Helke Sander | Ettore Sottsass | The Mamas & the Papas | The Who | Thomas Struck | Bernd Upnmoor | Roger Vadim | Valie Export | Agnès Varda | Wolf Vostell | Andy Warhol | Peter Weiss | Hans-Jürgen Wendt | Charles Wilp et al.
1968: the year that changed the world through radical action
From a posting about one revolutionary year in the 20th century (1918/19), we move 50 years in time to a another revolutionary year in that century: 1968.
I had wanted to do a posting on this exhibition and the 1968: Changing Times exhibition at the National Library of Australia (1st March 2018 – 12th August 2018) to compare and contrast what was happening in Australia and around the world in this most revolutionary year. But the six crappy press images that the National Library of Australia supplied were not worthy of a posting. Australian galleries in general and those in Canberra more particularly (I’m talking about you National Gallery of Australia!), really need to lift their game supplying media images. They are way behind the times in terms of understanding the importance of good media images to independent writers and critics.
In Australia, Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in the surf at Cheviot Beach, Victoria, presumed drowned in December 1967. A new prime minister, John Gorton, was sworn in in January 1968. Australians were dying in greater numbers in Vietnam; Aboriginal land rights issues vexed the Australian cabinet; and the White Australia policy of Old Australia, soon to be swept away in 1973, was still in full force. “Billy Snedden, the Minister for Immigration, said that Australians, and certainly the government, did not want a multiracial society. Sir Horace Petty, the Victorian Agent-General in London, explained that ‘the trouble comes when a black man marries a white woman. No one worries if a white man is silly enough to marry a black woman’.” (Text from the National Archives of Australia website)
Around the world, 1968 seemed to be the year where all the stars aligned in terms of protest against hegemonic masculinity, racism, war and social inequality.
- The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr (civil rights movement) and Robert F. Kennedy (engagement with youth, social change, civil rights) shocked the world. Race riots rock America including the Orangeburg massacre, and riots in Baltimore, Washington, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Louisville, Pittsburgh and Miami. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968
- The frustrations of youth boiled over in the Paris student riots of 1968 (protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions, values and order), leading to a “volatile period of civil unrest in France during May 1968 was punctuated by demonstrations and major general strikes as well as the occupation of universities and factories across France”
- The Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1968 called for revolutionary committees to be established to help preserve the ideological purity of the Chinese Revolution
- Muhammad Ali toured American student campuses giving hundreds of anti-Vietnam war speeches; protestors massed outside the White House at all hours. Eventually 4 students were killed at the Kent State Shootings by the U.S. National Guard during a demonstration on 4 May 1970
- A Viet Cong officer named Nguyễn Văn Lém is executed by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The event is photographed by Eddie Adams (Saigon Execution (General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon). The photo makes headlines around the world, eventually winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, and sways U.S. public opinion against the war
- The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968 or March events pertains to a series of major student, intellectual and other protests against the government of the Polish People’s Republic. Student protests also start in Belgrade, Yugoslavia
- The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalisation and mass protest in Czechoslovakia as a Communist state after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), and continued until 21 August 1968, when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to suppress the reforms during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
- In the following year, the Stonewall riots took place, a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBT) community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. They are widely considered to constitute the most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States, the official starting point of gay liberation, a movement that had been building momentum since the 1950s
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(R)evolution was in the air.
Marcus
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Many thankx to Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Paris Riots (1968)
Günter Zint (German, b. 1941)
Berlin, 1968 (Class struggle demonstration APO)
Silver gelatin print
© Panfoto, Hamburg
Günter Zint (German, 1941)
Hamburg, 1968
Silver gelatin print
© Panfoto, Hamburg
Günter Zint (German, 1941)
Paris, 1968 (Horst Wolf on car)
Silver gelatin print
© Panfoto, Hamburg
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (West German, 1945-1982)
Katzelmacher (film still)
1969
Scene with Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirschmüller, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Lilith Ungerer and Hannes Gromball
Black and white film, 88 min.
© RWFF Fotoarchiv
Katzelmacher is a 1969 West German film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film centres on an aimless group of friends whose lives are shaken up by the arrival of an immigrant Greek worker, Jorgos (played by Fassbinder himself, in an uncredited role).
In this unflinching German drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a group of young slackers, including the couple Erich (Hans Hirschmuller) and Marie (Hanna Schygulla), spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos (played by Fassbinder), moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos, particularly when Marie threatens to leave Erich for the outsider.
Trailer for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1969 film Katzelmacher
The exhibition 68. Pop and Protest brings together all the defining pictures, movies, texts and sounds of this era forming a complex atmospheric picture. The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) will display about 200 objects including music installations, fashion, movies, photos, posters, design objects, historical documents and spatial ensembles such as Verner Panton’s Spiegel canteen, which show what moved and motivated people in 1968 – in Hamburg, Germany and the rest of the world: awareness of their own rights, and the possibility to advocate their opinions publically through protest and revolt. The year 1968 is shaken by dramatic events which lead to protests, and promote revolutionary ideas. At the same time, a global cultural revolution is initiated that imaginatively revolts against conservative authoritarian structures, propagates sexual freedom, and demands equality for all people. Various avant-garde forms of expression in all artistic departments are the non-violent weapons of the time: progressive music, unconventional styles, bold designs, contentious theatre, and socio-critical cinema d’auteur. Furthermore, there is an unprecedented desire for critical discourse, public discussion, and civil disobedience. A common thread is hope; hope that the world will turn into a fairer place, that society will get more just, and that people will become better; hope that political suppression will stop, that borders will be overcome, walls will get torn down, and that sexuality will be non-exploitative. It is more important than ever to once again consolidate these ideas of freedom and self-determination in our collective memory. Current events show that central aspects of a free and democratic way of life are at stake (again): individual development of the self, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, democratic participation, and first and foremost open-mindedness towards what and whom we don’t know.
Text from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg [Online] Cited 11/02/2019
Ronald Traeger (American, 1936-1968)
Twiggy
June 1966
© Tessa Traeger
Fashion as a statement
When maladjusted outfits become consumer society, materialism and conventionality are put to the test. After short time, the looks can be found in the department stores: the protest mode is moving from subculture to mainstream. In haute couture, designs are related to the changing society set, in which gender assignments stumble and a relaxed handling of physicality and sexuality is propagated.
Installation views of the exhibition 68. Pop and Protest at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG)
Photos: Michaela Hille
The exhibition 68. Pop and Protest brings together all the defining pictures, movies, texts and sounds of this era forming a complex atmospheric picture. The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) will display about 200 objects including music installations, fashion, movies, photos, posters, design objects, historical documents and spatial ensembles such as Verner Panton’s Spiegel canteen, which show what moved and motivated people in 1968 – in Hamburg, Germany and the rest of the world: awareness of their own rights, and the possibility to advocate their opinions publically through protest and revolt. The year 1968 is shaken by dramatic events which lead to protests, and promote revolutionary ideas. At the same time, a global cultural revolution is initiated that imaginatively revolts against conservative authoritarian structures, propagates sexual freedom, and demands equality for all people. Various avant-garde forms of expression in all artistic departments are the non-violent weapons of the time: progressive music, unconventional styles, bold designs, contentious theatre, and socio-critical cinema d’auteur. Furthermore, there is an unprecedented desire for critical discourse, public discussion, and civil disobedience. A common thread is hope; hope that the world will turn into a fairer place, that society will get more just, and that people will become better; hope that political suppression will stop, that borders will be overcome, walls will get torn down, and that sexuality will be non-exploitative. It is more important than ever to once again consolidate these ideas of freedom and self-determination in our collective memory. Current events show that central aspects of a free and democratic way of life are at stake (again): individual development of the self, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, democratic participation, and first and foremost open-mindedness towards what and whom we don’t know.
Atelier Populaire
La base continue le combat
1968
Silk screen
65.4 x 50 cm
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
La révolution est dans la rue – The revolution is on the street
In 1968, France is experiencing serious unrest, with a general strike. In the democratically organised Atelier Populaire, rehearsing artists and workers have productive co-operation: hundreds of protest motifs are printed in their thousands as posters, which create and shape the Parisian cityscape. La beauté est dans la rue – not only the revolution, but also the beauty of the road reached.
Gert Wiescher (German, b. 1944)
Che Guevara
1968
Offset print
86 x 61 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
Straße als Massenmedium – Street as Mass Medium
Public space becomes a central place of expression, the protesters getting their messages to the mass media and conveyed to the general public. But strong pictures are needed: the political actions offer in their skilful staging, great visual attraction potential. All means of expression unites an understanding of democracy, the current rules and power structures in the (media) public, performatively questioned.
Street as Mass Medium
In May 1968, France experiences severe riots. Students and workers take a stand for mutual political demands for reforms as well as for cries for international solidarity which leads to a “wild general strike”: They occupy factories and public facilities such as faculties of Paris’ art college Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The printing workshop is opened as an Atelier Populaire to give everyone the chance to publically express their own views by creating posters. Artists and workers productively collaborate in this democratically structured space: the community collectively consults about how the protest messages should look like, and everyone can be a printer. Within a few weeks, hundreds of protest pictures – printed thousand fold – are spread across the city and can be seen everywhere. Universities are breeding grounds for protests; this is also true for the Federal Republic of Germany. Here, students discuss controversial opinions in an academic discourse, and organise resistance. In the light of global protests against the Vietnam War and Western economic colonialism, they express basic criticism of the political landscape. Their criticism also addresses education policy, elitist structures, emergency laws, and the German media landscape. The street is the place for the non-parliamentary opposition to utter their opinions. In the fight for political recognition and public attention, performative actions are more and more successful. Sit-ins, teach-ins, rallies, happenings and demonstrations offer creative provocation, and civil disobedience in combination with well-known forms of protest such as flyers and posters, all of which arouses high visual sensations and great media response. These different forms of action range from giving out paper bags with caricatures depicting the ruling Persian couple, which Kommune 1 does in 1967 at a demonstration against their visit in Berlin, to the famous banner saying “Unter den Talaren – Muff von 1000 Jahren” (“underneath their robes – fustiness of a thousand years”), with which undergraduates demand university reforms on the 9th November in 1967 at the University of Hamburg; these protests also include knocking down the monument of colonial civil servant Hermann von Wissmann in Hamburg as a statement against the “ongoing exploitation of the Third World.”
Manfred Sohr
Rektoratswechsel im Audimax der Universität Hamburg
Change of rectorate in the main auditorium of the University of Hamburg
“Unter den Talaren – Muff von 1000 Jahren” (“underneath their robes – fustiness of a thousand years”)
1967
Photographic agency Conti-Press
© Staatsarchiv Hamburg
Die Wahrheit ist radikal – The truth is radical
The universities are the germ cells of the protest: right and left groups claim the opinion of (academic) youth and the interests of society for themselves. Each as truth, propagated views are sometimes radically represented. In the fight for attention and political perception, actions are used that are between creation and provocation and cause civil disobedience.
Rainer Hachfeld (German, b. 1939)
Distribution: Kommune 1
Karikatur / caricature: Schah-Masken (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Farah Pahlavi) / Shah masks
1967
Paper
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
Photo: MKG
Harun Farocki (German, 1944-2014)
Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The words of the chairman)
1967
Black and White film
16mm, 3 min.
© Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin
Harun Farocki (German, 1944-2014)
Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The words of the chairman) (videostill)
1967
Black and White film
16mm, 3 min.
© Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin
Diana Davies (American, b. 1938)
Protestor at Weinstein Hall demonstration for the rights of gay people on campus
1970
Silver gelatin print
Diana Davies, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
© Diana Davies
Power to the people
The social discourse is characterised by civil rights movements, including feminist groups, the gay movement and the Civil Rights Movement of the African American population in the US. Racism, intolerance and discrimination are systematically and openly denounced. The means of protest range from demonstrations and information campaigns about civil disobedience to partly artistic, partly militant actions up to armed resistance.
Talking ’bout my Generation
In the 1960s, a pop revolution conquers the Western hemisphere, starting in Great Britain and the USA which conclusively establishes rock music as a generation-defining phenomenon and expression of an international way of life. This marks a paradigm shift in entertainment music that defines rock and pop as an essential part of youth and subculture with an existential identity-establishing function. For adolescents, English music also means separating themselves from the generation of their parents and the (fake) bourgeois Schlager music idyll. In only a short time, bands rise from playing in underground clubs to performing on big stages. One of the reasons is the growing festival scene that starts in 1967 with the Monterey Pop Festival and peaks in 1969 with Woodstock. The exhibition will feature the concert movie Monterey Pop that shows ground breaking performances by Jimi Hendrix, as he sets his guitar on fire, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Mamas & the Papas and more, which will give visitors the chance to dive into the festival atmosphere of the time. Concert posters, record covers and audio stations with the most famous songs bring the world of 68 to life. Already established musical genres are mixed, psychedelic rock captures the hippies‘ drug influenced style of life, experimental arrangements and instrumentation produce completely new electronically amplified and distorted sounds. Records are conceptualised as complete art works. As a consequence, a visual cross-media language evolves that includes psychedelic poster or album cover designs and extravagant style presentations of the rock stars themselves. Pop culture becomes the international language of an entire generation.
D.A. Pennebaker (American, b. 1925)
Monterey Pop (filmstill)
1968
16mm
© 1982 Pennebaker Hegedus Films, Inc. and The Monterey International Pop Festival, Inc.
Talking ’bout my generation
Rock music finally establishes itself as generation-determining phenomenon and an expression of an international lifestyle. This is accompanied by a cross-media visual language, from psychedelic poster and cover design to extravagant fashion staging of the rock stars. Pop Culture becomes the international language of a whole generation, that is in turn incorporated by the cultural industry.
Monterey Pop Official Trailer
The Monterey Pop Festival ran for three days in June 1967. For most of the five shows, the arena was jammed to bursting with perhaps as many as 10,000 people. The live performances were spectacularly successful. Janis Joplin, who was singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company, pulled out all the stops with a raw, powerful performance that helped establish her as the preeminent female rock singer of her day.
The Who climaxed a brilliant set by smashing their equipment at the conclusion of “My Generation”. Jimi Hendrix (in the American debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience) offered an awesome display of his virtuosity as a guitarist and as a showman, humping his Marshall amplifiers and then setting his Stratocaster ablaze. Another highlight was Ravi Shankar’s meditative afternoon of Indian ragas. And then there was Otis Redding, the dynamic soul man turned in what many present believe was the festival’s best performance. ABC offered $400,000 for network rights to Pennebaker’s film (which was released in theatres after ABC decided it was too far out for the TV audience).
Günther Kieser (German, b. 1930)
Jimi Hendrix Experience
1969
Offset print
118,9 x 84,1 cm
Photo: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
© Günther Kieser
Stages of Revolt
The performing arts are said to have a great political clout, and the stage becomes the place for social debates. Classical plays are reviewed regarding its political messages, and newly written plays accuse the bourgeois establishment. The shrine-like status of museums is challenged by wearing jeans to openings, no evening dresses, no champagne. The theatre leaves established institutions behind; companies are formed that take their messages to the streets. They no longer respect the division between actor/actress and spectator, exaggerated in Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung (1966, Offending the Audience), or in Hans Werner Henze’s oratory Floß der Medusa (The raft of the Medusa) in which he criticises “the authority of humans over humans”. For its premiere with the NDR radio symphony orchestra, Henze puts a portrait of Che Guevara and a red flag on stage. Actors/actresses exit erratically, there is tumult, cries for Ho Chi Minh, an overwhelming police presence, and arrests – the show is stopped eventually. Art and life merge into each other, as can be seen in collectives like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s antiteater in Munich. Such creative communities see themselves as antitheses to the middle-class, which could never give birth to any relevant art, because of its saturated complacency.
Filmstill from Publikumsbeschimpfung, premiere in Frankfurt am Main, 1966
Director: Claus Peymann , Aufzeichnung des HR
Bühnen der Revolte – Stages of revolt
The performing arts have major political clout and the stage becomes more about sociable Debates. The theatre leaves the institution, new pieces emerge and bring charges against the educated middle class Establishment. The border between actor and spectator is no longer respected, the audience is called to action. Art and life merge into collectives like Fassbinders antiteater and Steins Schaubühne.
Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience)
A speech piece by Peter Handke
World premiere in the Frankfurt Theater am Turm 1966
Director: Claus Peymann
Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012)
Das Floß der Medusa (1968)
The Raft of the Frigate “Medusa”
Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl), Alexander Kluge, 1966
The Old Film is Dead
In 1962, a young generation of filmmakers demands the aesthetic, thematic and economical reorientation of the German cinematic landscape, as expressed in their Oberhausener Manifest. The economic crisis of the film industry in the 1960s and international innovative movements like the Nouvelle Vague, lead them to clearly distance themselves from both the NS history and sentimental films with regional background (Heimatfilm) as well as the Karl May and Edgar Wallace franchise and the like. The 26 signers seek intellectual liberation through radically turning to film d’auteur and to independent productions apart from already established studio business. These filmmakers reject the conventional uplifting entertainment conventions of the time, and like to provoke the audience – impressively shown in Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl). Thus, the critical avant-garde of the Neuer Deutscher Film, including the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others, is internationally successful. In 1967, in the wake of the American experimental and underground cinema, the Hamburger Filmmacher Cooperative is founded. Without any state funding or need to submit to corporate profit values, the partly autodidactic filmmakers realize unconventional projects, distribute them through their independent network, and establish their own public sphere of the Andere Kino (Other Cinema) with their several days long film-ins. Inexpensive substandard films and super 8 cameras forward a vital underground scene, which primarily produces short films that fathom the dividing lines between visual arts and filmic experiments.
Alexander Kluge (German, b. 1932)
Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl) (videostill)
1966
Black and White film, 88 min.
Courtesy/Copyright: Alexander Kluge
Der alte Film ist tot – The old film is dead
1962 calls a young generation of filmmakers with the Oberhausen Manifesto the aesthetic, content and economic realignment of German film. The collective project borders on the Nazi-film-burdened past and the presence marked by Heimatfilm. Many of the films refuse entertainment conventions, but provoke the emotional and sociopolitical reflection in the audience.
Gerd Conradt (b. 1941)
Farbtest – Rote Fahne (Colour test – Red Flag) (videostill)
1968
Colour film 16 mm, 12 min.
© Gerd Conradt, Mandala Vision
Gerd Conradt (born May 14, 1941 in Schwiebus) is a German cameraman, director, author and lecturer in video practice. His films and video programs are mostly portraits – conceptually designed time pictures, often as long-term documentaries.
Werner Nekes (German, 1944-2017), Dore O. (German, b. 1946)
Jüm Jüm (videostill)
1967
Experimental film
© Ursula Richert-Nekes
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (German, 1945-1982)
Katzelmacher
1969
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla
Black and White film, 88 min.
© RWFF Fotoarchiv
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Katzelmacher 1969 trailer
Valie Export (Austrian, b. 1940)
Tapp und Tastkino / Tap and Touch Cinema (detail)
1968
© sixpackfilm
“As usual, the film is ‘shown’ in the dark. But the cinema has shrunk somewhat – only two hands fit inside it. To see (i.e. feel, touch) the film, the viewer (user) has to stretch his hands through the entrance to the cinema. At last, the curtain which formerly rose only for the eyes now rises for both hands. The tactile reception is the opposite of the deceit of voyeurism. For as long as the citizen is satisfied with the reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state is spared the sexual revolution. Tap and Touch Cinema is an example of how re-interpretation can activate the public.”
Valie Export
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This outdoor action on Munich’s Stachus square translates the concept of expanded cinema and the cinema’s fairground roots into the ‘first immediate women’s film’, as the artist describes her ‘Tap and Touch Cinema’. ‘Public’ accessibility – restricted to 30 seconds per person – is noisily proclaimed by Peter Weibel. A direct demonstration of cinema as a projection space for male fantasies, this still ironic transgression of the border between art and life is an early indication of Valie Export’s often risky, but always resolute, deployment of her own body in later works.
Text by Martina Boero from the YouTube website
At age twenty-eight, Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, in all uppercase letters, to announce her presence in the Viennese art scene. Eager to counter the male-dominated group of artists known as the Vienna Actionists including Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler she sought a new identity that was not bound by her father’s name (Lehner) or her former husband’s name (Hollinger). Export was the name of a popular cigarette brand. This act of provocation would characterise her future performances, especially TAPP und TASTKINO (TOUCH and TAP Cinema) and Aktionhose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic). Challenging the public to engage with a real woman instead of with images on a screen, in these works she illustrated her notion of “expanded cinema,” in which film is produced without celluloid; instead the artist’s body activates the live context of watching. Born of the 1968 revolt against modern consumer and technical society, her defiant feminist action was memorialised in a picture taken the following year by the photographer Peter Hassmann in Vienna. VALIE EXPORT had the image screen printed in a large edition and fly-posted it in public spaces.
Text from the MoMA website, gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980, September 5, 2015 – January 3, 2016 [Online] Cited 12/02/2019
F.C. Gundlach (German, b. 1926)
Grace Coddington wearing red blouse and mini skirt by Missoni
1969
Cibachrome
50.1 x 38.8 cm
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
© F.C. Gundlach
Mündig und mobil – Of age and mobile
The design scene responds to the urge for freedom with a colourful drive during 1968. Right angles, hard edges and solid colour do not fit the modern attitude to life. Individual home accessories solve the interior design problem, from the assembly line. Furniture is no longer made for eternity; uncomplicated and practical is the new design ethos and above all, it is mobile. Design is no longer used for status determination; this also applies to fashion. Originality is more important than noble material and refined cuts.
Fashion as a Statement
The different clothing styles of the generation of 1968 express more than a mere taste of fashion. Fashion becomes a political statement. Elements of hippie and ethnic looks, pieces of uniforms, or uncommon revealing styles challenge society’s conventions. In many families, the generation conflict shows itself in arguments about the mini skirt, ascribed to fashion designer Mary Quant. While parents are worried about indecent provocation and for their daughters to carelessly sexualise themselves, for adolescents, the mini skirt expresses their desire for autonomy and a form-fitting style of clothes. Soon, these outfits can also be found in the shop windows of department stores: Protest fashion finds its way from subculture into mainstream. Originally designed as a promotional tool for the paper industry, the paper dress achieves an enthusiastic success in 1966 in the USA and Europe. Women’s magazines distribute these inexpensive A-line mini dresses which are used as a vehicle for advertising in electoral campaigns throughout the USA in 1968. Designed as Poster Dresses by graphic designer Harry Gordon, they represent the new and fast-paced fashion world showing the growing impact of pop art and pop culture. All-over prints range from everyday motifs to poems by leftist writer Allen Ginsberg, and even the portrait of Bob Dylan – the voice of a young critically thinking generation. The fashion avant-garde is interested in the social function of fashion and its normative effects. Designs such as the business pants suit for women by Yves Saint Laurent and Rudi Gernreich’s unisex bathing suit reflect a changing society, question gender norms, and propagate a free approach to body and sexuality.
Paper Dress “Campaign Dress”
1966-68
Cellulose/Nylon non-woven
Acquired with funds of the Campe’schen Historischen Stiftung
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Paper Dress “Big Ones for 68”
1966-68
Cellulose/Nylon non-woven
Acquired with funds of the Campe’schen Historischen Stiftung
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Paper Dress
1966-68
Cellulose/Nylon non-woven
Acquired with funds of the Campe’schen Historischen Stiftung
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Art: Up against the Wall!
Global mass protests also mobilise visual artists. Andy Warhol, Wolf Vostell, Jasper Johns and others use posters, the artistic mass medium of the time, to criticise world events. Their poster aesthetics reflect contemporary artistic trends such as pop art and Fluxus, drawing on an unlimited repertoire of forms of expression: They use montages, collages, photography and xylography; a multifacetedness that matches their diverse voices and their political agendas.
Wolf Vostell (German, 1932-1998)
Umfunktionierungen (Reinterpretations)
1969
Offset printing
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
Art: up against the wall!
The political trouble spots find global resonance and motivate prominent artists to political opinions. Posters, the artistic mass medium of the time, articulate a critical attitude. The aesthetics includes different expressions: from montages and collages via photographic cut-up to woodcut techniques. This multifariousness, artistic practice corresponds to the polyphony of the actors and their political concerns.
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happening and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are characteristic of his work, as is embedding objects in concrete and the use of television sets in his works.
Wolf Vostell was born in Leverkusen, Germany, and put his artistic ideas into practice from 1950 onwards. In 1953, he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer and studied at the Academy of Applied Art in Wuppertal. Vostell created his first Dé-collage in 1954. In 1955-1956, he studied at the École Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts in Paris and in 1957 he attended the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts. Vostell’s philosophy was built around the idea that destruction is all around us and it runs through all of the twentieth century. He used the term Dé-coll/age, (in connection with a plane crash) in 1954 to refer to the process of tearing down posters, and for the use of mobile fragments of reality. Vostell’s working concept of décollage is as a visual force that breaks down outworn values and replaces them with thinking as a function distanced from media.
His first Happening, Theater is in the Street, took place in Paris in 1958, and incorporated auto parts and a TV. In 1958, he took part in the first European Happening in Paris and he produced his first objects with television sets and car parts. He was impressed by the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which he encountered in 1964 in the electronic studios of the German radio station WDR, and in 1959 he created his electronic TV Dé-coll/age. It marked the beginning of his dedication to the Fluxus Movement, which he co-founded in the early 1960s. Vostell was behind many Happenings in New York, Berlin, Cologne, Wuppertal and Ulm among others. In 1962, he participated in the Festum Fluxorum, an international event in Wiesbaden together with Nam June Paik, George Maciunas. In 1963 Wolf Vostell became a pioneer of Video art and Installation with his work 6 TV Dé-coll/age shown at the Smolin Gallery in New York, and now in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. The Smolin Gallery sponsored two innovative Wolf Vostell events on TV; the first, Wolf Vostell and Television Decollage, featured visitors to the gallery who were encouraged to create poster art on the walls. In 1967 his Happening Miss Vietnam dealt with the subject of the Vietnam war. In 1968, he founded Labor e.V., a group that was to investigate acoustic and visual events, together with Mauricio Kagel, and others.
Wolf Vostell was the first artist in art history to integrate a television set into a work of art. This installation was created in 1958 under the title The black room is now part of the collection of the art museum Berlinische Galerie in Berlin. Early works with television sets are Transmigracion I-III from 1958 and Elektronischer Dé-coll/age Happening Raum (Electronic Dé-coll/age Happening Room) an Installation from 1968.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Wes Wilson (American, b. 1937)
Jefferson Airplane… at the Fillmore
1966
Offset Print
56 x 35.5 cm
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
© Wes Wilson
Wes Wilson (born July 15, 1937) is an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters. Best known for designing posters for Bill Graham of The Fillmore in San Francisco, he invented a style that is now synonymous with the peace movement, psychedelic era and the 1960s. In particular, he is known for inventing and popularising a “psychedelic” font around 1966 that made the letters look like they were moving or melting. His style was heavily influenced by the Art Nouveau movement. Wilson is considered to be one of “The Big Five” San Francisco poster artists, along with Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Stanley Mouse. (Text from Wikipedia)
Günter Beltzig (German designer, b. 1941)
Brüder Beltzig, Wuppertal (manufacturer)
Floris
1967
Polyester
Photo: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
The international design avant-garde aspires to revolutionise the established Bauhaus guiding principle “form follows function”. The spirit of departure and the desire for creative innovation characterise the new generation of designers, often in artistic collective works. Nothing is more wrong than a standstill. Some seating furniture almost appears as socio-political statement and proverbially shows a new attitude. Form now follows the idea.
Form follows idea
In the 1960s, the international design avant-garde strives towards an opposition to the so far prevalent Bauhaus dogma “form follows function”. This new generation oftentimes works in artistic collectives with passion for creative innovation. Objects to sit on should no longer mean that people are forced into an unnatural posture, it is rather the furniture such as the slack beanbag chair Sacco by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro, or the unconventional chair Floris by Günter Beltzig that should adapt to forms and needs of people. These new approaches in product design show ideas and a new attitude towards life of a nonconformist, dynamic and critical generation. Some seating furniture seems to be a downright socio-political statement that proverbially presents a new stance. Now, form follows idea. In 1968, the publishing house Spiegel entrusts Danish architect and designer Verner Panton with the design of the interior of their new building in Hamburg. For every story, he uses a different colour of the rainbow, consistently designing everything in one tone – from the colour of the wall to the ashtray – and creates a pop art icon. In the course of the years, the colours of the offices get whitewashed. Only the red-orange-purple Spiegel canteen has survived unaltered, since 2011 it is located in the MKG as a Period Room.
Joe Colombo (designer) (Italian, 1930-1971)
Elda
1963/64
Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg
Günter F. Ris (designer) (German, 1928-2005) and Herbert Selldorf (designer) (1929-2012)
Rosenthal Möbel (manufacturer)
Armchair “Sunball”
1969-1971
Polyester, Aluminium, polyurethane foam, cotton cord, synthetics
Property of the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen
Photo: Hersteller
Gaetano Pesce (designer) (Italian, b. 1939)
Fa. Cassina and Busnelli (manufacturer)
Armchair Donna UP5 with Bambino UP6
1969
Polyurethane foam and Nylon-jersey
Photo: Hersteller
Piero Gatti (designer) (Italian, b. 1940) Cesare Paolini (Italian, b. 1937) and Franco Teodoro (Italian, b. 1939)
Fa. Zanotta, Milan (manufacturer)
Italien Sacco
1968
PVC and Polystyrene
Photo: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Between Consumption Binge and Space Age
While in the 1950s in the beginning of the Miracle on the Rhine, it was most important for the population to cover the basic needs, the following decades are characterised by a consumption binge. Growing prosperity and a rapidly expanding choice of goods increases the desire for more and more consumer items and luxuries. Changing life styles challenge the commodity producing and the advertising industry. Zeitgeist aspects such as mobility, belief in progress, emancipation, individualism, and cult of the body gain in importance, also in terms of consumer behaviour. Desires are pre-formulated by an advertising industry which has a broad audience across all media with its TV ads, press advertising, and poster campaigns. They draw a picture of a hedonistic society between materialism and alleged expansion of consciousness that ultimately combines lifestyle aspects of youth culture with contemporary product design. Advertisements for items such as Afri-Cola or the Astro-Lavalampe (Astro lava lamp) by Edward Craven-Walker promise ecstatic sensory impressions without the use of drugs. The lava lamp, inspired by the science fiction movie Barbarella, becomes a popular accessory in clubs and living rooms; and to this day, it is representative for the psychedelic look of the time.
The 1960s are characterised by technophilia and optimistic belief in progress. The “Race to the Moon” is a battle between the political system of the United States of America and communist Russia. The era of space travel influences futuristic aesthetics, produces innovative materials, thus, inspiring new consumerist ideas. Furniture, electronic devices, everyday objects and fashion use the Space Age look, and define a creative Zeitgeist. Paco Rabanne is the futuristic designer of the 1960s. The trained architect frees himself of the traditions of haute couture and uses unusual materials. His martial mini dress (1966) has no threads at all: metal rings link aluminium plates and only allow minimal flexibility for the wearer. André Courrèges’ space collection from 1964 to 1965 shows girls from the moon in angular clothes with helmet-like hats and glasses made out of plastic with curved eye-slits as a stylish protection against space radiation.
In 1968 on Christmas Eve, NASA’s snapshot of the earth forever changes the way we see her. For the first time, a world audience views an “Earthrise” over the horizon of the moon through the eyes of the Apollo 8 astronauts. The iconic picture is henceforth symbolic of the preciousness of planet earth and the uniqueness of earthly life; and it makes people think about how to responsibly treat this world that seems to be so small and fragile from a distance.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Cited 11/02/2019
Paco Rabanne (Spanish, b. 1934)
Minidress
1966
Aluminium, metal rings, metal studs
L 74 cm
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe
Photo: Maria Thrun/MKG
Verner Panton (Danish, 1926-1998)
Spiegel-Canteen, Snackbar
1969
Photo: Michael Bernhardi/Spiegel Verlag, 2011
Verner Panton (Danish, 1926-1998)
Spiegel-Canteen, Orange Dining Room
1969
Photo: Michael Bernhardi/Spiegel Verlag, 2011
Von “Rauschhülle” bis Filmkulisse – From “noise cover” to film set
In 1968, Spiegel-Verlag commissioned the Danish architect and designer Verner Panton with the interior design of the new publishing house in Hamburg. He declines the colour gamut of the rainbow – consistently he designs everything uniformly in one tone. But taste changes and the rooms are painted white. The canteen alone remains spared and is now a listed building. Since the move the publisher is in the Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg.
Verner Panton (13 February 1926 – 5 September 1998) is considered one of Denmark’s most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant and exotic colours. His style was very “1960s” but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton’s most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10 am – 6 pm
Thursday 10 am – 9 pm
Closed Mondays
Text: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Death and the image’ 2018
Tags: Album of Paris Crime Scenes, Alexander Gardner, Alexander Gardner Lewis Paine, Alphonse Bertillon, Alphonse Bertillon Album of Paris Crime Scenes, Alphonse Bertillon Place where the corpse was found, ante-mortem, anterior future, art, Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, Barthes anterior future, Barthes third space, Billie Holiday, Billie Holiday Strange Fruit, Camera Lucida, Child's grave Hale County, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Chloe Dewe Mathews Former Abattoir Mazingarbe, Chloe Dewe Mathews Shot at Dawn, citationality, continuity and resemblance, death, Death and the image, death in photography, death in the language of photography, death instinct, death photographs, death photography, death point, différance, differing and deferring, discontinuity and death, discontinuity and difference, displacement and deferral, Emmet Gowin, Emmet Gowin Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, empathy, encountered sign, execution, Former Abattoir Mazingarbe, General Anton Dostler, ghost in the machine, hidden likeness, iterability, Jacob Bronowsi, Jacob Bronowsi hidden likeness, la petite mort, Lacan différance, Lacan Imaginary, Lacan Symbolic order, language of the photograph, Lewis Paine, life after death, life and death, liminal moment, little death, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Marcus Bunyan, Marcus Bunyan Death and the image, memento mori, memory, Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault Technologies of the Self, mise en scène, moment of death, neither here nor there, noeme, noumenal space, outside language, paradoxical state of loss, past present and future time, photography, photography and trauma, photography outside language, Place where the corpse was found, point of death, post-mortem, presence and absence, present but absent, punctum, punctum as trauma, real time and sensual time, representation, Robert Capa, Robert Capa Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Robert F. Kennedy, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, Shot at Dawn, spatio-temporality, stigmatum, Strange Fruit, Susan Sontag, Symbolic order, tableau vivant, technologies of the self, temporal hallucination, Thanatos, the dead are always dying, the dead other alive in me, the ghost (the soul) in the machine (the camera), The mark of photography, The real and trauma, the spatio-temporality of photographs, the traumatic trace of the photograph, the vertigo of time defeated, time and representation, Trauma, trauma and photography, trauma of death, U.S. Signal Corps Photo, U.S. Signal Corps Photo General Anton Dostler, unconscious phenomenon, victim, Vita ad mortem, Walker Evans, Walker Evans Child's grave Hale County, Walker Evans unconscious phenomenon, Walter Benjamin, war photography
November 2018
This text was written in 2017 for a special issue of the international magazine Text on the subject ‘Writing Trauma’. While the text was accepted, the peer-reviewers wanted heavy revisions, including reordering the piece and editing out my personal stories. At the time, I was going into hospital for an operation on my hand and such revisions were impossible to undertake.
Now, over a year later, I have reread the text… and I have amended and extended it, but otherwise I am going to leave it as I wrote it in the first place. I like the way I write and I like my personal stories. While it is a long read the writing addresses an important subject with, I hope, some interesting insights along the way.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 8,137
Download Death and the image (4.3Mb pdf)
Abstract
This text investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma. Through an analysis of the context of images of death by artists such as Alphonse Bertillon, Robert Capa, Alexander Gardner, and Walker Evans the paper ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem.
It seeks to understand that line between presence and absence where life was there… and now death is in its place. Death was one step removed, now it is present. How does the act and performance of photography depict the trauma of death, this double death (for the photograph is a memento mori and/or the person in the photograph may already know that they are going to die).
“The text of eternity that the photograph proposes, imparts and imposes a paradoxical state of loss. The secret of telling truth in a photograph is that the more truthful, “the more orgasmic, the more pleasurable, the more suicidal” the pronouncement of the perfect paradox (you are dead but also alive) … then the more we are strangled while uttering it. The language of deferral in the writing of trauma in death and the image becomes the dissolve that seizes the subject in the midst of an eternal bliss. In death and the image we may actually die (be)coming.”
Keywords
Trauma, photography, death, art, memento mori, war, execution, memory, victim, representation, Alphonse Bertillon, Robert Capa, Alexander Gardner, Walker Evans, ante-mortem, point of death, death point, post-mortem, punctum, empathy, vita ad mortem, life after death.
Death and the image
“German General Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad in the Aversa stockade. The General was convicted and sentenced to death by an American military tribunal. Aversa, Italy.” Blomgren, December 1, 1945. 111-SC-225295. National Archives Identifier: 531326
Trial and Execution of General Anton Dostler
The still photograph (above) can be seen being taken by the flash from a still camera that occurs at 5.16 secs in the YouTube film. The photographer can then be seen walking off. Later in the film another angle of the execution is shown, again with the flash of the absent camera recorded, starting at 7.10 secs. The displacement of time and space, between one point of view and another, with the absence of the still camera in both instances (in the image and in the film), is uncanny.
* See additional image of Dostler’s execution taken from a different perspective in the Addendum section of this text.
1
One of life’s recurrent themes is mortality. As Bataille notes, we are discontinuous beings: we live, we breathe, and we die. Photography’s recurrent theme is also mortality. In a ghostly evocation, the medium possesses an odour of death that sticks in the throat. So how then does photography visually write the trauma of death – over time, through space, in different contexts, with multiple narratives and different points of view?
As a first point of reference, we need to define trauma. Trauma can be an injury to living tissue; a disordered psychic or behavioural state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury; an emotional upset and an agent, force or mechanism that causes all or any of these conditions.3 Atkinson and Richardson note that the work of theorists such as Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Dominick LaCapra, and Cathy Caruth in broad terms view trauma,
“… as the delayed manifestation of a psychic wound sustained during an experience that has happened too quickly to allow registration and processing of the event at the time of its occurrence. To study trauma in literary or cultural terms, then, is to be concerned with the tension between what is known and what is not known, and with the impact and dynamics of the woundedness and machinations of trauma – not only its purely physical instantiation, but in all its reverberations. This is what brings the study of trauma to the uncertainty of truth, the impossibility of bearing absolute witness to catastrophe, the multiplicity of historical narratives.”4
.
Constitutive of trauma and its affects is the “piercing of the psychic shield” which protects a fragile subjectivity leaving in its wake shattered individuals, communities and even whole nations.5 Further, Michalinos Zembylas citing Kaplan (2005) notes that “an important distinction that needs to be made here is one’s positioning and context of encountering trauma,”6 between being a primary or secondary witness. Personally, I believe that a testimony (a formal written or spoken statement that something is true) in the first instance… becomes a testament (something that serves as a sign or evidence of a specified fact) in the second.
When looking death in the face, we can state that death is a trauma not only for the physical body and the psyche of the person involved (the direct trauma victim), but also for the witness of the event, be they a primary witness – one who actually witnesses the traumatic event – or a secondary witness, a person “who has no personal connection to the victim but may encounter trauma through other sources such as the media and oral or written accounts of a catastrophe.”7
These secondary encounters can never be the actual experience of trauma but, acting through language (be it oral, written or visual), they may embody sensations that stimulate feelings and thoughts in the secondary observer. A social construction of a testament may produce an empathetic engagement in viewers as “secondary witnesses.”8 Through an understanding of spectatorship, experience, aesthetic effects, narrative strategies and temporal shifts in the polyvocal nature of language we can begin to understand how the affect of secondary traumatisation – on memory, history and the body – can break down the subject-object dichotomy, can break down the realist norms of representation to produce “a mode of cognition involving sensuous, somatic and tactile forms of perception.”9 Here language (the photograph in this case, reinforced by the title of the photograph) stands in for that which is absent, but it is not in opposition to an intensity of feeling. The language of the photograph can intensify the affect of the image, especially if the photograph becomes transcendent, embodied, in the vitality and “aliveness” of the viewer.10
This mimetic experience “promotes a critical and self-reflexive empathy” and knowledge in the secondary witness that LaCapra observes is a “virtual, not vicarious, experience … in which emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own.”11 Essentially, this is a social concept, a social construction of reality, a matrix-like view of the world that draws on relational and contextual dimensions for understanding trauma. This concept requires careful consideration of issues related to history, culture, race, gender, ideology, beliefs, agency and power.
“From a social constructionist and narrative perspective, people reconstruct their selves through the stories they tell about their past and the meaning they ascribe to the present in anticipation of the future. They shape their stories through active and creative interpretation of their lives and are in turn shaped by these stories. However, the self is not only a product of narratives. People are purposeful and moral beings, having the power and agency to change scripts, discourses and ideologies…”12
.
Here we can ask, what are the machinations of the image in the affective dynamics of photographs of trauma and how are they situated in a certain relation to trauma? What do photographs actually do that give rise to a way of thinking and feeling about trauma?
Although no representation can fully describe the first hand experience of trauma because of the partial nature of language – its gaps, elisions and impossibilities of speech13 – it is because of these very gaps that new spaces of interpretation can open up. Rather than just representing the perceived reality of trauma (this happened, at this time, in this location – an ordering of reality), images have the unique ability to transcend their indexical relationship to the real, pointing and touching (as if with the index finger) to the relationality of trauma as it touches human emotion. With its ability to police and regulate it subject, the implicit violence of photography is a predatory means of taking possession of both its victim (the subject) and its viewer.
Anna Gibbs has stated that we live, “in a more or less continuous state of mediatized emergency and traumatic aftermath, desensitized by the onslaught of images … to the affect we ought to feel.”14 I strongly disagree. I would argue that the traumatic numbing15 and supposed “death of experience”16 allegedly present in the world of image circulation, translation, and accumulation only occurs if the witness lets it be so.
Personally, I believe that something in the image is transferred to the witness pre-cognition – intuitively, imaginatively – which can then be interpreted cognitively and relationally with regard to history and memory, art and culture, politics and experience through an orthogonal movement through time and space. As viewers and interpreters, we are not fixed at a particular point in time and space, nor do we observe from one particular point of view. Our existential engagement provides a space to close the gap between affect and enunciation.
“Facts can vibrate; they can give of colors, sounds, smells, images. To talk of these facts with no recognition of this is to lack any awareness of the act of enunciation, of the gaps between language and experience and the unpredictable ways that sparks can break out of language, leap across the gap and ignite the tinderbox of traumatic memory.”17
2
Surfing Pinterest (a photo sharing website) recently, I absentmindedly clicked on an abstract image of three hanging black shapes from the pantheon of image tiles that presented itself to me. Up popped this horrific image of three Afro-Americans who had been lynched in the Southern United States in the 1920s. I was shocked and dismayed. I had such a strong emotional reaction to the image. But more than that, my feelings and memories of the bigotry that I had faced as a young gay man growing up in the 1970s swelled in my consciousness. This story is a example of how exposure to an image can bring to the surface unresolved aspects of being ‘Other’, of being different, and being persecuted for that difference. I thought about the lives of these people that had led them to that point, their families, their histories and the terror that they must have experienced on that day. You cannot begin to understand that, but you can have empathy and anger against the systems of racism and bigotry that exist in the world.
Then the cognitive part of my brain linked the image to a report I had only just seen a few days before on lynching, which told of the thousands of Afro-Americans who had been killed between 1882 and 1968.18 Mentally, I then linked this to a Facebook posting which put forward the analogy that the current killing of Afro-Americans by police in the United States was akin to a contemporary and publicly endorsed and enforced form of lynching. Finally, in my head I heard Billie Holiday singing that famous song Strange Fruit, “a dark and profound song about the lynching of African Americans in the Southern United States during the Jim Crow Era, “strange fruit,” as they hang from trees, rotting in the sun, blowing in the wind, and becoming food for crows upon being burned.”19 I watched the video of Billie Holiday singing this song on YouTube.20 Every time I think of this image I have these associations of animate thought intrinsic to the original experience,21 where the micro and macro conditions of production work to “embody and register trauma,”22 a communicable language of sensation and affect, time and time again.
Billie Holiday – Strange fruit
These chains of affect, the nexus between affect / feeling / emotion / cognition, are a form of synaesthesia where facts, emotions, feelings, memories, sounds and images vibrate against each other as an active and continuous engagement of the self with the world in which one lives. In a human being who is un/consciously aware, these real and mediated experiences may encourage a sensory intensification that elicits thought and empathic vision in the materiality of embodied experience, something (the punctum?) that takes us out of our selves into a higher register of being.
As part of this system of impressions, of an instantaneous, affective response triggered by an image,23 photographs force us to engage visually and involuntarily. “Impressions that force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think.”24 Encounters which force us to comprehend. The conjunction of affect and critical awareness “constitute the basis of an empathy grounded … on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.”25 This combination of affective and intellectual operations – about forcing oneself to look (and that process of looking/surrendering) but never forgetting your ‘point of view’, your memory, history and identity, is when empathy becomes that process of surrender, “but also the catch that transforms your perception.”26 How is this “catch” enunciated in photographs? I now want to look at a few images that explicate these phenomena.
Ante-mortem: present but absent
3
With the invention of photography in the late 1830s, the photograph as memento mori allows the spectator to observe death not at first hand, but through the representation of the image “taken from life.” Photographs provide a verification of reality through their apparent verisimilitude, while being woven into narratives – oral, textual, intertextual, spatial and temporal – that frame the event in multiple ways.
“Photographs … have come to stand in for reality … despite the fact that it is relatively easy to manipulate their meaning. As a result of their ability to project reality, images, and particularly those that depict death and destruction, are seen as potentially powerful pieces of documentary evidence…”27
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Photographs are embedded in “a context of the cultural circumstances at the time, and therefore exist rarely in isolation or without meaning”28 and can be seen as having a denotative level (what they physically represent) and a connotative level (the meanings attached to that representation).29 Photography quickly changed how death was displayed because it introduced a “reality” and immediacy of representation that was democratic, personal and everyday.30
Alexander Gardner (1821-1882)
Lewis Paine
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
An example of the personal, everyday and documentary nature of photography can be seen in the photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in April 1865. This portrait is of Lewis Thornton Powell (aka Lewis Payne or Paine) who was one of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln which occurred the same month. The photograph has a background of dark metal, and was taken on one of the ironclads U.S.S. Montauk or Saugus, where the conspirators were for a time confined. The reality is Paine was executed in July 1865 just eight short weeks after this photograph was taken, so in effect (and in the affect on us of this knowledge), he is (already) a dead man walking. This is a double death – that death buried in the very act of taking any photograph, La petite mort or “the little death,” an idiom and euphemism for the orgasm of the photographic time freeze; and the fact that we know that he was going to die, those short weeks later.
The photograph forms the central panel of a three-panel Renaissance-like altarpiece, the form in which the three photographs are usually displayed. The left and right hand photographs were taken within minutes of each other, with the camera in the same position, whereas in the centre photograph the camera has been lowered to show more of the body, and the image has been cropped at the top. In the central plate the figure of Paine has been raised up in the frame – almost prematurely brought back to life by his placement. The centre image is the only one where Paine stares directly at the camera. He surveys the viewer with a gaze I find enigmatic.
Alexander Gardner (1821-1882)
Three photographs of Lewis Paine
26th April, 1865
Albumen silver prints from a Collodion glass plate negative
This is a very modern face, a very contemporary face. His hair is similar to Justin Beiber’s. Who brushed his hair across for this picture, and would it normally be this long, or has it just been ignored because of his fate? He still has good muscle tone – has he been exercising in his ironclad cell? And finally, his clothing – are they navy issue, as his top appears to have been given to him, perhaps the coarse, navy blue wool of the Northern states. If we were to place this image within the metaphysical school of photography which peaked with Paul Caponigro and Minor White we could say: Hovering above his head, has his spirit already begun to leave his body?
One reading of his gaze is that he is interested in what the photographer is doing – almost the gaze of an apprentice wanting to apply these skills in the future. Given his fate is he insane because of his interest? Another reading could be that he is looking out to the future in the hope of finding that he will be judged in another way. And another is the immediacy of his gaze – it is a gaze that is happening now!
The other thing that I find mysterious is the distance of the photographer from the subject. Was it fear or the presence of the guards that stopped Gardner getting any closer, or are there deck fittings we cannot see that prevented his approach. Imagine being Paine, having a photographer point a damn great view camera at you, documenting your countenance for prosperity. What was going on in Paine’s mind – what is his perspective on this performance by the photographer? And what brought Paine to this place?
Michel Foucault calls the methods and techniques by which human beings constitute themselves, “technologies of the self.” Foucault argued that we as subjects are perpetually engaged in processes whereby we define and produce our own ethical self-understanding. According to Foucault, technologies of the self are the forms of knowledge and strategies that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of immortality.”31 As we look into his eyes he knows that we know he is going to die, has already died but the intensity of that knowledge is brought into present time. In this instant, what Paine emanates is a form of i-mortality.
Roland Barthes in his seminal work Camera Lucida observes in Section 39:
“He is dead and he is going to die… The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.”32
.
This is Barthes anterior future, a moment where truth is interpreted in the mind of the photographer, not out there but in here (your head and your heart), where past, present and future coalesce into a single point in time: his death and our death connected through his gaze, and the knowledge of our joint discontinuity. In this moment in time, what we are doing is making a list about the human condition when we talk about something that is remarkable. Language can never fully describe the human condition, much as it may try… and this is why this photograph is remarkable, because it is ineffable, unknowable. The photograph inhabits you; it haunts you like few others, because it is a memoriam to a young man and his present death. Here he is present but absent at one and the same time.
As such, this is an image as triple death – the death of the photograph (past time / memento mori / remembrance of death), the death of the person in the photograph and also a third death, the knowledge that Paine is going to die. Death, like life, can be cyclical. This is the catch that transforms your perception, in Barthes terms the punctum of the image, in which the wounding, personally touching detail (past pose, future death) establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.
“The punctum (a Latin word derived from the Greek word for trauma [my emphasis]) … inspires an intensely private meaning, one that is suddenly, unexpectedly recognized and consequently remembered (it “shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me”); it ‘escapes’ language (like Lacan’s real); it is not easily communicable through/with language. The punctum is ‘historical’ as an experience of the irrefutable indexicality of the photograph (its contingency upon a referent). The punctum is a detail or “partial object” that attracts and holds the viewer’s (the Spectator’s) gaze; it pricks or wounds the observer.”33
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This trauma, prick or wound that lifts the viewer out of themselves, out of their everyday existence, “points to those features of a photograph that seem to produce or convey a meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system. This kind of meaning is unique to the response of the individual viewer of the image.”34 This punctum also accounts for the importance of emotion and subjectivity in interacting with photographs; memory of that photograph displaces it from its moment of origin.35 Photography enacts the trauma of death even while being enacted upon.
Now we can read Eduardo Cadava’s comments on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the photograph:
“As Benjamin suggests … the photograph, like the souvenir, is the corpse of an experience. A photograph therefore speaks as death, as the trace of what passes into history. I, the photograph, the spaced out limit between life and death, I, the photograph, am death. Yet, speaking as death, the photograph can be neither death nor itself. At once dead and alive, it opens the possibility of our being in time.”36
4
Photography then, can be seen as death taken away from itself.
Through the oscillation between studium (historical, social or cultural meanings extracted via semiotic analysis) and punctum (those features of a photograph that seem to produce or convey a meaning without invoking any recognisable symbolic system) the traumatic photograph of death, death’s afterimage, transcends the initial shock inducing signifier leading to a more extended form of engagement that addresses the duration of trauma in memory – through the images elisions, slippages, and conceptual, political and historical complexities. Our negotiation with imaging and imagining, therefore, takes place within ever-expanding contexts of meaning – some relating to the past and some to the present – which impact future interpretations.
I believe that these negotiations are, firstly, linked to what Deleuze calls the encountered sign, a “sign that is felt, rather than recognized, or perceived through cognition.”37 A feeling that is a catalyst for critical enquiry or deep thought. “For Deleuze, affect or emotion is a more effective trigger for profound thought because of the way in which it grasps us, forcing us to engage involuntarily…”38 Secondly, I believe that these negotiations are linked to what Barthes calls the images “third meaning.”
“In Barthes’ view, the image’s third meaning compels viewers after they encounter and deplete both its literal/informational side and its symbolic dimensions. Barthes argued that the third meaning is difficult to locate, because it is not situated structurally or in a certain place of the image. It is similarly difficult to describe, because it involves what he called the image’s obtuseness, its accent or anaphoric side.”39
.
Again, we have this idea of the catch, accent, or punctum that grasps us and takes us out of ourselves, that modulates the images “voice” (which is how the image takes on an already provided meaning upon its initial appearance), a voice which then also “helps us to understand both the image’s third meaning and the role of contingency in visual memory.”40
Death point
5
Commentators such as Barbie Zelizer observe that images, especially about-to-die images, easily “reduce complex issues and circumstances to memorable but simplistic visual frames.”42 The image,
“… depicts for its onlookers a moment in an event’s unfolding to which they attend while knowing where that unfolding leads. This means that visual work often involves catching the sequencing of events or issues midstream, strategically freezing it at its potentially strongest moment of meaningful representation.”43
.
Other writers such as Susan Sontag note that these images have the potential to stir public emotions, simply because they freeze a moment in time and can be looked at again and again… but at the same time the repeated viewing of images of atrocity can have a numbing effect.44 The pain and fear evidenced in the photograph as seen in the victim’s eyes (for example in the photograph of the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy), expands the literal / informational side and its symbolic dimensions (chivalry, love, devotion, hope – Camelot!) into a Barthes’ third space. While Kennedy is a victim twice over (the victim of the assassin and the camera) in a guttural interpretation of the image he is to remain a victim for eternity in the contingency of the future, as long as we continue to look at this photograph.
For me, this is sad and painful photograph. I remember the day it happened. I was ten years old at the time. It’s one of those events that you will remember for the rest of your life – where you were, who you were with – like the moon landings or 9/11. I was in a car outside a small newsagent when the news came on the radio. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot: first aural, then visual on the black and white TV that night, then textual in the newspapers and then visual again with this photograph, then associative. The pain of the loss of those heady days of hope lessens not.
Boris Yaro (American, born 1938)
LOS ANGELES. KENNEDY MOMENTS AFTER SHOOTING. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Lies Gravely Wounded on the floor at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight today, moments after he was shot during a celebration of his victory in yesterday’s California primary election
June 5, 1968
Gelatin silver print
17.2 x 21.1 cm (6 3/4 x 8 5/16 in.)
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010
While photographs of the actual moment of death are rare I have been able to find around ten images that capture this vital moment, a freezing of reality at the point of death, the death point: that line between presence and absence where life was there… and now death is in its place. Death was one step removed, now it is present.
However, I would argue that in the contextual language of the photograph, there is no singular death point. I would propose the idea of an extended period of time and space embedded in the spatio-temporal matrix of the image, so that there is no single point, no singular resolution to the traumatic moment of death – either for the person involved, nor the witness or viewer.
Setting aside the concept that the image could have been staged, in Robert Capa’s famous photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936 (below), there is something about this image where space or some basic element is being democratised at the moment of death – or maybe in the choice to struggle with death. In an ontological sense of becoming, perhaps it is this that becomes the pure representation of time. In contrapunto, there is an anonymous image of a German soldier at the point of death on the steppes of Russia that is totally unknown. Why has one become famous and the other not?
Has it to do with the fame of the photographer, the pose of the person, or the agency of photography itself, where one photograph regarding the pain of others is too damning a legacy and of too plain a purpose to bare contemplating, while the other – with its masked face, outflung arm and falling, quasi-religious nature – has become possibly the most famous of war photographs through its proliferation in newspapers and magazines.
Whatever the merits of each image, these death point photographs are noteworthy for what is not said: the violence that is being perpetrated on the victim every time a person looks, and looks again, at the photograph. The writing of trauma by photography never ends, is always and forever infinite.
Robert Capa (1913-1954)
Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936
1936
Gelatin silver print
Photograph by Robert Capa © Cornell Capa / Magnum
Anonymous photographer
Falling German Soldier, Eastern Front
c. 1942
akg-images / Interfoto AKG138118
Caption: A German soldier pays the ultimate price of war. German casualties were less than those of the Red Army, but the steady attrition suffered by the Wehrmacht began to undermine its effectiveness.46
Anonymous photographer
Russian spy laughing through his execution in Finland, 1942
1942
Rare Historical Photos website 2013
Caption: A Soviet spy laughs at his executioner in a picture taken in Rukajärvi, in East Karelia, in November 1942. It has been thought within the Finnish Defence Forces that the decision to withhold pictures of the fate of Russian POWs and spies may also have been prompted by concerns that pro-Soviet elements in Finnish society could have used the images for propaganda purposes. This picture was declassified by the Ministry of Defense of Finland in 2006, with the description: Unknown Soviet intelligence officer before being shot, Finland, 1942.
It’s a pretty amazing picture. To capture the last few moments of life. He knows he will die in a few seconds, in a forest in the snow. And there he will bleed out and be forgotten. His life, his experience, has come to an end. What else could he do but smile? That smile was his final defiance. Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.47
6
Here we might ask, is it possible, through the use of encountered signs, “voice”, punctum, catch or accent, to extend the unreal time of death?
Personally, I believe it is and I would argue for a sense of a Buddhist “no-time”. A transcendent time embedded into the fabric of the image. In Walker Evans’ terms an “unconscious phenomenon” that culminates in amazing accidents of composition, where things constantly rub up against each other “in the desire to create a type of friction that tests the boundaries of representation.”48 An example of this spatio-temporal dimensionality, third meaning or Thirdspace, can be seen in the interplay between the still image and film footage of the execution of German General Anton Dostler by a firing squad in the Aversa stockade December 1, 1945. By examining the film we see a flash of light at 5.16 secs, which is the still photograph at the top of this text being taken by the flash of a camera. The photographer can then be seen walking off. Later in the film another angle of the execution is shown, again with the flash of the absent camera recorded, starting at 7.10 secs. The displacement of time and space, between one point of view and another, with the absence of the still camera in both instances (in the image and in the film), is uncanny.
The fluidity of Barthes’ third meaning, where the image’s obtuseness compels viewers, has obvious links to Edward Soja’s conceptualisation of “Thirdspace”, which emerged from the spatial trialectics established by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Soja defines Thirdspace as, “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality.”49 In this amorphous space, “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”50
A further example of the presence of a third meaning in a still photograph can be seen in the image by an unknown photographer Photo taken at the instant bullets from a French firing squad hit a Frenchman who collaborated with the Germans (1944, below). Caught like a rabbit in headlights, the flash illuminates the collaborator kneeling, bound, and masked but it is not quick enough to freeze the explosion of wood, the dynamic breaking of the rope or the slight movement of the hands. The body seems to float on a bed of leaves. The cheap, dirty shoes and striped trousers leading up to the material that covers the victim’s face. Is that his hair, or a hat or another hood over his head? Although we know the what, why, and where of the photograph – an encounter with both its literal/informational side and its symbolic dimensions – the placing of the image, its accent and obtuseness is much more difficult to understand. The photograph and its protagonist seem to exist beyond time and space, the anonymous man surrounded by a death bed of leaves, bursting the bonds that wrapped him and held him tight. Like the mystery of Man Ray’s L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse (1920), the photograph has disturbed the trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality, destroying the imploring label, “Do not disturb.”
Unknown photographer
Photo taken at the instant bullets from a French firing squad hit a Frenchman who collaborated with the Germans. This execution took place in Rennes, France. 21 November 1944
1944
Silver gelatin photograph
U.S. Army Signal Corps
National Archives Identifier (NAID)
Post-mortem: absent but present
7
Letherolfsvile Oct 29 AD 1859
This is the likeness of Catherine Christ
When I am dead and in my grave
And when my bones are rotten
Remember me
When this you see
Or I shall be forgotten
The grass is green The rose is red
here is my name when I am dead 51
This short poem written on a piece of paper hidden underneath an image in a daguerreotype case implores us to remember the person – a plea to the future to remember them – through a composite narrative of portrait and text. Through the creative addition of text, the language of photographs can be supplemented which adds to the functionality of the photograph as an effective memory object.52 But what if the scene of the text (the photograph) contains an absence, no depiction of the person who has died? What happens to the writing of trauma in images of the dead then?
If we acknowledge that a photograph of a person always prefigures its subjects passing then what we are doing “in reality” is deferring the death of an/other onto the foreseen death of ourselves. In this process, we must remember that every photograph is a construct, a performative act by the photographer. What the photographer chooses to record is an act of will, whether ethical or not. Photographers have the presence of mind to attend to a certain manufacture of history. When viewing this instant narrative the viewer must acknowledge a loss of a sense of time:
“This lost sense could manifest as reliving a traumatic episode as if it is taking place in the present … In the context of trauma… a loss of sense of time deprives one of the ability of remembering and telling one’s narrative in a chronological order.”53
Emmet Gowin (b. 1941)
Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, England and Danville, Virginia
1972
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
© Edith and Emmet Gowin and courtesy of Pace MacGill Gallery, New York
One way that artist’s upset this chronological order is by playing with the fragmentary nature of time, space and memory – of present absence/absent presence. In Emmet Gowin’s accidentally double-exposed negative, Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, England and Danville, Virginia, 1972 (above), the photograph combines “a funerary image of his wife’s grandmother, Rennie Booher, with the surface of a Neolithic monumental stone he had photographed in England a few days earlier.” Floating through eternity, encased in ancient rock that nourishes her spirit, Gowin’s photograph acts as a kind of testament of absent but present, neither here not there. This loss of sense of space and time can be deeply disturbing (like trauma) as it questions one’s physical presence in the world, but it can also have a transcendental dimension as both time and space are inextricably bound to the very specific conditions of the material world. Photographs like the one of Booher have the potential to draw together what would otherwise seem to be incompatible. To form what Jacob Bronowsi calls a “hidden likeness”, one that transcends time and space, one that is reactivated with every looking.
“The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else’s work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again…”54
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An important fact about the nature of trauma is the compulsion of the human psyche to repeat traumatic events over and over again. The reproducibility of photographs and the ability to look at them again and again – their machine-like repeatability, their citationality or iterability to use Derrida’s signature term – feeds into this repetitive “death instinct” (Thanatos). However, Bronowsi’s “hidden likeness” (also the name of one of Emmet Gowin’s exhibitions and a form of punctum) is perhaps a liminal moment, one that may upset the death instinct. These liminal moments may occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. By disrupting the threshold – between life and death, between past, present and future time – they are requisite of the ghost (the soul) in the machine (the camera).
As Derrida observes, building on the work of Barthes,
“It belongs to it without belonging to it and is unlocatable in it; it never inscribes itself in the homogenous objectivity of the framed space but instead inhabits, or rather haunts it: “it is the addition [supplement]: it is what I add to the photograph and what is none the less already there.” … Neither life nor death, it is the haunting of the one by the other … Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in the studium, the dead other alive in me.”57
8
In this scenario, perhaps the act of writing trauma through death in the image becomes the true act of learning, and the interpretation of that act becomes an act of creation rather than one of rote memorialisation. These are images that require contemplation, time, analysis, and sensation, where the subject of the photograph is transformed “from somebody merely seen to someone really felt,” which is, as Batchen says, “an emotional exchange transacted in the heart.”58
This emotional exchange can take many forms. It can be triggered when the dead body is only metaphorically represented in the image, when the physicality of death has been transmuted. For example, photographs such as Walker Evan’s Child’s grave, Hale County, Alabama (1936, below), or the documentary image Place where the corpse was found (1901-8, below) by the French photographer Alphonse Bertillon, propose a re-imaging and re-imagining of the life of the person. They do so through an un/ambiguous photographic context, that is, through the marking of place in the photograph. In the latter case, this marking of a life is represented by two pieces of wood lying on the ground and two pieces of wood propped at 45 degrees against the wall. As though this is all that is left of the existence of Mademoiselle Mercier in a street (Rue de l’Yvette) that still exists in Paris to this day. A photograph of pieces of wood and an empty space.
Walker Evans (1903-1975)
Child’s grave, Hale County, Alabama
1936
Silver gelatin print
7 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (18.7 x 23.9 cm)
© 2016 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914)
Place where the corpse was found
1st November 1902
From Album of Paris Crime Scenes
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 24.3 x 31 cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16 in.)
Page: 23 x 29 cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001
Other photographs picture the place of death nearly a century later in order to commemorate the traumatic death of “deserters” at the hands of a firing squad during the First World War. These are some of the most traumatic photographs of death I have seen, for they require me to imagine the mise en scène that was enacted at dawn almost 100 years ago, in the very place where these photographs were later “shot” at dawn.
The artist, Chloe Dewe Mathews, realised that “I was placing my tripod around the same spot where the firing squad had stood and looking directly at the place where the victim was placed.” It was, she says, “a solitary and sombre undertaking,” an undertaking (with that name’s etymological link to the word undertaker) which the viewer is invited to partake of, a re-imaging of those traumatic events that requires an active imagining, and thinking, in the neo-spectator. It is this duration of trauma in cultural memory which calls for an active negotiation in ways of seeing, a re-negotiation which can produce an empathic vision that “changes the terms of our engagement” with the image.
Chloe Dewe Mathews (b. 1982)
Former Abattoir, Mazingarbe, Nord-Pas-de-Calais
2013
Eleven British soldiers were executed here between 1915-18
From the series Shot at Dawn
© Chloe Dewe Mathews
Vita ad mortem: life after death
9
The absence/presence contained within all photographs speaks to the ultimate affect: that of la petite mort – the “little death” – the sensation of orgasm as likened to death, a short period of melancholy or transcendence as a result of the expenditure of the “life force.” While Barthes metaphorically used the concept to describe the feeling one should get when experiencing any great literature, it can also be used when some undesired thing has happened to a person and has affected them so much that “a part of them dies inside.”
A photograph can also contain this melancholy transcendence, a catastrophe that has already occurred.
“Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe… This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die… At the limit, there is no need to represent a body [in photographs] in order for me to experience this vertigo of time defeated.”63
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Barthes’ concept of an extended punctum may be useful here, when he states, “I now know that there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the ‘detail’. This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”64
Here Barthes is proposing a punctum of intensity; a punctum as lacerating “detail”; and/or “the vertigo of time defeated.” This “temporal hallucination” embedded and embodied in the photograph – the temporality of the “will-have-been”, they are dead (today), they are already dead (yesterday), Barthes’ anterior future – represents a symbolically mediated subject bound up in three extases of time (past, present, and future).65
The subject becomes lost in the language of the photograph, the intersection of Lacan’s the Imaginary (in which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire), the Symbolic (the social world of linguistic communication and inter-subjective relations), and the Real (defined as what escapes the Symbolic, the Real can be neither spoken nor written, it is impossible, but is ceaselessly writing itself). These concepts serve to situate subjectivity within a system of perception and a dialogue with the external world.
According to Lori Wike, the experience of punctum and the structure of iterability can be aligned to Lacan’s concept of the death drive (or death instinct) present in the Symbolic order, in which the signifier “materializes the agency of death.”66 This may account for the role of the photographic punctum as trauma, in which the punctum opens up “a kind of subtle beyond” where “a blind field is created (is divined)…”67 As Barthes notes, “Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”68 Further, we can say that, “unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as “presence” and “absence”, there is no absence in the real,” for the real is undifferentiated, “it is without fissure.”
“The symbolic introduces “a cut in the real,” in the process of signification: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things.” Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: “it is that which resists symbolization absolutely.” The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.”69
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The “mark” of photography is eviscerated in the intensity of the real, a traumatic loss of time that confronts us with our own mortality and the knowledge that we will not be remembered. This is where images of death can take us once the initial affective connection is established – to a noumenal space where in the play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable (Lacan’s différance).70
“In French, différance simultaneously contains within its neo-graphism the activities of differing and deferring, a distancing acted out temporally as well as spatially.”71 Where the moment (the time freeze of the shutter) turns in, on and around its own fulcrum, where there is always difference at the point of origin. For all of its instantaneous nature, in photography there is always a perverse moment of displacement and deferral. In its history, “a perverse complicity of continuity and resemblance with its supposed opposite, discontinuity and difference”72 … the latter only existing in a reciprocal relationship to the former.
The circle is closing and we return to where we started.
10
Human beings in their longing for lost continuity are mirrored by their photographs which transition from continuous to discontinuous and back again. While we yearn for our lost continuity, we must acknowledge that death is an unedited event, one that we cannot look back on. There is no following event to blank out that moment… and the dead are always dying. But what images of death in photography do is this: they allow us to approach the noumenal, that state of being of which we can have knowledge of, but can never know. We can approach, touch, feel, analyse, and have empathy for traumatic events in the representation of an unknowable reality. The photograph has the ability to go beyond the symbolic, to approach the impossible, the real.
The photograph may proffer a ‘releasement toward things’,73 a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there. As Martin Jolly notes, citing John Thompson, “… images of death can be seen a form of “mediated, non-reciprocal intimacy, stretched across time and space” in which we are increasingly unconstrained by our location or our time.”74 Further, John Thompson observes, “While lived experience remains fundamental, it is increasingly supplemented by, and in some respects displaced by, mediated experience, which assumes a greater and greater role in the project of self-formation.”75
In the sense that the photograph becomes la petite mort, the little death, it embodies our desire for the soul to become eternal in the form of this mediated experience… the displacement of the soul via the ghost in the machine, the soul remembered throughout time in the traumatic trace of the photograph. Death in the language of photography is always postponed and deferred: into the physicality of the photograph; into cultural memory; into the gaze (of the photographer, the camera and the viewer); and into the body of the observer. Here, a relationship exists between an impossible reality (an encounter with an “outside” which is unknowable) and a floating referent in an image that is both formative and transformative. And in that relationship, as Donna Haraway observes, “Relationship is multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential.”76
The text of eternity that the photograph proposes, imparts and imposes a paradoxical state of loss. The secret of telling truth in a photograph is that the more truthful, “the more orgasmic, the more pleasurable, the more suicidal”77 the pronouncement of the perfect paradox78 (you are dead but also alive) … then the more we are strangled while uttering it. The language of deferral in the writing of trauma in death and the image becomes the dissolve that seizes the subject in the midst of an eternal bliss. In death and the image we may actually die (be)coming.
© Dr Marcus Bunyan 2018
Word count: 8,137
Addendum
“Empirically acknowledged as tragic, the photographic print was really just that when, at the turn of the century, it became the instrument of the three great authorities over life and death (the law, the army, medicine). This is when it demonstrated its power to reveal the unfolding of a destiny from the word go. As deus ex machina [god from the machine or, providential intervention], it was to become just as ruthless for the criminal, the soldier or the invalid, the conjunction between the immediate and the fatal only becoming more solid, inevitably, with the progress of representation.”
Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 43.
“Written with her trademark flair and force, Sontag’s book [On Photography] inaugurated a wave of criticism, much of it influenced by Foucaultian theory, that underscored the instrumentality and implicit violence of photography, its ability to police and regulate it subjects, especially those lacking social and political power: the poor, presumed “deviants” or “criminals,” and workers. As Sontag herself acknowledged, however, photography is not only a predatory means of taking possession, but also a mode of conferring value; it can potentially be put to counter-hegemonic uses, used to see and frame in ways that affirm and legitimate, rather than strictly contain and control, the presence of culturally disenfranchised persons.”
Entin, Joseph. “Milton Rogovin’s Approach: Photography, Class, and the Aesthetics of Making Space (2008),” on the ASX website July 12, 2010 [Online] Cited 27/10/2018
“The submissions attest to our insatiable hunger for images of suffering. “Sight can be turned off; we have lids on our eyes,” says Sontag5. But sometimes we just can’t resist taking a look. Since its inception photojournalism has traded in images of human suffering. If one of its motivations for representing tragedy has been to change the world then it has been unsuccessful. Instead the profession has turned us into voyeurs, passively consuming these images, sharing in the moment without feeling implicated or responsible for what we are seeing. Roland Barthes summed up the analgesic effect of looking at images of horror when he wrote “someone has shuddered for us; reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing – except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence.”6 Put another way, we look at events in photographs and feel relieved that they’re not happening anywhere near us. …
In the final analysis we were choosing between a French landscape, a dead guerrilla, an HIV positive mother and an American soldier. A strange task. Rather predictably the majority vote went to Tim Hetherington’s soldier. Yet comparing so many diverse images and ultimately declaring one of them a winner feels meaningless. Do we even need to be producing these images any more? Do we need to be looking at them? We have enough of an image archive within our heads to be able to conjure up a representation of any manner of pleasure or horror. Does the photographic image even have a role to play any more? Video footage, downloaded from the internet, conveys the sounds and textures of war like photographs never could. High Definition video cameras create high-resolution images twenty-four photographs a second, eliminating the need to click the shutter. But since we do still demand illustrations to our news then there is a chance to make images that challenge our preconceptions, rather than regurgitate old clichés.”
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. “Unconcerned but not indifferent,” on the FOTO8 website 04 Mar 2008 [Online] Cited 20/11/2018
5. Susan Sontag, Regarding The Pain of Others (Penguin, London, 2003) p. 105
6. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York, Hill and Wang, 1979) p. 71. quoted in John Taylor, Body Horror: photojournalism, catastrophe and war (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 17
Adrien Constant de Rebecque (Swiss, Lausanne 1806-1876 Lausanne)
[Man in Chainmail Tunic Posing as a Dying Soldier]
c. 1863
Albumen print from collodion glass negative
17.9 x 24.2 cm (7 1/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Ouvrier en grève, assassiné (Striking worker, assassinated)
1934
Silver gelatin print
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping)
1939, printed c. 1970s
Silver gelatin print
One of my early heroes in photography was Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Many Mexican photographs tell such stories based on the mythology of the country: there are elements of the absurd, surrealism, macabre, revolution, political and socio-economic issues, also of death, violence, beauty, youth, sexuality and religion to name but a few – a search for national identity that is balanced in the photographs of Bravo by a sense of inner peace and redemption. This potent mix of issues and emotions is what makes Mexican photography so powerful and substantive. In the “presence” (or present, the awareness of the here and now) of Mexican photography there is a definite calligraphy of the body in space in most of the work. This handwriting is idiosyncratic and emotive; it draws the viewer into an intimate narrative embrace. Two famous photographs by Bravo illustrate some of these themes (Apollonian/Dionysian; utopian/dystopian). When placed together they seem to have a strange attraction one to the other.
Anne Frank, photograph inscribed with her wish to go to Hollywood, October 10, 1942
Unknown photographer – U.S. Signal Corps Photo
General Anton Dostler
1945
Silver gelatin photograph
From International News Photos
References
Atkinson, Meera and Michael Richardson 2013 ‘Introduction: At the Nexus’, in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1-21
Atkinson, Meera and Michael Richardson (eds) 2013 Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Barthes, Roland 1981 Camera Lucida – Reflections on Photography New York: Hill and Wang
Bataille, Georges 1962 Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo New York: Walker and Company
Batchen, Geoffrey 2004 Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance New York: Princeton Architectural Press
Batchen, Geoffrey 1997 Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography paperback 1999 Massachusetts: MIT Press
Bennett, Jill 2005 Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
Berger, John 1985 The Sense of Sight New York: Vintage International
Brett, Donna West 2016 ‘Damaged: Ruin and Decay in Walker Evans’ Photographs’ Walker Evans Symposium Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography
Bronowski, Jacob 1958 Science and Human Values New York: Harper and Row
Brown, Andrew (ed. and trans,) 1987 Sophocles: Antigone Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips Ltd.
Cadava, Eduardo 1992 ‘Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History’ Diacritics 22 no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter), 84-114
Chaouat, Bruno 2005 ‘Image malgré tout’ (review) L’Esprit Créateur vol. 45 no. 1, 110-111
Deleuze, Gilles 1964 Proust and Signs New York: George Braziller, 1972 in English
Edwards, Janis L. 2012 ‘Visual Literacy and Visual Politics: Photojournalism and the 2004 Presidential Debates’ Communication Quarterly vol. 60 issue 5, 681-197
Foucault, Michel 1988 ‘Technologies of the self’ in L H Martin and H Gutman and P H Hutton (eds) Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 16-49
Gibbs, Anna 2013 ‘Apparently Unrelated: Affective Resonance, Concatenation and Traumatic Circuitry in the Terrain of the Everyday’ in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 129-147
Gibbs, Anna 2007 ‘Horrified: Embodied Vision, Media Affect and the Images from Abu Ghraib’ in D Staines (ed) Interrogating the War on Terror Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 125-142
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Haraway, Donna and Cary Wolfe 2016 Manifestly Haraway Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Hegel, George Wilhelm Frederich 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit Preface (trans. A. V. Miller 1977) Oxford: Oxford University Press
Heidegger, Martin 1966 Discourse on Thinking New York: Harper & Row
Houlihan, Kasia 2004 ‘Annotation on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – Reflections on Photography’ New York: Hill and Wang 1981 in Theories of Media, Winter
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Kopelson, Kevin 1990 ‘Wilde, Barthes, and the Orgasmics of Truth’ in GENDERS no. 7 Spring, 22-31
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O’Hagan, Sean 2014 ‘Chloe Dewe Mathews’s Shot at Dawn: a moving photographic memorial’ The Guardian website
Papastergiadis, Nikos and Mary Zournazi 2002 ‘Faith without certitudes’ in M Zournazi Hope: New Philosophies for Change Annandale NSW: Pluto Press Australia, 78-97
Randell, Karen and Sean Redmond (eds) 2008 The war body on screen, New York: Continuum
Rastas, David and Maria Schlachter 2016 Art as a Sanctuary for the Mad: Six characteristics of mystical experience and their visual accompaniment in contemporary art
Rogobete, Ileana Carmen 2011 Reconstructing Trauma and Recovery: Life Narratives of Survivors of Political Violence during Apartheid PhD thesis Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Rutherford, Anne 2013 ‘Film, Trauma and the Enunciative Present’ in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 80-103
Sontag, Susan 1977 On Photography New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Staines, Deborah (ed) 2007 Interrogating the War on Terror Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Strawberry 2013 ‘Roland Barthes: studium and punctum’ Museum of Education website
Thompson, John 1995 The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of Media Cambridge: Polity Press
Virilio, Paul 1994 The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Walsh, Stephen 2000 Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron, 1942-43 London: Simon and Schuster
Wike, Lori 2000 ‘Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida’ In[]Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies issue 3, 1-28
Zelizer, Barbie 2002 The Voice of the Visual in Memory Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Zembylas, Michalinos 2008 The Politics of Trauma in Education New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Endnotes
[1] Berger, John 1985 The Sense of Sight New York: Vintage International, 122
[2] Bataille, Georges 1962 Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo New York: Walker and Company, 15
[3] Anonymous 2016 Definition of Trauma by Mirriam-Webster, at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trauma (accessed 8 November 2016)
[4] Atkinson, Meera and Michael Richardson 2013 ‘Introduction: At the Nexus’ in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 5
[5] Rutherford, Anne 2013 ‘Film, Trauma and the Enunciative Present’ in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 82
[6] Michalinos Zembylas 2008 The Politics of Trauma in Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 4
[7] Ibid., 4
[8] Rutherford Op. cit., 87
[9] Rutherford Op. cit., Footnote 49, 93
[10] Rutherford Op. cit., 94
[11] Bennett, Jill 2005 Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 9
[12] Rogobete, Ileana Carmen 2011 Reconstructing Trauma and Recovery: Life Narratives of Survivors of Political Violence during Apartheid PhD thesis Cape Town: University of Cape Town, at https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/10884 (accessed 8 November 2016)
[13] Rutherford Op. cit., 85
[14] Gibbs, Anna 2013 ‘Apparently Unrelated: Affective Resonance, Concatenation and Traumatic Circuitry in the Terrain of the Everyday’ in M Atkinson and M Richardson (eds) Traumatic Affect Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 130
[15] “Perhaps rather than numbness, what we actually feel is our own helplessness or impotence, and the shame of helplessness, which robs us of agency. Helplessness is what Tomkins calls an affect complex, and within it distress is the dominant affect, although there may be admixtures in it of fear, anger and shame… Helplessness immobilises, and this is what induces the shame which, as a reduction of interest, makes us lower our gaze and look away.”
Gibbs, Anna 2007 ‘Horrified: Embodied Vision, Media Affect and the Images from Abu Ghraib’ in D Staines (ed) Interrogating the War on Terror Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 139-140
[16] “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more – and more. Images transfix. Images anaesthetize…”
Sontag, Susan 1977 On Photography New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 20
“Are we making too much of images? Are we lured by our own voyeurism and iconophilia, numbed as we are by the democracy of the spectacle? Or, on the contrary, do images open the eyes of our conscience? In other words do images merely entertain and anaesthetize us or do they shame us and awake our conscience?”
Chaouat, Bruno 2005 ‘Image malgré tout’ (review) in L’Esprit Créateur vol. 45 no. 1, at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/265181/pdf (accessed 8 November 2016)
[17] Rutherford Op. cit., 89
[18] Anonymous 2016 ‘Lynching in the United States’, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States (accessed 11 November 2016)
[19] Anonymous 2016 ‘Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday’, at http://genius.com/Billie-holiday-strange-fruit-lyrics (accessed 11 November 2016)
[20] ‘Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit’, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlTHvJBeP0 (accessed 11 November 2016)
[21] Rutherford Op. cit., Footnote 55, 95
[22] Bennett, Jill 2005 Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 4 quoted in Rutherford, 95
[23] Ibid., 11
[24] Deleuze, Gilles 1964 Proust and Signs New York: George Braziller (1972 in English) 7, in Bennett 161
[25] Bennett Op. cit., 10
[26] Papastergiadis, Nikos and Mary Zournazi 2002 ‘Faith without certitudes’ in M Zournazi Hope: New Philosophies for Change 94-95, in Bennett, 10
[27] Hanusch, Folker 2010 Representing death in the news: Journalism, Media and Mortality London: Palgrave Macmillan, 55
[28] Ibid., 56
[29] Ibid., 56
[30] Randell, Karen and Redmond, Sean (eds) 2008 The war body on screen New York: Continuum, cited in Hanusch, 30
[31] Foucault, Michel 1988 ‘Technologies of the self’, in L H Martin and H Gutman and P H Hutton (eds) Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 18
[32] Barthes, Roland 1980 La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida) (1981 in English) New York: Hill and Wang Section 39, 94
[33] Houlihan, Kasia 2004 ‘Annotation on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – Reflections on Photography’ New York: Hill and Wang 1981 in Theories of Media, Winter at http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/barthescamera.htm (accessed 12 November 2016)
[34] Strawberry 2013 ‘Roland Barthes: studium and punctum’ Museum of Education website 12 March, at https://educationmuseum.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/roland-barthes-studium-and-punctum/ (accessed 11 November 2016)
[35] “For memory is always in a state of ruin; to remember something is already to have ruined it, to have displaced it from its moment of origin. Memory is caught in a conundrum – the passing of time that makes memory possible and necessary is also what makes memory fade and die.”
Batchen, Geoffrey 2004 Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 78
[36] Cadava, Eduardo 1992 ‘Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History’ Diacritics 22 no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter), 110 in Batchen 172
[37] Bennett Op. cit., 7
[38] Ibid., 7
[39] Zelizer, Barbie 2002 The Voice of the Visual in Memory, at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/folklore/center/ConferenceArchive/voiceover/voice_of_the_visual.html (accessed 13 November 2016)
[40] Ibid.,
[41] Brown, Andrew (ed. and trans,) 1987 Sophocles: Antigone, lines 850-52 Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips Ltd., 91
[42] Edwards, Janis L 2012 ‘Visual Literacy and Visual Politics: Photojournalism and the 2004 Presidential Debates’ Taylor Francis Online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01463373.2012.725000 (accessed 13 November 2016)
[43] Zelizer Op. cit.,
[44] Sontag Op. cit., 18 cited in F Hanusch 2010 Representing death in the news: Journalism, Media and Mortality London: Palgrave Macmillan, 105
[45] See ‘Robert Capa: The Falling Soldier’, The Met website, at http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283315 (accessed 13 November 2016)
[46] Walsh, Stephen 2000 Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron, 1942-43 London: Simon and Schuster, 23
[47] Anonymous photographer 2013 ‘Russian spy laughing through his execution in Finland, 1942’, Rare Historical Photos website 29 December, at http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/russian-spy-laughing-execution-finland-1942/ (accessed 13 November 2016)
[48] Brett, Donna West 2016 ‘Damaged: Ruin and Decay in Walker Evans’ Photographs’ Walker Evans Symposium Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography October 7, 5 at https://www.academia.edu/29201498/Damaged_Ruin_and_Decay_in_Walker_Evans_Photographs (accessed 13 November 2016)
[49] Soja, Edward W. 1996 Thirdspace Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 57
[50] Ibid., 57
[51] Batchen Op. cit., 47
[52] Ibid., 48
[53] Rastas, David 2016 Art as a Sanctuary for the Mad: Six characteristics of mystical experience and their visual accompaniment in contemporary art, at http://www.davidrastas.com/kunstglaube/madness&mysticism/essays.html (accessed 19 November 2016)
[54] Bronowski, Jacob 1958, Science and Human Values New York: Harper and Row, 31
[55] Anonymous 2015. ‘Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan’, The Morgan Library & Museum website May 22 through September 20, 2015 https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/emmet-gowin (accessed 08 May 2018)
[56] See Turner, Victor 1966 The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure Chicago: Aldine. For a definition of liminality see Anonymous ‘Liminality’, Wikipedia website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality (accessed 08 May 2018)
[57] Batchen, Geoffrey 1997 Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (paperback 1999) Massachusetts: MIT Press, 194
[58] Batchen Forget Me Not, 94
[59] O’Hagan, Sean 2014 ‘Chloe Dewe Mathews’s Shot at Dawn: a moving photographic memorial’ The Guardian website 29 June, at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/29/chloe-dewe-mathews-shot-at-dawn-moving-photographic-memorial-first-world-war (accessed 25 November 2016)
[60] Bennett 2005 Empathic Vision 69
[61] Hegel, George Wilhelm Frederich 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit Preface (trans. A. V. Miller 1977) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10
[62] Anonymous 2016 ‘La petite mort’ Wikipedia website at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort (accessed 25 November 2016)
[63] Barthes Op. cit., 96
[64] Barthes Op. cit., 96
[65] See Wike, Lori 2000 ‘Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida’ in In[]Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies issue 3, at http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/wike.htm#BackFromNote10 (accessed 25 November 2016)
[66] Lacan, Jacques and Jeffrey Mehlman 1972 ‘The Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’’ in Yale French Studies, no. 48, 53 quoted in Wike 2000
[67] Barthes Camera Lucida, 57-58 quoted in Wike 2000
[68] Barthes Camera Lucida, 31-32 quoted in Wike 2000
[69] Anonymous 2016, ‘The Real’, Wikipedia website at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real (accessed 25 November 2016)
[70] “Derrida sees differences as elemental oppositions working in all languages, systems of distinct signs, and codes, where terms don’t have absolute meanings but instead draw meaning from reciprocal determination with other terms… Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other… the a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation – in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being – are always deferred.”
Anonymous 2016 ‘Différance’ at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Différance (accessed 25 November 2016
[71] Batchen Burning with Desire 179. Information on photography and differance 178-179.
[72] Batchen Burning with Desire 186
[73] “We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery… Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”
Heidegger, Martin 1966 Discourse on Thinking New York: Harper & Row, 55-56
[74] Thompson, John 1995 The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of Media Cambridge: Polity Press, 208 quoted in M Jolly 2015 ‘An Australian Spiritualist’s Personal Cartes-de-Visite Album’ in A Maxwell and J Croci (eds) Shifting Focus: Colonial Australian Photography 1850-1920 North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 84
[75] Thompson 233 quoted in Jolly 2015
[76] Haraway, Donna and Cary Wolfe 2016 Manifestly Haraway Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 122, at https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed 26 November 2016)
[77] Kopelson, Kevin 1990 ‘Wilde, Barthes, and the Orgasmics of Truth’ GENDERS no 7 Spring, 26
[78] You are dead but also alive, the dissolution of the distinction between objective and subjective realities, “the image is an interface connecting inner and outer, past and future, affect and cognition.”
Gibbs, Anna 2007 ‘Horrified: Embodied Vision, Media Affect And The Images From Abu Ghraib’ in D Staines (ed) Interrogating the War on Terror Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 130
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