The Memory of Photography

In the past weeks I have been working on several conference papers and abstracts, and as part of this process tried to come up with snappy titles that would somehow sum up what I felt was at stake in cultural productions such as the Lee Miller exhibition discussed earlier on this blog. I came up with what I thought was the neologism ‘technostalgia’ – a term that seemed to encapsulate the longing for an earlier, more tactile and seemingly more ‘real’ technology represented by pre-digital cameras, film canisters and paper prints. The term was clearly too perfect not to have been already coined by somebody somewhere, and so it proved when I investigated the matter through a quick Google search.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technostalgia has so far often been deployed to describe some sort of nostalgia relating to computers – the collecting of outmoded hardware, for instance, or the simulation of antiquated computer games using state-of-the-art software (see for example Melanie Swalwell, ‘The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games’, journal of visual culture 6:2, 2007). On a more sophisticated level it has also been defined, by blogger Kenneth Rufo, as the phenomenon of how ‘thinkers bemoan the present technological moment precisely because its presence cannot measure up to the tortured univocality their theorizing demands of it and look to a technological predecessor as a means of reestablishing their selves, their world, and their politics’ (Ghost in the Wire, 24 January 2006). David Bell, on the other hand, has used it to denote what he calls ‘memories of futurology’, that is, the comparison of ‘the present as it is with the present as it was imagined in the past as the future’ (‘The Culture(s) of Cyberculture’, 2005). The earliest (published) coinage of this term that I have found referenced is from Richard Francaviglia’s Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America’s Historic Mining Districts (Iowa City, 1991). I haven’t got hold of this volume yet, but in a later essay Francaviglia glossed the term as ‘the nostalgic appreciation of earlier forms of technology for what they conveyed about our lost connections with time and place’ (‘Walt Disney’s Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West’, The Western Historical Quarterly 30:2, 1999). This seems to me the most fruitful definition of the term, and one which chimes well with my own conception of the phenomenon.

Photographic technology is perhaps an overdetermined object of technostalgia, since its primary product – the photograph – functions in and of itself as a material allusion to ‘our lost connections with time and place’. Much of the anxiety surrounding the virtualisation or dematerialisation of photography in the digital age has been linked to the perceived loss of the photograph’s indexical relation to the referent, which is what underpins the materiality of this allusion – the idea being that the digital code which stores the information gathered through the lens in a digital camera does not have the same physical relation to the object in front of the lens as does the film emulsion on which the same reflected light is registered in a traditional camera. This notion labours under something of a technical misapprehension, as André Gunthert (among others) has argued. Be that as it may, while most people’s trust in photographic ‘truth’ has remained more or less unaffected by the different technological phases of the medium’s development, I would venture that they experience digital photographs, on the whole, as less tangible traces of a time or place in the past. My own take on technostalgia is therefore concerned with tangibility as a hallmark of technostalgia, explored through analysis of contemporary cultural productions that exploit the tangibility of pre-digital photography as a tool as well as a theme.