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. Read more »

In view of the expectations raised by the microsite for The Art of Lee Miller exhibition, currently at the V&A Museum (see previous post), I was not disappointed when I finally went to see it today.

The show itself foregrounds photographic materiality and historicity by privileging vintage prints (produced close to the time of the negative, as the introductory panel explained), even when these are in a fragile or even damaged condition. This means that most of the works on show are quite small, and invite a the viewer to take up a pleasingly intimate distance to each object. The sense of intimacy is further induced by the dark interior of the exhibition space – the walls are painted black – which is of course also an illusion to the interior of the black box that is the camera. Read more »

Since my current research focuses on the materiality of pre-digital photography I am always alert to the ways in which this materiality is foregrounded in contemporary representations of the medium.

A good example is the website design for the exhibition The Art of Lee Miller, which is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 15 September 2007 – 6 January 2008. The pages devoted to this exhibition on the V&A website quite deliberately deploy signifiers of photographic materiality in order to historicise Miller’s work within a bygone era of the medium. The text panels appear against a background that is meant to look like the back of a faded paper print, complete with scuffed edges and the slight miscolouring that such old-fashioned fibre-based (i.e. non-resin-coated) prints tend to acquire with age. Moreover, each page features an image of some sort of outdated photographic paraphernalia: the visitor information page shows the various parts of a 6×6 roll film, complete with tin canister, while the events page depicts a battered light meter of the hand-held kind (from the age before cameras had built-in light meters).

(click to enlarge)

The overall background seems to resemble some sort of coarsely woven green cloth, possibly intended to evoke Miller’s uniform when she was an accredited photographer with the US Army during the Second World War. I haven’t yet been to the actual exhibition (my enthusiasm for Lee Miller having been severely dampened by recent overexposure to badly-written undergraduate essays on the subject) so I can’t say how the show itself might address or, indeed, harness the haptic quality of old press prints, dented film canisters or crumpled contact sheets. Read more »

Photography is a primary example of what Régis Debray would call a technology of memory. These technologies include writing, printing, painting, sound recording, computer code, and all the other ways in which we inscribe images and utterances in order to preserve and/or transmit them. Photography has of course since its invention, to a much greater extent than any of these other technologies, also been conceived as a powerful metaphor for memory – and memory has often been likened to photography. (Recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of the daguerrotype as a ‘mirror with a memory’ or look up the cognitive science concept of flashbulb memories.) As anyone who possesses a family album will acknowledge, photographs are important instruments in the work of memory. In this project, however, I am also concerned with how memory functions as a crucial tool when working with photographs.

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