… and I’m back

This blog has been inactive for a while, due to several factors – not the least of which being that I started a new job about a year ago and have been busting my proverbial guts getting the hang of it. Whatever time has been left over from teaching, preparation and administration I have tried to channel into publishing projects, which means writing for the blog has been shunted down the list of priorities. I have decided to resurrect it, however, in a slightly different form, with shorter posts more in the style of regular (as opposed to ‘research’) blogs, where I will write short comments and notes on items of relevance to my project (which remains the focus of this site), such as exhibitions, publications and events that capture my interest and attention.

Materialising the medium

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 Moreover, each page features an image of some sort of outdated photographic paraphernalia: the visitor information page shows the various parts of a 6×6 roll film, complete with tin canister, while the events page depicts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.

The Memory of Photography

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.