Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past, by Jennifer Green-Lewis (original) (raw)
Related papers
(Spirit) Photography and the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2009
The catalogues issued with these exhibitions consist of two impressive collections of plates-they date from the late Victorian period (the peak of Spiritualism and its material manifestation in spirit photography), but also from the early twentieth-century revival of the Spiritualist faith (after World War I). Most interestingly, the organizers and curators included the media-based work of contemporary artists who are inspired by the ghostly aspect of photography. Another timely publication in relation to spirit photography is Martyn Jolly's Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, published by the British Library in 2006. In it Jolly addresses spirit photography from the beginnings of the phenomenon to postwar manifestations of the deceased loved ones, and concludes his study of spirit photography by suggesting the reasons behind the prevalence of this subject. Significantly, he mentions the master trope of haunting and spectrality which ''is being increasingly invoked in contemporary philosophy and cultural studies'' (Jolly 144). This reappearance of Victorian spirit photography can be examined against the backdrop of recent scholarship concerning the spectral presence Rosario Arias is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of M a alaga where she received her PhD in English in 2001. She was a Visiting Researcher at Brunel University in 2002. She has published a number of articles on contemporary Women's fiction and psychoanalysis in refereed journals. Her main research areas are neo-Victorian fiction, the occult and revisions of the past. She has most recently contributed to Frank Lauterbach and Jan Alber's Stones of Law-Bricks of Shame (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming), and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Pictures of the past: Benjamin and Barthes on photography and history (Tim Dant & Graeme Gilloch)
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002
This paper explores the key moments in Benjamin's and Barthes's analyses of the cultural significance of the photograph. For Benjamin these are; the optical unconscious, the transmission of aura, the representation of cultural and political decay and proto-surrealist political commentary. For Barthes they are; the techniques of the photographer, the studium, the punctum and the ecstasy of the image. These rather different approaches to photography reveal a common concern with history. Both authors have written about the nature of historical understanding and photography has provided both with a powerful metaphor. What emerges from their analyses of photographs is that each evokes a double moment of historical awareness; of being both in the present and in the past. For Benjamin this is the 'spark of contingency' with which the aura of past existence shines in the present. For Barthes it is the 'ça-a-été', the emotional stab of awareness that what is present and visible in the photograph is irretrievably lost in the past.
Photography, cinema and time in Jane Campion's The Piano and Gail Jones' Sixty Lights
Outskirts Feminisms Along the Edge, 2007
Using the logic of the absence-presence of light (through mimicking shadows and remnant ghosts) in the images/time-images of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights and Jane Campion's The Piano, this paper attempts to frame time such that the overexposed past becomes the blank page of the future. I propose that history, when viewed in the light of the present, enables a truly open future for female and postcolonial subjects. It is important, therefore, to think of the blank page emerging from the overexposed image not as symbolic of a psychoanalytic lack of the phallus, but as an open response in the wake of the excesses of phallogocentrism and Eurocentrism. Such a conception of the past and the future in terms of an excess and a lack that do not constitute a dialectical relationship requires a re-visioning of the Hegelian view of time as "linear, progressive, continuing, even, regulated, and teleological" (Grosz, 1995: 98). Following Bergson and Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz problematizes the common philosophical view that history is the basis of learning from the past, and the idea that by reflecting on it, we can improve the future:
Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and fiction as modes of recollection. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, these novels are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory. Extending and elaborating influential theoretical models of contemporary historical fiction, these novels deploy the ghostly figure of photography in order to posit the persistence of the past as uncanny repetition and as embodied memory. The article closes by considering the implications of these historical fictions as “memory texts,” arguing that they are not, primarily, concerned with metafictional or metahistorical reflections but rather write the period into our cultural memory, offering themselves as the uncanny repetition of the “body” of Victorian culture persisting in the here and now.
Extract: Part One: American Romanticism and the Idea of Light
American Romanticism and the Idea of Light, 2010
This thesis argues that the technical and aesthetic appropriation of light in American Romantic literature draws on a network of relations between time, space and subjectivity that is specifically linked to the invention of photography. It argues that, after the Enlightenment, after its advances in the scientific comprehension of light and colour, there followed a comprehensive philosophical and artistic re-evaluation of light and its properties. The appropriation and mediation of light by art in this period is informed by new understandings of its reflective and colouring properties, and directed by new constructions of the relation of light to darkness. Most significantly, the thesis describes a relocation of the creative power of light from God to the artist and the individual, and an incumbent transformation of its association with omniscience towards new notions of individualism, subjectivity and perspectivism. It argues for the historical and the technical specificity of photographic processes, and so for photographies over photography. Part of the exploration of this specificity entails an enquiry into the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth picturesque mode, and the specific dynamics that it initiated between the observer and the observed across several arts. Similarly, the thesis argues that Daguerreotypy, when properly understood as a medium of art, has a critical role in the reconfiguration of relations between the arts specifically related to a new, intermediary idea of light. It concludes that the American picturesque mode is fundamental to the appropriation of ‘photographic’ techniques in the visual writing of the period and, more specifically, shows that Daguerreotypy actuates the American Romantic way of seeing and describing.
Photography and Its Shadow, Stanford University Press, 2020, INTRODUCTION
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence. The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.
Photographica no. 11 - Call for proposals : Blinded by light, just to see: Flashes and revelations
Photographica no. 11 - Call for proposals : Blinded by light, just to see: Flashes and revelations, 2024
As early as October 1859, William Crookes, one of the editors of the Photographic News, mentioned the possibility of using magnesium to produce an artificial burst of light to illuminate a scene for photography. Flash photography became one of the most spectacular technical manifestations of commercial photography within a few years of its invention. Thanks to the most recent camera sensors (specifically the SPAD type), scenes can now be recorded with a minimum of 0.001 lux without any artificial light. Like film, flash could well eventually become a somewhat distant memory in a new technological ecosystem that both digitally alters and expands what is visible and recordable. It is therefore particularly timely to reopen this case in order to carry out an archeology of flash free of purely technicist narratives. The history of photography might easily be reduced to a rather narrow narrative of successive technological advancements that ultimately lead to its triumph over darkness. It is the aim of this conference to steer clear of such teleological readings in order to better understand the flash – a sudden emission of artificial light caused by a variety of technical means (from magnesium to the electric stroboscope via flash bulbs), in contrast to more permanent artificial light – not only as a technique, but as a connecting point between different ways to investigate the history of photography. The photographic pyrotechnics cannot be separated from rich visual, cultural, and social contexts, as Jacob Riis's work in New York illustrates well. Through its history, flash has helped redefine contemporary visualities. From subterranean worlds to the nocturnal lives of animals and men, from the polar night photographed by Herbert Ponting to the sordid New York nights captured by Weegee, from ectoplasms frozen in their apparitions to pistol bullets captured in their flight by Harold Edgerton, bursts of burning magnesium have often made the unimaginable visible. Perhaps more than any other socio-technical device, the flash has contributed to photography's unique perspective on the world, this "optical unconscious" (W. Benjamin) materialized by its ability to reveal what escapes the human eye. Since its first developments in the 1860s, the flash has been part of a long history of the expansion of the photographable world. Far from a purely technicist history, this conference wants to engage in a renewed technical history, considered in relation to cultural and social uses. The conference aims at engaging in a conversation about flash that traces all of its dimensions, whether aesthetic, cultural, or media related. Flash is never just light for instance, its manifestation has an important performative dimension that contributes to shaping the photographic event itself. An example of this can be found in the use of magnesium flash by Jean-Martin Charcot and Albert Londe: the noise and smoke it produced helped capture and triggered the pathologies they sought to understand. The stupor and blindness caused by early flash photography technologies or the willingly invasive capacity of artificial light sometimes harnessed by photojournalists are two of the many manifestations of how flash can shape the actual photographic act. Magnesium flash was materially dangerous. Photographers were sometimes burnt by the burning magnesium and intoxicated by its fumes. The photographed subjects were often paradoxically blinded or even stunned by the sudden incandescence of artificial light. Photography as hazard may therefore prove to be an interesting avenue for research. Flash can also be approached as a trope or analogy that is particularly rich in meaning. Walter Benjamin's use of the word (aufblitzt) in On the Concept of History illustrates the use of the flash as a metaphor to understand the inner workings of memory. As made clear by snapshots of lynching scenes in the early-20th century United States for example, the flash, in texts and in images, entertains a peculiar connection with both blocked and repressed memories in the history of photography. The motif of the flash as an instrument of revelation also fuels many narratives about the struggle between photographic light and darkness (social, colonial, criminal). In the history of photography, another axis of exploration involves the poetics and aesthetics of flash – or its definitive refusal, as demonstrated by Cartier Bresson’s spite for the technology. The almost uncontrollable explosion of artificial light brought the medium closer to a mechanical image (the combustion of magnesium blinded almost everyone around, transforming the camera into the only seeing thing). This distortion of vision, as well as the other effects of the flash – its use as fill-in light, how it spectacularly whitens anything in the foreground against a dark background in night photography, how it surprises the unprepared subject, its ability to help capture objects in rapid motion – are not merely formal elements. A very dynamic part of photographic production in the 20th century exploited flash-induced immediacy effects to create new visualities, specifically in genres such as celebrity or wildlife photography. Refused in the name of a purist approach, the use of flash draws technical and symbolic boundaries between art and non-art, well beyond the valorization of a blurred image in pictorialist photography at the end of the 19th century. During the latter half of the 20th century, one individual who utilized this distinction was Chauncey Hare. He aimed to differentiate between photography as a means of politically revealing narratives and photography as a medium used solely for creating aesthetically pleasing images. Flash can appear as a format, with which photographers have also played, in images that the flash marks ostensibly as ordinary images. The use of flash is thus evident in artist's work borrowing a snapshot aesthetic, such as in the American Surfaces series by Stephen Shore (1972), but also, until today, in any photography (including commercial) which plays with the deskilled image – whether this image is domestic or produced at the end of the night. Flash becomes an aesthetic associated with strongly signified visual practices and regimes. The old-fashioned flash would seem to be turning into a species of photographic grain. In a period when the sensitivity of captors replaces the power of flash, it may be seen as not just a passing technology, but also as the sepia tone of contemporary lives. This archeological object is a still familiar element of photographic literacy, but who knows for how long. It appears increasingly marginal not just in contemporary visualities but also in theory. The ordinary light manifestation of the most common photographic camera, the cell-phone, is the flashlight used as a lamp, while the obvious flash of speed cameras is an exception to discreet and delocalized surveillance apparatus. The title of a 2020 movie about new visual forms of warfare declared, “There will be no more night.” The most contemporary visual regimes thus require new thinking about what the flash has materialized, and still materializes, between the elusiveness of light and the capture of the subject.