‘The alluring patina of loss’: Photography, Memory, and Memory Texts in Sixty Lights and Afterimage (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Jennifer Green-Lewis has written an ambitious book that simultaneously wrestles with how literature responded to photography's emergence and with how acts of cultural remembering are elicited and facilitated by photography. It is with this latter point that she departs from her earlier Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (1996), which not only suggested that photography offers a direct route to understanding the Victorians, but also argued that the Victorians invested in both realism and photography as tools for seeing. 1 In her new book, Green-Lewis again identifies photography as an invaluable tool for the Victorians, but this time for looking at the past: for remembrance. She focuses on how the Victorians were already aware of the way in which the past and the present intersect in the photograph. Despite the heavy echoes of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) throughout this book, Green-Lewis's prefatory chapter attempts to move away from Barthes's fascination with the nostalgic power of photography. Noting that Barthes described the photograph as a gesticulation to 'look', Green-Lewis adds that the photograph also asks the viewer to 'look' and to see time passing. Nonetheless, this book relies heavily on what Barthes would term 'metalanguage', as it comes to rely heavily on the idea that different meanings 'adhere' to the photograph itself. 2 In fact, Green-Lewis proposes that the physical photograph and its meaning can operate independently from one another. The section titled 'Afterlight', which is both a postscript (it was written only when the rest of the book was completed) and a preface, exposes this tension between physical object and metaphorical meaning by exploring how modern
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.
(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).
Light-Writing and Photography's Bodies of Memory
Life Writing, 2020
Photography has a history of being metaphorically understood as a second skin; it is also photo-graphia, or light-writing. A seemingly banal photograph of myself as a sleeping adolescent girl marks me with the sluicing experience of long-term chronic illness and my woman’s writing body responds to the physical trauma interior to the image. I explore what it means to write with photography when the affective force stirred by a visual medium is not visibly illuminated but is blindingly felt. How can photographic writing testify to memories of pain and yet acknowledge that bodily trauma escapes representation? Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, I experiment with an ‘aesthetics of the flash’: a fragmentary interplay between text and image enables past and present to spark around a site of trauma, and a female body in pain is evoked but evades complete capture. In the context of today’s networked media ecology where millions of photographed lives are co-present, this writing aesthetic is an ethics or responsibility towards what is not visible in the vernacular photographs of others. Photographs carry bodies of memory, invisible to the naked eye, and yet for their wounded beholders, these images are a second skin that makes the eye feel naked.
Rituals of remembrance: photography and autobiography in postmodern text
Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura, 2006
I argue that the use of photography in postmodern and postcolonial fiction functions firstly, by providing a powerful strategy for drawing attention to the creative and subjective ways in which both verbal and visual images are produced and presented and, secondly, by validating a verbal narrative’s exploration of events as well as supplying a special access to events and experiences that may have been forgotten or unknown. Photography emerges as a unique vehicle for moving between past and present and for thinking photographically as the image of a fleeting moment in time and space is allowed to dissolve into a multitude of possible takes, conflating various<br />viewpoints and space-times of the past, present and future.
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.
In Pursuit of the Unknown: Photography & the Artifact of Nostalgia
This paper focuses on building a conceptual framework for looking at contemporary photographic methods through the lens of historical process within the medium; its relationship to the fields of science and technology, how society’s relationship with photography has changed, and why process is not as valued today but continues to have relevance. It is also a defense for reimagining how we can approach the medium in a more holistic way, while still generating relevant and contemporary dialogue about a medium that is rapidly being replaced by it’s digital successor. My concern is that the issue of what is lost, as we barrel into the future, further and further away from the tactile and hand-made image, is that our critical thought of the past, present and future is not considering the contexts of those times respectively, lacking the universal perspective to analyzing over-arching modes of image making. What I attempt to do in the following pages is take a step back from the standard, polarized view of the differences between “then” and “now”, and elucidate the modes of common thought that continue to inform visual culture. To look holistically at the photographic, outside of time, at the objective agenda of why we make what me make.