Photography, space, memory

Erin: Are photographs heterotopias, and if so, is this important to their use? From the Foucault reading we have this definition: Heterotopias are “real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (his examples include mirrors, cemeteries, and abandoned fairgrounds) I'm having a little trouble unpacking the definition though. It seems like photos can be counter-sites to the sites they depict because they are selective in what they display. They do, more than other mediums, accurately represent these real sites. But the accuracy is contested because they can distort, invert, and contest. For instance, photos have the ability to play with size (using perspective) which can contest a space, particularly its power dynamics (e.g. there is a photo of a whole in the Berlin wall through which you see two East German guards who look like miniatures-in this way it reduces perspective in a 2D form to blur distance and size). Photos are also unreal in that they fix viewpoint and time. They are static places. But they are also real objects that can be displayed, copied or transferred from one person to another. In this sense they seem to give mobility to the real spaces they represent. In addition, the photographic space is different because it relies on an author to exist, but this author is absent from the space. Do you guys think these aspects of the photograph are what make it different or important as a medium?

One of the interesting points from an article by Estelle Jussim ("The Eternal Moment: Photography and Time") is that photos let us see through time because we can look at all different times at once when we look at a collection of photos. This made me think of the effects of the context of a photo within a group of photos of a particular place or event. For instance, does a comical photo of a guard leaning over to look through an escapee's whole lose its humor and become bitter when the next page has a photo of an 18-yr-old shot and left to die next to the wall? Do these photos even have to be in the same book to influence each other, or just part of a group of circulating photos?

One more quote: “As Benedict Anderson has argued, communities are not necessarily constituted directly through collective experiences, but rather through values articulated through shared sets of images and styles of imagining held in he minds of fellow members. Such a grouping forms an ‘imagined community’ which is made visible through a ‘print culture’, that is the circulation of those styles of imagining.” (61, Edwards, ‘Englishness’ and Collective Memory). How can we tell whose values a circulating photo represents? My topic is on photos of the Berlin wall while it was still being guarded and right as it symbolically, and then actually, fell. On that note, I was wondering what you guys thought about how photos of the wall could or could not create a creation myth for the city of Berlin, or a Berlin culture for the newly unified city.

Posted at Apr 12/2009 06:06PM:
Marissa Faerber:

From Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer ‘There Was Never a Camp Here’ (in Locating Memory):

In this piece, two individuals journey to the site of a former concentration camp with the goal of linking postmemory to place. Their aim is to transform the black-and-white photograph into a living, in-color memory. Below, is a quote from the piece that I found both applicable to our discussion as group and my individual case exploration of the Holocaust.

“Photography helped us to perform and carry out such a memorial act. We recorded our visit in still image and video. Even when the last remnant of the camp is removed, our pictures, together with a narrative version of this account, can serve as testimony to the lives of those who were interned there, and to our own effort to understand and transmit their stories. Our photos and videos, however flat, partial and fragmentary, however limited by their frame, do record and memorialize the fleeting reconnection that transpired between memory and place…”

In our last group discussion, we touched on the fragmentary quality of photography (Emily spoke about this in reference to images of urban revitalization in New York City). I find it interesting that the two authors of ‘There Was Never a Camp Here’ recognize this short coming of photography, yet also embrace the merit of photography as a memory tool. In response to the question Erin raises – concerning the photographs of the wall as a creation myth – I think it would be useful to look at the various ways in which the wall was captured in photographs. There are two different sides –East and West – and therefore two entirely different views. Additionally, it would be useful to think about who is taking the picture – is it an observer in a crowd? An artist? A politically motivated individual? All of these considerations can help you to determine the extent to which representations of the wall can be considered myths.

To build my case, I plan on using the following texts:

Phototextualities intersections of photography and narrative. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico P, 2003.

Safdie, Moshe. Yad Vashem MOSHE SAFDIE-The Architecture of Memory. New York: Lars Müller, 2006.

Struk, Janina. Photographing the Holocaust Interpretations of the Evidence. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to forget Holocaust memory through the camera's eye. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1998.

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology