This was a quick feedback session this month luckily squeezed in before my tutor off on research leave. This means that the paperwork for this meeting will be done closer to the next session but this not seen as an issue. As usual feedback in the form of a video chat and as is normal the feedback was more a sharing of ideas rather than a review of previous works.

Despite being short call arranged at short notice, we covered a lot of ground.

My tutor commented on my notes about the Geoffrey Batchen book “Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance”  I had commented on a vanity mirror where a woman had replaced one of the panels with a photograph of her dead husband. When looking at the mirror, the image of her dead husband would have always been seen in relationship to her own reflection. My tutor commented that this was a literal mirror with memory which is a term first used in 1859 from when photography only 20 years old by Oliver Wendell. As an aside I looked up Wendell and learned he was a poet and more interestingly for my research, a medical professor. I commented that it occurred to me that the mirror with that photograph also spoke of life as well as death. I can infer that the woman never remarried as if she did, would she have kept the image of her deceased husband in such a prominent place?

We spoke of Batchen’s idea that something creative must be done to a photograph to connect that image to the ritual of death. This an interesting thought of the idea of a shrine of which the photograph might be one element. This similar to the idea of use of human hair or baby teeth as a physical, haptic artefact which connects the person remembering to the person who is dead. The haptic idea is reenforced because of two-way nature of our senses. The touch and feeling of an object but also how the object touches us. My tutor mentioned the photograph as being just the same. A two way thing which we look at but in a way which looks back. The photograph is a frozen instant. This set my mind off at a tangent as it spoke to me of time. All light is a form of time travel. Light from the stars for example is light from however long it takes for light to travel to our eye. Photographs are also about time travel. The light which touched that person or object and touched film or camera sensor is frozen just as the image is frozen.

I mentioned human hair and my tutor mentioned the idea of a metonymic (hope this spelled right) artefact which is when we replace one aspect of something or someone with an object which is a symbol for that something or someone. I will need to explore this idea. More specifically, metonymy is when the thing/person that is meant is substituted with one of its attributes or something that is contiguous to it. In this way, hair and the photographic image (which has shared light and time with the person meant) is the substitute of this person in their absence. It comes to mean this person; it is metonymic of that person.

I mentioned by visits to graveyards and some of my photographs and we spoke of the symbolism carved on gravestones but also the symbolism, one stage removed, of the flowers at the graveside which in themselves symbolism, life, growth, death, corruption. This idea echoed by the graveyard itself particularly if an old graveyard where graves are uncared for, being swallowed by moss or are eroded and worn. This idea of decay, of the forgotten, of memory fading as the body and grave fade is very interesting to me.

I mentioned my thoughts about the process of my study and of my research and how I feel that my project is shifting from how I first imagined it. I do worry that each time I look at something new, I am taken further and further from my starting point. It has crossed my mind that if my starting point thought of as a home port and the unknown of my research is represented by the open sea which is deep and unsafe. My destination then is unknown and is out of sight over the horizon. In equal parts terrifying and exciting but also I have no idea if my end result will make any sense, nor what if any destination I might reach.

Some recommended texts to look at.

John Berger, “About Looking” and specific thoughts that image seized by camera is violent, ritualized photograph and the memory of a stranger.

Elizabeth Edwards , “Photographs and the Sound of History” about the tactile and aural characteristics of photography.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Myths, Emblems, Clues”