Following tutor feedback, I have re-written and re-structured my literature review so as to divide up my sources into seperate sections. As I did this have edited my essay to make it less bulky. I have added a conclusion and I have also added in my first draft of my dissertation proposal as a part of the review. Minor changes to add table of contents and to increase spacing to make essay easier to read. Although I have copied document here, I will also send this as a word document for my next assignment.

My essay seems to have a nice flow to it, well at least from my own personal perspective. Will be interesting to hear tutor feedback on this work. I did wonder about whether my sources should be allocated the same number of words to each but feel that the bulk of my argument is concerned with the thoughts of Barthes so that is what I have given the most attention to. This feels right to me but I hope it doesn’t create a sense of imbalance.

19/10 – version iii

How the Dead are Remembered Through Photography

Dissertation Proposal, Research to Date and Future Aims

It would seem a natural human reaction to death or impending loss and as a reaction to grief caused by such loss to seek to capture that moment in time. Whether by looking at existing photographs or to reach for camera to create new ones, this appears to be attempt to find an image that conveys a sense of what has been lost, to freeze moment and cast a memory which preserves a sense of that person in happier times or to try and store the last precious moment of life before death. To capture the very essence of that time and, mirroring the capture of the photographic image, to fix it forever.

My research into this subject builds upon written works by Roland Barthes, Geoffrey Batchen, Marianne Hirsch and Susan Sontag. My inspiration stems from living through the deaths of my mother and daughter.

To date, my research and test pieces have considered medical treatments and investigation into cancer and how a person is portrayed by the medical scan, I have shifted medical scans into different contexts for example a child’s game or onto wall of an art gallery. In current year of study, I have looked at social conventions surrounding the death of children and of sudden death versus expected death. I have explored the symbolism of death and the graveyard as a type of theatre for a specific kind of performance but have also looked at memorials outside the graveyard setting and of those who die and are forgotten, their graves abandoned, eroded and overgrown and those placed into unmarked graves. I am interested in providing dead people with a new story through my photography, not to bring them back to life, but instead to say to the living that these people are not forgotten and to demand that my audience confront thoughts of their own deaths. At all times I am aware that working in the field of death and memory, this is about the living for simple reason that the dead have no wish to be remembered and indeed have no wishes at all.

In my dissertation, I intend to look in more depth at emotionally challenging areas of death, loss, grief, memory and memorial through the optic of photography. This is a very large field so in attempt to narrow this down to a manageable essay suitable for undergraduate level, I have detailed my current thoughts on questions I would like to explore:

• To better understand and learn to accept my own grief.
• How death is portrayed in visual culture?
• To understand the societal response to the death of children.
• An understanding of the use of memorials and why large segments of society are not remembered.
• Explore the act of assigning new memories and stories to those who have been forgotten.

Literature Review

Roland Barthes seems to have lived his life surrounded by loss. He wrote his book Camera Lucida following the death of his mother. His father died when Barthes was an infant. I can imagine similarities with my own experiences of a life defined, in part, through death. Barthes expressed his grief for his parents through writing. Of his mother and his sense of the inevitability of his own death, “Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force…From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 72). Barthes speaks of his father’s name being written on the blackboard by a teacher and that when that blackboard was wiped clean, “nothing was left of his proclaimed mourning.” (Barthes, 2018, p. xi). I might safely assume Barthes had no direct visual memory of his father in life so used photographs, stories from his mother or the words on the blackboard at school which served as a proxy for his memory of his father. The chalk on the blackboard like a memory fading as it is rubbed away until we are unable to recall what was written. There is also a sense of the feelings of mourning fading through time.

After his mother died, Barthes was going through photographs looking for a sense of her so he could write to memorialise her. He states that “I had no hope of ‘finding’ her, I expected nothing from these photographs”. At first unable to find anything, “none seemed to me really ‘right’: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face.” (Barthes, 1981, pp. 63–64). Then finding a ‘perfect’ photograph that speaks to him of his mother, “looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 67) Barthes describes his find, a faded sepia print from 1898, showing his mother aged five with her brother. He tells us that, for him, this ‘Winter Garden’ photograph represented justice and accuracy and helped him resolve her death and remember her before old age and illness (Barthes, 1981, pp. 69–70). Barthes later refutes this idea as his argument develops. How could a photograph match his sense of his mother? All he can find in her photograph is death. He acknowledges the fatality in mourning “I could never recall her features (summon them as a totality).” He writes of “the terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 9)

Is the fading of memory and idea of nothing being left of his mourning the same for memories related to the written word and for photographs which are more definite and fixed than are chalk marks on a blackboard? If I was to look at the blank blackboard and try to recall the words, their meaning and how they looked, how exact might my memory be? Yet the photograph is an attempt at an exact copy of the original. Does referring or deferring to a photograph fill in the gaps in memory? Barthes states, “The photograph does not call up the past” (Barthes, 1981, p. 82) It appears that neither the written word nor photography can conjure a true sense of a person.

An added layer of complexity with memory is that looking at a photograph can replace the original memory with a memory of the photograph. Barthes tells us that the photograph hinders memory, “Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, becoming a counter memory.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 91) Barthes’s point is that the photograph is not an inert object but that it interacts with the human mechanism of codifying and of recalling each memory. The photograph can become memory. Importantly, by extension, what the photograph does not show must not have happened so these details are gradually erased from memory. Barthes phrases this as, “The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused and transformed.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 91) Barthes tries to resist this violence of the photograph wiping clean the chalk marks of his memory by trying to avoid the photograph, “I cannot place it [the photograph] in a ritual (on my desk, in an album) unless, somehow, I avoid looking at it (or avoid its looking at me), deliberately disappointing its unendurable plenitude and, by my very inattention, attaching to it an entirely different class of fetishes”. (Barthes, 1981, pp. 90–91) I wonder if, in trying to avoid photographs, Barthes is attempting to keep hold of his sense of mourning for the loss of his mother and father.

When looking for that perfect sense of his mother, Barthes writes, “There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her…” (Barthes, 1981, p. 67)  I can imagine his mother getting younger and younger until he found the ‘Winter Garden’ photograph of her as a child and at same time Barthes would have crossed a point where he no longer existed. The sense of death permeates this idea, of Barthes own mortality mixing with his mother’s in the place where she had died. I can imagine his emotion as he looked through these images. He writes of being unable to separate the logic of a photograph from its pathos. “As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for ‘sentimental’ reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observer, and I think.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 21) Barthes also found a picture of his parents, “In front of the only photograph in which I find my father and mother together , this couple who I know loved each other, I realize: it is love-as-treasure, which is going to disappear forever; for once I am gone, no one will any longer be able to testify to this” (Barthes, 1981, p. 94)

Susan Sontag’s life seems to echo Barthes’ as regards the spectre of loss. Her father died from tuberculosis when she was aged 5 (Moser, 2019, pp. 21, 26) and she spent much of her adult life dealing with cancers which eventually killed her. (Moser, 2019, pp. 336, 611, 700). Perhaps this sense of death is why she echoes Barthes words saying that, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 15) Of added relevance to my research is that Sontag wrote these words in hospital waiting on exploratory surgery for cancer. Her words expand on a point made in an introduction she writes for Peter Hujar’s book Portraits in Life and Death, again written in a cancer ward, “Photography…converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also, wittingly or unwittingly, the recording-angels of death.” (Sontag, 1976) Sontag is expressing the sense that photography acts between life and death. While life is colour, movement and noise, death is silent and still. I reflect on this point in my practical works where I mix images from the past as monochromes with coloured images of today. Sontag deals with similar point made by Barthes on pathos saying of Hujar’s work, “these momento mori can exercise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic” (Sontag, 1976) This raw emotion seems very different from when Sontag speaks of photo-reality, “Photographs furnish evidence… The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 5) There appears to be a juxtaposition in play here, the empirical, mechanical truth of a straight photograph, what we see must have happened and the emotional response to memory and in the middle the memory of that person or thing which changes through time. Interesting that Barthes and Sontag both wrote when faced with the closeness of death.

Marianne Hirsch attempts to explains Barthes point that, “The photograph does not call up the past” (Barthes, 1981, p. 82) stating of Barthes’ words, “photography, he implies, does not facilitate the work of mourning.” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 20)  Hirsch goes onto speak of the rewriting of memories when viewing photographs. She quotes Marguerite Duras’s words, “photographs promote forgetting…It’s a confirmation of death.” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 20) which seems to agree with what Barthes says on the violence of the photograph. Hirsch goes beyond Barthes words when she describes the idea of postmemory as being the relationship between one generation to those who came before and how their personal and collective traumas might be communicated from one generation to the next and to the one after that. For Hirsch this is related to the loss of millions in the Holocaust which to me almost seems too big to try and comprehend any sense of individual loss. It is interesting how photography, for a relatively recent invention, has become a core element of that cultural memory. Disturbing to ask what memories those who took photographs in the death camps were trying to preserve?

Geoffrey Batchen supports Barthes asking whether photography a good way to try and remember, “the photograph does not really prompt you to remember people the way you might otherwise remember them—the way they moved, the manner of their speech, the sound of their voice, that lift of the eyebrow when they made a joke, their smell, the rasp of their skin on yours, the emotions they stirred. (Can you ever really know someone from a photograph?)” (Batchen, 2004, p. 15) Batchen is talking about the complexity of memory which isn’t about just a single sense. When we view a photograph which is only visual, we recreate fabric and depth around this photograph as if it showed a real person or place. Yet, memories from looking at photographs is no different from memories from real events.

Batchen goes beyond Barthes who speaks of pathos asking if photography is solely concerned with nostalgia, “the extended act of remembrance, more about a state of reverie…Involving an illogically warm feeling towards the past, a kind of pleasurable sadness” (Batchen, 2004, p. 15) Interestingly, he tells us that nostalgia is a real thing regardless of why this idea might be promoted. While Barthes tries to hide from the photograph, Batchen looks from different perspective, speaking of photographs and objects used for the exchange of memories related to death and remembrance, “These object, then, are not really about remembering; they are instead dedicated to the fear of forgetting or of being forgotten.” (Batchen, 2004, p. 47)

Conclusion

This essay seems inextricably linked with death and grief on many levels. Is this in part because of the nature of my chosen sources or is it because, as I research death, I have started to see death everywhere I look? Many of the sources I have looked at write about their experiences rather than take pictures but this feels entirely consistent when dealing with grief and memory. Sontag’s son, David Rieff’s wrote of his mother’s death. He says Sontag had been receiving twice-yearly scans for 6 years since her last cancer.(Rieff, 2008, p. 2) This triggered a memory and tells me that doctors saw a high risk of cancer recurring. It makes me wonder what went on in Sontag’s life which she didn’t share with her son. From a photographic exploration of death it was very emotional to read that Sontag’s partner, Annie Leibovitz constructed a photo-essay detailing chemotherapy, pain and death, (Moser, 2019, p. 358) This controversial work provoked debate and Rieff and Leibovitz fell out. To my mind, it was entirely natural for Leibovitz to take such pictures as a way of expressing her grief. I can say no different as I have taken the same pictures.

Grief is an ancient emotion. Photography is new. Photographs capture loss whether brutal or quiet. They record death, capture the pale pallor of the skin and the pain on the face of a loved one as they suffer. When we look at photographs, we are transported to that time of our grief and pain and the pain of our loved ones. Is it any wonder then, that as an act of self-preservation, the human mind has found ways to reshape memories to create a less traumatic, more liveable and perfect moment? Even faced with photographs showing violent ends such as an execution or a drowned child, the mind can deaden the impact of such images so that each time we look they seem less shocking. Barthes was searching for a ‘perfect’ image of his mother but came to conclusion such an image could not exist. The photograph can never encapsulate the complexity of a life. The dead exist only as fragments in memory. Emotions and memories we attach to photographs of the dead are always ours.

Looking at photographs of our known dead, involves mental leaps to find sense of that person in life, to recognise the tricks of memory which might tell us they were happy, content or that, at their end, they didn’t suffer even if we know they did suffer. Part of this is our own mental strength or fragility in how we cope. The search for the dead is part of life not part of death.

References

Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Books.

Barthes, R. (2018) Album: Unoublished Correspondence and Texts. New York: Columbia University Press.

Batchen, G. (2004) Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=2YAXe5_y3IIC&pgis=1.

Hirsch, M. (2012) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hujar, P. and Sontag, S. (1976) Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo Press.

Moser, B. (2019) Sontag: Her Life. Allen Lane.

Rieff, D. (2008) Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. Lodon: Granta Publications.

Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.

Word Count

Word count – dissertation proposal / literature review – 467 / 2,283 / Total = 2,750