I was reading Batchen’s book, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance and found the idea of metonymy which I wanted to explore further.
Batchen looked at some images of the dead which are displayed alongside hair, whether from the deceased or from a loved one. He asks why hair has been added to these images and what purpose does it serve? He answers his own question suggesting that, “The hair serves a metonymic memorial function, standing in for the body of the absent subject.” (Batchen, 2004, p. 73) This means that the hair is a symbolic object which stands in for the dead person. The hair serves as a memorial. The surviving relative or friend can look at or handle the hair which helps as a tool to trigger memory of the dead. Barthes goes on to ask why the hair is needed and why the visual traces of the deceased in the photographic image doesn’t serve the metonymic function? Batchen’s answer is that the photograph is not an object but is a sign. The photograph he says is limited as representation apparatus. (Batchen, 2004, p. 73). I find this a difficult concept to grasp.
The dictionary definition of metonymy is a name that can be used to symbolise something else.(Matzner, 2019) Examples might be a crown used as a word used for royalty or for the power of the monarch or of a suit being used as a word for someone from the corporate world. In these examples, the crown and the suit are real things in their own right. “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.” (Xenou, 2022) A photograph is also a real thing yet when the shutter closes and the light which bounced off the subject reaches the film or memory sensor, it is a thing which is very different from the original scene, even if from a certain viewpoint they might appear to be the same. The photographic image is not the same as the subject of the photograph. The photograph represents the subject. It is a sign. As Sontag says, “a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 154) The photograph can act as a gateway to trigger memory of the image it shows even though the photograph is not the subject and so back to original question of why the photograph does not serve the metonymic function? The hair is real. The photograph is no less real but the subject contained within the photograph is not real, or rather it was real when the picture was taken but now is sign.
I think the one answer to my confusion here might be to consider the point in time when the photograph was taken. Imagine a person constructing a metonymic memorial consisting of some hair and a photograph. As I have said, the hair is a real object but the photograph is an object which serves in place of a real object. Would it matter if the person who constructed the memorial and who cut the lock of hair and took the photograph all for a memorial for their own use? Would then that specfic audience treat the hair and the photograph in the same way? Both objects can be looked at and touched. Both are associated with the same memory. This idea Sontag expresses of the real seems to me to be but a fragment of a much larger whole. How can a lock of hair convey truth, or rather a complete truth, I wonder? Does the photograph not serve a purpose to expand on that sense of ‘truth’ and provide a more complete sense of the memorial object in relation to what or who it has been designed to represent? In this sense does it matter if the photograph is metonymic or not if the memorial is a device to try and bring back a sense of the past? To that audience does the metonymic object really have only represent a single aspect of the missing person? Does that lock of hair become a substitute for the missing or does it act as a trigger to cast a spell and in the mind oif that audience, bring the person back to life as they were before they died? This is interesting idea of how people interact with their pasts. Historian Keith Jenkins speaks of this saying, “histories we assign to things and people are composed, created, constituted, constructed” These histories contain the philosophy and shadow of the state of mind of the author. Crucially Jenkins tells us that ‘history’ is not the same as ‘the past’, (Jenkins, 1991, p. xi) The past has gone and will always remain in the past. “The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by historians in very different media, for example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as actual events. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work. History is the labour of historians” (Jenkins, 1991, p. 8)
Without being able to ever grasp the absolute truth of the past I can only use my imagination and try and conjour the thoughts and emotions of the person who used that memorial; things such as grief, pain, love, loss and of trying to keep hold of something which is fading. The lock of hair might have been cut many years before as the photograph might have been taken many years before. Without the audience of the person for whom the memorial was intended and who might have constructed it, what sense can I make of this so many years later. Was the memorial a private object or intended for a wider audience of intimate family or friends? To me with the benefit of my own perspective and knowledge of the passage of time, it seems that the photograph and the hair might be seen as symbols or signs for decay and for the passage of time. If I consider the memorial as a set of signs, are there hidden signs which are not immediately obvious to me as a stranger or because I come from a different place and time? In looking into the ideas around signs and texts I read passages from Barthes book, Image – Music – Text. In one section, “The Photographic Image”, Barthes speaks of the innocence of the photograph, of a tragic sign offering no possibility of choice and of a poetic sign, “traumatic images are bound up with an uncertainty (an anxiety) concerning the meaning of objects or attitudes.” (Barthes, 1964, p. 156) I can never know the precise meaning or attitude towards that image and that lock of hair or experience that person’s feelings unless I was that person.
This idea of an absolute meaning or truth behind stories or images is something Barthes returns to in his essay, The Reality Effect. Barthes writes of the small details of a story which provide the atmosphere and make the story seem more real. However, he goes onto question the word ‘real’, “This is what we might call the referential illusion. The truth of this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist speechact as a signified of denotation, the “real” returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do-without saying so is signify it”(Barthes, 1969, p. 148)
To return to my question around metonymy and to add another layer to the complexity of this idea, Allan Sekula compares two photographs which a similar subject; Lewis Hine’s photograph called “Immigrants going down gangplank, New York” and Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 photograph called. “The Steerage”. Sekula compares these images with viewpoint that Hine’s photograph represents documentary photography and functions as metonymy while Stieglitz’s photograph represents art photography and functions as a metaphor, or rather that “the photograph is invested with a complex metonymic power, a power that transcends the perceptual and passes into the realm of affect.” (Sekula, 1982, p. 100) Sekula thinks that some photographs can be metonymic and others not. As he says, “the Hine discourse displays a manifest politics and only an implicit aesthetics, which the Stieglitz discourse displays a manifest aesthetics and only an implicit politics.” (Sekula, 1982, p. 103). He goes on to say that this means that criticism should be applied to each photograph based upon its manifest discourse.
While I think arguing whether some photographs might be metonymic and that some might operate as a form of metaphor might be an academic exercise, it seems to me that to the original audience who used that memorial of the photograph and the lock of hair, who might have added text or addition memories through the years, who touched them and looked at them, and lived with these memorial objects, it seems that the photograph and what it showed, would have been as every bit real as the hair.
One final thought is that the memorial object acts as a form of time travel machine. It’s purpose was to remind the living of the person who is no longer living but more than that, it acted as a vehicle to transport the living back to that time when their loved one was still alive. In doing this, the memorial was an attempt to try and keep their image and their memory alive even as the person themselves is gone.
References
Barthes, R. (1964) ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image – Music – Text. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 32–51. doi: 10.2307/2515419.
Barthes, R. (1969) ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of Californa Press, pp. 141–148.
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.
Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-thinking History. Routledge.
Matzner, S. (2019) ‘metonymy’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics. doi: 10.1093/ACREFORE/9780199381135.013.8229.
Sekula, A. (1982) ‘On the invention of photographic meaning’, in Burgin, V. (ed.) Thinking Photography, p. 249.
Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.
Xenou (2022) Photography 3 Tutor feedback. OCA