“I DON’T KNOW WHY A REPLICANT WOULD COLLECT PHOTOS-MAYBE they were
like Rachel-they needed memories.” In the role of the bounty hunter
Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner,
Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to
“terminate” the beautiful Rachel, an “android” especially menacing
because she’s almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a “real” person,
Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she’s human, not
machinemade, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick’s brilliant
science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the
otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick’s vision of a near
future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication-the
electric sheep of Dick’s title- warm-blooded animal life has been all
but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost
forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human
flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed
second- order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory. In
the film version memory survives paradoxically only as a faint
reminder of itself, a remembered need to a memory and thereby an
individual identity. Here’s where the collected photographs come in.
They answer to the need for at least an illusion of memory. Deckard
vents his angst just after Rachel leaves his apartment in tears, her
selfdelusion shattered by the hardboiled bounty-hunter’s refusal to
accept the presumptive snapshot of a mother and child fished from her
purse as proof of human rather than laboratory birth. “Look,” she had
said, “here’s me with my mother.” But Deckard knows better; he has his
own tests for androids or “humanoid robots.” True, she’s a special
model, long-lasting and seductively beautiful but still a replicant.
“Not your memories,” Deckard had said to her, “but some else’s,” a
“synthetic memory system” as fraudulent as the faked photo.
Crushed, Rachel leaves him musing at his piano, flipping through
another set of faked “old” snapshots he had commandeered from another
android. He has also spread his own family snapshots on the piano top,
some faded, browned, curling with age and use. These photos are
presumably the real thing, true memories of a past that actually
happened. Replicants collect photos because they need memories in
order to believe they are human, a need itself programmed into their
system. The photos in the film are something like the electric sheep
in the novel, fake pets in the absence of real ones. In such a world,
where the photograph has lost its ground of reference in the past,
where the surrogate assumes the look and force of the real, Deckard’s
faded personal photos represent pure nostalgia; they are symbols of a
life already lived, a dream of the human persisting in the nightmare
world of replicants dreaming of electric sheep.
With its cult status as book and film, the story has an aura of
foreknowing coming events in real-world genetic engineering and
robotics. The pathos of the photograph as faked memory strikes an
especially prescient note. As far as we can tell, the photos collected
by the androids were made by actual cameras, with lenses and film. The
chief point is that their fakery lies in their use, their implied
captions or texts and narratives, the fictions that falsely identify
them as memories of a past that never was. Yet many of the pictures
Deckard holds in his hand seem to have been made by the replicants
themselves, of their rooms, of one another-all the more ironic and
pathetic examples of futile and abortive yearning for human emotion,
attachment to things and persons who can be thought to represent a
tangible past. The film accepts the traditional idea of the photograph
as reliable proof that something once existed before a lens. What is
false about the pictures is not what is pictured but the implied story
about what is pictured: “Look, here’s me with my mother.” In fact,
Deckard has such faith in the firstorder reliability of photographs
that he uses an enhancement on a digital scanner of a tiny section of
one of the commandeered snapshots to identify one of the rebellious
androids he is assigned to destroy. In the film, digital scanners
serve to deconstruct images in order to see more of what is there,
rather than to reconstruct an image of something that is nowhere else
but in the image. In this sense the film seems to stand firmly within
the horizon of conventional photography, even as it envisions the
limits of that horizon, the end of the era of the photograph as memory
in the old, familiar sense.
As represented in Blade Runner the kind of picture known as
“photograph” (written in light, literally) conveys the traditional
association of memory and history with photography. Today that simple
idea of a light-based transparent nexus between photograph and a
determinate past is undergoing radical reappraisal. The digital
revolution, as probably everybody on earth now realizes, has eroded
the old confidence in that transparency. We and our comfortably
reliable old paper photographs now live alongside the all-pervasive
digital method of producing replicas, virtual replicants, of the old
photographic image without the old apparatus of lenses and film, or
indeed of anything we need believe was ever to be photographed.
Calling these new instruments “electronic photography” or “digital
camera,” we employ metaphors in hope of easing the passage into a new
regime of picturing the putative “real world.” But as William J.
Mitchell points out in his recent book, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual
Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, this particular metaphor misleads,
obscures the digital difference. He writes: “Although a digital image
may look just like a photograph when it is published in a newspaper,
it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as
does a photograph from a painting” (1992:4). Based on changes in
chemical emulsions caused by exposure to light, old-style photographs
are analog or continuous tone images; computer-generated images are
digital, based on discrete units called pixels, entirely the product
of computer programs.
These programs may include actual photographs converted into digital
images, which then can be altered, reprocessed, or recombined to
produce an image as if made in the old manner of light- generated
miages. The hardware for producing such electronic images has swept
the mass market: Kodak’s Photo CD Player, for example, converts
snapshots into still video, and electronic cameras can digitize the
image as it is being recorded by light. The image can be manipulated
even as it is being “captured.” As a result, writes Mitchell, we are
faced “with a new uncertainty about the status and interpretation of
the visual signifier” (Mitchell, 1992: 17). On an ominous note he
adds: “The inventory of comfortably trustworthy photographs that has
formed our understanding of the world for so long seems destined to be
overwhelmed by a flood of digital images ofmuch less certain status”
(1992:19).
Such radical technological change in image-making affects the mass
experience as well as the theoretical understanding of photography as
memory. Imagine memory as a storage area where images or traces of
past sensations lie in wait of retrieval on call or involuntarily. In
analogue photography memory takes the form of the material negative,
an image held in an emulsion on celluloid. When reproduced in a
chemical-mechanical process that reverses the making of the negative,
the image gives a “positive” picture that is the memory proper. It is
an extractive process, from negative to positive, from potency to
realitya second or reborn reality of the sensory past as a positive
picture. In digital photography memory potency and reality lose their
distinctiveness. In place of a store of images (such as negative
versions of positive pictures) are electronic “chips” that compress
electrical changes that can be called up, shaped and. reshaped by
command as images that look like those of a sensory past though are
not necessarily so. In the old photography the camera is an instrument
of memory; in the new photography the camera itself serves as
electronic repository of memory from which a past, a simulacrum of any
past, can be called up and programmatically shaped.
If the nineteenth century invented photography, the late- twentieth-
century began to disinvent it. We’ve learned how machines can be made
to mimic or replicate human ways of seeing, and with robotic modes of
mass production cheap versions of replication devices are available to
everyone on earth. It has been a quiet cultural revolution of
incalculable consequence. Everywhere you look you see people with
these slips of metal and plastic instruments not peering at the world
through a view finder but looking for the world at or on the back of
the new-style “camera” (another sly metaphor) with its screen or
monitor. The wonder is that people have adjusted to this new
phenomenon so easily, as if without a grunt or ripple, perhaps with
minor annoyance at the baffling array of choices among digital
settings that soon gives way to happy complacence. But think of what
happens. It is as if the world given to the eyesight no longer lies in
front of the instrument of seeing but on its backside, already
processed into image: a digital version of seeing through a glass,
darkly. The new photography elides so well with the old, and digital
image-making couples so smoothly with laptops and desktops, that
snapshot memory has taken an amazingly radical turn. Most users of
these compact boxes rigged with hi-tech switches and chips may barely
notice the difference. But difference is real and stunning. It teaches
a high-stake lesson about our lingering assumptions regarding
photographs and memory. People seem still to believe that if it looks
like a photo, it must be one of the old kind, a record of something
that truly happened. Post-photography undermines that glib assumption.
MitchelTs image of a flood hardly exaggerates. With electronic
imagemaking having effectively taken over and computer memory
established as the matrix of images-of-the- world, we are already well
within the era of post-photography.
A backward look can help us better see what lies ahead. In the
nineteenth century and early twentieth century the most commonplace
idea of photography was of its role as memory. People spoke in awe of
how photographs made the past seem here and now, restored to visual
presence hi ghostly vividness. The notion of photography as a form of
memory unique among the visual arts became the groundwork conception
of the medium. It seemed archetypically true, a proposition held with
spontaneous conviction. Didn’t the camera reproduce with automatic
mechanical accuracy exactly what appeared before the lens during a
measurable slice of time? Recording the world as it looked through a
lens within a distinct duration meant that the resultant picture
offered to the eyes an image of time that was already a particular
determinate “past” when the exposure ended.
BELIEF IN PHOTOGRAPHS AS TRUE PICTURES OF THE PAST COMES FROM apparent
correspondence between them and images we hold in the mind and call
“our” memory, traces of what our eyes once delivered to our brains.
Collecting and preserving snapshots, making family albums, pinning
pictures of loved ones on the wall, all are based on the belief that
photographs are remnants of past experience, imageremnants of past
feelings, associations, stories, the stuff of the pictures we carry in
our heads of our pasts, of the private history we have lived and the
public history we share with overlapping communities. Indeed, the line
between private and public began to blur as more and more photo-images
of private life began to circulate in the expanding public sphere to
the point where all private lives and intimate experiences now seem
grist for the insatiable public eye of the mass media, including the
snooping eye of government surveillance.
Between the photograph and history in the sense of everything past,
there was assumed to be an absolute continuity assured by nature and
by culture working in tandem: light acting on certain chemically
treated surfaces within a controlled interior site, the “dark chamber”
of the camera by means of a controlling mechanism of lens, shutter,
secure slot for the plate to be exposed to light. The cultural part
was to assure an image “fixed” or stable on the model of paintings,
drawings, or engravings, the older tradition of referential image-
making used to represent and confirm a “real” world. Photography made
the real seem the function of memory, image- traces of the visible
world preserved on its exposed plates. The camera was understood to be
a machine for freezing time into recoverable images in this, as Roland
Barthes (1981) remarks in Camera Ludda, renouncing “the Monument” on
behalf of the passing and the fleeting. Barthes calls it a paradox
that “the same century invented History and Photography,” History
substituting memory for life, photography giving “a certain but
fugitive testimony.” Accordingly, the camera produces not “the Past”
but the intractableness of “what has been.” Nothing fugitive can
escape its pounce and its paralyzing memorial gaze.
One of the inventors of photography, the Englishman William Henry Fox
Talbot, spoke of his pictures as “impressed by Nature’s hand,” as if
the making of a photograph were equivalent to the action of a bed of
type upon a sheet of paper in a printing press. The printer is
“Nature” itself, possessed now, by virtue of the camera, of a “hand”
by which it imprints itself in the form of image, of what Talbot
dubbed “calotype” (from the Greek word for beauty) or,
proprietorially, as “talbotype.” Talbot titled his 1844 book of
pictures and commentary The Pencil of Nature, a trope that links the
new medium to both drawing and writing, to media of imaginative
creativity. Scientist, inventor, gentleman scholar, Talbot was also
one of the original artists in photography who explored the new
medium’s aesthetic possibilities in picturing.
For Talbot, the power of the sun gave rise to “one of the charms of
photography,” that unexpected discoveries can be had through close
reading of what the pencil of nature has writ:
in examining photographic pictures of a certain degree of perfection,
the use of a large lens is recommended, such as elderly persons
frequently employ in reading. This magnifies the objects two or three
times, and often discloses a multitude of minute details, which were
previously unobserved and unsuspected. It frequently happens,
moreover-and this is one of the charms of photography-that the
operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards,
that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time.
Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or
printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls:
sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it- unconsciously
recorded-the hour of the day at which the view was taken (plate 13).
This extraordinary account of what the eye missed reveals that claims
of certainty in the camera-made picture of the world are contingent on
perception. The words “unconsciously recorded” suggest simply that the
mechanism of the camera records more than the photographer knows at
the time, that “time” is in fact one of the unregistered visual
elements in the image. The photograph provides a record of what the
mind might have known had it been aware of the totality of its visual
field at that moment. The unconscious field Talbot calls attention to
is a dial-plate, a human mechanism for translating the movement of a
shadow across a calibrated surface into a human discourse of time,
into a grammar of number, name, and tense. What Talbot discovers at
the buried heart of this image is the artifice of language, the
arbitrary devices and constructions that underlie all human cultures.
About a hundred years later in 1931 essay, the German critic Walter
Benjamin also speaks of an “optical unconscious” in photographs. He
refers to old nineteenth-century portraits made at the dawn of the
medium:
All the artistic preparations of the photographer and the design of in
the positioning of the model to the contrary, the viewer feels an
irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here
and now. In such a picture, that spark has, as it were, burned through
the person in the image with reality, finding the indiscernible place
in the condition of that long past minute where the future is nesting,
even today, so eloquently that we looking back can discover it (1980:
202).
Benjamin’s optical unconscious refers to what appears in the image
unintended, not the product of the photographer’s will but a sign of
the contingency involved in the making of the photograph: a blur or
the glint of light hi an eye quite unlike any handmade inscription m a
painting or drawing. It comes from the photographic process, from the
duration of time in which exposure occurs. Most important for Benjamin
is the notion that such unconscious signs of life as the look we
return to a sitter’s eyes construct the palpable sense of a future
“nesting” within the past registered by the image. The photograph’s
past contains its future, a future realized when the picture is seen
by a viewer, received in another’s eyes. As viewers we are the future
of the past recorded in the image; we realize the presentness of that
past. The relation to time, then, gives the photograph its
distinguishing traits for Benjamin; the image contains time, not a
picturetime passing but an experience of a past exactly at the instant
it crosses into an indeterminate future.
Another early witness, Elizabeth Barren, future wife of the poet
Robert Browning, made a similar point when she wrote longingly in 1843
of the photograph as a prosthesis of private memory.
I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world.
It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases- but the
association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing… the
fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is
the very sanctification of portraits I think-and it is not at all
monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out against so
vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly
loved, than the noblest artist’s work every produced (Heron and
Williams, 1996: 2).
Barrett speaks of the daguerreotype, whose images appeared on a
mirror-like sheet of metal that could, when held at a certain angle,
produce what seemed “the very shadow of the person.” The conception of
an intimate memorial image that will not fade but retain its
brilliance fit nicely into sentimental middle-class culture of the
time. By making palpable the absence of the sitter, making that person
appear as already having been, the photograph rehearsed the experience
of mourning at the heart of sentimentalism.
The notion of the photograph as an uncanny memory continued with the
introduction of paper prints. New technologies of reproduction
extended the memorializing claims for the medium so that when
Baudelaire in 1859 described the “true duty” of photography as that of
a “humble handmaid” of art rather than an art in its own right, he
evoked precisely those imperial claims: “Let photography quickly
enrich the traveler’s album and restore to his eyes the precision his
memory may lack. . . . Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion the
prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which
claim a place in the archives of our memories” (1980: 88). At the same
time Lady Elizabeth Eastlake in England in 1857 also argued against
confusing photography with fine art. Photographs are simply too
accurate, too precise, too indiscriminate; for this very reason they
answer best the modern need for empirical knowledge. A “purveyor” of
knowledge, “she [photography] is the sworn witness of everything
presented to her view; she gives “unerring records.” Her realm is
fact, not art, and the facts she renders are unsurpassed in
communicative power-a “new form of communication between man and man-
neither letter, message, nor picture.””In this sense,” Eastlake
continues in high-toned prophecy, “no photographic picture that ever
was taken in heaven, or earth, or in the waters underneath the earth,
of any thing, or scene, however defective when measured by an artistic
scale, is destitute of a special, and what may be called an historic
interest.” City views may be weak in tonality compared to what
painting can achieve, “yet the facts of the age and the hour are
there, for we count the lines in that keen perspective of telegraphic
wire, and read the characters on that playbill or manifesto, destined
to be torn down on the morrow.” Here, then, is photography’s
“legitimate stand”: “her business is to give evidence of facts, as
minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning
machine can give” (1980: 65-67). Unreasoning machine, evidence of
facts: the terminology seems dated and naive in our age of artificial
intelligence, digital scanners, random access memory- a world more
like that of replacants and blade runners than the world of Daguerre
and Mathew Brady. Digital photography reinforces recent post-
Enlightenment suspicion that “reality” is something made up, a
construction, not something secure for a camera to confirm. More
likely the camera is part of the game, not to be trusted as a guide to
anything but itself. Still, the confidence of nineteenthcentury
witnesses remains a tenet of popular belief much exploited by
commercial advertising for digital cameras. Our typical curiosity
about photographs, like Deckard’s, tells us as much.
In recent years a growing number of historians have begun to explore
common ground with the photographer. It has been pointed out that
historian and photographer share the business of discerning and
describing fact, which is transformed then into narrative or picture.
The act of transformation, as Siegfried Kracauer and others have
observed, gives presence to what is absent, what has passed away. “The
photographic media,” Kracauer wrote in 1969 (192), “makes it easier
for us to incorporate the transient phenomena of the outer world,
thereby redeeming them from oblivion. Something of this kind will also
have to be said of history.” Hence, for Kracauer, history as writing
and photography as picturing parallel and complement each other as
modes of saving, preserving, fixing, knowing, and finally redeeming
physical reality from the fate of mere transience.
But the analogy goes only so far. What historians produce as “history”
are mainly written texts. Images may be seen as analogous to words but
not identical with them; they are a different kind and order of thing
from narrative or written description. Andre Bazin has said that the
photograph is an actual portion of the visible world, a physical trace
or residue of an actual event within light. In this view the
photograph appears to be less cognate with written history than with
the raw materials of written history: traces of lived experience such
as letters, journals, artifacts, the data historians sort through,
arrange, measure, analyze, and interpret. It is not an identity but a
symbiosis that links photography and history: the historian needs the
visual record as supplementary data or information; the image needs
the historian or historically minded viewer to read in its
hieroglyphic markings the possibility of meaning.
WHETHER WE SAY PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MERELY SURFACE DESCRIPTIONS or
interpretations analogous to written history comes down to how we look
at the image. We look in order to recognize what exists in the
recorded field of vision. Choices in the act of viewing are rarely as
deliberate and reflective as this account makes it seem, but as a
general rule we choose to see a photograph either as a mechanical
transcription of a field of light with randomly disposed objects, or
as an intentional reordering of that field into a deliberate meaning.
We can look at the picture as the world, or the maker’s mind or
imagination playing upon the world. Photographs typically provoke and
pose questions. What is it? When and where was it made? What does it
mean? We desire and need more information than the image alone.
Uncaptioned, a photograph can seem a mote floating in space, unmoored,
unattached. Or a cryptic hieroglyph. Hieroglyphs hide the codes, the
secret knowledge they require for decipherment. For all their apparent
transparency and ease of identification, photographs often seem
hieroglyphic, obscure, ambiguous, elusive, the more so the more
transparently window-like they seem. The bafflement photographs
inevitably arouse in close, attentive viewers at some stage of their
viewing is a good thing. The era of digital post-photography brings a
healthy infusion of skepticism to our reading and experience of
photographs old-style or new, analogue or digital.
The old regime photograph (analogue) had seemed a certifier of
authenticity, an assurance that here at least was a sign that matched
a referent. Hence on the centenary of photography in 1939, Paul Valery
could put down in words a sentiment that may sound oddly naive in our
ears: “The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our
meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value,
suggests this simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is
narrated, have been photographed?” (1980:195). The Civil War
photographs associated with the name of Mathew Brady offer a case hi
point: they perpetuate a collective cultural image of what that war
must have looked like to those who saw it. Civil War photographs
continue to historicize the war, to confirm that certain events took
place then and there: this is how places and persons would have looked
had you been there, pristine landscapes, ruined cities, battlefields
wreckage, the shapeless debris of war, signs of violence, pain, and
terrible deaths. “These time-stained photographs,” wrote historian
Francis Trevalyan Miller in 1911 in the monumental and monumentalizing
10-volume Photographic History of the Civil War are the only
incontrovertible facts to survive the partisan passions of the war
(Miller, 1911:16). The pictures “bring past history,” wrote another
historian, “into the present tense” (George Haven Putnam in Miller,
1911:60).
This positivist view claims that memory is whatever survives from the
past as present experience, not something shaped by will or desire but
only what is left over from the great passage of time. This view of
memory pretends to pure objectivity, and like classic nineteenth-
century historicism (“how it really was”) denies its own ideological
complicity in saying what are and were “the facts.” Constructions such
as the grand “photographic history” and its more famous companion, the
film by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), foreclose and
forbid ambiguity of interpretation. Once certainties quaver, the whole
edifice of “Civil War” as cultural memory risks coming apart. Hence
the fervency of the 1912 presentation of the largest selection of
Civil War photographs ever published, a fervent race-based nationalism
that attaches each image to an urgent idea of the war and the nation.
The pictures either support the following assumption or the nation as
an idea falls in shambles.
This is the American epic that is told hi these time-stained
photographs-an epic which in romance and chivalry is more inspiring
than that of the olden knighthood; brother against brother, father
against son, men speaking the same language, living under the same
flag, offering then- lives for that which they believe to be right. No
Grecian phalanx or Roman legion ever knew truer manhood than in those
days on the American continent when Anglo-Saxon met AngloSaxon in the
decision of a constitutional principle that beset their beloved
nation. It was more than Napoleonic, for its warriors battled for
principle rather than conquest, for right rather than power. (Miller,
1911:16).
The pictures in the 10-volume history produce what the text names as
“the American War of the Roses,” a war of brothers based on a
disagreement over a principle-the allusion is to “state’s rights,” the
Confederacy’s preferred rationale for its secession. “We must all be
of one and the same mind,” we read, “when we look upon the
photographic evidence. It is in these photographs that all Americans
can meet on the common ground of their beloved traditions. Here we are
all united at the shrine where our fathers fought-Northerners or
Southerners.””As Americans” looking at these pictures “we can see only
the heroicself-sacrifice of these men who battled.” Slavery excised
blacks, extirpated and driven from sight, “we” confirm ourselves “as
Americans” by seeing “only” what the text sees and says we see, by
seeing, as it were, Anglo-Saxonly. (Miller, 1911:18).
The 1912 appropriation of the photographic record of the war gives an
extreme instance of ideology trumping vision. The same ideology of
race, of “Anglo-Saxon” superiority, dominance, and privilege that by
the end of the nineteenth century had purged slavery and blacks from
public memory and memorializing events of the war also asserted
exclusive rights of interpretation over the photographs. The power of
photographs as cultural memory, the memory of events or persons we
could not have experienced firsthand except through photographs,
derives from ingrained belief that every photograph portrays at least
the raw material of memory, shows what memory is. This assumes that,
whatever else it shows by way of composition and design, each
photograph cannot help but show a residue of something that once
existed before a lens. By reflex alone photographs produce memory. But
the Civil War photographs teach that without accompanying words,
without captions or surrounding text, photographs remain helpless
examples of indiscriminate visual experience open to many
understandings. They become cultural memory only by deliberate acts of
will and purpose. Those moved to contest the larger frame of memory
imposed on the photographs, as in the 1912 volumes as well as albums
by Alexander Gardner, George P, Barnard, and others that appeared
shortly after the war, can begin by freeing images from their putative
frame in order to open the eyes to neglected, repressed, or forgotten
memories. To imagine alternative captions offers a path toward revised
and refreshed collective memories. As much an interpretation of the
present as the past, and an anticipation of a future, the framing of
visual memory can have major consequences on how people identify
shared historical culture. It is not cultural memory of the Civil War
as such that is at stake but the role that photographs play in any
version of the past we call memory.
Gardner makes explicit this theory of the photograph in his preface to
the Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, where he speaks of
wishing to preserve images of “localities that would scarcely have
been known, and probably never remembered” if it were not for “the
fearful struggle” of the war, signs of which may or may not be visible
in the local scene. Gardner’s task as editor of the volume is to
provide a textual means to connect the local with the national, the
particularity of the scene with the grand narrative of the constructed
cultural memory. Local images become “mementoes of the fearsome
struggle,” and “remembered” becomes another form of re- connection or
“union” (“reunification”), of “re-membering” broken or dis-membered
localities (such as the rebellious states) to resume wholeness or to
make one body with the newly confirmed nation. Anticipating 1912,
Gardner writes about haunting battlefield scenes such as the famous
“Harvest of Death,” that they are “held sacred as memorable fields,
where thousands of brave men yielded up their lives a willing
sacrifice for the cause they had espoused.” Remembrance of “sacrifice”
re-members the dismembered, reunites the dead with the living, a type
or model of the nation restored to itself as “union.” As if preparing
the way for Trevalyan in a later generation, Gardner directs the
reading of the photographs as visual equivalents of victory, of
“union,” not simply in the sense of making a record of victory but by
demonstrating in the act of interpretation how victory comes about and
especially how victory counts on the imaginative labor of viewers who
thereby come to themselves “as American.” The reading of the
photographs as collective memory becomes a prime nationalizing
experience.
We can see more exactly how this is imagined to occur by the design of
the title page of the Photographic Sketchbook. Images are sketchily
dispersed on the page. With its allusion to hand-drawn impressions
made with pen or pencil, sketchbook implies images made on the spot by
an eyewitness, someone who was there. Pen and pencil are a far cry
from the cumbersome equipment and time-consuming labor of the wet-
plate photographer, but subsumes the photographer under the heading of
the hand-based arts of visual storytelling or reportage. The
organization of the title page divides memory of past scenes-army camp
life and battle on the right and left-from the scene of present
retelling at the bottom center of the page. The panoramic vista of the
entire page promises bird’s eye or “eye of God” unity, a view to which
the reader is invited as eyewitness from above, with draped flag
framing the vista and affirming its national outlook. Setting sun
affirms that war and nation remain embraced by “nature” and its
cycles-a healing of pain by sacred memory. Military hierarchy belongs
as well to the structure of the national view, officer on right and
mounted figure on left obviously, “naturally” social superiors to foot
soldiers and diggers of trenches. In the two figures lounging in the
foreground, we see a different remembered social order, of male
comrades swapping tales around a wilderness campfire, the long rifle
at the ready. The design and vignettes of the title page thus prepare
a role for the photographs within what is already (and so
acknowledged) a nostalgia, a cultural memory of white frontier
manliness and class-based military noblesse oblige.
The unstated predicament that the title page confronts and solves is
how to make perception into memory, how to pile trace upon trace in a
certain order so that cultural memory-shared (hence public) conception
of the way things were that must have brought about the way things
are-arrives as a visible tangible of social experience. In other
words: how to monumentalize. Gardner gets to the heart of the matter
when he writes about a rather quotidian picture of “a mud- bespattered
forge,” some mules, and knapsacks and blankets “carelessly thrown on
the ground” that if we had been at this same spot earlier, before the
picture was made, we would have seen “one of the most magnificent
spectacles ever seen in the army,” something “truly grand”: the mass
encampment of troops. Now that all that has “passed away,” this
decidedly unheroic picture becomes “particularly
interesting.””Interesting as it is,” writes Gardner, “our picture…
gives but a small portion of the gorgeous whole.”
Mud-spattered forge (symbol of the mechanical fire and brimstone of
this war) and mules bring the picture to life as a comic variant of
the absent “gorgeous whole.” The disjunction between the gorgeous and
the mundane echoes Melville’s sardonic insight in “A Utilitarian View
of the Monitor’s Fight”-that “Orient pomp” no longer befits a war
fought by machines, “by crank,/ Pivot, and screw,/ And calculations of
caloric.””The clangor of that blacksmiths’ fray” proclaims that
“warriors/ Are now but operatives.” The covert text within the Gardner
picture suggests less a missing “whole” than a wholly new picture, not
pomp and ceremony but mud, forges, and mules.
Image and text seem more seamless, more transparent to each other in
the most famous picture, Timothy O’Sullivan’s “A Harvest of Death,
Gettysburg, July, 1863” (plate 36). The allegorical title disguises
the political making of sacral memory as natural process (“harvest”),
though ironically so; by dislocating the bloated corpses from their
history as objects of political violence and subsuming them under
natural process or “harvest,” irony powerfully jerks the image from
the realm of repertorial disclosure of ugly fact into the “gorgeous
whole” of cultural memory. “Such a picture conveys a useful moral: it
shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its
pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing
such another calamity falling upon the nation.”
The text reads the blankness of the image, writes as if upon the yet
unseen scene. Fixed in their final agony, the corpses are self-
memorializing. Here Gardner articulates the central motive of the
photographic project of the war and acknowledges its ideological
moment: to transform what is seen and recorded (the camera’s mode of
“remembering”) into sacral monument. Appropriately, Gardner’s album
concludes not with an image of Appomattox but of the “Dedication of
Monument on Bull Run Battle-field, June, 1865” (plate 100). The
monument, a stone carving of a classical motif, serves as another
ironically dislocated paradigm of the stiffened human remains of the
battlefield, analogue of the memorializing function of the
photographs. The picture shows the stone shaft in the rear and those
performing the dedication immortalizing themselves in the stillness of
having their picture taken.
Writing about an exhibition in New York of battlefield photographs
showing piled up corpses similar to “A Harvest of Death,” Oliver
Wendell Holmes write in Atlantic Monthly in July 1863:
Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of
illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless
heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but
yesterday…. It is so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look
over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of
the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back
to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would
have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly
represented.
Holmes had just returned from a visit to the Antietam battlefield in
search of his son, and the exhibit of photographs revived his
revulsion and fear. The pictures stirred memories too fresh to bear,
images that must be buried, as when one hides a photograph in a
drawer. The passage illustrates vividly the role of the photograph in
the process of distancing and transmuting pain into memory
How to deal with the corpse, the most gruesome and reproaching of the
nongorgeous objects of war-the human body frozen in its shock of
violent death-was one of the two great challenges to the war
photographers. The other was the sight of black people, the visible
sign that slavery was what the war was insistently about, slavery the
cause of secession, and ultimately the cause of battlefields and
corpses unbearable to see. How Gardner deals with blacks in the few
pictures that allows them to be seen at all is instructive. One
solution is minstrel comedy. Plate 27, “What Do I Want, John Henry?
Warrenton, Va., November, 1862,” stages a scene of stereotypical
servility. A black youth stands beside a seated officer, poised to
serve him a demijohn of whiskey and a plate of food. As if oblivious
of his presence three other figures, also white officers, appear in
poses that make hem seem to believe they are sitting in a
photographer’s studio, their eyes gliding off at an angle oblique to
the camera. The standing figure may be looking at the transaction
between the black servant and his officer, though we cannot tell. The
picture makes little effort to hide its stilted triteness, a
performance designed to show that even good Union officers know the
difference between the white and the black “race” and thus to give
comfort to the “whiteness” upon which the nation would seal its
reunion under the farce of “reconstruction.” Master and servant might
just as well be master and slave. The text speaks of the servant,
“John Henry,” as “that affectionate creature” with an “untutored
nature.” The caption fills out the portrait of “an unusual capacity
for the care of boots and other attentions,” a propensity for his
master’s “spirits” and for “the other sex,” and a distaste for “manual
labor.” This stereotype would survive the war and provide a new
rallying cry for “union” of North and South, as in the 1912
Photographic History. It appears scattered among the Civil War
photographs at large. So do clusters of black refugees on the edge of
Union army camps, “contraband” (as former slaves freed by Union forces
were known) gathered at depots, and many albums of portraits of black
Union soldiers. On the whole, just as Northern rhetoric stressed the
cause of “Union,” called the enemy “rebels” rather than slaveholders,
and made the defeat of secession rather than of slavery the most
loudest rallying cry, the photographic record tends to banish blacks
to the margin of visibility, their presence unacknowledged even when
plainly there.
This sad scene represents the soldiers in the act of collecting the
remains of their comrades, killed at the battles of Games’ Mill and
Cold Harbor. It speaks ill of the residents of that part of Virginia,
that they allowed even the remains of those they considered enemies,
to decay unnoticed where they fell. The soldiers, to whom commonly
falls the task of burying the dead, may possibly have been called away
before the task was completed. At such times the native dwellers of
the neighborhood would usually come forward and provide sepulture for
such as had been left uncovered.
Black “soldiers”-or are they “the native dwellers”?-clean up after
those to whom “the task of burying the dead” have “possibly” been
called away. This image is Gardner’s only acknowledgement that the
Union forces included former slaves, and it presents them in the most
menial of roles.
The image resonates beyond text and frame, its grim ironies and
bizarre revelations suddenly flashing before us the “remains” Holmes
wished to bury from view: decomposing flesh and bleached bones
attended by those very humans whose claim to humanity gave cause to
the horrors of war. In a gesture so simple it eludes the author of the
text, the two grand invisibilities of the war appear together as one
image: death as decomposition and dissolution; blacks laboring in once
pastoral fields, reaping an even grimmer harvest than that imagined by
“Harvest of Death.” The grim image and its equivocal text shows with
even grimmer irony how the victors cleansed the war of troubling
debris and in the fading replications of the photograph found evidence
of a gorgeous whole, the desired sacredness of a bleached cultural
memory.
Heron, Liz, and Val Williams, eds. Illuminations: Women Writing on
Photography from the 1850s to the Present. London: I. B. Tauris, 1996.
Miller, Francis Trevalyan. Photographic History of the Civil War. Vol.
1. New York: Review of Reviews Company, 1911.
Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-
Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
ALAN TRACHTENBERG is Neil Grey, Jr. Emeritus Professor of English and
Professor Emeritus of American Studies, Yale University. His books
include Reading American Photographs: Images as History (1989; winner
of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize), Shades of Hiawatha: Staging
Indians, Making Americans, 1890-1930 (2004; winner of the Francis
Parkman Prize), and Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas (2007).
Sep 30, 2008, 9:29 am Sep 30, 2008, 9:20 am Sep 30, 2008, 9:16 am Sep
30, 2008, 5:49 am Sep 30, 2008, 5:24 am Sep 30, 2008, 4:56 am
Search Engine News 