Photography, Shmotography (Part Three)

In two (count ‘em: one, two) previous posts, I wrote about the decline of the story through our society’s increasing reliance on images.

In my work on the public history class’ Museum London exhibit (plug-plug, wink-wink, Jeremy), questions like “did people want to document their lives for the same reasons that we do today?,” or “has the desire to record events changed over time?” popped into my head frequently. As I always try to do with my students, this thinking led me to the present day. This thinking prompted me to question why it is that we, today, want to document our lives so heavily. As I wrote in my museum text, cameras are everywhere. Everywhere!

I hesitate to think that the ubiquity of the camera is because we are a completely narcissistic society, but sometimes I have to wonder. I am not harping on the fact that we document everything (not yet, anyway), just wondering from where it stems.

I concur that photography, in the words of Nancy Martha West, “functions as its own language, with its own codes, rhetoric, agency, and reading practices separate from those of written language.” [1]

I also concur with West when she states that in spite of the language of photography that has evolved over the years, photography cannot adequately document our lives enough to supplant our memories. West posits that Kodak advertising in the early decades of the twentieth century planted the idea in the minds of the public that their memories were in danger of escaping them, and that Kodak was there to save the day. Thus, people began to rely on photographs and photography as a means of documenting the past. This practice, argues West, is partially to blame for the resultant erosion of the practice of telling stories through words.

While photography rose in prominence after the advent of the camera, writing, speaking, and telling stories as means of communicating our stories did not all of a sudden disappear from the landscape. After all, I am writing this blog. My point is that the ability to tell stories, and the skills involved in telling those stories has, in many cases, been largely superceded by the preference to tell stories through pictures. And I am just as guilty of this as the next person.

When I used to visit my grandmother before she passed away, I always made her pull out her family photo album. Whenever I return from a trip somewhere, or if visiting with people I have not seen in some time, I refer to pictures. I even have a flickr account (don’t judge me!), where people can go to see what pictures I think are interesting or worthy of publishing.

The thing is, when I interact with people and show them my pictures, or ask them to show me theirs, I always make sure to try to tell or get the story behind each picture. Every time I was at my grandmother’s house, I made sure to get at least one story out of her that I had not ever heard before. Sometimes I got the same story, but with a new twist, which was okay. It’s not that she was without her wits, but that talking about a particular person or event, in different ways and at different times, aroused different thoughts for her, as it does for me, and I suppose for you, too, dear reader. That just demonstrates the flexibility of memory.

But you cannot get that from pictures; you can only get the same picture, time and again. It is the people telling the story behind the picture that bring the picture to life. Now, if I ever get a chance to see my grandmother’s photo album again, I will be able relate some of her stories to the people around me who care to listen.

Which is why I have a problem with things like flickr. The only story you get is that told by the picture. People like Bill Turkel will tell you that now, with the wonders of the internet and Web 2.0, there is all sorts of metadata than can be embedded in the pictures that can tell you quite a lot more about the photo. And who knows, perhaps some day we will be able to attach a digital file to the photograph that will tell the viewer the story behind it, via the microchip implanted in that viewer’s brain.

And therein, once again, lies the problem. For me. In this semi-science fiction scenario I just made up, the human interaction is non-existent. It is just computer to brain.

I suppose the overarching gist of this three-part post, then, is not so much about photography, but how we communicate with one another. I know that I should not be too critical about photography, as it allows us a bit of a glimpse into the past. Albeit a brief, passing moment that we try to freeze into perpetuity.

Plus, I have some very close friends and family members who are extremely passionate about photography, and if I ever expect to get some nice prints from them, I had best stop bad-mouthing their passion.

I will conclude this by requesting that all those out there trying to enlighten us as to how to read photographs keep working at it; you have a lot of work ahead of you. Because for every thousand words a picture tells, there are another billion waiting to be told and heard.

____________________________________________________________________

[1] Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 166.

Photography, Shmotography (Part Two)

In a previous post, I lamented what I see as the loss of stories and storytelling. Their surrogate, I argued, is fast becoming the image, specifically the photograph. I would like to state that I am not advocating a complete disregard of the photograph, as I have a collection of my own that I cherish very deeply. Some might say that if we did not have photographs, there is much of the past that would be forgotten. Photo-journalists talk of “documenting” the atrocities of war and hardship the world over. Those, among others, are valuable uses of photography.

Nor do I think that the story is on a short rope.

It is when we expect to be able to tell a whole story just by looking at a picture that I believe we lose something of the past. The cliché, “a picture tells a thousand words,” is a crock if we take it to mean that it can tell the whole story. I fear that if we use pictures and images as the only means of telling our stories (through things like flickr and YouTube), the real depth of the world may slip away from us.

In the CBC interview I mentioned in my past post, Jennifer Baichwal discussed some issues surrounding photography that resonate with a discussion we had in one of our Public History classes regarding memory. She says that photography is artificial in some senses, especially in the way that it is a suspension of reality representing a specific moment. She equates still and moving images with laziness in memory. Her fear is that people are not living in the moment, not focusing on what it is they are doing. Instead, we worry about documenting the moment for future reference and use.

I agree with her. I think that in some ways we are too caught up in things like documentation to be able to stop and enjoy the moment, or even reflect on the moment.

But for historians, including public historians, this documentation is often seen as a goldmine, a real wealth of information. The problem with this view, however, is that rather than being able to tell our stories about the past, and relating events and moments to ourselves and others, we rely on the picture to tell those thousand words. Are we losing our ability to tell stories?

Now, some may argue that it is better to at least have a glimpse – a window, if you will – into a moment in the past, than nothing at all. And I think I agree. But I waver. And this is why.

A number of years ago, I did a tour of Australia with the band in I was in. On one particular night, my closest friend (and bandmate) and I sat outside Flinders University in Adelaide on a clear, sparkling night. The university is on a high elevation, so we could see for kilometres. We could even see the footy pitch where we had spent the previous day soaked to the skin watching the most amazing spectacle of sport I have ever witnessed. We sat out on that hill and talked for quite a while. It was a glorious, dazzling evening. We were young. We were about to play a gig. We were full of vim and vigour. I turned to Darryl (my bandmate), and said, “Man. This is beautiful. I wish we had a camera.”

He responded with something that has stuck with me ever since. He told me that that moment, that glorious view, could not be captured in a picture. It was better encapsulated in our minds. There was no way that a picture would ever relate how the two of us felt at that moment. This was a new idea to me, and it struck me with such profundity that I think it burned itself onto the rear interior of my skull.

Still, I remember just as clearly how he screamed like a girl and jumped into the front seat of our car when he saw a spider.

But Darryl’s point was that some things are better left to the imagination, to our memory. It was a memory for Darryl and I – and only Darryl and I – to share. Taking a picture of it and sharing it would have taken us, and any viewer of that picture, out of the moment. Sure, Darryl or I could look at the picture and recall that moment, but it would never capture the entire story.

Good public history ought to tell a story. To be honest, I just wanted to include "public history" in this blog somewhere so it shows up in a Google Blog Search under that topic. Cheeky of me, ain't it? Not really, though. I truly believe that history is storytelling, and that for the public to be interested in history (hence, "public history"), we public historians need to find ways of communicating meaningful, interesting stories about the past.

That’s long enough for one post. Stay tuned for Photography, Shmotography, Part Three.

Photography, Shmotography (Part One)

In researching and crafting the text for my artefacts for our class exhibit on inventions and innovations in London, I have been thinking about why people feel the need to document their lives. The items I am working on are a Ciné-Kodak Model B movie camera, and a Bell & Howell Filmo Ciné Projector (both dating from about 1925). One area that I have been thinking about, and that I did not get to address in the exhibit work, is the effect that photography and filmmaking has on our ability to tell our stories. So, I decided to think about that here.

Some people will argue that photography and filmmaking are nothing if not the stories of our lives. I disagree. I think that images (both still and moving) are quite often poor substitutes for the stories they attempt to relate.

According to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, photographs are false pathways to memory. Real memory, as I heard on CBCs The Current for November 16, 2006, is created in the mind. While photos can trigger memories, they are not the memories themselves (My classmate, Molly, wrote a great blog about something quite similar to this). Yet, we increasingly rely on photography and other images (like films) to document the past, rather than using our brains to hold those memories.

Images have a valuable place in our world, to be sure. My fear is the potential erosion of our memories – and collective memory – that comes along with our reliance upon them. While images are valuable for those who were not present to be able to get some sense of the past, are they really a substitute for the real memory? (I suppose you could ask me what “real memory” is, and I would have to concede that that is a fair question, and I do not have the answer for it. What I mean, in this case, by real memory, is the memory of the past contained within our heads).

Photographs do not stand in as a record of the reality of what happened. And I recognize that no credible historian would tell me to use photos as my sole source when looking into the past. I also admit that the memories inside our heads are far from perfect. The historian in me believes that history is story. My fear is that many of the stories that can and ought to be told are not, simply because people think it sufficient to supplement the story with an image.

To be continued…