This exercise summarises and draws some conclusion on Bate’s paper The Memory of Photography (Bate, 2010).
Photography and its relation to human memory
Bate’s document discusses the relationship between photography and memory. In particular he discusses whether or not it helps or hinders one’s recollections.
His paper is titled The Memory of Photography and he begins by noting the ambiguity in the title – is the paper related to the memory of photography itself or the memories created and stimulated by photography. He raises this point as he notes that photography is changing, moving from perhaps formal collections created by museums or institutions to those created easily using digital software applications such as Lightroom and the ease of creating images using phones, and of course the volume that this creates.
I think that this phemonenon may change his analysis of the other interpretation, photography’s part in defining a memory of the past. The reason I say this is that the software created archives of phone images are likely to contain images that are taken as spur of the moment snapshots, genuine captures of what was happening at the time, I accept that they are still polysemic, but their intent is one of capturing a memory whereas other, more formal, images are likely to have been taken with a purpose in mind and may therefore deliberately include and exclude items, as O’Sullivan did for example with his images such as his sand dunes (O’Sullivan, 1867)
Returning to the main interpretation of his paper’s title, Bate draws on Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad (Freud, 1925). Freud discusses the difference between actual memory, the recollection of an event, and aides that we might build to act as prompts for our memories, which is where photography fits in amongst other things such as writing and drawing.
In a later paper, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud agues that when mankind invents a machine or tool to help them with their own ability, that ability is weakened. He uses a motor power as his example citing that a human’s muscles weaken as alternative power is used. Bate raises the question of whether the usage of photography therefore weakens our ability to remember events as they occurred stating “the issue is whether these external technologies affect the inside mental space: the “archive”.
Collective Memory
Bate moves on to discuss the large formal collections produced in the past, such as those curated by Kings and Queens, giving the Louvre in Paris as an example. He discusses what he states as “the obvious”, archives such as these are not neutral. They are created for a purpose and that purpose is at the direction of the sponsor of that collection. I agree with this point of view and therefore that we cannot rely on collections such as these to illustrate history to us. Of course, actual memories of these times are no longer with us and so we do use these collections to act as a proxy for human memory. Clearly this is flawed.
That said, in the positive sense, Bate discusses family archives in that context states “ In a positive sense, such an archive or databank of images enables specific social groups, perhaps hitherto unrepresented, to find an identity or identification”. This is right in my mind, it is possible to create a databank with purpose that will provide a memory for others to view in the future. This is something I have come to understand more and more through my studies. Many images, though unremarkable at the time, become memories that in the future may serve a purpose in helping those who live in the future understand what has gone before; perhaps that is why the study of this paper is located within the Landscape as Political Text section of the course. It is possible to make a point now, but also to create a point that can be used in the future.
Meta Archives
Bate uses the term Meta Archive to describe the act of collecting or assembling a set of images specifically to “memorise things for us” in the future. He discusses Talbot’s ‘The Pencil of Nature’ in which Talbot states that he has essentially “copied” items into the archive as inventory. Using Talbot’s image of Nelsons Column Under Construction (Talbot, 1844) Bate discusses the layers of memory within the same image. The image is concerned with the building of Nelson’s Column, itself a memory of Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. At the same time, the image records the creation of a space to memorialise this memory. So the image is a memory of the creation of something that itself is a memory of something. Hence the phrase Meta Archive. Talbot, over 150 years ago, had already identified the ability of photography and the technique of archiving, to create something that can be used to preserve events for use as memory prompts in the future.
Prosthetic Memory
Bate moves on to discuss criticism that these archives are “obstructing” popular memory. They are being used not to show people what they were, but what they should remember having been. I am reading this paper at time when there is significant debate in the UK over the usage of statues, and the uncomfortable truth that many of the people that they depict became prominent through slavery. There is an ongoing debate over the statues, originally erected to essentially ‘glorify’ those individuals, should they now stand to continue that memory, stand to highlight the wrongs of the past, or be taken down due to their history. This is a debate that will not be resolved quickly but illustrates well how recordings of history can be viewed differently; the same considerations apply to photography.
This issue means that we cannot be sure of the relationship between memory and photography. Bate stating “So how are these various archipelagos of photographic practices in public popular memory … What relation do such images, as memory devices have to actual human memory? Is it that these Artificial Memories create uncertainty for the human faculty of memory, simply because they are “memories” that we have not necessarily experienced, or were experienced in a different way? Is it that as the human faculty of memory internalizes photographic images we no longer trust our memory as our own?”. He, like I, has no answer to this.
Mnemic-traces
Bate turns back to Freud to conclude his paper. Freud first notes that the apparatus we build to augment our senses are typically built “on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cam- eras, trumpets” (Freud, 1925) and notes “devices to aid our memory seem particularly imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory-traces of them.” (ibid.).
Bate states “The mnemic-traces are left in different systems, the conscious-preconscious and the unconscious. However, there are no memories, as such, in the unconscious (since it has no concept of time or reality, it is not a type of “historical record”), only mnemic inscriptions, mostly inaccessible, which is the trace “left by the memory”
This point is key to Bate’s conclusion. It essentially means that we don’t have explicit memories, we have abstractions of them, acting as mnemic aids and which help us piece together, or assemble, what we think of as a memory. Bate suggests that a photograph could be thought of as an empty shell for a fuller story from memory, creating a space for that memory to be constructed as it is recalled. Bate brings this back to Barthes’ studium and punctum. The studium being what is familiar or obvious about the image, corresponding directly to what the image shows. The punctum is what comes afterwards, what we make of the image or how we react to it. This would perhaps come from elements of the image corresponding to the traces we have stored away, and our minds recreating the memory associated with those traces, we therefore jump from the image to our memories.
I think this concept serves to highlight the importance of leaving space in an image for a viewer to perform this feat in their mind, to retain that polysemic nature, to provide enough detail to trigger a trace, but no so much detail as to ensure that the traces are discounted.
Bate finishes on this point stating “With photographs, memory is both fixed and fluid: social and personal. There is nothing neutral here. As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or ana- logue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemic devices, are perceptual phenomena”. Although he doesn’t say it, I feel that his conclusion therefore is that whilst Photography can play a part in memory, the link is not as strong as one might first suppose.
Bibliography
Bate, D., 2010 The Memory of Photography, Photographies, 3:2, 243-257, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2010.499609
O’Sullivan, T., 1867. Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada. [online] Cleveland Museum of Art. Available at: <https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2002.45> [Accessed 11 May 2021].
Freud, S., 1925. The ‘Mystic Writing-pad.’ 1925. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Pelican Freud, vol. 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 427–433.
Freud, S., 1930. Civilization and its Discontents. 1930. Civilization, Society and Religion. Pelican. Freud, vol. 12. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. 243–340.
Talbot, W., 1844. [Nelson’s Column under Construction in Trafalgar Square, London] (Getty Museum). [online] The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. Available at: <https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/40138/william-henry-fox-talbot-nelson%27s-column-under-construction-in-trafalgar-square-london-british-april-1844/> [Accessed 11 May 2021].