Paper #2, "Rough Draft"

So here's what I've written so far for my second paper due Sept. 1 (yeah, I know it's a little early, but I've had a lot on my mind with these pieces, and frankly I've had more time to write lately than to make artwork). It feels a little disjointed to me right now, and there's some themes that I didn't add, including the idea of fetish, because it seemed like it might be overload for one paper. Please please please give me any thoughts, questions, and comments you have before Sept. 1 so I can make improvements! I'll try to do the same for anyone else who posts their papers!

Here goes:

In centuries past, the feeling of nostalgia was considered to be a neurosis caused by a swelling of the brain. At some point around the turn of the 19th century, it became a marketable industry. How was it that nostalgia made the sharp turn from feared, irrational thought to longed, embraced emotion? Is it possible that the proliferation of photography, with its promise of truthfully recording the present (which immediately becomes the past) was paramount in the change? It seems likely, especially since photographs created during the first sixty years or so of the craft’s existence appear to people today to be steeped in nostalgia, practically regardless of the subject. Many find it practically impossible to look at old photographs or even old-looking photographs without injecting a healthy dose of bittersweet longing for the past into them. This can be a problem for the fine art photographer. A majority of the fine art world of today views nostalgia in a similar way to those who lived centuries ago: with distrust bordering on disdain. Therefore, it is imperative that any artist working in early photographic processes or a process that harkens back to old photographs must deeply understand and deal with this phenomenon.

This is not to say that any trace of nostalgia within a piece of artwork is a cancer that must be surgically removed. It does, however, mean that the artist must be careful not to get “caught up” in it; or if he does, be able to defend it. My own artwork up to this point has been in danger of being lost in the sea of nostalgia, which is fine for marketing to the masses at craft fairs and sidewalk art shows, but it does little to further my own artistic development and intellectual voice. Taking pictures of “old things with an old process,” as one of my professors at Lesley put it, can only take me so far. I must begin to find some inner meanings in my work. Why, for instance, am I so interested in the mannequins at a large antique store near my home that I return to photograph them repeatedly? Why am I printing these images with a process similar to 19th century tintypes? And if I am insistent on continuing to produce these images, how do I use them to create fine art that will speak to more than just pure nostalgia?

At the June MFA residency I was directed by more than one person to the book, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance by Geoffrey Batchen. It has ended up being an indispensable resource for me, breaking down in very clear, concise prose the relationship between photography and memory. Batchen’s book is important because it takes a rare serious look at portraiture photography of ordinary people in the 19th century and how these images were used and embellished by their owners with the intention of enhancing their memories. Unfortunately for these people, according to Batchen and Siegfried Kracauer, the German critic he cites, their attempts to bring people “back to life” through photography were invariably futile:

“Photography captures too much information to function as memory. It is too coherent and too linear in its articulation of time and space. It obeys the rules of nonfiction. Memory, in contrast, is selective, fuzzy in outline, intensively subjective, often incoherent, and invariably changes over time – a conveniently malleable form of fiction.”

A photograph is able to answer the questions “what” and “where,” at best. It may be able to show a viewer what a person’s face looks like at a particular age, what kind of clothing they wore, what some of their surroundings were like. It may even allow a viewer to recall a treasured memory of an interaction or conversation with the person in the photograph; it cannot, however, contain a memory itself. The question “why” cannot be accurately answered by a photograph, and even “when” is an answer that can’t be trusted. It is always, therefore, the viewer’s job to create a history for or memory of the subject in the photograph. This is where nostalgia rears its potentially ugly head.

In Forget Me Not, Batchen instructs the reader to “think back to childhood. Can you remember it? Or do the images that come to mind resemble the photographs you have been shown of your childhood? Has photography quietly replaced your memories with its own?” I would answer yes and no to this question. Photography, especially the family snapshot, tends to capture only one side of the subjects’ lives: the happy moments, the events and times that people want to remember. How often are the bad times we experience, or even simply our mundane daily rituals, rushed to be captured on film? I have vivid memories of sad, painful moments of my childhood that were not photographed, nor would anyone have thought to photograph them. Photography is particularly susceptible to nostalgia, I believe, because of this. We expect to see a positive view of life in portraits and candid snapshots; our minds are trained this way at an early age, when our parents and grandparents sit us down to look through the album of “family memories.” We sit, look, and long for a pleasant past that didn’t really exist. “Why can’t our lives be more like the people’s in these pictures?”

With my series of mannequin tintypes, I am currently attempting to make an ironic comment on this phenomenon of “created memory.” I was told often during the June residency that it was difficult to tell if some of the portraits I created were of real people or mannequins. Some people got the impression that the mannequins were coming to life; others had the exact opposite response, believing that these were real people who had seemed to turn artificial. Geoffrey Batchen makes an interesting comment in his book that helps me relate 19th century portraits to the work I am producing: “In early photographs, it seems, if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual image, one had to pose as if dead. Not surprisingly, the resulting portraits have all the animation of a wax effigy.” Exposure times for photographs during a good part of the 19th century were quite long – in some cases so long that sitters would have their heads supported by clamps to keep the final image from being blurred. The resulting poses were often unnatural and lifeless. In an attempt to inject more “reality” in these old ambrotypes and tintypes, they were often hand-colored by the photo studio that took them. A mixture of media, including transparent oil paint, India ink, and wax crayon or chalk pastel, was used to coat the image’s surface. Some contain a minimum of color: some rose in the cheeks, a bit of gold on buttons and jewelry. Other photographs were almost obliterated by color. A person’s face might be colored using transparent paint, while the rest of the image is drowned in opaque ink and crayon to the point where it resembles a folk art painting. In these, Batchen argues, “the epistemological presence of the photograph is strengthened by its perceptual absence. These images, so simple at first glance, exploit a complex form of palimpsest; they could be said to offer ‘an erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read.’”

Addition as erasure; artificial as real; fiction as truth – these are the themes that are being explored in my tintypes, which I am now hand-coloring as well. I am creating loving portraits of beings that have no memory, and no way of relating their history. However, I have a history with these antique store mannequins that I can share. I have known of them and have “visited” them for ten years now. As time passed they moved from room to room; their clothing changed; a hand shifted from desk to sofa. They inhabit the bizarre world of the antique store, watching over objects that once had a useful purpose in a home but now are in a historical limbo, waiting to be adopted or destroyed. I do not consider the mannequins to be “friends” of some sort, but I do think of them fondly, and I look forward to seeing them when entering the store and breathe a slight sigh of relief when I turn a corner and find one standing “where I left it” the last time I was there. The feeling may have something to do with a human’s desire to see faces and bodies in all places and objects. James Elkins states in his book, The Object Stares Back, “The face is definitely the object I see best. I see the most in it: in fact I see far more than I am aware of seeing, more than I could ever describe or list. It is the site of the most nuanced looking of which I am capable, and I am lucky if I see anything else in the world with a tenth of the concentration that I train on faces.”

Of course, I could look into the eyes of an antique store mannequin until the cows come home and would not find any true understanding or meaning behind them. The same is true of 19th century photographic portraits. We have as much information about the people in these photos as we do of a mannequin standing in front of us. We must create a history for them using the clues we see and potential memories we have. Viewers of my tintypes are welcomed to bring their own histories and memories to the works. They can find nostalgia in them if they like, but to do so they must grapple with the knowledge that the subject in the photograph is not real, and following that, that photography itself plays in inherent untruths. As Geoffrey Batchen says, “memory…is both artifice and reality, something perceived, invented, and projected, all at once.”