Derrida’s Spectres:  Hauntography and Photography

Contents

Abstract 3

Introduction 4

What is Hauntology? 6

Photographic Theory 9

Materiality:  Analog v. Digital 12

Contemporary Practitioners 15

Hauntography - Rephotography and

Hauntology 21

Conclusion 23

List of illustrations 25

References 26

Bibliography 29

Abstract

 This essay explores the inherently hauntological nature of photography as a medium and shows that photographic theory had already established this nature before Derrida coined a name for it.  It considers the work of a small selection of contemporary practitioners to identify a number of different ways in which work can manifest its hauntological nature.  It proposes though that there is no fundamental distinction to be drawn between analog and digital photography and that ultimately the choice of technology alone does not make a difference to a photograph’s potential hauntological effect.  Particular attention is given to the practice of rephotography and suggests that such an approach might be termed “hauntography” and that it is a particularly powerful and adaptable tool for producing work that is manifestly hauntological in its effect.  Despite the fact that hauntography and photography are in a symbiotic relationship relatively little would appear to have been written about that relationship from the point of photographic theory.  This essay proposes that each can benefit and enrich the other, but tentatively identifies that further work on the relationship is needed.

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.”

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets:  Burnt Norton

Introduction  

To what extent can it be said that photographs are inherently hauntological?  As with Orwell’s animals, (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” (1972)), are some photographs more hauntological than others?  As starting point I will give a brief overview of the concept of hauntology, its genesis, as originally proposed by Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s, and meanings.

Although relatively little has so far been written that relates directly to how hauntology might find its place in photographic theory, the concept has however been applied in other cultural spheres, beside Derrida’s original political, historical, and economic perspective.   I will look at how hauntology has been applied and understood in relation to such areas as they are examples of how the concept has been developed and expounded over time, something that Derrida himself never did, so that they can cast further light on what hauntology means in practice. 

I will consider what lessons can be learned from how hauntology has been applied to cinema, insofar as photography and cinema are so closely related.  Both involve the capturing of light from a subject, on a suitable matrix (film or a digital sensor), over a given period of time.  The two media differ only in so far as photography deals with single images whereas cinema uses a sequence of photographic stills seen in quick succession that our brains stitch together and perceive as a single, continuous, moving image.   [“Perception of moving images” in Gregory (1987), p 604.]

I will consider general photographic theory and the temporal elements within photographs to see what earlier theorists, notably Roland Barthes, can tell us about the relationship between hauntology and photography.  Indeed, I intend to argue that what existing theory did was to identify the hauntological nature of photographs before Jacques Derrida coined a name for it.

I will then consider the work of a number of artists whose work might be regarded as hauntological, exploring the different artistic strategies that they have employed, and how those strategies might affect or influence our perceptions and understanding of the temporal elements contained within those photographs.  What I propose is that whilst all photographs are inherently hauntological, not all photographs necessarily communicate their hauntological nature in the same way or to the same extent; that, returning to Orwell, some photographs are more hauntological than others.  In this regard, I will look specifically at the practice of rephotography [Also known as repeat photography, the practice of taking photographs of a specific site or location over time to show evidence of change; in the present context, more specifically, taking contemporary photographs of places that have been photographed in the past.] which, I will suggest, has a particularly close relationship with hauntology.

What is Hauntology?

“Hauntology” is not a word that commonly appears in contemporary dictionaries (though it has its own Wikipedia entry).  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology]  So what does it mean and where did it originate?

In 1848 (the year of revolutions) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published, in German, Manifesto of the Communist Party and announced, in its opening sentence:

“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”  (1888, p. 39)

In 1991 the Soviet Union came to and end, the culmination of a process that had gathered pace in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communist regimes across Eastern Europe.  Francis Fukuyama announced, controversially, “the end of history” in his book (1992) and argued that liberal democracies and free-market capitalism signalled the end point of humanity’s social and cultural evolution, the final, most prevalent and efficient form of government.

However, Jacques Derrida argued in lectures at a conference in California, subsequently forming his book (1994), that the spectre of Marxism and Communism, even though no longer existing as forms of government and political economy, nevertheless still haunted Western liberal capitalism and democracies, that “the time was out of joint”, and that the ghost of Communism, like that of Hamlet’s father, still stalked the battlements.  Punning on the French pronunciation of ontology, [The metaphysics of the nature of being.]  he coined the term “hauntology”.  Derrida saw hauntology as a concept more powerful than ontology alone, and that it would include within itself eschatology, [The theology and philosophy of death and final destiny.]  and teleology.  [The explanation of phenomena by their purpose rather than as a function of possible causes.]

It comes out of his earlier work on deconstruction, and the assertion that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an “always-already absent present” (Macksey & Donato, (1970), p.254).    Elements of the Past (here communism), although they no longer have an actual existence, are nevertheless given a virtual presence in the Present. 

Hauntology is in some ways a difficult concept to explain clearly or summarise succinctly, not least because Derrida himself never had the opportunity to fully work through his own idea.  Whilst at the heart of the book, the word appears only three times within 240 odd pages.  Although Derrida did write elsewhere about photography, particularly in discussing and developing some of Barthes’s work (2000) which is relevant to how we might see the relationship between photography and hauntology, (for example 2002, in conversation with Bernard Stiegler, and 2010, with Hubertus von Amelunxen and Michael Wetzel), he did not expand much upon the concept in this particular context.  

Nevertheless, the idea of hauntology has in recent years been applied to a number of other cultural discourses.  This has however led to it being interpreted and applied in a number of different ways, without any clear consistency.  Much has been written, in particular by Mark Fisher (2012), Simon Reynolds (and Parker, (2012)), and Adam Harper (as Rouges Foam) (2009), about how hauntology might be applied to popular music (how in particular music has in many ways become mired in nostalgia and is constantly repeating old forms, what Reynolds termed “retromania”).  Fisher put forward a compelling argument that hauntology is not just about the past but is more about a future that failed to materialise, and a nostalgia for that lost future.  Berardi (2009) argues, that we have lost faith in the idea of a Future as being something better than the Present.  It has found a place in anthropology and ethnography (Cavalcanti de Araujo (2006), and Clanton (2017)).  Gallix (2011) discusses hauntology from the point of view of literary theory.   

Such work, developing and expanding Derrida’s original thoughts, suggests that many forms and media of representation, ways of recording the past, have the capacity to be hauntological.  However, how a medium is used does not automatically mean that it is in fact hauntological and, as the case of music, it might amount to little more than a nostalgia-based aesthetic.

Importantly, as we will see when considering the work of contemporary practitioners, hauntology can be seen to be as much about a future that did not materialise than simply about the past.  This is arguably implicit Derrida’s initial formulation of the idea.  At its heart is the story of Hamlet and of the haunting by his murdered father.  Rather than just being about the haunting, the ghost’s presence in the here and now of the play is about a lost future:  a future in which Hamlet would himself have become king, and might have married Ophelia.

Hauntology does not though yet appear to have had much direct impact on photographic theory.  Both are concerned with the same phenomenon, giving the past a virtual existence in the present.  In the same way that other cultural disciplines have been enriched, and developed in new directions by the application to them of hauntology,  given the apparent close kinship of hauntology and photography, a similar symbiotic relationship should also exist.

Photographic Theory

To understand how the idea of hauntology and the medium of photography relate to each other we need to go back to basics.  What I propose to show is that photographic theory already told us that photographs are hauntological and that what Derrida did was to give us a new name for an existing phenomenon.

The work of such photographic theorists as Roland Barthes and John Berger, shows that photographs do indeed contain elements of the Past and are able to convey hints of possible Futures, even when only a “snapshot” (in de Duve’s sense of an unstaged picture, such as a press photograph, rather than a particular photographic genre).  How the viewer perceives those traces of time though is subjective, and is therefore relative, depending on the wider context within which the photograph might be viewed.  Much also depends on the photographic codes employed by the photographer and typologies used.  These are issues particularly important, and to which I shall return, when looking at the work of a number of practitioners.

As photographs do contain traces of the past, they are particularly well suited to acting as memory devices, as souvenirs (from the French verb for to remember).  They help to keep alive the memories of people, places, events, from the past.  As such they are closely connected to nostalgia, as is discussed by Boym (2001):  many examples that she gives of the collections of souvenirs, almost in the nature of shrines or fetishes, kept by immigrants to America, feature photographs, particularly of people (family members), and places where they lived before emigrating.  Boym identifies two different types of nostalgia.  One, which she terms restorative is characterised by a desire to reconstruct a lost past, to in effect turn back the clock.  The other, reflective, has more to do with a yearning for a lost past or place, that can no longer be recovered.  As Boym puts it, reflective nostalgics “see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts.”  (2001, p. 251)  It is just such a reflective nostalgia that is provided by photographs, especially where they perform a memorial function.  Superficially at least, there are some similarities in this regard between nostalgia and hauntology.  However, whereas nostalgia focuses squarely on the past, and a desire to resurrect or recreate it in the present, hauntology is, as we shall see, more forward looking towards the future, concerned with futures that failed to materialise.  Hauntology deals with how elements of the past, although they no longer exist, nevertheless have a virtual existence in the present.  Those traces, which are subjective and relative - the photograph is, as it were, an unreliable witness of the past - upset or interrupt the flow of time, destabilising the present, shaping and affecting the future.

Returning to “traditional” photographic theory it might be argued that there is in fact no need to look for ways in which hauntology might relate and be applied to photographs as the work had already been done before Derrida proposed the idea.  It had already been proposed by Barthes and his identification of the photograph as “that has been” (2000, p. 76).

Although the subject of the photograph might no longer exist, its past is nevertheless still here in the present in virtual form in the photograph.  Much of Derrida’s consideration of photography was of course largely based upon an analysis and development of the work of Barthes (for example, 2010).  Barthes’s analysis of the photograph is effectively that it is “hauntological”, avant le mot.  Barthes was perhaps the progenitor of the idea of hauntology, it was Derrida who gave it the name.

As has been discussed at some length by Schofield (2018), Derrida’s reappraisal of Barthes has significant consequences for my central question.  In so far as all photographs tell us “this has been”, they are all hauntological to some extent.  What Barthes suggests though is we cannot necessarily perceive their spectres, to fully perceive and understand their hauntological nature and effect.  For Barthes what is important here is the punctum.  Initially Barthes simply described punctum as an element in the photograph that catches the attention of the viewer, “pricks” or “wounds” them.  Without punctum there can only be a neutral reaction to the picture (2000, p.27). 

Later (2000, p. 96), Barthes recognised that time itself acted as a punctum, suggesting again that all photographs are inherently hauntological.  Derrida developed Barthes’s thinking by arguing (2010, pp 8ff) that punctum, in its temporal nature, is not just a single instant but “a differential duration that is more or less calculable” (p9), and that all recorded media are spectral (p39). 

Most of his work was to do with cinema and he only wrote once on photography (1967), but André Bazin is an important theorist whose thoughts on photography are particularly relevant.  This brief essay prefigures Barthes and Derrida.  He argues that, in contrast to realist painting, the photograph preserves, indeed becomes, the subject and gives it an “afterlife” (1967, p. 8).  In this sense Bazin takes the idea of “this has been” further even than Barthes appears to have contemplated.  Not only does the photograph tell us that “this has been” but that “this still is” in the form of the photograph itself.  What, or who, no longer exists, still has a virtual presence in the present.  He also prefigures Derrida, for whom the notion of time being “out of joint” is central to hauntology, the idea that the photograph “embalms time”, interrupting its flow, preserving the past in the present.

There though is also some objective, empirical, evidence thats support the theory that photography is indeed inherently hauntological.  Varga’s paper (2022) deals with a pedagogical study, carried out in a Florida secondary school, that explored how students’ historical awareness and knowledge were affected by their engagement with photographs.  In particular by using different approaches to rephotography, and the concept of hauntology (amongst other analytical concepts), it was found that the students extended the boundaries of their historical consciousness and thinking about their relationships to the past, present, and future.

This study was not about rephotography or hauntology, and it is a single study, so by no means conclusive.  The authors themselves qualify their findings and suggest further work that might be done.   Nevertheless, it does support the idea that photographs are hauntological.  By demonstrating how the photographs used affected the students’ historical awareness demonstrated hauntology in action.  It also showed in practice that how the spectres are discerned and interpreted can be affected by the visual strategies used by the artist, the contexts within which the work is seen, and the subjective experience of the viewers, supporting Barthes’s analysis of the punctum. 

Photographic theory tells us, especially in the writing of Roland Barthes, the hauntological nature of photographs was already clearly recognised.  Derrida has given us a name for this element of the temporal phenomenology of photographs, and offers new, more nuanced ways, of understanding the relationship between the photograph and the past.

Materiality:  Analog v. Digital

Traditionally, photographs existed as physical artefacts, negatives and prints.  Now, photographs are more likely to be digital and have no physical presence.  Does the nature of the photograph, print, or digital copy, itself spectral as it has no physical presence, affect its hauntological nature?

Materiality in photography is a large topic in its own right and not something that can be fully considered here.  Nevertheless, there are some important questions that can be raised in the context of hauntology.  Schofield (2018) discusses this at some length, and is also touched upon by Benjamin and Stiegler.  Is the physical existence of a photograph determinative of its hauntological nature?  Are there significant differences from a hauntological point of view between analog and digital technologies? 

There is little doubt that the materiality of old photographs can lend them a particularly haunting nature.  Tears, scratches, creases, stains, faded colours, are all visible and physical evidence of the passage of time, emphasising that what they show is lost and that its past existence is now evidenced only by its appearance in the photograph.  this For Benjamin (2008) physicality lent historical photographs their “aura”, the uniqueness of the original work of art.  Benjamin lamented the loss, or diminution, of this aura through mechanical reproduction, and his argument suggests the materiality of a photograph is bound up with the extent to which it is haunted.  However, Benjamin recognised that an image can nevertheless be “re-aurified”:

“… in allowing the reproduction to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in, it actualises what is reproduced.”  (2008, p. 7)

Benjamin identifies as characteristics of the original work of art, “uniqueness and duration”, and of the reproduction, “transience and reiterability” (p. 10).  This temporal element suggests that Benjamin’s aura is similar to Barthes’s time as punctum.  As punctum was developed by Derrida, suggesting that all photographs are haunted, there is no real distinction to be drawn between the hauntological nature of the original and the copy in Benjamin’s formulation of aura.

Bernard Stiegler, both a student of and collaborator with Derrida, entered into a dialogue with him that included hauntology in their joint book (2002).  Stiegler agreed hauntology and photography are linked, taking Barthes as his starting point.  Taking up Barthes’s discussion of a portrait of Baudelaire, Stiegler argues that the photograph has an hauntological nature as result of the chains of photons in the light that originally touched Baudelaire, that can still be seen today in the physical photograph, so the viewer is “touched” by that light notwithstanding that Baudelaire cannot literally be touched by the viewer (2002, p. 125)

In his essay “The Discrete Image”, (2002, pp. 145 ff.) Stiegler proposed a distinction between the analog image and the digital.  He argues that analog photography presupposes that what is photographed is “real”, producing a negative from which physical prints can be made.  On the other hand, the digital image is “synthetic”, having no physical existence, and may be manipulated so that the possibility of distinguishing the true from the false is compromised.  The analog photograph, captures Barthes’s “this has been”.  The potentially manipulated digital image allows doubt “that the thing has been there.”  He does recognise that even analog images can be manipulated but nevertheless holds to his main point. He argues that even when an analog photograph has been manipulated, it still must be said of the subject, “this was”.  With an analog photograph it is not possible to say that “this was not”.  

“I have to say:  This was, but there is something, however, that isn’t quite right.” (2002, p. 150)

Arguably though, the fact an analog image can still be manipulated, deliberately or accidentally, must undermine the distinction.   There are plenty of instances of manipulation for artistic purposes: for example, the fantastical tableaux of Oscar Rejlander.  For political purposes, those who fell foul of Stalin were “airbrushed” out of Soviet photographs, and of life, as Leon Trotsky suffered and attacked as the Stalinist school of falsification (1937).  An analog photograph might be “real”, as “this was”, and has a physical existence.  But, as it can still be manipulated it is not necessarily “true”, as the “this was” visible in the photograph was not necessarily as it really was; the photograph does not necessarily show what the camera actually saw.  Even without manipulation analog photographs are capable of not telling the truth.  A classic example is the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs that purport to show real fairies in a garden with the two children.  They are “real” in that the camera accurately recorded what was before it.  [See for example https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/the-story-of-the-cottingley-fairies-shows-that-image-manipulation-is-nothing-new/ ]  They are however not “true” as the fairies were just card cut-outs.  The analog image therefore has the potential to be as unreliable as the digital.

Rosemier (2021) suggests that the ephemeral, non-physical, nature of digital images heightens their haunting nature.  Paradoxically though, she also suggests that older technologies and techniques might be useful strategies for making hauntological work.  Working with film might well inform an artist’s intentions and how they approach their work, and that this might have an effect on the outcome.  However, most photographs today are viewed digitally regardless of the methods used to make them.  Little, if anything, in the photograph indicates how it was made.  How can a viewer if what they are seeing is digitally generated image or a digital version of something originally shot on film.  Marc Wilson, (see below) works primarily with large format colour film.  What we see when we view it on his website, or in one of his books, has been scanned so we see a digital image.  The underlying materiality of the photograph is lost to the viewer.  The use of film does not make his photographs any more, or less, hauntological.  Their hauntological nature and effect comes down his intentions, the codes employed, the context within which the work is displayed and viewed.

Is the choice of older technologies little more than an aesthetic choice rooted in nostalgia?  The work of artists such as Wilson suggests that this is too simplistic an analysis.  Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously argued that “the medium is the message”, that the nature of the medium used to share a message is more important than the actual content of the message itself. The medium makes no difference to the hauntological nature of photographs, (as Gere also argues (2016, pp. 204 - 205).  How their spectrality manifests itself might differ from image to image, and has more to do with the approaches and intentions of the photographers, as we shall see when next we consider the work of some contemporary photographers.

Contemporary Practitioners

Any survey of contemporary photographers whose work can be regarded as hauntological must of necessity be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and subjective.  Nevertheless, there are a number that are worth considering for what they can tell us about different approaches to hauntological photography.  They also throw up an apparent paradox that has implications for the meaning of hauntology itself.

The paradox: at the heart of Barthes’s analysis of photography there is the concept of mourning.  He uses the Winter Garden photograph as a way of “finding” his mother and mourning her death.  The object of the photograph no longer exists.  For de Duve (1978) the photograph is a “Denkmal”, a memorial.  Derrida also referred to the photograph as an act of mourning (2007).  In some contemporary work the subject matter of the photograph still exists, the physical traces of the past still exist.  The “this has been” still is, is not “dead”.  So what has died, what still haunts the present and the photograph?  Death here relates to time, the moment of the exposure.  It is the moment that is dead and has left a trace that persists.  But is it only that moment that has died, or something else as well?

In discussing the work of Michał Grochowiak and Nicolas Grospierre, Marianna Michałowska suggests that what has “died” is a future that failed to materialise:

the photograph shows a failed utopia, the project of socialism. (2020, p. 84)  This is consistent with Mark Fisher’s argument, that hauntology is not so much about the past as about a future that never arrived, and Berardi’s ideas about a loss of faith in the future.  As Rosemier puts it:

“… photographic hauntology is conspicuous in the extensive documentation of cultural relics and deteriorating structures, symbols of futures that failed to materialise.”  (2021 p. 12)

In contrast, the photographs of James Lacey for his World in Ruins project (2022), which includes locations in Europe but not in the East, are much more firmly rooted in the past and an exploration of the histories attached to them. 

Similarly, Marc Wilson’s The Last Stand (2020), which photographs the re mains of Second World War coastal defences around the UK and mainland Europe’s Atlantic and North Sea margins, depicts things that still exist.  Many are too large and well-built to have been removed or destroyed.  Their continuing existence is itself a form of concrete memory of the past that the photographs can help to  preserve.

2. Marc Wilson, 2019, Studland Bay

Within these various works there a variety of aesthetic choices made by the artists that have an impact upon the hauntological nature of the images.

In his photographs of the interior of the Palace of Culture and Science, as well as the furniture and other artefacts within its rooms, Grochowiak has included small clouds (of dust or smoke?) that hover, ghostlike, in the spaces.  These wraithlike presences serve to emphasise that something is missing:  people.  The clouds are a memory of the presence of the people who inhabited these rooms in the past. 

3. Michał Grochowiak, 2009, Breath

Grospierre on the other hand, focuses on the monumentality, the huge size, of buildings and installations, excluding people from view.  The monumentality reminds us of the failed utopia.

4. Nicholas Grospierre, 2016, Museum of Archeology, Tbilisi

A particularly interesting contemporary practitioners is Marc Wilson, in particular his work  A Wounded Landscape (2022). This differs from The Last Stand (2020) in that it is much less direct, the images are more enigmatic, and only give up their meaning when combined with portraits, testimonies, maps, and other documents.  The viewer therefore has to work harder to read them and immerse more deeply in the project as a whole.

The book is an extended series of photographs of sites throughout Europe that are related to the Holocaust.  There is little immediately visible in the photographs that tells us their significance.  In discussing Adolf Eichmann’s role in the bureaucracy of the holocaust, Hannah Arendt (2006) coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, arguing that Eichmann was not a fanatic or ideologically driven, and that his actions came from a complacency that was unexceptional.  Many of Wilson’s images might be termed banal, of unexceptional places:  overgrown woodland, scrubland, empty fields, patches of concrete, nondescript buildings in various states of disrepair.  However, when these viewed in the context of the other materials included the book their true significance becomes apparent. There are portraits of Holocaust survivors, with their personal testimonies.  There are old family photographs, and other documents and artefacts that combine to build a broader picture of what befell these people, and millions of others who did not survive, and the horrors committed in these places.   

5. Marc Wilson, 2022, Area to the right of crematoria, forest camp, Kulmhof extermination camp.

In contrast to the other works discussed above, there are few physical remains of the structures that existed in the 1940s.  His photographs are therefore, one might say, doubly haunted:  they are haunted by the absence of the physical traces of genocide, as well as by the shades of the people who were killed there.  Unlike the concrete remains of the fortifications, here we have “true” ghosts, things and people that cannot be seen but  nevertheless still haunt these places and the photographs now made of them.

Does it though necessarily follow that all photographs can be perceived as hauntological? Are there artists whose work does not easily fit the hauntological bill? What about abstract photography, or work that although it involves a recognisable, representational subject, lacks any sense of time or place?  

Take for example, the Japanese artist Masao Yamamoto.    Much of his work deals with readily identifiable objects, but no real sense of time or place is apparent.  He captures a moment and stops time, steps out of time.  There is neither a sense of past, nor indeed of present beyond the moment in which the photograph is made.   

6. Masao Yamamoto, 2023, Tomosu

As Jacobo Siruela observes in his introduction to Yamamoto’s Small Things in Silence (2020) (p. 7): “… Nor can the imprint of contemporary historical events be discerned in his photographs.”

Such work is nevertheless still hauntological.  The spectre, the dead moment of the exposure, is still there.  That spectre is in the DNA of the image and is also the photograph itself.  It is not the experience itself but a ghost of the experience.  Such work simply manifests its hauntological nature differently.  Rather than being an exception to the “rule” that all photographs are hauntological, such work instead offers an example of how an image can give up its hauntological nature reluctantly.  The aesthetic choices of the artist mean that there are effectively no, or few, temporal elements that are readily apparent, so the photographs might be said to be “less hauntological.”  They are nevertheless still inherently hauntological.

A further question to consider is whether for a photograph to manifest its hauntological nature it must be temporally specific?

It might be thought, given the central role of time in photographs, that to have an hauntological effect a photograph needs overtly to be historically and temporally specific,  to look back a particular historical moment, or otherwise demonstrate when it was made.  Wilson again suggests that this is not the case.  The work in A Wounded Landscape is not temporally specific, does not overtly point to any particular historical moment.  There is nothing obvious in the photographs to indicate when they were taken, apart from their captions.  Nothing on their face alone tells us that they are linked to the Holocaust.  That historical moment becomes apparent only when the images are viewed in their wider context, and in conjunction with the other materials upon which he relies.

These various examples of contemporary work offer a more nuanced and qualified answer to the question under consideration.  It can clearly be argued that photographs are inherently hauntological.  However, it can also be said that some are more hauntological in their effect than others.  Some photographs give up their story of the past easily.  The traces of the past that they carry are patent.  Others are more subtle, their meanings, their traces of the past, are less easily read, and dependent on a wider context, making their hauntological effect all the stronger, and more affecting, by not being so literal.

Hauntography - Rephotography and Hauntology

One particular approach to the making of overtly hauntological photographs is the practice of rephotography.  It is a practice that wears its hauntological nature on its sleeve.  Indeed, the clear and patent hauntological effect is its very raison d’être, and as such offers a particularly clear example of the inherent hauntological nature of photographs and the symbiosis between the medium and hauntology.

The work of Michael Schofield (2018), referred to above, is firmly grounded in practical, rephotography projects.  His practice involves rephotographing sites in and around Leeds that appear in the extensive archive amassed by retired industrialist Godfrey Bingley, and Schofield has paired the old and new images, and combined them in various ways to create composites that show, at the same time, traces of both the past and the present.  This is what sets up their hauntological effect.  My own practice is similarly project led, an extended exercise in rephotography in and around my village.  [https://www.markrobinsonphotography.com/stocksfield-rephotographed-introduction ]

Kalin (2013) makes an argument that the process of rephotography itself is a haunting:

“Rephotography is best understood as hauntography to emphasise how any perspective upon the present is haunted by its own past.  Hauntography - hauntological montage - retemporalizes memory by inventing memory images and places that mobilise perspectives and bodies to perform acts of personal and public remembering.”  (2013, p. 176)

An aspect of rephotography/hauntography is what Schofield has termed “impossible rephotography”, by which he refers to original places and sites that no longer exist or cannot be identified.  The contemporary photograph is therefore attempting to capture something from the past that can no longer be seen.  As with Wilson’s work, there is here a double haunting, photographing something from the past that can no longer be seen, that is also invisible now.  His approach to such places has been to use maps, combined with the new photographs to give a sense, albeit an admittedly flawed and partly speculative view, of what those now invisible places might look like today.  (This is something with which I have had similar experiences in my own project, Stocksfield Rephotographed.) 

This use of a variety of different media to accompany the photographs themselves, raises parallels with Wilson’s holocaust work.  Whilst the groupings of images are in themselves hauntological, the force of their haunting nature is enhanced by the use of other less literal approaches than straightforward landscape photography.  The original scene is recreated, rephotographed, not simply by the activity of making a new photograph, but by also combining it with other materials that help to show something that would not otherwise be visible in a photograph alone.

Rephotography can be seen as a particularly powerful, yet subtle, strategy to make work that has a strong hauntological effect. It is of particular importance in so far as it shows so clearly how the medium and the theory can be of mutual benefit to each other.

Conclusion

Even before Derrida coined the word “hauntology” in 1993, the idea of haunting and its relationship to photography, was already abroad, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.  It was already there in Benjamin’s thoughts on “aura” in the 1930s.  It is there in Bazin’s rare foray into photographic theory in the 1960s, and in Barthes’s seminal work when it first appeared in 1980.  Barthes is rightly to be regarded as the writer who, more than anyone else, made that spectre “visible” in the physical form of the photograph.  What Derrida did was give the spectre a name.  Taken together they demonstrate that photography is indeed an inherently hauntological medium.  The “dead” moment of the exposure, its spectre, is there in the DNA of all photographs.

Whilst there are differences between analog and digital photographs, their physical existence or lack of it, the haunting effect of a photograph does not depend upon the medium.  However, the work of those artists who seek to make the spectre visible and given a virtual presence in the present, suggests that how that hauntological effect can be achieved can vary.  It is subject to the artist’s intentions and aesthetic practices, and depends upon the wider context within which the work is viewed, including the subjective perceptions of the viewer.  

The practice of rephotography would appear to be particularly suited to making hauntological images, to the extent it could be referred to as “hauntography”.

Photography and hauntology share a symbiotic relationship.  In many cultural, social, economic, and political realms, hauntology shows us how the past is “all around us”, and still has a virtual presence now.  The theory shows how the past has a continuing effect on the present and the future. 

What photography does, in a way that no other medium (apart perhaps from cinema) is give the revenants of the past a physical existence in the present.  Photography is able to give new life to the past in a variety, nuanced, and subtle ways.  Artists (and those who use their images), through their technical, artistic, and aesthetic choices, and depending upon context, can influence how the past, shows itself in photographs. 

The theory of hauntology is able to give more profound meaning to photographs, bringing out significances that might otherwise be missed, by the photographer, or the viewer, or both.  On the other hand, the multiplicity of possible aesthetic and artistic approaches that can be adopted in order to give a contemporary physical existence to the past helps to make the theory itself richer, more nuanced, and flexible.  Explicitly recognising and acknowledging the fundamental and profound nature of the relationship between photography and hauntology, can only expand our understanding of the theory, enrich it, and widen its possible applications further.  

It must though be recognised that there is still more work to be done to explore further how hauntology and photography can relate to, and benefit, each other.  Rosemier has suggested (2021) that hauntology might offer new ways in which photography can be used as a form of activism.  Varga (2022) suggests that there is more work to be done on the use of photography in a pedagogical setting.  My analysis here has approached the relationship more from a theoretical point of view, showing how photography and hauntology are inherently connected.  Considering contemporary artists’ practices shows that there are a variety of ways in which photographs can have their hauntological effect.  That multiplicity, and the fact that the sample here is fairly limited, suggests that further consideration of how photography can be used to hauntological effect would be in order.

List of Illustrations

1.  James Lacey 2022 Manoir Scavenger, France, from the series A World in Ruins

https://www.aworldinruins.co.uk/?lightbox=dataItem-k5nyf6sp

2.  Marc Wilson, 2019, Studland Bay, from the series The Last Stand

https://www.marcwilson.co.uk/project/thelaststand?itemId=wdr633z4mzz34e6c6fh077mcqlqu09

3.  Michał Grochowiak, 2009, Untitled, from the series Breath.

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/photography-michal-grochowiak

4.  Nicolas Grospierre, 2016, Museum of Archeology, Tbilisi, 2006, from the series K-Pool i Spółka.

http://grospierre.art.pl/portfolio/k-pool-i-spolka/#/6

5.  Marc Wilson, 2022, Area to right of crematoria, forest camp, Kulmhof extermination camp. Rzuchow forest, Poland. 2015, from the series A Wounded Landscape.

https://www.marcwilson.co.uk/project/a-wounded-landscape

6.  Masao Yamamoto, 2023, Untitled, from the series Tomosu.

https://www.gallery51.com/exhibition/masao-yamamoto-small-things-in-silence/

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