The Past in the Present:  traces of time in photographs

“I would define photography as a mechanical description of time.”

(Killip, 2001) 

Time, along with light, is of course one of the corner stones of photography.  This research is concerned with an element of temporality in photographs, how time affects and relates to photography, specifically the question whether, and how, photographs, singly or in series, can contain elements of the Past and hints of possible Futures.  It will refer to the work of a contemporary practitioner, and of Henri Cartier-Bresson in relation to the theoretical work of Thierry de Duve.  Relativity and the subjective nature of our responses to the temporal elements in photographs will also be considered alongside the application of Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” to photography.     [The idea that elements of the Past, although no longer actually present, nevertheless can still have an effect upon the Present, and can still have a virtual presence.]

Traces of Time 

Time operates in and on photographs in various different ways.  There are the time of the exposure, the time it takes to make the print, the time in which the photograph exists, the time taken to view it, and so on.  In the literature, which covers a diverse range of sources, not all of which have explicitily to do with photography, there is a broad acceptance that the traces of time to be found in a photograph are not to be limited simply to the time of the actual exposure, however long or short, but also include elements of the time before the exposure and hints of those after it.  An example of such a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered further below. Such an argument is to be found in Barthes, (2000) (his idea of “the thing had been here”), Battye, (2014) (photographs can refer to time stretching before and after the moment of exposure), Benjamin, (1931 & 2008) (more concerned with the idea of “political time” but he argued that the past can be seen to be crystallised in aesthetic documents, including photographs), and Berger, (2009) (quoted at length below).  Derrida, (2010), in particular develops Barthes’s concept of the studium and punctum, and argues that the latter is not just a single point in time.   So too do Edwards, (2020) (dealing with ethnological archives), Lindroos, (1998 & 2006) (an exegesis of Benjamin), McQuire, (1998) (quoting Barthes, argues that archives function as “space-time machines” and that photographs are not mere re-presentations but resurrections of the past), and Sutton, (2009) (discussing Deleuze’s work, below, he explores photography’s relationships with cinema and argues “the photograph contracts all pertinent images of time”).

Photographic Codes

To properly understand a photograph it is necessary to be aware of the various codes that are used by the photographer, what have been referred to as “perceptive codes:  technical and aesthetic codes relating to the image itself; and social codes relating to the subject.  What this research suggests though is that an understanding of these codes is not necessarily enough by itself to read the traces of time contained within a photograph.  Our perceptions of time are relative and subjective.  How we read the photograph depends much on context, internal and external, such as how, where, when it is viewed, in conjunction with what other information, the viewer’s own knowledge, memories, and so on.  Social and cultural conditioning also have roles to play.

Typologies 

The use of typologies is clearly important in affecting how we can read traces of time in photographs.  The use of typologies is central to Marc Wilson’s Holocaust work (see below).  Edwards (2020) shows how the organisation of photographs in archives for anthropological and ethnographic purposes affects how they are read as historical documents.  Typologies and comparative viewing were central to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and directly affect how we view Europe’s industrial past, and present.  De Duve’s analysis is also concerned with typologies, how different photographs carry different elements of time.

Visual Methodologies

The two most pertinent for this methodologies research discussed by Rose (2013) areSemiology (the analysis of “signs” contained within an image in order to uncover its meaning), and Discourse Analysis (which relies on a wider range of images and texts than the subject of analysis by itself).  The consideration of Cartier-Bresson’s photograph below is semiological, a reading of the elements that make up the image.  Wilson’s work, on the other hand, falls more within the latter methodology in so far as an understanding of it depends on more than just each individual image.

A Contemporary Practitioner:  Marc Wilson

Wilson’s work deals directly with the Past in photographs.  His major project  - A Wounded Landscape - involved photographing sites throughout Europe associated with the Holocaust and earlier pogroms.  The landscapes are accompanied by portraits of Holocaust survivors, together with maps locating the photographed sites, and interviews with the survivors.  He seeks to record the past before the living memory is inevitably lost.  Many sites appear nondescript, banal.  Only when put into context by captions, juxtaposition with other images, the portraits, other  documents, does their significance becomes apparent.  Traces of the Past are fixed in the Present of the photograph.

Above is an example that shows how the wider discourse about the Holocaust is needed to understand individual images.  It is an image of a church.  Where is not clear.  The crucifixes are not Orthodox, so not in, for example, Russia?  Somewhere in Europe?  Only the caption tells us it is in Chelmno nad Nerem, Poland.  What is the significance of the church and the meaning of the image?  Only when seen in the broader context of the other materials does it emerge that this church was used to house prisoners overnight before being murdered at the nearby Kulmhof extermination camp.  This simple image therefore carries within it traces of memory, of the past events that occurred here, and is haunted by the ghosts of the victims of the Holocaust.  It is that wider knowledge that makes this image so powerful.

Lessons from Cinema

Whilst we are concerned only with the still photograph, there are nevertheless useful points to be taken from what has been written about film and cinema.  Peter Wollen, comparing photography with cinema, suggests that photographs can be categorised as “elements of narrative”, implying a “before” and an “after” the instant that is captured.  (In Wells, 2003, page 78)  The ideas of Deleuze (1989) about the “time-image” suggest that a photograph can act as a direct representation of time, and therefore contain or suggest something more than just the single instant of the exposure.   [ Deleuze drew a distinction between what he termed the “movement-image”, the depiction of “action”, as an indirect depiction of time, and the “time-image”.  For this he gives the example of action-less shots, analogous to still-life photographs, as a direct depiction of time.  In particular he referred to the extended, still shots used by Yasujiro Ozu - Tokyo Story is a classic example - in which such shots are used to indicate the passage of narrative time, for periods longer than the real time of viewing the take.]

Time exposure and Snapshot:  De Duve’s analysis

An influential analysis is offered by de Duve (1978) in which he seeks to draw a distinction between the “snapshot” and the “time exposure”.  

What amounts to a “snapshot” from an aesthetic or stylistic point of view, has been defined at length by, for example, Bull (2018), in which he considered various elements that are characteristic of a snapshot.   De Duve is though more concerned in using the word with the length of the exposure and the lack of formal posing.  As an example of the former he uses what he calls “the press photograph”. The former is a so-called “instantaneous” photograph.  [The French word for such a snapshot, which is used by Derrida (2010) in his consideration and development of Barthes’s studium and punctum, is, appropriately enough, “l’instantané”.]  For the latter de Duve offers the example of the longer exposure of a posed photograph, such as a portrait.  His analysis is worthy of a closer examination.

It can be argued that the potential temporal richness of the elements of a “snapshot” can get lost in this sort of analysis, and those of a “time exposure” overstated.  A useful example is provided by Rue Mouffetard, 1954 by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

At one level this photograph, capturing a “decisive moment”, is, in de Duve’s analysis, a snapshot.  It shows a small boy carrying two large bottles of wine, grinning self-assuredly and apparently oblivious of the presence of the camera, or possibly showing off for the benefit of Cartier-Bresson, while, just out of focus, two girls look on with signs of delight.  It captures a fleeting moment in which the boy passed in front of the camera.  And yet, it can be seen as so much more than that.  Although Cartier-Bresson might not have intended to do, it actually suggests more of a story, even if one that has to be inferred from the brief moment captured on film.  This single image contains not just a present but also a past and a possible future. 

The present is the simple fact of the boy’s passing in front of the camera.  The past is that he did  not just “happen” to be there, materialising out of thin air, but got there on his way from a local bar, restaurant, or shop, to which he had been sent by his parents (presumably) to buy a couple of bottles of wine.  He will have been instructed what to buy, given enough money to do so.  Given the pleased expression on his face, perhaps he was given permission as a reward to buy some treat for himself out of any change.  There is a future in that once he passed Cartier-Bresson he will no doubt have continued on home to safely deliver his cargo, and perhaps get his reward there instead.

Berger makes a similar point discussing the work of Paul Strand and comparing him with Cartier-Bresson, comparing the “decisive moment” with the “historical moment”.  Of Strand he says:

“The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime.  Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told.”  (2009, page 47)

Berger describes Strand as the antithesis to Cartier-Bresson, but that does not necessarily entail that a decisive moment cannot tell a longer story.  Indeed, as Cartier-Bresson himself put it (1952), “one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigour and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself”.

The Importance of Context

De Duve argues that the portrait serves as a Denkmal (he uses the German word), a memorial to the subject of the photograph.  Returning to Berger and his discussion of Strand, of his portraits he argues:

“His photographs conveys unique sense of duration.  The I am is given its time in which to reflect on the past and to anticipate its future:  the exposure time does no violence to the time of the I am:  on the contrary, one has the strange impression that the exposure time is the lifetime.”  (2009, page 51)

However, it is arguable that the “memorial” nature of a portrait, its ability to convey some elements of the subject’s history, to point towards more of the subject’s life beyond the (still relatively brief) moment of the exposure, depends on the viewer knowing who the subject is/was and knowing something of their life, both before and after the making of the portrait.  A portrait of someone unknown to the viewer offers little, if anything, of the sitter’s history.  Any construction of a life story for the subject is therefore little more than speculation.   The snapshot of the boy with his bottles of wine, on the other hand, although we know nothing of him nor his life story, contains within it sufficient purely visual information to enable the viewer to construct, albeit tentatively, a narrative that brackets the moment captured by the camera.  There is inevitably an amount of speculation involved, but nevertheless it is speculation that has a plausible starting point based upon the elements in the photograph and how those “signs” can be read.

Caveats to a reading of de Duve

Towards the end of his article de Duve acknowledges that “there is no such thing as an empirical definition of snapshot and time exposure”, there is no shutter speed that forms the borderline between these two types of photograph.  His argument is therefore more of a theoretical and intellectual exploration (“didactic models provided by intuition”) of the conundrum previously identified by Barthes, the appearance within a photograph of both the present, the “here-now”, and the past, the “there-then”.

De Duve’s analysis is predicated on the indexical nature of photographs.  How and why indexicality might be relevant to the temporal elements in photographs is though not something that he explains.  Rather, he seems to take it as a given that photographs are indexical, and that its relevance is self-evident.  Indexicality is a hotly debated topic, and the view that photographs are necessarily indexical is not shared universally.  For example, Joel Snyder (in Elkins, (2007)), argues that, as he puts it in his final sentence, “The index is beside the point and pointless.”  What is not explored is whether indexicality does in fact affect the traces of time that a photograph can carry.

Time and the Archive

That context is crucial in order properly to read the temporal elements in a photograph is also borne out by Edwards’s work on archives (2020).  She argues that, as used for anthropological purposes, they are not merely pictures of things or people but are part of a wider and dynamic view of time, not just of the moment of creation but in how they are subsequently viewed and presented, in the archive. Photographs can point to histories beyond what they show in their immediate, or superficial, appearance.  Her work also suggests that depending upon how a photograph is presented in the archive can have a deadening or distorting effect on its temporal elements.

Relativity and the Subjective View of Time

Although in the realm of theoretical physics, Einstein’s theories of Relativity (as explained by Hawking, (1988)) are relevant to how elements of time can be read in photographs.  There is no absolute time, and each individual has their own personal measure of time that depends on where they are and how they are moving, relative to anyone else.  Individuals experience time, and literally age, at different rates, depending upon their relative positions.  Just as the meaning of a photograph is contingent and dependent upon context, and a matter of subjective response to it, so too is the perception of the temporal elements to be found in it.   This is a view expressed particularly by Berger (2009) and again with Mohr  (2016):

“If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would re-acquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments.  It is just possible that photography is the prophesy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved.  Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity.  The distinction between the private and public uses of photography would be transcended.”  (2009, page 61).

“A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the suppression of future moments.  In this respect photographs might be compared to images stored in the memory.  Yet there is a fundamental difference:  whereas remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant.

“And in life, meaning is not instantaneous.  Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. … An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself.  When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”  (2016, page 91)  

Berger is arguing that what one person sees in a given photograph is not necessarily what someone else, who will have a different frame of reference, will see.  How an image is read depends upon the context within which it is viewed but also the knowledge, memories, experiences, and so on, of the viewer.

Barthes exemplifies the subjective and relativistic responses that viewers have.  His engagement with the Winter Garden photograph is deeply personal and it is doubtful that any other viewer would react to it in a similar way.  Indeed, it is arguably impossible to react to it at all, or to question Barthes’s response to it, as we never see the iconic photograph (and there is some doubt whether it ever existed).  This sense of subjectivity is at the very core of the various artist’s own speculations about the missing photograph in England (2020).

Social/Cultural Conditioning

The anthropological archive work of Edwards, and Lopez, (2022, pages 65-67) discussing the different ways in which he and his companions observed, and interpreted, the sight of a grizzly bear feeding on the carcass of a caribou, suggest that our subjective view of the temporal elements within a photograph might also be a matter of social and cultural conditioning.  Lopez focused just on the bear.  His Indigenous companions saw much more than the bear and the caribou.  They saw these as elements in a larger context:  “…where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter with the bear, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left.”  (Page 66)

Hauntology

The concept of hauntology offers a potentially useful tool for obtaining further insights into how photographs can carry temporal elements.  In originally proposing the idea Derrida was concerned with politics; how the spectres of Marx and Marxism still “haunt” the world today, notwithstanding the collapse of much of communism as we knew it.  It has though in recent years come to be used in art as a metaphor to refer to the ‘spectral’ and unseen which emerges in the images we see.

In Derrida’s (1994) terms, hauntology describes a situation of temporal and ontological [n metaphysics, dealing with the nature of being, and also showing the relationships between the concepts and categories within a field of study.] disjunction in which presence, especially socially and culturally, is replaced by a deferred non-origin. It is a logical development from deconstruction [A critical approach to understanding the relationship between ‘text’ and ‘meaning’ introduced by Jaques Derrida in 1967 that proposes that language is a system of signs and that words only have meaning because of contrast between those signs. ]  and means that any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions.  He asserts that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an ”always-already absent present”.

These ideas are ideally suited to photography.  Any photographic image is nothing more than a trace of a past, a ghost, in which whoever or whatever is depicted at the moment of exposure might no longer exist, at least not in the same form.  As Barthes put it “the thing has been there” (2000, page 76).   As he also describes them, the referents are “chimeras”.

Although writing more from the point of view of cinema and television, Mark Fisher’s essay (2012) suggests an argument that photography, in so far as it captures “ghosts” of the past, is inherently hauntological.

Apart from Rosemier (2021), who is more concerned with how the idea might give rise to new thought and creation, and sees it as a possible form of activism, there does not appear to have been a great deal written so far about how hauntology might be used in photographic theory.  Rather, as Rosemeier points out, and as is exemplified by, for example, discussions of “hauntological” music (Adam Harper (Rouge’s Foam), 2009), hauntology has been used more as a stylistic, aesthetic approach rooted in a sense of nostalgia.  Such an approach arguably does not do full justice to the rich veins of temporality that photographs should be capable of carrying.  How hauntology might be applied to photographic theory, and the hauntological nature of photographs, is clearly something worthy of further exploration.

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https://www.marcwilson.co.uk

http://rougesfoam.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/hauntology-past-inside-present.html