(Disclaimer: I should warn you, there turns out to be quite a bit of Usher in this post)
Something about the way the light dances off a surface startles you, a subconscious stimulus causing you to turn just in time to notice a dying wisp of sound at the boundary of your perception, beyond which dreams and memories reside. You instinctively reach for the camera hanging at your hip, but before it reaches your eye the vanished reverie leaves you frozen, momentarily uncertain as to what caused you to stop in the first place.
Perhaps this has happened to you too, and you’ve experienced the uncanny way the subconscious whirl can occasionally spill into your waking hours. The way you can be somewhere new and suddenly experience an almost visceral certainty that some part of you has been here before, and that the only way to be sure is to capture it in your box of memories, a frame at a time.
The connection between visual images and memory has been extensively explored and has long occupied writers and researchers. The practice of photography lends itself to nostalgia of course, from the very act of capturing a single moment in time and space and the numerous decisions and omissions that this act involves, to the fact that the relentless development of photographic technologies and the torrential pace of image sharing practices confers an immediately archival status to each photograph we take. The materiality of printed photographs offers a tangible illustration of this encapsulation of memory, a fact that Alec Soth discusses here:
Artists often seem to play with this relationship, using the link to nostalgia and memory for creative or narrative purposes, but even if your intention is not to exploit this link it is worth being mindful that it exists, such is its pervasiveness in the collective consciousness.
As I’m writing this my mind’s going off on a tangent, to a song…I’m blaming Twitter for this one though as this man is probably on my mind at the moment due to how frequently he’s popped up on my feed over the last week or so as the subject of a meme. Anyway, in this song he puts forth a learned exposition on the connection between his visual perception and his memories and thus it is totally relevant!
Anyway, back to what I was saying…photography and memory, yes…
So, this is something that’s been bubbling away in my own work recently as I continue to slowly piece together something new. In recent weeks I’ve also had the pleasure of discussing this topic with some fellow photographers and have really valued their perspectives on this idea.
Working my way through some of my own childhood photographs, I’ve been experimenting with how altering these images and placing them alongside contemporary photos changes their reading. This is not a visual device that I invented, by any means. For example, Damien Williams uses this technique to great effect in his work Black Other.
Screen grab of some scanned childhood photos
What’s been most notable so far, aside from the technical challenge of making visually plausible adjustments to these photos, has been my emotional response to them. Working with these photos has stirred up quite unnerving emotions, often not directly related to the content of the pictures themselves or to a recollection of the events the photos depict. The photos have rather triggered a general sense of overwhelming wistfulness, a sense that the places and people contained within them have slipped into an adjacent timeline right alongside my own, of which I’m aware but that still remains stubbornly out of reach. It’s a weird thing and difficult to properly describe, but it’s been striking just how deep-rooted that feeling is and how readily it is summoned by even a few minutes with these old images.
The work I’m making in some way describes a journey and I guess every journey is about change. Maybe that’s what nostalgia is, an acute and sometimes jarring awareness of change. There is something almost mystical about it though isn’t there? Otherwise it would just be a straightforward memory, a factual recounting of previous happenings.
This elusive element is something that has always intrigued me and I’m often drawn to artists who find ways to represent this, or at least hint at a process of wrestling with this ‘thing’ in their work. Off the top of my head, Todd Hido’s Between the Two comes to mind as a body of work that gave me the same feels, like you’d seen these scenes somewhere, somehow before, almost subconsciously. Of course, this response is mediated by a range of our own personal experiences and memories so that no two people will respond in the same way to the work, but it’s an example that comes to mind.
In speaking with someone recently about this a question occurred to me: is nostalgia a tool that can be knowingly utilised at any time, at the artist’s discretion, or does it instead only show itself in the work through a process of the artist’s divination of their own subconscious? Do we only see it in the work when the practitioner finds a way to drag from within themselves an impression of their past or dreamworld, and reconstitute it in the present?
The answer to these questions feels like an unsolvable riddle, partly because it strays into the territory of suggesting that an objective and rational deconstruction of the artistic process is even possible and I’m not sure that it is. Also, the phrases ‘artist’s divination of their own subconscious’ and ‘artist’s discretion’ that I used above may actually be describing the same thing!
So, there we are. I’ll admit that this didn’t go where I thought it would when I started writing, but I guess where we’ve ended up is where we’re supposed to be.
I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of possible answers to these questions, a whole mountain range of different perspectives on how nostalgia and artistic practice are related, if indeed they are. As always, I’d be interested to hear yours if you care to share it.
Werkhaus Zine Issue 3 will be available very soon
In other news, I’m delighted to have some work published in the forthcoming 3rd issue of Werkhaus Zine from Workhorse Collective, especially because the submission includes some stuff I wrote that’s related to the project I’m currently (very slowly) working on.
To have these reflections published alongside work in progress is really pleasing and probably also means I’m going to continue writing these blogs as well for the foreseeable (sorry!), to keep my ideas simmering away.
Next time it’ll probably be something about identity as that’s another theme currently occupying my brain warehouse. For now, I’ll leave you with the ubiquitous meme, so it can contaminate your mind like it’s done mine.
Till next time…