All Of The Things She Put Me Through: On Photography and Memory

(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.

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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…

Research/Life

One of the reasons I decided to write about my work in progress in this way was to affirm (and remind myself of) the fact that the reality of the creative process is rarely of a brilliant artist working singlemindedly towards the production of a widely-acclaimed masterpiece, but rather a quite normal person, who cares about something, battling various practical and financial obstacles in order to bring into being a piece of work that, in the majority of cases, nobody else cares about at all, with the progress towards this objective being anything other than a straight line. 

Thinking about this brings to mind the wise words of Wendy McMurdo, an actually brilliant artist, who I was fortunate to be tutored by in the final phase of my MA. During one of my many existential crises she calmly informed me that the numerous issues and problems preventing me from making work that I was describing to her were in fact simply part and parcel of being an artist, and that the associated self-doubt and uncertainty were all part of the creative process. Her advice being that I should basically suck it up and make work anyway because that was the only way anything ever got done, the only way any progress was ever made. Coming from her, these words meant a great deal and have stuck with me ever since. 

So, I write to remind myself of this and also to keep myself accountable and it is in this spirit that I make this latest entry in the WIP log. The last few months have of course being challenging for everyone, what with the rona, and life as we knew it seems to be gone for good. I’ve been overwhelmed with work stuff and also had to survive my own bout of the virus, so it’s been a challenging time for sure. Amongst all this though, I’ve tried to stay committed to the idea of continuing on regardless, as best as I could under the circumstances. One of the lessons I think, is that instead of being hard on yourself for not being as productive or creative as maybe you’d hoped to be in certain circumstances, it’s preferable to stick to your guns and just do what you can. Every little helps and with each small step you’re that bit little closer to the end goal. It’s important for me to remember that there never is a ‘perfect’ time to make work, with absolutely no obstacles or distractions to contend with, there’s always just now.

As I’ve continued planning and researching for a project focusing on mental health, there’s been an inexorable convergence with the themes of Reaching Out. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

Loneliness and solitude certainly offer psychological challenges, but it’s been really interesting that I’ve found myself circling back round and being forced to consider loneliness from new angles. Another lesson perhaps, that research is never wasted even if it seems to be not directly related to the topic at hand at first, and a reminder that my MA work lives on, and remains unfinished business. 

I’ve been reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. Looking at how loneliness has been conceptualised, written about and experienced through history, it’s an ambitious work indeed. Interestingly, Alberti starts from the position that loneliness is not intrinsically bad, and that there are positives to be gained from experiencing this state. Describing loneliness as a ‘cluster of emotions’ rather than a single feeling, the author argues that it hits differently at different life stages such as divorce or old age. Alberti also argues that loneliness is not an inevitable or universal aspect of the human experience, and when encountered can also confer benefits such as increased self-knowledge or creativity. 

It’s fascinating to consider that loneliness has not always been with us, simply because the vocabulary associated with this experience did not exist before about 200 years ago. Prior to that, being alone was not at all bound up with typically negative ideas of loneliness that we take for granted today, but rather considered a much more neutral state of being. This idea is really interesting to me, that how we describe or think about things, materially affects the way we experience them and it’s an interesting idea to explore visually in the future.

Another book I’ve covered recently is Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr. This is an interesting story, about a woman going through a difficult time who’s revisited by an imaginary friend from her childhood, returned to accompany her through her troubles. This friend, a lion named Jericho, appears when things seem to be slowly falling apart in her life, and while their relationship is never fully explained, there quickly develops a seemingly mutually beneficial co-dependence. The key theme that resonated with me here was the idea of perception, of being able to ascertain what is real and what is not, and whether sometimes it’s actually easier, even safer, to surrender to the constructions of our minds rather than address difficult things in the ‘real’ world. The idea of spending so long immersed in your own perceptions that you struggle to differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined is also interesting. How does one categorise experiences that can seem very real to us, and from which we may derive some positives, if they are not perceptible to others…are they any less valuable, less real? This boundary between our tangible material world, and that of our very personal, internal world is a fascinating place to explore.