“Ultimately the bulkheads are the battlegrounds where our past choices and our future options confront themselves.”
Bill Hare
An object as a sign of remembrance and reminiscence
I.
1. The photograph is a recalled awareness, a remembered perception, one that opens the door into an individual's history.
2. One’s life, emptied of novelty, organized, cleansed, plotted, secure, unpursued, could then proceed in the monotonies of welfare from cradle to the tomb.
II.
3. Here, the sentiment of memory, combined with the practical empiricism of the photographic document and the aesthetic appeal of the photograph as object have joined to create a striking chord.
4. There is an incident in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz where the protagonist is confronted by a photograph. He reflects:
I heard Vera again, speaking of the mysterious quality peculiar to such photographs when they surface from oblivion. One has the impression , she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sights of despair, gemissements de desespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in former lives.
III.
5. Memory, that is, as something that will 'surface from oblivion', in which there is 'something stirring' and which may release these 'small sighs of despair'. Everyone, perhaps, has photographs of family and friends, and loved ones, that are treasured as reminiscence, or as recollection. These are the transcripts of the generations, handed through families and groups to aid recall and to initiate storytelling.
6. For their design, maintenance and use, machines can exist only within the context of human intentions and values, thus should not be seen as separate from our own normal codes.
IV.
7. Always, the photograph is a kind of evidence of something ‘that-has-been’ and that is lost. So that, even in the most casual of snapshots, there is the substantiation, and the memorial, to a moment.
8. Of course, all of this assumes a settled, and an uncomplicated, sense of history and identity. In any nation this is not so, and it is certainly not so in Scotland. In fact these visual images these photographs of symbolic sites, do not simply recollect collective memories, but construct a collective memory.
V.
9. Like the scene of a horrific historical pile-up after the Big Crunch, past and future, high and popular culture, are compacted (Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past, as Eliot had it.) The material and visual result is a modernist’s nightmare of a mechanical dystopia, a machine aesthetic.”
10. In the words of St Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, all the objects in the visible world were to be regarded merely as ’corporeal metaphors of things unseen’.
VI.
11. The memorial, the document and the object - offers a passage towards a concrete and a conceptual understanding of the history of photography in, and from, Scotland.
12. Ultimately the bulkheads are the battlegrounds where our past choices and our future options confront themselves.
VII.
13. Thus, at last, a hint of my style and the character of my mind.
Realm of Memory footnotes:
1. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland’, chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p16
2. Norman Mailer, ‘Truth and Being: Nothing and Time, A Broken Fragment From A Long Novel’, The Essential Norman Mailer, (1982) Great Britain by New English Library, p26
3. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p13
4. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p13
5. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p13
6. Andrew Patrizio, ‘Templates for the Future’, The Prints and Drawings of John Kirkwood; Battlegrounds; John Kirkwood, (1993) printed by featherhall press Edinburgh, p11
7. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p20
8. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p17
9. Ralph Hughes, 'Between the Idea and the reality', The Prints and Drawings of John Kirkwood; Battlegrounds, John Kirkwood, (1993) printed by featherhall press Edinburgh, p8
10. Ralph Hughes, 'Between the Idea and the reality', The Prints and Drawings of John Kirkwood; Battlegrounds, John Kirkwood, (1993) printed by featherhall press Edinburgh , p7
11. Tom Normand, 'Memorial, Document, Object: The Photograph in Scotland', chapter one, Scottish Photography: A History, (2007) printed and bound by Grafo, Bilbao, Spain, p13
12. Bill Hare, ‘East of Eden’, The Prints and Drawings of John Kirkwood; Battlegrounds, John Kirkwood, (1993) printed by featherhall press Edinburgh , p3.
13. Norman Mailer, ‘Truth and Being: Nothing and Time, A Broken Fragment From A Long Novel’, The Essential Norman Mailer,(1982) Great Britain by New English Library, p27
