Orphaned By Time

I just want to briefly revisit some ideas I posted about in 2020. At the centre of my admittedly nebulous thoughts on the the matter is the question of the authenticity of the photographic record. As I've mentioned before, I wrote my degree dissertation on this very topic, asserting a counter argument to Roland Barthe's essay, "The Rhetoric of The Image", where he argued for the notion that a photograph has an innate, non-symbolic truth, due to its direct one-to-one analogue relationship to the subject photographed. My thesis was that there were already ample historical examples of 'tampering' with or enhancing images that stretched way back into the history of the practice. He alludes in his essay to the cultural connotations - he was using advertising imagery as his example - afforded by the various elements assembled in the advert he featured: the signification of colour, language, assemblage, etc., arguing that the photographic element within the advert somehow stood outside the normal language of signs and symbols, which are intermediary in much the same way that language is itself, somehow conferring veracity to the intended [advertising] message within.

We use sounds and symbols to convey meaning. Words and sentences refer to stuff in the real world by reference - a kind of mutually agreed code if you like - whereas, Barthes argued, a photograph, as a direct analogue stripped from the reflected light of the scene captured, acted in a wholly more primitive and direct manner: was in some way more 'honest' and 'real' as a result. At the time I felt he was on dodgy ground, philosophically, and here's the thing: in arguing my case for the effects of human intervention on the sphere of the photographic 'real', I was presaging the much later world of the digital image, and where we stand at present, where no-one accepts the total reality of a modern image because, even without our own personal curation of our imagery, the technology we use to create pictures messes with the reality we 'photograph' without our knowledge. Now, the point to this little ramble is a thought that always crosses my mind when looking at photographs where - I refer to real, actual, analogue images - the people pictured are unknown to me. I refer back to a piece I posted on the 19th of September 2020; where I'd found a glass negative that had lain unseen and unwanted for around ninety years, turning up in an eBay purchase that year. I quote:

'I find the whole thing fascinating: here's a slice of someone's young life around a century ago. The young woman sitting in the window looks in her twenties and the car and house suggest that the image was made sometime prior to 1930 - cut film started to replace glass plates in the 1910s, which would be too early certainly for the type of car depicted or the hairstyle of the young woman. I find this totally bewitching. That image has been locked away since around the time my maternal grandparents were married; out of sight to the world, its maker and his subject long-deceased.'

The narrative and substance of the moment captured is lost. Those whose intimate knowledge of the subject of the image are presumably long deceased, along with their memory of it. Does it make the subject of the photograph any less 'real' as a result? It could have been staged, as opposed to a snapshot, but in the end it matters not: the narrative void is there anyway. If you take the snapshot resting on my deskpad in the above image, however, you will see two young children, photographed in the late 1930s sat against the background of the hop yards of Fromes Hill in Herefordshire. How do I know that for a fact, rather than inferring the narrative as one of a possible many? Because the kids featured are my mom and my uncle Edgar. My living memory informs the meaning of the image: its certainty as a record of a specific, recognisable, connected event, rather than a vague historical fragment, is intimately connected to my knowledge of its content.

We all play that game of trying to guess the lives of people featured in old photographs, the invention of narratives unknown, much as when we people-watch, trying to figure out lives other than our own; we are storytellers at heart, even if we don't realise it. The artist Tom Phillips was fascinated by these parallel, unknown narratives, and created works that hinted at fictional realities ripe for the 'unpicking' by the viewer. One such was a book he curated back in 2010: 'Readers', which was simply a collection of photographic postcards across the early and mid twentieth century, of people photographed simply in the act of reading. Each and every one of the images featured would have meant something to those featured, obviously - but also to the friends and family who were the recipients of the postcards themselves. The thing that obviously fascinated Phillips was exactly the notion of the lost narrative: the hook into the reality behind the image. Photographs have meaning, and in the era that Barthes wrote his essay, it seemed reasonable to accept the veracity of a photograph's assumed message; but without context, that meaning is as subjective as that of a painting taken outside of its native culture: its analogue imprint of reality is simply transient. Images unhitched from memory are rendered orphans by time...