Photos to Embellish My Memoirs: Part 1

[RonPrice]

VOLUME 1: CHAPTER SIX of My 3 Volume Memoirs

A CENTURY IN PHOTOGRAPHS
1908-2007

I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.-Vincent van Gogh, "Letter of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer. The photograph of a missing being, Susan Sontag says, touches me like the delayed rays of a star.-Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
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At the age of sixty-three I now possess a dozen albums of photographs of various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of any autobiography I might want to write. This essay, this part of a chapter of this book, tries to put all these photographs in perspective, tries to provide readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives hegemony to the visual. More generally, too, I provide here in this part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director Federico Fellini said about film could also apply to my photographs. "My films are not for understanding,” said Fellini, “They are for seeing." This essay, though, is about understanding.

The French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, said that "no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light and this light is the very imagination of the image. Baudrillard sees his photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible, as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph is never of any “real” world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially illusion. I certainly sense this as I look back over nearly 100 years of photographs in my dozen albums.

Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of whatever type intended to elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. In an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny, colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life. They relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness.

The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag wrote that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. What, I ask myself, is the semiological universe that is being called into play by such dissociated transmissions of affectivity.

The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded most of my life.

This would be true a fortiori of the effigy. Of all the religious and artistic treasures which a visitor may see at Westminster Abbey, the collection of eighteen funeral effigies in the Museum is perhaps the most intriguing. Carved in wood or in wax, these full-sized representations of kings, queens and distinguished public figures, many of them in their own clothes and with their own accoutrements, constitute a gallery of astonishingly life-like portraits stretching over more than four centuries of British history. Can only the dead astonish us by seeming “life-like”? Is there something lifelike in this memoir? Perhaps even the living can induce the uncanny effect of an effigy from time to time—but in print. Modern celebrities, of course, do this all the time and a whole industry has been created to cater to these ‘life-like’ forms and antics.

This class of lively royal artefacts from merry and not-so-merry old England trouble the finality they serve to commemorate. English royal effigies are an historic prefiguration of modern celebrity. The funeral effigy did its work in part by materializing in death a well-known likeness, symbolizing, at a moment of high ritual expectancy the general image that all the subjects of a monarchy might reasonably be expected to hold in their minds’ eyes. I mention the above because I can not see any purpose at all not only to an effigy of myself but even photographs.

Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100 years of black-and-white prints, the little-changing record of my affinal and consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that got in front of a camera while I was around and a wide range of friends and associations beginning in 1947. The power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back on a very small section of 99 years(1908-2007) of that century and a half within the confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have lived, moved and had my being.

I have been working on this essay on photography for nearly a decade now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include in this autobiography. Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in this fifth edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to record some of the types of the minutiae of social life makes it an ideal method for dealing with a number of aspects of the autobiographical process and some of the complexity and richness of the human situation. Many people see much more in photos than they even do in written text; for these people, my photographs and the commentary are indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story.”

The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos, before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. If I had the technological competence and the money, I'd include many of the photos. Sadly readers will find none in this work.

Vision and perception are active ingredients in the creation of understanding. When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs. Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since the birth of the Baha’i revelation. The photos are full of vanished details of the way life was lived – the styles of chairs, of clothes, of hats and bathing costumes, of accessories like spectacles – and of a wide range of intriguing bits of human activity. As one critic put it, photographs may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, but whether they in fact do is another question.

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[RonPrice]

Here are two prose-poems that place this subject of photography in what I hope is a helpful perspective:
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TELLING THE STORY

Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al.-Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19.

The enterprise began, perhaps as early as 1894 when the first Baha’is landed in America from the Middle East, or even when the Letters of the Living travelled throughout Iran in 1844 and thereafter. The twenty-five years from 1894 to 1919 was a precursor to the year 1919 when the Tablets of the Divine Plan were read and a pioneering program began that is now eighty years old. It is a program that is immensely diverse and operates at local, regional, national and international levels. It is important, as the Baha’i community comes to describe this vast and complex story, that it avoids a tendency to an affinity with the reverential writers of medieval England, to endless edification and to what is called hagiography. There is a need to emotionally individualize stories so that readers will not have to wade through hundreds of pages of reverential, pious and lifeless prose. -Ron Price with thanks to Edward Morrison,”When the Saints Come Marching In: The Art of Baha’i Biography”, Dialogue, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1986, pp.32-35.

Defining character,
determining worth,
touching on the personal,
bringing people out of
verbal concrete,
through understanding.

Needing an eye
for telling detail,
a certain dramatic power,
analysis and interpretation,
with incisiveness and conviction,
with no doubt about its being true,
a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,
for we need more than a glimpse.
We need the story of the saintliness
in all its unsaintliness.

It is as difficult to write
a good life as to live one.
We want to know we are not alone:
for the community is its own ritual,
the greatest drama in the world of existence,
something forever new and unforeseen,
devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,
a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,
conveying to the reading public insight
and a knowing who they are into their lives.
For a great life does not make a great book.

Ron Price
1 February 1999
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A DOCUMENT, A RECORD

The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.

Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days,
not so plain and simple,
clear and visually straight
from the shoulder as Evan’s work.

But, with Keats, an almost instant
transmutation of impressions, thoughts,
reading and ideas into poetry, well,
what some might call poetry, what
I might see as a study for poetry.1

1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.

Ron Price
7 April 2000
(revised for:
‘This So Called Life’
18/2/06)
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The Gestalt psychologist attests that only the organization of materials into a concrete and meaningful image can fully express and communicate the whole of universal experience. Without this direct portrayal of awareness and nature, the art stands incomplete within the natural world, and therefore is nothing. All continued human activity, of which photography is but one, requires a continued supply of activating energy, and no energy comes forth without a motive. The effect of photography is not what I see in, say, my vacation snapshots, but a tendency to see only the present as something that exists; our human energy seems to focus on the now. And of course only the present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present. Photograph albums tend to produce in the viewers a permanent now, a continuous present. I think this was, not so much a dominant attitude, as a daring and for me a useful affirmation.

The writings found among media theorists and in the humanities and social sciences are sprinkled with such affirmations and often tend toward a provocative style of writing and thinking about photography and its substance. But the result of this analysis is often gross overstatements, particularly when media developments are causally related to other social-cultural or political phenomena. Even accepting a certain overstatement, though, I find my twelve albums of photographs do record a series of ‘present moments’ that are useful in reflecting on my autobiographical experience. All of this visual material does not capture the complexity; they transcend it, compress it, repress it. The paradox inherent in the presence of photography within autobiography is the photographs’ tendency to simultaneously document and yet undercut the narrative.

During these four epochs the camera has been for many the official family recorder. Film, video and the digital camera have come into play in the fourth and fifth epochs after, say, the mid-eighties. But for most in the West, in the cultures where I have spent my time and life, the camera has been a silent witness to many of the important stage in life, from birth to death. Photography’s social functions are integrally tied to the “ideology of the modern family” and the medium allows for and provides a sustenance for an “imaginary cohesion.” The photographed family can easily show us what they wish the family to be, though this may not often be the case. Photography operates at the junction between personal memory and social history and it requires an engaging narrative to act as the key to unlock the intricacies and complex nature of the “true” family behind the iamge. This memoir will function partly as that engaging narrative but, since my focus is only peripherally—and not centrally--on my family, its intricacies and complex nature will not be unveiled here beyond a few broad brush-strokes.

In my consanguineal(birth) family and the two affinal(marriage) families I have been a part of, there are between one hundred and two hundred souls, depending on how far I extend the relationships on the tree. There were about a dozen ‘significant others’ on that tree and I write about them all, but not in the detail that a 2500 page memoir might give to such a group.

Often, for reasons of vanity or because they know they are not particularly attractive, some people often dislike the way they look in photographs. Inga Clendinnen, Australian historian, thinks that photographs challenge and corrupt memory. Most of us, she goes on, remember individuals through time as a sort of moving collection of lights, vague images or an indistinct melody. If you think of how you might describe people who've mattered to you it's never in terms of a static photograph. I find this to be very true of my own experience. People, of course, will be in your memory bank, but it is as an action not an image. It will be as a glance, a movement; it will be a sensation you get when you see them or think of them. It might be a particular happiness. It's a bit like a distinctive melody that surrounds them. Clendinnen thinks that photographs cannibalise this complicated moving memory, this sequence of indistinct memories we all have. Photographs fix these memories into a form. For Clendennin photographs are a violation of the actuality she wants to cherish in her memory.

We all lose things in life; we all change out of sight. Memories fade. All methods of recording past actualities are imperfect, every one of them. Human memory, written texts, photographs. All of them are deficient in some way. Clendennin says she just doesn't much like the way she looks in photographs and she doesn’t much like the falsification of experience that she thinks is entailed in photographs. Of course, she is expressing her own views and others will inevitably have different views. I think these views throw my own collection of photographic memorabilia into perspective.

In photographs it is not only the content that has the impact, but it is also the capability of the photograph to bring the receiving human body, thanks to the sensual stimuli, into a state of physical distraction, if not of sheer trance. The seductive power of photographs in particular and media in general lies in their suggestion that it is possible for us to become pure intensities of feeling. We connect to photographs and media out of a desire for a direct experience of something that is not ourselves. This is also true of print. But with photography you only have to see, you don’t have to say. You do not need any narrative or analytical skill.
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That's all folks
More at a later date....Ron