By BEN WILKE
“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
Frank Zappa
The first of these images is merely paperwork and a cataloguing; the second is nostalgia. Susan Sontag discusses the inability of photography (and of the photographer) to emphasize any event or identity of event, given the saturation of competing images now prevalent.1 Images are quickly digested and new ones emerge in their place. Being now surrounded by histories, geographies, cultures, and images, we are in fewer ways ignorant of both the present and the past. This lack of ignorance has become a plethora of information; the supply of imagery now exceeds the demand. Past generations could lean on a single image to describe an era or an occasion of the recent past, but we are now hard-pressed to locate a singular image for any event. In addition it has grown increasingly difficult to imagine how we will archive and remember the current glut of still-frame and video imagery. It would not be excessive to claim that there will be a desire to identify the images of our era as special or unique, and as having been made in a particular time where the unique medium of capturing our events did part of the work, and imbued the images with a particular patina, instantly recognizable by those who inherit the images somewhere in the future.
The nostalgic photo exists in a vacuum. The only way to get to the photographic place is through an abstracted and imagined remembering. The word “nostalgia” comes from a pair of Greek roots: nostos, which means to “return home,” and algia, which is “pain.” Each condition requires movement in order to resolve; such movements, in the case of nostalgia, are impossible to achieve physically.
Photography and the published photograph amplified the tendencies toward nostalgia. This partial fallout from the consumption of the photographic medium coincides with another cultural phenomenon: the shift from ethics to aesthetics as a primary compass for action and living. As snapshots, photographs do not pose significant questions or challenges to ethics, yet are subject aesthetic critique. The philosophy of most amateur photographers is that one in five shots will be worth keeping. The photojournalist or professional photographer does very much the same thing, but with an editorial caveat: they produce a series of proofs from which they or the client may select a preferred moment of (or in) time.
175 years into its history, it is easy to see how the photograph became, and continues to be, so pervasive in cultural history; it is a perfect distiller of time. Both because of and in spite of their often-editorialized nature, photographs are able to deliver immediately. It only makes sense that the trajectory of the photograph went from acting as a mode of preservation or documentation to acting as a mode of remembering. The historical and the idealized frequently overlapped2 prior to the advent of photography, but the photograph allows a heightened and more accurate sense of memory. The photograph allows a more perfect version of nostalgia.
What is it that we find in photographs and images that we do not find in other forms of account like, say, literature or story telling? What can the photograph say while isolated from these other modes of remembering? Yearning and longing are terms bound to the definition of nostalgia, and each of these emotions are understood as being accompanied by a sense of loss and a sense of distance, in this case of time. Time and the idea of the past create a line of resistance that cannot be crossed from where we are. Our sense of nostalgia for a particular image and for what the image suggests is held in place by desires that the photograph excels in delivering for the viewer: escape, timelessness, interpretation, and narrative. Nostalgia is a longing for both escape and return. In order to facilitate our doing this, the photograph must be read in ways that detach it and isolate it from other interpretations. We must make it our own.
The nostalgic image occurred in places that are elsewhere; the occurred in places that have been erased, even if we are able to occupy the same Cartesian coordinates represented in the photo. Real places now belong to us. The place is part of something that we know, included along a timeline of learned traditions, physicalities, and relationships. We are bound to these places. The nostalgic photo is outside of that timeline, even if it has informed what we now know. These images can remain pure and open to interpretation; they are invulnerable to the norms of our own activity. Such images become transcendental in that they are indicative of an eternal present tense.3
The first photograph taken4 marks a turn for our own ability to long for the occupation of a place that is elsewhere. We can construct a make-believe chronology that is free from imposed histories. Within this fictional chronology, we hold the potential to move from objective (third-person) account to subjective (first-person) account. The borrowed image becomes adopted time and will absorb the tradition and order that we choose to impose upon it. The nostalgic photograph is one that recaptures lost cultural ‘signs’ and saves them from eradication, at least in our mind.
Our current pace of image production and image consumption creates a saturated and unique condition. For nostalgic photos, we can easily read their position as being of the past and disconnected from our present. But we are unable to dislocate ourselves from our own collections of self-made images. We automatically locate the order of our own such images in both place and time, and being able to do so binds it to the symbolism, norms, and sequences of our own personal timelines. In the same way that uncharted locations remain secret and dreamt of until they are mapped, so too with the nostalgic image. Despite our ability to mimic the techniques, filters, and chemical processes of visual nostalgia, we are unable to render our current collection of imagery with the same type of weight5 that prior mediums carry through to us now. The possession of so much current contextual awareness pushes nostalgia out of reach; we are left only with self-awareness.
As much as we may like to create our own instant nostalgia of self, our own interventions render the objective recording of events unattainable. Our self-made images are a monologue, and we are both the audience and the speaker in most cases. We can incite a sense of desire in others with such images, but to create a sense of nostalgia with such images is impossible given the proximity (in both space and time) to those from whom we are likely to have feedback. The nostalgic image is with specific (but inaccessible) place and outside of the moving timeline. The self-made image is bound to its author’s respective timeline and experiences. The former type is very material in its physicality – it has aged because of a physical nature; it is a recorded moment separated from the reality that bore it. Lost is the real-time experience of enunciation and reception; gone is the context of before and after. The nostalgic image can refer to lost narratives. Conversely, the self-made or digital image is one that cannot give away its narrative. It is inundated with the idea of before and after and subject to revisionism and re-enunciation.
These self-made or digital images reinforce our actual timeline; they surround and enclose our actions and motivations in the same way that property lines enclose territory. The line is always there and always understood as designating something that is necessarily our own, for better or for worse. The notion of self and separation from others is what allows our individual timeline to be experienced as a collection of unique memories and ideas. The nostalgic image allows us to momentarily escape that island and to partake in something that was not our own; the nostalgic creates an autonomous place that holds the ability to affect our own self-constructed narrative. The creation of these hybrid narratives enable us to somewhat escape; they allow us to create new references and validations for our choices and projected selves. In this sense, the nostalgic is adopted, lived-in, and composes a kind of artificial history and truth. The artificial remains real.
Robert Venturi’s position that old buildings were “not just worth saving, but could inspire new buildings,”6 provides a tenet to how we may approach nostalgia, and in particular, the nostalgic image. Because it insists on existing in the past, yet still impacts and in some cases steers our present, the nostalgic image – by way of immunity to critique, escape from master narratives, and the fostering of necessarily subjective lifestyle interpretations – will continue to suggest possibilities for other lives or the projections of those lives, somewhere other than the present.
1. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
2. A primary example being the nostalgia attributed to classical cultures.
3. It is interesting to note that the development of the photograph is barely predated by the invention of the chronograph, which is a timepiece made to both keep time (like a standard timepiece) and stop time (i.e. perform basic stopwatch functions).
4. Nicéphore Niépce's “View from the Window at Le Gras”, Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. 1826.
5. (Or perhaps weightlessness…?)
6. From Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York 1966.
