In the Absence of the Photograph

Introduction

When viewing family photographs in relation to autobiographical memory, the image is only part of the process. Other factors such as photographic materiality, its presentational form, and the context in which it was made versus an evolution of feeling towards the photograph inevitably changes over time. The photograph is not a static object despite its ability to freeze moments and should be instead situated on a spectrum to be able to understand the complex and nuanced meaning that can be attached to it. As Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart on the materiality of photography reminds us, an object cannot be fully understood at any single point in its existence but should be understood as belonging in a continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning (2004, p. 4). Whilst Tim Fawns, who introduces us to the idea of distributed memory, points out everyday autobiographical memory involves a coalescence of different kinds of remembering, realised through social and material processes (2020, p. 905). These other factors are abstractions, completely absent for a third-party viewer who gazes only in the present. If however, the photograph in question has been re-visited, re-contextualised, defaced, or even deleted, then we can gain a sense that something else is happening, either during the making of the photograph, albeit out of the frame, or in the time since. This continues to support the idea that the image alone is not to be trusted without the support of those other factors.

This chapter is a result of finding such a photograph in my own archive. Seeing an image cut in half with the other absent is so completely jarring that it has been impossible to move beyond it. The photograph presents a fundamental question that I am compelled to understand: Why keep a photograph that wounds you? I also want to understand the life of a photograph after it was made and the challenge that represents to an established autobiographical account of my family. To explore this, I will look at the work of Joachim Schmid and the attached ritual associated with photographs. I will draw close comparisons to the work of Karl Ohiri who has a significant and poignant body of work documenting a painful relationship breakdown though changes in material presentation. This will connect to the work begun by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart who position photographic materiality as important to the interpretation as the depicted content of the image itself.

Throughout the chapter, I refer to some of the later works of Roland Barthes because of the autobiographical relationship that Camera Lucida (1993) has with personal archive and family photographs continuing to be relevant to contemporary discourse. This will be presented in tangent with Mourning Diary (2009), which creates new ways to understand the value of poignant photographs with deeply attached emotions. Barthes also posits a useful justification for keeping undesirable and painful memories with the idea of integrated rejection that is contained in his lecture notes of How to Live Together (2013). I will also discuss autobiographical memories in relation to photographs that have been discarded, defaced, and even deleted. This will converge with ideas presented by David Bate on involuntary memory responses (2010) and Tim Fawns key concepts of blended remembering that seeks to consider the widest range of phenomenological factors highlighting the absence in photographs that still make them so compelling to us.

The discussion within this chapter, informed by my own experiences of the defaced photograph, creates a framework in which the image is available for interpretation based on a spectrum of distributed factors. This deepens understanding of the photograph beyond the static position it is seen in the present context. This then provides the viewer with a more nuanced, informed, and rounded method to understand a compulsion towards photographs, even those that are absent either phenomenologically or in its material presentation, which elicit a great amount of pain for the author.