We’ll always have nostalgia
Nostalgia and vernacular photography from the early 1900s, and today
Réka Szentirmay / s1882104 r.szentirmay@umail.leidenuniv.nl
Supervisors: Tineke de Ruiter and Dr. Helen Westgeest Second reader: Dr. Peter Verstraten
MA Thesis Media Studies Film and Photographic Studies Leiden University
Word count: 15,876 words
Acknowledgement
I share the credit of my work with my thesis supervisor, Tineke de Ruiter, for governing me off of immaturely chosen paths, and for unveiling the woods that I had not seen from the trees.
I am more than grateful to Dr. Helen Westgeest, for her heroic efforts to enable me to achieve the best possible results.
I am truly thankful to Dr. Peter Verstraten, who made sure he would have some time available to evaluate my paper.
I will be eternally indebted to Marc MVM Duiker, source of my sanity during turbulent times. Without him I would be even further from the best version of myself.
With special thanks and gratitude to Fortepan and dearphotograph.com.
I owe a great deal to Cobie Hijma, for her guidance and being my cornerstone; and Roland
Kovács, for his intervention during the crisis of 9th January, when I got the closest to
giving it up.
I am extremely thankful for Dániel Antal’s genuine enthusiasm and assistance. My work and research would have been entirely different without him.
This thesis would not have been possible without the invaluable support and patience of Ilonka Boomsma and Ebel Dijsktra.
I am also beholden to my employer and colleagues, for their agency and perseverance for letting me follow my dreams without losing a steady grounding. First and foremost, to Jamie van Gerve, who might have been the cursing the most due to my absences. Last but not least, I would like to thank all my beloved friends and family that bore with me, and kept on cheering for me.
TABLE OF CONTENT
TABLE OF IMAGES AND FIGURES ... 5
PREFACE... 6
INTRODUCTION ... 8
1. NOSTALGIA—THE PHENOMENON AND BEYOND ... 12
1.1. A historical summary ... 12
1.2. Nostalgia and photography—temporality as the common ground ... 16
1.3. Fetish ... 21
2. EASTERN PATHOS—OR ELSE MODERN NOSTALGIA ... 26
2.1. The beginnings of modern nostalgia—and photographic analogies ... 26
2.2. An introduction to the Fortepan archive ... 32
2.3. Case studies and content analysis ... 33
3. A GLOBAL SENTIMENT—OR ELSE POSTMODERN NOSTALGIA ... 41
3.1. Postmodern imagery ... 41
3.2. The digital era—and digital seeing ... 43
3.3. Digital mementos—an introduction to Dear Photograph ... 47
3.4. Case studies and content analysis ... 48
4. CONCLUSION ... 54
APPENDIX ... i
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... xii
FILMOGRAPHY ... xvii
TABLE OF IMAGES AND FIGURES
Image 1 - Gooseherd, 1901, image number: 028001 (FORTEPAN discovery) ... ii
Image 2 - Boys, 1907, image number: 100103 (donated to FORTEPAN by the Jezsuita Archívum) ... iii
Image 3 - without title, 1914, image number: 53643 (donated to FORTEPAN by Lóránt Szabó) ... iv
Image 4 - The image on page 96–97 of Dear Photograph, taken by 'Mamma' ... v
Image 5 - The caption and the image once again, as displayed on the website dearphotograph.com ... vi
Image 6 - The image on page 142 of Dear Photograph, taken by Judith ... vii
Image 7 - The image on page 232 of Dear Photograph, taken by Peter ... viii
Figure 1 - Word cloud featuring the 100 most often used words on dearphotograph.com, generated with the help of tagcrowd.com ... iix
Figure 2 - A simplified structure of the dual monarchy ... x
PREFACE
“In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I have always been prone to nostalgia. Collecting keepsakes to remind me of good times is a second nature to me. Not so much the official souvenirs sold by tourist traps, more like letters from friends cherished, gravels from river beds crossed or tickets from museums visited. I have a considerable collection by now—not so well managed however, I must admit. Nevertheless, going through these mementos always fills me with warmth and joy. Whenever I visit my family in Hungary, at least one afternoon is spent going through old family photographs and albums. Mother adds her stories. Some rings a bell, some are complete novelty. I have never understood people who expressed their pity towards me after I admitted feeling nostalgic. For me it is a privilege, a pleasure that is always welcome, undeterred by the fact that indeed might be bittersweet.
Although I have always been embracing this guilty pleasure of mine, it reached a whole new level a few years ago: it was notably intensified by my father’s passing.
Nostalgia is what helped me cope with mourning. His death gave me a new
experience, being an organic part of my life now: whenever, wherever I walk by the violet flowers of Chinese wisteria, something he always wished to have in our back yard but my mother never gave up opposing, a whole rainfall of memories is being triggered. Bitter and sweet at the same time.
Then the time has come, I had to decide what my thesis would be about. This very thesis, to be specific. Roland Barthes and his Camera Lucida was an obvious choice, being a bible for me; an inexhaustible source of photographic wisdom. On the other hand, probably somewhat too vague. After several failed ideas, I have reached the territories of nostalgia. A celebration of special memories; the sublime merger of my passion, photography, the Barthesian punctum that never ceases to amuse me, the Freudian fetish that I do not seem to be able to exclude from any of my photography related thoughts—and a road to understanding something that always has been such important part of my life.
Nostalgia is a little like cotton candy. A sweet, edible cloud made from the most prosaic ingredient, refined sugar, its delicious smell sweetly covering the odours of street life. Memories as well become somewhat distorted, coloured to one’s taste, sort of caramelised. Details get lost, some other are made up.
Lucky for us, opposed to cotton candy, nostalgia is considered healthy. “If you’re not neurotic or avoidant, I think you’ll benefit by nostalgizing two or maybe three times a week.”1
INTRODUCTION
Psychologist Erica Hepper claims, “[a]fter centuries of scientific neglect, [nostalgia] has recently been the focus of burgeoning empirical and theoretical developments”.2 I believe it is time to turn our attention towards the phenomenon indeed, given its fast metamorphosis into an everyday marketing tool, as Clay Routledge, psychological researcher now labels it.3 At the same time, to cite literary scientist Andreas Huyssen, the “past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in previous centuries. […] temporal boundaries have weakened”.4 Modern media and reproduction have remodelled memory and recollection, the way we approach these often-involuntary experiences. It has changed the way we nostalgise: it became a semi-conscious activity, one that we may intentionally work on.
By today, photography has become “inescapable”, states Hans Rooseboom, curator of Photography at the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam.5 Just like the experience of nostalgia that is provenly “commonplace”.6 With my thesis, I would like to join the researchers who have decided to justify: nostalgia is not only a sentimental interlude, but a significant experience that can teach us a lot about the world around us.
In the following chapters, the question I intend to answer is: how did the close-knit relationship between the medium of photography and the domains of nostalgia change since the beginning of the democratisation of photography and today’s image downpour? Is there a difference between analogue and digital triggers—and the experiences they spark?
I am going to approach my case in three stages. In the first chapter, I will examine the history of nostalgia. The question defining my argument will be: what makes photography an unequalled medium of longing? I will also explore why vernacular
2 Hepper at al., 2012, 102
3 Why do we feel nostalgia?, Anton Bogaty, 2016. Film. (Educator: Clay Routledge) 4 Huyssen, 2003, 5
5 Matti, Rooseboom, 2014, 32 6 Routledge at al, 2012, 457
photography is especially suitable to discuss the notion; and the connection between punctum, fetish and yearning.
In the second chapter, with the help of vernacular images from Hungary in the early 1900s, I will investigate the modernist approach to photographic images. I have chosen Hungary for a very personal reason: it is my home country. As to the period, from 1900 to 1914, it is a carefully chosen window of the last few peaceful years of the country before the Great War. Then, the country was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an entity with significant power in Europe. As historian Ignác Romsics refers to this phase: these were the “the joyous years of peace”.7 I believe, the collective nostalgia Hungarians tend to feel towards this time period, gives me a special advantage during my research.
In the third chapter, I will turn my attention to the postmodern form of yearning and discover the contemporary version of the notion so many seem to enjoy. My question will be: how did the spread of digital technology change the way we nostalgise? As a case study, I have chosen images from the contemporary project celebrating private nostalgia, Dear Photograph—dubbed as “digital nostalgia of the highest order”.8 The creator behind it, Taylor Jones, invites everyone to “[t]ake a picture of a picture from the past in the present”, and share the final result with the public via his website, dearphotograph.com, and the related Twitter and Instagram accounts. It is a project that was expressly created to celebrate and visualise a connection between past and present, to actively nostalgise—and share this deliberate act with others.9 This is what makes it the perfect companion to my argument.
Both of my case studies deal with vernacular photography indeed, for there is an analogy between longing and photography, both in their nature and development.
7 Romsics, 2001, 17
8 Source: dearphotograph.com. Accessed 10th June 2017. 9 Source: dearphotograph.com. Accessed 10th June 2017.
Why have I favoured nostalgia over memory? Sociologist Fred Davis claims that nostalgia is based on personal experiences “rather than one drawn solely, for example, […] from history books”. He distinguishes it from the “antiquarian feeling, a condition with which it is sometimes confused”. He also adds however, that it probably “will in time acquire connotations that extend its meaning to any sort of positive feeling toward anything past” [emphasis in original].10 I argue that the time has come: nostalgia is not any more the phenomenon Christopher Lasch, historian and social critic, described: it is no longer considered purely an “escapist absorption in the past”.11 His denunciation of the phenomenon reminds me of an evergreen quote from the 1969 Hungarian classic, A tanú (The Witness): “Let's leave sexuality to be the opium of the declining West!”.12 Lasch believes that archives are nothing else but a waste of space of “mummified images” that once certainly were useful, but we no longer understand why. He looks at nostalgia as a pastoral lack of realism, a negative sensation coupled by disillusionment.13 I, on the other hand, recognise it as a life-seasoning encounter. Memory is like food to live on—nostalgia is the salt. Memories, however fictitious, are the base of the plot of, e.g., the movie
Wonder Woman. At the end of the film Diana lovingly touches Steve’s photograph
on the memorial wall set up for the heroes that died during the Great War. Her eyes are tearful, yet she is smiling. That is nostalgia. Painfully and beautifully human.
That is what I am interested in. The quest is not easy however. According to Davis,
nostalgia “fall[s] […] within the realm of subjective experience” [emphasis added].14 Back to the beginnings of this modern term, in the 17th century nostalgia became the official name of a fatal neuropathological malady. It is rather surprising how long it took to identify the debilitating condition that “has been argued [to be] older and
10 Davis, 1979, 8 11 Lasch, 1991, 114
12 “Hagyjuk a szexualitást a hanyatló nyugat ópiumának!” in the Hungarian original. (A tanú. Péter Bacsó.
1969. Film.)
13 Lasch, 1991, 112, 83 14 Davis, 1979, 123–124
more fundamental than human nature itself […] that all people of the world, all ages, and all temperaments […] are more or less susceptible to […] Although the ancients seldom mentioned nostalgia in their writings, we know that they were acquainted with it. Homer wrote that Ulysses wept and rolled on the floor when he thought of home.”15 Soon after, with the French Revolution, it gained yet another layer: serving far from one’s home country became ordinary, exile was no longer unexampled. The Romantic period and its fascination with the past helped the notion to be institutionalised, in a positive way: in museums and via metropolitan monuments. As Svetlana Boym, theorist of the off-modern says, ‘the past became “heritage”’ [emphasis added]. None of these were enough, however, for the word to lose all its adverse undertone.16 In the early 20th century, nostalgia was still considered a psychological disorder with a Freudian twist, accompanying melancholia and depression.17 Surprisingly enough, today’s academics are still not entirely sure what exactly this experience is, or whether they should take it seriously at all. As Davis puts it, “it was something different in the past and will be probably be different again in the future”.18
The theoretical framework I have based my thesis on, is largely inspired by Davis’
Yearning for Yesterday, an in depth research of the experience in the field of
sociology. I also incorporated several contemporary works by psychological researchers associated with the University of Southampton, such as Erica Hepper, Clay Routledge and Tim Wildschut. Their work in the field of a previously neglected notion is pioneering, moreover helpful to prove the significance of my study. Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia have also shaped this thesis considerably. I have also attempted to deepen my research exploring studies cited by the authors above.
15 McCann, 1941, 165 16 Boym, 2001, 1
17 Wildschut et al., 2006, 975 18 Davis, 1979, 7
1. NOSTALGIA—THE PHENOMENON AND BEYOND
“Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—remove nostalgia from their palette and what would we have? Some noble sentences no doubt, but dry as a biscuit when what we crave is cake…” ― Norman Austin, Homeric Nostalgia
In the following chapter, I will first explore the history of nostalgia. The phenomenon went through quite some changes in the last few millennia, its long record is an important part of its complexity. In the second part of the chapter, my main question will be: what makes photography an excellent medium of longing? In this part of my thesis, I will discuss why vernacular photography is exceptionally suitable to prove my claim. In the last section of the first chapter, I will investigate the relationship between punctum, fetish and yearning. I will argue, photographs are prone to be fetishized―making them even more apt to become a trigger of nostalgia.
1.1. A historical summary
Nostalgia is a profoundly complex notion that has been a scholarly challenge for hundreds of years. From Homer’s poetic approach to the latest contemporary psychological researchers, the structure of the construct has changed several times. As literary theorist Sean Scanlan presents it, “nostalgia has an uncanny ability to exceed any constraining definition”.19
It made its first recorded appearance more than two thousand years ago, yet without a name, as a powerful lyrical apparatus in Odyssey. Norman Austin, professor emeritus of classics at the University of Arizona, starts his acknowledged essay on the Homeric tool with the emotional outcry, “Nostalgia! Now there’s a theme that calls for high poetry.”20 In Homer’s time (he was born circa
19 Scanlan, 2004, 4 20 Austin, 2010, 37
8th–9th century B.C.)21, however, it was not yet labelled as such. The emotion clearly existed, might have very well been just as commonplace as today, yet it took another thousand years to become classified.
Despite the emotion being a constant companion to human beings since ancient times, the term nostalgie22 was not conceived until 1688—approximately 1000 years
after the Greek poet’s timeless opus. At that point in time, a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, decided to base his doctoral dissertation23 on the phenomenon he was also to name, id est the until then undescribed group of symptoms disabling Swiss soldiers. “Persistent thinking of home, bouts of weeping, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, anorexia [and] insomnia”24 tormented the good soldiers serving far from their Alpine homes, causing a serious headache to decorated officers, and the medical work force treating the patients. Contemplating such words as nostomania and philopatrodomania25, amongst others, Hofer finally decided that combining the Greek word for pain and grief, “algos” (-algia), with the translation of homecoming, “nostos”(nost-,) is the best way to describe “the suffering caused by the yearning to return to one’s place of origin”26. Hofer attributed the sickness to “the inner parts of the brain, where the animal spirits were supposed to dwell”.27 He fundamentally believed the disorder to be of “demonic” provenance.28 His colleague however, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, claimed that the cause of the malady was “due to the sufferer’s having experienced a sharp differential in atmospheric pressure […] [that] drove blood from the heart to the brain, […] producing the observed affliction of sentiment”. The belief that it was a particularly Swiss illness (another term to
21 His exact birth of date and death is unknown: his persona, and the very fact whether he existed at all, is
surrounded by several disputes, dubbed the Homeric Questions.
22 Nostalgie indeed, as originally spelled. 23 Hofer, 1934 (1688)
24 Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, Routledge, 2006, 975 25 Piason Natali, 2004, 10
26 Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, Routledge, 2006, 975 27 McCann, 1941, 165–166
describe nostalgia was “Schweizerkrankheit”29), caused by the “neurological damage to eardrum and brain cell caused by exposure to the incessant clanging of cowbells” in the Alps30, was widely accepted until around the French Revolution (1789–1799) and the consecutive Napoleonic wars (1803–1815).31
According to historian Peter Fritzsche, it was the French Revolution that, for the first time in history, disturbed “the faith, the legibility and knowability in history” enough to evoke a shared sense of discontinuity, “rearrang[ing] previously authoritative structures of temporality by redrawing the horizon of historical possibility and thereby manufacturing a set of differences that separated past, present, and future”.32 It “mobilized millions of people who […] came to participate in its drama. Moreover, the revolution took place across Europe over an entire generation”. This created a base for broadly shared common understanding, a sense of belonging together, on a level that previously had been unknown. Citing the philosopher George Lukács, Fritzsche emphasises the importance of the “mass experience”. In addition, those that had been forced to leave their home countries and spend a long time, occasionally the rest of their lives, in exile could now reach a wide audience with their novels and/or autobiographies. The cheap access to mass produced books from both the authors’ and readers’ side also accelerated the process.33 “Nearly the entire world […] regards […] emigration as an inexhaustible source for novels”, as literary scholar Fernand Baldensperger put it, quoted by Fritzsche.34 Lasch believes that nostalgia before the revolution was “luxury”. The deep structural changes in society however “began to colour the way [people] thought about the historical past”, the phenomenon thus came to be historicised and democratised.35
29 McCann, 1941, 169 30 Davis, 1979, 2–3
31 Davis, 1979; Fritzsche, 2001, 1590 32 Fritzsche, 2001, 1592, 1595
33 One of the most famous authors that worked a significant period in exile is Victor Hugo (1802–1885),
exiled by Napoleon III in 1852.
34 Fritzsche, 2001, 1607 35 Lasch, 1991, 84
Parallelly, Romanticism (greatly inspired by the industrial revolution) and its obsession with the glorified past gave way to yet another gulf of changes: “[o]ne of the most striking operations of the reconfiguration of Western temporality at the turn of the nineteenth century was the production of artificial ruins. Suddenly, traces of past lives appeared everywhere”. Fritzsche sets the careful construction of the German identity as example, that is, he states, practically based on “cultural debris”, collected by the Brothers Grimm.36
This was thus the beginning of a slow yet steady shift towards the beginning of a new era, when longing became sort of an “epidemic”, to use the medical terminology of the time. The sensation was still considered a disease, nevertheless the demilitarisation37 of the term, as sociologist Fred Davis characterised the first
stage of these structural changes of the phenomenon, had begun. It was no longer associated with the Swiss, or soldiers, for that matter. It has spread to the civilians: anyone far from their home was prone to it. Beside this democratisation of nostalgia, another shift had slowly started at the beginning of the 19th century: the feeling of nostalgia became more and more of a “temporal dislocation”. Nostalgia as we know it today, says Jeff Malpas, is the yearning for “the only home that is rendered truly inaccessible […] the home that lies in the past”.38
The second stage of Davis’ structural changes, the demedicalisation of the phrase, begun in the early 20th century. Longing was not a neurological affliction any more, it floated over to the waters of psychological disorders. Literary theorist Linda Hutcheon, who herself “confess[es] to suffering from an utter lack of nostalgia” [emphasis added], claims that this change happened on the grounds of “the rise of pathologic anatomy and bacteriology” that discredited prior medical opinions. The illness became “from being a curable medical illness to an incurable […] condition of the […] psyche”. Besides, it “was no longer simply a yearning to return home”.
36 Fritzsche, 2001, 1610–11 37 Davis, 1979, 4
Referring to Immanuel Kant, she adds that people suffering of homesickness could not be satisfied by going back to the place they were missing, their home. “[T]hey did not want to return to a place, but to a time […] Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to—ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact.” [emphasis added] Thus, just like Malpas, she as well emphasises the significance of a shift from the spatial to the temporal.39 The parallel between photography, a medium that is likewise temporal, and the phenomenon of nostalgia thus emerges.
Davies believes that at the end of the 1970s, there was a third stage in progress: that of depsychologisation.40 However, he also adds, the back then so influential linguistic direction of semantics deemed nostalgia a “sociolinguistic paradox”: 1) today’s nostalgia has no longer anything to do with the original pathological connotations, 2) “the gradual semantic deterioration of its core referent of homesickness” [emphasis in original].41 From the distance of the almost forty years passed, it appears to be a time when scientists were somewhat confused about the phenomenon: the experience of nostalgia had no fixed place any more. Davis’ work opened up new domains midst this identity crisis, and set the research of yearning on the contemporary road.
1.2. Nostalgia and photography—temporality as the common ground
Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames is a journey through the visual narrative of the family photograph, is largely inspired by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Hirsch, professor of English literature at Columbia University, explains the Barthesian
studium as the “contextual and therefore narrative reading of the photograph” and
represents the punctum as a “disturbance” that “arrests and interrupts”. She states
39 Hutcheon, Valdés, 2000, 18–19
40 This is the time he was working on his book, Yearning for Yesterday. Published in 1979, this book became
one of the most significant works for the researchers of nostalgia.
that the “verbal overlay”, the narrative that only the one in the picture and those closest to them get to know, often hides the image itself. “[I]t undoes the objectification of the still photograph and thereby takes it out of the realm of stasis, […]—what Barthes calls “flat death”—into fluidity […] and […] life”.42
The presence of death is Barthes’ main fascination: “there is in every photograph: the return of the dead”, he says, right at the beginning of his famous book. This is why it can animate us, through its incidental punctum: it captures a thin slice of time
that had happened (that-had-been)—and is never to return. A photograph is proof
that someone, something did exist.43 This is exactly what nostalgia strives on: the traces of this someone or something important that probably does not exist any longer. Or exists, but in a different state, lacking the essence of some meaningful event in the past. Looking at a photograph one likes, yearning for the moment it was taken at, is almost inevitable. The temporal nature of the medium, its connection to its referent and its capability to carry an imprint of practically any given moment in life, is exceptional. And even though this past moment one is longing for is distorted by memories, it undeniably could be an important part of one’s personality, identity. Sociologist Don Slater asserts, “[w]e construct ourselves
for the image and through images” [emphasis in original].44 And as Davis puts is, nostalgia “is one of the means […] we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, main tinging and reconstructing our identities”.45
According to Boym, nostalgia is a “romance with one’s own fantasy”.46, And it appears to be a phenomenon many enjoy flirting with: so much so that some even go as far as faking a photograph’s timeliness, applying filters to make their just passed memories look as if they had happened long ago, taken with decade-old cameras. The time we live in values yearning for the yesterday—some might say we 42 Hirsch, 2012, 3–4 43 Barthes, 2000, 9, 20–21, 82, 93 44 Slater, 2001 (1995), 134 45 Davis, 1979, 31 46 Boym, 2001, xiii
are somewhat obsessed with it.47 We seize, conserve and stock memories, just like Barthes’s butterflies.48 Pinned down, placed behind glass. We share every little detail of our lives on social media, carefully shaping an image we want others to be impressed by. Some might say we are so busy seizing, conserving and stocking that we forget to live.
Media and cultural scientist Dominik Schrey brings up an interesting argument in his essay titled Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation: “it seems to be important to consider the mediality of nostalgia itself”. As photographs are an obvious way to find connections to the past, they have become a significant supply of information. Furthermore, “they often establish the precondition for a nostalgic perspective” on the past one intends to research.49 Huyssen calls it the “seduction of the archive”: the obsession and fascination collections of old records can generate around themselves.50 And indeed, the phenomenon Davis defined as collective nostalgia, has never been more ordinary: objects are public and broadly
shared, having the chance to trigger yearning in many at the same time. Simultaneously, the notion he calls private nostalgia, triggered by materialised memories of personal experiences has never been more public. In brief, this is how the digital revolution, including the popularity and accessibility of the world wide web, has changed the nature of nostalgia. I will discuss this in detail in the third chapter of my study.
At this point, it might be interesting to take a closer look at the possible triggers of nostalgia, what might be the strongest of them all. At the University of Southampton longing is an important field of research, their Department of Psychology is deeply interested in the reasons behind the phenomenon and its functions. According to a series of studies and the resulting paper published in 2006,
47 Schrey, 2014, 27 48 Barthes, 2000, 57 49 Schrey, 2014, 28–29 50 Huyssen, 2003, 5
the most commonplace of triggers is negative affects, the feeling of loneliness for example. Right after those follow social interplay—and sensory experiences, like smells and music.51 Even though Wildschut and his colleagues do not mention photography per se, I would place it in this group, as it definitely is a visual, thus sensory aid that might become a trigger. It may be a special case though: I look at photography as an active agent of nostalgia. Music and olfactory events are usually
passive attachments to memorable happenings. They simply happen to be present at
the event and then, accidentally, pair up with the memory. They are there on the spot as background “noise”, therefore becoming a trigger later on, like the taste of madeleines for Proust. Photography on the other hand, due its democratic nature, is not necessarily a static memento. It often is used exactly for the reason to seize something that one does not want to forget. It is an aid, actively created by the photographer and all those that are in the picture. Not an accident but an intentional act in order to capture a moment fleeting by.
Geoffrey Batchen, historian with a focus on photography, in his book about the medium and remembrance, Forget Me Not, states that “we usually construe photographs and memories as synonymus”.52 Even though many critics of the field do not agree with this standpoint, amongst them Barthes, it is important to admit that plenty of people handle prints as tokens. Sometimes they become relics, a fetish.53 Flipping through the first dozen pages of Batchen’s aforementioned book, we are bound to see several images to prove his point from the early days of the medium. Many are depicted with earlier photographs of others: deceased ones, ones living far away. Often, that portrait in the portrait is in the centre of attention, not the flesh and blood model. This metaimagery embodies how people about a century ago approached photography, what it meant for them, and what they wanted to use this new invention for.
51 Wildschut et al., 2006, 980 52 Batchen, 2004, 8
Batchen claims, based on historian Richard Terdiman’s theory, that the fact that photography has become the heavy-weaponry of remembrance is self-explanatory. It was conceived in the time of a “perpetual memory crisis” prompted by social and political turmoil, seasoned with the industrial revolution.54 This is the time when, as Lasch has put it, nostalgia gave past a new tint and spread all over the social hierarchy (in Europe at least), it became sort of fashionable.55 When photography was invented, demand finally met supply, and in a few decades practically anyone could make sure that there would be a testimony to their life, an imprint of light that verifies: they-had-been. The medium thus became a substantiating mechanism, a device to serve the constant human need to leave some sort of visual legacy behind. This almost parallel democratisation of photography and nostalgia is the specific reason I have chosen vernacular imagery as the visual bases of my thesis. What could be a more suitable way to interpret, to illustrate the notion of longing than looking at pictures, as Batchen puts it, “that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy”? In Vernacular Photographies, he continuous, most of these artefacts have barely any scholarly value, almost nothing “beyond sentimental cliché”. Nevertheless, he is convinced that there is no better way to discover a medium than through the material its researchers decide to avoid. I find it especially compelling what he says about the morphologies of photography: how the tactility and the thingness of vernacular prints make these objects less transparent.56 He claims that one looks at them—not through them; like one tends to look “through” valuable pieces of art at an exhibition.57
The old Hungarian images, to be introduced in the second chapter, are photographs I have never touched. They have been digitalised, some of them from negatives. All
54 Batchen, 2004, 94–95 55 Lasch, 1991, 84
56 In the sense Jay David Botler and Richard Grusin media scholars define it in their book, Remediation.
Understanding New Media: One tends to look at photographs as if they were the real thing, not a
representation of something or someone. “[R]epresentation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself”. (Bolter, Grusin, 2000, 34)
the spectator needs to access them is a computer with internet connection. Yet there is a sort of tactile experience to them. They are all scratched and the dust from the glass surface of the scanner became a charming part of the digital copies of the original, adding to its character.
This tactility of time, deterioration, stains, rips etc., real or digital, maybe even faux, is in the nature of a photograph. Boym describes it as patina.58 Critical essayist Susan Sontag compares the medium to architecture, gaining “the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time”, just like buildings. “[M]any […] probably look better as ruins.”59 Cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin would probably cry “aura”.60 Furthermore, these traces of time appearing on a printed photograph, are a perfect analogy to nostalgia: they, in a sense, add a kind of filter to our memories, converting them into a “remembered reality” [emphasis added], as Szarkowski would describe it61. Counter-memories, as Barthes calls them.62 That is the exact reason why a photographic print cannot “have a singular meaning [and] neither […] does photography as a whole”. Therefore, the researchers’ task is to discover “the intelligibility of [them] for our own time”.63
1.3. Fetish
As I have mentioned in the Preface, I consider nostalgia a manifold fusion of the photographic medium, punctum—and somehow even fetish. By now, I have hopefully proved the relationship between nostalgia and photography. It is time thus to touch upon the complicated notion of fetish. Barthes mentions that no matter how much he loves photography, he cannot see himself worshipping a photograph
58 Boym, 2001, 45 59 Sontag, 2002, 79
60 Aura, as in “the work’s materiality that changes through time, it’s uniqueness, and its cult value”
described by Helen Westgeest. (Van Gelder, Westgeest, 2011, 41)
61 Szarkowski, 1966, 8 62 Barthes, 2000, 91 63 Batchen, 2001, 78–79
like a painting or sculpture—unless elevated to a level where an image becomes a
fetish, something like an icon for the orthodox Christians.64
According to sociologist Tim Dant, there are two significant interpretations of the term that the keen perceiver needs to know. Both are describing a sort of unhealthy relationship between humans and objects, in which the latter one replaces (embodies) the object of desire, something that should be human. For Karl Marx it is overvalued commodities, for Sigmund Freud it is inappropriate proxies to sexual objects. Dant however argues, that they both talk about fetishes as if they were
unreal, which means that they ignore “the importance of the object as a mediator of
social value”. He names Jean Baudrillard as the first one to recognise fetishes “as means of mediating social value through material culture”. Their creation happens when an object associated with a certain “power or capacity” becomes celebrated, what is more, admired.65 Dant introduces the theory of anthropologist Daniel Miller who differentiates six of these capacities66: function (a perfume, for example, changes the smell of its consumer), ostension (the same smell may prove that this consumer is part of a certain social group), sexuality (the scent might result in sexual arousal in others), knowledge (of what sort of aromas are in fashion, for example), aesthetics (the impression the perfume might make) and mediation (letting others know of the status and taste of the consumer). Objects may carry several of these capacities that depend on the “social and material milieu in which [they are] consumed”. The fetish emerges to the degree of admiration, based on aforestated capacities, once it reaches a level that goes beyond the bounds of routine consumption, once it becomes an
obsession. 67
Photography on its own right “enjoys a high degree of social recognition in […] private and family life”.68 Film theorist Christian Metz explains this indeed somewhat
64 Barthes, 2000, 90–91 65 Dant, 1996, 495–497, 499
66 To demonstrate them, I would like to use Dant’s perfume analogy. (Dant, 1996, 513) 67 Dant, 1996, 511
obsessive relationship with the medium with linguist Louis Hjelmslev’s theory of the lexis, “the socialized unit of reading”. While the lexis of a film is large and closely controlled by the creator of the film, the lexis of a photographic print is much more limited, by the size and the edges of the image. Also, the time spent with it is controlled by the spectator. Metz claims that this is the main reason behind the fact that a photograph is so easily fetishized. Barthes discusses something very similar when comparing film to photography. He claims in Camera Lucida that for him it is impossible to find a punctum staring at a screen: he does not “have the time”, he is “constrained to a continuous voracity”. Photography’s noeme, the infamous that-has-been, disappears as soon as the image becomes animated.69 I would visualise Hjelmslev’s filmic lexis as a working fan, creating draft. Its shape is lost in blur, the noise it makes might be just as relaxing for one as annoying for another. The photographic lexis on the other hand is the resting propeller, waiting patiently to refresh, to inspire. One can see its shape; like a photograph that stands nearest to its referent.70 This indexicality is what makes it so special, unique amongst the arts. This closeness to the referent already is an excellent reason for a print to become a fetish. However, returning to Miller’s capacities, there is more to it. When it comes to
function, an image could be an aid to remember, a tool to create a painting, a source
of information for the researcher, just to name a few. Ostension might not be that obvious any longer, but in the early days of photography the way a picture or an album was presented largely depended on the client’s wallet. Sexuality is clearly there in the nudes or suggestive photographs of strangers—and sometimes loved ones.71 Knowledge is not necessarily carried in a photograph for everyone but it certainly can
be the case. One example is the creator of the image itself and their technical skills invested in the process. Aesthetics need no elaborate explanation. A photograph can
69 Barthes, 2000, 55, 78 70 Metz, 1985, 139
71 This capacity gets an interesting emphasis in today’s social media: less appropriate images often become
be a truly beautiful addition to one’s home, be that an anonymous vernacular image purchased at a flea market or an invaluable fine art print taken by the greatest of the field. Mediation is another capacity that is obviously there in this art form: it is a
medium that can bear (and mediate) an infinite amount of details, emotions and
information that might interest the observer, potentially becoming a punctum. As Hirsch phrases it, referring to Camera Lucida, “photography holds a unique relation to the real […] through […] magic, alchemy, indexicality [and] fetishism”.72
Metz also believes in the photograph’s potential to become an obsession; however, he explains it with pure Freudian theory: it is “replacing an absence by a presence”. Sometimes even becoming a “pocket phallus”, should one keep an image of the object of desire in their wallet or purse, for example.73 He clearly considers the fetish of personal nature and does not at all mention its possible social value. Should the reader be interested in the Metzian fetish that is photographic, Walerian Borowczyk’s Une
Collection Particulière (A Private Collection)74 showcases the perfect object to illustrate Metz’s theory. In the avant-garde documentary short film, we are invited to take a close look at the directors own collection of antique sex toys, amongst them a wooden item to substitute for the male genitalia. On its wider end, there is a photograph of a man. The user of the tool could keep a constant eye on this image during pleasuring herself with the help of a hand-hold mirror that comes with the accessory.
However, the medium is much more than a sexual aid—or a personal token. Once one accepts the fact that there is more to fetish than eroticism, the Millerian multi-capacity of photographs does not only prove their power, but also the social value they may represent.
To return to the domains of nostalgia for a moment, it is easy to see how the photographic medium, or an entire archive of them, can be appropriated by
72 Hirsch. 2012, 4 73 Metz, 1985, 1942
nostalgia. It might be a contemporary “strategy of survival”75 (anticipatory nostalgia76), a tool in the hands of nationalists and the far-right in order to reconstruct monuments and cherry-picked values of the past (restorative nostalgia), or an “ironic and humorous” take on “individual and cultural memory” (reflective nostalgia77) to learn from our past, to be entertained.
Photography and its closeness to its referent, especially in images from a non-digital age, enable a humble rectangular to reach levels of influence that is inaccessible to any other medium. It is more than a possible object of desire. However, this desirability definitely is an important part of a photograph’s profile: it can become an amulet—or the first victim of rage after a bad break-up, as if part of a cleansing ritual. One could keep on finding these spiritual, almost religious analogies when looking at the history of the technique. It also is democratic, available to the masses. By now, with the smart phones becoming affordable, taking pictures is an everyday act, a second nature. The end product can be interpreted in infinite versions. It holds a potential to possess super-powers, if the reader prefers, be that more than a century old, or uploaded to an online platform a few minutes ago.
∞
In the preceding chapter, I have summarised the milestones in the development of nostalgia. I have proven what makes photography an excellent medium to represent the phenomenon and I have discussed why I chose vernacular photography for my case studies. I have also investigated the connection between punctum, fetish and nostalgia. In the consecutive chapter, I will take a closer look at the modern form of the experience and introduce the parallels between the democratisation of both nostalgia and the medium itself.
75 Boym, 2001, xvii
76 Batcho and Shikh, 2016, 75 77 Boym, 2001, 41, 49
2. EASTERN PATHOS—OR ELSE MODERN NOSTALGIA
“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. […] All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
In this chapter, I am going to examine the modernist attitude towards the photographic medium, and investigate collective nostalgia. With the help of my case study, I will take a closer look at vernacular photographs from the 1900’s Hungary. I intend to use my cultural heritage to be able to dive into the collective memories originating from this period, that is held dearly by the general public.
2.1. The beginnings of modern nostalgia—and photographic analogies
While the notion of nostalgia became more and more widespread in the 18th century, due to the demilitarisation of the term as Davis states, the democratisation of photography has likewise started. Thanks to the American entrepreneur George Eastman, by the end of the 1880s just about anyone could operate a camera. Kodak took over the developing process, thus photography “became an art form that was truly accessible to all”. Several cheap cameras appeared on the market. Despite their built quality was far from perfect, they were “hugely popular”.78 Hirsch claims, the people who have picked up Eastman’s gadgets, had never even thought of taking photographs before.79
In the 1890s, Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of electric light bulbs amongst many others, designed the 35 mm film strip. The rollfilm that has remained the standard
78 Nobel, 2006, 30, 34 79 Hirsch, 2012, 6
in analogue photography to date. There is no doubt that by the end of the century photography has “captured the imagination of the public”.80
Art historians call the philosophical movement dominating the late 19th and early 20th century modernism. The trend was inspired by a sort of tiredness of old techniques and by the rapid social and economic changes defining these times. Modernism thrived on the era’s freshly gained knowledge and technical development. The human capability to shape the world around us and the constant pushing of boundaries characterised the art world.
The socio-economical changes brought by the industrial revolution lessened inequalities: new opportunities opened up, certain products became more attainable. The “quality, affordability and availability of personal photography” forced professionals to reshape their approaches. The very same changes widened the artistic landscape and made photography a reachable form of creative expression—for trained artists and keen laics likewise.81 And more importantly, it made a new way of remembrance possible for the masses. To reinterpret Pope Gregory’s influential excerpt, “[p]ainting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who read”: the way one looks back, one is enabled look back, went through a revolution. Written journaling, a pastime of those higher in the social hierarchy, became on hand for nearly anyone, quite literally. The tool for visual storytelling was now in the hands of the masses, giving them the chance to leave a trace behind. The number of amateur photographers took over that of professionals by the beginning of the 20th century and “it changed the way photography pictured the world”. It is their merit that today’s scientists and enthusiasts can easily research the everyday day life of the last 100‒120 years. The images they took were nothing like the ‘masterpieces’ created by professionals. The Kodak’s Brownie was largely criticised for encouraging the production of “artistically worthless” photographs.
80 Nobel, 2006, 30, 34 81 Nobel, 2006, 34
Their operators indeed did not care much about the rules, they simply wanted to “have fun”.82 Ordinary people were finally “in a position to portray things as they perceived them” [emphasis added].83 The invention became a tool of visual journaling, each picture became a memento of events happening to or around the photographer. The way human beings can remember received a serious upgrade: nostalgia became accessible. As Sontag put it, photography “democratize[d] all experiences by translating them into images”. A “society becomes ‘modern’”, she states rephrasing the German philosopher Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, “when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images”.84
According to Fritzsche, nostalgia is as well a product of modernity, in a sense: it “is a fundamentally modern phenomenon because it depended on the notion of historical process as the continual production of the new”.85 As mentioned in the first chapter, Fritzsche points to the French Revolution as the symbolic Other;86 the reason for the large-scale spread of longing, being the first time in European history when masses had to deal with displacement and could share their bittersweet thoughts. A few decades later, photography was invented. Within a century, it was widely popular and available anyone that could afford the low price set by Kodak: one dollar in 1900. Boym, on the other hand, calls nostalgia an off-modern phenomenon, even though it “is coeval with modernity itself”. “Off-modernism offered a critique of both the modern fascination with newness and no less modern reinvention of tradition”.87 An off-modernist approach is when ones thinks in parallel realities and imagines a what-if scenario: “[l]ike modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways.”88 And indeed, longing is a ‘prodigal child’. It would 82 Szilágyi, 1982, 40 83 Boom, Rooseboom, 2014, 20 84 Sontag, 2002, 7, 153 85 Fritzsche, 2001, 1589, 1590 86 Stovall, 2008, 143 87 Boym, 2001, xvi–xvii 88 Boym, 2011,
never exist without the time passing by and progress, yet it is constantly yearning for yesterday. It “can only survive in a long-distance relationship”.89 And this is what makes photography an excellent medium of the notion. A photograph is a slice of a past we long for, yet we can never again be active part of it. When it comes to longing, the famous analogy between hunting and photography takes an unexpected twist. According to Sontag, “[w]hen we are afraid, we shoot”. However, she states, “when we are nostalgic, we take pictures”.90
I do not necessarily agree with Sontag on this. I do not believe that it is nostalgia per se that makes us take snapshots. It is indeed true, “all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”, and the camera becomes a “device […] to record what is disappearing” in the operator’s hands.91 I indeed argue that it is largely an intentional act to collect fragments of our lives. One might think ahead and reaches
out to grab the camera pondering “I must take a picture of this”. Researchers of nostalgia call this form of the experience anticipatory nostalgia, the experience of “missing what not yet been lost”.92 Yet I contend, this does not necessarily go any further at the moment of exposure. It is not yet the nostalgia we would feel looking at the image a few years or a couple of decades later. When we take a picture, we are still in the moment, enjoying whatever is happening. The matured experience one day might become something we long for, the feeling triggered by the taken image. This is how the photograph gains what Sontag calls “talismanic” power. 93 It is not just a picture, “it is also a trace, […] like a footprint or a death mask”.94 We might anticipate this function from the captured moment sometime in the future. But it is a different kind of notion from the nostalgia I wish to discuss here. In this thesis, I wish to analyse the triggered feeling itself, the experience one might encounter
89 Boym, 2001, xiii 90 Sontag, 2002, 15 91 Sontag, 2002, 15–16 92 Davalos et al., 2015, 75 93 Sontag, 2002, 16 94 Sontag, 2002, 154
while looking at an image, one with a punctum for them—and quite possibly no one else. This is why my case study of the Hungarian archive is interesting. These are images taken in the past, more than hundred years ago. Nevertheless, they are not about nostalgia, not originally. Not like the pictures I will introduce in my third chapter: those images were taken with nostalgic intentions.
Sontag also claims, that “most photographs do not keep their emotional charge”. “[Q]ualities and intentions of [the pictures] tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.” She is talking about “a photograph of 1900”.95 We cannot know if she had a specific image in mind but I dare to say we can utilise her idea for just about any old picture, or all images that have no personal link with us. I claim however, that the “emotional charge” does not have to evaporate. It
transforms: the punctum is in the details. And I suggest that punctum and nostalgia
are, to a great extent, inseparable.
There is, however, something closely related to modernity that is all about nostalgia. Ignited by the rupture that followed the French Revolution, Fritzsche claims, something previously unknown started out: “[n]ever before had tradition been so closely or self-consciously examined the conscious way”. He says, European scientists in the field of philosophy and history begun to think “deeply about the legacy of the past”.96 The preservation of ruins—and creation of their artificial versions—took off. As Boym has put it, “[r]estorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstruction of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins”.97 Barthes asserts that photography and history were born in the same century. Interestingly, in his opinion, photography has replaced the “Monument”, the gravestone erected to immortalise death of any kind. “The Photograph, is a certain but fugitive testimony. […] the age of the Photograph is also the age of […] impatiences, everything which denies ripening.” He believes, thanks to this
95 Sontag, 2002, 21 96 Frietzsche, 2001, 1594 97 Boym, 2001, 41
restlessness, the notion of that-had-been is no longer important.98 Nonetheless, one needs to remember: the ruins and monuments mentioned by Fritzsche and Boym, artificial or genuine, are the traces of collective nostalgia. They have been erected to remind us to heroes and losses, occasionally myths or other cultural heritage. The
that-had-been mourned by Barthes is, very often, a private experience. His critique is
formulated of mortality itself; contemplating the fate of his family photographs after his death he asks: “once I am gone, […] nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature.”99 Sontag’s parallel between the tactility of time on old photographic prints and architecture appears once again. “Photography extends the […] beauty of ruins into genuinely popular taste” [emphasis added]. It “offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin”, she claims.100 Thus the medium, in a manner, successfully democratised the sense of belonging, both on a micro- and macrolevel.
On the microlevel, one finds personal photographs of individuals, like those of Barthes. On the macrolevel, however, there are collections, accessible to the general public. Some of them, like those in my case studies, are built on hundreds, thousands of personal archives. Literary critic Susan Stewart suggests that an archive, replacing the origins of the items with classification, moves away from temporality towards spatiality, as if working against the ‘evolution’ of nostalgia itself.101 Yet, it is “the past that lends authenticity to the collection”.102 A collection that is ready for use for a community, be it a small village’s local, offline records or a large-scale archive available online, democratises knowledge—and they are largely popular. As Huyssen puts it, “the seduction of the archive and trove of stories of human achievement […] has never been greater”.103
98 Barthes, 2000, 93–94 99 Barthes, 2000, 94 100 Sontag, 2002, 79–80 101 Stewart, 1993, 153 102 Stewart, 1993, 151 103 Huyssen, 2003, 5
2.2. An introduction to the Fortepan archive
The public archive of Fortepan104, founded in 2010, is run by two driven private persons, Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási. From their physical collection of hundreds of thousands of negatives and photographs, about 80,000 got digitalised up until today, accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection. Analogue went digital.
The first few thousand images originate from two decades of scavenging. The creators’ aim was to share their favourite pieces for the sake of “the legacy of (mainly unknown) amateur photographers” they discovered. After their immediate success, numerous private persons offered their own family albums and images. Furthermore, various institutions contacted Fortepan to donate their long-forgotten archives (that themselves had no means to process) to the collection. The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA)105, associated with the currently heavily attacked Central European University of Hungary106, soon became a major patron behind the initiative.107 Nevertheless, most images belong to the domains of vernacular photography, which I find particularly useful for my goals: the less we know about a picture, the more freedom it gives us. The narrative “overlay”, described by Hirsch, practically disappears and enables the onlooker to go with the
104 Named after a black and white rollfilm popular after Hungary’s once successful photochemical factory. 105 The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives is and “archival laboratory”, established in 1995. Its
main purpose is to make contemporary, historically significant documents accessible to everyone under the auspices of the Central European University and its open society mission. The institution is also a pioneer in the development of new means digitalising traditional archives. They have a considerable collection, for example, in the topic of communism and the Cold War, furthermore human rights. (Source:
http://www.osaarchivum.org. Access date: 9th May 2017)
106 The Central European University (CEU) was founded in 1991. Its main purpose to promote open society.
The American-Hungarian private university, identified with one of its main benefactors, the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, chose Budapest for a reason to establish the school. The institution is actively working on “transforming the closed communist inheritance”. (Source: https://www.ceu.edu/about, accessed on 8th May 2017.) At the beginning of 2017 the Hungarian regime declared war on the academy, trying to incapacitate it by introducing new laws, directly aiming at the “weaknesses” of CEU. The actions of the Hungarian regime evoked an international outcry. By the time this thesis was finished the controversy has not been solved.
flow, maybe that of the subconscious, or right the opposite: pairing the imagery with existing knowledge, creating a whole new layer of reality.
Szepessy and Tamási do not make it a secret that their curatorial practice is based on their emotions and personal aesthetic sense, and not so much on a historiographic interest. “[T]hese pictures show another Hungary, denying or supplementing the perception that only public events took place in the 20th century: inaugurated, signed, arrested, welcomed, buried. In FORTEPAN the world consists of holidays, every day.” [emphasis in original]108 I find it especially interesting that in an interview Tamási explains, why they have changed sepia toned images into black and white: “Brownish hues reflect something bygone. We want you to feel immersed, as if you had been right there.”109
Sontag says, “[t]he knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism”. The observer gets easily “charmed by the insignificant detail” and lets the self rule how the image is being read.110 Seduced by the archive, one might easily find a way to nostalgise about their own life.
2.3. Case studies and content analysis
“The way we see things is affected by what we know”, claims the English art critic, John Berger. This is why pictures remain interesting and “outlast what [they originally] represented”. His deliberation on “to whom […] the meaning […] of the past […] belong[s]” is a significant element when it comes to research.111 Even though Berger’s famous book is pondering about paintings, the camera112 is a critical part of his reasoning. “The invention of the camera changed the way men saw.”113 The spectator, all of a sudden, had a chance to get close to the referent. When one
108 Source: http://www.fortepan.hu/?view=fortepan&lang=en, accessed 7th May 2017. 109 Vincze, 2010
110 Sontag, 2002, 24, 99 111 Berger, 2008, 8, 10, 32
112 Foremost as means of reproduction. 113 Berger, 2008, 18
does not know the portrayed individual in person, this relationship is transformed, yet it cannot completely disappear. These people in the following pictures had-been. Now, several life spans separating us from the moment of capture, their presence triggers countless different emotions and thoughts than originally intended. Amongst them, for some, nostalgia.
The first image of my case study was captured in 1901 (see Image 1 on page ii). On the left there is a boy, maybe seven-year-old, casually standing against a tree. Clearly a young man already, aware of being in charge. On the other side of the tree, in the middle of the picture, three younger boys stare into the lens. Brothers maybe? Standing, lying, sitting—it does not really seem to matter. An air of self-confidence and mischief sways around them. They are right next to a dirt road that is leading to an invisible township. Alongside the road there are trees on both sides, their crowns wildly blown by the wind. Around the boys, geese pasturing, struggling against the gale.114
This photograph is an excellent example to discuss how Lasch looks at the development of nostalgia and its relationship with childhood, before and after the Great War. “For those who lived through the cataclysm of the First World War, disillusionment was a collective experience […] that made the prewar world appear innocent and remote.” An entire period, he continuous, “began to take on the
114 The little gooseherds instantly recalled two memories that, to a degree, belong to me. One of them is a
film experience of mine. It has been one of my favourite feel-good films for a long time: The
track-watchman’s house is about to depart (Indul a bakterház. Sándor Rideg. 1980. Film.). It is about a savvy boy of about ten that his impoverished mother is forced, by their social circumstances, to send to work. He ends up looking after the track-watchman’s cows—and from the day he is hired, the hosts’ peaceful, quiet days are certainly over. Thus, a punctum has been discovered.
It is curious how this photograph makes me yearn for such a passive experience. For a mood, for some Eastern European humour. It makes me long to watch a film I have not seen for years. Along with this desire to find the DVD I do have somewhere around, this image also reminds me of my mother. As a little girl, she worked as a gooseherd during summertime, when there was no school to attend.
I have a whimsical idea in my mind about how it might have looked, largely influenced by Rideg’s classic. I can imagine her with a long stick in her hand. Her lonely figure trying to deal with the vicious poultry in the very same town I went to high school about four decades later. Somehow, I see my mother in the child that is sitting the closest to the road. A little bit of an outsider, self-conscious, feeling awkward. There are no pictures from my mother’s childhood. There were none taken. This image is a little bit as if I had my own winter garden photograph.
qualities formerly associated with childhood”.115 His view suggests that the first global war was at least as huge of a milestone in the transformation of nostalgia as the French Revolution, thoroughly analysed by Fritzsche. Those men who had experienced combat first hand (troopers, medical personnel, etc.) were, to a large extent, young adults, thus children before 1914. Lasch claims, “it was natural for them to play off postwar disillusionment against idyllic images of prewar childhood”. The generation that was born around the turn of the century, he says, all of a sudden had to grow up in the midst of their adolescence: “it was easy to see the history of the twentieth century as the life history of their own”. This is the most important reason, he asserts, that in the 1920s scientists started to discuss “nostalgic sentiment”—as a problem. The common ground of the aforementioned generation, seemingly, lead them to believe that all conflicts are as simple as generational rivalry.116 Probably this is the time when the politicisation of nostalgia becomes widespread. It was Marx in the 1850s that had made it “an explicitly political problem”, claiming that social justice cannot benefit from the past, its believers need to look into the future and search for the solutions there.117 Yet, it was the 1920s when it became an organic part of everyday political discussions.
“Everything in the early pictures was designed to last”, conveys Benjamin in A short
history of Photography.118 The medium possesses “a magical value”, he says, that makes “the spectator [feel] an irresistible compulsion to look for […] that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself.” Looking at a photograph, he presents, we probably discover this point once again.119 I suggest that Benjamin here is talking about the pursuit of the temporal compression that Barthes half a century later calls punctum.
115 Lasch, 1991, 107 116 Lasch, 1991, 107–108 117 Piason Natali, 2004, 13, 16 118 Bejamin, 1972 (1931), 17 119 Bejamin, 1972 (1931), 7
