Lost and Found
Landscape as Keepsake Box for Traumatic Memories
Lost and Found
Landscape as Keepsake Box for Traumatic Memories
Sybren Dallinga S1542567
Department of Humanities, Media Studies (MA): Film and Photographic Studies Supervisor: Dr. S. A. Shobeiri
26 September 2019 20.451 words
Abstract
Due to its severe and incomprehensible nature, trauma remains problematic in terms of representation. How does one represent the unrepresentable? This tricky territory of trauma and representation will be explored by this thesis within the context of the medium of photography by focussing on aftermath landscape photography. This thesis intends to answer the question: How does the landscape within aftermath photography position itself in relation to the historical traumatic atrocities it aspires to capture? A comparative theoretical analysis of two aftermath landscape photographs by Chloe Dewe Mathews, from the aftermath photography project Shot at Dawn (2014), guide the chapters which address the concept of place, the presence of absence and the concept of time. Three interrelated overarching understandings of the landscape’s position, in relation to the trauma the aftermath photographs aspire to capture, have emerged through the analysis. These can be summarized as landscape as a keepsake box, landscape as contradiction, and landscape as perception.
Acknowledgements
First, and most of all, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Dr. S. A. Shobeiri from the Humanities department of Leiden University for his guidance and patience. He has assisted and supported me throughout the process of writing this thesis and steered my often tumultuous mind in the right direction. Thank you.
In advance, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the second reader and their valuable commentary on this thesis.
I would like to thank photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews for providing me with such an interesting and provocative case study. Without her project Shot at Dawn, this thesis would not have been able to explore as many aspects of the genre of aftermath photography as it did.
I also want to thank my close surroundings including my parents, sister, family and friends for the ever-present support, encouragement and sometimes much needed distraction during the process of writing this thesis. I would not have been able to do it without them.
Finally, a special thank you to my grandfather who just missed me completing this thesis, but I felt was spiritually present to help me finish it.
All are trimmed for a Sunday jaunt. I know That bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall, Which are there yet and not changed. From where these sit
You hear the water of seven streams fall To the roarer at the bottom, and through all The leafy valley a rumouring of air go. Pictured here, their expressions listen yet, And still that valley has not changed its sound Though their faces are four decades under the ground.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1 – 7
1.1 The Photograph After the Fact 1
1.2 Defining the Landscape 3
1.3 The Alluring Aftermath 5
1.4 Methodology 6
2. Theoretical Framework 8 – 15
2.1 The Belatedness of Trauma 8
2.2 Memory of a Memory, Trace of a Trace 10
2.3 An Analogy of Ambiguity 11
2.4 Representation of Trace 13
3. Replacing the Placeless 17 – 27
3.1 Experienced Places 17
3.2 The Picturesque Landscape 19
3.3 Trauma and the Traumatized Landscape 22
3.4 Anonymous Collective vs. Detailed Individual 25
4. Representations of Absence 29 – 39
4.1 The Traumatic Presence of Absence 30
4.2 Astigmatism: “Too See or Not to See” 32
4.3 Uncanny Holes of Absence 34
4.4 Haunting Shadows of the Past 37
5. Post-Traumatic Landscape 41 – 49
5.1 Time within Photography 42
5.2 Revisiting Time 44
5.3 Traumatic Re-enactment 46
Conclusions 50 – 52
Bibliography 53 – 56
1. Introduction
How can we represent what is, by its own definition, by its very nature unrepresentable, (without denying the traumatic experience and the cause of this experience, the evil, the terror,) without banalizing it, trivializing it, spectacularizing it, finally repressing it for a second time.
Peter Weibel, Repression and Representation: The RAF in German Postwar Art.
1.1 The Photograph After the Fact
Some occurrences are of such a horrific nature they are almost too awful to be comprehended. Events that one can literally not wrap one’s mind around and are unacceptable as truths. When even thinking about such incomprehensible happenings is extremely difficult, it seems impossible to represent these traumatic events in the ‘right’ way, if there even is one. Because, as Weibel has noted, how do you represent what appears to be “unrepresentable”?1 In this thesis
I will explore this tricky territory of trauma and representation within the context of the medium of photography, focussing on the aftermath landscape photograph. Since the period of Romanticism, not only the medium of photography, but the arts as a whole have been interested in representing things on the border of what the human mind is able to understand. Trauma belongs to these ungraspable themes art wishes to visually represent, because it often surpasses the limits of our comprehension and “verges on the indecipherable.”2 The invention of
photography has transformed and reshaped this visualization of trauma, because it allows the moment at which the trauma occurred to be arrested by the camera. The traumatic atrocities of the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War have caused this connection between photography and trauma to become evidently apparent. Thousands of photographs were taken during the war both by Nazi’s and citizens of the occupied countries.3 However, the
documentation of the Holocaust did not end with the Second World War. The liberation of multiple concentration camps by British and American troops caused a wave of distressing photographic material displaying dead and emaciated bodies, piles of shoes, mass graves and
1 Peter Weibel, “Repression and Representation: The RAF in German Postwar Art.” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures. Barron, Stephanie, Sabine Eckmann, and Eckhart Gillen. (New York: Abrams, 2009), 256.
2 Margaret Iversen. Photography, Trace, and Trauma. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 83. 3 Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 7.
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dirty barracks.4 After this first flood that captured the “hysterical subject” of the trauma of the
Holocaust, other photographers chose to let time pass in order to address the trauma from a different, less testimonial perspective. Instead of using the camera to capture imagery in the heat of the trauma, these photographers tried to apprehend the traumatic experiences long after they took place.5
This approach results in aftermath photographs, also called late photographs, that complicate the representation of trauma by neither directly revealing nor obviously displaying it. In the case of Dirk Reinartz, this aftermath method led to the photographic series Deathly Still: Pictures of Former Concentration Camps. The photographs display the sites of former concentration camps fifty years after the end of the Second World War. While some photographs reveal their direct connection to the Holocaust by depicting the remains of the concentration camp, the landscape photographs keep this connection more ambiguous by only displaying the scenery (see fig. 4). The ‘emptiness’ within these aftermath landscape photographs is perhaps what makes them more intriguing than the photographs that immediately reveal the trauma. Reinartz’s attempt to preserve the trauma through his images of the landscape, stimulates one to think about the connection between “presence and absence”, 6
“seeing and not seeing”.7 It is almost as if the landscape is deliberately misleading by seducing
the spectator to perceive the photographed landscape as simply a landscape, only showing its true colours when accompanied by context.8 As stated by Ulrich Baer, a scholar of German and
Comparative Literature, in his book Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, a photograph is able to offer the spectator a chance to see “not narrative, not history, but possibly trauma.”9
Baer’s book is among the leading texts written on aftermath photography and delves into how the traumatized mind and the medium of photography capture and preserve trauma. Also belonging to these principal texts is art historian Donna West Brett’s book Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945. In this book, she elaborates on photography’s role in the creation of memories of specific places and the traumas that have
4 Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 124.
5 Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 17. 6 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 17.
7 Donna West Brett, Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945. (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2016), 3.
8 Sonja Fessel, "The Absence of Atrocity: Bart Michiels's The Course of HistoryPhotographs." History of Photography 36, no. 3 (July 09, 2012), 315, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2012.669934 (accessed September 23, 2019).
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occurred there. Another essential book is Photography, Trace, and Trauma, written by art historian Margaret Iversen. She focuses on the analogy between trauma and photography, and delves into the ways in which the photographic medium is able to represent the traces of trauma. Besides the previous books, the article The Absence of Atrocity: Bart Michiels's The Course of History Photographs by art historian Sonja Fessel also contributes to the discourse of aftermath photography by focussing on the presence of absence within the aftermath photograph.
1.2 Defining the Landscape
The photograph might be able to show the spectator trauma, but what is the position of the landscape within this trauma? What does it represent? To understand the position of the landscape within the aftermath photograph, one must first come to terms with the concept of landscape itself. The landscape, according to geographer Denis Cosgrove and cultural geographer Stephen Daniels, is “a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings.”10 They continue by explaining that this cultural aspect of the
landscape does not imply that it cannot be represented through materials such as “paint on canvas, writing on paper, in earth, stone water and vegetation on the ground.”11 Therefore, the
photographic image created through the recording of light is also a fully justified material to represent the cultural image of landscape. These different materials capable of representing the landscape, including the photographic image, produce something that can be observed by the spectator. Philosopher Jeff Malpas draws upon art historian Enzo Carli who links the fact that a landscape is used by the spectator for different purposes, ranging from experiencing pleasure or stimulating thoughts to encouraging interaction and a process of growth, to the landscape as “an object of aesthetic appreciation.”12 The objectification of the “external environment”
enables the landscape to serve as an aesthetically pleasing object serving the needs of the human spectator.13 Separating the landscape from the viewing spectator, while also making it
accessible through a certain usefulness, shows the duality that is present within the concept of landscape. The concept of landscape as a viewed object was introduced into the English language at the end of the sixteenth-century. Whereas the previously dominating etymological
10 Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 1.
11 Ibid.
12 Jeff Malpas, The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 7. 13 Ibid.
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definition of landscape focused on the relationship between “a human collective (denoted by the suffixes –schaft, -ship, -scape)” and its accepted power over the riches of a “bounded area (land)”, the literary usage of the word landscape surpassed this definition by perceiving the landscape as a piece of land that is perceivable from a vantage point.14 This vantage point can
be a position of perspective such as a hilltop or “enhanced by an instrument such as a looking glass or binoculars.”15
To this category of instruments enhancing the vantage point, one could also add the lens of a camera. But then what does this vantage point through the lens of a camera imply? The answer goes back to the power relations and distance between the landscape and spectator, or more specifically: the landscape and the human eye looking through the camera lens. Cosgrove argues that the vantage point allows the spectator a position of agency, because during the process of transforming the external environment into a landscape, the spectator has to use the power of their imagination.16 To become aware of these relations of authority and power and to
be able to understand the landscape, one has to comprehend “the forms of action out of which they arise, to which they give expression, and to which they may also contribute.”17 The
landscape already consists of these complex structures before it is ‘used’ by the spectator. One could ask whether it is the scenery or a point of view that is actually represented by a landscape photograph. One could argue that the landscape represents neither, but rather symbolizes the “particular influence and involvement –different in each case– of the landscape (and of the place) in the life and modes of life that arise within and in relation to it.”18 This implies that a
landscape is never just a landscape but is shaped by everything that has put its mark upon it. Therefore, the landscape should not only be thought of as a representation of involvement at the time of creation, but also a container of memory and markers that have faded and been replaced by others. In his book Landscape and Memory, historian Simon Schama acknowledges and emphasizes this aspect of memory that is present within the landscape as cultural image, and proposes a new way of looking at landscape in order to rediscover it. He states that every time a part of the external environment is framed and captured by the camera “the old culture-creatures re-emerge from their lair, trailing the memories of the generations behind them.”19
14 Denis E. Cosgrove, "Landscape and the European Sense of Sight - Eyeing Nature." in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson, et al. (SAGE Publications, 2003), 254.
15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.
17 Malpas, The Place of Landscape, 14. 18 Ibid.
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1.3 The Alluring Aftermath
The photographic method of aftermath photography deliberately looks for these “old culture-creatures”. By letting time pass, the aftermath photograph attempts to capture the marks and indicators of something beyond what can be seen in the photograph, something that belongs to the past but of which the traces are perhaps still present. Photographs taken in the aftermath of trauma thus have a different interpretation of the trauma, acting as “secondary witnesses.”20 The
aftermath photograph is an expression of the change surrounding the logic of the index that was established in the 1990’s and has been developing ever since.21 Consequently, the aftermath
photograph does not only correspond to a “state of postmemory”22, a term introduced by
Marianne Hirsch describing the attempt of the photograph to go back in time to the moment of the original traumatic event, but should also be understood as part of a movement that is “similarly subtended by memory yet equally suspicious of the index, the trace of touch, as a privileged mode of encounter.”23 Due to this ‘progressive’ aspect it is worth discussing whether
the aftermath photograph, similar to other new photographic methods of addressing trauma, could be an answer to Weibel’s conundrum of the unrepresentable trauma.
To me, one of the most alluring features of this highly fascinating genre of
photography, is its disobedience. While the ‘rules’ of the medium prescribe that a photograph functions as evidence, the aftermath photograph rebels against them by doing the exact opposite. It is a mysterious genre that consists of so much more than what meets the eye, it complicates rather than explains. But this complexity is exactly the reason I find myself drawn towards the genre. Although the aftermath photograph begs to be fully unmasked, I realize that due to the complex relation with the past physical trauma, this thesis will never be able to fully reveal all its secrets. This thesis attempts to reveal one layer by analysing the landscape within the aftermath photograph and its underlying pursuit of capturing trauma. That aftermath photography can be considered an option for representing the unrepresentable,
20 Brett, Photography and Place, 51.
21 The logic of the index had always been associated with realism. This changed during the 1990’s, when the
logic of the index started to include other forms of representation such as the aftermath photograph. Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007), 2, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-020 (accessed September 23, 2019).
22 Postmemory was first introduced by Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of English and Comparative Literature. She has
used the term to explain the reaction of a second generation to trauma experienced by a previous generation. Brett has described how looking at an aftermath photograph depicting trauma is similar to the “state of
postmemory”, because both the reaction of the second generation and the looking at the aftermath photograph are actions that attempt to bring back the past. (Brett, Photography and Place, 51.)
23 Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. (Chicago: University
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leaves one wondering what happens when the landscape and all its challenging aspects are combined with the aftermath photograph. How does the landscape within aftermath photography position itself in relation to the historical traumatic atrocities it aspires to capture? This is the question this I intend to answer with this thesis.
1.4 Methodology
Aftermath photographs differ in the amount and the way in which they hide or reveal or their connection to trauma. This thesis aims to unravel the landscape’s position in relation to the trauma it attempts to capture, but do individually photographed aftermath landscapes position themselves in different ways to past trauma? This question will be answered by undertaking a comparative theoretical analysis, which will enable observation, juxtaposition and engagement with different literature on the aftermath genre. My approach is further informed by Baer, who states that it is necessary to address aftermath photographs from a modernist perspective “because they do not contain evidence of their importance (…) as if their significance and merit derived not from our knowledge of context but from intrinsic criteria alone.”24 Since the absence of evidence within the aftermath landscape is central to this thesis, the modernist perspective will be an important aspect of the analysis. Two photographed landscapes (see fig. 1 and fig. 2) from British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews’ aftermath photography project Shot at Dawn (2014) will be used as case studies within the comparative theoretical analysis.25
Shot at Dawn focuses on sites at which British, French and Belgian troops were executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. The project, commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford as part of 14–18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, consists of twenty-three photographs depicting the locations where soldier(s) where executed. Dewe Mathews has tried to photograph these sites at the exact time of day and year to when the original shootings took place.26 The following passage elaborates on Dewe
Mathews’ intentions behind her aftermath photography project Shot at Dawn.
24 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 66.
25 The full photographic series Shot at Dawn (2014) by Chloe Dewe Mathews accompanied by text written by the
Ruskin School of Art and University of Oxford can be seen the website dedicated to the photographic project:
http://shotatdawn.photography/work/
26 Dewe Mathews, and Ruskin School of Art / University of Oxford, 2014, http://shotatdawn.photography/work/
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Whether slag-heap, back of a primary school, churchyard, town abattoir or half-kempt hedgerow, these places have been altered by a traumatic event. By
photographing them, Dewe Mathews is reinserting the individual into that space, stamping their presence back onto the land, so that their histories are not
forgotten.27
This thesis will be divided into four different chapters. The first section provides the reader with a theoretical framework of the concept of trauma and will function as a basis for the following chapters. The division of the remaining chapters will be based upon three auxiliary questions, each containing their own theoretical focus point. The first chapter: Replacing the Placeless will delve into the relationship between trauma and place to answer the question: In what way does the landscape within aftermath photography rearrange traumatic events? Since place within aftermath landscape photography, and especially within the project Shot at Dawn, is such a substantial aspect, the thesis will start by analysing this topic. By analysing the concept of place, this chapter is the first step towards a better understanding of the landscape in relation to trauma. The second chapter: Representations of Absence, will elaborate on the presence of absence. The astigmatic “tension between seeing and not seeing” present within aftermath photography has guided the formulation of the second question28: To
what extent does astigmatic seeing within aftermath photography stimulate reflection upon traumatic events? This chapter will investigate the different layers of the project Shot at Dawn; those that are perceivable by the human eye and those that make their appearance through other entrances. The third chapter: Post-Traumatic Landscape, studies the importance of time in relation to the medium of photography, trauma and the aftermath photograph based on the question: How does the concept of time within aftermath photography influence the relation between the landscape and traumatic events that took place there? This final chapter will specifically analyse the crucial role time plays within Chloe Dewe Mathews’ project Shot at Dawn. The conclusion will re-evaluate all the discussed findings and combine them in order to answer how the landscape within aftermath photography positions itself in relation to the traumatic events it aspires to capture.
27 Dewe Mathews, 2014, http://www.chloedewemathews.com/shot-at-dawn/ (accessed September 23, 2019). 28 Brett, Photography and Place, 3.
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2. Theoretical Framework
2.1 The Belatedness of Trauma
The theory of trauma was largely shaped by philosopher Sigmund Freud, who introduced the concept of “Nachträglichkeit”, also known as the theory of deferred action, in the never published A Project for a Scientific Psychology.29 The concept of Nachträglichkeit, which was
developed “over the course of decades”, was inspired by Freud’s struggle to explain the ability of post-traumatic events to reshape the memory of trauma.30 Even though Freud himself never
gave a clear definition of the concept, in a 1896 letter to his friend Fliess, he elaborated indirectly on the essence of Nachträglichkeit: “memory traces being subjected from time to time to re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription.”31
Subsequently, the concept was defined by psychotherapist Adam Philips as: “In one sense Freud’s theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience.”32 According to this definition, one should understand trauma
as something that cannot be remembered per se, but is rather remembered through the memory of the traumatic memory.33 The aftermath photograph perceives trauma in a similar manner by
attempting to capture what is left of the traumatic memory rather than the memory itself. Cathy Caruth, a scholar of English and Comparative Literature, is more interested in the personal affairs that shape trauma than the process of maintaining the trauma. In line with Freud, Caruth addresses trauma as a developing entity.34 She elaborates on her statements by
drawing upon the Greek origins of the term trauma, meaning wound, and how it has developed from a physical to a mental term. According to Freud and Caruth, this mental wound of trauma is not able to heal itself naturally in a manner similar to a physical wound, due to the fact that the birth of a trauma is often triggered by an event that happens too quickly to be fully
29 Freud has never offered a clear definition of Nachträglichkeit but has rather given a general description of
“the notion of deferred action” Jean Laplanche and J.-B Pontalis quoted in Adam Philips, On Flirtation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 33.
30 Fred C. Alford, "Trauma and Psychoanalysis: Freud, Bion, and Mitchell." Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 23,
no. 1 (2018), 44. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-018-0070-7 (accessed September 23, 2019).
31 Freud quoted in Philips, On Flirtation, 34. 32 Ibid, 33.
33 Alford, Trauma and Psychoanalysis, 44.
34 Andrew Barnaby, "Coming Too Late: Freud, Belatedness, and Existential Trauma." SubStance 41, no. 2 (2012),
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comprehended by the victim at the moment of its occurrence.35 These “unclaimed experiences”,
as Caruth has entitled traumatic memories, are further explored through their repetitive imposition upon the survivor36: “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event
in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature, the way it was precisely not known in the first instance, returns to haunt the survivor later on.”37 This traumatic
residue of the original traumatic event could be perceived as something that is preserved within the mind “as a record or trace of an actual occurrence.”38 Andrew Barnaby, a specialist in
early-modern English literature and cultural history, notes that this traumatic “remnant” is indeed a piece of the traumatic event, however, it is a distorted piece that is not entirely capable of comprehending the actual event.39 One could compare this experience to having a scar, the
leftover trace of a wound, that only brings back the memory of the incurring of the wound when looked at. This is in line with the aspirations of aftermath photography, which wants to revive the traumatic memory by being perceived by the spectator.
Iversen addresses trauma not necessarily as scarring but rather as something that is able to disturb and derange. She states that: “Trauma creates a disturbingly ambiguous relation between inside and outside, self and other.”40 Iversen, in line with Caruth, identifies the cause
of this disturbance of the self and the other as the overwhelming surprise and the inability of the victim to “assimilate” to the traumatic occurrence.41 In the process of disturbance, the
trauma not only effects the victim’s separation of self and other, but also the “linear temporality of experience”. Through this other traumatically outing of disturbance, defined as Nachträglichkeit by Freud, Iversen draws upon the Freudian parallel between the deferred action that occurs within the victim’s (sub)conscious and the deferred action of the time preceding the development of a photograph: “an image can be developed after a long or a short interval.”42 Trauma is therefore not only disturbing at the moment of its occurrence, but is also
able to ultimately release the emotional pain related to the previously experienced trauma from
35 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007), 4.
36 Ibid, 10. 37 Ibid.
38 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 122. 39 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 120, 135. 40 Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 3. 41 Ibid.
42 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Katerine Jones. (Knopf, 1939), 19,
https://www.taagloucester.org/sites/default/files/uploaded_documents/moses_and_monotheism_excerpt.pdf (accessed September 23, 2019).
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“an unconscious limbo.”43 This Freudian parallel is reinforced by the aftermath photograph,
which deliberately defers the action of taking the photograph by letting time pass.
2.2 Memory of a Memory, Trace of a Trace
Perceiving trauma as a memory of a memory, is in line with how David Campany, a scholar of photographic theory and practice, describes the shift from photographing the hectic to capturing the aftermath. Within the context of the Joel Meyerowitz’s series Aftermath, which consists of photographs depicting the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York, Campany states that such photographs display “not so much the trace of an event as the trace of the trace of an event.”44 This description of the aftermath photograph as a “trace of an actual occurrence”
correlates with the internal development of the trauma it aims to portray.45 It can be stated that
there is a commutuality between the Freudian description of the nestling of trauma within the psyche and Campany’s understanding of the aftermath photograph. Despite this common ground between the memory of a memory and “trace of a trace” that appears to relate trauma and aftermath photography, Campany states that this fragmented characteristic of the aftermath photograph, which is able to display only a piece of the trauma, is undeniably problematic.46
From this perspective, Campany is drawn more towards elaborating on the aesthetic lack of the aftermath photograph. This visual lack is nestled within the aftermath photograph, due to its decision to withhold information and leave the viewer alone with the emptiness: “In its apparent finitude and muteness it can leave us in permanent limbo, obliterating even the need for analysis and bolstering a kind of liberal melancholy that shuns political explanation like a vampire shuns garlic.”47 According to Campany, the emptiness of the aftermath photograph results in a surplus
of open space, which can eventually mislead the spectator into making ‘false’ assumptions about the photograph and its context.
In contrast to Campany, Barnaby does not discuss emptiness and absence within the context of questioning the capabilities of the perceiving spectator, but replaces presence with absence in relation to the concept of trauma. He raises the question: “But what if the experience
43 Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 83.
44 David Campany, "Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on the Problems of ‘Late Photography’." Where Is the Photograph?, 2003, https://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/ (accessed September 23, 2019).
45 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 122. 46 Campany, Safety in Numbness, 2003. 47 Campany, Safety in Numbness, 2003.
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of trauma registers an absence rather than a dislocated presence?”48 The reason for Barnaby to
ask this question, and thereby emphasize the absence rather than the presence of trauma, lies in the option of the trauma to be something other than “the remnant of an event we actually experienced.”49 If so, the previously established incomprehensibility of trauma could be a result
not of belatedness but of the absence of trauma within the mind, and is therefore not in need of transformation because it has not been experienced by the victim.50 As Barnaby defines it:
This notion of traumatic belatedness as the subject’s coming too late rather than too soon helps us conceptualize the possibility of an experience of an initial seeing that fails to see, a presence that is also an absence, the inexplicable missing
of what could not possibly have been missed.51
By allowing absence into the discussion of “dislocated presence”,52 Barnaby touches upon the
conflicting collaboration mentioned by both Baer and Brett, of “presence and absence”,53
“seeing and not seeing.”54 This collaboration is inherently connected to the genre of aftermath
photography. Therefore, one could state that the absence that is present within trauma’s “dislocated presence”,55 whether perceived within Caruth’s context of “incomprehensibility” or
Barbaby’s literal understanding of belatedness in which the subject’s consciousness rests within a place of absence,56 is not only connected, but in fact essential to the dualities on which
aftermath photography is based.
2.3 An Analogy of Ambiguity
This foundational connection between the phenomenon of trauma and photography has also been acknowledged by Baer. The absence, defined by Barnaby as the starting point of the analogy, is shifted by Baer from the position of originator to that of inevitable outcome. The analogy lies in the ability of both the traumatic mind and the medium of photography to “trap
48 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 120. 49 Ibid.
50 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 120. 51 Ibid, 123.
52 Ibid.
53 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 17. 54 Brett, Photography and Place, 3. 55 Barnaby, Coming Too Late, 120. 56 Ibid, 133.
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an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory.”57 The traumatic
mind neither conserves the traumatic experience as memory nor leaves it behind by disturbing the “routine mental process”,58 and thereby traps the experience in an uncertain place within the
mind. In a similar manner to the traumatic mind, photography freezes and thereby traps an experience within its moment of occurrence, unable to preserve the experience as complete memory.59 The place of ambiguity Baer established, located, as it is, somewhere between
forgetting and processing, can be compared to Iversen’s concept of “unconscious limbo”, as outlined earlier.60 She described the unconscious limbo as a place of storage in which the trauma
is confined with the option of being (re)discovered in the future.61 This corresponds with Baer’s
idea that: “Some events (…) register in the psyche, like negatives captured on film for later development, without being integrated into the larger contexts provided by consciousness, memory or the act of forgetting.”62 Whereas Baer searches for an analogy between trauma and
photography and finds it in the position of entrapment, Iversen does not connect the psychological unconscious limbo of trauma with a possible photographic limbo.
Traumatic experience cannot be fully abandoned nor fully assimilated, but hovers at the boundary of both states. Does the aftermath photograph, as an object, remove the trauma from this uncertain position within the psyche and transfer it into an equally ambiguous position in between memory and forgetting? The writers W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, most commonly known for their narratives about the Holocaust and the Second World War in relation to “change and coincidence”,63 address photographs as objects. In their book Unrecounted they state that,
because objects, in theory, have a longer lifespan than humans “they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them.”64 Thereby,
the photograph becomes a wise object consisting of, in the case of the aftermath photograph, traces of traumatic experiences ready for the us as spectators to be unravelled “if we are lucky enough, or open enough, to encounter them.”65 This element of unexpected coincidence can be
compared Freud’s idea that the emotional recognition of trauma is deferred by its victim; “the
57 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 9. 58 Ibid.
59 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 9.
60 Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 83. 61 Ibid.
62 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 9.
63 Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 8.
64 W. G Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp. Unrecounted. Translated by Michael Hamburger. (London: Penguin Books,
2004), 78-79.
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trace can be modified, deferred, reformed – but never erased.”66 Therefore, when considering
Sebald and Tripp’s description of objects as experience comprising entities, one could assume that the aftermath photograph has the ability to release the trauma from limbo by welcoming it into its safe haven, located in between memory and forgetting.
2.4 Representation of Trace
One might think that Baer’s analogy, between trauma and analogue photographic processes enables a smooth, cooperative understanding between the two. Nonetheless, due to its severe and incomprehensible nature, trauma remains problematic in terms of representation. The genre of aftermath photography, deliberately interacts with the traces of trauma and, as a result, captures the traumatic occurrence in a different manner. Although the concept of trace appears to be fundamental to the aftermath photograph, (as established through my discussion of Campany and his aversion to the effect of displaying ‘only’ trace), according to philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the concept of trace is also inherent to the medium of photography itself. Within his well-known essay The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard defines such a crime as one where “the truth would forever have withdrawn from it and its secret would never be revealed, for want of any clues [traces] being left behind.”67 He draws a parallel between this so called
‘perfect crime’ and the scene represented within the photograph. This parallel is based on the impossibility of the perfect crime, which is emphasised by the photographic trace as a symbol of the artist’s inability to resist “the fundamental drive not to leave traces.”68 In terms of
representation, the trace is used by Baudrillard as an indicator to demonstrate the irrelevance of the degree of realness with which the subject is represented. In fact, the traces that are present within this representation potentially lead to nothing at all.69 This idea is explained by
Baudrillard through his theory of “simulacrum.”70 This theory is based upon the notion that,
whereas, in reality, traces such as photographs refer to nothing, they are able to recollect and refer to signs constructed within the spectator’s psyche.71 The concept of simulacrum supports
the idea that, although there is no truth, nothing, or the absence of something, lives on within
66 Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2012), 43.
67 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime. (London: Verso, 1996), 6. 68 Ibid.
69 Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art. (Malden, MA: Blackwell publishing, 2011), 38.
70 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 16.
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the photograph: “It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn’t any – that is to say, the continuity of the nothing.”72 The simulacrum relates to the essence of aftermath
photography, which in itself attempts to capture something that is physically impossible to represent.
This continuation of nothing, or in other words, this never present presence resulting in absence, is very much relatable to aftermath photography and the initial question raised by Baudrillard’s essay: “Why is there nothing rather than something?”73 This question came into
being as a replacement of the traditional philosophical question: “Why is there something rather than nothing.”74 This focus on absence and nothingness, in line with Barnaby’s perspective on
the belatedness of traumatic experiences, results in Baudrillard’s vision of the world as a place in need of the abolishment of its illusions.
The absence of things from themselves, the fact that they do not take place though they appear to do so, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own
appearance and is, therefore, never identical with itself, is the material illusion of the world. And, deep down, this remains the great riddle, the enigma which fills us with dread and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of
truth.75
Although the enigma Baudrillard mentions does not specifically refer to trauma in itself, the passage above does describe and include many of the puzzling aspects of the concept of trauma. It refers to the conflicting and often haunting nature of trauma as well as its duality. However, Baudrillard also refers indirectly to the conflicting and paradoxical character of the aftermath photograph: “the fact that they do not take place though they appear to do so, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearance and is, therefore, never identical with itself.”76 The passage brings one back to the
difficulties of representing trauma, trace and the subsequent presence of nothingness. The genre of aftermath photography embodies and deliberately explores all of these
72 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 57. 73 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 6. 74 Ibid.
75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.
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difficulties by attempting to capture the traumatic trace of what once was. The aftermath photograph chooses to answer Baudrillard question “Why is there nothing rather than something?”77
The concept of trauma is and will always be an enigmatic topic of philosophical discussion. The definitions and effects of traumatic experiences differ, perceived as a trace of the original traumatic event or as something to be released from a place of “unconscious limbo.”78 There can be found common ground in the idea that trauma cannot
be fully erased, due to it being located in between memory and forgetting, and will sooner or later leave its mark. This presence of memories and traces does not exclude the presence of absence from the discussion of trauma. As discussed, both Barnaby and Baudrillard locate absence and nothingness within the concept of trauma. The question of what might make photography and the photograph as an object suitable for representing traumatic occurrences, has been discussed by elaborating on the analogy between trauma and photography. The next chapter will further explore the placement of traumatic memory within two aftermath landscape photographs from the series Shot at Dawn by Chloe Dewe Mathews, by drawing upon the importance of place, the theories of landscape representation, and the analogy between trauma and landscape.
77 Ibid.
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3. Replacing the Placeless
Trauma appears to be placeless, located within the victim’s mind in a place of in betweenness. With her project Shot at Dawn, Chloe Dewe Mathews has photographed “twenty-three locations” at which soldiers were executed by firing squads for the purpose of obedience during the First World War.79 By photographing these locations, she returns the placeless trauma to its
original location. The photographed landscapes explore the past traumatic occurrences through both the vantage point of the landscape and the camera. In my introduction I already touched on landscape as a vantage point, which according to Cosgrove establishes a powerful position for the spectator in relation to the landscape.80 Brett states that due to the landscape’s subjection
to the human eye it “forms a particular way of seeing and experiencing the world and has ambiguous and multi-layered meanings.”81 She adds that in a similar manner, this is also the
case for the medium of photography, since the photographic lens also arranges a specific vantage point for the human eye.82 This chapter will examine how the photographed landscape
within the genre of aftermath photography influences the ability to rearrange the traumatic events, by looking at two aftermath landscape photographs from Chloe Dewe Mathews’ photographic series Shot at Dawn (see fig. 1 and fig. 2). This chapter intends to answer the following question: In what way does the landscape within aftermath photography rearrange traumatic events? Answering this question requires an investigation into the relationship between trauma, landscape and place within the genre of aftermath photography. This relationship will be investigated by elaborating on place as an experienced entity, the picturesque representation of landscape, the photographed landscape as a location of trauma, and the photographed landscape as a detailed representation of personal trauma.
3.1 Experienced Places
Landscape, representing “an historically specific way of experiencing the world”, needs to be looked at from a cultural perspective, taking into account social structures, rather than solely from a geographical perspective.83 According to Brett, the belief shared by Daniels and
79 Dewe Mathews, and Ruskin School of Art / University of Oxford, 2014. 80 Cosgrove, Landscape and the European, 254.
81 Brett, Photography and Place, 6. 82 Ibid.
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Cosgrove that one should explain landscape from a socio-cultural point of view, is perceived by cultural geographers to be crucial for the nuanced understanding of “making and experiencing place.”84 However, the concept of place can also be defined on its own, while
remaining attached to Daniels and Cosgrove’s historical social perspective on landscape. Brett notes that place sets itself apart from landscape as “a physical site which can be affected by events and is a lived space, rather than an abstracted space.”85 She continues that places are able
to be experienced and remembered, and subsequently photographed.86 Place could be perceived
as the material relative of the “ideological concept” of landscape, both shaped by everyone and everything that has left a mark upon them.87 Philosopher Edward Casey states that in the case
of the concept of place, leaving a mark works both ways: “place is selective for memories” and “memories are selective for place.”88 In other words, place selects memories by welcoming
certain remembrances and refusing others.89 On the other hand, memories are attracted to a
specific place, treating it as their territory.
Place is a mise en scène for remembered events precisely to the extent that it guards and keeps these events within its self-delimiting perimeters. Instead of filtering out (as place can do for inappropriate, ill-placed memories), place holds
in by giving memories an authentically local habitation: by being their
place-holder.90
The places displayed and the traumas addressed in the two photographed landscapes by Dewe Mathews function as an example of this interaction between place and memory, as described by Casey. The places at which the soldier(s) were executed have selected the traumatic memories by being the physical place the perpetrators chose to initiate the traumatic events. This is a consequence of the element of calculation that is present within the act of execution, which stands in stark contrast to an arbitrary and sudden death on the battlefield. One might even suggest that the places not only welcomed the trauma, but were also complicit
84 Brett, Photography and Place, 6. 85 Ibid.
86 Brett, Photography and Place, 6.
87 Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998),
15.
88 Cosgrove, Social Formation, 15.
89 In contrast to the concept of site, “whose featurelessness is nonselective with respect to memories, much as a
blank television screen can accommodate any and all images that might flit across it.” Edward S Casey,
Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 189. 90 Ibid.
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within the process of planning the trauma. The places were established as the locations of trauma, before the traumatic executions had actually taken place. At the same time, the traumatic memories have selected the locations as their place-holders. The traumatic memories choose to be kept safe and guarded within the places that gave birth to them. By photographing the places at which the past trauma occurred, Dewe Mathews confirms this mutual connection between place and traumatic memory.
By stating that place stores and protects memory, Casey endorses the earlier mentioned notion that place and landscape can be compared to a container loaded with memory and markers, which will restock itself with new memories after the old ones have faded. In that sense, landscape provides the spectator with unlimited vantage points from which one is able to perceive and connect with the endless self-restoring memories of the place it portrays. Aristotle has stated that place is “the innermost motionless boundary of what it contains.”91
Casey comments that this boundary, which defined by Aristotle “to be something like a vessel”, is detachable from its content.92 This corresponds with the idea that place operates as a keepsake
box in which different memories can be placed and preserved over time. The two photographs by Dewe Mathews each focus on a specific trauma, but one should be aware that both places contain many more memories besides the traumatic memories related to the execution of the soldier(s). Despite the fact that Casey and Aristotle elaborate on place as a physical site and the Shot at Dawn series revolves around photographed places, it can be argued that Dewe Mathews’ photographs also function as confined shells of the traumatic memories they attempt to capture. This leads one to question, how these seemingly ‘empty’ photographed landscapes are able to visually represent the traumatic memories of the executed soldier(s) listed in the descriptions of both photographs.
3.2 The Picturesque Landscape
Landscape is the container for the traumatic memories of the place it depicts but, in terms of visual representation, landscape comes in many different shapes and forms. At the end of the eighteenth century, three aesthetic categories, functioning as philosophical separations, were
91 Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press,
1991), 57. He elaborates on places being motionless by stating that a not a part of the river can be considered a place, but rather the river as a whole “because as a whole it is motionless”.
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introduced: the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque.93 In order to define the relationship
between “sense impressions and the faculty of imagination” each category has its own typical features.94 The sublime and the beautiful are the most well-known and dominating categories,
finding common ground in “giving pleasure to the eye.”95 The sublime produces this feeling of
‘pleasure’ by overwhelming the spectator with “the huge, the chaotic, and even the ugly, making one feel ecstatic to the point of pain, intensely alive and yet yearn for death.”96
Mountains, wild oceans and canyons serve as perfect examples of sublime landscapes: pleasurable while also ungraspable in their majesty.97 The beautiful, in line with the sublime, is
also capable of creating a pleasurable sensation. However, this feeling of pleasure within the beautiful is caused by a harmonious and peacefully arranged representation of the landscape.98
Whereas the beautiful and the sublime can be considered rather clearly outlined categories, the picturesque is situated in between these two categories and, as a result, is more difficult to define. The picturesque neither contains the smoothness of the beautiful nor the toughness of the sublime, but according to eighteenth century writer Uvedale Price rather relies on “intricacy and variety.”99 Within the book The Politics of the Picturesque, Stephen daniels and scholar of
rural geography Charles Watkins elaborate on Price’s ideas about the picturesque. In the following passage, they stress the focus on continuous gradual change in Price’s models of the picturesque landscape:100
Price’s models for the Picturesque were embanked and embowered ‘hollow lanes and bye-roads’ because they were not designed but the product of long-term, piecemeal changes and impressed into them were the gradual processes of nature
mixed with the steady impact of men and livestock.101
93 Cosgrove, Landscape and the European, 254. 94 Ibid. .
95 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful: And, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 39.
96 Yi-Fu Tuan, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2013), 93.
97 Anne Janowitz, “The Sublime.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, 2006,
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195169218.001.0001/acref-9780195169218-e-0453 (accessed September 23, 2019).
98 Tuan, Romantic Geography, 96. 99 Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, 81.
100 These models were constructed in the context of the Foxley estate, which came into the Price family in the
late seventeenth century. Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, “Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829.” Rural History 2, no. 2 (1991), 160.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0956793300002739 (accessed September 23, 2019).
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Daniels and Watkins recognize the landscape as the result of a gradual process of both human and natural impact, which is “impressed” into the landscape over time. This aligns with the notion of the landscape as a place-holder for everything that has left a visible or invisible trace upon it. Looking at the photograph taken by Dewe Mathews in Roucy in the region Picardi (fig. 1), the landscape depicts a large open wheat field that appears to continue behind the bushes visible on the right of the photograph. In this photograph, the natural impact on the landscape is visible through the variety of vegetation. This natural impact is complemented by the presence of both visible and invisible human impact upon the landscape. The trace of a tractor represents the visible human impact upon the landscape. This trace arises gradually from the darker coloured wheat and gains definition once it reaches the lighter coloured wheat. It almost becomes an adaption of a “bye-road” itself, capturing the attention of the spectator and drawing them away into the traumatic landscape.102 The invisible human impact of execution
lies at the core of Dewe Mathews’ motivation to capture this place within a photograph. Without the traumatic human impact of executing four soldiers on the 23rd of May 1916, this aftermath
photograph would never have been taken of this specific place within this landscape. The concept of aftermath photography, of being late to the trauma, adds a layer of complexity that differentiates this landscape from both the sublime and the beautiful, and places it closer to the convoluted category of the picturesque. The fact that the wheat field landscape could be considered ‘beautiful’, since the photograph also breathes a beautiful serenity, does not imply that it belongs to this category. Price has stated that “there were numberless objects which give great delight to the eye, and yet differ as widely from the beautiful.”103 This statement applies
to this particular aftermath photograph by Dewe Mathews as, despite its beautiful features, it displays close ties to the picturesque.
Similar to the photograph taken of the wheat field, the second photograph (fig. 2), taken by Dewe Mathews in Ferfay, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, also speaks to the intricacy of the picturesque. The photographed landscape shows the spectator the location at which William Bowerman was executed in 1917. Whereas the first photograph raises questions about the landscape being simultaneously beautiful and complex, the second photograph, displaying a dark, ascending slag-heap104, does not present the spectator with a harmonious landscape. Dewe
Mathews has pointed out that there were other slag-heaps on the Western front, all through
102 Daniels and Watkins, Picturesque Landscaping, 163. 103 Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, 39.
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France and towards Germany.105 This photograph, besides being late to the traumatic event,
speaks to the convoluted category of the picturesque. Daniels and Watkins state that: “In his advocacy of the Picturesque, Price was often accused, notably by William Marshall, of celebrating sterile landscapes –rocky, ruinous, weed-choked and so on–.”106 Price’s notion of
the sterile describes a landscape that is left untouched and therefore able to freely develop into a state of overgrowing decay. Although the earthy slag-heap, on which some branches, rocks and plants are visible, was originally created through human impact during the First World War, through the piling up of waste materials left over during the mining process, the photograph displays what is left of it. This decayed physical reminder of what once was, does not only shows similarities to Price’s visual ideas about the definition of the picturesque as sterile landscape, but also correlates to the complexity of the category itself. I posit that both photographed landscapes, by the nature of their purpose to capture a past traumatic occurrence, are drawn towards the picturesque, a category fitting the conflicting character of the aftermath landscape photograph. Despite the fact that both photographed landscapes are placed closer to the picturesque, they also display features that can be connected to the other categories. The serenity of the wheat field connects to the beautiful and the overwhelming darkness of the slag-heap relates to the sublime.
3.3 Trauma and the Traumatized Landscape
Despite the fact that the two landscapes display different visual conformities to the picturesque, they both stimulate the spectator to question and wonder. These questions are elegantly answered, at least in part, by Dewe Mathews in the descriptions of the photographs where she has listed the name(s) of the executed soldier(s) along with the geographical location and moment of execution. Dewe Mathews has stated that these descriptions will “always be shown next to the works”, since the relationship between the photographed landscape and the text is essential to communicating the message of the project.107 The description of each aftermath
photograph (see the description of fig. 1 and fig. 2) functions as part of the photographed landscape’s “multi-layered meanings.”108 The names of the executed soldiers in both
105 Dewe Mathews, “Chloe Dewe Mathews – Memories of World War One | TateShots.” Tate, January 8, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AMD2qrUzog (accessed September 23, 2019).
106 Danield and Watkins, Picturesque Landscaping, 160. 107 Dewe Mathews, Tate, 2015.
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descriptions answer a question that the aftermath landscape is unable to fully answer on its own.109 Brett has stated that within the context of trauma and “sites of violence”, photographs
of landscapes have a certain built-in obligation to both ask and answer.110 The photographed
landscape questions “what it means to imagine or re-imagine history, to fix or record elements of the landscape, which despite its historical tension as being both provider and taker is seemingly unchanging and neverending.”111 The two photographed landscapes by Dewe
Mathews, which I have established have complex picturesque features, also recognize this dichotomy of providing and taking. On the one hand, they provide the spectator with the place at which the trauma occurred, while on the other hand the landscapes take away the actual traumatic occurrence, replacing it with a visual absence. The theoretical framework has aided in my discussion of the analogy between trauma and photography, which, according to Baer, has the ability to “trap an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory.”112 The question that remains is, if this analogy withstands or even strengthens itself
when the captured subject within the photograph is a landscape displaying a place at which trauma has occurred, is there an analogy between trauma and the two landscapes within the project Shot at Dawn?
In his book Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, Baer elaborates on the relationship between trauma and landscape photography. He starts by explaining that ‘empty’ landscapes create an atmosphere in which the spectator will experience a feeling of confliction. While the perspective of the photograph creates a “sense of belonging”, the spectator simultaneously experiences an “equally powerful sense of nonbelonging and trespass” as a consequence of the fact that the trauma captured in the photographed landscape is situated in the past. 113 According to Baer, this friction between the landscape encouraging spectators to
envisage themselves within the scenery, while at the same time, being aware of the unchangeable character of photography, relates to the complications of trauma representation.114 In line with Cosgrove’s definition of landscape, Baer emphasizes the act of
viewing and the position of vantage in relation to the landscape, which he states is forced upon the spectator “by imbuing a scene with auratic significance but without necessarily linking this
109 Fessel has emphasized this inability of photography to be an all-knowing medium by stating that: “The
combination of absence in the image and explanatory caption or text also underlines the intrinsic limits of photography as medium”. (Fessel, The Absence of Atrocity, 325).
110 Brett, Photography and Place, 175. 111 Ibid, 176.
112 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 9. 113 Ibid, 78.
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sense of familiarity to any remembered past.”115 According to this frame of reference, the
landscape is able to acquire this auratic significance not through the vantage point supplied by the landscape, but through the position of the spectator perceiving the landscape. As a result, the specific place where the trauma occurred fades to the background and is replaced with a focus on the spectator. Baer elaborates that this focus upon the spectator’s sense of self lies at the core of an analogy between trauma and landscape, in which the traumatic memories search for their physical and mental spatial traces, and the landscape enables the spectator to become self-aware.
A structural analogy exists, then, between depictions of landscapes that refer the viewer not to a specific spot but to a heightened sense of self and the puzzlingly exact encoding of spatial markers that signals the presence of traumatic memories
outside of, and yet within, an individual’s mind.116
Baer’s analogy is rooted in both trauma and landscape undertaking a journey of appraising placement. Facilitating a “heightened sense of self” cannot be considered a main intention of the project Shot at Dawn.117 Yet, the act of viewing draws the spectator into the
process of placing the viewed, both consciously and unconsciously, into an existing web of associations.118 The appeal of the two photographs by Dewe Mathews lies in their ability to
create an “impression of proximity, familiarity, and relevance in a possibly quite-distant scene.”119 This ability of the landscape to derange the spectator’s sense of self, through an inner
conflict between familiarity and distance, is also visible in Iversen’s elaboration on the capability of trauma, as outlined in chapter two. Iversen states that trauma, similar to landscape, is capable of disturbing the “relation between inside and outside, self and other.”120 Both
photographs by Dewe Mathews produce this disturbance, but they walk separate routes to the spectator’s self-awareness. The wheat field, as a scene consisting of features familiar to many people, triggers a sensation of familiarity which is able to recall a feeling or memory the spectator did not know existed within them. The slag-heap is almost unable to be identified as such without additional context. Therefore, it could be argued that its abstract and inconclusive
115 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 79. 116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Alison Oddey and Christine White, Modes of Spectating. (London: Intellect Books, 2009), 126. 119 Baer, Spectral Evidence, 79.
