This was first presented as a talk in a series inquiring into issues raised by archaeological interest in the recent and contemporary past. Paris 1993, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, funded by the French Ministry of Culture, organized by Alain Schnapp and Laurent Olivier.
Here is the publication:
Fondation Maison Des Sciences Humaines - Une Archaeologie du Passe Recent.pdf
The origin of many of the ideas here can be tracked back to Reconstructing Archaeology written with Chris Tilley, particularly through my book Experiencing the Past - where I sketched the elements of a contemporary archaeolgical sensibility - see now The Archaeological Imagination - a new work revisiting these matters.
Introduction: photographs, archaeological sources and the contemporary past
Forensic science and excavating a scene of crime; the emotional power of artifacts and places; fragments in the present witnessing loss and the possibility of recovery. How are we to think of the archaeology of the contemporary past? I suggest that a model or paradigm for archaeology is photography.
Both photography and archaeology may be considered as cultural work: they work upon aspects of the material world. They are also both about time, the past - arresting, capturing particles of time.
I will focus particularly upon time and making, and this will lead to a sketch of a social and material field, the archaeological, which we often overlook, even as archaeologists. I will suggest some ways of working with this - montage and collage. In all I will follow some associations between the temporality of photographs, archaeological temporalities, and the life and death of things. My point is to reflect upon archaeological source materials and what we may do with them.
Reconstructions of the archaeological past often aim at photographic verisimilitude - a moment arrested before the viewer, or a reconstruction which is a naturalistic mis en scène ready to be photographed. Consider the number of museum displays which go to considerable expense and use every technological device to do just this.
It is important, however, to distinguish naturalism from realism. Naturalism is an adherence to the appearance of things, a replication of external features. These reconstructions want this. Photography can do this very well, but may not, thereby, provide a realistic picture. A realistic representation is not only or necessarily naturalistic. This is clear from the experience of photographs of ourselves - how often they do not resemble us but only duplicate momentary facets. Realism is a project, not a set of formal conventions. As James Clifford puts it: 'realistic portraits, to the extent that they are "convincing" or "rich", are extended metaphors, patterns of associations that point to coherent (theoretical, aesthetic, or moral) additional meanings'. Realism involves allegory. The construction of narrative is but one aspect or possibility here. In looking at photographs and things found we make stories, relating our looking to our experiences, to connections we see and imagine.
Realism and the time of interpretation
So, to be realistic, I argue that photographs need to be given a past and a future, a context. Let me explain a little more. A photograph merely acknowledges a disconnected instant, but it does often provide some certainty about that instant. Uncertainty and doubt, however, the roots of interpretation, require time for deliberation. Meaning comes from the two, from certainty and doubt, from the process of making sense. Meaning comes from making connections and exploring contexts. This is something brought to the photograph by the maker and the viewer and it may involve considerable deviation, temporal, spatial and conceptual, away from the naturalism of the photograph.
Paul Valéry declared that photography freed the writer from describing, but photographs do not describe in the same way as writing: they do not have the same temporality as text. They have a different duration of interpretation, the contextualisation mentioned above. This has implications for archaeological interpretation.
To make sense, a photograph needs to have established connections and contexts which work within and beyond the image. This may occur through its subject matter and composition. The viewer may recognise particular social relationships in the photo; the shot may have been set up to make a particular point. Mis-en-scène is the term referring to what goes on in front of the camera in cinematography and may also be used here. An excavation is cleaned up and prepared for photography with diggers removed and key features highlighted, ranging pole sited strategically.
The camera is a clock for making images. Consider some issues on the subject of time, photography and the material artefact. We can begin with three categories of photographic time in archaeology: the moment arrested/captured, date, and continuity from past through present. To these may be added actuality - a return of what is no longer the same. Actuality is the non-arbitrary conjunction of presents: the past's present, the instant of photography/archaeological excavation or discovery, and the time of viewing or reading. I argue that actuality is a key concept in understanding photography and the discourse of archaeology.
Compare photowork with memory. Memories live on with us, as do photographs, and as we reinterpret memories and incorporate them into new stories of our life, so photographs change: what was once a holiday shot becomes social document or historical source. Memories sometimes seem to escape time in that they stay with us. We may feel too that photographs sometimes witness that which escapes time, the timeless.
The timeless here is not an unbounded infinity, but is convoluted or folded time, a folding or recycling of past moments or experiences. As conjuncture between the person remembering and past event, memory crosses time (faster than light), just as the photo before you now witnesses a lost instant in time past.
Just like photowork, memory is in fact the act of memorising. The past as memory does not exist as it was. The past has to be recalled: memory is the act of recalling from the viewpoint of a subsequent time. So too a photograph is meaningless unless lent a past and a future. The captured moment of the photo needs a past and a present to make sense. This is done by the contextualisation that takes place in interpretation: we read signs within the photograph (its mis-en-scène) and add to these connections made through montage and juxtaposition with text. And just as memories change, so do photographs. This is photowork.
We may add also the idea of rapturous temporality: memory holds onto the past, just as a photograph grabs the moment, potentially missed, now lost. In memory time stands still: there are no clocks. In the world remembered there is no bottom line, no horizon, no past-as-it-was, no ordained chronology. There are instead but enfoldings. Photowork shares also this art and science of assemblage, while the photograph snatches and attempts to hold onto the connections. Naturalism may require chronicle: dates and linear chronology. A realistic memory (or indeed history) may need flashbacks, long-term backgrounds, reflexive reinterpretations of past events.
These same points may be made about archaeology, its actuality and rapturous temporality, holding on.
To point out the affinities between memory and photography, and to emphasise the temporality of actuality is not a call for "relevance", to recognise simply that archaeology happens in the present, that this matters above all else and so we should ensure the relevance of archaeology to present interests. Such an argument corresponds (as opposite or negation) to an historicism which denies the present in a self-effacing posture emphasising that what happened in the past is the measure of all archaeology. Instead we should retain the ambiguity and tension which is actuality; actuality is the primacy, but not the superiority, of the present over the past. This is simply to acknowledge that the soluble present is the medium of knowing the past.
Imagine a photograph of the room in which I sit. The databack on my camera records it as July 28th 1991, 15.17.48pm. But what date or time is this room? There is no one answer: original architectural fabric, dates of structural modifications, dates of manufacture of artifacts, dates of their styles, moment of capture on photographic film, time of reading and interpretation (when it may appear as many different things)?
Archaeology too has a multiple temporality involving the past, its decay, and the encounter with remains in our future-oriented projects. Photography thus seems so appropriate for the archaeological. Photowork presents us with inventories of mortality, quoting fragments, creating juxtapositions potentially as strange as a fibula, quernstone and ox scapula which may be found together in an archetypal archaeological report. Photographs turn the now into the past, or more grandly, into history, depending upon the rhetoric. Reality is turned antique. Documented triviality is made memorable.
Ruination, romance and a plea for pathology
These last points about photographs turning the now into the past, bearing witness to the abrasions of time bring me to melancholy and the romance of ruin. This is the fundamental importance to archaeology of formation processes, yet so little theorised as ruination. Michael Schiffer's standard work on formation processes appears as a sanitisation of ruination and an attempt to bring it to an order of formulaic association between an objective past separate from an interpreting present.
So the archaeological refers to an aspect of materiality and its temporality - a far wider category than the discourse of archaeology. It refers to ruination, the materiality which we are, to an order of temporality by which we are partially constituted. It deals with the gaps between things - the dirt which is trapped between floor tiles. The results of slow processes of life and death. Archaeology as a pathological materialism or materialist pathology attends to such things and processes, but most archaeologists ignore this and attempt to use archaeological sources to construct accounts of what happened in the past on the model of a conventional historical or social science or on the model of a spurious photographic naturalism.
One of the few historians who has dealt with this character of archaeological or material sources is Walter Benjamin. most notably in his never completed Passagenwerk - le livre des passages. Consider this list of some of his categories of evidence about nineteenth-century Paris - a phantasmagoric collage of fragments, apparently unconnected remains of the life of a city.
passages, magasins de nouveautés, calicots prostitution, jeu mode, les rues de Paris le Paris atiquisant, catacombes, démolitions panorama l'ennui, Éternel retour miroirs Haussmannisation, combats de barricades peinture, modern style, nouveauté constructions en fer types d'éclairage expositions, publicité, Grandville Saint-Simon, chemins de fer le collectionneur conspirations, compagnonnage l'intérieur, la trace Fourier Baudelaire la photographie ville de rève, maison de rève, rèves d'avenire, nihilisme anthropologique, Jung Marx maison de rève, musée, pavillon thermal la poupée, l'automate le flaneur mouvement social réflexions théoriques sur la connaissance, théorie du progrés Daumier
Benjamin's project was to foreground source materials in direct quotation. Photographs are often used like quotations, but let me say more about montage and collage.
A photograph may be given a caption, positioned in relation to other images and text. Or it may, through mise-en-scène, suggest connections through juxtaposition.
Collage and montage are important terms here. Collage is an extension of an artist's pallet or a writer's vocabulary, prose and poetic art to include actual pieces of reality or fragments of what the artist or writer is referring to. It is direct quotation, literal repetition or citation of something taken out of its context and placed in another. The photograph, seen as naturalistic objective correlative, may especially lend itself to collage and quotation. Montage is the cutting and reassembling of fragments of meanings, images, things, quotations, borrowings, to create new juxtapositions. When recognised for what it is, collage is a simple questioning of the notion of representation as finding some correspondence with an exterior reality. 'Reality' and other bits and pieces are instead brought into the picture; collage may be tangible representation without attempting some sort of an illusion. It represents in terms of change - the shift of borrowings from one context to another, from 'reality' to 'representation', and from representation to representation.
The aim, whether it is recognised or not, is to construct something new out of old, to connect what may appear dissimilar in order to achieve new insights and understanding. This emergence of new meaning depends on the perception of instability, of retaining energies of interruption and disruption - the quotation interrupts the smooth surface or text; it is distracting. The interruption of illusion and distraction by collage sets off allusions through the juxtaposed, montaged elements. So the new understanding comes through contaminated representation rather than pure reference to the depicted subject matter. The quotations are cut out of context to create new meanings.
Disruption, cutting and juxtaposition make of discourse an unstable set of links between images, words and concepts and the material world, between signifiers and signifieds. Things and words and images can always be disengaged from their meanings and inlayed into new combinations. This disassembly should be constant. The discovery of new insight depends on a nervous novelty which avoids the settling of montages into accepted equations and identities. Consider again Benjamin's notebooks and plan for the Passagenwerk. A certain degree of shock and jolt are necessary; moving on when the juxtaposition becomes too homely. In doing this collage maintains an ambiguity of presence and absence, the presence of fragments of absent items being referenced.
Montage and collage may occur along both syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Discourse may use syntactic sequence and narrative of images and words, melodic succession; paradigmatic connection is like harmonies of association within a photo and its reading.
All these workings of discourse are temporal processes both of construction and inherent in the viewing of a photograph. Consider the implications for archaeology, dealing with multitemporal fragments and attempting to make sense of them.
Estrangement, collection and fetishism
A range of experiences may be involved in photographs. Photowork may involve estrangement, with the photograph standing for the absence of what is photographed. It may involve making an inventory of inanimate possessions, a fetishism of sorts. An impulse may be to save and celebrate the past, collecting souvenirs. We should be wary here of an ideology that detaches objects from the social relations which give them meaning and bring them to life. The actuality of the archaeological past can easily be denied with the lived experience of the remains of the past processed according to received categories, genre visions, or with the past locked into its own time and detached from present interest. Photowork may attempt to invoke magical experiences of the past in a re enchantment of lost times that denies this inventory of meaningless souvenirs. In the texture of their detail photographs provide a partially involuntary record; there is always in every photograph some escape from intentionality and processed experience. That the materiality of the world is ineffable is presented. Finally, temporality, often a melancholy of the past in the present, is invoked throughout photowork.
The fascination of photowork is that it attests to so much sensory experience. Critique may be made of ocularcentrism, that we are too focused upon sight and have to have other senses and sentiments educated, but realising the ineffable richness of the empirical is a valuable antidote to one-dimensional or deterministic explanations.
Archaeologies of the ineffable
Photographs capture the ineffable, translating experiences. Photographs also, of course, have different relationships to the creator and the viewer and themselves change with time. What began as a snapshot of a famous person could become an historical document.
A photograph has a subject matter and pictorial structure which we may read according to discourse - interpreting sense and reference. However, in its attestation to the infinite detail of materiality, in its unwitting record, a photograph sometimes has its transparency clouded. A detail may intrude and indicate that it is only an item of discourse. Perhaps we know something of someone or something in a photograph which subverts its apparent message (the snapshot I showed of friends in a hillfort). Perhaps an anomaly disturbs the categorisation and genre. The photographed world is rarely ever fully controlled. The heterogeneity of photowork, with all those possible interconnections, may break the predictability of mis en scène. Roland Barthes calls this the punctum of a photograph. Indeed this is part of the working of association and discourse: resistances to the order imposed upon the world are endemic.
- to remember the character of archaeological sources
- to use them creatively to help generate embodied knowledges of ruined or fragmented pasts in presents
- to experiment
I have explored photowork and its relations with the temporality of archaeological discourse and its objects, its source materials. There are differences of course, but I invite you to consider how they are similar. I have discussed the analogies between photography and the collections of memory, emphasising the concept of actuality.
Both photography and archaeology deal with moments arrested, continuities of those arrested moments, the return of the moment, but changed (the concept of actuality).
Archaeologists collect their sources and work upon them, but sometimes to inappropriate ends or those which are unnecessarily narrow . Consider instead quotation and source materials. Here I propose that archaeologists should think laterally about montage and collage in archaeological texts and knowledges. The invitation is to experiment with associations that attest to the actuality of the past, and to think again of the character of archaeological narratives, contrasting naturalism with realism.
Embodiment and archaeologies of the ineffable: photographs and archaeological objects can introduce the heterogeneous and ineffable into discourse, that richness and detail in every photograph and artefact which lies outside the categories and schemes of discourse. I use the term embodiment to introduce bodily sensitivity as a means of suspending our conventional categorisations and a means of achieving more textured understanding of social realities. Photographs and artefacts can help us attend to materiality by saying "look at what has been omitted", rather than "look, believe this text". An imperative here is to keep open things which are passed over in an instant. Archaeological source materials are, after all, of a material world with a distinctive temporality. The challenge is to work with this.
To end then I extend an invitation to conceive of the dialectical text and image as tangent to the past - a vector (from the present) touching the past at the point of sense and then moving off to explore its own course, partaking of actuality, the temporality of memory. Such texts are part of a method which lends contexts of all sorts to images, words and artifacts. Good archaeology is such a humanistic discipline which is dialectical because it denies the dualisms of past and present, objective and subjective, real and fictive, with all their pernicious variations. We may work instead upon the continuities which run through our encounters with the shattered remains of the dead.
