Mourning the dead: Memory, culture and family snapshot photography

Janet Sayers, Massey University

This paper will discuss themes to do with family snapshot photography and its role in constructing both memories (remembrances of the past) and identity (constructions of self facing the future). In discussing these themes the paper will use a variety of essays and writings on photography in the fields of cultural anthropology (Chalfen, 1987; Langford, 2001) and photography (Barthes, 1980; Keenan, 1998; Kracauer, 1993; Lury, 1998).

Starting from the point that memories are slippery and surprising things, characterized by what Kracauer called ‘demonic ambiguity’ (1993), this paper will argue that memories are “…organized according to a principle that is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography … Photography grasps what is given, a spatial (or temporal) continuum: memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance” (ibid). Celia Lury comments that the photographic image is one of the techniques that “enables a refiguring of the conventional relations through which the previous self-understanding of the possessive individual has been secured. It does this through its abilities to frame, freeze and fix its objects”. She identifies the ‘retrodictive prophecy’ of the photograph as being a key aspect of the image’s power, and argues this arises from the photograph’s ability to freeze time:

These processes have a distinctive temporality; more specifically, the freezing of time creates a dimension in which the future perfect of the photographic image – this will have been – may be suspended, manipulated and reworked to become the past perfected. (Lury, 1998: 3)

Family photography is significant to the ways we collect and organize our memories, construct our identities and make meaning out of our lives. Keeping albums has been subject to research which has drawn attention to the importance of photographic albums as a cultural and structured behaviour of a photographic culture – a Kodak culture (Chalfen, 1987) that “greases the wheels of remembrance, reinstating and expanding the repertoire of remembrance as images are seen and heard in the rolling present” (Langford, 2001: 201). ‘Kodak culture’ is argued by Chalfen to be production of a “standardized system of visual presentation ... Ordinary people are afforded a chance to order past experiences, making their travels, past adventures, and segments into a coherent order of events” (141). Kaufmann notes: “…the ritual making of family photographs – like most strategies for ordering experience — … offer(s) soothing evidence that our lives are better and sometimes more coherent than we sometimes believe (cited in Chalfen: 141).

Photography is a way that the dead communicate with the living; and the living communicates with the dead. This is not a dire and dismal topic, but rather an uplifting and hopeful one. Within family albums, as people recall and remember people, events and things significant in their lives, can be seen humour and pathos, wickedness, hopefulness, ambition, searching and tenderness (Langford 2001). Remembering those that have died brings the living back to cultural life.

In short, organizing family albums is a way of ‘structuring’ ourselves —our identities and culture —through rituals of remembrance. Some cultures use oral renderings of history, others textual, and the western method appears to be increasingly visual (Chalfen, 1987). But, as mentioned, memories are also intensely personal and sensual: they are embodied. The ‘demonic ambiguity’ that Kracauer refers to arises from memory’s connection to the sensual and emotional aspects of life: its seemingly unpredictable and emergent nature often juxtaposes odd recollections in the emotional and sensual present. Family photographs are significant to the extent that they recall memories of what is essential in the now.

The ubiquitous domestic camera provides a powerful force for the freezing of moments of self-performance at times like births, deaths and marriages. Using the example of the author’s father’s recent funeral, which was a combination of both a traditional Anglican ritual and a Maori tangi, this paper will discuss the role of family photography in organizing identity and culture, in the process of mourning the dead.


References

Barthes, R. (1980). Photograph essay (In A. Trachtenberg (Ed.), Classic essays on the photograph. US: Leete's Island.
Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot versions of life. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press.
Keenan, C. (1998). On the relationship between personal photographs and individual memory, History of Photography, 22(60 — 64).
Kracauer, S. (1993). Photography, Critical Inquiry, 19(3), 421 — 436.
Langford, M. (2001). Suspended conversations: the afterlife of memory in photographic albums. London: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Lury, C. (1998). Prosthetic culture: Photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge.