The Relationship of Photographs, History, and Memory
Abstract: This essay reflects on the relationship of photographs, history, and memory based on a found and mutilated photo album. Photographs provide opportunities for disrupting and restructuring history with their attraction to memory; they privilege the subjective, creative power of the personal explanation and provide an emotional and even ideological grounding for memory. Photographs as manifestations of memory assist in the process of understanding the present.
As this century fades into the past it is worth remembering that its course--in contrast to earlier times--has been chronicled by a visual narrative that relies on the attraction of photographs as means of storing and disseminating information. Photographs emerge as documents of a lived experience, and their presence in the cultural milieu of technologically enhanced contemporary communication practices remains virtually unchallenged at the threshold to the twenty-first century.
Photographs are the story-telling companions of time, they direct the gaze of the spectator to ponder the past. Reflecting on our own lives we often refer to photographs whose presence conditions our recollection of people and events and keeps them alive. Recently I came across a small family album--a generation after the end of the Second World War--that had been left by an aunt who had saved it through times of expulsion, flight, and resettlement in West Germany. It had been severely cut--pierced but not destroyed by the thrust of a bayonet in 1945--when the invading Soviet army overran refugees and ransacked their belongings. Its sudden appearance in my life is a reminder of the power of photographs, the seductive specificity...
... middle of paper ...
...
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rugg, Linda Haverty. 1997. Picturing Ourselves. Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Samuel, Raphael. 1994. Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Society. London: Verso.
Sekula, Allan. 1982. "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning," in Victor Burgin, ed. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 84-109.
Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux.
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1995. The Art of the Motor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Having such an image before our eyes, often we fail to recognize the message it is trying to display from a certain point of view. Through Clark’s statement, it is evident that a photograph holds a graphic message, which mirrors the representation of our way of thinking with the world sights, which therefore engages other
After reading this book all I can think about and imagine is the horror and pain that the Tutsi must have gone through and their families and friends who have survived to think about and re-live the memories they have of such a horrible event. In the book, Gourevitch really paints a picture by the way he describes what things looked like and the way things were during that time period. Since watching the movie from last semester Hotel Rwanda and reading this book it reminds me of the movie Tears of the Sun when the rebels are in the small communities murdering everyone in sight and Hitlers reign in which mass genocide that he and his army committed.
...rm the other’s story. This does not, however, mean that they are considered equal. Memory can be seen as slightly privileged over memory. When Art learns of the destruction of his mother’s diary he responds by calling his father a “murderer”. The use of exclamatory punctuation and spiked speech bubble conveys the anger and shock over the destruction of memories. The validity of memory is also never discussed as dates given for memories are never confirmed but assumed to be true. On the other hand, history is shown as unreliable. Valdek remarks that after the end of the war he “passed once a photo place what had a camp uniform – a new and clean one – to make souvenir photos.” The actual photo is used in the book as historical documentation. This show how history can be perverted as photos are seen as objective and historical but this photograph is clearly staged.
The mass media carries with it unparalleled opportunities to impart information, but also opportunities to deceive the public, by misrepresenting an event. While usually thought of as falsifying or stretching facts and figures, manipulation can just as easily be done in the use of photography and images. These manipulations may be even more serious – and subtle – than written manipulations, since they may not be discovered for years, if ever, and can have an indelible and lasting impact on the viewer, as it is often said, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. One of the most significant images of Twentieth Century America was the photograph of a migrant mother holding her child. The photograph was taken during the Great Depression by photographer Dorothea Lange, and has remained an enduring symbol of the hardship and struggle faced by many families during the Depression Era. This image was also an example of the manipulation of photography, however, for it used two major forms of manipulation that remain a problem in journalistic photography.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. New York, NY : Abbeville Publishing Group, 2007.
Tolmachev, I. (2010, March 15). A history of Photography Part 1: The Beginning. Retrieved Febraury 2014, from tuts+ Photography: http://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/a-history-of-photography-part-1-the-beginning--photo-1908
To find the cause of the Rwandan genocide, many people had tried to follow the path of history from the colonialism of Rwanda to the Rwandan genocide. Belgium wanted to expand just like other powerful nations like Great Britain, Spain, and France due to the lack of space and resources provided to each nation in Europe. After the great discovery of Vasco de Gamma, many European ventured towards Africa to colonize territories. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Belgium had colonized the territory of Rwanda. After colonization, they left the Tutsis in charge as opposed to Hutus because of the fact that the Belgians thought Tutsis had a Caucasian ancestry. After the Rwandan independence, power was given to the Hutus. After the power was given to the Hutus, the Hutus took revenge on the Tutsis which resulted in some killings. In the movie, Hotel Rwanda, President Habyarimana was killed. The killing was blamed on the Tutsis which caused the enraged Hutus to start the Rwandan Genocide. Although the initial cause of the genocide could be Belgian Imperialism, in the movie it was actually the killing...
For years, Rwanda has been a hotbed of racial tension. The majority of the Rwandan population is made up of Hutu's, with Tutsi's making up the rest of it. Ever since European colonial powers entered the country and favoured the Tutsi ethnic group over the Hutu by putting Tutsi people in all important positions in society, there has been a decisive political divide between the two groups. This favouring of the Tutsi over the Hutu, and the Hutu subjugation as an ethnic lower class resulted in the civil war and revolution of 1959, where the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi dominated government, and resulted in Rwanda gaining their independence in 1962.
Photography is defined at the art or practice of taking and processing photographs. To understand photography is having insight or good judgment to know how to take the picture, but also edit it if need be. Does photography limit our understanding of the world? What some people haven’t realized is that photography is all around us, whether it is in the person’s mind to see it or not. While we see photography throughout our daily routine, people dismiss the small types of photography and focus on the bigger sceneries like other countries beautiful cities and landscapes. It’s true that in this day and age, most photographs we see have been altered in some way. When photographers use Photoshop to edit our photos, we use many different ways to make that image appealing to the eye. Although, photographers unless told to do so will not change an image into something totally absurd that takes away from being astatically pleasing. Images are a gateway to the insight of the rest of the world’s cultures landscapes, and architecture, and photography is the key aspect to it. Photography is a one way to see the world, but it is better if you go and travel around the world to see it. In order to see if photography actually limits our understanding, we have to first look at the positive side of photography.
The definition of genocide as given in the Webster's College Dictionary is "The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group." This definition depicts the situation in 1994 of Rwanda, a small, poor, central African country. The Rwandan genocide was the systematic extermination of over eight hundred thousand Tutsi, an ethnic group in Rwanda, by the Hutu, another ethnic group in Rwanda. In this essay I will briefly describe the history of the conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi, the 100 days of genocide in 1994, and the affects of the massacre on the economy and the people of Rwanda.
The Tutsi race has long held control over the Rwandan government because, though they only make up an approximate 14 percent of the Rwanda population, the Europeans who took over the country chose them because they were said to resemble the Europeans more than the Hutus. The Hutus later started a revelution for independence that the Belgian, who controlled the country at the time, quickly ended it by letting the Hutu run the government instead of the Tutsi. Of course, this did not make the Hutu forget the years of oppression they suffered at the hands of the Tutsi. So, naturally, there were Hutus who believed that the Tutsi race should be exterminated. These people were called Hutu extremists. The Hutu etremists within the government blamed the Tutsi as a whole for the countrys' st...
When the Rwandan Hutu majority betrayed the Tutsi minority, a destructive mass murdering broke out where neighbor turned on neighbor and teachers killed their students; this was the start of a genocide. In this paper I will tell you about the horrors the people of Rwanda had to face while genocide destroyed their homes, and I will also tell you about the mental trauma they still face today.
Between the months of April and July in 1994 approximately one million people were killed in Rwanda. There are three ethnic groups in Rwanda, Hutu, Tutsi, and Aboriginal Twa. The genocide occurred between two different groups, the Hutu and Tutsi people. The Hutu composed close to 85% of the population while the minority Tutsi people make up approximately 14% with the Twa people composing the remaining 1%. The Republic of Rwanda like most African nations has a history of colonization from different European countries with different and conflicting ideas of governance and how a colony should be developed and used. It can be argued that many of the problems occurring in all African nations stem from previous colonization and subsequent exploitation. “ A Brief history” UN.org n.p. n.d. Web. 16 April 2014.
Whether referring to a poem, a situation or someone in particular, we as a society are told not to judge a book by its cover, not to judge someone until getting to know him or her, or without discovering the underlying message. In Dionne Brand’s, Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater and Margaret Atwood’s, This Is a Photograph of Me, both texts must be looked at in-depth before jumping to any conclusions. Both authors incorporate photography to paint a picture for their readers. By doing so, Brand defines slavery through an artistic perspective and signifies aspects of time, physical appearance and her outlook on life, which gives life to the aftermath of an ex-slave. In contrast with this, Atwood incorporates the same three aspects into her work and as a result, both text are much alike than originally thought.
Photojournalism plays a critical role in the way we capture and understand the reality of a particular moment in time. As a way of documenting history, the ability to create meaning through images contributes to a transparent media through exacting the truth of a moment. By capturing the surreal world and presenting it in a narrative that is relatable to its audience, allows the image to create a fair and accurate representation of reality.