(A note to the reader: this paper was written from sources that were made available in class, and as such, not all of the sources are publicly accessible, and I did not have full information to construct a proper bibliography. Where possible, I've tried to include links to comparable sources.)
fallen autumn leaves
memories of days that passed
wait for winter snow
(Lindsay Zike, personal collection, 2013)
While no event at any point in history is so fully documented as to know every possible fact, the twentieth century introduced several key innovations that changed the way people interact with memory and history. Photo albums, rolls of film, video collections, and scrapbooks around the world hold a greater number of clues to personal and collective memories than at any previous age. Using those kinds of primary sources, a group of University of Illinois Historians and students spent a year “explor[ing] 'the fate of the twentieth century'” by casting a wide-net that pulled in the perspective of the famous victors and the defeated poor with no special regard for race or political associations, which culminated in Imagining the Twentieth Century, a “frankly unauthoritative history” (Charles C. Stewart and Peter Fritzsche, pg. viii). Despite the broad scope of the project, the photographs and essays that dug deep into likely forgotten collective memories still missed several major events.
Two photos, the preceding one a faint echo of the following larger copy of the scene Dorothea Lange's camera lens captured in 1936, demonstrate the contrast of what is remembered and what is willingly forgotten (Stewart and Fritzsche, pgs. 50-51). A rotund man leans upon the bumper of a car that is parked in front of a group of men sitting on the steps of an establishment that proudly sells Coca-Cola. Through careful cropping, the smaller version limits the conceptual scope of the photograph to the self-made, independent-looking white man, and his car. Mark H. Leff's accompanying essay, “Individualism”, adds a deeper understanding to the significance of the photos by further contextualizing them. The man is a white plantation owner, the black men on the stoop might be his sharecroppers, and the cropped image was published in a book celebrating “American individualism” (pg. 50) Among the three (the two photos and the essay), an understanding can be drawn of persistent class and race discrimination, not just in Mississippi, but spread all across the nation as photographic evidence was publicized, but with specific visual content skillfully removed.
While the selective cropping of unwanted, but truthful context causes the viewer to lose the deeper meaning of Lange's photograph, it is not always the case that removing an important element causes one to not see. Sometimes, removing the most striking thing is the only way to see. In some photographs, the subject is so emotionally overwhelming, that it hides the context.
Artist Ken Gonzales-Day explored this notion in his Erased Lynchingseries that he exhibited from 2002-2011. In his photographs he digitally altered archival images and lynching postcards to remove the elements that tend to be the natural human focus, the bodies and the rope, so that the viewer was left with only the surrounding context, the crowd and the perpetrators (Ken Gonzales-Day, http://www.kengonzalesday.com). In highlighting the often jovial atmosphere, like those in East First Street and The Wonder Gaze, in addition to the method of transmission, postcards, all sense that lynchings could include anything remotely like justice seem to fade.
Following the notion of erasing past injustices, Gonzales-Day discusses the unfolding of a trial and execution in the late 1800s (Gonzales-Day, pgs. 124-32). Gonzales-Day provides the reader with an annotated transcript of the direct cross-examination where he points out how the prosecutor preyed upon Rodolfo Silvas' weak grasp of the English language to defeat any possible chance Silvas could claim self-defense. If Gonzales-Day's narrative of events is true, then the illusion of justice on that day evaporates, as it did with the lynching photographs. While significant, the greater message Gonzales-Day forwards is that the photographs that hint at this dysfunction of justice have lost their context.
In a photograph in the Seaver Center of Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, a regal looking Silvas confidently leans on one arm peering out of the frame (Plate 8). The photographer that took the undated photograph may have taken the photograph to sell it, perhaps as a memento of Silvas' impending execution (pg. 125). However, sometime in the twentieth century, all clues to the origin or purpose of the photo had been lost or forgotten to the point that a person looking at Silvas would have no idea about the tragic events that led to his death, the context, if not the entire point of the photo. While Silvas' execution happened a little more than 15 years before the opening days of the twentieth century, the decontextualization of a photograph that brings the past forward in an almost animate, living way, occurred during that century as the living memory of Silvas' trial faded from existence. It is but one representation of an entire class of forgotten memories of past atrocities.
A host of photos in Imagining the 20th Century depict a wide array of injustices, and are further supported by insightful explications of the historic meanings of them. From dirty, shoeless children in Chicago and childhood servants in training in London, to a burned out Soviet light bulb in Russia and the blatant, nearly palpable racism embodied in a faceless group portrait of the Ku Klux Klan, the photos allow the modern viewer to add another landmark along the long march of progress (pgs. 6-9, 30, 36-7). However, the photos that are so powerful as to reach out of the past and drag the modern viewer to the deathbed of due process and force us to silently witness the violent rape of justice by grinning people that could be neighbors, parents, or grandparents....
Those are left in the archives, where entropy and time slowly remove them from memory and history.
A stoic, black and white group portrait, not unlike many photographs from 1941, shows a family in the process of documenting their lives. The Fujimori family had immigrated to Lima, Peru, from their ancestral home in Japan, and in 1938 they had a son, Alberto, who would later become “[o]ne of the country's most powerful presidents of this century”. (Stewart and Fritzsche, pgs. 38-9). However, if instead of choosing the land of the Inca, Alberto's parents had chosen the land of the free, a short time after this portrait, they would have found themselves in an American concentration camp, and this might have been their last photo for many years.
There are things that have happened in the world while there were cameras watching. Things that we have images for. There are other things that happened when there were no cameras watching, which we re-stage in front of cameras to have images of. There are things which happened for which the only images that exist are in the minds of the observers present at the time, while there are things which have happened for which there have been no observers except for the spirits of the dead. (Rea Tajiri, 5:10)
In her 1992documentary, filmmaker Rea Tajiri “re-staged” her family's experience in the Japanese internment camps during World War II from the post memories she had, and the scant testimony of her family. In the film, she traced their path from their home in Salinas, California, via train to Parker, Arizona, and finally to the camp at Poston (17:20-19:57). She uses the 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock as a metaphor and reference to how the Japanese-American's were treated saying, “Kimoko's disappearance from Black Rock was like our disappearance from history; his absence is his presence” (26:46). Few photographs exist showing what life was like in the camps, because the Japanese-American's were not allowed to have cameras or radios for fear that they would be used to spy on the US, or signal the Japanese military (11:20). Despite that, “... no Japanese were ever convicted of any anti-US sabotage” (28:30).
While it may be true that there are very few photographs of the Japanese Internment, there are some, and Tajiri made use of them, along with the propaganda and Hollywood films, to re-imagine her family's story. By getting her relatives to recount their collective memories and pairing them with the scant visual records, she enables her mother's story of filling a canteen on a hot Arizona day to become history, and memorializes the experience. She gives a visual record to the spirits of the dead. As life-changing as the internment was for those that lived through it, there is no mention of it in Imagining the 20th Century. As with Kimoko, the absence of this event is its presence.
One might reasonably claim that efforts like those of Assemblyman Gil Ferguson, who in 1990 attempted to force schools to teach that the Japanese “were held in 'relocation centers'” by “military necessity”, were attempts at symbolic annihilation (27:00). “[A] powerful rhetorical and representational strategy for obscuring ...” histories that some want to forget, George Gerbner, Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benét first used the term “symbolic annihilation” to describe the “absent, trivialized, or condemned … non-stereotypical gender roles” in the representations of women (Jennifer L. Eichstedt andStephen Small, pg. 106-7). Historians and authors have also applied the term to gays, lesbians, Native Americans, and the institution of slavery in America (Eichstedt and Small, pg. 106-7). While some of those groups were discussed in Imagining the 20th Century, even the photograph selections of a rather pitiful looking Wild West show, the boxer Joe Louis standing triumphant over his white opponent, and an advertisement image for birth control that plays to stereotypical gender roles, do little more than hint at the story (pgs. 14-5, 102, 90-1). The complete absence of any photographs of gays and lesbians denies their struggle in the twentieth century.
How many pages would it take to document the atrocities and injustices that happened in the twentieth century? Would it even be possible to find photographs of all of them? While a photograph of Auschwitz might serve as a stand-in for the many other camps in many other countries, it would not be a fair comparison of the Japanese in Poston. It might be conceptually similar enough for the political prisoners held in Chacabuco, Chile, except that it doesn't capture the continuing legacy of the dictator's short reign of terror: the memories of the prisoners, little evidence except a few slivers of bones ripped out of mass graves and scattered across the Atacama desert, and an ongoing, 40-year wasteland search by those that lost family to the camps to find any clues of what happened to their loved ones (Patricio Guzmán, 32:00-53:45). How can this collective memory not be worthy of being included as a distinct historical event?
Of course, it would not be fair to claim that this project, which attempted to use photo albums and scrapbooks as an introduction to the twentieth century, is guilty of intentionally excluding one group among many in a hundred years of history (Stewart and Fritzsche, pg. vii). It is far more likely of ongoing struggles, like those of the women searching the Atacama desert for the remains of the victims or the LGBT community's struggle for equal rights, that if symbolic annihilation is a factor at work, it is because of continuing issues that have yet to move from collective memories into history. In America, the cultural importance of the LGBT movement in the twentieth century may be too temporally close to the present for proper, true understanding. That is similar to the complex emotion-laden tapestries of national, local, and family collective memories surrounding the terrorist attacks on 9/11 making it nearly impossible to objectively analyze the significance of photographs like TheFalling Man, that show victims jumping from the towers to their deaths, or even artistic representations of the jumpers, like Tumbling Woman (Tom Junod, section 8).
By the end of the twentieth century, the camera was no longer new, and as the novelty of truly realistic depictions wore off, some people like John Berger and Susan Sontag speculated that the life-like violence inherent in graphic images caused fundamental changes in the way modern people think about the violence they see. To Berger, publicized graphic pictures (specifically of war) are not motivated by either the viewer's search for the truth, nor the publisher's quest for “more violent sensationalism”, but the publishing is done “with impunity” because the image “accuses nobody and everybody” of the horrible act in a way that causes the viewer to be confronted with one's own lack of freedom in light of the things being done “in 'our' name” (Berger, pgs. 38-40). Sontag argues that there is a cultural bias against seeking photographic evidence of historic wrongdoing, an undertaking she expressed as “unpatriotic” (Sontag, pg. 94) Despite the importance of remembering the “incurable past”, the pressure to blame the captured “barbarism” on someone, but finding only people just like us, makes it difficult to know which violent images are worth “looking at”, or, more clinically, “examining” (Sontag, pg. 92-4).
Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect an “unauthoritative history” to show us atrocious photographs that may contain elements that draw us into the horrific moment, while stripping the context of the event, and destroying the greater historic meanings. Perhaps it is too much to ask of anyone to stare into the immortal moments of desperation or of barbarism of people that could be directly tied to them, or might as well be, since the subject of the photograph and the viewer are both members of at least one common collective, humanity. Perhaps the only grisly past that we are all morally obligated to revisit, as Archeologist Lautaro Núñez states, are our own personal and collective histories (Guzmán, 1:07:15). Perhaps only the passing of time will allow others the objectivity needed to see the universal historical value of our personal collections.
Until then, “[w]e cannot forget our dead. We must keep them in our memory” (Guzmán, 1:07:34).
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