Environment, Space, Place

Abstract:

Photographic representation promises the possibility of an identical reappearance, which has often been labeled as a window to the past moment, as if one were just looking through the image surface to the moment itself. But the represented past present is actually always already different in every present in which it is presented.

In the story of Butades’s daughter, in which a young woman traces the shadow of her lover, who will soon march off to war, the drawing will only become visible once the person throwing the shadow has left his place. Thereby, the present in which the shadow had been traced becomes the past of the presently visible, traced shadow on the wall.

The same applies to photographs, as by its technical condition, a photograph appears always in the future of the recorded moment. In both, the tracing of the shadow and the recording of a photographic image, the image develops what I want to call a post-visibility in reference to the present of the traced moment.

Post-visibility is what photography has in common with a constructed historical remembrance. History is written retrospectively. In the present one can only anticipate what will be considered important in future retrospection. As Emil Angehrn observes, that which becomes history is not predetermined by the past and its present-day testimonials and residues, but is ultimately entrusted to the writing of history.

As a particular field of historical commemoration I compare specifically the remembrance constituted by German war memorials before WWII, when the memorialization became more anonymous, with photographic memory. The essential difference between photographs and historical remembrance is that the photograph is necessarily recorded in the moment of a present perception in expectation of an event, its course unknown on recording, while historical narratives tell the story from its end.