Orson Welles once said that photographs are not so much a reflection
of our own world, but seem to come to us from another one. This new book by
Ulrich Baer, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages at New York University,
confronts us with an other-worldliness that fixes us with its stare, and
examines us as closely, as the camera does itself. It is profoundly unsettling,
exerting, as it does, an awful fascination as we explore the link between the
photographic image and the traumatic event, remembrance and recall, reality
constructed and reconstructed. Baer wants us to ask “what we see, or fail to
see in these photographs”.

In order to orientate his position, Baer refers to the Ancient
Greeks, notably the flowing river of history of Heraclitus into which no-one
can step twice, and, opposing this, the idea propounded by Democritus that the
world as we perceive it is nothing but a swirl of atoms and the projections of
our own minds. This latter, profoundly postmodern, notion is the point at which
Baer begins to question the reality
of photography, its perceived ability to freeze time, and the troublesome idea
that the camera cannot lie. He is concerned with developing a philosophy of
photography.

The second major theme of the book is trauma. Baer bases his work
around the Freudian notion that trauma is a disorder of time and memory; it is
a pathology of remembering and forgetting, of displaced and intrusive time.
This, he argues, is what so disturbs us. Baer, however, is not a psychoanalyst,
but a historian, and so he brings forth these conceptions not to show how they
may be accessed, but to remind us of their power. He notes that we see the
subjects of photographs in a peculiarly atemporal way; that is to say they live
with us in the moment, but they are not of our time at all.

Baer is also struck by the coincidence of photographic theory and
the first theorization of trauma. It is not, to be sure, as startling as the
coincidence of the Lumiere brothers first public cinematographs and Freud’s
first published works in 1895, but it is close. Of particular interest here is
the series of photographs taken by the great figure of the neurologist and
“master-physician” Charcot of patients with hysteria, which so Baer argues,
were part of his attempts to see in a fundamentally different way. This
chapter, while elegantly and persuasively written, does not cover completely
the already considerable history of psychiatric photography, and the work of HW
Diamond in particular (nor does it particularly link forward to the work of
documentarists like the Geneva Foundation). Diamond, working a decade or more
before Charcot, was a psychiatrist and colleague of John Connolly and produced
a series of photographs that were a startling and eloquent testimony to his
patients, who were incidentally also clinically described by Connolly. Later,
in his “Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of
Insanity” in 1856 he articulated three principles of psychiatric photography;
to record, to treat through the accurate presentation of self-image (remarkable
insight given the present-day concerns with body dysmorphic disorder), and,
somewhat less enlightened perhaps, to facilitate recognition and identification
on readmission. Nevertheless, as with Charcot’s portraits, when we gaze at
them, and gaze we do, we cannot but feel the shaft of humanity that connects
them with us. It is this interaction of our gaze and the way it is returned
that is so unsettling, and begins to suggest to us how and why trauma remains
so fascinating. We cannot look, but we cannot look away. What we see is not of
our world, but the people too clearly are. Sometimes we do not know who is
looking at whom. It is at these moments that the book is at its most effective
and compelling.

Later chapters cover contemporary Holocaust photography, secondary
witnessing of the Holocaust and a commentary on Darius Jablonski’s Holocaust
documentary Fotoamator. These
chapters, however, seem to be particularly concerned with a certain
revisionism, and the Holocaust, which has been so often been examined, is
perhaps more of a subject of its own than a model for all trauma. The manner in
which it has been recorded and reworked and become familiar to our everyday
discourse does not render it less interesting, but puts the locus of its
interest elsewhere.

The book is a very thought provoking contribution to the theorizing
of photography and memory, both collective and individual. It is at its best
when confronting us witnessing, and being witnesses. Perhaps, bearing witness
is what we must do, what we cannot help but do, but at what cost and to whom?

© 2002 Mark Welch

Dr Mark Welch is
currently a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Coordinator in The School of Nursing
at the University of Canberra, Australia. His PhD investigated the
representation of madness in popular film, and his other research interests
include the mental health of refugees and victims of torture, and the history
of psychiatric epistemology.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography, Psychoanalysis