It is often said that if a person’s
house is burning down among the things of highest priority to be rescued, after
pets and children (or maybe before, I don’t know), are photographs. In some
respects this seems very odd. Why should this be? What is about photographs
that seems so precious, so irreplaceable? How do they resonate with our sense
of self? How do photographs connect us with our past, how do they link us with
memory?

Photographs adorn family fridges
and are found, frayed and bent in wallets. In hospitals when people personalize
their tiny space, or their bedside locker, photographs are often the first
things to be placed there. They are sometimes put up around unconscious
patients as though those in the photograph can somehow bring a ministering or
supportive presence.

There is increasing interest in
photo-narratives as a therapeutic means of expressing the self and experience,
and making it accessible and understandable to others. This, it seems is
beginning to approach the meaning we try to capture in a photograph.

Often in grief counseling we are
told to bring in some photographs of a loved one as if they will still be there
in some way through the medium. In some cemeteries you will find photographs of
the interred. Usually they show them when they were young, it might even be a
wedding day. There appears to be something in the nature of a photograph, often
a family snapshot rather than a posed portrait that brings us close to our
selves.

Jay Prosser suggests that we treat
photographs in a way that seem to bring the past into the present. We have
photographs on our mantelpieces, we have albums of them, we take them on
special occasions — births, marriages, but not deaths. But, he argues,
photographs are not a sign of presence in our lives, they are a sign of
absence. They indicate loss.

Every photograph is of a past
moment. Something happened and has now gone, although its one time existence
has been recorded. Photographs do not show "the presence of the past, but
the pastness of the present" as Prosser argues. They are reminders of our
mortality, rather than our continuing life; and within that they become
meditative.

For Prosser this is not a sad thing,
not something to be mourned. Rather, it is rich in possibility and he tries to
show this by describing in detail four very different articulated experiences
of loss, by four very different figures with widely divergent histories, perspectives
and outlooks. The things that link them together are loss, photography and
curiously enough, some experience of Brazil (all the people involved spent time
in Brazil and their particular loss is sometimes associated with that period of
their life).

Prosser describes the reflections
of the philosopher Roland Barthes on the death of his mother, the experience of
the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in observing the death of
a culture, the meditations of the photo-journalist Gordon Parks on the loss of
youth and innocence, and the impact felt by the poet Elizabeth Bishop on the
death of her lover. He uses considerable amounts of original material from
each, and interweaves his own commentary on the meaning of loss for them, the
experience of taking and looking at photographs and the great sadness, and
perhaps enlightenment they can bring.

One can imagine a kitchen table
strewn with old photographs, some perhaps faded now, being picked over and
discussed — "How young we were", "I’d quite forgotten that",
"This was the day we left" – and here Prosser’s point that they act
as memento mori, reminders of death, appears at its most perceptive.

However, his prose is not always as
clear as that insight. His academic orientation, and postmodern tendencies
sometimes obscure a point when a simple and direct manner would be better. Sometimes
the delicacy of his point is lost in the heaviness of the writing. He devotes a
whole chapter to himself and his reflections on the writing of an earlier book,
which seems rather an indulgence. He finds within each of his subject chapters
a palinode, i.e., a poem of retraction and return, which in itself becomes a
motif for his book as he returns and reflects in each essay. However, the
integrity and consistency of this idea is not completely compelling. There are
times at which he appears to be inducing the thesis, rather than deducing it;
he may be trying to persuade the reader rather than let the conclusions become
obvious. Of course, others may feel differently.

Nevertheless the book is not
without merit. It makes the reader look anew at the photographs that may
surround him or her at the moment of reading. It puts forward some intriguing
ideas and its treatment, or at least the arrangement of the principal characters
is thought provoking. Perhaps the best of these is Gordon Parks, but as a
photographer himself, he had some added experience to the way photography can
both capture and obscure meaning.

It would not be a book for the
beginning reader, although there is one there to be written for this is a most
interesting subject.

© 2006 Mark Welch

Mark
Welch, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of
Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta and Co-Director of the PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre
for Nursing & Mental Health.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography, Philosophical