The Lost of Found Photography

Abstract

A loss of meaning ensues as family photographs come into public circulation and display, and the question of how memory endures within this process has become of increasing concern. Retaining photographic materiality, along with original meanings previously associated with images, has been presented as one way of defending against loss. This paper argues that this involves a particular dynamics of object-relating, which is important to consider. What is documented here is how a new cultural treatment of family photographs, within photographic theory and practice, performs a heightened fidelity to the photographic object, which can be challenged on certain grounds. The article takes as its particular focus the artistic adoption of images as “found photography”, where the provenance of the photograph is unknown. Rather than being concerned with defending against the loss of meaning that arises through the public-artistic appropriation of such material, I prefer to see the photograph as a “transitional object” and argue for both a greater recognition of the complexities of the process of appropriation, but also for an unbounded notion of “use”, as a means of releasing the potential of the “found” photograph, as a point of imagining for new realities.

Full text

Karen Cross
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY
A loss of meaning ensues as family photographs come into public circulation and
display, and the question of how memory endures within this process has become of
increasing concern. Retaining photographic materiality, along with original meanings
previously associated with images, has been presented as one way of defending against
loss. This paper argues that this involves a particular dynamics of object-relating,
which is important to consider. What is documented here is how a new cultural
treatment of family photographs, within photographic theory and practice, performs a
heightened fidelity to the photographic object, which can be challenged on certain
grounds. The article takes as its particular focus the artistic adoption of images as
“found photography”, where the provenance of the photograph is unknown. Rather
than being concerned with defending against the loss of meaning that arises through
the public-artistic appropriation of such material, I prefer to see the photograph as a
“transitional object”and argue for both a greater recognition of the complexities of the
process of appropriation, but also for an unbounded notion of “use”,asameansof
releasing the potential of the “found”photograph, as a point of imagining for new
realities.
Within photography theory and practice, the family album has represented a site of
struggle for meaning. This is particularly the case for feminists seeking to engage in a
political reworking of gendered and classed notions of identity. With a playful attitude
toward family photographs, interventions have taken the form of “phototherapy”
(Spence; Spence and Holland; Walkerdine) or involved “a conscious and purposeful
performance”(Kuhn 157) of “memory work”(Kuhn 3 and Hirsch on “work of
memory”31), which have invited a renewed understanding of what is otherwise
quite ordinary and familiar cultural material. In more recent times, however, there has
been a notable shift in the work on family photography, which, although activating
earlier feminist concerns, has appeared rather more interested in defending the family
photograph as politicised formation of memory, which crucially serves to draw our
attention to the domestic and intimate sphere.
What has become apparent is that family photographs, while long having been
understood to be embedded within personal social processes of commemoration, are
now more likely to stand as public memorial forms. They no longer simply
represent prompts to personal memory. This is especially evident within the context
of artistic appropriation, which I seek to describe here, where it has become
apparent that family photographs appear in order to remind us of a structural
absence, and to redirect artistic vision beyond the academy and professionalised
space of photographic practice. With this has developed a certain anxiety around the
loss of meaning that ensues within this process of appropriation, which represents,
Photographies, 2015
Vol. 8, No. 1, 43–62, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2014.974285
© 2015 Taylor & Francis

for some, a problematic extraction of the image from its original context of mean-
ing. But it is precisely this defence of the image which, I seek to argue, is
problematic, for it delimits the full experience of creative engagement. Here I
deploy aspects of psychoanalytic theory in order to explain this, and, although
acknowledging the importance of recent theories on the topic, I seek to extend
theorising beyond the defence of family photographs as protected cultural material,
or as archival objects of salvage.
“The use of an object”
Family photographs are what Patricia Holland calls “restricted code”(118) and, when
extracted from their “rich soil”(118) and placed into wider circulation, their particular
meanings, and memories associated with them, cannot be easily accessed. Such
photographs ostensibly have a lot more to lose than any other image type when
entering the public sphere, because they exist in order to record “phenomena of
situational relevance to the image-maker”(Smith 10). Yet this has not prevented an
acceleration of public interest in family photographs, which have become widely
collectible forms of visual culture.
With such growing interest, photography theorists have worked to define a
framework for handling family photographs which are not our own. In relation to
inherited family photographs, Marianne Hirsch, for instance, proposes the notion
of “post-memory”. As she reveals, there comes a point in time when the family
photograph can only come to us as second-hand experience. Even when they are
directly passed down through family inheritance, they are subject to the wider
vicissitudes of cultural memory. Family photographs, however, particularly within
the context of Holocaust memory that Hirsch describes, constitute a critical source
of memory. They provide presence in the face of traumatically imposed absence.
Thus, the contemporary use of such images, as found for instance within Christian
Boltanski’suseofthearchive,
1
gives rise to an ethical dilemma.
In particular, Hirsch wonders “how and what”family photographs, following their
public dispersal, “can communicate in the different contexts into which they will be
inserted”(264). Boltanski’s technique of blowing up and highlighting faces at once
illuminates and defaces. Light is cast upon photographic subjects, but in a way that
produces a blurred vision of the human form. This is a consciously adopted technique
that Boltanski uses in order to make a point about the historical loss of meaning arising
when the photograph comes to represent “an anthropological space”(Enwezor 13).
The personal portrait forms within the context of this kind of practice an object
through which the artist and audience can observe society’s relationship to photo-
graphy. But the archive, as Allan Sekula notes, can be seen to act as a “clearing house
of meaning”(“Photography Between Labour and Capital”154), and with the disem-
bedding of objects from the social dynamics of their use, artistic deployments of the
family photograph, as Martha Langford has more recently argued, also risk becoming a
sort of “appropriative primitivism”(“Strange Bedfellows”74).
“The vernacular”is “honoured”, as Langford argues, but only as an “idea”(74); the
use of the image sustains “the artist’s status as a dialectician”(76). In addition, as
44 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Gillian Rose has more recently described in relation to journalistic practice in the UK
newspaper press, the family photograph is sometimes co-opted within the context of
contemporary cultural uses as nothing more than that which can reflect a broader
“politics of sentiment”(Rose 131)
2
now governing the public sphere.
To mitigate against these circumstances, Rose argues that we need to apprehend
the family photograph in terms of its “alterity”(Rose 114).
3
We must understand that
we can never fully access the meaning of the family photograph, which she also argues
requires special conditions of analysis involving recourse to “the doing”of family
photography, as both a culturally and personally defined practice. This reflects
something akin to the process of engagement argued for by Martha Langford, in
Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. What she
proposes is a framework for engaging with unknown family albums, which she argues
represent a kind of “oral consciousness”(viii).
4
Within this, the album is understood
to constitute a kind of “fabric of memory”(viii), whose meaning may not become
activated through the structure of conversation, but can also stand to represent
conversation itself.
The treatment of “fabric”renders different cultural relationships to the past and
becomes the means by which appropriative practices are judged. Within Geoffrey
Batchen’sForget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, for instance, Langford identifies a
commitment to exploring the connection to memory. Batchen’s aim is to draw our
attention to the links between photography, tactility and memory. He provides an
insightful analysis of the particularised cultures of commemoration evident within the
wider framework of family photography practice. Foregrounding the photographic
materiality of the family snapshot and reading this as a reflection of memory, however,
involves a particular political investment and attempt to bring to light that which has
been historically denied, or “left out”(“Snapshots”125).
The analogue family photograph carries impressions of time; the purposeful
inscriptions imposed upon, or around, its surface; the unintended and accidental fading
or creasing of its plastic film. When they are retained, Langford argues, these traces
can make the reproduced image seem “almost to breathe”(“Strange Bedfellows”91)
and it is in this respect that the historical family snapshot now comes to us as if an
agent of memory, able to awaken our senses to an alternative field of personal vision.
Yet the effect of such a photo-materialist approach can, as Peter Buse argues, be
“anthropomorphizing”(192).
5
And this is most apparent in the way that the family
snapshot is presented as if a body in the archive,
6
which appears to require life-support
more than it forms an object that requires critical analysis.
*
When Roland Barthes spoke of his “Winter Garden Photograph”, what he was
revealing to the readers of Camera Lucida was how the image formed for him ‘a
catastrophe which has already occurred’(his emphasis 96). This was death of his mother —
a loss that he was doomed to suffer, over and again, when faced with, or even just
imagining, the photograph. All he can see when looking at it is that “she is going to
die”(96) and it makes him “shudder”(96), he says, like “Winnicott’s psychotic patient”
(96). It would appear that this is because the photograph provides a stark realisation of
the inevitable absence brought about by the passing of human life.
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 45

In functioning as a “trace”the photograph provides some solace. But it becomes
clear that the image is Barthes mother in more than just this sense. It sends him to the
brink of madness because it evokes an earlier infantile experience, also involving the
loss of the mother, but which is too painful to bring into consciousness. The image is
what Sarah Kember, using the thinking of Christopher Bollas, terms a “transforma-
tional object”(Virtual Anxiety 32), in relation to which the earliest moments of object-
relating are being replayed, or cathected.
7
Looking forms an “intense affective experi-
ence”, which is defined by an earlier infantile experience, or “aesthetic moment”
(Bollas qtd. in Kember, Virtual Anxiety 33), of being at the mother’s breast. This is
not a situation particular to the family photograph, but the sense of the mother’s
presence is certainly highlighted as Barthes seeks out the particular photograph of her
in which she is actually a child.
In “the shadow of the object”(33), Barthes perceives loss. Not the loss of his actual
mother but, rather, the loss that constitutes what he calls “a secret thing (monster or
treasure)”(73): the unspeakable action, which formed the earliest loss, for which
Barthes and his own destructive impulses were responsible. The image is put away,
because, Barthes says it exists only for him and “would be nothing but an indifferent
picture”(73) for us, the readers of Camera Lucida. In with(holding) the “wound”(73),
Barthes performs, however, a psychological defence, choosing, instead, to focus his
attention on how the photograph can reveal to him “that thread”(73) which draws him
to photography. “Henceforth”, he says, “I must interrogate the evidence of
Photography, not from the point of view of pleasure, but in relation to what we
romantically call love and death”(73).
Barthes resists pleasure —a somewhat aggressive principle —as constituent
elements of these two facets of life. Not only the image, but the “secret thing”is also
put away, even though it is the very thing that draws him in. Writing Camera Lucida
becomes a way of confronting loss, but it is also, first and foremost, a work of
reparation —a compensation for the mother’s loss and a loss of innocence, primarily
within photography. It is no wonder that Barthes should choose an image of his mother
as a child; where she seems independent, in a time before he was born. And it is no
surprise that he should wish to simplify his approach to the image: dismissing “the rules
of composition”and “sociological commentary”(7)
8
in order that he may “get back to
Photography …to be a primitive, without culture …alone and disarmed”(7).
Just as an infant, Barthes submits to the embrace of his most prized love, and it is
in this moment that he wishes to stay, constantly seeking out a new defence against the
realisation of that “aesthetic moment”in which he would be forced to relate to the
image-as-an-image. There is a constant oscillation in Camera Lucida between life and
death: to “get back”(7), or face the “intractable reality”(119). The moment of relating
is imminent, as is a loss that he knows must be suffered. What Barthes describes, and
what he knows, is the absolute impossibility of preventing what has already happened;
the object’s destruction, at the fate of his own hands.
In his manic state, Barthes casts the photograph according to the principle of
“animation”:“it animates me, and I animate it”(20), he claims. In this respect, the
image verges on becoming what psychoanalyst Maria Torok defines as “the fantasy of
the exquisite corpse”(Abraham and Torok 107). The image, projected in fantasy,
becomes a protected love-object, which must exist in the purest state of perfection,
46 PHOTOGRAPHIES

made available in order to be drawn into a psychodynamic, dramatic, play of meaning.
The ego avoids having to confront its earlier transgressions via the act of “incorpora-
tion”(110), which is more like the integration or, rather, harbouring of the object
within the self. This process reveals a failure, or difficulty, in the process of “introjec-
tion”(110),
9
which is a more complex and laborious sort of internalisation, or
subjectification, involving object mediation.
D.W. Winnicott —Barthes’own, imagined, analyst —describes such healthful
object-relating as having precisely that destructive quality, which Barthes will not
entertain. Not the object, Winnicott says, but, crucially, a destruction of the object
must be internalised before autonomous life “as an external phenomenon, not as a
projective entity”(713) can be permitted. This process is vital, for it permits a release
of the love-object from omnipotent control and the recognition of one’s own inde-
pendent creative capacities. The (infant) self, identified against the other, can enter
into a process of “creating the object in the sense of finding externality itself”(714),
which puts into action a spiral of playing, or “use”of objects, far more “sophisticated”
(716) than a simple, although primary scene, of one standing in relation to the other.
The sequence can be observed: (1) Subject relates to object. (2) Object is in
process of being found instead of placed in the world. (3) Subject destroys the
object. (4) Object survives destruction. (5) Subject can use object. (716)
Barthes’real mother does not survive and so cannot be any longer “used”, so to speak,
but this is not so much of concern. What is at stake here is the capacity to bear loss. As
Winnicott’s rough sketch of a sequence makes clear, there are vital, necessary, stages
involving the use of an object —which entails a destructive impulse —that are key
here. They provide the foundation for coping with the traumatic loss of life, but, more
fundamentally, they form a key part of our ability to approximate reality. Destruction
forms a key part of survival. Each stage, and action involved in Winnicott’s model,
becomes situated as an experience of relation, which is carried and drawn upon in all
future moments of relation, and within the projective imaginings they involve. It is
from this point that I wish to return to the family photograph, as “a transitional object”
—to be used —even if only as an “idea”.
Keeping it in the family?
Lynn Berger views the appropriation of snapshots as an attempt to stage a sort of
“democracy”(31) and desire to capture something “authentic”(31). Considered in light
of an object-relations framework, however, this is no simple matter. For, as I have just
argued, the process of image appropriation involves a complex dynamic, the outcome
of which is not set and decided in advance. It may be structurally defined, but
“authenticity”, and the attribution of this quality to a photographic object, depends
very much upon the nature of the relation enacted within the process of the image’s
appropriation. Just as the notion of what is “amateur”shifts, so too does any related
experience of “authenticity”, which is ultimately something that resides “in the eye of
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 47

the beholder”(45), rather than being something that is essentially inherent in photo-
graphic material.
Furthermore, “the amateur”, as John Roberts argues, must be understood as “one
of the defining figures in modern arts construction of its own ideal self-image (and self-
alienation)”(15). Featuring as a sort of “failure”, amateurs signify the inability to “get it
right”(18), he argues, and this is what has prompted artists to adopt amateur vision as
a sort of defence, mainly against their own institutional incorporation. This suggests a
sort of inherent value in the materiality of amateur productions, but there is very
strong sense in which this materiality becomes open to dialectical modification, when
in the hands of the artist and theoretician. Ten years before Barthes’elegy was
published, the photographer Bill Jay signalled something of this process within artistic
photographic practice. Inspired by experiments in America, his article “In Praise of
the Snapshot”
10
presented a critique of the dominance of a technical attitude in
photography.
Jay asks us to imagine a woman on a beach sitting watching her children. With
“love”(44), she plucks an Instamatic spontaneously from her bag, in order to capture
them at play. In contrast to the professional’s staged falsehoods, Jay argues, the
mother’s photography is “instinctive and direct”(44). She seeks not to impose her
own personality but, instead, is concerned with “revealing the subjects”(44). This
action (or inaction) represents a sort of pure moment in photography. The scene is
devoid of ego and anything that might be oppressive about the familial frame is denied
within this romanticised space of leisure. Professional and domestic photography are
essentially cast apart and stand to reflect a diametric opposition of autonomy and
market control, leaving little or no room for thinking through how the mother may in
fact be involved in an aspirational procedure, attempting to emulate a professional’s
ideal of childhood, cast in the golden glow depicted so well in the adverts.
Jay’s representation reflects a growing attempt within the 1970s artistic photo-
graphic scene to use the familial domestic frame to look beyond the vista of the
professional lens. But what is revealed, particularly in Jay’s essay, is the way in which
family photography can only come to represent an alternative framework by first
becoming cleansed of any association with the aspirational consumer market. The
practice of “found photography”was also emerging at this time, which entailed a
similar celebration of mundane photography. In the UK this was evident, for instance,
in the work of Dick Jewell, who published Found Photos in 1977. This was based upon
a collection of photobooth images that had been amassed over the period of almost a
decade (Walker 22). While not strictly family photography, this work was to reflect a
broader developing interest in “vernacular”images, which attempted to restage earlier
Ducampian uses of objects from the field of popular culture. It was the practice of
using “found”objects, along with rise of the “snapshot aesthetic”, which in part
defined the post-war institution of art photography, particularly in Britain and
America.
11
By the time of Peter Galassi’sPleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1991, there was a clear sense of the wider impact of the
outward turn within conceptual art, which, through the use of photography, had
perversely produced a turn toward the inner sanctum of the home. The exhibition
followed earlier precedents, set, for instance, by Steichen and Szarkowski.
12
Emmet
48 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Gowin’s snapshot intimacy during the 1960s, along with the colour photographs of
William Eggleston’sGuide, which was inspired by the drugstore snapshot (Weski),
formed other departure points and sources of inspiration at home and abroad.
The exhibition sampled a range of photographers, including Philip-Lorca di Corca,
Tina Barney, Sally Mann and Larry Sultan. It documented the intensification of interest
in the domestic scene, which came during the 1980s and in the wake of broader social
changes responding, for example, to the demand for sexual rights. It showed how
photographers were turning in on their own lives, revisioning photography by domes-
ticating the photographic lens, and also exploring the nature of familial representation
in their own artistic terms. Photographers included in the show also sought to
document scenes of the domestic use of family photographs. This is evident, for
instance, in Nan Goldin’s“The Parent’s Wedding Photograph”, Pok Chi Lau’s
“Teen-ager’s Room”, and Kathy O’Connor’s“Untitled”, which contains an old
woman directing a young child’s attention to an image in a photo-frame. More in
the style of a collage, the snapshots that appear in Lorie Novak’s“Fragments”confront,
in a more direct manner, the role of photography within the family. Apparent with all
of family photographs appearing in Pleasures and Terrors, however, is the requirement
for that which is amateur to be first filtered through the vision of the artist/photo-
grapher before being able to appear.
The exhibition mapped the transitions within photography art-practice, as it
sought to adopt a greater critical stance. What it missed, however, was the opportu-
nity to explore the “three-dimensional social relations conveyed by the humble snap-
shot”(Smith 10). But this had become somewhat beside the point. Just as Galassi’s
show was being finalised, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on photography was published in
English (Stallabrass). The social and memorial frame of photography, which Bourdieu
had defined in 1965 as that which had been so vehemently dismissed by the establish-
ment, was now clearly being included. What Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort
thus reflected was an attempt to come to terms with how family photography —or at
least an illusory memory of it —had already, in a manner of speaking, been welcomed
into the family of art.
Not much longer after, Val Williams’Who’s Looking at the Family? was staged at the
Barbican in 1994. While including many similar kinds of artistic productions engaging
with the familial frame, it marked a departure by demonstrating a more overt and
forthright interest in analogue family snapshots. Artworks by Joachim Schmid and
Alexander Honory,
13
based around the practice of using “found”photographs, were
included. But within the exhibition a family photo, found at a flea market by Williams in
the East End of London, was also shown. Its inclusion signalled a sort of maturity in the
presentation of “found”images. Shown here in Figure 1, the photograph is a portrait of a
young child. It is distinctly working-class, yet entirely aspirational. The girl is roughly
composed, but it is a performance of commemorative portraiture, contained by an
embellished deco-style frame. Reproduced as found, the photo-object challenges some-
what the idea that family snaps should be processed by the artistic gaze, categorised,
chopped, blurred or collaged, before being able to legitimately appear on the gallery
wall. It stands out against other more technically and conceptually sophisticated repre-
sentations, returning photography to what Williams, in a later essay on the emergence of
“found photography”, would call a “common ground of culture”(“Lost Worlds”).
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 49

There is an ultimate denial of authorship in this act of inclusion, which speaks to a
more anonymous field. At the same time, “Untitled [The Lost Child]”(Figure 1) can
only tantalise us with the idea of shared experience. As Williams reflects, beyond what
can be seen, the exact provenance of this photograph is unknown, and, consequently,
it emerges as what she terms an “enigma”(Who’s Looking at the Family? 25). The
“ambivalence”(25) of the image, she argues, allows us to “invest it with our own
drama”(25) (a thing that is too painful for Barthes to allow). But the investment made
in this image is not simply personal —it is institutional and cultural, and, its
deployment is implicated in a broader desire to open up the discipline of photography
to scrutiny.
“Untitled [The Lost Child]”is shown in order to demarcate an absence. The image
appears out-of-place and punctuates the space of photographic display. As a
Fig. 1 Anonymous, “Untitled [The Lost Child].”Who’s Looking at the Family, 1994. (From the archive of Val
Williams.)
50 PHOTOGRAPHIES

recuperated object, this family photograph (already a memorial form) sustains perso-
nalised memory within the space of public photographic display. Just in same way that
Batchen describes, the intention here is to reveal that which has traditionally been
excluded from artistic consideration. The identification of the image as the excluded is
further intensified by the feeling of responsibility which Williams experiences as a
curator. In the context of the clutter of the market stall, she says, “faces stand out
which demand rescue”(24). The image comes to us as if were an actual abandoned
child. Indeed, if it were to be thought of as a kind of transitional object, then it could
be argued that what it signifies is the salvage of the mother-and-child incorporated,
drawing us ever further into the interior dynamics of the domestic frame.
“Untitled [The Lost Child]”demonstrates a sort of awkwardness about labelling.
At the same time, the conventions of art display and cataloguing demand a label.
Through its title, the image becomes analogous with the body of the child. It is the
child in need of a home; in need of salvage from the clutches of the monetised
marketplace, where use-value has been transformed into exchange-value. Not just a
feminine domestic form (although, maybe because of this), the photograph acquires,
here, a new dimension of capital as salvageable material. The adoption of the image
reflects what is now becoming a growing trend in the collection of other people’s
photographs, beyond the confines of traditional art display.
14
Participatory designs
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has developed a burgeoning field of
appropriative practice, which seeks to adopt everyday forms of image-making and
place them centrally within public life. Curators and artists, often working with
established cultural institutions, have demonstrated a growing commitment to the
collection and display of family photographs through a range of exhibitions, coffee-
table-style publications and magazines. Key examples include Fineman’sOther Pictures,
published in 2000, based upon images taken from the Thomas Walther Collection,
and, following on from this, Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy’sPhoto-Trouvée,
published by Phaidon in 2006.
As Mia Fineman describes in relation to the images contained within Other Pictures,
the snapshot can be interpreted as a “successful failure”(n. pag.). But in order to be
able to recognise “failure”, we must first know what art is, before being able to
recognise what it is not. Only then can one understand the mechanism of appropriation
designating contemporary art practice. This speaks to a particular art audience, and, it
could be argued that texts such as Other Pictures stand much closer to the curatorial
practices of the Museum of Modern Art than to the material purported to be elevated
(Zuromskis). The investment is within a version of avant-garde art practice, the basis
of which is the celebration, rather than critique of ordinary and mundane aspects of
everyday life.
Family photographs are now uploaded to photo-sharing sites for many different
commemorative purposes, but maybe what is most intriguing is the adoption of the
artistic strategies of collecting and displaying everyday images within the context of
what once constituted a broader field of cultural industry practice. Some graphic
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 51

designers have turned their hand to the practice of “everyday”image adoption and
curation in order to extend and expand their creative portfolios. Sandwiched in the
years between Other Pictures and Photo-Trouvée, Frederic Bonn’s project Look at Me is one
such example.
A chance find of some discarded photos on the streets of Paris inspired him to set
up the project in 2001, which operates as a participatory web production, now hosted
on Tumblr. In the archives of the original website we find guidelines for submission,
which requests that photographs are not cropped or tampered with. Images should also
not be studio productions and, within the parameters laid down, there is a clear
preference for that which is home-made and DIY. Pictures should be over 25 years
old. “This is not a strict rule”, we are told, “but this is all about memory…”, which
forms a somewhat elusive concept. This is later clarified in an interview where Bonn
states:
I don’t care for a photo of your cousin sitting on a couch, drinking a beer. What I
find haunting are abandoned photos, the ones from the past that you find in the
street or at a flea market. (Baldwin)
Beyond the graphic designer’s personal fascination, there is nothing obvious in Look at
Me’s instructions to direct us toward the precise purpose of the collection, or, indeed,
any of its potential uses. Bonn says that no one has ever contacted him to reclaim an
image, and it is not exactly as though the website were set up to function as a lost
Fig. 2 Look at Me web archive <http://www.moderna.org/lookatme/archives.php>.
52 PHOTOGRAPHIES

property exchange. Rather, it seems, the project exists in order to provide testimony
to the process of snapshots becoming trash.
Following its abandonment, the return of the snapshot takes the form of an artistic
recuperation. On the surface, Bonn’s collection looks to valorise a particular moment
of analogue photography. But this is no simple nostalgia for a former photographic
technology, for Bonn also begs the question: “how much better are printed photos over
digital if the former end up in a dumpster?”(Baldwin). Implicit within the project Look
at Me is a desire to foreground taste and artistic intelligence, but also an ability to
perceive the affordances offered by new technologies. Bonn plays the role of the artist-
as-curator, salvaging decaying images, but, by also inviting participation within the
framework of this project, he also confers this role upon members of the general
public, who are all potential participants of the site.
While ultimately reflecting the omnipotence of the artistic frame, and extending it
in the guise of fashion, Look at Me is more than a little ego-project. What the site
signals is a growing concern to integrate the past in visual form. The organisation
Found, also set up in 2001, reflects a similar concern. Although not so narrowly
defined as Look at Me, it too solicits the contributions of anonymous finds from the
street. What the organisers of the site request, however, is that the individual
circumstances relating to the moment of the “find”also be documented. The backstory
acts to authenticate the material. Embarrassing prom photos, heartfelt teenage love-
notes (see Figure 3) and scribbles upon restaurant napkins are the sort of stock objects
that define the core material of this collection.
Found requests that submissions be scanned and not photographed. This may be
to do with reproduction quality, but what it also reflects is a fetishising of the touch
of the trace, and attempt to simulate the haptics of holding an original analogue
production. Just as with other self-published artistic initiatives collecting such
material, such as Ohio
15
and Useful Photography,
16
Found transforms its content into
features for specialist magazine publications. The importance of touch and texture is
reflected in the hand-crafted look of their magazine publications. The cloth of the
football shirt and the raised letters of the red Dymo embossing tape demonstrates a
commitment to Craft; a kind that uses the ready-made functional objects of the
popular past.
We do not know the people shown in the picture, but their adolescent embarrass-
ment is familiar. Everything here about the artistic reproduction, and collaging of the
images, represents an attempt to reanimate the past, but, just as with Look at Me, this
project does not articulate a simple longing for return. Indeed, projects like these must
be understood to enact a wider commitment to a techno-cultural shift, within which
there is a new emphasis placed upon craft and the materiality of ordinary and everyday
life, which foregrounds “domestically anchored memory”(Hand 163). The scanning
and uploading of analogue images supplies a stream of new, yet fundamentally old and
familiar, content to the internet. And this is precisely what induces an alliance with
common experience.
Whatever one feels about the nature of this artistic appropriation, it must be
understood as a creative project, at least in the respect that the image becomes
conceptually repositioned and redefined as a cultural form. It is this aesthetic strategy
that was recognised more broadly by curators as an example of alternative
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 53

photographic practice, which foregrounds and elevates “the everyday”.Found has
featured, for instance, in David Brittain’s exhibition Found, Shared: The Magazine
Photowork, which was staged alongside a Joachim Schmid
17
retrospective at the
Photographer’s Gallery in London in 2007 (Figure 4).
The exhibition sought to underscore the value of printed self-publications in the
digital age. It collaged together a range of artefacts and also accepted, and concurrently
displayed, contributions of images found by gallery goers and sent in via fax machine.
As the press coverage at the time reflected, this formed a display of “accidental art”,
which “transgresses all the accepted rules of artistic merit, formal excellence and good
taste”(O’Hagen), reflecting earlier forms of avant-gardism.
Fig. 3 Found Magazine 2 front cover (Winter 2002).
54 PHOTOGRAPHIES

The exhibition, it was also argued, prompted us to “turn toward our own
photographic albums”and ask “why is memory so important to us?”(Davies). In
light of the creation of a burgeoning public–private archive of family snapshots, this
question takes on particular significance. “Memory”is now understood to underpin
contemporary digital practice and the deployment of this concept is precisely what
invites engagement with the analogue past. Look at Me and Found both rely upon
members of the public for their supply of images. In this way they confirm that it is no
longer just the artist who serves as a “historic agent of memory”(Enweznor 46),
making patently clear the public’s responsibility for the preservation of the past. The
promise offered by digital technologies to ensure cultural heritage is what, in part,
necessitates an amateur investment.
The alternative family: slideshows, bad taste and the forming of
“retrochic”
Family photographs, it is by now clear, feature as an incorporated element of culture,
which reflects the merging quality of the new “aesthetics of the everyday”(Murray).
Yet, with a continual demarcating of a boundary around amateur forms of contribution
—specifically through drive toward labelling and categorisation —it is difficult to see
Fig. 4 ©paula roush/msdm archives:CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Found, Shared Exhibition display, Photographer’s
Gallery 2007.
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 55

what might be democratic about this process. The preservation of “the everyday”,
moreover, risks a dilution of the political poignancy of the critical frame. Rather than
ending on this point, however, I want to turn to briefly consider an altogether different
kind of artistic performance also using family snapshots. It is one which initiates the
sense of the “orality”that Martha Langford promotes, albeit transposed in lyrical form.
The Trachtenberg Family Slide Show Players are a New York-based anti-folk
mother–father–daughter musical trio, who describe themselves as an “indie-vaudeville-
conceptual-art-rock-slideshow-band”(Myspace). They are firmly entrenched within
New York’s independent anti-folk art scene and associate with figures such as John
Water and Regina Spektor.
18
Anyone who has been to one of their shows will have
had their senses assaulted by a strange, yet compelling, aural-visual experience.
Carefully prearranged slideshow are played through a vintage slide-projector by the
mother of the band, Tina Piña Trachtenberg. The father, Jason, sings and plays piano,
rather poorly, accompanied on the drums by their daughter Rachel Trachtenberg.
Around the archive of other people’s slides they have amassed from various yard sales
and flea markets, The Trachtenbergs form acutely incisive lyrics, which bring to life the
odd little lives of those depicted in the slides. The Trachtenbergs adopt a playful but
mocking tone to convey their opposition. In songs, such as “Look at Me”(“On and Off
Broadway”), focusing on the lives of two retired military nurses Jean and Cappie, they
send up the individuals, couples, groups of friends and families going about their ordinary
everyday lives hosting barbeques, going on holiday and performing in general merriment
for the camera. The sentiment is biting, which provides a marked contrast to more
familiar reproductions of Americana that we see in other publications such as Lenny
Fig. 5 The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, Still from video for “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959.”2001.
Note: The image shown here is taken from a YouTube video clip <http://youtu.be/J6sEdodZEg0>. Also see DVD
compilation “Off and On Broadway”, 2006, for a similar performance.
56 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Gottlieb’sLost and Found in America, where the intention is to reflect a quite normalised
sphere of public “consciousness”, which is “firmly rooted in private experience”(7).
In some images in Gottlieb’s collection, we see minor acts of rebellion against
authority, such as soldiers in uniform flashing bare backsides to the camera, but, mostly,
photographs are intimate portrayals of the common themes and rituals of 1960s
American family life. We find a purposeful refusal of ordinary Americans to get too
weighed down by the weight of the world, even at a time when events of wide-scale
human catastrophe were unfolding. By contrast, the Trachtenbergs seek to positively
admonish ordinary Americans for political ignorance. In “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959”
(Figure 5;“On and Off Broadway”) constructs a story of an ironically “well rounded”
man whose slide collection exposes a world of conspicuous leisure. The parodying of the
trip through the lens of “Kodad”(a not so subtle replacement for the “Kodak”branding,
which would ordinarily appear on the slide frame) allows the music artists to point
toward the American paternalism underpinning a spectacularising approach to other
cultures. Interspersed with the man’s slides of expensive cars travelling through Old
Japan and its various heritages sites are rare images of public execution. These are
strange finds in a pool of holiday snaps depicting smiling family members. Any potential
political resonance the images hold is silenced. The tourist here is not only a distanced
witness, but one who is essentially staging support for atrocities abroad.
Although the slides show a familiar and comforting scene of domestic life,
displayed within the context of the Trachtenberg’s narrative are the murky undertones
running through this golden era of slide-film. The Trachtenberg’s visual appearance,
furthermore, parallels this revelation. Adorned in thrift-store chic, and displaying their
love for popular childhood objects of the recent past —including 8-track tapes and
Troll Dolls —they look, on the surface of it, like any other retro-novelty act. Beyond
surface appearance, however, is revealed a parody of the all-American family. The act
forms a version of what Raphael Samuel refers to as “retrochic”—an “anti-fashion”
(91) or “visual joke”(112). This is distinct from “restorationism”and “conservationism”
(112), as the aim of “retrochic”is to turn attention to the “the bric-a-brac of material
culture, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life”(114) in order to confront the
materiality of a defining moment in the history of popular culture and mass leisure.
The Trachtenbergs take great pleasure in salvaging images, but promptly destroy the
chance for reviving any sentiments of the world they stand to represent. Slide collections
are deployed in narrative form but, through the overlay of the band’slyrics, we are invited
to meet the material in a new way. As slides are located as material implicated within a
broader ideological framework of social life, we are almost returned to the framework of
earlier left-wing political critique. The Trachtenbergs seek to go beyond immediate familial
myths. They are also aware, however, of the impossibility of escape. Hanging in a place
between nostalgia and political critique, they realise the impossibility of forming a
straightforward opposition to the mainstream, especially since this is already defined in
certain respects by the celebration of “common”culture. What their act involves is not so
much a reanimation of the past but, rather, a self-conscious attempt to stage a creative
appropriation of objects, beyond a simple salvage, in order to manifest alterity. And it is
through this that they are able to reveal political motivation, and, even though knowing it
to be somewhat naive, they salute a hope for something that goes beyond the social and
cultural framework of life, in relation to which they stand.
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 57

Conclusion: Life with and beyond the photographic object
The inclusion of the family amateur snapshot is no straightforward matter. It is always
motivated by a particular desire to establish a relationship to the past, and classify history in
a particular way. Appropriations of the snapshot, as it has been my aim to demonstrate
here, involve a range of scenarios of meaning-making, which are underpinned and
developed according to a particular dynamic of object-relating that is both personal,
cultural and often entangled within institutional challenges. Snapshots become recuperated
forms, or what I earlier termed ‘objects of salvage’and this holds a double sense of meaning.
The snapshot is both object and subject of the archive—stabilized and secured for the
future but also changing the grounds of history.
Photographic theory may provide the insight of how to approach the family snapshot,
but it must also be recognized that theory (or in the case of Barthes: anti-theory) enacts its
own particular stance toward the photographic object that may intentionally or unintention-
ally misfire. Camera Lucida does not so much give us a model through which it is possible to
realise the wider cultural value of the family photograph, but rather forms a digest of the
object-status it attains when located within one person’sexperienceofloss.Itisbyresisting
interpretative structures that Barthes makes hispoint,whichisthatbyconstantlyoscillating
between the positions of presence and absence, the photograph can only bring suffering.
Family photographs are not to be treated as memory itself, but are, rather, to be viewed
as prompts to memory. In respect of this we must see that the process of apprehending the
meaning of a photograph cannot necessarily be known in advance or preempted by set
principles of action. To continue to seek to materialize memory in the form of the photograph
is in fact to destroy memory “principally by depriving it of movement”(Kember, “The
Virtual Life of Photography”185). Memory is dynamic and what is returned from the process
of looking at a photograph depends very much upon the capacity possessed by the individual
(maybe a curator, artist, theoretician or other socially defined being) to apprehend the object
according to the principle of “use”,whichisentirelysubjectiveanddrivenbyadesiretohold
the image in hand or mind, while at the same time allowing oneself to be moved by it, but
also move beyond it. (The photograph stays with us only as an image).
To see the family photograph is an object that naturally requires protection—as that
which is in Winnicottian terms constantly “in the process of being found instead of placed in
the world”(716)—prevents proper recognition of the personal, social, cultural value it
possesses. Furthermore, by formalising the image as that which is akin to public “sites”(Nora)
of memory, and thus declaring the collapse of the boundary between public and private life,
leads us to miss the point that “what is taken to be personal is always already thoroughly
social”(Radstone 136). We fail to see the photograph, transitional in nature, as an object that
inevitably points elsewhere; to worlds beyond its own frame, differently visualized, with the
capacity to build relationships beyond the accepted and known. Not defenses of memorial
forms, but deeper recognition of the lessons that memory brings is what is now required.
Notes
1 See, for example, “Lessons of Darkness”, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art,
1988. Images also shown in Marianne Hirsch, Chapter 8, “Past Lives”.
58 PHOTOGRAPHIES

2 Here, Rose is deploying Laurent Berlant’s terms, which are directed toward the
critique of the replacement of “active citizenship”with sentiment, which Rose sees
as drawn through “the public citation of affective institutions such as the family”
(Rose 131).
3 Rose deploys Kaja Silverman’s“ethics in the field of vision”(qtd. in Rose 112)
in The Threshold of the Visible World to define the moment of encountering the
photograph as representative of the moment of being face-to-face with “the
other”.
4 Langford deploys Walter Ong’s notion of “orality”in Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the World in order to describe how photographic albums are not
only defined within conversation but also themselves represent conversations
formed in time.
5 Buse is referring to Elizabeth Edwards’“Photographs as Object of Memory”here,
specifically her desire to see the photography “not merely as an image”(qtd. in Buse
190), but as an affective presence in the world.
6 This is a reference to Allan Sekula’s“The Body and the Archive”, often and easily
misquoted as “The Body in the Archive”.
7 Cathexis is the investment of energy in the object, which is transferred from the
mother to other objects; the photograph here.
8 As Barthes refers to “a team of sociologists”(7) dealing with amateur photographs,
it can be assumed that this is a reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s study Un Art Moyen
first published in France in 1965. Both Barthes and Bourdieu, in their different
ways, announce a dismissal of aesthetics.
9 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok adopt Sandor Ferenczi’s definition of this
concept, which was taken up by Freud and Abraham and Melanie Klein, and
which was interpreted as a kind of transference and moment of inclusion of the
object in the ego. Initially defined in 1909 in “Introjection and Transference”, the
processes were later clarified in 1912 in “On the Definition of Introjection”. It is the
clarification which concerns Torok, who seeks to put forward the distinction
between “introjection”as a process of “incorporation”, and “incorporation”as a
failed form of “introjection”, more forcefully. This emphasises the importance of
mediation in the process of self-identification and meaning-making.
10 Originally published in The Casual Eye in 1971.
11 As Benjamin Buchloh argues, the earlier shock effect of appropriative art practices
was to become reformed as an epistemology of the archive developed around 1925,
which he sees as signalling the end of photocollage.
12 Edward Steichen The Family of Man,1955, and John Szarkowski The Photographer’s
Eye, 1966, both at the Museum of Modern Art, sought to foreground the importance
of photography by elaborating its placement within a wider universal human experi-
ence, firmly including the domestic sphere within the photographic frame.
13 Joachim Schmid, from the series Archive, 1986–94 and Alexander Honory, Institute
of Contemporary Family Photography, The Found Image, 1989 (see Bull, “The
Elusive Author”).
14 Other People’s Pictures, a film by Lorca Shepperd and Cabot Philbrick, documents this
growing personal interest in collecting family photographs in America.
15 <http://www.ohiomagazine.de> First published in 1995 by Huber and Jörg Paul
Janka in Germany.
THE LOST OF FOUND PHOTOGRAPHY 59

16 <http://www.usefulphotography.com> Published by Kessells Kramer in the
Netherlands.
17 Joachim Schmid: Selected Photoworks at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, 20 April–
17 June 2007.
18 A revealing vision of their life on tour is given in their film “Off and On Broadway”,
which includes live performances of the songs under discussion here.
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