TM Essay plan.

I am prone to lose things. I'd probably leave my laptop somewhere so I shall leave my essay plan up here. =]

Examine the use of personal memory in the work of one or two artists of photographers.

Consider the way in which memory is used and also the objective/motivation of the artist.

 

Emotional Response

 

“Has photography quietly replaced your memories with its own”

Is Nobuyoshi really going to see his wife properly in all her essence and aura when he reflects upon his photographs, or just someone he recognises.

 

Barthes – “memory is not so much image as sensation”

It is more of an emotional response.

Can Nobuyoshi get this from just an image?

However, an image CAN elicit a response, and from that can come the emotions and feelings.

 

Araki “After Yoko’s death, I wanted to photograph nothing but life”

His motivation to photograph AFTER his wife’s death was to photograph all things alive. It was all he wanted to do. The man photographed in grief.

 

Memory Tool

 

The past to be remembered by an involuntary trigger

i.e. smell, touch, taste

POINT

Does (indeed, can) a photograph do the same in its static state? “bring back the sound of her voice, her smell, the way she walked?”

Photography as the Cause of memory, it would have to “transcend the merely visual and engage the other senses”.

Static image alone is just not enough.

Connection

Nobuyoshi's memory may have been his objective, but Proust likes to think that photograph's do not seem to really help one remember.

 

“Photography in itself is an art of memory... we usually construe photographs and memories as synonymous”

Eastman Kodak Company – “enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost”

“as if to fail to do so [take 550 snapshots a second] would be to let out precious memories fade into the mists of time”

Are we really this reliant on photography? Evidently Nobuyoshi was, especially in the way he was drawn to photograph everything after Yoko’s death.

Connection

Nobuyoshi photographed his wife after his mother died. He wanted to keep it close, didn't want it to fade.

Araki – “The photographs become my memory”

 

“But is photography indeed a good way to remember things?”

Define what memory is first?

“less about the detailed recall of appearance and more about the extended act of remembrance... a state of reverie”

What was Nobuyoshi after? What was he thinking when he shot the honeymoon?

Did he want the detail of the photograph, or the reverie Batchen talks of. The essence that he can draw back to, the state of mind.

 

“Has photography quietly replaced your memories with its own”

Siegfried Kracauer - “An individual retains memories because they are personally significant”

Fair to say Nobuyoshi's memories [especially those of a funeral] would be retained for definate.

 

Richard Terdiman [Historian] - “Memory is always in a crisis, always in a fearful struggle with its other, with the encroachment of amnesia”

CONNECTION

Was this why Nobuyoshi was so desperate to photograph his wife, to escape the ever permanent threat of amnesia? Is he running away from that fact that one day, we all forget. He’s holding on to her presence and her LACK of presence, and showing it to us.

 

“Photography does not enhance memory... but rather replaces it with images”.

But these images are what Nobuyoshi considers his memory. He said it himself. Does the rest of the sensory experience come with it? Consider Batchen at this time.

 

Transformation of Images

 

“To induce a full, sensorial experience of involuntary memory, a photograph must be transformed. Something must be done to the photograph to pull it (and us) out of the past and into the present.”

“The subject of the photograph must be similarly transformed... into an emotional exchange transacted in the heart”

Nobuyoshi's images are so provocative that they DO become transformed. The death and the foreshadowing death of a loved on makes the subject incredibly emotional, and through the transformation, the full experience arrives. But this experience is only for Nobuyoshi. We are essentially strangers to his grief and motives, so we can only speculate from outside.