BY Stephen Horne

“To photograph has long been synonymous with the procedure of isolation and dislocation of an instant from its temporal/contextual mother land.”1 — Scott Connaroe

“To define the present in isolation is to kill it.”2 — Paul Klee

“Nostalgia is part of the problem and it does not contain the solution.”3 — Edward S. Casey

1.What better context in which to explore the topic of emplacement and displacement than by abandoning one’s own fixed abode in favour of a journey, with its characteristics of motion, distance, estrangement and roaming: a passing through that becomes a kind of home, one identifiable as ritual. Last year Scott Conarroe pursued By Rail (2008), a year long photographic project premised as a North American landscape survey, but undertaken thematically as a journey (a road trip) on the one hand and on the other, concerned with documenting a subject: railways and their environs. That Conarroe posed this work from the perspective of a journey situates the artist within our own topic of nostalgia, implicated as it is with the concept and experience of the home-place. The term “journey” is also inflected with myth and tradition, maintaining continuity with other terms I privilege here such as “place” and “aura.”

In the photographs of Conarroe we do encounter the landscape of place but neither as the heroic spectacle of Andreas Gursky nor the journalistic commentary of Edward Burtynsky. His subject for this project, the railway, is a mode of travel and transport most closely identified with the 19th century, modern industrialization and its definition of progress as expansion and the creation of ever more efficient logistics. Of course the railway can provide plenty of raw material for a nostalgic return to times past; for example, an image of a steam locomotive belching white smoke as it rushes across a prairie, or the memory of a train station from one’s childhood. These however are not at all Conarroe’s motivation or his topic, his images being entirely contemporary and never invoking history as a lost past as found in the images of Mark Ruedel’s decaying railway traces.

In West Texas Flat 2, (2008) we view into space from an elevated vantage point, looking downwards and “onto” a voluminous scene of emptiness activated only by a single rail track fenced on each side and showing one obsolete utility pole. Our position is directly centred over the track. Nearly two thirds of this photograph’s surface is given over to sky and because of the composition the sky’s volume floods the entire image. The rail track and its parallel fences rise upward into a central vanishing point. Very early morning light has emphasized texture by way of detail and richness of colour with the result that the track, perhaps out of use, is rendered with the intense fragility of fine lines drawn across a rough and barren plain. The single utility pole and the fences either side of the track suggest the tentative and fragile uncertainty of human enterprise in the face of such a hopeless and void terrain. Place is described in this image of time differentials — the land and the human. Disparity between the scale of the human artefacts and the landscape gives a strong sense of the finite nature of things human and produces an ironic reversal of the primacy usually accorded to human vision.

In London Sunrise Behind Townhouses (2008) again the elevated vantage point and threshold perform an extraction of our point of view. This is another composition in which a single railway line disappears into the physical centre of the photograph. In this image the point of view is slightly decentred in relation to the track that is centred in relation to an overall composition that includes the parallel lines of fencing and a housing development following the track. All the linear elements converge at a single vanishing point near the centre of the photograph. As the title suggests, a sunrise is occurring near the left edge of the scene and this suffuses the image with the soft radiance of morning colour and defines a maximum of detail. The two rails are polished streaks of light zeroing into their vanishing point near the horizon.

2. The question of nostalgia is posed from the perspective of various familiar writings on photography regarding the place of memory, history, and culture. The texts to which I refer lead us to ponder as to how (liberal) humanism is to be understood in the light of technological development. If the tradition of this particular humanism has been to place human being as the centre and source of whatever is then we now need to recognize non-nostalgic ways of relating to the decentring of the human by technology. One of the ways this can be done is by re-examining pre-modern and non-western relationships with nature, a fundamental project of this “journey” would be a questioning into what place means. Perhaps turning to a concept of place-resting-in-motion would return us to more relational (post-anthropocentric) understandings of human existence in which non-human actors such as nature and technology would feature more emphatically.

As a starting point for a discussion of nostalgia and photography, the statement at the beginning from Conarroe works well with its emphasis on displacement and use of the term motherland. Viewing some of the images from his recent project By Rail will also contribute to the topic, as will denoting aspects of nostalgia drawn from some of the established commentaries made on the nature of photography by authors such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes and from Sigmund Freud’s
contribution with his discussion of “the uncanny.” In the case of the first two authors I mention, my sense is that with respect to the issue of aura they are not always in agreement, with Benjamin’s evaluation of art as ritual, including the aura’s loss, as a positive progress toward reason and toward democratization, while Barthes’ more Catholic view indulges a degree of mysticism, allowing himself “the magic” of a photograph, one not coincidentally also invoking a “motherland.” (my italics) These correlations are important as aura and nostalgia are intimately connected in photography by their relationship with both the place form and its subsequent devaluation into space / time.

This notion of a “motherland” is consistent with a traditional view of “home” as origin, a stable, fixed and secured centre. Equally important is the modern, rationalist and
instrumental re-definition of place as a location in uniform space or pure extension lacking recognition of distance and therefore also nearness. These concerns are at the root of any analysis of nostalgia, defined as it is by way of “homesickness.” I situate the erosion of aura as described by Benjamin, in a “pathology of place” in the modern era. As an aside, we may note that the inception of both the railway and photography occurred more or less concurrently in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

The experience we call “nostalgia,” means from its roots “a return home,” and “pain.” In other words, homesickness, the longing for a lost place or a former time. In the case of lost place this might be traced back to its literary appearance in the story of Odysseus’ journey, and in the modern context where time has taken priority over space, Marcel Proust with his search for lost time would be the appropriate reference. Somewhat earlier, in the mid eighteenth century Immanuel Kant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, the time of an earlier life. This demonstrated the modern conception of time in which no return is possible. And the outcome is nostalgia, a reaction to the irreversibility of modern time. However, the disappearance of distance, and therefore as Martin Heidegger wrote, the possibility of nearness, is a greater occasion for the experiencing of nostalgia.

“The sense of self, personal or collective, grows out of and reflects the places from which we have come and where we have been. (…) If nostalgia is a characteristically modern malaise, this may be due to its covert recognition that a time once existed when place was ‘the first of all things,’ when time and space in their modern (dis)guises were not yet fatally at work.”4 In his essay on the place form, Edward S. Casey goes on to describe pathology of place in which he locates nostalgia alongside “disorientation, memory loss, homelessness, depression and estrangement.” He assigns nostalgia’s occasion not simply to “progress” (ever increasing instrumental efficiency) but to the modern redefining of place as static with time as a mere linear succession of instants, and then to the sense of distortion following these transformations.

Benjamin’s writing (1935) on the aura seems to introduce a number of possibilities, one being the substitution of ritual by politics, possibly now meaning technological, corporate and consumer oriented communications, or more optimistically not a liquidation of “the human project” but of a specific way of constructing it, away from its liberal-humanist nexus. Benjamin’s early definition of aura, “Aura is the unique existence of a work of art at the place where happens to be,” and “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,”5 implicitly connect the aura with place. In a further step he “frees” the work of art from its definition as ritual, saying, “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”6

If Benjamin’s first theory of the aura was linked to a unique, authentic origin, “here and now,” (a fixed and unique point of origin) his later theory (1939), proposes aura as leave- taking, the singular leave-taking of the singular “no longer the other of reproduction and repetition but their most intimate effect.”7 “We define the aura (of natural objects) as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”8 It is difficult to see though how any such distance would be achieved in the Modern era with its shrinking of distance by the efficient transportation and communications system.

Writing in the late fifties, French film critic and theorist Andre Bazin defined the photograph’s realism by way of the index, (a kind of decal or transfer, an imprint)9 saying that the photograph rests on a privileged relation to the real, which determines realism as the essential aesthetic of photography. His statement, “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man,”10 extends his discourse in another direction as well “The photographic image is the object itself, freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.11

Benjamin’s statement on ritual is contrasted when Barthes wrote, “…photography has something to do with resurrection”12 For the realists, (himself and Bazin) the photograph was, “…an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art.”13, “Every photograph is somehow co-natural with its referent.”14

FREUD’S “UNCANNY”
A direct passage can be traced between Bazin’s conception of photography’s introduction into the creative process of a “production by automatic means”15 and Freud’s concern with the automaton and “the uncanny.”16 The fact that no human agency is involved in the fundamental photographic process is in fact an aspect of an intervention, which opens and then erodes the liberal humanist (and anthropocentric) point of view. The uncanny happening or event disrupts the cycle of an object opposed to a subject, and creates the possibility of openness towards something other, something strange and alien, unhomely.

It does seem that the entire Barthian description of the photographic image is a project continuing the humanism of an era as presented in the writings of Bazin. These fragments from well known texts by Benjamin, Bazin and Barthes bear on the relationship between photography and the topic of nostalgia in so far as all involve discussions of displacement of one sort or another, and so construct a theme of place and image. Ultimately it is the correction of a distortion, that of liberal humanism and its anthropocentric view that situates human being as the centre and transcendental condition of the universe, a distortion of which nostalgia is symptomatic. This correction can be found at work, paradoxically, in Bazin’s and Barthes’ shared ontology of the photographic image, in Freud’s category of “the uncanny” and most explicitly in Jean Baudrillard’s “generation by models of a real without origin or reality.”17

Nostalgia is not yet avoided in the discussions of the photograph presented by Bazin, Benjamin and Barthes and this is due to their allegiances to a modern conception of “place” divided into space / time. Their conceptions of the photographic image are bound to a post-place and pre-televisual conception of space and time, and my comments are framed by this context. But one that does, nevertheless, co-exist alongside the interpretation provided from the perspective of our current electronic communications environment.

Until the recent epoch in which televisual communications forms an environment (post-nostalgic?), photography has played an ambiguous/ambivalent role. On one hand, there is the operation on time and space (arrest and displacement) that actually produces the conditions for our experiences of loss and longing for origin and belonging while at the same time promising to alleviate that pain through repetition, reproduction and preserving against disappearance what passes in time. Nostalgia is part of the problem and it does not contain a solution. If in fact there is to be a “solution” it can only come from out of an intensification of the same process of transformation that has, from the perspective of “former times,” been so destructive of the ritual ties that bind us with place, our bodies, and recollection.

Notes:
1. Scott Conarroe, unpublished letter to the author, 2005
2. Paul Klee, in Virilio, Open Sky, (London, Verso, 1997), 10
3. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, (Bloomington, Indiana University, 1993), 39
4. Edward S. Casey, 38
5. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, (New York, Schocken 1969), 221–222
6. Benjamin, 224
7. In Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: in Form, Technics, Media, ed Alan Cholodenko, (Sydney/Stanford, 1996), 104
8. Benjamin, 222
9. Andre Bazin, The Ontology of The Photographic Image, What is cinema?(Hugh Gray, Trans., Ed.). (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–71). 14
10. Bazin, 13
11. Bazin, 14
12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York Hill and Wang, 1981), 82
13. Barthes, 76
14. Barthes, 85–89
15. Bazin, p. 13
16. Sigmud Freud, The Uncanny, (New York Penguin, 2003), 135
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, in Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis, (New York, The New Museum, 1984), 253