“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of the previous conversation. “It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of an old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times.— to Death, if we give the matter the right word!”
Holgrave, “The Daguerreotypist” from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables
It just keeps coming around . . .
Sometimes I wish I could unlearn a bunch of stuff, to make the world seem more interesting. I can’t get excited by Laurie McNeill’s review of Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. pointed at by Wood s Lot. Michael Lesy did something too similar in 1973 with Wisconsin Death Trip. The enterprise of reconstructing narratives from photos reminds me of a show I saw in the 1980s called Proof. I think it was a piece by Alan Ruppersberg, but I’m not sure. There were several snapshots blown up to a huge size, with a big book on the table with a pencil. Gallery visitors were expected to write down a story to go along with the photographs. Any story we write about the past ultimately turns into just another fiction. It’s hard to accept that and move on. Sometimes it hardly seems a game worth playing. Hawthorne was onto that, but he played just the same.
I’m even less excited by the Conscientious pointer to the photographs of Nikki S. Lee. It seems like only the slightest twist on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1977. So, the subject for dress-up has been moved from the past to the present. It’s entertaining, yes, but profound? I don’t think so. Sometimes, I wish we could stop dragging around some elements of the past. Strange words from a guy engaged in writing a history, no? But I never claimed to be consistent, now did I?
