Writing Wednesday: Fragments and Photography

My writing the past week has been pretty rough. After years of dodging Walter Benjamin, I finally created a situation from which I could not escape dealing with Benjamin. 

The result is a clunky section of text, but one that I’m feeling confident can be rehabilitated. Part of my reason for posting this very rough draft is to show some of my readers (who are my students) that writing and revising are part of the process.

For those of you with a score card, this is the second section in the third part of my book focused on oil, mobility, and modernity. This final substantive chapter focuses on photography, permanence, and fragmentation. This section is where I am most out of my depth (or trodding on new ground) and both excited and terrified to put my own thoughts on paper.

I posted the first part of the final chapter last week (you can check out the outline for my book here).

4.2 Permanence and Fragments

A key way to understand the role that photography plays in archaeology and indeed in modernity is unpacking the tension between the capacity for photography to produce fragmentation and their persistence.

The previous section demonstrated how the persistent character of the photograph served to commemorate the authenticity of the tourist’s experience, to preserve contexts subject to the archaeologists destructive practice, and to arrest a world in constant motion. In this context, the photograph became a salve for the ephemerality and mobility fundamental to the modern age. This same mobility made the tourist and archaeologist possible. For the archaeologist, the photograph transformed the kinetic world of excavation into static, persistent, and portable evidence for the past. In this way it reified the archaeologist’s distance from the past in a way similar to how photographs embody the tourist’s alienation from their own past. The use of photography in the archaeology of the contemporary world is rather different. In traditional archaeology, the photograph captures evidence for a distant past and embodied the transformation of the transitory encounter into static evidence. In archaeology of the contemporary world, the archaeologist cannot gain distance from the past. Indeed, the very concept of the archaeology of the contemporary world requires the archaeologist and their object of study to be contemporary. Thus the archaeologist of the contemporary world seeks to document their own embodied contemporaneity with and in the present.

In this context, the photograph is a complex artifact. It documents an ephemeral experience, event, or situation and renders it permanent. At the same time, the photograph is part of a elusive contemporaneity and therefore subjected to the same instability as the moment from which it emerged. Martin Lister (2012) notes that the time in and time of the photograph collapse into contemporaneity. Ann Fuchs (2019) follows François Hartog’s (2015) notion of presentism when she argues that photographs are a presentist medium “precisely because it freezes a moment that is devoid of duration and temporality” (33). The photograph becomes a fragment of an ongoing experience rather than representing our alienation from the past or the world we see as tourists. In its fragmentation, it comes to embody our encounter with the modern world.

The emphasis on fragmentation, photography, and archaeology (and indeed tourism) has roots in the early 20th century. Nora Goldschmidt has recently argued that the connection between the fragmentary nature of archaeological remains — particularly those of Greco-Roman antiquity — and the fetishization of the fragmentary among early 20th century modernists is not a coincidence. Following Linda Nochlin’s lead (1994), Goldschmidt points out that the rise of archaeology in the late-19th and early-20th century also paralleled the rise of photography which became a regular companion both of the tourist and, as the previous section has shown, the archaeologist. Modernist poetry and prose with their concern for discontinuity, rupture, and abrupt juxtapositions found an appropriate complement in the photograph. As Goldschmidt notes, the modernist writer H.D. embraced the photographic collage in her manuscripts for example by combining text and photographs. Ezra Pound’s invocation of fragments , especially the poem “Papyrus,” and Eliot’s use of the Sibyl story as the epigram to his poem “The Waste Land,” made clear that early 20th-century writers saw the use of fragments as a way to engage with the irreconcilable elements of everyday experience and modernity. Fragments embodied the discontinuous experience brought about by social and technological changes at the turn of the century. Moreover, they made clear that the past could not provide a continuous narrative for understanding the contemporary but instead offered only discontinuous glimpses into a past that no longer supported the weight of the constantly changing present. In effect, the fragmentation and discontinuity encountered in the present found parallels with the growing corpus of fragments produced by archaeologists studying the past.

Any discussion of photography as the fragmentation of experience must also contend with the monumental (and obscure) work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin argues that recognizing the fragmentary character of present allows us to subvert mythic narratives that frame the present as inevitable. Benjamin’s writing, exemplified in his essay “Naples” with Asja Lacis, explored how the city’s engagement with capitalism created a series of fragmentary encounters with the city’s past and future. Attentive to the city’s place in the tourist economy and its proximity to the ruins of Pompey, Benjamin and Lacis present the city from the perspective of a tourist who marvels at the authenticity of the city’s traditions performed for money. Their encounter with the city stressed the fragmented encounter with the urban situation punctuated by a series of discrete scenes. A similar embrace of the fragmentary defined his early collection of aphorisms — One-Way Street (1928) — which juxtaposes a series almost photographic vignettes anticipating the method he employed in the larger Arcades project. It is in describing the Arcades of Paris where Benjamin comes to recognize how the juxtaposition of objects in and between the small shops creates a sense of the past in the present. Fragmentary encounters with obsolete and outmoded objects next to the latest styles and fashion subvert the myth of progress and destabilize the contemporary as a culmination of the past. Needless to say, archaeologists have been drawn to Benjamin’s interest in objects and materiality, his embrace of fragments as modes of presenting his arguments, and his attentiveness to the contingent temporality of the present. Laurent Olivier’s influential The Dark Abyss of Time (2011) similarly emphasizes the irrepressible character of the emergent past. Shannon Lee Dawdy uses Benjamin to significant effect in her work Patina by showing how the presence of older objects, heirlooms, and signs of wear and patina made the past visible in the present in unpredictable and contingent ways. Photography’s capacity to fragment reality while collapsing time into a persist contemporary paralleled Benjamin’s methods for critique the present.

Shanks thinks of performance of “photowork” produces a persistent moment or ”place/event” and transforms it into an object that the archaeologist can transport, archive, and reproduce. This moment, or kairos, as Shanks and Svabo call it, exists in tension with the “duration of the material past” (Shanks and Svabo 2013). In contrast to the duration of the objects in the photograph and the potential persistence of the photograph itself, the moment of photowork is a bounded fragment. The fragmentary nature of time and the portability of the photograph itself is what allows it to enter the archive and remain susceptible recontextualization, recombination, and collage (Shanks and Svabo 2013: 97). It is perhaps ironic, of course, that the disassembly of the whole is a vital aspect of the construction of the construction of the archive.

The momentary character of the photographic place/event enforces the inaccessibility of the whole that is a central feature of modernist thought. The fragmentation of experience, of text, of space, and of time was a precondition for the sometimes chaotic, if purposeful, modernist mise-en-page. Just as the deliberate arrangement of fragments of text emerged as a formative practice among Modernist writers, it was also being embraced by archaeologists who dutifully organized photographs of fragments of papyrus, sculpture, and ceramics. The mise-en-page emphasized the plurality of capacities in these images. They represented the original moment when the photographer created the image, they provided a window into the world of the object photographed, and perhaps most importantly, they created new occasions for meaning in the juxtaposition of objects on the new space of the page (or the archive). Paradoxically, the fragmentary nature of the image not only ensure its the persistence in the archive, but also gave it the capacity to subvert its power to represent the singular and presumably permanent meaning necessary for its status as archaeological evidence.

It is here where Michael Shanks “photowork” and Dan Hicks “photology” intersect. The photographs in this book are fragments in an archive. Their organization and placement on the page creates new ways of producing meaning steeped in archaeological and modernist literary practices. The photographs are not representative of an unseen whole, but offer windows into fragmentary worlds constituted as much by the subjects of the photographs as their location in the archive. The relationship between objects on the page opens the photographs to unexpected juxtapositions, contingency, and temporal and spatial possibilities.