Writing Wednesday: Photographic Permanence in the Age of Ephemerality

Those of you who come to this blog regularly know that I’m using any free time that I have to work on a short book project focused on photographs from one particular man camp in the Bakken oil patch. The book is, broadly speaking, looking at the relationship between oil, modernity, photography, and archaeology. 

The third part of the book focused oil, mobility, and modernity. The final substantive chapter will focus 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.

Here is the first part of the penultimate chapter (you can check out the outline for my book here).

4.1. Photographic Permanence in the Age of Ephemerality

We framed our first book length study of the Bakken as a tourist guide. This allowed us both to acknowledge the setting of the Bakken in the American west and to leverage the connection between oil and the emergence of the tourist, the middle class, and the suburb. It also gave us space to explore the connection between the modern tourist and the archaeologist (Johnson 2011). These connections made us increasingly aware of the link between tourism, archaeology, and photography which continues to attract the attention of scholars who study these fields (Shanks 1992; Hamilakis et al. 2016; Riggs 2020). This work complements and drew upon the recent deluge of scholarship on photography in anthropology which could and has filled many volumes on its own (citations). Of particular interest for this project is work that has recognized the contingency present in photography and the photograph, and its potential to produce surplus meaning. Thus the social and disciplinary expectations and practices that direct both the archaeologist’s and the tourist’s gaze and their photographic practices nevertheless fail to control for the contingency present in the photographs. This contingency requires the viewer to confront the tension between the photograph as the representation of a view, an experience, or a spatial relationship and the photograph as an artifact whose meaning destabilizes the intentionality of the photographer’s gaze. It is this tension that has made photography an important tool for archaeologists of the contemporary world. By shifting disciplinary focus from the past to the contemporary, the very contemporaneity of the archaeologist, the photograph, and view further complicated the distancing necessary to to treat and see photographs as representing a reality separate from the world of the viewer. The following section unpacks the consequences of this for the photographs included in this volume.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, photography emerged as both an important tool in the archaeologist’s kit as well as a key component to tourism. As Susan Sontag famously observed, the tourist with their cameras conveyed a kind of immortality on their immediate experiences. For Sontag, the permanence of the photograph compensated for the sense of alienation brought about by the tourists’ experience of the modern world. The photograph became a reminder of the authenticity of a past experience shaped by the act of photography itself (Sontag 2007, 7). The tourist defined their encounter with the world by taking a photograph and the photograph itself became a memento of the tourist’s gaze.

The same turn-of-the-20th-century currents that shaped tourism and photography, contributed to the development of archaeology which also embraced the use of industrial tools construct new forms of political and social identity in an age beset by alienation (Thomas 2004). Indeed, as Christina Riggs has noted, archaeologists recognized the relationship between the destructive practices associated with archaeology and the ability of photography to document the objects and relations that the archaeologist destroyed (Riggs 2020). Y. Hamilakis and F. Ifantidis emphasized the parallels between the work of the photographer and the archaeologists. Both drew together the fragments of the past and presented them as a sufficiently comprehensive vision to serve as the foundation for the nation-state (Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2015). They stressed the capacity of photography and archaeology to arrest time and substitute permanence for the ephemerality of the contemporary experiences. Needless to say, the archaeology of the contemporary world has drawn heavily on photography to document the ephemerality seemingly intrinsic in the instability of the contemporary as a chronological period. The contemporary is not chronologically stable, but relies upon the coincidence of the viewer and the broader situation. The archaeologist of the contemporary world is not looking down into a trench or back into a past revealed through excavation (cite Lucas; Simonetti (2018); Caraher 2024). Indeed, some scholars have observed the parallel between archaeologists of the contemporary world and survey archaeology where the multiple temporalities jostle for the attention of the archaeologist’s gaze on the surface of the ground (Harrison 2011). In this way, archaeologists of the contemporary world are less concerned of their own explicitly destructive actions—particularly those associated with excavation—and more aware of their contribution to larger schemes of destruction implicit in modernity. Archaeologists of the contemporary world use photographs much like the tourist does: we seek to create an archive that allows us to convert our present experiences into a portable past. Unlike the conventional archaeologist, however, the destruction that we seek to forestall through photography is not the product of our method.

Archaeologists traditionally view of photography in the context of an archaeological epistemology that understands photographs as evidence that makes possible the reconstruction of the past. It stresses the representational character of photography which limits the capacity of the photograph to produce knowledge beyond the archive. This ignores the potential for photography to function as a subversive tool in the hands of the photographer (e.g. Taylor 1994; Urry and Crawshaw 1997) or for viewers to read photographs against the grain and in ways counter to their intended purposes (citations). These understandings of photography have prompted archaeologists to consider approaches to photography that go beyond their roles in the representational practices of the discipline. Indeed, Leslie McFadyen and Dan Hicks have argued that archaeology and photography form “an idorrhythmic coexistence” rather than photography being dependent on representational ways of seeing embedded within the visual language of the former. This approach to photography, which Hicks terms “photology,”allows viewers to consider photographs not as documents representing the past, but as objects that are contemporary with the viewer and every bit as unstable and fluid as the viewer’s understanding of their own world. This commitment to the contemporaneity of the photograph and its independence from some original archaeological object parallels the development of an archaeology of the contemporary world that places the archaeology in the same frame as the world that they study. The inability to distinguish the archaeologist from the period that they study or to separate archaeological work from the formation processes that produce the contemporary world also makes impossible the traditional acts temporal or spatial distancing at the core of the epistemologies that makes archaeological knowledge possible. This is a particularly valuable way to understand the archaeology of oil, for example, because it foregrounds how the viscosity of oil renders inseparable the archaeologist from their own modernity. Thus, photography, archaeology, the archaeologist, and the tourist continuously co-create a kaleidoscopic understanding of the world destabilize by the mobility facilitated by the viscosity of oil.

This approach to photography seeks to emphasize the degree to which we can disentangle photography and archaeology from its modern roots. This is particularly important in the 21st century as modern problems, ranging from global climate change to the convulsions associated with late capitalism and overripe nationalism, beg for solutions that operate outside of the systems which have caused the current sense of crisis. The photographs included in this volume represent a minor contribution to this approach. They are not meant to represent the work of the North Dakota Man Camp project or to have captured for posterity a window into a more expansive reality that occurred “on the ground.” Instead they embody archaeological knowledge and invite critical engagement both within and between the photographs in this archive. This means in some ways, relieving these photographs — or indeed this essay — from carrying too great a theoretical, ontological, or narrative burden.