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Bibliography
Susan Pearce: On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition.
In this book Susan Pearce discusses the the nature of collecting and about collectors relationship to objects. It covers issues surrounding the practice of collecting and the fact that objects can have such a special significance, like a kind of magic they can bring about a transformation.
'Objects are not inert or passive; they help us to give shape to our identities and purpose to our lives. We engage with them in a complex interactive or behavioural dance in the course of which the weight of significance which they carry affects what we think and feel and how we act.'
Susan Stewart: On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Stewart looks at our fascination with the souvenir and the collection. She sees the miniature as a metaphor for interiority and the gigantic as an exaggeration of the exterior. Stewart looks at the ideas of representation and its relationship with the real thing.
Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
'Every photograph is a certificate of presence.'
An unmissable reflection on photography, Barthes looks at the impact of the photograph, the role of spectator and operator, the 'spectrum of the photograph' and how the photographed becomes the object. Barthes discusses the 'studium' and 'punctum' of the photograph- the different ways it effects the viewer. It is a work about absence, presence, history and the touching search in his family albums for his mother.
Barthes says of the relationship to painting:
'Photography has been and is still tormented by the ghost of painting.'
Susan Sontag: On Photography
'Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself — a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.'
'a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.'
These series of essays examine the role of photographs, how we all rely on them to authenticate ourselves and show us the world around us. They fulfil so many needs, they are evidence, memorials, create nostalgia, inform us and most of all identity ourselves.
Andreea Ceciu Ritivoi: Yesterday's Self, Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity
As the child of refugee parents I found this book fascinating. It was a sensitive look at the idea of the immigrant as castaway and dealing with the solitude that brings and keeping a sense of sef- identity.
'As long as it leads to a reconciliation of change and sameness, nostalgia can contribute to the adjustment, by revealing patterns and retracing the same characteristics even in the midst of difference.'
'Nostalgia tells a story and each story has a beginning.'
David Lowenthal: The Past is a Foreign Country
I was particularly interested in the chapters on memory and history.
'The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember.' Harold Pinter.
'Memory pervades life. We devote much of the present to getting or keeping in touch with some aspect of the past.'
'The subjective nature of memory makes it both a sure and a dubious guide to the past'
Lowenthall looks at how memory forms identity, how it is altered by revision, is malleable and flexible, the different types of memory and how it is also important to forget in order to organise the chaos that is our memories.
Lowenthal looks at memory and history, at the collective nature of history compared to the memory being unique to the individual.
'Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness.'
Svetlana Blom : The Future of Nostalgia
This book looks at nostalgia in a historical context, the longing for home, the familiar or the perfection of the air brushed image of the past.
Nostalgia, no longer seen as an ailment of soldiers far from home or a psychological pain, though often bittersweet, is now seen to improve self worth, optimism and make life more meaningful.
'Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values:..' The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.'
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
It is composed of seven narratives, each addressing the idea of forgetting.
This book begins with the imperfect cropping of a historical photograph to erase Clementis, a party comrade no longerin favour. His fur hat, lent to the Communist leader Gottwald remained in the photograph. It was a trigger for counter-memory, like a fault line in the official history
'They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.'
Gerhard Richter: Portraits
I was very interested in the chapter The Most Perfect Picture. This discusses Richters move to painting from photographs. Initially he described painting from artists as unartistic. He later realized that photographs were a good representation of reality and by using the photo he could respond truthfully and authentically to the world. Richter felt that in using photographs it gave him freedom to paint anything he felt like.
Devotional Pictures looks at how Gerhard Richter used family snapshots as a source for his paintings. The images were not simply copies of photographs. By painting it Richter is experiencing it, reporting on it, inventing, altering and manipulating the image. Richter says ‘something new creeps in, whether I want it to or not: something that even I don’t really grasp’.
SF MOMA: Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans is often descibed as a history painter as he tries to address many of the world changing historical events of the last century. His painting subjects have been as diverse as the Holocaust and 9 / 11. He is exploring what we remember and what we forget. His works are painterly and often have a faded or washed out look and use photographs as source material. This book looks at a large number of his works, paintings on subjects as diverse as history and catastrophic paintings to his screen paintings, looking at television, computers, security monitors and phone screens. In all his works Tuymans engages the viewer in thinking about the making of and the reading of images.
Tate: Marlene Dumas The Image as Burden
This book was published to go alongside the exhibition of the same name at Tate Modern. It includes conversations with Marlene Dumas about her work and photographs of the works include in the exhibition and other work. Her work is diverse, from personal to political.
The title of this show is taken from the painting, the Image as Burden. It links the artist struggling with images to a man carrying a person. It is ambiguous as to why the person is being carried. She is being held tenderly and is either unconcious or dead. The source of this painting is a film still from Camille, featuring Greta Garbo swooning into Robert Taylor's arms. This is a much more romantic image than the dark painting that came from it.
The book is a fascinating mix of commentaries from Dumas and many others and I am really enjoying reading it.
Other books I am referencing:
Didier Semin, Tamar Garb, Donald Kuspit: Christian Boltanski
Memory: Edited by Ian Farr Documents of Contemporary Art
October Files: Gerhard Richter
Putting Myself in the Picture: Jo Spence
Family Frames, photography narrative and postmemory: Marianne Hirsch