Catalogue text for Michelle Munn
Theorist Roland Barthes believes within a photograph there is substantial evidence of the existence of the past. The camera divides time into instances as well as creating an object. These ‘captured’ experiences are not necessarily comments on time and its passing but rather pieces of it. These pieces are then held for eternity with the potential for being used for reflection, evidence and truth, “Born as a machine offering a novel grip on time, fixing it, freezing it, immobilising its ineluctable flux, the camera expanded its claims by reconstituting times ‘living flow.’”1
However, an opposing view from John Tagg determines the photograph as being material history for use within investigations of the past, rather than it being actual evidence. Photographs allow the past to become an object. Clips and pieces of a past reality are confirmed of their authenticity because they were immortalised in a photograph, “Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”2 The photograph merely gives an essence, aura and trace of a subject, a starting point for the viewer to then embark on a journey through their unconscious self and create coherent sets of memories. A photograph is not a result of memory but was an invention brought about to enhance it.
In the mid-nineteenth century the camera appeared to offer a convenient mode of recording due to its ability to contain certain amounts of history. However, the camera has not been used solely as an instrument in the collection of memories, it has also been a leading reason for their corruption. This corruption is the result of the burden on photography; a burden that was placed upon it as a result of its ability to ‘capture’ real moments. This transformation between the relationship of photography and memory has developed as a result of the realisation that ‘we’ take photographs not to remember, but so as not to forget.
People forget on a daily basis, so have an understanding of their mental-selves and appreciate that not everything they experience or people they know will last forever in their memories so they take photographs. This however, hinders the act of remembering, it can be argued that true memory is lost and the recollection of the still (manipulated) photographic image is all that is left. This is important when considering the work of Munn who bases her paintings on lost images that she has found. They no longer have a specific history, or point of remembrance. Munn therefore creates her own memories, taking the familiar and uncanny and presenting them in such the aesthetic manner that they no longer need to mean anything in particular, all they need do is evoke a memory in the viewer. Memory is after all just a repetition, “the concrete process by which we grasp the past in the present is recognition.”3 That, which is perceived within a photograph, penetrates the depths of memory to seek remembrance of a previous perception, which is resembled within the image. Munn’s paintings, when viewed by the public, exist. They transcend any notions of the forgotten for within them they grasp a vast and varied eternity brought about by every motion ever made by the audience. As we, the public, gaze passively at Munn’s familiar images we bring with ourselves a massive amount of ‘time’. As our subconscious takes hold we bore great holes into the images, as we embark on the journey of remembering.
What then when a photograph is used not for reflection but reinvention? Michelle Munn is a painter from the West Midlands who rediscovers forgotten photographs, reclaims them from market stalls, bric-a-brac sales and on-line auctions. She then breathes new life into them by removing the captured subjects from their original context and rejuvenates the models by repeating their images upon canvases. However, though Munn’s technique is virtuous and established I believe the more interesting question behind her work is that of its history. What do these images mean? Why they are so familiar? Why do they captivate their audience immediately? And the answer, I believe, lies in the heritage of the original subject matter: the photograph. As Ernst Bloch summarises “strangely familiar pictures may appear to us as mirrors of the earth in which we see our future like the masked ornaments of our innermost form, like the adequate fulfilment that has finally been recognised, like the self-presence of eternal meaning, . . . of our hidden godly existence. That is the same as the yearning finally to see the human face.”4 Nevertheless, the familiar is not the same as memory and they can often be confused. Familiarity is dependent upon looking at, for example, an image that compels the viewer to remember, as a consequence of something within the image that relates to them then being recognised. Regardless, memory is caused from “a power absolutely independent of matter”5 ; a true memory can not be provoked from seeing a photograph.
When a photograph is taken or a picture painted, the personal narrative is unknown and can never be predicted. As a result “the diverse perceptions of the same object, . . . will not, then, when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object,”6 our conscious and unconscious memory will be full of gaps when looking for a memory within an image. Memory is inseparable from conscious perception. For a memory to be wholly attained we must look at and into the unconscious, for there the past can be moved into the present, while still being recognised as history. This operation “compels us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves [the unconscious] whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter [the conscious].”7
Bergson’s exploration of ‘matter and memory’ discusses in depth the relationship between matter and memory and how they not only affect each other, but how they affect our act of remembering. Memory images immediately act against photographic representations of events, as they are clouded by factors found within a viewer’s conscious and unconscious self. Your perception, however present, consists of an immeasurable array of remembered elements; “in truth every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”8 The time that an event may appear in the conscious memory is different to how it will be viewed in the unconscious as memory does not agree with times natural and recognised flow, “it skips years or stretches temporal distance.”9
However, with the photograph acknowledging time, it also acknowledges the absence of time, “What photographs often ‘preserve’ today is only the nostalgia arising from a pervasive and intractable sense of loss.”10 The photograph proves the presence of time and proves the continuous flow of it, but by singling out certain moments and cancelling out others makes these non-photographed moments obsolete and forgettable. The memory evoked by a photograph can be summed up, I believe, as nostalgia. The images associated with nostalgia are those that appear to be from distant times and places, those that evoke thoughts from the past into the present. They discard any rule of time and become irreversible and impossible yet true. Nostalgia is what I believe to be the main factor in Munn’s work. By presenting her paintings alongside the original photographs, she ushers you in a nostalgic direction. Munn is not afraid for you to realise where the images have come from, they are not wholly imagined but actually existed, she wants her viewing public to grasp this notion of nostalgia and the uncanny. She does not tease her viewer into believing a myth or created reality, she is honest and almost confrontational. She says ‘this is history, this existed’ but allows its actual past to remain a mystery. We are therefore left to create their meanings.
Nevertheless because of a photograph’s aptness to be a trace, an echo of a thing, it does not make it eternal and immune to the world, and that is what we as a contemporary public communicate with Munn’s work. Preserved ‘forever’ in an image, the photograph becomes therefore an invention of it or a replacement rather an instrument of memory . And then on top of that, the image then removed and reinvented allows memories, whether real or imagined, to be evoked. Memory is simply a repetition of events within the conscious and unconscious mind. Photography’s aid to memory is clouded, photography complicates it; to picture is not to remember. And Michelle Munn capitalises on this, though the initial reference point is the photograph, a concept she invites viewers to be aware of, she ultimately makes no other reference. Allowed, are we, to know all her secrets and subjects, we are however not allowed to know her meanings upon them. Each piece holds within itself a whole world of meaning ready to be unlocked, and we are each privilege to be holding the key to unlock them.
1 McQuire S, Visions of Modernity, representation, memory, time and space, 1998, p. 107
2 Sontag S, On Photography, 1979, p.81
3 Bergson H, Matter and Memory, 1978, p. 105
4 Bloch E, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 1996, p. 102
5 Bergson H, 1978, p. 81
6 Bergson H, 1978, p. 46
7 Bergson H, 1978, p. 80
8 Bergson H, 1978, p. 194
9 Kracauer S, 1995, p. 50
10 McQuire S, Photography: The mass ornament, 1998 , p. 111
Pity is Akin to Love
death of the author
