Photography, Memory, and Historical Truth
Keywords:
memory, photography, history, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Kracauer, Berger.Abstract
As a sign of the past, photography is the strongest form of memory. Walter Benjamin wrote in Arcades Project that history decomposes in images, not stories. Although photographs provide us with the possibility to witness worlds we no longer have access to, some authors claim that photography does not illustrate the truth and is opposite to history. Photographs are are discontinuous, they `freeze` events, they are traces of events. Unlike photography, that just captures the moment without considering its meaning, history also tries to understand its meaning. Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger and Siegfried Kracauer are a few of the authors that analysed the connection between photography, memory and history.References
Barthes, Roland, Camera luminoasă, Editura Idea Design & Print, Cluj Napoca, 2009
Berger,John, Another Way of Telling, John Berger and Jean Mohr, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972
Benjamin, Walter, Little History of Photography, în Selected Writings, volume 2 1927- 1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, edited By Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge M.A
Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture, Columbia University Press, New York
Kracauer, Siegfried, Photography, în Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1993)
Sontag, Susan, Despre fotografie, Editura Vellant, Bucureşti, 2014
Taminiaux, Pierre, The Paradox of Photography, Rodopi, New York, 2008
Wigodir, Meir, History Begins at Home: Photography and Memory in the Writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes, în History and Memory, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2001)
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