Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (review)

According to Ulrich Baer, "Each photograph, by virtue of the medium, inevitably turns the viewer into a late-comer at the depicted site" (p. 181), unifying in some paradoxical way the present and the past. Given that we are in some sense "present" at the scene, how are we to read photographs of sites that elicit some of the most awful associations it is possible to imagine? Should we do so as passive observers who are shielded by the buffer of historical distance or are we really, as Baer argues, witnesses to an event that is not entombed in the past, but part of an ongoing process of seeing and knowing?

Analyzing a range of images of "trauma," from Charcot's flash-frozen hysterics in the Saltpêtrière to a Nazi official's matter-of-fact color slides of life in the Polish ghetto of Lodz, Baer asks us to consider the scenes depicted outside of their historicized context. Instead we are invited to look upon

them as a testament to extreme human experience—a "zenith" of horror—that cannot be defused by an appeal to a wider social milieu.

He argues that photography and trauma (both 19th-century inventions) are characterized by a postponement or delay by which an event that occurs but is not consciously registered is only brought into experience at a later date, just as a film exposed in a flash undergoes a prolonged process of development and fixing. Thus,

Traumatic events . . . exert their troubling grip on memory and on the imagination because they were not consciously experienced at the time of their occurrence. Just as the photograph 'mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially,' as Roland Barthes writes, trauma results from experiences that are registered as 'reality imprints' or, as psychiatrists have phrased it, recorded 'photographically, without integration into semantic memory' (p. 8).

Using a range of authors from Freud to Benjamin and Bazin to Barthes, Baer seeks to usurp our common understanding of the photograph with a richly informed and persuasive discourse. Rather than serving as an objective record of historical fact, photographs of the kind considered here construct a experience that never existed at the time the image was taken. Thus we become part of, and to some extent responsible for, a living chain that extends across time and is not foreclosed by the shutter.

In Spectral Evidence, Ulrich Baer manages to overcome the deeply melancholic mood of the images discussed, with their profound sense of foreboding and suffering pending. He looks to the images to "open up a future that is not known and, because it is not known, might yet be changed" (p. 182).