Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

From Photo to Object: Personal Documents as History-Writing in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Ilya Kabakov

19 The use of real objects—and junk in particular—in art is the most visible sign of the reassessment of not only the aesthetic hierarchy (traditionally with “beauty” on the top) but also the way the Western narrative has been reconstructed since photography turned it upside down. While oil painting was from-thetop -down narrative—that of divinities, kings and queens, famous battles, and outstanding individuals or, at least, the life of the mainstream bourgeoisie—the photo, ever since the coated photographic paper and Kodak’s first portable box camera were marketed in the late 1890s, was grassroots narrative, from-thebottom -up, anyone’s private image-making. Levels of reality that had not been accounted for throughout history became visible and documented. Any individual with a camera could, by clicking a button, turn a previously unnoticed and unacknowledged segment of the world a part of collective memory. Photography has chipped into the unified Great Narrative by breaking it up into splinters of individually created narratives in art. Private photographic documentation of daily life was now possible. The two different approaches, the aesthetic and the documentary, inevitably blended in many photographic images. It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to explore the analogy From Photo to Object Personal Documents as History-Writing in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Ilya Kabakov Éva Forgács 10 FROM PHOTO TO OBJECT between the emergence of photography and sociology, the study of the social reality on the ground as opposed to the narrative of great heroes. It would also surpass this paper’s boundaries to discuss the use of photography for the documentation of the society, or the connection between the vivid interests of mass societies’ alienated citizens in each other’s private pictures. The process has most probably been mediated by such semi-documentary, semi-artistic photographic activities as photojournalism, as well as the ubiquity of images in the print and now the electronic media. Another reason why the artistic photo and the photo as personal document merged is, as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes pointed out in their respective essays,1 inherent in the medium. Photography, capturing a nanosecond of the present as it is becoming past as soon as the camera is clicked on it, is about transition. It is inseparable from the awareness of passing away, and the melancholy and anxiety that pervade our secular culture with regard to the fact of death. The French artist Christian Boltanski was one of the first to exploit this double implication of photography. In 190 he exhibited a family photo of a 1. Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, 1985–1988. Detail. Courtesy of the artist. FROM PHOTO TO OBJECT 11 thirteen-year-old boy under the title The Last Photo of Paul Chardon, playing on the double meaning of the word “last” both as “the latest” and “the final.” Inspired by the casual clumsiness of family snapshots, he took pictures from a friend’s family album and re-photographed and enlarged them to a uniform size. He presented them as a piece of art that consists of a series of framed photos, suggesting monotony as well as a systemic rhythm. Breaking up the homogeneity of the photographic material, he then started to mix objects among photos. In Reference Glass Cases he displayed photos of himself, a few artworks he had made, and photos of some of his works as a future historic presentation documenting his personality and activities. His project explored that objects have the same documentary value as photos and bespeak transition as he made visits to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In an interview he said: …it was there that I saw large metal and glass vitrines in which were placed small, fragile, and insignificant objects. A yellowed photograph showing a “savage” handling his little objects was often placed in the corner of the vitrine. Each vitrine presented a lost world: the savage in the photograph was most likely dead; the objects had become useless—anyway there’s no one left who knows how to use them. The Musée de l’Homme seemed like a big morgue to me. Numerous artists discovered the human sciences (linguistics, sociology, and archeology) there…2 In 19 Boltanski sent out letters to sixty-two natural history museums and a few curators, suggesting that they purchase and exhibit...