Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

Please Recycle! On Ágnes Eperjesi’s Family Album

15 As its maker and protagonist states, “this is a totally real, fictional album”.1 (Fig. 1) It is an album that “tracks the most poignant events” of the artist’s life up to her eighteenth birthday and consists of pictograms of packaging materials taken from commercial goods. Eperjesi’s album, with its “real-fictional” character, seems to be imprinted with ambiguity and opacity, with constant doublings, distortions, and repetitions. Hence it both models and reproduces, reflects and replicates, those family albums that we all own and hold dear. Before looking at how it does all that, I would like to look at how it was made. As the artist put it: I decided to recycle small images destined for the wastebasket, images we discard without giving them the slightest attention. For years, I have been fascinated by packaging materials of all kinds. Pictograms printed on transparent packing material serve as raw material for my art, and I use them as I would film negatives. Placing these in the enlarger, I generate scaled-up images, complementary colors and inverted tonal values. Please Recycle! On Ágnes Eperjesi’s Family Album Ágnes Berecz 154 PLEASE RECYCLE! After reversing and modifying her original images, Eperjesi not only arranged them into chronological sequences, but also created a historical repertory of photography as a medium: from the medallion-shaped portraits of the grandparents to snapshots, the story of photography and the story of her family are fused—the album remembers and evokes both the history of its alleged medium and its assumed object. In Family Album everything is a bit blurred and grainy, and the colors are off. Family history and its recycled image, reality and its representation, are never in sync: the grass is lilac, the dog is blue, and the grandmother is neoncolored , as if the artist, with a twist of self-referentiality, wanted to reveal the fictionality of what is in front of us. As in Warhol’s silkscreens, where Marilyn’s fabulous blondeness becomes the canary-yellow wig of a clown, the Family Album acts as a travesty of mechanical reproduction. The technical reversal of the commercial pictograms reiterates their recontextualization—their repositioning from the sphere of the commercial to that of cultural goods—while also echoing the process of remembrance. As remembering is as much about substituting one thing for another, repeating and distorting what was not even our own experience but a story heard from someone else, seen in a movie, or read in a book, the replacement of real family photographs with blown-up negatives of commercial pictograms functions not only as a device of the mnemonic practice but also as its model. The pictograms, like memories, are reversed and turned into something else. Thus they open up an endless chain of rethinking , revising, misreading, and imaginary substitution, bringing to mind the mistaken identification of Roland Barthes, who took the necklace of a Harlem matron for the precious bijou of her favorite aunt in Camera Obscura.2 Family albums structure the images of past, create chronological narratives out of fragments, and order memories. That is, they write, rewrite and erase, affirm, or fake that obscure and polyphonic story of secrets and lies, joys and traumas, oblivions, and memories that is the history of a family. Proving once again that photography’s truth-claim is anything but justified, family albums look as we would like to see ourselves, often through the images of others. It is no wonder, then, that all family albums are alike, that one life unfolding on their pages seems just like another, and despite our cherished singularity we resemble one another more than we might wish to. Memories too, even the PLEASE RECYCLE! 155 most important ones, are similar to one another. As Eperjesi put it, “we slide back and forth between memories of our most intimate selves and prefabricated clichés.” This sliding starts in and with the family, when one learns the stories of grandparents and parents, then learns the roles that, in a lifelong double-bind of appropriation and refusal, one plays when living life. Family memories are learned and created in the double dynamics of forgetting and recollection, by telling and repeating, looking and looking again at them. Caught between mirrors and masks, images and narratives, we slide from one role to another, just as Eperjesi does when working with recycled images. A pictogram taken from the wrapping of...