Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (review)

Photographic Memories comprises eight essays that meanderingly reflect upon the private mnemonic functions of photographs and, at greater length, the memory work images perform in the public sphere. Kroes' opening essay—the book's strongest and nearly its longest—is poignantly autobiographical, recounting the sudden death of his first wife and his anguished inability to find solace in the family photographic album in which he had documented his "dream … to have a happy family" (17) unlike the one he had grown up in. With his wife's death, he writes, "the book had been closed." (23) But several years later he remarries and his second wife encourages him to take out the album again and narrate to her the story of each photograph, and in doing so he must "rephrase their meaning" (24) for this new viewer. Seeing these pictures again and re-formulating their significance exhilarates him and permits him to integrate his former life with his new one. His account thus qualifies if not refutes Roland Barthes' proposition that such photographs intrinsically convey to viewers a sense of irremediable loss. Photographs also possess, Kroes says, a "suturing power … to heal the wounds inflicted by history or the mere passage of time." (5)

The Family of Man exhibition—seen by millions of viewers around the world following its 1955 premiere at the Museum of Modern Art—is Kroes' example of photography's suturing power evidencing itself in the public sphere, and much of his long essay on "Cold War Photography" is dedicated to a laudatory appraisal of the show. He argues that the Holocaust is the exhibition's structuring absence inasmuch as Edward Steichen, its organizer, deliberately avoided depictions of Nazi atrocities but recontextualized the photographs he did include in such a way as to imbue "them with new meaning, connecting past trauma with future hopes." The effect, he says, is to make the exhibition as a whole proclaim "a message of `Never Again.'" (127) Whatever one thinks of that interpretation—and I have doubts about it—its persuasiveness is compromised by Kroes' failure to address adequately the many criticisms that have been directed at The Family of Man. Some have been of its ideology, critiques Kroes glancingly acknowledges but breezily dismisses as unoriginal, but others indict its disrespect for photographs' integrity as the exhibition's sequencing and captioning of several pictures inverted their makers' intentions, its neo-primitivism and suppression of the transformations that modernity had brought about in most twentieth-century societies, and the condescending determination of its design to narrowly supervise viewers' responses.

Other essays address portraits exchanged by nineteenth-century Dutch emigrants with their families in Holland (Kroes is a Dutch scholar of American culture), photography's reception in Europe and America, the congruence of Mathew Brady's and Stephen Crane's Civil War depictions, and other similarly discrete topics. Photographic Memories is a pleasant read and includes a fair number of useful observations but they are insufficiently knitted together for it to compose an edifying whole.