'To picture is not to remember'
Burgoyne, Greig (2024) 'To picture is not to remember'. In: Vestiges of Memory, 18-19th July 2024, UCA Canterbury.
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This paper will seek to unpack the paradox of autobiography, inherent in the works of the late French photographer Hervé Guibert.
Guibert’s photography is akin to a power of powerlessness- he photographed what was not there. Distinctly autobiographical, familial photographs, still lives and portraiture exist ‘only as latent forms, that in turn create truths that lie dormant in the photograph, invisible to the eye, but central to the image’ (Guibert 1991). To arrest one’s past through the photograph, would be no more than to become trapped in mere representation says Bergson, whilst on the other hand Merleau-Ponty suggests, to look upon an object is to inhabit it.
This precarity within Guibert’s’ modest works, is akin to this paradoxical, if Hegelian event of something and nothing. By this we mean an irretrievable if painful actuality Bergson called pure memory that is the photographing self. Alongside that sublated state through the making of the image/s as indicative of working memory, in which recollection is symptomatic of an actuality of the virtual other. In contrast to that sense of control autobiography can denote, Guibert echoes loss and absence of the photographing self, made by the attempt to retain it by the photographed other.
Levinas stated memory makes the past available to us as a material for our future (Levinas:2007). This means we traverse a past, present, future course, indicative of Guibert’s intentioned aims in making his photographs. Alongside this, a future, present, past trajectory, that corresponds to the will of consciousness to express ourselves, because our consciousness is always ahead of us. Levinas called this the living contradiction. In Guibert, we oscillate between these realms of becoming in those places where it has departed, indeed, for Bergson that ‘realism fails to draw from reality the immediate consciousness which we have of it’. This paper will highlight that painful joy autobiography embodies in the work of Guibert, as deeply phenomenological events. In doing so, revealing their paradox, not as visual coalitions of residual fragments of the past inhabiting the present, but instead that incessant weaving and un-weaving of ourselves’ (2015:68)
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