Spectral
Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
by Ulrich
Baer
2002, MIT Press, Cloth, £19.95,
182 pp., Illus. b/w, col.
ISBN 0-262-02515-9
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
pepperell@ntlword.com
According to Ulrich Baer, "Each photograph,
by virtue of the medium, inevitably turns
the viewer into a latecomer 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 it be as passive observers who are
shielded by the buffer of historical distance
or, as Baer argues, are we really witnesses
to an event that is not entombed in the
past, but part of an ongoing process of
seeing and knowing?
Analysing a range of images of trauma,
from Charcots flash-frozen hysterics
in the Saltpêtière to a Nazi
officials matter of fact colour 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
nineteenth-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 which 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 pending
suffering. Rather, 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).