…just not always an honest one.
O ld photographs of familiar places stir up nostalgia. They show a past that could have gone any number of ways but for events conspiring to turn out the way they have. They can provoke feelings of loss when a place, long gone is replaced with a less aesthetically pleasing edifice or use of land and this may lead to a feeling of unfulfilled could have beens; a black and white gloss over all that went into the rendering of today.
A photograph holds a single moment in perpetuity; the stride of a passerby, the momentary gaze of a person in the frame, the wait for somebody who will never arrive and all those incomplete stories frozen in a split second.
My street in 1927
Human actions converging and recorded without explanation, like extras on a film set providing context without intrusion. Often blurred enough in motion to hint at a before and after but without the clarity to suggest protagonism.
The eye of the beholder
However inspiring the representation of a place held in a moment for posterity, the viewer today and the photographer of the time share very little beyond the time it took for a shutter to close. Public ways, architecture and the profiles of buildings give away changes, informing on newer additions and those since erased without communicating the attendant noises, smells, moods and what it was to be there living and breathing that moment on into the next. Not to dismiss the ability of a skilled photographer to communicate feeling and a sense of being but old pictures can only invite projection, not conveying the true smells, pain, fear and the joined up imagery of living. One is always voyeuristically pressed up against the window, looking in and trying to partake in some way but ultimately a passive bystander.
Perhaps it is the sudden leap to a time without having to do the hard miles of living, a time travel of sorts.
A building in Madrid that once bore a 10 metre high red yoke and arrows symbol of fascist Spain to remind victor and vanquished of the state of play, now inspires the ire of Castilian nationalists as current home to a Catalan cultural centre. The building of about 100 years of age has seen monarchy, republic and fascist dictatorship and today sits quietly among the backdrop to the strange, stable uncertainty of modern Spain.
War games
No photograph depicts the analogue crawl of time and all the changes that flowed from it. That rests in the minds of people who grow ever fewer as memory is turned over to snapshots representative of little more than the moment captured. Like the Robert Capa picture of the moment a loyalist militiaman was shot in the Spanish Civil War. No name, no final step leading up to it, never to fall to ground, no sounds or crack of rifle fire, no smells, no blood, and death only insinuated – a moment frozen for all time like a sentence cut from a far longer story. Photographs can be dissuasive to all but those truly set on perpetrating such horrors as lead to mass graves. They are already too blinded by cause, ignorant of effect and unmoved by bloodletting lest it be their own.
It is a strange sensation watching First World War footage recently restored by film maker Peter Jackson. The men who had always been silent, black and white and jerkily moving a few frames per second too fast, have been freed to retake their place as once living beings of flesh, blood and personality. But what is gained in reality is lost to romance in another step on the path from historic war painting to HD film shot from the business end of a missile. Suddenly, a gilded foothold of patriotism looks oddly real as the pasty, malnourished, young yet aged soldiers are sent cheerfully convinced of their cause to live and die in someone else’s war. Youth pitted against youth suffering only for nationalism and its kin to be brandished once again by profiteers who lay wreaths in their honour. Dying so more can die in defence of the freedom to lie unashamedly.
It is difficult to predict the development of visual media over the coming decades but harder still to imagine high definition nostalgia. Is the past finished now we can re-master it shot by shot?
Fool’s gold
Golden ages as a gold standard have to hark back to a time that strikes a chord with the lowliest village idiot whether he knows himself to be so or not. Populist sentiment portrayed with the broad strokes of sanitised imagery works tirelessly as an emotional choreographer.
As the ultra right in Spain spot a chance to fully re-emerge from the shadows, they follow Vladimir Putin’s lead with images of a leader on horseback to evoke a golden age that is more Brokeback Mountain than intended. They are still some way short of attaining any level of sophistication, but their audience sets a very low bar.
The golden ages of Spain were never quite as golden for all as some would believe. There were those ages in which the natural resources of colonies flowed freely into the hands of the pious who enjoyed free rein to do as they pleased – and did so freely.
A question of perspective
There was another golden age in which poets, writers and artists fleetingly enjoyed the creative flow that accompanies freedom of expression. Crushed underfoot by a holy trinity of government, military and church, it gave way to a golden age of execution, political prisoners, exile, stolen babies and the ugly excesses inherent in totalitarianism.
When the future is uncertain the past is often touted as the way forward, using selected images of a bygone age as a roadmap to a brighter tomorrow. Snapshots of the good old days when everyone was from around here and everyone knew their place are but two dimensional images that tell of neither the short lives nor their accompanying miseries and squalor. Instead they revel in some else’s glory and are guilty of omitting the connective tissue of what lead up to that moment and what followed on from it.
