Cultural Memories Slightly Out of Focus
”The first casualty when war comes is truth”, said American senator Hiram Johnson in 1918. Since the photograph can define history which shapes a collective memory which in turn forms culture and personal identity. The composition of a photo can provide a double exposure of meaning, truth and vulnerability . The power of an iconic photograph can obfuscate the boundaries between history, cultural memory and our willingness to question.
A most obvious examples are in the Milan Kundera novels such as The Book of Laughing and Forgetting, where the Communist party’s efforts at the manipulation of cultural memory were an art form. There is an art of memory where we structure our own distinct cultural narrative; a looking in from a point of exile. and no object is more synonymous with memory than the photograph which we perceive to be an authoritative medium and container of memory.
Frank Capa, The Falling Soldierr
The veracity and authenticity of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of the Spanish Civil War, known as ”The Falling Soldier’‘ has been contentiously debated amid evidence it was faked.The photo shows Spanish anarchist Frederico Borrell, a loyalist militiaman for the Republican cause, shot by Franco’s fascists. The elements which give it such universal meaning, and our empathy with the victim are charged with a political resonance and ambiguity, tempered by the competition between competing ideologies, and the inevitable clash between romanticism and nationalism.Thus a tension between the collective and the individual.
If Fallen soldier is a staged and manipulated image, then it could be considered art, which would perhaps make its meaning more powerful and compelling since there was no spontaneous mortality, or human sacrifice in its execution.
The authenticity is secondary, the intention in presentation supercedes emotions of betrayal and being cheated. Geographic inconsistencies and the absence of the negative can weigh in favor of the staged school, but like the war over the interpretation of history, witness the Dead Sea Scrolls, it will be long and protracted. However, most evidence seems to be coherent with the authenticity claimed by Capa.
Robert Capa, 1945
”Still images can be quite imposing through their silent claim on the actual past and our simultaneous willingness to embrace this claim without questioning, at face value. They help us blur the boundaries existing between the image of a historical event and a historical event as an image, between cultural memory and cultural fantasy, between life re-membered and life dis-membered.”
About This Post
