Barthes Archives - Nicholas Hedges

Reading Roads

March 8, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

Introduction

In Wales in 2008 I walked a path along which my great grandfather had walked every day from his home to the mines in which he worked. He died in 1929 (as a consequence of his work) and all I knew of him, before my visit, were what he looked like (from two photographs) and things my grandmother had told me. But on that path I felt I found him on a much deeper level. The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way. It was as if these elements had combined to ‘remember’ him to me.

As a consequence of my walk, the line which linked us on my genealogical chart changed to become instead a path, for when I follow lines in my family tree from one ancestor to the next and find myself at the end, so that path in Wales had led to my being born. That path on which I walked for the very first time, was as much a part of who I was as my great grandfather: “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places.” [i]
Roads (paths, tracks and traces) have become an important part of my research and it was whilst reading Edward Thomas’ poem Roads that I found connections between what he had written and what I was thinking. I’ve reproduced the poem below, and where necessary added my thoughts.

Roads by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
The reference to stars (or a star) in this verse, reminds me of a quote (to which I often refer) from Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, in which he writes:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

The star shoots its light and is gone and similarly we walk and are gone. But what is left behind is the road, a version of the light left by the disappeared star; a ‘delayed’ ray which allows us to ‘see’ those who went before us. I use the word ‘see’, but we ‘see’ with our bodies. We see the light from the star, but we feel the road. This in turn brings me to the idea of empathy as something which is tactile and kinaesthetic. Roads and paths become ‘a sort of umbilical cord… a carnal medium, a skin I share’ with those who’ve walked that road or path before – precisely what I’d felt in Wales.

On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

In the third verse we might interpret the lines as a description of the difference between the act of walking and the road itself. We walk in the moment – a moment which fades in an instant (‘so soon’) and yet, behind us a record of the sum of all those moments is lined up along the road behind us – one which endures for centuries. It’s the same difference as that between speaking and writing; one is fleeting, the other endures. Christopher Tilley writes that “…if writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.” [ii] Paths and roads ‘record’ our movements, they are texts which we can read with our feet.

The idea of the ‘moment’ is also discussed by artist Bill Viola who writes that:

“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights. [iii]

This ‘same moment’ is in many respects like the act of walking and the road rolled into one; it fades and yet endures at one and the same time. There is an echo of this idea in Camera Lucida when Barthes writes:

“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…” [iv]

I described earlier, how the path on which I walked in Wales was as much a part of me as my great grandfather; it was the first time I’d ever walked it and yet I was a part of it long before I was born. There is then a continuous moment running along all paths and roads, and it’s memory and to some extent birth and death that gives the impression of discrete parts. This ‘universal’ moment is the ‘nowness’ of the present and it was this ‘nowness’ which I experienced on that path in Wales and which I’ve since been exploring in my work as regards empathy.

“The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way.”

The third verse in Thomas’ poem seems to me to allude to the idea of experiencing the moment:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

The ‘we’ in the last line refers to us as individuals, whether ‘we’ were walking that path in 1915 or today in 2011; if ‘we’ weren’t there to see it, it wouldn’t be seen at all.

In the fourth verse we read the following:

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

Before I look at this verse, I want to look at another quote; this time from the catalogue of a Paul Nash exhibition in which David Fraser Jenkins writes how Nash:

“…did not often show people in the landscape, even walking about in his lanes and paths, and as a result his pictures look deserted… Despite this absence, there is in his pictures a remarkable sense of drama, and it is this reaction between things – the trees or the buildings… that these pictures are about.” [v]

Looking at the fourth verse above, we can say that the ‘lack of the traveller’ alludes to the passing of that traveller, whether from the immediate scene, or perhaps life itself. Either way, all that’s left of what Sontag called ‘the missing being’ is the trace of the road on which they walked, the text written as they travelled. That traveller is now a dream, dreamt by the road and the elements by which it’s surrounded, a dream which I see expressed by David Fraser Jenkins as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’. The road might be lonely, but it’s never empty; the trees, the buildings, the feel of the wind and the way the clouds move all dream of the traveller – the missing being. There’s also a parallel to be found here in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where in the second elegy we read:

Look – trees exist.

The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we

pass away like air traded for air and everything

conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps

half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope. [vi]

This ‘silence’ alludes I think to what Jenkins describes as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’ and what I have called a ‘dream’. But how can we connect with these? In his book The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:

“The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. [Martin] Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.” [vii]

Just as the trees function as what Dillon calls ‘Other’, so does everything else. It’s as if the shapes of disappeared travellers are somehow retained, like the people-shaped holes in the ash of Pompeii, which when filled with plaster, revealed the presence of people lost for almost 2000 years. Similarly, people-shaped holes exist along every road or path; gaps which can only be filled with our own bodies, by our own presence; by our experience of the nowness of the present.

In a definition of the Metaphysical poets, Georg Lukács described their common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ whilst ‘attempting to erase one’s own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here.’ [viii] For me, the road is the mirror which Lukács describes, and as I walk along it, I try to look beyond the palpable, to erase my own image so that the road reflects the not-now and not-here. The palpable is the present (as opposed to the nowness of the past); the not-now and not-here is the nowness of that continuous moment in its entirety. To erase one’s image is to imagine one’s own non-existence, to see a part of that continuous moment when one did not exist, when that part was nonetheless now. It is about seeing the presentness of past events.

From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion* tales
Is one of the true gods,

(*In the tale of Lludd and Lleuelys from the Mabinogion, you will find the following text: “Some time after that, Lludd had the island measured in length and breadth; the middle point was found to be in Oxford. There he had the earth dug up, and in that hole he put a vat full of the best mead that could be made, with a silk veil over the surface. He himself stood watch that night.” I discovered this passage whilst researching my Welsh ancestry, and being as I am from Oxford, found it rather appealing.)

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

The line ‘Now all roads lead to France’ reminds us that those who fell and are buried in France (and indeed other countries) were men with lives beyond the theatre of war – that the theatre of war extends well beyond the boundaries of any trench map. To know them and to know the missing, we have to follow the roads from France back to the towns and villages where they lived, just as to know ourselves we should follow the roads and paths from our own hometowns to those of our ancestors. To walk those streets, paths and tracks, is to turn them back into ‘consanguineal lines’; to restore lost connections in forgotten family trees; to remind us that those who fought and died were each part of a family as well as a wider community of friends and acquaintances.

The road brings and takes away and the dead keep us company at every step ‘with their pattering’. Again this could refer to the idea of the moment as being both fleeting and enduring. The moment is like a looped recording which plays and records at the same time, creating a kind of palimpsest, where all that’s gone before is contained in a moment, like light, tens of thousands of years old seen in a single second.

The line ‘Crowding the solitude,’ echoes what I wrote earlier, that roads might be lonely, but they’re never empty. And finally in the last two lines, Thomas reminds us of our own mortality; where the multitudes that make the towns roar are themselves brief.

i Christopher Tilley, 1994, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford, England, Berg

ii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
iii Bill Viola, 2005, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, Thames & Hudson

iv Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage, 2000

v David Fraser Jenkins, 2010, Paul Nash – The Elements, London, Scala Publishers Ltd.

vi Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Martyn Crucefix, 2006, Duino Elegies, London, Enitharmon Press

vii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
viii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets

Windows, Bicycles and Catastrophe

January 9, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

Windows in images are, as I’ve discussed previously, evidence of people living their lives without a thought for the subject or subjects in the photograph. This entry examines a number of details taken from photographs of Oxford at the beginning of the 20th century.

This detail below, from a view of the High Street taken in 1907, shows the open windows of what was then the Mitre Hotel.

Perhaps these windows were opened by guests visiting the city over 100 years ago, or perhaps by maids in preparation for their visit. But what was taking place behind these windows when the photograph was taken? What conversations were being had? As I’ve said above, whatever they were and whatever was happening within, the open windows serve to give life back to a place from which the photograph was taken. The rooms become portals to unseen parts of the image, not just in the rest of the city, but rather the wider world. It is perhaps then, rather appropriate, that this image shows a hotel.

The image above, taken from a photograph of 1909 (amazing how we can just skip a couple of years) is particularly interesting, in that as well as being open, we can also see clear reflections within the window’s glass. This window serves again to take us beyond the boundaries of the image, into its hidden interiors, from where we might look upon that view reflected in the window. The same can be said to some degree about the image below, also from a photograph of 1909.

As an aside, it’s interesting how these two images, because they were taken in the same year, constitute in our mind’s eye a single moment; the year (in this case 1909) becomes just that – a moment in time. But what period of time separates the photographs from which these details are taken? Is it minutes, hours, days, weeks or several months? What happened between the taking of one picture and the other?

In the detail below (from a photograph of 1907) my eyes are drawn to the the bicycle; not the make or the style, but the way it seems to reveal the presence of time, or rather an inconsequential moment in time. For me, it’s in these everday, unremarkable moments that the past is revealed – where history really comes alive.

Of course the man in the foreground looking at the camera, and those people walking up the High Street are subjects of a particular moment (cameras are, Barthes beautifully put it, ‘clocks for seeing’), but there’s something about the bicycle which expresses it better. Below is another a detail from a photograph of 1911. Taken again in the High Street, a few metres back from the one above, Carfax Tower in visible the distance.

In the image below, something in the window of a shop on the High Street in 1909 has caught they eye of the man looking in as well as the two men walking towards him. The man with his hands in his pockets also describes a specific moment in time; the way he’s standing seems to suggest that he’s just that second stopped; something very different to being ‘stopped’ – as in the case of the two men walking – by the shutter of the camera. But again it’s the bicycle parked at the side of the road which, for me, best describes the moment; or more accurately, its continuity – its place in a passage of time. Even though the two men walking have clearly come from somewhere and will no doubt go somewher else, the bicycle is still much the better way of representing a moment within the passage of consectuive moments, both before and after.

But why is this the case?

One might assume that in a photograph there’s no better means of indicating someone’s presence than someone’s image. The detail above shows such a person on the right. But somehow, the bike and the absence of its rider are more indicative of presence than the man we can actually see, just as it is – as I’ve described above – a better indicator of a single moment in a wider sequence of moments.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes:

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

Forgetting the bicycle for a moment and looking instead at the man in the photograph, one knows that he is dead. His frozen pose alludes to this anterior future of which Barthes speaks. He also writes:

“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…”

The idea of time engorged conjures up apocalyptic images of disaster; Time not able to proceed but growing nonetheless, swelling within the frame of the picture, the world shaking as it struggles to chew and to swallow. The man in the picture above must and will fall victim to this catastrophe (he must and will die), but the man who’s left his bicycle (and as such the photograph) will instead be sure to survive.

I’d assumed it was the act of leaving the bicycle which gave the bicycle its status in the photograph; the fact that whoever left it would be sure to return and pick it up in a matter of seconds or at most minutes; that it was the idea of these few moments which countered the blurring of time I described above (where entire years can implode to fit the space a second – which itself alludes to the idea of engorged time). But in fact, I believe it’s the rider’s escape from the photograph which instills in them – the bicycles – their appeal to the viewer.We know the rider must be somewhere and it’s as if he’s still there; as if the moment from when he left his bike (for example in 1909), to picking it up again is still ongoing.

The detail above is taken from a photograph of Cornmarket in 1889. Looking at the entire image, one can see that all the buildings shown have since been demolished, and as sad as this is when one sees what stands there now, one doesn’t find it hard to imagine. Buildings are demolished all the time – it’s a fact of life. But when looking at the detail above, with its open window, it seems less conceivable that it’s since been destroyed, that it no longer exists.

Such a thought doesn’t occur however when I look at images of people.

The image above is a detail from the same photograph. Like the building they stand against, all these men are gone. But this, unlike with the detail of the window, does not strike me as inconceivable in any way; quite the opposite. Perhaps it’s the open window which makes the building’s demise (or non existence) seem so unlikely. The open window is indicative of life, of the everyday aspect of life. Who would open a window in a building set to be demolished? But then, who would dress and pose for death?

Above, Cornmarket 1907. Another rider has escaped impending disaster.

Also Cornmarker 1907. A group of people talk at the southern end, nearest to Carfax. Their clothes (particularly those of the women) position them unequivocally in the time in which they lived.

A number of questions come to mind as I look at them and the scene around them. What are they talking about? What were the hot topics of the day? Where is the woman pushing her bike? (Wherever it is, it’s too late to escape the imminent catastrophe). In this image however, that which captures my interest above all is the rain on the pavement.

Just as shadows give life to a photograph (without the sun beyond the frame of the photograph there can be no shadows within it) so puddles and reflections on wet pavements point to a time before the photograph was taken and, – like shadows with the sun – to the clouds above and beyond the gaze of the lens. Barthes declares that “the photograph is without a future” and while this might be the case, there’s is no doubt they have a past.

Sometimes, photographs (without shadows, puddles, windows open and closed) can look flat and lifeless, as if they’re merely constructions (tableau vivant) designed in their entirety, as counterfeits for the reality they purport to be. They have no future, but, more importantly perhaps, no past. The rain in the photograph above however counters this; it gives the photograph its validity, it is a recognisable sign that something came before.

The detail above is taken from the same picture (Cornmarket 1907), and, rather sentimentally perhaps, I was drawn to the rocking horse in the window. One can’t help but wonder what happened to this somewhat peripheral object (peripheral in terms of the overall photograph). I can well imagine it languishing in some dusty attic, forgotten, even broken… although, of course it might be in very rude health, respected as an old family heirloom. And herein lies its point of interest. Whatever its current state – if indeed it still exists – here, in the picture, it’s yet to occupy the mind of the person to whom it belonged. It’s yet to form the memories which that person would have carried with them throughout their life, memories which they might have passed down and which might, to this day be talked about. Perhaps this rocking horse no longer exists as a physical object, but maybe somewhere, it continues to move in words, written or spoken.

Windows 1

January 5, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

This image was part of a collection I bought a few years ago. I had no idea what I was buying at the time and was intrigued by the image reproduced below.

In the photograph, a young woman poses beside a car. The awkwardness of her pose and the uncertainty in her face suggests that she is attending a special occasion of some kind. In the second image below, she is joined moments later (or perhaps it was before) by a young man (her partner?) who also looks a little uncertain, not necessarily because of what he’s about to do, but rather because of what he’s doing at that exact moment, i.e. having his photo taken. Perhaps they are young lovers about to get married? Of course we’ll never know.

What intrigues me about these pictures are the details. Looking again at the second photo – which might of course, in the course of time, have come before the one above it (“…if things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged…” as Bill Viola writes) – a car has appeared on the left, moving into shot just as the shutter is released. Even though the young man has also ‘appeared,’ it’s nevertheless the car which gives us the sense of time passing; it is a vehicle for what Sontag describes in her book, ‘On Photography’ as “time’s relentless melt.”

Who was in the car as it drove past? Where was it going? Where had it come from?

History often comes to us ‘top ‘n’ tailed’, where all that went before the period in question, and all that came thereafter is removed, leaving us with an event which reads like a novel; conveniently packaged with a beginning, a middle and an end. To some extent, regarding this, the first image serves as an illustration, whereas with the second, the car tells us that something came before the ‘beginning’, and that something will follow ‘the end’. As a painter, Degas was inspired by photography, and used this device to give his works a greater sense of movement. It’s not so much a means of accentuating movement with regards to that which is shown, but moving the viewer into the world that’s hidden beyond its edges.

Just as in the first photograph I looked at, my viewpoint shifts as I become aware of the image’s other protagonists. From in front of the couple, and in the guise of the person who took the photo, I glimpse the couple as if I can see them out the window of the car. It doesn’t last for long, but it shows how an image can be opened up by such small details.

Windows in photographs have always interested me for much the same reason. Within the context of an image, like those above, they provide a means of escape, or again, as in the case of the first photograph I discussed, a means of concealment. They act as eyes, reflecting – literally – the world around them; the world beyond the limits of the picture’s edge. Spatially and temporally, there’s always more to a photograph that that contained within its borders; and for me, a photograph’s appeal, often resides in how it allows access to these spaces.

In the detail below, we can see in some of the windows, the sky and the trees reflected from beyond the frame of the camera; another way in which a camera can capture that beyond its reach.

Windows are also evidence (or perhaps reminders) of ordinary people living their everyday lives without a thought for the subject or subjects below – in this case the couple on the pavement. They conceal those who are perfectly oblivious to the chemical annexation of whatever inconsequential moment in time is being captured. And as a result, this invisible population can often breathe life into a photograph well beyond the stage upon which the action is taking place.

In his book ‘Camera Obscura,’ Roland Barthes describes a portrait by James van der Zee, of a Black American family taken in 1926. Barthes writes:

“On account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait.”

What Barthes perhaps means, is that the necklace has a provenance, and therefore seems to speak more about the woman’s life than anything else in the photograph. It is a cherished object, worn perhaps for the occasion of the picture (just as the necklace has perhaps been worn by the young lady in the images above). For me, this is, in a way, analogous to the windows in the first picture and the car in the second, for they are small details compared with the picture’s subjects, but details which, nonetheless, build for us a bigger picture of the world the subjects inhabit.

The closed windows in the building then, reflect the world beyond the edges of the photograph, they provide evidence of a world beyond the stage. Furthermore, they are windows onto the stage, through which those sitting, standing or passing behind might, just like the driver in the car, catch a glimpse of the actors.
The open windows however provide us with something a little different. Open a window and the outside world pours in; sounds, smells, the noise of the traffic and passing conversations. In other words – life. They serve to animate the scene, again just like the car, and through them we can let our imaginations wander, to discover for themselves, more of this world long since vanished.

An Introduction

January 2, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

“Such is the photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see.”
Roland Barthes

The aim of this project is to write about photographs; about those things they let me see but which they cannot say. I will select, mostly at random, photographs from some of my books, as well as those in my own collection and write whatever comes to mind as I look at them. From time to time I might discuss them in light of the work of writers like Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, but my aim is to keep things simple, insofar as I will write about my own personal experience of looking at, and on occasion, holding each of the images.

Photographs are like the night sky, or as Susan Sontag writes – ‘the delayed rays of a star.’ They show us something that was and is, but which at the same time isn’t any longer. Each one is a paradox where the act of looking creates a space in which the observer and observed (as regards photographs taken before we were born) are both absent and present at one and the same time. A whole new dimenison is opened up, where the presentness of the past becomes most apparent. It’s as if the act of photographing slows the light from the photographed being or beings to the point of being still, without it actually coming to a complete stop.

Looking at a photograph is not only a visual thing, but something which brings into play our embodied imagination. The term ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ is often used to describe the phenomenon of watching dance on stage, where members of the audience feel with their bodies what is happening in front of them. And while photographs might seem like static images, the image itself, like the light which caused it to be made, is merely slowed rather than stilled. With our embodied imaginations, we can speed the light up and see, indeed participate in what came next in the seconds which followed.

The Ruined Ruins of Madinat Al-Zahra

September 29, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

For more than 700 years, from 711 to 1492, there was an Islamic presence in Spain, and for that, in the 21st century, with the legacy of its beautiful architecture, we can only be grateful. After all these years, the stunning buildings with their beautiful interiors still retain the power to beguile, and certainly, the Moorish sights of Andalucía are without doubt, amongst the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

From the well-preserved ruins of ancient baths in Granada and Ronda, to the strange and somewhat schizophrenic Mezquita in Córdoba, the sights reach their zenith in the awe-inspiring perfection of the Alhambra palace. The craftsmanship of the Islamic artists responsible for its creation are, I believe, quite without equal, and with every step and every space within, the sense of wonder increases, as if playing pass the parcel where you win every turn, unwrapping an increasingly bigger prize.

Built in the 10th century by Abd ar-Rahman III of Córdoba, the city of Medinat al-Zahra existed for less than a century, when in 1010 it was destroyed during a civil war. In 1911, the ruins were discovered buried beneath the earth and since that time 10 per cent of the site has been uncovered.

Given what we’d seen in the rest of Andalucía, we had high hopes for the ruins. Of course we weren’t expecting another Alhambra or Mezquita – far from it – but what we found was, in our minds, a disaster.

We arrived first at the new visitors centre, a low profile, modern building – all crisp lines and angles – in which we got our free ticket, used the loo and bought fridge magnets. There was, as far as I could see, little else on offer, and it seemed to me that apart from the shop and the toilet, it was little more than a glorified bus stop. It maybe that in hindsight, I’m being particularly unkind, but the very shape of it, its very contemporary feel, all found an unwelcome resonance at the top of the hill, in the ruins of the Medinat al-Zahra.

Having arrived on the bus and walked through the gates, we found ourselves with a view of the ruins, and at that moment our hearts sank. Everything was orderly, neat and clean, with far too many straight lines. We walked on, down concrete paths into what remained. The walls had been tidied up and neatened with concrete slabs, so that far from the tumbledown walls peppered with flora which make ruins so special, and which for centuries have delighted artists, writers and philosophers, visitors are presented with a series of modern facsimiles, of, amongst ther things, walls and gates.

Whole parts of the site have been ‘restored’, which is to say destroyed. Ruins of course are by their nature evidence of destruction. What we see in a ruin is the destructive passage of time as well as perhaps evidence of some historic trauma. Of course, the site has to be excavated, and again, by definition, archaeology – to some extent – destroys. But there is a huge difference between excavation and preservation on one hand, and restoration – or rather rebuilding – on the other. What visitors are offered at the site of Medinat al-Zahra isn’t the chance to see with their imaginations what it might have looked like 1000 years ago. Instead we are spoon-fed a vision of what someone else thinks it might have looked like.

On the Andalucía website, the following passage about the ruins speaks volumes:

To visit Madinat al-Zahra today does not mean entering an archaeological site where imagination has to make up for lack of volume. In al-Zahra, the huge amount of fragments found over many years of excavation made the experts seriously consider the question of how to present them. A museum would have meant metres and metres of display cabinets. Finally, it was decided to assemble the pieces of each palace over huge models at a scale of 1:1. This enable today’s visitors to perfectly visualise the setting for the tales of chroniclers and poets of the caliphate’s time.

It is then a model. Nothing more.

This response to what is a very important arcaheological site is rather like taking the recording of a song on a wax cylinder made in the late 19th century and embellishing it with new voices, new instruments and so on. While following the same melody, the new recording will ultimately drown out the original. Instead of listeners using their imaginations to enter the world of the 19th century room where the recording was made, and to hear how the voices would have sounded by using their experience of sound today – and there by doing become a part of that original moment – we get instead, nothing more than a replica.

Perhaps the most deplorable part of the extract from the Andalucía website is the first line: To visit Madinat al-Zahra today does not mean entering an archaeological site where imagination has to make up for lack of volume. It’s as if using one’s imagination is seen as bad, or at best a chore. You don’t have to do any of that here! We do it for you!

Imagining the ruins in our own minds, as they once might have looked, creates the space for us to imagine ourselves there. We’re never going to be able to recreate them as they really were, but that’s not the point. It does become a point however when someone tries to imagine them for us. As Christopher Woodward writes in his book ‘On Ruins’:

“A ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator…”

Furthermore, a city isn’t just a series of streets and buildings, it’s as much about the people who live there, who walk the streets, stand around, looking, chatting, getting on with their everyday lives. With ruins, in particular the ruins of cities, we have not only the fragmentary remains of physical structures, but the fragmentary remains of people – not in terms of their physical remains, i.e. their bones, but their movements.

This movement is bound up with what I call sightlines (and sightlines in turn with movement, for when we observe something, we do so as much with our bodies as our eyes). If you can imagine that when you look at something, the light between you and the thing observed remains once you’ve turned away, then we can imagine that bound up in every fragment within a ruin are hundreds and thousands of these lines.

In Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, we read:

When I look at the stones of a ruin, I’m sharing a similar skin with everyone who’s seen it.

In his novel Invisible Cities, the writer Italo Calvino writes of a city:

“Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment…”

In another extract:

“…there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns…”

Every place contains remanants of these threads which we can then pick up, and when we pick them up, we become for a moment part of one of these long since vanished patterns.

The picture below shows a reconstructed arch at the site.

The following shows an arch which hasn’t been (completely) rebuilt, part of which still rests on the ground.

When I look at the remains on the ground, I imagine the sightlines associated with them. I imagine the people who would have looked at the arch every day – at those very stones lying on the ground. And by looking up at the gap where it once was, my body in some way mirrors that of the person looking centuries ago. The sightlines, as if they’re strings, become taut, and for a split second, a moment in the distant past is recovered. Part of a pattern (as Calvino describes) is restored; the dead light piled on the ground lives again.

A few years ago I described my view of history in terms of the cloning of dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park. I explained how I took what fragments remained of a particular time or event (for example the old stones of a ruin) and filled the gaps with my embodied imagination. Embodied imagination in this instance, is an imagination anchored in the real world – in the sensory world around us. People in the past knew how it felt to feel the wind on their face; they saw the same sky and the clouds. They knew how it felt to have a body. In other words, it’s not a pure flight of fancy. It is just as Christopher Woodward explained – a dialogue. Not a monologue. We are not being dictated to by the ruins, and we are not dictating to them. Instead we are talking together, and it’s in this conversation that we find an authentic view of the vanished past.

At the Medinat al-Zahra however, what we experience is a monologue, but one which is spoken not by the ruins – but by those who have chosen to rebuild it. The gaps in the ‘DNA’ are filled not by our imaginations, but by concrete. Imagine a conversation between two people, with a third person – quite unknown to the others – shouting over the top of them. That is what it’s like here.

Useful Quote for Future Work

May 21, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

“It’s as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse… two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the window-pane and the landscape…”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Highgate Cemetery

May 6, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

I’d known about Highgate cemetery, principally as the last resting place of Karl Marx, but this was the first time I had visited it. Having left Archways Tube station, I walked up Highgate Hill, through the pleasant surroundings of Waterlow Park and found my outside a large iron gate, standing amongst a small group of people waiting to go in. The cemetery itself is divided into two sections; the older West and the newer East. The East side can be visited at any time, but the West can only be accessed as part of a guided tour. It was for this tour that we along with a dozen others waited our turn.

I had the feeling that we were queuing to be let inside a prison. Not that I’ve ever queued for such a reason. It was simply the fact that we were locked outside waiting for our appointed time to visit, when those kept behind the walls would be allowed to receive us (there is something similar too in the architecture of the gatehouse and that which one sees in some Victorian prisons). Also, I couldn’t help but think of King Kong – the wall and the gates behind which the giant beast was kept. There was certainly a sense of anticipation, which had, it seems, been in part been created by the cemetery’s architect Stephen Geary.

The way into the cemetery itself, from the courtyard, is via a flight of steps. When standing in the courtyard, the cemetery cannot be seen; it’s only when walking through the archway leading to the steps, at the top of which one can see the greenery and the first of the monuments, that this vast cemetery is slowly revealed.

There is certainly more than a hint of theatre in how one enters, and the fact one ascends the stairs into the world of the dead serves to reflect a belief in the continuity of life after death; by ascending the steps we follow in the footsteps of those long since passed away, as if they were not borne here by pallbearers, horses and hearse, but had walked here themselves. Their lives continue and of course life continues through our present-day visiting.

It is this which makes the place feel strangely alive. That is not to suggest of course that those interred within are indeed still living in the physical sense of the word, but that the memory of their lives is almost tangible. Many of those buried here would have enjoyed the finer things that Victorian life could offer, things which we modern-day visitors can only know through books, films and television. These people lived the lives that we can only imagine.

I do not wish however to over-romanticise their lives, by suggesting that they were all happy and spent their time at balls, dressed in splendid costumes; that their lives were indeed little more than costume dramas; that would be naive to say the least. But nonetheless, as I walked around the cemetery, I was aware as I read the names on the tumbledown, but nonetheless impressive monuments, that the names inscribed upon them – or at least some of them, particularly in the Circle of Lebanon (which reminded me, in some respects, of the Great Crescent in Bath which we’d visited the day before) – would have been known in society. They would have called to mind faces, voices, attitudes and characters where today they are labels for empty spaces.

The Victorian attitude to death – the strong belief in the afterlife which I’ve already mentioned – is clearly apparent in this cemetery; religion was of course very important to them. Strange then that they should choose to design their funerary monuments in the style of Ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. Perhaps this was as much down to the fashion of the time as anything else, but could it also be that the Ancient Egyptians’ attitude to death and remembrance was somehow a confirmation of a continued existence? That’s not to say – and this goes without saying – that Victorians shared in the Polytheistic beliefs of the Pharaohs, but that the very age and ancient duration of their (the Pharaohs’) memory, which had and has spanned several millennia, promised an afterlife of a different kind; one that would be shared with living. Alongside the immortality of the soul, the endurance of the name was also important.

Such large and elaborate monuments are rebuttals of death itself. They are large and elaborate parts of the living world and, it could be argued, belie the uncertainty of a continued heavenly existence. They occupy a space in the land of the living, just as did the deceased, and when we read a name, we hear within our minds, albeit silently, the sound of a name that was spoken countless times. We hear it muffled, like bells were muffled at times of death.

I was reminded when reflecting on this of some work I did on Old Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It might sound obvious, but having studied materials used in the making of a Lira di Braccio as well as its shape, I became aware that it was so designed and made so as to make a sound. Names too are like this. They are given so as to be said.

Considering the perpetuity of names and memory amidst the slow convulsions of the ground , I coudn’t help but think of the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, who in Urne Burial, published in 1658, wrote some of the most beautiful lines ever put down on the subject of mortality and remembrance:

“And therefore restlesse inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems vanity almost out of date, and superanuated peece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ‘Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes. To extend our memories by Monuments, whose death we dayly pray for, and whose durations we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.
[…]There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks. To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for Eternity by Ænigmaticall Epithetes, or first letters of our names, to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were, and have new Names given us like many of the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting Languages.
[…]Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.”

Walking in the Circle of Lebanon (reached by a gateway which itself could be a cast off from a production of Aida) one couldn’t help but think of the families entombed within the sepulchres and, as I’ve already written, the lives which they led in Victorian society. The dead names carved in the stone were now as hollow and as empty as whatever lay behind the closed doors. And up beyond the Circle of Lebanon, the once wealthy inhabitants of the cemetery, far from the whirligig of their colourful lives were now just bones turned over in the soil. The trees, growing all around, seemed to be reaching with their roots deep into the ground like a man searching for change in his pockets, elbowing their way between the tombstones, staggering amongst the ivy trusses, as if driven mad by the idea of nothing.

In a recent study of another cemetery, this time in Wolvercote, Oxford, I came to the conclusion through a particular process of observation, that there were no such things as cemeteries. Well, of course there are cemeteries, but in a wider, more holistic view there is just the cycle of birth, life and death, whether those cycles are applied to the existences of human beings, animals or leaves. Where those leaves fall and where bodies are laid to rest is in the end quite irrelevant.

Highgate Cemetery itself was saved because of the threat of development. For many years it was left to decay, grown over with ivy, brambles and trees and suffering from vandalism. Unchecked, this cemetery could have disappeared along with all the names and their monuments. Thankfully, through the dedication of a relatively small number of people, the cemetery remains a place that we can visit today. But why is it we do so?

There are of course many reasons why a place like Highgate is of interest, not least from a purely historical perspective. The Victorian attitude towards death is a subject in itself, as are the styles and designs of the various funerary monuments. But for many of us who visit I think the reasons run much deeper.

The monuments we see were put there for us. As we walk, we try to imagine the lives of those who lived a century before we were even born, when we did not exist. And now, when the those who lived back then, exist only in the hollow shell of their names, so we cast our eyes to the future when our names will also no longer be spoken.
Back in 2007, Monika and I visited Pere Lachaise and Montmartre cemeteries in Paris, and reflecting on our visits I wrote:

“Cemeteries have something in common with old photographs, particularly when we consider the the writing of Roland Barthes who writes that photographs have within them the ‘catastrophe of death,’ and that, ‘in the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…’. In cemeteries too, Time is somehow engorged and contains in abundance that catastophe. One has the impression of time standing still, stopped by the dates of death carved into the many gravestones and tombs, yet we know, all too well, that time continues.”

Perhaps it’s Time, engorged within the bounds of the cemetery that skews the gravestones and monuments.

As I wrote earlier, the people buried in this cemetery lived lives that we can only imagine. Similarly, their existence now is one that we can only conceive at the very limits of our imaginations. My aunt once said to me, “you have to believe in something,” ergo, you can’t believe in nothing. And this is certainly true, I can’t imagine nothing, whether that nothing is all the time before I was born or all the time that will come after my death. Cemeteries, like any historical record, building or object tell us there was something and that there always will be something.

Cemeteries point to both our past and future non-existence at a moment when we feel the present most acutely.

As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his conclusion to Urne Burial:

“‘Tis all one to lye in St Innocents* Church-yard, as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrainus**.
*in Paris where bodies soon consume.
**A stately Mausoleum or sepulchral pyle built by Adrianus in Rome, where now standeth the Castle of St. Angelo.

Umbilical Light

March 14, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

In ‘Camera Lucida,’ Roland Barthes asks whether history is not simply that time when we were not born? He writes:

“I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her.”

The study of history necessitates the consideration of our own non-existence. To imagine a past event, as it was before our birth, requires us to see that event without knowledge of what was to come, much as how we don’t know what is coming tomorrow. But to imagine our non-existence, our being not-yet-born, becomes in our conscious minds nothing less than the image of death; such is why perhaps we struggle to comprehend the past, to look upon a turn of the century photograph, where our coming-into-being is so precarious.

Looking at photographs of Oxford, taken around the beginning of the 20th century (such as that below taken in Cornmarket in 1907), I can’t help imagine that somehow, amongst the numbers pictured, are some of my ancestors, or, failing that, someone they at least knew. Perhaps there might be someone unknown to them, who nevertheless crossed their path and in some small way (or, in the case of my own coming-into-being, no small way) made an impact on their life and indeed on all those to come.

But then of course, by thinking this, I am doing just what I shouldn’t do when trying to properly understand this image or rather this moment in time. I am placing upon it the weight of future history. But when I recognise the buildings in the picture, how can I take myself ‘out of the frame’ altogether? Is it not impossible?

Is history then not simply the study of the past, but rather the study of how we got here today? A study of pathways, intersections and the spaces in between – a form of cartography? Well, it is and it isn’t. To study an event we must discover what really happened, and what could have happened if things had been different, what might its protagonists have done otherwise? History therefore – through these other possible outcomes – requires us to examine our own fragility, our unlikely selves and the possibility of our never being born to ask the questions at all.

At the moment the photograph above was taken, when all those pictured were going about the business of their lives, the chance of my Being was practically nil. Now, as I look at the photograph I know that everyone pictured is dead; I can read my own non-existence in the clothes they are wearing, just as they might have read theirs in the photograph itself. But here we have a difference between not-Being and being dead and the photograph is an illustration of that very thing.

Susan Sontag wrote:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

When we look at a star in the night sky, we can be assured that in most cases, the light which hits our eye, is at least hundreds of years old. It might even be that the star no longer exists, yet we can be certain that it did exist. The same can be said of those we see in the photograph; somehow the light as Sontag writes is like the delayed rays of a star – an umbilical cord which links us with them and vice-versa (if any of those pictured are indeed my ancestors, then the metaphor becomes more vivid). The moment the light left them (and the star), we did not exist; the moment we received it, they did not exist, and yet here we both are and here we have been.

This umbilical light, which springs from each of us, links us to our own non-existence. History is indeed a study of pathways, intersections and the spaces inbetween, and these pathways are made of light.

Dreamcatcher II

November 15, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst working on my ‘Dreamcatcher’ project/installation today, I thought again about the idea of it being a piece of music, and, as I thought, a visitor to the studio (Tiffany, who has a very nice voice) decided to try and ‘sing it’, along with Philippa (who first suggested it looked like music). Using the vertical strings as measures and the horizontal strings as indicators of notes on a scale, they sang the entire work, and, although it was a bit of fun, the sound they made did remind me of a kind of lamentation. As I worked on the strings, untangling them and tying knots etc. I felt as if I was playing some kind of instrument – something like a harp.

I also thought a lot about the action of weaving, for it’s felt these past two days as if I’ve been creating a piece of clothing, and, given what these cut strings or threads represent, I was reminded of a quote from Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’.

“Clothes make a second grave for the loved being.”

A second grave is somehow analogous with the idea of post-memory, for if one sees the clothes of someone who has passed away, one can somehow imagine them without really knowing who they were, just as post-memory allows one to get a feel for a past event without having witnessed the actual moment itself.

Parisian Cemeteries and Old Photographs

November 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst writing about Parisian Cemeteries, I came to realise that there was a similarity between the cemetery and old photographs. Roland Barthes, in relation to photographs talks of the catastrophe of death inherent in every one, and how, in photographs time is engorged.

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…”

The same could be said of cemeteries, except in their case, the death in question (the inherent catastrophe) is not those of the already dead, but our own, and Time’s engorgement, is the passage of time within the cemetery’s boundaries, where with all the dates of death, where it has been ‘tripped up’ and where it has stumbled, the passage has been disrupted, much like a cart pulled over rough ground. In a cemetery, time lags behind itself, behind where it should be, and for a moment we are more free of its grasp than at any other time; more alive amongst the dead than ever amongst the living.

Parisian Cemeteries

November 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst on a trip to Paris with Monika, we paid a visit to two cemeteries; one, the cemetery at Montmartre, near our hotel, and the other, the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in the east of the city. The cemetery at Montmartre was interesting in the way it was very much a part of the city, rather than a place divorced from life. This feeling was enhanced by the bridge which ran above it, beneath which the tombs of the dead reminded me of the makeshift dwellings put up by the homeless.

The first grave we saw took my interest, since a cat was laying on to of it, dead centre, looking towards the headstone. I took a photograph (which I have since, accidentally deleted) and immediately, a lady, standing with a man (I presume was her husband) asked me in French, ‘why did you take a picture?’ I must confess here that I do not speak French and relied on Monika who does. I explained that I was interested in the cat and was amazed to discover that the grave was that of her mother. Suddenly, from an anonymous grave with an anonymous name, the memorial had come to mean much more. There was a physical, living connection. She explained in polite conversation, that the cat had been there most of the day and hadn’t moved even when she busied herself about the grave arranging flowers and so on. Cats, we were to discover, were a common feature of the cemetery.

The day we visited was November 1st, a public holiday and the Day of the Dead, a time in some European countries when people visit the graves of loved ones. I knew, through Monika, that it was an important time in Poland, and, sure enough, where there were Polish graves in the cemetery, there were Poles, laying flowers, saying prayers, and remembering those of their country who had long since died; a tradition which is both poignant and to be admired. Later, when we visited Pere Lachaise, we found the grave of Chopin bedecked with flowers and a sashes of the Polish colours.

Some of the graves in the Montmartre Cemetery were particularly beautiful. Many were like tiny dwellings replete with doors and windows (usually stained glass), and although many had decayed through the ravages of time, their wearied state accentuated the romantacism inherent in many such cemeteries.

One sculpted tomb was particularly beautiful. It showed what I presume to be the deceased, not as he was whilst living, but as he was dead. His sunken features, his closed eyes, and the exposed shoulder all pointed to something deeper than sleep. The eyes in particular were striking, in that one could see they were the eyes of a man who would never open them again. The shroud had been pulled back, to allow one last look at his face, a look which had lasted over a century. I say, as he was dead, but of course he still is dead, and this sculpture serves in a way to remind us, that even in death we are not free from ‘time’s relentless melt’.

At Pere Lachaise, I was keen to visit the graves of artists, writers and composers such as Ingres, Moliere, Pissarro, Proust, Chopin, Gericault, Delacroix and Wilde amongst many others and having bought a map of the cemetery (which is vast) Monika and I planned our visit and began to seek them out.

It was strange – in the case of the various painters buried there – that having seen their work in the Louvre, we were now standing above their remains. One painting, for example, which we had seen in the Louvre, stuck in my mind as I stood next to the grave of Ingres (1780-1867). It was his portrait, painted in 1832, of Louis Francois Bertin, one of the most famous works by the artist, and one which is so full of life, it hardly seemed possible that the man in the painting and the man who painted it were long since dead. How was it, that I had seen something I know Ingres had also (obviously) seen, yet here I was, standing above his grave where he had lay for over a century before I was even born. That is the power of painting; they are objects into which the artist paints him or herself, in brushstrokes (particularly in the case of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works we saw) which made in moment can exist for all time.

On the way home from Paris, as I passed beneath the sea in the channel tunnel, I began to write about the visit to Pere Lachaise. What I had been aware of as we walked around, was the content of the photographs I was taking, some of which follow:

They were all images of decay, the gradual fall into disrepair of the numerous memorials in this vast necropolis, and, given the work I have lately been doing on the ‘gestures’ of things, I began to consider the ‘gesture’ of this particular cemetery. What follows is what I wrote on the way home:

(The gesture is) like mould, lichen, which grows slowly in small patches over a long period of time. But these spores are invisible, we cannot see them except in the broken panes of glass, the flaked paint, the verdigris patinas on the doors to individual tombs, the chipped stones; every trace of time’s slow, considered vandalism. It’s always present in the cemetery and every now and then, one detects a trace of its fleeting presence – the scent of vinegar which lingers around a tomb where the glass is missing, where the door is open, or where the iron gates have corroded and been worn through by time’s relentless scratching; time’s relentlessness.

Even when all trace of the bones has gone, long after the burial clothes and the casket, time will continue its malevolence, picking at the fabric of memory, wearing down the words, smoothing over names, dismantling the dead and our memories of them, withering through slow alchemy these parts into atoms. Candles lit and placed beside the graves will soon be extinguished, flowers will be wilted, trees will be naked, picked of their leaves and left like confetti, to remind the living of this withering certainty.

Cemeteries are not just places where the dead are dismantled, where the names by which these parts were held together are also broken apart. They are as much for the living, who fight with death to keep the parts together, to deny death, to deny its certainty; to deny their own futures. The living wander the graves to maintain the present. Inside cemeteries the present is stretched.

We walk through cemeteries, and with our minds like nets try and catch this butterfly called Time, but we are assailed by its beauty, we stand open-mouthed and wait for the crysalis to be spun with invisible thread around us.”

Cemeteries have something in common with old photographs, particularly when we consider the the writing of Roland Barthes who writes that photographs have within them the ‘catastrophe of death,’ and that, ‘in the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…’. In cemeteries too, Time is somehow engorged and obviously contains – in abundance – that catastophe. One has the impression of time standing still, stopped by the dates of death carved into the many gravestones and tombs, yet we know, all too well, that time continues…

Postcard 1906

April 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

This morning I received a postcard which I’d purchased on eBay; an early twentieth century hand-tinted photograph of Magdalen Tower postmarked on the reverse Oxford 1906.

The text on the rear of the postcard reads as follows:

“My Dear Boy I am sorry that I will not manage to see you on my visit to Coombe. I go to Wallingford on the 13. Will visit when I get settled then you must come over, much love and blessing, your loving brother…”

It’s amazing as one reads this card, to think that it was posted over 100 years ago. Combe (the version written on the postcard – Combe – is actually a misspelling) is a village near Woodstock and a place where my Mum and Step-Dad once lived, and as I read it, I’m reminded of their cottage and the many memories associated with it. Secondly, at the end, the author signs off as ‘your loving brother’ and so, as I read the words in my own voice, I’m reminded of my own brother. In a text of just a few lines written 101 years ago, I have an image – or rather images – of my own family and a house from my own past. I imagine too the bond between the two brothers as being the same which exists between me and mine and as such I have an interest in their lives – lives which have almost certainly been over for several decades. Yet, although the author of this card is certainly dead, by reading his words, we somehow give him life, albeit for the time it takes to read the message. And in some ways, this message might be likened to the last words of a man killed in war, whose last letter reaches his loved ones after news of his death had already been received.

The fact the postcard features an image of Magdalen Tower, serves to strengthen this feeling of familiarity. The man who wrote the postcard, and his brother who received it, no doubt knew it well, just as I do now. It becomes – as indeed does the postcard as an object in its own right – a memory space, a “‘starting point’, and a place for the ‘purpose of recollecting'”. Reading these words, I am sharing the ‘space ‘ of the postcard as an object, as well as a recollection of the scene it shows, Magdalen Tower.

In his book, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says regarding photographs:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

This quote precisely describes a memory space. “‘From a real body [the author of the postcard], which [who] was there [in 1906], proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here [in 2007]; the duration of the transmission [101 years] is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being [the author] as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing [or the author of the postcard] to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin [a memory space] I share with anyone who has been photographed [or seen the thing I’m seeing].”