The Photograph as a Reminder That We Are Already Dead
Daisy Patton
Detail of “Untitled (Leonar 5746),” by Daisy Patton, oil on archival print on panel, 80”x136”, 2017.
As a child, I held wildly onto what I remembered as a fond life living in Los Angeles after moving to Oklahoma. I would revel in my recollections of the summery warmth that never really went away, beloved cultural institutions like museums, the flowery landscape, and the multi-faceted people. I could clearly remember ordinary events that had also been recorded in photographs because of this longing for the past, a desire to return to what I considered my true home. But the more I looked at my childhood photos as I grew older, the more my original recollection disappeared. In some ways, photography’s method of preservation is akin to mummification, desiccating these moments until they crumble.
The family photograph is a curious object whose primary purpose is to ward away forgetting. It forces us to reckon with that passage of time, sometimes with an exasperated mourning of how quickly it elapses. The moment captured will be saved, and it will be remembered precisely and unaltered. While paintings have existed for centuries as a means to contain a person’s likeness and personality, with photography, there is an exactness that somehow is more and simultaneously less faithful to the subject. And how strange and peculiar the photograph must have been when it was first created. To be able to see oneself three-dimensionally rendered, more precisely than a painting, on a two-dimensional plane. More, because of increased detail; less, because how can a split second encapsulate a life and a being?
I think of the conversation around digital filmmaking instead of analog, how its crispness supposedly pulls people from the fantasy of immersion. It seems the closer and more exacting we are with our technology to record ourselves, the further away we become. This is, in a sense, synonymous with memory. The harder we try to remember something, the fuzzier it becomes; to some degree, it slowly fades away each time we try to recall a particular moment.
There is something thrilling about looking at an old photograph and trying to imagine oneself in that moment, or bringing the person contained into ours. I prefer to look at old family photographs in this way, yearning to excavate them from the past into now. The years around my birth have frequently been called a mini-generation, those from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Our lives straddle the analog and digital. But we can still remember the smells of sharpening our pencils at the front of the classroom, of lives before social media, of when the first computer arrived in our classroom, of being the first to have to teach our older relatives how to use these new technologies. We captured our photographs with film and digital; we still remember what one-hour photo processing was and the impatience in seeing what was in those opaque film canisters.
Analog photography is now a choice, aesthetic or conceptual, but certainly unusual in the age of digital. There’s a preciousness to it, in both senses of the word: treasured and rare, but also a little pretentious. One result of our shift to digital is the new uncommonness of printed photography. Those one-hour photo printers now often use digital inks that are not as stable as C-prints; I think this is especially the case in the early 2000s, where it is as easy to spot the time period by the photo aesthetic as it is the fashion.
Today, we take more photos than ever before but have less in our homes and on our person. The personal computer devices we carry are meant to store and hold those memories, but they just make me think of those floppy disks lying around in basements or piled up in garage sales, impenetrable and unknowable. We reflexively, obsessively document our lives now with the ubiquity of affordable photo-taking devices. We share our images with others through social media, giving glimpses into our worlds that are carefully edited and curated. Facebook, for instance, nudges users to share older posts, always noting that the image is a certain number of years old.
Digitally over-documenting our lives and the antithetical conflict of less physical evidence of this documentation could inevitably impede future historians. What will they have left to study, and how will they understand us? Perhaps our surrendered privacy and excessively captured selves will finally gain respite when the ability to view these images fades away.
Time is viewed linearly in history as well as photography. To study historical moments is to look into contained parcels, which is the opposite of how time and history actually behave. We cannot wrap a neat ribbon around a political event or social movement; these things bleed into others, merging or changing in ways that are inconceivable. What may seem a failure in one period may be viewed as influencing extensive shifts in others.
Currently, we try to contain time to decades, to bestow stereotypes to these specific timeframes. Photography mediates the never-ending dialogue of how we link our current selves to past lives. To stare at an abandoned family photograph is to reckon with our mortality, as well as find new ways to communicate with and understand what has come before us. Time is somehow both omnipresent and falls away when we stare at these unknown figures.
A palatable discomfort exists in viewing anonymous family photographs. These images are supposed to contain the memories of the people depicted, as well as their loved ones who have touched, creased, and marked these objects. When the photographs are untethered to their first owners, they are unknowable. We can try to read and interpret each detail to assess their personalities and selves. A stance, a gesture, clothing choice—all these things are given greater significance than the moment necessarily expected.
In my recent photos, I am not thinking about how I will be frozen in time at that moment; there is not a deliberation or performance in how I want to be understood to future peoples. Conversely for early photography subjects, this consideration was part of the whole point of having their pictures taken. They borrowed symbolism from painting, the ever-intertwined older sibling of photography, to communicate themselves and their full beings to those surrounding them. Their aim was painterly likeness, a greater sense of the person than how we typically understand photographs now. In a certain level of arrogance, they assumed we could still understand that language, their specific dialect in translating themselves in photographic form.
Photography as keepsakes of memory is in its fullest with funerary photography. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; they are opportunities to say goodbye, to demonstrate our fidelity and love for the deceased, to celebrate their existence. The body just lays there, an empty vessel for what once was. Funerary, or post-mortem, photographs have an eerie quality to them, but their purpose is clear: this person was loved and will live on in memory, visual and otherwise. They are relics of affection, equally a nod to the deceased as it is to the living who carry on with their lives.
The photograph marks that moment of loss, and it is physical proof of devotion being performed. This is possibly why the genre of funerary photography distresses so many now; we are looking at memorials to remembrance but have no idea who the people are any longer. Susan Sontag once asserted that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” To look at an old photograph is to be reminded that we too will die, and perhaps someone will inherit or purchase our photographs without ever having met us.
Even within our own photographs, we tell ourselves stories of how we connect to our childhood selves, this picture of a small child that we cannot really recall. If there is a dismissal about not truly knowing others from their old photographs, the same can be said about our younger selves. How do we think of time when the photograph intervenes? I would wager, at least from my own experience, that we think of our past as more fluid than it technically is. We are transported back to ourselves as children, as young adults, and so on when we encounter people or even familiar smells that spark those memories. Conversely, photography insists on a linear timeline: this happened on this date, before this other thing, after this other moment. In the case of family photographs from a person who is no longer alive, the display of time is poignant though no less frustrating.
When we look at a photograph from a specific moment, we already know how their story will end—something they could not know when the shutter closed. There is an openness of the future that is starkly closed off in a photograph. We do not know if and when that image will be our last, what is to come, how our lives might shift—but our future selves or other people do. Looking at these pictures is a form of time-traveling, and the first rule of time travel is not to disturb the past.
The family photograph is a curious object whose primary purpose is to ward away forgetting. It forces us to reckon with that passage of time, sometimes with an exasperated mourning of how quickly it elapses. The moment captured will be saved, and it will be remembered precisely and unaltered. While paintings have existed for centuries as a means to contain a person’s likeness and personality, with photography, there is an exactness that somehow is more and simultaneously less faithful to the subject. And how strange and peculiar the photograph must have been when it was first created. To be able to see oneself three-dimensionally rendered, more precisely than a painting, on a two-dimensional plane. More, because of increased detail; less, because how can a split second encapsulate a life and a being?
I think of the conversation around digital filmmaking instead of analog, how its crispness supposedly pulls people from the fantasy of immersion. It seems the closer and more exacting we are with our technology to record ourselves, the further away we become. This is, in a sense, synonymous with memory. The harder we try to remember something, the fuzzier it becomes; to some degree, it slowly fades away each time we try to recall a particular moment.
There is something thrilling about looking at an old photograph and trying to imagine oneself in that moment, or bringing the person contained into ours. I prefer to look at old family photographs in this way, yearning to excavate them from the past into now. The years around my birth have frequently been called a mini-generation, those from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Our lives straddle the analog and digital. But we can still remember the smells of sharpening our pencils at the front of the classroom, of lives before social media, of when the first computer arrived in our classroom, of being the first to have to teach our older relatives how to use these new technologies. We captured our photographs with film and digital; we still remember what one-hour photo processing was and the impatience in seeing what was in those opaque film canisters.
Analog photography is now a choice, aesthetic or conceptual, but certainly unusual in the age of digital. There’s a preciousness to it, in both senses of the word: treasured and rare, but also a little pretentious. One result of our shift to digital is the new uncommonness of printed photography. Those one-hour photo printers now often use digital inks that are not as stable as C-prints; I think this is especially the case in the early 2000s, where it is as easy to spot the time period by the photo aesthetic as it is the fashion.
Today, we take more photos than ever before but have less in our homes and on our person. The personal computer devices we carry are meant to store and hold those memories, but they just make me think of those floppy disks lying around in basements or piled up in garage sales, impenetrable and unknowable. We reflexively, obsessively document our lives now with the ubiquity of affordable photo-taking devices. We share our images with others through social media, giving glimpses into our worlds that are carefully edited and curated. Facebook, for instance, nudges users to share older posts, always noting that the image is a certain number of years old.
Digitally over-documenting our lives and the antithetical conflict of less physical evidence of this documentation could inevitably impede future historians. What will they have left to study, and how will they understand us? Perhaps our surrendered privacy and excessively captured selves will finally gain respite when the ability to view these images fades away.
Time is viewed linearly in history as well as photography. To study historical moments is to look into contained parcels, which is the opposite of how time and history actually behave. We cannot wrap a neat ribbon around a political event or social movement; these things bleed into others, merging or changing in ways that are inconceivable. What may seem a failure in one period may be viewed as influencing extensive shifts in others.
Currently, we try to contain time to decades, to bestow stereotypes to these specific timeframes. Photography mediates the never-ending dialogue of how we link our current selves to past lives. To stare at an abandoned family photograph is to reckon with our mortality, as well as find new ways to communicate with and understand what has come before us. Time is somehow both omnipresent and falls away when we stare at these unknown figures.
A palatable discomfort exists in viewing anonymous family photographs. These images are supposed to contain the memories of the people depicted, as well as their loved ones who have touched, creased, and marked these objects. When the photographs are untethered to their first owners, they are unknowable. We can try to read and interpret each detail to assess their personalities and selves. A stance, a gesture, clothing choice—all these things are given greater significance than the moment necessarily expected.
In my recent photos, I am not thinking about how I will be frozen in time at that moment; there is not a deliberation or performance in how I want to be understood to future peoples. Conversely for early photography subjects, this consideration was part of the whole point of having their pictures taken. They borrowed symbolism from painting, the ever-intertwined older sibling of photography, to communicate themselves and their full beings to those surrounding them. Their aim was painterly likeness, a greater sense of the person than how we typically understand photographs now. In a certain level of arrogance, they assumed we could still understand that language, their specific dialect in translating themselves in photographic form.
Photography as keepsakes of memory is in its fullest with funerary photography. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; they are opportunities to say goodbye, to demonstrate our fidelity and love for the deceased, to celebrate their existence. The body just lays there, an empty vessel for what once was. Funerary, or post-mortem, photographs have an eerie quality to them, but their purpose is clear: this person was loved and will live on in memory, visual and otherwise. They are relics of affection, equally a nod to the deceased as it is to the living who carry on with their lives.
The photograph marks that moment of loss, and it is physical proof of devotion being performed. This is possibly why the genre of funerary photography distresses so many now; we are looking at memorials to remembrance but have no idea who the people are any longer. Susan Sontag once asserted that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” To look at an old photograph is to be reminded that we too will die, and perhaps someone will inherit or purchase our photographs without ever having met us.
Even within our own photographs, we tell ourselves stories of how we connect to our childhood selves, this picture of a small child that we cannot really recall. If there is a dismissal about not truly knowing others from their old photographs, the same can be said about our younger selves. How do we think of time when the photograph intervenes? I would wager, at least from my own experience, that we think of our past as more fluid than it technically is. We are transported back to ourselves as children, as young adults, and so on when we encounter people or even familiar smells that spark those memories. Conversely, photography insists on a linear timeline: this happened on this date, before this other thing, after this other moment. In the case of family photographs from a person who is no longer alive, the display of time is poignant though no less frustrating.
When we look at a photograph from a specific moment, we already know how their story will end—something they could not know when the shutter closed. There is an openness of the future that is starkly closed off in a photograph. We do not know if and when that image will be our last, what is to come, how our lives might shift—but our future selves or other people do. Looking at these pictures is a form of time-traveling, and the first rule of time travel is not to disturb the past.
About the Author
Daisy Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. Her MFA is from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. Patton's practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas. Patton is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and she was also awarded a position as an exchange student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK while an undergraduate. She has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver. More here.
Daisy Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. Her MFA is from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. Patton's practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas. Patton is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and she was also awarded a position as an exchange student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK while an undergraduate. She has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver. More here.
