Photography, Music and Memory

Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life

Michael Pickering, Emily Keightley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137441201
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137441218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination.

1

Media and Memory

Sight and sound

Before we examine in detail, later in the book, how photography and recorded music facilitate remembering and are drawn upon as mnemonic resources, we need to consider more fully their characteristic features as both communications technologies and cultural forms. As ways of recording, storing, retrieving and replaying certain events and sequences of events from the past, they have, of course, not remained static over time. Their various means of production, reception and use have changed a great deal since the key moments of their invention and early development.¹ Change and modification mark the history of these two technologies and have to be part of the story we tell about them, yet running through them is one relatively constant factor, which is the actual mechanical recording of images and performances. It is this which they always have in common, and it is this which provides us with our starting point: their convergence in recording and evoking the past. Beyond that convergence, how they record assorted events in the past and transmit them into an assortment of futures has always been divergent, in a number of significant ways, so we need also to delve into what most obviously differentiate photography and recorded music as ways of capturing and returning to what has happened in the past.

If we begin with the long-established distinction between professional and amateur photography, it is easy to see that, despite the various gradations in between them, this isn’t duplicated with recorded music, even though some recorded music is made and disseminated under the direct control of singers and musicians, and amateur musicians may record themselves for their own individual purposes. Many photographs are taken with various degrees of expertise and skill by individuals, families and communities, and then subsequently used by them as ways of relating to the past. Their self-produced abetments of remembering are not mirrored by similar processes or similar scales of activity in recorded music. Despite this disparity, it is worth recalling that the late-Victorian phonograph was designed for both recording and reproducing sound in the home. That’s the reason there is a half-buried history beneath the image of the dog ‘Nipper’ in the classic Victor/RCA advert ‘His Master’s Voice’, for the dog was listening to his owner’s recorded voice.² The reduction of gramophones to machines allowing only the playback of mass-produced discs represented a drastic loss of scope which was not repaired till the advent of later recording machines around the mid-twentieth century, but by then ensemble music-making in the home was not as common, at least in Britain, and people had become inveterate consumers of phonograph as well as broadcast music. Aside from this early parallel history as self-made media, and the widespread availability of cheap cassette machines in the later twentieth century, it remains the case that home recordings have never rivalled the photo-album as a mnemonic repository.

If we then turn to the communicative underpinning of these two media, it is clear that they appeal to distinct senses of human perception, signify in quite different ways and operate through codes and conventions, idioms and styles that are specific either to image- or sound-production. Their relationship to time is also somewhat different. Photography appears to arrest time, whereas recorded music transcribes time in its sequential flow. These distinguishing features extend into their different modes of reception, even if they sometimes coincide in acts of remembering. They cannot simply be run into each other without regard for their semiotic and aesthetic constitution and the particular forms of recording and reproduction that they involve.

These are commonplace analytical considerations, but they need not obstruct the intention to think about our two chosen media comparatively. So, for example, those who are blessed with unimpaired visual and aural faculties use them as parallel forms of perceptual engagement. Although they can be employed independently of each other, for the most part neither our eyes nor our ears assume priority as ways of gathering empirical information. We do not listen for a train approaching a station platform and only when we hear this happening open our eyes to check that the sonic data we have acquired is correct. We see and listen simultaneously. It may be that we hear a bird singing in a tree, but have to look carefully until we see it. Hearing has then preceded seeing, but seeing follows up on this and when our eyes alight on the bird, what we comprehend is a happy convergence of both modes of experience. This also applies to their relationship with remembering. Despite the predominant reference to seeing when describing a vivid memory, it is quite compatible with references to hearing, and both kinds of perception may be used in combination as we look back to the past: ‘I met him my first term at school. I can see the place. I can see the notice board and what was on it. I can hear the bell ringing.’³ It is this kind of complementarity that we want to pursue in thinking about media and memory.

We want to do so because it is not as if auditory and visual cultures never meet, interact or play off each other. Throughout the past century they have been used together, as well as separately, as ways of representing or evoking the past. Popular songs and photographic images are routinely deployed in various media as complementary cultural forms, at times with great dramatic effect, at others in rather hackneyed, outworn ways as, for example, when the narrative shifts to the past in television documentaries and ‘up pop the close-ups of and montage sequences of family snapshots, school photos, or official group portraits, usually accompanied by appropriate music to evoke the era – for example, the Charleston for the 1920s, the sound of gunfire for World War 1’.⁴ We have undertaken the research that is drawn on this book in order to cut through such clichéd uses of personal photography and popular music, and discover instead what family snapshots or pieces of music mean for people in the vernacular connections they maintain, or forge, with the past. It would, of course, be strange indeed if, in everyday social life, they were regarded as entirely separate or unable to be considered in conjunction with each other. That is not the case and, however unimaginatively, this is commonly recognised in television and film. In both media narratives and in the stories we tell in everyday life, the roles of photography and recorded music in practices of remembering are not necessarily at odds because of their obvious differences. They can be considered instead as interrelated ways of mediating the past, as they do in ‘She’s Got You’.

This is important for another reason. It is commonly assumed that one of the hallmarks of modernity is the ascendancy of visual media over other media of communication, and of the eye over other human senses. This has supported the view that photography, cinematography, television and video are the most significant modern media, and so led to an over-concentration on visual media in the ways media production and consumption have been studied and researched. With the exception of photography, these other visual media have been accompanied, for the most part, by sound of one kind or another, and that sound has often been musical. Throughout the modern period, sound, hearing and listening have been central to social and cultural life, yet the scholarly attention paid to them has hardly been commensurate, as has long been recognised. The neglect of sound and hearing in communications research was noted in 1935 by Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport in their Psychology of Radio, and a year later in another book on radio by Rudolf Arnheim.⁵ If this was the case then, it has been even more so ever since. Think of the subsequent ink spilt in attending to images, still or moving; there is nothing like this for the semiotics of sound, despite the dissemination of the telephone, the phonograph and the radio into social life over the past century or so, and despite the sonic dimension of visual media. There is, in fact, a considerable literature on sound, including a range of studies dealing with telephony, radio and recorded music, but the problem lies in their silo-based status and their consequent lack of interconnection. Added to this, research on sound in more general terms suffers because of its intellectual incoherence and its failure to take on broader theoretical, historical and cultural questions that would help connect it with other fields of study.

It is only fairly recently that media scholars have attempted to overcome these shortcomings and redress the imbalance towards visual media in communications research. Jonathan Sterne has been much to the fore in this through his exploration of the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience in modernity, basing this on the assumption that sound reproduction technologies and our sensory orientation to them, including the questions of presence and absence entailed in their usage as forms of communication, are historical in character, and do not involve transcendental answers. In Sterne’s own words: ‘Sound reproduction is historical all the way down.’⁶ Sterne’s work has been complemented by various publications which are beginning to show not only the wide-ranging variety of sounds and sonic experiences in modern life, but also how they converge and diverge, operate together or in degrees of opposition to each other.⁷ The effort to comprehend the role and significance of sound across our social and cultural experience more broadly is complemented by the increasing attention being paid to general soundscapes in modernity, following Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World, and more specialised applications of the concept of soundscape such as John Picker’s study of Victorian responses to sonic environments and the changing configurations of sound and voice within them.⁸

Two further illustrations of the slow, but nevertheless definite turn of attention to the relations between sound, music and remembering are William Kenny’s study of the role of the phonograph in American cultural history, and a volume edited by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, which attends to audio technologies and memory. Kenny notes how Americans in the period between 1890 and the end of the Second World War found ways of expressing aspects of their personal lives in recorded music, and how music strongly evokes emotions and feelings attached to related past experiences. In this way, 78 rpm records ‘offered Americans memories of memories’. Kenny correctly remarks that ‘recorded music has had much more to do with the way many people relate to the past than historians have realised’.⁹ Bijsterveld and van Dijck’s edited collection is concerned with the cultural practices in which people use various forms of audio technology to elicit, reconstruct and manage their memories. It is valuable not least because auditory aspects of remembering are much less examined than their visual aspects, and more specifically, because recorded music is much less explored than photographs as a resource for everyday mnemonic practices.¹⁰

As all these examples show, the neglect of sound, in all its diversity of form, scope and texture, is gradually being made good, and to some extent at least helping to offset the visualist hegemony in studies of media and communications. Self-evidently, image-making media have been hugely important, but the point is not to attend to them at the cost of non-visual media. There is, of course, a danger looming the other way in the development of sound studies, and that is to develop scholarly work on sonic regimes and soundscapes at the expense of attention to non-sonic media. This is another reason why we want to consider photography and recorded music together, as complementary mnemonic forms. Attending to technologically mediated images and musical sounds alongside each other may help to counter the visualist bias in media studies, but studying sound in the round requires the avoidance of its own anti-visual bias. Only by countering both kinds of bias can we approximate more closely to the lived realities of these two media in their promiscuous mnemonic intermingling.

This is especially important in relation to the ways in which both photography and recorded music operate in processes of both individual and public remembering. Even at a technical level, they involve the activity of recording and preserving and are invested with a high level of fidelity to their pro-graphic referent. The common, although not unquestioned, belief among our informants is that they both fix a sound or an image in some way and send this forward into the future as a record of the past. This sense of technical fidelity in image and sound has always affected how these media have been attended to. For a long time, the popular reference to technologically mediated forms of music was, quite literally, that of ‘records’, while the terms pictorial or photographic records carry a similar meaning, even if they sound somewhat archaic. This provides us with another reason why these two media should be considered in tandem, for what we see influences how we hear and what we hear influences how we see. Not only do they mutually rely on each other for their definition; response to past images and sounds is also not confined solely either to one or the other, in any absolute or static set of alternatives. There is instead a periodic or more regular movement and interaction between them, making our everyday engagement with these key signifiers of what has gone before at times undecided and ambivalent as well as, at others, more certain and unswerving. The point of thinking about shifting responses to them in this manner is to explore the possibility of reconciliation between their too easily polarised hermeneutics. Such polarisation makes no sense when we consider them in relation to remembering, where they are valued for their differences and where their differences act as the basis of their cross-fertilisation.

Record and reconstruction

Along with all the other reasons already discussed for developing a comparative study of photography and phonography, we need to introduce another that is particularly important for our ethnographic analysis of how they operate as mnemonic vehicles or catalysts. This is that both technologies have served as paradigms of memory where emphasis has been placed on the value of memory as a means of recording and reproducing information. So, for example, photography offered ‘a new analogy for the processing of visual experience’, with human memory in psychological theory being conceived as like a photographic plate ‘prepared for the recording and reproduction of visual experience’, while the notion of the phonograph having an acoustic memory began ‘to serve as an analogy in theories on the auditive memory’.¹¹ In the past, analogies such as these have been supported by empiricist conceptions of the relationship between experience and memory in which memories were regarded as replicas of what had been perceived through such primary senses as the eyes and ears. These were then retrieved from storage and reproduced, as one might play a sample of recorded music on a gramophone. This meant that memory became merely ancillary to perception, so reducing the varied and complex phenomena of memory to the relatively straightforward process of memorisation. Although that is simplifying the history somewhat, such reduction paved the way for the methodological approaches developed in mainstream psychology during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries which separated memory from its significance for self-identity, and from its relation to social, cultural and historical context. The focus instead was on how memory functions as a means by which information is retained and reproduced, with a major concern in this being the extent of its accuracy and reliability. In their mutual involvement and support for each other, these conceptions and approaches underpinned and gave credence to the metaphorical extensions of photography and phonography as models of memory where the emphasis was on precision copying and replication. That, in turn, accorded with the pedagogic value placed upon memorising objective facts in nineteenth and early-twentieth century educational philosophy, and on the application of rote memory skills in commercial business, industrial work and bureaucratic institutional structures as these developed during the same period.¹²

Understanding and valuing memory primarily in these ways is antithetical to our own interest in photography and phonography as either forms or adjuncts of remembering. It is not as though attempting to relate memory to recording machines is entirely inappropriate, for as we shall see later in the book, people describe using photography as a form of external memory and deliberately take photos in order to facilitate remembering, ‘capturing the moment’ so as to look back on it at various points in the future. We put photo albums together or keep old letters because the preservation is a symbolic representation of their value as traces of a past we have lived through, and is still in some way part of who we are. We rarely throw photographs away; we often keep our collections of recorded music for many years; and especially with photos and to some extent with music we do so because we know that they hold or correspond to our memories, memories we share with family and friends. As metaphors of memory, photographic inscription and phonographic recording are nevertheless unhelpful and misleading.

Despite the remarkable ways in which a striking image from the past may come back unsolicited, or a song on the radio may seem to take us instantly back to a moment in the past, recollection does not involve retrieving an original, immutable experience in pristine form from an earlier stage in our lives. Though it is a commonplace expression, no one actually possesses ‘a photographic memory’. Even so-called flashbulb memories are not fixed forever; over time they may change, becoming conflated with other memories, for example, or strengthened because of being storyworthy and often reiterated as a result.¹³ Likewise, exact replicability may be a defining feature of a phonograph record, but it is not characteristic of human memory. When we recall a popular song and a particular recording of it, we don’t, for the most part at least, hear the musical accompaniment to the song as we would in the recording. Similarly, the exceedingly clear memory we may have of a group of people gathered together for a wedding party does not mean that with this memory we can count the number of people in the group, as we could if we looked at a photograph of them.

What we recollect relates to different events and episodes across time, some recent, others distant, some sharp and bright, others almost spectral in quality, but all constituting only a small portion of what happens to us, week by week, year by year, and it is precisely because remembering is always both temporally situated and temporally extended that memories are interconnected in the dynamic sense of earlier memories affecting those that come later, and later memories modifying, rearranging and casting different degrees of light upon those that preceded them. We not only exist in time but also move through it, and as we do our frameworks of understanding and ways of making meaning of the past change and develop. It is in respect of such change and development that the analogy of memory and record, whereby data is stored and retrieved without a modicum of change, tells us nothing of the experience of explicit remembering in either its personal or interpersonal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Media and Memory
• 2. Resources for Remembering
• 3. Purpose and Meaning
• 4. Value and Significance
• Pieces of the Past
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index