Years ago, I was a teenager dragged along on a family vacation on a tour bus through the Alps . The tour guide took an unwelcome interest in me, spiking the boredom of bus rides and prepackaged sightseeing with queasy moments when he professed his longing. One afternoon, while fleeing his attentions, I happened onto a village graveyard in the Italian Alps where many of the gravestones were covered with photographs: images of the deceased affixed to gravestones. The photographs were paper, sealed in plastic sleeves, worn to varying degrees by the elements. This iteration of the faces of the dead set on tombstones epitomized haunting of a culturally specific kind. The affixed photographs articulated a kind of “exergue,” uncanny supplements to the names, dates, and epitaphs carved in stone.1 One might also say the photographs functioned as masks , performing a ritual release or translation of the dead.2 The second death , the death that follows physical death and is achieved through symbolic action, was anticipated and enacted by these photographs affixed to gravestones.3 They were not professional additions but vulnerable and amateur.
As a fourteen-year-old, I was disturbed by what I first saw as the youthfulness of so many of the dead: the photographs showed people in their twenties and thirties. Reading the dates of the deceased, I realized that the mourners had placed photographs of the dead taken while they were young, regardless of the person’s age at death . This small graveyard was full of youthful masks. The passage of time showed only in the wear of elements on the photographs, bleached by sunlight, shaggy from rains that the plastic shields did not entirely keep out. The photographs would disintegrate long before the gravestones. I wondered why the mourners had participated in what seemed a futile ritual—these photographs were such transient mementos juxtaposed with stone. Though now, after so many years, and many more graveyards visited under various circumstances, that is the graveyard I remember because of the photographs.
It was very much like standing in a square of ghosts , in the sense of ghost that Avery Gordon intends in Ghostly Matters : the ghost as social figure.4 The faces of the dead fluttered like small flags, doubles for the dead. This doubleness is the essence of photography’s uncanniness: a photograph is in some ways a copy of another noun, showing a person, place, or thing in the material world. As such, it stages a return to what may have been right in front of the camera years, days, or only moments ago, but is already—as is the case of all materiality in time—changed by time.5 A photograph is the imprint of the patterns of light that render the seen world visible. The faces of the dead in that graveyard were accurate representations of faces and also startlingly inaccurate to the reality of time, the substance of bodies in time. The actual persons were, to be blunt, corpses, skeletal remains. But the photographed faces were earnest, pretty, well-groomed, delicate miniatures of the almost still living—almost, that is, in the sense that someone was still tending these graves, so the dead still had social lives through photographic public memorial. It was an ordinary practice and also uncanny, eerie. The photographs on the tombstones in that village graveyard were at once familiar and also exceptional and strange. The everydayness, the quotidian feel, of the graveyard rubbed against the strangeness of the photographic masks of the dead. By dying, they had become strangers, the buried, and the villagers used photography to articulate and engage this transitional otherness. Critic and scholar Jae Emerling’s haunting claim that “It is the image that has the potentiality to traverse the discourse, that is, to be ‘untimely,’” shapes my approach to understanding photographs in their uncanniness.6 For at its core the uncanny is that slip in time that awakens us to the strangeness of the gaze we usually normalize, the untimely world we inhabit.
Ordinary Uncanny
Pierre Bourdieu in his classic sociological study, Photography: A Middle Brow Art , calls photography “the most ordinary thing.”7 He grounds his understanding of photographic practice in the everyday, the familial and domestic. Yet Bourdieu also argues that, once photographed, an object, person, scene, or place ceases to inhabit the quotidian and is articulated as significant beyond the ordinary .8 What one photographs is, by dint of being photographed, visually set apart as exceptional, strange.9 Susan Sontag has taken this argument further, suggesting that we confer value only on that which manifests as a photographic moment.10 Paradoxically, photography defines the familiar at the same time it transmogrifies the familiar into that which is strange and set apart. This cleavage is an aspect of the uncanny: at the precise point of the photograph, the familiar diverges into the strange. Photography marks this boundary where the familiar edges away. Photograph the uncleared breakfast table and suddenly, as image, the quotidian scene will seem to carry a message. Nicholas Royle argues that the uncanny is a “peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar .”11 Photography is always already approaching this familiar–unfamiliar quality.
The practice of photography reflects and is actively part of the social creation of community, family, and self.12 It is a way of constructing and also, at times, deconstructing the familiar. Bourdieu points to the precept that in the industrialized West one must photograph one’s progeny to participate in the articulation and construction of class.13 Bourdieu’s research is dated—it was originally published in 1967 and is based on research undertaken years before—but many of its insights hold: photography is both entirely familiar , “the most ordinary thing,” and also strange, the image-object that carries a stain of otherness revelatory of time.
Photography has inherently to do with the concepts and use of home , or the core experience of embodiment, because photography so faithfully mimics the appearance of the spaces we inhabit. Yet it also presents that which radically estranges us from home : being entirely image, it is inhospitable to occupancy, fully embodied experience. Photography estranges physical space . Photographs are halfway marks between what we’ve got (maybe a family, maybe a certain social life) and what we can lose (house, social identity, biological life). A photograph is fundamentally homeless —and never more so than when it is a photograph of a house.14 As such, it marks a space we have lost, usually through time or distance but sometimes through more traumatic fractures. An incompatibility with—and yet a dense and inextricable tie to—home is a definition of the uncanny, the unheimlich . That which is “heim,” or “geheim,” is “of home,” covered, protected, and yet that which is “ungeheim” is a secret unmasked, a place that feels familiar and yet is not comforting but disturbing.15
The German word “unheimlich ” indicates a nonspecific sense of anxiety, edging toward horror but different from horror in that the uncanny is strange rather than immediately physically threatening. “Unheimlich” means “not-homey”—“heim” being German for “home ” and also connoting refuge and asylum. “Unheimlich ,” then, is that which is not like home, and not of refuge. Importantly, the German “geheim” also means “secret” and “hidden,” so that “unheimlich ” means something that was kept a secret and no longer is.16 The unheimlich, then, is something revealed that was formerly concealed. It carries the implication of something disturbing that we would rather not know. It rearranges our sense of the structure of the familiar, making what was home decidedly not homey.
In this book, I develop a definition of the photographic uncanny by articulating ways that specific photographs comment on their own identity as uncanny image-objects. My theory of the uncanny moves to the side of the Freudian uncanny and also does not have much to do with horror films, cyborgs, or spirit photography images evoking the supernatural.17 Photography, of course, encompasses these categories, staging the uncann...