Photography as becoming: Networked Memories
Thursday, September 9, 2021, 12:00 - 1:30pm AEST
Photography has a legacy as a medium that creates sites of mourning by returning the past as the presence of absence. With this history as a haunting trace, what becomes of the photograph’s temporal signature in the context of a live networked smartphone ecology? Every twenty-four hours just under four-hundred million photographs are uploaded to Facebook and Instagram, accentuating that networkers are “here and now” as a vast repository of data accumulates social media’s everyday records of departed experience. Contemporary scholarship suggests photography’s relationship to memory-making and mourning has been outstripped by networked immediacy and the use of images as fleeting conversational devices. My research posits that photography continually exposes subjects and beholders to their existence within duration, what Henri Bergson envisaged as the co-existence of the past within the present in a becoming that endures. Digital autoethnography and a cultural history of the medium are here brought together to traverse personal and collective photographic encounters across screens, streetscapes and family archives of mourning. The networked medium is reunited with the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes as I explore affectively wounding images amidst the ephemerality of the online ecology to reimagine photography’s relationship with personal mourning; not as a static embalming of the past but as a generative reminder of the durational forces which constitute each present instant.
A response will be offered by Dr Edgar Gómez Cruz (UNSW) before discussion.
Dr Tara McLennan lectures in media and cultural studies at the University of New South Wales. She adopts creative practices to explore visual culture and a poetics of the past in the context of digital media ecologies. Her work uses media archaeology to query the relationship between images, material media practices, and memory.