Image History And Memory

This book discusses the active relationship among the mechanics of memory, visual practices, and historical narratives. Reflection on memory and its ties with historical narratives cannot be separated from reflection on the visual and the image as its points of reference which function in time. This volume addresses precisely that temporal aspect of the image, without reducing it to a neutral trace of the past, a mnemotechnical support of memory. As a commemorative device, the image fixes, structures, and crystalizes memory, turning the view of the past into myth. It may, however, also stimulate, transform, and update memory, functioning as a matrix of interpretation and understanding the past. The book questions whether the functioning of the visual matrices of memory can be related to a particular historical and geographical scope, that is, to Central and Eastern Europe, and whether it is possible to find their origin and decide if they are just local and regional or perhaps also Western European and universal. It focuses on the artistic reflection on time and history, in the reconstructions of memory due to change of frontiers and political regimes, as well as endeavours to impose some specific political structure on territories which were complex and mixed in terms of national identity, religion and social composition. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, history and visual studies.

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity’s afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg’s published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg’s cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West’s cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

This collection of essays, written in honour of the eminent architectural historian Paul Crossley, brings together some of the most distinguished scholars of medieval art and architecture from the United States and many parts of Europe. Covering a broad spectrum of topics and approaches including recent discoveries, new interpretations and critical debates, this book and its counterpart Architecture, Liturgy and Identity (also published in the Studies in Gothic Art series) offer a fitting tribute to the exceptional range of Professor Crossley's intellectual interests, while providing invaluable insights into the present study of the Middle Ages.

How is photography connected to global practices? This is a first edited collection to trace the relationship between history, photography and memory in a global perspective on three interrelated levels: firstly, in the artistic and cultural production of pictures, secondly, in the decoding of colonial and contemporary photography, and thirdly, in collecting photographs in picture archives dealing with colonial, anthropological and family photography. The contributions sketch the contested field of global photography and trace the manifold intertwinements between historical and contemporary photographs.

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, Isabelle McNeill investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the author examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the author argues that memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience.Memory and the Moving Image:*Introduces new ways of thinking about the relation between film and memory, arising from a compelling, interdisciplinary study of theories and films*Subtly explores the French context while drawing theoretical conclusions with wider implications and applicability*Provides detailed and illuminating close readings of varied moving image works to aid theoretical explorations*Moves away from auteurist approaches, examining work by canonical directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and AgnA*s Varda alongside that of less well-known filmmakers such as Claire Simon and Yamina Benguigui*Brings together thinkers such as Bergson, Deleuze, Bazin and Barthes with, for example, Rodowick and Mulvey, in an engaging interweaving of theories.Works considered include Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du CinA(c)ma (1989-98), Yamina Benguigui's MA(c)moires d'ImmigrA(c)s (1997), Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory (1998), Claire Simon's Mimi (2003), Michael Haneke's CachA(c) (2005) and AgnA*s Varda's multi-media exhibition, L'Ale et Elle (2006).

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Film, History and Memory broadens the focus from 'history', the study of past events, to 'memory', the processes – individual, generational, collective or state-driven – by which meanings are attached to the past.