travel

We're so postmodern, nostalgia isn't quite the same anymore. It's easy to access archives of memories, reconstructing experience in your head, reconstructing other people's experiences in your head. It's lovely. But photographs are fundamentally melancholic, because without saying anything, they remind us of what has been lost. That instant in time has a distinct singularity, like a fingerprint. Photographs exacerbate the bittersweet wounding that nostalgia inflicts. 

(OK, I am now in show-and-tell mode.)

This image is an artifact on several levels. Firstly, it is an image of the blue car that appears in the following photograph, the self-immolation of the monk Thích Quảng Đức to protest the Diem government in Cochinchina:

If you look closely at the first picture, there are two framed photographs exhibited alongside the car. One is hung on the wall much like an information panel, seemingly an accompaniment to the spectacle of the rusted blue car, as if merely there to validate its historical value and authenticity. The other photograph is placed on the windshield within a more elaborate frame. It is the same photograph, only in solemn repose. It is funereal and contemplative. It is interesting to view the original photograph again within the frame of the windshield, as if it's forcibly giving us context — the car, much like the people in the background as well as the people looking back on history, is a spectator partaking in the horror and the humanity of the scene. Not only is the car an artifact of a shared collective memory, it contains the photograph which in itself is an artifact referring constantly to the past. The framed photograph is an artifact within an artifact, both interlaced in a relationship that mutually reinforces the experience of seeing each other. This relationship has been captured in the first image, making that an artifact within an artifact within an artifact. (Yay!)

Let's take this a level further. There is the implied photographer within the photograph, with motivations, intention, unconscious psychological undertows, etc. (Really, it's just me.) The photograph is not just a testament to the the existence of what it depicts, but an expression of sight, a declaration of seeing. It carries the weight of the photographer's response to the scene in front of him. In this case, it was that strange, overwhelming sensation of being so close to a mythical piece of knowledge about Southeast Asian history that I studied from a scholarly distance. At the same time, the violence and tragedy embedded in the blue car felt confrontational; encountering it within the grounds of a temple made for further emotional dissonance. The photograph is not only an artifact within an artifact within an artifact, it is also an artifact relating to the inner life of the photographer himself.

It (an abbreviation for all the levels of meaning in the photograph) is also an object of nostalgia, in that it replaces past experience (like, Gestalt holism) with visual record. We now recall the past in terms of images that we take with our cameras, and I think that opens up a different world of experiencing nostalgia — that it privileges the ocular simply because it is now the primary way of experiencing the world. (Our memories are arranged in images, anyway.) Yet at the same time, there still lie memories (mostly forged unconsciously) that don't revolve around vision and image. Familiar smells and sounds provoke a nostalgia that is surprising, and in this way, somewhat more intense. 

I hope my bunkmates never find this blog.