Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography 9780520356016, 9780520285279

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UNCERTAIN HISTORIES

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation.

UNCERTAIN HISTORIES Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography Kate Palmer Albers

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albers, Kate Palmer, 1974– author. Uncertain histories : accumulation, inaccessibility, and doubt in contemporary photography / Kate Palmer Albers. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28527-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Photographic criticism. 2. Photography, Artistic—20th century. 3. Photography, Artistic—21st century. 4. Art and history. 5. History in art. I. Title. tr187.a425 2015 770—dc23 2014048856 Printed in China 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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PART 1: PHOTOGRAPHY IN SUSPENSION

1.

Introduction

2.

Cultivating Uncertainty

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PART 2: ABUNDANCE AND OPACITY

3.

Displacements: Gerhard Richter’s Atlas

4.

“around this nucleus a large empty space”: Dinh Q. Lê’s Mot Coi Di Ve 74

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5.

Historical Reconstruction and Doubt: Christian Boltanski’s Les archives de C. B., 1965–1988 PART 3: UNSEEN HISTORIES

6.

After the Fact: Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site

7.

The Performative Landscape: Ken Gonzales-Day’s Hang Trees

8.

Conclusion

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Notes 157 Bibliography 185 List of Illustrations Index 205 •

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is humbling to trace the personal, professional, financial, and intellectual support that has sustained me over the course of this project. I have had the good fortune over the past seven years to work in a collegial and supportive campus environment at the University of Arizona, and I thank the faculty and staff in the School of Art for that. In particular, my colleagues in the Art History and Photography Divisions and at the Center for Creative Photography have been great sources of insight and encouragement. Tracing back to this project’s origins, I warmly thank my doctoral advisors, Caroline A. Jones and Kim Sichel, for their ongoing support of my ideas and my research. At Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I enjoyed the conversation and critique of my peers and my mentors, including faculty members Gregory Williams, Andrew Stauffer, and Patricia Hills. I had the good fortune to work closely on the American Professional Photography Collection in the Photographs Department at the Fogg Art Museum; it is a collection of prints and negatives from small photography studios located around the country, established by the photographer and curator Barbara Norfleet. The everyday mysteries of its contents and its obscure archival dimensions shaped my thinking in surprising ways, and it was a great joy to work with colleagues— and friends—Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière. The collections and archives of numerous institutions were crucial to my research. I thank Candy Stobbs at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Wendy Olsoff and the staff at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York; the staffs at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon,

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and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, California, for their help with Dinh Q. Lê’s work; Nicole Simpson in Photography Special Collections at the New York Public Library; Melissa Chiu and the staff at the Asia Society, New York; Matthias Muehling at Lenbachhaus, Munich; Dietmar Elger and Konstanze Ell at the Gerhard Richter Archives; Thomas D. Grischkowsky at the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Evelyne Pomey at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris for her thoughtful assistance with the MNAM’s Boltanski collections; Youk Chhang at the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh for his insightful assistance; the staff at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, for making the original prisoner dossiers available; the staff at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and Paris, in particular Catherine Belloy, for her help at various stages along the way with the work of both Christian Boltanski and Gerhard Richter; and Caroline Burghardt at Luhring Augustine, New York. Over many stages of the project’s development, my research benefited from several sources of financial support, which often came with intellectual support as well. I am grateful to the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin for a pre-doctoral research fellowship that got the wheels turning; the Boston University Humanities Foundation; Boston University’s College of Arts and Science Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship, which enabled me to carry out critical research in Paris; the Walter Read Hovey Foundation; the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship; the Getty Research Institute Dissertation Workshop; Boston University’s Art History Department, for providing travel funds for a key research trip to London; the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts Faculty Professional Development Endowment and Small Grants; and the National Institute for the Humanities Mapping and Arts in the Americas summer research institute at the Newberry Library, run by James Akerman and Diane Dillon, which provided an invigorating and collegial work environment and reoriented my understanding of atlases and location-based visual material. Several scholars and artists working on directly or indirectly related topics generously shared ideas, pointers, research in progress, and difficult-to-access or unpublished material, including Catherine Blais, Boreth Ly, Rebecca McGrew, Alexandre DaugeRoth, Moira Roth, Bruce Myren, and Leslie Brown. I also gratefully acknowledge Solveig Koebernick, Sara Iantosca, and Virginia Anderson for their help with language translations and international correspondence. I warmly thank Kari Dahlgren, formerly of University of California Press, for her steady guidance and patient encouragement while shepherding this book. At UC Press I also thank Jack Young for his patience and assistance through production, and Lindsey Westbrook for her sharp editorial eye. I am profoundly grateful for the thoughtful time Dinh Q. Lê, Christian Boltanski, Joel Sternfeld, and Ken Gonzales-Day spent answering my many questions and for the extensive work they shared with me. The richness and rigor of these conversations and

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meetings sustained my inquiry and unfailingly bolstered my momentum, whether to stay the course or rethink my approach. The ongoing friendship and intellectual support of many friends first made in graduate school—Virginia Anderson, Becky Senf, Dalia Habib Linssen, Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw, Michelle Lamunière, Mitra Abbaspour, Sam Lee, Stephanie Mayer Heydt, Julia Dolan, and Holly Markovitz Goldstein—has buoyed me throughout this process; I am lucky to count them as colleagues and collaborators, too. Many family members have been great sources of support: my grandmothers, who have lived their lives in the arts; my brother and his family; and my parents and in-laws have, by turns, sparked my curiosity, instilled an admiration for independent and creative thinking, and made it possible for me to work under otherwise challenging circumstances. I am deeply grateful to all of them. Finally, Porter and Heide Albers have given me daily infusions of joy that sustain me in all aspects of life. And Greg Albers has been with me, cheering me on over the complete duration of this project, start to finish. Maybe I could have done it without him, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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PART 1

PHOTOGRAPHY IN SUSPENSION

1 INTRODUCTION

Uncertain Histories revolves around a fundamental paradox generated by the photographic medium: How can photographs so vividly capture specific moments and yet, at the same time, tell us so little? In this book, I argue that the fraught relationship between photographs and the histories they might tell is precisely where some of the most interesting artistic minds have been working since the late 1960s. In its relatively short history, photography has been characterized both as a clear record keeper of history and, more recently, as a medium so deeply contingent on context that it is incapable of transmitting a historical truth. Uncertain Histories considers artists whose work, rather than subscribing to either end of this spectrum, presents photography as a fundamentally ambiguous medium that can be, at once, deeply evocative of the historical past while at the same time deeply limited in the stories it can convey. This aesthetic position has emerged and shifted since the late 1960s, developing at the same time as the theoretical impulse to see photography as contextually bound, but treating the medium in a more nuanced and specific way. Rather than proclaiming definitively what photography “is,” the work discussed here revolves around photographs that function as objects always held in suspension, perpetually oscillating in their ability to convey history. The following chapters focus on several instances in contemporary art where the power of the work depends on the affective and evidentiary role of photographs, and yet the barrier to producing meaning from the image is the central point. Crucially, the problematic engagement induced by these barriers generates questions and criti-

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cal involvement, thus activating a viewer’s own sense of historical engagement. To this end, Uncertain Histories addresses the photographic work of Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Dinh Q. Lê, Joel Sternfeld, and Ken Gonzales-Day, among others. The strategies these artists and others have used to get at this perpetual ambiguity has shifted over time. Part One of this book, “Photography in Suspension,” establishes a historical and theoretical context for the concerns at stake. Part Two, “Abundance and Opacity,” hinges largely on installations that incorporate family and other types of personal photographs, often in great quantities. Work by Boltanski, Richter, and Lê is examined for how it probes the often-ambiguous experience of reading family photographs—​whether one’s own or someone else’s. In Part Three, “Unseen Histories,” I turn to the artists Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day, who have confronted an absence of the visual in photographic representations of history. Crucially, for them, photography emerges as a critical medium with which to grapple with such absences. I argue that their projects are, counterintuitively, deeply dependent on our notions of photographic indexicality, whether or not we see their ostensible photographic referents. In this book, the compulsion to dwell on history—​on how it is recorded, stored, forgotten, collected, saved, narrated, lost, remembered, and made public—​is at the heart of each artist’s engagement with the photographic medium. The artists question the different and varied ways in which photographs maintain and construct historical knowledge, and their endeavors expose the ongoing processes of writing, telling, and seeing the past. Through their work, they examine a photographic paradox that hinges equally on knowing and not knowing, on definitive proof coupled with uncertainty, on abundance of detail being met squarely with its own inadequacy. The work considered in the following chapters rests, on the one hand, on the status of the photograph as document and as evidence, as a medium whose images are indelibly linked to a real, physical world. On the other hand, through various aesthetic strategies, each artist’s project elaborates on a specific failure or limitation of this evidentiary quality. The photographic projects foreground what we don’t know about the images in question, and use the medium less as a springboard to knowledge than as a site for uncertainty. In turn, however, the photographs’ uncertain history leads back around to a new kind of knowledge production. The uncertainty is not a dead end, but a generative space for the viewer’s own productive engagement with the construction of history. Ultimately, the works that interest me in Uncertain Histories are the ones that use the photographic medium as a vehicle for thinking past the close indexical relationship a photograph has with its subject and toward the ever-evolving relationship a photograph has with its viewer. This temporal adjustment from looking at a photograph as a record of the past to looking at a photograph as an object that will activate a relationship with a future audience entails shifting from a subject-centric view to a user-centric view, and pressing on the conventional terms of photographic indexicality.

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P H O T O G R A P H Y ’ S D UA L I T Y

In 1969, the French artist Christian Boltanski made a little album of his childhood that vividly demonstrated how easily a photograph can stand for a history it does not actually represent. This album will be the focal point of the next chapter and in many ways sets the terms for the ensuing chapters. In it, photographs of Boltanski’s young nephew mingle seamlessly with the artist’s own boyhood mementos, and demonstrate what has, in the nearly fifty years since, become a truism in critical photographic studies: that the meaning of a photographic image is deeply dependent on its context. Beyond this, the album also engages with the capacities and limits of a photograph’s ability to tell a story of history. Boltanski presents personal history as a mixture of factual record and fictional invention, in which not only the viewer, but eventually the artist as well, is hard pressed to distinguish between the two modes. The album may initially have seemed to claim merely that photographs do not necessarily convey the truth. But it does much more than this, particularly as it engages questions of the many-faceted and complex ways that photographs can, often simultaneously, succeed and fail to engage their viewers with history. Since Boltanski’s work in the late 1960s, to which I will return, the terms of the conversation have shifted. From the vantage point of 2015, and in the wake of postmodernism, anyone with a critical interest in photography has had an opportunity to consider that photographs fail, often spectacularly, in their ostensible promise to narrate the past. The routine conventions of photographic albums have been clearly charted by historians, and critically minded viewers are well aware that photographs themselves are subject to endlessly mutable iterations of meanings that are deeply dependent on such variable factors as framing, captions, context, presentation, and historical position. Decades of Photoshop and critical theory have taught us to know better than to blindly trust photographs, and to be sophisticated in how we consume images—​for instance to recognize that we don’t know what is just outside the frame. The temptation, which one sees over and over again, is to make a blanket statement: No one believes photographs anymore. But it is not so simple as this. While any unshakable faith between a photograph and “truth” long ago eroded (at least within many scholarly and professional circles), photographs still have a tremendous capacity to inform, to document, and to communicate. In many realms of the medium, from photojournalism to travel photography, family portraiture to scientific documentation, photographs are made and circulated with the intent to describe and visualize, and with the expectation that they will do so. Despite the emergence of a collectively sophisticated eye that is ever more wary of the elusiveness of photographic truth, we do not, in everyday practice, simply take photographs as bald lies. Recently, scholars have begun to point this out more persistently. For example, in her study of photography and political violence, Susie Linfield ruminates on the complex affective power of photographs, even in an age when

Introduction

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viewers are trained to “know better”; indeed, scholars and practitioners of photojournalism and what has become known as citizen photojournalism are perhaps those most deeply invested in tracking the shifting forms of photographic authority and document in the digital age.1 The concept of the photographic “index” is related to nineteenth-century positivist notions about the medium, but emerged specifically from the writings of the American semiotician, mathematician, and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. As will be discussed more fully in later chapters, Peirce developed a system—​if a loose one—​ that includes icons, symbols, and the index as a way of differentiating the functions of various types of signs. The aspect of Peirce’s idea that has, over time, come to be most relevant for scholars and theorists of photography is that the index describes a physical connection between the photographic image and its referent in the real world: The “action” of light rays emitted from the subject affect the film’s emulsion and cause a physical and chemical change that is recorded as the photograph’s negative. This close physical relationship is seen by many as the defining characteristic of analog photography’s distinction from other methods of visual representation that are not connected so directly to their real-world counterparts. Peirce’s term was given new life in an influential set of essays that the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss published in the late 1970s, “Notes on the Index,” and the term has since been a regular part of photographic discourse—​deployed with greater and lesser degrees of earnestness and irritation—​among scholars and critics. The discussion of the index will be developed in chapters 6 and 7 to highlight a greater extent of Peirce’s analysis and definition of the “index” than is generally acknowledged in photographic studies, extending beyond the physical connection between image and object. Specifically, I will take up the expanded role of the index to point, focus attention, and provide a junction between two “portions” of experience to understand artists’ interest in the function of photographs as markers of something unseen and thus not visually inscribed, and the rising importance of the performative act of photography in contemporary practice. Extending the function of the index away from the photograph’s point of origin untethers the photographic object from its necessary, yet often unknowable, historical referent and directs attention to the ongoing role of the photograph as it moves forward through time from one viewer to the next, serving multiple functions. The artists in this book are attuned less to capturing current events and more to the roles of photography in evoking the past. Yet they demonstrate over and over that no matter how analytic a viewer may be in decoding the many ways in which photographs remain, at best, a subjective approximation of some lived reality, at the same time they continue to be extraordinarily powerful in their evocation of a real past, whether in terms of a historical moment or something as apparently simple as a likeness of a friend or family member. Knowing that photographs are deeply deceptive, yet still reacting with fondness and delight—​and a clear absence of critical judgment—​to a funny or

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happy photograph taken by a friend or family member are not mutually exclusive positions. Indeed, it is precisely this dual response to photographic imagery that artists have investigated in their sustained engagement with the basic yet deeply complex question of how photographs evoke history. This book focuses specifically on how, since the late 1960s, artists have been particularly instrumental in pointing to and elaborating this complexity. Throughout Uncertain Histories, I discuss ways in which artists have pressed on photographs’ status as documents that invariably record the existence of something before the camera, and the difficulty of determining what that subject was. Rather than a totalizing theory about what photography is or does, the artists in this study demonstrate in highly specific ways how our relationship to photographs and our efforts to glean meaning from them remains muddled and vexing. It is tempting to find, or coin, a word to describe the shifting or oscillating ambiguity of the work discussed here. Consider “anceps”: The word has its origin in Latin meter, the foundational structure of poetry and verse.2 An anceps is a type of syllable that can be either short or long; it describes a segment of language that is unfixed or undecided. Most appealingly, anceps indicates a wavering, an indeterminacy, a state of fluctuation. Doubt and ambiguity are at its core. And yet, as appealing as this word is, it lacks the counterbalance of being fixed, as most of the photographs in this book stubbornly (also) are, even as they oscillate and waver in the viewer’s eye. Another (if inelegant) contender might be “ambi-photographs” or “amphi-photographs,” indicating a photograph that does two things at once, or inhabits both an uncertain but fixed past and an activated and malleable present. Ultimately, however, it is the common word “uncertain” that indicates best the indeterminacy and flux I am concerned with. To some ears, “uncertain” may have a ring of the wishy-washy, or a weakness of just not being sure, but, as the artists will demonstrate, there is a highly productive uncertainty in numerous forms of photographs. Consider, too, from physics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (also translated as the principle of indeterminacy), which states that at the quantum level, paired properties such as the position and the momentum of a particle cannot be known at once. The degree of certainty that fixes one element is counterbalanced by a greater uncertainty about the other, and yet both properties undoubtedly exist and have a real bearing on the particle. While I would not seek to import the truths of science to explain the arts, the uncertainty principle is a useful reminder of the pervasiveness of uncertainty in a world we seek to measure and explain with exactitude. Ultimately, Uncertain Histories takes its structure from a field of approaches contemporary artists have used to address the limits of photography’s ability to narrate the past. It argues that in their works of art, doubt, uncertainty, and inaccessibility are not dead ends: These apparent impasses to knowledge can generate a space for a productive uncertainty that is as culturally valuable as information and clarity. Uncertain Histories identifies a range of artists who have taken up similar issues as Boltanski but have redirected their aesthetic strategies to accommodate fresh approaches to a lasting core

Introduction

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concern. In a trajectory of case studies from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century, the ambiguity and uncertainty of how we today can “know” history is built into the projects, each of which uses photographs as reminders of what we do not know, what we cannot see, what is not recorded. Fundamentally, the sum total of the artists’ approaches offers a revised account of the conventional understanding of photographic indexicality. The projects shift attention away from resting primarily on the photographed moment or the event captured—​and the medium’s remarkable connection to that always-past place and time—​and direct the primary area of engagement to the shifting present of the viewer.

U N C E R TA I N O R I G I N S

John Szarkowski provocatively claimed that photography was “a medium born whole,” and, indeed, the contradictions of photography that captivate many artists today were already in play in the nineteenth century, despite a far more pervasively felt belief in the positivist qualities of the medium.3 As early as 1844, when William Henry Fox Talbot began publishing his extraordinary The Pencil of Nature, assessing and predicting the potential uses of this new technology, he posited that photographs might be used as evidence in a court of law—​proof, in his example, that stolen pieces of china had existed and belonged to an individual. Talbot referred to the “mute testimony” a photograph could present, but left open the question of “what the judge and jury might say to it,” recognizing already that the photograph’s “testimony” might not be admitted without question. Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, wisely hesitated to claim that the relationship between photographs, the evidence they bore, and the subsequent retrieval of that evidence as historical fact was clear. But in practical application, belief in a transparent communication from past to present was acknowledged in the first decades of photography’s invention. To take one example from many that could be cited: In the early 1860s, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, working in Paris under the direction of Napoleon III, hired Charles Marville to use the new medium of photography to document the narrow medieval streets and buildings of Paris that were slated for imminent demolition.4 Just ahead of the wrecking crews, Marville faithfully recorded each building and street that was to be torn down in the process of modernization. He produced a document that immediately served as a historical record: not just a smattering of images, casually taken, but a systematic representation of a specific predetermined subject made to keep a record for the benefit of posterity. Haussmann presumably commissioned the photographs to create a record of what he saw as the dirty, cramped, germ-ridden medieval streets of old Paris, and perhaps assumed that they would effectively contrast with the clean, broad new streets and uniform buildings that were to be built in their stead.5 The Marville example suggests that the medium of photography has been understood from its outset to have an integral relationship with time, with documentation, and

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with the encounter between the present (or, indeed, the projected future) and the past. Implicit in the making of Marville’s photographs was the assumption that they would act as a record for future historians to tell the story of what once was. They were to preserve what would be destroyed. By the time of Marville’s commission, photography had already become entwined with the official historical record in France. Joan Schwartz has argued that the positivist spirit of the nineteenth century is paradigmatic for both—​that “the photographic imagination and the archival imagination are inextricably linked, and can be traced to the same social origins and intellectual climate, the same desire for comprehensive knowledge and unmediated representation.”6 Upon its invention, photography immediately became situated within the longer development (since the seventeenth century) of institutional memory-houses such as libraries, Wunderkammern, and museums, as well as the establishment of encyclopedias. Photographs, notes Schwartz, “took their place in this project as a means to know the world through possession of its images.” 7 During a three-year period in France, from 1839 to 1841, both photography and archives came to share a paradigmatic origin within the empiricism of the mid-nineteenth century; because they were seen as accurate records of a past event, photographs easily took on the role of historical truth telling.8 Schwartz points to the nineteenthcentury photographer and critic William Lake Price to make the connection, in 1868, between the functional underpinnings of photography and the representation of history: “Posterity, by the agency of Photography, will view the faithful image of our times; the future student, in turning the page of history, may at the same time look on the very skin, into the very eyes, of those, long since mouldered to dust, whose lives and deeds he traces in the text.” Price optimistically imagined that photography would stabilize what might otherwise be a rocky interplay of past, present, and future. A photograph in the pages of a history book would faithfully restore a physical past that had long since “mouldered” into dust. Importantly, to possess the photograph was to possess the knowledge. And possessing the knowledge was—​not insignificantly—​a path to control. As scholars such as John Tagg and Allan Sekula demonstrated in the 1980s, this impulse for possession and control via photographs quickly found fertile ground for use and abuse in a range of nineteenth-century state and institutional settings.9 In socially controlled archival settings, such as police files, photographs operated as extensions of repressive institutional power, imbued with the restrictive force of the systems in which they were inscribed. In this setting, there was no room for uncertainty. Indeed, the function of the photograph (and the archive of which it was a part) was to transmit an ironclad and unshakable meaning, valued for its evidentiary status. But even as Price attested to the medium’s historical faithfulness and state archives harnessed its evidentiary qualities, some practitioners were deeply involved in the practical and conceptual limitations and challenges of the medium when it came to recording or evoking qualities of people, places, or events that were no longer present. Alexan-

Introduction

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der Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, printed in 1865–1866, is one of the earliest and best-known examples. Gardner and his men, in their quest to photograph the events of the American Civil War, were arriving at battlefields perpetually “after the fact” and were thus challenged to picture something that had already happened. At the time, the difficulty of photographing war had as much to do with getting to the battle sites too late as it did with the limitations of the equipment. Unable to capture a battle in progress, they instead pictured places where battles had happened—​an empty bridge, for instance—​or scenes of a battle’s grisly aftermath. But, as Anthony W. Lee has persuasively argued, the quality of “belatedness” that characterizes the Photographic Sketch Book photographs is not to the publication’s, or the medium’s, detriment. Through the lengthy texts Gardner wrote to accompany the photographs, he evinces a critical “imaginative reconstruction” of what can no longer be seen, or witnessed, by viewer or camera. The supplementary text implicitly recognizes that while the photographs convey an essential truth about the realness of “the blank horror and reality of the war,” they cannot possibly narrate the experience of war. It was photography’s very limitations, Lee argues, that “offered new possibilities”10 by showing that the war “could not be narrated” and “was too large to comprehend” as a narrative arc.11 Rather than seeing photography as insufficient due to its limitations, in other words, Gardner used its perceived deficits to useful and provocative effect. Since the late 1960s, artists have increasingly done just this. Uncertain Histories traces an arc that shifts in focus from deliberately misleading the viewer to make a point about the slippery nature of the photograph’s role as evidence (as seen in the early work of Boltanski) to a more recent sensibility that takes the contingent status of photographs for granted, on the one hand, while on the other provoking a complex and nuanced relationship between photograph and referent that proposes a performative framework for the photographic production of a historical encounter (in the projects of Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day). Intriguingly, this latter sensibility returns in many aesthetic aims and effects to the example set by Gardner in his Photographic Sketch Book, work to which we will return in chapter 6.

P H O T O G R A P H Y ’ S O S C I L L AT I O N S

Photography’s capacity to both elicit and obstruct history has not gone unnoticed in theoretical approaches to the medium—​far from it—​but more often, within any single argument, one end of the spectrum prevails. Two highly influential examples of these opposing views have been articulated by Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes.12 Kracauer was writing in 1927 in Germany, immersed in the rising flood of photographic images designed to communicate to a mass audience in the illustrated newspapers of the time. His analysis of the ontology of the photographic was an early and cogent argument against the possibility of a photograph serving as an agent of memory in the age of mass media. In his essay “Photography,” he contemplates an image of a woman

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in an illustrated magazine to launch an argument that the overflowing images of the illustrated press tell us little about the world they purport to depict; rather, the onslaught actually prevents an understanding of the world. In an analysis distinctly at odds with William Lake Price’s optimistic view of the relationship between a photograph and the history it can tell, Kracauer declares, “The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged.”13 Photographs are thus, in his estimation, fundamentally at odds with memory and can neither retrieve nor reconstruct the past. The “residuum” he identifies is on par with the disdain associated with Price’s “mouldering dust,” but whereas in Price’s example the mouldering dust was left behind in the physical event of history while the photograph carried truth forward, Kracauer’s “residuum” is all that moves forward in the photograph, leaving instead the truth to moulder in Price’s pile of dust. Kracauer extends his analysis to a holistic theory of the medium: Photography, far from retrieving the truth of something lost, instead “sweeps away the dams of memory.”14 He denies the possibility that a photograph on its own could communicate the essence or truth of a person to a later viewer. A half-century later, the French theorist Roland Barthes articulated the opposite position, not for the first time but perhaps in the most influential and widely read iteration. Camera Lucida, published in French in 1980 and in English in 1981, is Barthes’s search for the ontological core of photography, a search that is anchored by his hope after his mother’s death to find her essence in a photograph. The author does indeed claim to find what he is searching for in the famous, and infamously un-reproduced, Winter Garden photograph. After looking at a sea of photographs of his mother that, painfully, almost capture her spirit and truth, at last this one finally transmits to Barthes the core of her being. He is moved to conclude, “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.”15 Not only does it enable his memory of his mother, but in a way, it is his mother. Barthes’s own hesitation, however, is relevant for this study in its acknowledgment of the complicated relationship between photography and memory. Barthes argues elsewhere in Camera Lucida that the photograph is “never, in essence, a memory . . . but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”16 We will return to this complexity in chapter 2, along with Barthes’s introduction, also in Camera Lucida, of the terms studium and punctum, twin concepts that again seem to position the photograph as intrinsically connected to its physical referent. Barthes’s poignant essay has been useful for photographic historians seeking to understand and establish an emotional core of this (missing) photographic referent, a formulation distinctly at odds with Kracauer’s empty shell of a relationship between the image and its historical referent. Kracauer and Barthes present complicated and conflicted views, yet even the apparent opposition of their viewpoints illuminates the issues at stake. While Barthes pinpoints the photograph’s fundamental emotional hold on us in highly personal terms, Kracauer points to the eternal frustration built into the medium’s apparent promise. I am not the first to consider these two texts side by side; that each has been influential

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and articulates a near-opposite point of view makes them an appealing study in contrasts. While it is tempting to choose sides, the works discussed in this book are notable for their willingness to hold in suspension both positions at once. That mass-media photographs (in the case of Kracauer) and personal family photographs (in the case of Barthes) animate this contrast is not incidental. Indeed, as we will see, the artists on whom I focus often themselves incorporate or refer to photographs from news media or familial sources. As different registers of the photographic medium, the two operate in different spheres of life—​one seemingly public and the other apparently private. But both mass-media and familial photographs are profoundly embedded in the medium’s relationship to the construction of history, whether public or private. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, in his essay on Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962–​ongoing), to which I will return in chapter 3, observes that the familial photographs Richter uses at the outset of Atlas serve the artist “as the point from which the reflection on the relationship between photography and historical memory would originate. It was as though photography’s oscillating ambiguity, as a dubious agent simultaneously enacting and destroying mnemonic experience, could at least be fixed for one moment by situating the image in an analogue to the mnemonic imprint of the family relation itself.”17 Buchloh’s characterization of photography’s “oscillating ambiguity” eloquently notes the paradox at hand as deeply evident in family photographs, and is thus a fitting place to start in Uncertain Histories. A wave of critical texts and contributions appeared in the 1980s to signal the complete erosion of any remaining belief in the ability of a photograph to communicate independently of its cultural context. Prominent scholarship in this era was deeply concerned with tracking the mutability of photographic images, and with the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, who so brilliantly and succinctly pointed to the contextual bounds of photographs and urged viewers to be savvy and knowing in their consumption of photographic images, whether they stemmed from photojournalism, mass media, or the official canon of art history. As such, the critical mindset of the period fairly easily disposed of any concerns about indexicality and generally sidestepped nuanced views of individual photographs in favor of more sweeping positions about the limitations of a unified photographic meaning. Within this period, Allan Sekula’s essays, noted briefly above, stand out for their distinct emphasis on the implications of this mutability of meaning for the ability of photographs to narrate history.18 Sekula identified the broad reliance of mass culture on photographs as simple illustrations or representations of unmediated history, common well outside of the artistic and art historical circles where many of the challenges to photography’s explanatory capabilities were taking place. In particular his text points to the conventional practice, still in place today, of popular and educational historical texts casually incorporating photographs as unquestioned illustrations of fact. In this common formula, the archival photograph “confirms the existence of a linear progression

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from past to present, and offers the possibility of an easy and unproblematic retrieval of the past from the transcendent position offered by the present.”19 Sekula’s critique pivots around the photographic archive and is influenced by Michel Foucault’s analysis of the broad impact of cultural structures in the formations and shifts of societal standards through history.20 Thirty years ago, Sekula’s concern was that “historical narration becomes a matter of appealing to the silent authority of the archive, of unobtrusively linking incontestable documents in a seamless account.”21 Opening any history book today demonstrates that the historian’s impulse to use photographs to pictorially describe history is still largely intact.22 Each of the artists in the chapters to follow is attuned to the intellectual, popular, and literal structures we routinely use to facilitate a connection between ourselves and the photographed past. The artworks share—​and often precede—​Sekula’s impulse to disrupt the notion of a photograph’s ability to seamlessly narrate history. As such, it might intuitively follow that this book would track the footsteps of the now-dozens of studies of contemporary art based on “the archive.” In recent decades, both artistic practice and scholarship have been tremendously influenced by the rise of critical interest in the role and function of archives, and some of this will be addressed. But the term itself has become a watered down, catchall phrase. The work will demonstrate that the formulation of “the archive” that so productively served Sekula is limited in its ability to function as an overarching, umbrella term of explanation, as it so often is in the recent torrent of curatorial and scholarly projects claiming to be unified by an archival framework. The category “archive” has by now been employed with such abandon that it seems to encompass anything that has to do with either historical reference or a collection in general. It is my specific intent to move this study beyond what I see as the now-overgeneralized use of the term “archive” or “archive studies.” Many of the projects in Part Two of Uncertain Histories, in particular, could be analyzed in terms of the archive, but I have found it more useful to tease out their specific structural differences and invoke other categories of cultural collection and display, such as “album” or “atlas.” The later chapters in this book, though still deeply concerned with the archive in the abstract, are more productively animated by an analysis of the photograph’s relationship to historical narration through considerations of the role of the photograph as a document and its sometimes-performative relationship to a viewer. As Sekula pointedly asked, “How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted, and obliterated by photographs? What futures are promised; what futures are forgotten?”23 This question, now thirty years old, continues to animate the photographic work of artists today. Throughout, photographs are seen as visual launching pads for storytelling, as sites designed to provoke and evoke an accumulation of meanings. If the photographs point to history, that backward glance is only one portion of the content; the indexical trace is both foundational and fodder for future and innumerable gestures. Again and again, the evidentiary quality of a photograph is insistently suspended with its unknowability.

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S H A R E D S T R AT E G I E S

Nearly every artist discussed in this book has a connection—​often fundamentally informing the work—​to a traumatic personal or historical event. These histories have often been central to existing discussions about the artists’ work and oeuvres, and it is not the project of this book to rehearse those connections and analyses.24 That traumatic wartime or otherwise violent experiences motivate much of the work included in this book is neither accidental nor coincidental. But rather than tracing a shared traumatic origin among the projects, the goal is to follow the material forward toward its reception, and as it indicates the artists’ engagement with the photographic medium. Uncertain Histories identifies and assesses several core aesthetic strategies that highlight photography’s complicated relationship to the production of history. Crucially, the artists I focus on move uncertainty to a productive outcome wherein viewers become active and engaged participants in examining the process of historical excavation. And, despite their clear national and generational differences, they share several overlapping strategies. First, in a viewer’s apprehension of the artwork, some element typically remains out of view, an awareness of which is often supplanted by text. In the case of Richter’s Atlas, it is the sheer quantity of images that spreads the work out over several galleries, while in Boltanski’s Les archives de C. B. 1965–​1988, the photographs are deliberately obscured. Conversely, in the work of Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day, it is the ostensible subject of the photograph—​its historical referent—​t hat is out of view, not just for the viewer but for the photographer as well. The role of the text varies as well. It may deliberately confuse or obfuscate (Boltanski), it may make the ultimate subject of a photograph clear (Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day), or it may point the viewer toward further meaning (Lê). The text may be as seemingly simple as a title (Richter’s Atlas), come in the form of extended caption (Sternfeld), or fill a book (Gonzales-Day). In each case, however, the words the artist chooses deeply affect the viewer’s interpretation of the photographic image and encourage an uncertain reading of the material at hand—​even, at times, as it seems to fix it. The combination of omitting or obfuscating some portion of the work along with the frequently ambivalent role of text to fix meaning leaves a viewer on unsteady footing, yet at the same time activates a participatory impulse; the uncertainty generates a viewer’s productive engagement with highly specific personal and national histories. Several of the works in question use large numbers of photographs (Boltanski, Richter, Lê) so that the prospect of even looking at, let alone comprehending, each image in the work is daunting. Faced with upward of eight thousand individual images in Atlas, for example, a minimum of three and a half hours is necessary to look at every image for just two seconds. Others suggest that their physical referent—​t he ostensible “subject” of the photograph—​has long since disappeared, presenting an obstacle to producing meaning based on the availability of physical evidence. The viewer must ask how a photograph evokes history without showing its subject. In either case—​large

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numbers of images, or, conversely, a lack of a visible photographic referent—​t he works pointedly do not “reveal” history but create an initial offering, a suggestion, perhaps a challenge. Information is consciously both offered and withheld. The viewer is referred elsewhere, and back again; the works call for a deferred comprehension. Any meanings ascribed to the individual items can only be constructed by residual or potential significance. No longer is the photograph clearly associated with its referent, pointing to a former life; rather, it teems with potential interpretations, cross-references, and narrative possibilities.

CHAP TER OUTLINES

Uncertain Histories engages with photography’s limitations in narrating a past history through a series of linked approaches taken by contemporary artists. This introduction is followed by a chapter that establishes an aesthetic framework for uncertainty in photography. I discuss a range of approaches to differentiate between photographic uncertainty and photographic fiction, focusing intently on an early project by Christian Boltanski as exemplary of the former mode. His modest “family album” Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (Research and Presentation of Everything That Remains from My Childhood, 1944–​1950), created in May 1969, gathers a small group of ostensibly personal childhood snapshots that are set into an ambiguously captioned narrative. This project centrally features family snapshots, a genre that reappears throughout this book and has lately become a core issue in historiography. Through an analysis of the evolving critical reception of this little album, I argue that it is only in the album’s extended life that Boltanski most profoundly challenged his audience to accept ambiguity and uncertainty as a valid conclusion. In the second part of the chapter, I extend Boltanski’s concern forward toward several contemporary photographic projects to differentiate between cultivating uncertainty and producing fiction. Finally, I focus on the intersection of Collected Visions, by the artist Lorie Novak (begun in 1996), and the critical contributions by the scholar Annette Kuhn to the literature on family photography as two manifestations of a remarkable turn toward a public engagement with photographic uncertainty in the very personal terrain of family pictures. Part Two, “Abundance and Opacity,” begins with a chapter devoted to Atlas, Gerhard Richter’s ongoing, career-long public “archive,” exhibited first in 1972 and as recently as 2014. Like Boltanski, Richter mines his own photographic past as well as the anonymous flow of photographic ephemera that sometimes informs his painting. His aesthetic closeness to the source material of family albums provides a friction that ultimately underscores the unknowability present even in images of those supposedly closest to us. Following an analysis of a critical confusion that persists in determining the precise origin of the family snapshots in Richter’s Atlas, I turn to the title of the work itself to continue to press on the categorical distinctions that are implicit—​yet understudied—​among albums, archives, atlases, and artworks. By focusing on the “album”

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images contained within Richter’s archival artwork, Atlas, I argue that in this work a viewer must navigate a shifting set of framing devices for the images contained in the work, a process that perpetuates a persistent uncertainty about the role and use of both particular photographs and photographs as they are contained in distinct yet overlapping categorical structures. Chapter 4 considers the theoretical implications of activating personal memory by using the snapshots of anonymous others. This chapter focuses on the Vietnameseborn artist Dinh Q. Lê and his 1999 project Mot Coi Di Ve, using the photographic uncertainties of the German author W. G. Sebald as a point of entry. Mot Coi Di Ve is a net of roughly two thousand small, found photographs that are sewn loosely together, corner to corner, and hung from ceiling to floor, collectively spanning nearly twenty feet across. Lê’s family fled Vietnam in 1975, leaving behind their family photographs, and Lê, upon moving back to his birth country in 1999, began to purchase old photographs by the kilo in Ho Chi Minh City thrift shops, inscribing them with Vietnamese poetry and entries from wartime journals. I read Mot Coi Di Ve as an instantiation of Margaret Olin’s notion of “photographic misidentification,” in which our own memory can be deeply activated by photographs of someone else’s family, thereby deeming questionable the long-standing notion of photographic indexicality.25 Chapter 5 builds on these themes and returns to the work of Boltanski, as it also anticipates the subsequent chapters’ focus on the inaccessibility of images. Whereas Boltanski’s early work in 1969 establishes a framework for the terms of this book’s interests, the artist’s return throughout his career to questions of the possibility of historic retrieval via photography addresses the book’s themes in shifting ways. Twenty years after his first modest album, the artist’s Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (The Archives of C. B., 1965–​1988) debuted in Paris. It is a large-scale installation that seems to hold the artist’s archive (including some fifteen hundred personal snapshots) in 646 tin boxes. I extend the questions of photography and narrative toward the promise of biographic reconstruction that archives hold, and Boltanski’s adamant stance, expressed through this under-studied piece, that doubt must feature centrally in any such effort. I return to the questions posed in chapter 2 about categorical disruptions between archive, album, and artwork (not “atlas,” in this case) to demonstrate how Boltanski critiques the belief that a photographic document or, by extension, a photographic archive, can reveal history. In Part Three, “Unseen Histories,” I move away from the personal snapshot and away, even, from the notion of a visible subject. While the artists in this last section work with a substantially different aesthetic and mode of presentation than those in the previous chapters, these differences provide an opportunity for considering a broad range of approaches to the themes at hand. Work by Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day shows how the medium of photography can present historical subjects that are now unseen. Sternfeld’s attention to violence in the United States and Gonzales-Day’s historical and political inquiry into lynching sites in California both dwell on a now “empty” land-

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scape—​after the fact, after the violent event has passed and the land has returned to its quotidian appearance. Circling back to the limits of photographic evidence with regard to individual memory, this concluding section opens outward to track the same limits, now with regard to the politics and stakes of constructing national histories. It also returns to the question of photographic indexicality, as well as to the crucial factor of the viewer’s experience. My personal involvement in the book’s narrative becomes more and more evident, as the work discussed in these last chapters more explicitly invites a participatory experience. Chapter 6 considers the work of Joel Sternfeld and returns to the dilemma, sketched briefly above in the case of the Civil War photographs, of how a photographer engages with an event that has already happened. From 1993 to 1996, Sternfeld traveled to sites of violence around the United States, ranging from the well-known, such as the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, to the more obscure, such as the rocket testing facility in Utah where the critical failing part in the space shuttle Challenger’s 1986 explosion was tested. Through a potent combination of text and image, many of which prompt the viewer to recall a previously seen horrific image in the news media, Sternfeld’s series addresses multiple forms of violence, none of which can any longer be photographically documented. Like Alexander Gardner, Sternfeld prompts his audience to a kind of imaginative reconstruction of history. I consider Sternfeld’s own characterization of the series as performative, addressing the relationship between performance, document, and viewer, and returning to the reframing of photographic indexicality introduced in chapter 4. This chapter ultimately considers the complex temporal function of Sternfeld’s On This Site. Chapter 7 continues to engage with the challenge of photographically representing an unseen history. In his pursuit of the history of lynching in the West, the American artist Ken Gonzales-Day seeks to make visible a period of American history that has been largely ignored. His multifaceted approach includes archival and scholarly research and writing, the production of original photographs, the digital manipulation of historic imagery pertaining to lynching, and walking tours. I focus in particular on the ways in which he encourages his audience to become, themselves, active seekers of history, thereby internalizing the artist’s own performative—​and, at times, uncertain—​process. As with Sternfeld’s On This Site, through the impulse to both refer photographically to an unseen history and engage a performative process, this project relies as much on the photographic gesture as it does on its trace.

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2 CULTIVATING UNCERTAINTY

“You have a very real nucleus and around this nucleus a large empty space.”1 The German author W. G. Sebald (1944–​2001) offers this metaphor for the process of constructing a narrative from a photograph, evoking a sense of it as being both moored to its origin in reality and simultaneously surrounded by possibility. The photograph’s “realness” is essential, but so is the fact of that “reality” being detached from its surroundings. The “large empty space” in which the “real nucleus” exists is where we tell the stories, in the space that contains the narrative. Sebald’s description mirrors the sense of photographs as a duality (at least), held perpetually in suspension, oscillating between their “realness” and the shifting stories they might provoke. In his life, Sebald always collected what he called “stray photographs,” vernacular snapshot images that often made their way into his novels. Within Sebald’s texts, these photographs served as starting points, artifacts that enabled his process of fictive construction. These snapshots, untethered from their former lives, sprinkled his novels with a tantalizingly ambiguous relationship to the surrounding text. The photo historian and theorist John Tagg has provocatively suggested that in Sebald’s work, the primary role of photographs is to elicit what cannot be documented, what resists coming to light. In a brief yet rich analysis, he directs his readers to an array of photographs in Sebald’s book The Emigrants, published in German in 1992.2 In one particular snapshot, which Tagg illustrates, a figure wears a dark coat with the collar turned up; he is hunched against the cold, standing on the shores of an ocean, waves crashing behind. But the particulars of the image are almost immaterial: Tagg

18

could have chosen nearly any other image from the book to make the same point.3 The photograph clearly records a fact (a man stands on a beach) and potentially could serve as evidence to the degree that any other photograph could, but in Sebald’s context, it does not. Not only does it not serve as evidence, but its presence within the text serves primarily to obfuscate any perception of clarity about its fundamental role with regard to the narrative. It is tantalizingly uncertain. As Tagg suggests, Sebald used photographs precisely for the uncertainty they conveyed—​for their tenuous relationship to reality and their invariably ambiguous relationship to his narratives. J. J. Long, a Sebald scholar with a particular interest in the author’s use of photographs, characterizes Sebald’s narrative project as involving “an exploration of man’s historical relationship to his environment, the connection between individual, familial, and collective memory, and the means by which such memory is passed on from one generation to the next.”4 Given these interests, it is not surprising that Sebald was familiar with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), perhaps the most influential and widely cited rumination on photography and memory.5 In Camera Lucida, Barthes seems to suggest that a photograph can, in fact, hold the essence of memory. But the photograph as memory container is also entirely subjective: The famously un-reproduced photograph of Barthes’s mother, in which the son recognizes the mother’s essence, even as a little girl he could never have known, would, Barthes was certain, “be nothing but an indifferent picture” for anyone else.6 For that reason, he regards the photograph as precious and cannot share it. In this case, Barthes’s encounter with his mother’s essence is based on an unseen familial bond and fundamentally private. But he also proposes a vaguer kind of memory encounter with a snapshot, one that depends on something other than personal knowledge of the subject or firsthand memory. Deploying the Latin words studium and punctum, he contrasts the elements of a photograph that inform and describe (studium) with the elements that are deeply and personally affecting (punctum). For Barthes, the studium is the scene described, and it is of scholarly interest alone. It is “that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste.”7 We encounter most photographs in the world in this manner: We learn something from them, a scene is described in a more or less interesting way. But the punctum describes the moment when “in this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it.”8 The punctum disturbs the studium; it “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”9 Despite the tendency of scholars to focus intently on the punctum as an idiosyncratic detail of a photograph, one that is likely a necessary by-product of whatever the photographer intended to capture, Barthes proposes at least three distinct ways the punctum works. As popularly and most widely understood, it can be a detail that seizes the viewer. It also can emerge, however, as the realization of the past-ness of time in a photograph (the “this-has-been”), or, in a third case, it can be some element of a photograph that arrests the viewer only later, well after having looked at the image itself, something not quite nameable. In other words, as is the case in the latter two examples, the punctum

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need not be a specific visual component of the photograph. Rather, it can be the realization of a past reality (a representation of something real that is necessarily over), or it can be an element of the photograph as it is recalled. In any scenario, the punctum is entirely subjective and nontransferable from one person to another. Importantly, it also represents a kind of reciprocal collaboration between photograph and viewer. The punctum “is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”10 As such, the concept of the punctum offers far more than an understanding of how certain photographs visually grab (or “prick”) us more than others. In its reciprocity and subjectivity, it describes what Sebald later referred to as the tension between the “very real nucleus” of the photograph surrounded by the large empty space of possibility and what the viewer “adds” to the picture. While the connection between Sebald and Barthes is certainly not new, within the context of this study a compelling possibility comes to the fore: that the memories produced by photographs have very little to do with the viewer’s personal relationship to the image in question. Margaret Olin, in her brilliant analysis of Camera Lucida, argues that the punctum offers a way of thinking past the close indexical relationship a photograph has with its subject and toward the ever-evolving relationship a photograph has with its viewer, whoever that viewer might be.11 Like the punctum, the notion of the photographic index, as introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, has been similarly narrowly interpreted by most photo historians to indicate the physical connection between a photographic image and the object it represents, through the action of light that reflects off an object and “imprints” the photographic negative. We will take up the complexity of the index more substantially in chapter 6, accepting for now the conventional notion of it as indicating a photograph’s physical connection to its referent. The strength of Olin’s analysis lies in the layers of excavation through which she demonstrates several instances of Barthes’s own identification with a photograph’s punctum that could be better construed as misidentifications. In one of Barthes’s most frequently cited descriptions of how the punctum works, he notes a necklace, “a slender ribbon of braided gold,” worn by a black woman in a James Van Der Zee photograph he is studying. As Olin points out, this detail, supposedly evidence of the visceral power of a slight visual moment to serve as a searing punctum, is misremembered. In the Van Der Zee photograph, the necklace is, in fact, a strand of pearls. But Olin notes that a braided gold necklace does appear in a similarly composed photograph of members of Barthes’s own family, with his Aunt Alice as the wearer of the displaced punctum. The punctum, then, in Barthes’s own treatment, was displaced through memory from one photograph to another. While it may be nontransferable between viewers, it is remarkably transferable from one photograph to another. Olin further suggests that Barthes’s “mistake” was no mistake at all: Why else would he have pointed out to his readers that the punctum will not bear any scrutiny?12 Thus, the displacement of the punctum ultimately means that our typical notion of the importance of photographs’ close relationship to the referents they depict—​t heir indexicality—​is flawed. If we can

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be “pierced” by a false memory, it matters less what we are looking at than the fact that we are looking at a photograph, period. As Olin puts it, “The fact that something is in front of the camera matters; what that something was does not. What matters is displaced.”13 Photographs, then, are not important for conveying a particular real, but for conveying any real. It matters that it is something real, but not what the real “really” is. This may go some way toward explaining why, in the age of digital manipulation, we still enjoy photographs. It’s not that they offer a platform for engaging with a specific reality, but rather a suggestion of the real, just enough of a visual cue to the real that we are sufficiently seduced, circumventing the need to critically evaluate their relative authenticity. In this formulation, the viewer’s focus shifts forward from the subject pictured in the photograph to encompass the user of the photograph in terms of understanding the relationship of photograph to referent.14 And now, as users of photographs, Barthes’s narrator and Sebald’s narrator appear to share some traits: Each has a remarkable ability to identify his own personal history with a photograph of someone else, and to construct an elaborate game of signification that has little to do with the factual content of the photographs. Rather than dwelling on facts, Sebald is concerned with the narrator’s eclectic conflation of photographic images with memory images, to the point of dissolving each into the other. What Sebald suggests is that while we may be attached to our own pictures, others’ photographs can do the job just as well. It can just as easily be someone else’s family snapshot that triggers a personal memory. Sebald, as it happens, made his own photographic misidentification while discussing his interest in Camera Lucida. In his only interview specifically devoted to photography, Sebald refers to a 1931 photograph by André Kertész of a young Parisian schoolboy named Ernest, which he saw as Barthes illustrated it in Camera Lucida (fig. 1). In the interview, Sebald recalls generally (admitting that his recollection is hazy) that Barthes posed the question of “what might later have happened to this boy.”15 In Barthes’s text, the photograph appears within a rumination on the importance of a photograph’s date: “The date belongs to the photograph: not because it denotes a style (this does not concern me), but because it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute life, death, inexorable extinction of the generations: it is possible that Ernest, a schoolboy photographed in 1931 by Kertész, is still alive today (but where? How? What a novel!).”16 It makes perfect sense that Sebald, the novelist who spins stories out of photographs, would have been struck by Barthes’s own brief projection, nearly fifty years after the photograph was taken, about the future life of this boy. Ironically, though fittingly, Sebald himself misremembered the date of the photograph, locating it to “perhaps the year 1903 or so” and from there projecting forward to imagine Ernest’s involvement in World War I: “Fourteen years later this now about twenty year old man sacrificed his life on the Somme or in Passchendaele, or at another horrible place.”17 But Sebald’s misidentification is not the same as Barthes’s. And, surely, their interests in the photograph diverge. Barthes projected the life of the young French boy, who

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Figure 1 André Kertész, Ernest, Paris (1931), as reproduced in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Image: © Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.

would have been less than ten years his junior (if the boy in the photograph is six or seven, he would have been born in 1924 or 1925; Barthes was born in 1915), forward to Paris in 1979: his own place and time at the writing of Camera Lucida. Sebald, by contrast, who was German, imagined the boy’s death on a battlefield in World War I: material for a historical novel of the type Sebald wrote. That the boy was not yet born during World War I is of little import or consequence for Sebald’s purpose. But Barthes imagines that Ernest might be alive in Paris in 1979, a man in his mid-fifties, a peer to Barthes’s mid-sixties. While the exact date of the photograph was important for Barthes,18 it may never have been for Sebald. The photograph did not make him think about the historical specificity of Paris in 1931 or 1979, but served as “a real nucleus” that he could launch into the open space of his historical imagination. In other words, it

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mattered to Sebald that the photograph was a real person—​a boy in France, even—​but getting the dates right was entirely superfluous to the project of narrative construction. These examples illustrate the tangle of memory, projection, and fiction that may unfurl from a single compelling snapshot. While we may know, on some level, that their truth is impossible to obtain, the images become an irresistible springboard for our own narrative impulses. While Tagg identifies a compelling ambiguity in the Sebald images, he argues that “few have shared Sebald’s scruples,” and that few believe photographs exist for the purpose of provoking the viewer to ponder their verifiability, their status as evidence.19 It is the project of Uncertain Histories to examine the work of contemporary artists for whom this belief is precisely a core concern. Using the example of Sebald as a foundation, it also distinguishes photographic uncertainty from photographic fiction, arguing that although the distinction between the two artistic strategies is found along a continuum, it remains an important difference. Christian Boltanski’s project establishes an aesthetic framework for uncertainty in photography, which the conclusion of this chapter sees perpetuated in more recent digitally based and socially networked aesthetic commentaries on snapshot photographs such as Lorie Novak’s Collected Visions. Begun in 1996, Novak’s digital snapshot archive continues to be active, inviting contributions from the public of both personal photographs and stories. Though they are radically different projects, both critically challenge the assumption of snapshots as fundamentally personal by highlighting the productive instability of photographic images. The aesthetic transformations of personal snapshots are taken just far enough into the artistic arena that we, as viewers, may engage in the fraught process of historical reconstruction. It is our engagement that is key; by becoming complicit in the artist’s historical constructions, we are propelled into our own doubt and uncertainty.

L I K E P R O O F T H AT T H E H I S T O R Y O N E T E L L S I S R E A L Photography interests me because it feels like truth, like proof that the history one tells is real, it gives the illusion of reality. CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI, 1975

In 1969, a decade before Barthes authored Camera Lucida in Paris, a twenty-five-yearold Christian Boltanski distributed his first artist’s book, composed of snapshots from family outings, school pictures, and photographs that seemed to show relics from childhood, such as a bed, a lock of hair, and a piece of a sweater. The book functioned to demonstrate the notion he would express several years later, that photographs are “like proof that the history one tells is real,” in an implicit argument that all histories are, in fact, illusions on some level.20 At the time, Boltanski was acquainted with Claude Givaudan, the owner of a prominent Paris gallery on Boulevard Saint-Germain, just a couple of blocks from the artist’s childhood home. Givaudan allowed artists to use

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his primitive copy machine for mailings, and the dealer made an arrangement with Boltanski in which the latter had only to pay for the paper and ink he used to make artist’s books at the gallery. Significantly, Givaudan also made his mailing list available. Boltanski figured that this list would include important collectors, dealers, and critics, an appealing audience for the young, unknown artist.21 He made 150 of the little booklets on Givaudan’s machine and sent them out to the addresses on the mailing list. His “viewers” thus received this odd little album in the mail unsolicited.22 The recipient of each book, presumably, would have opened up the small package received with the rest of the day’s mail and read it as a kind of personal photo album made oddly public. As art collectors or people otherwise affiliated with Givaudan’s cutting-edge gallery, they were probably at least moderately receptive to this unusual mailing. Boltanski identified himself by name in captions throughout the album, but he did not know the people who received it, and it was early enough in his career that they would have had no reason to know him. Not knowing who else may have received the album, or to how many people it had been sent, they would not have known just how public it was—​that across Paris there were dozens of other people implicated in this experiment without conclusion. The reception of Boltanski’s little album has changed dramatically over time as the artist’s reputation has grown. Its meaning has changed, too, evolving from a comment on the malleable construction of photographic identity to a wry indicator of the tenuous bond between a photograph and its meaning. The first grainy photograph, on the cover page, appears to be a class picture and is captioned “Collège d’Hulst, Paris 1950–​51” (fig. 2). In it, nineteen young students sit and stand in three rows, the typical format for a class photograph. The girls, ankles crossed, wear plaid and plain skirts, and the boys wear utilitarian crewneck sweaters and pants. Five children stand in the last row, and an “X” appears above one boy’s head. The viewer’s attention is quickly drawn to this boy, who would otherwise blend in with his classmates, and a caption identifies him as Christian Boltanski. He has dark hair and wears a jacket that is open to reveal a T-shirt. As a genre within Boltanski’s Western European context, the class picture is instantly recognizable and highly formulaic—​t he record of a ritualized, annual classroom performance. On turning the page, the addressee would have encountered a typewritten text, signed by this still-unknown character, Christian Boltanski, Paris, May 1969. The text, written in French, is an immediate indicator of the tone with which one should approach the ensuing pages: We will never realize quite clearly enough what a shameful thing death is. In the end, we never try to fight it head on, doctors and scientists merely establish a pact with it, they fight on points of detail, they slow it down by a few months, a few years, but it all amounts

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Figure 2 Christian Boltanski, cover of Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969). Artist’s book, 26.2 × 17.5 cm. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

to nothing. What we need to do is attack the roots of the problem in a big collective effort in which each of us will work towards his own survival and everyone else’s. That’s why—​because one of us has to give an example—​I decided to harness myself to the project that’s been close to my heart for a long time: preserving oneself whole, keeping a trace of all the moments of our lives, all the objects that have surrounded us, everything we’ve said and what’s been said around us, that’s my goal. The task is vast, and my means are frail. Why didn’t I start before? Almost everything dealing with the period that I first set about saving (6 September 1944–​24 July 1950) has been lost, thrown away, through culpable negligence. It was only with infinite difficulty that I was able to find the few elements that I am presenting here. To prove their authenticity, to situate them precisely, all this has been possible only as the result of ceaseless questioning and minutely detailed research. But the effort still to be made is great, and so many years will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labeled in a safe place, secure against theft, fire and nuclear war, from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point, and that, being thus assured of never dying, I may, finally, rest.23

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It suddenly seems that the reader is holding a relic, the precious few remaining mementos of an individual life. To preserve oneself whole—​what is this impulse? Even as he recognizes that much has been lost, Boltanski seems—​at least in writing—​to be after the project of preserving not only his whole life but all that happens around him. But it is a simultaneously sincere and mocking gesture, the desperate tone going well over the top to clarify the absurdity of the maker’s urgent preservation efforts that seek, ultimately, eternal life. It is a Borgesian dream reminiscent of that author’s imaginative quest to produce a map of the world so perfect and complete that in the end it exactly covers the existing world, thereby rendering the map useless.24 But Boltanski’s statement also marks this book as less a regular album than a manifesto for personal documentation, anticipating by forty years the promises of digital technology. Equal parts earnest and absurd, Boltanski defines an impulse many will recognize in our own age of endless digital preservation, yet with goals so comprehensive as to be clearly futile. He suggests that our efforts at preservation, meant to extend life, are instead at the expense of it. Turning the page again, we return to the photographic. Though the images are all captioned, their crude quality of reproduction further exaggerates any graininess already present in the photographs, making some of the pictures nearly unreadable. The next two photographs are different in kind from the cover image: not official school pictures, but casually taken family snapshots: a young boy playing with blocks, looking directly at the camera (fig. 3), and a kind of still life of what appears to be the same blocks. These blocks, however, are dated two decades later (1969 versus 1946) to indicate their status as a relic, now carefully arranged and lit to highlight the goal of the image as a study of form, composition, and light. The next page confirms the notion of childhood relics, fallen out of use: At the top, an image of a mostly made bed, seen from the foot, and below, a photograph of a striped shirt that has been pinned up (fig. 4). The objects could not be more banal, yet, as Boltanski’s text insistently reminds us, this is all that remains. These objects, plain as they are, are precious survivors—​or at least their photographic images are. The objects were present to be photographed, but the album preserves their reproduction. The same is true of the class photograph: It is not the children that remain, nor even the original class photograph, but the reproduction of that image. Turning the page one more time, the viewer sees two more photographs (fig. 5), one depicting a scrap of patterned plaid fabric, perhaps similar to what the two-yearold wears in the photo with the blocks, and the other an oblong mass of dense, frizzy hair. If it wasn’t sensed before, the absurdity of this seemingly egomaniacal parade of childhood relics is now in full force. We are no longer seeing a bed and a shirt used by Boltanski, but a fragment of a pullover and a matted lock of hair, recalling the veneration of fragments left from the bodies of saints and martyrs, or the mother’s impulse to save a lock of hair from her child’s first haircut.25 The next two pages move from photographs of objects to photographs of text: a worn and tattered page from what appears to be a children’s story or fairytale and a slightly

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Figure 3 Christian Boltanski, page 2 from Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​ 1950 (1969). Artist’s book, 26.2 × 17.5 cm. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 4 Christian Boltanski, page 3 from Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​ 1950 (1969). Artist’s book, 26.2 × 17.5 cm. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 5 Christian Boltanski, page 4 from Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​ 1950 (1969). Artist’s book, 26.2 × 17.5 cm. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

crumpled piece of paper—​perhaps one that a six-year-old Boltanski had written in class. The final two spreads return to photographs of the family-snapshot variety. Arranged informally, three images to a page, they are less than two inches square, and some bear the scalloped edges of the commercially printed images of their time. They show mother and child, the family car, and beach scenes of the family on vacation. As before, they are extremely difficult to decipher visually. The initial mailing did not include a title, though later this project would be called Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (Research and Presentation of Everything That Remains from My Childhood, 1944–​1950).26 In its first iteration—​a little album without a title, mailed to strangers—​t he book functioned within a contained and disconnected, yet curiously intimate, offering between artist and unsuspecting recipient. But the gesture operated within a bourgeoning cultural dialogue marked in 1965 by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who considered the role and function of family albums in his edited study Photography: A Middle-Brow Art.27 Bourdieu’s formulation is useful both to set a context of then-current French sociological thought regarding photographs, and to establish a framework for reading Boltanski’s initial choices in Recherche et présentation. Notably, Boltanski’s sociologist brother, Luc, is included as an author in the volume.28 “The family album,” Bourdieu writes, “expresses the essence of social memory.” He continues, “The images of the past arranged in chronological order, the logical order of social memory, evoke and communicate the memory of events which deserve to be preserved because the group sees a factor of unification in the monuments of its past unity or—​which amounts to the same thing—​because it draws confirmation of its present unity from its past, has all the clarity of a faithfully visited gravestone.”29 The traditional family album, then, serves primarily as a marker for memory and for connecting a group’s past with its present. Unlike an archive, an album is a product of personal selection, its contents having been culled for presentation and labeled for future reference. As such, the form is a powerful indicator of identity within a family group, identifying not only a specific past but recalling that past for the present as a reminder of unity. More recently, in her study of family photographs, Marianne Hirsch has argued that a family photograph is constituted by a “relational network” of familial gazes.30 Family members see themselves in photographs in relation to one another, something that has happened since even before George Eastman’s invention of the Kodak camera and the popularization of amateur photography.31 Since this explosion of family-made imagery, Hirsch writes, the photograph has become a family’s “primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation—​the means by which family memory would be continued and perpetuated, by which the family’s story would henceforth be told.”32 By extension, the assembling of a family album actually becomes a tool to construct and perpetuate stories, to construct how we see ourselves. Where an archive may offer relatively raw information, an album gives the opportunity to construct narrative. Furthermore, in Hirsch’s formulation, the process is ongoing (if perhaps not always fluid). The

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notion of a relational network is necessarily an evolving one, subject to the ever-shifting and unfolding interpersonal relationships that constitute the network’s infrastructure. In 1975, echoing to some degree Bourdieu’s thoughts (of which he likely would have been aware because of his brother’s connection), Boltanski remarked, “When I exhibited a photography album, I noticed that we have, in fact, all, the same photographs, that these albums were nothing but the catalogue of familial rituals, such as marriages, vacations, first communions, and that their function was to reinforce familial cohesion. Spectators recognized themselves in these photographs, they said, ‘I was on this beach’ or ‘it looks like my uncle’ or ‘I too had a white suit when I was little.’ ”33 Extending this logic, the album is not only an expression of social memory, but a construction that may be largely interchangeable within a common culture from one person to the next. On one level, Boltanski’s project was, initially, a declaration of certainty, a plea for preservation that, though tinged with futility, was built on the premise of the photograph’s evidentiary power, its ability to fix and delineate certain portions of a young boy’s life. Its malleability with regard to its actual subject was, in fact, confirmation of shared societal ritual. This aesthetic assertion strikes to the core of how we understand our relationship with photographic images.

RECONS TITUTION

Remarkably, for the first fifteen years of his artistic career, there was scant mention of Boltanski’s biography in written reviews and articles, a fact all the more remarkable given the artist’s stated predilection for inventing his life story as he went. Though his artistic work in the 1970s was largely about personal history, and was frequently understood at the time as an attempt to reconstruct the objects of his childhood, only rarely did an article or interview delve into the story of his life.34 And although the constructed nature of Boltanski’s identity, and his interest in it as an artistic subject, was a major theme of the 1984 Pompidou Center mid-career retrospective curated by Bernard Blistène, there was still virtually no mention of the story of his childhood beyond the obligatory “Né à Paris le 6 septembre 1944. Vit et travaille à Paris.”35 It was not until 1985 that Boltanski’s construction of a “personal mythology” (as he put it) entered the discourse—​something now so ingrained in the literature that it is hard to imagine a time without it. In a 1985 interview with the poet and art critic Demosthènes Davvetas, Boltanski reminds his interviewer, “Don’t forget my artistic sensibility derives from my personal mythology.”36 In the same interview, he claims the 1969 Recherche et présentation as his “official artist’s debut.” In a separate article by Davvetas one year later, the author argues, “We can trace the enduring subject of [Boltanski’s] art to his childhood in a Jewish family in Paris, France, during the years after World War II.”37 Boltanski was born at home in Paris on September 6, 1944, just twelve days after the liberation of the city from Nazi forces. His mother was Catholic, his father Jewish. The Boltanskis lived on rue de Grenelle in the elegant 7th arrondissement.38 Their bourgeois

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neighborhood, though well-removed from the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 20th arrondissements, where most arrests and deportations took place, was relatively close to the heart of Nazi operations in the city. Following the German army’s May 1940 invasion and subsequent occupation, Paris had become increasingly dangerous for Jewish residents.39 In October 1940, Nazis bombed seven synagogues in the city; in June 1942, Jews in Paris were ordered to wear the Star of David for identification. By mid-1943, just sixty thousand Jews remained in the city, from the hundred and fifty thousand who had been registered in a 1940 census. Many had fled, but by the liberation of 1944, about fifty thousand Parisian Jews had been deported and murdered. At some time in 1943, fearing for the father’s safety, Boltanski’s parents staged a loud fight for the benefit of the neighbors and then filed for a legal divorce.40 Hoping to have convinced both their immediate neighbors and the authorities of his disappearance, the father hid beneath the floorboards of the family house. Though Christian had not yet been born, his two older brothers endured their father’s concealment for about a year.41 According to Boltanski, the older brother, fourteen-year-old Jean-Elie, knew the truth; Luc, just four, was too young to be trusted not to accidentally reveal the secret. Shortly after the war ended, and after Christian was born, the parents were legally remarried; the family jokes that Christian was a bastard child. But they were moved enough by the timing of his birth that they gave him the middle name “Liberté.” On September 9, 1944, when Christian was three days old, Charles de Gaulle established a new government to replace the fallen Vichy State, and the country and its citizens began the long process of recovery. The horrifying extent of the atrocities the Jewish people had suffered under the Nazis unfolded over time. Boltanski grew up in a home where, as he has put it, “all the friends and family were survivors.”42 Conversations in the household about the war and the Holocaust were pervasive; indeed, he recalls that his family and their friends spoke about it “all the time, all the time.”43 Even after the war, his father rarely left the house alone, an effect of his wartime trauma. The sudden emergence and circulation of this biographical information became fuel from the mid-1980s on for endless speculation as to the place the Holocaust occupies in Boltanski’s work. The artist himself seems to have encouraged the ambiguity of the connection of his work with the Holocaust, stating at different times that his work has nothing to do with it, and at other moments that it does. But this now-prevailing mode of understanding Boltanski’s artistic career as intertwined with death, loss, and the Holocaust obscures earlier interpretive frames and works engaged with archaeology, archives, and, especially, “reconstitution.” Indeed, the theme of reconstitution is a central one for Boltanski, and a term he first used as the title of his 1971 solo exhibition at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris.44 Reconstitution was also the title of an important and widely reviewed 1978 monograph on Boltanski and a 1990 retrospective exhibition of his work that traveled to London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the Musée de Grenoble in France, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.45 “Reconstitution,”

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at its core, acknowledges a difference from the original, a structure erected to fill the place of something missing. Like a photograph, a reconstitution can never be what once was, but only a newly interpreted model approximating a former state.

THE ALBUM OVER TIME

It was only over time that an increased state of uncertainty about the contents of Boltanski’s seemingly benign little album began to emerge. Given the artist’s biographical context, it may seem remarkable that the uncertainty is centered on the truth or falseness of the individual images rather than the album’s relationship (or not) to Boltanski’s childhood with regard to World War II.46 But it is a testament to the album’s success in the establishment of uncertainty that even though that could be one way of situating the work, it is not clearly the primary one. Certainly, two factors about the book’s production remained obscure for those who initially received it in the mail: Neither the images nor the text revealed that some of the captions were false, and some of the images pictured objects that were not the artist’s own but belonged to his nephew, newly photographed for the occasion of this supposedly personal book capturing the remains of an ephemeral childhood.47 The “falseness” of its contents was not immediately apparent, nor was it apparent three years after the initial mailing, when it was first exhibited to the public, in 1972.48 The art critic Gilbert Lascault, one of Boltanski’s earliest commentators, observed in relation to a photograph in Recherche et présentation that supposedly depicts the young artist’s shirt: “The multitude of details only reinforces the doubtfulness of a presence and of meaning: Does he still exist, the subject who filled these now-empty clothes?”49 If Lascault had his suspicions about the subject of the album, it was only along the lines of questioning whether the individual to whom these objects belonged still existed. Soon thereafter, the artist indicated his willingness to vault the project into its second life. Reflecting on his work in general at this time, and this project in particular, he wrote in a text that accompanied exhibitions in 1972 and 1973: “I would like to recover my childhood, to prevent this part of my life from disappearing forever. I looked first to find all that remained of the period that spread from my birth until my sixth year. The elements that I could find were few and often insignificant, a lecture book, a piece of sweater, a lock of hair. Having recorded the few objects that have remained with me from my childhood, I wanted to reconstruct by memory the missing elements.”50 By 1972, then, Boltanski revealed that some parts of the book were “reconstructed by memory,” seemingly in contrast to the other “true” elements: the lecture book, a piece of sweater, a lock of hair. By admitting some falsification, the artist could then, by contrast, claim which pieces were true, setting up a dual-pronged belief structure in which some images represent truth, and others fiction (or perhaps reconstitution). The strategy proved irresistible to critics, and the long-term status of the images in Recherche et présentation has become more complicated and more interesting. The artist’s skillful

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ambiguity has perpetuated itself: Even today, with the benefit of thirty-five years of scholarship on this project, it is still difficult to sort out which photographs are “real” and which are narrative reconstructions. Critical response to the work tracked over three decades demonstrates a shifting tone in how this enigmatic grouping of seemingly familial imagery has been categorized. The responses below also demonstrate, despite our supposedly sophisticated knowledge that photographs no longer can be counted on to convey truth, what even art critics still expect photographs to show us, and just how emotionally tethered viewers are to the promise of stable meaning. Boltanski’s album offers a lens through which to begin to understand how our contemporary culture considers its relationship to snapshots, particularly as we move through rapid changes in how we make, produce, distribute, and view them. As Boltanski’s renown as an artist rose, so, too, did interest in this very early work. In a 1979 interview with Irmeline Lebeer, Boltanski says that when he made the book, he had a real desire to find his childhood, but that when he started, he saw that very few traces remained and decided not to attach himself to the reality of things. He explained that the bed he photographed was not his own, and that the shirt he presented had never belonged to him.51 Given this still-piecemeal explanation, historians hungered for more specifics. Five years later, in a 1984 interview with Delphine Renard that was published in the catalogue for his retrospective at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris that year, Boltanski commented that in the book, “Photography provided apparent proof that I had vacationed at the sea with my parents, but it’s an unidentifiable photo of a child and a group of adults on the beach.” He goes on to say that one can also see a photo of the bed in which he slept when he was five, adding that it is the caption that orients the viewer, but that the documents (though he does not say which ones) are false.52 Boltanski continued the slow leak of information, baiting the curiosity of more scholars along the way. In Jennifer Flay’s extremely useful 1992 publication surveying Boltanski’s artist’s books, she notes, “Genuine photographs—​a class photo with Christian Boltanski second from the left in the back row and one of him on the potty—​and others where his brother sits in for him, are combined with authentic relics such as a fragment of a sweater, and imitation ones: a lock of hair cut off 20 years later, building blocks, a reader and a shirt worn by a nephew in 1969.”53 Flay does not, however, specify in which photographs his brother sits in for him, nor, in my view, is there any photograph of a child on a potty.54 But she does hold on to the promise of a binary distinction in the album: There are “genuine” photographs and there are “others,” just as some relics are “authentic” and some “imitation.” By 1998, the British historian of French literature Richard Hobbs claimed to find “obvious fakes” in Recherche et présentation, “such as a fairly new shirt belonging to a nephew, and a lock of hair shorn recently.”55 But, as we have seen, these “fakes” were far from obvious at the album’s debut. Hobbs benefited from access to decades of scholarship on the artist, and even so, it is doubtful one could distinguish in a poor photographic reproduction between a lock of hair shorn

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in the 1940s and one shorn in the 1960s. Surprisingly, in her extended 2004 analysis of Recherche et présentation, the art historian Rebecca J. DeRoo makes no mention of any fakery involved at all, photographic or otherwise.56 These examples from the scholarship on Boltanski emphasize the obsessive yet curiously inconsistent speculation regarding the relative truth or falseness of Recherche et présentation. Clearly, Boltanski succeeded in producing a “document” that, while it continues to generate interest, also continues to generate uncertainty and a degree of vagueness among historians. But that uncertainty is consistently banished. As well as indicating clearly that viewers want to believe the photographs (at least some of them), it’s the desire to get it right, to pin it down, that emerges as a central critical and scholarly desire. It is as if once one has established a certain group of false—​according to the artist—​documents, one can move on and declare the rest of the album true. Hobbs ultimately, and more convincingly, argues that Boltanski’s interpreters enter “a bewildering labyrinth in which the power to distinguish between truth and authenticity, between document and fake, is forever deferred or suspended.”57 It is remarkable that it took nearly thirty years for someone to articulate that the power of the piece, its central achievement, is in producing a perpetual inability to determine its documentary status one way or the other. The album’s ambiguity is central to its appeal, and its perpetual deferral of certainty is instructive, yielding its own form of knowledge. By foregrounding doubt as the primary by-product of the album, a productive uncertainty compels the viewer to embrace a kind of performative play as the only possible engagement with the piece. In a 2006 interview with the artist, I continued the dance, asking Boltanski to testify yet again on the status of the images and captions within Recherche et présentation. I am willing to accept the certain falseness of my own account here, and add it to the intriguing palimpsest of the ongoing record. At the time of our meeting, Boltanski claimed that the opening photograph of the Collège d’Hulst is authentic: a real photograph of Boltanski’s class, taken at the time indicated in the caption (Paris 1950–​51).58 The next photo, of a child playing with blocks, is also claimed as authentic, said to be showing young Christian and his brother JeanElie, who is fourteen years his elder. According to the artist, the photograph below this, captioned “cubes de christian boltanski retrouvés en 1969,” was made in 1969; the blocks are not Boltanski’s but most likely his nephew’s (the son of Jean-Elie). On the following page, the photographs captioned “lit de christian boltanski—​1947–​1950” and “chemise de christian boltanski—​mars 1949,” showing a rumpled bed and shirt, respectively, are both from 1969, not the late 1940s, and, according to the artist, the top one probably shows the bed of his nephew, who was about four years old in 1969.59 Following, the “morceau d’un pull-over porté par christian boltanski en 1949” is not “real,” showing, the artist recalled, “a piece of, I don’t know, a jacket or something,” while below, “cheveaux de christian boltanski—​1949” is indeed a tuft of Boltanski’s hair, but from 1969, not 1949. These items, while “real,” are not “true relics” as presented;

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instead of a child’s lock of hair, the album fetishizes a twenty-something’s lock of hair. The reproduction of a page from a child’s book, captioned “page 69 du livre de lecture de christian boltanski—​1950” is from one of his brother Luc’s childhood books, while the next page, “composition de recitation de christian boltanski—​juin 1950” is a page from one of Christian’s old schoolbooks that his mother had kept, randomly selected. That the reprints are difficult to visually discern—​ranging from muddy to nearly illegible—​adds to the sense of a viewer’s struggle to understand these remainders from the past. This visual strategy continues in the final sequences of images in the album, which turn decisively toward family snapshots, all from conventionally happy and relaxed times: the family smiling and posing, riding in a convertible or vacationing at the beach. As with the beginning images, the visual and stylistic “look” of snapshots is faithfully represented; their compositional quality—​or lack thereof—​t ypifies amateur snapshots. The captions indicate that we are seeing a snapshot of the Boltanski family in their car, Christian as a baby with his mother, the artist as a boy contemplating the ocean. In fact, Boltanski ensures that the captions are critical because his persistently poor image quality necessitates a significant degree of creative reconstruction on the part of the viewer. According to the Boltanski of 2006, all three are actual family photographs, but they don’t necessarily correspond to their captions. Boltanski could not (or would not) identify the figures or location of the top photo with the car, while he thought the middle photo of the baby was of himself, and the bottom photo of the boy at the beach showed one of his brothers. Finally, on the last page, we see snapshots captioned to indicate that they are Boltanski’s parents on the beach, which the artist verified as true, but explained that the photographs were taken not in Morbihan (a coastal town in Brittany) as the caption indicates, but “probably” in Algeria, about ten years later than the caption indicates (so, 1959 rather than 1949). Boltanski himself does not appear in the third snapshot on this page, which, like those above, according to the artist is a real family photo but does not depict what the caption states: “Christian Boltanski avec des amis (la Baule)—​1950.” It is instead “probably” his brother with friends of the family. When Boltanski made this book, his studio was still in his parents’ house on the rue de Grenelle in Paris. He would have had easy access to whatever old photos, schoolbooks, and family memorabilia his parents had kept, and one can imagine him rooting through boxes of mementos, recognizing some things and not others, blithely shuffling new and old pictures to construct his childhood story.60 While it is tempting to conclude that at last we now know the truth of how Boltanski put the album together, it is more to the point that we know what information Boltanski was willing and able to produce on a particular afternoon thirty-seven years later. At this point, there is very little “in it” for him to remember all the facts. And, indeed, that he has forgotten the details of several of the pictures, reflected in his repeated use of words such as “likely,” “probably,” and “I think,” underscores his original point all the more. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see his project as demonstrating an early inter-

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est in testing the parameters of certainty and doubt in the construction of history. But now, it is less about the uncertainty of the construction itself than of the reflective process of looking back. Who, after all, doesn’t have an old family picture or album, passed down from grandparents, perhaps, in which practically no one is identifiable? We may care about our snapshots—​even deeply so—​but in the space of a generation or less, those narratives shift and become obscured, distorted, or simply forgotten. Remarkably, this modest and even poorly produced little album continues to have legs, illustrating now something quite different than it did upon Boltanski’s first experiments with sending mail art to strangers. Its relational network, to return to Hirsch’s term, has shifted, from Boltanski rearranging his own past when he first made the album; to entering his constructed past into the homes (and lives, and memories) of strangers through the mail and inviting their (unseen) reactions; to exhibiting it internationally within the institutional framework of the museum for those voluntary visitors—​and professional art critics—​to ponder; to engaging with it on personal terms again, forty years on, and finding its contents to be less certain—​t hough in a different way—​t han they once were. The album has become a reminder of the frailty of photographic meaning over time. Though, to its great credit, it was not manufactured as readymade nostalgia. Boltanski’s album was initially a critical look at the conventional format of family snapshots and the essential interchangeability of pictures from one album to another, and an early comment on the highly structured and predictable format of family photo albums. Ultimately, it challenges us to accept ambiguity and uncertainty as a valid conclusion.

U N C E R TA I N T Y V E R S U S F I C T I O N

It is fitting to begin this study with Boltanski because of the artist’s position within the arc of art historical scholarship over the past several decades. The notion of photographic certainty was, in 1969, then just beginning to be dismantled. Much of the postmodern project with regard to photography has been directed toward taking apart notions of photographic “truth.” And while by now, with several decades of critical and theoretical contributions quite successfully demonstrating the malleability of photographic truth, whether it is regarding captions, digital effects, subjectivity, or simple choices about framing, we often still basically believe photographs. But it is important to differentiate between cultivating uncertainty and producing fiction. The play between the seeming veracity of the photographic image and stories staged for our consumption therein has long been appealing, certainly since the French photographer Hippolyte Bayard’s self-portrait as a drowned man in 1840.61 Bayard’s gesture played on the delightfully proximate, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship between reality and its photographic representation. Testing the parameters of fiction in photography has, in the contemporary period, been irresistible to artists, encompassing such projects as varied and diverse as William DeLappa’s The Portraits of Violet and Al (1973), Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills

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(1977–​80), Joan Fontcuberta’s Fauna (1987) and Sputnik (1997), Jeff Wall’s staged constructions, Gregory Crewdson’s Twilight series (1998–​2002), Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–​96), and Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), to name only a very few. William DeLappa’s relatively little-known construction of twenty-eight “family” snapshots of a supposedly married couple, Violet and Al, is somewhat similar in content to Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation. DeLappa creates remarkably believable scenarios for his fictional couple and rounds out their activities with clear stylistic affinities to amateur, vernacular photography. Likewise, in The Fae Richards Photo Archive, Leonard and Dunye masterfully spoof the look of 1920s commercially printed snapshots, for instance faithfully reproducing the scalloped edges, the appropriate sizes and tone of the prints, and so forth. In both cases, the artists construct the photographs in the present to refer to a past time, and the photographs thus function as part of an elaborate fiction that trades on our willingness to accept photographs as authentic. Several other projects refer to the content and aesthetic conventions of other media in distinct time periods, such as 1950s B-grade cinema (Sherman), William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century sequence A Rake’s Progress (Shonibare), and Crewdson’s simultaneous reference to science fiction movies and the paintings of Edward Hopper. In the case of all of these artists, however, the viewer either knows or doesn’t know that a particular project falls into the category of photographic fiction or performance staged for the camera, and there is very little in between. In other words, a viewer may be initially unaware that a project is presenting a fictional construction, but the works tip squarely into fictional status once the viewer learns more. By contrast, Boltanski maintains a state of uncertainty with Recherche et présentation in which the more a viewer learns, the less he or she knows. But like Boltanski, DeLappa, Fontcuberta, and Leonard and Dunye refer to photographic conventions, and much of the delight of their projects comes from the skill and thoroughness with which they mine and mimic particular genres within photography, whether scrapbook imagery, publicity stills, or scientific proofs. To give an extended example, in Fontcuberta’s Fauna (1987), the artist invents the life of Dr. Peter Ameisenhaufen, a German zoologist who conducted research all over the world from the 1930s to the 1950s. According to the artist’s presentation, after Ameisenhaufen’s untimely death in 1955, his archive of notes, drawings, and photographs of fantastical beasts and other research paraphernalia went unnoticed until it was “discovered” in 1987 by Fontcuberta. The documents of Ameisenhaufen’s apparent research were installed in Barcelona’s Museum of Zoology in 1988, and later at Madrid’s Museum of Natural History under the pretense of fact, bringing Fontcuberta’s inventions into a realm of scientific truth. Between 1933 and 1950 (as the museum visitor reads in the exhibition’s wall text), Ameisenhaufen “classified virtually every known species. He traveled in almost every country on Earth . . . and, when not traveling, worked in the laboratory, often to the point of total exhaustion.”62 However, “Of the total of 15 volumes full of notes, sketches, and impressions from his life and work, up to this point only seven have surfaced.”63 After

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Figure 6 Joan Fontcuberta, detail from Fauna (1987), installation view from the exhibition Camouflages at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2014. Image: Courtesy the artist.

being diagnosed with leukemia in 1950, we are told, Ameisenhaufen moved to Glasgow, where he spent the last five years of his life. He disappeared on August 7, 1955. The house where his notes were stored burned to the ground, and the surviving documents are those in this exhibition. The biographic sketch of Ameisenhaufen’s life illuminates him as a bit of a mad genius, endlessly tracking down ever more elusive and exotic forms of life. Ameisenhaufen was not interested in the typical specimen or the ideal example; rather, as Fontcuberta puts it, “He was trying to find exceptions to the theory of evolution: hybrid or mutant animals.”64 Accordingly, on display are Ameisenhaufen’s photographs of creatures found all over the world, not one of which actually fits into a known system of scientific classification. Nevertheless, they are scrupulously documented, with notes detailing their classification in phylum, subphylum, and class; their native habitats, physical traits, and behavioral habits. For example, the non-flying reptile Solenglypha polipodida, found in the deciduous forest of southern India, has an osseous internal skeleton and a pulmonary respiration system, and it hunts its prey with “venomous aggression.” An X-ray of the animal, several drawings, photographs of it in the field prior to capture, and subsequent laboratory photographs are included in the exhibition (fig. 6).65

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Whereas Boltanski references the nostalgic authority of the family photo album, Fontcuberta references the arguably more authoritative institutions of both science and the museum. That Fontcuberta initially exhibited his fiction in a natural history museum rather than a contemporary art space underscores our faith in institutional structures of knowledge. Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is never clued in that Ameisenhaufen’s story is an entirely invented one, given scientific credence precisely by Fontcuberta’s insistence on using the tools and conventions of scientific realism. But a viewer may learn from sources outside the exhibition that the project is (in fact) entirely fiction. Once the ruse becomes clear, while a viewer may continue to appreciate the thoroughness with which Fontcuberta describes Dr. Ameisenhaufen, his job, and his animal-kingdom discoveries through photographs and other fabricated documents, there is no lingering uncertainty about the line between fiction and reality. The fiction is complete. Both Boltanski and Fontcuberta demonstrate the persuasive powers of conventional structures of knowledge (whether in the realm of scientific documentation or that of personal family history). In the latter case, once we’re in on the joke, we can relax and appreciate our newfound understanding of the artist’s deceit. But Boltanski leaves us unsettled, perpetually uncertain. A third strategy of photographic fiction is seen with artists and writers who use previously existing photographs, usually snapshots or other vernacular imagery, as a starting point for the creative process. For instance, the art historian Eugenia Parry became obsessed with a particularly horrific album of crime photographs in Paris and used its images as a springboard for a novel brand of creative nonfiction. Parry researched the crimes in the French press and drew on her knowledge of the social history of the period (she is a photo historian specializing in nineteenth-century France and Britain). In her final work, Crime Album Stories, Paris 1886–​1902 (2000), she, as narrator, assumes the voice of, by turns, the criminals, the police, the victims, and other involved parties as she reimagines their roles in the crime. Within photography, the crime scene genre is among the most factually obsessed; nowhere else are the stakes higher for photographs to serve as evidentiary documents. The disturbingly graphic photographs Parry reproduces from the original album still derive their power from our belief in them as testaments to a criminal aftermath. Because of this, Parry’s creative responses have a flavor of sacrilege.

L O R I E N O VA K ’ S C O L L E C T E D V I S I O N S

What emerges through these brief examples is a continuum of certainty and doubt in aesthetic—​and particularly photographic—​production. A more recent example of this line of thought as expressed in the digital age is seen in the work of Lorie Novak. Boltanski’s ostensible concern with whether or not it matters that the photographs we identify with in memory have anything actually to do with our real pasts resonates in Novak’s Collected Visions website, which debuted in 1996 and is ongoing. The artist has created a searchable archive of more than three thousand snapshots from approximately

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Figure 7 Lorie Novak with Clilly Castiglia, Betsey Kershaw, and Kerry O’Neill, collectedvisions.net (1996–​ ongoing). Website. Image: www.collectedvisions.net, © Lorie Novak, www.lorienovak.com.

three hundred contributors. A defining feature of the site is its invitation to visitors to create a photo essay about either their own photograph or, more intriguingly, someone else’s (fig. 7). Disconcertingly, a visitor to the site cannot distinguish between stories submitted by the owners of the photographs and stories submitted about others’ snapshots. Indeed, browsing through the “museum” of snapshots and their stories, one finds that several images have proven compelling to many: One photograph of three children sitting in a hammock has drawn stories from viewers in Ann Arbor, Boston, and New Brunswick. The base assumption—​or provocation—​of the site is that both memory and imagination can be stirred by any photograph, our own or not. Intriguingly, one of the photographs selected for Novak’s “Create Your Own Photo Essay” is recognizable as the object of scrutiny in film scholar Annette Kuhn’s essay “ ‘She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl . . . ’ ”66 Depicting a young girl in a plaid skirt and hair ribbons who cups a small bird in her hand, the snapshot is as utterly ordinary and intriguing as any vernacular image, embodying both matter-of-fact record and enigmatic meaning (fig. 8). Though the image can be easily found again through the search engine, it does not appear that anyone, including Kuhn herself, has added a story about it to the website.

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Figure 8 Harry Kuhn, Annette and Budgie (1950s), from Annette Kuhn’s book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. Image: © Annette Kuhn.

But Kuhn’s essay about the image, published not on the website but in her book, is poignant. The photograph features centrally in Kuhn’s incisive analysis of how, and by whom, meaning is generated in family snapshots. The photograph of young Annette holding a bird (that her father gave her, we learn through the author’s remembrances) is marked, literally, by the conflicting and even competing memories of Kuhn and her mother. Kuhn frames the image for us: “The six-year-old girl in the picture . . . is seated in a fireside chair in the sitting room of the flat in Chiswick, London, where she lives with her parents, Harry and Betty. It is the early 1950s. Perched on the child’s hand, apparently claiming her entire attention, is her pet budgerigar, Greeny. It might be a winter’s evening, for the curtains are drawn and the child is dressed in hand-knitted jumper and cardigan, and woolen skirt.”67 Kuhn argues that “a photograph can be material for inter-

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pretation . . . to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime.”68 She goes on to suggest that family photographs are meant “to evoke memories that might have little or nothing to do with what is actually in the picture. The photograph is a prop, a pre-text: it sets the scene for recollection.”69 The heart of Kuhn’s analysis concerns the competing struggle for a kind of conceptual ownership over a particular photograph’s story, and the impossibility of reconciliation with regard to her and her mother’s conflicting stakes in this particular image. While the author’s mother has staked her claim on her daughter’s image by inscribing the back of the photograph with a brief note as to when it was made, the adult Kuhn objects and disagrees, writing her own corrective inscription below her mother’s mistaken one; through these small notational gestures, decades of family dynamics unfurl. Kuhn writes poignantly of the intertextuality necessary in establishing photographic meaning for such images: Memory, and thus meaning, “do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in a network, an intertext, of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image.”70 It is tempting, then, to read Kuhn’s contribution of this image to Novak’s Collected Visions as an invitation to extend the network, even to release her personal—​and thus authoritative—​claim on the image’s meaning. What could once have been a relatively unproblematic image accumulated baggage as it traveled through time, and now, after having been subjected to the will of both mother and daughter to fix its story, it has been sent into the collective space of the Internet, ready to spark the memories of strangers. By submitting the photograph to Collected Visions, Kuhn allows for the possibility that her competing familial claims toward fixing a certain past history for this fraught image are, in a way, no more authoritative than the story a stranger might spin from the very same prompt. Novak’s online archive extends from and builds upon the gestures of Boltanski’s little album, audaciously mailed to the homes of strangers. But the networked nature of the Internet allows Novak to collect strangers’ reactions and, further, to set them into conversation with still more strangers. While both projects generate energy from the notion that snapshots wait for meaning to be constructed around them, in Boltanski’s album this portion of it remains a thought piece. The strength and success of Collected Visions is its power to demonstrate what following through on this in a tangible way actually feels like: Writing a story about someone else’s picture is a kind of overwriting, with new stories piling up in a tug-of-war, each developing a claim to ownership. But none of the meanings are stable, and none are final. This somewhat rare impulse to let a photograph exist in a state of suspended meaning is at the heart of Boltanski’s and Novak’s projects and continues in the projects in the following chapters. While photographs may not begin this way—​perhaps we don’t let them—​t hey reach this state over time. For Boltanski’s little album, it was only over time than an intentional ambiguation evolved into an arguably more poignant testament to uncertain meanings. While the album was misleading from the start, and intentionally so, it only later became unknowable by default rather than by design.

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PART 2

ABUNDANCE AND OPACITY

3 DISPLACEMENTS Gerhard Richter’s Atlas

One of the most extraordinary collections of images compiled in the contemporary period is the career-spanning body of work Atlas by the German artist Gerhard Richter. As do Christian Boltanski and Annette Kuhn, Richter mines his own photographic history and production in large segments of Atlas, while in others he gathers photographs from external sources: magazines, newspapers, calendars, and more. While in Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969) Boltanski mined his own family pictures, crucially he kept those images quite close to an imagined starting point of a family album, despite the poor quality of the reproductions and the made-up captions. What Boltanski created with Givaudan’s photocopier resembles an album, is almost an album, but is far enough removed from the conventions of the form that the artist’s role in creating a commentary on the traditional album format is highlighted. It is this closeness that provides the friction—​recalling the “just noticeable difference” in physics that measures the differential threshold of a light’s brightness, or a tone’s pitch, to be perceptible. The conventions of the family album produce an intellectual structure that directs how we, as users, understand, and thus know, the past. That Boltanski hewed closely to that conventional form to provide an anchor made his slight deviations all the more significant. Richter, though often drawing on imagery from personal and family sources, has not stayed within the album’s conventions. Rather, he introduced a new structural entity through which to provide a displacement: that of the atlas. Whereas Boltanski insisted on closeness to the album form, which is so widely familiar, it is Atlas’s sta-

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tus as an atlas—​and in relation to other atlases—​that shapes our encounter with the photographs it contains. The sheer quantity of photographs in Atlas might suggest a wealth of potential meaning, but in actual encounters with the material, the quantity primarily yields opacity. A close analysis of the specific form of an atlas, as opposed to an album or archive, reveals the form’s capacity for narrative conflict, located in the tension between objectivity and subjectivity—​and between part and whole—​t hat Atlas so effectively fuels. Three years after Boltanski mailed out his little album, Richter debuted what has since become a sprawling, career-long magnum opus and so-called public archive, Atlas. In December 1972, a visitor to the Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht would have encountered 343 panels of uniform size hanging on the walls and arranged on tables under glass, titled Atlas of Photos and Sketches (in Dutch, Atlas von de foto’s en schetsen). Mounted on each panel were between one and forty-five images—​the eponymous photos and sketches—​some in regular grid configurations, others affixed more irregularly and intimately, as if in a photo album. Richter has been adding to Atlas ever since; it remains in progress to this day, nearly forty years after its first public display (fig. 9). The content of Atlas interweaves both a personal history and a larger political history. It incorporates fragments of national and international history with personal family snapshots as well as images from Richter’s professional work in the form of sketches, proposals, and source photographs for many of his paintings. Atlas begins with family photographs and media images but quickly moves on to encompass images from a broader political world. Early on, there are photographs depicting concentration camp prisoners that Richter re-photographed from a magazine; later, photographs of Adolf Hitler at rallies (again re-photographed) are added, and later still, in the 1990s, images of the German flag that Richter was studying for a commission at the Reichstag. But throughout, and often for long stretches at a time, Atlas is strikingly banal, offering up hundreds of commercially printed snapshots of landscapes and scenery. Nearly all of these photographs are presumably the artist’s own: We see places, such as Sils Maria, Switzerland, that he visits frequently, and intimate photographs of his wife, Sabine Moritz, particularly at the time of the birth and babyhood of their children, Moritz and Ella. We see photographs of Richter’s friends and acquaintances, the artist’s home, trains, flowers, architectural studies, and more. Massive portions of Atlas are plainly geographic, featuring endless snapshots of landscapes and cities. Without a conventional atlas maker’s need to capitulate to a standard of completeness or accuracy, Richter has been free to define his own atlas of personal geography, which emerges through place names as titles: Gran Canaria, Düsseldorf, Corsica, Greenland, Venice, the Rhine, Toronto, New York, and Niagara Falls, to name a few. In addition to a clear geographic bent, spatial experiments abound: sketches of massive rooms with installations of enormous cloud photographs with diminutive visitors, comparative photographs of slightly differing compositions, close studies of contours

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and Opacity

Figure 9 Gerhard Richter, Atlas (1962–​ongoing), installation view at Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, 2005. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Image: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

of paint that seem to have topographic features. Among the most arresting portions of Atlas are the most human elements of his overall personal geography: family pictures. Beyond the old family snapshots that opened Atlas, Richter returns to family regularly, if not nearly as often as he defaults to landscape. In both cases, Atlas’s photographic bounty does far more to establish barriers to clear meaning than to delineate a certain history. Because of its sheer volume, in addition to the often-repetitive subject matter, it is difficult to approach Atlas except as a totality. Indeed, its volume nearly precludes close attention; for a viewer to simply lay eyes on each single image in Atlas for two seconds would take several hours of invested time. Moreover, Atlas in publication is sequenced differently than Atlas in exhibition: in the former it strictly follows the numeric order of the panels, while the latter allows latitude and variation in sequencing. Thus, looking at the book is not the same experience as viewing the installation, in terms of not only scale and object quality, but also sequence and, thus, content. Add to this the simple fact that Atlas is still a work in progress, and the challenges to getting a grasp on its complexity become apparent. It is no wonder, then, that scholarship on Atlas remains limited—​at least, relative to scholarship on the artist’s paintings.

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This is not to say that there haven’t been some notable contributions. Armin Zweite’s essay “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen” has been frequently republished, is clear and straightforward, and as such stands as the centrally accessible analysis of Atlas. Zweite is a former director of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the institution that now owns Atlas and where Atlas was exhibited in 1989. First published in the 1989 edition of Atlas, Zweite’s essay has since been translated, expanded, and reprinted in both of the twin “canons” of Atlas writing, Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas and Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader.1 Helmut Friedel, Zweite’s successor, has also written about Atlas, using a similar model of outlining the sections of Atlas in terms of keeping analysis subordinate to description. Zweite’s approach is to outline the contents of Atlas descriptively through the subject matter of the images, interspersing commentary and analysis in selected places. This approach is extremely useful for providing a textual overview of an enormously expansive project, but it does have limitations. According to Zweite, Richter conceives of Atlas not as a sequence of individual panels but as “a spatial totality that is experienced simultaneously, not sequentially.”2 Within this conception, Zweite seems to suggest that Atlas is not to be “read” from beginning to end, but rather absorbed as a whole in a kind of corollary to Richter’s mental storehouse of images. Zweite must be referring to a conceptual experience, as Atlas is, in fact, impossible to experience physically as a simultaneous totality. It cannot be housed in a single room, making the viewing experience necessarily one in which simultaneity is only the product of continuous recall. It is a useful comment, however, in that it gets us thinking about how exactly we encounter, experience, and understand Atlas. Still, there are many questions left unexplored in Zweite’s text. He comments only briefly on many sections, and often points out when Richter has made paintings from particular images; in so doing he perpetuates the view that Atlas is primarily and most usefully seen as a source of images for the (ultimately privileged) paintings.3 Zweite is clear about his preference for analyzing Atlas within this framework of a “spatial totality” rather than at a micro level: “It is unnecessary to describe the Atlas panel by panel, nor could we demonstrate all the numerous relationships of Richter’s painted works to the corresponding photographic models.” 4 The limits Zweite imposes on reading Atlas reveal its capacity to both awe and frustrate commentators; in order to get a grip on its totality, it seems necessary to leave the details behind. And while individual images have generally receded into the whole of Atlas, as in the accounts of Zweite, Friedel, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, recent scholarship has begun to hone in on particular images. The art historian Jeanne Anne Nugent does a sustained and careful reading of individual images within the first ten panels of Atlas, introducing the concept of Richter’s “shadow archive,” a collection of material from his years in the GDR that he carefully organized and maintained, yet until recently withheld from scholars and researchers. Nugent argues that analysis of the individual images in Atlas has worth, writing in response to Zweite’s approach that Atlas “simultaneously invites

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the scrutiny of its fragments and rewards such patient reading with discoveries at once biographical, historical and aesthetic.”5 Indeed, the individual images within Atlas need not succumb to its totality. Rather, they can be used to begin to build a new way of approaching Atlas that allows the spatial totality of the work to refer well beyond Atlas itself, expansive as it already is, both to Richter’s larger body of work and to external sources. My argument rests on the belief that it is impossible to get a grip on its totality without taking a closer look at some of the contents. While 1972 marked the public debut of Atlas, Richter had been gathering images destined for Atlas for years before the Utrecht show. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up in East Germany during World War II. During his youth, the Richter family moved several times in an effort to shelter the boy from the immediate dangers and impacts of the war years. In 1935, they moved to the small town of Reichenau, and in 1942, when Richter was ten, they moved again to Waltersdorf, a village in the countryside about one hundred kilometers from Dresden. Nevertheless, the family was deeply embedded in the politics of the time: Richter’s father, Horst, a schoolteacher, was a member of the National Socialist Party, as were his two maternal uncles, Rudi and Alfred. Horst served first on the Eastern front, and later on the Western front, where he was captured by Americans and made a prisoner of war. Both of his uncles were killed while serving. Outside of combat, Richter’s maternal aunt, Marianne, suffered from mental illness and was thus not fit to be part of Hitler’s ideal Aryan race; she was killed by Nazi doctors under their system of euthanasia.6 At the same time, then, that Richter’s father and uncle were fighting for the Nazis, their comrades were killing his aunt. His family was both participant in and victim of the regime’s goals, the logic of which could not have been clear to a young boy. Less than a week after Richter turned thirteen, from February 13–​15, 1945, Allied forces pummeled Dresden, the city of his birth, in a devastating air assault. Richter’s aunt and grandmother were in the city at the time; they survived. The artist recalls of his proximity to the raids: “In the night, everyone came out into the street in this village 100 kilometers away. Dresden was being bombed, ‘Now, at this moment!’ We knew because of the radio, and you could hear it, [though] I can’t remember whether I really heard it, whether that was possible . . . but maybe over the radio.”7 German forces surrendered on May 8, 1945, and Richter’s knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, like Boltanski’s, would unfold over time. In the meantime, he now lived under Soviet occupation in Communist East Germany. In 1946, Richter’s father was released by his American captors and returned to his family in Waltersdorf. As an ex-Nazi, he was not allowed to return to his teaching position. With devastating brevity, Richter recalls, “He shared most fathers’ fate at the time. . . . Nobody wanted them.”8 In 1948, the teenage Richter left home, moving to a nearby town. By this time, he remembers, “I was absolutely clear that there is no God—​an alarming discovery to me, after my Christian upbringing. By that time, my fundamental aversion to all beliefs

Displacements

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and ideologies was fully developed.”9 Nevertheless, he continued to be subject to strong ideologies. To earn a living he had a variety of painting jobs in the service of Communist propaganda, and in 1950 he was accepted to the Dresden Art Academy, where the curriculum’s emphasis on Socialist Realism was shaped by Communist policy. In 1955, Richter began to travel a bit outside of the repressive East Germany, going first to West Germany to study mural paintings, then to Paris, and, most significantly, to view Documenta II in 1959 in Kassel, where he was deeply impressed by the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. Two years later Richter seized an opportunity to defect to West Germany. Five months before the Berlin Wall was built, the twenty-nineyear-old was on a trip from Dresden to Moscow and Leningrad. On the return trip, the train made an unexpected stop in West Berlin; Richter got out and stored two suitcases at the station before getting back on his original train. Later, he returned to East Berlin with his wife and crossed the border as if on a day trip. As he recalled in 2002, “I knew it would be dangerous to carry too much with me, so I took almost nothing. Anyway, I was not leaving anything behind except my work, which I didn’t want.”10

FA M I LY P I C T U R E S

Among the few things he did bring to West Germany were old family photographs that would become the foundation of Atlas.11 Indeed, the first six panels of Atlas consist nearly entirely of such former album photographs, and personal snapshots reappear throughout the project, often in large quantities. These images have received scant scholarly attention, paling in comparison to the more volatile political imagery of Hitler and concentration camp victims, sexual imagery, and what viewers have recognized as professionally significant imagery: the photographs, from all manner of sources, that served as source material for Richter’s justly celebrated oeuvre of paintings. But personal imagery, in addition to comprising the literal beginnings of Atlas, has, in the project’s now nearly forty-year public existence, been a consistent subject, despite some historians’ claims to the contrary. Atlas is usually referred to as a singular object or collection, but it is critical to delineate its many shifting and ongoing manifestations. It has been shown in full or in part twenty times in sixteen cities since its Utrecht debut.12 The format of the exhibition has changed at least slightly with every installation, and it is as yet impossible to show Atlas “in full” due to its status as an active archive, an always-unfinished work in progress.13 Its most recent installation in Munich in 2014 was a far cry from its initial 1972 appearance in Utrecht. The work had more than doubled in size to 802 panels. The present version of Atlas did not exist in 1972, and the 1972 version of Atlas no longer exists outside of its published form. And, indeed, its published form comprises a significant component of Atlas’s public presence—​one that differs in crucial ways from the installation. Atlas was published in full on its first exhibition in 1972. Since then, the complete Atlas has been published

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three more times: in 1989, 1997, and 2006.14 While the exhibitions were temporal, publications mark the points at which Atlas has become fixed, in print. The publications testify to the work’s ongoing instability and perpetual incompletion, yet at the same time, they serve to fix Atlas at particular points in its history. The two distinct presentation formats yield notably different interpretations and meanings. The exhibition exists as a three-dimensional and nearly sculptural installation, and the tangible materiality of each image on each panel becomes manifest in a way that is completely effaced in publication. When Atlas is published, it appears akin to a photo album. A reader can hold the entirety of the project in his or her hands, flip the pages, and look closely at each image, not just those at or below eye level as they are hung in installation.15 Atlas’s book form is arguably the most common way to come across the project’s entire sequence. In this version of display, the old family pictures are reproduced in the necessarily flat manner of photographic reproduction. But in exhibition, their material presence as snapshots is palpable, even surprising.16 These insistently diverse objects are generally marked as “old snapshots” due to their sepia tone, deckled edges, and, not insignificantly, the dress and demeanor of the subjects; one imagines Richter’s relatives photographed during the war years and earlier, vestiges of a former life. But while they share some features, the prints, all original, vary in size and format. They have been developed with different processes and printed by different companies, and were likely used for varying purposes. Further underscoring their status as objects, many are worn from handling, a physical state that testifies to their previous lives outside of Atlas. One speculates that these photographs mean something to the artist, or he would not have bothered to bring them to West Germany, but they have not been kept close at hand. Once the photographs entered Atlas, they necessarily became disengaged from his daily life, entering instead the flow of artistic and professional space.17 But Richter’s exhibition presentation does much to challenge the individuality of the photographs, and the distinct stories they may, in another context, have borne. Precious objects depicting loved ones are affixed to panels of uniform size, put behind glass, and encountered hanging on the wall as part of larger grids of panels in which the images may be well higher than a viewer’s comfortable viewing height. The family images, which in an album context might reflect the impulse to gather images of shared experiences with one’s loved ones into a book of special meaning—​a family album—​become in this configuration an impersonal type of image equivalent to all the other types that Richter gathers. Everything about their physical presentation works to distance, to standardize, to stay at arm’s length from the prying eyes of the viewer. Unlike Boltanski’s album, with its misleading captions and nearly indecipherable imagery, Atlas’s photographs are clear enough visually, but not connected to any specific captions. Beyond the generic titles of the panels, they float without identifying marks, untethered from the narratives they must once have had (or still have, to an ever-smaller familial audience). Richter shares these personal mementos, but in a highly neutralizing way. This damp-

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Figure 10 Gerhard Richter, “Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 1 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Twenty-eight blackand-white
photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

ening of personal meaning is seen, too, in each panel’s title. The carefully arranged and glassed-over images are, simply, “Album Photographs.” They are not “Family Pictures, 1930.” Richter’s bland titles for each panel resist both the particular and the personal and provide instead a flattening effect that resists the otherwise visually evident uniqueness of each photographic object. Indeed, Atlas’s first fifty panels display a dizzying array of sources, presentation styles, and formats (figs. 10–​15). The images run the gamut of modes of photographic presentation. In addition to the vintage family snapshots from the 1930s and 1940s with scalloped edges, worn from handling, there are images from newspapers and magazines, faded and yellowing, cut out irregularly; strips of photo-booth pictures in black and white; Polaroid prints in color; pages torn from a small weekly wall calendar; images marked up in pen and paint with notes by the artist and mounted on their own separate boards; small contact prints on glossy paper and large, blurred reprints; hand-colored photographs and portraits cut from an encyclopedia; and color snapshots, some in tones reminiscent of the 1970s and some more recent commercial prints, to name just a few.18 That Richter’s attention to a range of materiality in Atlas has not received much

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Figure 11 Gerhard Richter, “Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 2 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Twenty-four black-and-white photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015. Figure 12 Gerhard Richter, “Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 4 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Thirty black-and-white
photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 13 Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 5 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing). Thirty-three black-and-white
clippings, ten black-and-white photographs, and two color photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015. Figure 14 Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 7 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing). Two color and twelve black-and-white photographs, three calendar sheets, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 15 Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 10 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Eighteen black-and-white clippings, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

critical or scholarly interest can be attributed in part to the artist’s own statements that reinforce the primacy of information and content in the photographic medium over the materiality that emerges in exhibition. In 1966, the young artist proclaimed, “[A photograph] is perfect; it does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous and unconditional. It has no style. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified.”19 In a 1972 interview, the year of Atlas’s first public exhibition, Richter celebrated the emotionally detached appearance of the functional photograph, reiterating that the importance of photography for him is that is has “no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. . . . It was pure picture.”20 Despite Richter’s claims for photographic neutrality, however, the entire work is particularly rich in its recognition of modes of photographic functionality: News images convey information, advertising coerces, family photographs are “personal.” While these apparently personal photographs may seem at first to be fairly clear in their origins, appropriately, a certain amount of confusion exists about where, exactly,

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the displaced photographs on these early Atlas panels came from. If Boltanski offers a perpetually intriguing and even contradictory take on his own not-quite-album production, Richter has done a remarkable job of rarely commenting on Atlas’s contents. In Atlas’s four complete publications, the artist’s own voice is notably absent. In introductory essays, he is quoted only from previously published sources, but never directly on the specific contents of Atlas, and never as an author who has something to say about the work at hand.21 It is not clear that his two chief Atlas interpreters, Armin Zweite and Helmut Friedel, interviewed him about Atlas. True to its title, perhaps Atlas alone is to be taken as the final word. The art historian Catherine Hürzeler has the clearest account regarding these family pictures: “Initially Richter collected mostly photographs which he had found. They are photographs taken from the family albums of his parents and parents-in-law and from the album of his artist friend, Sigmar Polke.”22 Polke, also from East Germany, fled the country with his family when he was twelve, in 1953; he and Richter met at the Düsseldorf Art Academy at the time Richter was first gathering and assembling images for Atlas. It seems surprising that Polke’s family pictures are in Atlas. Hürzeler does not cite the source of her knowledge, but one would expect Richter’s major interpreters to shed some light on the question. But there is not yet a consensus on the originating point of the “family” pictures that begin Atlas, and ruminations on their origin have provided fuel for critical speculation, in a manner not unlike art historians’ confusion over the origins of Boltanski’s “album” pictures. Friedel wrote in 1997 that Richter had been collecting photographs “since the beginning.”23 He clarified this somewhat in the most recent publication of the complete Atlas, in 2006, writing that Richter had been collecting “snapshots from family albums” since “the beginning of the 1960s.” He continues by noting, however, that, “it is not even certain whether the early shots were his own family photographs.”24 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, perhaps Richter’s most important interlocutor, describes the early snapshots in a manner particularly rife with interpretive speculation. Drawing no conclusions, he writes that the early images “appear at first as though they had been torn from a family album shortly before Richter’s flight from East Germany to serve as souvenirs of a past that was being left behind forever, or as though they might have been mailed to him from his relatives in the East to console the young artist about his recent departure from his loved ones.”25 For an artist about whom so much has been written, the scarcity of Richter’s own testimony with regard to these foundational Atlas images is striking. The cumulative uncertainty about the origin of each specific photograph only serves to reinforce the malleability of photography between specific memory touchpoints and generalized images recognizable to all as the category “family photo”—​a point that recalls in many ways Boltanski’s aims with his own early work. Even—​perhaps especially—​w ithout knowing the photographs’ origins, the contrast between their present life in Atlas and their imagined previous lives is notable.

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AT L A S A S AT L A S

Whatever their precise origin—​which the artist may or may not remember, or indeed ever have known—​his early album group of photographs represents private pictures wrested into public view, and the transition from album to atlas. What are the implications of such re-categorization in terms of how we understand the images? Shifting private images that had been part of personal albums from the Nazi and Communist eras to inclusion in a public exhibition under the generic title Atlas is significant, but has been infrequently commented upon. While an album is quite a well-recognized and understood form, an atlas is less so, particularly in the art world. To complicate matters, Atlas has most often been analyzed in relation to an archive, albeit a very public archive. Arguably the most prominent and authoritative reading of Atlas is that of Buchloh in his 1999 article “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive.”26 Buchloh’s chief contribution is to take on the endeavor of theorizing Atlas with regard to the historical avant-garde, the medium of photography, and archival practice, going beyond rehearsing Richter’s well-worn statements from the 1960s on photography. As such, he provides a valuable contextual framework for Atlas. His argument is complex and multifaceted but contains a series of key points. The critic conceives of Atlas as a response to the condition of a “memory crisis” in a two-pronged way: both because of Richter’s historically determined place in the larger memory crisis of postwar Germany (in which Richter’s personal situation of moving from East to West Germany was a factor) and also because of his deep professional and philosophical immersion and investment in the “impact of photographic media-culture on the project of painting.”27 Following Siegfried Kracauer, who argued that photographs play a role in erasing memory (as discussed in this book’s introduction), Buchloh understands “photographic media-culture” as the primary agent for the collective repression of history, and situates Richter’s project as a “rephrasing” of Kracauer’s argument.28 Per Buchloh, Richter lives “at the moment of the most violent, collectively enacted repression of history,” a historical circumstance that serves to augment Kracauer’s concerns.29 Buchloh convincingly sets Atlas in terms of the fraught politics of memory and history in post-1945 Germany, an era that has been ably and extensively studied by numerous scholars.30 My concern here is neither to duplicate nor to refute this work, but to consider the possibilities that open up with a view oriented toward the present. In most scholarship on the work, the signal of its very name, Atlas, goes unexamined. What, after all, is an atlas? On first glance, it seems a simple question. Yet the question is rarely asked. And though Richter himself may not have plumbed the depths of what his title evoked (there is no record of how the artist came up with the name, and, as with all matters pertaining to the work, he has thus far declined to comment) an atlas is a specific kind of production, with a particular history.

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The art historian Dorothea Dietrich has gone furthest in reading Atlas as, actually, an atlas. An atlas, Dietrich writes in an article on the work, is an instrument of control . . . [in which] the unfamiliar is brought under control by the ordering eye and hand of the cartographer, the distant territory neatly charted and represented in readable form as a two-dimensional abstraction. It holds at bay the terror of the unknown and is relentless in its pursuit of order. Its agenda is all-encompassing, its goal the charting of each and every area of the globe so that even the last remaining pocket of chaos will be tamed and made available as ordered space. And once the space has been charted and the map drawn . . . the atlas may become the road map for the developer.31

Dietrich puts Richter in the role of the controlling cartographer charting his territory, holding the unknown at bay, pursuing order, and taming chaos. In this view, Richter is in a clear position of power, deftly organizing his barrage of otherwise-unwieldy photographic imagery—​and personal history—​into a controlled area, fit for presentation. He is smoothing, sanitizing, making submissive. In Dietrich’s terms, we—​t he viewer, the art historian, or the curator—​might be understood as the metaphorical “developer” building edifices or designing the topography that will be laid over the “map” with which we have been presented. In her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, the scholar Giuliana Bruno posits a radically different interpretation of Richter’s Atlas that poetically situates the installation within an intimately emotional experience of architecture and film. Bruno, too, is taken with the notion of reading Atlas in cartographic terms, but she views it as an expressively private geography. Rather than a controlling taxonomic order, Bruno reads Richter’s inscrutable arrangements as evidence of an equalizing impulse and as a “journey of emotions.”32 Ultimately, for Bruno, the architectural form of Richter’s Atlas unfolds as a highly personal geographic and cinematic space through which the viewer may traverse and find a window into the artist’s mind. Both of these readings situate Atlas in terms of mapping, but as historians of science have shown, the atlas form has a specific history. Though this history began in a cartographic context, it developed in the sciences. In addition to road atlases and atlases of the world, we have anatomical atlases, botanical atlases, cloud atlases, and atlases of disease. Notably, in either case, whether cartographic or scientific, an atlas is a compilation of primarily visual material, culled together in such a fashion as to edify viewers. Whether they contain maps or other visual information, atlases are created to be consulted, looked at, studied. Reading Richter’s Atlas into this history offers a path into its many internal tensions. In a cartographic context, the term “atlas” finds its origin in the Atlas, or Cosmographical Meditations on the Fabric of the World of the Flemish mathematician and cartographer Gerard Mercator, the first part of which was published in 1585.33 Mercator’s colleague Abraham Ortelius published his own collection of maps several years before Mercator,

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the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the World), which is generally recognized as the first modern atlas. In the history of cartography, Ortelius’s Theatrum and Mercator’s Atlas were hardly the first bound collections of maps. But their generation, as the atlas scholar James R. Akerman has argued, was the first to conceive of the atlas idea, “the notion that atlas-making was a technique for organising information” that expressed particular concepts and perspectives.34 Importantly, the emergence of the atlas idea meant that these compilations of maps were not just gathered together randomly, but carefully and consciously structured by the guiding hand of an editor. Far from neutral, atlases of maps have always been constructed to communicate and circulate a specific worldview through the spatial arrangement of visual information. The atlas maker’s job is not to make maps (though he or she may well do that, too), but to assemble a view of the world from the best available map sources. Compiled map by individual map, an atlas seeks to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.35 It was not, however, until the last third of the seventeenth century that the name “atlas” fully caught on and subsequently became the shorthand description for a book of maps. Until then, several terms had been in use to indicate the same sort of production. In addition to “atlas” and “theater,” titles of some bound collections of maps referenced mirrors and light. Importantly, each of these terms, as Akerman puts it, “referred to the ability of atlases to help their readers perceive the world in some heightened or enlightened way.”36 Both atlases and theaters are human-made microcosms of the world, “where the drama of life in all its variety and complexity could be presented and observed.”37 But the atlas metaphor gets at something even more intriguing, with its implicit reference to the powerful Titan god who, in Greek mythology, is condemned to hold the heavens on his shoulders. Atlas is a figure of great strength, but he carries a tremendous burden. In the ancient accounts, Akerman describes, “Atlas wavers between god and man, one who literally holds the world aloft and one who holds it in his hand and mind only figuratively. The atlas provides its readers with a god’s-eye view of the world, but at the same time this view requires the combination of human eyes and skills, those of the topographers and chorographers whose maps provide the substance of the image.”38 Thus, the atlas metaphor offers an attractive conflation of the human-made and the divine, elevating the atlas editor to a godlike position while acknowledging the human toil of geography and astronomy that makes the maps possible. In its flattery to the makers of these map collections, “atlas” stuck. In Richter’s Atlas, the relationship of the parts to the whole is central. Importantly, it is a relationship that remains entirely unresolved. Due to Atlas’s status as an ongoing work in progress, unlike an atlas of maps, Richter’s Atlas has, as of yet, no end. And while it is easy to see this tremendous project as an egomaniacal exercise of uncommonly outsize proportions, it carries, to some degree, its own existential burden. Mercator, in fact, toiled on his Atlas for some twenty-five years, publishing some parts but leaving it incomplete at his death. It was only published in full by his son in 1595, the year after he died.

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The collected volumes of Mercator and Ortelius in the sixteenth century have by now evolved into myriad forms of atlases. Typical world atlases have come to compile statistical information on flora and fauna, gross national products, population distributions, census information, and soil and mineral deposits, among other useful and ostensibly objective facts. But atlas creators also produce war atlases to define national allegiances and educate citizens about defense strategy; county atlases rife with local information concerning crops, property lines, and residents; school atlases to educate the youthful citizenry of a nation about their country’s riches in comparison to foreign lands; and pocket atlases that fit in a breast pocket for on-the-go consultations. Each type, and each version of its type, evolved from a particular set of needs and has a perspective, a point of view. And yet the maps within them bear the mark of objectivity. All maps do. Maps abstract lived experience, flattening the nitty-gritty of our messy lives into a twodimensional space neatly represented by orderly lines, a helpful legend, and a suitable font for the script. This is what Dietrich means when she refers to the cartographer as operating with an ordering impulse, charting unknown territory.

B E YO N D M A P S

Moving beyond the historical origin of atlases as books of maps, the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison recount that it was by the eighteenth century that the term “atlas” came to designate not just illustrated volumes of geography—​maps—​but also those of astronomy and anatomy. By the nineteenth century, these picture books were produced as guides throughout the empirical sciences, covering topics as varied as snowflakes, diseased organs, clouds, and crystal structures.39 These atlases, whatever the field, purport to be totalizing views, the final word on any given subject. From topography to botany to world history, atlases both define and claim knowledge of discrete subjects. As Daston and Galison write, they “are the guides all practitioners consult time and time again to find out what is worth looking at, how it looks, and, perhaps most important of all, how it should be looked at.”40 They are made to instruct, expected to do no less than teach us to see. Within atlases produced in the scientific realm more broadly (i.e., not just maps), Daston and Galison show how, since the late nineteenth century, atlas makers have worked to standardize phenomena to an “objective” view and eliminate the idiosyncratic interruptions of fallible humans. Perhaps most importantly, they argue, atlases are “certified free of human interference.”41 Furthermore, as any plate can be referred to for the necessary information without need for drawing on surrounding plates, atlases are deemed essentially non-narrative. But are atlases wholly without narrative? While scientific atlases such as those of crystal structures, botany, or anatomy may well be, cartographic historians have argued for a place for narrative within the seemingly neutral zone of map atlases. The cartographer and scholar Denis Wood suggests that narrative has been implicit since the first atlases, for if one reason to compile maps together is simply for practical convenience, to reduce

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wear and tear, the other is “to make something greater than any single map can be; to, through the inter-relatedness of the maps, through their juxtaposition and sequencing, make something higher, something no individual map could aspire to, to . . . create a discourse, a mediation, to tell a story.”42 So while each plate can be consulted for its factual information, without regard for the rest of the plates, there is something to be gained from perusing the work as a whole. But a viewer may not respond as much to Richter’s aesthetic cues toward interpretive totality as to the content of each image. Wood describes the “sheer pleasure” of reading an atlas: “What possible use will I have for the names of the craters, chasm, fossae, mons, mones, mensae and patera of the surface of Mars? None: I have no use for this information, I pore over these plates with pleasure, with the same pleasure I take in looking at landscape paintings, or in reading landscape descriptions, the same pleasure that I find in a good book.”43 Wood’s comment suggests that while atlases are, and always have been, functional, descriptive, didactic sources of pure information, this very information, particularly in visual form, has its own distinct pleasure found precisely in its own opening toward narrative. Ultimately, Wood concludes of atlases, “The whole comprises a narrative sequence that is not just one thing after another, but a single thing, an argument, a demonstration no single map could quite as strongly make.”44 By contrast, while Richter’s Atlas tends to be consulted on a macro scale only, the approach of dipping in one image or one panel at a time, as with a “real” atlas, proves rewarding. It might seem from the scholarship that atlases of maps and scientific atlases are categorically different species, sharing only broad strokes but none of the same motivations. Instead, I see them as two sides of a coin, each of which has evolved to embody more fully one feature of “atlas-ness.” It may be that the politics embedded within maps of all kinds—​t he claims for territory, the implicit assertions of national power via map organization, their trajectory of use, historically, to demonstrate national and international allegiances, trade routes, and imperial conquests—​make their subjectivities and narratives more evident. By contrast, an atlas of botanical specimens likely has no overt political message. But all kinds of atlases strive toward demonstrating the world as its maker understands it to exist, usually as objectively as possible. It is just in atlases of maps that we see the subjective narratives more clearly.

FA M I LY P I C T U R E S , TA K E T W O

As we have seen, whether they are geographic or more broadly scientific, atlases, like albums, are edited. But they are not typically edited to produce an individual story (a national or imperial story, however, yes). And it is precisely here, in his use of familial material, that Richter’s own Atlas evinces its greatest tension between neutrality and narrative. Critical attempts to grapple with this tension lay bare the stakes in constructing such a narrative. Rather than leading us back to their own origins, these personal photographs point us toward the scaffolding of the scholarly project to construct mean-

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ing. Atlas’s various commentators have deeply divergent opinions as to whether or not Atlas is personal. Zweite declares, “The Atlas is above all an instrument for work, and only rarely does it serve to record personal experiences and memories.”45 Zweite acknowledges the presence of Richter’s second wife (the artist Isa Genzken) in it, but maintains, “It is striking how Richter, consciously or unconsciously, excludes his private life, blocking this aspect out of the Atlas almost entirely.”46 Later in his essay Zweite further concedes the presence of friends and family members in Atlas but still insists on its ultimate impersonality: “The photographs of friends (Palermo) and family members (wife and daughter) define two salient positions in the kaleidoscope of images, but they should not be seen primarily as personal disclosures by the artist; the attitude manifested in many of these photographs is too abstract and distanced for that.”47 Zweite’s trouble in aligning the ongoing appearance of personal photos with his belief that the work does not record personal experiences and memories is evidence of the difficulty of resolving the totality of Atlas with its images on an individual scale. Richter’s structure urges the viewer to stand at arm’s length, and Zweite’s final inclination to do just this even as he is compelled by the emergence of personal family images testifies to the force of Atlas’s imposing design. But the viewer’s mode of engagement is not always as institutionally grounded as that of Zweite, who, as director first of the Lenbachhaus, which owns Atlas, and now of the Düsseldorf Kunstsammlung, which hosted Richter’s major 2005 retrospective, is invested in and responsible for establishing and maintaining the artist’s enduring reputation. A strategy that conforms to the artist’s own clear construction of scaffolding around his private life, motivations, and even history is a reasonable way to go. However, the critic Rainald Schumacher, once Richter’s studio assistant and thus much closer to the daily comings and goings of the artist himself, sees the issue of personal pictures within Atlas very differently, writing, “Atlas is a vast album of the stages and interests of a life . . . . It is a document for biographical research.”48 Further, Schumacher suggests that a biographer could use Atlas to trace Richter’s whereabouts: “Friends, wives, apartments, studios, holidays, short stays, and changing interests in professional life” are all subjects a biographer could follow.49 Where Zweite insists on the ultimate exclusion of private life in Atlas, Schumacher sees it as a fundamental aspect of its character. Zweite and Schumacher find nearly opposite meanings in the question of whether or not Atlas is personal.50 Schumacher’s suggestion that Atlas be treated as a roadmap to Richter’s life is remarkable for its wholly practical and straightforward attitude: An atlas can be a roadmap, so why not treat it as such? Why should following Richter’s directive, “This is an atlas,” be so difficult? At the same time, Schumacher does not consider the effect of Atlas’s overall system, nor does he question the transparency of photographs, their ability to tell a clear story. By now, there are a significant number of personal images in Atlas, hundreds more, even, than when Schumacher was responding to it. The question is how to understand them in relation to both the other images Richter includes and in relation to the larger structural system of the work.

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It is, thus far, part of Atlas’s nature to be in constant flux. If it is not the shuffling of panels between exhibitions that Richter used to engage in regularly, it is certainly the mere fact of Atlas’s ever-expanding girth, with nearly eight hundred panels now, well more than double its debut size in 1972. Atlas does, however, settle into something like a routine after the dizzying array of material presented in the first 135 panels.51 Panel 135 begins an extremely long series of landscapes, skies, and working studies and sketches. In marked contrast to the early panels, it is not until panel 393 that a human face appears again, and the shift is jarring. So, too, is the sudden intimacy of our view: From distant vistas and conceptual architectural projects we suddenly see Richter’s then pre-teenage daughter, Betty (panels 393–​394) regarding us squarely. Identified as “Betty Richter, 1975” and “Betty Richter, 1978,” the panels are a sudden reminder of Richter’s family life.52 The next reemergence of family life is shortly thereafter: Panel 414, “Double Portrait,” includes two portraits of Richter with his second wife, whom he married in 1982. This photograph is the beginning of a short sequence of multiphoto typologies, all titled, rather formally, “Isa Genzken,” perhaps because of her own professional identity (figs. 16 and 17). The next emergence of family begins more than one hundred panels later and is a long sequence of photographs of his third and present wife, Sabine Moritz, and their two children together, Moritz and Ella. The photographs of Sabine alone, even while she is pregnant, retain the ambiguous feel of the Isa Genzken portraits with regard to their balance of private subjects seen and arranged with a clinical eye, but the later images of her feel increasingly intimate. Along with Sabine are her babies; these family groups, unlike photographs of a lover or wife, feel at once more universal and less like aesthetic studies. Baby pictures are warmly shared with friends and family; photographs of women are displayed more comfortably on museum and gallery walls. Again, however, it is crucial to note a distinction in the presentation format: While the old sepia-tone family album photographs of the earliest panels in Atlas have a palpable material power in exhibition that they flatly lack in publication, the later sequences of family images provoke the opposite response. In exhibition, as parts of large blocks of framed panels, many of which are placed on the wall well above the viewer, even pictures of Richter’s children feel imposing, distant, and off-limits. Yet in publication, they become intimate. The publication appeals to a viewer’s familiarity with the album form. Like Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation, Atlas in publication—​this section, anyway—​may remind viewers of their own family pictures. Flipping through the pages in the 2006 edition, in particular, one may feel unexpectedly welcome to this family’s world. In panel 586, for the first time the viewer sees Sabine smiling: She is in the hospital with her newborn daughter Ella on July 11, 1996 (fig. 18). Turning the page reveals three photographs of Sabine kissing her infant son Moritz, dated February 12, 1995. The panels are identified specifically: names and dates serve as titles, though in contrast to the Isa Genzken panels, here Richter uses just the more familiar first name and occasionally just an initial (“S. with Moritz” or “S. with Ella”). In panel 588, January

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Figure 16 Gerhard Richter, “Double Portrait” (1981), panel 414 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Two color photographs, 51.7 × 36.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 17 Gerhard Richter, “Isa Genzken” (1982), panel 417 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Three color photographs, 51.7 × 36.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 18 Gerhard Richter, “S. with Ella” (1996), panel 586 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Three color photographs, 51.7 × 36.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 19 Gerhard Richter, “S. with Moritz” (1995), panel 603 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Sixteen color photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

23, 1995, Moritz is even younger and is either just about to nurse or has just finished, since we see him at Sabine’s breast (fig. 19). Richter’s photographs are identified with specific dates, but, again, are incorporated in Atlas panels well after the fact.53 Panel 589 shows Ella, a robust-looking baby, shortly after her birth on July 11, 1996. Panel 590 shows the younger Moritz in an incubator, with gauze over his eyes and monitors attached to his tiny chest in January 1995. In the following panels, grids of Ella and Moritz are interspersed, though images of Moritz far outnumber those of Ella. Richter, too, moves from grids of eight and nine to dense groupings of sixteen four-bysix photographs on one panel. The images are touching, poignant, and often funny. Viewers are privy to dozens of pictures of Sabine breastfeeding, multiple grids of both Ella and Mortiz in a repetition of nearly identical poses, views of baby Moritz on sheepskin, bathed in sunlight, Ella propped on an armchair, Moritz in the bath and, later, just starting to smile at the camera. Richter shares photographic grids of Moritz and Sabine playing on the floor; Moritz in his high chair; Moritz lying back on a pillow, all

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Figure 20 Gerhard Richter, “Moritz” (1995), panel 611 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing). Nine color photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

chin; Moritz laughing, round, and bald; and Moritz sitting up by himself (fig. 20). The multiplicity of views, even the repetitions, unexpectedly work not toward the generic image but toward, as Rainald Schumacher wrote, what seems “the interest of a father who looks on astonished.”54 Here, photography is used as a medium through which to look closely, and again and again; it is a form of intimacy that is recognizable because of Richter’s familial subjects, but can inflect other obsessive photographic studies within Atlas with a new and potentially emotional valence. Yet Atlas works its paradoxical logic: Even within such a deluge of imagery, viewers are not fooled into thinking that they somehow “know” Richter’s family, and yet at the same time, by piecing together dates and studying photographs, one learns that his son Moritz is the older child and was in an incubator while Ella seems to have been born in good health, that Sabine breastfed the children, and that Richter takes as many photographs of Moritz and Ella as any parent would (even excluding those that may not have made Atlas’s cut—​and noting the disproportionate number of older-child versus younger-child photos). Atlas sets up a model wherein viewers are invited to have a privileged view (whether into his working process, his family life, or his thought process).

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Yet at the same time, the framing, the gridded and repetitious arrangement not only of panels but of photographs within panels, and the banal categories of organization, work to create distance rather than closeness.

B U C H E N WA L D

A further example will illustrate the limitations of the photographic in the political and historical, rather than familial, realm of Atlas. To make panels 16–​20, Richter gathered together images of Holocaust camp victims re-photographed from books and blurred them before printing and attaching them to the panel. Richter titles the terrifying photographs with the excruciatingly banal description, “Photos from Books.” In these five panels, naked and emaciated prisoners, deplorable living conditions, Nazi officers, and bodies piled high in carts or being pushed by bulldozers or spread across a large empty space are on display. While these early inclusions have received much critical attention—​and they are impossible to ignore—​another camp picture in Atlas, appearing some five hundred panels later, has gone completely unnoticed. This photograph appears on the panel titled “Buchenwald,” numbered 522 but undated (fig. 21). Unlike the earlier concentration camp photos, here it is the panel’s title that arrests the viewer’s attention, not the image itself. The panel presents three rather nondescript photographs. They are standard four-by-six prints, commercially processed, like all the others Richter has taken for Atlas during vacation and travels, of landscapes, cities, friends, and family. A long, four-story, light-brown building with a red roof appears at the top, across a gravel field. The second photo is a closer view, and the third is taken from a similar vantage point, but without the building in the frame. The difference between this view of the camps and the ones Richter included early in Atlas is on an order of magnitude. These three images depend on the title of the panel to have any impact at all, with the exception, perhaps, of viewers who have themselves toured Buchenwald. When the Buchenwald picture was first published in 1997 (having been exhibited in New York in 1995), it was simply titled, “A Beech Wood” and given no date. This literal translation of “Buchenwald” completely effaces any connection to the Nazi concentration camp.55 The 2006 edition returns to captions on every page; and now the photograph’s subject is clearly revealed as Buchenwald. The image’s lack of date gives pause, as well. The picture was first exhibited in 1995, but this only tells us the latest date the photograph may have been taken. Richter’s photograph depicts the building that now serves as the Camp Museum.56 He did not choose (or, rather, did not choose to include in Atlas) a photograph of the much more widely recognizable gatehouse into the camp, or the more grisly crematorium or ovens. Instead, “Buchenwald” is a rather banal view, meaningful only with external information. In exhibition, the Buchenwald panel is easy to miss, as it requires effort to find the title on a display label, usually off to the side and several feet away from the image itself, and still further effort to locate the image within the entire block

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Figure 21 Gerhard Richter, “Buchenwald” (n.d.), panel 522 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing), Three color photographs, 51.7 × 36.7 cm. Image: Atelier Richter and Cantz, © Gerhard Richter, 2015.

of panels.57 Friedel, in writing about this section of Atlas, seems to follow the installation’s logic of generics. He writes of a larger block within which the Buchenwald panel appears, and says that the panels “are dominated by landscapes and urban views, including once again a series of shots with traces of paint which were made during the transposition into a painting. What has to be particularly emphasized are the pictures of flowers from 1992–​94 (sheets 537 ff.) almost all of which served as models [for paintings].”58 In his earnestness to emphasize those panels that have become paintings—​t he lovely flowers—​Friedel seems not even to see Buchenwald within the more usual views of Cologne and Madrid. But it’s hard to fault him. This is what Atlas does: A potentially charged image is located in puzzling enough a place that it is simply overlooked; it is without its own clear meaning. One is not wrong to focus on apolitical and ahistorical flowers, but that Friedel does this underscores Richter’s achievement in not directing a viewer’s conclusions, and in resting the burden of interpretation squarely on the viewer. Whereas with Boltanski we saw a closeness between an actual album and an artwork about albums, in the case of Richter, the categorical displacement and differentiation between album and artwork is further complicated by an introduction of the atlas form. Richter creatively reworks these traditional and historical forms, so that Atlas hovers just one step removed from a “real” archive, a “real” atlas, or a “real” album. This work at once clarifies and obfuscates the histories and narratives told by individual photographs and by the archives, atlases, and albums that contain them. Atlas points us again and again to its structural framework as a means to engage with its individual images. A viewer must navigate a shifting set of framing devices, engaging in an elaborate game in which the meaning of the single image is bypassed in favor of understanding the manner in which it is delivered. I suggest that Atlas’s most “atlas-like” qualities are, in fact, the very tensions it shares with “real” atlases: between objectivity and subjectivity, between narrative and nonnarrative, and between the view of the whole and the view of the specific. Atlases of all kinds necessarily embody a dualism—​they must, in order to do their work—​and the most atlas-like feature of Richter’s Atlas is also to embody these contradictions. Opening up these internal tensions in its form demonstrates the obstacles to clear meaning we face in approaching Atlas’s scores of photographic images. But it is these obstacles that engage us as viewers. Our negotiation of the contradictions produces a productive uncertainty about the place of narrative and subjectivity at the core of Atlas and, by extension, in the structural frames we impose upon photographic images.

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4 “AROUND THIS NUCLEUS A LARGE EMPTY SPACE” Dinh Q. Lê’s Mot Coi Di Ve

In Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005) by the Vietnamese-born artist Dinh Q. Lê, nearly two thousand small, found photographs cascade from ceiling to floor, loosely sewn together into a porous and netlike curtain (fig. 22).1 The installation is a visual and conceptual counterpart to W. G. Sebald’s spatial notion, discussed in chapter 2, of the “very real nucleus” of photography animated by the empty space that surrounds it. Indeed, in Mot Coi Di Ve, the negative space between the photographs is a crucial aspect of the piece. Collectively spanning nearly twenty feet, the individual photographs reflect a range of photographic objects and images, including vacation snapshots, scenic postcards, high school and other studio portraits, and family pictures of birthday parties, babies, and loved ones—​all “stray photographs,” as Sebald would put it. Their object-quality is profoundly evident: Some testify to a past use through their visible wear and handling. Others, such as postcards, have canceled stamps and brief notes written on them. On the reverse of many of the photographs are handwritten excerpts of text (sometimes in addition to preexisting script) added by the artist and his collaborators. The texts—​ whether added or found—​immediately begin to fill in the empty narrative space that both literally and metaphorically surrounds the individual photographs. Mot Coi Di Ve’s individual photographs are of intimate size, yet they form a considerable mass overall in their collective presentation. The piece occupies space in a physical way, and the installation commands the space of a room. The spaces between the individual objects (or nuclei, in Sebald’s terms) open the work up to the room’s surroundings, and a viewer participates corporeally by walking around the hanging, bending

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Figure 22 Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999), installation view at Montgomery Gallery, Pomona College, 1999. Found photographs, thread, and linen tape, 120 × 240 in. Image: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

down to see the images on the floor, and catching glimpses of other viewers through the mesh-like installation (fig. 23). A viewer can perambulate the installation and study the fronts and backs of the small pictures individually, which are sewn together to face both directions. Like a loosened up and unframed version of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962–​ ongoing), the sheer number of images in Mot Coi Di Ve presents a similar challenge to the viewer. The whole cannot be accessed at once; some images and text are always out of view. Indeed, the work is burdened by the same weight of inaccessible history so present for a viewer of Atlas or Christian Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969). It is also deeply entangled in the recovery of personal memory through strangers’ photographs, while conveying a substantial dissatisfaction with written history, particularly written Western history. Lê was born in Vietnam in 1968. His hometown of Hà Tiên is southwest of what is now Ho Chi Minh City, close to the Cambodian border, on the Gulf of Thailand.2 During Lê’s childhood, the entire region was embroiled in wars of national liberation.

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Figure 23 Dinh Q. Lê, detail of Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005), installation view at Asia Society, New York, 2005. Found photographs, thread, and linen tape, 120 × 240 in. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

South Vietnam was defeated in 1975, when Lê was seven. After the Communist victory, Lê’s parents lost their jobs and began planning the family’s escape.3 By 1978, masses of Vietnamese, including Lê’s family, were fleeing the country by boat, frequently under perilous conditions of overcrowding, assaults by Thai pirates, and unpredictable seas.4 Lê recollects the experience: My mom and dad planned [our escape] with the boat owner for months. It was postponed many times. It was a small fishing boat, about 72 people made it [on]. I don’t know how many people were left behind during the scrambling and how many the boat owner sold space to. When the time came we quietly walk[ed] down the beach on a moonless night. We were discovered by the local police and the next thing they were shooting and throwing grenades at us trying to prevent us from getting to the boat. My mother, myself, and three young siblings were able to get on the boat and escaped. My three older siblings were left behind in the mad scrambling, two were caught and imprisoned. We were on the boat for three days. We encountered a big ship in the ocean but they did not allow us to get on the ship. They sent us on with some food and water. On the last day we were attacked by a Thai pirate boat before we landed on the coast of Thailand.5

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For one year, the remaining family lived in a Thai refugee camp, waiting, as the artist puts it, “for the U.S. to make up its mind whether they wanted us or not.”6 After their harrowing escape and their time as refugees in Thailand, Lê, his mother, and his three siblings were sponsored by a Protestant church group in the Pacific Northwest, and the family was assigned to live in Banks, Oregon, which Lê remembers as a small farming and logging town.7 They lived there for three months, but his mother wanted to be closer to Lê’s uncle (his father’s brother) in California.8 Lê, his mother, and all six of his siblings were eventually reunited in Simi Valley, California, northwest of Los Angeles. Lê’s family lost all of their photographs (and of course much more) when they fled. Though the family had not owned a camera in Vietnam, they had studio portraits, vacation pictures, and prints given to them by other family members who did have cameras.9 Lê did not return to Vietnam until 1992, newly emerged from art school in New York.10 By 1998, he was spending more than half of each year in Ho Chi Minh City and moved back to the city full time. He made Mot Coi Di Ve in 1999, during this period of transition. While in Ho Chi Minh City, he frequented thrift stores and antique shops, looking through their stacks of old, “orphaned” snapshots. He says he was initially motivated by a compulsion to locate pictures from his own family’s albums. “Sifting through these old photographs,” he has said, “I was hoping that one day I would find some of ours.”11 To date, Lê has not succeeded in this unlikely pursuit. He did, however, purchase others’ old photographs by the kilo from one of the thrift shops, ultimately using them to build Mot Coi Di Ve. The piece immediately evokes the sense that, as Lê’s family fled the country, leaving everything behind, so too must these photographs have been violently severed from their original owners.12 Lê reflected, “Along the way, I realized these photographs in a way are my family’s photographs. These people probably were also forced to abandon memories of their lives as well, either because they did not survive the war, or they had escaped from Vietnam.”13 A baby picture, a snapshot from a vacation at the beach, a high school portrait, a postcard from a loved one: These, as the artist puts it, are “not the kind of things that you leave behind deliberately.”14 In them, collectively, Lê saw a mirror of his own experience. His collection of other people’s pictures became, then, “a way of getting closer to my family.”15 As Margaret Olin suggested with her notion of photographic misidentification, the photographs do not need to show Lê’s actual family to be useful. Like Roland Barthes and W. G. Sebald suggest, individual memory can be activated circuitously, through someone else’s family photograph. Lê’s understanding of how photographs operate in the construction of personal history was conditioned by the formative experience of losing the family pictures, while his understanding of how photographs inform public history was shaped during his college years. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Lê began to think more critically about the wartime experiences of his youth and, crucially, how they squared with his new life in the United States.16 While taking a class about the Vietnam War, he realized that the material he was learning was almost completely

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one-sided: The professor placed a heavy emphasis on the suffering of the American soldiers, but practically none on that of the Vietnamese. Out of frustration and anger, in 1988 Lê made a series of posters that he put up on campus and in town, listing the casualties and suffering on both sides (fig. 24). He also included statistics on the number of children orphaned in Vietnam. This information was included on the posters with news photos and texts such as “The Destruction Was Mutual.”17 This student project vividly demonstrates Lê’s frustration with the one-sided perception of the war perpetuated in the United States, but it also points to the beginning of his fundamental concern with understanding how history is written. “History” may seem an abstraction when it appears in college textbooks. But in Lê’s case, it was an abstraction to be measured against personal memory as he learned firsthand that the history—​both text and photographic—​presented as truth in his class had a profoundly Western bias.18 A missing personal photographic record, then, was joined with a deep understanding that, no matter how authoritatively they are presented, photographs cannot be relied upon to tell personal or public history in any clear, reliable way. This understanding has informed the majority of Lê’s photo weavings, which have occupied the artist through much of his career and include the series Cambodia (1994–​ 99) and From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003–​5). The former was inspired by Lê’s first visit to Cambodia as an adult in 1994, to the site of the Khmer Rouge who had tormented his town and family members.19 The series literally weaves together images of Khmer Rouge prisoners with photographs of the bas-relief sculptures at the ancient Angkor temples, thus constructing a visual and physical link between two violent epochs in the country’s history (fig. 25). Combining highly disparate images in photographic weavings, the series asks the viewer to question the way visual artifacts maintain and construct historical knowledge. The artist continued this line of investigation with the series From Vietnam to Hollywood, which more explicitly addresses how personal memory can be manipulated over time, particularly by popular entertainment. Still weaving, Lê took stills from American movies that deal with the Vietnam War, such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, and combined them again through weaving with iconic photojournalistic images from the same war. He thus wove together a fictionalized Hollywood view of the Vietnam War (as it is known in the West) with the ostensibly factual (or, at least, “documentary”) view from the photographic press. Weavings continue to be a crucial part of Lê’s practice, and installation works such as Mot Coi Di Ve continue this engagement with the promises and limitations of the photographed past. Lê first created Mot Coi Di Ve in 1999 and exhibited it at Pomona College, but its production dates (1999/2005) indicate its precarious history. Only weeks before it was to go on view again in a solo exhibition at New York’s Asia Society, Lê realized it had been lost from his mother’s Southern California garage.20 The disappearance of the original Mot Coi Di Ve is a bitter yet perhaps appropriate irony, replicating the tropes of loss that categorize Lê’s relationship to a photographic past. In this case, any hope of achieving

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Figure 24 Dinh Q. Lê, posters from The Destruction Was Mutual (1988). Photocopies, each 11 × 17 in. Image: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. Figure 25 Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled (1998) from the series Cambodia (1994–​99). Chromogenic print and linen tape, 63 × 48½ in. Image: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

what we saw in Chapter 2 as Boltanski’s at-first seemingly absurd and over-the-top goal for the minutiae of his life to be “secured, carefully arranged and labeled in a safe place, secure against theft, fire and nuclear war” was clearly thwarted. Lê began work on a new version, which would now stand as a marker of double loss (fig. 26). He returned to the same supplier in Ho Chi Minh City from whom he had bought the photographs for the first piece, buying more photos in bulk. While the second loss was decidedly more banal than the one that resulted from the family’s flight from Vietnam, it was, one senses, just as final. It is poignant to know that in the second version of Mot Coi Di Ve, these particular images are only on view because of the multiple losses leading up to their appearance in New York. At the same time, what might otherwise read as precious family mementos—​survivors, even—​now also seem intrinsically replaceable, just another fifteen hundred snapshots of unknown origin from a junk dealer. In its original 1999 installation in Pomona, the piece hovered just above the gallery floor. In the re-created and modified 2005 version, due to the lower height of the gallery ceiling, the sewn photographs gently drifted onto the wooden floor and continued horizontally for several feet.21 In both versions, the notion of a family album looms large. It is impossible to know how many of the photographs were housed in personal albums, but much of the imagery suggests it. While a number of the photographs are postcards, and thus less likely to have been affixed in an album, many have telltale remnants of paper and glue on their backsides, indicating that they were indeed torn from an album (fig. 27). But diverging from the care with which one would sequence a personal album, Lê did as little sorting and arranging as possible. From the kilos of photographs he purchased, he only removed those that appeared to have been taken after the war.22 Building Mot Coi Di Ve the second time was a collaborative enterprise. Lê’s friend Ngo Minh Hao cut and pasted tiny linen squares to the corners of the photographs to keep them from tearing. Lê enlisted the help of several friends and family members to transcribe the texts he had selected (which will be discussed below) onto their backs.23 Lê himself did not choose all of the texts; he gave the art historian Moira Roth, who also collaborated with him on the replacement piece, free rein to choose English selections from The Tale of Kieu, an epic poem written in the early nineteenth century by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Du.24 His aunt, Cuc Thi Lê, “arrive[d] each day by motorbike” to his Ho Chi Minh City studio to take batches of photographs to sew together with white thread and return them a day or two later, “rolled up in a thin, cheap blue-red-white nylon plastic cover.”25 This distribution of labor ensured Lê’s distance from the arrangement of photographs, the selection of text, and the decisions about which texts would appear with which photographs. While collective memory of the war in the United States may be shaped by brutal and unforgettable images incessantly reproduced in the media—​a young, naked girl fleeing an accidental napalm strike, a Viet Cong soldier being shot point-blank in the street, a Buddhist monk self-immolating—​what is missing from this visual record is the daily

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Figure 26 Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005), installation view at the Asia Society, New York, 2005. Found photographs, thread, and linen tape, 120 × 240 in. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

Figure 27 Dinh Q. Lê, detail of Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005). Found photographs, thread, and linen tape, 120 × 240 in. Image: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

life that Vietnamese people managed to carry on despite the war: the rituals of family, school, tourism, and so on. As Lê puts it, the photographs he collected “came to represent the lives we had before and during the war, a way for me to reclaim what was lost. This was a time when the world only saw images of death in Vietnam but we did have a life there then. I actually have some very fond memories from the years during the war.”26 While a handful of famous photographs from the war are burned into a Western collective consciousness, Lê counters, “I want the world to see [the other] side.”27 As he was choosing text passages for Mot Coi Di Ve, he looked for entries that had less to do with the war directly, and more to do with everyday life.

T R A N S L AT I O N

The title Mot Coi Di Ve comes from an eponymous Vietnamese song. Originally written by the famed composer of popular songs Trinh Công So’n (1939–​2001), the sweet and melancholy “Mot Coi Di Ve” has been performed by numerous musicians. Lê translates it as “Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home,” a sentiment that suggests

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the yearning embedded in this piece.28 Many simpler translations exist, such as “A Place to Come,” “A World to Return,” “True Journey’s Return,” and “A Realm of Return.”29 The variety of translations testifies to the difficulty of rendering Vietnamese into English as well as to the elaborate gesture and specificity of Lê’s own act of translation. The difficulties of translation continue in the portions of poems, letters, oral histories, and diaries, originally written in English, Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, that Lê selected to accompany the photographs.30 He and his collaborators inscribed them on the photographs’ reverse sides, suggesting both the international breadth of Vietnamese experience and the voices otherwise silenced in the Euro-American archive. Roth selected excerpts from a translated version of The Tale of Kieu as well as from oral histories of Vietnamese Americans published in James Freeman’s 1989 book Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives. Lê himself chose excerpts from letters between a North Vietnamese soldier and his family during the war in Nhung La Tho Vout Tuyen, recently published in Vietnam, and made selections from two also recently published diary accounts from the war years: Forever 20 Years Old, written by a young Vietnamese soldier who was killed in combat at the age of twenty, and Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram, written by a young North Vietnamese army doctor who ran a jungle hospital before she, too, was killed. With the exception of Vietnamese American oral histories published in Hearts of Sorrow, which are in English, and translations of The Tale of Kieu in both French and English, the texts are written in Vietnamese. Mot Coi Di Ve is thus addressed primarily to Vietnamese and English speakers, and only those who are bilingual will be able to read everything.31 Just as Lê was interested in the photographs for conveying the qualities of everyday life that persisted during the war years, he was also interested in parallel evidence found in the writings. As Lê points out, when people make snapshots of themselves, “they don’t photograph themselves within the context of the war, they photograph themselves at the happiest moments of their lives.”32 Within this logic, Lê explains, “I wanted the text to kind of mirror that. It’s not so much about the war but about just the daily life and the memories that it was worth it for them to write about, or to remember about.”33 From the letters and diaries, Lê chose passages that told stories not of fighting, politics, and bloodshed, but of family relationships, simple parts of life, and reminders of the everyday world that did persist, despite being overshadowed in history’s perspective by the war. The transcribed excerpts from The Tale of Kieu can be identified—​even by a nonVietnamese speaker—​by their verse form. The Tale of Kieu has been called Vietnam’s national poem, and Huỳnh Sanh Thông, who annotated and translated into English the 3,254-line poem, writes that since its publication and dissemination in the second decade of the nineteenth century, it has “stood unchallenged . . . as the supreme masterwork of Vietnamese literature.”34 He adds that the work has “pervasive popularity, little short of adulatory worship, among both scholars and illiterates and in all spheres of life.”35 That Lê chose a widely known literary work with a beloved and sympathetic

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protagonist speaks to his desire to keep Mot Coi Di Ve in the realm of the everyday—​at least for Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans—​in both its photographic and textual sources. Thuy-Kieu, the central character, is a young woman from a good family who is forced to leave her home and her country and turn to prostitution. After years of struggle and suffering, Kieu is redeemed and reunited with her family at home. Many Vietnamese identify with Kieu’s struggles, and Vietnamese living out of the country—​as Lê was for much of his life—​are referred to as “Viet-Kieu.”36 Huỳnh Sanh Thông believes that Kieu appeals to “peasants and scholars alike” across Vietnam because her tale portrays “the picture of victims, of people punished for crimes or sins they are not aware they have committed.”37 Looking at Mot Coi Di Ve, a viewer sees the people—​or their friends and relatives—​who have lost their photographs. As a viewer reads verses of Kieu’s story recounted in Vietnamese in excerpts on the backs of the pictures, they may consider the ways in which the photographs and their owners likely became separated. The texts in English that are not in verse form can all be attributed to oral histories from James Freeman’s Hearts of Sorrow. Freeman, a U.S. academic anthropologist, interviewed forty Vietnamese American men and women and published fourteen of their oral histories regarding their refugee experiences.38 In fact, his choice of title is derived from The Tale of Kieu: The opening lines of the poem, translated literally, are: “To experience the events of the mulberry-covered sea, while watching over these events, causes sorrows of the heart.”39 Like Lê’s keen interest in remembering those aspects of daily life that cannot be boiled down to a textbook history of the effect of the war on the people of Vietnam, Freeman found that many of the people he interviewed focused not on the war and politics, but on their family lives and childhood memories. It is these passages that Lê was most drawn to when excerpting the narrators’ stories for Mot Coi Di Ve. The Vietnamese texts distill excerpts from letters between a North Vietnamese solider and his family and the two diaries, Forever 20 Years Old and Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram.40 Lê noted that the diaries had only been published in Vietnam a few months before he created the second version of Mot Coi Di Ve, and expressed amazement that they were published at all, saying, “There are parts where [the soldier] talks about how he’s scared, and usually something like that the government doesn’t want to be published, because they want the portrait of the Vietnam War as a glorious fight against the imperialist American. But recently Vietnam has opened up, too, so more and more things have been allowed to be published that I think maybe ten years ago, five years ago, wouldn’t have.”41 Indeed, both diaries were a publishing phenomenon in Vietnam, quickly becoming best-sellers and evoking comparisons to Anne Frank’s World War II diary. Forever 20 Years Old, published in Vietnam in 2005 as Mai Mai Tuoi 20, was written by Nguyen Van Thac, who had been a college freshman before enlisting in the Vietnamese army on October 2, 1971. In one year of service, he wrote 240 pages in his diary, chronicling his daily life, writing about his girlfriend and

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his patriotism. He was killed at the age of twenty in May 1972.42 The diary’s emphasis on daily life appealed to Lê, a textual parallel to his interest in reviving and displaying the quotidian. Dang Thuy Tram, whose diary was also published in Vietnam in 2005 as Nhat ky Dang Thuy Tram, was born in Hanoi on November 26, 1943. A surgeon from a prosperous family of doctors, she volunteered to serve at a military hospital in 1967. Tram was head doctor at the hospital, in the Quang Ngai Province of south-central Vietnam, and kept a diary for three years, until she was killed by a gunshot to the head when her hospital came under U.S. attack on June 22, 1970. Tram, twenty-seven, had stayed behind to fight the Americans after having ordered her colleagues and patients to go. Like so many other Vietnamese, Lê was immediately attracted to the diaries, and particularly interested in how both the young soldier and the doctor were “grappling with the war, but in a very personal way. Trying to deal with the fact that they have to get rid of the Americans. But at the same time, there’s doubt. . . . It’s just really human. And this conflict and confusion about their role. They’re scared, too.”43 As he says, “Sometimes they just talk about how beautiful the sky is . . . or their fishing trip.”44 Of the snapshots of vacations, the family pictures and visual records of regular life that went on during the tumultuous war years, Lê observes that “we . . . carry on. There are some good moments as well, it’s not all horrible.”45 Lê’s extensive use of text in the installation—​and the sources of that text—​distinguish Mot Coi Di Ve and provide a productive counterpoint to Sebald’s fictive narratives. With Mot Coi Di Ve there is little chance of finding the particular personal stories of those we see in the photographs. In one of the letters excerpted by Lê, from the North Vietnamese soldier to his wife and children, the soldier writes, “My children, to all my children, I keep taking your photographs out and looking at them, and I never get tired of it.”46 Serendipitously (as, according to Lê, he did not choose which text and images should appear together), a photograph of a beautiful young woman hangs close by this text (fig. 28). It is painfully easy for a viewer to imagine connections: Perhaps this photograph of a young woman was also cherished by a soldier on the battlefield, studied again and again.47 With visual and textual sources in such close proximity, Sebald’s “large empty space” is easily filled. But despite the ease of storytelling and imagining, Mot Coi Di Ve makes perfectly clear the tenuous fragility of such narrative impulses. Ultimately, although the photographs and texts serve as indexical markers, they are deeply incomplete, foregrounding loss above all. In a practical and tangible way, Lê has enacted Boltanski’s proposition—​seen as well with Barthes and Sebald—​t hat family photographs are interchangeable. Recall Boltanski’s assertion that “we have, in fact, all, the same photographs,” and that our family photography collections are “nothing but the catalog of familial rites, that of marriages, vacations, first communions.” But while Boltanski’s analysis has the feel of an ironic gesture pointing to this newly realized and somewhat hard-edged truth of what we

“around this nucleus a large empty space”

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Figure 28 Dinh Q. Lê, detail of Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005). Found photographs, thread, and linen tape, 120 × 240 in. Image: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.

­ istakenly believe as our most precious and personal photographs (they are “nothing m but a catalogue”), Lê’s proposition offers a more poignant acceptance of the emotional utility of strangers’ photographs. The function of a family collection of photographs, Boltanski says, is “to reinforce familial cohesion.” With Lê, it seems this is the case whether or not the “family” in question is actual or a constructed surrogate. Mot Coi Di Ve gives these thousands of abandoned thrift-store photographs a new context, but one that is profoundly aware of its own ambiguities and limitations. While recognizing the chance that a viewer could conceivably recognize him- or herself, a friend, or a family member in the piece, in most viewers’ experience the photographs can only represent Olin’s quality of “misidentification” that emerged through Barthes and Sebald’s use of the medium. The photographs of Mot Coi Di Ve are powerful because they represent a real history, but any experience of punctum will draw not on the facts of the photographs, but rather on the viewer’s own memory and imaginative narrative.

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5 HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION AND DOUBT Christian Boltanski’s Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988

Latent in any encounter with Dinh Q. Lê’s Mot Coi Di Ve (1995/2005) or Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962–​ongoing) is the issue of volume. Mot Coi Di Ve’s information is both visual and textual, and the combination of the quantity of text (much of it in a foreign language for the majority of viewers) and copious visual information precludes extended contemplation. In the case of Atlas, several hours would be required for even a cursory glance at every image in the piece. Even the most dedicated viewers of these artworks will inevitably focus closely on only a relatively small percentage of the whole. But while both pieces use an aesthetic of volume strategically, and to different effect, neither takes the experience and implications of sorting through vast quantities of information as its central motif. In January 1989, Christian Boltanski presented Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 at Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot in Paris (fig. 29).1 The monumental work filled the upstairs gallery exhibition space and was soon purchased by the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the recommendation of their curator of contemporary art, Bernard Blistène.2 In this project, Boltanski revisited his fascination with the idea of saving everything, which he had established in the text of his 1969 Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950, discussed in chapter 2. Recall his assertion that “I decided to harness myself to the project that’s been close to my heart for a long time: preserving oneself whole, keeping a trace of all the moments of our lives, all the objects that have surrounded us, everything we’ve said and what’s been said around us, that’s my goal. The task is vast, and my means are frail.”

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Figure 29 Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965– ​1988 (1989), installation view at Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, 1989. Mixed media, 270 × 693 × 35.5 cm overall in this installation; each box 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, © Christian Boltanski, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Recherche et présentation, as we saw, demonstrated Boltanski’s interest in the storage and retrieval of photographic information and his deeply urgent sense of preservation coupled with a profound skepticism of this pursuit. And it instituted a relationship with his audience that was at once eagerly sought and deeply evasive.3 The new project, appearing some two decades later, clarified the artist’s career-spanning questions of information retrieval and preservation while engaging with his own place in art history through a teasing dialogue with his audience. In the postwar era, the concept of the archive has inspired artists as generationally and aesthetically diverse as Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, Douglas Huebler, Hanne Darboven, Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Joan Fontcuberta, Joachim Schmid, Susan Meiselas, Fred Wilson, Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, and Walid Raad. Artists and theorists began investigating archival systems in the 1960s, but the past decade and a half has seen a sharp uptick in curatorial and scholarly investigation of the role and function of the photographic archive in contemporary culture and artistic practice.4

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Boltanski’s work has been a mainstay of this dialogue. Whereas Richter’s work addresses the atlas form and Lê’s installation may be seen within the framework of family albums, Boltanski’s work moves clearly into the territory of the archive. Despite his early Recherche et présentation and other early forays into archive-based projects, both the artist’s popularity and his critical reputation, particularly in the United States, rest largely on a body of work that he began in 1985, the series Monuments (fig. 30), and the series Reserves from slightly later.5 They are installations of blurry photographs of anonymous faces—​often children—​enlarged and frequently presented with candles or electric lights and arrangements of tin biscuit boxes. Commentators were quick to point out associations with the Holocaust, although this was a connection that Boltanski himself was slow to endorse. The installations from this period are frequently compared to shrines or memorials and evoke a generalized feeling of loss, sorrow, and absence. In the Monuments series, Boltanski’s core strategic methods are evident: the incorporation of blur, mass quantities, anonymity, and ambiguity, and his much-discussed “obsessions” with death, childhood, memory, and loss.6 The year 1969, when Boltanski created his ambiguous little album, also marked the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. Working in Paris, like Boltanski, Foucault launched the current critical interest in the role and function of archives. For him, archives are neither the physical accumulations of documents and data that individuals and societies store, nor the buildings that house those collections. Rather, for Foucault, the archive refers to the systems of statements and networks of events that combine to create any historical moment—​the historical a priori on which our current statements are predicated and through which they are defined and made possible. Foucault eloquently describes his concept of the archive as “the border of time that surrounds our presence. . . . It is that which, outside ourselves, limits us.” 7 As such, the archive can never be described exhaustively and is never complete; it necessarily emerges only in fragments. Although distillations of Foucault’s discussion have fueled more than four decades of critical inquiry into the nature of archives, subsequent interpreters have largely glossed over his proposal that the archive refers not to any actual material manifestation of papers, photographs, or other historical collections, but to a larger system outside of ourselves that shapes and determines our own systems of discourse. But this entry into the concept of an archive—​rather than its material manifestation—​is useful in considering how Boltanski points to an archive as a framing structure, a conceptual apparatus that precedes his own subjectivity. As we will see with Les archives de C. B., Boltanski’s “archive” directs us and simultaneously produces and constrains our understanding. Our engagement with this form, as Boltanski aestheticizes it, enacts the interpretive process of historical reconstruction in a self-conscious way. Twenty years after he produced Recherche et présentation, Boltanski continued to be fueled by the same basic aesthetic ingredients, but had catapulted to an international stage and thus had the resources with Les archives de C.B. to redirect his concerns from

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Figure 30 Christian Boltanski, Monument (1986). Photographs, lightbulbs, and wire, 77 × 59 in. Image: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

the relatively compact and personal photo-album format to the more unwieldy archive. In Les archives de C. B., Boltanski institutionalized a large portion of his archive of photography and text documents from the years 1965 to 1988, but aestheticized it into an artwork, thereby limiting research access and directly challenging the art historian’s impulse. He continued this archival endeavor with La vie impossible (2001), a project that, through its massive display of the artist’s archival material in twenty vitrines, reverses the invisibility of Les archives de C. B. but ultimately meets the same goals as both earlier projects.8 Spanning more than thirty years, from 1969 to 2001, each of these projects is a touchstone along the arc of Boltanski’s career that collects—​and indeed constructs—​his lifetime detritus, operating seemingly outside his more generalized evocations of loss and memorial. Through their autobiographical specificity, these projects demonstrate the artist’s ongoing compulsion to attend to the problem of “saving everything” while simultaneously underscoring that it is only retroactively that we can produce a narrative. Comprised of tin boxes under lights, Les archives de C. B. does not offer much at first take, resisting a casual reading.9 The MNAM, in its own catalogue of acquisitions made from 1986 to 1996, describes the piece as “a résumé of all his work and all his life.”10 It is, however, essentially an invisible résumé. The fullest published description and analysis of the work comes from Lynn Gumpert’s 1996 monograph on the artist, where she neatly summarizes its complexity, writing, “Boltanski had removed from his life and his studio years of accumulated clutter, shuffling his past into the boxes and out of sight, both from himself and from his audience. Once again, though, his irrepressibly ambivalent and contradictory spirit was in evidence. True, the papers and ephemera were saved in an archive, but lacking any index or order, it is, practically speaking, unusable.”11 There is, however, much more that can be said about Les archives de C. B. To begin, it is a piece whose meaning rests fundamentally on its description. It is comprised of 646 tin biscuit boxes, rusted to varying degrees and stacked against a wall, illuminated from above by a row of electric lights. Black cords dangle in front of the stacks of boxes and cast linear shadows across the rows. The boxes are closed and they bear no labels. Each box rests on another’s closed lid, and those high on the top row support the electric lights. Thus, inaccessibility is built into the design and presentation. The work teases the viewer, and particularly the scholarly one: twenty-three years’ worth of archival material, safely ensconced in a museum’s care, but rendered inaccessible. If viewers were presented with 646 closed biscuit boxes with no external markings and no title, their response might be indifference, or at most a formal reading tracing the rust of the uniformly geometric and industrially produced tins to a minimalist precedent: a rickety, weathered, readymade take on Donald Judd.12 But we are told in the title itself that these boxes are the artist’s archives, and we are thus compelled to wonder about their unseen contents.

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LOOKING IN

The usual object description of the work states that the biscuit boxes contain about twelve hundred photographs and eight hundred documents. Intriguingly, the MNAM curators, in the 2005 exhibition of the piece, wrote that the boxes were said to contain the objects listed above, not that they actually did.13 This open-ended phrasing was necessary because, as I later learned, no one at the museum had yet opened the boxes, and no catalogue of their contents existed.14 And for any visitor, it would remain unknown. While on display, though the boxes are sealed only by gravity, they are stacked high and ultimately out of reach. And even if they were stacked at more approachable heights, museum protocol would forbid us from touching them, let alone opening and exploring their contents. In our first conversation about the work, Boltanski said that he would not divulge what the photos and documents were about, if the boxes were to be opened.15 There is no formal agreement with the museum about researchers opening the boxes, but there is, however, a practical challenge: The 646 boxes usually are stored off-site and are difficult to access not only for researchers but for staff as well. Yet in the work’s 2005 exhibition at the MNAM (fig. 31), only 624 boxes fit comfortably into the space designated for the piece, leaving twenty-two boxes in on-site storage at the museum. That both the artist and the curators deemed this partial display acceptable is telling: 624 boxes is “enough” to communicate the idea of the piece and, I would argue, the partiality only underscores Boltanski’s larger point about the impossibility—​indeed, inadvisability—​of total archival reconstruction. In practical terms, this circumstance created an unusual moment of accessibility that allowed me to investigate the boxes’ contents, while at the same time it raised ethical questions regarding the fundamental meaning of the piece.16 Should one look inside, even though every aspect of the work’s presentation suggests that this impulse be stifled?17 If special access can be gained, is the curator or art historian the only one allowed to “know” the archival Boltanski? Or is not knowing a crucial part of the piece? This is a suggestion that Boltanski has endorsed: “It’s the idea . . . it’s not to look at them.”18 With this problem in mind, I issue a spoiler alert here: Given the opportunity, I looked. And ultimately, like so many of Boltanski’s claims, his initially professed stance that he would not discuss specific images within the boxes if they were opened became yet another—​presumably strategic—​move in the developing game of archival hide-and-seek. As we will see, this strategy is hardly unusual for Boltanski and ultimately serves to underscore the point of the piece. Opening what had once seemed to be a hidden or even forbidden box necessarily entailed an element of suspense and drama (fig. 32). The exteriors are rusted and rough-looking, but their bedraggled state is only a facade. The sleek, shiny interior surfaces have the pleasing aesthetic effect of reflecting their contents on their vertical sides.19 While the boxes have been described as “stuffed,” in fact their contents are notably scant. Simple

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Figure 31 Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989), installation view at the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 2006. Mixed media. Dimensions variable; each box 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

math would suggest this: twelve hundred photographs and eight hundred documents divided equally among 646 boxes comes to approximately three objects per box. The twenty-two boxes I opened revealed a range from one to eight objects per box. Though Boltanski concurred that this sample was representative, there is no reason to take the artist at his word, or to place too much faith in the approximate calculations testified to by the object description, so we must allow for the possibility that this small selection (just over 3 percent of the complete piece) is misleading.20 These spartan contents appear ever so carefully placed within the boxes, usually face down and neatly folded. The choice to have spread the contents so thinly has two effects: Not only does each carefully preserved document appear exceptionally important, like a single jewel glistening in a special jewelry box, but there are also a monumental number of boxes. Rather than the few dozen boxes that might be needed, the viewer is confronted with a towering wall of an archive. The contents vary. One box, for example, contains an approximately seven-by-five-

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Figure 32 Christian Boltanski, open box from Les archives de C. B., 1965– ​1988 (1989). Mixed media, 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

inch black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged woman in a bathing suit, seen from the shoulders up, and a smaller snapshot-size color photo of a nicely dressed middleaged couple (fig. 33). These photographs are different in kind: The former is related to Boltanski’s work and could very well have appeared in one of his installations. The other appears to be a personal snapshot, a style of photograph not seen in his public oeuvre since the 1970s. In fact, according to Boltanski, it is a snapshot of some friends on their wedding day.21 Another box contains a letter, dated October 29, 1973, from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, regarding an upcoming project with the artist. A third contains a color photograph of one of Boltanski’s Compositions photographs from 1983, alongside a typed—​but anonymous and undated—​manuscript of an interview with Boltanski about his work. Another reveals a Polaroid photograph of one of Boltanski’s installations, together with a snapshot of a boy seated at a table with a plate of food (fig. 34). The boy, according to Boltanski, is the nephew of the artist Annette Messager.22 Other documents in subsequent boxes include a memo from the curators (Lynn

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Figure 33 Christian Boltanski, open box from Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989). Mixed media, 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, © Christian Boltanski, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Gumpert and Mary Jane Jacob) of the popular exhibition Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness that toured the United States; small figurative drawings—​one of a man, one of a canopy—​on graph paper; photocopies of photographs that appear to be from a family album from about the 1930s; the calendar of events at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California from January 1977 (when Boltanski had an exhibition on view);23 a loan receipt; more blurred black-and-white photographs of the type found in his installations; a typed manuscript of what appears to be Serge Lemoine’s essay about Boltanski’s work, from the 1984 Pompidou retrospective catalogue; notes about work at the Musée Rodin, Paris, from July 5, 1986, that appear to have been made by the artist; more Polaroids of Boltanski’s large color photographs; papers documenting the transfer of artworks, and so on. It thus appears that Les archives de C. B. freely mixes “art” or “professional” source photographs with “personal” photographs. In short, as advertised, the boxes hold things—​photographs and documents—​that one would expect an artist to accumulate over several decades. Certainly, the contents could be accounted for according to year, or according to category (exhibition business,

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Figure 34 Christian Boltanski, open box from Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989). Mixed media, 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

personal notes, critical writing, and the like), but what emerges from the boxes, as much as their contents, is the viewer’s perception of the act of looking and the artist’s role in drawing his researchers in. Upon opening them, what had been concealed is revealed, and this transformative moment heightens the expectation of what one will find. Thus invested, a researcher is hard pressed to discount any of the contents as unremarkable. How we judge the relative importance of any particular object within the boxes is entirely up to us. Yet the oscillation between concealment and revelation is too seductive to move quickly past what, in a more conventional archive, might be passed over as unimportant. That I lingered over a museum’s printed calendar of events from more than thirty years ago, scrutinizing it for meaning, is only the result of its presentation within such a precious format. One box, when opened, reveals a particularly beautiful interior containing a single black-and-white photograph of a young woman standing in front of a setting sun in Venice (fig. 35). The shimmering insides of the tin box have great aesthetic effect, reflecting

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Figure 35 Christian Boltanski, open box from Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989). Mixed media, 12 × 23 × 21.5 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Kate Palmer Albers, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

this lovely photograph on all sides and thus mirroring the reflection that we can imagine appears in the water of the Venetian canal behind the woman (but this aesthetic effect is just chance, for business papers are reflected in the same way). One knowledgeable of Boltanski’s life and oeuvre will recognize this image as having appeared in a series on which he collaborated with Annette Messager in 1976, the Model Images. Indeed, Boltanski confirms, the photograph depicts Messager herself.24 In its 1976 appearance, the photograph was titled Coucher de soleil à Venise and appeared among thirty photographs that Boltanski had taken to illustrate “model” photographs of beautiful subjects (fig. 36).25 Within this other framework, the photograph illustrated the conventions and seduction of photographing a beautiful woman at sunset: It is a prototype for every tourist who has sought to capture a girlfriend, wife, or lover bathed in the fleeting and shimmering beauty of a magical city. Within the second framework, the outward and knowing representation—​even instruction—​of photographic conventions is replaced by the viewer’s curiosity about the archival significance of this particular photograph.

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Figure 36 Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, Images modèles (1976). Chromogenic prints, installed dimensions variable. Image: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

T H E A R C H I VA L G A R B AG E C A N

Boltanski describes the impulse for Les archives de C. B. as wanting to clean up, to get rid of all the clutter in his studio. For years, he explained, he had kept everything, and finally it was too much. However, with items such as photographs of friends and family, love letters, and other personal mementos, it was difficult to get rid of everything. So, he says, creating Les archives de C. B. “was a way to throw them away and not to put them in the garbage.”26 He could get rid of them and at the same time preserve them. Boltanski claims that there was no sorting, no plan for which photographs and documents went in which boxes.27 He simply filled 646 tin boxes with whatever happened to be lying around the studio. The artist’s claims to random allocation are necessary, for without

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them Les archives de C. B. would run the risk of appearing too ordered, too deliberate, not “raw” enough. In other words, Boltanski did just enough to nudge the material of the archive toward aesthetic product while simultaneously alienating it just enough from the illusion of raw, unsorted documents. Indeed, there is no clear connection among the individual objects in each box, suggesting that Boltanski did simply gather material that had accumulated over the years and incorporate it into Les archives de C. B. Likewise, the arrangement and organization of the boxes themselves (and not just their contents) is also of key importance. Like the documents they contain, the boxes seem to be at once controlled and random. While neatly stacked, identical in size, and displayed in a grid, there is no imposition of order such as one would expect in a “proper” archive and no labeling system to guide a researcher to their contents, or a curator to their placement. Nor could this type of more typically archival system ever be put in place: The boxes’ status now as a complete artwork prohibits anyone—​purely on an ethical basis—​from “arranging” the contents any differently.28 As Gumpert commented, “Lacking any index or order, [Les archives de C. B.] is, practically speaking, unusable.” That is, it is “unusable” as a normal archive—​to be sifted, sorted, tagged, rearranged, and mined by scholars intent on their own “new” orders and histories. Yet it is usable as a platform from which to consider the role of personal storage and individual attempts at archiving the material of our lives, photographic and otherwise. For whom does such material have significance? Although many of the objects contained within Boltanski’s boxes are recognizable—​such as loan forms, images from his artworks, and manuscripts of published interviews and essays—​many others are not. Mostly it is the personal photographs—​Messager’s nephew, a vacation snapshot from the beach at Berck, friends on their wedding day—​t hat a future historian would have a particularly difficult time decoding. Boltanski is well aware of this, as it is true for any archive. But the artist acknowledges that even he himself does not really remember the friends in the wedding photo, as he has not seen them in a number of years.29 If Boltanski himself does not remember the significance of the photographic subjects squirreled away in his “archive,” what exactly is a historian finding out? Which version of “Boltanski” is revealed here? With architectural restoration, one must choose a target date to which a building will be restored; in an archaeological dig, one must privilege one specific historical epoch over another. In viewing an artist’s archive, a researcher attempts to “restore” the artist’s life, but is it the Boltanski of 1989, who remembers who these people in the snapshot are? Or the Boltanski of 2005, for whom they are no longer significant? Boltanski sets this reconstructive and restorative role of the art historian into motion, while at the same time calling attention to the absurdity and impossibility of the project. In 1969, of his modest little album Recherche et présentation, Boltanski could say: “Preserving oneself whole, keeping a trace of all the moments of our lives, all the objects that have surrounded us, everything we’ve said and what’s been said around us, that’s

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my goal.”30 Twenty years later, in the “trace” of Les archives de C. B.—​t his aesthetic mark of an archive that is not, technically speaking, an archive—​it would seem Boltanski has succeeded. His life, it could be said, is indeed in some way “secured, carefully arranged and labeled in a safe place, secure against theft, fire and nuclear war.”31 Boxing up one’s archives, calling them an artwork, and—​best of all—​selling them to a major museum would seem to achieve this goal. After all, a museum’s primary function is to care for its collections, and the ingenious move to transform the ordinary photographs and documents from one’s life into art assures Boltanski’s quotidian artifacts a safe and long-lasting home.32 Yet the mute facade of boxes also provides the negation of this view by simultaneously ensuring that the archive will be functionally inaccessible. An artist’s archive is a primary source of study in most serious scholarly inquiries, but the artist ensured his photographs’ and documents’ protection via mummification, enclosing them and then limiting access by dint of categorizing them as art. Unlike a typical artist’s archive, which might be bequeathed to a particular library, museum, or research center for the benefit of future scholars, and transformed by archivists into a sorted, categorized, and searchable entity, Les archives de C. B. proactively prevents this from happening solely through its status as an artwork, not an archive. Even if Les archives de C. B. is someday fully catalogued, any bits and traces—​or significant chunks—​of the past he has tucked away in it will not be in any “official” archive that might one day exist, an archive that might be categorized, sorted, tagged, and filtered according to someone else’s taxonomies. Boltanski has thereby effectively guaranteed that any future archive that may be put in place after his death will necessarily be an incomplete one. The impulse in 1989 to cordon off sections of his archive in unusual ways was not new for Boltanski, nor would it be the last time he would distribute his personal effects in this way. In 1972, he had held an auction during which he sold the contents of his desk drawers to the highest bidder, thus simultaneously valorizing and dispersing the relics of his daily life.33 In 1993, he donated a number of objects from his personal collection—​including drawings; samples of the many pipes he continually smokes; and objects such as a knife, a pen, and a watch he had used as props for his various photographic projects—​to the Karl Valentin Museum in Munich. This museum, dedicated to one man (a German actor, comedian, and satirist) is very much off the beaten path.34 While some artists may wish for their archives to be bought or acquired by a prominent art institution, through these repeated gestures, Boltanski insists on the opposite. Indeed, his archive will only ever exist in an intentionally fractured state, thus making its reconstruction by future art historians difficult by design. Boltanski’s point is coherent, but it is best accessed (and fittingly so) through an accumulation of gestures over time rather than through one complete artwork. In a recent interview, Boltanski commented, “I think the difficulty of seeing a work of art is part of the work of art.”35 This stance, which builds on the impulse to scatter his archival remnants and is clearly evident in Les archives de C. B., was demonstrated again

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Figure 37 Christian Boltanski, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (2001), installation view from the exhibition La vie possible at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, 2009. Twenty cases, archival documents, and neon lights, dimensions variable. Collection Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Image: Stephan Altenburger, © Christian Boltanski, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

in his 2001 installation La vie impossible, a piece the artist considers a direct companion to Les archives de C. B. Like the 1989 project, La vie impossible gathers together artifacts, ephemera, documents, and photographs that one could imagine eventually comprising the artist’s archive.36 It is, however, in some way the 1989 project’s opposite. Rather than exhibiting closed boxes that “are said to contain” photographs and documents from his archive, La vie impossible is comprised of twenty tall yet shallow wooden vitrines (approximately five by three feet), mounted on the wall and filled like overstuffed bulletin boards with layer upon layer of the artist’s archival materials (fig. 37). As with Les archives de C. B., these consist of photographs, drawings, loan forms, letters, and the like, all jumbled together in a seemingly arbitrary way. Though they seem to offer these materials for our inspection, each vitrine is covered with a wire mesh screen, and they are installed in a gallery with extremely low light. While each vitrine has a lamp affixed to its interior, it would be an overstatement to suggest that the dim glow somehow constitutes lighting for the archival material.37 Rather, the lights primarily display their own functional inadequacy. Thus, while the contents of the vitrines are visible to some degree, their details are extremely difficult to decipher. Indeed, the experience of peering into the cluttered, dark wooden frames makes even more obvious the voyeuristic (or maybe just plain nosy) impulse of the viewer, as he or she wonders, Who signed that letter (only part of which can be seen)? Or, Who is standing next to Boltanski (in the photo that is obscured by the letter)?38 Thus, even more explicitly than Les archives de

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C. B. does, La vie impossible offers the tantalizing promise of full archival disclosure but in the same gesture retracts that promise.

IT’S NOT AN ARCHIVE

According to the artist, Les archives de C. B., despite its name, is not an archive. When pressed, Boltanski insists on this point, stating it several different ways: “It’s not an archive. It’s art about archive[s];” “You know, it’s a piece. It’s not an archive”; “It’s . . . to speak about an archive, but it’s not an archive. I don’t care about archives. I care to speak about archives. It’s not the same thing.” And, yet, a moment later he acknowledges, “In fact in these boxes is my real archive.”39 Boltanski’s back and forth here should not be dismissed as evasiveness, or, at least, not purely so. The categorical indeterminacy of Les archives de C. B. is precisely what makes it interesting, and Boltanski’s own comments on the piece should, perhaps for once, be taken at their ambivalent face value. It’s not an archive, but it contains his real archive. The artist pushes the project just far enough into the aesthetic realm that a viewer’s determination of its “proper” category is perpetually deferred. As such, the stories and conclusions that we are tempted to draw from the work’s suggestive riches come to rest, finally, on art, not document. Boltanski claims that what is important in Les archives de C. B. is the “idea of the archive inside. It’s not the archives that are important. It’s the idea that for the spectator, for the visitor, that he knows that something is inside. It’s not to look at them.”40 This suggests that the work should operate purely conceptually, which is appropriate, since nearly everyone who encounters it in the gallery will not look at the archives inside. Nevertheless, Boltanski further claims that it doesn’t even matter if his “real” archives are inside. For him, it’s not important to be honest—​as he puts it—​about what the boxes contain. Here we may think again of Foucault’s suggestion that the archive is most powerfully read as a framing network that makes certain histories possible. Boltanski’s insistence that we understand Les archives de C. B. as pointing to a conceptual framework rather than as boxes of stuff may seem a contradiction, but it actually underscores this viewpoint. It does matter that his “real” archive is inside: personal photographs, professional correspondence—​not junk mail or old newspapers or nothing at all. The work is most effective in its operation at the hinges: between artwork and archive, between public and private. Were it not so close to a “real” archive, and were there not documents of actual historical importance inside (by scholarly standards, at any rate, if not the artist’s own), it would just be a stack of boxes with an empty promise. There would be no reason for a viewer to become engaged. Boltanski thus raises questions about the process of archiving itself, and of providing access to the contents of those archives, the photographs, the textual documents that historians use to tell a story. He is fundamentally aware that archives imply a future use, and speak more to this future than to any past they purport to document. Gumpert

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notes briefly that Les archives de C. B., secured as it is in the MNAM collection, succeeds “in preserving and documenting, for the indeterminate future,” the details of the artist’s existence. “Here was proof,” she writes, “that he lived at such-and-such address and that he received a letter from such-and-such a person on such-and-such a day.”41 The indeterminate future to the archive is the key. In his influential 1995 book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida argues that even a “typical” archive cannot offer smooth passage from past to present. His text has at its core the argument that an archive never refers to a point of origin in the past but is, by contrast, always open to the future. This point of view engages well with Gumpert’s observation that Les archives de C. B. is successful in preserving and conserving the details of Boltanski’s existence “for the indeterminate future.” Boltanski is not concerned with helping the future scholar piece together his life, but with highlighting both the conventional structures we rely on to make a story of history possible and the impossibility of ever being able to do so in a way that returns us to some “true” Boltanski. By using the framework of “archive,” a construct that we expect to shed light on the past, Boltanski most effectively makes his point that a future reconstruction is all that is possible. Derrida’s proposition that “the question of the archive is not . . . a question of the past” echoes the points Boltanski makes with Les archives de C. B., creating just the kind of future-oriented ambiguity that fuels Derrida’s theoretical position.42 It is nevertheless the simultaneous promise of the work to offer means to reconstitution, coupled with a built-in denial of that initial claim, which accounts for its seductive qualities. In toying with the production of his own archives, Boltanski is producing a certain reading (arguably, the one I am making here) of his concerns and body of work. Further, I would add that the process of reading Les archives de C. B. in turn produces as much as records the “events” of Boltanski’s life: There was a time in Venice, there was someone’s nephew, there was a show, there were friends. All of these things were photographically or otherwise documented. But what do they tell us now? To whom do they speak? It is not just the boxes’ contents that Boltanski is interested in, or that he asks his researchers to be interested in. Rather, it is the very process of his “archivization” of such documents and the process of reconstitution in the “indeterminate future” in which Boltanski is interested. How can we read these personal snapshots that belong to someone else, and show people we don’t know, even if their owner is a famous artist? What can they possibly reveal? While art historians have a professional stake in biographical resuscitation, Boltanski’s “not an archive” resonates more broadly toward a shared cultural impulse to record our own lives. We all have boxes of photographs, notes, letters, and mementos—​if fewer actual objects, in a digital age, than we used to. As the artist puts it, sometimes the stub of a train ticket is more important than a love letter—​but only the person who kept them would know why.43 Boltanski’s somewhat perverse desire for Les archives de C. B. underscores his seemingly contradictory position of having both secured the documentary remains of his

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past and taken steps to prevent them from being too readily reassembled by anyone in the “indeterminate future.” His professed hope is that someone catalogues the contents of all 646 boxes without consulting him as to the significance or origin of any of the objects.44 Then, the cataloguer should try to reconstruct the artist’s life from the photographs, letters, clippings, and the like as if Boltanski were already dead. It is an idea very close in spirit to his lopsided “collaboration” with Didier Semin for his 1988 monograph.45 Semin agreed to write the text, and it was decided in advance, in consultation with the artist, that there would be no interview and no contact with the artist. Boltanski summarized: “One could speak of the rules of the game that were established from the start and that Didier followed: I didn’t want to see him and he had to think of me as dead . . . . I gave him truly no information. It was remarkable: He never called me.”46 Almost a decade later, Daniel Soutif suggested that for his essay on the artist in another monographic catalogue, he could attempt to “reconstruct” Boltanski’s career through various fragmentary articles and artifacts. Boltanski, who had liked the results of his non-interview with Semin, readily agreed.47 In the transformation of archival material to aesthetic object, from private document to public display, Boltanski activates an engagement on the part of the viewer, a curiosity that will never be sated. Boltanski has secured the documentary remains of his past, and simultaneously taken steps to prevent them from being too readily reassembled by anyone in the “indeterminate future.” Very few of us have the opportunity—​or the desire—​to “discard” our personal archives into the care of an art museum. Yet in constructing an elaborate model for deferring investigation, Boltanski encourages it. In Les archives de C. B. Boltanski presents history as inaccessible in order to activate both the imagination and skepticism of viewers. By withholding the imagery upon which viewers might typically rely to learn about a subject, Boltanski asks his viewers to consider the limitations of such information and to approach historical material with a degree of doubt. In his engagement with the distinction between an artwork and an archive, he negotiates the systems of knowledge present in our culture and addresses their inevitable shortcomings when it comes to reconstructing history. And, though he is his own case study, Boltanski’s points are not limited to the cloistered realm of artistic hagiography. Rather, they extend outward to the far more diffuse and widely practiced project of historical reconstruction via archival sources. Boltanski engages his audiences by activating their own participation in historical and biographic reconstruction, making them more attuned to the limits of photographic representation and to the historian’s investment in interpretation. The artists in the following section approach the limits of photographic representation from a different angle. Whereas the work discussed in this section takes the interpretation of existing photographic images as the central challenge, the next chapters address artists for whom the ostensible subjects of their photographs have already passed into history.

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PART 3

UNSEEN HISTORIES

6 AFTER THE FACT Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site

“But we are here” . . . “Where’s here?” WILLIAM GIBSON, SPOOK COUNTRY, 2007

William Gibson’s novel Spook Country, set in 2006, tells the story of an aspiring arts writer assigned to cover so-called “locative art.” The story tracks her involvement with the virtual reality inventions of an artist obsessed with visualizing the past in the present.1 The book opens at 3 a.m. in Los Angeles, with the writer, Hollis Henry, on her way with the artist, Alberto Corrales, and his assistant to the corner of Larrabee and Sunset. Hollis’s response—​“Where’s here?”—​to Corrales’s declaration of their arrival indicates the nondescript nature of the intersection to which she has been brought. Corrales fits her with a foam-padded virtual reality (VR) helmet and fumbles with his cumbersome laptop computer and its cables. “This way,” he said, leading her along the sidewalk to a low, windowless, black-painted facade. She squinted up at the sign. The Viper Room. “Now,” he said, and she heard him tap the laptop’s keyboard. Something shivered, in her field of vision. “Look. Look here.” She turned, following his gesture, and saw a slender, dark-haired body, facedown on the sidewalk.2

Corrales’s assistant tells Hollis that it is Halloween night, 1993 (thirteen years earlier than the story’s present). Hollis is looking at the dead body of the actor River Phoenix, who collapsed that night from a drug overdose on the sidewalk outside The Viper Room, the Hollywood nightclub renowned at the time for attracting young, “A-list” actors and

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musicians.3 She is struck by the effect of this apparition, and by the fragility of the spectral body, which Corrales has conjured through VR technology. Hollis learns that the actor’s apparition is one of nine site-specific tributes Corrales has made, including two others in Los Angeles: one at the site of the photographer Helmut Newton’s death in 2004 outside the Chateau Marmont, and another about Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, on Wonderland Avenue. Reports of River Phoenix’s death often included a photograph of The Viper Room’s exterior, typically as it appeared in the days following the actor’s collapse, with an impromptu shrine of flowers and messages. In the novel, Corrales’s VR conjuring implicitly suggests that this sort of photograph—​of a place where something once happened—​is insufficient. The Viper Room occupies a place in Hollywood lore, but the sidewalk outside its doors is utterly banal. Its nondescript “nowhere”-ness that Gibson’s character observes hardly seems a suitable location for a heartfelt memorial. Spook Country is a work of fiction, but the storyline revolves around the limits of representation, and asks its readers to consider a technologically mediated engagement with the past. Though Gibson does not mention photography, the medium’s limits of representation are implicit in his story of seeking a way to document and visualize the past. Gibson’s novelistic musing addresses the voyeuristic impulse to revisit the past by literally seeing it and bearing witness, if belatedly. Even more powerfully, it speaks to both the potency of a specific place and to the dislocation of the past’s reverberations in the present. Gibson points to the drably nondescript locations that can mark the site of a death as well as the performative aspect—​in this case through virtual reality—​of conjuring the past in the present. It is these characteristics that connect the storyline of Gibson’s novel to the photographic work of Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day in these closing chapters. Uncertain Histories has dwelled thus far on works that take the interpretation of existing photographic images as a central challenge. This final section addresses artists for whom the ostensible subject of their photographs is no longer visible, having already passed into history. In the absence of a visible connection to an important moment, how can a photographer communicate—​or even produce—​the significance of a particular site? In the following chapters, we will see artists who, like the fictional Corrales, conjure the past in the present when faced with similar obstacles. In the work of both Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day, the concept of the photographic performative in concert with an archaeological practice of making the past meaningful in the present allows us to continue to press on and reformulate the terms of photographic indexicality. The performative aspect of each artist’s work deeply entwines with distinctly different approaches to place, extending outward from the artists’ practices to the viewers’ involvement with the work. Despite, and even because of, shifting modes of viewership, each artist sets up a nuanced encounter with place that is, by turns, mediated through photographic and textual representations and either suggestive of or insistent upon direct viewer

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involvement. As with the previous chapters, these shifting modes of encounter wrest the photographic image away from a singular connection with a conventional indexical subject as a marker of the past and toward an open-ended and, at times, uncertain present and future.

P H O T O G R A P H Y ’ S B E L AT E D N E S S

Anyone using a camera is bound, in at least a practical and operational sense, to record the subject before the camera, no matter what effects or manipulations may be employed. But throughout the medium’s history, photographers have adopted approaches—​both practical and conceptual—​to evoke the qualities of people, places, or events that are no longer present. As noted in the introduction, Civil War battlefield photography was one of the earliest instances of this conundrum when, due to limitations of travel speed and available technology, photographers were challenged to convey the drama of fighting that had concluded by the time of their arrival. Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, printed in 1865–1866, is, as the scholar Anthony W. Lee argues, a remarkable example of a creative response to the limitations at hand: The photographer and publisher devised a system of text and image that called the viewer or reader into a critical “imaginative reconstruction” of what could no longer be seen, or witnessed, by viewer or camera. In a process perhaps not so different from Boltanski’s career-long fascination with “reconstitution,” in this earlier case the photographer’s “lateness” was mitigated by a creative approach to viewer engagement. The Photographic Sketch Book effectively turned the medium’s perceived deficits to useful and provocative effect. The temporally complex textual narratives that accompany the images invoke, in parallel, a temporally complex view of the events and the photograph’s relationship to both the passage of time and to sensory effects beyond sight. Ultimately Lee suggests that the Photographic Sketch Book presents “an awareness through photography that antinarrative and antiheroism, forms of fracture and the impossibility of exaltation, were what lay in store in the modern world.” 4 Whether or not Gardner presaged the tropes of modernism, aspects of his strategy were revived in the 1990s and have since become nearly a mainstay of photographic practice.5 A crucial difference, however, is the lag time between an event and the later presence of the photographer. While Gardner missed battles by a matter of days or weeks, and may well have preferred to be a direct witness, the work of Joel Sternfeld, Ken Gonzales-Day, and other artists may involve arriving years or decades after the fact. Sternfeld’s series On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam is a contemporary anchor for work in this area, offering perhaps the first sustained renewal of these temporal concerns. The project began in 1993, when the artist visited the site behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art where, as we learn from the text presented with the photograph, a young woman named Jennifer Levin had been killed seven years

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Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers were seen leaving Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar, at 4:30 A.M. on August 26, 1986. Her body was found beneath this crab apple tree in Central Park at 6:15 A.M. that same morning. An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. She was eighteen years old when she died. Chambers, who was nineteen at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Figure 38 Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 1993 (1993). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

earlier (fig. 38). “It was bewildering to find a scene so beautiful,” Sternfeld recalls in the book’s afterword, “to see the same sunlight pour down indifferently on the earth.”6 He p ­ hotographed the scene as he found it, centering on the ground beneath a lovely crabapple tree. The geometrically rigorous glass exterior of the museum is just visible through the tree’s gangly branches; its presence, and the absence of people, lends the site a quiet stability. The late-afternoon sun infuses the scene with warm, dappled light, in contradiction to the grisly scene evoked in Sternfeld’s text, itself an integral component of the image:

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Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers were seen leaving Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar, at 4:30 A.M. on August 26, 1986. Her body was found beneath this crab apple tree in Central Park at 6:15 A.M. that same morning. An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. She was eighteen years old when she died. Chambers, who was nineteen at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

From this point, Sternfeld embarked upon a three-year photographic project traveling to and documenting sites of violence in the United States. The series is comprised of fifty-two sites that Sternfeld photographed from May 1993 through April 1996; they were exhibited as prints and published as a book in 1996.7 The book is ordered by the date of the violent event, not the date on which Sternfeld took his picture; the Central Park photograph that began the series appears midway through.8 The project came to include sites associated with such high-profile moments of violence as the 1955 kidnapping and killing of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till; the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States; the Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people were killed on April 19, 1995; and the 1991 beating of Rodney King by police officers at the conclusion of an eight-mile high-speed chase. The parameters of the subjects were set by the timeline of Sternfeld’s own life: violence that had occurred since 1944. As the book progresses, an increasingly large number of photographs from the early to mid-1990s cause the book to telescope around the recent past, as Sternfeld takes closer note of the violence he was most immediately and recently aware of. Importantly, On This Site has a fluid definition of what constitutes violence and what constitutes site, regularly departing from strict interpretations of violence as associated with a specific crime (though there are many of those) as well as from straightforward interpretations of how to locate a particular or extended act of violence. He also includes many less-known and less-sensational crimes in addition to those that grabbed national headlines or would qualify for inclusion in history books. The sites Sternfeld chose rarely reflect official memorials or otherwise-sanctioned sites of memory that were treated exhaustively in the media. Indeed, of the fifty-two photographs in the series, the locations are, in most cases, completely unrecognizable as sites of past violent crime, and sometimes squarely at odds with viewers’ media-inflected memories of the event. Throughout On This Site, one is struck with the ordinariness, and even the occasional beauty, of the locations. That dynamic, on its own, is not unusual within Sternfeld’s oeuvre. The artist is best known for his color landscapes, particularly those that offer the viewer an appealing combination of beauty, banality, and the unexpected—​even humor. But portraiture, too, informs his work, and the humanity of Sternfeld’s recorded encounters, no matter what the subject, is also found in On This Site, though the project does not include any human subjects. These are landscapes, for the most part, but they are infused with past and painful human failings.

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Sternfeld’s own encounter with the challenge of photographically representing something unseen had been under way for several years by the time he began On This Site. While spending a year in Italy (1990–​91), having won the Rome Prize, he had repeated encounters with roadside memorial crosses. The result of this project was his series and book Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome.9 Campagna Romana both preserves and shatters a romantic conception of the fabled Roman countryside, squarely depicting often less-than-idealized contemporary residents, activities, and development amid the still undeniably lovely landscape. Sternfeld notes that his love for Italy was fostered by his parents; his gift, as always, is to let genuine affection for his subject comingle with a clear-eyed assessment of the reality before him. Sternfeld’s engagement with landscapes evocative of a memorial past continued in November 1991, when he was invited by the artist Melinda Hunt to participate in a project about New York’s Hart Island. A few miles off the eastern shore of the Bronx, Hart Island is a site where, since 1869, more than 750,000 people have received public burials. Hunt describes those buried at Hart Island as those in the city of New York who “die alone and unclaimed or for whom nobody is willing or able to afford a private funeral.”10 According to Hart, what intrigued her and Sternfeld about this place was “how the natural landscape seems to completely mask almost 140 years of burials. Each mass grave of 1,000 children or 150 adults disappears from view within a season. Small, white concrete markers barely interrupt a view of the Long Island Sound framed with successive bridges and crowned by the Manhattan skyline.”11 In fact, Hart Island was used as a burial ground for Union and Confederate soldiers in the Civil War; Sternfeld’s photograph of the overgrown former Union cemetery speaks to the ability of the land to overwrite its own history, and serves as a tacit connection to Gardner’s challenges (fig. 39).12 Sternfeld began On This Site the same year he finished working on Hart Island, and the capacity of the natural landscape to mask past events animates both projects. To address the disconnect between the events and their sites as they appear months, years, or even decades later, in On This Site Sternfeld pairs the photographs with brief texts that recount the blunt facts of the crime. The texts, based on newspaper and magazine reporting, are crucial to establishing a link to the past, as the images alone are nearly always resolutely mute about the historical moments to which they refer. As with Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book, the tone of the texts is as important as their content. They are matter-of-fact but not cold, factual without sounding like police reports. Crucially, they often flesh out the moment of the crime to include information both previous and subsequent to what appears to be the central—​and now missing—​event. The texts may reach further into the past than the crime itself to set up the backstory and complexity, and then fill the space between the event and the photograph with references to ensuing legal trials, sentencing, psychological reverberations, and more. Sternfeld nearly always includes some precision in the texts, whether the time of

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Figure 39 Joel Sternfeld, Cemetery for Union Soldiers (Civil War), September 1992 (1992). Chromogenic print, 28 × 35 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

day the violence occurred, the price of bail, or simply a date. These details anchor the much more indeterminate photographs to harrowing fact, activating the imagination, as Gardner’s work does. In the Central Park example, text and image operate in concert to produce the distinctively unsettled quality of the series. Sternfeld directs the viewer to admire the gracefulness of the tree’s branches, the quality of the light on the trunk, and a sense of lush beauty in simplicity, and simultaneously to conceptually square this visible image with a scene well outside the visual confines of the photographed image, in this case a bar on the Upper East Side and a strangled body. The timeline is both precise and indeterminate, from when the young woman left the bar to the hour of her body being found. The visual experience is wedded to the text, as the photograph’s primary feature shifts radically to become its own emptiness, the nearly overwhelming absence of any visual indication of what we have just read. The site is unrecognizable as a place of violence, and unnervingly so. Sternfeld thus confronts the nearly galling return of a

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­ hysical place to such a benign state. And without a marker to tell us what happened p here, viewers—​perhaps even conceived as virtual visitors—​are as indifferent as the sunlight Sternfeld evokes in his text. The factual details disclosed in the text also reveal something about the artist’s process. Sternfeld began the series suddenly, and it is evident from the dates of the crimes that many of them took place after he was already engaged with it.13 In the few months before he photographed the crabapple tree behind the Metropolitan Museum, two particularly violent events shocked the country: the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, followed two days later by the eruption of a gun battle near Waco, Texas, that began a fifty-day standoff between federal agents and Branch Davidian sect members. The siege ended violently on April 19, with a total of eighty-four dead. Just a few weeks later, Sternfeld began On This Site in Central Park and would go on to make photographs about both the World Trade Center bombing and Waco.14

T H E P E R F O R M AT I V E L A N D S C A P E

As with later photographs in the series, Sternfeld was meticulous in finding the right place, consulting with the Central Park precinct of the New York Police Department to identify the exact location where Levin’s body was found. Finding the correct location was, for him, a way of serving tribute to the victim through a memorial act, uncomfortable though it may have been to do so. Finding the precise spot was part of the process that Sternfeld undertook for each of the sites he visited, a process he has characterized as performative.15 Within artistic discourse, the relationship between performativity and photography has most often been analyzed in terms of the photograph’s indexical relationship to the performance; conventionally, the performance is understood to be the noteworthy aesthetic act, with the photograph serving as a form of documentation of that primary event. As the relationship was theorized by Peggy Phelan in 1993, performance “cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”16 In other words, a photograph (or other recording or document) of a performance is a fundamentally and ontologically different product. Phelan continues by observing, eloquently, that performance “becomes itself through disappearance.”17 Phelan’s critique, though insisting on a distinction between the initial event and its later reproduction, leaves room for debate about how documentation might be usefully read. Amelia Jones has pressed on this distinction and its implications for conducting art historical research, arguing that “while the experience of viewing a photograph and reading a text is clearly different from that of sitting in a small room watching an artist perform, neither has a privileged relationship to the historical ‘truth’ of the performance.”18 For Jones, both experiences (like all cultural experiences) are mediated and intersubjective, and while each may produce a specific kind of knowledge, neither is

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inherently more valuable or useful than the other. Philip Auslander complicates the argument further with his categorization of performances staged only for the purpose of being photographed, rather than as autonomous events. In these cases, he argues, “The space of the document (whether visual or audiovisual) thus becomes the only space in which the performance occurs.”19 Auslander’s analysis gets us closer to the type of performative event occurring in the cases of Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day (as we will see in the following chapter), in that while the artists’ carefully thought out and, to some degree, repeated actions over time constitute a kind of performance (perhaps not unrelated to ritual or pilgrimage), these actions are taking place primarily with an eye toward the future document that will be circulated among audiences. Though their actions are not directly depicted, the photographs serve both as traces of the artist’s actions and as constitutive of the events themselves. Ultimately, Auslander proposes, “The crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience.”20 This temporal adjustment from looking at a photograph as a record of the past to looking at it as an object that will activate a relationship with a future audience is at the heart of this book’s concern. Auslander concludes with the “radical possibility,” in his terms, that “our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating a document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience.”21 Considering the photograph itself as the performative document, capable of instantiating an engagement with the still-future audience, moves us productively away from thinking of the photograph as indexically wedded to its time and place of origin, as some sort of window (however imperfect) onto a past event. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is within photo theory rather than performance theory that we find a useful rethinking of photographic indexicality in terms of the performative. In their essay “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality,” David Green and Joanna Lowry argue that Roland Barthes’s highly influential 1980 book Camera Lucida (discussed in earlier chapters) has had “a subtly distorting effect on our understanding of the nature of photographic indexicality,” the result of which is excessive scholarly attention on photographic indexicality as tied to the past, death, and mourning.22 Their essay seeks to redirect the sway of melancholy on indexical considerations toward an application that is both conceptual and performative. To appreciate Green and Lowry’s contribution, it is useful to revisit Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the index, one component of a system of signs that also includes icons and symbols, which the philosopher developed roughly between 1893 and 1910.23 Peirce defined a sign, in its basic capacity, as “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.”24 Signs address somebody; the receiver of the sign is a critical component of the formulation. Peirce’s scheme has been influential in art history and photographic studies at least since Rosalind Krauss leaned on his writings

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for her influential 1977 essay “Notes on the Index.”25 Since then, it has been taken up by historians of photography, typically in the context of attempting to define the medium’s unique attributes. Peirce categorized photographs as both iconic and indexical, and further argument has been made for their status as symbols, as well. Photographs are iconic because they “look like,” or resemble, the real object or person to which they refer, in the manner of a painted portrait. They are indexical because it is the chemical action of the light reflected from an object onto the light-sensitive negative that makes the image possible, which Peirce understands as a responsive physical relationship akin to, for example, a footprint in the sand, a fingerprint, or the action of wind upon a weathervane.26 Peirce writes that an index is “really affected” by its object. That is, in analog photography, the negative is “really affected” by the light that its object reflects.27 Peirce’s discussion of the index is far richer than it is usually given credit for in scholarship on photography. Indeed, it is remarkable how rarely historians of photography engage with the term beyond its usefulness for describing the uniquely close relationship, among forms of representation, between the photograph and its subject.28 Peirce also writes, “Anything which focusses the attention is an index,” using the example of a rap on a door, or something startling. This version of the index, he explains, “marks the junction between two portions of experience.”29 Peirce devotes attention, as well, to the notion of the index as a pointing gesture, as in the North Star, which directs its viewers north, or the demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that,” which direct the attention of a listener to a particular object or place. Peirce elaborates: “Some indices are more or less detailed directions from what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant.”30 Considering a photograph, this sort of index as well would entail thinking of a photograph as a direction for the viewer to place him- or herself in connection with the subject of the photograph—​a reasonable leap, and arguably one of the primary functions of photography. Returning to Green and Lowry: By addressing Peirce’s breakdown of the term “index,” they suggest that the act of photography “as a kind of performative gesture which points to an event in the world, as a form of designation that draws reality into the image field, is thus itself a form of indexicality.”31 Green and Lowry remind us that, in Peirce’s terms, indexicality goes beyond the photograph’s physical connection to the past event in the manner of a footprint. When the gesture of pointing is also indexical, as an act of designating something in the world, it likewise invokes a relationship to the real that is an aspect of photography. In elaborating this second form of indexicality for its critical usefulness, Green and Lowry note that it was conceptual artists such as Douglas Huebler, Jan Dibbets, and John Hilliard, working in the 1960s and 1970s, who pointed out the “complex interdependency between an event and its record”32 as twin aspects of photography’s indexicality that are fundamental to the medium itself. In particular, they give the highly relevant (for this present discussion) example of Robert Barry’s 1969 Inert Gas Series. Barry, a

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Figure 40 Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series, Site Being Occupied by Helium, 38 Cubic Feet, From Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion, 5 March 1969, Mojave Desert, California (1969). Image: Courtesy the artist.

conceptual artist, has produced work over the course of his career dealing in invisibility and unknowability; his performance in 1969 took place in locations around Los Angeles (mountains, beach, desert) where he photographically documented the event of releasing various invisible gases into the atmosphere (fig. 40). Because both the gases and the air are invisible, there is, in the documents, essentially nothing to see besides the landscape. The authors argue that Barry’s photographic record might seem consciously futile and absurd yet these images may be significant for our understanding of the limitations of a particular form of indexical inscription. . . . While providing us with the indexical trace of the moment of the gas’s release they also gesture towards the impossibility of recording it, and our attention shifts instead towards the act of photography itself as the moment of authentication. Thus the photograph is not intended so much to denote the inert gas that cannot be seen as to point us towards it, and in that process of pointing to declare its existence.33

Though substantially different in content, Barry’s photographs lay a conceptual groundwork for considering the works of Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day within this expanded framework of indexicality. Lowry and Green’s suggestion is noteworthy for this study,

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as it considers instances in which photography is called to evoke something that is impossible to photograph. There is nothing, in these cases, to “index” in the sense of recording the physical effect of light on a negative. The analysis allows us to move away from speculating as to whether or not (or how) the artists themselves “perform” any kind of action or ritual (because we can never repeat that initial “event”) toward conceptualizing the very fact of the photographic act as declaring the existence of a noteworthy site, whether or not we can see why.34 The scholar Mary Ann Doane takes up Green and Lowry’s suggestion of photography’s role as a gesture of pointing as particularly relevant for images of suffering and pain, images that resist postmodern arguments that photographs, alone, do not produce meaning and cannot successfully bear witness or serve as testimony. Doane recognizes the complexity of the role of indexicality today, both in terms of technology (digital versus analog) and in terms of the trajectory of critical thought. In a list of questions about the index, she asks, “What is the relation between the index as trace or impression and the index as pointing”?35 While it may be the case that this relationship is active in all of photography, the relationship of these two modes of the index is particularly dynamic in the cases of Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day precisely because their works upend the expectation of an indexical subject. In the absence of an expected visual referent (the trace or impression), the photographs foreground the photographer’s gesture of pointing. Both forms of indexicality (trace/impression and pointing) can coexist in a photograph. So, Sternfeld’s photograph can be both a record of how a particular tree in Central Park appeared at a certain time on a certain day, and also a declaration of an event, which is Sternfeld himself marking the site’s now-unseen history and bringing it into the viewer’s field of images. The photograph is both a visible representation of a tree and a designation or declaration of the image into a reality that cannot be photographically recorded. Importantly, this coexistence dovetails with the unresolved temporal state of the photograph (and the On This Site series as a whole). The photograph is simultaneously a record of a particular time and place in the past and, for the present viewer, a nexus for the conceptual comingling of a series of pasts we no longer see (and maybe never did). These pasts are described in multiple ways: in words, with the moment of the photograph, and in our present response as the viewers to whom this performative document has been addressed.

PL ACE IN ON THIS SITE

The dates of the photographs in Sternfeld’s book reveal that the artist began with sites that were relatively close to home. Following Central Park, he visited the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, where in 1990 a spurned lover set fire to the club where his girlfriend worked (fig. 41) and a storage facility in New Jersey where chemicals for the first World Trade Center bombing were kept (fig. 42). These first three photographs,

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The Happy Land Social Club was a popular, unlicensed Honduran social club. On March 25, 1990, Julio Gonzalez was thrown out of the club for quarreling with Lydia Feliciano, his former girlfriend and a Happy Land employee. He bought a dollar’s worth of gasoline, poured a trail of gas from the street through the club’s single doorway, ignited it, and left. The fire killed eighty-seven people. Lydia Feliciano was one of five survivors.

Figure 41 Joel Sternfeld, Happy Land Social Club, 1959 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx, New York, June 1993 (1993). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

made in May and June of 1993, establish many of the aesthetic hallmarks of the series, including its crucial flexibility in marking the equally important roles of beauty and drabness. While the Levin tree photograph gives an air of beauty amid loss or nostalgic yearnings, those themes do not persist uninterrupted. The Happy Land photograph could not be less conventionally beautiful. The building’s red and black exterior wall and its dirty sidewalk fill the frame, leaving no room for a sense of the area or surrounding businesses. (Sternfeld’s interest in restrictive walls and fences continues throughout the series.) The image is tightly framed, showing both graffiti and more recent temporary memorials that patrons, neighbors, or loved ones

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On February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a rented yellow van parked beneath the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and over one thousand were injured. The bombing was alleged to be part of a larger plot intended to force the United States Government to cease its support of Israel and Egypt; other targets included the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the main Federal Office Building in Manhattan. A serial number from a truck axle found in the wreckage led investigators to followers of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Islamic leader. Four men were found guilty of the World Trade Center bombing, and ten were convicted in the larger conspiracy of urban terrorism, including Rahman. Chemicals used to build the bomb were stored at this facility.

Figure 42 Joel Sternfeld, A Space Station Mini-Storage, 69 Mallory Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey, June 1993 (1993). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

have assembled: a white cross with text inscribed to two of the victims in handwritten marker, and real and fake flowers around the edges of frames, in paint buckets, or hanging from a metal coatrack or other makeshift support.36 At the time of Sternfeld’s photograph, three years after the fire, the tragedy was still being memorialized, if modestly. The text reads:

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The Happy Land Social Club was a popular, unlicensed Honduran social club. On March 25, 1990, Julio Gonzalez was thrown out of the club for quarreling with Lydia Feliciano, his former girlfriend and a Happy Land employee. He bought a dollar’s worth of gasoline, poured a trail of gas from the street through the club’s single doorway, ignited it, and left. The fire killed eighty-seven people. Lydia Feliciano was one of five survivors.

It is both matter-of-fact and devastating for its succinct summary of the cheap incompetence of a bungled crime that managed to claim the lives of eighty-seven victims but not the one intended. In his photograph about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Sternfeld departs from the “scene of the crime.” Rather than make a photograph in the area beneath the World Trade Center, where the rented van that exploded was parked, Sternfeld draws our attention to the decidedly banal entrance to A Space Station Mini-Storage at 69 Mallory Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey, where the bombing conspirators stored the chemicals used to build the bomb. This is hardly a place that would typically be memorialized. The photograph is made from the vantage point of approaching the facility’s entrance, featuring asphalt, a chain-link fence, drab rows of storage units, and a dull sky. Both despite and because of this photograph’s remarkable visual flatness, it begins to establish the “sites” of violence as moving concentrically outward and away from what would become the site of official memorial tribute to the six who were killed, and more than one thousand injured.37 As he does throughout the series, Sternfeld directs our attention away from the moment of violence and the victims and toward its banal unfolding in a place that is unsettling in its ordinariness. In a parallel logic, much of the power of the project comes from Sternfeld’s broad assessment of what constitutes a violent act in American history and what “counts” as being worth publicly memorializing. Rather than sticking closely to highly publicized or historically well-known and widely remembered acts of violence, On This Site encompasses more obscure events and locations. For instance, it includes an exterior of the Plaza Hotel in New York, seen from the vantage point of Central Park on an autumn day—​a photograph that, again, only through its text evokes a sinister history (fig. 43). It reads: In the December 1953 issue of Cancer Research, Dr. Ernst Wynder presented the first definitive proof that cigarette smoke causes cancer in laboratory animals. A few weeks later, the presidents of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel and agreed to begin an aggressive advertising campaign to counter Wynder’s findings.

In 1954, the Tobacco Industry Research Group was jointly formed among tobacco companies, and the campaign was called “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” Advertisements disputing the scientific findings ran in magazines and fifty major newspapers around the country. In photographing the exterior of an iconic New York

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In the December 1953 issue of Cancer Research, Dr. Ernst Wynder presented the first definitive proof that cigarette smoke causes cancer in laboratory animals. A few weeks later, the presidents of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel and agreed to begin an aggressive advertising campaign to counter Wynder’s findings.

Figure 43 Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, looking toward the Plaza Hotel, New York, October 1994 (1994). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

building, one with innumerable other and more powerful associations, Sternfeld marks the location of an insidious beginning to a long, and still ongoing, crime, and certainly not one that has been recognized as worthy of an official memorial. The Plaza Hotel stands for many things, and Sternfeld’s photograph, without the text, could double in another context as a tourist postcard of autumn in New York. In fact, one of the Plaza Hotel’s own promotional postcards depicts the hotel from nearly the same vantage point, though with a vertical orientation.38 When I walked through Central Park looking for the site from which the photograph was taken, it proved to be

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an iconic spot, and a popular location for tourists to take each other’s pictures: the Gapstow Bridge. Indeed, the Central Park Conservancy notes on its website that the bridge “offers postcard views of the surrounding cityscape.”39 Bearing this out, I watched dozens of people pose, standing on the footbridge with a backdrop of the pond, trees, the famed Plaza Hotel, and the larger New York skyline. Most were casual passersby, tourists reaching into their pockets and bags to pull out a camera from the moment they began to walk up the bridge’s incline. One couple was there with a professional photographer. The impulse to take a photograph at this spot appeared nearly magnetic, throwing into relief the significance of each image’s contextual surround. I had been making my own trace of Sternfeld’s footsteps, looking at the Plaza and thinking about cancer and the tobacco industry, but I was taking more or less the same photograph as a pair of cheerful sisters trading sassy poses. Our photographs would end up in different places: theirs perhaps shared with friends and family in online albums marking their trip to New York, mine in my research files. The Plaza postcard would be mailed by others in conventional “wish you were here” fashion, or maybe just kept in a stack of memorabilia. We would all have the same view of the Plaza Hotel, each version activated by a different story. In choosing the Plaza Hotel to stand for decades of insidious tobacco industry coverups, Sternfeld implicitly calls attention to what cannot be photographed: a complex and largely secretive history that, photographically speaking, can only be pointed to indirectly. Ultimately, Sternfeld’s strategy of pointing indirectly, in this case at the Plaza Hotel, may be more effective and direct than, for instance, re-creating the meeting through virtual reality, as Gibson’s artist might do. Sternfeld, like the artists in previous chapters, engages us by activating our imaginations and compelling us to consider how we define and understand both the site of an event and how we come to mark events of consequence, photographically or otherwise. There is no historical event here, at least not one conventionally recognized. But Sternfeld calls attention to a simple business meeting and the unfolding over time of its sinister consequences. Other subjects and images follow this rationale. For the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, rather than photograph the Kennedy Center launchpad from which the doomed shuttle took off, or the control room from which the flight’s launch was approved, Sternfeld went to Morton Thiokol’s remote rocket testing facility in Promontory, Utah. He writes: At this facility the space shuttle’s booster rockets were tested. The elastic O-rings in the booster rockets were found to malfunction in cold conditions. Unusually low temperatures were predicted for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger at Cape Kennedy on January 28, 1986. NASA and Morton Thiokol managers, under pressure to perform on schedule, approved the Challenger’s launch. Seven astronauts, including the first civilian crew member, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, died when the main booster rocket exploded.

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At this facility the space shuttle’s booster rockets were tested. The elastic O-rings in the booster rockets were found to malfunction in cold conditions. Unusually low temperatures were predicted for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger at Cape Kennedy on January 28, 1986. NASA and Morton Thiokol managers, under pressure to perform on schedule, approved the Challenger’s launch. Seven astronauts, including the first civilian crew member, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, died when the main booster rocket exploded.

Figure 44 Joel Sternfeld, Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility, Promontory, Utah, August 1994 (1994). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

The photograph focuses not on the rockets that are on triumphant display at the company’s entrance, nor on the network of roads snaking through the otherwise nearly deserted area, nor on its rather modern office buildings, but instead on a sign on the side of a large and fairly featureless building set behind a chain-link fence amid the Utah scrub (fig. 44). The sign, bisected by an even larger American flag, reads “THINK SAFETY / ACT SAFELY.” The intended irony is clear enough.40 Seven photographs in the series depict interiors, but the project’s subtitle, Landscape in Memoriam, locates it as fundamentally about landscape. This is solidified by the

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artist’s comment in his afterword: “Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a facade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading.” On This Site is a testament to the ambivalence and ambiguity of the notion of the landscape either “remembering” or “forgetting its own past.” It also suggests that sometimes, what we want to see, or hope to see, just isn’t there.

R E A D I N G U N C E R TA I N T Y

Many of the events to which Sternfeld’s photographs refer have their own iconic images. In these cases, his photographs direct us not only to our memories and understanding of the events themselves, but also to the associated photographs. The series thus not only reframes the places pictured, but becomes a factor in rereading previously existing documents and images. In terms of their performative indexical function, Sternfeld’s photographs direct us to see these earlier photographs differently. Thinking of the Challenger disaster will call to mind most immediately the mangled plumes of smoke in the sky that indicated to any viewer that, though the shuttle was at an altitude of forty-five thousand feet, more than ninety seconds into takeoff, something had gone sickeningly wrong. Similarly, Sternfeld’s photograph “of” Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 is as aesthetically distant as can be from the photograph of the murdered boy in an open funeral casket that made international news. To mark this act of racial violence, Sternfeld traveled to the former Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi, and made a photograph of the still-standing storefront where the teenager reportedly flirted with a white woman (fig. 45). By 1995, the store, whose name had changed to Young’s Grocery and Market, was boarded up and abandoned, standing as a haunting reminder of an ugly history and the passage of forty years. Sternfeld’s photograph about the assassination of John F. Kennedy is likewise well removed from any number of media images in the popular imagination, whether stills from the Zapruder film of the president’s drive through Dallas, the photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, or images of Jacqueline Kennedy from the funeral. Instead, Sternfeld’s frame shows the dark velvet seats in the movie theater at which Oswald was apprehended, centered on what is supposedly the exact chair in which Oswald sat. The empty seat conveys a bodily absence and has itself become a tourist destination. Other photographs in On This Site conjure the memory of a similarly powerful photographic history: the picture taken immediately after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination showing several men pointing from the balcony to the sky; a student slain at Kent State and a woman fallen to her knees in grief beside him; the amateur video of Rodney King being beaten by police; or the collapsed Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it was bombed in 1995. Sternfeld addresses each of these histories, but his photographs resist the memory of the publicized and iconic media images.

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In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi. Anxious to show new friends that he knew how to talk to white women, Till said “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant as he left this store. Three days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped, tortured, and killed Till. Milam and Bryant were found not guilty by an all-male, all-white jury. The deliberations lasted a little over an hour.

Figure 45 Joel Sternfeld, Former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi, June 1994 (1994). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

The media scholar Barbie Zelizer has argued that photographs that circulate in news publications after violent events, particularly those resulting in human death, characteristically are of the type she terms “about to die” images, standing as visual proxies for human death without graphically depicting dead bodies.41 With these choices, Zelizer argues that news organizations reveal a preference for printing images that, far more often than not, convey open-ended ambiguity and uncertainty. They are often situated into a temporal continuum in order to disrupt it: a photograph of someone leaping to their own death before they hit the ground, a young child in Africa who appears to be

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starving but has not succumbed entirely, the infamous photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge of their prisoners at S-21 before killing them. None of these photographs depict death or even its definite imminence. And they range along a continuum of certainty regarding conclusion. The more ambiguous and uncertain images serve a powerful function: In visually suspending what is often the already-known conclusion, they get the viewer invested and involved. Rather than sealing the story’s conclusion with visual certainty, they preserve an anticipatory moment, leaving the story’s resolution open to question and encouraging viewer engagement. On This Site, in a way, addresses the same problem from its temporal opposite. Whereas newspapers may favor photographs that rely on their viewers’ knowledge of a subsequent future that the subject could not possibly have known, Sternfeld brings his viewers to a moment when the conclusion is clear but, in the aftermath, nothing much has changed. In the series, photographs of sites with memorials of any type are atypical; more often, viewers are put in the position of contemplating either the loveliness or banality of a landscape. In either case, the emotional pitch of the place in the photograph is at odds with its known history. Zelizer’s analysis brings us back to Roland Barthes, where we began, for a revised assessment of how photographs may “pierce” us with their temporality. Barthes identifies a quality of the photographic punctum as relying on the viewer’s realization of the “past-ness” of a photographic subject, a flash that animates a viewer’s sense of the “that-has-been” quality of photography. It is precisely this quality that gives so many personal snapshots their melancholy quality: the event we took part in, or witnessed, that is irrevocably past; the vital presence through photography of a loved one who is, in reality, absent; the wistful fondness of moments memorialized in a family album. The artists already discussed in this book have both relied on and complicated what Barthes identified as one of the defining features of the photographic medium. Barthes’s best example of the unnerving temporal disjunction is his illustration of Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Payne (fig. 46). Gardner photographed Payne after his arrest for conspiring to assassinate members of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, but before his trial and conviction to death by hanging. The portrait, Barthes argues, conveys the haunting quality of “that-has-been,” a man in advance of his death, which we, the viewers, know to be imminent. Per Zelizer’s analysis, the photograph is effective—​and would be more desirable to a news organization than Gardner’s photographs of the conspirators’ hanged bodies—​because it activates viewers’ imaginations. Though we know the outcome, the photograph is suggestive rather than absolute. Sternfeld’s strategy rests similarly on activating our imaginations, but from a temporally anterior point. The photographs, then, rely not on a “this-has-been” quality, like the “about to die” photographs on which Barthes (and later Zelizer, among many others) dwell, but “this is.” That is, they are insistently of their present while simultaneously referring always to the past. But not to a singular event: Sternfeld’s Challenger

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Figure 46 Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne (1865), as reproduced in Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

­ hotograph refers us not to the moment of malfunction or explosion but to a web of misp communications, non-communications, and grievous errors in judgment that unfolded in multiple locations over a period of months if not years. It is a complexity that is just as impossible to represent photographically as it is to take a picture of an explosion after it has occurred. Sternfeld’s series, then, proposes a solution to one of the limitations of photography in general, and documentary photography in particular.

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7 THE PERFORMATIVE LANDSCAPE Ken Gonzales-Day’s Hang Trees

In the summer of 2011, on a temperate July day in the heart of California’s wine country, I found myself looking for a specific tree. I had a printed-out Google map in hand, marked up to make my task easier, as I stepped out of my car at a cemetery in Sonoma County. The handwritten directions on my map read: “old gate,” “white marker is just below tree,” and “tombstone in distance.” Each of these verbal directives was accompanied on my map by hand-drawn schematic illustrations of: a gate, a historical marker by a tree, and a tombstone. I also had three photographs of the tree: one that had been taken six years prior and two from almost a century ago, one taken at night and one in the daylight. As I made my way past the old gate and the white marker, I had my own Hollis Henry “Where’s here?” moment, baffled among the sea of trees and tombstones in the distance as to how I would locate the one I had come to see. In contrast to Gibson’s character, my tools were decidedly low-tech. But I, too, was trying to visualize the past in the present as mediated by an artist. I had come to the cemetery because I was interested in understanding the working process of the artist Ken Gonzales-Day in his series Searching for California’s Hang Trees. The tree in question was the site where three men—​two Anglos and one Latino—​had been lynched at the late date of 1920. My map notes and recent photograph were from Gonzales-Day, and the two 1920 photographs had been reproduced in his book as pieces of the historical research he had conducted on the little-known history of lynching in the West. Gonzales-Day’s project consists of four primary parts: the photographic series

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Figure 47 Ken Gonzales-Day, East First Street (St. James Park) (2006). Light-jet print mounted on cardstock, 3¾ × 6 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

Searching for California’s Hang Trees (begun in 2002 and ongoing); the artist’s scholarly publication Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935 (Duke University Press, 2006); the series Erased Lynching (2002–​present); and a walking tour of downtown Los Angeles (2006). Each part seeks to engage the viewer or reader with the little-known history of lynching in California, and each employs a different strategy of communication.1 The material I had with me on my graveyard search was emblematic of the project as a whole. There was the original lynching photograph, discovered in the process of Gonzales-Day’s extensive historical and archival research. It had become part of the artist’s Erased Lynching series (fig. 47), in which he digitally removes the bodies of the hanged to redirect a viewer’s attention from the spectatorial to the contemplative; denied the visual gruesomeness of the dead body, the viewer must consider instead what it means to have “erased” these hanging bodies and, by extension, what it meant that such scenes

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were photographed and circulated in the first place. The Erased Lynching series demonstrates the profoundly visual nature of lynchings, and seeks to interrupt the circuit of cruel spectatorship and visual consumption.2 I also carried a copy of a recent color photograph by Gonzales-Day, part of his attempt to locate and photograph, after the fact, as many sites of lynchings as possible, based on his research. These photographs act well beyond straightforward visual documents; they are transformed by text, scale, and aesthetics into evocative and ambiguous markers of both resilience and erasure. Third, I had another historic photograph of the scene that the artist had reproduced in his book and that had come to stand for the many failures of photographs to serve as impartial or objective documents. Gonzales-Day points out again and again in his text the questions these historic photographs leave unanswered and the subjects not included within their frames. And finally, the map I had, in this case marked up with the artist’s notations, represented Gonzales-Day’s impulse to have others engage physically with this history as he himself had, a process he had formalized with the downtown Los Angeles walking tour, to be discussed below. This closing chapter focuses on the photographs in the series Searching for California’s Hang Trees, which have received less critical attention than those in the Erased Lynching series, and on the little-discussed walking tour of downtown Los Angeles. The photographic series is most clearly connected to the representational strategies of Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site, while the walking tour opens the realm of the performative up to the viewer more directly, creating a visceral engagement with the unseen histories presented in the other elements of the project.3 Though I focus here on these two components, the project’s overall richness is a result of the four components in play with one another. Like Sternfeld’s On This Site, Gonzales-Day’s Searching for California’s Hang Trees series and walking tour evoke past events, but do not represent them. Sternfeld’s and Gonzales-Day’s projects are linked not only because of the artists’ engagement with the conceptual complexity of photographically grappling with now-unseen histories, but also for their focus on the productive limitations of the photographic medium. As with Alexander Gardner’s 1865–1866 Photographic Sketch Book of the War, photography’s “belatedness” is framed as an asset rather than a liability. In each project, the artist’s use of text contributes substantially to the interpretation of the images: in Sternfeld’s case through extended captions, and in Gonzales-Day’s case through poetic and evocative titles and a deeply researched scholarly book. Crucially, both artists have characterized their processes as “performative,” a categorization that sheds light on the complex temporal dislocation that animates the work and ultimately allows for a reconsideration of photography’s indexical function.

HISTORICAL ER ASURE

Gonzales-Day’s project pivots on the persistent stress lines between what is seen and how it is understood, what is unseen and how it is represented, and the complex contin-

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uum between visibility and absence. The role of the photographic within this dynamic is central. The work insists on a nuanced approach wherein the condition of visibility can be deeply necessary and desirable while at the same time nearly oppressive in its confines. Likewise, invisibility is, by turns, aesthetically evocative and engaging, or grounds for political intervention. Within this aesthetic and conceptual approach, it is notable that what appears to be generally a landscape project began with portraiture. GonzalesDay was looking into the history of photographic portraits of Latinos and noticed that early portraits, when they existed, tended to be mug shots that were sometimes made in connection with a lynching. While the gruesome history of lynching in the South is widely known and taught in U.S. history classes, this history as it unfolded in California is decidedly less transparent.4 Erased Lynching addresses the act of erasure literally, yet in a manner akin to Dinh Q. Lê’s work, it also points to the larger issue of historical erasure and the politics of what history is recorded and later written about, and, thus, seen. Gonzales-Day is keenly aware of the daily injustices lived by Mexican Americans in the United States, both historically and in the present, which range along a spectrum from routine to extreme, but all insidious in their impact. Much of his oeuvre is devoted to the recognition and inscription of bodies, whether culturally, individually, or historically, and the study of a range of practices that revolve around reading the visible body, from phrenology and physiognomy to eugenics and criminology. In concert with this is Gonzales-Day’s long-standing interest in the photographic index. Having taken courses in art history at Hunter College with Rosalind Krauss, author of the influential pair of 1977 essays “Notes on the Index,” both his artwork and his writing continue to tease out the assumptions and limitations of the physical and visible “trace” in the photographic.5 His series Dysmorphologies (1997–​2000) examines the possibilities and boundaries of abstracting the body, considering how little a visual and indexical trace of a body’s skin is necessary to extrapolate if not a whole identity, then at least a sense of one.6 The index, in this series, is conceived as both deeply personal and perhaps dangerously generic, a mark of identity and a potential source of entrapment. But Gonzales-Day’s most personal and direct engagement with the complexities and the politics of bodily representation is in his earliest series, Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1997), completed at the conclusion of his graduate studies (fig. 48). Bone Grass Boy is a fictional historical frontier novel authored by GonzalesDay and illustrated with digital composite photographs. It established, among several other themes, the crucial interplay between text and image that has run throughout the artist’s career. The story is set in what is now the state of New Mexico at the time of the Mexican-American War, and charts among its characters a complex intermingling of race, sexuality, and heritage. The protagonist, Ramoncita, has Spanish, Mexican, and Indian blood. Played by Gonzales-Day himself in the photographs, Ramoncita is at once male and female, a “two-spirit” being. The novel presents itself as having been penned by the (fictional) Nepomaceno Gonzales, a New Mexican soldier fighting on the Mexican side in the war.7 It opens with a note to the reader recounting the difficulty

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Figure 48 Ken Gonzales-Day, title page from Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1997). Chromogenic print, 8 × 11 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

of ­interpreting old family photographs, particularly when they’ve become decontextualized from their sources.8 In a passage that recalls the indeterminacy discussed in W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs with text (as well as the strategies of Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, and Dinh Q. Lê), the family members, upon finding an old, worn portrait, talk over one another, trying—​and failing—​to establish the sitter’s identity using visual cues alone. The narrator recalls: It was in poor condition and like many of the photographs it had no markings. “That must be brother—​Encarnacion” said one. “Oh no, I think that’s great aunt—​,” said another. “No, that’s—​I believe she was Indian, or part Indian,” said aunt Matilde.

The failure of the photograph to tell its story, and the failure of the family members to recognize the person in it, are emblematic of what would become Gonzales-Day’s central concerns. The very existence of the photograph to establish literal visibility is crucial, and emotionally critical to the family members, yet the subject’s visibility alone reveals itself to be wholly inadequate to meaningful interpretation. In function, the Bone Grass Boy is not unlike Joan Fontcuberta’s Fauna (1987), discussed in chapter 2. The lived complexity of Ramoncita’s experience only begins to come to light through

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the narrative, as the two-spirit being is historically and geographically implicated in a shifting international border with immediate ramifications for an already-mixed national, sexual, and cultural identity. Notably, and appropriately, the novel’s narrative is unfinished, and, in an echo of this unfixed state, the book itself hovers between concept and object. Viewers are presented with photographic facsimiles of the book’s cover and pages, which are richly illustrated with the artist’s own performative interpretations of the characters and scenes. But the book does not exist as a three-dimensional material project; indeed, as it was produced in the mid-1990s, one of the artist’s aims was to deploy the then-current narratives of digital manipulation and truth. Through the heavily manipulated, and decidedly campy, photographic performances, he sought to make visible, however artificially, the absence of frontier novels with sympathetic or multidimensional Native or Latino protagonists. Gonzales-Day describes the book as “a digitally constructed artifact whose material existence stands in for the historical absence of such text” and observes that in typical frontier novels, Native and Latino characters are routinely depicted as “ridiculous personages”; the Bone Grass Boy is the “nemesis” of this standard practice.9 With it, Gonzales-Day commented, “I wrote the book I wanted to find.”10 Several of these concerns persist in Gonzales-Day’s scholarly publication Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935. It also tracks a predominantly Latino history embedded within the deeply politicized and racial formation of the emerging United States as shifting political structures transferred the control of land while human inhabitants struggled to adapt to new realities of power and privilege. The artist’s own biography is implicated as well: Gonzales-Day grew up visiting his grandparents in temporary sheep camps in Idaho, and later visited the family home in southern Colorado, sometimes going to New Mexico to visit his grandfather’s birthplace or extended family. Gonzales-Day eventually wrote his art history master’s thesis on Native American cultural influences on church design, recognizing the absorption of one culture’s practices into another’s.11

S E A R C H I N G F O R C A L I F O R N I A’ S H A N G T R E E S

Historical erasure is a driving force behind each piece of Gonzales-Day’s body of work on the history of lynching in California. Like Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site, Gonzales-Day’s project asks his viewers (and readers) to reconsider what they know of landscape and its history, and of photography’s capacity to picture or communicate a past event. Where it is distinctly different, however, is in the relative cultural knowledge about the histories in question. Many of Sternfeld’s sites are related to events that were widely publicized, written about, and made the news for some period of time, capturing the public imagination. Several of the sites are associated with their own official memorials. When On This Site does include a little-known event, it is to push a viewer’s engagement with the past’s sometimes quiet and unseen reverberations and to extend the photograph’s temporal reach into both its past and its future. For Gonzales-Day, however, the fact

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that the history of lynching in the West is so little-known is a fundamental political aspect of his investigation and multipronged approach to revealing it. As he writes, “Acknowledging lynching in California is only the first step in addressing the legacy of violence and terror experienced by racial and racialized communities in the West.”12 As Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935 meticulously documents, lynchings in California targeted Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites more than African Americans. In his research, Gonzales-Day departed from the traditional practice of an artist, spending years visiting microfilm stacks in libraries throughout the state to piece together firsthand news accounts. He was fastidious about the accuracy of his research, ultimately accounting for 352 lynchings in California between 1850 and 1935.13 The book departs subtly and effectively from the conventional scholarly format in that in addition to documenting and analyzing his extensive archival research, the artist interweaves his personal and artistic relationship to the historical material, primarily by including selections from Erased Lynching and Searching for California’s Hang Trees and his own anecdotal accounts of the research and artistic process. He has referred to the book as “a very long artist’s statement,” which, at nearly three hundred pages, is no exaggeration.14 Despite his various aesthetic interventions, however, overall Lynching in the West: 1850–​ 1935 retains the look and feel of a typical academic publication, a fact that disguises, to some degree, the disruption of the form. The disguise is appropriate, though, because it is again the twin goals of evidentiary proof along with the recognition of the inadequacy of that proof that animates the project. Gonzales-Day recounts in the book his own process of researching this brutal past, and making pilgrimages to what he believed to be the former lynching sites. Once there, if he found a “there,” and if there was a tree that appeared to be old enough to have been the lynching site, he made a photograph. His process of making the photographs was also performative. As discussed in the previous chapter, the act of taking the photograph directs the viewer’s attention to the significance of the site. A powerful indexicality comes from the artist’s gesture of pointing: this tree, this place, this history. The photographs act as the demonstrative pronouns “this” and “there” that Charles Sanders Peirce suggests are components of the indexical. And yet, this direction is complicated: Gonzales-Day recalls in the text, “Sometimes a natural landmark or the mention of a street name guided me, but often I had no way of knowing whether I was photographing the exact site or not.”15 The photographic project, then, in contrast to the fastidiousness of the book’s research, has at its core a degree of uncertainty. For this piece of the project, the uncertainty is productive, generating a viewer’s own sense of questioning and recognition of the difficulty—​if not impossibility—​of Gonzales-Day’s self-appointed task. The artist’s subjects at these sites have a seemingly inherent visual appeal. Many are beautiful old oak trees in the rolling hills of California. The photographs themselves reveal nothing—​at a glance, some of them could be mistaken for modernist Western visions of an unspoiled and de-historicized landscape. In the book, they are reproduced as modestly sized color plates. But for exhibition, they are printed large, forty by fifty

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Figure 49 Ken Gonzales-Day, About a hundred yard from the road (2002). Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

inches at a minimum. They have been installed at wallpaper size in exhibition and as billboards, most recently in Reno, Nevada. One photograph, About a hundred yard from the road (2002), shows a knotty old gray oak amid verdant hills (fig. 49). Another, Run Up (2002), closely frames a sprawling and expansive oak on a cloudy day, its gray arms echoed in the neutral sky (fig. 50). Others in the series present a landscape more affected by contemporary life, one for instance showing an enormous oak now closely backed by a large, nondescript commercial structure (fig. 51). Another, more ominously, shows a line of trees in the distance through a barbed wire fence, immediately evoking a sense of property lines, trespassing, and voyeurism (fig. 52).16 Like Sternfeld’s images, they are activated historically and violently primarily through their accompanying texts. But in Gonzales-Day’s work, the images have varying degrees of text based on the venue. In exhibition, the titles are poetic and elusive, recontextualizing fragments from the artist’s archival research, and a wall text typically describes the project.17 The billboards feature no text at all, absorbing the context of their surroundings while simultaneously disrupting it by the very fact of their unexpected presence (fig. 53). A deeply historical reading of a photograph’s meaning emerges only in the full book.

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Figure 50 Ken Gonzales-Day, Run Up (2002). Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. Image: © Ken GonzalesDay, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles. Figure 51 Ken Gonzales-Day, Next morning when jimmy woke, the cowboys were gone (2002). Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

Figure 52 Ken Gonzales-Day, With none but the omni-present stars to witness (2002). Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles. Figure 53 Ken Gonzales-Day, Macready Way (2005) as a billboard in Reno, 2013. Image: © Ken GonzalesDay, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

Gonzales-Day photographed the trees with an eight-by-ten-inch Deardorff camera, in the tradition of modernist landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.18 Art historically, the photographs make abundantly clear that the vision of the Western landscape constructed by Adams and Weston turned a blind eye toward any investigation of the contextual and local histories of the places depicted. Gonzales-Day’s photographs recall that vision of the landscape at times, but as large color prints that allow discrepancies in focus, they do not duplicate the style.19 Gonzales-Day characterizes Weston’s work as “brilliantly moving photography away from the contextual, into pure form,” whereas his own project is to “reverse that legacy,” seeking to uncover the context and particular histories of place even within our most cherished landscapes.20 While aware of—​and deeply informed by—​the profound differences between his own historically based and contextually informed approach to the landscape and that of his predecessors, Gonzales-Day’s concerns reverberate well beyond this particular art history. They must: In pointing his viewers beyond formal content and the purely visual aspect of the landscape, the work necessarily engages with the fraught and racist histories that may disappear without a trace into even the most beautiful surroundings. Very few of the lynching sites Gonzales-Day visited have previously existing associated photographs, and none are widely known. His process of directing viewers’ attention to the sites, then, is less a matter of spurring and then complicating a viewer’s memory, as is often the case with Sternfeld, and more about making the history known in the first place. In this way, Gonzales-Day’s project can be associated with the practice of archaeology. Archaeology is dependent on physical artifacts and remains, but it is also, simply, the practice of making history visible in the present. As Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks put it in their book Theatre/Archaeology, archaeologists “work with material traces, with evidence, in order to create something—​a meaning, a narrative, an image—​which stands for the past in the present. Archaeologists craft the past.”21 Gonzales-Day’s evidence is his archival research: the newspaper clippings, court records, and other ephemera that led him to follow the historical record and walk “two blocks from the sheriff’s office, or in the pass between this and that town . . . or 100 yards outside of town.”22 In the terms of Pearson and Shanks, this kind of practice is within the realm of the archaeological as “the relationship we maintain with the past: it consists of a work of mediation with the past.”23 Gonzales-Day is, in effect, inventing that relationship, not only for himself but for his future viewer. For Pearson and Shanks, the archaeological practice of maintaining (or constructing) this relationship with the past is performative: “The active process of interpretation is to clarify or explain the meaning and significance of something, deciphering and translating the past in the present. . . . Interpretation is also about the performance of a work—​acting out something to give it an intelligible life. This is an active apprehension—​making a past work a present presence . . . .You make an explicit or inexplicit critique of other interpretations.”24 Gonzales-Day’s “act” of going to visit the sites of all 352 lynchings (surely he is the only person to have tried this) is solidified by the

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performative act of photographic indexicality. His gesture of pointing to one tree, and another, and another, directs his action toward a future audience.25 He records the trees and, in so doing, records his gesture—​t he combination of which produces for the viewer an insight into history and landscape that one cannot see by looking alone.26 In this particular case, photography may fail us in one of its indexical forms—​t he trace—​but succeeds brilliantly in its articulation by David Green and Joanna Lowry (discussed in the previous chapter) that by “pointing to declare its existence,” a photographer can record an “event” even if it is not there to be seen.

L O C AT I N G V I S I B I L I T Y

Gonzales-Day is keenly aware of the range of contexts and interpretive clues that will come to light as an image travels through space and is adapted in scale. A forty-by-sixtyinch large-scale print that dwarfs a viewer in an art gallery, and a brief title, can encourage curiosity. Run Up, for example, emerges from a notice of a lynching in an 1855 edition of Harper’s magazine: “Rafael Escobar, a Mexican, was rounded up in Columbia with 39 other Mexicans and identified as being in the shootout at Drytown. Taken to Jackson, he was run up on Jackson’s hanging tree.”27 The fuller excerpt recalls Sternfeld’s texts in On This Site, having a similar matter-of-factness. But the reduction to the more elusive fragment, Run Up, is not as legible, or even necessarily recognizable as a shorthand phrase for the act of hanging. The aesthetic impulse to direct the viewer away from a reliance on visible evidence alone is a conceptual echo of On This Site, though the strategic process differs. The archival news sources the artist found during his research often contain the best—​if wholly inadequate—​directions to the hanging tree in question. A letter written in 1853 and published in the Daily Alta, a newspaper based in San Francisco, reports: “I would inform you that one of the party of robbers who have so long eluded the vigilance of their pursuers was taken today, a few miles below here, tried before the citizens of this place, found guilty, and hung at 5 ½ P.M. He now swings on a tree, two doors down from where I write, as a warning to all evil doers.”28 The note brims, on the one hand, with direction and incident specifics: “today,” “a few miles below here,” “5 ½ P.M.,” “two doors down.” And yet there remains an elusive and unknowable element to the report; it is evidence, but of limited value. The phrase “two doors down” became one of the photograph’s titles, and seems—​when placed in the context of its origin—​to summarize the conflict between specificity and unknowability at the heart of Gonzales-Day’s project (fig. 54). In his important study of photographs of “empty” landscapes of the Holocaust, the scholar Ulrich Baer wrestles with the implications of not being able to see or photographically record a past tragedy. Baer’s analysis centers on two relatively recent photographs: one made in 1995 by the German photographer Dirk Reinartz on the site of a former Nazi extermination camp in Poland, and the other by the American pho-

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Figure 54 Ken Gonzales-Day, Two doors down from where I write (2005). Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

tographer Mikael Levin, also in 1995, at a former concentration camp in Germany.29 Both photographs show similarly “empty” views of the landscape, eschewing crumbling physical remains of these sites of intense trauma in favor of landscapes that seem to be missing a central subject. Both photographs are published in monographic books by the photographers—​books that contain numerous other images that do depict the physical remnants of Holocaust crimes. Baer homes in on these two photographs in particular as emblematic of a certain aspect of photography’s relationship to the trauma of the Holocaust—​that they, unlike the other photographs directly surrounding them in the books, “ask to be regarded on strictly modernist terms.”30 Following through on this, Baer presents a strangely dematerialized interpretation of the photographs that prioritizes the internal aesthetics of these “empty” images over the larger projects of the photographers who made them. Baer asks relevant questions about the role of photographs in facilitating a “selfaware” access to a historical event rather than simply going through the rote motions of remembrance without actually facing it in any meaningful way or considering one’s own historical position. These questions are, of course, tied up in the specific concerns of

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much Holocaust scholarship, which must contend with the ongoing problem of the very possibility of representing a history understood as unspeakable. Gonzales-Day’s questions are quite different: His aim is make a history many are unaware of decidedly more visible, and to contend with the politics of and resistance to visibility while considering the role of photography and the place of particular photographic images in the ongoing process of historical erasure. The history Gonzales-Day’s photographs refer to is grim, to be sure, but it is not unspeakable; indeed, the project asserts, it should be spoken of more. To this end, for both, addressing the viewer’s relationship to a particular place, a particular site of visible absence, is central. Because these pictures, “in which absence becomes the referent,” as Baer writes, are “all but useless as documents.”31 Denied a recognizable subject, the viewer is implicated in seeking a source of significance. As Baer observes, and as is also the case in Gonzales-Day’s photographs, a specificity of place certainly matters, but primarily to the extent that a photographer went to the site and made a photographic gesture. The photograph marks the artist’s gesture. The physical place that is recorded is, to a degree, only as significant as the fact that the viewer’s attention is directed to the place. In this way, the photograph does not pretend “that there exists a stable, originary place and experience” that it can show us.32 Both the photographer and the viewer may remain uncertain what, precisely, happened in a particular location, or even that the location is “actually” correct. Gonzales-Day’s own narrative in his book Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935 conveys the confusion of recognizing a place that is known—​intellectually, at least, and historically—​to be a site of interest. He recalls his disorientation while visiting the site in downtown Los Angeles where a fifteen-year-old Mexican, accused of stabbing and robbing a shopkeeper and denied due process, was lynched at the hands of an angry mob in 1861. Knowing the intersection—​A lameda and Aliso Streets—​where the boy had been dragged, Gonzales-Day, tracing his death almost a century and a half later, writes, “I realized that I was standing at the very intersection I had been searching for. I walked in slow circles and squinted helplessly at the bleached gray asphalt . . . . I knew he wouldn’t be there. I had gone to witness his absence . . . . What did I expect to see? The broken circle of blood-soaked dirt that would have formed beneath his feet as the wind pushed his body in slow circles? No, there was nothing to see, no clues to what had happened here.”33 Scholarship on place and memory tends to assume that the historical memory of a place is known. Where an event happened may become integral to its memory, as is the case in innumerable memorial sites, from the roadside crosses Sternfeld saw in Rome, each marking the site of a single death, to monumental public memorials such as the World Trade Center memorial. In his essay on public memory, the scholar Edward Casey remarks, “The place . . . lends itself to the remembering and facilitates it at the very least, but also in certain cases embodies the memory itself.”34 It may almost go without saying that for public memory to work, the location must be known. But, as both Sternfeld’s and Gonzales-Day’s projects show, the physical sites and places of memorial significance are often not remembered.

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Gonzales-Day has characterized his travel to hundreds of lynching sites in California as “part pilgrimage and part memorial.”35 Considering his act of traveling to the sites (and potentially the resulting photographs) as memorials connects the project to the complex state of memorial production and criticism today. The official remembrance of lynching of any kind in the United States is a subject as yet dealt with through avoidance, as evidenced by the notable lack of formal commemoration. For Gonzales-Day, official recognition of the gruesome history of lynching in California is a political imperative. Yet in California, as nationally, official commemoration of lynching sites is a decidedly fraught practice. Notable for its singularity, in 2003 the city of Duluth, Minnesota, dedicated a public memorial to the three African American victims of a lynching in 1920. The memorial is across the street from the site of the lynching, underscoring Casey’s notion of the place embodying the memory of the event. In her study of memorial culture in the United States, the art historian Erika Doss argues that the Duluth memorial commemorates a site of shame, and as such is in line with a contemporary approach to memorial construction: Rather than heralding a narrative of national pride through the public recognition of triumphant people and moments, “shame-based” memorials recognize and publicly admit to shameful histories. Doss points to the National Park Service’s adoption of a formal policy to recognize sites of shame that “complicate standard sagas of a progressive and heroic national history.”36 This agenda is seen, for example, in the formal recognition of Manzanar National Historic Site to commemorate the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II. Doss examines the emotional complexity of shame, as it puts those experiencing it into a paradox of looking both at and away from the source of the shame, yet she cites the potential of its transformational possibilities. It is worth noting that Gonzales-Day himself has no reason to feel shame; a designation of California’s lynching sites as sites of shame can only come from a position of political power. Doss writes that the Duluth memorial “posits a counternarrative of racial violence, civic trauma, and sociopolitical complicity. And it visibly engages the scopophilic dilemma of representing racial terrorism and trauma without voyeurism and dehumanization.”37 These terms describe Gonzales-Day’s project as well, which operates as a kind of memorial “site,” albeit one that is dispersed both conceptually and physically into multiple forms of representation. Crucially, though, Gonzales-Day’s project does not represent the voice of the state, or any branch of official civic leadership. Indeed, if an official memorial to the lynchings in California existed, the meaning of the artist’s project would irrevocably shift.

T H E WA L K I N G T O U R

One of the most powerful instantiations of Gonzales-Day’s project, and certainly its most visceral, is the walking tour. It offers an opportunity to engage in one’s own performative act in the search for an unseen history, effectively transferring both the expe-

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Figure 55 Ken Gonzales-Day, Hang Trees postcard publication (2006). 6 × 4½ in. Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

riential knowledge and the burden from his own historical (and largely rural) tracing to the metropolitan viewer. To this end, he organized the Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour, the last component of the project, begun only when the book was nearly complete.38 Despite its late entrance, I suggest that it is in fact central to the artist’s overall concern, even though it has thus far largely escaped critical attention. The tour debuted on the occasion of Gonzales-Day’s exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, in fall 2006, and remains accessible on the artist’s website.39 It was initially guided by a sort of guidebook and postcard souvenir book that Gonzales-Day produced as the “catalogue” for the Pomona show (fig. 55). In lieu of a more conventional exhibition publication, viewers were offered a small, postcard-size booklet that, in addi-

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tion to the expected short scholarly essays, offered a series of three detachable postcards that one could write a note on and circulate through the mail to friends or family. The postcards bore images from the Erased Lynching series, which were direct adaptations of the gruesome, once-popular postcards showing scenes of hanged men and leering crowds and sent in a “wish you were here” manner. Between the contextualizing essays and the detachable postcards, the booklet held a map and written directions—​in the manner of a tourist guidebook—​for the walking tour. Gonzales-Day worked with a Geographic Information System (GIS) specialist at Scripps College, where he is also a professor, to produce a map that identifies former lynching sites in the downtown area, and annotated it with walking directions and descriptions of both the crimes and the buildings and landmarks that would have been present at the time (fig. 56). The tour extends to the viewer Gonzales-Day’s own bodily engagement with unseen histories. And, as opposed to the limited duration of a gallery or museum exhibition, the walking tour—​like the book—​is available anytime via the artist’s website, thereby extending the conceptual impact of the work well beyond the photographs’ formal presentation. Gonzales-Day links to other self-guided walking tours of downtown Los Angeles from his own site, thereby highlighting how far removed from conventional urban tourism his own route is.40 The other tours invariably celebrate the city in its current state, pointing to its existing landmarks, thriving and visible diversity, and, of course, the best spots for shopping and dining. In its dramatic difference from walking tour conventions, the vision and experience of Los Angeles that Gonzales-Day offers highlights the literally overlooked and overwritten history of the area, bringing the viewer or art tourist to sites that require an imaginative reconstruction of place. The tour itinerary begins at the historic Union Station. I went with two other people; once we all found each other amid the oddly appropriate SWAT team (actors) filming a scene of justice being carried out inside Union Station, it was immediately evident that this was no ordinary walking tour.41 There would be no ticket to buy, no physical tour guide, and we would not be stopping to admire architectural details, famous monuments, or establishments where actors or politicians slept. Indeed, after describing the architectural significance of Union Station, which Gonzales-Day notes in his guide is on the National Register of Historic Places, the artist directs his tourists to leave the station, take “a sharp left at Alameda,” and walk south one block to Aliso Street. Standing on the corner of a busy (and seemingly perpetually windy) intersection, elevated over the 101 Freeway, with few other pedestrians in sight, we read that we were standing at “the site where in 1861 an angry mob dragged Francisco Cota up from lower Alameda, repeatedly stabbing him before they hanged him in the vicinity of this intersection. He was fifteen years old and had killed Frau Leck, a local shopkeeper.” As cars whizzed by, we checked the street signs again for accuracy—​A lameda and Aliso—​and noted that the largest building on the corner is a prison: the Metropolitan Detention Center, which houses approximately one thousand inmates.

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Figure 56 Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour map (2006–​ongoing). Image: © Ken Gonzales-Day, courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

In fact, it was the very same corner with which Gonzales-Day began his book, and noted his confusion about the indeterminacy of location. For the artist, it was often impossible to determine with any degree of precision or certainty if, in fact, he had found the right tree. The ambiguity and uncertainty of how we today can “know” history is built into the photographic series. The walking tour, however, is more closely aligned with the book in terms of factuality, particularly through the exceedingly precise appendices at the conclusion that rely on multiple sources of cross-referenced information. Despite the temporal disorientation a walker/tourist/ viewer (and the walking tour decidedly interrupts one’s sense of such categories) might feel once arriving at a former hang site that is now entirely overwritten by the Los Angeles infrastructure of highways, onramps, overpasses, chain-link fences, and detention centers, Gonzales-Day was fastidious about determining precise locations. His attempts at precision were again supported by his process. In addition to working

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with a GIS specialist to create the walking tour map, he also relied on the city’s historic Sanborn maps. The Sanborn Map Company was established in New York in 1866 and began making highly detailed maps of cities for fire insurance companies to assess risk in particular locations. The company grew quickly and routinely updated its highly precise renderings of urban areas, making the Sanborn maps an extraordinary trove of historical information. In addition to basic information such as the names of streets, they plot the outlines of all buildings and outbuildings; record locations of doors and windows; list measurements of the widths of streets, sidewalks, and alleys; provide the names of businesses, churches, and public institutions; and cite property boundaries. In addition, they depict other topographic features such as lakes, rivers, railways, and the like. The information was recorded at a fifty-feet-to-one-inch scale, resulting in highly readable and detailed documents. The first Sanborn map of Los Angeles was produced in 1888, and new editions were made in 1894, 1906, and 1929.42 Gonzales-Day and the GIS specialist, then, were able to align historical descriptions and landmarks—​such as the gate to a ranch—​w ith contemporary locations by layering maps from subsequent decades on top of one another, creating a kind of visual stratification of urban modification, growth, and erasure. This strategy of cartographic layering provides a level of geographic certainty that is not reliant on the continuity of physical landmarks, and, indeed, has recently become a highly sought-after tool for historians wishing to digitally visualize history.43 That said, however, the self-guided tour is not without its share of confusion and uncertainty, which, I would argue, effectively mirrors the artist’s own mental and physical process of attempting to find the sites of the hang trees. Indeed, from the first step at Union Station, it became clear that despite the certainty of the location, on the one hand, there was significant room for interpretation: Were we on the correct corner of the intersection? Did it matter if we “got” the right spot or not? Though Gonzales-Day does lead his own tour on occasion, I view the minor disorientation of the self-guided tour as a valuable addition to the experience that allows viewers to engage in a process of uncertain decision making and historical reconstruction that mirrors the artist’s. The next stop was back toward Union Station, on the other side of Alameda: the entrance to the 101 Freeway. There was considerable discussion among my group about where, precisely, to stop and look at, as far as we could tell, nothing. It is, as GonzalesDay notes, “hardly a hallowed end for the site of the city’s most notorious mass lynching,” the Chinese Massacre of 1871. He recounts: “18–​24 Chinese men died here at the hands of the mob of over 300 Anglos and Latinos. The struggle lasted well into the night and when it was over at least fourteen men (and one boy) were lynched to anything that would hold the weight of a man. The original site was known as Calles des Negros or ‘Nigger Alley’ but it was eliminated when Los Angeles Street was extended—​and further altered by the construction of the 101 freeway through downtown Los Angeles.” The Chinese Massacre is infamous, and a departure from Gonzales-Day’s focus on lesser-

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known lynching sites, though one that serves to more broadly culturally contextualize the period. Despite the swelling numbers of Chinese residents starting in the late 1860s in what is now known as Old Chinatown, the residences and businesses of the area began to be erased in the 1930s, when the city started building Union Station, and later in the 1950s, for the freeway construction. Gonzales-Day’s point is remarkably and viscerally well made in these first three stops alone: History that is no longer visible is easily forgotten. Indeed, along the tour, monuments and memorials to other histories are everywhere—​from a modest plaque below a tree (just yards away from the freeway entrance) honoring the author and artist Leo Politi, to a much grander memorial to Latino American heroes who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, to the former site of the Bella Union Hotel, to the founding of the Los Angeles Star newspaper, and on to the public service of United States Senator Frank Putnam Flint, the engineers of the first high-rise in Southern California (City Hall), the honor of the Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, Overton H. Mennet, M. D., the fighting men of the Los Angeles Fire Department and the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial (more on this last memorial later). Particularly in the park south of City Hall, as a walker is reading Gonzales-Day’s recounting and trying to imagine the corral gate of a ranch that was used to lynch Charles Wilkins in 1863, there are at least five actual monuments in sight, none referring to lynching. Through the act of repeatedly stopping at sites where lynchings occurred, and simultaneously becoming acutely aware of all the monuments and memorials that do exist along the route, viewers come to know for themselves, and experience firsthand, the unsettling awareness of physical absence. There is one point a walker might be inclined to skip: a lone site on Hill Street half a mile from anywhere else on the tour. But the text works to entice the viewer, if in a macabre manner, to the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, which was dedicated in 1957: “Once there, you can walk up the stairs to the top and you will be able to share the same view witnessed by at least nine men who were legally executed, and an additional seven who were lynched before the gathered citizenry: [including] Doroteo Zabaleta, Cipriano Sandoval, and ‘Baramus’ in 1852; Juan Flores in 1857; and Pancho Daniel in 1858. All seven of these men were of Mexican or Latin American descent, and the last two lynchings drew crowds that may have numbered in the thousands.” Climbing up to “share the same view” turned out to be impossible due to a locked gate at the top of the memorial, but the site was a sensory experience nonetheless, as it reeks of human waste and is strewn with the debris of drug users. Though its prior history is not part of Gonzales-Day’s tour, it has a storied past. The hill was the site of a U.S. military fort that was active during the Mexican-American War. The fort was in heaviest use during the Siege of Los Angeles, in 1846, when an uprising resistant to United States forces ignited to retake Los Angeles. The fort was abandoned in 1849 and decommissioned in 1853, the year after the first hanging. Later, the site became a public playground, then home to a popular beer garden (1882–​87), and, later still, the location

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of the Banning Mansion. Part of the hill became a cemetery, which was subsequently shut down, and later a high school. In 1949, most of the hill was removed, again for construction of the freeway. The towering memorial that stands there now is dedicated to the men who raised the American flag over Los Angeles on the city’s first celebration of Independence Day in 1847 (five years before it became a lynching site), and it has the distinction of being the largest bas-relief military monument in the United States. It is evident from his selective consideration of the Fort Moore site that Gonzales-Day is not interested in all missing or erased histories, but it is also the point on the tour in which the discrepancy between the memorialized and un-memorialized pasts come closest together. The hulking memorial panel itself, which depicts the raising of the flag, is seventyeight feet wide and forty-five feet high. These dimensions are just a fraction of the overall installation, which also includes an eighty-foot-wide waterfall and a 279-footwide brick facade. But despite its grandeur, it is remarkably easy to miss. It is not a focal point, and every day thousands of cars pass by on Hill Street, overlooking the 101 Freeway. The waterfall has been defunct since 1977, and the stairs to the locked gate at the top of the memorial serve primarily as a gathering place for homeless men and women. It is the type of memorial that Lee Friedlander traveled across the country to photograph in 1976: one that has been sadly overshadowed by its ineloquent surroundings, whatever glory it once held now subject to the daily humiliations and disgrace of urban neglect and shortsighted planning.44 Given these circumstances, one wonders whether it is better to be memorialized or not. Indeed, perhaps Gonzales-Day’s walking tour is more effective—​once one knows about it—​than any stone marker, dedicated tree, or bronze plaque. Notably, the walking tour is organized around sites that Gonzales-Day has not photographed—​t his is not a tour of beautiful trees in a landscape, but of the roads, street signs, intersections, highway entrances, and urban experience of downtown. While the Hang Trees photographs clearly address a history of “pure” landscape photography, the walking tour engages a different visual vocabulary, perhaps closest to Lee Friedlander’s.45 It is also a vocabulary that is decidedly more oriented to all of the physical senses, and, as noted, a way for Gonzales-Day’s viewers to physically engage in the same type of searching and mental calibration of present versus past that he did. In directing viewers to look at what is not there—​neither as physical remains nor as worthy of a memorial—​ Gonzales-Day asks his viewers to consider the politics of history writing and the very basic questions of who and what gets remembered, and by whom. Through the work of Joel Sternfeld, chapter 6 of this book introduced the complex temporal dynamics of photography’s ability to re-present past, and now unseen, events, and proposed that a revised attention to the performative gesture of the photographic index is more suitable for such representations than the visible photographic referent. This chapter has extended these concerns to focus more intently on the production, through

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uncertainty, of an engaged viewer, and the politics of place-making and visibility in the construction of historical awareness. Both Sternfeld and Gonzales-Day invoke the medium-specific limitations of photography and reorient them toward a productive uncertainty. They propose a performative framework for the photographic production of a historical encounter. By focusing on an insistent present-ness of the landscape, the works actively engage the viewer in an analysis of the process of historical construction. Both series activate a complex temporality that extends our notions of how photographs can depict now-unseen histories. Ultimately, our uncertainty as viewers is shaped by the artists’ inquiry into those histories that are written and commemorated, and those that are not. The works destabilize our sense of what we know, and how we know it. The landscape itself is evidently indifferent to the stories and events that play out in particular places, but we need not be.

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8 CONCLUSION

Throughout Uncertain Histories, we have seen a range of approaches artists have taken to get at the peculiarities of photography’s relationship to the past, and the medium’s duality as a document that is linked to the real but deeply contingent on context for meaning. Counterintuitively, artists have often employed photographs as reminders of what we do not know, what we cannot see, what is not recorded. This issue has remained a core concern for the past forty years, and artists have approached it with a variety of strategies, accommodating new emphases within the broader realm of inquiry. Whereas in 1969, there was a greater attention to the deliberate attempt to mislead the viewer, the underlying impulse of a performative provocation has more recently been highlighted. The oscillation between certainty and uncertainty is a productive one, activating a viewer’s own sense of engagement in the fraught process of reconstructing history through photographic means. The distinct temporality of photography is not constrained to looking back at the photograph’s referent; but it also looks forward toward the photograph’s ongoing and ever-shifting relationship to future viewers. Indeed, the most powerful impulses of the photograph may not be in its trace of a real, but in its gesture toward something that could even remain unseen. The perceived limitations of photography become fertile ground for the production of a historical encounter. As a colleague of mine has noted, most conversations about photography in the last decade invariably end with some version of the question, “What about digital?” Indeed, it is worth acknowledging that all of the artists in Uncertain Histories work in or with traditional analog forms of photography. But, in alignment with the core concern of

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Uncertain Histories, the most relevant question to pursue in the digital vein may not be how the images are made (in analog versus digital format) but how new technologies facilitate the viewer’s engagement with those images. To open up this line of inquiry, I conclude with a highly digitally mediated encounter with the photographs and the places depicted in Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site.

ON THIS SITE REDUX

Sternfeld does not openly suggest that his viewers retrace his steps, stand in the places he stood, and follow his memorial pilgrimages to American violence. He does, however, give viewers enough information that they easily could: Nearly every photograph in On This Site is titled with a specific intersection or street address.1 I have visited several of the sites in person (in California, Utah, and New York) but many more virtually, mediated by Google Street View. In these instances, I have in front of me Sternfeld’s photograph (as published) alongside a screenshot captured much more recently by the Street View cameras.2 Many of the sites have changed dramatically, while others have remained remarkably stable. In several cases, houses, parks, streets, and storefronts that Sternfeld documented in a dismal state of disrepair have been fixed up. For instance, in Sternfeld’s photograph, a brick house in St. Louis where a young boy was killed in a drug dispute has a run-down wooden porch; overgrown weeds, trash, and abandoned toys out front; metal bars on the door; and a For Rent sign in the window alongside frayed blinds. In the Street View capture of the same location, the brick porch has been rebuilt, the yard is tidy and features a trimmed lawn and attractive plantings, and the house has a brightly painted red door and neat window treatments. When Sternfeld visited the Los Angeles intersection of Florence and Normandie eighteen months after riots broke out in 1992 when four white police officers accused of beating the black motorist Rodney King were acquitted, he photographed a cracked and dirty sidewalk and empty corner lot divided by a chain-link fence covered by a range of cheaply made signs advertising (in handwritten letters) for iron window coverings, (in stencil) for drain services, and (in girlish bubble letters) for “Braids by Sabrina.” Almost twenty years later, the sidewalk has new asphalt, a branch of the national Auto Zone chain occupies the well-kept corner lot, and the chain-link fence has been replaced with grass and palm trees. Time has had an opposite and perhaps more expected effect on other sites, such as the former Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi. Sternfeld made his photograph in 1994 (see figure 45), and by 2011 the building had slipped even further into decrepit ruin: The sign is gone, the wooden porches have collapsed, the door is boarded over, and the ivy and trees have encroached over the majority of the facade (fig. 57). Even more dramatically, the tiny, pale-green house in Niagara Falls, New York’s Love Canal Neighborhood, which Sternfeld photographed as an example of one of the five hundred homes the state of New York purchased upon discovery that the neighborhood was built on a

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Figure 57 Google Street View of the former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi (2011).

toxic dump, has vanished entirely (fig. 58). “Visiting” by way of Google Street View, we see in its place an open and somewhat wild grassy area surrounded by trees, no house in sight (fig. 59). A satellite view of the neighborhood (also courtesy of Google) shows that all of the homes in the neighborhood have been razed and only the streets remain, winding past the now-empty lots. By 2013, even the Street View photograph of the site had vanished: Google, at least for a time, did not recognize this portion of the Love Canal neighborhood as part of its purview, a remarkable omission for a photographic project as voraciously accumulative as Google Street View.3 The degree of change matters insofar as it affects a viewer’s temporal understanding of a photograph and place individually, as well as the series of which it is a part. Sternfeld positions his photographs along an axis of present-ness: Though their content points inexorably to past events outside the frame, they performatively insist on the particularity of a place, this site. None of the sites can be seen as timeless. After all, our precondition for looking (and Sternfeld’s precondition for arriving there in the first place) is our knowledge that we are witnessing—​if vicariously—​a place where something terrible happened, even if we can no longer see it. The technological mediation involved in “re-visiting” Sternfeld’s sites through Google Street View brings us back, in a way, to William Gibson’s fictional accounting of an artist’s reconstruction of history via virtual reality. And while Sternfeld is no longer directly involved in this updated visual exchange, his own pilgrimage arguably set the stage for this new digitally mediated encounter. The performative aspects of Sternfeld’s own physical engagement with the locations in On This Site can be pursued by the viewer and mediated through technology. It is less important, then, that the photographs themselves are digitally produced than the fact that they are accessible and circulating, available for perusal and ­comparison.

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Figure 58 Joel Sternfeld, 518 101st Street, Love Canal Neighborhood, Niagara Falls, New York, May 1994 (1994). Chromogenic print, 18½ × 23 in. Image: © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the city of Niagara Falls, the United States Army, and the Hooker Chemical Corporation dumped over two hundred different toxic chemicals into Love Canal. Many of them contained dioxin, one of the most lethal chemicals known. In 1953, Hooker Chemical covered the then-dry Love Canal with a thin layer of dirt and sold it to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar. The terms of the sale stipulated that if anyone incurred physical harm or death because of the buried waste, Hooker could not be held liable. A school was constructed on the site of the waste dump and private homes were built nearby. In the late 1970s, an unusually high number of birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, and other illnesses were reported in the Love Canal neighborhood by the Niagara Falls Gazette. Lois Gibbs, whose two children developed rare blood disorders, led a successful grassroots campaign to have the state of New York purchase the homes of five hundred families, enabling them to relocate.

Figure 59 Google Street View of 518 101st Street, Niagara Falls, New York (2011).

Their existence does not change the content of Sternfeld’s photographs; they make possible an expanded encounter with the artist’s original impulse to evoke the past, and its relationship to the present, through photography. The impulses of the digital age may be reviving the most positivist periods of photographic history: We want to photograph more so we can remember more so we can know more. It seems that not a moment of our present is permitted to go unrecorded. But it is artists who can remind us to temper that impulse and who demonstrate the value of dwelling in photography’s ambiguities and uncertainties.

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NOTES

1. I N T R O D U C T I O N

1. See for instance Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2010); essays in Martin Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); or Mette Mortensen, “When Citizen Photojournalism Sets the News Agenda: Neda Agha Soltan as a Web 2.0 Icon of Post-Election Unrest in Iran,” Global Media and Communication 7, no. 4 (2011): 4–​16. 2. I thank one of my UC Press reviewers for the suggestion of “anceps.” 3. John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). 4. One also thinks of somewhat later projects: Edward S. Curtis’s lifelong pursuit to document the North American Indians, whom he considered “the vanishing race,” or August Sander’s project to catalog the German national population in the first half of the twentieth century. Both endeavors resulted in mammoth collections of work. 5. In particular, see Maria Morris Hambourg, “Charles Marville’s Old Paris,” in Charles ­Marville: Photographs of Paris, 1852–​1878 (New York: French Institute, 1981). See also Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press, 1997). 6. The philosophy of positivism was developed by Auguste Comte in the 1830s. As part of this, he argued that knowledge must be based on observed facts, a method neatly coinciding with the coincident invention of photography. Joan Schwartz, “ ‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control,” Archivaria 50 (fall 2000): 40. For more on the role of French archivists during the July Monarchy in establishing an archival regime, seen within a broader historical context, see Margaret

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Hedstrom and John Leslie King, “On the LAM: Library, Archive, and Museum Collections in the Creation and Maintenance of Knowledge Communities,” published in 2004 by the Organization for Economic and Co-Operation Development, accessible at http:// jlking.people.si.umich.edu/OECD-LAM-published.pdf. 7. Joan Schwartz, “Records of Simple Truth and Precision,” 3. 8. Ibid., 34. In 1839, the French Minister of the Interior, Tanneguy Duchâtel, proposed to grant Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre a lifetime annuity for providing the French government with the details of his newly invented photographic process. The proposal was ratified, and in August of that year, Daguerre’s invention was made public. As Schwartz recounts, it was in the same month that Duchâtel also began to reorganize France’s national archives; two years later, he distributed instructions on their reordering and reclassification. Duchâtel’s archival framework has been seen as the beginning of the modern era of archival theory and practice. 9. See, for instance, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1988. I will discuss Allan Sekula’s contributions more extensively below. See Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” (1983) in Brian Wallis, ed., Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists (New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1987) and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (winter 1986). Their contributions are within a broad category of scholars for whom the influence of Michel Foucault was of paramount importance, and the critiques are within the postmodern turn of seeing meaning in photographs as dependent on context. 10. Anthony W. Lee, “The Image of War,” in Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alex­ ander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 32. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), reprinted in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), first published in French as La chambre claire: Note sur la photo­ graphie (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1980). 13. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” 55. 14. Ibid., 58. 15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80. 16. Ibid., 91. 17. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (spring 1999): 138. 18. Along with Allan Sekula and John Tagg, previously cited, Martha Rosler, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss were some of the key contributors during this period. 19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” 121. 20. The relationship of photography to archives was of interest to Sekula for decades. See his “Reading an Archive,” Blasted Allegories, 114–​127; “The Body and the Archive”; and “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs),” October 102 (fall

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TO PAGES 9–13

2002). Sekula’s writing was, like that of many authors of the time, deeply influenced by Michel Foucault, in particular Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault, too, took up the archive, not as a literal collection of objects or a physical repository, but as a concept that identified a system of statements and a network of events that combine to create any historical moment; Foucault’s “archive” forms a historical a priori on which our current statements are predicated and through which they are defined and made possible. Terry Cook, an archivist, clearly explains why, despite his conceptual formulation of “archive,” Foucault is relevant and critical for practicing archivists in the article “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science 1 (2001): 15–​16. Cook emphasizes that while Foucault is not concerned with our traditional conception of archives per se, he is writing about information systems and their impact on our understanding of documents and other materials. An archival system is one piece of this larger constellation; the arrangement and organization of information is critical to how we view archives. Sekula, in his essays, adapted Foucault’s abstract concept of “the archive” to an analysis of actual photographic objects in a physical archive. Influenced as well by Louis Althusser’s 1969 critique “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which in turn comes out of Marx, Sekula thought of objects materially, as occupying specific places of power, and with a specific eye toward their economic function. The photographs in the archive that Sekula focuses on in “Reading an Archive” were taken by Leslie Shedden; his largest client was the local coal company, and many of his studio photographs are of the coal workers who lived in the town. 21. Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 121. 22. This is beginning to change. See, in particular, the themed issue of History and Theory 48 (2009), “Photography and Historical Interpretation,” for a consolidation of the historians currently engaged in upending the field’s casual reliance on photographs. 23. Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 115. 24. Scholars such as Andrea Liss, Eric Rosenberg, Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, Ulrich Baer, and others have delved deeply into the relationship between photography and trauma, often within the context of Holocaust studies. 25. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (autumn 2002).

2 . C U LT I VAT I N G U N C E R TA I N T Y

1. The quote is from an interview with Sebald in Christian Scholz, “ ‘But the Written Word Is Not a True Document’: A Conversation with W. G. Sebald on Literature and Photography,” in Lise Patt, Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald (Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), 105. 2. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xix–​xxiii, and W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: Harvill Press, 1996), 89, originally published in German as Die Ausgewanderten (Frankfurt am Main: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co. Verlag KG, 1992). Sebald’s oeuvre has prompted a voluminous outpouring of critical commentary revolving around the muddy line separating fact and fiction and the futility of applying the traditional categorical structures of novel, historical fiction, or autobiog-

NOTES TO PAGES 13–18

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raphy in describing his work. Very little of the critical response is from scholars working primarily in visual studies. Besides Tagg, one notable exception is the artist Tacita Dean, who has produced several projects related to or inspired by Sebald’s prose. See also Margaret Olin’s essay on Sebald in her book Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3. I say “almost” because, although Tagg does not treat the image at length, this particular snapshot opens up a complicated rabbit hole of uncertain meaning when read in the context of Sebald’s narrative, which itself revolves around a decidedly thin line between the autobiographical fact of the author and the fictional representation of the narrator in search of his family’s photographic history. Nevertheless, this type of deeply layered uncertainty is at the heart of Sebald’s work with text and image. I presented a more thorough interpretation of the image in a paper titled “Around This Nucleus a Large Empty Space”: W. G. Sebald’s Productive Ambiguity” at the symposium The Madness of Photography held at the Savannah College of Art and Design on February 10, 2012. 4. J. J. Long, “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” Modern Language Review 98, no. 1 (January 2003): 117. 5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1982), originally published in French as La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1980). 6. Ibid., 73. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Ibid., 20. 9. Ibid., 26. 10. Ibid., 55. Emphasis in original. 11. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (autumn 2002): 99–​118. This essay was republished in Geoffrey Batchen’s edited collection of scholarship Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009) and in Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs. Photography Degree Zero also includes contributions from Carol Mavor and Shawn Michelle Smith that take up different aspects of the “misidentification” Olin addresses at length. Photography Degree Zero recognizes the unyielding interest among historians and theorists of photography in Camera Lucida. Batchen, perhaps optimistically, suggested that his collection would allow scholars to “get [Camera Lucida] out of our systems” and that the book would be “the end result of this impulse” (4). James Elkins’s book What Photography Is (New York: Routledge, 2011) is a recent example of the persistence of Camera Lucida as a subject. 12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53. Margaret Olin speculates that the famously unreproduced Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’s mother is, similarly, a constructed memory that does not exist. 13. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs,” 112. 14. Ibid., 115. Olin suggests that this could be called a “performative index” or an “index of identification.” 15. Christian Scholz, “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document,” 105. 16. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 84.

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17. Christian Scholz, “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document,” 105. Avi Kempinski points out Sebald’s mistaken reference to the Kertész photograph and notes that if Sebald had gotten the date right, his fourteen-year projection of Ernest’s life would have landed him squarely in World War II, and potentially to the year of Sebald’s birth (1944), often a significant year in the author’s writings. Kempinski goes on to analyze the photographic image of a boy that features in Sebald’s later novel Austerlitz. Avi Kempinski, “ ‘Quel Roman!’: Sebald, Barthes, and the Pursuit of the Mother-Image,” in Searching for Sebald. 18. Perhaps fittingly, his information seems to have been slightly off: The Kertész photograph is now routinely dated to 1929. 19. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, xxiii. 20. Interview with Jacques Clayssen in Identité/Identification, 24. “La photo m’intéresse parce qu’elle est ressentie comme vraie, comme preuve que l’histoire que l’on raconte est réelle, elle donne l’illusion de la réalité.” 21. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. The gallery was at 201 Boulevard SaintGermain, Paris VII. The fact of Boltanski’s use of Givaudan’s mailing list is mentioned briefly in Une scène parisienne: 1968–​1972 (Rennes: Centre d’histoire de l’art contemporain, 1990), 17 and 77, though the authors do not note the significance of this. Lynn Gumpert notes that he used Givaudan’s photocopier but does not mention the mailing list in her book Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 22–​23. 22. Boltanski made two books at Givaudan’s gallery; the other was Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas encore arrivé et où j’ai trouvé la mort (Reconstitution of an Accident That Has Not Yet Happened and Where I Died, November 1969). The late 1960s saw the growth of mail art as an artistic strategy to circumvent the gallery system, although ironically this mail art operated within it. Typically an inexpensively produced multiple, mail art was attractive to artists who did not want their work to feel as precious as a traditional painting or sculpture. See Jean-Marc Poinsot, Mail Art: Communication, a Distance Concept (Paris: Éditions CEDIC, 1971) for a survey of artists working with so-called “envois” at this time in Paris. In addition to the two artist’s books, Boltanski also mailed out letters and photographs during this period. 23. From Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (Paris: Edition Givaudan, 1969). The text appears only in the original edition of the book, and not in the more widely distributed reproduction. See note 26 below. In 1997, the book was translated into English by Shaun Whiteside and reprinted in Didier Semin, Tamar Garb, and Donald Kuspit, Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon, 1997), 126. 24. “In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science” (1946), in A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1972), 141. For our 2005 interview, Boltanski chose to meet at the chic L’Hotel, at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, just down the street from the École des Beaux-Arts, where he teaches. Borges frequently stayed at L’Hôtel while he was in Paris in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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25. It should be noted that Boltanski is extremely interested in the connection between artists and saints, particularly in establishing and venerating their lives and collecting their relics. See for example his interview with Georgia Marsh, “The White and the Black,” Parkett no. 22 (December 1989): 36–​40. 26. Boltanski prefers the original version. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. The re-publication is much more widely available than the 1969 original, and differs from it significantly. Perhaps due to the fact that Recherche et présentation has appeared in reproduction several times since Boltanski’s career began to flourish, notations of this discrepancy are infrequent. There are three major differences: 1) The reproduction has a title page and the original does not, 2) only the original includes a lengthy text, and, perhaps most significantly, 3) while the image and paper quality were crude in 1969, later versions are cleaner, sleeker, and more visually legible. Turning the pages of the bound, glossy reproduction with its higher-quality photographic reproductions is a completely different experience than paging through the crude, heavy, and much more amateurish original. For further details on the 1979 reprinting as well as 1990 and 1991 facsimile reproductions of Recherche et présentation, see Jennifer Flay, ed., Christian Boltanski: Catalogue: Books, Printed Matter, Ephemera, 1966–​1991 (Cologne: Walther König, 1992), 8–​9. 27. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), which includes contributions from Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Dominique Schnapper. Originally published in French as Un art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, 1965. 28. Boltanski has repeatedly denied any specific link between his interest in albums and Bourdieu’s arguments, although he allows the possibility of an indirect exposure to Bourdieu’s ideas through his brother, Luc. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. For a discussion of the brothers’ relationship with regard to their professional activity, see Richard Hobbs, “Boltanski’s Visual Archives,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 4 (November 1998): 121–​40. 29. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography, 30–​31. 30. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3. 31. Even before this now-more-popular conception of a family album took hold, one could construct an album from cabinet cards and professional photographs. These images, however, were not made by family members. 32. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, 6–​7. 33. Boltanski is referring here to his slightly later project, L’Album de la famille D (1971). Interview with Jacques Clayssen in Identité/Identification (Bordeaux, France: Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains, 1976), 23. “Quand j’ai présenté un album de photographies, je me suis aperçu que nous avions, en fait, tous, les mêmes photographiques, que ces albums n’étaient que le catalogue des rites familiaux, tels que les mariages, les vacances, les premières communions et que leur fonction était de renforcer la cohesion familiale. Les spectateurs se reconnaissaient dans ces photographies, ils disaient ‘j’ai été sur cette plage’ ou ‘on dirait mon oncle’ ou ‘moi aussi j’ai eu un costume blanc quand j’étais petit.” 34. See, for instance, Marianne Lemoine’s essay in the exhibition catalogue for Christian

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TO PAGES 26–31

Boltanski, Jean Le Gac, Annette Messager (Musée Rude, Dijon, France, 1973); Gilbert Lascault’s essay in the exhibition catalogue Cinq Musées Personnels (Musée de Grenoble, France, 1973); Jean Clair’s essay in the exhibition catalogue Pour Mémoires (Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains, Bordeaux, France, 1974); Jacques Clayssen’s interview with the artist in Identité/Identification; Andreas Franzke’s essay “Le Souvenir et Les Cliches” in Reconstitution; or Irmeline Lebeer’s interview with the artist in Les Modèles: cinq relations entre texte & image (Chalon-sur-Saône, France: Cheval d’attaque, 1979). None of these significant essays is remotely concerned with Boltanski’s biography. 35. The emphasis on the constructed nature of Boltanski’s identity is seen in Blistène’s lead essay emphasizing the creation of the character “C. B.” as a kind of alter ego for the artist; in Boltanski’s interview with Delphine Renard, in which he tells the story of being fascinated with the idea of an exhibition of his work that would split it into the supposedly factual “reconstitution” of his biography in one section and the “artwork” in another; and in the first extended publication of a jointly written and illustrated “Biography” section, by Blistène and Boltanski, covering the years 1958–​83. Bernard Blistène, ed., Boltanski (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984). 36. Interview with Demosthènes Davvetas in Flash Art no. 124 (October–​November 1985): 82. Davvetas is a Greek-born poet and art historian who was, at the time, an art critic for the French newspaper Libération. By now, Boltanski has made the autobiographical interview format an art form: Two recent publications demonstrate his willingness to be interviewed extensively and to testify repeatedly about his autobiographical origins: one, a book-length interview that took the form of a “confession” over repeated meetings with the curator Catherine Grenier in The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), and a similarly lengthy interview with the leading art-world interviewer, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, that takes nearly the form of an artist’s book with Boltanski’s repeated redactions preserved in the final publication in Obrist’s Christian Boltanski, trans. Will Bishop and Ben Carter (Cologne: Walter König, 2009). 37. Demosthènes Davvetas, “In the Twentieth Century C. B.,” Artforum 25, no. 3 (November 1986): 109. 38. Later, the young artist would become keenly aware that his bourgeois upbringing was at odds with the image of an avant-garde artist. Boltanski was born in the family house; in 2006 his two brothers still lived there. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. 39. For histories of life in Paris, particularly for Jews, during the occupation, see David PryceJones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940–​1944 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981); Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and the Holocaust Encyclopedia provided by the United States Holocaust Museum, accessible online at http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/. 40. Boltanski took care to emphasize that while the fight was staged, the divorce was real, albeit for political reasons, not marital ones. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. 41. Ibid. Boltanski does not know for certain how long his father was in hiding, but believes it was about a year. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–32

   •   163

44. The word can best be translated into English as “reconstruction,” but I preserve the use of “reconstitution,” since it remained untranslated as the title of his 1990 exhibition and catalogue, even in the English versions of both. Boltanski also notes that “reconstitution” is the word French investigators use when consulting the evidence of a crime scene. This point is particularly relevant for the other book project Boltanski did in 1969, Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas encore arrive et où j’ai trouvé la mort. 45. See Christian Boltanski, Reconstitution (Paris: Chêne, 1978), with an essay by Andreas Franzke; and Christian Boltanski, Reconstitution (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1990). 46. Much later in his career, and after he had become known as an artist chiefly concerned with the Holocaust, Boltanski addressed the complexities of the album form in relation to World War II with his artist’s album Sans-Souci (1991). It is not clear that earlier in his career he was occupied with the same concerns, though they may have been latent. See Ernst van Alphen, “Nazis in the Family Album: Christian Boltanski’s Sans Souci,” in Marianne Hirsch, ed., The Familial Gaze (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1999). 47. That Boltanski photographed his nephew, and did not use photographs of some unknown child, keeps the album within the familial sphere. 48. The album made an international debut that year, appearing at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland (March–​April 1972), the Grand Palais in Paris (May–​September 1972), and Documenta V in Kassel, Germany (June–​October 1972). Each venue was part of a group exhibition; see note 50 for details. 49. Gilbert Lascault, “Boltanski au Musée Municipal d’Art Moderne,” XXie Siecle no. 36 (June 1971): 144. “Mais la multitude des détails ne fait que renforcer l’incertitude d’une presence et d’un sens: existe-t-il encore, le sujet qui remplissait ces vêtements maintenant vide?” 50. This text originally appeared in the catalogue for an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern (March–​April 1972) titled Ben Vautier, Christian Boltanski, Jean LeGac, and John C. Fernie. Recherche et présentation was exhibited the same year at Documenta V in the “Individual Mythologies” section curated by Harald Szeemann; this text ran in the exhibition catalogue. In France, the text was included in the exhibition catalogue Douze ans d’art contemporain en france (Paris, Éditions des musées nationaux, 1972); the exhibition ran May–​September 1972 at the Grand Palais. It also ran in Gilbert Lascault’s 1973 exhibition Cinq Musées Personnels in Grenoble, France, discussed below. In the rest of the text, Boltanski describes his artistic activity subsequent to, and on the same themes as, Recherche et présentation, and concludes that his projects have shown him that these memories are not his own; they could just as well be anyone’s collective memory of childhood. 51. “Le lit que j’ai photographié n’était pas mon lit et cette chemise présentée comme mienne ne m’a jamais appartenu.” “Entretien entre Irmeline Lebeer et Christian Boltanski,” in Les Modèles: cinq relations entre texte & image (Chalon-sur-Saône, France: Cheval d’attaque, 1979), 7. As Boltanski frequently changes his story, my approach here is to take his word when he corrects his previous “lies,” but of course it is possible that he was not telling the truth here, either, and that this “correction” is yet another perpetuation of ambiguity. 52. “La photographie apporte la preuve apparente que je suis allé en vacances à la mer avec mes parents, mais c’est une photographie non identifieable d’un enfant et d’un groupe

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TO PAGES 32–34

d’adultes sur une plage.” Delphine Renard, “Entretien avec Christian Boltanski,” in Boltanski (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984), 75. 53. Jennifer Flay, ed., Christian Boltanski: Catalogue, 11. 54. Interestingly, this piece of (mis?)information is picked up in 1998 by Richard Hobbs, who briefly argues that the “authentic” photo of Boltanski on the toilet is of a subject “far distant from the idealistic overcoming of death, such as potty-training.” Richard Hobbs, “Boltanski’s Visual Archives,” 125. 55. Ibid. 56. Rebecca J. DeRoo, “Christian Boltanski’s Memory Images: Remaking French Museums in the Aftermath of ’68,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2004): 228–​30. DeRoo’s work on Boltanski, based on her dissertation, was subsequently published in her book The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France After 1968 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Also see DeRoo for an alternate reading of Recherche et présentation. She does not see it in terms of a family album, but rather in terms of following an impersonal museum model of presentation, and thus corresponding to her broader argument regarding Boltanski’s relationship to the widespread interest in and reassessment of French museums during this period. By contrast, I would argue that the “museumification” of Recherche et présentation took place only later, when Boltanski made it into a relic of his own career in his 1971 Vitrine de reference, discussed below. 57. Richard Hobbs, “Boltanski’s Visual Archives,” 126. 58. All of the following regarding Recherche et présentation is based on an interview with the author, March 2, 2006. 59. My use of the words “most likely” and “probably” reflects Boltanski’s own uncertainty, thirty-seven years later, about what exactly the images show. 60. Interview with the author, March 2, 2006. 61. This photograph has been analyzed many times. See for instance Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999) and Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998). 62. This and subsequent “biographical” information is compiled from “Peter Ameisenhaufen: A Life in Research,” in Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, Dr. Ameisenhaufen’s Fauna (Göttingen, West Germany: European Photography, 1988), 6–​11. 63. Ibid., 10. 64. As quoted in Diane Neumaier, “Reviving the Exquisite Corpse: Joan Fontcuberta and Spanish Photography,” Afterimage 18 (April 1991): 7. 65. As it appears in the book project, see Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, Dr. Ameisenhaufen’s Fauna, 20–​27. 66. Annette Kuhn, “ ‘She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl . . . ,’ ” in Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 2002). Lorie Novak also submitted a photograph she has written about elsewhere and featured in her own installations, though it is accompanied by her own memory of the image. There is as well, it must be said, a level of “who’s who,” as one notices submissions by prominent photo historians and photographers such as Geoffrey Batchen, Alison Nordström, and Henry Horenstein. Notably,

NOTES TO PAGES 34–41

   •   16 5

67. 68. 69. 70.

these three entries all come from the subsection “On Photography”; the authors, perhaps not surprisingly, were all compelled to pen stories about photography in some way. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets, 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid., 14.

3. D I S P L A C E M E N T S

1. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Armin Zweite, and Rainer Rochlitz, Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 1999) was published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museu d’Art  Contemporani de  Barcelona. Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader (London: Whitechapel, 2003) was published on the occasion of Atlas’s exhibition in London’s White­chapel Gallery. It reprints Buchloh’s widely circulated 1999 essay “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive”; Lynn Cooke’s very brief essay on Atlas written on the occasion of its exhibition at New York’s Dia Center for the Arts in 1995, which Cooke organized; and Helmut Friedel’s 2001 essay “Reading Pictures—​Possible Access to Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” first published in 2001 in the catalogue for Atlas’s exhibition at Japan’s Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. 2. These are Zweite’s words, not Richter’s. Zweite does not indicate the source of this knowledge. Armin Zweite, “Gerhard Richter’s Album of Photographs, Collages, and Sketches,” in Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter, 90. An earlier version of the essay was published in German in the exhibition catalogue Atlas. Gerhard Richter (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1989). 3. This is not to say I don’t appreciate Atlas as a source of images for the artist’s paintings. Indeed, without this aspect, Atlas would lose a tremendous amount of its appeal. But I maintain that, as a whole, it is counterproductive to view Atlas exclusively in this light. 4. Armin Zweite, “Gerhard Richter’s Album of Photographs, Collages and Sketches” 44. This text is revised from the edition of Atlas published in 1989. 5. Jeanne Anne Nugent, Family Album and Shadow Archive: Gerhard Richter’s East, West, and All German Painting, 1949–​1966 (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005), 18. Nugent’s dissertation is not specifically about Atlas, but she considers Atlas thoughtfully and has a more sustained analysis of its contents and meaning than most other writing dedicated to the work. This passage appears in a long footnote on Zweite. The first ten panels, in Nugent’s reading, chronicle Richter’s transition from East to West. In particular, Nugent reads the sixth panel of Atlas as documenting “the artist’s leave-taking of his East German family and friends and his re-assimilation into a newly extended family in the West” (25). Nugent has particularly compelling readings of several of the family photographs and media images that became paintings during Richter’s early career, including Diver I and Diver II (both 1965), Horst with Dog (1965), Bombers (1963), Family by the Sea (1964), Secretary (1964), Terese Andeszka (1964), Swimmers (1965), and Eight Student Nurses (1966). These last three, all found in the eighth panel of Atlas, receive a fascinating and insightful reading within the overall panel. Nugent concludes that Rich-

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ter’s formal arrangement on the panel of seemingly disparate images “clearly constructs the theme [of ] anonymous victims and accidental survivors” (266). 6. In 1965, Richter painted his uncle Rudi, his aunt Marianne, and Dr. Werner Hyde, a neurologist who, under Hitler, established the Nazi program of euthanasia. 7. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 19. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 20. 10. Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms,” The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2002. The couple left West Berlin soon after, and Richter later enrolled with a scholarship in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied until 1963. 11. The story of Richter fleeing East Germany has appeared several times since 2002. See Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Maler (Cologne: DuMont, 2002); Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms”; and Jeanne Anne Nugent, Family Album and Shadow Archive. Richter recalled, as cited by Kimmelman, “I left my luggage in one of the storage lockers at the rail station. All I had was enough for two weeks, a suitcase of clothes. Then I returned to Dresden, sold the car, found someone to drive me and my wife back to Berlin.” According to Nugent, among the items Richter brought with him were documentation of artworks he had made in Dresden, family snapshots, and photographs of his friends. Within Nugent’s framework, this is part of Richter’s “shadow archive.” 12. For extensive information on the exhibition history, including when particular panels joined Atlas, when they were not included, and how the installations were hung, see the 2006 publication of Atlas and Richter’s regularly updated website, https://www.gerhardrichter.com. 13. Even within an exhibition of Atlas with multiple venues, the configuration of the panels is always modified to meet the physical parameters of the exhibition space. As with any curatorial endeavor, the proximity of one image to another or the need to remove some objects due to lack of space affects the micro-narratives within the installation. 14. All editions are out of print. 15. Due to Richter’s heavy involvement in the production of these publications, it is reasonable to assume that the artist approved of their layouts. In this way, the various publications of Atlas are not unlike artists’ books. The 2006 edition very clearly states the depth of Richter’s involvement: He conceptualized the format of one panel per page, closely edited the volume, and personally translated all German titles into English for the Thames & Hudson / D. A. P. English edition. Armin Zweite also discusses the differences between the 1972 and 1989 publications in Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader, 60. 16. All of my observations regarding Atlas in exhibition are based on having seen it at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where Gerhard Richter—​Atlas was on view December 6, 2003 through March 14, 2004. This presentation was the United Kingdom premiere of Atlas; it was organized by Andrea Tarsia, head of exhibitions and projects, with guest curator Helmut Friedel, director of Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. In addition to hanging the complete Atlas, Tarsia also included several paintings whose source imagery is found in Atlas.

NOTES TO PAGES 51–53

   •   167

17. This separation was formalized when Richter sold Atlas to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, in 1996. Since then, in an unusual situation, Richter has added nearly two hundred panels to Atlas. 18. An encyclopedia is another form of historical reference related to the structures I discuss here. 19. Interview with Dieter Hülsmanns and Fridolin Reske (1966), published in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews 1962–​ 1993, trans. David Britt (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press and Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1995), 56. First published in German as Gerhard Richter Texte (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1993). 20. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, 72–​73. An analysis of the high frequency with which this quotation is cited in writings about Richter could be its own paper. Richter’s use of photography, it is interesting to note, by and large is not discussed by photo historians but by writers who are interested in understanding his paintings. 21. See, for example, Armin Zweite, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen,” in the exhibition catalogue Atlas. Gerhard Richter, and Helmut Friedel, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas Photographs, Collages and Sketches 1962–​2006,” in Helmut Friedel, ed., Gerhard Richter: Atlas (New York: D. A. P., 2006). 22. Catherine Hürzeler, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas of Photos, Collages and Sketches,” Domus no. 763 (September 1994): 97. 23. Helmut Friedel, in Gerhard Richter, Helmut Friedel, and Ulrich Wilmes, Atlas of the Photographs, Collages and Sketches (New York: D. A. P. in association with Anthony d’Offay, London, and Marian Goodman, New York, 1997), translated by David Britt from the German publication Gerhard Richter: Atlas der Skizzen, Fotos und Collagen (Cologne: Oktagon, 1997), 5. 24. That Friedel cannot find the answer to this question is puzzling. Since 1990 he has been director of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, which acquired Atlas in 1996, and he has edited several publications on Atlas, including the 1996 volume. Either he has not asked, or Richter has declined to answer. Helmut Friedel, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas Photographs, Collages, and Sketches 1962–​2006,” 7. Some family members are identified by Susanne Küper in her essay on Richter’s photo paintings “Gerhard Richter: Capitalist Realism and His Painting from Photographs, 1962–​1966,” in Eckhart Gillen, ed., German Art from Beckman to Richter (Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 1997), 233–​36. Nugent also identifies specific people who appear in the early panels of Atlas, as I discuss later in this chapter. 25. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (spring 1999): 136. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 138. In 1961, shortly before the Berlin Wall was built, Richter left Dresden for West Germany, a now well-documented transition in the artist’s life. 28. See Sigfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), reprinted in Sigfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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9. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” 138. 2 30. In addition to Buchloh, see for instance Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003); W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003); and Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), among others. 31. Dorothea Dietrich, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: One-Man Show in a Shipping Crate,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter XXVI, no. 6 (January–​February 1996): 204. 32. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 338. 33. Originally published as Atlas sive cosmographicae meditations de fabrica mundi et fabricati figural. 34. James R. Akerman, “Atlas: Birth of a Title,” in The Mercator Atlas of Europe, ed. Marcel Watelet (Antwerp, Belgium: Fonds Mercator, and Pleasant Hill, Oregon: Walking Tree Press, 1998), 20. 35. Ibid., 26. 36. Ibid. In his frontispiece, Mercator described Atlas as a Phoenician king rather than the mythical figure bearing the world on his shoulders, but Akerman argues that Mercator’s sophisticated humanist education would surely have enabled Mercator to understand the Atlas figure as a complex one. 37. Ibid. Shakespeare used the same allegory in naming his Globe Theatre, which opened in 1599, not fifteen years after Mercator named his book of maps. 38. Ibid., 21. 39. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 23. 40. Ibid., 23. 41. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (fall 1992): 81. 42. Denis Wood, “Pleasure in the Idea / The Atlas as Narrative Form,” Cartographica 24, no. 1 (spring 1987): 29. 43. Ibid., 25. 44. Ibid., 34. 45. Armin Zweite, “Gerhard Richter’s Album of Photographs, Collages, and Sketches,” 57. 46. Ibid., 57–​58. 47. Ibid., 60. 48. Rainald Schumacher, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas,” Flash Art International 199 (March–​April 1998): 86. 49. Ibid. 50. It is worth noting that Rainald Schumacher’s article appeared nine years after Zweite’s essay, by which point Richter had added a large number of family pictures to Atlas. 51. This shift does not clearly correspond to any date. 52. Betty (Babette), born in 1966, is Richter’s only child with his first wife, Marianne (Ema) Eufinger, whom he married in 1957.

NOTES TO PAGES 59–65

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53. Sabine’s pregnancy and all of the photographs of the children taken between 1994 and 1996 were exhibited for the first time as part of Atlas at Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, in 1997. 54. Rainald Schumacher, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas,” 86. Richter has acknowledged that his role as a father is continually evolving. In his 2002 interview with Michael Kimmelman, he speaks of a painting he made in 2000 of his infant son Moritz in his high chair: “Yes, it is sentimental. But I’m old enough now to show my love. I have finally discovered what it means to be a good father.” Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms.” Horst Richter until recently was identified as Richter’s father; now, Richter does not know who his biological father is. These harrowing aspects of Richter’s personal life have emerged only relatively recently. See Jeanne Anne Nugent, Family Album and Shadow Archive, 23. Buchloh has addressed the theme of paternity and the postwar generation and Germany’s “inability to mourn” in his article on Richter’s 48 Portraits, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” October 75 (winter 1996): 60–​82. 48 Portraits was completed in 1972 for the Venice Biennale, where Richter represented Germany, and shortly thereafter was shown at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht, which hosted the first appearance of Atlas (the two Richter shows appeared back-to-back). Of the installation, Buchloh writes that it “articulates above all the imaginary construction of a retroactive paternal identification organized by a subject who has been both individually traumatized by the destruction of the paternal image and historically traumatized by the hypertrophic adulation of an image of the male Führer.” “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” 73. 55. This could have been just a translation error, and thus only applicable to readers of the English version, but nevertheless it is an error that affects a viewer’s comprehension of the image. It furthermore brings up the issue of translation in the reception of these works. Though they are image-based, their ability to be “read” by an international audience relies on museum workers, editors, and, in the case of the 2006 publication, Richter himself providing accurate captions. 56. http://www.thirdreichruins.com/buchenwald.htm. 57. A different analysis is necessary for the panel in the published form of Atlas, as the panels are arranged differently there, a fact that only underscores the malleability of meaning for particular images in Atlas. 58. Helmut Friedel, Gerhard Richter: Atlas, 14.

4 . “A R O U N D T H I S N U C L E U S A L A R G E E M P T Y S PA C E ”

1. This number is an estimate. Lê has guessed that there are fewer photographs—​perhaps fifteen hundred or so. 2. Hà Tiên’s location on the river made it a valuable strategic location, used, for example, by United States military swift boats. 3. The best published account of Lê’s family experience in Vietnam is Vince Aletti’s early interview with the artist, “Playing God,” The Village Voice, April 23, 1991, 89. Also see Karin Lipson, “An Angry Voice from Vietnam,” New York Newsday, December 8, 1992, 58.

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Lê’s father was a school principal and his mother a gold dealer. His father died of a stroke before the family was able to escape. 4. Lê is one of the group that has become known as the Boat People, the masses of Vietnamese people who fled the country by boat, particularly in 1978. Between 1975 and 1989, more than eight hundred thousand refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam came to the United States. Many, like Lê, came via refugee camps in other countries. For a general background, see Thanh V. Tran, “Sponsorship and Employment Status Among Indochinese Refugees in the United States,” International Migration Review 25, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 536–​50; Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975–​1992 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2006); and Bruce Grant, The Boat People (New York: Penguin, 1979). I asked Lê about Andrew X. Pham’s account, which the artist cites in his 2005 interview with Melissa Chiu. For Pham’s story of his family’s terrifying escape from Vietnam by boat, also from a child’s perspective, see his memoir and travelogue Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Lê notes Pham’s traumatic ordeal in the broader context of the Vietnamese diasporic experience and, in his case, return home, in the Melissa Chiu interview in Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium (New York: Asia Society, 2005), 21. 5. Email correspondence with the author, January 10, 2007. 6. Vince Aletti, “Playing God,” 89. The boat Lê was on followed a southwestern route to Thailand, across the Gulf of Thailand. This was the most common route, but also the most dangerous due to pirates. The refugee camps were at best crowded and unsanitary; many were dangerous as well. 7. Though Lê’s family is Buddhist, it was a common practice for churches and other volunteer organizations in the United States to sponsor Vietnamese refugees during this time. The U.S. State Department contracted with agencies that identified individuals and organizations to sponsor refugees. See Thanh V. Tran, “Sponsorship and Employment Status,” 536–​37, and Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People, 173. 8. Email correspondence, January 10, 2007. 9. Lê recounts that it was very common not to have a camera in Vietnam. There was no commercial photo lab in his town, only a professional studio that processed black and white. Email correspondence, January 10, 2007. 10. Lê now lives in Ho Chi Minh City. 11. Moira Roth, “Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory,” Art Journal 60 (summer 2001): 42. This long-term email interview with the artist is exceedingly valuable. 12. According to Lê, because of Vietnam’s lack of natural resources, the country recycles everything. The same thrift and junk shops in which Lê finds old photographs also have collections of old bottles, plastic bags, dishwashing detergent containers, and scraps of paper. Interview with the author, September 13, 2005. 13. Moira Roth, “Obdurate History,” 42–​43. 14. Melissa Chiu, “Interview with Dinh Q. Lê,” in Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium (New York: Asia Society, 2005), 23. 15. Ibid., 22.

NOTES TO PAGES 76–77

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16. Lê graduated with a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989. When he entered, he was on the engineering track. From there he transferred to computer science, then fine arts. Email correspondence with the author, January 10, 2007. 17. See Vince Aletti, “Playing God,” and Moira Roth, “Obdurate History,” 48. Also see Karin Lipson, “An Angry Voice from Vietnam,” 55. Lê revisited and expanded this poster project in 1992 for Creative Time in New York. The anger and raw politics that fueled this early work appear again at times throughout his career, for example in Damaged Gene (1998) and Lotusland (2000), in which he addresses the high rate of birth defects as a result of Agent Orange. 18. From Santa Barbara, Lê went directly to New York, where he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts and earned an MFA in photography and digital media in 1992. 19. The trip was precipitated by work Lê had been doing with Cambodian refugees at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Using the technique he had already employed in his own artwork, Lê taught schoolchildren how to make weavings using photographs of themselves, family members, and images from magazines and newspapers. This project was organized by Linda Yee as an art program for kids; some parents participated as well. According to Lê, the experience got him thinking about his own childhood. Email correspondence with the artist, October 30, 2007. Also see David Spalding, “Weaving History: An Interview with Dinh Q. Lê,” Art Asia Pacific no. 38 (2003): 68–​70. The most thorough sources on Lê’s The Cambodia Series are Moira Roth, “Obdurate History,” and Allan deSouza, “Interview,” in Dinh Q. Lê: The Headless Buddha (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 1998). See also Dinh Q. Lê, From Vietnam to Hollywood (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2003) for an extended version of Roth’s earlier essay, here titled “Of Memory and History.” 20. According to the art historian Moira Roth, who was with Lê at the time, the loss was discovered on August 1, 2005, while the two were traveling in Hanoi. Lê’s Asia Society exhibition was scheduled to open in New York on September 13. Upon returning to Ho Chi Minh City, Lê purchased ten kilos of photographs and went to work on the replacement piece with a crew of friends and family. I thank Moira Roth for sharing with me her account of this experience, “Letters from Saigon #8, Visiting Dinh Q. Lê,” before it was published in Dinh Q. Lê and Stefano Catalani, A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê (Bellevue, Washington: Bellevue Arts Museum, 2007). 21. In fact, in the first installation, the dimensions of the piece were based on the size of the gallery in which it would hang. The exhibition was organized by Rebecca McGrew and hung in Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery March 4–​April 9, 2000. McGrew created a loose-leaf gallery brochure printed on vellum sheets, Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return (Pomona, California: Montgomery Gallery, 2000). I thank her for sharing this publication with me. When Lê made the second version, he based its size on the size of the first. The Asia Society galleries have lower ceilings than the museum in Pomona, thus the continuation of the piece on the floor was serendipitous. Nevertheless, it adds significantly to the sculptural presence of the work, and the artist was happy with the change and its formal effects. Interview with the author, September 13, 2005. 22. Ibid. 23. The information regarding the collaborative construction of the piece is based on an

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interview with the author, September 13, 2005. I am also grateful to Moira Roth for sharing “Letters from Saigon.” 24. Moira Roth, “Letters from Saigon,” n. p. 25. Ibid. 26. Melissa Chiu, “Interview with Dinh Q. Lê,” 23. 27. Lê’s Asia Society lecture, September 13, 2005. 28. As cited in Moira Roth, “Obdurate History,” 6. 29. These translations were all found in an online search for the song in August 2007. The differences among the interpretations of the first stanza alone show the variety of possible translations. The title of the song is featured in the last line of the first stanza. Vân Mai translates, “So many years, I keep on leaving / For nowhere ’til life wears out / On my shoulders the sun and moon / Shine unending through the realm of return” (translated February 2004). Cao Thi Nhu-Quynh and John C. Schafer translate, “Many years I’ve wandered / Going in circles, growing tired / On my shoulders the sun and the moon / Lighting a lifetime, a place for leaving and returning” (translated 2007). 30. Only the 1999 version included text in Chinese. 31. For centuries, the Vietnamese written language was based on Chinese characters (as Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu originally was). The French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–​1660) codified the Vietnamese alphabet in the seventeenth century. Under French colonial rule, a gradual shift began to take place, and by the early twentieth century, the writing system was predominantly based on the Latin alphabet, modified for tones and letters by diacritics. See Dinh-Hoa Nguyen, “Vietnamese,” in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 691–​69. 32. Interview with the author, September 13, 2005. 33. Ibid. 34. Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu, trans. and annotated by Huỳnh Sanh Thông (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), xx. 35. Ibid. Vietnam has a history of professional and amateur bards learning poems by heart and reciting them. 36. On Viet Kieu, see James M. Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989); Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala; and Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Introduction,” in The Tale of Kieu. 37. Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu, xxxii. 38. Freeman is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University in California. 39. A looser translation reads, “Those vicissitudes we have experienced / Cause our hearts to break.” Freeman explains that the mulberry-covered sea “refers to the time it takes for the sea to transform itself into a mulberry field and back again into the sea, a poetic expression for momentous upheavals that occur in nature or in the lives of people, to the fate of a nation and a grief so deep that it speaks to all people, to a mourning for the sufferings endured by the Vietnamese over the centuries.” James M. Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow, 20. Freeman also notes that The Tale of Kieu resonates deeply with many of the elderly Vietnamese Americans he interviewed.

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40. Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram was published in English translation by Andrew X. Pham (New York: Harmony Books, 2007). In Vietnam, the two diaries created a publishing phenomenon and became best-sellers. See “New War Diaries Reshape Reading Market,” VietnamNet Bridge, August 22, 2005. The backstory of Dang Thuy Tram’s diary is remarkable: A U.S. veteran, Fred Whitehurst, found it while he was in Vietnam. He and other American soldiers had advanced to a Vietnamese base in the Quang Ngai Province in south-central Vietnam in 1970, after a violent United States attack. He took the diary and other documents and read them with the help of the translator in his unit, Nguyen Trung Hieu. Whitehurst, then a twenty-two-year-old intelligence officer, was ordered to burn the diaries, but instead followed Hieu’s advice to keep them. Whitehurst had always wanted to return the diary to the family of the killed doctor, and when he presented the diary at a seminar on the Vietnam War, another veteran, Ted Engelmann, took note. Engelmann, a photographer, had traveled back to Vietnam eleven times since the war and volunteered to visit Tram’s family and return the diary. In April 2005, Engelmann brought a digital copy of the diary to Tram’s mother, Doan Thi Ngoc Tram. Tram’s diaries are now archived at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. See “Best-Selling Diary Transformed Into Television Show,” VietNamNet Bridge, August 15, 2005; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_Thuy_Tram; and “Vietcong Doctor’s Diary of War, Sacrifice,” ohmynews.com, October 10, 2005. 41. Interview with the author, September 13, 2005. 42. See “Best-Selling Diary Transformed Into Television Show”; also “Fallen Soldiers Diaries Stir Up Vietnam,” ohmynews.com, September 5, 2005. In 1970, as a high school student, Nguyen Van Thac had won first prize in the North Vietnam Literary Writing Contest. 43. Interview with the author, September 13, 2005. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. This is Lê’s translation. 47. Roth notes this as well, writing in her unpublished account that she is struck by the “amazing happenstance of which images and texts appear next to one another, creating an elusive narrative.” Moira Roth, “Letters from Saigon,” n. p. It is possible, of course, that Lê’s aunt had a hand in choosing provocative image-text combinations as she sewed the pieces together.

5. H I S T O R I C A L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N A N D D O U B T

1. Portions of this chapter were previously published in my article “ ‘It’s Not an Archive’: Christian Boltanski’s Les archives de C. B. 1965–​1988,” Visual Resources 27, no. 3 (August 2011): 249–​66. 2. This is according to the Musée national d’art moderne archival records. Boltanski was not sure which curator was responsible for the acquisition during our interview on March 2, 2006. 3. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (Paris: Edition Givaudan, 1969). A number of Boltanski’s early works address storage, archiving, and the theme of reconstitution, particularly his 1970–​71 Essai de reconstitution

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(Trois tiroirs), the 1971 Vitrine de référence, and the auction he held in 1972 selling the contents of his desk drawers. I elaborate on this in my PhD dissertation, Archive, Atlas, Album: The Photographic Constructions of Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, and Dinh Q. Lê (Boston University, 2008). 4. For general studies on the emergence of the archive as a critical subject for artists, see Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen, eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, with essays by Geoffrey Batchen, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Susan BuckMorss, Susan Stewart, et al. (Munich: Prestel, 1998); Rebecca Comay, ed., Lost in the Archives (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002); David Campany, ed., Art and Photography (London: Phaidon, 2003); Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006); and Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008). 5. For instance, while the scholars Ernst van Alphen and Richard Hobbs have taken an interest in the centrality of photographic archives within Boltanski’s work, they focus largely on works deemed evocative of the Holocaust. See Richard Hobbs, “Boltanski’s Visual Archives,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 4 (November 1998): 121–​40, and Ernst van Alphen, “Visual Archives as Preposterous History,” Art History 30 (June 2007): 364–​82. 6. For more on this series, which has been extensively written about, see especially Lynn Gumpert and Mary Jane Jacob, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988); Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994); and Danilo Eccher, Christian Boltanski (Milan: Charta, 1997). See also Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 7. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 130. 8. La vie impossible was first installed at the Anhaltische Gemädegalerie in Dessau, Germany, in 2001, an exhibition that jump-started my interest in the artist’s work in an archival context. 9. Since being purchased in 1989, the monumental installation has been exhibited in São Paulo, Brazil (2002), Marseille, France (2002), and twice at the MNAM (1992, 2005–​6). In each instance, it was part of a larger group show. 10. “un résumé de toute son œuvre et de toute sa vie.” From La collection du Musée national d’art moderne, acquisitions 1986–​1996, MNAM registrar files. 11. Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 140. 12. Serge Lemoine reads Boltanski as a formal descendent of minimalism in his essay “Les formes et les sources dans l’art de Christian Boltanski,” in Christian Boltanski, ed. Bernard Blistène (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984). Gumpert notes that Boltanski himself has made this connection. Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 140. Interestingly, a draft of Lemoine’s essay is contained in Les archives de C. B. 13. MNAM museum label, viewed June 2005. Les archives de C. B. was on view at the MNAM for the 2005–​6 Big Bang exhibition, which featured highlights from the museum’s collection. 14. According to Boltanski (interview, March 2, 2006), neither he nor anyone else actually counted the objects in the boxes when he made the piece, and the numbers given are his

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estimate from the time of the work’s original 1989 showing. As of 2006, according to MNAM archivist Evelyne Pomey (interview with the author, March 7, 2006), the contents of Les archives de C. B. had not been catalogued by the museum, so the numbers do, in fact, remain an estimate. 15. Christian Boltanski, interview with the author, June 23, 2005. 16. Normally the boxes are stored off-site and are rather difficult for scholars to access (Evelyne Pomey, interview, March 7, 2006), which enhances the inaccessibility of the piece. At the time I viewed the contents of the boxes with museum archivist Pomey, it seemed from all accounts that we were opening them for the first time since they were assembled in 1989. 17. I thank Boltanski scholar Catherine Blais for pressing this point. 18. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. 19. Boltanski (interview, June, 23, 2005) claims over time to have bought approximately seven thousand boxes from a biscuit box supplier in Paris, telling the supplier that he made cakes. He manufactures the rust on the exteriors by exposing them to a variety of acidic solutions. Initially, he claims, he urinated on them (one of the artist’s several Warholian gestures); unable to keep up with the number of boxes he needed, later he used Coca-Cola or oven cleaner. He last used biscuit boxes for his installation in the reopened Reichstag; these boxes were from a German supplier. He suggested that his supplier in Paris had gone out of business. 20. Christian Boltanski, interview, June 23, 2005. 21. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. I photographed the boxes’ contents and brought Boltanski printouts to identify. 22. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. Annette Messager and Boltanski have lived together since the 1970s. 23. The exhibition was Christian Boltanski: Stories and Posters. In 1990, the museum changed its name to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. 24. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. 25. Other photographs included such idyllic subjects as a mother and two children walking in a park, a boat at dock, a girl running along a beach, and two children next to rabbit hutches. In the exhibition and its catalogue, the photographs were accompanied by Messager’s drawings. 26. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. 27. Ibid. 28. But one could imagine an online version of Les archives de C. B. in which the contents were endlessly sortable. 29. Christian Boltanski, interview, March 2, 2006. 30. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation, n. p. 31. Assuming, that is, that the MNAM has state-of-the-art storage facilities, though one doubts even their off-site storage is safe from “nuclear war.” 32. Boltanski (interview, March 2, 2006) is aware of the unusualness of his situation, comparing himself to an older friend who is trying to decide whether or not to keep photographs of his old girlfriends, saying, “I am very lucky . . . because I have made a piece, an art piece, of that. And now it’s in the museum. You know, it’s easier.”

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33. For details on this project, see Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 138–​39. The project was titled “Musée social: Dispersion à l’amiable du contenu des trois tiroirs du secrétaire de Christian Boltanski” (Private Auction of the Contents of Christian Boltanski’s Three Desk Drawers). Gumpert notes that with his work, Boltanski “was both conserving and erasing traces of his existence” (140). 34. Boltanski (interview, March 2, 2006) admires Karl Valentin (1882–​1948) a great deal and has said, perhaps alluding to a shared spirit between the two men, “I thought it would be funny that my archive . . . was in the museum of a clown.” For more on this project, see Virginie Freyder, Les oeuvres du fantaisiste, ou le statut de l’artiste dans les travaux de Christian Boltanski (MA thesis, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2001). Thanks to Catherine Blais for this reference. The museum is now called the Valentin Karlstadt Musäum. 35. As cited in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Entendre les chiens (Cologne: Walter König, 2005), 29. Boltanski was discussing his project for the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which the difficulty of accessing an island to view his project was an important element. He also related this to an archives project he did at the music conservatory in Paris that is open to the public, yet difficult to find (I can attest to this fact) and even to the often-arduous journeys of religious pilgrims, for whom the challenge of getting to a place is crucial to the meaning of the “final” reward (something along the lines of, “the journey is the destination”). 36. La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski was the title of a film Boltanski made in 1968 and showed at his first solo exhibition in Paris, La vie impossible, in 1968, as well as the title of an artist’s book (Cologne: Walther König, 2001) in which he imagined that his friends, acquaintances, and professional colleagues had been asked to describe him after he had died (Boltanski made up all of their responses). The book was published on the occasion of the 2001 exhibition La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski at Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie in Dessau, Germany, where the installation La vie impossible was shown. The artist’s reuse of the phrase throughout his career signals its ongoing resonance for him, and the various and shifting impossibilities of either capturing or representing a life. Les archives de C. B. is also the title of a 1998 film made about Boltanski by Brigitte Cornand. 37. I have seen this piece exhibited twice, once at Anhaltische Gemädegalerie in Dessau, Germany, in 2001, the work’s premiere, and once at the MNAM in Paris in 2005. Though the installations differed in terms of space and gallery size, the extremely low light was characteristic of each. The photographed versions, by contrast, are much more illuminated. My thanks to Evelyne Pomey at the MNAM for making it possible to see the 2005 installation after the exhibition had ended. La vie impossible has been seen (and written about) more frequently than Les archives de C. B., having been installed also in 2002 at Kewenig Galerie in Cologne; in Siena, Italy, at the Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea in the same year; and at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris in 2003. Like Les archives de C. B., it is owned by the MNAM, Paris (purchased in 2004). 38. In contrast to Les archives de C. B., La vie impossible has been carefully and fully photographed, with wire mesh screens open and closed, and numerous detail shots, by the MNAM (though, like the 1989 piece, there is no itemized listing of the contents of each vitrine). Thus, a researcher can quite easily gain visual access to material that, when on view, would otherwise be extremely difficult to decipher. My thanks to Evelyne Pomey for sharing many of these photographs with me.

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3 9. Christian Boltanski, interview, June 23, 2005. 40. Ibid. 41. Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 133. 42. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Penowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36. 43. Christian Boltanski, interview, June 23, 2005. 44. Ibid. 45. Didier Semin, Boltanski (Paris: Art Press, 1988). 46. “On peut parler des règles du jeu qui ont été fixées au départ et que Didier a suivies: je ne voulais pas le voir et il devait considérer que j’étais mort. . . . Je ne lui ai donné vraiment aucun renseignement. Il a été remarquable: il ne m’a jamais téléphoné.” “Christian Boltanski: la revanche de la maladresse,” conversation with Alain Fleischer and Didier Semin for Art Press 128 (September 1988): 6. Their conversation took place after the publication was completed. 47. Soutif’s essay appeared in a monographic catalogue, Christian Boltanski, ed. Danilo Eccher (Milan: Charta, 1997), published for the exhibition An Attempt to Reconstruct Christian Boltanski at Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna.

6 . A F T E R T H E FA C T

1. I thank Frank Gohlke for suggesting Gibson’s book to me. 2. William Gibson, Spook Country (New York: Putnam, 2007), 7. 3. The Viper Room opened in 1993 on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood; the club was partially owned (until 2004) by the actor Johnny Depp. 4. Anthony W. Lee, “The Image of War,” in Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 50. 5. I am thinking, for example, of Taryn Simon’s The Innocents (2002), Oscar Palacio’s History Re-Visited (2006–​9), Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (2008–​10), and Stephen Chalmers’s Dump Sites (2009), among others. 6. Joel Sternfeld, “Afterword,” in On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), n. p. The book was republished by Steidl in 2012. 7. Though Sternfeld visited more sites than this, this is the number of photographs that were published, indicating that the artist considers them the core of the project. For the published work, Sternfeld visited twenty-four states and the District of Columbia. He made the most photographs in New York (nine) and California (eight). 8. There are exceptions to this general organizational rule. In some cases, Sternfeld chooses a date to mark a moment within ongoing violence. The closing image in the book, which appears after the afterword and acknowledgements, departs from the temporal sequence and is also the only image to—​somewhat optimistically—​address peacemaking in the midst of extended violence. 9. The book includes essays by Richard Brilliant and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (New York: Knopf, 1992). 10. Melinda Hunt and Joel Sternfeld, Hart Island (New York: Scalo, 1998), 19.

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11. Ibid., 20. 12. On This Site, it should be noted, is also highly personal. In the afterword, Sternfeld writes, with regard to the project’s origins, about losing his brother in an automobile accident. 13. I am grateful to Joel Sternfeld for his generosity in talking with me about On This Site. We spoke in New York on June 23, 2011. 14. Sternfeld does not specifically connect the World Trade Center and Waco to his desire to begin the series, but agreed in hindsight with my suggestion that these high-profile events may have contributed to its beginnings. 15. Interview with the artist, June 23, 2011. 16. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 17. Ibid. 18. Amelia Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal (winter 2007): 11. 19. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” Performance Art Journal 84 (2006): 2. 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Ibid. Auslander’s analysis revolves heavily around the photographic works of Vito Ac­conci and, to a lesser degree, Chris Burden. It is worth noting that he also concludes that perhaps it does not even matter if an event occurred at all, if a photograph later exists to “document” or present it to an audience. While I agree with Auslander’s assessment that it matters little that Yves Klein “faked” his Leap Into the Void, I disagree that audiences would feel the same way about, for instance, Chris Burden having himself shot, if we “really knew” it never happened. It need not be a one-size-fits-all rule. 22. David Green and Joanna Lowry, “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality,” in David Green, ed., Where Is the Photograph? (Brighton, England: University of Brighton and Kent Institute of Art and Design, 2003), 47. 23. Peirce’s assorted writings on the topic are compiled in “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 98–​119. 24. Ibid., 99. 25. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” (Parts I and II), in October 3 and 4 (spring and autumn 1977), reprinted in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), 196–​219. 26. Symbols have no visible or physical connection, in look or impression, to the things for which they stand. Peirce’s own writings are substantially more complicated than the basic outline I am distilling his system down to. 27. This line of thinking is typically summarized by photography scholars as a kind of physical impression, a description to which Joel Snyder has objected, but it is worth noting that there need not be a physical impression or touch for a negative to be “really affected.” The argument is modified, though not lost, with digital photography. See Snyder’s arguments in “The Art Seminar” in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007). 28. Elkins has referred to Peirce’s writings as “a lovely swamp.” James Elkins, Photography

NOTES TO PAGES 112–116

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Theory, 130. This volume marks a renewed interest among photo historians in “the index” and goes some way toward rectifying these standard omissions, though because of its conversational format, it does so largely through an identification of the problem rather than through sustained analysis. In their book The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson refer to what they call the “double indexicality” of photography as a medium that points both out to the world and back to the photographer to register both the visual trace and a sensibility. Their “double indexicality” is tied to an assessment of the loss, after postmodernism, of the conventional indexical truth claims of photography as a unique medium, and the ongoing plausibility of photography’s relevance today. For them, the second half of the “double indexicality” must emerge in the form of a trust that “must now be lodged in its ability to facilitate social commitments that recognize the traffic between the burgeoning image world and the social and political realities in which it is materialized” (xxiv). 29. Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 108–​9. 30. Ibid., 110. 31. David Green and Joanna Lowry, “From Presence to the Performative,” 48. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid. 34. This is related to Susan Sontag’s astute and concise observation that “to photograph is to confer importance.” By the very act of making a photograph, a photographer has pointed, and directed our attention. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 28. 35. Doane’s text is an introduction to a special journal issue on indexicality and what she justly identifies as the “vexed issue of referentiality in representation” in the wake of critical emphasis on the determining factors of social and cultural contexts in the construction of meaning. Her thoughts, thus, are exploratory and expansive. Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction,” differences 18, no. 1 (spring 2007): 1–​6. 36. Erika Doss considers the role of temporary memorials in her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). This memorial somewhat diverts from that convention, as its “temporary” quality has lasted for an extended period. 37. A memorial fountain was dedicated in 1995, on a plaza directly above the site of the bombing, to the six adults and one unborn child who were killed as well as those injured. It was destroyed in the 2001 attacks, but a surviving fragment was to be incorporated into the new memorial that honors victims of both attacks. 38. At the time of my visit, the only postcard that was both produced and sold by the Plaza showed this view. 39. http://www.centralparknyc.org/visit/things-to-see/south-end/gapstow-bridge.html, accessed July 26, 2011. 40. I visited the testing facility in July 2011; remarkably, the sign was still there, seventeen years after Sternfeld’s photograph, for motorists passing along the rather isolated road to read. 41. Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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TO PAGES 116–126

7. T H E P E R F O R M AT I V E L A N D S C A P E

1. Of the components, the Erased Lynchings have thus far received the greatest critical and scholarly attention. The most valuable contributions are Juli Carson, “Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West,” in Bruce Yonemoto, ed., Ken Gonzales-Day, exhibition catalogue (New York: CUE Art Foundation, 2006); “Ken Gonzales-Day and Edgar Arceneaux,” an interview edited by Matt Keegan and Sara Greenberger Rafferty, North Drive Press 4 (2007); Jason Hill, “The Camera and the ‘Physiognomic Auto-da-fe’: Photography, History, and Race in Two Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day,” X-tra 11, no. 3 (spring 2009); and “Ken Gonzales-Day in Conversation with Grant Kester, Elize Mazadiego, and Jenn Moreno,” in Pros* Issue I: Silent Witness: Violence and Representation (San Diego: University of California, San Diego, 2011). Also see the postcard-size publication from the artist’s exhibition at Pomona College: Ken Gonzales-Day, Hang Trees (Pomona, California: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2006), which functions as an artist’s book about the project. 2. The gruesome spectatorial quality of lynching and, by extension, photographic records of lynchings, have been the subject of an increasing amount of scholarly discussion, particularly in the wake of the 2000 book and exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Press, 2000) and the exhibition Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen, which first opened at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York. See especially Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–​1940 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 3. Gonzales-Day was not aware of Sternfeld’s series until he saw (and admired) it at the exhibition of Sternfeld’s work that ran from October 24, 2006, to February 25, 2007, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Interview with the artist, Los Angeles, June 14, 2011. 4. That said, Gonzales-Day’s book is certainly not the first account of this history, though earlier studies do not have the level of detail and extensive listing of individual cases. See, for instance, the foundational work of Robert W. Blew, which influenced Gonzales-Day’s research, “Vigilantism in Los Angeles, 1835–​1874,” Southern California Quarterly 54, no. 1 (spring 1972): 11–​30; scholarship by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, including their cowritten essay “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 2 (May 2003): 449–​51, and their subsequent book Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–​1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and, more recently, Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 5. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” (Parts I and II), in October 3 and 4 (spring and autumn 1977). 6. In addition to the photographs, the artist wrote about the series in Ken Gonzales-Day, “Analytical Photography: Portraiture, from the Index to the Epidermis,” Leonardo: Journal for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology 35, no. 1 (2002): 23–​30. 7. The artist wrote a brief description of the project as “The Bone-Grass Boy,” Atzlán: A

NOTES TO PAGES 131–133

   •   1 81

Journal of Chicano Studies 30, no. 2 (fall 2005): 171–​72. I thank Gonzales-Day for showing me the entirety of the project. 8. Even this is too simple a characterization. The fictional novel in fact has two iterations: the first edition, produced in 1995, said to be authored by Nepomaceno Gonzales, and the second edition, produced in 1996, said to be authored by Ramoncita and with an introduction by Nepomaceno Gonzales. 9. Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Bone-Grass Boy,” 171. 10. Interview with the artist, January 2, 2014, Los Angeles. 11. Ibid. 12. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 13. To ensure a degree of accuracy when dealing with fragmented archival evidence, the artist only included lynchings documented by more than one source. 14. Interview with the artist, June 14, 2011, Los Angeles. 15. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 16. 16. For further formal analysis of the series, see Anna Meliksetian’s 2006 essay “California Strange Fruit: Ken Gonzales-Day’s ‘Lynching in the West’ ” written for CUE Art Foundation, http://www.kengonzalesday.com/press/essays/annameliksetian.htm. 17. Exhibitions of the work may or may not make reference to Gonzales-Day’s book. This decision is typically at the discretion of the curator or gallery; viewers thus have varying degrees of contextual information with which to assess the photographs and the artist’s project as a whole. 18. For more on this connection, see the conversation with the artist in Silent Witness: Violence and Representation. 19. Weston and Adams were both part of Group f/64, a group of photographers who joined together in 1932 in reaction to the Pictorialist aesthetic in photography. They typically worked with large-format cameras and made gelatin silver contact prints in a style that placed a premium on precision and clarity of detail. 20. Interview with the artist, January 2, 2014. 21. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. For a slightly different approach to Gonzales-Day’s work within an archaeological framework, also see Jason Hill, “The Camera and the ‘Physiognomic Auto-da-fe.’ ” 22. Interview with the artist, June 14, 2011. 23. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, 11. 24. Ibid. 25. There are a handful of sites Gonzales-Day has not yet visited. They are close to his home in Los Angeles, and he could easily visit them. The project’s perpetual state of being unfinished seems fitting given the artist’s ambivalent relationship to certainty. 26. One could also consider the artist’s research efforts performative. The act of spending hours upon hours in libraries and archives was, indeed, essential to the subsequent performance in the field. I thank Virginia Anderson for this insight. 27. I thank Gonzales-Day for sharing this archival material with me. 28. Ibid.

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TO PAGES 134–141

29. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002). 30. Ibid., 66. 31. Ibid., 76. 32. Ibid., 73. 33. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1–​2. 34. Edward Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Kendall R. Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 32. 35. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 16. 36. Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 258. Doss’s book is a leading part of a major scholarly effort to address revised notions of memorials and their complex role in public life. 37. Ibid., 264. 38. Gonzales-Day finished the book in fall 2005, and it was published in fall 2006, close to the time of his exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Project Series 30: Hang Trees, curated by Rebecca McGrew (September 10–​October 22), and his concurrent show at the CUE Art Foundation in New York, Lynching in the West, curated by Bruce Yonemoto (September 7–​October 14). 39. Gonzales-Day has updated the map and the online walking tour at his website, most recently in 2014. The update includes a more substantial history and, notably, historic photographic images along the route chosen by the artist and his GIS collaborator. My tour was informed by the previous iteration. 40. These tours include routes put together by Olvera Street, the Little Tokyo Business Association, and the Los Angeles Conservancy. 41. I thank Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw and Hannah Palmer for their gameness in accompanying me, as well as for their thoughtful observations along the route. 42. Maps were also made in Los Angeles outside the scope of Gonzales-Day’s project, in 1950, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1967, and 1970. 43. For instance, historians and other scholars in so-called “spatial humanities” have recently worked to converge historic data with GIS imaging systems to produce a spatially accurate rendition of what General Lee would have seen on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Patricia Cohen, “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land,” New York Times, July 27, 2011. For more on historians’ use of GIS, also see Amy Hillier, “Invitation to Mapping: How GIS Can Facilitate New Discoveries in Urban and Planning History,” Journal of Planning History 9, no. 2 (2010): 122–​34. 44. Lee Friedlander, American Monument (New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 1976). 45. It is more accurate to say that Gonzales-Day has not photographed the streets in the same manner as the landscapes; the latter were shot carefully with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera. He did make snapshots of the urban landscape, some of which he published in the February 2014 update of the walking tour on his website.

8. CONCLUSION

1. For instance, the art historian Leslie K. Brown has made a Google Street View map of On

NOTES TO PAGES 142–153

   •   1 83

This Site in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Bruce Myren. I thank them for sharing this unpublished research with me. 2. The introduction of Google Street View’s time-lapse function in April 2014 provides additional perspectives on Sternfeld’s sites. 3. I reflect on this particular image at somewhat greater length in my essay “Joel Sternfeld’s Empty Places,” Environmental History (spring 2015). The availability of Street View imagery of this neighborhood is in flux.

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TO PAGES 153–154

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   •   19 9

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. André Kertész, Ernest, Paris (1931), as reproduced in Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida  •  22 2. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969), cover  •  25 3. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969), page 2  •  27 4. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969), page 3  •  28 5. Christian Boltanski, Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (1969), page 4  •  29 6. Joan Fontcuberta, Fauna (1987)  •  39 7. Lorie Novak with Clilly Castiglia, Betsey Kershaw, and Kerry O’Neill, collectedvisions.net (1996–​ongoing)  •  41 8. Harry Kuhn, Annette and Budgie (1950s), from Annette Kuhn’s book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination  •  42 9. Gerhard Richter, Atlas (1962–​ongoing) installation view  •  49 10. Gerhard Richter, “Album Photos” (1962–​66), panel 1 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing)  •  54 11. Gerhard Richter, “Album Photos” (1962–​66), panel 2 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing)  •  55

2 01

12. Gerhard Richter, “Album Photos” (1962–​66), panel 4 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing)  •  55 13. Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 5 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  56 14. Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 7 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  56 15. Gerhard Richter, “Newspaper and Album
Photos” (1962–​66), panel 10 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  57 16. Gerhard Richter, “Double Portrait” (1981), panel 414 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing)  •  66 17. Gerhard Richter, “Isa Genzken” (1982), panel 417 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  67 18. Gerhard Richter, “S. with Ella,” (1996), panel 586 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  68 19. Gerhard Richter, “S. with Moritz” (1995), panel 603 from Atlas (1962–​ ongoing)  •  69 20. Gerhard Richter, “Moritz” (1995), panel 611 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  70 21. Gerhard Richter, “Buchenwald” (n.d.), panel 522 from Atlas (1962–​ongoing)  •  72 22. Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999) installation view  •  75 23. Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005) installation view  •  76 24. Dinh Q. Lê, The Destruction Was Mutual (1988)  •  79 25. Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled (1998) from the series Cambodia (1994–​99)  •  79 26. Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005) installation view  •  81 27. Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005)  •  82 28. Dinh Q. Lê, Mot Coi Di Ve (1999/2005)  •  86 29. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989), installation view  •  88 30. Christian Boltanski, Monument (1986)  •  90 31. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989), installation view  •  93 32. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989)  •  94 33. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989)  •  95 34. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (1989)  •  96 35. Christian Boltanski, Les archives de C. B, 1965–​1988 (1989)  •  97 36. Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, Images modèles (1976)  •  98 37. Christian Boltanski, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (2001), installation view  •  101 38. Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 1993 (1993)  •  110 39. Joel Sternfeld, Cemetery for Union Soldiers (Civil War), September 1992 (1992)  •  113

2 0 2   •   I l l u s t r a t i o n s

40. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series, Site Being Occupied by Helium, 38 Cubic Feet, From Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion, 5 March 1969, Mojave Desert, California (1969)  •  117 41. Joel Sternfeld, Happy Land Social Club, 1959 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx, New York, June 1993 (1993)  •  119 42. Joel Sternfeld, A Space Station Mini-Storage, 69 Mallory Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey, June 1993 (1993)  •  120 43. Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, looking toward the Plaza Hotel, New York, October 1994 (1994)  •  122 44. Joel Sternfeld, Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility, Promontory, Utah, August 1994 (1994)  •  124 45. Joel Sternfeld, Former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi, June 1994 (1994)  •  126 46. Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne (1865), as reproduced in Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida  •  128 47. Ken Gonzales-Day, East First Street (St. James Park) (2006)  •  131 48. Ken Gonzales-Day, Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1997)  •  134 49. Ken Gonzales-Day, About a hundred yard from the road (2002)  •  137 50. Ken Gonzales-Day, Run Up (2002)  •  138 51. Ken Gonzales-Day, Next morning when jimmy woke, the cowboys were gone (2002)  •  138 52. Ken Gonzales-Day, With none but the omni-present stars to witness (2002)  •  139 53. Ken Gonzales-Day, Macready Way (2005) as a billboard  •  139 54. Ken Gonzales-Day, Two doors down from where I write (2005)  •  142 55. Ken Gonzales-Day, Hang Trees postcard publication (2006)  •  145 56. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour map (2006–​ongoing)  •  147 57. Google Street View of the former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi (2011)  •  154 58. Joel Sternfeld, 518 101st Street, Love Canal Neighborhood, Niagara Falls, New York, May 1994 (1994)  •  155 59. Google Street View of 518 101st Street, Niagara Falls, New York (2011)  •  155

Illustrations

   •   2 03

INDEX

About a hundred yard from the road (GonzalesDay), 137 fig. 49 Acconci, Vito, 179n21 Akerman, James R., 61, 169n36 L’Album Photographique de la Famille D (Boltanski), 162n33 albums, 5, 13, 16, 30–​31, 40, 48, 59, 63, 73, 123, 162n31; Boltanski and, 5, 15, 16, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33–​37, 39, 43, 47, 48, 53, 58, 73, 89, 91, 95, 99–​100, 162n28, 162n33, 164nn46,47,48, 165n56; family, 15, 30, 37, 39, 47, 53, 58, 65, 77, 80, 89, 95, 127, 162n31, 165n56; Lê and, 77, 80, 89; Richter and, 15–​16, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54 fig. 10, 55 figs. 11–​12, 56 figs. 13–14, 57 fig. 15, 58, 59, 64, 65, 73 amateur photography, 30, 36, 38 American Civil War, 112, 113 fig. 39; photography of, 10, 17, 109 analog photography, 6, 116, 118, 152–​53 Angkor, temples of, 78 Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau, 175n8, 177nn36–​37 archaeology, 32, 99, 108, 140

The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 13, 89, 102, 159n20 archival photographs, 12–​13 archive and archiving, 9, 13, 30, 38, 48, 83, 88, 103, 158n8, 158n20, 175n4; Boltanski and, 14, 16, 32, 87–​88, 89–​104, 174–​75n3, 175n5, 175n8, 175n13, 176n14, 176n28, 177nn34–​ 38, 88 fig. 29, 93 fig. 31, 94 fig. 32, 95 fig. 33, 96 fig. 34, 97 fig. 35, 101 fig. 37; Fontcuberta and, 38; Foucault and, 89, 158n9, 159n20; Novak and, 23, 40, 43; Richter and, 15–​16, 48, 50, 52, 59, 73, 167n11. See also GonzalesDay, Ken: archival research conducted by Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Derrida), 103 Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988 (Boltanski), 14, 16, 87–​88, 88 fig. 29, 89–​104, 93 fig. 31, 94 fig. 32, 95 fig. 33, 96 fig. 34, 97 fig. 35, 163n35, 174n2, 175n13, 175–​76n14, 175nn9–​10, 176n16, 176n19, 176n21, 176n25, 176n28, 176nn31–​32, 177nn37–​38 artist’s books, 181n1; Boltanski and, 23, 24, 25 fig. 2, 27 fig. 3, 28 fig. 4, 29 fig. 5, 34, 161n22, 163n36, 177n36

205

Asia Society, New York, Lê’s exhibition at, 78, 81 fig. 26, 172nn20–​21 Atlas (Richter), 12, 14, 15–​16, 47–​73, 49 fig. 9, 54 fig. 10, 55 figs. 11–​12, 56 figs. 13–​1 4, 57 fig. 15, 66 fig. 16, 67 fig. 17, 68 fig. 18, 69 fig. 19, 70 fig. 20, 72 fig. 21, 75, 87, 166n1, 166n3, 166–​67n5, 167nn12–​16, 168n17, 168n24, 169n50, 170n53, 170n57 Atlas, or Cosmographical Meditations on the Fabric of the World (Mercator), 60–​61, 62, 169n33, 169nn36–​37 atlases, 13, 15, 16, 47–​48, 58, 59, 60–​61, 62–​63, 73; Richter and, 12, 14, 15–​16, 47–​61, 49 fig. 9, 54 fig. 10, 55 figs. 11–​12, 56 figs. 13–​1 4, 57 fig. 15, 63–​73, 66 fig. 16, 67 fig. 17, 68 fig. 18, 69 fig. 19, 70 fig. 20, 72 fig. 21, 75, 87, 89, 166–​67n5, 166nn1–​4 , 167n13, 167n15, 167n16, 168n17, 168n24, 169n50, 170nn53–​ 54, 170n57 Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Bruno), 60 Auslander, Philip, 115, 179n21 Baer, Ulrich, 141–​43, 159n24 Barry, Robert, 116–​17, 117 fig. 40 Barthes, Roland, 10, 11–​12, 19–​23, 22 fig. 1, 77, 85, 86, 115, 127, 128 fig. 46, 160nn11–​12 Batchen, Geoffrey, 160n11, 165n66 Bayard, Hippolyte, 37 Berlin Wall, 52, 168n27 Blistène, Bernard, 31, 87, 163n35 Boltanski, Christian, 4, 7, 10, 14, 16, 23, 40, 79, 134, 161n24, 162n25, 163n40, 175n12, 177n35; albums and, 5, 15, 16, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33–​37, 39, 43, 47, 48, 53, 58, 73, 89, 91, 95, 99–​100, 162n28, 162n33, 164nn46–​48, 165n56; archive and archiving and, 14, 16, 32, 87–​88, 88 fig. 29, 89–​104, 93 fig. 31, 94 fig. 32, 95 fig. 33, 96 fig. 34, 97 fig. 35, 174–​75n3, 175n5, 175n8, 175n13, 176n14, 176n28, 177nn34–​38; artist’s books of, 23, 24, 25 fig. 2, 27 fig. 3, 28 fig. 4, 29 fig. 5, 34, 161n22, 163n36, 177n36; auction of desk drawers of, 100, 177n33; early years of, 31–​32, 163n38, 163n41; and Fontcuberta, 38, 39–​40; interviews with, 31, 34, 35, 94, 99, 100, 104, 161n24, 163nn35–​36, 164n51, 164–​ 65n52, 174n2; and Lê, 78–​80, 85–​86; and

2 0 6   •   I n d e x

Novak, 40, 43; “reconstitution” and, 32–​33, 109, 164n44, 174–​75n3; and Richter, 14, 15, 47–​48, 51, 53, 58, 73, 75, 89 Boltanski, Christian, works of: L’Album Photographique de la Famille D, 162n33; Les archives de C. B., 1965–​1988, 14, 16, 87–​88, 88 fig. 29, 89–​104, 93 fig. 31, 94 fig. 32, 95 fig. 33, 96 fig. 34, 97 fig. 35, 163n35, 174n2, 175n13, 175–​76n14, 175nn9–​10, 176n16, 176n19, 176n21, 176n25, 176n28, 176nn31–​ 32, 177nn37–​38; Compositions series, 94; Essai de reconstitution (Trois tiroirs), 174–​ 75n3; Images modèles (with Messager), 97, 98 fig. 36; Monuments series, 89, 90 fig. 30; Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (“little album”), 5, 15, 16, 23–​30, 25 fig. 2, 27 fig. 3, 28 fig. 4, 31, 33–​37, 38, 39–​40, 43, 47, 48, 53, 58, 65, 73, 75, 88, 89, 99, 161nn21–​23, 162n26, 164nn47–​48, 164n50, 165n54, 165n56, 165n59; Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas encore arrive et où j’ai trouvé la mort, 161n21, 164n44; Reserves series, 89; Sans-Souci, 164n46; La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski, 91, 101–​2, 101 fig. 37, 175n8, 177n36–​38; Vitrine de référence, 165n56, 175n3 Boltanski, Jean-Elie, 32, 35 Boltanski, Luc, 30, 31, 32, 36, 162nn27–​28, 163n38 Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River series (Gonzales-Day), 134 fig. 48, 133–​ 35, 182n8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 26, 161n24 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30, 31, 162n27 Bruno, Giuliana, 60 “Buchenwald” (panel in Richter’s Atlas), 71–​73, 72 fig. 21 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 12, 50, 58, 59, 166n1, 170n54 Burden, Chris, 179n21 California, 117 fig. 40; Gonzalez-Day’s project on lynchings in, 16–​17, 130–​31, 132, 133, 135–​ 36, 144; Lê in, 77, 78 Cambodia, 75, 171n4, 172n19; Lê’s series on, 78, 79 fig. 25 Cambodia series (Lê), 78, 79 fig. 25

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Barthes), 11–​12, 19–​23, 22 fig. 1, 77, 85, 86, 115, 127, 128 fig. 46, 160nn11–​12 Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome (Sternfeld), 12 cartography, 60, 61, 62, 148, 161n24 Casey, Edward, 143, 144 Cemetery for Union Soldiers (Civil War), September 1992 (Sternfeld), 112, 113 fig. 39 Central Park, in Sternfeld’s On This Site, 110 fig. 38, 111, 113, 114, 118, 121, 122–​23, 122 fig. 43 Central Park, looking toward the Plaza Hotel, New York, October 1994 (Sternfeld), 121–​23, 180n38 Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 1993 (Sternfeld), 109–​11, 110 fig. 38, 113–​1 4, 118, 119 Centre Pompidou, Paris, 31, 87, 95; Boltanski’s retrospective at, 31, 95 Chalmers, Stephen, 178n5 Chinese Massacre, 148–​49 Chiu, Melissa, 171n4 Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 95 Christian Boltanski: Stories and Posters, 176n23 class pictures, 24, 25 fig. 2, 26, 34, 35 Collected Visions (Novak), 15, 23, 40–​43, 41 fig. 7, 42 fig. 8, 165– ​66n66 collective memory, 19, 80, 164n50 Communism, 51, 52, 59, 76 Compositions series (Boltanski), 94 Comte, Auguste, 157n6 concentration camps, 48, 52, 71, 141–​42 contemporary art, 3, 7, 13, 15, 23, 40, 87 Cook, Terry, 159n20 Cooke, Lynn, 166n1 Cornand, Brigitte, 177n36 Crime Album Stories, Paris 1886–​1902 (Parry), 40 crime scene photographs, 40 CUE Art Foundation, New York, 182n16, 183n38 Curtis, Edward S., 157n4 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé, 158n8 Damaged Gene (Lê), 172n17 Daston, Lorraine, 62 Davvetas, Demosthènes, 31, 163n36

Dean, Tacita, 160n2 DeLappa, William, 37, 38 DeRoo, Rebecca J., 35, 165n56 Derrida, Jacques, 103 The Destruction Was Mutual series (Lê), 77–​78, 79 fig. 24, 172n17 Dibbets, Jan, 116 Dietrich, Dorothea, 60, 62 digital age, 6, 40, 103, 156 digital photography, 23, 118, 152–​53, 154, 179n27; Boltanski and, 23, 26; GonzalesDay and, 17, 131, 133, 135 Doane, Mary Ann, 118, 180n35 Documenta II, 52 Documenta V, 164n48, 164n50 Documenta X, 170n53 Doss, Erika, 144, 180n36, 183n36 Dresden, 51, 52, 167n11, 168n27 Du, Nguyen, 80, 173n31 Duchâtel, Tanneguay, 158n8 Duluth, lynching memorial in, 144 Düsseldorf, 48, 58, 64, 167n10 Dysmorphologies series (Gonzales-Day), 133 East First Street (St. James Park) (GonzalesDay), 131–​32, 131 fig. 47 East Germany (GDR), 58, 59; Richter’s years in and escape from, 50, 51, 52, 58, 166n5, 167n11 Elkins, James, 160n11, 179n28 The Emigrants (Sebald), 18–​19, 21–​23, 77, 85, 86, 134, 160n3, 161n17 Erased Lynchings series (Gonzales-Day), 131–​32, 131 fig. 47, 133, 136, 146, 181n1 Ernest (Kertész), 21–​23, 22 fig. 1, 161nn17–​18 Essai de reconstitution (Trois tiroirs) (Boltanski), 174–​75n3 The Fae Richards Photo Archive (Leonard and Dunye), 38 family photographs (family albums, family portraits, family snapshots), 4, 5, 12, 15, 21, 30, 38, 42, 43, 77, 127, 162n31; Boltanski and, 4, 15, 26, 30, 36, 37, 39, 47, 85–​86, 95, 165n56; Gonzales-Day and, 134; Lê and, 4, 16, 80, 85–​86, 89; of strangers, 16, 31, 41, 58, 75, 77, 85–​86; Richter and, 4, 15, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 65–​71, 166n5, 167n11

Index

   •   2 07

Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (Kuhn), 42 fig. 8 Fauna (Fontcuberta), 38–​39, 39 fig. 6, 40, 134 518 101st Street, Love Canal Neighborhood, Niagara Falls, New York (Sternfeld), 153–​54, 155 figs. 58–​59 Flay, Jennifer, 34 Fontcuberta, Joan, 38–​39, 39 fig. 6, 40, 88, 134 Forever 20 Years Old (Thac), 83, 84–​85 Former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi, June 1994 (Sternfeld), 125, 126 fig. 45, 153, 154 fig. 57 Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, Los Angeles, 149, 150 48 Portraits (Richter), 170n54 Foucault, Michel, 89, 102; influence of, 13, 89, 158n9, 158–​59n20 France, 9, 23, 31, 32, 40, 158n8, 164n50, 175n9 Freeman, James, 83, 84, 173n38 Friedel, Helmut, 50, 58, 73, 166n1, 167n16, 168n24 Friedlander, Lee, 150 “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality” (Green and Lowry), 115, 116–​18, 141 From Vietnam to Hollywood series (Lê), 78 frontier novels, 133, 135 Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, 87, 88 fig. 29 Galerie Sonnabend, Paris, 32 Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, 177n37 Galison, Peter, 62 Gardner, Alexander: Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 10, 17, 109, 112, 113, 132; Portrait of Lewis Payne, 127, 128 fig. 46 Genzken, Isa, 64, 65, fig. 17 Geographic Information System (GIS), 183n43 Gerhard Richter—​Atlas, 167n16 “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” (Buchloh), 12, 50, 58, 59, 166n1 “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen“ (Zweite), 50–​51, 58, 64, 166n4, 169n50 Germany, 10, 142, 170n54; postwar, 59, 170n54. See also East Germany; West Germany, Richter’s defection to Gibson, William, 107, 108, 123, 130, 154 Givaudan, Claude, 23–​2 4, 47, 161nn21–​22

2 0 8   •   I n d e x

Gonzales-Day, Ken, 4, 17; archival research conducted by, 17, 131, 136, 137, 140, 141, 182n13, 182n26; project on lynching sites in the West, 16, 17, 130–​51, 181n1, 181n4, 182n13, 182n25, 183n45; and Sternfeld, 4, 10, 14, 16–​17, 108–​9, 115, 117, 118, 132, 135–​ 36, 137, 140, 141, 143, 151, 181n3 Gonzales-Day, Ken, works of: About a hundred yard from the road, 137, 137 fig. 49; Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River series, 133–​35, 134 fig. 48, 182n8; Dysmorphologies series, 133; East First Street (St. James Park), 131–​32, 131 fig. 47; Erased Lynchings series, 131–​32, 131 fig. 47, 133, 136, 146, 181n1; Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935, 14, 131, 135, 136, 143, 181n4, 182n17, 183n38; Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour, 131, 132, 145–​50, 145 fig. 55, 147 fig. 56, 183nn39–​40; Macready Way, 137, 139 fig. 53; Next morning, when jimmy woke, the cowboys were gone, 137, 138 fig. 51; With none but the omni-present stars to witness, 137, 139 fig. 52; Run Up, 137, 138 fig. 50, 141; Searching for California’s Hang Trees series, 130, 131, 132, 136, 145 fig. 55; Two doors down from where I write, 141, 142 fig. 54 Google: maps, 130; Street View, 153, 154, 154 fig. 57, 155 fig. 59, 183–​84n1, 184nn2–​3 Green, David, 115, 116–​18, 141 Group f/64, 182n19 Gumpert, Lynn, 91, 94–​95, 99, 102–​3, 161n21, 175n12, 177n33 Hanoi, 85, 172n20 Happy Land Social Club, 1959 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx, New York, June 1993 (Sternfeld), 118–​21, 119 fig. 41 Hart Island (Sternfeld), 112 Hà Tiên, Vietnam, 75, 170n2 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène, 8 Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives (Freeman), 83, 84, 173n39 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, 7 Hirsch, Marianne, 30, 37, 159n24 historical erasure, 133, 135, 143 historical memory, 12, 143 Hitler, Adolf, 48, 51, 52, 167n6 Hobbs, Richard, 34, 35, 165n54, 175n5

Ho Chi Minh City, 16, 75, 77, 80, 171n10, 172n20 Holocaust, 141, 142, 143, 159n24; Boltanski’s work and, 32, 89, 164n46, 175n5; Richter’s Atlas and, 71. See also “Buchenwald” (panel in Richter’s Atlas) Huebler, Douglas, 88, 116 Hunt, Melinda, 112 Hürzeler, Catherine, 58 Images modèles (Boltanski and Messager), 97, 98 fig. 36 index and indexicality, 6, 12, 20, 115–​16, 118, 133, 136, 160n14, 180n35; photographic, 4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 20–​21, 85, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116–​18, 125, 132, 133, 136, 141, 150, 180n28 Inert Gas Series (Barry), 116–​17, 117 fig. 40 installation, 4, 165n66; Boltanski and, 16, 89, 94, 95, 101, 175n9, 176n19, 177nn36–​37; Lê and, 74–​75, 78, 80, 85, 89, 172n21; Richter and, 48–​49, 52, 53, 60, 73, 167nn12–​13, 170n54 internment camps, 144 Jacob, Mary Jane, 95 Jones, Amelia, 114–​15 Karl Valentin Museum, Munich, 100 Kempinski, Avi, 161n17 Kertész, André, photograph by, in Camera Lucida, 21–​23, 22 fig. 1, 161nn17–​18 Khmer Rouge, 78, 127 King, Rodney, beating of, 111, 125, 153 King Jr., Martin Luther, 17, 125 Klein, Yves, 179n21 Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography,” 10–​12, 59 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 115–​16, 133, 158n18 Kuhn, Annette, 15, 41–​43, 42 fig. 8, 47 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, 58, 167n10 Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf, 64 landscape, 63, 111–​12, 117, 125, 135–​37, 140–​41, 142; Gonzales-Day and, 133, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 150, 151, 183n45; Richter and, 48, 49, 65, 71, 73; Sternfeld and, 109, 111, 112, 124–​25, 127, 135, 151 Lascault, Gilbert, 33, 164nn49–​50 Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (Tram), 83, 84, 174n40

Latinos, 130, 133, 135, 136, 148 Lê, Dinh Q., 4, 16, 75–​78, 133, 134; in Cambodia, 78, 171n4, 172n19; Cambodian refugees and, 172n19; photo weavings, 78; undergraduate years at UC Santa Barbara, 77–​78, 172n16, 172n18; years in, and escape from, Vietnam, 74, 75–​7 7, 80, 170n2, 170–​ 71n3, 171n4, 171n6, 171n12, 171nn9–​10 Lê, Dinh Q., works of: Cambodia series, 78, 79 fig. 25; Damaged Gene, 172n17; The Destruction Was Mutual series, 77–​78, 79 fig. 24, 172n17; From Vietnam to Hollywood series, 78; Lotusland, 172n17; Mot Coi Di Ve, 16, 74–​75, 75 fig. 22, 76 fig. 23, 77, 78– ​86, 81 fig. 26, 82 fig. 27, 86 fig. 28, 87, 170n1, 172nn20–​21, 173nn29–​31, 173n35, 173nn38–​39, 174n40, 174n47; Untitled, 78, 79 fig. 25 Lebeer, Irmeline, Boltanski’s interview with, 34, 164n51 Lee, Anthony W., 10, 109 Lemoine, Serge, 95, 175n12 Leonard, Zoe, 38, 88 Levin, Jennifer, murder of, 109–​10, 110 fig. 38, 111, 114, 119 Levin, Mikael, 142 Linfield, Susie, 5–​6 Long, J. J., 19 Los Angeles, 77, 107, 108, 143, 153, 182n25; Barry’s performance in, 117, 117 fig. 40; Gonzales-Day’s walking tour of downtown, 131, 132, 145–​50, 145 fig. 55, 147 fig. 56, 183nn39–​40; Sanborn maps of, 148, 183n42 Lotusland (Lê), 172n17 Love Canal, 153–​54, 155 fig. 58 Lowry, Joanna, 115, 116–​18, 141 Luster, Deborah, 178n5 lynching. See Gonzales-Day, project on lynching sites in the West Lynching in the West: 1850–​1935 (Gonzales-Day), 14, 131, 135, 136, 143, 181n4, 182n17, 183n38 Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour (Gonzales-Day), 131, 132, 145–​ 50, 145 fig. 55, 147 fig. 56, 183nn39–​40 Macready Way (Gonzales-Day), 137, 139 fig. 53 mail art, 37, 161n22 Manzanar National Historic Site, 144

Index

   •   2 0 9

maps and mapping, 26, 60–​63, 64, 107, 130, 132, 146, 147 fig. 56, 148, 161n24, 169n37, 183–​84n1, 183n39, 183nn42–​43 Marville, Charles, 8–​9 mass media, 10, 12, 78, 80, 125–​26 McGrew, Rebecca, 172n21, 183n38 The Meaning of Photography (Kelsey and Stimson), 180n28 Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Doss), 144, 180n36, 183n36 memorials and memorializing, 108, 143, 180nn36–​37, 183n36; Boltanski and, 89, 91; Gonzales-Day and, 143, 144, 149, 150; Sternfeld and, 111, 112, 114, 119–​21, 122, 127, 135, 143, 153 Mercator, Gerard, 60–​61, 62, 169n33, 169nn36–​37 Messager, Annette, 94, 97, 98 fig. 36, 99, 176n22, 176n25 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 109, 110 fig. 38, 114 Mexican-American War, 133, 149 minimalism, 91, 175n12 Money, Mississippi, 125, 126 fig. 45, 153, 154 fig. 57 Monuments series (Boltanski), 89, 90 fig. 30 Moritz, Sabine, 48, 65, 68 fig. 18, 69, 69 fig. 19, 70, 170n53 Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility, Promontory, Utah, August 1994 (Sternfeld), 17, 123–​2 4, 124 fig. 44, 153 Mot Coi Di Ve (Lê), 16, 74–​75, 75 fig. 22, 76 fig. 23, 77, 78–​86, 81 fig. 26, 82 fig. 27, 86 fig. 28, 87, 170n1, 172nn20–​21, 173n35, 173nn29–​31, 173nn38–​39, 174n40, 174n47 Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM), Paris, 34, 87, 91, 92, 93 fig. 31, 103, 174n2, 175n10, 175n13, 176n14, 176n31, 177nn37–​38 Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht, 48, 170n54 National Socialist Party (Nazis), 31, 32, 51, 59, 71, 141, 167n6 New York, 48, 71, 148, 166n1; Lê in, 77, 80, 172nn17–​18; as site in Sternfeld’s work, 109, 112, 119 fig. 41, 121–​22, 122 fig. 43, 123, 153–​ 54, 155 figs. 58–​59, 178n7

21 0   •   I n d e x

Next morning, when jimmy woke, the cowboys were gone (Gonzales-Day), 137, 138 fig. 51 Niagara Falls, 48, 153–​54, 155 figs. 58–​59 “Notes on the Index” (Krauss), 6, 115–​16, 133 Novak, Lorie, 15, 23, 40–​43, 41 fig. 7, 42 fig. 8, 165– ​66n66 Nugent, Jeanne Anne, 50–​51, 166–​67n5, 167n11, 168n24 Oklahoma City bombing, 111, 125 Olin, Margaret, 16, 20–​21, 77, 86, 160n14, 160nn11–​12 On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam series (Sternfeld), 17, 109–​29, 110 fig. 38, 113 fig. 39, 119 fig. 41, 120 fig. 42, 122 fig. 43, 124 fig. 44, 126 fig. 45, 132, 135, 141, 143, 153–​56, 155 fig. 58, 178nn6–​8, 179n12, 179n14, 180n40, 181n3, 184n2 Ortelius, Abraham, 60–​61, 62 Palacio, Oscar, 178n5 Paris, 8, 22, 22 fig. 1, 40, 52; Boltanski in, 16, 23, 24, 31–​32, 35, 36, 89, 161n21, 161n24, 176n19, 177nn35–​37; Boltanski’s exhibitions in, 34, 87, 88 fig. 29, 93 fig. 31, 95, 164n48, 164n50 Parry, Eugenia, 40 Pearson, Mike, 140 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 20, 115–​16, 136, 169n23, 179n26, 179n28 The Pencil of Nature (Talbot), 8 performance, 17, 38, 114–​15, 117, 135, 140, 182n26 performativity, 6, 13, 35, 115, 116, 140, 152, 160n14; Gonzales-Day and, 10, 17, 108, 115, 132, 135, 136, 140–​41, 144–​45, 151, 182n26; Sternfeld and, 10, 17, 108, 114, 115, 118, 125, 132, 150, 151, 154 Pham, Andrew X., 171n4 Phelan, Peggy, 114 Phoenix, River, 107, 108 photographic indexicality. See index and indexicality photographic “misidentification,” 16, 20–​21, 77, 86, 160n11, 161n17 photographic quantity, 10, 14–​16, 48–​49, 70, 75, 87, 91, 92, 157n4

Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Gardner), 10, 17, 109, 112, 113, 132 photographic truth, 5, 6, 9, 11, 23, 34–​37, 78 photographic uncertainty, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 13–​16, 18–​19, 23, 33–​35, 40, 58, 148 photographs: as documentation (evidence), 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 31, 34, 38–​39, 40, 54, 91, 102–​4 , 108, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 129, 132, 136, 143, 152, 153, 157n4, 166n5, 179n21; limitations of, 5,9, 10, 15, 104, 108, 109, 117, 129, 132, 133, 152 Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Bourdieu), 30, 31, 162n27 photography: and absence, 4, 6, 11, 14, 16, 17, 78, 80, 91–​92, 108, 112–​13, 117–​18, 130–​33, 135, 140–​43; analog, 6, 116, 118, 152–​53; contingency of, 3, 5, 10, 12, 152; digital, 23, 118, 152–​53, 154, 179n27; and narrative, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 18, 21–​23, 30, 33–​34, 37, 40, 43, 62–​63, 73, 85, 133–​35, 143, 159nn2–​3; and text, 10, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24–​26, 33, 36, 40–​43, 54, 71, 80, 82–​83, 85, 87, 112, 121, 133–​37; and temporality, 4, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19, 21, 33, 38, 109–​1 4, 115, 118, 126–​27, 132, 153–​54, 161n17, 178n8; vernacular, 18, 38, 40, 41 “Photography” (Kracauer), 10–​12, 59 Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Batchen), 160n11 photojournalism, 5, 6, 12, 78 Plaza Hotel, 121, 122, 122 fig. 43, 123 Polaroids, 54, 94, 95 Pomey, Evelyn, 176n14, 176n16 Pomona College, California: Gonzales-Day’s exhibition at, 145–​46, 181n7, 183n38; Lê’s exhibition at, 75 fig. 22, 78, 80, 172n21 Portrait of Lewis Payne (Gardner), 127, 128 fig. 46 portraits and portraiture, 5, 37, 54, 65, 66 fig. 16, 74, 77, 111, 116, 127, 128 fig. 46, 133, 134, 170n54 The Portraits of Violet and Al (DeLappa), 37, 38 positivism, 6, 8, 9, 156, 157n6 postcards, 74, 77, 80, 122, 123, 145–​46, 145 fig. 55, 180n38, 181n1 postmodernism, 5, 37, 118, 158n9, 180n28 Price, William Lake, 9, 11 punctum. See Camera Lucida (Barthes)

Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–​1950 (“little album”) (Boltanski), 5, 15, 16, 23–​30, 25 fig. 2, 27 fig. 3, 28 fig. 4, 29 fig. 5, 31, 33–​37, 38, 39–​40, 43, 47, 48, 53, 58, 65, 73, 75, 88, 89, 99, 161nn21–​23, 162n26, 164nn47–​48, 164n50, 165n54, 165n56, 165n59 Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas encore arrive et où j’ai trouvé la mort (Boltanski), 161n21, 164n44 refugee camps, 77, 171n4, 171n6 Reichstag, 48, 176n19 Reinartz, Dirk, 141 Renard, Delphine, Boltanski’s interview with, 34, 163n35, 164–​65n52 Reserves series (Boltanski), 89 Richter, Betty, 65, 169n52 Richter, Ella, 48, 65, 68 fig. 18, 69, 70 Richter, Gerhard, 4, 8, 134, 167n6; albums and, 15–​16, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54, 54 fig. 10, 55 figs. 11–​12, 56 figs. 13–​1 4, 57 fig. 15, 58, 59, 64, 65, 73; archive and archiving and, 15–​16, 48, 50, 52, 59, 73, 167n11; and Boltanski, 14, 15, 47–​ 48, 51, 53, 58, 73, 75, 89; defection to West Germany, 52, 53, 59, 168n27; in Dresden, 51, 52, 167n11, 168n27; early years of, 51–​52; years in and escape from East Germany, 50, 51, 52, 58, 166n5, 167n11 Richter, Gerhard, works of: Atlas, 12, 14, 15–​16, 47–​73, 49 fig. 9, 54 fig. 10, 55 figs. 11–​12, 56 figs. 13–​1 4, 57 fig. 15, 66 fig. 16, 67 fig. 17, 68 fig. 18, 69 fig. 19, 70 fig. 20, 72 fig. 21, 75, 87, 166n1, 166n3, 166–​67n5, 167nn12–​16, 168n17, 168n24, 169n50, 170n53, 170n57; Bombers, 166n5; Diver I, 166n5; Diver II, 166n5; Eight Student Nurses, 166n5; 48 Portraits, 170n54; Family by the Sea, 166n5; Horst with Dog, 166n5; Secretary, 166n5; Swimmers, 166n5; Terese Andeszka, 166n5 Richter, Horst, 51, 166n5, 170n54 Richter, Moritz, 48, 65, 69–​70, 69 fig. 19, 70 fig. 20, 170n54 Roth, Moira, 80, 83, 171n11, 172n20, 174n47 Run Up (Gonzales-Day), 137, 138 fig. 50, 141 Sanborn Map Company, 148 Sans-Souci (Boltanski), 164n46

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Santa Barbara, 77, 172n16, 172n18 Schmid, Joachim, 88 Schumacher, Rainald, 64, 70, 160n50 Schwartz, Joan, 9, 158n8 Searching for California’s Hang Trees series (Gonzales-Day), 130, 131, 132, 136, 145 fig. 55 Sebald, W. G., 16, 18–​19, 20, 21–​23, 74, 77, 85, 86, 134, 159–​60nn2–​3, 161n17 Secretary (Richter), 166n5 Sekula, Allan, 9, 12–​13, 158n9, 158n18, 158–​ 59n20 Semin, Didier, 104 Shanks, Michael, 140 Simon, Taryn, 178n5 Sontag, Susan, 180n34 Soutif, Daniel, 104, 178n47 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 17, 123, 124 fig. 44, 125, 127–​29 A Space Station Mini-Storage, 69 Mallory Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey, June 1993 (Sternfeld), 114, 118–​19, 120 fig. 42, 121, 143 Spook Country (Gibson), 107, 108, 123, 130, 154 Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 49 fig. 9, 50, 64, 167n16, 168n17, 168n24 Sternfeld, Joel, 4, 150; and Gonzales-Day, 4, 10, 14, 16–​17, 108–​9, 115, 117, 118, 132, 135–​36, 137, 140, 141, 143, 151, 181n3 Sternfeld, Joel, works of: Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome, 12; Cemetery for Union Soldiers (Civil War), September 1992, 112, 113 fig. 39; Central Park, looking toward the Plaza Hotel, New York, October 1994, 121–​23, 122 fig. 43, 180n38; Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 1993, 109–​11, 110 fig. 38, 113–​1 4, 118, 119; 518 101st Street, Love Canal Neighborhood, Niagara Falls, New York, 153–​54, 158 figs. 58–​59; Former Bryant’s Grocery, Money, Mississippi, June 1994, 125, 126 fig. 45, 153, 154 fig. 57; Happy Land Social Club, 1959 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx, New York, June 1993, 118–​21, 119 fig. 41; Hart Island, 12; Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility, Promontory, Utah, August 1994, 17, 123–​2 4, 124 fig. 44, 153; On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam series, 17, 109–​29, 110 fig. 38, 113 fig. 39, 119 fig. 41, 120 fig. 42, 122 fig. 43, 124 fig. 44, 126

212   •   I n d e x

fig. 45, 132, 135, 141, 143, 153–​56, 155 fig. 58, 178nn6–​8, 179n12, 179n14, 180n40, 181n3, 184n2; A Space Station Mini-Storage, 69 Mallory Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey, June 1993, 114, 118–​19, 120 fig. 42, 121, 143 studium. See Camera Lucida (Barthes) Szarkowski, John, 8 Tagg, John, 9, 18–​19, 23, 158n18, 160nn2–​3 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 8 The Tale of Kieu (Du), 80, 83–​84, 173n31, 173n39 Terese Andeszka (Richter), 166n5 Thac, Nguyen Van, 84–​85, 174n42 Thailand, 76, 77, 171n6 Theatre Archaeology (Pearson and Shanks), 140 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Ortelius), 60–​61, 62 Thiokol, Morton, 123, 124 fig. 44 Till, Emmett, murder of, 111, 125, 126 fig. 45 tobacco industry, 121, 123 Tram, Dang Thuy, 84, 85, 174n40 Two doors down from where I write (GonzalesDay), 141, 142 fig. 54 United States, 80, 89, 95, 133, 135, 144, 150, 170n2, 170n40; Lê in, 77–​78, 171n4, 171n7; Sternfeld’s project on sites of violence in, 16, 17, 111 University of California, Santa Barbara, 77, 172n16 Untitled (Lê), 78, 79 fig. 25 Utrecht, debut of Richter’s Atlas in, 48, 51, 52, 170n54 Valentin, Kurt, 100, 177n34 van Alphen, Ernst, 159n24, 175n5 Van Der Zee, James, 20 Venice Biennale, 170n54, 177n35 vernacular photography, 4, 12, 18, 38, 40, 41 La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (Boltanski), 91, 101–​2, 101 fig. 37, 175n8, 177n36–​38 Vietnam, 83, 171n4; Lê’s years in and escape from, 74, 75–​7 7, 80, 170n2, 170–​71n3, 171n4, 171n6, 171n12, 171nn9–​10; refugees from, 171n4, 171n7. See also Lê, Dinh Q., works of: Mot Coi Di Ve Vietnamese Americans, 83, 84, 173n39

Vietnam War, 77–​78, 80–​82, 83, 84–​85, 174n40 viewer, role of, 4, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20–​21, 23, 24, 35, 38, 40, 41, 43, 60, 70, 73, 75, 91, 96, 104, 116, 127, 130, 140–​41, 146, 151 violence, as theme. See Sternfeld, Joel, works of: On This Site series virtual reality, 107–​8 Vitrine de référence (Boltanski), 165n56, 175n3 West, Gonzales-Day’s project on lynching in the, 17, 130, 131, 135, 136–​41, 143, 145, 147 fig. 56, 166n5, 183n38 West Germany, Richter’s defection to, 52, 53, 59, 168n27

Whitechapel Gallery, London, 32, 166n1, 167n16 With none but the omni-present stars to witness (Gonzales-Day), 137, 139 fig. 52 Wood, Denis, 62–​63 World Trade Center bombing, 114, 118–​19, 120 fig. 42, 121, 143, 179n14 World War I, 21, 22 World War II, 31, 33, 51, 84, 144, 161n17, 164n46 Zelizer, Barbie, 126, 127 Zweite, Armin, 50–​51, 58, 64, 166nn4–​5, 167n15, 169n50

Index

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Text: 9.5/14 Scala Pro Display: Scala Sans Pro Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Prepress: Embassy Graphics Indexer: Jane Friedman Printer and binder: QuaLibre