It has been a month since I exited a relationship with someone I had loved for five years. Just a month before the breakup, I submitted a photo of my then-partner for a class assignment where I bemoaned my memory for twisting the past in such a bittersweet, beautiful way. I wrote, “nostalgia is a liar, sometimes” and now I find that true tenfold. As I continue to traverse the landscape of my memory, is it hard to discern what is “true” or not. And as I became increasingly preoccupied with this search, I decided to turn to certain media which have always comforted me—with the added benefit that I could now relate to it personally. Music sounded sadder, art seemed more darker, poetry seemed less like poetry and more like the inner ramblings within my own head. I fixated on a now defunct webcomic titled “A Softer World.” I had always consulted the work in moments where I felt the need to confront the brutal honesty of human emotion. And when presented with the opportunity in class to write a paper about any image, I jumped at the idea of explaining how three little panels and one sentence phrases have helped me endure the trials of existence. I will explore the comic’s one-thousandth issue, titled “millenial” and its relationship with photography, text in the form of poetry, and memory. First, I will argue that photography, poetry, and memory are interestingly connected to each other through their use of obscurity. I will employ Martha Langford’s “Speaking the Album: An Application of the Oral-Photographic Framework” to explain how images have unfixed meanings, Michael Nott’s Photopoetry 1845-2015: A Critical History to define the relationship between poem and image, and Jens Ruchatz’s “Photograph as Externalization and Trace” to show how memory is essentially uncertain as it depends on social symbols and knowledge. Second, I will explore that this intrinsic unknowing due to obscurity leads to obsessive and even addictive memory recollection after experiencing a trauma. I will argue this with an excerpt from Julia Skelly’s Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft, and selected studies from Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Finally, I will visually and textually examine my selected image and show that the piece exemplifies the art of obscurity and the addiction of remembrance. This is shown formally in the work’s cropping and repetition, and textually in its references to memory and strong emotion.
First, I will argue that image, text and memory are interrelated as they all employ the art of obscurity. I refer to this lack of clarity as an “art” because of its intentionality; indeed, it is purposefully open to interpretation as opposed to pedagogy which has a fixed message. To start, photography is obscure as it does not have a set meaning until spoken into meaning. Martha Langford explores this concept in a chapter from her book, Locating Memory: Photographic Acts. She uses the term “oral photographic framework” to describe the social performance of an album. Further, she argues that even when a photograph is given meaning, the recounting cannot be considered fixed as the speaker’s and the audience’s experiences evolve over time. No matter how close to the source the recounting comes from, the new experiences of the performer will cast an image into different lights. Additionally, an image too far divorced from its knowing community “casts it into an unnatural silence”; but what if a photo could speak for itself? In my selected image, short phrases are placed over images, infusing them with a story—as if it were its own “performer”. Additionally, there are titles under each strip, printed upside down and offering more context to each part of the narrative. I have dubbed this interaction between text caption and image as photopoetry based on Michael Nott’s definition in his monograph, Photopoetry 1845-2015: A Critical History, wherein he states that it is sufficient that poetry and photograph interact in order to be called photopoetry. Indeed, he writes that photopoetry is not defined by its production but by its reception, as “reading becomes interwoven through alternating restitchings of the signifier into text and image.” However, I am not arguing that this meaning given to the image by the poetry should be taken as fixed; in fact, I believe that poetry renders an image more esoteric, as its form is essentially obscure. The poetic process necessitates compression, metaphor and assumption. Thus, it can be argued that poetry relies on its audience’s life-stories in the same way an image does. Further, let it be noted that symbolism depends on public knowledge and therefore, public memory. Author Jens Ruchatz explores this in her essay, “The Photograph as Externalization and Trace” and confirms that memory is intrinsically social and is constantly changing over time. Therefore, I have established that photography, poetry, and memory are all intrinsically obscure forms and in fact, heighten each other’s intricacy when considered altogether, contrary to mainstream belief that each medium would render the other more intelligible.
Second, I argue that unknowing caused by obscurity in photography, poetry, and memory is what leads to obsessive remembrance after a person experiences a traumatic event. For the purposes of this essay I am referring to a definition of addiction provided by Julia Skelly in her monograph, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft. She writes, “crafting, and the consumption of drugs and baked goods are often characterized by repetition, pleasure, obsession and shame.” Further, she argues that these addictions are dependent on the community that they provide, quoting Dennis Stevens who states that “communities of practice are formed when social units are united by common areas of concerns or interests, interact regularly, share a common vocabulary, and, even without acknowledging it, learn with and from another in the process.” Indeed, we often find refuge in a community after experiencing trauma, in order to find understanding and compassion. My selected image depicts a story of heartbreak, one of life’s most common griefs. After my breakup in the fall, I began to reflect on the moments that I shared with my partner and spent many sleepless nights replaying the memories. I had often been advised to avoid nostalgia, but I revisited—or rather, recreated those bittersweet memories anyways. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma researcher provides some insight into this phenomenon in his best-selling book, The Body Keeps the Score, stating that “the body learns to adjust to all sorts of stimuli… in the long run people become more preoccupied with the pain of withdrawal than the activity itself.” This may explain the compulsion to return to memories in fear that if they are not preserved, they will be forgotten. Van der Kolk also touches upon the imaginative mind, which is crucial to memory recollection and how the mind further traps us in a state of pain; he writes “when people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past… they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of mental flexibility.” This inflexibility is worsened by obscurity, as there is no true resolution to my selected image and similar photopoetry works. Thus, the mind repeats its same sentiments, inviting the pleasure of remembrance, the shame of loss, and the obsession of unknowing.
I will now argue that my image directly responds to the characteristics of addiction as outlined above through formal and textual analysis of the image and poem respectively. To start, the work consists of twelve comic strips composed of three panels of photographic art. In certain strips, the images are repeated with varied crops and zooms. This repetition can be read as the addicted mind, cycling through memories with clearer or vaguer focus on certain parts. Curiously, the images also display a sort of uncurated quality to them; indeed, they truly seem like brief glimpses into the past, as the protagonists of the photos never make eye contact with the photographer and are mostly depicted unposed, fragmented, and transient. One woman looks off into the night, the other sits by the water, they traverse a supermarket, out of focus and half-blinking. The text captioning also feels fragmented and unsure. The first strip reads, “I can only infer that love exists from its effects on others” and repeats this notion of love in the following two strips with “I know I want love” and “I don’t believe in love at first sight.” This first act of the work represents the speaker’s initial cynicism about romance. In the second trio of panels, the images mostly focus on their partner and the captions are hopelessly romantic stating “the skies will turn to ash in the lungs of everyone who isn’t safe in your arms.” The following six panels depict a falling out of love, and a final goodbye. My favourite strip from the third trio reads “I can’t remember our first kiss. Was this really all it was?” and from the last trio, “we both deserve better than this.” The captions I have singled out perfectly represent the elements of pleasure, obsession, and shame in the work; the initial delight of mutual attraction, followed by the all-consuming pull of romance, followed by the humiliation of inadequacy are potent in this work, just as they are in many breakups. Therefore, outside of the obscurity inherent to photopoetry and memory that triggers addiction-like remembrance, the piece also visually reads as an addictive practice—which in this case, is love, perhaps the most addicting drug of them all.
There is a bright side to all of this. Bessel van der Kolk mentions a systematic study conducted by James Pennebaker and Anne Krantz wherein nonverbal artistic expression was compared with writing in the context of trauma relief. They concluded that the subjects who expressed their trauma through dance and wrote about the exercise a few minutes later showed objectively better physical health and higher GPAs than other subjects who only physically expressed their feelings. On the same page he writes, “the capacity of art, music, and dance to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with terror may be one reason they are used as trauma treatments…” However, the mere expression is not sufficient. Greater overall health requires translating these experiences into language. Therefore, while photopoetry can trigger obsessive remembrance, it is not the same as reviewing trauma like a slideshow in your mind. The text aspect allows us to contextualise our emotions—as obscure or unintelligible as they may be. This is how this work has helped me through my grieving journey following my breakup. Even if I cannot relate to every part of the story being laid out in front of me, I can find community in the narrative and I can contrast my experience against it to make sense of how I feel. In conclusion, I have explored the nature of photopoetry as an essentially addictive form of visual media, due to its intrinsic obscurity and invocation of repetition, pleasure, obsession, and shame. However, I have also argued that the interaction between text, image, and memory is not totally negative; in fact, language can improve general health after a trauma. In effect, I have responded to the final lines of the image, first exposing the world’s pain and loss, and then giving them meaning.