03.03 Collaging Memories

John Stezaker

After the Barbican project I was inspired by using archive imagery and exploring how locations can trigger memories through context specific cues. Although the majority of Stezaker’s work focusses on the uncanny combination of film stills with postcards and actors headshots, I began to look into some of his compositions which are purely centred around architecture and landscapes. All of his collages are simply composed and clearly evocative of memories and times gone by. The vintage look of the images, themselves collated from old collections found in charity shops, only enhances this aesthetic and elicits the theme of memory. His pieces that simply combine two images of architecture such as Underworld XIII seamlessly join two different images making them appear as if they could quite easily be reflection of one another. I believe this would be an interesting way to explore this method of combining photographs to convey a landscape that has changed over time. Combining an old image, a memory, of one space with a contemporary photograph of the same area as it is today could show the ways in which memories are cued by a certain context and one's presence in a location.

Garden I, 2016

Underworld XIII, 2011

Nicholas Dhervillers

My Sentimental Archives is a photographic series created by Dhervillers in 2012. Living in Sion, France for 6 months, the photographer began by working with the town's archives which held historical photographs of the area dating back to 1880. Through placing figures found in archive images amongst modern architecture and an urban contemporary landscape, these images speak of the residents' collective memory of their town.

By collaging opposing modern architecture and the urban landscape of the town, there is a clear sense of changing times and the memories that are held in these reimagined spaces. The dark sky and unnatural light in the photographs was created digitally and they aid the images’ melancholic mood whilst giving the impression that the landscapes are unearthly and exist ‘outside of time’.

“It was very important to find a technique that gives an impression of being ‘outside time,’” Dhervillers told TIME in an email. “Thus, it’s not about a simple photograph but rather a photograph that mixes different mediums that I particularly like: theater for the positions and attitudes of the characters, movies for the light, photography for the idea of controlling the framework, painting for the final rendering.”

Each figure from the archives—small, dusty, black and white people—has been carefully restored by Dhervillers. And, in the process of restoration, the photographer says he felt that the images raised a spiritual question: can we create a present, a now, out of the scraps of the past? “The appropriation of the collective memory, of photographic memory, overlaps with the desire to question a picture in a larger sense,” he said. “This series takes us into a fictional space outside of time, through the photographic processing.”

https://time.com/3793424/displaced-history-and-the-art-of-collective-memory/

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