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February 21, 2012
Donna MF Brett in The Uncanny Return: Documenting place in post-war German photography in Photographies says that:
The photographs discussed in this essay are similarly at a temporal disjunction between the moment of the photograph and the present and also suggest various returns: the return home, the return to the street and the return to the past. Each example explores the notion of the return in terms of the “photographic return” to places and sites of historical unease and to an urban topography as a site of alienation – erased and empty. This idea of the return will be considered in terms of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the “uncanny” or “unhomely” as that which is familiar yet becomes strange and Siegfried Kracauer’s “homeless” image in as much as the images themselves reference a history of place that is estranged from contemporary experience and from the place it records. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, the photography I will discuss in this essay is similarly caught – staring into the abyss of the past and yet propelled towards the future – in a spatial and historical lacuna that I will consider as not only unhomely but by its very nature as existing in a space of temporal disjunction, is homeless
One example is mentioned by German curator and photographic historian Rolf Sachsse with respect to the topographic photography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He considers considers topographic photography to have a specific relationship to time in that it is able to concentrate on the peculiarities of a city or landscape over an extended period.
One example is the representation of erasure, destruction and absence in Germany effected by the Second World War. Friedrich Seidenstücker, for instance, returned to the Tiergarten after the war to re-photograph the same locations and sculptures he'd photographed before the war, thereby opening up the images to the melancholic tones of the city’s ruins.
Brett says:
The subtle changes of the urban landscape recorded by the topographic image make us conscious of time and the minor alterations in the fabric of our environment – a coat of paint here, a new store there or the growth of a tree – all indicators of time passing. In addition, the comparative topographic image, as a lacunae image, is anticipatory and incomplete, hanging in an air of expectation, constantly between what-has-been and what-will-be, with both (before and after) images in a state of constant referral to the other.
While the photograph simultaneously holds the moment at which it was taken and interrupts or fractures history in the moment of the capture, the second photograph of a site taken at a time in the future could be seen as a further fracture, which in its attempt to fold back time to the first image reflects Kracauer’s consideration of the photographic spatial continuum.
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