Tracing the Trace: Photography, the Index, and the Limits of Representation

Photography, as is well known, is the image-making technology which specializes in the freezing of time.1 What kind of historiography, then, might photography be said to embody? How can photography, with its ineluctable connection to the present moment, hope to say anything at all about the past—about either the broad processes of history or even the events of the hours and minutes immediately preceding the second in which the photograph is taken? What kinds of knowledge of the past does photography allow, and what does it disallow? How can photography, that most superficial of media, hope to become a vehicle for the archaeological imagination, with its love of immanent depths? If photographic technology is uniquely equipped to record (visually) the present moment, it is also characterized—famously—by its thorough and indiscriminate recording of surface detail. What it lacks in temporal depth it makes up for in this meticulous rendering of appearances; any surface marked by the effects of action or time can be faithfully recorded by this technology which itself produces the marked surfaces of photographic plate, film, or print. History and the passing of time is available to photography only in the form of its traces, the more-or-less legible marks and remnants it has left behind at any one moment in the world. And it is precisely photography’s own nature as a chemical trace (until digitization, at least) that enables it accurately to reproduce these marks and signs of history. As discussed in Chapter 1, since the nineteenth century (at least) historical sciences such as palaeontology, geology, and archaeology have based themselves upon the reading of such signs of the past in the present, and this broad epistemological model could be extended to include military reconnaissance, forensic science, and art connoisseurship. Photography, fixing these signs in an image, has had—unsurprisingly, perhaps—an important part to play in the historical development of these disciplines. Photography meets the archaeological imagination as soon as photographic images are scanned for historical information in these disciplines and practices. In a sense, however, photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces. Ruskin enthused over this quality of the new medium.

Introduction

In his introduction to a selection of verse and prose by John Betjeman, Slick but not Streamlined (1947), W. H. Auden attempted to define ‘topophilia’, a particular kind of attachment to landscape and environment which, he said, suffused Betjeman’s writings. ‘Topophilia’, he wrote, has little in common with nature love. Wild or unhumanised nature holds no charms for the average topophil because it is lacking in history; (the exception which proves the rule is the geological topophil). At the same time, though history manifested by objects is essential, the quantity of the history and the quality of the object are irrelevant; a branch railroad is as valuable as a Roman wall, a neo-Tudor teashop as interesting as a Gothic cathedral. Auden regrets (disingenuously, perhaps) that he himself is ‘too short-sighted, too much of a Thinking Type, to attempt this sort of poetry, which requires a strongly visual imagination’. It is a particular brand of literary topophilia, typified by Betjeman, that Auden discusses; but broadly defined it is a far more widespread sensibility in British culture. Requiring not only a visual imagination, but also a wilfully parochial outlook and a reluctance to engage with the homogenizing forces of urban modernity, a topophilia of one sort or another was characteristic of a whole generation of artists and writers in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. This topophilia is not the same as a love of the countryside, as Auden points out, although that is what it might sometimes be mistaken for. What unites these ‘topophils’ is an interest, sometimes amounting to an obsession, with local landscapes marked by time, places where the past is tangible. For some, such as Betjeman, John Piper, and Geoffrey Grigson, this topophilia—as Auden suggests— is eclectic, including medieval churches, Gothic and mock Gothic architecture, Regency terraces and ancient sites. Some topophils of this generation, such as Paul Nash with his fascination with the genius loci, made atmospheric prehistoric landscapes a particular focus. Others, like painter Graham Sutherland, were attracted towards scarred nature and geological vistas. In the Four Quartets T. S. Eliot looked for redemption and history in an English village: ‘History is now and England’.

Revenants in the Landscape: The Discoveries of Aerial Photography

In 1937 John Piper’s article ‘Prehistory from the Air’ was published in the final volume of the modernist art journal Axis. In it, Piper compares the landscapes of southern England, seen from above, with the modernist works of Miró and Picasso (Fig. 4.1). His interest in the aerial view is not, however, confined to its Formalist-aesthetic aspect; Piper also points out how flying and aerial photography have accelerated archaeological theory and practice. Aerial photographs, he writes, ‘have elucidated known sites of earthworks and have shown the sites of many that were previously unknown’. They are also, he continues, ‘among the most beautiful photographs ever taken’. The aerial view, it seems, could be both investigative and aesthetic. The use of aerial photography by archaeologists, known as ‘aerial archaeology’, began in earnest in Britain in the decade in which Piper was writing, although its possibilities were beginning to be suspected in the 1920s, after the use of aerial photography for reconnaissance purposes in the First World War. In the interwar period it was British archaeologists who pioneered the new methods of aerial archaeology. In his book on aerial archaeology, Leo Deuel notes that until the 1950s ‘no other European country had made any comparable effort to tap the almost limitless store of information consecutive cultures had imprinted on its soil’. As many commentators pointed out, the British landscape offered plenty of such ‘information’: the series of invasions, settlements, clearances, and developments that constitute British history have made the landscape a veritable palimpsest, the layers of which can potentially be revealed in an aerial view. Archaeologists became expert in deciphering aerial views of this palimpsest, as we shall see. But such views of Britain exercised an appeal beyond archaeological circles. Aerial photography showed Britain as it had never before been seen; it revealed aspects of the landscape hitherto unknown, or at least never before visualized in such concrete form. The aerial view ‘made strange’ long-familiar features: hills seemed to disappear, towns and cities might appear tiny, rivers and roads ran through the two-dimensional scene like veins.

Conclusion

The photographic image, with its umbilical attachment to the moment in which it was taken, may seem an unlikely vehicle for the archaeological imagination. The startling presence of the past has surely most often been revealed to poets, writers, and artists through ancient artefacts (Seamus Heaney’s preserved bog-people, Keats’s Grecian urn) or through contemplation of ruined empires or geological vistas (Shelley’s Ozymandias, Ruskin’s Alps). Photographs of such things might inspire the same feelings, it could be argued, but only by virtue of certain kinds of subject-matter, which photography is of course uniquely well equipped to record in full detail. I do not think this is quite true, however: photography is not simply a transparent vehicle. What I have set out to demonstrate is that the medium of photography can be shown to be itself uniquely well equipped to facilitate a particular version of the archaeological imagination as manifested in a particular time and place: Britain around the 1930s and 1940s. Anxieties over the despoliation of the British landscape between the wars manifested themselves partly as fears that modernity was in danger of obliterating all traces of the past in the countryside and towns. Images of ‘Beautiful Britain’ asserted the continuing existence of a landscape in which it was increasingly hard to believe, in the face of a simultaneous proliferation of images documenting ribbon development, arterial roads, and unchecked building. But there was an alternative to these two poles of representation, one which attempted to resolve an acknowledgement of modernity with a desire for a landscape in which the past was discernible. To exercise an archaeological imagination in this context was to perceive the presence of the past despite the evident incursions of modernity. It was to believe in the immanence of history, the essential indestructibility of what has been, and to believe in this regardless, in some cases, of appearances. Not only were the remains of history perceived to be still there; they were understood— with some thrill—to have been there all along without us realizing it. Such a sensibility, I have argued, is therefore essentially a redemptive one. For in the face of the disintegration of the remains of the past, and the destruction wrought by modernity and war, the archaeological imagination refuses to acknowledge, quite, the loss of anything.

Reading Antiquity, Mapping History

When, in 1978, the poet, critic, and editor Geoffrey Grigson (1905–85) was asked by the Times Literary Supplement which journals had influenced him when young, he answered that one magazine, Antiquity, founded and edited then by O. G. S. Crawford, still seems to me to have been the flower of all periodicals familiar to me in my day. In that treasury, so decently laid out (and so well printed . . . ), prehistory, and history, rather as it was understood by Marc Bloch in France, and later by W. G. Hoskins, and imagination, received a stimulus such as no periodical administered to literature. Antiquity was begun in 1927 by the field archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957) as a quarterly review aiming to disseminate the findings of a new generation of archaeologists in an accessible style and a visually attractive format. For Grigson, this journal most fitted the bill, in the late 1920s and 1930s, of what he calls the ‘periodical of Utopia’ that Tolstoy had called for in 1858. Tolstoy wanted a journal proclaiming the ‘independence and eternity of art’, where art would be saved from the politics that was engulfing nineteenth-century Russia, threatening to destroy or defile art. Such a journal was Grigson’s ideal, too. Drawing an implicit parallel between Tolstoy’s Moscow of 1858 and politicized interwar Britain, he decried the endemic admixture of politics with art in the periodical press at this time, when every ‘shrewd editor’ had an ‘axe to grind’. One of his favourites, the New Republic, while excellent, ‘came under the curse . . . which ordains that most literary journalism in our language must be for ever mixed with politics’. T. S. Eliot’s journal The Criterion was tainted by the same ‘curse’: ‘covert politics’, claimed Grigson, ‘slightly defiled its superiority’. Only in Antiquity, it seems, could Grigson discern art—‘independent and eternal’—without the defiling politics or the dullness that accompanied it in other journals and weeklies. Only in a publication that did not claim to deal with art could he find what he was looking for, as he viewed this archaeological journal through the lens of poetry. Antiquity, he wrote, made ‘all the past with firework colours burn’—a line he borrowed from Wyndham Lewis’s poem about Sir Thomas Browne’s antiquarian tract Urne Buriall.

A Tale of Two Cities

In the summer of 1943, a year after the Baedeker raids on Canterbury that devastated large sections of the historic city, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger began to film A Canterbury Tale on location in wartime Kent. Its plot was curious: three individuals find themselves on the railway station of Chillingbourne, a fictitious village in Kent, during a blackout. Bob Johnson, an American GI on leave, is heading for Canterbury, but has got off at the wrong stop. Alison Smith has come to Chillingbourne to work as a land girl. Sergeant Peter Gibbs is based at an army camp nearby. As these three head into the village, Alison is ambushed by an assailant who leaves some sticky stuff in her hair. They give chase, but the stranger disappears. Arriving at the town hall, they are told that Alison has been the latest victim of a local troublemaker dubbed the ‘Glue-Man’, believed to be a soldier, who pours glue onto the heads of young women, making them scared to go out with the soldiers stationed near the village. Alison, Bob, and Peter eventually deduce that the ‘Glue-Man’ is the local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper. Colpeper runs lectures on the beauties of the English countryside for (male) members of His Majesty’s Forces. Disappointed by small audiences, he comes up with the idea of pouring glue on young women to stop them from dallying with the soldiers who would otherwise be learning about the Old Road that runs by the village, and other matters of local interest. When all four—Alison, Bob, Peter, and Colpeper— travel to Canterbury at the end of the film, Peter intends to report Colpeper to the police, but other events intervene, and each of the three central characters receives an unexpected blessing. This detective story, of sorts, in which the perpetrator of a bizarre crime is unmasked less than halfway through the film, where the criminal goes unpunished, and where his motives stretch credibility, was bound to confuse contemporary audiences when the film was released in 1944. As Ian Christie notes, A Canterbury Tale ‘perplexed even the film’s relatively few admirers’.

Recuperating Ruins

As has been well documented, images of the British landscape performed an important propagandist role in the Second World War, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940, when Britain faced the prospect of both aerial attack and all-out invasion by air or sea. In what Angus Calder has called ‘the myth of the Blitz’ the nation’s landscape, framed by war, played the role of backdrop, target, refuge, dream, and prize. An advertisement for F. J. Harvey Darton’s books English Fabric, Alibi Pilgrimage, and The Marches of Wessex, which appeared in Country Life in August 1940, made a familiar association when it asserted that at ‘no other time in our long island history has the spirit of the English Countryside made such an appeal to us as now’. In illustrated publications like Country Life and Picture Post, the landscape was repeatedly presented in its most idyllic form of ‘Beautiful Britain’ as—explicitly or implicitly—‘what we are fighting for’. An article entitled ‘The Beauty of Britain’ which appeared in Picture Post on 22 June 1940, for example, included picturesque shots of hay-harvesting in the Lake District, captioned ‘The Dream Men Carry With Them’, and a lake in Caernarvonshire, captioned ‘The Peace That Will Come Again’. ‘This is Britain’, ran the accompanying text. ‘This is the soil we are fighting for.’ Pre-war anxieties that the distinctive characteristics of the British landscape were disappearing beneath a tide of modernization were largely eclipsed under the immediate impact of the threat of enemy bomb attacks. For the sake of the rhetorical power of these morale-boosting images, it was imperative to stress the continuing presence of that which was in fact feared by many to be disappearing. This development did not mark a great U-turn so much as a change of emphasis. There was a continuity of rhetoric, as we shall see, for Britain under threat of modernization could easily be rewritten as a country under threat of aerial bombardment or invasion. And by relocating the threat in the war machine of a nation—Nazi Germany—that seemed to embody the forces of an aggressive mechanization, this was not hard to do.

The Archaeological Imagination

Rudyard Kipling’s stories for children Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies were first published in 1906 and 1909–10 respectively. In these stories, Puck (Shakespeare’s Puck of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and the last ‘fairy’ to survive in England) meets two children, Dan and Una, in the Sussex countryside where they live in the early twentieth century. Puck introduces the children to various historical characters—a Roman Centurion, a Norman Knight, and so on—who tell them stories about the past, and in particular the history of their locality. In these stories it is the land itself that is the bearer of historical meaning, as revealed by Puck and these messengers from the past. Indeed, time and space are seen to be inseparable, since a place and its features are often literally constituted by what has happened there. ‘Puck’s Song’, the opening poem of Puck of Pook’s Hill, makes this connection plain:… See you the dimpled track that runs, All hollow through the wheat? O that was where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip’s fleet . . . Puck reveals to the children the antiquity of some of the landscape’s features:… See you our little mill that clacks, So busy by the brook? She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Domesday Book…. Sometimes it is a past that has left no trace that Puck restores, through storytelling, to the landscape:… See you our pastures wide and lone, Where the red oxen browse? O there was a City thronged and known Ere London boasted a house…. Puck, who is thousands of years old (‘the oldest Old Thing in England’), is the witness of the history of the British Isles since ‘Stonehenge was new’, and has an epic memory. All of history is available to him, both impossibly distant yet immediately present in his mind, as it is in the landscape he inhabits, which bears the marks of the past. The figure of Puck is a literary device through which Kipling could liberate himself from the limitations of written history, for within the frame of the stories, Puck’s testimony as the witness of time—however fanciful—is indisputable.