{"id":174,"date":"2011-09-13T15:55:55","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T15:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=174"},"modified":"2020-01-08T13:55:21","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T13:55:21","slug":"computing-the-past","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=174","title":{"rendered":"Computing the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image_162_18\"<\/a>As Shooting the Past<\/em>, BBC2\u2019s acclaimed 1999 television drama begins, the Fallon Collection, a large, prestigious London-based photographic archive, is about to be removed from its premises.\u00a0 It is to be sold, dismembered or destroyed–so that a new American business school can occupy the space.\u00a0 But when the building\u2019s new American owner, Mr. Anderson, arrives one morning expecting to find an empty building, not only is the archival material is still in place, but to his considerable frustration the staff\u2014with one suspected exception\u2014has been unaware until now that they and the collection were under legal obligation to leave\u2014by the end of the week.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sense of alarmed resistance among the archive staff and anger among the Americans is immediately palpable, conveyed through Stephen Poliakoff\u2019s superb writing and direction, and superlative performances by the leads: Timothy Spall is Oswald Bates, the archivist with an astonishing visual memory, able to make \u201cconnections\u201d among disparate parts of the collection; Lindsay Drummond is Marilyn Truman, the archive\u2019s efficient, diplomatic administrator and Oswald\u2019s putative \u201cboss;\u201d Liam Cunningham is new owner, Christopher Anderson, who can not really understand why these people are obstructing his plans and failing to keep their agreements.\u00a0 Neither he\u2014nor, perhaps, we viewers\u2014initially appreciate the emotional intensity with which the archive\u2019s close-knit staff — five in total \u2013 resists the threat: the possibility that the photographs could be destroyed or, nearly as unthinkable, dispersed.\u00a0 The two sides are mutually incomprehensible at the outset, and the issue is probably not very clear to the audience either. Only as the story unfolds do we learn what is really at stake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At one level this seems like a story about a \u201cnew\u201d culture eclipsing an older one. The boxes of paper photographs (the filming was done in the Hulton Collection, now part of Getty Images), the look of long, shelf-lined corridors, darkrooms and enlargers, leisurely lunches and in-group loyalties are identified with England.\u00a0 The Americans, by contrast, have new mobile telephones and computers, are impatient with delays and insensitive to what I\u2019ll call, for now, \u201cthe presence of the past\u201d.\u00a0 In the end, they \u201cwin,\u201d broadly, yet also make some important concessions.\u00a0 But I\u2019d like to propose a different reading of Shooting the Past<\/em>, namely a struggle between two competing models of photographic \u201cmemory.\u201d\u00a0 Here, the Americans represent the \u201cold\u201d view, and the English archival team who, with Oswald as their rather improbable visionary, really grasp the future, including the positive potential of digitization.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Both sides understand the photographs to carry information about the past, that is, to function in some sense as memory.\u00a0 To Mr. Anderson, the archive is a collection of objects with values determined by various factors\u2014age, condition, but above all an aesthetic quality grounded, I would say, in an unexamined analogy between photographs and paintings.\u00a0 The value of the whole collection then becomes, for him, a simple sum of all the independent values.\u00a0 The total will determine whether the collection is worth the cost of its storage.\u00a0 Oswald\u2019s thinking is, at a minimum, far subtler.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to suggest that he thinks of photographs as an extension, or externalization of human memory itself.\u00a0 His own role, then, is to activate, energize, or as we\u2019d be more likely to say now, to access that memory.\u00a0 He obsessively remembers the photographs, tirelessly seeks surprising connections among them, because he senses in this vastly enlarged memory the tantalizing possibility of remembering\u2014in a sense thinking–collectively.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oswald is difficult.\u00a0 He\u2019s intelligent, articulate and so steeped in his own exceptional perspective as to have no patience for what he considers stupid\u2014or more exactly, backward perspectives, Mr. Anderson\u2019s prominently among them.\u00a0 He\u2019s rude, presumptuous, and sly.\u00a0 But the archival staff has long since come to the realization that Oswald, exasperating as he can be, spells the difference between a lot of old pictures and a magical, endlessly surprising and revealing lot of stories, connections, revelations\u2014bearing on the present.\u00a0 Oswald can, as he is always saying, \u201cmake the connection,\u201d link photographs to one another and to the preoccupations of the present, link them in ways that surprise and reveal exactly because together they reach beyond any single human memory. The staff accept Oswald, treasure him — warts and all, because of his memory\u2014not only because it is prodigious in scale and incredibly fast, but also because, in the final analysis, he uses it with enormous generosity toward others.\u00a0 Oswald forms the core, that is, of an implicit, but strong and sustaining set of loyalties, mutual tolerance and respect\u2014a group of insiders capable of resisting outsiders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To Oswald, then, the threat of the archive being destroyed or dismantled quite literally registers as a threat to the real functioning of his own memory, his identity.\u00a0 This is true of all the staff members to some extent.\u00a0 But one of the attractions of discussing these models through Poliakoff\u2019s film is that the fiction makes the two positions\u2014Oswald\u2019s and Mr. Anderson\u2019s\u2014more \u201cpure\u201d and polarized than they usually are.\u00a0 In the film they are taken up with enough clarity and force to confront one another, whereas most of us, most of the time are, like most of the archive staff, somewhere between the two, able to at once share Mr. Anderson\u2019s \u201cartistic\u201d or \u201caesthetic\u201d evaluation of photographs and to project the possibility of photographs as so many human memories that might, somehow, link up to form a community, a national, or even a human memory.\u00a0 We don\u2019t, as a rule, sense them as being in conflict.\u00a0 Marilyn, the archive administrator, is \u201cone of us\u201d in the sense that even as she demonstrates her enormous respect for Oswald\u2019s skills and commitments, she doesn\u2019t entirely share them\u2014at least not yet.\u00a0 She knows that Oswald can be perverse, impossible as well as brilliant, and she is able, briefly, to empathise with Mr. Anderson\u2019s position.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t exactly believe that the two positions are inherently contradictory, and seeks a reconciliation: at one point she even sets out cull the collection, separating the \u201cvaluable\u201d pictures from the others.\u00a0 Oswald reads this move as betrayal. She can\u2019t go through with it, in any case, and finally throws herself on Anderson\u2019s mercy, pleading for a bit more time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oswald has a number of absurd and counterproductive responses to the impending disaster, and he actually carries out several of them.\u00a0 There are admirable ones, too, however, among them a complex bid to show, rather than try to tell the American what this is about: Oswald sets about \u201cmaking the connection\u201d between the memory stored in the photographs and Anderson himself.\u00a0 With no explanation, he asks Anderson for key data: his grandmother\u2019s place of birth–Ireland; the name of small town in Virginia where he grew up, and most critically, a photograph of his mother.\u00a0 From this slender start, Oswald does in fact make the connection, a persuasive, revelatory link between the American businessman and the English pictorial memory.\u00a0 He tells no one.\u00a0 He goes home and, after recording the story of the threat to the archive on audiotape, takes an overdose of barbiturates.\u00a0 Exasperating to the end, he telephones Marilyn just as he is losing consciousness.<\/p>\n

The plot at this point is largely carried through photographs.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have them, and in any case the details aren\u2019t crucial here.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that the pictorial links Oswald made, linking Anderson to his grandmother as a young woman in Ireland, in France, and eventually in the United States, prove to be a life-changing revelation to the receiver.\u00a0 The new connections enable him to confirm or acknowledge repressed aspects of his own memory, experience, personality.\u00a0 As if to underscore the difference between what Oswald has done and the more usual order of archival business, Poliakoff writes a very ordinary request into the script just as the story is reaching a climax: someone wants pictures of all the Prime Ministers of Great Britain in the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 So, in the midst of the staff\u2019s\u2014but particularly Marilyn\u2019s–intense struggle to \u201cthink like Oswald,\u201d to grasp the connections he\u2019s barely suggested, the archive secretary quickly assembles the pictures, asks Marilyn to confirm that they are complete, and it\u2019s finished.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy \u2013\u00a0 and very dull by comparison to the rich, strange, twists and turns in the emerging story they are trying to \u201cconnect\u201d to Anderson.<\/p>\n

Oswald\u2019s work is, in a word, creative<\/em>.\u00a0 There is an unmistakable tone of discovery, of astonishment and \u2013 yes — joy at both poles of the dramatic tension as these connections are revealed.\u00a0 And yet familiar models of creativity, themselves lodged in models of heroic individuals in the arts and sciences, don\u2019t seem to accommodate Oswald or the staff or the archive very well.\u00a0 In a book first published in the mid-1980s called Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>, the philosopher Vil\u00e9m Flusser (1920-1991) introduced a rather different model of creativity that seems to me to fit this context better.\u00a0 Flusser grounds the whole purpose of human life in communication\u2014in the possibility of making real, creative contact with other people and in having that creative moment remembered past the point of any one person\u2019s inevitable death.\u00a0 As might be expected, Flusser was keenly interested in media.\u00a0 But more to the point here, he divides communication into two broad types–discourse and dialogue, discourse being a kind of a formal consensus, like \u201cbroadcast\u201d news, and dialogue being an exchange of information, explorative, provisional and often ephemeral.\u00a0 We need both\u2014discourse to distribute and preserve information. But dialogue, and only<\/em> dialogue, actually creates<\/em> new information.<\/p>\n

Flusser defines dialogue as an exchange of information between at least two memories.\u00a0 These memories may be human or artificial; the critical thing is that the exchange be genuine\u2014no following a script (as in the request for photographs of the Prime Ministers), no staying within established categories, no unidirectional flows.\u00a0 He accounts for one common model of creativity, the lonely genius alone in study or studio, as a dialogue between different aspects of the same memory, as Newton, for example, finding the \u201cconnection\u201d between celestial mechanics and the dropping of an apple from the tree to the ground.\u00a0 But exchange between people is invariably a far faster, more exciting process.\u00a0 One memorable example he gives of creative dialogue involves a hypothetical chess game. The rules of the game are complex enough to provide nearly infinite possibilities and so considerable scope in themselves for creative, absorbing engagement; but the moment of genuine creativity\u2014of \u201cconnection\u201d–would come when both players look up from the game and decide\u2014together–to change the rules, to really \u201cplay\u201d.<\/p>\n

This seems to me a more congenial framework for Oswald, someone who is absolutely delighted with his job (In a quiet moment he remarks to Marilyn on how lucky they all are to be able to float above, to speculate about the photographs), who has a small group around him who reflect, confirm, both his stubborn strangeness and his creativity.\u00a0 In Flusser\u2019s model, one might identify him as a thinker of the age of external memory, a philosopher who, through the technology of photography, has gained access to an artificial memory much longer and more comprehensive than his own, a chance to \u201cplay\u201d with people he could never meet, places he will never go.\u00a0 At one point he dares Mr. Anderson to set him a task–to find something in the archive within 5 seconds.\u00a0 It is like he is putting himself in competition with an artificial memory — something that could make connections faster, more efficiently that he can himself\u2014something Mr. Anderson \u2013 because he does not understand the archive as artificial memory — does not see at all.\u00a0 Oswald does not bother to mask his contempt.<\/p>\n

In attempting suicide, Oswald clearly registered the threat to the archive\u2014to its coherence and to his association with it\u2014as a threat to his life.\u00a0 And that makes sense, for given the extent to which he had invested his own memory in that specific collection, the extent to which his colleagues shared the sense of creative play, he was facing the loss of\u00a0 himself, his unique position, identity.<\/p>\n

Shooting the Past<\/em> is, of course, a fiction.\u00a0 It was filmed in the real-life London-based Hulton Picture Collection, established by the publishing magnate Edward Hulton.\u00a0 From the core holdings of Picture Post<\/em>, the well-known British magazine published between 1938 and 1957, Hulton enlarged the collection through the subsequent acquisition of other collections from Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere.\u00a0 Shooting the Past<\/em> was filmed near the time the collection was sold, intact, to Getty Images, where it merged with Archive Film and Photos, New York, forming a resource of some three million images.\u00a0 Shooting the Past\u2019s<\/em> fan website claims that the Hulton Collection can now be accessed online.\u00a0 But for what it\u2019s worth, I was unsuccessful in my attempts to do so\u2014the \u201carchival\u201d images I was able to locate dated from as long ago as 2005!<\/p>\n

This is not at all in any way intended as a slight to the monumental achievement of scanning and cataloguing literally millions of images.\u00a0 But it is to say that the most exciting possibilities of artificial memory still seem quite distant.\u00a0 By this I mean the prospect of being able to \u201cremember\u201d three million images, to do what Poliakoff imagined Oswald\u2019s memory could do, namely \u201cplay\u201d with the superhuman quantities of information, find connections across decades and continents, links among, say, faces, costumes, architecture, landscapes, build connections into narratives, bind them with text-based records (as they are in Shooting the Past<\/em>).<\/p>\n

When I asked our archivist at Falmouth what she would do if forced to decide between keeping paper photographs and digitizing the images she was, it\u2019s fair to say, alarmed at the question, but also quick to answer in favour of paper.\u00a0 The reason was that the durability of paper is \u2013 although limited, at least known; the durability of digital storage is not.\u00a0 It is a persuasive point.\u00a0 This is rarely, if ever, the real choice, however.\u00a0 Almost anyone is happy to digitize if–always a big \u201cif\u201d\u2014the equipment and expertise can be found to do it, and the process poses no threat to paper. With this brief reconsideration of Shooting the Past<\/em> I rather hope to have raised a different question, a different reason to digitize. That is the possibility that digitization may eventually realize a promise that was always inherent in photography, namely the future prospect of creating a shared visual memory far larger, longer, and richer and more flexible than any we have ever known.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Shooting the Past, BBC2\u2019s acclaimed 1999 television drama begins, the Fallon Collection, a large, prestigious London-based photographic archive, is about to be removed from its premises.\u00a0 It is to be sold, dismembered or...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":176,"parent":1070,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-174","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":953,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/174\/revisions\/953"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}