Time Falters
Work In Progress Portfolio
Jayne Russell
PHO730
Sustainable Strategies
Statement of Intent
Looking at cross-cultural intergenerational memory in my work, I aim to highlight commonalities and diversity in the shared human experience of grief and how we memorialise it.
In this body of work, I consider ‘Western’ photography’s importance to memory alongside alternative rituals of remembrance with reference specifically to Hong Kong’s ‘On Water People’ and their hand-carved statues.
Their statues were carved to resemble the departed and given importance as traditional objects for memory similar to Western photos.
Enshrined on the boat they embodied the Confucian virtue of filial piety or respect for parents and seniors in both life and death.
They were given offerings as an act of remembrance and celebration; very different to the veneration of the dead in Ancestral worship.
Few On Water people had no photos of past generations. Though available, money and ethnic discrimination prevented them from being allowed on land.
However, their dead were interned on land limiting the times relatives could visit. Instead, the onboard shrine containing the statues was the central focus of remembrance.
Just as with photographs the statues represented ‘In living memory’; that is within the memory of those still alive. Similarly, the demarcation of liminal spaces for remembrance, meditation and mourning was a commonality between ‘West’ and this non-Western culture.
This project looks at the destruction of the photos, the negatives and the statues once dislocated from the referent, once valueless and devoid of memories. Photos and negatives rot; the statues are burnt or painted over.
As photography developed in the West, it became a significant referential objective marker of key moments in the narrative of people’s lives from birth to death; central to intergeneration memory and shifting the importance from the object and its symbolism.
Colonialism aided the rapid spread of Euro-centric culture and photography; in many other regions, it failed to thrive, held in the hands of the colonists, and often used to denigrate the locals.
Yet is the photo more valid to memory?
As John Beger comments ‘The camera relieves us of the burden of memory’1 Without photography, we may remember experiences differently; this autobiographical consciousness incorporates personal reactions and may create false memories. In the context of remembering a loved one, individual memories are entwined with emotion and may not need qualifying.
With this project in the future, I will incorporate what psychiatrist and philosopher Thomas Fuchs calls the ‘temporal desynchronization’2 universally experienced during the process of grief and the significance of remembrance. Poet and philosopher Denise Riley describes the sudden arresting of time following the death of her adult son as ‘Time conceived of as a viscous fluid takes on a different form, no longer a line with direction or purpose but a pool, the welling up of present time that will not pass and has no rim. Suspended time allows the seeping of the materiality of time into consciousness. It pools, like a great pocket of blood, that both holds and suspends time as motion”3
To conclude the project, I will consider the concept of the 3rd death as defined by neuroscientist and author David Eagleman: the ‘moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.4 ” and the future of the everlasting memorial in the virtual space.
Online Links
Online Work In Progress PortfolioTime Falters Online Book
Online Image GalleryTime Falters Web Page
DocumentaryDocumentary Online
References
1. BERGER, John. 2015. About Looking. Bloomsbury. [accessed 5 Aug 2024]. Available at: https://www.vlebooks.com/Product/Index/995882?page=0&startBookm arkId=-1
2. FUCHS, Thomas. 2018. ‘Presence in Absence. The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17(1), [Accessed 08 June 2024], 43–63. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9506-2
3. BARAITSER, Lisa. 2017. Enduring Time. Bloombury, Bloomsbury Academic an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Reproduction of Poem by RILEY, Denise. 2012.Time Lived, Without its Flow
4. DAVID EAGLEMAN. 2024. ‘Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives’. Prestonpans, Scotland: Canongate Books. [online Accessed 08 June 2024] Available at: https://eagleman.com/books/sum/
