Thinking photography beyond the visual?

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produces a communicational contract’ (Carter 2004: 43). To extend this para-digm then, the heard sound of the oral, listened to, draws the visual, the photo-graph, deeper into the world of the perceiver and his or her social relations. Inthis way it reinforces and moulds the visual apprehension of the photograph.It extends the photograph from the enclosed pictorial space of the image itselfto something ‘dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment bymoment’ (Carpenter in Ingold 2000: 249).However, silence, the absence of voice or sound, is an equally important formof performance and communication (Tacchi 1998: 28). This might, of course,be the intentionally silent contemplation of photographs, a specific momentthat involves specific social desire surrounding photographs: one can imagineBarthes’ (1981: 67–71) contemplation of the photograph of his mother in theWinter Garden as such a silent moment. However, one can argue that forget-ting and loss are not merely about a Barthesian ‘that-has-been’, but that silencesrepresent a non-functioning of the oral, a lack of sociability, around photo-graphs. Such silences may not be intentional, but enforced by the history ofpower relations and regimes of visibility. Yet they contain that which Burgin(1986b: 58) has described as the ‘faint auditory images of words’ which heremight constitute possible histories. The power of this suggestion is demon-strated in the way in which photographs are often described through oral meta-phors. For example, an exhibition Lost Identities: A Journey of Rediscovery(1999) curated by members of the Peigan Nation, Canada, proclaimed on itswebsite that ‘photographs can speak, they can whisper or shout’; but they arealso described as voiceless: ‘Many photographs ... are silent. When individuals,events or other details are not known, photographs do not have voices’. Peoplewere asked to ‘find voices and stories buried in the pictures’. 20 Oral articulation, the naming of names, invests tellers with a dynamic powerover their own history, breaking the silence, articulating the interaction ofphotographs and people in historical relations. Hence the importance of photo-graphs in telling genealogies, for photographs return or reinforce the power tospeak of one’s history, to name names (MacDonald 2003: 235–6), for the namedcan no longer be erased from history. 21 There is a strong sense in which suchhistories, mediated by photographs, are inscribed in the flesh which, evoked bysensory modalities, incorporates cultural memory and history (Stoller 1997: 45).The photographic moment intervenes in the sensory structures of everyday life,which become marked and recalled; it intervenes in the zones of amnesia for‘the senses as the bearers or record-keepers of involuntary and pervasive mate-rial experience, and therefore as potential sources for alternative memory andtemporality are precisely that which is frequently subjected to social forgetful-ness and thereby constitute the sphere of hidden history’ (Seremetakis 1996: 20).This, of course, becomes important in histories of fracture and dispossession,such as Native American or Australian Aboriginal histories, but it is equally soin other forms of submerged or alternative historical narrative, where it canbe argued that the imposition of Western-style visualism has been able to hide