Contestations

My favorite essay in this group is Charles Merewether’s “A Language to Come: Japanese Photography After the Event.” The piece and the bodies of work he focuses on offer a heartbreaking look at the archive, specifically in the way that he describes the condition of the trace in the present (whenever the present occurs) and the actual event and the way that there is a fracture between the two. The fracture here is the bombing of Hiroshima – a real fracture in and of itself. As the space of time grows between the bombing and the traces, the traces change, but there is still no denying of the event. The archive takes on an air of extreme importance in the case of works by Ken Domon and Shomei Tomatsu, and therefore in the works or archives that follow. They documented physical evidence of the event that is most likely largely invisible to us in the present and it becomes more and more so. Here is the value of the archive.

It is interesting to think about this archive in relation to Marcel Broodthaers intervention with an archive – the symbol of the eagle, which he calls a fiction. While the eagles physically exist and are therefore a physical reality, its various meanings are fictional. The meanings of the photographs discussed in Merewether’s essay are impossible to see as a fiction due to their emotional weight. Although, the thing that the two archives have in common is no matter what, the reaction is going to be subjective. None of these objects hold the same value for every person. Thus, while photography does “unearth the remaining evidence” and “reveals the traces and produces an inventory that will serve as an index to contemporary Japanese history” that history is going to have a different feeling to everyone. Therefore, there is no one true reality of the archive, just as there is no one true reality to the symbolism of the eagles.