Absence and Revelation: Photography as the Art of Nostalgia

Abstract

Any research on photography, cinema, video and television necessarily entails a reflection on technique.1 This reflection is not merely technical in nature; it is also cultural since it explores the impact of such media on the ways in which we live, think and act. In making such an assertion one has to mention Raymond Williams, one of the most important critics of our time, who from the 1950s to his death in 1988 worked to redefine the meaning of culture in the post-war world. Against the conception of culture as a given and eternal set of universal references — epitomized by the canon of ‘great works of art’, the idea of high culture that informed British intellectual life for almost two centuries — Williams put forward a notion of culture which corresponded to the realities and tensions of Western liberal democracy. In Culture and Society (1958), he wrote: ‘The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life.’2