Is the Conscience Collective Black and White?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes as its theme the black and white photography that forms a common record of occupations and kinship ties in the fishing communities of West Cornwall. These photographs also form the iconography by which tourists remember their holiday experience there. The essay explores tourists' acquisition of photographs through the assertion first put forward by Sontag [1977] that photographic images are “miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” The countervailing argument is put forward that tourists' access to the past through such images can only be partial. The principle argument advanced is that photographs play an essential role in the continuity of contemporary cultures in Cornwall. Taking as its focus the fishing village of Sennen Cove in West Cornwall, the study shows through ethnographic examples how black and white photographs stimulate the conscience collective among indigenous peoples. It uses anthropological methodology to stimulate remembrance of kin ties, experience, and interaction, and demonstrates that this process is not confined to the location of elderly informants in a “dying culture.” Contrary to this view, it is shown that new generations of Cornish people are using the past, captured in black and white images, to give collective meaning to their own existence. This process is partially illustrated by the reaction of a local woman to a photo of her relatives (all fishermen in Sennen Cove). She said, “It makes me feel existential to ponder how in their lifetimes, they knew the Cove as I do in mine.” Black and white photographs, far from being merely the subject of tourist curiosity and acquisitive behavior, create a medium in which indigenous people today create their own being.