Light-Writing and Photography’s Bodies of Memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Photography has a history of being metaphorically understood as a second skin; it is also photo-graphia, or light-writing. A seemingly banal photograph of myself as a sleeping adolescent girl marks me with the sluicing experience of long-term chronic illness and my woman’s writing body responds to the physical trauma interior to the image. I explore what it means to write with photography when the affective force stirred by a visual medium is not visibly illuminated but is blindingly felt. How can photographic writing testify to memories of pain and yet acknowledge that bodily trauma escapes representation? Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, I experiment with an ‘aesthetics of the flash’: a fragmentary interplay between text and image enables past and present to spark around a site of trauma, and a female body in pain is evoked but evades complete capture. In the context of today’s networked media ecology where millions of photographed lives are co-present, this writing aesthetic is an ethics or responsibility towards what is not visible in the vernacular photographs of others. Photographs carry bodies of memory, invisible to the naked eye, and yet for their wounded beholders, these images are a second skin that makes the eye feel naked.