Off European Ground: A Response to Lutz Koepnick's "Photographs and Memories"

Abstract

In his essay on photographs and memories, Lutz Koepnick offers an incisive critique of the limitations of digital photography and of those theoretical models that suggest its innate ability or the innate ability of any medium to produce particular meanings. Shifting the focus of analysis away from the properties of specific media and their contexts of production, Koepnick turns to the spaces of reception and modes of meaning construction that inform the viewer's relation to the image. Indeed, it is the spectatorial address to the viewer and the kind of historical memory this mode of address produces which constitutes the primary political and aesthetic criteria according to which Koepnick evaluates the images and words of Alan Schechner, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Andreas Gursky, Tom Tykwer, Christopher Nolan, and Alan Cohen. Accordingly, my comments here address the conjunctions among historical contexts of reception, political arguments, and aesthetic judgments. In particular, I want to ask about the implications of Koepnick's analysis for the politics and aesthetics of photographs and memories when one steps off European ground, away from the particular heritage of European fascism and the specifically Western context of the Holocaust. In his reading of Alan Cohen's On European Ground, Koepnick focuses on the anti-indexical, anti-prosthetic qualities of images which militate against the conventions of contemporary entertainment culture in the tradition of Steven Spielberg's Schindlers List. In contrast to Spielberg's film or the many recent German films that suture the viewer into the historical space and time of the Holocaust and World War II through the mechanisms of affective identification, Cohen's On European Ground accentuates the incursions of the past into the time-space of the present. As Koepnick argues, Cohen's non-narrative exhibition practices, reminiscent of filmic montage, oblige the viewer not to subject incommensurable experiences to user-friendly fantasies of sympathy and identification.1 Like Alan Schechner's It's the Real Thing (SelfPortrait at Buchenwald), Cohen's project and Koepnick's paper respond to the increasing commodification of images of historical trauma