This section describes the definitions of the word nostalgia, and how the word has come to change meaning in more recent times. Throughout this essay I hope to examine all the ways that photography can influence the viewers ability to feel nostalgic.
To increase clarity, I feel it is necessary that I deconstruct the idea of nostalgia, and make it distinct in this context from more general memory. The word nostalgia, as defined in The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (10th edition, 1999), means a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past”. The word’s roots reflect its meaning, coming from the Greek ‘nostos’ meaning ‘to return home’ and ‘algos’, meaning ‘pain’. (Pearsall, J., ed., 1999, p972) Svetlana Boym describes how the term was established in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001). According to Boym, nostalgia was originally considered to be a curable disease of the mind, first recognised in the seventeenth century within soldiers who were serving abroad. They were noted to be experiencing extreme longing for their motherland, so much so that it turned into an obsession, with physical symptoms accompanying the psychological ones. Remedies such as leeches and opium were suggested, with briefly returning to their home seeming to act as a definitive cure (Boym, S., 2001, p3-4). The focus of early descriptions of nostalgia heavily emphasise the pain and longing experienced, being framed as a negative thing which impeded happiness in the present. The doctor who coined the term, Johannes Hofer, is cited in Boym’s book, describing nostalgia as “the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (p3) With suggestions that the feeling of nostalgia was actually a disease, and terms such as pain and longing being attached to it, it is clear that this kind of sentimental remembrance would have been actively discouraged.
However, in more recent times, the word has come to be associated with the warm, sentimental emotions often conjured when looking back into the past - the feeling of happy times that we cannot return to, often accompanied by a reminder of joyful innocence. It has taken on a whole new set of positive connotations. Experiencing nostalgia can be seen as a form of escapism, a comforting sensation. Geoffrey Batchen refers to it in his book Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance (2004) as “an illogically warm feeling toward the past, a kind of pleasurable sadness” (Batchen, G., 2004, p14) Positive adjectives have become attached to descriptions of the term. Also, according to Elena Stephan, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, “Nostalgia refers to unusual and meaningful memories that are preserved, if not idealized, across time”, described as such in their article entitled Mental Travel into the Past: Differentiating Recollections of Nostalgic, Ordinary and Positive Events (2012). (Stephan, E., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., 2012, p290) The key word here is ‘idealised’ - looking back to a memory that may never have existed in such a way as we remember it, but is conserved in our mind as a positive event. In the context of photography, these glorified memories may be conjured whilst looking at an image of a loved one who is no longer here, or one of a specific place and time that we imbue with all the positive associations from that time in our lives. In Robert Rowland Smith’s article The Real Thing (2012), which specifically refers to how nostalgia is affected by photography, he describes how this sentimental remembrance “offers stale and illusory comforts from the past in place of the bracing air of the present” (Rowland Smith, R., 2012, p74) Comforting memories that are safe, and easy to return to, and which act as a moment of escapism from a potentially stressful present reality.
Roland Barthes has written on the subject of nostalgia extremely extensively, with particular reference to his book Camera Lucida (1993). Batchen, in the introduction to Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009), describes the book as “perhaps the most influential book yet written about the photographic experience” (Batchen, G., 2009, p3) In Part Two of Camera Lucida, Barthes describes a personal journey that he undertakes - sorting through an old box of photographs of his late mother, trying to find an image of her that matches the representation he has in his memories. He then describes that “none seemed to me really “right”: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face” (Barthes, R., 1993, p64) No matter how many images he reviews, none of them provide him with this ‘living resurrection’. Until he comes across a print of his mother as a child, taken by an unknown photographer, which he describes as having captured her true essence; he has “rediscovered” her. (p69) Barthes describes how “For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance” and that this unknown photographer had “produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer” (p70) The sudden change in his opinion, from suggesting that photography can never really live up to our own recollection, to being stunned that a certain photograph could bring back to him all the emotions and memories he associates with his mother, represents two theories. Firstly, that photography can truly transport a person back to the moment the image was taken, encapsulating their emotions at the time and bringing those feelings back into the present. In contrast there is the suggestion that Barthes describes first: that no photograph can ever match up to the images of moments we keep in our memories. Perhaps it is because those moments never existed, and because a photograph, with all its truth and honesty, has the ability to snap us back to reality.
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