Cinders of life - death and photography

I.

When I was still very young, my father used to write the names of deceased relatives on long narrow pieces of rice paper for the annual memorial ceremonies With due care, often referring to the book that contained many examples of appropriate phrases, he wrote something like, "May we wish that Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so stay in peace in another world" in Chinese. The writings were then stored in small cabinets, twenty different kinds of food were placed on the table, and all male members of the family did a traditional vow three times in the direction of the writings while all the women stood nearby. Under the heavy air, filled with an intoxicating smell of incense, my mind was occupied with two things; one was to stay awake and the other was the closing ritual that always struck me with its indescribable beauty. After the vows and wine offerings, my father gathered the papers with the names written on them, held the edge of each paper, and then burnt one corner after another before throwing it in the air. Then he caught the crumbled ashes in a bowl filled with water and returned those to the soil inside an urn. I was always moved, watching thin crusts of paper landing on the surface of water with a faint glow on their tails, like falling meteorites. It was the arch that those flying ashes drew in the air before landing that I imagined to be something similar to death itself, a finite gesture in an infinite circle of redemption.

Around 1994, this ritual of burning papers faced its end when we started a ceremony for my long lost grandfather, with whom we had lost contact four decades before when the North Korean army kidnapped him during the Korean War. After a long and futile wait for her husband, my grandmother finally gave up on his return--or, more exactly, his life--and wished for a ceremony to be held in his name. This was not so surprising to us since nobody thought he would have survived until then anyway. Modifying the normal procedure of the ritual, my father decided to use a photograph of grandfather for the ceremony, and that was effectively the end of the burning rituals. Though nobody really talked about why the photograph should not be burnt like the other papers, all of us understood it from a very practical point of view; there were, in fact, only a few photographs of my grandfather left to us. Yet, it was also not hard to imagine why we silently agreed that we could not burn "him" as in a proper funeral process. So, after three vows and a fake offering of wine, the photograph went back into the family album for next year's use.

I did not realize what our first ceremony for my grandfather had installed in our psyche until later. It was not about the morbid encounter with my "dead" grandfather, but about how we had come to terms with his death--how it had to be reasoned and pronounced, with and against our lingering belief in his life elsewhere. It seemed that his death stood at the impasse of our days, unfittingly harbored in his ghostly life. And that life was already being discussed in the past tense, even when he could possibly have been living somewhere only [50 kilometers away from home. It was therefore meaningless to now sentence him to death, as if we were adding a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence that had already exhausted its meaning. If it was not another death for him, it was a new life for us, a life accepted in place of the concreteness of the missing corpse.

My grandfather's death has never actually taken place; it has always been speculated about and sentenced (as a logical conclusion of that speculation) by our family, but we never witnessed the event itself. His absence has been like a birthmark on our life, whereas his life has been less familiar to us than his death. His life, by default, has never occupied his own body in any moment in our life (except my grandmother's), and it has taken our bodies instead, inhabited our eyes looking at the photographs of him, our minds imagining him, and been on our tongues as we pronounced his name. For decades we mourned for our life without him, and missed him without ever having seen him. In fact, every day of our life has been his funeral--only without his body.

(But, when we sought solace in his death, his life haunted us, as enveloped in the annually recycled photograph. We were tormented by the youthful face resembling that of my father; the slim shape shrouded in a white doctor's gown closely resembled the offspring that survived him, and we were all struck by a departure that would forever come back to us as permanently premature.)

II.

Two boys in the photograph: one lying on the couch, the other standing behind. Their faces emerge like vapor, from the pool of bottomless sepia and bloody red pressed against their backs. As if there had once been flaws, strokes of opaque paint hide their bodies, separating them from the ethereal shades of the faces--will their bodies peel off, if I press my fingernails too hard on the painted surface?

At first glance, their seemingly identical features seem like some kind of illusion created by the homogenous treatment of the surface. They struck me as a glitch in my perception rather than a truthful record; it seemed that their faces were trapped in those painted uniforms, resonating with each other in a great approximation of the same. Looking closely, their resemblance to each other is evident in the uncannily matching contours of noses, lips and chins. Only their eyes remain different, as one boy's are open and the other's are closed. But I cannot tell anymore where that difference belongs: is it a difference between frowning and resting in the same face, or is it a simple distinction between two different faces?

The caption says: "Black Twins, Will and J. G. Kehoe of Atlanta; H. Lyman, Atlanta; 6 1/2 x 8 1/2", Tintype; 1863. Postmortem photographs of black people from photography's earliest era are quite rare...The father of these boys was a slave owner and obviously loved his twins." (1) Parents' love for their children often finds strange ways to express itself--especially for the dead ones. Photography allowed for the creation of a tangible object that substituted for loss, and, in this photograph, Mr. Kehoe apparently felt that it not only reinstated the loss of a son but also countered the obliteration of a pair. (2) The photograph was, then, taken and altered so as to obscure their essential difference (of being dead and alive) and to manifest the sameness in appearance between the two.

I assume that the dead boy, the one who appears to be sleeping on the couch, was J. G., as if his name was shortened by his premature death. Will, on the other hand, must be the one who stands behind his dead twin, like a guiding angel. His survival must have been more a burden than a gift, something that he had to carry through his life, always foreshadowed with the death that he had seen on his own (i.e. twin) face. After the photograph was taken, nobody but Will could distinguish himself from his dead twin; for, he was there and survived, as an accomplice as well as a witness to the moment that was so painfully crafted in the photograph. Considering the rarity of photography in that era, this photograph was probably the only one featuring both of them; thus, this memorable event marked the somber truth about the photograph. Although Will remained a survivor until his own death, it is not hard to imagine the psychological trauma implied in Will's looking at this double image of himself, both dead and alive.

Barthes says: "All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental...Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents. For resemblance refers to the subject's identity, an absurd, purely legal, even penal affair; likeness gives out identity 'as itself,' whereas I want a subject--in Mallarme's terms--'as into itself eternity transforms it." (3) As a twin, Will's identity resides precisely in his likeness to J. G., in his being a copy of the other. Thus, to borrow Barthes's analogy, Will could never be himself except by being constantly referred to J. G., unless he was (as here) present simultaneously with him. Only by being seen as double, two similar beings sharing the same dimensions of time and space, could Will acquire the power of designating himself, and, finally, becoming himself: he points out his image in the photograph to his friends and says, "This is me, and that is J. G."

But positing J. G. as a threshold to Will's identity is also questionable, especially when we, or Will, look at this photograph, away from all the biographical information (or at least, with the pretense of doing so). (4) Though "in photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric," it is almost impossible to avoid having this double image become a metaphor, as seems particularly desired in the process of its making. (5) In fact, the uncanny resemblance between the two boys is hinged upon the very notion of photographic truth, which the viewer selectively projects in terms of either "the presence of the thing" (i.e. the presence of the twins) or of a photographic apparatus that makes "the presence of the thing" possible (i.e. an illusion of the twins). As the "being" of this double image is trapped between two splitting modes of presence and absence, and as it can only be expressed in contingencies toward one another, it has already become something other than itself, a me taphor (of the double, or of the twins).

So, here is Will, the viewer, looking at this photograph. In order to be alive, to look at the photograph at that specific moment, he must not look at the boy on the couch; he must forget his own face resting on the couch; he must blind himself so as not to recognize his likeness to the other; therefore, he must deny his own being, which appears to be ubiquitous in the photograph. (The coexistence of sight and blindness can be observed in and out of this photograph--one looking straight toward the dark chamber of the camera, the other [the same eye] gazing at the eternal darkness that no living man ever sees; the lost reciprocity between the boy's gaze and that of the viewer, etc.)

Thus, Will's viewing experience of this photograph culminates in the establishment of himself as himself, in the gaining of the historicity of himself precisely by suppressing the historicity of the very moment of witnessing his own ubiquity, by transforming the physicality of his sight into a metaphorical experience, in a deliberate confusion of seeing and knowing: not that he sees a death in this photograph, but that he undergoes the deadening experience of looking at this specific photograph.

III.

If life is unfair, it is only because it dies, leaving us only with the memory that once a handful of air filled our lungs. It now seems impossible to look at a photograph without reflecting on our own sad fate. As Bazin argued, "Death is but the victory of time. To preserve the bodily appearance artificially is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it neatly away, so to speak, in the hold of life." (6)

It is only recently that I have been able to truly understand my family's experience by comparing it to that of the victims' families after September 11; their sudden turn to the "irrational," a stupor that hovered between the possible and the impossible, their nonetheless tragic and empty hope, speaking all together (altogether) in the form of the Missing Person posters: "Wanted: Dead or Alive." What they (and my family) wanted was the "body," neither death nor life, but the body that can "conceive" either state. Like an incubus that presses on our chests, the body occupies our own bodies as long as it is still missing, as long as we are unable to touch it--the missing body is always the most tangible, a haunting presence confused and exacerbated by memory and desire. Every relation of absent victims said in interviews that they needed some sort of "closure." However they imagined this end, I cannot help but seeing an image of a body bag being zipped up. After all, the body bag discloses by concealment, maki ng a sealed break between "us" and "them." A body in the bag, coffin, or in flames; if there is any purpose to this double murder (i.e. the suffocation and obliteration of an already vacated site), it must be to empower the living, to let them gain control over their own bodies again as vessels for living. (7)

With this journey in mind, I cannot help being saddened by the momentary glory of our theft, in which life is preserved in a series of pulsating afterimages on pieces of paper. Photography insists that life is indeed an aftermath passed on to those who witnessed it, once the catastrophic moment has escaped from memory. For me, who has not yet seen the death of my grandfather, looking at the photograph of him is nothing but a rupture in my longing for his assassination. And, it is at the horror of this treachery that I am left feeling hopeless again, faced with a never-ending riddle; when will death end and photography begin?

NOTES

(1.) Stanley B. Burns M. D., Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (New York: Twelvetrees Press, 1999), plate 46 and caption.

(2.) It is not clear whether the father of the twins was an affluent black slave owner or a white slave owner who had a black mistress--especially when considering the boys' rather light skin for African Americans. The extended caption for this photograph gives very few clues on this matter: "Postmortem photographs of black people from photography's earliest era are quite rare. By the 1880s, however, postmortem photographs were regularly being taken of the black middle class. The 39205 and 305 postmortem Images of Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee contained in The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978) are the best known postmortem photographs in the world. This tintype taken on November 7, 1863, of twins will and J. G. Kehoe, is the earliest known postmortem image of a black American. The father of these boys was a slave owner and obviously loved his twins."

(3.) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 302.

(4.) J. G. and Will compose an oscillating identity; Will is always understood as "not J. G."

(5.) Camera Lucida, p. 78.

(6.) Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in What is Cinema? (Berkley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 15.

(7.) The thoughts gathered in this newly added paragraph are indebted to Geoffrey Batchen's recent article about the Missing Person posters that covered New York after September 11: Geoffrey Batchen, "Requiem" in Afterimage, vol. 29, no. 4 (January/February 2002), p. 5.

INDICES

[1] Photographer Unknown, portrait of my grandfather, Bae-Hyun Chang, taken in his lab at Seoul National University. He was kidnapped by the North Korean Government during the Korean War, and this is one of the few surviving photographs of him as an adult.

[2] H. Lyman, Black Twins, Will and J. G. Kehoe of Atlanta, 6.5 x 8.5" tintype, 1863. The image is part of the Thurman F. Naylor Collection.

JINA CHANG is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses photography, film, video and installation. She lives and works in Rochester, New York, where she teaches computer art and video production.

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