The Politics of Exclusion,

or, Reanimating the Archive

Ernst van Alphen

a b s t r a c t The notion of the archive covers two kinds of knowledge: knowl-
edge and memories that can be articulated and objectified by convergent dis-
cursive rules, and knowledge that remains overlooked because of the same
discursive rules, now working as rules of exclusion. Many contemporary art
practices foreground these exclusions from the archive by presenting them as
yet another archive. Artists highlight this residue of the archive by collecting
images that were until then not considered to be archivable, that is, of any
value or importance. In this article I will discuss work of Santu Mofokeng,
Akram Zataari, Walid Raad, and Darius Jablonski as examples of such arch-
ival artistic practices.
k e y w o r d s Archive, Exclusion, Classification, Archival organization, Ar-
tistic archiving

Since the 1990s, an archival boom has been spreading through the aca-
demic as well as artistic domain. At first it is difficult to assess this inter-
est in the archive, because the notion of the archive is used literally as
well as figuratively. Literally it refers to the institution or material site,
in short a building filled with documents and objects. Figuratively, it
concerns a much more general and ungraspable notion of knowledge
and memory practices not bound by or located in an institutional organ-
ization. Especially Michel Foucault’s notion of the archive seems to be
responsible for this figurative use of ‘archive’. He used the term archive
for ‘the law of what can be said’, or a set of discursive rules. Such a set
of discursive rules consists of specific conceptual distinctions that de-
termine what can be said and what cannot be said. In that sense, discur-
sive rules imply always at the same time exclusions. Those exclusions
concern memories, documents, practices of knowledge production that
are overlooked, not taken seriously, considered as unimportant or with-
out any value. Exclusions from the archive are inherent to any archival
organization. This explains why memories and knowledge ‘outside the
archive’, are also part of the archive, in the sense of produced by arch-
ival rules of exclusion. As a consequence an archival organization has by
definition an inside as well as an outside.
This implies that archival organizations are by definition selective.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida has shown how this selectivity comes

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 49–50 (2015), pp. 118–137

 The Politics of Exclusion, or, Reanimating the Archive

about. In his book Archive Fever he argues that he archive marks an insti-
tutional passage from the private to the public. Even private archives, like
family archives, demonstrate this, not in being publicly accessible, but in
what they store. Even private archives usually store that which is storable
and worth storing in the eyes of the public or the culture at large.1 It is
in the archive that the singularity of stored objects and documents is, or
better: becomes, at the same time representative for the category under
which the objects have been classified. The status of the archive as a place
of transition of private to public, and a place where the general (the rules
or laws of classification) and the singular intersect, has fundamental con-
sequences for the nature of that place. It implies that not everything can be
sheltered in such an archive. The archive is a selective place. It should be
more than a storage place of heterogeneous items or objects.
Because it intersects with the public and with the law, the archive is
ruled by the functions of unification, consignation, and classification. The
acts of unification and consignation imply that the archive is not passive;
it is not a place that stores uncritically. These acts imply the distinction be-
tween archivable content and non-archivable content, and on the basis of
that distinction one can even say that the archive produces its own content.
It is not just a passive receiver of content but an active producer of it.
This active, regulatory force is implied in the functions of unification
as well as consignation. That implication explains why according to Der-
rida consignation is a power. In his words:

By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the
act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign,
to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through
gathering together signs. […] Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus,
in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an
ideal configuration.2

The storing and gathering together in an archive pursues the formation

of a unity, a planned unity that decides what is archivable and what is
not. The objects stored are the result of ‘gathering together signs’ which
means that each object is not just stored because of its singularity, but
because of what it means and does in relation to the other stored objects.

The Politics of Classification

One fundamental way of establishing the distinction between what is
archivable and what is non-archivable is by means of classification. It
is not Derrida but Michel Foucault who in his The Order of Things: An

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Archaeology of the Human Sciences addresses the issue of the coherence

of the established classifications. This coherence (or lack thereof), is the
result of grouping and isolating, of analysing, of matching and pigeon-
holing concrete contents, in other words of establishing an order among
things. But this grouping and isolating is not the result of a ‘spontaneous’
ordering:

In fact, there is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained
perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of the application of
a preliminary criterion. A ‘system of elements’ – a definition of the segments
by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of vari-
ation by which those segments can be affected, and lastly, the threshold above
which there is a difference below which there is a similitude – is indispensible
for the establishment of even the simplest form of order.3

This simplest form of order can be recognized in the fundamental codes

of a culture, according to Foucault. He mentions the codes governing
a culture’s language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its tech-
niques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices, as examples of such
codes that harbour an order.
On the deepest level, Foucault’s entire oeuvre is devoted to the critical
analysis of the idea of order and the practices it inspires. This focus ex-
plains the wide range of his disciplinary frameworks as well as his enor-
mous historical scope. In The Order of Things, but in fact also in his other
works, Foucault attempts to analyse the experience of order and its modes
of being. He analyzes which modalities of order have been posited and
recognized ‘in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find
it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology, in
the study of wealth and political economy’.4 He is bringing to light the
epistemological field, or what he calls the ‘episteme’, in which knowledge
grounds its positivity. His ‘archaeological inquiry’ has revealed that the
‘episteme’ or system of positivities was transformed radically at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. An earlier
discontinuity had inaugurated the Classical age; the second discontinu-
ity, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of
the Modern age. These transformations of episteme were not a matter of
gradual development or progress; it was ‘simply that the mode of being of
things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the
understanding, was profoundly altered’.5 In his bringing to light of a spe-
cific episteme, either the Classical or the Modern one, he is concerned with
a history of resemblance, that is, with the conditions on the basis of which

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such an episteme was able to reflect relations of similarity or equivalence

between things; relations that provide a foundation and justification for
the episteme’s words, classifications and systems of exchange.
When Foucault writes about the episteme (the order of things), or
heterotopia as a subversive variation on an episteme, he is not referring
to archival organizations in the literal sense. An episteme is a more fun-
damental or ‘simpler’ form of order than an archival organization. But
archives are examples of ‘techniques’ or ‘practices’ in which the opera-
tions of an episteme can be recognized easily. The episteme governs the
principles according to which archival organizations are structured in
such a way that archives can be seen as emblematic examples of the
nature of an episteme. Also, archival organization is structured on the
basis of resemblance and distinction, on categories to which items belong
because they resemble the other items in their category, or they do not
because they are different.
But because of the increasing importance of the archive in the Modern
age, Foucault has also written extensively on the role of archives in that
period. For, what changed radically then is the so-called ‘threshold of
description’, the minimum of importance a piece of information must
have to be worthy of archiving. This threshold was lowered dramatically
in order to include common people. In the words of Foucault:

For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of every-

body – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed,
described in detail, followed from day to day by an interrupted writing was
a privilege […] The disciplinary methods reserved this relation, lowered the
threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means
of control and a method of domination. [What is archived] is no longer a
monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. And this new
describability is all the more marked in that the disciplinary framework is a
strict one: the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become […]
the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts.6

Foucault argues that a variety of new ways of examining and describ-

ing individuals was developed. The question, which then emerges is in
which sense this accumulation and processing of the new data differed
from the knowledge production of earlier centuries. For, scientists from
earlier centuries also had had an obsession with classifying objects and
archiving the results of these classifications.7
Foucault’s answer is that while it is true that plants, animals and even
human beings had been the subject of study before the examination

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regime was in place, they entered a field of knowledge as general cat-

egories, as a species for example, and not as singular individuals.

What was innovative about the new archives was precisely that they objecti-
fied individuals not as members of a pre-existing category, but in all their
uniqueness and singularity. Far from being archivable in terms of their shared
properties, human beings became linked to all the unique series of events
(medical, military, educational, penal events) which made them who they are
as historical individuals – a history which could now take the form of a file
while the individual became a case.8

In other words, whereas in the old archives individuals were used to

build or substantiate categories, in the new archive, categories are being
used to build or substantiate the individual. This leads to a situation in
which human bodies, events and archives interact, and it is this inter-
action, which brings about individual identity. This identity is then not
seen as a subjective interiority, but as an objective exteriority. All the
facts about people accumulated in the files and dossiers of databases and
archives, extracted from us via a variety of examinations, provide people
with an identity. This identity is not a matter of interiorized representa-
tion, like an ideology, but of an external body of archives within which
we are caught and that compulsorily fabricate an objective identity for
us. This ‘archival identity’ may perhaps have little to do with our sense
of identity, but this may not be the case for an insurance company, for
example, for whom archived medical facts are the key to our identity,
whether we like it or not.9
One of the radical implications of this new archive is that what, or
who, is not in the records does not really exist. This drastic consequence
is understandable when we realise that archival administrators do not
observe, describe and classify reality, but the other way around: they
shape people and events into entities that fit the categorizations and that
are recordable. This kind of reification entails that there are virtually no
other facts than those that are contained in records and archives.10

Reanimation
The notion of the archive covers then two kinds of knowledge: knowl-
edge and memories that can be articulated and objectified by convergent
discursive rules, and knowledge that remains overlooked because of the
same discursive rules, now working as rules of exclusion. As a conse-
quence any archival organization has by definition an inside as well as
an outside.

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 The Politics of Exclusion, or, Reanimating the Archive

Many contemporary art practices foreground these exclusions from the

archive by presenting them ‘as yet’ another archive. Artists highlight this
residue of the archive by collecting images that were until then not consid-
ered to be ‘archivable’, that is, of any value or importance. These images
excluded form the archive are still there but cannot be looked at because
according to the accepted discursive rules they do not show or articulate
anything worth knowing. An example of such an artistic practice trans-
forming exclusions from the archive into an archive in its own right is
the Black Photo Album by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng.
The Black Photo Album is the result of an investigation of images that
were commissioned by black working and middle-class families in South
Africa in the period between 1890–1950. It was in this period that South
Africa developed and implemented a racist political system. In this period
it was still common practice to depict African people in the same visual
language as animals, as part of the fauna in their own natural habitat.
In the ideologies of authorative knowledge, they were considered as ‘na-
tives’ and the official, ‘archivable’ images had to confirm such a notion
of African people. The photographs commissioned by black people and
representing them as bourgeois families did not fit this ideology and were
excluded from the archives of official knowledge.

Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo

Album / Look at Me 1890–
1950, c. 2011. Copyright Santu
Mofokeng. Images courtesy
Lunetta Bartz.

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 Ernst van Alphen

These images remain scattered in the private domain and are largely
invisible. In the words of Santu Mofokeng:

They have been left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on
obscure parlour walls in the townships. In some families they are coveted
as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lin-
eage and personality. And because, to some people, photographs contain the
‘shadow’ of the subject, they are carefully guarded from the ill-will of witches
and enemies. In other families they are being destroyed as rubbish during
spring-cleans because of interruptions in continuity or disaffection with the
encapsulated meanings and history of the images. Most often they lie hidden
to rot through neglect in kists, cupboards, cardboard boxes and plastic bags.11

Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album reverses the exclusion of these images

from the authorative public domain. He collects these images and the
stories about the subjects of the photographs. Within the context of the
gallery and the museum he presents them in a new format in combina-
tion with the stories. By doing this the neglected memories and images
are inserted into the public domain, and form the archive from which
until now they had been excluded. This reanimation of the invisible
exclusions from the archive implies much more than bringing to life
almost forgotten memories. By making these images into archival ob-
jects the ideology that subjected African people to the lower orders in the
‘family of men’, is rewritten.
Another example of an artistic practice compensating earlier exclusions
is the work of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. In 1997 he co-founded the
Arab Image Foundation (AIF). Based in Beirut, this archival foundation has
collected thousands of photographs and negatives from countries in the
Middle East and North Africa. Zaatari himself has conducted research in
photographic practices in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and collected
also images from those countries. Zaatari envisions his collecting of im-
ages not as appropriation of overlooked material but ‘as an intervention in
the social life of waning photographic images’.12 Because of civil and other
kinds of wars in the Middle East it is urgent to preserve these images from
destruction. In Beirut for instance, most commercial photo studies, which
were located in the downtown area, were destroyed in the civil war. The
only remnants of the production of these studies are prints collected from
Beirut families. The collections of commercial studios, not only in Beirut
but throughout the Middle East, have faced their peril in their commercial
decline. Many studios have sold off their negatives because of the value of
the silver content. But as destructive as wars and commercial decline is the

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fact that until AIF started to collect these images and negatives the photo-
graphic practices of these commercial studies was largely invisible because
not included in the public register of archivable knowledge.
Zaatari’s effort to preserve the photographic heritage of the Middle
East has resulted in a variety of projects. He made a documentary about
the studio photographer Van Leo from Cairo, titled Her + Him: Van Leo
(2001). Van Leo was professionally active in the fifties and sixties of the
last century. He had an eroticised relationship with his amateur models
who would make secret appointments at the studio to explore different
identities, also in the form of pornographic images. Zaatari also pub-
lished a book about Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer from
Beirot, who also used the studio as a site where clients explore new identi-
ties through portraiture. Cross-dressing, dressing up and dressing down,
and pornographic self-images belonged to an almost standard repertoire
of imaginary identities. His archival research resulted also in another
book titled The Vehicle (1999). In this book Zaatari has collected images
of studio clients who pose with their recently acquired automobile. In
new modern lifestyles identity is also constructed by means of the por-
trayal of the ownership of a car.
Yet another strategy to reanimate forgotten images was chosen by
Zaatari by pursuing the history of a set of images back to the people
photographed.13 He interviewed the people about the context and situation
in which the photo was taken but also asked them to pose again in exactly
the same pose as they were in in the photos taken so many years earlier. A
variation of this strategy was deployed for the series of images titled An-
other Resolution (1998). For these photos he asked Lebanese artists to pose
in the same way that photographers had asked children to pose a genera-
tion earlier. The original photograph and the re-enacted photograph were
installed together. The re-enactments were not made by Zaatari in order to
recreate an original moment but ‘to measure the limits of accepted behav-
iour in age and gender’.14 It is through the comparison of original and re-
enacted images that this social dimension of the images is revealed. When
the re-enacting adult artists stick out their tongues, recline in the nude or
drop their pants, one becomes aware of the fact that this kind of behaviour
in front of the camera is acceptable when it concerns children, but not for
adults. Also this social knowledge was so far invisible.
It is yet another Lebanese artist who has had great impact on the re-
thinking and of the archive and its impact: Walid Raad and his fictional
collaborators of ‘the Atlas Group’. These collaborators donated work to
the Archive of the Atlas Group. To give an example, Missing Lebanese

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 Ernst van Alphen

Akram Zaatari, Another Resolution, 1998, Lara Baladi, photograph. Copyright Akram
Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation. Image Courtesy Sfeir-Semeler Gallery, Beirut.

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 The Politics of Exclusion, or, Reanimating the Archive

Wars, consisting of plates and a notebook, was deposited in The Atlas

Group Archive by a well known (but fictional) Lebanese historian, named
Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. Other fictive legatees of the archive are Asma Taffan
(Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped, 1992), Habib Fathallah (I Might Die
Before I Get a Rifle, 1993). Walid Raad himself also donated work to the
archive (We Decided to Let Them Say, ‘We are Convinced’, Twice). The
project of the Atlas Group unfolded between 1989 and 2004. In the 2004
Raad decided to end this ‘collaborative’ project. In 2006 a retrospective
exhibition was organized that showed the complete Atlas Group Archive
in one single place, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.15
By means of the works in The Atlas Group Archive Raad questions the
mediation and archiving of information. The artistic, fictional archive
enables the exploration of new epistemic and cognitive models. This new
knowledge challenges the kind of knowledge that is disseminated by the
dominant mass media and by Western discourses about terrorism, colo-
nialism and orientalism. The presentation of artistic works as belonging
to an archive directs the attention to the cognitive conflicts and prob-
lems thematized by these works. Walid Raad explains why the archive as
place is the necessary framework for his cognitive project:

I like to think that I always work from facts. But I always proceed from the
understanding that there are different kinds of facts; some facts are histori-
cal, some are sociological, some are emotional, some are economic, and some
are aesthetic. And some of these facts can sometimes only be experienced in
a place we call fiction. I tend to think in terms of different kinds of facts and
the places that permit their emergence.16

Besides fiction, the other place in the work of Walid Raad that permits
these facts to emerge and become visible and knowable is the archive.
The documents and images presented by the Atlas Group are not inher-
ently fake or fictional. The texts and photographs were not manipulated.
But it is their montage and assembling into a narrative or specific histor-
ical situation that propels them into fiction. The montage of image and
text, or of different images is a specific mode of producing knowledge.
The texts and images are never presented at face value, but they always
‘trouble each other’.17 A good example of this use of montage of the Note-
book Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire donated to the Atlas Group
Archive by the already mentioned Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. This file contains
145 photographic images of cars. These cars are of the same brand, model
and colour as those used in car-bomb attacks during the Lebanese wars
of 1975 to 1991. Notes and annotations made by Fakhouri are attached to

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 Ernst van Alphen

Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plate 57 and 58, 2003.

the images. They specify information such as the number of casualties,

the location and time of the explosion, the type of explosives used. The
documentary information is all real and true. What is fictional however,
is the bringing together of these different elements in the notebook of the
imaginary character of Dr. F. Fakhouri. And of course, the notebook is an
archival genre. By using the notebook as the framework where factual
images and notes are presented, a cognitive status is assigned to them. It
is thanks to this archival genre that the images and notes are no longer
disparate elements without any cognitive value. They become knowable
and visible objects through the newly acquired status as archivable ob-
jects. The fictional archive of the Atlas Group present, in the words of
Chouteau, ‘latency, lapse, and speculation as vectors for historical truth
equal to those of verification, authenticity and proof’.18
But in the case of Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire,
the ultimate goal of this artistic project is not conveying knowledge about
the kind of cars that were used in car-bomb attacks during the Libanese

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 The Politics of Exclusion, or, Reanimating the Archive

wars. What is much more important are the layers of transmission due
to which this kind of knowledge was lost; and subsequently, the arch-
ival framework thanks to which this knowledge can be retrieved. What
is important is that the documents in the Atlas Group Archive, whether
they are photographs, texts or videos, are never authentic or original, but
always digital reproductions. They are always scanned, increased but of-
ten also decreased in size, and multiplied. The point is that ‘their original
state is lost in the layers of transmissions, exhibitions and repetitions,
and metaphorically in the rumours of history’.19 After the cognitive im-
pulse has been installed by means of these inauthentic reproductions,
what should be verified is not the materiality of these artefacts, but the
structures through which knowledge is lost or transmitted.
The works of Santu Mofokeng, Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad are
examples of artistic archival practices that pertain to a larger category of
memory practices, meant to reanimate excised histories. Since the 90s of
the last century the spread of memory practices in art and literature has
been enormous. These memory practices manifest themselves around is-
sues such as trauma, war, Holocaust and other genocides, migration, but
also in the increasing use of archival organisations combined with media
and genres like photography, documentary film and video. The primary
question raised by this flourishing of memory practices, which intend to
reanimate lost or invisible knowledge and memories, is if we should see
this as a celebration of memory, as a fin de siècle, and in the meantime
debut de siècle, as an expression of the desire to look backwards, or, in
contrast, as a symptom of a severe memory crisis or a fear of forgetting?
The answer will depend on how these memory practices are articulated.
As we have seen, these memory practices converge also in a specific aes-
thetics. It is on the basis of this aesthetics that we can evaluate the nature
but also the effectivity of these memory practices.

Reanimating Still Images

Either way, the contemporary art practices I just discussed, like other
memory practices so typical of our moment, may point to the meaning
of the present itself. In order to approach an answer to this question
of the meaning of the present through art practices, I will wind up
by focusing in the rest of this article on the work of Polish filmmaker
Dariusz Jablonski. He uses old, almost forgotten archival images for the
making of his film Fotoamator (1998) (Photographer). Jablonski based
his film on a collection of colour slides of the Jewish ghetto of Lodz
which were found in 1987 in a Viennese antique shop.

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 Ernst van Alphen

The fact that this filmmaker uses presumably authentic material for
his films does not, however, guarantee the effectivity of his work as reani-
mation. He had to frame and even manipulate the material profoundly
in order to convey the historical dimension of this material effectively.
In this respect his work is congenial to that of the three artists discussed
above, especially to Zaatari and Walid Raad’s. Zaatari’s re-enactments
and Raad’s montage of authentic material and facts within fictional arch-
ival frameworks were necessary devices in order to foreground the imag-
inary structures responsible for loosing as well as transmitting histor-
ical knowledge. But, I contend, it is precisely their explicit work on this
authentic material that safeguards this historical material from oblivion.
Jablonski highlights his manipulative work on the authentic material
even more than Zaatari and Raad. But it is in the tension between the
authenticity and manipulation of material that the political life of the
knowledge it contains becomes prominently visible.
Jablonski made his film on the basis of a collection of several hundreds
of colour slides of the Jewish ghetto of Lodz in Poland. These slides made
during the Second World War belong to the first generation of colour
photographs. So, they are exceptional in a double respect: because of
their subject matter and because of the fact that they have colour. They
were made by the Austrian chief accountant of the ghetto, Walter Gene-
wein. Jablonski’s film consists for the major part of close-ups, zooms and
pans of Genewein’s slides. These images are accompanied by a voice-over
that reads from letters written by Genewein and from his administrative
records. He was not only recording life in the ghetto by means of his
camera, but also, as accountant, by making endless lists. It is on the basis
of these lists that we learn that the inhabitants of the ghetto produced in
the factories in which they were employed 59.000 tooth brushes, 321.262
bras and 426.744 braces. But we also learn about the number of people
who died in the ghetto, subdivided in victims of tuberculosis, of heart
diseases, of malnutrition. The different deportations are mentioned and
the number of vans that were needed to transport the belongings of the
new inhabitants of the ghetto. These numbers alternate with informa-
tion about Genewein’s career, the promotions he made and the raises of
his salary. We get an image of him as a perfectionist administrator and
archivist. His records are utterly impersonal and distant and detailed in
the most surprising ways. In his correspondence he also tells his addressee
that he has decided not to use carbon paper anymore and to change to a
semi-automatic administration device.
The voice-over of the impersonal administrator is in sharp contrast

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 The Politics of Exclusion, or, Reanimating the Archive

with the vividness of the colour slides we see at the same time. This
vividness is even enhanced by the addition of realistic background
noise, such as that of traffic and the buzz of voices. The scenes showing
the colour slides accompanied by the voice-over of the administrator/
archivist alternate, however, with moving images showing the surviv-
ing doctor of the ghetto, Arnold Mostowics. He is being interviewed
about his memories of the ghetto. In fact, the film opens with footage
that shows the doctor in an old archive, probably the archive which
houses the former administration of the ghetto. These images are in
colour, like the slides, which are only later introduced into the film.
Before we get to see the slides, the doctor gives his reaction to these
slides and what they convey:

It was a shock, it was a shock, it was a shock that they existed. Please under-
stand, this was some 45 years after the war had ended. Suddenly I find out
about the existence of several hundreds of photographs taken by Germans.
And these were not ordinary photographs. Immediately these photos pro-
voked a feeling of unease in me. Unease at the fact that although they showed
the ghetto, it was not the ghetto. Although they were real, they did not show
the truth.

The nature of the doctor’s unease is not further explained at this mo-
ment. A self-evident explanation is that his memories of his past ghetto
experiences are not reconfirmed by the slides. The slides show some-
thing different, less horrific than we later hear him tell. But the unease
also seems to be caused by the colour and vividness of the slides. The way
the slides are framed in the film suggests that the doctor responds to the
fact that these images are too vivid to belong to the past, whereas his own
memories of the ghetto do.
Immediately after this introduction of the doctor the moving images
transform from colour into black and white. From then on, each time the
doctor is interviewed, we see him in black and white. Also other footage
that shows present Lodz is in black and white. This results in a rather
confusing, but also penetrating situation: black and white connotes the
present, whereas colour footage connotes the past. This is so confusing,
because out of convention we associate colour or the lack thereof, with
the opposite. Black and white has an aura of pastness, whereas colour re-
fers to the present. Watching Fotoamator we constantly have to readjust
our expectations of the significance of colour.
But there is more to it: the colour slides showing the ghetto are accom-
panied by the voice-over of chief accountant Genewein. His sentences

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 Ernst van Alphen

are in the present tense. He is not talking about the past but from the
past. The doctor, however, describing or recalling the situation in the
ghetto talks in the past tense. He is clearly talking from another temporal
dimension than the time he is talking about. One would think that the
vividness of the colour slides and the presentness of the accountant’s
voice-over is countered by the fact that the slides are stills and that time
in it is frozen. But this effect is not achieved because of the zooming and
panning movement of the animation. Although the slides show frozen
moments of time, what we as get to see as viewers is always moving.
In this film, the movement of time is in all respects the reverse of what
the ontology of time prescribes. This is, of course, first of all because of
the fact that the images contemporaneous to the ghetto are in colour.
Film director Jablonski is not responsible for this. But a variety of de-
vices he employed intensify the effect of the colour slides, bring past time
more definitely into the present, and distance the present from the past.
When, in the literal sense of the word, memory is a form of re-calling,
the film Fotoamator succeeds most effectively in bringing this past back
into our present. It does it so effectively that this past looks even more
present than do moments that are contemporaneous to the viewer’s time.
It may be clear by now that Jablonski’s film is highly self-reflexive about
colour, the lack thereof, and its effects. There is a recurring motif in the film
that foregrounds this issue of colour in unexpected ways. Chief accoun-
tant Genewein is quoted three times from letters he wrote to photography
company AGFA. He complains about a red-brownish shade that covers all
his slides. He asks for an explanation for this shade and for a solution to
prevent it from happening again. The moments that his complaints about
the quality of the colour are quoted are far from neutral. It happens at
moments that the most horrifying slides are being shown: slides of fam-
ished inmates of the ghetto, or of the deportations. The contrast between
what the images show and what the chief accountant comments on is enor-
mous. He is literally blind to the horror that he documents and archives.
Although the colour has now the effect on us that it makes the images
vivid in unusual ways, for Genewein, the colour was not vivid enough. He
could not see what he had registered. In this film colour separates times.

Understanding the Memory Crisis

The archive boom since the 1990s but also the spread of memory
practices in the artistic domain, of which I presented some examples,
raise the following question: are these symptoms of a memory crisis or
are they the opposite of that, rather a celebration of memory. I contend

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that they seem to be the expression of a situation in which memory is

under siege. This conclusion concords with that of other cultural critics.
Scholars such as Benjamin Buchloh and Andreas Huyssen have argued
that this memory crisis is first of all historical and specific. According
to Buchloh mnemonic desire is activated especially in those moments
of extreme duress in which the traditional bonds between subjects, be-
tween subjects and objects, and between objects and their representation
appear to be on the verge of displacement if not outright disappearance.20
In the 1990s especially massive migration due to economical reasons or
political wars resulting in genocides, have caused such moments of ex-
treme duress. But the memory crisis is not only historically specific in
the socio-political sense. I contend that it is also caused by media culture,
by its overwhelming presence since the 90s and by the specific forms
this culture develops. The enormous impact of photographic and filmic
media culture has not worked in the service of memory, but on the con-
trary, threatens to destroy historical memory and the mnemonic image.
Already in the 1920s, German sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried
Kracauer explained how media culture can have this devastating effect.
In his essay simply titled ‘Photography’, he makes a diagnosis of his own
times that seems to be at the same time a prophetic diagnosis of our time:

Never before has any age been so informed about itself, if being informed
means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic
sense […] In reality however, the weekly photographic ration does not all mean
to refer to these objects or ‘ur-mages’. If it were offering itself as an aid to
memory, then memory would have to make the selection. But the Hood of
photos sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of this mass of images
is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potential existing awareness of
crucial traits. Artworks suffer this fate through their reproductions. […] In the
illustrated magazines people see the very world that the illustrated magazines
prevent them from perceiving. […] Never before has a period known so little
about itself.21

Relevantly for our discussion, Kracauer sees historicism, the scholarly

practice that emerged more or less at the same moment as modern photo-
graphic technology, as the temporal equivalent of the spatial mediations
that take place in photography. In Kracauer’s words:

On the whole, advocates of such historicist thinking believe they can explain
any phenomenon purely in terms of its genesis. That is, they believe in any case
that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in

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their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial

continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According
to historicism, the complete mirroring of an intertemporal sequence simul-
taneously contains the meaning of all that occurred within that time. […]
Historicism is concerned with the photography of time.22

How can we consider a medium and a scientific discourse as parallel?

Photography and historicism regulate spatial and temporal elements ac-
cording to laws that belong to the economic laws of nature rather than to
mnemonic principles. In contrast, Kracauer argues, memory encompasses
neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire
temporal course. Nor does memory pay much attention to dates; it skips
years or stretches temporal distance. Kracauer writes in this respect:

An individual retains memories because they are personally significant. Thus

they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from
the organizing principle of photography: memory images retain what is given
only in so far as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible
to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds
with photographic representations.23

Memory images are also at odds with the principles of historicism, con-
cludes Kracauer later in his essay.
Historicism’s temporal inventory corresponds to the spatial inventory
of photography. Instead of preserving the ‘history’ that consciousness
reads out of the temporal succession of events, historicism records the
temporal succession of events whose linkage does not contain the trans-
parency of history.24 It is in the daily newspapers that photography and
historicism join forces and intensify each other in their destruction of
memory. In the 1920s daily papers are illustrating their texts more and
more and the numbers of illustrated newspapers increased. For Kracauer
those illustrated journals embody in a nutshell the devastating effects of
the representation of spatial and temporal continuities, mistaken for the
meaning of history.
Clearly, Kracauer’s diagnosis of a memory crisis as caused by the phe-
nomena of photography and historicism, relatively new in his day, seems
also highly relevant for an understanding of the position of memory in
the 1990s and after. His bleak prophecy seems to have come true.25 For
Huyssen, the spread of memory practices especially in the visual arts, is
symptomatic of a crisis, not of a flourishing of memory. The memory crisis
that started at the beginning of the twentieth century seems to have ac-

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celerated and intensified at the end of that century. The reasons for this are
again twofold. First of all, there is a historical and specific reason; second,
this acceleration is a result of the impact of developments in media culture.
I will focus, here, on the second reason. The principles of mediating
historical reality introduced by photography and historicism are inten-
sified through film, advanced electronic technologies such as computers
and internet, mass media, by the explosion of historical scholarship and
an ever more voracious museum culture. It is the abundance of infor-
mation that explains the memory crisis of the 1990s. Huyssen writes:

For the more we are asked to remember in the wake of the information explo-
sion and the marketing of memory, the more we seem to be in danger of for-
getting and the stronger the need to forget. At issue is the distinction between
usable pasts and disposable data.26

Yet, it is not only this very specific mediation of (historical) reality that
has its devastating effects on memory; it is also the nature of the histor-
ical and political reality of the 1990s itself. Historical memory used
to give coherence and legitimacy to families, communities, nations
and states. But in the 1990s these links that were more or less stable
have weakened drastically. In the processes of globalization and mas-
sive migration, national traditions and historical pasts are increasingly
deprived of their geographic and political groundings. Whereas older
sociological approaches to collective memory, most famously repre-
sented in the work of Maurice Halbwachs, presuppose relatively stable
communities and formations of their memories, these approaches are
no longer adequate to grasp the current dynamic of the fragmented
memory politics of different social and ethnic groups.
It is against this background of a century-old, but now accelerated
memory crisis that the memory practices in the visual arts, archival or
not, should be understood. It is in these practices that memory becomes
an issue of transforming aesthetics. To assess the political value of such
transformations in the aesthetics of memory, the question that remains
is how effective these practices are in countering the threat of oblivion.
Mofokeng’s, Zaatari’s, Raad’s, as well as Jablonski’s work are strong
examples of what I called the spread of archival memory practices that
have become so prevalent since the early 1990s. Of course, it is impossible
and undesirable to generalize about this art and the cultural practices
that are performed in it. It is more important to distinguish productive
from unproductive memory practices, and try to understand in what re-
spect memory practices are productive or unproductive. Because some

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and perhaps even most of these practices show a kind of naïve, nostalgic
and sentimental celebration of the past, usually limited to a personal past,
without actively engaging this past in our political present, it is impera-
tive to stop at attempts such as Jablonski’s to overcome these distancing
practices. My reading of Jablonski’s Photographer, suggests, however, that
the media and genres used for these memory practices are themselves
deeply implicated in the crisis of memory they appear to counter.
If used conventionally and uncritically the archive, but also media such
as photography and film and genres like documentary, the family album,
or home movies, lead to a memory crisis. They embody the principles of
traditional historicism Kracauer criticized, for they are based on the kind
of temporal or spatial continuities that are easily mistaken for the meaning
of political situations or of personal lives. It is only when the use of these
media and genres is performed critically and self-reflexively that they are
transformed from embodiments and implements of that crisis to alterna-
tive practices that counter the very same crisis. It is only then, in the words
of Jill Bennett, ‘that art does not represent what already occurred, but that
art sets up conditions for relating to the event’.27

Notes
1. See for a discussion of how and why archival records are socially constructed
and maintained entities, Ciaran Trace, ‘What is Recorded is Never Simply “What
Happened”: Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture’, Archival Science
2, no. 1 (2002), 137–59.
2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), xx.
4. Ibid., xxii.
5. Ibid.
6. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), 191–92.
7. For clear descriptions of the history of archival science, see Fernanda Ribeiro,
‘Archival Science and Changes in the Paradigm’, Archival Science 1, no. 3 (2001),
295–310 and Hermann Rumschöttel, ‘The Development of Archival Science as a
Scholarly Discipline’, Archival Science 1, no. 2 (2001), 143–55.
8. Manuel DeLanda, ‘The Archive before and after Foucault’, in Information is
Alive, eds. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing and NAi
publishers, 2003), 11.

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9. Manuel DeLanda, ‘The Archive before and after Foucault’, 12.

10. In archives interfaces function as the critical nodes through which archivists
enable and constrain the interpretation of the past. The interface is a site where
power in the Foucauldian sense is negotiated and exercised. It is power exercised
over documents and their representation, over the access to them and over the uses
of archives. See for archival interfaces, Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Archives, Memory,
and Interfaces with the Past’, Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002), 21–43.
11. Santu Mofokeng, ‘The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1900’, in Chas-
ing Shadows, ed. C. Diserens (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2011), 230.
12. Mark Westmoreland, ‘You Cannot Partition Desire: Akram Zaatari’s Cre-
ative Motivations’, in Akram Zaatari: El molesto asunto / The Uneasy Subject, ed.
Juan Vicente Aliaga (Mexico City: León, 2011), 43.
13. Ibid., 43.
14. Akram Zaatari, ‘Interview’, in Indicated by Signs, eds. Aleya Hamza and Edit
Molnár (Bonn: Bonner Kunstverein, 2010), 120.
15. The complete contents of the archive are published in the following book: The
Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad (Köln: Walther König, 2006).
16. Quoted in Gunilla Knape, ‘Afterword’, in Walid Raad: I Might Die before I Get
a Rifle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), 99.
17. Hélène Chouteau-Matikan, ‘War, There, Over There’, in Walid Raad: I Might
Die Before I Get a Rifle, 104.
18. Ibid., 105.
19. Ibid.
20. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive’, in Atlas:
The Reader (London: Whitechapel, 2003), 109.
21. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 58.
22. Ibid., 49.
23. Ibid., 50.
24. Ibid., 61.
25. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Mem-
ory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1.
26. Ibid., 18.
27. Jill Bennett, Lecture at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 July
2005.

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