Stallabrass, Julian (b. March 16, 1960)

Memory and Icons: Photography in the War on Terror

May-June, 2017

"Describing the phenomena as 'flashbulb memories', Brown and Kulik found that episodic and source memory appeared tightly enmeshed, so that subjects vividly recalled not just the event, but where and how they came to know it. Such recollections also seemed to have a strong affinity with the still photograph, to the extent that they were sometimes described as being like a print--static and unalterable."

In a 1977 study, Roger Brown and James Kulik looked at memories that seemed to preserve or freeze detailed images of shocking events over long periods of time, apparently unchanged. They interviewed adults about how they remembered such events as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Describing the phenomena as 'flashbulb memories', Brown and Kulik found that episodic and source memory appeared tightly enmeshed, so that subjects vividly recalled not just the event, but where and how they came to know it. Such recollections also seemed to have a strong affinity with the still photograph, to the extent that they were sometimes described as being like a print--static and unalterable. Indeed flashbulb memory may be set off by the shock with which a disruptive icon is first grasped. Sontag, in a famous passage, writes of first seeing photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau as a child, describing the experience as a deep cut that transformed her view of the world and would stay with her for life.
(pp. 47-8)

Visual Arts::Photography Machine::Flashbulb

Reading. Stallabrass cites "Olivier Luminet and Antonietta Curci, eds., Flashbulb Memories (Hove: 2009), pp. 250-1.

Julian Stallabrass, "Memory and Icons: Photography in the War on Terror," New Left Review (May-June 2017). <Link to NLR>

08/05/2017