Oldal 145 [145]
Ana Djordjevié
stance—what an ordinary or extraordinary event or picture is? What categories do
we apply and what discourses shape our perceptions and notions? Also, following
James Elkins’s thoughts on photography, it is important to ask what we as research¬
ers are reading into the pictures and what we want them to be. Are we so obsessed
with our hunt for Barthes’s punctum? that we are ignoring “photographs themselves”
and instead looking beyond “for romance and memory” (Elkins 2011: 41)?
When it comes to discussing practices involved in “Othering” and visual en¬
counters of alterity, it seems that images that supposedly unequivocally construct
the Other or the “different” are elevated. Does this focus strengthen and continue
Othering because we as researchers use loaded categories and reproduce Self-Other
relations found in our sources? Is there a way out? I believe there is if we try to focus
on the “Self,” bringing forward powerful narratives involved in identity building
and strategies of the Self in negotiating its position in society (Hall 1994: 394-395).
“Just as the family picture can be read as a self-portrait, so the self-portrait al¬
ways includes the other, not only because the self, never coincident, is necessarily
other to itself, but also because it is constituted by multiple and heteronomous rela¬
tions ... Difference or otherness, in this conception, is not an external difference,
but an otherness within—within a circumscribed cultural group, such as a family,
and, also, within the self, reflecting the subject’s own plurality over a lifetime, the
intersubjectivity that is subjectivity” (Hirsch 1997: 83).
In her seminal work Family Frames, memory scholar Marianne Hirsch has not
only introduced the concept of “postmemory” for describing imaginative projections
and re-creations of post-Holocaust generations, but also has laid down an inspiring
way of accessing and analyzing family photographs. By thinking about Self-Other
relations as embedded in multiple and heteronomous relations, as she suggests, a
fruitful path for overcoming binary opposition thinking can be pursued. The col¬
lections I discuss do not include family photographs only. They rather witness a
broadening of social relationships, which do not comprise relatives only but give
insight into how concepts of friendship and work relations alter Serbian society as
well as concepts of individualism and national belonging.
Before I start analyzing the selected images, I would like to emphasize the role
of the photographer in the process of creating an image of the Self. As scholars such
as Stuart Hall and many others have shown, photographs always need to be embed¬
ded in the contexts of discourses that shape the final outcome. In the case of studio
2 As reactions to photographs, Barthes differentiates between the studium and the punctum. The studi¬
um denotes a cultural interpretation, an overlying meaning visible to most spectators and an encounter
with the photographer’s intentions, whereas the punctum describes an affective, emotional concept, a
personal meaning evoked by some photographs. The punctum is something seen by the spectator al¬
though not intentionally shown by the photographer. Barthes also calls it a personally touching detail,
an accident that pricks the spectator (see Barthes 1989: 35-36, 52; see also Burgin 1986: 78; Fried
2005: 546).