Page 593 [593]
Historical Reenactment in Photography: Familiarizing with the Otherness of the Past?
tory. The foreignness of the past represented in them (to refer to the often-abused
slogan of David Lowenthal, 2011) is strengthened by the otherness of the war itself
and by the frequently raised issue: the separation of contemporary viewers of war
photography from war experiences (Berger 1999; Sajewska 2013; Sontag 2010).
Nevertheless, the feeling of otherness does not paralyze reenactors’ will to cognize
the past. History in this perspective is seen rather as a different culture, which can
be understood within the general human condition (see Domariska 2005: 61, 76—
77). Moreover, war photography, though it presents a foreign (to use Lowenthal’s
notion) reality, is a convenient material to imitate, since there are many pictures
preserved that were made by war cameramen working at various fronts and within
various armies. Imitating those photographs allows us to simulate the aesthetics of
war pictures, however, reenactors are often more ambitious in this respect and want
to represent more than aesthetics.
The analysed activity is enumerated in Vanessa Agnew’s definition of reenact¬
ment: taking photographs may be an act of reenactment (2007: 300). The phenom¬
enon I am going to describe refers only to historical periods when photography was
in use. Photographers take pictures that imitate or simulate the past; sometimes
they even reenact the whole practice of taking photographs. In their work they refer
to form, content, and aesthetics of the original pictures they have access to. They
learn how photographs were produced and composed, what was their subject in
a particular epoch and what was deliberately ignored in the iconoclastic gesture of
a photographer (see Demski 2015; also Mitchell 2005). Having some knowledge
about original photography, the reenactors try to create their vision of the past
themselves by means of photography, capturing scenes from re-created reality. This
kind of photography has to be considered within the wider framework of historical
reenactment as such, since, as I will show further, it is closely related to the general
goals of re-creating history—namely, performing, experiencing, and immersing in
the past (Gapps 2009).
There are various media through which touching and narrating the past in
historical reenactment is possible. They—just like Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire
(1989)—include movement, gesture, historical sources, and memorial sites: indis¬
pensable and interconnected elements of the reenactors’ practice. What is more,
representations of the past embedded in those elements are frequently transferred
from one medium to another. I am particularly interested in the process of turning
images into gestures, which are subsequently transformed into image once again
by reenacting war photography. I focus on the crucial relation between photogra¬
phy and practice or, in other words, the embodiment of the photography-related
knowledge based on static images of the past and the performance of it. Perform¬
ing and constructing visions of the past, as experiencing history itself, relies on the
interplay of these factors, and due to the powerful ability to create new interpre¬
tations of history and new ways of experiencing it, the performance seems to be
the strongest of all media representing the past involved in reenactment (Johnson
591