Page 593 [593]
OCR
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 reenactment: taking photographs may be an act of reenactment (2007: 300). The phenomenon 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: indispensable 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 photography 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. Performing 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 interpretations 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
