Oldal 599 [599]
Historical Reenactment in Photography: Familiarizing with the Otherness of the Past?
acting photography as well, but perceiving it as a part of historiophoty allows the
viewer to see the voice of reenactors in the discussion of history in those images.
Reenactors try to depict war history through the prism of particular types of biog¬
raphies—for example, to underline bravery or contrary depression of the soldiers
of a particular unit in a particular moment of the Second World War. Reenactors
would like to attract audience attention to details, to microhistories (see Domanska
2005) and not to global processes.!! Photography is in their opinion one of the
means of expression that can draw attention to a detail—despaired sight, madness,
to a single death that was forgotten in a chaos of war, or to a determination with
which soldiers fought, though they had no chance to survive. This perspective of
a detail was what photographers I talked to wanted to grasp. They have the ambi¬
tion to show war as a sum of microhistories, of particular stories that melted into
a history of global, macro processes. Some choose to do it through photography.
Analogous to historiography, which operates with words, historiophoty is un¬
derstood to work on images. I sustain, however, the conviction expressed earlier
that in reenacting photography there is more than a mere attempt to represent the
past in images. This particular historiophotic practice involves evoking emotions
and experiences directed towards history, since reenactment is a kind of affective
history (Agnew 2007; McCalman & Pickering 2010), based on a personal engage¬
ment with history (Carnegie & McCabe 2008).
Referring to art, Bojarska writes that when reenacting the past from a historical
distance, we make history irreducible to a particular historical event, making the
past involved in a game of memories, associations (2013: 10). I believe this is rel¬
evant for reenacted photography. Although it uses the language of WWII pictures,
it inevitably involves the language of later wars, as well as of contemporary photog¬
raphy and the whole of contemporary imagery of war. Moreover, nowadays those
pictures cannot be seen, read, or interpreted within the historical context of WWII.
Historiophoty, just like historiography, depends on the condition of the present.
Simulating War Photography
Reenacted photography is a part of historiophotic practice; it gives or at least
should give us an image of the past. At the same time it does not bear witness to
the past, it simulates it. As one of the photographers put it:
I have my own satisfaction, that Im, well, close to the original to the degree
that someone who also deals with history takes my picture and says—look it
is an original one. But I never make those pictures thinking that I’m going to
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This kind of perspective of a detail embedded in reenacted photography usually allows a photographer
to escape the more general discussions on the visions of history, which are present also in the reenactment
movement and are inevitably connected with historical policy. Photographers I talked to agreeably stated
that they try hard not to get involved in politics.
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