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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 biographies—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 ambition 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 understood 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 engagement 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 relevant for reenacted photography. Although it uses the language of WWII pictures, it inevitably involves the language of later wars, as well as of contemporary photography 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 11 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. 597
