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Historical Reenactment in Photography: Familiarizing with the Otherness of the Past?
Re-creating photography is a part of the historical reenactment movement
not only as one of its practices but also as a realization of its assumptions and
ways of relating reenactors to the past. The aim of the reenactment movement is
thus to present history in a multimedial way, different from school education (see
Wilkowski 2013). For photographers, the camera is another means to look at the
past. They share this view with other reenactors, the audience, and all those who
enter their profiles on social networking sites.
Reenacting photography, as a whole historical reenactment movement, is more
about first-hand experiences of the past and about an affective attitude towards
history (Agnew 2007; Cook 2004) than about raising academic discussion on rep¬
resenting history. Thus, in this particular case the camera is a medium of experienc¬
ing the past not only of capturing it. It is also a medium of presenting a different
face—focused on details and microhistories—of WWII,” since it is, as I see it, an
attempt to supplement original war photography with reenacting photography and
to tell another story about war, a story of unknown facts, focused on the particular
biographies of both men and things (Daugbjerg 2014), making an advantage of the
contemporary reflection about it.
Reenacted photography tries to capture the dynamics of the past: battles (e.g.
from the September Campaign in Poland 1939, the Winter War 1939-1940,
campaigns in Africa 1940-1943, Italy 1943-1945, battles in Netherlands 1944,
France 1944), gatherings, joys, and sorrows. Using various techniques, the photog¬
raphers—reenactors—present their photographic narration of WWII. They com¬
plement their own—reenactors —historical narration construed, not only as the
basis of academic, social, and cultural narrations of the past, but also of their own
experiences of touching history (Schneider 2011) deriving from the participation
in the reenactment movement. For reenactors, such photography can be described
in Berger’s words as private: not only linked to their own life experiences but above
all as a representation of their attitude towards the past. Dorota Sajewska reminds
us that reenacting the past is not merely representing it, it is participating in it
(2013: 11). This strategy seems to also underlie reenacting photography. And for
others, who are just looking at those pictures, it remains, using Berger’s categories
again, public photography, since neither war experiences nor the reenacted ones are
a part of their lives.
2 Tt is important to note that reenactors do not present alternative and fantastic visions of history but try
to switch perspective from general to particular.
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