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OCR
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 representing history. Thus, in this particular case the camera is a medium of experiencing 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 photographers—reenactors—present their photographic narration of WWII. They complement 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. 601
