Photography and Nostalgia

Sophie Newell b. 1987 Manchester, England. Lives/Works: Omaha, NE “This Sure Is a Grand Place,” 2019 Mixed media collage on postcards; Photo courtesy of the Artist

In the early 2000’s, after graduating from college and looking for some adventure, my husband and I packed up and moved out West to San Francisco. We found an apartment in a four-plex and soon after met our neighbor, who took it upon himself to introduce us to all the best Bay Area flea markets. One of our favorites became the Berkeley Flea Market, and we would often take the train under the Bay on Sunday afternoons to wander around and see what the vendors had to offer.

There was one vendor we would visit regularly, his booth made up of several large cardboard boxes set on the ground, filled to the top with photographs. There was no particular organization or order and the images spanned decades, moving from black and white and sepia tones to Kodachrome. I could spend hours there, just digging and looking at all the little snapshots from people's lives. I would wonder why these once treasured objects would end up here in this bottomless bin; if someone took the time to document that moment it must have been important. The thousands of nameless, smiling faces staring up at me did not offer an answer.

In addition to photos the vendor also sold cameras and camera parts. One weekend my husband purchased an old super 8 film camera from him, and on returning home we found that there was still film on the roll. We sent it in to be developed and a couple weeks later found ourselves watching a stranger’s pool party unfold on our living room wall. In 2002 this felt very clandestine, watching a family from 1970 wave at the camera and take turns on the pool slide. Watching someone else’s memories. Thinking back on it now it seems funny that I would feel that way, when everyone’s personal lives are readily available online through a variety of social media platforms. If you don’t post it did it actually happen? What is the role of photography in our digital culture? Ksenya Gurshtein writes in her essay for the Biennial, “in a world full of selfies and casual documentation of our lives in myriad digital snapshots, portraiture as an art form still remains singularly powerful.”

These memories, and many others, come flooding back when I look at Sophie Newell’s small collage “This Sure is a Grand Place.” Newell collects her found images from sources much like the Berkeley Flea Market vendor. Cast off photographs, postcards, and memorabilia find new life through her work. In her essay On Photography, Susan Sontag refers to photographs as “an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.” Although photographs are often thought of as historical recordings, over time the images lose their context, becoming less about documentation and more susceptible to our own personal projections. Even though we can hold the physical object in our hands, is the image ever really ours? Newell is depending on this collaboration with the viewer, asking that we bring our stories along. This approach reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Cindy Sherman, whose photographs are purposefully ambiguous and build on the viewers’ narratives.

Newell’s work hangs on a wall with three other artists: Morgan Ford Willingham, Josephine Langbehn, and Melinda Laz. Grouped together to suggest a wall of family photos, this installation highlights the ideas of nostalgia present in the artists’ works. Instead of nameless faces the images by Newell, Langbehn, and Laz present the viewer with faceless figures. This opens the images to interpretation from the viewer, playing on our own memories and nostalgia. Langbehn, in particular, remarks in her statement that she often leaves her subjects faceless, because “no matter how much I discover about them through interviews or research, they still remain a mystery to me.” These pieces are flanked on either side by Willingham’s cyanotypes, a method of photo development created in the 1840s traditionally used for blue-prints. Willingham’s portraits of herself and her daughter are printed on found vintage textiles, alluding to shared histories and memories carried over generations.

Photography and Nostalgia

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