Till Förster: Remembering visually. How pictures instigate processes of remembering

Mittwochskolloquium Ethnologie

Pictures do not ‘bring back’ memories – they rather instigate processes of remembering.

Photos taken years, sometimes decades ago are not mere mirrors of the past. They may depict people, events or landscapes of the past, but they are also part of the present when people look at them, take them in their hands, turn them, show them to others. ‘Watching’ pictures is, as Arielle Azoulay has claimed, a multilayered practice, which is deeply entangled with the present and the past. It testifies to sedimented experience and to what the people who watch the pictures make of it when they are watching them.

It is not a new insight that pictures have a life on their own, that they seem to want something from us, the spectators. And it is neither new that spectators can and do engage in many ways with pictures. Exploring this tension is a challenge for everybody who does ethnographic research in cultural settings where other forms of mediality prevail. How do people remember when they watch pictures of people, events, and things past? This question is the thread that ran through my fieldwork conducted in January and February 2022 in northern Côte d’Ivoire. After an interruption of two years, it renewed empirical research conducted of the SNSF project “Life in the West African Savannah since the 1970s”, which had begun shortly before the outbreak of the Corona pandemic.

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