Speak Memory I

On Memorials and Documentaries

Memorials are visual structures set in public spaces to recall history and remember the dead. Documentaries (see Speak Memory II) can serve a similar purpose. But in contrast to the emotional and intellectual effect documentaries have on us, how often do we walk by memorials without deeply acknowledging the suffering and sacrifice they are intended to remind us of? And how little do we know of the events memorialized in either case? For the most part, are we largely unaware, unmoved and distanced from the history of war, even of recent paroxysms of organized human malice as considered in the Serbian and Congo cases. In speaking to this, these linked photo essays revisit a few memorials in passing as a tourist might along the Thames Embankment in London or at Kew Gardens, overlooking Plymouth harbor or across the Atlantic on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

How often do we pass by such memorials or pass over showing such films in classes, the multitude of wars and war crimes, rampant human rights violations ongoing, safely out of sight and out of mind?

Dawn on the Embankment

When I am in London, I find myself drawn before dawn to the embankment. I wait there for the sun to rise over the Thames, sometimes with Conrad’s opening lines to The Heart of Darkness in mind, the whole history of colonialism and empire ingathering. Perhaps you recall the “mournful gloom”, the “brooding motionless”, the “benign immensity” – “the serenity” and “tranquil dignity”.

As the early light whitens the ancient twice plundered Pharonic obelisk my thoughts shift from J. M. W. Turner’s oil paintings and draft water color sketches of the Thames and the House of Parliament in flames to Napolean’s Egyptian campaign. There the exquisitely executed Orientalist paintings of Gerome always come to mind. And as the bright rays of the day strike the golden eagles wings on the World War Two memorial, slowly, gently, the lowermost words “I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you unto myself” begin to lighten.

Thus in London on the embankment waiting for dawn, at Kew Gardens and in Washington, D.C., waiting to enter into archives and libraries or for the effects of remaining light at the end of the day, I have found myself around war memorials capturing moments that speak memory to me - words and images, thoughts that travel across time and place as unconstrained as butterflies. Here then a few disparate images of memorials and gardens that recall and speak to the fragility and beauty of life in contrast to all the horror revisited in the three documentaries related to war in Speak Memory II.

Across the road from the World War Two Memorial on the banks of the Thames, yet un-warmed by the day, in the well kept park across the road, the morning dew is yet fresh on the memorial sculptures. There pink tulips are subtly opening by the Fawcett memorial, between there and Whitehall, the whole history of public works, social consciousness and Empire evoked. There we stroll past a history of capitalism and colonialism, of public and private gardens as Karl Marx might have on his way to the British Museum. If you know this park, you might now then recall these memorials to commemorate the various historic events and important figures in education and welfare placed tastefully along the way.

My mind is in motion. It flits across images in history and art, word and image marking moments along the trajectories of the rise and fall of empires. Book after particular book, Ruskin, paintings by Turner and Gerome, a film, a photograph, all manner of works of art constantly intrude on the conversations in my inner landscape. Sometimes particular scenes in films and documentaries replay unbidden. Is it not the same with you?

Towards Whitehall, the camel corps memorial, bronzed power twists. Have you ever stopped there and wondered where is Romani or Baharja, Mazar or Daklah? Who died there in 1916, how and why? What happened on Hill 265 in 1917? Of-course, you recognize some of the places such as Gaza and Amman, the Jordan Valley. But who knows where Mudawara is? And why should you care unless you are Palestinian or Jordanian or Jewish or an Oxford don studying the final conquest and partition of the Ottoman Empire?

As my work has come to increasingly focus upon archives and memorials I have found that taking photographs provides me with an extended and heightened subjective means of engaging these places. It has become more than a documentation process, allowing me to foster a sense of being there-ness and ultimately I hope for extending and communicating the moment, the memory no less the importance of the memorial.

Whether it be in tulips in spring in London or in the only garden in Kabul, the red poppy fields in Flanders, the same enlightenment joy courses through me when I see archives, libraries and gardens well tended. Perhaps I am more aware of the gift of libraries, of memorials of artistic merit and gardens of great beauty in places like London and Georgetown than one would be if one either lived in such places or was less obsessed with history and did not live in a place like Jakarta or Bangladesh.

Little doubt there are larger legacies at work in this pleasure taken in gardens and libraries, in the power of spaces and images as it were. Thus I have come to appreciate the annual pruning of the woody vine above the yet un-leafed hedgerow below across the road from the World War Two memorial upon the Thames, the un-American gently tasseled grace of the

flowering blue border in spring and the soft grassy English edge saved from Teutonic discipline and chemical war.

In the impressionistic density and intense color range of the unfolding symphony of tulips and the calculated planting, re-planting and care of the beds over the seasons to follow, I take in each moment in such spaces with a profound sense of joy. It is a joy no less felt in the organization, management and richness of the great metropolitan libraries and archives, the quiet scholarly industry at work within places like The Courtauld and The Warburg Institutes.

My remaining task then, is ultimately a practical one - that just as one could connect the histories to which the above memorials speak, so might one compare documentary films about war and war crimes for historical memories sake.