Photographic Memory II

I wrote in my book The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker, 2020–2022: 

A filmmaker’s or writer’s work can be said to compose an oeuvre not simply when there is a recurrence of certain themes, events (for example, rain or snow falling inside an interior space in Tarkovsky’s films), singular movements (for example, levitation in Tarkovsky’s films), and sustained exploration of certain cinematic or literary elements (for example, the close-up in Bergman’s films) but when it is also the case that if one of his or her films or books has a proper name for a title, then this book or film includes the themes of his or her oeuvre foregrounded in those titles of his or her books or films that are not proper names. Someone who considers that Dostoyevsky’s writings compose an oeuvre is to expect to find in the novel Brothers Karamazov notes from the underground, an idiot, a gentle creature, a double, devils or the damned, crime and punishment, etc. … When an author’s books or a filmmaker’s films compose an oeuvre, it is apposite, indeed sometimes revelatory, to switch his or her book or film titles that are not proper names among each other – not randomly, but judiciously.1

Whether Hrair Sarkissian’s practice elicits admiration, reservation, or indifference, it is clear he has an oeuvre.2

From this perspective, the photographs that are part of Sarkissian’s Execution Squares – which depicts three Syrian cities’ public squares where executions usually take place photographed at dawn, presenting tranquil spaces emptied of bodies – might more aptly be titled Last Seen, the title of his series in which he photographs mostly interiors where people who later disappeared during war or civil unrest were last seen by their families, since the reported site of kidnapping is most often a public space: a street, a checkpoint, a café, the entrance to a building, a taxi stand, a road between two districts.3One of the most notorious sites of the Lebanese Civil War was the Barbara Checkpoint, which was established by the Kataeb (Phalange) militia on the Beirut–Tripoli highway on 22 April 1979, following the massacre of 13 of its supporters near the village of Amchit. By the late 1980s, the checkpoint had come under the control of the Lebanese Forces. The site was divided into two adjacent stations: a tax checkpoint, where militiamen collected money from those passing through, and a security checkpoint section, where travelers were stopped, interrogated, and sometimes detained. Many of those taken aside there were never seen again. It was also at this checkpoint that, on 4 July 1982, according to Lebanese media reports, four Iranian diplomats were abducted – in other words, last seen.

The title Last Seen would also fit Sarkissian’s project titled istory (2011), a series of 16 photographs documenting the ‘history’ sections of various semi-private and public libraries and archives in Istanbul. Sarkissian’s own history, as a Syrian Armenian, is entangled with these books and files. He was permitted to work in the rooms housing the archives yet was not allowed to pick up or open any of the material. If the site of a kidnapping marks the place where a body was last seen, the moment when an archive becomes restricted marks the last moment when a document was, in principle, last seen and read. In one case, what vanishes is a person; in the other, what vanishes is access to historical documents. Thus, the displacement of the title Last Seen from one of Sarkissian’s projects to the projects officially titled Execution Squares and istory is neither arbitrary nor whimsical but confirms that these three works belong to an oeuvre.

In one of the photographs of studio backdrops of Sarkissian’s Background – a 2013 series, shot without human subjects, in which he documents photography studio backdrops and settings in six cities in the Middle East, thereby preserving a record of a disappearing convention of studio portrait photography in the region – some books, notably those on the floor in the foreground and those placed on the central shelving structure, seem materially present, while the densely stacked books behind them appear to belong to the photographic image that forms part of the backdrop. This impression is supported by two distinct border effects. Near the bottom of the backdrop, a horizontal band of rectangular, brick-like forms projects slightly beyond the surface formed by the stacked books behind it, so that this lower band reads not as a mere line but as a shallow relief. Above, one seems to glimpse a narrow-illuminated edge or border running horizontally over the mass of books. This upper strip can be viewed as the limit of the backdrop, where the photographic surface or panel catches light differently from the darker studio environment surrounding it. It is apposite to displace the theme of Sarkissian’s Execution Squares onto this studio backdrop in Background, for then the very crime for which the condemned is executed – publishing and distributing books critical of the government – becomes the backdrop against which he or she is put to death. The books are seized, displayed in the interrogation room as proof of guilt, then catalogued as evidence and stacked. In such a scenario, the crime is no longer peripheral to the scene of execution; it becomes the dominant visual field. The execution takes place in a room lined with the very materials deemed subversive; crime and punishment occupy the same frame. When a human figure stands before a studio backdrop showing stacks of books, the resultant photograph makes the represented background seem fully three-dimensional, and thus makes the books appear readable. The books seem to promise reading, and yet most of them cannot be read because they are, in fact, a flat décor, an image; they signify knowledge – in the imagined scenario above, subversive knowledge – without granting access to it. In istory, by contrast, the books and other documents are materially real – not photographic props but archival holdings – yet they, too, cannot be read: the guest is permitted to photograph the shelves but not to open the books. In both cases, the book is visible yet unavailable. What differs is the mode of unavailability: medium-related in one instance, institutional in the other. Thus, two distinct regimes of unreadability emerge: the backdrop produces an illusion of access; the archive, the reality of restriction. But the effect converges: the viewer confronts stacks of books that cannot be opened and read.

‘Because we don’t know [when death will arrive], we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really … How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless’ (Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky). When giving a prognosis to patients reckoned terminally ill, their respective doctors had spoken with measured reserve, indicating not a date but a starkly narrowing temporal horizon, so that the perceptive addressee would have sensed that while the future persisted grammatically in sentences such as ‘I am too tired to talk to Anna now; I will call her in half an hour’, it thenceforth survived only in the attenuated form of a death sentence, if not of a hypothesis. When asked, as in Sarkissian’s Last Scene, to choose the places they wished to see one last time before dying (for his project Sarkissian photographed the locations chosen by terminally ill patients at the same date and time as the final visit in the previous year), one chose a dune at the edge of the sea; a second, a churchyard in winter light; a third, a museum gallery housing Rembrandt’s The Night Watch; a fourth, his father’s carpenter’s workshop, its walls crowded with wooden tools and with the slow accumulation of work done over decades (how felicitous: the sea exemplifies natural repetition, the museum cultural repetition, the churchyard ritual repetition, and the father’s carpenter’s shop artisanal repetition). One chose a scene of a first instance: the first encounter with a lover. One chose a scene of a last encounter: the last time one was with a beloved who later disappeared, was kidnapped, or was executed. The first is chosen because it retrospectively acquires the weight of origin; the second because it becomes, often without our knowing it at the time, the final point of contact before absence. At the time, the first encounter does not yet know itself as first; it is merely one meeting among others, a moment that could easily dissolve into the anonymity of ordinary time. Likewise, the last encounter does not announce itself as such but occurs without ceremony, often with the casual gestures of repetition: a familiar goodbye, the expectation of another meeting soon to come (Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962: ‘Nothing distinguishes memories from other moments; it is only later that they claim remembrance, by their scars’). The first encounter is extracted from the flow of experience and endowed with inevitability, as if the future relationship had already been latent within it. In the case of the last encounter, a word that seemed incidental becomes, in retrospect, the final word spoken; a glance becomes the last exchange and thus acquires an unbearable density. Memory thus selects, frames, and intensifies: what was once simply part of the ongoing texture of life becomes a scene – almost (classically) painterly in its composition. Between these two scenes – one recognised only afterwards as a beginning, the other only afterward as an ending – life unfolds in a succession of other encounters whose singularity is rarely perceived when they occur … or subsequently.4

The journey to the selected places was not experienced as the last journey to them. At the quaint train station café, the woman who had selected the shoreline she had once visited with the man who later became her husband, drank coffee from the paper cup in the same absent way she had drunk all her previous coffees from paper cups, whether there or elsewhere. During the train ride, she mechanically offered her ticket to the conductor, who clipped it with the same habitual motion he must have performed thousands of times. These habitual gestures belonged to the category of what repeats ‘countlessly’, of that towards which one’s attitude is ‘who’s counting?’ Having reached the dune, she stared at the sea: its waves ebbed and flowed with the constancy characteristic of many natural phenomena. After a time, she turned away and muttered: ‘I shouldn’t forget that I’ll be seeing Anna tomorrow morning for breakfast.’ Based on the doctor’s prognosis, it was almost certain that this would be the last time she would see this beach, but she presumed that the breakfast with her daughter Anna before her trip to the beach would not be the last. In her case, the anticipated end did not occur within the ever-narrowing yet still indeterminate interval set by the doctor’s prognosis – the diagnosis proved faulty. Months later she returned to the same shoreline, not because she wished to repeat the final visit to the sea, the ‘last scene’, but for another reason entirely: her daughter needed photographs of dunes for a school project. She had traveled to experience a memorable scene one last time, yet the trip yielded the opposite result: the scene designated as final proved repeatable, while the taken-for-granted, barely noticed figures, gestures, and places – the train conductor, his habitual ticket-clipping gesture, the café – that had seemed destined to repeat had already concluded their series of repetitions: the conductor who clipped her ticket on the earlier journey had retired, and the café where she had bought coffee had been purchased by a chain restaurant and remodeled. True lastness turned out to lie precisely where repetition had seemed most assured.

* The title evokes my text ‘Photographic Memory’, in The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic, vol. 1, No Place Press, 2025.