Interspatialism in the Nineteenth-century South

Are photographs memories? Do they recall people, places and events from across time and space, connecting the viewer with the subject? Are they, as Susan Sontag has argued, memento mori–reminders of our mortality and human condition? Or are photographs counter-memories? Do they block memory, as Roland Barthes would have it, replacing the thrill of memory with the dull certainties of history–a moment frozen from the past? Do they, instead of activating memories, exchange a personally significant moment (a memory) with a spatially significant one (a photograph)? Do they recapture lost people and places by imagining new ones? ¹ These are important questions, since photographs shape not only personal, but collective, memories–the ways in which groups, cities and nations remember and forget, how they construct versions of the past in order to understand and wield power in the present. ² From the birth of the medium, photography in America achieved an ‘astonishing collective visibility’ that profoundly shaped collective memories and national identities, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted. ³ Our collective understanding of slavery, as well as wars, depressions and working conditions, is inseparable from the images of them.