Reenactment as a Photographic Act

Reenactment as a Photographic Act Excerpt from

Chapter “3-1: Copying, Capturing, and Reproducing” from the book Reframing Photography: Theory + Practice

Rebekah Modrak

This excerpt concerned with the role of photography in reenactment concludes a chapter exploring various stages of reproduction – from capturing the original subject, to the production of a negative, to the printing of a positive image. The chapter begins by considering the photographic object as a relic such as a death mask that molds light to transfer the physical body of the original through time and space, Walter Benjamin’s liberation of the photographic reproduction and how this plays out in such feats as Otsuka Museum’s replication of 1,000 iconic Western artworks, the photograph as a kind of clone or as a set of genetic instructions that is only complete in its inaccuracies, the interconnections of reproductive technologies in the industrial age in stoking our urge to collect, share and consume, and the rules and ethics that govern what may or what may not be photographed, as practiced through art and journalism. This leads us to the excerpt below, which follows the act of recreating earlier scenes, photographs, and events. The feat of recreating can be found in rephotographic projects, in reenacting earlier works of art, and in group recreations of civil and modern war. Each method poses questions about the difference between an original and its copy, about presentday interpretations of the past, and about changeable standards of authenticity. The following section explores two types of re-enactments: those that recreate earlier images, and those that reproduce “actual” events (though, as many of these events were in themselves based on imagery, it is hard to pin down the origin as belonging to reality or to media). Keywords: Reenactment, Photography, Photography Theory, History of Photography, Contemporary Art, Art History, Postmodernism, Translation Studies, Historical Reenactment, Social Activism.

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Re-photographing Photographs: Re-photographic Survey Projects The term rephotography usually refers to the act of retaking an historical photograph: locating the original vantage point, under the original lighting conditions in the present day, and taking a second photograph that reproduces the earlier shot. Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) began his project with the Brown sisters in 1975. Every year he takes a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters, standing in the same order. In some senses, this is a rephotographic project, a photograph made to commemorate an earlier photograph; in other ways, the work speaks to the family photograph as a type of reenactment in which they (or we) confront the camera, and present themselves as a family, and as individuals within a family, in a particular arrangement, year after year.

The term rephotography is used to describe the process of rephotographing a scene that has been imaged previously. In Mark Klett’s (b. 1952) Rephotographic Survey Project (1977-79), Klett, JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus worked from photographs by wellknown nineteenth-century survey photographers, such as Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and John K. Hillers. Klett’s team located the original scenes and made new reproductions intended to show changes in land formation and cultural variance. Twenty or so years after making these second views, Klett continued the project with Kyle Bajakian, Toshi Ueshina, Byron Wolfe and Michael Marshall. This time, with the goal of supplementing the rephotographs with GPS mapping of the locations, field notes, artifacts, video and sound documentation taken at the sites and the creation of a website to display all the results.

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3 The process of making Third View (1997-2000) is documented in a book called View Finder. Unfortunately, the author William Fox underscores the machismo of the event by writing about Klett, his crew and the process of rephotographing with utter reverence. His use of third-person narrative, his action-based language and his emphasis on the pursuit (by car) and the equipment (“a formidable array of still, digital, and video cameras”) suggest that this journey in search of past views is a kind of safari-hunt. For example, as Klett hones in on the vantage point of a particular “rephoto” in Texas, Fox writes:

The whole time Klett is glancing back and forth between the eight-by-ten black-andwhite print in his other hand and the closest hillsides. He must be watching the road, too, because we make it to the edge of town in one piece. Without any fanfare, Klett takes turns immediately into the city park, drives by an improbably green lawn surrounded by sagebrush, parks, then walks directly to the vantage point.i

Fox’s emphasis on the pursuit and his of dynamic language perpetuates the romanticism of photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) who created grand views. These photographs documented the geology of the west to provide maps of unexplored territories, to help identify mineral reserves for development, and to encourage tourist trade. Many Third View images subvert this earlier, idealized first view by revealing the advance of human traffic or receding populations and by catching members of the photographic crew on camera, attending to distinctly non-heroic functions. In an image of Karnak Ridge, Nevada, Byron Wolfe appears to check a blister and in a rephotograph of Timothy O’Sullivan’s Shoshone Falls, Idaho, Wolfe checks his laptop above the Falls, seemingly enraptured by the laptop screen and oblivious to the grand scene nearby. [FIGURE 3-1.34]

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4 The desire to re-record past images is manifested in numerous other rephotographic projects, including The Atget Rephotographic Project, originating in 1987 to rephotograph scenes imaged by French photographer Eugene Atget, the Kansas Geological Survey’s 3D rephotographs of Alexander Gardner images, Boise Then & Now, the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotography Project, Douglas Levere’s rephotographs of Berenice Abbott’s images of New York. There often seems to be a desire in these “then” and “now” projects to make sure that the imaged world is still being classified, that the real world hasn't broken free during some lapse in attention. Often, words provides more context, conveying the impact of the historic images; this is the case with Bill Ganzel’s 1979-80 Dust Bowl Descent, in which he rephotographed and interviewed people pictured in the original 1930s Farm Security Administration photographs.

The Postmodern Phenomenon: Reenactments of Unreality Two trends in recent years have inspired artists to construct their own images of fictionalized realities. First, media images have become more accessible and more explicit since the 1950s, from daily images of accidents and tragedy on the local news, to the horror of war in Vietnam and images of abuse and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Second, notions of truth have been broken down by lapses in critical journalism that fail to examine representations of race, gender, class and power and by the emergence of digital media, which cast questions of truth or fiction onto all representations. Introducing the 1989 exhibition, The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s, Joshua P. Smith wrote that

The feeling of powerlessness engendered by the loss of hope for constructive social and political change and the feeling of betrayal produced by the official fabrications and cover-ups of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra scandal have conditioned many 4

5 of us to see real life as unreal and to view official public truth as fiction. In the kind of era in which television, our dominant visual and information medium, presents fiction and truth indistinguishably—with news becoming like entertainment and docudrama masquerading as history—and our leaders and would-be leaders present themselves through “photo opportunities” and disinformation campaigns, the invented images in this exhibition are a forceful response, and even a useful guide, to the brave new world in which we live.ii Photography is a perfect tool for invention as it connotes authority and can, therefore, be put in the service of creating an “official unreality.” Increasingly, images already in circulation are often the subject of this unreality. Rather than work from the “real” world, many artists, working from the 1960s to the present day, have chosen to use historical, vernacular, or media images as the point of “origin”. The philosophy behind this approach is similar to photographer Ken Josephson’s (b. 1932) practice of holding postcards or other images within the scenes he was photographing. Lynne Warren wonders if this was a way of making photographs that acknowledge the image as a representation that relies upon pre-existing representations. By recognizing the illusion and the fact that any photograph taken has, in some ways, already been taken, Josephsons’s insertions attempt to “escape being redundant.”iii Umberto Eco describes this as the postmodern attitude:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly 5

6 that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her; but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.iv

Likewise, artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) renders herself through the visual products of advertising, fashion, pornography and movies by performing (and rephotographing herself playing) the roles implied in the pose, costuming and attitude of their subjects. In her 1977-80 series, Untitled Film Series, she presented herself as 69 versions of female types, as seen in movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Alternately startled, seductive, wistful, or poised, all stills are characterized by framing that corners the female subject or by a vantage point that leers over or behind each woman. [FIGURE 3-1.35]

Sherman’s grainy, black and white prints captured the utilitarian spirit of film stills. Just as any film still presents a key moment in a movie, albeit an incomplete version of that character or narrative, Sherman’s series of moments reenact already existing media-identities. In other series, such as Centerfolds (1981), History Portraits (1989-90), Sex Pictures (1992) and Older Women (2002), Sherman continues to present composites of women constructed from her memories of what Merry Foresta calls “pictured experience.”v Sherman’s influence on future generations’ desire to stage reenactments can be seen in Janine Antoni’s (b. 1964) reenactment of herself as her parents (and they as each other), Chen Chieh-Jen’s (b. 1960) digital photographs of punishment [FIGURE 3-1.36], Nikki S. Lee’s (b. 1970) study and on-camera performance of groups such as Yuppies, skateboarders and young Japanese in the East Village, and Kristan Horton’s (b. 1971) obsessive recreation of stills from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove. [FIGURE 3-1.37]

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7 Yasumasa Morimura: Reenacting Across Cultures Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951) played the part of women in his reenactments of female starlets in classic roles, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minelli, and Marilyn Monroe, and in masterpieces, becoming Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Manet’s Olympia, Kahlo’s Kahlo and Goya’s Maya. With the aid of a computer to smooth out the details, the final works, printed large, assume the monumental status of the original painting or celebrity. If Sherman’s reenactments stir up vague memories of paintings or photographs, Morimura focuses on particular images and his uncanny ability to imitate gestures and facial expressions. Though his cross-gender reenactments originate in the Japanese tradition of Kabuki Theater, in when men played female roles, the choice to use cross-cultural works of art or identities comes from the influence of the Western world on Japanese tradition. As a child, the artists he knew and studied in school were Western masters such as Picasso. Morimura writes that by using his “clearly Asian-looking” male face to reenact these iconic paintings, he hopes that viewers will feel estranged. “The picture of things gone amiss, imbalanced, distorted, disturbing and strange serves as a psychological portrait of myself having been strongly influenced by Western culture, despite having been born and raised as a Japanese man.”vi

More recently, Morimura chose to reenact images from popular culture and recent historic events. In his 2006, Season of Passion/A Requiem: Chapter I, he transforms himself into author Yukio Mishima, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in Eddie Adams’ (1933-2004) photograph. [FIGURES 3-1.38 AND 3-1.39] Morimura chose to portray men as a kind of cleansing ritual to purge the history of what he perceives to be masculine values.

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8 There are two kinds of beings in the world: ones like Amaterasu [the Sun Goddess in Japanese mythology, known for warmth and compassion] and others like Susanoo [God of Storm and Sea, known for violence]. Awful historic events in the 20th century were men’s doing – I think, provoked by the Susanoo in them. For a long time, I produced works that embraced the values represented by Amaterasu, particularly with the “Actress” series. And I see that the [traditionally male-dominated] Japanese society has changed to accept and appreciate such values.vii

Reenacting Memory: Vik Muniz The famous photograph taken by Eddie Adams of a South Vietnamese colonel executing a communist North Vietnamese Vietcong prisoner in the street was printed on the front page of at least five major U.S. newspapers on February 2, 1968. Reproduced at a moment of public debate over whether American forces were winning the war in Vietnam, the lawlessness of the execution, along with the failure of the Tet offensive, fueled the antiwar movement.viii Eventually reaching iconic status, Adams’ photograph burned itself into the minds of citizens everywhere and continued to be reproduced in photo books such as The Best of Life and Photographs That Changed the World. In 1983, artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961), a Brazilian living in Chicago, purchased The Best of Life at a garage sale. Having recently arrived in the United States, with little knowledge of English and few acquaintances, Muniz says the book made him feel connected with his new home.

Losing the book gave Muniz an opportunity to check his memory to learn how much he remembered of those photographs. Every day, as he awoke, he would draw what he could bring

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9 to mind of Adams’ image and a few others, sometimes asking other people to contribute their memories to inform his drawing.

Once I’d transformed the image-memories into drawings, I thought they should be returned to their photo state. So I photographed the drawings. When they were ready, I printed the photos with the same halftone screen the original photos were printed on. People thought they were seeing bad reproductions of photographs of famous events, but in fact they were only looking at pictures of thoughts.ix

The process of making this work helped him to understand that our relationship with an image is more dependent upon the quasi-reproduction formed in our head. For Muniz, his memoryimages lost facial detail and correct body positions but retained clothing and architectural features and point of view. [FIGURE 3-1.40] Similarly, Kota Ezawa’s reductive drawings of historic photographs strip away all the minutiae and lay bare flat, orderly prompts in place of the originals.x [FIGURE 3-1.41]

Rephotography as a Passage Back in Time Mircea Eliade has noted that the act of traveling back in time is at the core of modern psychotherapy: “…the cure [of trauma] consists precisely in a ‘return to the past’; a retracing of one’s steps in order to re-enact the crisis, to relive the psychic shock and bring it back into consciousness.”xi Often, rephotography is a way to cope with experience, as in Zbigniew Libera’s (b. 1959) Positives, a series of photographs presenting buoyant versions of famous horrific images, such as the children burned by napalm or the moment when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. [FIGURES 3-1.42 AND 3-1.43] Lukasz Ronduda counsels that “What is real cannot be presented directly, because the essence of trauma is that the psyche is 9

10 not ready to represent it and capture it in words. Therefore, in the life of the psyche, the real can only appear in the form of unclear repetitions.” In this sense, re-enactments such as those made by Libera, Muniz and John Grech are more accurate than the original photographs because they depict the true nature of trauma, as a gap between the real and the unspeakable.xii

John Grech created the interactive web project, Sharkfeed (1997), to “gain greater insight into” the 1960 kidnapping and death of Graeme Thorpe, an Australian boy. Using historic photographs, recordings and his own rephotographs of significant locations in the tragedy, Grech tracks the event in a number of lines that follow the path of the boy, the response of his family, the media’s coverage and the kidnapper’s background, in order to confront a moment that redefined public perceptions of trust. Descriptions from police journals, such as a report of the handkerchiefs in the dead boy’s trouser pocket, still creased with the neat folds made by his mother’s hands, revisit not only the site of the physical trauma, but the loss of a mother’s son, and the larger cultural realization of the childhood as perilous, even with parental protection.xiii Grech used rephotography to separate the divide between the viewer and our ancestors.xiv

Reenactment as a Form of Photography Capturing an image does not complete the photographic act; a viewer is needed to rouse the subject through contemplation. Family photographs and historical documents, each allow the observer to “return to the past.” Many artists, such as Janet Cardiff, Pierre Huyghe, John Grech, Marina Abramovic, and Sophie Calle, use the photograph to stir such memories, but also thrust themselves or others into the past through conversation or reenactments. A reenactment is the ultimate photographic act, the process of reproducing a living representation. These forays enrich, question or reconfirm present convictions and individual or collective memory. In Other People's Feelings Are Also My Own - Soul Drawings (2004-06), artist Marcus Hansen dresses 10

11 like his subject, then attempts to assume the emotion, body language and facial expression of that individual. Presented through video documentation, the results are somewhat startling as Hansen’s transformations are incredibly reminiscent of his partner and each presents a drastically different version of Hansen “himself.” [FIGURE 3-1.44] Using reenactment, the work proposes a more empathetic role for a portraitist in recording his or her subject.

The act of reproducing, of retelling, asks us to recall details all over again. Psychologists studying memory have learned that the human brain will recall facts more precisely if they are received as a story, rather than as a list. Additionally, in “This is Your Life (and How You Tell It)”, Benedict Carey writes that “the perspective people take when they revisit the scene [in memory] – whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie” – affects the emotional intensity of that memory at the present moment. Those who describe a past event in third person, as though it happened to someone else, are less likely to be upset than those who become absorbed in the memory in the first person.xv

To be effective, the third person voice must be shaped by the individual in question. The unsettling dissonance of too many storytellers and the resulting inability to control one’s own memories is at the center of artist Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962) two-channel video, The Third Memory. Huyghe filmed John Wojtowicz retelling his memories of a 14-hour standoff with police in Brooklyn, New York in 1972. During the botched robbery, Wojtowicz and his partner took hostages, who quickly became sympathetic to their lives. The crime became a media event. Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, reenacted the events, with Al Pacino as Wojtowicz. Fictional liberties taken by the screenwriters have, over time, confused Wojtowicz about the actual events of the robbery. Using double screen projection, Huyghe’s Third Memory presents Wojtowicz in a set re-enacting the day’s events, alongside clips from Dog 11

12 Day Afternoon and original television footage of the robbery. Huyghe’s reenactment passes from the first memory of the actual event to the second memory of Dog Day Afternoon, to the third memory, Wojtowicz’s reenactment of the day in a rudimentary version of the Dog Day Afternoon set. Wojtowicz’s third view account is noticeably compromised by the striking collision between the first and second views. Additionally, Wojtowicz’s admission that he had studied for the crime by watching Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, with Al Pacino as the bank robber suggests that his actions were predisposed to media influence from the beginning.xvi

Historical Reenactment and Reproduction Reproduction as recreation involves retelling, recollection, memory, and interpretation. Matthew Brady’s team of photographers, who photographed the aftermath of battle in their images, essentially retold Civil War soldiers’ stories. Depending upon the photographer and their perspective, they reproduced the horrors of war or sense of patriotism. Timothy O’Sullivan photographed mutilated bodies in order to reproduce something of the reality of war. But Alexander Gardner felt that bloated bodies didn’t tell the real story. Instead, he turned bodies around to hide evidence of decay or swelling, planted guns as props to show the corpse as a soldier, not just a body, and placed a soldier’s hand on his heart to suggest that the death was valiant. [FIGURE 3-1.45] Authenticity was not an issue in the late nineteenth-century. Mary Warner Marien writes that during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) an amputation scene in a “Mexican daguerreotype was probably staged for the camera”xvii and during the Spanish-American War (1898), photographers even “faked battle scenes on the roofs of New York City buildings, using toy boats floating in bathtubs, and cigar smoke for the fumes of burning.”xviii By the early-twentieth century, photographic documents were expected to be “truthful.” In a scene from the movie Broadcast News, a guerrilla soldier rubs his bare 12

13 feet before putting on his boots. A cameraman urges the soldier to put on his boot and his producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) scolds the photographer, reminding him that they are not there to stage the news. “Wait and see what he does.” In a tension-filled moment, the confused soldier, now surrounded by attentive armed comrades and the news team, pauses, and then puts on his boot.xix This concern for misrepresenting even an insignificant action is telling of late twentieth-century journalism’s sense of objectivity in reporting facts and concern for looming threats to these standards – digital technology, increased competition among emerging cable, and satellite stations that often encourage entertainment-type news.

The insistence on authenticity in reproduction is an essential issue for Civil War reenactors, twenty-first century men, sometimes tens of thousands at a time, who don the period uniforms of nineteenth century soldiers and play out the battles as described in journals. Civil War reenactors sometimes refer to reenactments as “snapshots of history,” thereby implying that the simulation has become the document.xx The main goal of the fifty thousand reenactors in America is authenticity, to give a factual “impression,” a portrayal of a particular solider, from a particular unit. To ensure accuracy, reenactors study primary sources of information, such as soldiers’ diaries and the archive of Mathew Brady’s historical photographs, and use the research to do an “impression”, a portrayal of a particular soldier. In some instances, the socalled factual basis for their “impressions” was based on impression as well. For example, during the Civil War, the 17th Michigan Infantry used novels and color engravings to inform their sense of army life:

When called to combat, they changed from their usual fatigue uniforms into their dress uniforms, thinking they should meet the enemy in their best clothes. The men then went into their first battle in full dress uniform, with Hardee hats, brass scales on their 13

14 shoulders, and white gloves. Because the engravings never showed the men wearing packs in battle, they left them on the road. They never went back for their knapsacks, and during the rest of the campaign they went without food, blankets, or a change of clothes.xxi In Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor’s Handbook, an important guide for reenactors, R. Lee Hadden lists several levels of knowledge to achieve, including uniform and equipment; understanding of 19th century persona, attitudes and lifestyle; and general knowledge of the Civil War. In this third area, Hadden points out that reenactors know more than the soldier they are portraying would have known. Most significantly, they know how the war ended.xxii In all the 276 pages of his handbook on civil war reenacting, R. Lee Hadden gives such details as what kinds of snacks are authentic to eat (apples), and the type of apples that would have been available during the War (Granny Smith), but not one word alludes to slavery or other economic or political motivations for the war. The quest for authenticity is all in the details, with no care for the larger historical and social implications. In response to criticism that restaging war with all the details, but none of the sacrifice, trivializes the horror of war, reenactors counter that everyone – historians, journalists, reenactors, citizens – has a right to participate in interpretations of history.xxiii

When captured by the lens of Liz Magor’s (b. 1948) camera and printed as a black and white print, the Civil War “hobbyists” seem to become immortalized as the real thing. [FIGURES 31.46 AND 3-1.47] In her 1990-1991 images, taken at various reenactments across the United States, uniformed individuals stand by wagons, pose for the camera or lie dead. Only slight anachronisms – the clarity of the camera lens, and the film’s ability to capture smoke emanating from the muzzle of a rifle – reveal the truth. Magor’s Civil War Portfolio re14

15 imagines the past by asking if these scenes, taken a hundred and twenty years after the conflict, are a more realistic documentation of Civil War events than the technologies at the time were able to capture.

Jenny Thompson, author of Wargames: Inside the World of 20th Century War Reenactors, believes that reenactors do not use the hobby to relive history, but to cope with present-day issues, to use the role of soldier to act out unstated everyday ways in which they are either a hero and a pawn or use the hobby to fulfill the needs for camaraderie that go unmet in their everyday lives. Many reenactors are married and buried in their uniforms. By reproducing scenes of war, reenactors believe they have a legacy to leave behind.

Re-staging as a Slow Exposure: Jeremy Deller and the Battle of Orgreave Reenactments bring up questions of how a story is retold, but also about which stories are chosen for commemoration or inquiry. In an episode of TV Nation, Michael Moore reenacted the LA Riots. His choice pointed to the amount of time that must pass before we are ready to turn a bloody, deadly conflict into a leisure activity and the fact that the nostalgia of fallen soldiers isn’t applied to torched neighborhoods, or to African-and Korean-Americans. British artist Jeremy Deller (b. 1966) felt the same distress about the violent confrontation between striking miners and the police on June 18, 1984 in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Most media coverage of the mass picket and brutal pursuit by police provided violent images, rather than a deeper understanding of the conflict. After fifteen years of contemplating the effect of those images and wondering about the realities of those involved, Deller chose to re-enact the event. While Moore briefly revisited the L.A. Riots, Deller spent over a year reading about the Battle at Orgreave, and interviewing people involved in the strike and battle, including former miners, labor leaders, police officers, and participants in the women’s support group. Additionally, he 15

16 enlisted the help of re-enactment expert Howard Giles to direct over 800 participants, including many miners and a few policemen from the original battle. [FIGURE 3-1.48] Accompanying the “veterans” were members of more than 20 historical reenactment societies from all over the country who, Deller says were “well trained in recreating combat and in obeying orders” and whose involvement legitimized the Battle of Orgreave as “part of the lineage of decisive battles in English History.”xxiv

Whereas the original event was chaotic and provided little in the way of resolution, Deller’s reenactment introduced a kind of slow exposure, a thorough, thoughtful documentation of the event. Unlike Civil War re-enactments that focus on logistical details, rather than sociopolitical significance, Deller was not interested in “a nostalgic interpretation of the strike.”xxv Over time, he discovered evidence that the strike and conflict were part of a preconceived plan by the Thatcher administration to break unions in the UK using paramilitary tactics.xxvi

While re-enactments are often called “living histories”, Deller’s inclusion of former miners and policemen meant that the actors were walking in familiar and deeply personal territory. The reenactment enabled former miners, whose families had worked in the mines for generations, to commemorate the iconic moment when they lost a meaningful part of their lives. In this sense, the re-enactment may be closer to medieval pageants, than to contemporary historical reenactments. In An Arena in Which to Reenact, Sven Lütticken distinguishes between the contemporary reenactments, a group of individuals reenacting, and pageants, in which a community is “presented with an image of itself through exposure to history from the podium” and also learning “by doing through the medium of play.”xxvii Deller’s examination of the battle of Orgreave allowed the miners to be recognized and gave the public access to the collective memories produced by the project. 16

17 Ideally, Lütticken writes, “reenactors want to break through the two-dimensional images into physical experience.”xxviii In a reenactment, one could say that the size of the reproduction, the “photograph”, is based on a one-to-one scale. In this sense, the representation is similar to virtual reality (VR) technology. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich asserts that virtual reality

can be found whenever the scale of a representation is the same as the scale of our human world so that the two spaces are continuous. This is the tradition of simulation rather than that of representation bound to a screen. The simulation tradition aims to blend virtual and physical spaces rather than to separate them. Therefore the two spaces have the same scale . . .xxix

Re-enactment provides a compromise between the unsatisfactory two-dimensional image and the invented simulation. Re-enactments are related to the real, but are more immersive than a flat image.

The ability to reproduce an original is one quality that distinguishes photography from other media. One source can generate numerous negatives and positives, with varying degrees of difference from the original. The “Reproductive Processes: Tools, Materials, Processes” section that follows this essay builds upon these comprehensive and expansive definitions of reproduction by providing descriptions of tools and techniques associated with low tech duplication processes (from transfer to silkscreen and the photocopy) and film and digital recording, processing and printing.

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18 William L. Fox, View Finder: Mark Klett, photography, and the reinvention of landscape (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, c2001), 56. i

Joshua P. Smith, “The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s,” in The Photography of Invention: American pictures of the 1980s, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1989), 14. ii

Lynne Warren, “Kenneth Jospehson: A Philosophy of Paradox in Kenneth Josephson, (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983), 9. iii

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose including the Author’s Postscript, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harvest Books, 1994), 530-1. iv

Merry A. Foresta, “The Photographic Moment,” in The Photography of Invention: American pictures of the 1980s, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1989), 4. v

Yasumas Morimura, “About My Work,” in Daughter of art history: photographs, Yasumasa Morimura (New York: Aperture, 2003), 114. vi

Kay Itoi, Season of Passion [interview with Yasumasu Morimura], artnet magazine, December 6, 2006, 2. vii

Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 1993), p228-229. viii

Charles Ashley Stainback, “Vik Muniz and Charles Ashley Stainback: A Dialogue”, from Seeing is Believing, (Santa Fe, N.M.: Arena Editions; New York, NY: Distribution by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), page 25. ix

x

Kota Ezawa, The History of Photography Remix (Tucson, AZ: Nazraeli Press, 2006).

Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, trans. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 85. xi

Lukasz Ronduda, “Corrective Devices: Zbigniew Libera’s Art in 1989-2004” in from Zbigniew Libera: Work from 1984 – 2004, trans. Kasia Kietlilnska (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, School of Art & Design and Center for Russian & East European Studies, 2005), 29. xii

John Grech, Sharkfeed, , 2000, (August 24, 2009). xiii

John Grech, “Living with the Dead: Sharkfeed and the Extending Ontologies of New Media,” Space and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2002, p. 214. xiv

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19 Benedict Carey, “This is Your Life (and How You Tell It),” New York Times, May 22, 2007, Mental Health and Behavior, 1. xv

Jason Farago, Reality, “Narrative, and Reliability: Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory,”< http://www.sapheneia.com/huyghe.html> (June, 10, 2007). xvi

Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 48. xvii

Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York : Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 229. xviii

Broadcast News. VHS. Directed by James L. Brooks. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Film Corp, 1987. xix

R. Lee Hadden, Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor's Handbook (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, c1999), 19. xx

xxi

Hadden, Reliving the Civil War, 9.

xxii

Hadden, Reliving the Civil War, 11.

Jenny Thompson, War Games : Inside the world of 20th-century War Reenactors (Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Books, c2004), xviii. xxiii

Jeremy Deller, The English Civil War part II: personal accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike (Great Britain: Artangel, 2001), 7. xxiv

xxv

Deller, English Civil War, 7.

xxvi

Deller, English Civil War, 67.

Sven Lütticken, “An Arena in Which to Reenact,” in Life, once more: forms of reenactment in contemporary art, ed. Sven Lütticken (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 33. xxvii

xxviii

xxix

Lütticken, “Arena in Which to Reenact,” 37.

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c2001), 112.

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