Doesn't seem to be available to buy but I got hold of it via inter-library loan :-)
A slim collection of
essays, which explore the ways in which the past has political power
– we probably accept “nostalgia” as an interpretation which
might not give the whole truth, but tend to see “history” as
political neutral (although some many have pointed out that all
history is selective and generally written by the “victors” how
many really is it as neutral is questionable).
Most of the thoughts
explored in the collection make sense to me, but few were new to me –
but I guess should acknowledge it is 30 years old, and maybe when
published in 1989 the collection was more radical, ideas that were
new then have largely become mainstream now?
Some specific
thoughts…
In the introductory
essay Shaw and Chase reflect that “All photographs are memento
mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s
(or thing’s) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and
freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
But I wonder if that is still true, or true in the same way, in our
current age of the constant selfie.
They go on to quote
Raymond Williams “It only takes two generations to make anything
traditional...” but in my experience “tradition” can be
established much more rapidly than that, a couple of years rather
than a couple of generations is usually plenty of time to have
cemented a practice as traditional, and even sacrosanct.
While David
Lowenthal makes a key point, saying that “No one ever experienced
as “the present” what we now view as “the past”, for
hindsight cannot clarify today as it does yesterday; the past as
reconstructed is always more coherent than when it happened.” and
so “...history reveals and nostalgia celebrates an ordered clarity
contrasting with the chaos or imprecision of our own times.”
Malcolm Chase begins
his own essay with a quote from Arthur Gardner’s 1942 book
Britain’s Mountain Heritage “When we think of England we do not
picture crowded factories or rows of suburban villas, but our
thoughts turn to rolling hills, green fields and stately trees, to
cottage homes, picturesquely grouped round the village green beside
the church and manor house. It is a green and pleasant land.” This
is still largely true, and it becomes challenging because it tends to
render those who are “of the City” as excluded from authentic
expression of “English”
The collection ends
with essay by Andy Croft about how the 1930s are remembered. Despite
being the decade of the Great Depression, the decade that the world
slid back towards a War World, and many other negative features,
Croft shows that the 1930s is recalled as a Golden Age, and that
recollection is not politically neutral. He is writing in the late
1980s, so with a 50 year gap, which gave the 1930s the chronological
relationship we now have with the 1960s however I think many of the
features of the memory of the 1930s Croft identifies are still true.
The 1930s perhaps still feel more recent than they really are, and
more positive than they really were – and we need to be alert to
whose narrative of the present that does most to support.
