How big a role does nostalgia play in your photos?

[AJHingel]

<p>The main message I wanted to convey, is not to satisfy ourselves with the very simplistic wording: nostalgia is a feeling, it's an emotion ! ("Feeling" mentioned 30 times up till now in this thread, "emotion" :42 !). Yes surely it is a "feeling", it's an emotion and not a smell (a feeling about a smell. .) but what is of importance is that such feelings and emotions are translate by humans into social, cultural actions, decisions, convictions, positions etc : Homo sapiens, the "Wise Man", and that's where a photographical project starts with both feelings and emotions intact. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/9825555-md.jpg" alt="" width="679" height="418" /></p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Fred, what a shot! I know nothing about the setting or how long ago it was made, but it has a highly evocative style and a mood that I can certainly characterize as "nostalgic."</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Or just a photo hinting at dark old interiors.<br>

I would however never, ever, use the formulation Fred often fall back on: "Whatever !" which I read as an insult.<br>

I like the photo, but : nostalgia ?</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>Or just a photo hinting at dark old interiors. --Anders Hingel, speaking of Fred's photo</p>

<p>Your house is only obviously fairly old and definitely in need of a paint brush. Nostalgia? --Anders Hingel, speaking of my photo of an old farmhouse (posted above this morning at 5:26 a.m.)</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Anders, I suppose that nostalgia is a personal thing, and that different persons feel it in different situations or see it in different types of images.</p>

<p>Why don't you post an example of one of your own photos that evokes a sense of nostalgia in you? If you want to include a "back story" to help explain why it has that effect, that would be nice, too.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[Brad_]

<p>A photo causes one to be nostalgic because it's of a person sitting, rendered in B&W, and blurry?</p>

[inoneeye]

<p>to quote Fred "<em> </em><em>For me, there's a difference between being about something and showing something. A photo's being about nostalgia suggests a kind of distance. A photo's showing nostalgia suggests an intimacy. Regardless of whether or not one feels nostalgia when viewing a photo, the difference between its being about and showing can also be felt.</em>" <br>

Being about something or showing something or causing something are all very different things. <br>

I think Fred's photo in this context is about nostalgia and shows nostalgia it personifies nostalgia imo. and as I said before <em>It would be silly to expect a viewer (let alone all) to feel </em>[cause] <em>nostalgi</em>a. <br>

<br>

</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>FACT 1: Old photos of loved ones (or beloved places or things) can make me <strong><em>feel</em></strong> nostalgic.</p>

<p>FACT 2: Photos of persons and places I have never seen can <strong><em>show</em></strong> me something that I recognize as "nostalgia" or "nostalgic," even though I do not personally <em><strong>feel</strong></em> the nostalgia. (Such photos do not have to be old.)</p>

<p>In my opinion, any viable theory about nostalgia (and about nostalgia in photography) must account for both of these indisputable facts.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Lannie I will as you invite me to do show photos that in one way of another could be about or showing nostalgia a, that can make me feel nostalgic or show me something that I recognize as nostalgic - all in the same time.</p><div></div>

[AJHingel]

<p>But of course I could also show you a collage which I made with nostalgia in mind, below, and again it is about or showing nostalgia, that can make me feel nostalgic or show me something that I recognize as nostalgic - all in the same time.</p>

<p>PS someone among you could maybe help me out by correcting my pigeon latin.</p><div></div>

[Julie H]

<p>Brad wrote: "A photo causes one to be nostalgic because it's of a person sitting, rendered in B&W, and blurry?"</p>

<p>In a way, yes. Nostalgia is for the filler, the glue -- the stuff that is <em>not</em> an event, <em>not</em> a drama, but rather all, and all, and <em>all</em> of that slow, faintly colored/flavored/humming nothingness which fills in, supports, sustains; which was always <em>there for us</em>. Stuff, the details of which, we didn't pay particular attention to until it was gone or going; which we didn't 'see' because it was 'just' filler.'</p>

<p>'Blurry,' 'B&W' (no particular color), 'sitting' (between/resting/waiting), are all that kind of thing. I'd add 'darkness' as kind of the ultimate non-event filler.</p>

<p>'Now' is action, it's busy-ness, it's getting things done. Later, we notice what we missed.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Ah! sorry, Lannie, you asked for back stories concerning the photos above. A long story for each of the photos, which I would not launch myself in order not to overburden the thread with personal small talk. And furthermore I'm fiercely against using internet for spreading intimate knowledge about myself (difficult, impossible, I know), but anyway some back stories below</p>

<p>Top-left: photo from the seventies of a fortified village in Montenegro, which were in the war zone during the Nato bombings of 1999, but also part of the bombings of neighboring Dubrovnik. Fight for autonomy, role of royal family, could symbolise the strong role of nostalgia in our world of nation states.</p>

<p>Top centre : Photo from the seventies, again, but could be shot today. Nothing has changed. The Tullerie gardens in Paris created in 1564 and open to the public since 1667. The castle of the Tullerie of the same name was burned down and destroyed during the uprising of the Paris in 1871: the Commune. The park is maybe a symbol of Parisian bourgeois life-style. Nostalgia of old days - and then there is even a statue of the Julius Cesar who brought Roman Empire as far as to Britain illustrating imperialistic nostalgia for the extreme !</p>

<p>Top-right: Just a door knobs from a flat in a very old house in Paris (with cellars dating back to the middle ages) where I lived 4-5 years, years ago. The knobs are not older than begin of last century I would believe. Personal nostalgia !</p>

<p>Bottom-left: View from a house in Ireland. Childhood and memories, Looking out, day-dreaming. Nostalgia ?</p>

<p>Bottom-centre : Old people reading in a Parc de Bagatelle, in the Boulogne park in Paris. Bagatelle was created as a private park in 1775 by Count of Artois (and Queen Marie-Antoinette - LouisXVI). Back to nature, English country side park layout. Today, the place to make a promenade together with present days affluent Parisian bourgeoisie feeling nostalgia as just "normal". <br>

<br>

Bottom-right: Another private park that dates back to the beginning of the 19th century (1830s), now open for the public since not so many years (1972): The Solway Domaine with it's large park and a castle in the middle just outside Brussels in Belgium. A view towards a "folly", a star with references to the Versailles Palace. An image of nostalgia in garden layouts - day-dreaming .</p>

<p>Concerning my "Urbs Nostalgia" it is a collage of one single photo of Paris seen towards the Sacré-Cœur Basilica on the hills of Montmartre, at the far, trying to create a uniform unhistorical vision of the city. Pure nostalgia !</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>"A photo causes one to be nostalgic because it's of a person sitting, rendered in B&W, and blurry? "Brad.</p>

<p>I think many folk are getting nostalgia confused with the atmosphere/feel of the photograph. I really fall to understand Fred's photograph... an out of focus subject and a dark image why has it anything to do with nostalgia....sorry Fred. Just looking at the photo a sharp image of the subject would have done a lot more for it.</p>

<p>Julie,"the ultimate non-event filler". Love the phrase...I want one a "ultimate non-event filler". Putting it in my book of words along with a " ultimate event filler".</p>

<p><em> A photo's being about nostalgia suggests a kind of distance. A photo's showing nostalgia suggests an intimacy. Regardless of whether or not one feels nostalgia when viewing a photo, the difference between its being about and showing can also be felt.</em>" JD Wood</p>

<p><strong>'</strong>A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. Nostalgia. The above JD post can relate to any photograph.....</p>

<p> </p>

[aplumpton]

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[aplumpton]

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[Landrum Kelly]

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[Landrum Kelly]

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[Landrum Kelly]

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[Sandy Vongries]

<p>Oxford English Dictionary def. Nostalgia "A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past". No one is nostalgic about bad times, unless they profited or were in charge, or unless the present is worse. I prefer to keep images in my head and files of people when they were well and times that were happy. Just a romantic, I guess.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p><em>"No one is nostalgic about bad times" (Sandy)</em><br /> Sandy, people can be nostalgic of certain aspects of life in bad times too.<br /> If you talk to people that have lived through times of wars (Second World War) or dictatorships (Franco) you will often hear about stories on greater feeling of solidarity and togetherness among people, the joy of simple things and basic food. Many older people talk of longing back to those times despite the horror of war and prosecutions. "Good times" is a very complex issue - "longing back" too. You have former prisoners "longing back" to prison too of some reason or another.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Lannie, your mom does not need introduction, but the other two you uploaded do, I think. You wanted "stories behind", the least you can do is to follow it up yourself.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Sandy Vongries wrote: "No one is nostalgic about bad times, unless they profited or were in charge, or unless the present is worse."</p>

<p>That last is a BIG loophole. But it doesn't account for why the picture of Jackie trying to jump out of the car with her husband's (the President's) brains splattered all over her makes me feel nostalgic. I don't even see the fact's of the picture anymore. (And I don't think the present is worse.)</p>

<p>Also, see my previous post:</p>

 

<p ><a name="00dl17"></a><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=3885114">Julie H</a> <a href="/member-status-icons"><img title="Subscriber" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub9.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/1roll.gif" alt="" /><img title="Current POW Recipient" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/trophy.gif" alt="" /></a>, Feb 21, 2016; 06:27 a.m.</p>

 

<p>Personal confession of nostalgia: I never really liked darkroom work itself, the mechanics of the wet and dry work of processing; though I truly loved the magical-ness of what it <em>did</em>; the revelation out of darkness, and all that stuff.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, though I left the darkroom for Photoshop and have never looked back, I bought, enjoy and ... feel nostalgic when looking at, the book, <em><a href="http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=PY339&i=&i2=" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Developer Trays</a></em> -- which is nothing more than exactly what its title would lead you to expect -- lots of pictures of developer trays of famous photographers. I still have my equally stained developer tray -- which for so many years I dreaded.</p>

 

[aplumpton]

<p>Sandy is right, we have a sentimental longing for a previous period, one which we are no longer a part of but which influenced our way of thinking, our emotions, or was a period we simply greatly enjoyed. Bad times are more easily forgotten, unless they contributed something to our development that was positive in the long run.</p>

<p>Developer trays of Julie may be in the last category and something she had to do (as a learning process or because nothing else was possible then) before discovering better photographic techniques for her. Julie, that was not so long ago, so I need not be severely admonished for reflecting on age. Darkroom practice was and is part of my own "feuille de route". But the chemicals of today and the smell are much reduced in potency and the magic is allowed to trump the discomfort by at least a hair. I admit it is much easier to fashion an image today with a digital eyed device and later in Photoshop, with its considerable efficiency and artistic potential, and harder to push myself into the darkroom, but it remains on occasion one of the most relaxing and rewarding things I can do in photography. Like the friendship of an old friend, I cannot desert it.</p>

<p>At best, it is not with nostalgia that I look back at my more active printing days but instead with mild senses of guilt and procrastination for not doing it more often today. Nostalgia is still a future option in that case. We can also I think easily predict our future nostalgias. I am discouraged by much local verrnacular architecture that is going down the drain here, but there still remains a lot to be saved and enjoyed where that is practicable, and so I can only predict some future nostalgia that will be felt following its disappearance (and hopefully I will not be in that chronological position), although architecture will still exist to be that human made wall linking the outside with the inside.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Arthur, "learning process" strikes a chord ... I think you're onto something because I am, surely, proud of skills/craft that was gained in the doing and only in the doing.</p>

<p>Also, re darkrooms, there is something that I didn't really appreciate at the time (due to my misery ... ), about being in an exquisitely private, secret, secluded place (assuming a private darkroom). Mine has double doors, so I not only can't see the outside world, I can't hear anything except the humming of the exhaust fan and the radio (which, being in a remote area, only received one channel from a tiny town nearby, which inevitably played the local obituaries when I was doing 8x10 negatives -- especially fraught times for me because I *always* seemed to scratch one, no matter how careful I was, and because it was total darkness and no option to pause ... and ... I'm feeling less nostalgic by the second as I write this ... ).</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>No doubt, nostalgia will be different things to different people, and though there will be differences there will be overlap as well. I'm not saying nostalgia can be anything or everything, I'm just saying that there's a <em>range</em> of things that we each might consider nostalgic. That's why dictionary definitions and even agreement on exact definitions can be much less important than the ways in which they manifest for each of us in a photo. Telling someone else what's wrong with the way they think about nostalgia is like telling someone else what's wrong with the way they think about love or sadness or happiness.</p>

<p>What challenges me here is not how each of us defines nostalgia but how each of us sees it. To that end, looking at others' photos, the photos <em>they've</em> chosen as showing or being about or evoking nostalgia, is not something to argue with but rather something to try to empathize with or at least glean something from.</p>

<p>We can debate any photo's showing of any emotion until the cow's come home and supposedly prove to ourselves and each other that this is all merely subjective. Or, we can see our photos as an opportunity for each of us to share our visions of these various emotions with each other and only hope that fellow photographers have some desire and ability to open themselves up to the potential of another's realities and possibilities.</p>

<p>Just as what a photo looks like is in many ways more important than whatever we might assume it represents, what each of our chosen photos tells about our vision of nostalgia is much more important, to me, than whatever nostalgia supposedly "really" is.</p>