Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh

It took me a while to make my way through Marianne Hirsh’s book Family Frames.  The book is so dense with information that it is quite impossible to retain all of it. I think the best thing for me to do here is to concentrate on the themes that I have absorbed, things that I can apply to my own work as it continues to develop; and as my understanding of what photography might be evolves.  I have to say, the more I learn, the more the notion of what a photograph might be is unraveling.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

There are perhaps four reasonably solid ideas I take away from the book:

The first being that the family album serves to sustain the notion of family, reinforcing our ideas of how that institution is shaped and how we might fit into it.  Hirsh says early in the book, “At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[1].

The next big subject that really got me thinking was the idea of the “Gaze” and unconscious optics.  I had come across the gaze earlier in the course but Hirsh looks at the impact of looking, seeing and being seen.  She explores Lacan’s mirror theory and the chapter on this has made me eager to discover more.  Unconscious optics fascinated me;  the screens through which we view the world and thinking about the gaze, how we imagine those looking at us, in the flesh or within a photograph, might perceive us. 

Hirsh then looks at the role of mothers and photography; how the camera interrupts the maternal gaze, transforms it, and ultimately renders the maternal viewpoint, including her fantasies, tangible in the form of a photograph.

Lastly, although by no mean exclusively, as the book really covers a great deal more, is the notion of post-memory which has really struck a chord with me.  Those long held family myths that stem from before one’s own arrival in the world, and which inform so much about how a family operates and sees itself in relation to the world outside of it, and within it.

I will aim to cover each of those aspects in this essay, which forms the basis of my research for Assignment 5.

The Family Romance

The way in which families operate across cultures and history varies significantly and according to Meredith F Small in her book, Our Babies Ourselves, is dependent in large part on the economic needs of the society.  She refers to research that compares urban and agrarian societies, for instance: “In more urban-industrial societies, Le Vine suggests, parents don’t need much from their children because the economic system is constructed so the children are peripheral…*”[2] as opposed to agrarian societies where children are more central and very much expected to contribute to the economic activities of the society, i.e. they will work in the fields, for example.

So it is interesting for me to think about why families take photographs of themselves, which in turn gaze back, reinforcing a fixed idea about how that family should look and be.  We seem to need to believe the way we (whoever we might be) do it is the only way or perhaps the right way.

Hirsh’s second chapter is titled Reframing the Human Family Romance and covers various aspects of myth making with family photography but it is her exploration of Steichen’s Family of Man, which at the time was by far the most successful photographic exhibition to date, that resonated with me most. 

The exhibition is on the surface a celebration of the human family.  There are photographs from all over the world, by famous and not so famous photographers, of people and families; starting with lovers, then pregnancy and babies, then on to play, family, work, war, religion and government.   The way in which it is presented suggests that we humans are essentially all the same – despite our different and varying cultures. 

The power in that message is delivered with considerable force due to the nature of photography.

Hirsh says, “The illusion that photographs simply record a pre-existing external reality, the fact that photographs freeze particular moments in time, and the ambiguity that results from the still picture’s absent context all help to perpetuate a mythology of the family as stable, static and monolithic.”[3]

The Family of Man exhibition sold the idea of a “globalized, utopian, family album, a family romance imposed on every corner of the earth”.[4] 

Hirsh goes on to discuss Freud’s notion of the family romance being “a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility…” and then “The Family of Man disseminates the fantasies of Steichen and his contemporaries…”[5]

In my mind it is hardly surprising that this sort of mythology, the mythology of a paternalistic, Western, middle class ideal, Freud’s family romance, should be collectively conceived and expressed at that particular point in history.  Why wouldn’t a scarred and traumatised society who had just come out of a global conflict in which many millions of people were brutally slaughtered on all sides, and in the case of the Holocaust, whole towns and communities systematically murdered, need to see the world as a global family who fitted in with an ideal.  Of course that traumatised society, rightly or wrongly, wanted to perpetuate the fantasy of a family romance across the entire globe.  It would be, considering the recent extreme trauma, a mythology that Western society should very much want and perhaps need to buy into. 

Photography offers a powerful reflection of those fantasies which because of its capacity for perpetuating “an illusion of pre-existing reality” can be used by a society in one way or another, commercial advertising as well as cultural exhibition, to convince itself of a reality that is more palatable than the reality they have just experienced.

Hirsh explores the troubling aspects of this wholesale rejection of cultural difference, saying “One could argue that Steichen follows Parsons in promoting the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family as the norm and standard against which other arrangements are measured.” And “the exhibit invokes nature over culture, thus diminishing, if not erasing, pronounced differences due to culture and history, and thus also naturalizing and sentimentalising the institution of family”[6].   I think this is worth considering whether you’re thinking in micro or macro terms.

Unconscious Optics

I was absolutely fascinated to read about unconscious optics.   Our perception of life, of people, of ourselves are all filtered and mediated through unconscious optics.  I don’t think this was news to me but the level of exploration and the introduction of Lacan’s mirror stage certainly triggered lots of thoughts.  I have always been fascinated by varying cultures and about how people from different parts of the world relate to the word.  I find it extraordinarily interesting for instance, that a tribe in South America (frustratingly I don’t have access to the documentary so have no way of giving any further details) make beer out of saliva.  To us in the West this seems incredible and I have to admit as I watched it I felt revulsion as I saw people drink the frothy fermented liquid.  These differences in culture are so deeply and firmly held that it makes a bit of a nonsense of the Family of Man’s promotion; where we are all ‘naturialized’ in accordance with a Western patriarchal bourgeois model.  The chapter on unconscious optics looks at how we ‘see’ through our cultural and historical screens, and how we have very little control over that since we don’t really have access to our unconscious minds where the foundations for this screens stem from. 

The term ‘unconscious optics’ comes from Walter Benjamin, and Hirsh uses it throughout the book and in particular in relation to Lacan’s notion of the gaze, or look.  I wrote about this earlier on this blog so won’t go into much here but the idea of a looking and seeing, reflecting and being seen all being intrinsically related and caught up in how we build our realities is incredibly interesting for me.  Hirsh goes on to say that the ‘family as a social construct depends on the invisibly of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings must to some degree remain unconscious”.[7]

This fed into my thoughts about how I would approach A5 and what I hoped to get out of it.  Photography, however seems to have the capability and potential to both perpetuate the myth of the family romance and expose some of its invisible structures – perhaps even do both concurrently. 

Walter Benjamin, who Hirsh quotes, discusses Edward Mybridges series of horses running:

“Evidently a different nature opens itself up to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.  Even if one has general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride… Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.”

We as a culture, when putting together family albums at any rate opt for feeding into the myths, the romance.  The details of everyday life, the quotidian mundaneness is not typically focused on.  But what I found in my own project is that emerges regardless, and even when it is, the mythology is very difficult to quash.  So, my photographic interventions may have revealed some of the structural relationships within our family or perhaps exposed some of the tensions, but my edit nevertheless feeds into the notion of a family romance, albeit a more than slightly tense one. 

Post Memory

Hirsh describes post memory as one of the most important or influential unconscious screens or optics.  By this she is referring to the history of a family, not only theirs but also of the family’s community.  I was very interested in this aspect especially since Hirsh’s Jewish family was from Romania, and like so many during WW2, relatives she never knew were deported or killed.  Whole communities wiped out.  The legacy of this history continues to inform generations since and I certainly relate to this as my own family, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, were from Czechoslovakia.  My father’s father, as far as I am aware, was one of very few Fried’s to have escaped the Final Solution, having left for England before the war began.

I touch on post memory briefly here because it seemed like an incredibly important aspect of the book, and of how we see in general, plus how families see  - both as individuals within the family plus as a group looking inwards and out.  The sense of persecution, guilt, and pain, deeply held horror that exists within families who have a history linked to the Holocaust is immensely powerful and influential.  I am reminded of the book about Diane Arbus and a quote I used when writing about it –

“We grew up in an emotional desert of shame - never affirmation - and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing'"[8].  

Everything that I have written about here, all that has resonated with me seems to be at least in part due to the post-memory of my own family.  Not only the Holocaust connection but also the Victorian ethic that pervaded my mother’s upbringing.

I remembered the following quote for years although could not recall where I had read it until I picked up The Magus recently to reread. 

“”I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”[9]

The post memory in our family that pertains to that ‘monstrous dwarf’ resonates today and I have long been aware of it, especially in relation to the family mythology (as opposed to family romance – by mythology I refer to the stories within a family that get told again and again over the years) which I have listened to since yearly childhood.  For instance I was told repeatedly about how my mother was punished and shamed for undressing her doll in front of boys at an early birthday party, or how she undressed herself at boarding school and stood on the window ledge for passers by to see (mostly boys I am led to understand).  These stories feed into our perception of ourselves, our families and how we see; looking inwardly and outwardly. In other words, family mythology and post memory are integral parts of those unconscious optics.

Mothers and photography

The final aspect to the book (and I have in no way covered everything), which I found useful in terms of A5 at any rate, is the chapter about mothers and mother photographers.  Lacan’s gaze is important here because of the idea that a child’s development is dependent on a loving gaze from their primary carer, which in most cases tends to be the mother. 

The role of the mother in mammalian development has long been understood to be critical for healthy, well-adjusted, functioning mammals.  John Bowlby’s attachment theory was hugely influential and for instance led to a change in the way children are hospitalized, so that care is taken to keep consistent and regular contact with parents, and in cases of very young children, constant during a child’s stay. 

Although only one aspect of the symbiotic relationship between mother a child, the gaze between these two, and other members of the family informs and influences the way in which a child develops.  In Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book, Mothers & Others[10], there is a diagram indicating just how much of a human’s brain is given over to communicating, seeing, looking understanding, receiving and giving information – and although the eyes are by no mean the only part of this process, seeing, looking and being seen are integral. (The question of blindness brings up many questions when thinking about Lacan’s theories and I can only say at this point that the subject is so complex I can’t quite get my heard around it for now, however, I wanted to flag it up that I am aware of it!)  (You can see the full article inlcuding the diagram I mention here - page 75) . 

Hirsh looks at how there has been criticism of mothers who photograph their children and amongst others she focuses on Sally Mann whose Immediate Family is so well known, and which generated such a strong response, both positive and negative.  She discusses how the looking that goes on between a mother and her children, looking that is essential to a developing sense of self, is said to be disrupted when eyes are replaced by a camera, changing the mother’s organic eye into a machine.  And therefore replacing the process of looking with a “gaze”.  As I have seen and understood it the word gaze is pejorative; it is power based and I have noticed often used to describe the activity of male artists creating female nudes over the centuries.  Hirsh doesn’t fully accept the negative ramifications of turning a mother’s look into a gaze and explores various positions surrounding what feels to me enormously difficult and contentious. 

“Mann’s children can see in her photographs the operation of the gaze; they can see how the maternal look can be displaced by a maternal gaze.  The images show them how culture sees children, what fears and fantasies structure childhood and therefore structures them”.  She also goes on to say that Mann’s children ”demonstrate some control over the perpetuation of their images… they can manipulate the images through their own play with costume and make-up; they can mimic and thus play with the childhood into which the maternal gaze – even if it is seen as disembodied, monstrous, phallic and devitalizing  - has fixed on them”.[11]

Mann argues that “Photographing them in those quirky, often emotionally charged moments has helped me to acknowledge and resolve some of the inherent contradictions between the image of motherhood and reality”.[12]

The difference between reality and pre-conceptions of what that reality ought to be is what interests me mostly.  It ties in with the opening paragraphs of this (rather long!) blog entry-

“At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[13].

I think Mann in this instance has perhaps turned that on it’s head by taking photographs that defy the usual self-presentations, challenges the status quo and instead deals with a different reality, one that links to our very real and in some cases justified fears about childhood and sexuality, as well as fantasy, play, and the idea of children being separate from real humanity.

Conclusion 

Before I end I will briefly say that Hirsh covers a great deal about the Holocaust and I am a bit lost with some or much of it – although I find myself drawn to these chapters due to my own family links I feel I will need to revisit those chapters when I have understood and digested bit more about the role of photography and linking us to our histories.

Overall, the book has deepened my understanding of what photography might be, carrying on from my reading of Barthes and then James Elkin.  Hirsh does adumbrate some of Barthes theories, which is always useful.  It must all be very much on my mind though because last night I dreamt a photograph of mine was hanging in a restaurant.  In it there were trees, a stream and a group of children, some of whom I think were mine.  And every time I looked at the photograph I noticed the children come to life and start playing.  When I looked away they stopped.  They couldn’t leave the photograph, they were tiny but they were real - although real in another reality and one that I could not actually climb into.  And that is what I think I have learned about photography – the illusion of reality is immensely powerful even though it can never be real.  The photograph is nothing more than a flat representation of a version of reality at one particular moment in time, made up of dots on a screen or pigment on paper.  And that is all it will ever be.  But our brains expect a photograph to be real because it looks real, and so our brain does what it can to make it seem real.  Editing, in the case of a series of photographs, adds to the illusion.  This makes photography an extremely powerful tool for advertisers and makers of propaganda the world over.

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[1] Page 9 Family Frames

[2] Our Babies Ourselves Meredith F Small page 54 Anchor Books 1998 *I would argue that within our present cultural paradigm women are expected to make a choice about whether or no they want to exist on the on the periphery with their children or else abandon the caregiving role of mothering in order to be at work.  Although this is changing with more sustainable maternity laws, and in some countries for both parents.

[3] Page 51 Family Frames

[4] Page 51 Family Frames

[5] Page 52 Family of Man

[6] Talcott Parsons – Structural Functionalism

[7] Page 117 Family Frames

[8] Diane Arbus: A Biography By Patricia Bosworth, Open Road - Integrated Media, Published 1984, Kindle Edition 2012

[9] Page 15, The Magus by John Fowles, Kindle Edition, Vintage, New Edition 2004, First published 1965.

[10] Page 40, Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap Harvard, 2009

[11] Page 159 & 160 Family Frames

[12] Page 161 Family Frames (Sally Mann quoted)

[13] Page 9 Family Frames

Some thoughts on A5, Family Frames & Breasts

I am currently busy working my way through Family Frames, Photography Narrative and Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh.  It has set off all sorts of thoughts in relation to the narrative photographs I have taken for A5, and I am constantly on the look out for relevant work that might be worth thinking about.  Recently I stumbled across a magazine article about women’s pay.  Included was an old photographic essay relating to a wife/mother who worked at a bridal company during the 50s.  The essay offers an alterative narrative to the usual 50s story we are more familiar with where women stayed at home warming slippers for their husbands whilst keeping their homes in perfect order.

The images show a husband and wife sharing the domestic chores, financial decisions and child rearing while a housekeeper looks after the children as both parents work.  The woman is seen out with her friends at lunch for example, experiencing a life that is fulfilling and nourishing, and also at home caring for her children rather perfectly.  It seems like a thoroughly modern and progressive existence.

The problem for me is how very idealistic this narrative is and it is simply the other side of the supposedly idealistic ‘stay-at-home’ housewife coin.  Both images are suggestive of an impossible and unrealistic life for women to construct their lives around.

As Hirsh states in her book: ‘Freud’s ‘family romance’ is a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility which, when shattered, becomes the fantasy of replacing the father with a different, richer and more noble one, in Freud’s terms, a king or an emperor.  This is more than an Oedipal desire: it is also a fantasy of class aspiration, an economic fantasy of enrichment.”[1]

It seems to me that each side of the 50s feminine ideal as illustrated in the essay I have mentioned and in the more usual images one expects to see from that era is a ‘family romance’ about the role of the mother.  One that persists today, although it is probably quite surprising to think of the ‘working mother’ myth having existed so solidly during the 50s too.  Women now are perpetually suspended between these two supposedly opposing positions.  On the one hand today we have stay-at-home-mothers who are made to exist at the very least along the edges of our economy, if not right outside it, along with their inconvenient offspring.  Or, working mothers who often feel they have little choice but to leave their young children in the care of others if they are to keep any career break to a minimum.  (Taking time out is proven to be detrimental to a woman’s future economic prospects; pension gaps, the fact they often need to start again from scratch work-wise, part-time work for those who can get it. Not to mention that long breaks potentially destroy any confidence about being able to contribute effectively in the work place.)  

I am only part way through Hirsh’s Family Frames but one of the overriding themes I am getting to grips with so far is that the images we surround ourselves with reinforce ‘myths’ about family, support structures that our culture for a variety of reasons has constructed about who we all ought to be, where we should fit, and what is expected of us.

These images are immensely powerful and reflect who we are back to as well as inform us about who we ought to be – a complex feedback loop that potentially imprisons us.  My interest in particular is about how women relate to these images.

One of the most striking and perhaps obvious examples for me is about how women see their breasts in our culture.

I would like to state very clearly before I say anything further (as I know how contentious and difficult this issue can be for women everywhere) that I am in no way condemning any woman’s decision to breastfeed or bottle feed – how a person chooses to bring up their children is entirely their own choice.

However, it seems extraordinary to me that Page 3 has only just stopped being published. Even so, the idea of breasts being sexualized is reinforced by imagery in advertising, in films, in magazines and on TV pretty much constantly from the moment we are born.  Even our toys reinforce this idea – Barbie, springs to mind.  It is so pervasive and firmly entrenched in our culture that for many women the fact that their breasts might be for child rearing is simply anathema. 

Katherine Dettwyller is an anthropologist who has studied breast-feeding cross culturally and across species for her entire career.  She has written countless articles during her career and the thoroughly researched book, Breastfeeding; Biocultural Perspectives, amongst others.  Detwyller promotes the notion that formula may one day be seen in the same way we see smoking now – utterly detrimental to health and emotional well-being.

In her book about breastfeeding she compares breastfeeding in the West to foot binding in China, which “persisted well into the 20^th century”[2]. “Most Americans view Chinese foot-binding as the barbaric practice of backward people.  Yet breast augmentation, or female mammary mutilation, as it more properly called, is essentially the same thing…. A perfectly, healthy, functioning organ, the breast, is mutilated through surgery into something useful for only male sexual pleasure.  Rarely is the lactational function of the breast preserved, or even considered, in breast augmentation surgery.”[3]

I have chosen to concentrate on the subject of breasts and breastfeeding here because it’s such an extreme example of a cultural more.  In many non-western societies breasts are seen as organs for feeding children primarily.  In Western societies, and societies heavily influenced by the West, breasts are seen as almost exclusively sexual, to the point where their biological function is almost obsolete, or seen as strange, unusual, and even taboo.  

I am interested in the power of imagery; powerful imagery that supports the idea of breasts being exclusively sexual, as well as the less obvious, harder to discern manipulations of culture, of how we see ourselves.  Let's look beyond the breasts one might say...

One of the most interesting things I have come across in the Family Frames book so far is Lacan’s idea of looking and being seen:

“Looking and being looked at are identical processes for Lacan – when you look you are also seen: when you are the object of the look you return it, even if only to reflect light back to its source; ‘things look at me and yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109).   I need to know and understand more of this before I can discuss it in further depth but the reflective nature of seeing is fascinating to me.   

When describing Meatyard’s Family Album of LucyBell Crater (which incidentally I love and can’t wait to do something heavily influenced by Meatyard’s work!) Hirsh talks of subjects being “constructed relationally through an elaborate and multiply inflected process of looking[4]”, which as I understand it ties in with Lacan’s looking and seeing thesis.

I feel like I have only got fragments of different ideas and haven’t quite tied them together yet but I am intrigued by how this seeing and looking process informs our state of being given that we are constantly bombarded with images that inform us about who we are, that construct our being.  Which means that the whole breast thing might be impossible for women to reconcile, given the imagery we are surrounded by every moment of our lives, and breasts are just one tiny and very obvious example - look further. 

If I were to think about how women and indeed men are generally represented in photographs as well as other mediums, and also about how that looking and being looked at process works, it seems we are indefatigably caught up in an interplay that is a little like a snake eating its own tale.  The gaze that we choose to exist in front of, coming from the images that we create perpetuate the fantasies we construct about ourselves in those very images.

How does any of that tie in with my assignment?  Well, I’m not sure yet.  Family Frames discusses how family photographs ‘produce family relations and form family memory’[5]. I have taken a series of photographs of my family, which in the main centre round my mother, with whom I have had a difficult and fragmented relationship, although much has changed recently. 

At the beginning of this very long post (in which I try hard to bring together several strands of thought and perhaps a bunch of disparate ideas, all of which I hope feed into my assignment) I discussed the idealistic photographic essay about a mother in the 50s.  On the surface the essay seems like a positive alternative narrative which opposes the more usual 50s story we are used to seeing, where women wait cheerily for their husbands to return home while they happily get on with domestic chores before welcoming their hardworking men home.  And it certainly seems more positive than the overly sexualised images we are all bombarded with, which as I discuss negate any biological realities about who we are. 

However, I found the idealism in that essay just as awkward and difficult as its counterpart.  

Family photography is typically idealistic; and in fact I make a few pennies taking photographs for families that serve to reinforce those idealistic fantasies.  They are seemingly so important to families within our culture – and I wonder how helpful that is.  Hirsh says “the family as social construct depends on the invisibility of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as such a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings to some degree must remain unconscious if the familial ideology is to be perpetuated and imposed”[6]

For A5 I have taken a series of photographs, which I hope will reveal some of the realities of our family what ever those are, rather than the ideal – although I’m not sure at this point how possible that even is.  At the moment, however, every time I look at them I find myself crying… so who knows that they are doing or saying.

I end by repeating the quote from Hirsh’s book, “Looking and being looked at are identical processes for Lacan – when you look you are also seen: when you are the object of the look you return it, even if only to reflect light back to its source; ‘things look at me and yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109).  This sentence seems incredibly important somehow.

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Family Frames Photogaphy and Narrative Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh 1997, Harvard Publishing, reissued 2012 (FF)

Breastfeeding Biocultural Perspectives Ed. by Patricia Stuart-Macadam & Katherine A. Dettwyler, Aldine de Gruyer 1995 (BF)

[1] Page tbc FF

[2] Page 177 BF

[3] Page 177 BF

[4] Page 107 FF

[5] Page 116 FF

[6] Page 117 FF

Gallery Visit Whitechapel Hannah Hoch

Study Visit

Hannah Hoch

Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1 7QX

9^th March 2014

All the images I mention in this blog can be viewed at The Whitechapel Gallery http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/hannah-hch

I was looking forward to attending a study visit on Sunday 9^th March especially as I had to cancel going to the one at the Saatchi Gallery in February.  However, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the Hannah Hoch show quite as much I as did, despite having read somewhere that it was the must-go-to show of the moment.  I’m not sure why, especially as I’d been in a reenactment of The Cabaret Voltaire at Manchester Metropolitan University, shortly after graduating in 1994 and enjoyed it immensely.  I certainly didn’t see just how interesting she was when I looked up some of her work on the Internet prior to seeing it at the Whitechapel Gallery. 

There are several things that struck me about Hoch’s work early on in my day. 

The first was how resonant her work is now.  Her deep interest in how women are perceived is so current – the media’s preoccupation with feminine ideals and the lack of reality in many of the images that woman are faced with is something that might very well be explored in a show of work produced this week.  This makes Hoch’s work incredibly fresh and relevant.  I am intrigued by the fact that her work has lately become so important having been somewhat put aside for a time.  My mother's Open University History of Art books (she studied in the 80’s and 90’s) barely mention Hannah Hoch and show no examples of her work.  Even the books entirely focused on Dadaism and Surrealism fare no better.  Hoch it seems has now been placed in a formidable position amongst her contemporaries. 

The other thing that struck me was how much her work seemed to allude to ideas explored by the psychoanalytical movement.  I think this is hardly surprising due to her place on the timeline of Western History, and because the Surrealists, well known for their links to Freudian dream theories, and the Dadaists are closely related although the latter are known to be more anarchic and political. I was instantly reminded of the Jungian concepts I recently read about, in a wonderful book called A Very Short Introduction to Carl Jung, of fragmented, un-individuated personalities especially when looking at images such as Gerhard Hauptman (1919) and The Father (1920)  - which also speak to me of societies in the same state, so the collages work on a micro and macro level.   The whole process of collage seems to lend itself wonderfully to an illustration of Jung’s ideas.  Or perhaps rather they each tap into something that was happening to the outer and inner worlds for humanity at the time.

If it is true that there was a prolonged period of disruption to how society operated following the industrial revolution as described by Steven Biddulph below, then this fragmented picture of a new society makes sense:

“[1]The Industrial Revolution started in the English Midlands, but it rolled tsunami-like across the globe.  Wherever it arrived, it took us in one generation from small, rural villages to huge, industrial towns, and from working together as men women and children (there was as yet no school) into sharply divided lives.  Suddenly everything changed – women were stuck at home, men went down coal mines, and boys began to fall through the cracks.”  Families, communities became split, fragmented and broken by human development and then wars.

We were told by one of the tutors at our visit that The Father (1920) explores a period of time when the men were too frightened to go out at all due to persecution and violence and so were left behind to hold the baby which is how the central male figure is depicted.  He is surrounded by leaping, dancing women all at leisure pursuits which remind me of the images of Third Reich propaganda that we have in our collective memories; perfect Arian bodies exercising.  There is also a boxer who punches the baby; he has a black eye, stuck on in the typical collage style and the Father too a glued-on eye  - the same side of the face.  The violence in society that is wrought upon the father shows up on the face of the baby too.

The Father is feminised with a half a women’s mouth, women’s clothes, legs and shoes.  There is so much about genders being less fixed than society feels comfortable with: Hock talks about her desire to “blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is possible to us”[2].  The blurring of gender ‘borders’ is typical of much of Hock’s work and for me is it hard not to relate some of these themes to descriptions of Jung’s amina and aminus along with the model he devised of the human psyche.[3]  The delicate, carefully made collages seem to explore a human psyche that is split, fragmented.

The other thing that I have not been able to stop thinking about is the montage itself.  I had a terrific A ‘level theatre studies tutor over 20 years ago who taught us about montage and alienation, estrangement or “verfremdungseffekt” when we were looking at Bertolt Brecht.  Brecht and other artists as well as states were starting to explore montage; especially in response to the way states were using film-editing techniques to create powerful messages.  What editing (montage) allowed states to do was create subjective realities in their favour promoting ideals that suited them - propaganda.  Brecht and many other artists, Hoch included it seems, started doing the same but not to convince people, rather to make them question and even do something.  Brecht talks about making people see things afresh – to alienate them from reality.  By making something unfamiliar you can begin see it in a new way and are more likely to question.

I think this alienation technique is very much what Hannah Hock is doing too.  By sticking Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn’s face and legs together with the far more exotic and overtly sexual body of a ‘foreign’ belly dancer in Hommage a Riza Abasi (1963) the viewer is forced to question attitudes towards celebrity, femininity, sexuality, and the role of the media over how women are perceived.  One is unlikely to be faced with these questions so overtly if such a darling of the Hollywood era were not cut up and re-presented as such.

In another way we are forced to look at the crying eyes and mouth of a baby which is placed with an adult male’s nose, forehead, head and ears in the Der Kleine P (1931) or a crying baby’s mouth within the face of an adult women in Klage (1930).  Here a viewer is forced to look at the emotion of a child and the emotion of an adult afresh.  I think these works are extremely powerful and give a very clear illustration of the child within the adult.  We tend to dismiss a child’s cry or at least undervalue it and we suppress our appreciation of an adults pain but Hoch makes us look at it afresh by employing this “verfremdungseffect.”

Hoch's youthful collage also is somehow an echo of film, not only because of the propaganda montage which is literally cutting and pasting moving images, but because her earlier work which is far more fragmented than her later work, gives one the sense of the broken fragmented rhythm of black and white film of the era.

The upper level of the Whitechapel Gallery was filled with later work and again I was struck by the idea of Jung’s individuation – a coming together of the disparate parts of one psyche, a calmer more grown up time.  Hoch’s work is less stilted, less jarring, less loud, more serene and very beautiful.  I did prefer the earlier work though but I suspect this is a personal taste.  There is something beguiling about the time in Germany between those wars, which might seem a strange thing for the daughter of Jew to say given what was brewing there.  But the decadent, anarchic, rebelliousness of the Dadaists and other modernists is incredibly compelling.

Finally, I wonder if it is simply a case of projecting 21^st century pop psychology onto the work, which is what makes it seem so relevant and modern or if Hoch indeed was in fact ahead of her times.  She was working at a moment in history when Western society seemed to be at the dawn of it’s own modern consciousness, and my favourite quote from my little Jung book is “there is no dawning of consciousness without pain” and certainly the first half of the 20^th century was one of intense pain and loss - and perhaps this is what all forms of modernism may be an expression of. 

I do believe Hoch was ahead of her time.  I was a little blasé and underwhelmed before I went along to the Whitechapel Gallery, rather naively dismissing collage as something not quite art-worthy no doubt.  But the work is extremely powerful, delicate, highly original, resonant and extraordinarily relevant to our lives now.

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Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) was one of the Berlin Dada Group and the only female artist included, although I understand there were other overlooked but important female artists around at the time.  Even Hoch herself may have been somewhat undervalued by the Dadaists themselves because of her sex. Hoch is a pioneer of photomontage working during the time of Weimer Republic (1919 – 33) alongside other Dadaists Max Ersnt, Jean Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Johanness Bauder, amongst others and especially the German artist Kurt Schwitters whom she was close to. 

After beginning her artistic life in textiles she started working in fashion magazines where she became acutely aware of the contrast between images of women in the media and reality.  She began to work with cutouts and photomontage and became involved with the Berlin Dada Group.

Hoch took part in the First International Dada Fair where her collages where well received.  Hoch also designed backdrops for the Cabaret Voltaire and performed in some events too, although only rarely.

She was very active up until the Second World War, during which she kept a very low profile in Germany.  After the war she continued to work and exhibit until her death in 1978.  Her post war work has a very different quality to it but she continued to be concerned with women and how they are perceived.

The Whitechapel separates Hock’s work into two sections.  The lower floor shows the period 1912-36, including early textiles, drawings and the beginnings of her photomontage.  Upstairs a small room contains The Album – an exhibit celebrating Hoch’s scrapbook, a collection of cuttings.

Further on is work from 1936 up to her death in 1978.  Hoch continued to work throughout her life.

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[1] The New Manhood: 20^th Anniversary Edition, Steve Biddulph, © Stephen Biddulp and Shaaron Biddulp, Finch Publishing Sydney, Kindle, Loc 263 of 4094 (6%).

[2] Hannah Hoch, Whitechapel Gallery & Prestel, 2014, ©Whitechapel Gallery, page 140

[3] Jung: A Very Short Introduction, Anthony Stevens, 1994, © Anthony Stevens, Oxford Press, 2001 edition, Kindle page 46 of 159 (26%)