by Jon Lackman | 31 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
Also in the Spring 2007 Biography is an essay by Susan Bruce on author Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical writings:
[I] advance the argument that the advent of photography changes our perception of ourselves in time … its most fundamental and melancholy legacy. The advent of photography ushers in an age in which we are at once closer to our younger selves than ever we could have been before, and also, perhaps, more alienated from them. In the act of seeing ourselves as children or adolescents, we recognize a shared identity with those past selves, but must simultaneously acknowledge that distance, and the act of looking, objectifies the object of our gaze, turning our past selves into others … Perhaps that is why Sassoon, talking of himself in the closing paragraph of his autobiography, chooses, unusually, to switch to the third person. “In a moment of clairvoyance he realized that he had come to the end of the journey on which he had set out when he enlisted in the army six years before,” Sassoon concludes:
And though he wasn’t clearly conscious of it, time has proved that there was nothing for him to do but begin all over again. To that occupation let us leave him. Picturing him in the clear afternoon light, in his New York straw hat, with the National Gallery in the background, I can almost believe that I have been looking at a faded photograph.
