In Breda Beban's photographic sequences, images are positioned and framed by the narration of her story in texts which accompany the photographs. Beban is also a film and video- maker and, like film and video, these photo-text works remain structured like narratives: they are literally a story of an escape, of a journey and of arrivals. This article explores two of Beban's works I Lay on the Bed Waiting for his Heart to Stop Beating, 36 photos taken in various locations between 1991-97, and The Miracle of Death, a series of six photos taken in London in 1998, both preceded by written texts. These two pieces of work were shown in the exhibition Still (Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2000).

Born 1952 in Zagreb, Beban trained as a painter at Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1970s and went on to do postgraduate studies in Zagreb & Berlin in the early 1980s. She began to write and direct films and videos with her partner, Hrvoje Horvatic in 1986. They left Croatia when the Civil War broke out in 1991 and became refugees, travelling widely before they settled in London, where Horvatic died suddenly in 1997. These brief biographical facts inform the work.

Beban's photographs operate in a complex way in relation to temporality. Beban's narratives are not told with the fluid realism of film, but through the repetitive frozen frames of photography. Whereas lived experience may be said to be filmic, memory is often photographic in the way that it stills and separates a moment from the flow of time. Unlike a linear account, the series of photographic images are re-processed by the artist as returns to the past and thereby are re-created as sites for multiple inscriptions of memory. My contention in relation to Beban's series is that they enact a tension between the flow of film and the stilled time of a photographic image.

In I Lay on the Bed Waiting for his Heart to Stop Beating, each frame offers a depiction of an anonymous location in space and time that is minimally captioned with a place name and date. However, the series is preceded by a written text in the form of a diary entry that invokes the artist's own experience as a fragmented narrative that links memory with image, place and time. Each set of photographs in the series shows an image of an unmade bed, a shot of the window, and then a view from the window of a room. Every fourth image in the set was made by the subsequent photographic printing of an enlarged detail of the third photograph preceding it. The arrangement of the photographs into a series imposes a structure evident through the obsessive repetition of sequences: bed, window; view; bed, window; view. This also enacts a movement from inside to outside, from an enclosed space to the world beyond. I want to suggest that this repetition has at least two meanings, especially if we consider how the photographs operate within distinct time frames: that of 1991-7 when they were originally taken as personal records, and that of 2000 when Beban put the series together for the exhibition, Still. In the first time frame, the photographs were taken during the period of flight and exile during which the artist and her partner travelled from city to city across the world. They appear to enact a desire to impose some order and structure on places, objects and details that lack any coherent narrative. These are spaces emptied of time, which as Lynne Pearce suggests, can be seen as: 'temporarily frozen, yet held up to emotional account.’[1] The initial function of the photographs then may not have been only to represent the literal experience of dislocation, but their making itself became an act of survival; as psychic containers against emotional breakdown. The repetitive act of taking the same photographs in each unfamiliar setting became a kind of ritual performance through which Beban could objectify the conditions that threatened to overwhelm her.

In the catalogue for Still, Adrian Searle comments:
'Going to the window, a daily act, becomes a figuration of disconnectedness from one's surroundings, but it is also the first step (get up and go to the window) of finding, or re-finding one's place in the world.'[2]
The act of photographing the empty rooms then, may be seen as a ritual repeatedly performed during the artist's travels between 1991-1997. It is performative in the sense of bringing into being, or of anchoring herself as a subject in the world. As Searle suggests: 'standing at a window, taking a photograph of what lies outside, reduplicates a sense of exteriority, and of being one whose sense of place is interior, inside the body, inside one's own language, inside oneself, behind the eye that reaches out.'[3]

Here, the sense of identity for the person in exile is internal, the only place in which it can exist, and the eye that reaches out though the camera becomes, as Cathy Caruth has put it recently, a 'creative act of survival'[4]. In the second time frame of 2000 when the series was completed, I shall suggest that the fourth image in each sequence produced offers a means of coming to terms with that traumatic experience of exile.

This opens up a second way of thinking about repetition is in relation to the series as a whole, that is, with reference to the detail in the fourth photograph of each sequence, made in 2000. In the introduction to her book, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth examined the way in which traumatic experience is not fully grasped or witnessed by the subject at the time of its occurrence, but only after the event in a kind of temporal delay that is characterised by flashbacks: to be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event ...The traumatised carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history they cannot entirely possess.[5]

Walter Benjamin also insisted on the importance of personal memory as a counter to the claims of history. In his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', he argued that history is the narrative of the victorious and thus becomes the dominant ideology of the present: to re-examine the past critically is 'to brush history against the grain'[6]. For Benjamin, the documentation of lives that are un-marked or unrecorded is crucial to understanding how the past lives on in the present or enters into it in 'moments of danger', but:
'To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it "the way it was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger'[7].
Private and 'ordinary' memories, for Benjamin, function as interventions (jolts, shocks) that disrupt dominant narratives of the present. Photographs possess this ability as well. Or as Laura Marks puts it, the image has the power to make 'history reveal what it was not able to say.’[8]. Her work suggests that intercultural works in film and video are also constituted around a particular crisis: the political discrepancy between official history and 'private memory'.[9] These works of memory trouble history - as, unlike nostalgia, it is the insistent voices of the marginalised, the suppressed or the forgotten which they contain and which succeed in unsettling or disturbing official histories. Their disruption of the dominant account demonstrates how 'repressed cultural memories [can] return to destabilise national histories'.[10]

Conceived in this way, the repressed memories contained within Beban's photographs may be said to de-stabilise the narrative sequence of the photographic series. For Caruth, the peculiar temporal structure of trauma is linked to repetition, 'the belatedness of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, another time' [my italics].[11] This characteristic of trauma, 'its refusal to be simply located, ...its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of a single space and time',[12] is marked in Beban's photo- text series by the fourth enlarged detail in each set of four, which functions as "a now in then"[13]. This cut through time signals the point at which the traumatic return to her past experiences as a refugee flashes back and is fixed by the artist in the present. Each of these images possesses the grainy quality of shots like those of security videos that home in on an apparently random detail of an anonymous streetscape and freeze it in the frame. This fourth photograph, unlike the others, was made in retrospect, after the event to which it could be said to allude. The form chosen has resonances with a sequence in Antonioni's film Blow Up (1966) where death is revealed in the enlarged detail of a photograph. Antonioni was one of the European film- makers whom both Beban and Horvatic admired. Considering this, the temporal sequence of the photographs thus becomes even more complicated. The series represents time that is past, time that was present and, potentially, the involuntary memory of a future. Beban's own trauma was not originally present in these photographs; it only came later with the subsequent death of Horvatic, whose future absence the photographs would foretell. For the viewer, the significance of the "event” cannot be seen in the photographs, it can only be read in conjunction with the written texts that recount in stark terms, the artist's experience of flight and loss.

To Roland Barthes, the unique quality of any photograph is that, unlike other iconic signs, it provokes an awareness of "having been there"; the photograph is an illogical conjunction of between the "here-now" and the "there-then". [14] Every photograph bears the trace of its origin, thus all photographs carry the aura of a lost past, something that cannot be recaptured and what he calls a 'third meaning' beyond the semiotic or the symbolic. It is this 'ghost presence' that Barthes suggests haunts the photograph and produces an 'uncanny doubleness' that has the power to induce anxiety. This anxiety stems from a sense of pain associated with the irreplaceability of the past as well as from the link Barthes makes between the photographic act and trauma. The subtext of Camera Lucida (1981), which his meditation on photography and death, is the death of his mother: 'the terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead'.[15] But if every photograph conceals a death, how do we read the specificity of Beban's photographic series that are produced both before and after a death which has literally occurred?
In a footnote to her analysis of Freud's discussion of the child's game of fort-da, Caruth argues that this game could be read as one of mourning:
'The received understanding of the game is that it represents a form of mastery and is thus, not strictly speaking, purely traumatic repetition - unless traumatic repetition is understood as already itself a form of mastering.'[16] [my italics]

Yet this is precisely how the repetition in Beban's work operates; it is a mastery of trauma through repetition, that is in itself a form of mourning. This is what, I think, constitutes the peculiar temporal and spatial structure of this work. In order 'to master what was never fully grasped in the first place',[17] the photographs had to be re-located in a different temporal and spatial relationship to the past. In this series, the fourth, "blown up" detail signifies what was there, but hidden in the image all the time.

Barthes names the evidential status of photographs as carrying their own effects: the sense of "having been thereness". Beban's images in one sense provide the only evidence of having been there, in those rooms, at those times, with Horvatic. For Barthes, it is the 'punctum' of a photograph that seizes the eye, interrupts the scene, and pierces the viewer:
'Precisely these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium, I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).'[18]

In Beban's work, the 'punctum' is not the incidental frozen detail in the fourth image of the sequence, but the residual sense of presence; of someone having been there, represented in the first image of the unmade bed. In her introduction to Mourning Sex (1997), Peggy Phelan states her interest in investigating:

The possibility that something substantial can be made from the outline after the body has disappeared. My hunch is that the affective outline of what we have lost might bring us closer to the bodies we want still to touch than the restored illustration can. Or at least the hollow of the outline might allow us to understand more deeply why we long to hold bodies that are gone. [19]

This description parallels Beban's task or rather the effect produced by these photographs. She never shows us Horvatic's likeness, only his bodily trace left in the hollow where his head was outlined on the pillow. He is always elsewhere.

Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey suggest in their introduction to the issue of Cultural Values on the theme of 'Testimonial Cultures', in which Caruth's essay appears, that she argues for a new reading of Freud's analysis of trauma. She proposes that it is precisely the failure to bring the figure of the loved one who has been lost into presence that can offer a way for the survivor to separate from the other and move on. In response to Caruth's 'Parting Words', Phelan's essay in the same volume, 'Converging Glances', offers a different reading. She shifts the focus in Freud's account of the fort-da game from "stories" (narration) to the visible (performance). Like Caruth, Phelan suggests that in Freud's account of the child's game of fort-da, the child is making into words what is actually a pre-linguistic utterance. However, rather than conceiving this as Caruth does in terms of a story, Phelan uses the metaphor of the 'screen'. The child's play is, she says,
a game about "seeing" and what is at issue, is the child's fear of being "out of sight". This is the traumatic core of all seeing... In every encounter with the limit of the eye's capacity to see, one encounters something that extends beyond the I. Thus the confrontation with optical limitation is also a vivid reminder of the blindness in all encounters.[20]

In Beban's photographs, the hollow on the pillow, the closed sheds in the Italian hills, a cardboard box in an empty room, return the viewer to psychic landscapes that are charged with significance that is only ever partially accessible to the eye. When I looked at the work for the first time it was like a sensation of a stilling of the heartbeat, a chill in the body. The title of her exhibition, Still, relates exactly to that sensation, a cut through narrative time - a still from a film or a moment of stasis on a journey or a flight. These are stills from a life attempting to come to terms with death and to move on in 'an act of parting that itself creates and passes on a different history of survival'. [21]

Barthes also describes the punctum as the 'wound' in the photograph that 'bruises me, is poignant to me'.[22] What then is my affective encounter with these works? It is not one of sympathy or pathos, but rather of silence and shock. In The Miracle of Death there is also a kind of banality in the cardboard box that contained Horvatic's ashes, photographed in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the study of their London flat, as well as a powerful sense of a location that is still embodied. The series also has a darkly comic side, bringing to mind the black humour of cremations, misplaced remains and coffin comedies. The box is just a box after all, and we do not know what it contains. Yet its presence touches me, I am fingered by the photograph, arrested by it, and cannot move away. What does it mean to be "touched" by an image? What does such "touching" mean?

In her essay, 'Trauma and Ineloquence', Lauren Berlant suggests that trauma is 'the literal unsymbolisable mark of pure violence, or its opposite, violence congealed in an intensified representation'. [23] Here the box appears to congeal the meaning contained in the sudden violence that all death marks for the survivors. It becomes a reliquary and the room, because it suffused with light, a shrine. It is also a memento, in the sense that Caruth describes, as an attempt to 'memorialise a life'. [24] But Beban's work is not solely an act of personal memory. I would suggest that she calls upon us, as viewers, to be witnesses although we are not party to the event itself. As Caruth productively suggests:

'The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it also a continual leaving of its site . ...And, by carrying that impossibility of knowing out of the empirical event itself, trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing precisely of impossibility.' [25] Berlant also calls for 'an ethics of critical attention’ [26] on the part of witnesses to trauma which challenge us to be 'transformed by the knowledge of what you cannot feel directly'. But this is a retrospective view since as she warns, 'the witness is always belated'.[27]

These photographs articulate Beban as the subject of a traumatic narrative that is mobilised across differing times and spaces, a subject who is produced through the specific media of still image and written text. Her story is brought into being through the material objects she photographed, but these of themselves do not offer the viewer access to the "truth" "here and there"; "now and then": especially, the idea of reciprocity through a movement between two beings. As images, they invite the kind of "dialogic address" that requires attentive forms of listening that both Berlant and Caruth invoke. Gayatri Spivak also calls for this form of attention when she suggests that it is the task of the translator - or here, the viewer - to 'surrender to the text' and to attend to 'the space outside language' if she is to respond to and be responsible for it: 'Rhetoric must work in the silence between and around words in order to see what works and how much’ [28] [my italics]. The stillness of Beban's photographs refuses any easy reading or identification for the viewer and instead requires an ethics of attention to the very structure of their silences. While speech and writing are forms of representation, visual testimony opens up a gap that cannot be entirely filled with knowledge - it is a space where empathy or understanding is not enough. The ethics of the encounter with Beban's work then is to recognise the limits of their translatability into our own terms. We see beyond the limits of ourselves and fall silent.

This article is from a paper given at the Affective Encounters conference, School of Art, Literature and Music and Media Studies, University of Turku, Finland, 13-15 September 2001. E-book of the papers available at: http ://www.utu.fi/hum/mediatutkimus/affective/ proceedings.pdfTurku: Media Studies, 2001.

Rosemary Betterton is Reader in Women's Studies at Lancaster University. Her latest book is Unframed: practices and politics of women contemporary painting (IB Tauris, 2003). Her other books include Intimate Distance (Routledge, 1996) and (ed) Looking On (Pandora, 1987).

Notes

1. Lynne Pearce (ed.) Devolving Identities: Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging (Ashgate Publishing: Aldershot, 2000) p. 171.
2. Adrian Searle catalogue may in Still (Sheffield Site Gallery, 2000) p.3.
3. ibid.
4. Cathy Caruth 'Parting Words: Trauma, Testimony and Survival' Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No. 1, pp. 7-26.
5. Cathy Caruth, (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) pp. 4-5.
6. Walter Benjamin 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1969) in Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1970) p. 256.
7. Ibid p. 255.
8. Laura Marks The Skin of the Film (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000) p. 29.
9. ibid p. 60.
10. ibid p. 27.
11. Cathy Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory p.8.
12. ibid p.9
13. Nick Darke catalogue essay in Still (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2000) p.40
14. Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (London: Paladin, 1981) p. 44.
15. ibid p.9.
16. Cathy Caruth 'Parting Words: Trauma, Testimony and Survival' Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No.1 p. 22.
l7.ibidp. 10.
18. Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography p.27.
19. Peggy Phelan 'Converging Glances: A Response to Cathy Caruth's "Parting words" Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No. 1 p.3.
20. ibid p. 33.
21. Cathy Caruth 'Parting Words: Trauma, Testimony and Survival' Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No.1 p.21.
22. Roland Barflies Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography p.29.
23. Lauren Berlant 'Trauma and Ineloquence' Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No. 1 p. 43.
24. Cathy Caruth 'Parting Words: Trauma, Testimony and Survival' Cultural Values (2001) Vol.5, No.1
25. Cathy Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory p.10.
26. Lauren Berlant 'Trauma and Ineloquence' Cultural Values, (2001) Vol.5, No. 1 p.45.
27. ibid pp. 44-45.
28. Gayatri Spivak 'The Politics of Translation' in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds.) Destabilizing Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) p. 179.