In my first reading of Marianne Hirsch’s text, I was struck with her attachment to photography, “especially analog photography” (37), and her conceptualization of the family in the production of “postmemory.” I understand that she is referring, above all, to the victims of The Holocaust and that she is aware of the risks involved in defining a family. But it is uncomfortable that Hirsch exposes photography, being such a modern art and so tied to the idea of the individual (ultimately, the photograph is taken by one subject), as the ghost, using Barthes, that “haunts” our present and the one which we return to “haunt” our past (50). I think of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s movie The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon. In it, a young woman makes art out of the remains of bombs dropped by the United States in Vietnam. There are no photographs there to recall the death of the father. Instead, the ghosts are in the remains of those bombs, which, thanks to the young girl, become art and sound and, therefore, healers of a traumatic past. In that film, the family is not just the mother, daughter, or cousin but an entire community.

However, I see Rosana Paulino’s Wall of Memory and understand what Hirsch is referring to. The photos reproduced on hundreds of knitted cushions by the Brazilian artist are taken from her family’s albums. When I see this work, I realize that this is also what it feels like to reflect what a family is. Likewise, when I think of the current Colombian civil war, a photograph of Jesús Abad Colorado keeps coming back to me, and it has nothing to do with me. I don’t know the person in the photo, but it feels familiar. That photograph, which I attach below the text, embodies the war and, at the same time, subverts it. It is the ghost of the past and the glimpse, in the girl’s eyes, of a future. It is hopeful and, at the same time, catastrophic. Perhaps it is our memory that has become photographic. Maybe, in fact, the photographs tend to become the ones Paulino uses to weave over them. Instead of being static, memory, time, and people stitch different forms onto them. Like any piece of matter, photography, “especially analog photography,” fades, gets damaged or lost; at some point, it also becomes memories, stories, and sounds.

Email: jda8852@nyu.edu