TIME'S past in the present: Nostalgia and the black and white image

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 383-392

  Grainge, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005336113     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875899006155     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 71;
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), 81.
3. My use of the term "nostalgia for the present" differs from that of Fredric Jameson. For Jameson, the "nostalgia mode" is a representational economy that has emerged as a symptom of a crisis in the postmodern historical imagination. I focus upon the aestheticization of nostalgia in particular stylistic forms, examining the cultural and memory work performed in the negotiation (rather than negation) of historical meaning.
4. Roger Rosenblatt, "Prologue: In Black and White," in P. F. Bentley, ed., Clinton: Portrait of Victory (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 10.
5. Paul Durrant, telephone interview, 25 Mar. 1997.
6. Michele Stephenson, telephone interview, 24 Mar. 1997.
7. Cited in Latice Morrow, "The Time of Our Lives," Time, 9 Mar. 1998, p. 27.
8. Victor Burgin, "Looking at Photographs," in Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), 144.
9. All the images I discuss in this article will be Time covers. These are significant not simply because they announce the issue at hand, but also because very few covers ever appear in monochrome. When black and white is used therefore, it can be indicative of the signifying regime that monochrome operates within. A more detailed analysis would have to consider the relation between monochrome covers and the visual narratives inside the magazine. It is possible to get a sense of the signifying regime I want to outline simply from the covers, however. All of my references are to Time Atlantic. Everything that appears in the international edition also appears in the domestic edition. While there may be some differences in content, style, and layout, I do not take these to interfere with my treatment of black and white.
10. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997), 13.
11. P. F. Bentley, e-mail interview, 28 Apr. 1997.
12. P. F. Bentley, e-mail interview, 1997, Ibid.
13. Lance Morrow, "Man of the Year: The Torch is Passed," Time, 4 Jan. 1992, p. 27.
14. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 13.
15. Representations, Ibid., 22.
16. Nora's theory is applied specifically to France, but his distinction between "sites of memory" and "environments of memory" has been applied to other cultural, in particular American, paradigms. See Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally, eds, History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
17. A.Robert Lee, "Shooting America: American Images: Photography 1945-1980," Journal of American Studies 2 (1986), 294.