Adventures in Instagram #4
On my way home from Guyane I stopped off in Paris. Turns out I’ve been staying opposite Rue Crémieux which has recently been featured in international news as one of the most instagrammed streets in Paris due to its brightly painted houses, a stark contrast to the usual Parisian aesthetic of white/grey buildings.
Residents have requested gates be put up as the street is becoming overcrowded not just with tourists but with models and rappers using it as a backdrop for photo shoots and music videos.
In thinking more critically about instagram as a research tool especially when documenting and analysing dark heritage, this story (which on the surface has very little connection to dark tourism or heritage) provides a reminder of the tensions between local and tourist appropriations and representations of certain spaces. Instagram encapsulates the desire to clear out the messy, everyday, inhabited-ness of certain spaces in order to turn them into 2D backdrops.
Similar examples can be found in cities like Detroit where deep recession caused by the sharp decline in manufacturing has resulted in the abandonment and ruination of vast swathes of its once glorious real estate. John Patrick Leary has written on the appropriation of such space by film crews looking for locations which offer a vision of a post-apocalyptic future. The irony of course is that this future is now.
References
Leary, John Patrick, ‘Detroitism: What does “ruin porn” tell us about the Motor City,’ Guernica, 15 January 2011. Available: https://www.guernicamag.com/leary_1_15_11/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
O’Sullivan, Feargus, ‘Their street is famous on instagram and they can’t take it anymore,’ CityLab, 5 March 2019. Available: https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/rue-cremieux-paris-instagram-tourists-where-to-take-pictures/584164/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Adventures in Instagram #3
I made a short return trip to French Guiana in March 2019. Although I didn’t take a lot of photos, there were things I noticed at sites that I hadn’t seen or at least noticed previously.
For example, on this visit to the Bagne des Annamites in Montsinery, I had time to continue along the trail to the creek which is a popular picnic spot. As it was half-term there were a number of families swimming and picnicking. I took a photo of the creek using my smartphone rather than my Nikon but was nevertheless careful not to be invasive of people’s privacy. The image shows people swimming but you cannot make out any clear details. Nevertheless I decided not to post the photo on instagram despite thinking how it contests dominant images of former prison sites. By which I mean images which fetishize certain aspects of architecture such as windows with bars, cells, instruments of torture and restraint and so on. The creek was integral to life in the camp and provided a form of transportation via the river network at a time when there was no road to Cayenne. One of the roles of the camp was to create a network between the other sites at Saut Tigre and near Apatou where Annamite (Vietnamese) prisoners had been sent.
But in not reproducing the photo, I am also caught up in the processes of cropping, framing and excluding which allow us to present penal heritage as empty and abandoned. This seems to me a similar practice as the production of images of the pristine, empty beach. Such images evoke notions of blank, deserted space awaiting the arrival of the tourist to project his or her neocolonial fantasies and pathologies. The enlightened amateur (or indeed professional) historian or anthropologist exploring the vestiges of the bagne is perhaps no different here to the gap year traveller looking for Leonardo DiCaprio’s beach. So instead of reproducing the image I took of families enjoying the creek, I will offer up a different yet comparable image – a postcard on sale in the gift shop on the Iles du Salut.
I have taken care to reproduce this as an object rather than an image for copyright reasons. The postcard shows a similar bathing scene but this time at what came to be known as the ‘piscine des bagnards’ on Ile Royale, the largest island of the Iles du Salut archipelago. The postcard whose date is unknown probably dates from the end of the 1990s, early 2000s when AGAMIS (whose stamp appears on the back) took over the management of the Iles on behalf of CNES. However, the image itself seems to capture an aesthetic belonging to an earlier moment, itself located between the vintage reproductions of images taken during the operation of the penal colony and more recent photography which offers us a conventional aesthetic of ruins and nature abandoned of messy human presence. It reminds me of tourist guides dating from the 1970s and 80s during which the Iles du Salut were being reimagined as a site of leisure within a wider agenda intended to energise the department’s tourist industry precisely by moving beyond rather than celebrating its dark past.
Today the two activities appear less mutually exclusive although for some there is something inappropriate about reimagining a site of suffering as a site of pleasure. The stakes are complex not least the various discourses aimed at controlling and often excluding the use of different sites by local communities. SF
Adventures in Instagram #2
Having recently completed a month of fieldwork in French Guiana, it seems like a good moment to take first stock of how Instagram has accompanied other forms of photography and the presentation of images so far.
There are a few things worth commenting on briefly:
1. Photography is a key aspect of the project and Claire’s role has involved extensive photographic documentation of the various penal heritage sites we have explored. One of the things we intend to analyse via these images, their cataloguing, storage and presentation is how these enable us to reconstruct our visits as well as allow a certain degree of reflexivity on how we ‘frame’ and ‘capture’ objects, landscapes etc at these former sites of incarceration and forced labour. Another aim of the project is to explore how these images might be re-presented as part of an artistic project (again led by Claire) that emphasize the various layers of colonial and penal history at the sites together with the different infrastructures and networks that link these sites physically and virtually. What this had meant during site visits is that I have spent less time taking photographs which has allowed me a different engagement and experience of the spaces to previous visits to other prison museums and penal heritage sites. At the same time this has given me more time to use my Instax camera (more on this to follow) to varying degrees of success and also take and upload images to Instagram using my mobile phone. Switching between devices is less easy when using a larger camera.
2. Phone and data coverage has generally been good in French Guiana. Added to which as a French overseas department, it is a part of the EU which means no extra data roaming costs. That said, we have avoided providing an incessant commentary of our visits on Twitter and Instagram usually bookending our visits with an update on our way to or from a site. However, it is often on longer journeys to more remote sites that phone coverage is more sporadic. Instead I have found these journeys a useful time to prepare blog posts using the notes app on my phone. There is a fine line it seems between a post or upload which emphasizes the present moment and one which risks substituting that moment.
3. In relation to the previous point, we have been attentive to the fact that our project involves visits to a number of sites promoted as tourist destinations. In exploring the different stakes of penal tourism and other forms of heritage, any so-called ‘live’ commentary risks simply reproducing a tourist narrative and aesthetics. This is particularly true in French Guiana given the luscious beauty of its forests and its traditional Creole architecture. This will also be an issue in New Caledonia. A simple google image search for ‘New Caledonia’ reveals a dominant aesthetic of white sandy beaches and turquoise waters. It is difficult not to be seduced into reproducing this aesthetic uncritically. As we both have personal Instagram accounts, we have an outlet for sharing this type of image.
4. Our main concern around using Instagram to document the project is the generally positive aesthetics of Instagram as a celebration of the visual. While there are Instagram accounts and projects such as Blue Bag Life (@bluebaglife) which use the platform to provide a critical look at contemporary images of incarceration and addiction, these tend to include longer commentaries. As we are producing a project blog where images play a more illustrative role and are carefully contextualised, Instagram seems to offer an opportunity to do something different more in line with more widespread uses of the platform. As a result, the practice of not presenting images directly associated with the penal colony – cells, manacles, mug shots etc has emerged over the course of the project so far. Instead a set of different images are presented which hopefully provide a different appreciation of the spaces we are exploring. One particular example here is the image I took of the broken shells that make up the beach on Île Saint Joseph. Île Saint Joseph was the island where convicts were placed in solitary confinement. To get sent to the Îles du Salut [Salvation Islands] was usually punishment for attempted escape. To get sent to Île Saint Joseph usually meant further punishment. The island was, in a sense, the prison within a prison within a prison.
Where many of the buildings belonging to the penal administration have been restored on Île Royale, those on Île Saint Joseph have been maintained as ruins. The relationship between the former buildings and the natural environment, the trees, moss, spider webs, agoutis, iguanas which have reclaimed the space, has been captured in various photography projects including Rodolphe Hammadi’s images produced as part of his collaboration with Patrick Chamoiseau in 1994.
I chose the shell image instead as a way of presenting the island differently avoiding both the aesthetic of ruins and the prolific palm trees that frame all views from the island. Regardless of how visitors opt to explore the island during the short time they have (tours usually drop visitors by dinghy after lunch with the catamaran returning to Kourou around 3.30/4pm), most end up on the shell beach. The beach is next to the cemetery where guards and their families were buried. The broken shells seem to tell a comparable story to the forgotten, and irreparably broken lives washed up on the island during its time as a penal colony. The image, I feel, is also inspired by some of the work featured in Edmund Clark’s In Place of Hate exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham earlier this year which I wrote about here. Clark eschewed a traditional aesthetic of incarceration in the exhibition and strikingly the first things one sees are films of a fish tank and a glass display of pressed flowers arranged around a space the size of a cell.
It is important to look for ways to challenge an oversimplified depiction of incarceration which relies too heavily on traditional prison architecture and the mug shots of those sentenced. However, what purpose does a series of alternative images play? Do these risk becoming too abstract? Or allow for a romanticisation that fills the gap of the fetishisation of the prison cell both past and present?
References
Chamoiseau, Patrick and Rodolphe Hammadi, Guyane: Traces-Mémoires du Bagne (Paris: CNMHS, 1994).
Adventures in Instagram #1
Some preliminary notes on Instagram as a research tool
One of the main aims of this project is to think seriously about ways in which different experiences and narratives of incarceration are framed and presented to a general audience. We are particularly interested in how objects and photographs are displayed and annotated within museums and exhibitions focused on the bagne. We are also thinking about how maps are used in different formats in guidebooks and postcards as well as museums to help conceptualise the location and space of the bagne according to different geographical markers.
While we are using photography fairly extensively to document the sites, displays and material we encounter and have already begun to use some of these images to annotate our blog and on twitter, we are cautious as to the role such images can play in affirming rather than contesting both current forms of incarceration and the ongoing impact of now defunct models of imprisonment such as transportation.
Over the course of the project we plan to use Instagram to share images linked to our fieldwork and other activities. But we also want to explore more critically the potential and limitations of Instagram for this type of research. While there are a number of excellent academic blogs dedicated to research blogging (Pat Thomson’s excellent blog is a go-to resource here), there seems to be little on the effective use of Instagram. It would be great to hear from anyone developing ideas and best practices around this.
Finally, our initial thoughts are that Instagram can offer a great way to document the positive, exciting experience of carrying out research at different historical sites. It can also provide a wider, messier, more ad-hoc context for the carefully framed images that will be used as illustration and undergo analysis when we come to write up our findings. Yet we will continue to ask if and how this practice becomes in itself a form of tourism (inevitable it must) and how this operates alongside or at odds with the main claims of our project. SF & CR
The project Instagram handle is: cartespostalesdubagne
Our twitter handle is: @postcards_bagne
