Not too long after photography's grand debut in 1839, physician and inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes described the new technology as a “mirror with a memory.” What might this phrase mean for the question of African Americans and their relationship to the vicissitudes of photography and the vagaries of memory in particular? Through readings of works of art and social activism that make use of lynching photographs, this essay considers ways in which photography has functioned as a technology of memory for African Americans, what the essay calls critical black memory, and proffers a mode of historical interpretation that both plays upon and questions photography's documentary capacity. (1996) Conifers and Commemoration: the Politics and Protocol of Planting In Military Cemeteries', Landscape Research, 21:1, 73 - 87. (2004) Sites in the imagination: the Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial on the Somme, Cultural Geographies, 11: 3 pp.235-258 ISSN 1474 - 4740 Gough, P. It will also try to understand the recent disputes as examples of borrowed ‘entitlement’ and a resistance (by British visitors) to recognize the historic value of Canadian (or more specifically, Newfoundland) heritage.
Reflecting on the recent dispute, the paper will explore issues of historical accuracy, topographical legibility, freedom of access, and assumed ownership. This paper will revisit the original arguments and examine the many tensions that have arisen in one of the most popular destinations on the old battle front. As a result, measures have been taken to restrict access and control roaming rights. A land that took decades to recover and reclaim from violation is now being threatened again both by developers and crowds of tourists. Since the publication of the paper, the soaring popularity of battlefield tours and visits has placed an intolerable strain on the very land that many regard as sacred and hallowed. Such an achievement required close semiotic control and territorial demarcation in order to render the ‘invisible past’ visible, and to convert an emptied landscape into significant reconstructed space. In its artificially preserved state the tragic part played by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment could (until recently) be measured, walked and vicariously experienced. In that paper it was asserted that the topographical layout was deliberately arranged so as to focus exclusively on a thirty-minute military action during a fifty-month war. This argument focused on the premeditated re-design of the ‘park’ after the Great War, and then again in the early 1960s. A previous version of this paper argued that those who chose the site of the Park, and subsequently re-ordered its topography, helped to contrive a particular historical narrative that prioritised certain memories over others. Beaumont Hamel Memorial is a complex landscape of commemoration where Newfoundland, Canadian, Scottish and British imperial associations compete for prominence.
The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is a 16.5 hectare (40 acres) tract of preserved battleground dedicated primarily to the memory of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment who suffered an extremely high percentage of casualties during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.
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