Trauma Explorations In Memory Summary

Cathy Caruth, a Professor at Cornel University has looked at the themes surrounding trauma, looking in-depth at the ideas of flashbacks and how trauma causes us to repeat these disturbing events. In her book, Trauma: Explorations In Memory, she discusses the concept of flashbacks, how we cannot go back and relive the moment when the trauma occurred so we create flashbacks which rely solely on our memories and the emotions that we felt at the time . This idea that trauma only exists in our emotions means that it is difficult to translate into art because emotions and memories are hard to write down and to be understood by anyone else but yourself, so how do you do this? Caruth argues that just showing the public the trauma or tragedy isn't enough "While images of
Here she argues that although a photo is factual, and proves that trauma has occurred, it does not possess the ability to convey the traumatic emotions that the individual went through.
In order to attempt to translate the experience of trauma, as an artist, is to acknowledge the fact that trauma cannot be fully represented. One piece of work that acknowledges this is Alfredo Jaar's 'Real Pictures' (Figure 1) in which he has encased and buried away in boxes, photographs from the Rwandan genocide. On each box there is a description of what is on the photograph inside. Susan Sontag talks about how Jaar has suspended the images that haunt him and applied text in place of the image as the photography by itself is unable to translate the traumatic experience and reality of the situation. With this work he has acknowledged