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Popular Icons and Contemporary Memory: An Apology, Year 2001 Marguerite Helmers continued . . .
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An immediate question is how to read the angles and planes of the photograph of Diana and Teresa. As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen point out in their study Reading Images, "there is a close similarity between sequential information structure in language and horizontal structure in visual composition" (188). Images and icons can be read like the left to right structure of language: from the temporal before to the temporal after (188). Left is "already given" (Teresa is aging, familiar to people of many ages, identifiable as a humanitarian). The right side of the photograph tends to present a "role model highly valued" (186), and is the side of "key information." The right is something New, not yet agreed upon by the viewer, "problematic," "contestable" (187). Kress and van Leeuwen read several images with this structure in mind, referring to the left as Given and the right as New. In the photograph of Mother Teresa and Diana, then, Mother Teresa is Given, the "paradigm example" of devotional service (196). Diana is the New example of that service, and she is surprising in this role because she is an a upper-class representative of fashion, status, wealth, power, and Anglican religious values. Although the photograph is divided into two planes, the eye is initially drawn to Diana, who occupies a position of prominence in the photograph because of her height. Her gaze is directed downward to Mother Teresa. As our eye follows Diana's gaze, we take in the nun and her clasped hands. The photograph also establishes Diana as a transgressive figure, one who uses her image in self-referential ways. Diana is mobile and to transgress means to move across borders. Physically, Diana was, in life as well as in death, a moving signifier. She appears in hospitals doing good works, just as easily as she appears about a yacht in the Mediterranean. That she went to India to visit Mother Teresa is a more powerful iconic statement that if she had brought Mother Teresa to London for a special audience. In addition to establishing her credentials as a humanitarian, it elides the fact that her visit was an exercise of power and wealth. What is represented in the image is only the affect of the visit: the fact that it existed, in time and place, in India, the cultural and semiotic Other of England. What is not overtly represented is the mobility of Diana, that she expended considerable amounts of money on travel, clothing, and retinue, all of which made her visit to this site possible. Thus, to be ratified as a humanitarian concerned with the people she needed to expend personal wealth in order to cross class boundaries and demonstrate a concern with the poor, malnourished, and sick in their own geographic space. In her astute investigation of the Marilyn Monroe legacy, S. Paige Baty referred to this type of visual imaging as "cartographic remembering" (2). Cartographic remembering investigates the dislocations that exist when history as recorded in images and history as recorded in words reveal new stories, turning history into an entertaining performance. History's "hidden plots" are illuminated by mass-mediated "public appearance" (117). Just as contemporary cultural icons bear little resemblance to the original, biological body, cartographic remembering bears little resemblance to the facts of history. It is more important that humans tell stories, based on the photographs and media images they have accumulated. 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Node | 5 | 6 | Notes | Works Cited
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