Stained Glass Identity

In No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites argue that shared experiences and shared images create a shared memory and shared civic identity.  To argue this, Hariman and Lucaites examine multiple iconic photographs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—these images are powerful partly because they have spread, argue Hariman and Lucaites.  Photography has allowed the spread and reproduction of selected images; this ability of a selected image to be reproduced and spread is an important factor in it becoming a recognized image and icon.  It is in the ability to spread and reproduce these images that shared civic identity can be formed around them—shared memory from the individual experience of viewing an iconic image.

But what about images that do not spread?  What about images that remain attached to a particular local and what about the shared and civic identity which can emerge around these images?

Stained glass windows are images created from a process very different that photography, and the materiality of these images preclude the possibility for easy mobility.  These images do not move; the individual—the community—must come to the image.  But these images are also traditionally attached to a church, and the church was, for centuries, the center of a community.  The importance of the church to society and community in the middle ages made this so. 

Stained glass images presented the images of the church and had the potential to become, I would argue, as significant to these smaller communities in the creation of shared memory and identity as Hariman and Lucaites’s photographs.  Just as there are often multiple versions of a single photographic image, there are multiple variations of a subject presented in stained glass.  Subjects repeat in stained glass, however; this is especially true of the images presented by the church.  The Madonna or the saints were the most frequent subjects represented in stained glass, and each of these subjects had iconic motifs to identify him or her.  Mary would be depicted in Blue, often with the addition of red to her dress, for example.  This motif would identify the image of Mary for the viewer, a cultural cue learned through community and shared experience. 

But no two Mary images are alike.  The iconic image of Mary spreads through multiple images encoded with the same symbolic cues, but each Mary is herself unique.  Where one image might depict a stoic Mary, another image might represent a smiling Mary.  This combination of shared iconic imagery within different images makes me questions how Hariman and Lucaites’s concept of shared memory and civic identity would function with these images.

One thing is for certain—the image would not travel to the viewer; instead, the viewer would have to come to the image.  As mentioned above, given the church’s function in a community, community members would be familiar with the images of their own church.  Would these images create a shared and civic identity among that community that is different that the shared and civic identity among a community three towns over with a different church and different images?   My inclination would be, yes.  In small ways, I think it probably would make a difference.  To understand Mary through an image depicting her as a smiling new mother is to interpolate different qualities and a different understanding of the figure than to understand Mary from an image of a sorrowful, contemplative woman.  Yet, both these images would be readily identifiable as Mary by the colors in which she is depicted.

Would these two different iconic representations of the same figure then create two different shared cultural identities?  Would these identities conflict when a member of one community then discusses some matter with a member of another community, both of whom have been affected differently by their formed shared memories and identities? 

I don’t yet know, but it’s something to think about.  The materiality and mobility of an image might not preclude the formation of shared memory and shared identity, but it certainly changes the scope of influence.