forget me not? photography and remembrance

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Forget Me Not? Photography and Remembrance
Photography is linked closely with memory. Well aware of this, photographic manufacturers and retailers have aggressively exploited and promoted this fact in their advertising campaigns. But what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Photographs help us recall family, friends and special moments. But do they allow us to really remember them? Some people have argued that photography and memory do not mix, that one even precludes the other. Photography, they say, replaces memories with mere pictures. In order to create and preserve memories, people have enhanced photographs by adding words, fabric, objects and even hair. The photograph becomes something that is touched, whether really or in the imagination of the viewer, and this helps drag its perception into the immediacy of the present.

Selling Memories


Kodak advertising poster, c1925
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, summed up the company’s enormously successful marketing strategy in a few words: ‘Kodak doesn’t sell film, it sells memories.’ In so doing, he acknowledged the strong link in the public perception between photography and memory. Popular surveys of what people choose to photograph and why regularly ‘discover’ that one of our primary motivations for taking pictures is to preserve family memories. However, is this imperative something that photographic manufacturers have merely responded to? Or is it, rather, something they themselves have created?

One of our primary motivations for taking pictures is to preserve family memories. The fundamental shift in photography heralded by the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888 was to have a profound effect on the nature of photographic advertising. As photography became a truly popular activity, the preservation of domestic memories was to become the dominant theme of all photographic advertising. Indeed, capturing personal memories was widely promoted as the raison d’être of snapshot photography. Yet this preoccupation with the mnemonic properties of photography did not appear overnight. There was, rather, a gradual change in focus from photography as a form of leisure to photography as a form of memory. Photography stopped cel


'In Memoriam' carte-de-visite, c.1875
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Celebrating the present and became, instead, a means of safeguarding the past and protecting against the uncertainties of the future.

The Mirror With a Memory


Irish 'In Memoriam' card, 1918
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

In the 1860s, the American poet and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was one of photography’s most enthusiastic advocates. For Holmes, photography was nothing less than a means of triumphing over time, and, indeed, even over death itself. He wrote: ‘Those whom we love no longer leave us in dying, as they did of old... the unfading ar
a means of triumphing over time, and, indeed, even over deathtificial retina which has looked upon them retains their impress... How these shadows last, and how their originals fade away!’ Quite clearly, the ‘truthfulness’ and accuracy of the photographic image was a distinct improvement on the vagaries and weaknesses of human memory. It is an assumption that we share today in our enthusiasm, indeed, almost obsession, to capture significant people and events in our lives through photography.


'In Memoriam' brooch, c.1870
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

To some commentators, however, the very permanence of the photographic image, while seeming to offer the possibility of a memory that never fades, also threatens to eclipse that original memory and, ultimately, to destroy it. Through repeated viewing, they argue, it is the photographs themselves that become implanted in our memory rather than the people or events that they represent. Photography, instead of being in the service of memory, is actually in the service of forgetting. Implanted images such as these are no more than ‘false memories’, overwhelming the viewer with their potency and usurping the possibility of experiencing true or ‘involuntary’ memory.

Forget Me Not


Locket with daguerreotype and lock of hair, c1855
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Images can stimulate memories but memories are not images. In Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past, just one bite of a madeleine is enough to transport the narrator into an extended reverie where he vividly experiences the past as a simultaneous part of the present. The taste of the biscuit is a trigger for ‘invo
luntary memory’ - an immediate, all-embracing, almost physical sensation. Occasionally, we have all experienced such involuntary memories. Usually stimulated by smell, touch or taste rather than by sight, they can stir up extremely powerful emotions. Compared with these, photography, with its frozen, static and unchanging representations of the past, is a very poor memory trigger.

Does a photograph really enable us to remember a person as he really was or an event as it actually happened? Does the sight of someone bring back the sound of her voice, her smell, the way she walked? Can a photograph of a childhood holiday ever bring back the sensation of warm sand slipping between our toes? Images can stimulate memories but memories are not images. They are sensations. As such, they cannot be encompassed within the boundaries of visual representation - photographic or not.


Portrait of a soldier in an embroidered mount, c1870
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Some have argued that for photography truly to serve the cause of memory, it hit has to transcend the merely visual and engage the other senses. It has to become something that you can feel as well as see. Since photography’s invention people have responded to this challenge in many different ways in an attempt to overcome time and space and create an emotional bond between subject and viewer. The results are photographs whose memory potential has been enhanced by adding words, fabric, embroidery, flowers and even human hair - extraordinary works of art created by ordinary people.

Quotes:

Marcel Proust
'Memory is not a constantly accessible copy of the different facts of our life, but an oblivion from which, at random moments, present resemblances enable us to resuscitate dead recollections.'

Pierre Nora
'History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
'The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.'

Friedrich Nietzsche
'If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.'

Walter Benjamin
'Memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past but rather its theatre.'

Andreas Huyssen
'Rather than leading us to some authentic origin or giving us verifiable access to the real, memory, even and especially in its belatedness, is itself based on representation.'

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