photography & collective memory

re:constructions: photography & collective memory [article]
By Marita Sturken, 1997

"All memories are 'created' in tandem with forgetting: to remeber everything would amount to being overwhelmed by memory. Forgetting is a necessary component in the construction of memory. Yet the forgetting of the past in a culture is often highly organized and strategic. Milan Kundera has said, 'Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life...But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting... a nation which loses awareness of its pat gradually loses itself.' Though Kundera speaks of the 'organized forgetting' propagated, for instance, by an occupying state, cultures can also participate in a 'strategic' forgetting of painful events that may be too dangerious to keep in active memory. At the same time, all cultural memory and all history are forged in a context in which details, voices and impassions of the past are forgotten. The writing of a historical narrative necessarily involves the elimination of certain elements. Hence, the narrative of the Vietnam War as told in the United States foregrounds the painful experience of the American Vietnam veteran in such a way that the Vietnamese people, both civilians and veterans, are forgotten...

No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze...Yet memory does not reside in a photograph, or in any camera image, so much as it is produced by it. The camera image is a technology of memory, a mechanism through which one can construct the past and situate it in the present. Images have the capacity to create, interfere with, and trouble the memories we hold as individuals and as a nation. They can lend shape to histories and personal stories, often providing the material evidence on which claims of truth are based, yet they also posses the capacity to capture the unattainable."

- Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and The Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)