Recently I visited a place that I knew intimately in childhood, a waterfall with cliffs on both sides and a pool of cold water below. We used to jump from those cliffs despite our parents' concerns and a posted sign that read, "Warning: accidents may result in serious injury or death."
I loved
this place, and revisiting it I am amazed by all that I can remember. Bends in
trails, sap stains on bark, crooks in branches, the intricate web of root
structures, the shape of trees - all are startlingly unchanged and I remember
them precisely. A small tree is in the middle of the trail. I put my hand on it
for support and drops of moisture fall on my back from above, and I realize: I
have done this before. I remember the sensation precisely, the sound of
rustling leaves above, the freshness of the smell, the temperature of the
droplets, the mixture of apprehension and pleasure. Standing on a rock ledge
getting ready to jump, I reach for a handhold so I can lean over the edge and
prepare myself for what I am about to do. The shape of the rock where my hand
touches it is known to me: I have performed this ritual.
Places hold
memories better than people and better than photographs. Family, or people from
our past who may remind us of events in our lives and with whom we may
reminisce, are themselves constantly changing, as is their version of events. Conversations with others about shared
experiences of the past can seem to augment memory but quite often, more often
then we probably realize, they operate in the opposite way: they alter or even
replace our own memories with those of another. Whatever the event, one's
memory of it is inevitably altered through conversation; recalling the same
event at a later date, it becomes difficult or impossible to distinguish an
original memory from the altered version that emerged.
Photographs
act on us in a similar fashion. Whatever their apparent precision or
correctness, photographs inaccurately reflect experience from the start. They
convert the three dimensions of space into two and eliminate, or at best
encode- as Flusser suggests- the third spatial dimension and time. Also
sacrificed are smell, touch, sound, and context. In a word, a photograph is an abstraction of
experience. Yet we take them compulsively. We fill scrapbooks and hard drives
with family outings, vacations, ballgames - Scotty in front of Niagara Falls,
dad and grandma smiling in front of the famous restaurant- in the hope of
friezing time, making experience tangible for future reference, preserving
memory. I do it, too. But it is well to
realize that photographs do not preserve memory, they replacememory. Just as
photographs are an abstraction of experience, they are even more so an
abstraction of memory - a dangerously compelling abstraction. Memories are fragile and impressionable. They
cannot hold up against the seemingly irrefutable factuality of a photograph. It
isn't that what is in a photograph is false: a photograph's version of events
did happen, what is in a picture did indeed pass before the lens. The problem
is that photographs only tell such a small part of any story. And while they may be technically correct,
nonetheless they deceive. Does a smile
in a photograph mean that a person is happy?
Or does it mean that a photographer prodded, "look up and
smile"? Was the fish I caught
really bigger than my uncle's, or did I cleverly, intentionally hold mine
closer to the lens? Photographs deceive in another respect. Whatever the event one wishes to preserve,
snapshots are most commonly a break from that event. The moment that a
photograph is taken is experienced as a moment taking a photograph, not as a
moment engaged in the activity implied by the resulting image. Time taken to make photographs is time
subtracted from the experience of the thing being photographed. What
photographs most accurately record, ultimately, is nothing more than the act of
photography, itself.
To be sure,
photographs can form a record of our lives that has value, and I cherish my old
snapshots as much as the next person. But as image-makers and consumers, which
all of us are these days, there is also value to be had in a recognition of the
limits of photography to the facility of memory - in an understanding of what
images can and cannot offer us in this regard. Moreover it is precisely the
deceitfulness of photography as it pertains to memory that gives the medium its
unique platform to address the nature of memory itself: its malleability, its
unreliability, its elusiveness. It seems to me that no conversation or
photograph can make memory so vivid or recognizable, so physically palpable, as
the return to a place. Such a visit cannot draw conclusions about one's past-
perhaps it is the lack of drawing conclusions that makes accuracy possible. But
it can with accuracy remind us how we felt. In my case, I was reminded how it
felt to be in the body of a twelve year-old boy. And that is perhaps the best
that reminiscence has to offer.
Chris Engman (Foam Magazine #24/Talent)
essay writing service writers disagree that places hold memories better than photographs if we are speaking about happy moments. Photographs are designed to hold our happy moments forever.
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