Transitioning out of a year that was either the longest or shortest year ever, depending on how we look back on it, it will be interesting to see how we look back at photos from the year and how we will come to understand their meanings.
I have mentioned on many occasions that photography is a language. What I didn’t mention is that a photo can hold our memories like an unbound container of sorts. This should not be considered by any means as scientific findings. This newsletter is about my curiosity and thoughts on photography.
I think of photos as bookmarks, methods of placing an image in time and within a context. However, those designations are assigned after-the-fact, as we are not able to see what they will mean to us in the future. They are open-ended.
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them to. Friedrich Nietzsche
But I should begin this issue on Memory & Photography by saying that I have been preoccupied with memory, the lack of it and what role photography plays in how we understand memory, for a very long time now.
In part, this has become a subject of interest because my memory has never been especially good. Particularly when it comes to rote memorization and remembering the kinds of information needed to ace most tests that I had in school. But rote memorization is not the subject of this issue and there won’t be an exam at the end!
Important Note - if you use Gmail, you will need to open this newsletter in your browser as the length of this newsletter exceeds Gmails’ limit. I only just realized this. So you may want to review what you missed in previous issues. Thanks!