theory proposal...

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about nostalgia and memory and the photograph’s relation to the act of reminiscing. It is not revolutionary that we use photographs as a tool to remember. Memory is often a point of discussion in photography. It is an interesting material—it shifts and shapes through elements of perspective and wears thin with time. One could argue that memory is always tainted with subjectivity—that it cannot and will not ever be an objective source of information. The same could be said for photographs. Although the medium is often linked to portraying aspects of truth and reality, the fact remains that photography is polluted with subjectivity and distortion of reality.

That being said, Jonah Lehrer once wrote, “a memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory” (Lehrer). Interesting. As mentioned earlier, we generally hold onto photographs as a will to remember, but this statement makes me wonder about photographs as a will to forget. If the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory, then the more you remember something, the further you become from the actual event, resulting in you carrying out the act of forgetting. Applying this to photographs, the more you observe a photograph and the more you try to reminisce, the more you are allowing yourself to forget the photographed event. Your memory of the event now becomes untrustworthy and worn.

You become removed from a perceived reality into a realm of surrealism through the now tainted memory of said event. The photographed event is now increasingly idealized or heavily dishonored. The further back in time the photograph takes place, the less accurate your memory, the more surreal the event becomes. Thus, you are forgetting. Photographs are a will to forget. In this act of forgetting, we are transferred into a new layer of surrealism in interaction with photographs. That is, photographs themselves are already surreal objects, transferring a three dimensional reality into a two dimensional reality. Adding the obstruction of memory, we are taken to another layer of surrealism. At some point, we are no longer remembering, we are dreaming, we are making things up about the photographed event. We either highly idealize the event or we do the complete opposite. Regardless, that act of forgetting and that act of removal is worth exploring in understanding the relationships between nostalgia and photography.

Evidently, I need to flesh this idea out more, and I need to do further intensive research on memory, but hopefully this serves as a potential starting point…