Temporality; Memory as the Embodiment of Photography

An essay about time and photography, inspired by Roland Barthes

Human memory, or at least part of it as it exists in the contemporary technologically-informed informational schema, is interrelated to the photograph’s non objective form. This non objective form is described in the research paper Modern Time: Photography and Temporality, when the author Kris Belden-Adams is explaining the significance behind Barthes’ claim that a specific gold necklace is the punctum of a photograph that does not in fact have any such gold necklace. She describes this mistake as an “anxious projection of the personal and specific into the snapshot that was becoming increasingly symbolic.” The author then states that “a photograph’s tendency to be a site for such projected subjectivities runs counter to claims that the photographic image is an objective document.” (Modern Time: Photography and Temporality by Kris Belden-Adams, page 105) It is specifically this quality of the photograph, as a site for projected subjectivities, that allows the photograph to serve as an integral part of some memories. For example, when I try to dig up my earliest memory I often imagine a specific photograph: my face and hair and eyes, my blue (or is it green?) shirt, my little jeans, the brown fence around my old house, and the shade of redwood trees and their leaves and branches diffusing light onto me. I describe these details not to say that my childhood memories are vivid and detailed, but because these details feel embedded in this memory through the photograph, in much the same way that the real memory I’m accessing is not the photograph, but is evoked through the photograph. I’ve also described the photo in detail because I’m uncertain about its existence and it may be interesting to attempt to find the photograph at the end of this essay. To be clear, in this essay, rather than discussing the objectivity of a photographic image, I’ll move forward with the understanding that some parts of a photograph, in its abstract form, are subjective. Furthermore, I’ve written this essay such that my stylistic and structural approach operationalizes the value of subjective representation that I go on to articulate further.
A brief aside to talk about this “abstract form” of a photograph: Given a specific photographic image, the abstract form I’m talking about is the bubble that is all the information about that image. So, you have the image as pure information, as a collection of pixels on a screen or whatever the equivalent bit of information is on film (I believe it would effectively be the “grain” of the film, but perhaps it can only be defined as a certain ordering of molecules, I don’t know but it doesn’t really matter, the important notion here is informational objectivity), and this is objective. It doesn’t matter who or what is taking the measurements, the precise pure information of a photograph is reducible to a mathematical description. There is also, within this abstraction, the subjective experiences around the photograph �" the experience of looking at the photograph, the information that exists in one’s mind when looking at a photograph. There is more to say here, but all I’m trying to explain is that the abstract form of a photograph is the entire set of information that the photograph contains: whether the photograph is representing, evoking, or is that information.
Part of the abstract form of a photograph is what I’ll refer to as temporality. Temporality within a photograph is both how a photograph exists in time as it is situated by subjectivity, and how a photograph transforms time as time is represented. For example, one experience of temporality in a photograph is the one I have of looking at childhood photographs of my family members. As I do this, part of my experience involves looking back in time, at an object as-it-was and as-it-is-not-anymore, so that photograph is now situated by my subjectivity such that the referent exists far backwards in time. On the other hand, a blurry photograph of a fast moving car is transforming time through it’s representation of time: the blur in the photograph shows not just the car existing at a point in time (untransformed, as it is ‘really’) but actually shows the car existing at several points in space and time at once. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to describe this phenomenon as several points in space at a single time (several points in time in a single place also works too, if the photograph is the place!) but nonetheless, I’ve described two fundamentally different photographic processes and experiences that both derive meaning and value from temporality.
The real purpose of this essay is to reconcile an internal dispute of mine pertaining to truth in my (childhood) memories: many of my memories, especially my earliest ones, seem to be stored as a photograph; at the same time, a photograph is not a memory, and a memory of a photograph is not the same as a memory of the photograph’s referent. So what are my childhood memories, and what value do they have in spite of this impurity? To elucidate what I mean by impurity: right now I can remember a photograph of 9/11, but I did not witness 9/11, and somehow this memory of the photograph of 9/11 is not coded (to me) as an actual memory of the events of 9/11, but simply and purely as a memory of a photograph. The memory of the photograph of 9/11 is a pure memory, but any recollection I may have (invented) of me actually experiencing 9/11 is “impure”, it is not really a part of my personal history but is a fiction, perhaps in part derived from a 9/11 photograph. This is one of the worries I have about “impurity”: are my memories fiction? There are other forms of impurity, though: in contrast to the 9/11 example, I remember that photograph I described earlier of myself walking around in the backyard as a very young child, but that memory is coded to me as an actual memory of my experience of walking around in the backyard. I know this coding is occurring because when I remember that photograph, I can’t only remember the photograph, but I also always must remember looking out of the eyes of the child in the image and I remember details of that setting that are not present in the photo. These two remembrances (the image and the backyard) are entirely united �" I don’t have one without the other �" but the two aren’t the same (a permanent aufhebung?). The internal dispute is clearly present here: if the memory that is evoked - of myself walking around my backyard, of my old grey house, of the forest that extended seemingly endlessly from just beyond my tall brown fence (that fence was a little bit fuzzy, I got some splinters from it), all glimpses of a way of seeing the world (glimpses also of objects that aren’t present in the photograph, much like Barthes’ gold necklace) from my child-perspective - is, by some perceptual magic trick, imbued within the photograph of myself, then what am I truly remembering, and, more importantly, what is the value (both sentimental and as a measure of truth) of the subjective narrative that is being projected onto this (imagined) image?
Depending on how we define memories, this value that I’m questioning changes. So instead of making some arbitrary decision about what memories are, and which memories are not real or valuable, I’ll discuss the inherent qualities of my memories and the values that already exist in that context. Specifically, the question I’m proposing, a question that imposes a critical structure that can (quite beautifully) exist outside of any arbitrary value system, is: what is irreducible about my photographically intertwined memory (my backyard, forest, fuzzy wood, image of me)?
As is only natural, I now turn to Roland Barthes to discuss irreducibility in the realm of photography: in his book Camera Lucida, Barthes discusses a photograph of his mother as a child because that image was “essential,” (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, Page 71) it achieved an evocation of his mother’s “unique being” (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, Page 71) that was, for him, utopic and impossible. The line of reasoning that follows this discovery in the book ends at this profound realization: “In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.” (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, Pages 76-77) I see here the opportunity to unite my exploration of personal memories to a broader discussion about what is a photograph.
See, what I have experienced with regard to my early, photographically informed memories, including the specific one I’ve been talking about throughout this paper, has been rather obvious: what is a child’s mind to do when it sees an image of itself? Of course: that image is simply describing reality, it shows not that ‘I have been there’ but when ‘I was there.’ And when a child holds an image that shows when they were there (and when they were then, of course), I think it’s no surprise at all that they may store the memory of when they were then and there alongside (or perhaps behind, in the way that pages of words are behind a book cover) the image of them being then and there. To explain this more specifically: what language do your thoughts speak in? English? Spanish? Language? Images? Textures? Sticky bubbles? It may be different for everyone (research on the ‘Inner Monologue’ is rather interesting, but it quite clearly shows that people think in several different ways with several different modes of communication), but the point I’m getting at here is that our thoughts can take on many different forms using distinct, separate phenomenological devices. I can only honestly talk about myself from here on out. I know that I tend to think in either words (in the audible, not visual/textual, way) or images, or in a sort of gray, undefinable, instinctive way. So it seems clear that when I create new memories or access old ones - and specifically childhood memories are a valuable topic here because I have to put in a large and intentional effort to dig up most of these memories - I will also create an icon for these memories. An icon is necessary to transform the memory from the raw, instinctive, gray matter kind of thought to a closed, story-like, well-indexed thought that is importantly more memorable now (this is a pretty common habit for me and I assume for everyone: when you remember watching a beautiful sunset, for example, you don’t remember the entire day and situation around that sunset and wait for the sunset to emerge from the depths of your mind, but you instead have indexed the memory of the sunset with an image of a sunset or a label of some sort that says “this is a sunset”). The argument I’m making, overall, is that the photograph is a natural choice for this index. Here’s what it boils down to: memories are, if nothing else, a sign of what happened to me as I see it now, and photographs are, if nothing else, a sign of something being somewhere as the camera saw it then, and so the two (memories and photographs) are, fundamentally, separated only by the context that is the beholder. Photographs are the memories of a camera, and because of that it is an intuitive and obvious decision (or conflation?) to store or iconize my memories - such abstract and odd things - with an image - it insists upon itself!
The conclusion I’ve just reached is precisely the unification I was hoping for this paper to find: given this odd frustration I’ve had about the photograph-ization (iconization) of memories, what can I draw out about the nature of photography itself? Well, it seems to be that I perceive the Photograph as the memory of the camera. Really, I’m describing the embodiment of the Photograph: how does the abstract “Photograph” analogize to my body? Through memory. I claimed earlier that the fundamental divergence between human memory and photographs as camera-memories is the beholder (man is not machine), but I was forgetting about the topic that spurred this entire conversation: temporality.
My memories become less accurate as time passes. Photographs degrade over time (at least a part of them does), even if perfectly preserved, because their subjective meaning relies upon the viewer’s memory, and as this faculty fades, the ability for the Photograph to serve as an icon for memories fades as well. The Photograph evokes memory just as much as it iconizes it, or rather, iconization is not a one way process in this case: memories become iconized, and the icons become memories. This is not an impurity, this is how I remember.

References

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang.
Belden-Adams, Kris. “Modern Time: Photography and Temporality.” Academic Works, 2010