Captured and Lost: Reflection on How Images Taint and Manipulate Memory

This landscape brings up memories associated with this view, but I am biased toward forgetting memories which this image does not represent. (Patagonia, Argentina)

One thought that has been pulsing through my mind is the irreparability of memory lost to images. With the collection of moving and still images, we concentrate our memory on that which we repeatedly observe. What we begin to most remember no longer is the recollection of the event, but the recollection of what these images present to us.

The nature of such reinforcement replicates the tested and true science of learning practices like spaced repetition. We see these images more than the moment that has passed long ago. Consequently, there is an imminent threat to our memories.

I do not want the happenstance of someone’s camera to dictate the story of my life. I want my innate biological being to paint that picture. I want to hold onto what exists between the photos in my camera roll.

It takes more energy to remember climbing these rocks from a first-person perspective. My memory is now a collection of recalling photos, rather than recalling my own experience. (Isalo, Madagascar)

Sometimes I find that the only way to hold onto my own memory-making, to grasp toe movement around these frames, is to refuse the camera’s entry altogether. My two eyes shall be the only lens in the room.

In some ways, this self-containment prevents easy communication and transcription to an audience, but I also imagine that my disappearing reliance on a photo’s thousand words forces me to foster relationships through communication.

In speaking the story aloud, one must be fully attentive to my words, embracing the sounds that fill and connect the space between us. Such an interaction, one that inevitably requires more time than glancing at a photo, creates a new shared memory.

With a camera, the moment is no longer about the experience, but removing ourselves to “capture” the experience. (Isalo, Madagascar)

My friends can scroll through their timelines, but I do not remember their lives in the same way that I understand them through our shared laughs and cries while sitting on a couch well beyond the sun’s set. Our shared recollections and retellings.

I seek to remove the lens that “captures” and thus disconnects the people from the movement, instead favoring the cyclical path of our existence which brings life to the past through recounting the past together, thereby bringing to life a new past where stories of the storytelling can be shared as well.

There’s irony in the filmmaker finding distaste in the camera’s intrusion but with all virtue comes some vice.

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What are your thoughts on memory and photos?