memoirs of my memoir

Growing up, my mother always told me that if the house was to catch fire: “forget everything — except the family albums — and head for safety”. As a result of her photo-paranoia I have often wondered what the consequences would have been if we had actually lost our family “memories” in a house fire. The biggest bookshelf in my family home holds a collection of photographic albums spanning three generations. As I have grown older my mother’s meticulous cataloguing has allowed me to revisit a set of collective familial experiences at will, allowing for reflection and refinement of my own sense of identity. Recently however, with the advent and rise of social media and photo-sharing platforms, I have begun to question how we would recall our collective history, without the aid of those objects — my mother’s worst nightmare.

Through the use of instant peel-apart photographs I am exploring the shifting perceptions of the intention and use of photographs. Traditionally viewed as a memory-artefact, the photograph has shifted to become a form of communication and construction of identity. Supporting this thought, José van Dijck suggests that:

taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard a family’s pictorial heritage, but is increasingly becoming a tool for an individual’s identity formation and communication (57).

I believe that the daily saturation of digital images, combined with the ability to disguise or delete the original referent, has resulted in a shift of the credibility of the digital photograph as a memory artefact.

The contemporary scepticism surrounding the digital image is testing. When constructing something under the guise of memoir and thus striving to communicate a personal narrative with a sense of veracity, the instant peel-apart photographs used in my project challenge this notion by existing as original referents within themselves. Any indication of manipulation is traceable to the trained eye and they are able to be kept as physical artefacts, separate from the final manipulated photographs.

In their book “The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice” Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering discuss the concept of storehouse memory as: 

an understanding of memory as simply the imprints of experience, available for straightforward retrieval in the present as items of experience exist discretely in the memory and can be located like catalogued books on a library shelf or a page in the index of a book (40).

The closest real-life representation of a “storehouse” of memory in photography is the family album.

By stacking the original polaroid images included in exhibition of Memoirs of my Memoir in a pile, rather than presenting them in an album, I am challenging  the concept of a “storehouse” of memory. Mieke Bal would suggest that in viewing the family album, “we tend to see memory as profoundly narrative as it plots the temporality of our lives (142).

 Rather than cataloguing and grouping my photographs by theme, subject or even colour, I have chosen to present them as part of my final exhibition so that they can be handled and rearranged by the viewer. Taking away any fixed structure allows the photographs to be viewed and revisited by an audience with no limitations in sequence or structure. While our memories must have a quasi-sequential nature for us to make sense of the narrative of our lives, I have begun to understand that often we borrow or re-evaluate experiences out of sequence in order to better understand ourselves today. Keightley and Pickering go on to note: 

the redrafting of memories of our past experience is always in process, always a cumulative assemblage of what was recalled at different stages of our lives by successive versions of the person whose memory was thereby revisited (46).

This concept of a “cumulative assemblage” has become more evident as my research has progressed and I have taken more peel-apart photographs. My stack of photographs has progressively become thicker, allowing me to revisit old “memories” and concepts with the possibility of new narratives. This accumulation of images is a large reason for my chosen medium this year; I wanted to hold on to every “memory” to find better ways of communicating the concept of creative remembering. The final, exhibited photographs are examples of how, when we communicate memories and experiences, we reshape them according to our current context based on a “cumulative assemblage” of life-events.

Much like the family album, we tend to think of memories as sequential, separated and fixed. Keightley and Pickering continue to state:

where directly or indirectly, the storehouse metaphor allows memory to be loaded with positivist notions of accuracy and veracity… It is misleading in that it distracts from the myriad ways in which imagination acts more mundanely, more regularly and continuously in our everyday lives and does not work in isolation from other modes of thinking and feeling (40).

I believe the notion of a “storehouse of memory” is why we defend our memories with such a fierce sense of veracity. 

The gap in our understanding between photographs and the creative act of remembering has been explored in recent times by artists such as Taryn Simon. In her series “The Innocents” Simon “documents the stories of individuals who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. At issue is the question of photography’s function as a credible eyewitness and arbiter of justice” (Simon).

Through this series Simon highlights the easily malleable nature of memory, particularly within the context of eyewitness reports and the “justice” system.

Like memories, we actively manipulate photographs either directly or indirectly (by means of Photoshop, or selecting the best shot in a sequence of one thousand). If functional brain imaging is unable to differentiate between an “authentic” and “imagined” memory (Sacks), and we are wrongly accusing and convicting people based on “photo-evidence” (Simon) then why are we still viewing the family album as an authoritative photographic nemonic device? If the highly imaginative act of remembering is likened to the mundane act of retrieving a file from a cabinet or photograph from an album, we are limiting the creative potential in the construction of a photographic memoir. 

While I consider the subject matter in both my cumulative assemblage of peel-apart photographs and my mother’s collection of family albums vast and varying, Gillian Rose suggests “all family albums are alike”, their subject matter “astonishingly narrow” and that they have an “overwhelming sense of similarity and redundancy” (6).

When I was fifteen I participated in a ten month exchange program to Italy. Having no say over which region I would live in, I ended up on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. For the first three months, pointing to words in an English/ Italian dictionary was my only means of communication with the people I lived with, and the people I went to school with every day. In due time my finger fumbled across la nostalgia — the Italian word for homesick. Having no linguistic or etymological understanding of language at all, I always assumed the word had come from Latin. However, according to Emily Keighty and Michael Pickering ‘‘nostalgia derives etymology from the greek nostos — return home, and algos — pain’’ (119).

A large portion of this project was spent figuring out how I could communicate nostalgia through images, without resorting to parody or the reconstruction of events. In order to create a photographic memoir of the sort I desired, I was determined to find a more figurative and emotive representation of memory than the concept of the fixed photograph allowed, and the term  “nostalgia” offered me this. Over the centuries the meaning of nostalgia evolved from “homesick” to become a term that describes ‘‘emotional yearnings for the past experienced by particular individuals … at a collective level’’ (Keighty and Pickering 120).

Memoirs of my Memoir is an exploration of nostalgia felt both personally and creatively. The nostalgia of leaving my home, family and friends to pursue a tertiary education in photography and the nostalgia for a time within photographic practice when polaroid peel-apart film was an essential part of every studio-kit. All of the people I have photographed have shared in the creation of memories in my life and all of the images of plants were captured in my mother’s garden during two sojourns at my family home in Nimbin, NSW, during 2013. 

Working in the medium of instant peel-apart film I speak to a niche of commercial photographers familiar with the nostalgia of the peel-apart photograph. Indeed, during one of the many hours I spent in the lab scanning, cleaning and working on images my photography teacher Monty Coles came to have a chat. While he feigned a vague interest in the content of the images (in his defence, it was still the early phases of the project) what he really wanted to do was smell my project. For me, this was all the validation I needed when exploring the concept of nostalgia for the commercial photographer. Creating a sensory experience, eliciting memories by touching and smelling my images, I was able to conjure the sense of nostalgia I had been hoping for. Was he smelling the chemical residue left on the images, or was he smelling the flowers as he walked down the path in my mother’s garden? 

By exhibiting the original peel-apart images as part of my final presentation I offer the viewer a tangible artefact and the opportunity to reflect more closely on the meaning and intent of the photograph. Presenting often obscure and abstracted photographs, in no particular order, I hope to leave space for the viewer to revisit or create a memory of their own while viewing my representations of memory, highlighting the mutable nature of memory and experiences. 

Exploring the photographer’s nostalgia surrounding the photo-artefact, the instant peel-apart photograph has shaped my own understanding of memory and notions of veracity within photography and the construction of a memoir. When we communicate personal narratives we duplicate, alter and transfer experiences and perceptions, depending on the context of our lives (Sacks 2013). This concept is at odds with our perception of photographs as memory-artefacts. By using the peel-apart photograph I am exploring this gap between photographic images and memory. Why do we continue to view photographs as objects of memory, when developments in neuroscience and digital photography have shown us that these notions are outdated and even wrong?

Oliver Sacks highlights the transferable, fallible nature of memories in his essay “Speak, Memory”. He discusses the implementation of “false” memories through:

the frequent combination of a suggestible witness (often a child) with an authority figure (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker or an investigator) can be particularly powerful… its deeper intentions may be to brainwash, to effect genuine change of mind, to fill it with implanted inculpatory memories, and in this it may be frighteningly successful (Sacks 2013).

The idea of trying to create and exhibit memories that I have borrowed from somebody else (in my case, my family and friends) both excites me, and makes me nervous. Sacks goes on to note that:

 the psychological correlates of such memory can be examined using functional brain imaging, and these images show that vivid memories produce widespread activation in the brain involving sensory areas, emotional (limbic) areas, and executive (frontal lobe) areas - a pattern that is virtually identical whether the “memory” is based on experience or not (Sacks 2013).

Much the same as memory, the process of manipulation and refinement is now a digital given within photographic practice. Memoirs of My Memoir forms an exploration into how “transferred” experiences affect our own memories, and how we communicate personal narrative. The images accompanying this essay are photographs of my sister’s younger brother, taken in my garage one evening during the early conception of my project. The post-production techniques applied are an example of how we can take one “item of experience” or “memory” — an evening in my garage — and mould it to communicate a very different narrative.

What does it mean, then, to be manipulating and changing the once unchangeable? Before we had access to high-resolution scanners and Adobe Photoshop the polaroid was viewed as a hard copy. Indeed, the instantaneous, fixed nature of peel-apart film is what attracted me to the medium in the first pace. The idea of fixing an experience by means of a chemical reaction occurring on paper is something that is quickly becoming a foreign concept for generations younger than I. 

Shields [quoting Patrick Duff] states:

Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fictions? (57)

 While the collaged photographs of my sister’s brother created a striking graphic image, I found they were lacking the feeling of nostalgia and had become more of a “fiction” rather than a memoir. While I believe we embellish and change our memories, I felt that it was important to maintain some aspects of the original “item of experience”. If all traces of the peel-apart image, along with its imperfections, could be manipulated and swept away with a few swift clicks of the mouse, then why not shoot on my digital SLR? 

 Choosing to take all my portraits on a high-speed black and white photographic emulsion has taken me back to my own introduction to photography. The year I spent in Italy was also the year I purchased my first digital camera. A few months into the trip I was worried I wasn’t capturing enough “memories” and couldn’t afford the film processing so simply had to upgrade. Ironically, with my early ventures into the world of digital photography, I lost all of my digital images from that year. The only surviving photograph I have is a grainy black and white photograph of my host family, taken on my first 35mm SLR camera from my sixteenth birthday. La nostalgia for my experience is intensified by the absence of any tangible memory-artefacts in my photographic album, the “storehouse” (Keighty and Pickering) of my memories.