Memory City

The camera only records what occurs in bursts or explosions, whereas behind every photograph is the suggestion that the depicted scene was also an experience that someone lived through. Yet, photographs, despite their representational realism and apparent immediacy do not necessarily provide straightforward access to the scenes or experiences they record. The startling effect/affect of many photographs comes from their ability to confront the viewer with a moment that had the potential to be experienced but perhaps was not. Often discussions of memories behind photographed images results in stories that the image does not capture. The photograph acts as a substitute: it gives access to an imaginary engagement with an experience that has never been photographed. It has enabled recollection at the same time as underlining how precarious is the nature of this testimony – both as image and as memory. This possibility that photographs capture un-experienced events creates a striking parallel between the workings of the camera and the structure of memory. A photograph, it might be said, cheats memory of its content and makes concrete a scene which the memory does not represent. As Susan Stewart asserts in On Longing (1993: 133) the ‘souvenir’ (in this case the image) replaces the memory of the body’s relation to the phenomenological world with the memory of an object. The photograph, like the memory, leaves more undiscovered than it reveals.

It would appear that the recollection of an image is not a re-collection of an image. At a personal, individual level it is, instead, the reconstruction of a series of sensations, a collection of contextual inferences, and a pattern of social and personal markers that focus the so-called memory of the image in a series of times, places and circumstances – some of which are, indeed, “virtual.”
The following are a few fragments of memory from the Memory City project. In each case there is a voiced articulation associated with a generic or personal image. The images do not re-present or duplicate what is remembered. Instead, the relationships between image and account point to interesting features of the communication of memories.