A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.
A pseudo – presence. How much of this person is here? None of him? It doesn’t feel that way.
Images are inextricably linked to memory. Like dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs exorcises some of the anxiety and remorse prompted by their disappearance so the photographs of neighbourhoods now torn down, rural place disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past.
OUR POCKET RELATION TO THE PAST.
Recording images is a way of certifying experience.
Is our image version of the past going to represent the important parts? Will it seem that a trip to FlorIda which we photographed relentlessly was more real than other events? What about the things we do every day that we do not photograph? Waking up, going to sleep. Going to work. The building we live in. A flag. A field. Colours. The weather. The things that make up our lives. Will these things remain as real because we haven’t documented them? Is any experience real if it isn’t documented for memory?
Images – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and of faraway cities, of the vanished past – images are incitements to reverie.
THE VANISHED PAST.
INCITEMENTS TO REVERIE
After an event has ended, the pictures will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and an importance) that it would otherwise never have enjoyed.
To phorograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified.
These things seem so important in their reproduced form.
Why were these things recorded? We do not quite know, but they must mean something.
While an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed ina brief span of time , a device is available to record what is disappearing.
What will these images make us remember?
The way this person speaks? And this person? And this person? If you knew them, would watching them remind you of other things about them? The way they tilt their head, a word they particularly enjoyed, their hands.
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.
Is any experience real if it isn’t documented for memory?
IS ANY EXPERIENCE AS REAL IF IT ISN’T DOCUMENTED FOR MEMORY?
Repeat the listed things but for longer.
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.
A pseudo – presence. How much of this person is here? None of him? It doesn’t feel that way.
Photographs give people an imaginary possession of the past.
As moving images, cinematic and television images are combined with sound and music in narrative forms, and their meaning often lies in the sequence of images rather than its individual frames.
What does it mean that this follows this?
What does this image mean? Why has it been isolated? Maybe it means this to me? Or this? Or this?
If a photograph is a trace of reality skimmed off the surface of life... is this what your life looks like? Not mine.
Debates about representation have considered whether systems of representation reflect the world as it is, such that they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact we construct the world the world and its meaning through the systems of representation we delpoy. Is this what the world looks like to you? Or is this what you think the world should look like?
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