Leftovers of history

“Compared to photography memory's records are full of gaps … Memory does not pay much attention to dates; it skips years or stretches temporal distance.” (p. 425)

Wow! There is nothing more truly than this. As a psychology major, I’ve being studying memory for a few quarters and I completely agree that what we have in our memory are persons and events who are or were meaningful at the moment that we captured that memory, and we record only what we consider important for us. If we were trying to remember who was in our birthday party when we were 9 years old, we would probably remember just a few things unless something really impacting happened that day. If we look at the pictures from our 9^th birthday, we would probably see people and details we don’t even remember, that’s the authors say “Compared to photography memory's records are full of gaps”. The memory that we capture in a picture has all the details of that moment. If we try to remember an event, we’ll probably have a hard time to remember it specially if it was a long time ago; if we see a picture of the same event, automatically we will remember and notice things we didn’t even pay attention before.

“The photograph is the sediment that has settled from the monogram, and from year to year its semiotic value decreases. The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged.” (p.429)

I believe this quote can be interpreted in different ways. I found this quote interesting because for me, a photograph can be interpreted differently depending on the person. A photograph is a captured moment, and the story behind that photograph depends in heritage. The story begins when the people involved in the picture tell the story of that moment, and this story goes from one person to another rolling over and over again; new things are added to it, things are taken away , and sometimes the original story is completely different from the last one told about the photograph. I agree that from year to year photography’s semiotic value decreases. As I said before, the original meaning of a picture changes due to diverse interpretations of it. At the end, the value of the picture is just what is left from the original version of the story. 

This is a picture of my son in Sea World from our visit last month. (June/2012)