In attempting to represent our notoriously unreliable powers of recollection, photographers often resort to a handful of well-worn photographic cliches. Pictures on the subject of memory are often deliberately flawed, incomplete in some way, blurred, abstract or marred by imperfections. It's no surprise. "Memory has a spottiness", wrote John Updike, "as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it". How apt that he used a photographic metaphor! The relationship between memory and photography is and always has been inextricable. A photograph acts, first and foremost, as a memento, a lasting reminder that an event really happened, without which all that would remain is the mysterious firing of a million neuronal synapses deep in our brains. At its most fundamental then, a photograph, as exemplified by the ubiquitous holiday snap, is proof. "Look! This is where we went, and this is what we did there." Yet this so-called proof is almost as unreliable as our memories themselves. The old adage that the camera never lies has been gradually replaced by a more or less universal acceptance that it very often lies its arse off. The straightforward visual recording of a tiny fraction of time can only ever offer an incomplete picture of the truth, edited, subjective and open to a great number of interpretations, and yet it can have a huge influence on how we look back on the event it recorded. Geoff Dyer notes in his book about the Great War: "A photograph from the war is also a photograph of the way the war will come to be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future's view of the past". The same can be said of any picture: in capturing a scene or moment for posterity, we influence forever the way in which that scene or moment will be remembered.
Editorial by Ben Smith
Editorial picture by Martin Scott-Jupp
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