Some thoughts (in progress)

We are the sum of our memories and experiences, but we mistake their effects, misattribute them.

We believe our memories to be representations of events that we lived. We remember our pasts. But how false this is. A memory is an impression, a fleeting sketch of an event and our reaction to it. At best, we hold on to flickering glimpses of what we actually experienced. Further, the occurrence is not our experience.

The occurrence, the experience, and the memory.

The occurrence is the event, a situation to which we are proxy, or in which we participate.

The experience is our perception of the event, and as such is subject to the limits of our senses and understanding.

The memory is our encoded recollection of our experience, not the event itself. It is subject not only to our imperfect and limited perception, but the process of recollection, which itself is subject to obfuscation and alteration: by other memories, by the experience that provokes the recollection, by personality, by knowledge. It is then twice removed from the occurrence.

The part of us that is aware, that considers, lives in the world of memory. When we draw on our experiences to inform a decision, we are really drawing on our memories of those experiences to guide us.

Experiences may inspire future reflexive reactions; if we are stung by an insect, we may draw our hands away unthinking from that insect from then on. The reflex is implanted by the experience.

But when we consider, when we deliberate, we draw on our memories of our experiences, complex assemblages of emotion, comprehension (or lack of it), and perception. Even events that we just experienced, even moments before, are filtered through the twisting river of memory.

We live, then, in a false world. Memory is faulty. Not only is it subject to revision by removal in time (how easily the tragedies of the past gain the patina of nostalgia), but we are perfectly capable of inventing memories. As occurrences lead to experiences lead to memories, we operate as if our memories stem from events we have personally experienced. But this is demonstrably false.

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Photography as an art turns on the interplay of occurrence, experience, and memory.

We may argue that a photograph is the literal truth of the event that it depicts. But this amounts to arguing that the photograph is the event in some sense. It consequently must equate viewing a photograph of an event with perceiving the event itself. In this argument, our experience of a photograph of an occurrence is equivalent to our experience of the event itself.

This is obviously absurd. Innumerable examples exist of photographs of mundane subjects arranged or captured in highly evocative and beautiful (or ugly) configurations. This is most evident in art photography. But even the most thoughtlessly executed snapshot is still constrained by the boundaries of the frame, the choice, thoughtful or not, imposed by the photographer. This choice, the limits imposed by the camera, sever the photograph from the occurrence.

Perhaps then a photograph is the depiction of an experience, the impression of an occurrence irrevocably filtered through the sensibilities and choices of the photographer.

(more to follow)

Top left, alley behind house. Lower right, near beach in Santa Cruz by Lauren Beck.