The Deception of Visual Memory :: Photography Essays

The Deception of optical MemoryWhat is visual memory? And what does it mean to consider through images? dissimilar verbal memory, visual memory functions primarily through a habituation on its materiality, on the texture and availability of the paintings, icons, photographs, films, and video clips that give it shape.We take to be whole events through condensed images that reduce complex and multidimensional phenomena into memorable scenes. The meanings of wars, political conflicts, tragic romances, and cataclysmic disasters can all be found inwardly a painters brush or a cameras lens, as in Emanuel Leutzes 1851 interpreting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River or Joe Rosenthals photographic capture of the flag-raising atop invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II. The materiality of visual memory is deceptive, in that it overstates elements of the visual that cater particularly well to memory work. Visual memory depends on images that are simplified, conventional, schematic, and often composite. These images tend to arbitrarily connect with the event or object being remembered, rarely making explicit how they construct what we run into and remember. Collectively held images thus act as signposts, directing people who remember to preferred meaning by the fastest route. These signposts are deceptive, favoring certain strategies for making, collecting, retaining, storing, recycling, and forgetting images that liberty certain ways of remembering over others. With photographs, visual memorys deception is particularly acute.We need only think of the photo of a dazed Jackie Kennedy gazing upon the swearing-in of Lyndon Baines Johnson as the next U.S. President or of the image of a small boy, his detainment stretched above his head, being herded out of the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers, to take in how well photographs work as vehicles of memory. But their strength is offset by the fact that in memory, one function of photography - its ability to reassure it like it is, commonly called its verisimilitude - is understated in order to privilege a second function - the ability of the photo to act as a symbol. In memory, then, contingent details matter less than the way in which contingent details are made part of a larger interpretive scheme. Holocaust photography bears this out with troubling implications for our understanding of contemporaneous atrocity. Photos of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 were recorded with inaccurate or incomplete captions, with few credits, and with an uneven relationship to the words at their side.