Photography, Shmotography (Part One)

In researching and crafting the text for my artefacts for our class exhibit on inventions and innovations in London, I have been thinking about why people feel the need to document their lives. The items I am working on are a Ciné-Kodak Model B movie camera, and a Bell & Howell Filmo Ciné Projector (both dating from about 1925). One area that I have been thinking about, and that I did not get to address in the exhibit work, is the effect that photography and filmmaking has on our ability to tell our stories. So, I decided to think about that here.

Some people will argue that photography and filmmaking are nothing if not the stories of our lives. I disagree. I think that images (both still and moving) are quite often poor substitutes for the stories they attempt to relate.

According to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, photographs are false pathways to memory. Real memory, as I heard on CBCs The Current for November 16, 2006, is created in the mind. While photos can trigger memories, they are not the memories themselves (My classmate, Molly, wrote a great blog about something quite similar to this). Yet, we increasingly rely on photography and other images (like films) to document the past, rather than using our brains to hold those memories.

Images have a valuable place in our world, to be sure. My fear is the potential erosion of our memories – and collective memory – that comes along with our reliance upon them. While images are valuable for those who were not present to be able to get some sense of the past, are they really a substitute for the real memory? (I suppose you could ask me what “real memory” is, and I would have to concede that that is a fair question, and I do not have the answer for it. What I mean, in this case, by real memory, is the memory of the past contained within our heads).

Photographs do not stand in as a record of the reality of what happened. And I recognize that no credible historian would tell me to use photos as my sole source when looking into the past. I also admit that the memories inside our heads are far from perfect. The historian in me believes that history is story. My fear is that many of the stories that can and ought to be told are not, simply because people think it sufficient to supplement the story with an image.

To be continued…