The Treachery of Photos

Do they really freeze time?

I haven’t checked old photos in quite a while now. I have folders and folders of them. They are occupying tens of gigabytes of storage on my computer and I rarely (if ever) look at them. Each album talks about a different episode in my life. They’re all some sort of stepping stones to the present.

Old photographs talk about the past, about moments that have gone and cannot happen once again. Granted, they can sometimes be relived in the imagination, but how much can they be what they have been? We keep editing and re-editing details each time we retrieve memories. Or so the latest studies show.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. (Nothing Twice — by the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska)

It seems the past is an illusion when one really starts to think of it. Has it happened? Has it not? Have I just imagined things? How could it slip between our fingers the way it did if not? What can we validate most of our memories against? Thin air?

The seventeenth-century Italian historian and philosopher Giambattista Vico considered both imagination and memory to be sides of the same coin. The imagination, he thought, is “expanded or compounded memory”. (Siri Hustvedt)

So maybe, remembering our lives is more anchored in an imagination realm than it can ever be in a palpable memory land. After all, memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past and… aren’t stories fiction?

Photographs are strange things. Time passes in real life and nothing can really stop its flow. Cells are dying, leaves are falling and then rotting, and everything around is decaying. There is a continuous transformation going on everywhere. Nothing stays the same for too long.

It however seems that photographs can freeze time. They are an aberration. They slice pieces of reality and they keep them preserved in some sort of formaldehyde reminding us of how we once were and we’ll never be again. Are our albums our portable pasts? Can it be as simple as that?

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do. (Andy Warhol)

Whenever I’m looking at photos of me and my friends from our early 20s I have the feeling that we are not those girls anymore. The people staring back at me from between the frames are certainly strangers. They were actors in a play that is produced no longer. It simply went out of fashion after a certain time and we all had to reinvent ourselves. Just like artists tend to.

So I do wonder, is this the best thing about pictures? The fact that they never change? It might be as they show us how far we have gone. They’re part of a “before and after demonstration” of sorts. Moments had to happen for us to get to the present version of ourselves. Every experience, good or bad, was a lesson. We learned a thing or two from all of them, with no exception, even when we’re not aware of it.

Did they however make us experts at living? Far from it in my case. There are many more lessons in store for me, I’m quite sure of that. In fact, I think that all of us keep learning things until we draw our last breath. This might actually be what life is all about. Learning and then, more learning.

Photographs can be treacherous little things. They’re not the people or the places they display. They’re just representations. The “this is not a pipe” kind of thing (Magritte). Nor can they really stop time. They only give us the feeling that they can. They seem to talk about people from the past, therefore presences, when they in fact talk about absences. They’re most paradoxical in nature.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. (Susan Sontag — “In Plato’s Cave”)

Albums record all kinds of losses. Late grandparents, friends, ex-lovers, you name it. They also record the most important milestones from our evolution. Those images might show bridges we had to cross to become who we’re supposed to be.

We’re all walking in the dark though. We have no clue where we are heading, but we will get there. We just have to. And, as with all the voyages, maybe it’s not the destination that counts, but the most important moments from the journey. The highlights of our lives. Many of those are recorded in albums nowadays.

So, it might not count that much that I don’t check them often. The important thing is they document my progress and inherently show the things I learned along the way.