Creating memories

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy; photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

Sally Mann, Hold Still

Sally Mann

For a woman whose career is taking photographs, Sally Mann, in her memoir Hold Still, makes a surprising number of negative comments about photography. One of these, that photography is "an invasive act,"  I mentioned in my review of the book two days ago. One the same page she writes that "many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject."

Yet her sharpest comment, one she makes above in her prologue and repeats throughout her memoir, is that photos corrupt memories while creating their own.

"I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory," she writes. Later she says she remembers photos of her father more clearly than she remembers her father himself. "It isn't death that stole my father from me; it's the photographs." Still later she observes that photos "not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity." That is, we can easily misjudge a person's character on the basis of that person's expression in a single photograph, something biographers are guilty of all the time. In fact, Mann does the same kind of thing herself when commenting on a photo of one of her ancestors.

So which is right, do photographs preserve memories or alter them? Both, I think. Yesterday I looked at a professional portrait taken when my son was about 18 months old. I recalled not that particular occasion but the studio where that and other portraits were taken during his childhood, the photographer, the clothes my son wore that day, his haircut and the way he looked as a child. Rather than distort my memory, the photo brought back memories that might otherwise stay forgotten.

Yet photos show just an instant in time, and that instant can be misleading. We don't always look the way we look when our photos are taken. We usually straighten our hair and our clothing before the shutter is snapped. Women check their makeup, men their flies. We stand up straight. We say cheese. Photos at their best show the ideal, not the reality.

Mann gives us an example in a photograph her father took of her she was a little girl. Something of a wild child by her own admission, she was "not the most willing subject," but her father finally got a photo of which he was proud and which he later framed for his office. It may have distorted reality, but only because one moment in time cannot represent every other moment in time.

Being as much into words as Mann is into photographs, I have often thought that words can distort reality in a way similar to what she says about pictures. Why do witnesses in a courtroom, or let's say an impeachment hearing, see the same thing so differently? It has much to do with their attitudes and world views, but it may also have something to do with how they first put what they observed into words. Afterward they may remember their words more distinctly that they remember the actual events they observed.