Photographic Memory

Until recently I had a distinct memory of laying on a blanket by my grandparent's pool in Pasadena, California, when I am one years old. It was a memory I've had for a long time but hadn't really thought about the uniqueness of before.

One day in a conversation with my family about our earliest memories, I told them about my memory at one years old. None of them believed me. I described the warmth of the cement on my belly, the light being thrown around on the blue water of the pool in front of me, the large feet walking by. My mother found an old album and showed me a picture of myself within this memory: I am 1 years old, laying on my belly on a blanket by the pool, at my grandparent's house.

Had I seen this photo before and forgotten about it - then misremembered it as my own memory? Or was it a real memory of mine that was only further validated by the photo? Can a photograph evoke that strong a sensation as to make you forget the photographic part of it? Or was I just seeing a photo of a moment I actually remembered?

Memory is a very slippery beast, with abilities to haunt as easily as it can bring pleasure. It also has a frustrating tendency to slip away. As soon as I saw this photograph of myself I lost my old memory. It was like the photo replaced the deep, warm, fuzzy, film in my mind with its sharp lines, bright colors and exact square shape.

Memories and photography are inextricably linked, and our expectations of what a photograph is are hinged on its inherent ability to record reality, which in the end is a memory.

Maybe this is because memories, like photographs, are visual. They're not graphical or textual, they're pictures of how we see. But they are reality made magical, memorialized, glamorized, galvanized, archived. As Susan Sontag said photographs are "clouds of fantasy and pellets of information." Memories don't seem to capture incidents and happenings as they actually occur but as they are when they're slowed down, repeated, stilled, and in that process they gain something, and reality is transformed. This seems to also be true of photography - that it has the power to make the everyday into something unique and magical.