Fixing and tricksing
October 15th, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |Here’s a quotation from Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Penguin, 2005).
She smiled, then waved and walked with Jack down the narrow stone path to the sidewalk. David watched her go, trying to fix this moment - the vivid backpack, her hair swinging against her back, Jack’s free hand reaching out to grab leaves and sticks - forever in his mind. It was futile, of course; he was forgetting things with every step she took. Sometimes his photographs amazed him, pictures he came across stored in old boxes or folders, moments he could not remember even when he saw them: himself laughing with people whose names he had forgotten, Paul wearing an expression David had never seen in life. And what would he have of this moment in another year, in five? The sun in Rosemary’s hair, and the dirt beneath her fingernails, and the faint clean scent of soap.
The idea that photographs “fix” the past is a common literary trope. According to the paradigm, memory is transient, but photographs are permanent, and can drag up a past we wouldn’t otherwise have any recollection of.
This is true to an extent, but what the Edwards quotation fails to acknowledge is that looking at a photograph is an interaction. In itself, a photograph is meaningless - its significance comes from the interpretation of an observer, who jogs it into meaning.
Earlier, I asked: “What is it that charges our photographs with meaning?”
I’m still not sure. Of course we use our memory when interpreting an old photograph - our memory tells us who these people are, and might bring to light the old holiday or party where the photograph was taken.
But it’s a vague kind of memory - one that relies (as memory often does) on imagination. The photograph surprises us, and our imagination conjures a memory into being, filling in the gaps to make sense of this ghost.
So I don’t think it’s entirely true to say that photographs fix the past, because they still depend on memory, the trickster, to make sense out of them.
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