Chapter 12 - MES 56: Souvenirs from the Past

Summary

My mother just received a digital camera. She carries it in her bag everywhere she goes, and often has her pictures taken against the backgrounds of the places she visits, the food she eats, or simply pictures of herself wearing the clothes she has just bought. One day I asked her why she liked being photographed so much. She answered, “Photographs are a way for me to exist forever.”

This statement about photography and mortality is similar to Susan Sontag’s observation about memento mori. In her book On Photography, Sontag wrote: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” Different from film, photography has a poetic charge, full of nostalgia and sentiment because it is a slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment that is transformed into a slim object that can be kept and looked at again and again. Through her own efforts, my mother consciously photographs herself and the objects she finds appealing; by taking pictures she remembers and even reminds others that she once existed, and will continue to exist.

My mother’s answer also reminds me of George Eastman, founder of Kodak in 1934, who developed an intriguing marketing concept that was summarized in the slogan: “Kodak doesn’t sell film: it sells memories.” ▶12.1

The notion of existing in photography is related to how reality is represented. It is also related to how memories of the past are constructed. During its infancy, camera technology was considered as capable of recording reality perfectly, and photographs were therefore often used as scientific proof. Over the years, scholars have rigorously critiqued these ideas of photographic objectivity. A photograph constitutes a choreographed visual record: to take pictures is to select what one wants to present in a single frame. When a photographer takes a picture, her or she is not capturing reality, but is constructing it instead. ▶12.2

Presented with a collection of photographs taken in photographic studios in the Netherlands East Indies from 1860 to 1940, I tried to focus on how these photographs have articulated reality and memory.