Photography as a Memory and Material Record
The concept of photography today is governed by a sense of afterwardness: it is haunted by its past and memory. The shadow of the past casts its presence and invades the sense of the present-future of contemporary culture. Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life born by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the debate of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. This lecture researched how memory affects our everyday lives and how we look at photographs. Each photograph has a specific signifier: a subject, object, place, or ‘feeling’. We can extract ‘symbolic meaning’ from each photograph and a particular texture.