About Memoria
Memoria (2002, 2003, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2018)
When photography was new, it was so strange and improbable that – even though it appeared to be a natural phenomenon – no one knew quite how to think about it or even what to call it. The image of a daguerreotype, one of the very earliest versions of the invention, was formed on the meticulously polished and brilliantly reflective surface of a metal plate, making it easier for the viewer to see himself than the image. But this is only one reason why such a photograph was called “a mirror with a memory.”
After all, a photograph seemed to be exactly that, a mirror, but with the extraordinary ability to retain a perfect, permanent image of whatever stood before the camera. We know better now than to believe entirely in either the truthfulness or the permanence of photographs, but the primary reason for our fascination with them remains their apparent veracity, their uncanny ability to contain, in a thin layer of silver or ink, an intricate constellation of detail, time, and presence. One might say that photography gives us what Randall Jarrell described as “a language so close to the world that the world can be represented and understood in it.”
Although it was intuited more than rationally understood, the most compelling thing about the medium was that the light recorded in the image was the light that illuminated the subject that had been in the presence of the camera. The light that shone from a face and gleamed in someone’s eyes formed the picture now present before us.
Which helps to explain another phrase often used in the nineteenth century to underscore this singular aspect and quality of photography. In order to make it clear that the image before the viewer was a photograph and not a drawing, it was sometimes captioned, “Taken from life.”
Every photograph of a person – and the vast majority of photographs in the world are of people – becomes, inescapably, a memorial image. For the first time in history, photography made it possible for virtually everyone to have a picture of herself or himself and of their families. Such pictures could inform others, long after the subjects were gone, of at least what they looked like, if not really who they were. For the first time there were cheap, ubiquitous images, millions upon millions of them, that seemed like unadorned, plainspoken facts and that appeared to epitomize the idea of memory made permanent and infallible.
Indeed, photographs are often used to revive, refresh, or restore memory, but just as often they rival, displace, and supersede it. Photographs seem to be more reliable than memory. And in some ways they are, but at the same time, it is too easy to regard them as both straightforward and objective when they are neither. As with memory itself, no photograph exists in isolation as pure fact. It is always part of a network of associations that extend far beyond the edge of the picture.
One could say that we do not exist unless we are recognized by others as existing. We are invisible unless we are seen. The most powerful element of any relationship is mutual recognition, regardless of the many ways in which that recognition may be characterized and expressed.
Of course I did not know a single one of the people whose portraits I have photographed, nor do I have any realistic way to learn anything about them. So why would I take such a keen interest in images of people I do not know and cannot know? In people I do not recognize and with whom I cannot connect a single story? In people whose lives are a complete mystery to me? Because I don’t require any of that information in order to find them evocative, compelling, intimate, moving, and powerful.
It took me a long time to figure out how to make photographs that I thought were meaningful images in their own right and not merely documentary records. I came to understand that I was looking for an elusive, intangible sense of connection with each person whose portrait I photographed. At the same time, I sought to construct a visual environment in which they could be seen with as much sensitivity and awareness as I was able to bring to them.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” This was precisely my experience in encountering these portraits and the individuals they represented.
As I have said, these individuals are not only unknown to me; they are unknowable to me. And yet what I seek in my encounters with their portraits is, above all else, intimacy. Since I cannot know them in any conventional sense of the word, that intimacy must come from reading their faces and listening to them with my eyes. I try to discern what I would describe as a sense of acceptance. I want to feel they are confident I will treat them with respect and affection.
Their lives were, like all lives are, like all of life is, ephemeral. And so are their portraits, and so am I, and so are my pictures of their pictures. We cannot escape our transience, the brevity of our existence. But we can honor that existence, theirs and ours. Which is what I seek to do in my work.
Like all photographers, I focus a great deal of my attention on my subject matter. In this case that means that I focus literally and figuratively on portraits and, even more particularly, on the people portrayed. But photographs are not exclusively about the thing looked at. They are also about the act of looking. And more than the act of looking, they can be about transforming vision into art. As Paul Klee once remarked, “Art does not reproduce what we see; rather it makes us see.”
With this thought in mind, I return to the concept of the camera as a mirror with a memory. In addition to reflecting the things at which the camera was pointed, a photograph is also a mirror in which we see the photographer. And any work of art, regardless of medium, is a mirror in which the viewer sees himself or herself. And when we look into the mirror of art that moves us, we find ourselves changed.