Photography and Memory

The affinity between photography and memory is rather axiomatic: We take photos to preserve our memories. This formulation considers photographs as aide-mémoire and photography as a mnemotechnique. Such a basic analogy, however, falls short in explaining the spatiotemporality and materiality of photography and overlooks the mediated aspects of memory in narrating the past. The difficulty with describing the conjunction of memory and photography lies in the fact that neither of them has a static essence: Both remembering and photography are inherently dynamic processes. While for some the photograph simply is a representational image that embodies past events, for others the photograph’s materiality and social uses are equally crucial in the way it continually reshapes our memories. In addition, debates on “prosthetic memory,” “postmemory,” and trauma have already shown how photography plays a role in the disembodied, transgenerational, and retroactive operations of memory work. To classify diverse approaches toward memory and photography without ignoring the dynamic aspects of either of them, this entry is divided into two parts: “conceiving photography through memory” and “perceiving memory through photography.” While the first section explains how the medium of photography has been historically defined via its approaches to memory and remembrance, the second section shows how some salient views on memory are largely founded on photographic lexicons and metaphors. Among others, the first part draws on the work of thinkers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, and Elizabeth Edwards, and the second part discusses the work of Sigmund Freud, Marianne Hirsch, and Ulrich Baer.