On Photography and Memory
Essay awarded the XI Marc Ferrez Photography Prize - 2010.
On Photography and Memory examines the relationship between image, time, and reliability. By deliberately foregrounding photographic deterioration, the project questions photography’s traditional role as a faithful record of reality and guardian of history. Just as human memory fades, shifts, and reorganizes itself over time, photographic images also reveal their fragility, gaps, and interpretative instability.
The work emerges within a moment of profound transformation in photographic practice — from the material, chemical processes of analog photography to the electronic, binary logic of digital production. This shift alters not only technical procedures but also the way images are produced, read, and trusted. In an era in which photographs can be manipulated or entirely fabricated, the notion of visual truth becomes increasingly complex.
The images were created by digitally scanning color negatives produced years earlier. The process embraces traces of time — fungi, stains, storage marks, and chemical deterioration — intensified by the characteristics of digital capture. Degradation ceases to be a flaw and becomes language.
The research further unfolds into what the artist calls “software memory” or “app memory”: in a time of excessively clean and organized digital archives, why do we reintroduce noise and temporal marks into newly produced images? Is this merely an aesthetic choice, or a need to reinsert humanity into increasingly automated systems? As we increasingly rely on technology to categorize and structure what we remember, the reliability of these new timelines itself comes into question.