“Once photographed, whatever you had “really seen” would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring from the fat life of time; elegiac, onedimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.”
– Sally Mann, Hold Still
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“When it comes as a memory, it dictates to you, it controls you. After I wrote that story about the breaking glass, I would hear a glass breaking but it never came back that way. I mean, I would remember what happened, but it was never as before.”
– Pacifique Irankunda, quoted in Good Prose by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd
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I have a poster in my kitchen of the film Cliffhanger. It is dominated by the phrase “Hang On”.
I feel that this poster is philosophical art: what a wonderful message, a reminder that sometimes all you need to do is maintain a secure grip, things will pass.
I bought the poster because I had a very strong memory of seeing it in my local video shop, circa 1993. I must have been 9 or 10- too young to have watched the film or to want to.
The poster was all.
It was so striking, dominated by that phrase, size A2, stuck on the wall, an advertisement, but also art.
Periodically, I’d recall that poster. There was no rational reason for the memory to be so entrenched and vivid. But it stood out amongst mostly blurred memories of my life at that age.
Why does one thing strike us and not another? Why did that poster choose me or I it for something special?
I believe the best art is that which is encountered with as little preamble as possible. I don’t want to read about or discuss something I have yet to experience.
My subconscious makes the decision of what is important or not. Or so I guess. Because I don’t know how I curate my experiences. I cannot force a picture to be special.
What was it about that poster in a small town video rental store over 30 years ago?
I have that picture now. I own it. I love having it to see on a daily basis. I concur with my 9 year old self. We share the same taste.
But because the poster exists now, in my kitchen, it no longer exists then, in the video store. I don’t have the image in my mind’s eye. By possessing it I have effectively erased the memory.
Did my subconscious bring out that image from time to time as a way of preserving the memory? An unfelt anxiety of losing something that should be remembered? It was out of my control. It still is.
What is better? The image in the mind or the image in the world?
I prefer to see my words in the world than jumbled in my head. But only once they are edited for public consumption.
Some things are happy to stay enclosed.
Once again, I proffer no definitive statement.
Perhaps one of the wisest and honest answers to a direct question: it depends.
Conversations With Quotations 