I have been browsing through a series of old family photographs recently. Each has a different impact. Here I am with my two elder sisters in America, on a trip to Dsiney Land. i believe I am about five.
This is one of a few photographs which fills me with a certain melancholy. My instinct is to link this to some simplisitc phycological cause; perhaps the imminant divorce of my parents, the last ties to the nucelar family of my early childhood. In reality this does not feel honest, the sadness is both more poigniant and more ambiguous than that.
The melancholy of the image seems more intrinsically linked to the nature of the photograph and memory. It seems to be a direct result of what Barthes cites as photography’s unique selling point, the ‘that has been’ of the moment depicted.
In the stream of time memory fades. We except photographs as a real bridge back to past and even lost moments. It shows us a time and place which proves we were there, doing that then. It is irrifutable. WE except it as truth, with no reason not to.
OUr conscious expereince of that moment leads us to believe its existence has been held in limbo, somewher in the reserves of our recollections. Our arrogance and idealism leads us to believe we can locate this moment, excavate it and reexpereince it.
In the faltter truth of reality many moment are lost, most moments. The past disappears completely. Only small fragments survive as actual memroy locked into our subconscious, and even those fade.
It is only luck when one of this precariously housed memories has also survived in photographic form. The photograph then acts as a supportive tool to the past. Often, however, the phootgraphed moment is one of the many which actually past into oblivion in our own mind.
The above phtograph is one of thesed moments. I believe that this passage of time, this place, this moment was erased, a natural by product of the amnesia induced by transcience. This creates a dillemma.
In seeing the photograph I want to reconnect to that moment, I believe I must be able to. Yet i can’t. All I can acutally reconnect to is my memories of viewing the photograph, for it has been seen many times in the years gon eby. WHat I cant actually connect to is the moment, for that was lost.
I feel I must be able to get back there. I know it was, I was it did happen. Yet it is gone. The past has been lost. I cannot imbue the photograph with its past and future context, because that is lost. I have no deaq what happened to the comedy hats. I have no clue as to the object of my distraction out of the frame to the right. For the object outside the frame does not exist in my mind, all that exist is what is in the frame. Before, after and outside were gone. Only the photographic flattened image survives, not the memory. The memory is when we can reopen the past in three dimesnsions with multiple sensations. It is not the silent, flat and one point perspective memory of the photograph.
Yet I try to pretend this image is a memory, it is easier that way. It becomes a fasle memory. It cannot re-exist. My desire to connect is met by the impossibility to do so. This leaves us in limbo, in a position of instability. It is desire met by frustration. In trying to piece it back together it falls apart. Rather than be relived it is just allowed to suffer death over and over. This is the real melancholy of the picture.
