Every so often, my father emails me old photographs — scanned copies with yellowing borders and colours that bleed — of long dead family members. There are often no words or other biographical details accompanying these photos. In fact, in an act of selfless remembering, there is no expectation from my father that I even reply to these emails. Usually, I look at these photos in a manner that one sees images in a gallery — as a form of documentation of other people’s lives. I find these photos quite disappointing as the immensity of the past that I carry in my head is reduced to postcard-size images, outside of which those large-sized lives no longer exist.
This mismatch between memory and the very act of memorialising — be it through photos, texts, public records — is not new. The concretisation of any phenomenon implies an imposition of form, rules, and structure. Photographs are no exception. When previously amorphous and free-floating memories are yoked to a new technology, it births new anxieties, stirring previously muted sentiments.
Finding meaning
In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato worried that writing would begin to decimate the traditional means of information storage which used memory techniques. Nearly two millennia later, the poet Petrarch endowed respectability to letter-writing among the increasingly literate elites. The result was that they began to explore their inner worlds in a language that was informal, free flowing, and revelatory, often without the forbidding rigidity of formal prose. As Gutenberg’s printing press began to percolate in the 16th century, the new technology was used to transform minor sectarian conflicts into major social schisms. That technology changes our lives is not surprising, but what is striking and less understood is how it begins to change people’s perception of themselves — how they find meaning to their own lives amidst the tumult of living.
Photographs, too, did something similar. In fact, when I look closely at the photos my father sends, I realise that how I interpret them has itself changed. Of these photos, I had seen some of them framed and displayed in the verandahs of our ancestral houses, arranged one after the after, like a police line-up, as a form of genealogical record-keeping. As a teenager what caught my eye, invariably, was the dourness of their faces, the pall of heaviness in their mannerisms, which perhaps betrayed their impatience and nervousness as the cameraman worked his contraption. Later, as I entered college and discovered the convenient righteousness of youth, I pitied the smallness of the lives of these men and women who powdered themselves for the sake of a photograph. But by now, I wonder, what did these photographs mean to many of them? Was it an effort to document their lives, a ritual of self-expression, or was it a deeper effort to efface their traditional selves and be born anew?
Being modern
Photography, wrote the American author Susan Sontag, is ‘the’ singular phenomenon that traces and reveals the contours of modernity more than any other. To be modern is to allow for the capture of our contingent selves into two-dimensional representations. But whereas once photographs were witnesses to the world, we are now awash in images — some photos of our own making and others made by public cameras. Ironically, however, many of our “private” photos, thanks to the performative aspect of social media, are now public, while many of our public photos remain locked in secretly held databases. As if anticipating this turn of events, the writer John Berger provided a taxonomy of sorts. He wrote: a private photo is that which is interpreted in the same set of circumstances in which it was taken and a public photograph is that which is interpreted in circumstances far removed from its origins. In essence, whether a photo is private or public is less about the display and more about the distance between the context of its origins and the context of interpretations that follow.
By this definition, the personal photos that my father sends me have now become like public photographs, since my life is far removed from the original. Historically, across societies, to understand our representations of reality — be it paintings, engravings, photos — we have relied on the stability of contexts to arrive at homogeneous and mutually reinforcing meanings. But this stability has come undone. And as a result, any claims of uniqueness of meaning in any of our arts subject to the logic of mass consumerism has become untenable. Photographs on social networks accentuate these forces: they are public, the stability of contexts have broken down, and their meaning is elusive. We’ve made our experiences into advertisement campaigns for our own lives, which have, in turn, become the products to be marketed. We’ve become the consumer goods we have been waiting for.
