photo by Alinne Rezende

Photography and its functionality

Our new external memories

The need to rethink what is photography’s role nowadays, recently made us talk about the overproduction of images that leads us to repeatability, as well as the relationship of time and ephemeral that is now part of photography in the digital era. Yet, still room for one more topic we should question ourselves that is related to the new photography world — Why we produced an absurd amount of images? What leads us to this compulsion to photograph everything, such that we no longer comprehend our own production, nor even absorb this content we create?

It would be irresponsible to blame just one factor, there is no simple answer. But I want to bring here one aspect, which may not only be a cause, but also a consequence — the memory.

“There is no doubt that the world is being ‘musealized’ and that we all play our roles in this process. It’s as if the goal is to achieve total memory”, says Andreas Huyssen, author of the book “Seduced by Memory”.

It is attributed to photography, a human function as if it were an external memory. We began to photograph as if it were part of our experience. For example, going to the Louvre museum and not taking a photo of Monalisa, is almost the same as if you had not seen da Vinci’s famous painting.

Memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions in every corner of the planet. This leads to an inability or unwillingness to remember. So as with repeatability, this use of external memory (in this case also by the excessive use of photography) leads us to forgetfulness.

“ With the shift from photography to its digital recycling, Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction art (photography) has regained the aura of originality. What shows that Benjamin’s famous argument about the loss or decline the aura in the modernity, it was only one part of history where it forgot that modernization created itself an aura. Nowadays, it is the digital life that gives it back to photography its aura.” Says Andreas.

The image needs to be virtual, so it can reach its full potential in today’s world. Without easy access to the screen, it loses its new function of social interaction, of external memory.

Visibility equals success. Our main concern with image culture is the visual construction or reconstruction. It seems that we relate much more to the image itself than to its use. And like that, we become an image.

We may have nowhere to run, “maybe the screen is our future”. Even without worrying about how reliable our scanned files are, even without worrying about recognizing the need for reflection. Is it all permissible even knowing that such overproduction will, in one form or another, lead to oblivion? How many images with relevant content will be lost between superfluous images? Are we really going to move from living in a real, palpable world to living in a fictional world of images? I don’t know, for now, the only thing we know for sure is that Sontag is right:

“everything exists to end in a photograph”

Originally posted in Portuguese at http://revistaold.com/blog/a-fotografia-e-sua-funcionalidade-na-era-pos-digital/