Strolling Down Memory Lane
The Instagram Project: photos in 1,000 words…more or less
“Just took a stroll down memory lane via my instagram feed. What an incredible and tumultuous year it’s been.”
My friend Jon Ashcroft wrote that on Facebook a couple weeks ago, and it’s stuck with me. Partly this is because I was lucky enough to be in some measure a part of Jon’s incredible and tumultuous year. But it’s also because his words got me thinking about my own Instagram feed. What memories were there waiting to be rediscovered? What emotions could be explored and teased out?
Instagram, if you think about it, is a personal museum in the palm of your hand. The rise of Instagram has allowed us to become curators of our own life. Through the app we capture life and times that are, at least to us, invested with some sort of meaning, worth framing and putting on display for the world to see.
Jon’s words were powerful for me because I rarely re-visit this curated life. I hang the paintings, but I don’t generally stop to stare, consider, and contemplate. I don’t take that second or third look. Why did I take that picture? What were the circumstances? What was I trying to capture in that moment?
In his paper, Factive Pictorial Experience: What’s Special About Photographs?, philosopher Robert Hopkins compares the nature of photography to the nature of handmade pictures. As Mark D. White summarizes in Psychology Today, “Handmade pictures may be beautiful, thought-provoking, or inspirational, but there is no guarantee, nor even an implicit suggestion, that the object or scene shown in the handmade pictorial is, or was at one time, real. But with a photograph, there is a such an implication: this is real, this happened, this is truth.”
Of course, White points out, pictures aren’t always true. Photo manipulation has been around since nearly the dawn of photography. Whether one wants to convince you that Nessie is real or that he spotted a UFO, the temptation has always existed to borrow the implicit realness of photos to pass off untruths.
But there is another element that undermines the concreteness of photography—our own memories.
Every picture, as time passes, becomes a beacon in our foggy memories. Its beams pierce the fog, but never dissipate it. And the longer we travel away from the picture’s moment, the less clear the context becomes. You will always have the facts in the photo, the people, location, weather, clothes, hair colors, runny noses, etc.
But what fades is the meaning, or rather it evolves—from what was important in that moment to what that moment now means in the present. You lose the things that arguably made the moment human, the conversations, smells, laughter, body language, thoughts, moments before and after, heat from the sun, and more.
You are left with your interpretations and vague recollections.These are not untruths but rather impressions of the truth. The wrestling with the implicit facts of a photo and the incapacity of our minds to remember those facts perfectly. Who’s to say the emotions a photo evokes three years later are remotely correlated to the emotions stirred when first snapping a picture? Yet, both are true, in their own way.
Take, for instance, the photo at the top of this essay—my very first Instagram photo. There are the facts: Emilie, Justin, and Vince are the folks in it, good friends who I haven’t seen in what seems like much too long. The yard is the Garbinski’s, whose house I stayed a little over a year ago when I had the privilege to officiate the wedding of my friends Paul and Stephanie. That was the last time I saw them in person. The scene is one of a picnic or a BBQ, the details start to become fuzzy. Clearly we chose Mexican beer that day, Emilie was expecting and talking to someone or giving a Fonzie impression, Vince threw a football, and it looks like Justin caught it one-handed. But who really knows? I honestly don’t remember. He might of dropped it, but I’m sure Justin would adamantly say he didn’t.
But what I do know, what is true in this moment, is the feelings this photo evokes. First, my disbelief that this was taken only thirty-one months ago, because it seems much longer. In fact, it seems like another life. Since that photo was taken, Vince has moved to Flagstaff; Justin and Emilie are now in San Francisco, the baby was born and another came recently (both of which I’ve never met in person); and I’ve been in Seattle for the past two years with one son who remembers Phoenix with nostalgia and another who has no recollection we ever lived there.
That picture captures a time of hot spring days, cold beers, and good times for all of us as friends that has not truly been recreated in over three years. So, there is a slight feeling of loss and remorse, yet fondness rekindled for those whom I have not seen in some time.
No moment lasts forever, even the ones we capture with our pictures. The only constant is change. Yet, the beauty of being human to be able to explore change, our relationship to it, and to even capture that moment with words, much like we do with our photos.
So, I’m going to take the time, for the foreseeable future, to push a bit against the current of time, and my Instagram feed, and explore my present by reflecting on the past as found in those photos.
I’m calling this The Instagram Project, and the rules will be simple. One picture, a thousand words, more or less. There’s no schedule. I’ll take the time I need to write each essay, and when each is ready, I’ll post here in this collection. I’m looking forward to the adventure. Let’s see what we find.
