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MEMORY FORMATION
Memories of our experiences connect with one another and they are the basis of who we are as individuals. Memories rely on a brain region called the hippocampus. If the hippocampus were to be taken out of your brain right now, you would be stuck in time and memories of new experiences would rapidly fade away. The hippocampus functions to create a seamless story of the self. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY & MEMORY There is a clear connection between human memory and the photographs we take. The photos we take can store information of what, where and when. In this regard, a photograph is very much like a memory of a life event. A photograph is simply information about past light that we can perceive in present time. Photographs serve as memory storage and, when viewed, can activate memory recall. Source: http://petapixel.com/2013/07/20/memories-photographs-and-the-human-brain/ |
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To say that what we see in photographs is gone is to state the obvious. At the very least that particular moment is gone, never to come back, just like any other moment (whether we photograph or not). The person in the photo might be gone, in all kinds of ways. Gone from our life maybe, either by our choice or their choice or maybe by nobody’s choice (in the case of death). The fact that something is gone makes photographs so poignant, and it is what makes photographs memories. This, again, is obvious, because memories concern the past. Photography is the past (maybe more accurately a past). To look at a photograph is to look at the past.
In the case of photographs, we have more power over the process of retaining and forgetting. The process here involves the decision to take a photo or not, and then later whatever is later involved in the editing. Seen in this light, photographs are more perfect memories, because we are given more power to control our past (if we had that power with our actual memories, most therapists would be out of work). Conveniently, we tend to ignore the fact that photographs are manufactured memories. Photographs are also expressions of our desire to hold on to something. As such expressions, they can take on their own life, essentially becoming something completely different.
Source: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/photography_and_memory
In the case of photographs, we have more power over the process of retaining and forgetting. The process here involves the decision to take a photo or not, and then later whatever is later involved in the editing. Seen in this light, photographs are more perfect memories, because we are given more power to control our past (if we had that power with our actual memories, most therapists would be out of work). Conveniently, we tend to ignore the fact that photographs are manufactured memories. Photographs are also expressions of our desire to hold on to something. As such expressions, they can take on their own life, essentially becoming something completely different.
Source: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/photography_and_memory
Artists Dealing with Themes of Truth & Memory
VIEWING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
Some artists try to document things exactly as they are in order to create a record for future generations. But others deliberately frame the past in different or unexpected ways to change the way we think about history. So how does art shape our collective memory of the past? And how might it inform our experience of major events in our own time?
There will inevitably be tension between an object invented by a subjective mind and the objective fact or event it is meant to depict. Many artists use art to tell stories about personal and cultural memory that are open to interpretation, that reframe the past not as a fixed narrative but as a multiplicity of voices from diverse points of view. This allows us to think twice about our history and how it has been shaped, and how we might best document things to come.
Source: Tate, Khan Academy - Archives, Memory, and Conservation
Some artists try to document things exactly as they are in order to create a record for future generations. But others deliberately frame the past in different or unexpected ways to change the way we think about history. So how does art shape our collective memory of the past? And how might it inform our experience of major events in our own time?
There will inevitably be tension between an object invented by a subjective mind and the objective fact or event it is meant to depict. Many artists use art to tell stories about personal and cultural memory that are open to interpretation, that reframe the past not as a fixed narrative but as a multiplicity of voices from diverse points of view. This allows us to think twice about our history and how it has been shaped, and how we might best document things to come.
Source: Tate, Khan Academy - Archives, Memory, and Conservation
ARCHIVE FEVER
Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.
Exhibition List:
Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbona, Andy Warhol
Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.
Exhibition List:
Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbona, Andy Warhol
THE MEMORY OF TIME
The Memory of Time presents work by contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history. In the last two decades, as the world has undergone an unprecedented technological revolution, photography itself has changed profoundly. With the advent of the digital age, people around the world are recording every aspect of their lives through photography, sharing their pictures with friends and strangers online and through the burgeoning social media. Yet digital photography has not only changed the way people make and circulate photographs, it has also shattered enduring notions of the medium as a faithful witness and recorder of unbiased truths, for now everything in a photograph can be fabricated; nothing need be real. Photography — once understood as verifying specific facts, capturing singular moments of time, and preserving explicit memories — is now recognized to have a multifaceted and slippery relationship to the truth and to the past. By embracing this complexity, contemporary artists have placed photography at the center of a renewed discussion around the construction of history and memory and the perception of time.
Memory of Time Exhibition List
The exhibition is divided into five sections: “Traces of History,” “Time Exposed,” “Memory and the Archive,” “Framing Time and Place,” and “Contemporary Ruins.” It features recently acquired works made from the early 1990s to the present by artists who explore these concepts.
The Memory of Time presents work by contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history. In the last two decades, as the world has undergone an unprecedented technological revolution, photography itself has changed profoundly. With the advent of the digital age, people around the world are recording every aspect of their lives through photography, sharing their pictures with friends and strangers online and through the burgeoning social media. Yet digital photography has not only changed the way people make and circulate photographs, it has also shattered enduring notions of the medium as a faithful witness and recorder of unbiased truths, for now everything in a photograph can be fabricated; nothing need be real. Photography — once understood as verifying specific facts, capturing singular moments of time, and preserving explicit memories — is now recognized to have a multifaceted and slippery relationship to the truth and to the past. By embracing this complexity, contemporary artists have placed photography at the center of a renewed discussion around the construction of history and memory and the perception of time.
Memory of Time Exhibition List
The exhibition is divided into five sections: “Traces of History,” “Time Exposed,” “Memory and the Archive,” “Framing Time and Place,” and “Contemporary Ruins.” It features recently acquired works made from the early 1990s to the present by artists who explore these concepts.
Sally Mann - Antietam, 2003, wet collodion plate
In this presentation recorded on June 21, 2015, at the National Gallery of Art, acclaimed photographer Sally Mann reads from her revealing memoir and family history, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are described as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." Mann crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel, but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.
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SALLY MANN
Mann’s work, which aims to capture the atmosphere of the deep South, has been duly acknowledged in a big way this month with the release of her memoir, Hold Still. In it, she recalls the first time she embarked on a photography expedition: “I shot many of the same things I still focus on today: the landscape of the rural South, with its keen ache of loss and memory.” It’s not just the dreamy sepia hues that grant her pics an otherworldly vibe; it’s her deep connection with a community caught up in its own past. Mann’s work is part of a collection on display at the National Gallery of Art called "The Memory of Time." The works, created between 1990 and today, collectively demonstrate the way the medium has pivoted to adjust to, and comment on, the digital age, when editing images is quite literally as easy as the push of a button. Once valued as a capturer of objective truths, photography has undergone some changes since the advent of easy-to-use apps that allow casual hobbyists free reign to alter the vantage point, subjects and time of day of an image. “Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.” - Sally Mann, "Hold Still" 
Sally Mann - Untitled (Self Portraits), 2006-2012, nine ambrotypes
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PHOTOGRAPHY ASSIGNMENT: Create a Memoryscape by combining history and photography to reveal a specific memory. The past event can represent either a personal or cultural experience. A Memoryscape should ultimately address the passage of time and remind us of our shared humanity. You will conduct either physical research (digging through actual materials) and/or online research (exploring digitally archived materials) to find primary sources that can deepen your understanding of an event that transpired. This chosen source (document, drawing, photograph, or recording) should be displayed alongside your final project or be incorporated within it. You may use either analog or digital photo manipulation techniques to alter you image(s) to allude to a memory. You will write an artist statement to accompany your work in the final exhibit that expresses the reasoning for your visual and conceptual choices.
HISTORIC RESEARCH LINKS: NOTE: You must find a primary source - either physical or digital evidence of a past event
National Historic Landmarks in Virginia
Search the Virginia Historical Society collections
Virginia History Explorer - Search by Category
Virginia Historical Society Papers: Family Search
Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs
Library of Congress: American Memory Project
Richmond Times Dispatch Genealogy Bank: Search Newspaper Archives
Library of Virginia Document Bank
Virginia Memory: Multiple Exposure - Catalog of Prints and Photographs @ the Library of Virginia
National Park Service: Virginia
Digital State Archives: Virginia
Family History Center: Richmond, VA
Our Family Tree: Collaborating to Connect Family to History
Explore Ancestry Collection
LIFE: Photography Archive
National Historic Landmarks in Virginia
Search the Virginia Historical Society collections
Virginia History Explorer - Search by Category
Virginia Historical Society Papers: Family Search
Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs
Library of Congress: American Memory Project
Richmond Times Dispatch Genealogy Bank: Search Newspaper Archives
Library of Virginia Document Bank
Virginia Memory: Multiple Exposure - Catalog of Prints and Photographs @ the Library of Virginia
National Park Service: Virginia
Digital State Archives: Virginia
Family History Center: Richmond, VA
Our Family Tree: Collaborating to Connect Family to History
Explore Ancestry Collection
LIFE: Photography Archive
