I recall as a four-year-old in the mid-1960s being taken to a studio in a department store and given a ball to play with. This was captured by a professional photographer using a Polyfoto camera, a device that took 48 sequential images on a single glass plate negative. These were subsequently printed. My two sisters underwent the same process that same afternoon. Some of these black-and-white images were cut out and sent to relatives. Some were selected and enlarged. In the photos I look carefree and preoccupied: a balanced, happy child. But was I? Perhaps I was while in front of the camera, but how representative was that minute or so of my childhood? Was I playing the role expected of me in that artificial situation? I have sadder memories of my early years, of being slapped around the head for being cheeky, of being told off, shouted at, and sent early to bed, but are they accurate? Was I a fundamentally happy child as the Polyfoto images suggest, or a sad child? Perhaps both. But the studio images are hard to match with how I remember feeling around that time. If I dwell on the album enough, perhaps I can expunge the darker memories altogether and build the narrative of my childhood around the ‘proof’ that the Polyfotos provide. It’s tempting to try.
It is well-established that acts of conscious recollection change our memories. Every time we recall something we modify it. Memory isn’t a filing cabinet full of reliable documents. Rather, remembering rewrites the memory and we put back something quite different from what we extracted. The next time we recall that event or place or person, we go back to something different: then we further revise the document before returning it to that cabinet drawer. Memories are malleable and ever-changing, they don’t give us completely reliable access to the past.
Photographs have traditionally brought us back to the reality of what happened and saved us from the distortions of memory that we are all prone to. A family album remains stable, acts as a kind of touchstone, and puts limits on our frequently revised recollections. I might have remembered two steps up to the kitchen door in our backyard, but the fading photograph reminds me that there was in fact just one. Photographs show that the climbing frame of my childhood was much smaller than I recall.
Yet photographs can be as misleading as memories. They are only partly legible. They capture a moment, one that might not have been typical, and there is no access to what was happening just out of the frame, or to what happened next. We can’t go back to verify that the photograph has accurately shown us what was there. And by convention, most family photographs are of happy times and celebrations. Much else was never photographed or has been edited out. Nevertheless, because they are traces as well as images, snapshots do carry a special kind of evidence. But that evidence isn’t always legible without further information.
Some philosophers, notably Kendall Walton and Patrick Maynard, have claimed that we can literally see through photographs. This means they have an especially direct connection with the past. The idea is that the causal chain of light reflecting from objects onto light-sensitive film or photosensitive cells, leading to the image we see as the photograph, is of a kind that gives us perceptual access to whatever was in front of the lens. The subject of the photograph in a sense makes its own image, but that image is transparent. We see through our spectacles, we see via a live video camera – why not see back in time through still photographs?
Walton and Maynard’s claim is that this is part of what makes photography special: photographic realism is different from realism in painting, though superficially similar. Like realist paintings, photographs tend to include details that persuade us we are looking at life rather than an idealised form of it. A painting always involves the mind of the artist, who decides what to include or eliminate and how to depict it. With photography, the claim is that something different goes on: there is a much more direct causal link back to reality, one that gave us a new way of seeing when photography was invented.
If true, this would mean that when I look at my photograph album I literally see myself as a child. That’s not the same as seeing from the perspective of that child, which is what my childhood memories seem to allow me to achieve. Perhaps if I’d had a camera when I was four and taken pictures, then that would have been possible. Perhaps then I’d be able to hold on to more reliable memories about how things were then, at least visually, because I’d be able to see again what I saw as a child.
I don’t, however, believe that we do literally see through photographs. When we see things, they typically occur at more or less the time we see them; our perceptions are sensitive to any changes that occur in the object, and, usually we have a very good sense of where we are in relation to what we are seeing. Looking at a photograph may feel like looking back in time, but it isn’t literally that.
It can be tempting to think that the selfies and snapshots that so many of us accumulate on smartphones are memories. They’re not, though they may act as catalysts for recall. Autobiographical memory isn’t entirely visual, but photographs are. When I remember a particular summer’s day aged ten playing in the woods, I recall the feel of the pine bark on my knees as I climbed, the smell of the wood sap, the sound of birdsong, the warmth of the sun on my cheek, the fear that I might fall, worries that I would get in trouble for being late back for supper. A snapshot of me climbing that tree might act as a trigger for those possibly unreliable memories, but it could never capture what it was like to be there in that moment. Access to the past is more elusive than we like to think.
Access to the past
From the Memory edition
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