In-memoriam

In-memorian 2012, Toned Silver Gelatin Print, 198mm x 249mm

Bernie O’Regan 1938-1996

I often think of my grand mother during the last few years of her life, when she was gradually losing her memory. I would visit her in Adelaide, where she lived with my grandfather, and watch with absolute despair every time he entered the room. My grandmother would again greet him with the same smile, and in the same voice invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea, and then ask him who he was. She was slowly also forgetting who she was. Perhaps you have to begin to loose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing. We no longer live an identity. Memory has become the means by which we posses identity.

One of the most precious things that we have in a marriage, in a family, in a friendship, is a shared collective memory. Just think of those moments when we gently resurrect that collective memory. Maybe it’s at night lying beside your lover, waiting for sleep to overtake, whispering and giggling, interjecting, trading in secrets, and restating the dreams of our youth.

This is also how I think of our potential relationship with photography. One of the most precious things about photography is that through it we can establish a shared, collective memory with ourselves. It places us outside of ourselves and our memory in much the same way that we are outside of, but a part of our lover’s memory. Photographs can glimpse intimacies and reflect facts beyond our recollection. Photographs if we allow them, can trade in confidences about ourselves, much as one’s thoughts can trade in revelations about the rest of the world …

From ‘Counterfeiting Happiness: Photography, Identity and the Betrayal of Memory’