The Physical Object as a Bridge to Memory
Everything started with a childhood memory: whenever I visited my grandparents, their house felt like a universe waiting to be explored. Perhaps that is where my curiosity for discovering the world began, decades ago.
I remember finding an old tin box in my grandparents’ attic, covered in marks of rust from the passage of time, with the label “Photos” written on it. Quite descriptive, really. There was no attempt to hide what was inside.
And indeed, inside were dozens of photographs, mostly portraits of people I didn’t know at all. Yet the older members of my family seemed able to identify most of the people in those old photographs, many of them already faded by the passing of time, as if those people were still somehow present in that moment. It was fascinating to me. Hearing them talk about those people so naturally made me feel as though I were the stranger there.
Thirty years later, that old box with its descriptive label suddenly came back to me. One of the wonders of our brains.
I decided to take a journey and drive to Spain, to my grandmother’s house in Yepes, a small town in Toledo, more than 2000 km from where I now live in the Austrian Alps. It felt important to me that retrieving that box should not happen through digitised photographs, received by email or WhatsApp, as mere data transferred instantly, as we are so accustomed today. I needed it to require an effort. I needed to make the journey to find it.
Now, when I think about it, I realise that those people were never really strangers at all. The photographs, as physical objects, connected several generations of my family through the space they occupied. But they didn’t seem capable of connecting us through time. Or did they?
My grandmother Alicia, now 95, is today the only person who can still act as a bridge between generations and carry with her more than a century of stories from my family, stories she lived herself or was told by those who came before her.
And there is something that still amazes me. At her age, and despite the obvious cognitive difficulties she now experiences in everyday life, forgetting simple, recent and ordinary things, something changes when those photographs appear. She can remember who the people are, how they were related to one another, where a photograph was taken, roughly when, what was happening at the time. She remembers details that everyone else lost a long time ago. Stories that no one else remembers. And the older the photograph, the more vivid her memories seem to become.
It is as if the photographs were capable of opening a door into a part of her memory that the passage of time has failed to erase. And that fascinates me. Because we are not simply talking about remembering an image. Behind every photograph there seems to be a story that she can still retrieve from her memory.
Our memory is incredibly powerful, although often rather vague. Sometimes, all it takes is a photograph to take us back to a moment we lived through decades ago. Or to remember a story someone once told us about that photograph, a story we thought we had forgotten.
Memory ultimately becomes a kind of caption, too. It completes what we see and allows us to give meaning to something that, on its own, the image cannot fully convey.
But a photograph as a physical object offers something else. Something that modern technology, with its bits and pixels, cannot give us in quite the same way. It has a smell. It has a texture. We can touch it, turn it over, see how it has curled with age and how it has faded over the years. And I believe all of that also becomes part of our memories.
The philosopher Roland Barthes wrote about the punctum: that detail in a photograph that we are not consciously looking for, yet somehow reaches us in an intimate and personal way. I think that punctum can be even more powerful when the photograph is a physical object. When you can turn it over, feel the weight and texture of the paper, see its marks, touch a corner knowing that someone else touched it more than a century ago.
A JPEG file will never have the intimacy of a handwritten note on the back of a photograph. Only digital metadata, making it feel even further removed from the human essence of the image.
We live in an age in which we are overwhelmed by stimuli. We are not only losing our ability to pay attention or think critically; we are also leaving other senses behind.
Technology has made photographs easier than ever to take, store and share, but it has also managed to make almost everything pass through the same place: a screen. In many cases, we have even lost the physical connection with the camera through the act of pressing a shutter button, as happens with virtually every modern smartphone.
Susan Sontag was already writing about something similar fifty years ago in On Photography (1977). She described photography, among other things, as a way of accumulating and possessing the world, without necessarily meaning that we truly look at it. What might have seemed like a warning back then feels remarkably familiar today, when we have thousands of photographs that we will probably never look at again.
Never before in the history of photography have so many photographs been taken and so few remembered. Taking photographs with a phone has become yet another automated habit of our time, a form of collecting and possessing, and has lost the sense of being a special event.
There are now more than 40,000 photographs in my phone camera roll which, by themselves, are nothing more than bits stored on a hard drive somewhere on a company’s servers. I can see them on a screen, but I don’t really have anything physical to touch. They are zeros and ones arranged in a particular way, and if that information ever disappears, or even if the order of those bits changes, the image disappears with it.
Some of the photographs in that old tin box have existed for 140 years. They don’t depend on a subscription, a server or electricity in order to be seen. All they have needed is for someone, at some point, to decide to keep them.
They have survived a civil war and the hardships of a dictatorship that tried to erase the memory of an entire country. And I suppose they could still survive for many decades to come.
Print your photographs. Keep them as physical objects!!! The future will thank you for it and recognise them for what they truly are!
This reflection has become the seed of a short film I am currently working on, titled What We Keep, which I hope to be able to share soon.