Click. A snap on the camera captures a moment in time, whether it is a fresh graduate collecting his degree scroll or a couple raising their glasses to a toast at their wedding.
Before the age of smartphones, we printed photographs and arranged them neatly into albums that tell stories of our past. Most of us still keep troves of them tucked away in old drawers, documenting scenes where our memories fail us. These books withstand the test of time, allowing us to relive events that would otherwise have been swept under the tides of change.
In the film Memory Box, teenage Alex learns about her mother’s youth through old photographs. Those stacks of memorabilia from Maia – Alex’s mother – depict how Maia changes from a wild, carefree adolescent to a more subdued individual beset by war anxieties. The meditative encounter with Maia’s past hence proves the lasting value of the physical medium.
As a result of Alex and Maia’s experiences, I am prompted to consider how the shift to digital photography impacts our daily lives. The film inspires the question – with digital images becoming the new norm, does their temporality and ease of manipulation undermine the human experience?
The Digital World
There is a growing sense that our past is becoming more ephemeral. After all, instead of occupying physical space, we chuck images into a virtual drive – or they remain scattered in our phones like detritus until we clear them out. Instead of setting fire to pictures of your ex-partner, you simply delete them with a click of your mouse. When images are so easily discarded and commodified, what is the significance of a digital photograph?
There is therefore a shift in the world of documentation to one of intangibility. As it becomes easier to record history, forgetting events also becomes faster. But this trend doesn’t necessarily mean that all meaning is lost. For example, Alex – Maia’s daughter in Memory Box – records the Lebanese sunset with her phone camera. By sliding her finger across the video footage, she traces the sun’s movement and feels an emotional connection to those moments.
Figure 1: Alex admires the setting sun. Image still from Memory Box (2021) courtesy of Abbout Productions
Digitalisation thus can improve the immediacy of experiences. Gone are the days when we must wait for the film to be developed before transferring them onto albums for safekeeping. Now, our reactions are instant, possibly increasing photography’s impact on us at the moment of capture. We can think, feel and reflect straight away.
To be sure, digital images can deliver stronger emotional resonance in the short term. But over time, their lack of physical presence may trivialise the memories forged and render them into mere kilobytes and megabytes. It seems that efficiency and portability triumph over these images’ lasting impact on the human psyche.
Fact or Fiction?
Nevertheless, the purpose of photos remains – to bring us back to older times. Whether these moments are cherished or spurned, they are pauses in time that point to a larger narrative. But this also prompts another debate: how do we actually know what is real and what is not?
With the rise of advanced digital editing tools, you can remove blemishes or people in the background. Additionally, it is no secret since the advent of image capture that photographers can deliberately stage their shots. In that case, do photographs truly chronicle history as it truly happened, or are they only telling a version of it?
This is a conundrum that documentary film director Errol Morris attempted to investigate. He puzzled over which photo taken by Roger Fenton was the legitimate version. Both images showed the same road, but only the second one became Fenton’s famous 1855 war photo – “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”.
Figure 2 (top): The devasted Crimean War landscape without cannonballs on the right
Figure 2 (bottom): Roger Fenton’s celebrated photograph, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”
Images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
One showed a plain clearing scattered with cannonballs at the time of the Crimean War. But the other depicted the same road sans the cannonballs, leading to speculations that the famous photo could be staged for dramatic effect.
He concluded that the cannonballs were indeed moved onto the road, though he could not fathom exactly why or how it was done. He did not know if it was Fenton who placed them in those exact positions or that they were truly fired there. So, did fireballs indeed assail this clearing? No one can be certain.
“Every photograph is essentially a mystery. And it’s a mystery that asks us to figure it out,” said Morris in an interview with Vox.
This dilemma is intensified in our modern world where we can extensively manipulate any image with Photoshop. Even famous photojournalists like Steve McCurry have been accused of deleting elements to make their shots look more visually appealing.
It is difficult to discern the accuracy of any image, whether digital or celluloid. Photos can be doctored to present a more polished narrative, cropping out details or altering colours. The question begs: can we trust every image to reflect reality? How do we know that a story is not false or distorted?
Perhaps, as long as photos still capture our lives, the precision of photographs matters less than the sentimental value they evoke. There are few other effective methods of recording events for posterity. If photography is not used in a way that misleads people in situations where accuracy comes first – like a criminal investigation – then maybe the human stories they tell should be prioritised.
In the end, putting together a series of images is also a form of art. As photography evolves, so does its nature and the means we should perceive it. So prevalent are photos in our modern world that there is less of a need to preserve them physically. Now that photo editing apps are becoming more ubiquitous, it can be argued in certain cases, slight alterations to the truth do not matter as much as the overall narratives portrayed through visual storytelling.
Ultimately, it is reasonable to expect that every photograph you see to have been edited in one way or another. Impact matters – a good storyteller should know that maximising aesthetic or emotional effect sometimes entails choosing to emphasise certain elements while removing others.
Figure 3: Alex looks at the past with new lenses. Image still from Memory Box (2021) courtesy of Abbout Productions
As the film’s protagonist Alex takes picture after picture of her mother’s old film reels, past and present converge in Memory Box. Both ways of photography – physical and digital – evidently still produce meaning. In the end, it is up to us to decide how we want to use and trust this evolving medium.
References
1. Lowndes, Coleman. “Was This Famous War Photo Staged? Errol Morris Explains.” Vox, Vox, 18 Nov. 2020, https://www.vox.com/videos/21573647/valley-shadow-of-death-photo-roger-fenton-errol-morris.
2. Memory Box. Directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, performances by Paloma Vauthier, Manal Issa, Rim Turkhi, Rabih Mroué and Clémence Sabbagh. Abbout Productions, 2021.
3. Schulz, Kathryn. “Errol Morris Looks for the Truth in Photography.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/believing-is-seeing-by-errol-morris-book-review.html.
Our 2022 articles offered a selection across four broad categories to facilitate your perusal. This article was part of the CONSIDER category: Opinions shared by our writers after watching the programmed films. For the opinionated and open-minded.
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