Picture This: Memory
From The Dog’s in the Car, 2019 , © Tami Aftab.
Source:Picture This: Memory
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This article was printed in the Decade of Change issue of British Journal of Photography magazine, available for purchase through the BJP Shop.
Cary Fagan, Aaron Schuman, Kalpesh Lathigra and others reflect on memories through image and text, as part of our ongoing series Picture This
What is your earliest memory? Does it change, or stay the same? Do they move, or are they still? Memory is subjective, a constant rewriting. It makes us who we are, keeping us grounded in the past while also allowing us to grow. To remember is not only the process of looking back, but the knowledge that there is something to look back to. There are memories that are individual and those collective. With storytelling, we can convert personal memories into a shared experience. Through the recollections of others, we are able to connect to places otherwise unknown. Memory can act in this universal way, while remaining deeply individual, a place to store a secret or a lie, a record of the people we once were. Those visions can become corrupted, with or without intention.
The self may exist in memory, but it’s not the same person present today. Memory is an evolutionary tool allowing us to not make the same mistakes again, it helps us move forward. But as we look towards a new year, and back at what has come before, what will we remember and what will we forget?
We asked six photographers to respond to the theme of vulnerability with image and text. Below, Aaron Schuman, Marton Perlaki, Cary Fagan, Tami Aftab, Kalpesh Lathigra, M’hammed Kilito present their responses.
Aaron Schuman
When I was nine-years-old, I climbed halfway up a cliff on the coast of Maine, where I then froze with fear, clinging to the rock face while realizing that I had no idea how to get back down. Twenty minutes later, as the tide was coming in, I heard my father’s voice below me. “Are you alright?” he shouted above the waves. “I’m stuck,” I screamed. My voice was unexpectedly high-pitched and trembled in a way it never had before, which was strange, almost primal, and shocked me. My dad was no rock-climber; in fact, he was afraid of heights. But within seconds I felt him wrapped around me. If I fell, he fell. His hands firmly grabbed ahold of my skinny ankles – first left, then right, then left again, and so on – as step-by-step he guided my feet downwards, finding footholds below entirely invisible to me.
In late-October of last year, my father died. I’m no good at grief. I try to contain it; hold it in. But I kept dreaming of cliffs and crashing waves. I now live in England, and with no immediate way of getting back to America, I drove west; as close as I could get – at least for the time being – to somewhere between where I am, and where he once was. At low tide, I scrambled around on the cliffs, the waves creeping closer and crashing all around me. This time, almost instinctively, I made sure to know exactly how to get back down.
