Memory City
The camera only records what occurs in bursts or explosions, whereas behind every photograph is the suggestion that the depicted scene was also an experience that someone lived through. Yet, photographs, despite their representational realism and apparent immediacy do not necessarily provide straightforward access to the scenes or experiences they record. The startling effect/affect of many photographs comes from their ability to confront the viewer with a moment that had the potential to be experienced but perhaps was not. Often discussions of memories behind photographed images results in stories that the image does not capture. The photograph acts as a substitute: it gives access to an imaginary engagement with an experience that has never been photographed. It has enabled recollection at the same time as underlining how precarious is the nature of this testimony – both as image and as memory. This possibility that photographs capture un-experienced events creates a striking parallel between the workings of the camera and the structure of memory. A photograph, it might be said, cheats memory of its content and makes concrete a scene which the memory does not represent. As Susan Stewart asserts in On Longing (1993: 133) the ‘souvenir’ (in this case the image) replaces the memory of the body’s relation to the phenomenological world with the memory of an object. The photograph, like the memory, leaves more undiscovered than it reveals.
It would appear that the recollection of an image is not a re-collection of an image. At a personal, individual level it is, instead, the reconstruction of a series of sensations, a collection of contextual inferences, and a pattern of social and personal markers that focus the so-called memory of the image in a series of times, places and circumstances – some of which are, indeed, “virtual.”
The following are a few fragments of memory from the Memory City project. In each case there is a voiced articulation associated with a generic or personal image. The images do not re-present or duplicate what is remembered. Instead, the relationships between image and account point to interesting features of the communication of memories.
R: I was more interested in going on walks around the river [...] and swimming in the river at night, which was very exciting; cold and miserable and horrid, but it was nice to be able to say to your friends the day after "I was swimming in the river last night at 10 o'clock." In actual fact it was terrible, you know, and you were muddy and cold and dirty, but it sounded good.
I: So who would you have gone to swim with in the river?
R: Girlfriends, but you'd meet the lads down there as well, yeah, yeah.
I: So was that quite a big thing?
R: If one of your friends was very fast, which one was, she'd go off with a boy, you know, for ten minutes and we never asked what they did, ever, we didn't want to know. But it wasn't rife, you know, mostly you didn't.
I met my wife at the bus station. We were both drunk after a night out and I knocked her over and she fell on the floor and hit her head. She seemed a bit confused and I wasn't sure if it was because of concussion or because she was drunk. I put her in a taxi. I saw her 3 months later and she didn't recognize me until I said, “How’s your head?” and then she remembered who I was. We've been married 20 yrs. I keep waiting for her to bump her head again and say, “Who the hell are you?”
It was 1973. I remember the lovely flowerbeds, the path, a green hedge. I said to myself don’t be so silly, you’re imagining things, don’t panic. But my heart was pounding, I was shaking. I sensed that somebody was really close behind me.
It was a middle-aged man with a terrible complexion and I can remember him staring at me, he said “Ive been following you, is it possible I can take you to the cinema?”
I saw another fellow walking down the path and I said “He’s my boyfriend and he’s meeting me here”
As he walked past me I walked behind him and I left the park at the entrance.
Ive lived in Preston for over 30 years since then and I don’t think Ive ever gone into that park alone.
Thats the church just round the corner. St Peters isnt it? This is another sculpture here. This is basically a sculpture of a pair of hands joined in prayer. I've got a press cutting of when it was first opened. The guy he actually carved it on site. The big rock was brought and put in the Peace Garden on Friargate and he was up a ladder hammering away at this thing, carving it out...They had it in the Peace Garden which you think would be an ideal place to put a pair of praying hands and apparently the Muslim community objected to it being a Christian thing and it was taken away. Unbelievable...It disappeared. I didnt know where it had gone and one day I was driving past and I saw it there.
It was at lunchtime, around 12ish. There was this pie shop that made brilliant butter pies. Whenever I’m feeling down I go get a butter pie. Well I was waiting in the queue when someone tapped me on the shoulder and this woman asked me “Do you want a bit of business?” At 12 o’clock, I couldnt believe it. I think I said something like “What here?” And she said “No No we’ll go round the back”.
I suppose its quite enterprising thinking she could squeeze in five minutes of business while waiting for her lunch. Other people just turned a blind eye to it.