Every day people access thousands of photographs. Recording a moment, a landscape or something very common is one of the characteristics of communication time on networks. However, images captured by cell phones or old cameras reveal their times, social and cultural demands and the social place that people occupy. The democratization of imagery resources, via cell phones, opens up a question for us: what do we want to keep? Is there still a space for collective and social memory in the act of capturing an instant? The poetic idea that photography froze, in one click, an instant of life that would become eternal is called into question in times of tons of images stored on different digital media.
Photography became something immediately disposable, manipulable and, at the same time, even more present. There is almost no person who has not taken a selfie or been recorded in some situation. The ubiquity of portraits, events and situations has created a paradox that dialogues with memories: what are we and what do we witness in our experiences?
For historians, photography continues to be a fundamental tool for explaining periods and building links with the past. And these dimensions can be both personal and social. Does anyone, for example, without the aid of photography remember their own childhood features? Do we keep the marks on our faces or just the memories of episodes? Photography brings us closer to what we were and what we could not imagine without producing a portrait. Imagining that we would have difficulty saying what we were like in times past sounds like a fallacy to people in the 21st century who are used to thousands of images displayed on social media.
Do so many photographs help to produce memory or are they a disposable trait in times of clouds?
Photography and new habits
The invention of photography in the 19th century meant a huge leap in the democratization of portraits. Ordinary people now have access to self-representation, the possession and consumption of their own image. Photographers took over the world and enchanted people by producing instantaneous records. In smaller cities, even in the final decades of the 20th century, there were frequent visits from people equipped with their cameras and who sold their services to people who did not necessarily belong to the elites. The organization and creation of an album, limited spatially and economically, made it a family and social event. Owning an album and handling it with family and friends was a moment of remembrance and the production of narratives, not always reliable, related to the past and experiences.
The rapid transformation of photographic techniques allowed the proliferation of images. Originally, there was a requirement for the existence of a studio, the frozen pose and the scenic resources that made up the portraits. Facial expressions, almost always seen in the 19th century, indicated sobriety and even the discomfort of those who had to prepare and produce themselves for an event: being clicked and being recorded in a family and private album. An attitude very different from today, where portraits demand striking smiles. Between the circumspect portrait and the almost playful manner there is a trace of artificiality and, above all, of how the links with private and public lives have transformed.
Photographs, before the proliferation of images on cell phones, evoked a feeling of nostalgia. Taking a photo was a way of producing memories for the future and, when accessed, it was a way of thinking about the faces, people and stories that begin to fade from memories. In the 1850s, for example, when families were large and life expectancy was very low, compared to current indicators, how could the youngest child in a family have an image or visual reference of a grandmother or grandfather? If the XNUMXth century was the century of History, photography was a fundamental support for composing narratives and memories.
Photography and its social and political uses
Photography as part of a society's cultural, historical and social collection is loaded with cultural, political and ideological meanings. The historical conditions of its production express the meanings and motivations of multiple actors: the vision of the photographer himself, in the service of whom he is presenting the image and, above all, the ways in which they gain the dimension of dissemination in newspapers, books and pamphlets. The reproduced photographs form part of a set of issues that attempt to translate an era and communicate quickly with their recipients.
A photograph that appears on the front page of a newspaper or a government advertisement is not devoid of intentionality. When a photo manages to capture the apprehensions of a political moment, it is the merit of whoever took the photograph, but also the way in which the image circulated and helped to build meaning for the circulating image. The reasons for the choices, the contradictions and what the image communicates is part of a set of signs that need to be critically analyzed.
The imaginary about photographs from the past, especially in relation to events that occurred or political, artistic, economic and intellectual leaders, is supported by the idea of being a faithful copy of an event. It would be naive to assume that an image could solve the enigmas and impasses in the way in which stories are narrated and legitimized: photography carries a discourse that needs to be questioned, in the same way as other historical documents.
If there is anything that the multiple photographs displayed on social media and, subsequently, the various filters and applications suggest to us, it is that photography does not hold the truth. It does not reveal things as they are, but only reveals conceptions and images that we want to produce, edit and publish in the form that seems most appropriate to us. And, in this sense, photographs continue to be an instrument of our memories which, in each person's way, are manipulated in an attempt to avoid inconvenient records. The problem is that, even though we forge and produce what we think is something comfortable, memories escape our control and they always come back to make adjustments to the past. Whether those of an individual or a collective.
