I keep coming back to Pierre Nora’s comment that there is “so little memory left”. What makes the news, how often, and in what terms continues, in an ever-growing way, to shape not only our picture of the world, but what will be left for the future histories of our time.
What role does memory play in shaping history today? Is there still a role for personal memory within the writing of larger social histories? If anything, it seems likely that personal histories will be dismissed or lost to history under the weight of the media’s versions of what happened, kindly brought to you by our sponsors.
Archives and databases offer hope for the continuance and validity of personal histories and experience to offer themselves to historians of the future, yet the ephemeral nature of the digital, as well as issues around the ownership and editing of cyberspace, haunt this hope.
In this project, I have been constantly bumping into the lack of history or context for these images. While it’s true that some information might be gained from some of the titles, and that these title names could be googled to glean other potentially related information, there is still no way to know what is relevant, when they were taken, or why.
On the other hand, I like that the way I have cropped and distorted the clarity of the images by enlarging the fragments to a larger size actively references the nature of memory itself – blurry, indistinct edges, suggestible, evocative, while the missing pieces suggest a greater, if somewhat elusive, whole. In this respect I’m very happy with this approach to the project. The fact that we now all share memories of these images, after and outside the facts and acts of their making and compiling, also makes them somehow poignant.
These images will soon fade into my own history and memories of both this course, and of Vid Ingelevics. The images are now so deeply connected to Vid that surely if I ever hear the names of Palmer and Stucke together, Vid’s face will rise before me, and slowly fade until only his smile remains, and I will re-experience an echo of my struggle with these 100 images.
I can also envision that the next time I see Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will picture him both as he was on the cover of that Star Week Magazine as “The Governator”, while I will also see my abstracted crop of the same image, creepy and vague as it is.
Yes Vid, you and at least some of your 100 images are now ingrained in my memory. I am hoping to find out where you live, and return, or repatriate, my cropped-to-almost-beyond-recognition versions of your images to you. The frond of my frustration and puzzlement should return, altered by my struggle, to its maker. That would be a fitting closure to this project. I will see what I can discover to make this happen . . .
