MEMORY

Utrecht (2017)

Until the day I started taking pictures, my perception of the past, and therefore of life, has been probably very different. If the person is nothing more than an approximated ordered accumulation of memories, those not supported by images will be significantly different from those frozen by a camera. Until 1992, when I borrowed my father's Handycam to shoot some videos with friends, I have imaginative memories of my relationships, and it is known that the essence of life is in your relationships. Those people that I have never portrayed have not vanished, but in my mind they have taken on a decidedly different aspect from reality, becoming less exact from a physiognomic point of view but more intimate, more multifaceted. Of them there is not only my visual experience diluted over the years, but also a specific sensation that is like a sort of composite impression, made of the multiple aspects of the person: the voice, the body language, the smell, but above all the context, the emotional experience of that unique relationship. That's my memory. An image can evoke it but it can also change it because the memories photographed are not like the others. Photography adds a lot to the memory but also takes away something.

There is a photo in particular that I miss; that of my first love, a platonic love, never consumed, lived exclusively in my adolescent fantasies. I keep memories of this girl unaltered by the emotional strength of her image, memories of black and long hair, of fleeting glances, of argentine laughter. A proving photo cannot support the existence of this person, now distant and probably very different from how I've known her, but the emotional impact of that strong desire has imprinted an indelible image inside me, even after a quarter of a century.

The feeling, which does not fade as it happens to a printed photograph left in the sunlight, still accompanies me while I remember it. Maybe if I had had a photo of her with me for all these years, the feeling would be different, less dreamy and more concrete.

In the age in which billions of photographs are taken every day, what have our memories become and how much do they depend on the images we collect?

In front of the photo of a loved one, I virtually recall the relationship we had. The image brings it back to my presence, infusing the memory with concreteness, truth, and safety. I didn't imagine it, it really exists!

So, do the photos help to remember or distort the memory?

Both things. What is certain is that we can no longer do without it. Never as today photography is part of our life, for better or for worse.