Are you a photos person or a not-photos person? I don’t mean “do you take pictures”: that, everybody does with their cell phones — selfies, unselfies and inbetwelfies. What I mean is: Do you like looking at photos? In albums? Or do you think albums are oh-so aeons ago?
Some of us love pulling them out of the woodwork every now and then to run our fingers over the pictures. Linger. Remember. Imagine. Turn. Return. And the memories come tumbling out.
In Psychology Today , Ira Heyman writes: “In families, reviewing pictures can serve as a scaffold that enables conversations about the past with children… pictures can strengthen both memory and relationships. But this only works if you review the pictures. I don’t know about you, but we’ve rarely taken the time to review many of our family pictures. Maybe later. Maybe.”
Yes, photographs unlock the sluice gates and yes, we have to look at them first. The point, I suppose, is that it’s become so easy and we’ve got so addicted to our over-user-friendly digital tools, that the review window has become a slit, one that can accommodate only the most recently clicked pictures, for a very short while, leaving little or no time to remember. The volume is plain impossible to organise. Therefore, in the future, there’s every likelihood that all those pictures will disappear into caches on gadgets, never to be retrieved again. As for albums, well, the pictures would have to be printed first and the possibility of that happening is remote. All of which presages bleak prospects for memory-making.
Time was when a roll of B&W Indu 120 ASA film cost ₹5 and after preciously shooting all 24 frames with a Russian-made box camera, the rush to the studio to have it processed and printed into tiny 2-inch square pictures on bromide paper was filled with much anticipation and trepidation. With colour came 36-shot rolls and rectangular frames, but you still had to wait for the prints to see the result.
We had a song, light-years ago, about remembering, about photo albums. One particularly popular verse went:
King Henry the eighth had several wives
Including Ann Boleyn
And he kept an album of their lives
With all their photos in
When Ann Boleyn was on her knees
Dressed in her very best frock
King Henry shouted, ‘Smile dear, please!’
As her head rolled off the block…
Digital’s changed all that. It’s also democratised photography, in a way, and it produces instant results. But does that also somehow mean instant forgetting?
In any case, Heyman’s really talking about excessive picture-taking, and suggests that we ruin our memories in the process. He quotes a study by psychological scientist Linda Henkel in which she “had participants take a guided tour of a museum and take pictures of some exhibits, but not others. On a memory test a few days later, people performed more poorly for the items that they took pictures of. Taking a photo led to worse recollection… almost as if the act of taking pictures allows you to not remember. I have a picture, so I don’t need to remember — I can always look at the picture later (which, again, we don’t really ever do).”
Perhaps the solution is to look at pictures now, which means making prints immediately and sticking them in the album right away. For me, though, it will always be albums — not mine alone, others’ too. To journey into their lives and times and places is to slip into a world in which time, history and moments melt into meditation.
Sometimes, the memories stray from reality — so what? Sometimes, despite the digital revolution, you need an album to make a discovery, as I did upon printing this photograph of the arali ( ghanera ) flower, growing in profusion in the compound of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. There, behind the bushes, is someone taking a picture from exactly the other side — of whom, of what? We will never know.
I wonder: When the time comes and we start to forget, how will we remember?