Photographs as Memory

I didn't think I would end up pulling a provocative quote from Berger because there is a lot in Another Way of Telling that I don't think I fully understand just yet. I hope that we will dig into the text tonight. But in the second half of Berger, I was really struck by his discussion of photographs and their relationship to memory, particularly his assertion that "The Muse of photography is not one of Memory's daughters, but Memory herself" (280).

What drew me to this quote was how truly bold it is. The use of "bold" sometimes conjures negative connotations, and one reading of Berger could bring up this association; by putting photography on the same level as Memory, the mother of all Muses, Berger is trying to equate photography to the source of all inspiration. However, I think the argument Berger makes to back up his assertion is a little more nuanced than that. He is saying that photographs do facilitate memory making, but they offer a narrower scope than the whole of a person's lived experience. It is only when a photograph, a small snippet of memory, is placed in simultaneity with a person's past experiences of living/viewing that connections are formed and memories are made. I feel like this view of memory resonates with, or is Berger's culmination of, the discussions of meaning making we've been having on the blog, as memory is the preservation of the meanings we make through discourse.

Berger's discussion of simultaneity, placing photographs in a wide spectrum with other photographs and experiences, relates to the idea of intertextuality because they both rely upon the interconnectedness of texts, images, and experiences. I think Introducing these concepts to our students could prove beneficial in the classroom, as it will help clarify that texts and their meanings are dynamic, being constantly shaped and reshaped by discourse. It will also help to move students' critical eyes to artifacts that are not just text-based, showing them that other media can serve rhetorical purposes.