A roundtable discussion attended by Robert Polidori, staff photographer for The New Yorker, Douglas Nickel, Professor of Modern Art at Brown University, Bevil Conway, Professor of Neuroscienceat Wellesley College, David Freedberg, Professor of Art History at Columbia University, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, President of Antidote International Films and Cristina Alberini, Profesor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The discussion was about trying to understand the ways in which photography influences memory and the objectivity of photography. It was an interesting discussion where academic viewpoints were contrasted with the practitioner viewpoint.

As a result of watching the discussion these are the ideas that remain with me:
A photograph can be considered as an imprint from reality; many times the photographer makes an effort to record nature objectively. There is the acculturated belief that photography is objective, although as we observe a photographed image, there are cultural references that inform our reading and help us put things into context. Our visual objectivity is put into question. But we could just look at a photograph from a physics point of view where the camera conveys the laws of perspective from the art of the western world so this hasn’t got a specific cultural input to us.

The relationship between photograph & memory was discussed; how a photograph carries the moment in time and the emotion of that moment, a photograph is a fixed reproduction but memory evolves and changes and moments are reinterpreted.

A photograph can replace a memory, a sharp photograph of a place in some way is given us a new interpretation of the experience of a place, so it is more than just a documentary visual. Our peripheral vision has much less accuracy therefore our experience of the moment is very different to that captured in the photograph. A memory is not a recording of an event as it occurred, but a group of fragments that represent an event.  An emotional recollection strengthens the visual memory thus giving photography a utilitarian use. A photograph can move us emotionally but we need to consider what we project into that photograph as well as the image itself.

Robert Polidori,Classroom in Kindergarten #7, “Golden Key.” Pripyat. (June 6-9, 2001)

This led me to think about the visual effectiveness of out of focus pictures, pictures that include movement and blurred sections, how they trigger our perception of the moment/memory. They can work in a manner where the photograph mimics memory,  as our peripheral vision does, highlighting one element in within the frame and letting the rest fade into the background. I  think this can be applied to my work, using different exposures of the same subject and working on them in post-production. It also can be contextualised with the surrealist photography movement and even earlier than that with the photography of  Peter Henry Emerson(1856-1936), he believed in objective photography and he photograph accordingly to what he believed was our way of viewing,  so he played with selective focus and careful gradation of tones.

Peter Henry Emerson, A Rushy Shore, 1887-88