Photographic Memories


A project by Mark Selby.


Photographs can act as powerful mnemonic representations of our personal memories, indicative of time, place and experience. However as digital photographic technologies strive for ease, convenience and instantaneity, photographs are mass–produced. The camera democratizes experience, recording differing experiences in identical ways. Often not valued as memories, photographs become mundane representations of unremarkable and unfamiliar events whose mnemonic value is increasingly diluted.
Photographic Memories is an ongoing project that intends to make photography an integral component of experience. Like the map, or the ticket, the camera becomes necessary to the journey. Here photography encourages the experience of travel, capturing it in ways more appropriate to the activity.
Oct 19
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Design a post-optimal camera

Photographs can act as powerful mnemonic representations of our personal memories, indicative of time, place and experience. However as digital photographic technologies strive for ease, convenience and instantaneity, photographs are mass–produced. The camera democratizes experience, recording differing experiences in identical ways. Often not valued as memories, photographs become mundane representations of unremarkable and unfamiliar events whose
mnemonic value is increasingly diluted.
What I propose here is not simply to make the capture, storage and display of images less convenient (why not just use an old camera?), but to use the photographic process in order to question why we want to record an event in the first place, with a view to affecting a move away from homogeneous commodity and toward more challenging and creative photographic practices in order to produce more emotionally significant ‘memories’.