Memories fade faster than photographs; and those memories that do remain seem distant and other worldly.
What is the connection between human memory and pictures of past events? Even in a society bombarded with visual messages words will always support the interpretative process.
In the early 1990s, the decade long civil war in El Salvador was grinding to an end. Funding for the conflict, about $4 billion coming in military aid from the United States, was running out. After the rebels launched a “final offensive” in 1989, it was clear that the Salvadoran army would have to accept an uncomfortable compromise.
Meanwhile, hundreds of children, abandoned, abused, and orphaned, found sanctuary sniffing glue and running in gangs near the central cathedral in San Salvador. Within a few feet of the tomb of the slain Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, the children beg coins and commit petty crimes.
The emotional connection between emotions and memories, especially feelings of longing, is very strong in the interpretation of an image. Although meaning seems to lose authority without the context and textual explanation, subliminal and symbolic forces tug at our emotions and intellect.
We assign meaning to images because they are personal – resonating culturally and sometimes even spiritually. The 5-year-old boy, right, provides the symbolism that connects this moment to a more universal human condition.
Impoverished and abandoned to the streets, the child gazes into the lens of a camera and raises his hands in a gesture of prayer that transcends the literal to move into the figurative realm of meaning.
Is the gesture of hands folded in prayer signifying the child’s surrender or is the picture simply speaking to our imagination?
When we witness suffering in a picture memories are conjured up in the mind’s eye.
However, as Richard Crownshaw warns, it may be dangerous to appropriate an image in the mind's eye in order to recall events of the past. Crownshaw writes:
What concerns me here is the potential for adoption to turn into appropriation....to collapse into seeing through one's own eyes and remembering one's own memories instead. In short, what is to stop the colonization of victims' memories and identities?
Source: Richard Crownshaw “Considering Postmemory: Photography, the Archive, and Post-Holocaust Memory in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.” Mosaic. Vol. 37, 2004.
Crownshaw's perspective is valuable in reading images that connect with suffering and hope. The notion that the human mind can "colonize" memory and identity, also suggests the potential for apathy and disinterest in viewing images.