Lately, I've really been struggling with how conditions of knowing relate to the pictures we see in our day to day world.
I am curious about why some images "stick" in our memory, while others do not. I am also fascinated by how images trigger specific emotional responses -- how they shape our cognitive, cultural, social and historical sense of place and being. How are human beings culturally and historically conditioned to interpret pictures when they often extend beyond the original occurrence? How do we understand our collective past when so many images become embedded in our visual and emotional memory?
The redactive and over-simplifying nature of the visual appears to be an intuitive process. The visual memory that we appropriate of our experiences on earth is a mix of cognitive and socio-cultural interactions.
When Frederick Franck went off into the jungles of Africa to work with Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s, he was hoping that the camera he had brought with him would faithfully record and document his experiences. He was hoping that the memories of his time in Africa would never fade, and that he could someday share those memories with others. However, Franck soon abandoned his "memory box" and picked up a sketch pad and pencil instead. Why? What pushed Franck away from making photographs, an art form reputed to be our mirror of reality?
What Franck perceived, even 60 years ago, was the encroaching tide of the visual in society. In a visual environment such as the one we live with today, Franck predicted a world that would overload "our switchboards with noise." The "switchboard" Franck is referring constitutes our capacity for memory and emotions. "We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes .... Our looking is perfected every day -- but we see less and less."
Today, we are constantly in a mental state of distraction as we bounce from one visual medium to another. The switchboard is on overload with no operators on duty. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his book Picture Theory, wrestled with this issue in writing about "narrative, memory, and slavery." Memory for Mitchell, within a contemporary context, views the process as "an aspect of private consciousness." Pictures as visual narratives possess a sense of temporal sequencing that are stored in the brain and recalled with necessary. The visual snapshots we carry around in our heads (memories), are emotionally biased, because we are conditioned by our experiences.
This brings us to a blog launched last June by Robert Hariman and John Lucaites called NO CAPTION NEEDED.
Hariman and Luciates offer analysis of images as they enter the switchboard of public consciousness. The authors are regarded highly in the field of visual rhetoric and the blog serves as a tool for many of their ideas and thoughts.