Aide-Mémoire
Memory, photography, and seeing things as we are
I have been thinking a lot about the documentary impulse lately—my own and our collective, social one. Technology has made it so easy to record, edit, and curate our lives that we do it almost unconsciously, automatically. We snap pics of our plates laden with eggs Benedict, of a pretty sunset, of our faces pouting mysteriously. We make it art, or we do not. We post it for the world to see, or we might not. Occasionally, my phone throws up something at me—“A Spotlight on Your Cat!” or “On this day ten years ago….”—and I am forced to contend with the fact that I have been unsystematically documenting my own life for well over a decade, and most of these images exist in a strange liminal space, in a mysterious Cloud, which permeates everything and nothing.
Ironically, my serious interest and love for photography (which well predates smartphones), was sparked by a childhood trip of which I have absolutely no photos in evidence. This, I realize, is highly anomalous in our modern hyper-documented world. Though not usual in historical terms—the overwhelming majority of humans throughout most of time did not take photos of their every waking moment, and somehow, still enjoyed their lives occasionally—in these days of ubiquitous cameras and habitual recording, curating, and sharing of ourselves, not having a single image to show for it lends the trip a sense of irreality. You know, pics—or it didn’t happen.
This lack of photographic evidence is all the more unusual given that, at the time of the trip, hobby documentation of family travel was all the rage. So, what happened? Simply put, it was an era of emergent technologies, the wild last years of a crazy millennium, full of novel, cutting-edge, experimental new forms of recording and storing audio-visual data. Alas, some of those technologies were far less permanent than anyone anticipated… But, I ought to tell the story in order.
Spanish Holiday
It was the spring of 1998, and the tour bus was climbing a serpentine, narrow road in the hills above Málaga. It was long past sunset, and the road was very dark and slick with rain. Somewhere to the side, across two barely-wide-enough lanes in opposite directions, the cliff dropped off precipitously. During the day, one could see a stunning view of the coast and the shimmering sea below, but now, as the bus wound steadily up the road, all I could see was the darkness, and the shadows of foliage pressing against the windows. I remember the road was rather curvy, perhaps because the driver took its turns with a bit more flair than strictly necessary. He was probably in a hurry to get us to our destination—a small, cozy hotel perched, in my memory, almost on the road itself. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that, however. What I mostly remember of that hotel is the hallways: warm wood panelling, ornate wall sconces, mirrors, rich yellows in the carpets. The room we stayed in, on the other hand, is slipping and sloshing vaguely in my mind, like a poorly developed image. I remember being tired and overstimulated, that first night. It was my first time on a trip abroad, my first time away from my parents. The world seemed suddenly very big, and I wanted to drink it all in.
At this point, people usually produce a photo or two to supplant the narrative, usually an image of a figure or a group standing still in front of a monument, grinning maniacally, or more aptly in my case, “smiling mysteriously”and coming out looking rather surly. Alas, I have no such thing to produce. A picture of myself “smiling” in a surly frown in front of an archway in the Alhambra would be appropriate to insert here. Anyway, I had just turned twelve, and the reason I was in a tour bus at the side of a narrow mountain road in the hills above Malaga was because my step-dad’s parents very generously took me along on their holiday as a bat-mitzvah present. All the more so, one might wonder why no photos of this momentous event remain. A first trip abroad, and one that marks an important birthday! Surely, someone would have thought to document it?
Surely. And they did. In fact, most of that trip was meticulously, if idiosyncratically, documented. But I’m getting to that.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking of taking pictures. I was mostly just really excited to be going at all. My parents belong to that cohort of Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel as a result of the upheavals of 1989-90, and they worked hard to build new lives in a place they knew almost nothing about before stepping on its soil. Most of my friends were of the same coinage, raised, like I was, at the crossroads of cultures, languages, habits, and eras. By the time I was celebrating my bat-mitzvah, a scant few of my peers had been as far as the Disneyland in Paris; indeed, the idea of going anywhere outside the country made me feel very cultured, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan.
I cannot recall now, if, in my excitement for this trip, I deferred to the adults’ assurances that there was really no need for me to take my plastic film camera along as I’d be surrounded by ample documentary equipment, or, if I simply did not think of it. At twelve, one’s priorities are different, and so is the very texture of one’s consciousness. How to put it? There is a special kind of intensity to one’s ability to be vividly present in the world, probably because so much of one’s experience is still absolutely novel, a first time. Yet, there is also a degree of clarity and order, a sensibility that is neither child-like nor fully adult.
Maybe this is why I actually remember certain moments of that trip so well. The tour was a loop from the coast to Madrid and back again, passing through Cordoba and Seville, ending back on the “Costa del Sol.” I do not recall the order of events very well, but certain scenes, moments, colours, and shapes remain vivid in my mind. The sunny, narrow streets of the medieval quarters of Spanish towns; the pink terracotta hues; the windmills and hill castles seen out the window of the bus and tales of Don Quixote; cheesy roadside diners meant for tourists; the breathtaking gardens and pavilions of the Alhambra; the arches of the great mosque in Cordoba; the cold, enormous cathedrals with their whispers of ice and fire; the foggy streets of Gibraltar, where we were supposed to gaze across the narrow straight to Africa, but instead, we got souvenirs in the rain; the snow softly falling as we stood in line to get into the Prado. In Seville, we saw a flamenco show that left me deeply awed. In my mind, that city is still a floating white cloud, elegant and magical, sherbet-coloured, adorned with striped awnings.
(It is always interesting, what one’s mind hangs onto, in the absence of all other aides and cues. Who is to say, what it would look like to me, were I to visit it now?)
Serendipitously (or not, depending how you look at it), my step-grandfather, Leon, was kind of a gadget junkie. It was less about the tech, I suspect, than it was about the status symbol that having the latest tech conveyed (wherever he is today, I bet he is driving a Tesla, or something). And, as every true technophile, he was deeply convinced in the superiority of his beloved gadgets over anything else, otherwise, what would be the point of staking one’s identity on them? Naturally, he set out to Spain equipped with the latest, most cutting-edge technology in image- and video-recording. In 1998, the latest and most cutting-edge was a Sony Mavica FD7 digital camera,1 a box or two of diskettes (what’s that, some readers may wonder), and a Sony handheld camcorder, all neatly stowed in their own special carrying cases. The Jetsons could read em and weep—presumably.
Here we must pause, and say something about this technological array. The nineties were a kind of awkward transition phase between digital and analogue. Digital was definitely around, but it was still the new kid, a little clunky and unsure of itself, though catching up to analogue at an exponential pace, like a gifted younger sibling. Analogue, on the other hand, could still lord it over digital in many respects, so the competition was fierce. Often, this meant that every new development in digital formats, be it hardware or software, meant the previous generation tech was quickly rendered obsolete. It was exciting! And so good for commerce! But a little less good for making stuff that lasts, if you catch my drift.
More specifically, towards the end of the millennium digital cameras were being widely embraced by consumers. The Sony Mavica, released in 1997, was especially popular. In the late 1990s and early 2000s various Mavica models comprised 40% of the market for digicams. Its main innovation was that it used, in place of internal flash memory or the SD cards we know today, diskettes. Diskettes, or floppy diskettes, for those who cannot recall or never beheld such a wonder, are a form of obsolescent readable-writable data storage (holding a whopping 1.44 MB per disk). Square and plastic, they were smaller in size than the iconic, hole-in-the-middle 8 or 5 inch floppy disks, slightly less floppy, and ubiquitous. That was their chief advantage: you could take some photos with your camera (not too many, 20-40 per diskette, depending on your settings), then eject the disk, pop it into your PC—et voilà! No need for extra cables and fancy software. All that pixelated, grainy aesthetic at your fingertips!
This detailed aside on nineties digital photography is to give you, dear reader, a full appreciation of the sort of sophisticated technology used to document our historic voyage. And for its time, it really was impressive; hindsight, as it turns out, is a merciless critic.
It is little wonder, then, that some of my more vivid recollections are associated with the peculiar rites surrounding the chronicling of the trip. Leon, a typical workaholic in whom the very notion of a holiday seemed to produce anxiety, took the task of recording our voyage as both a personal mission and a tedious daily grind—a truly nuclear combination. Early on it became clear that lugging around both the camcorder and the camera was negatively impacting his ability to enjoy record the scenery, as together they probably weighed in at over two kilos. Aside from weight and bulk, utility was also a consideration. The Mavica FD7, for all its high-tech capabilities, took a good ten seconds to write a single photo to disk, its processors whirring and creaking. Ten seconds per snapshot may be fine for when you’re not in a hurry, but less convenient for keeping pace with an energetic tour guide, or wanting to take multiple shots of something.
After a day or two of internal struggle, the camera was mostly left holstered on the bus; the heavy lifting of documenting Spain for posterity fell to the camcorder. For best results, Leon followed his own proprietary method of filming: he would pick a good spot, preferably as far away from the group as possible, and slowly pan the camera in one direction and then in the other. Slowly! Occasionally, he would slowly zoom in and out, to highlight important architectural details. More rarely, he would capture myself and his wife waving at him from afar or walking across the frame, as a bit of human colour to animate the scene. But just a bit. If we happened to be nearby while he worked, talking was to be kept to a minimum, so as not to distract future generations of viewers from the gravity of the subject matter.
At first, we tried to laugh it off as a bit of a quirk, but, his sense of mission remained steadfast. There was not much to do, but focus on one’s own immediate sensory experiences. We posed, when required to, and stayed out of his way the rest of the time. After all, we had entrusted the documentation to him, and he was going to do it properly, god dammit. Like Don Quixote, in whose native haunts we travelled and whose image adorned many a tavern and a souvenir shop, Leon had no shortage of trials testing his dedication to the noble task. It was a holiday week, and visitors thronged the streets of the walled cities, the gardens, the cathedrals, and all the other places, obscuring the view and foiling his methodical videoing efforts. Blessed were the rare moments when, at last, we would get to an observation point! There, he could find a stretch of vista without all these pesky people who kept him ever on the edge of seething frustration. But such reprieves were too short and too brief. And worst of all was our own lively, highly animated, knowledgeable and talkative guide: he was absolutely everywhere we went, and he declaimed historical anecdotes in a booming voice! Oh, the humanity!
As for me, I had a great time. Spain is beautiful, the history was fascinating, and I didn’t much care if my step-grandparents weren’t speaking to one another. Their complex adult feelings and dramas were, and I mean no disrespect, just kind of ambient to the strange caravan I found myself travelling in. Frankly, I was far more interested in the places we visited, the sensations, the colours, the sense of it all. I just wanted to look at things, and drink them in.
Afterimages
Even now, more than two decades later, I remember the quality of such utter present-in-the-moment attentiveness, and there is much to be said for it. Still, when we got back home and I began thinking back on the scenes I have seen and experienced, I realized I did long for some reminders of them—especially as the weeks went by, and my memory of things began to fuzz at the edges. That’s when I recalled that, after all, there ought to be photos and even footage of the trip, given all that technology that was lugged about and the meticulous, anguished, documentation.
I didn’t have long to wonder about it.
As it turned out, a week’s travels had yielded a few dozen or so grainy digital photos (if I ever saw them, we never got a copy; and if we did, they came on a diskette—did I mention their obsolescence?), as well as a good several hours of slow panning camcorder footage, three or four mini-DV tapes’ worth. Given the difficult filming conditions—you know, humans, talking, constantly walking somewhere—this was, I guess, impressive? At least, Leon thought so, because a few weeks after our return from Spain the family was treated to the requisite viewing party, in which all three of us who went plus my parents were sat on a sofa and made to watch the full, uncut, undiluted glory of it (a scene from Clockwork Orange comes to mind). Curiously, this 1990s custom of subjecting one’s friends and family to home video—especially home video from a trip abroad!—has itself been made obsolete by social media and short attention spans, and that is probably one of their very few net positives.
More importantly, that was the first time, I think, that I became aware of such a thing as a difference in vision—and the relationship between one’s vision and reality. There was something so bafflingly tedious to the Spain I saw on the screen, so different and incongruent to the Spain I had visited and still freshly recalled, that it took me aback. There was, though at the time I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it, a patina of resignation over the film, which did not belong, strictly speaking, with the subject matter of filming but with the hands holding the camera and the eyes looking out of it. Maybe I was a sensitive child, I don’t know, but I remember this feeling of strange, jarring dissonance very clearly. The production was amateur, sure, but that is not what I mean; rather, I was fascinated by how inevitably the mind of the author impressed onto the magnetic film, whether or not he meant to do it.
This was my first inchoate glimpse of a truth so well articulated by the philosopher Thomas Nagel: we may be able to imagine an objective “view from nowhere,” but we ourselves always view things from a particular, subjective, place. Everything we make, everything we produce, is tinged with mind—our mind, which is just a shorthand here for our particular ways of seeing, of thinking, of experiencing, of being.2 We see things from where we stand, and each of us stands somewhere. (In some ways, this is what the Buddhists, Vedantins, yogis, and other contemplatives seek to transcend, though I would venture that even transcending the personal self, or the illusion of it, may be just a shift in perspective; a learning to stand in several places at once.) This is not to say there is no objective truth or reality, but rather that, whatever we make of it, whenever we communicate our vision or knowledge of it, it is intensely personal. Or, as the Talmudic wisdom would have it, by way of Anaïs Nin: “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Postscript
As fate would have it, all of that footage, so painstakingly obtained, ended up in my possession. After resisting valiantly for nearly a week the siren call of the electronics shops, Leon bought a new digital camera in Gibraltar, and generously—as one might gift a still-good but painfully out of fashion coat—the Sony handcam was passed on to us, meaning, to me. And, with it, the mini DV tapes bearing the full glory of our Spain trip. In those days, one would transfer footage from the mini-DV tapes used by the camcorder to a standard VHS tape by hooking the camera directly to a TV, and recording the output on a blank tape using a VCR player. Doing this manually gave one a crude sort of editorial power—just like putting together a mixtape, maybe, if anyone still knows what that is. And so, as I was fiddling with my new toy (no one else in our family was even remotely interested in the camcorder), I hit upon a brilliant idea.
I still remember how over the course of the summer vacation I spent days painstakingly editing the hours-long depressing footage, distilling from it the few moments that evoked, for me, the real Spain. A scene of shuffling tourists along narrow medieval alleyways; vistas accidentally animated by the movement of people; the passionate oration of our tour guide; ornate facades; even a short fragment of a sun-drenched street, enlivened by the sounds of a guitar strumming in the hands of an unknown troubadour. At the end of many, many hours of careful rewatching, rewinding, and compiling, I produced about twenty five minutes of a kind of impressionistic, meandering, narrative-less footage that, I felt very strongly, was far superior to the source material.
Is it possible to take another’s vision, which clashes with one’s own, and make something of it? That is an open question. Coming back to the documentary impulse, however, I realize it is not only the act of recording or ordering information, but also of confirming it. For me, capturing my life in still and moving pictures serves many purposes both practical and creative, but it is also something else, too. Worldcrafting, maybe? Editing reality down to my version of it, making it sensible, making it legible—just like I did with the footage of our Spain trip.
These days, the documentation impulse has also become a social behaviour. Is it merely habit, or is it art? Is it archive-making? Is it a vehicle of connectedness? Really it’s all of the above, to some extent or other. Still, it is worth considering how the act of capturing the images of our lives, be they still or moving, changes how we think about events, how we picture them in our minds, and how they weave into the tapestry of our own sense of self, of history, of our lived reality.
Sony released two Mavica FD series cameras in 1997, the MVC-FD5 and FD7. Obviously, I did not remember all of this; I remembered the camera was a Sony that used diskettes, and then I searched the internet for such a beast. That said, when I saw images of it, I recognized the Mavica immediately. And I am pretty sure it was the FD7, because I remember playing with the optical zoom, which the FD5 did not have.
Of course, our minds are not formed in isolation; our minds commingle with those of others, we co-create knowledge, values, stories, patterns of relating and affect. This is our great strength, being able to learn of and through others; it is an opportunity to expand our ways of seeing and being, to inhabit a wider, richer, more diverse and versatile field.