This photograph of Macau is among the earliest existing photographs of China, taken some time in the 1840s. Everyone in it is dead; their children’s children are dead and their memories are dead. The photograph is not dead, but it is not a memory. We experience through sensory information—colored by other experiences, and encoded in an un-understandable cascade of electrochemical signaling. Each time we view a memory, we do so from farther away, and some fidelity is lost. Memories are infinitely reducible and labile. Finding an unremembered memory can evoke a painful emotional response, perhaps by virtue of its still native perfection against the experience it represents. Photographs have the quality of being unchanging, though our experience of them may change. They provide us with the starting materials for a new memory as much as they modify the memories we already own. Memories alone are destroyed and rebuilt, but photographs become stakes to which our memory is forever tethered, a position to which the rebuilding of memory is constantly drawn. In this way photographs not only eclipse and obscure elements of experience; they give to us the starting materials from which to build memories not experienced.
