About Memories and Meanings

© Guillermo Labarca

Human beings are meaning-making machines. We cannot really see something without attributing it some meaning. In other words without knowing or inventing their history, without placing it in a context or finding its value; in short without interacting with them with our reason, our feelings or just our memories. This is characteristic of living beings, to live is to process. Some beings process only matter in order to ensure their subsistence, others, like the human beings, not only process matter for subsistence but also elaborate meanings.

Here we come to photography. Reason and feelings process images, in part because we are built for processing images (not necessarily with a camera ) and partly because it is also a necessity for our survival as individuals and as part of a group, which may be a family, a nation, a sports club, a school. We process the leisure or celebratory activities from a group, the policies from a political party that we choose to belong too.

The photos we process, no matter how they are taken, with careful lighting or not, made by professional photographers with all their science or casual snapshots, with accurate focus or blurred, made with film or digital, color or black & white, on supports of any quality or size are always a construction, they are just a "pseudo truth", while they reveal only a bit of the reality they supposedly represent. Moreover, "what they represent", that bit of reality is completed by the meaning given by those who watch. The process of attributing meaning, of giving "meaning" to an image is essential for us to "see" it.

One of the most important things we do in our lives is to create memories. History, nations, politics, families, individuals. groups, etc. rely on memories to reinforce their systems of domination, identities, the legitimacy of a group, the construction of the past or the individual or collective identity; defines which events are meaningful, etc. Photography have been crucial in the last century hoarding raw material for this collection of memories that have become the basis for the building of meanings.

The memories and especially the significance we attach to them are important to the individual and the social life, first because cohere our present existence, and also because they awaken the longing for what has been that what we want alive again. In other words because they set the foundations of a necessary utopian thinking, which is how to build a better world.