Plato in Phaedrus pointed out the danger of easily retrievable information; in this case he was talking about reading. ‘They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.’
The family photograph albums were always accessible to me as a child; I looked at them often. Only years later I realised that I had two memories, one of sunny days, birthdays, holidays, smiling people, often performed for the camera; another of my personal life, unrecorded, real but unwanted. The constant present of the archive with its never-changing images pushed any memories further into the dark; I cannot remember anything from the first six years of my life. The archive with its faux-leather covers, its black pages, its perfect views and people, hammered memory to dust.
We now take 1.8 trillion photographs a year. We do not take them to look at them later so much as to dispel the fear of loss and forgetting. The photograph pushes us to forget everything but the photograph. We take them to prove that we are alive now, and for ever. Without our present archive we do nothing, are nothing.
Text by Julian Walker