Two uneven flagstones

Proust’s famous madeleine scene is prefaced by some stage-setting remarks about voluntary memory. After recounting at length how much he missed his mother when, as a child, he was forced to go to bed early at their summer residence in Combray, he seems to recognize how contrived the whole story was.

The fact is, I could have answered anyone who asked me that Combray also included other things and existed at other times of day. But since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence, and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of the past itself, I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of Combray. It was all really quite dead for me.

His memories of his bedtime anxieties are also voluntary memories, intellectualized and well-worn through their integration with his sense of himself, and in a certain sense pat and dead, containing nothing about the past and revealing instead the narrator’s present disposition toward what he habitually remembers about his personal history. To get at “the past” rather than merely “information about the past” requires the mediation of what amounts to a magical object:

It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.

And so, the magic cookie unlocks for Proust an entirely different level of recollection that purports to be “beyond intelligence” — not something calculatedly recalled because it suits some immediate rhetorical purpose or some long-standing narrative about the self, but something that floods in like raw sense perceptions in themselves, apparently unmediated by our present-moment concerns or concepts. “All the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” The profusion of detail is presented as if to prove that the past has become present, that this is no longer motivated story-telling but truth itself pouring out.

But it’s tricky to apply this kind of theory about memory to photographs. Is it so easy to distinguish “the past” from “information about the past” when we have hundreds or thousands of images to provide that information for us? Can a photograph ever be a madeleine, an accidental container for the entire “edifice of memory,” or is a photograph always just turning a moment into information and rendering it “dead” for our future selves?

Of course, some photos seem more effective at sparking Proustian involuntary memories than others — these tend to be the sorts of images that survive by accident, or is a matter of the incidental, accidental details perceivable in more ceremonial, formal images. That is, the aspects of the photo that seem unintentional now are the aspects most likely to trigger this kind of remembering. The more that the original intention of the photo looms over its contents, the less it is able to convey anything beyond that intentionality, that overt and obvious message. This extra, unintended material becomes capable of being more than just “information” because it prompts nostalgic feelings that Proust apparently equates with “the past itself.” This extra stuff reminds us of all we failed to conceptualize and codify about our experience as it was happening, revealing that it still somehow affected us anyway, shaping us somehow so that we can encounter it later and recognize it intimately without having been able to remember it. The dulled feelings we have about the stuff we deliberately focused on and intentionally photographed and integrated into our personal narrative is suddenly upstaged by this integral background material that emerges as crucially significant because we once took it for granted. (This is part of what Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” describes as “unremembered pleasure.”)

You would think phone camera rolls would be full of this kind of thing, overloaded with photos whose original purpose has dimmed or been totally lost so that they now seem to teem with unintended detail, providing a window into life how it was being lived rather than being staged or performed. But that is not what comes across in this writer’s lament about a disappointing camera roll.

I took a super deep dive into my phone’s camera roll and noticed something interesting: my way of seeing and capturing the world has actually changed pretty drastically over the last ten years … The “stupid but sweet” snapshots start to give way to something different. There is a new focus, an attempt to present an aesthetic, an idea, an editorial “look.” Many of my photos no longer even feature people. Instead, they become dominated by images of myself alone, or empty landscapes. What has replaced the people? Objects.

Part of this shift is attributed to being conditioned by social media metrics to post only what gets likes and circulation, and thus to think of photographing only what accomplishes those aims. Such images typically must be far more purposive, far clearer in their intended message, so that audiences know what idea they are liking. And even if they were originally obscure, the fact of their circulation and their being liked becomes their message, and that intention can be read back into the image after the fact. The metrics attached to an image mean that it will always unmistakably be “information about the past”: The numbers urge us to understand the entire image in such informational terms, as accomplishing certain amounts of circulation and attracting certain kinds of comments in the network. Algorithms work against the sense of “accidental” survival and unintended affects.

What is good for social media circulation is bad for involuntary, “real” memory. When images are made to present an idea of the self, they will ultimately fail at preserving the “real self,” because to our future selves, who we really were won’t be a matter of how we tried to show ourselves off but how we were behind the scenes, i.e. the usual “authenticity” ideology: What we intend to do is fakery; what we are despite that is real. From this perspective, our camera roll is embarrassing because it catalogs our efforts to try to be somebody and say certain things instead of our “just being,” somehow already complete and substantial without having any drive or desire to do anything that anyone else would have to notice.

Quitting social media, however, was not enough to correct the apparent inauthenticity problem:

Years after I deleted my personal social media, my camera roll still resembled a curated archive, as if I were crafting a personal “brand” or “aesthetic,” striving for marketability or commodification. There were many photos of empty places that I thought looked better without people, way too many photos of myself, and a heavy emphasis on the things I consumed rather than the people I loved.

The disavowal of posting for likes here is expanded into a disavowal of having a personal style or aesthetic at all: social media, work-life conditions under neoliberalism, etc., etc., have made it impossible not to think of self-presentation as anything but “branding.” And the self-branding impulse changes one’s relation to oneself, so that one tidies up the camera roll to suit a certain image of oneself and eliminates all the sorts of off-brand, unintended details that might later be madeleines.

For the writer, this mainly appears as a tendency to take pictures of objects (and an objectified version of herself) rather than her friends (making objects out of them). The objects are “empty places” that convey marketability or sad efforts to be cool; the friends convey sociality, genuine feelings, life being lived and shared in the moment as opposed to staged for a media economy.

I don’t disagree with what seems to be the underlying sentiment here, that relations with people are more important and meaningful than relations with things. But I’m not sure it follows that our photographs can or should reflect that sentiment. Social experience can’t inhere in a document; a document can only evoke it. Trying to reify sociality in photographs may also extinguish it. The objects that mediate social relations and memories of them, for Proust, are intrinsically accidental, undesigned, a cookie or uneven pavement stones, but taking photographs is an intentional act, a deliberate attempt to capture something. As Proust writes in Finding Time Again:

I realized that it was Venice, all my efforts to describe which, and all the so-called snapshots taken by my memory, had never communicated anything to me, but which the sensation I had once felt on the two uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had now at last expressed for me, along with all the other sensations associated with that sensation on that day, which had been waiting in their place, from which a sudden chance had imperiously made them emerge, in the sequence of forgotten days. In the same way, the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray.

If the “so-called snapshots of memory” don’t communicate anything, what chance do actual snapshots have? Taking pictures of friends may paradoxically make it harder to remember them, harder for their living spirit as it has manifested across time to come through in a rush, as if they are fully present in all their history and complexity all at once. Instead, the photos fragment them into on-demand pieces that are merely convenient for remembering this or that moment as a souvenir, a keepsake trinket on the shelf of memory and not the edifice of memory itself.

The camera roll writer asks herself, “There were so many times where you were laughing with a friend, and all you took a picture of was this mediocre beet carpaccio?” This makes me think of reading Proust and complaining, But he didn’t even tell me if the madeleine tasted good.

Proust’s work suggests how places and things can be more evocative of past experience than more literal and comprehensive forms of documentation (of which his books become ironical examples). A memory consists of feeling rather than information, and information can occlude the feeling. In turning to photographs to remember, we inevitably have to look past what is depicted, see through it somehow, get past the fixed impediment it represents so that what it evokes can seem to breathe. What we want to remember — the feeling — is never in the image.

There are lots of reasons besides “I’ve become too materialistic” for there to be more objects and places than people on a camera roll. A beet carpaccio doesn’t care if you take its picture and it doesn’t care how it is coming across or if you tag it on social media. It won’t ask you to delete it. Whereas every photo of friends should imply a negotiation of consent and it immediately brings into play different agendas and interpretations. I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you. Any image a friend has taken of me tells me infinitely more about myself than any selfie. The sociality an image might try to capture is not something that can be possessed unilaterally, but a photo seems to try to make into property, not a living thing but a frozen asset. Maybe the photos of friends seem like a document of the good times, but it depends on how they are consumed and by whom and when. The beet carpaccio remains a beet carpaccio. It never feels left out.

The writer’s camera roll has come to seem to her like a too well integrated story of the self — what Proust calls “the memory of intelligence”: It reflects her attempts to be tasteful or interesting in ways that she can still deduce, with no gap. Individual images can’t escape the total picture the camera roll comprises and evoke elusive contexts that need her to work to fill them in or invest them with significance. That is, the intention behind them from when they were taken remains too strong to give way to fresh apprehensions of the experience, to ways that open up the lost time and revivify it.

“Storytelling is not living,” she concludes, but that is not exactly it; it’s more like the story is as much told to you as by you if it is “living” and not dead. It is operating in the aesthetic gap where meanings haven’t been resolved yet but are instead held open, pulling continual sense-making effort out of us. This is not a question of the balance between photos of objects and photos of people, but a question of whether the images pin down what they depict in a too formulaic, too determinate way. There are photos of people that make it harder to remember how they were. Some photos (like my high school yearbook photo, for instance) make people seem especially forgettable.

Why we take a photo may only have a negative bearing on whether we will want to look at it in the future. (Some photos are taken so we will never have to look at what they capture again — as if photographing something can be seeing it once and for all.) Whatever the reason was for taking a photo, it may be better for our future selves if it was slight and inconsequential — if it ignored the possibility of a future self altogether. Trying to make a document of a moment often mainly documents that desire to try. The feelings of an experience don’t correspond to the fidelity of a recording of the experience, and the more thorough a recording is, the less we may end up feeling about what has been recorded.

If what seemed the point of making the photograph then seems exactly the same as what one can read out it now, then its usefulness to memory is extremely circumscribed by that point. But if you can make out what the point of image was or if it has outlived that original usefulness to become something else, it might unfold a vista we couldn’t have expected. It may be that we can never capture what we are trying to capture in an image and that is precisely why we should take more of them. They will always be succeeding at something else.