AT AN EXHIBITION at the FotoMuseum in Antwerp, I walked past a large color photograph of a forest. It was an exhibition about landscape in general, organized to give the visitor the feeling of a hike through mountainous terrain. The photograph of the forest was near the entrance of the exhibition, and I had walked past it without stopping because it seemed to be simply another big photo, of which there are so many in museums these days. But after going through the exhibition, I decided to double back. This time around, I took a good look at the large photograph, which was more than sixteen feet wide, and found that there was more to it than size. The leaves were odd, simplified. I read the caption. What the photograph (titled Clearing) showed was not a forest but a model of a forest. The German artist Thomas Demand had constructed this model from paper and set it in a steel frame fifty feet wide. Two hundred and seventy thousand leaves had been individually cut. The model was illuminated by a powerful lamp, to mimic shafts of sunlight falling through the trees.
The immense labor involved in creating Clearing was part of what made it now interesting to me. But more eerie was the knowledge that Demand had destroyed the model. All that remained was the photo. It was orphaned from its source, and that source would be remembered by only this one angle, this single point of view, under precisely these lighting conditions. The photograph gave us a memory of something we had never seen. Demand had done this intentionally, but Clearing reminded me of other photographs that were inadvertent records of artworks subsequently lost to war or fire. This was the fate, for instance, of Vincent van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888), which is believed to have been lost to Allied attacks on Magdeburg in 1945, late in the Second World War, and Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849), which was incinerated during the firebombing of Dresden the same year. Each now exists only as a photograph.
Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. At a dinner party earlier this year, I was in conversation with someone who asked me to define photography. I suggested that it is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. A shadow thrown onto a wall is not photography. But if the wall is photosensitive and the shadow remains after the body has moved on, that is photography. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance: the photograph results directly from what is, from the light that travels from a body through an aperture onto a surface.
But when the photograph outlives the body—when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down—it becomes a memorial. And when the thing photographed is a work of art or architecture that has been destroyed, this effect is amplified even further. A painting, sculpture, or temple, as a record of both human skill and emotion, is already a site of memory; when its only remaining trace is a photograph, that photograph becomes a memorial to a memory. Such a photograph is shadowed by its vanished ancestor.
I visited the Metropolitan Museum in early August 2015, at a time when the destruction of artifacts in Iraq and Syria was prominent in the news, to look at the museum’s collection of works from the ancient Middle East. Next to a selection of second- and third-century Syrian gravestones (many of them fresh with the pain of loss and inscribed with the names of the dead and the word “Alas!”), there was an old photograph reproduced from a book of the Temple of Bel, an important archaeological complex in Palmyra. About a week later, the iconoclastic fanatics of ISIS blew up this very temple. The photograph was unchanged; it was still there on the wall of Room 406 at the Met, but it was now filled up with the loss of what it depicted. The Roman-era columns of the temple still stand in rows in the grainy image—ravaged by time, but standing. In life, they’re gone.
The Institute for Digital Archaeology, a joint project of Harvard and Oxford Universities, uses sophisticated imaging techniques to aid conservation, epigraphy, archaeology, and art history. One of the institute’s current efforts, the Million Image Database project, involves photographing artifacts that are at risk of being destroyed for military or religious reasons, a bleak necessity in a world in which the beauty or importance of an object does not guarantee its safety. The goal of the project is to distribute up to five thousand modified cameras, to professionals and to amateurs, and use them to capture a million 3-D images. Already, more than a thousand cameras have been distributed, and the 3-D data from them are being received (though the directors of the project, to protect their associates on the ground, are leaving a lag of several months before they make the images publicly available). In the event of some of the objects being destroyed, the detailed visual record could be enough to facilitate a reconstruction. Photography is used to ward off total oblivion, the way that the photographs of Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon accidentally made the lost paintings visible to future generations.
But memory has a menacing side. Our own appearances and faces are now stored and saved in hundreds, thousands, of photographs: photographs made by ourselves, photographs made by others. Our faces are becoming not only unforgettable but inescapable. There is so much documentation of each life, each scene and event, that the effect of this incessant visual notation becomes difficult to distinguish from surveillance. And in fact, much of the intent behind the collection of these images is indeed surveillance: the government retains our images in order to fight terrorism, and corporations harvest everything they can about us in order to sell us things.
Little wonder, then, that many people would like to be less visible or wish their visibility to be impermanent or impossible to archive. At the dinner party where I had been asked to define photography, I asked my interlocutor if Snapchat, the photo-sharing app that causes sent images to disappear after a set number of seconds, would technically be considered photography. The conclusion we jointly reached was that it certainly would: what was important was the possibility of retention, not actual retention itself. A technology that simply did not have the ability to save the images it was transmitting would be more revolutionary.
I sent a friend a photograph of my face on Snapchat. She sent me one of hers. I sent a photo of my hotel room, its furniture barely visible in the gloom. She sent me one of her hallway, with its piles of brightly colored shoes. We sent a few texts. Over a poor network connection, we video-chatted for about a minute, discussing Demand’s Clearing. Afterward, the photographs, texts, and video were gone, leaving no evidence of who had done what, as in a meticulously executed heist. I am more familiar with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, where long-finished interactions can be retraced and relived, and the voiding of the record on Snapchat was startling. But it was also a relief. Our real selves remained, but the photographs were no longer there, and something about this felt like a sequence more preferable to the other way around, where the image lives on and the model is irretrievable.
But just as nothing can be permanently retained, nothing is ever really gone. Somewhere out there, perhaps in the Cloud or in some clandestine server, is the optical afterimage of our interaction: the faces, the shoes, the texts. In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.