AN ASSIGNMENT THAT I NEED IN 6HOURS. IT IS 2PAGES LONG,APA,1SOURCE

BARBARA F. LEFCOWITZ

~,,~

,,~~~ Memory and Photography

II[Photographs are] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement. II

-Susan Sontag

The Girl on the Swing

Decades later, I can smell the ropes of that swing, feel their coarse texture as I held on tight, twisting them together so I could spin in dizzying circles, sometimes grazing the oak tree near the swing my grandfather had built with a board and ropes attached to a stout branch of that tree. My own private amusement park ride, unrecorded by any camera, but relived-albeit in a much subdued manner-thanks to the wings of my brain's architecture responsible for evoking memories. But I cannot speak to the girl about what she was thinking and can only imagine her shrieks of delight. In fact she doesn't and will never know I exist, though my adult self acknowledges we share the same DNA.

What did she look like? A five-year-old girl with a laughing face, curly hair in the Shirley Temple style favored at the time; she wears a gingham pinafore trimmed with lace, lace-cuffed anklets in immacu- late white shoes. But no, I couldn't possibly have seen her actual face back then. I must be imagining it, editing the memory, as it were, by splicing in data from a photo taken about the same time and in roughly the same place: my grandparents' summer boarding house in then rural New Jersey. In the framed photo I am sitting on a birch-log bench, delighted to be holding a small dog. Maybe someone had told a particularly funny joke just before clicking the camera.

I retrieve the framed photo from the table on which it's displayed. Charming, but the girl is distant as any photo image and inaccessible to communication as the Girl on the Swing. How do I even know if the Girl on the Bench is indeed myself? Only because my parents long ago identified her as such. Still this two-dimensional girl's im- age evokes no sense beyond the visual: I cannot, even in a subdued

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manner, feel the dog's fur or the bench's birch-logs, smell the lilacs in the background, the leather of my white shoes.

Voila! I realize that I have "stolen" the face in the photo and su- perimposed it on the faceless face of the Girl on the Swing. That is, I have edited the memory. Such editing is doubtless the case of all representations of a remembered moment. In this particular example, I am lucky enough to have the photo on hand, easy for my unconscious mind to cut and paste part of it into the original image.

In a sense I am absent from my own representation in both cases, the imagined scene and what the photo captures, framed off from what came before or after. Like what did I do prior to climbing onto the swing, what afterwards? Maybe I fell off the swing and suffered from a bevy of scuffs and bruises. And probably the photo was posed according to the wishes of the unknown photographer. After he fin- ished I might well have pushed away the dog, relieved to be free from her. (My semantic memory is sure the dog's name was Blanchie, Sadie Goldstein's pet. On second thought, was it Roxy, a dog that belonged to another boarder named Jennie?)

The Girl on the Sled

My recall of a later moment, when I was sledding next to my friend Irene in Central Park, offers another example. I was probably twelve or thirteen years old. When this scene emerges from my per- sonal museum of memories, I can still feel how my hands ached from grasping the sled's gleaming handle bar and grazing the cold snow itself. But once again I cannot see my face. There exists no photo of me on the sled to help me fill in that blank, but I do have an old photo of Irene taken at another time and thus, with the help of my memory of her, can transpose it to the image of her on her sled. Dark curly hair, dark eyes ... a slim build.

Relatively minor editing. But not so the sudden reminder of the "silver" bracelet I (presumably) lost in the snow that day, never to find it again. The bracelet was a birthday gift from an aunt. Prob- ably it was not really silver but some amalgam of tin and copper; it was decorated with embossed spiral designs, but it was clunky and much too large for my wrists. Nonetheless I did not remove it for

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safekeeping before mounting my sled. Mea culpa. How could I be so careless? How could I explain the loss to my aunt?

I've no recollection of removing the bracelet, yet I did incorporate the loss-i.e. edit it into-my memory of the sledding moment. For my recall of that delightful moment led to a series of associations that might have had no connection with the scene in Central Park. Maybe I lost it on some other snowy occasion? It's clear, however, that the loss of the bracelet bothered me.

Contrary to the traditional view that memories, once constructed in the brain's synapses, are consolidated and hence stable, contemporary psychiatrists and neurobiologists believe a memory is never static. Rather it is malleable and subject to constant change-or else no one would ever learn. More precisely, one can change one's perceptions of the memory through analyzing its contents at a later time thanks to a more enlightened take on past events as shaped by subsequent experience. Given their malleability, memories are, of course, open to distortions and "corrections"-especially if another person shares the memory but adds or deletes certain details. But photographs, too, can involve distortions of reality. (More later when I discuss my essay "Menorah, Swastika, YouTube.")

The Woman in the Cottage

The following is what Daniel Schacter would call an "observer" memory, as opposed to the previous "field memories"-"those memo- ries in which we see ourselves vs. those in which we see only what we saw." All three examples, however, were recollected at a time when I was experiencing more than a usual sense of loss.

For a few years, starting in 1978, my former husband and I rented a small island in Casco Bay, Maine. It had only one wooden cottage; "no electricity, no plumbing, no neighbors," ran the ad in the New York Review of Books. With little else to do but gaze at the ocean and the dance-patterns of the gulls, perhaps pick some wild berries or climb the rocks in the cove searching for driftwood, shortly after arrival on the island I fell into a trance-like state, fully conscious of my surroundings but convinced-especially on the many foggy mornings-that they were self-contained. The rest of the world, the

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rest of my life, existed, of course, but only as an abstraction; even fa- miliar faces were hard to conjure up as the small island itself became a sometimes eerie combination of the real and imagined. Despite the tranquility of the place, each time I arrived, starting with the second visit, I felt a peculiar anxiety about time. The house was the same, down to the exact location of the white mixing bowl, red colander, old leather couch with its crackled cushions and claw feet, hurricane lamps, and the pinned-up maritime maps, thanks to the fastidiousness of the owners from whom we had rented the place. But on the wall just opposite the front door, as if in mockery, there stared the same mirror, its common sense wooden frame making it seem all the more powerful. Hello, island. Hello, cottage. Hello, face in the mirror, one year older than the last time you were reflected in silvery exactness in that same glass.

Hence the ritual dinner. While never consciously planned as such, the event always unfolded the same way as the first time: we would sit at either end of the pine kitchen table; look with pleasure at the white platter on which there sat three bright red barely dead steamed lobsters; the ritual bottle of Merlot; a salad in a wooden bowl and a loaf of blueberry bread. My ex would pour the wine, I would slice the bread, and as we extracted the first flesh from the lobster claws, a fog horn would sound and out the large kitchen window we could see the Scotia Prince, the nightly ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia, cross Casco Bay in the early stages of its journey east. The hell with the mirror, with the new face-cracks and neck-sags it revealed; the hell with the battery radio that chattered the time, weather, latest baseball scores, and murders; this was the repeatable moment! And if it was repeatable, no time had passed since the last such occasion.

Or so I made myself believe in the way one at times believes and at the same time does not believe an illusion, especially such a large illu- sion as stopping the flow of time. Lobster, Merlot, bread, salad, white platter: the table itself is the focus of the memory. I only appear in the background, my face invisible because I am turned towards the table, perhaps setting something down. The red colander? But surely I would not place the colander on the table. Yet in my mind's eye, there it is, a perfectly placed red presence gleaming more than the lobsters. The more I envision the scene the more I'm convinced that in my mind I placed the colander on the table to enhance that table aesthetically,

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in other words dis!orted the memory by adding a prop that logically did not belong there, especially since that ritual dinner never included pasta of any sort. Most likely, I did this shortly after encoding the memory, probably the second time the dinner took place, as if I were touching up a still life painting. Or using a Photoshop of the Mind if the memory had been a photograph instead of "just" a memory.

I can find no photo of the island, let alone the kitchen table, though some might well have existed. Probably I tossed any such photos out to reduce the pain of realizing that as far as I was concerned, the island was gone. Absence of any photos would help me forget the place or at least modify my regrets. I am reminded of a woman who took scissors to the face of a detested former daughter-in-law, Louisa (not her real name), excising her forever from any scene in which she might have participated. Never mind the gaps in what she allowed to remain, whether other faces or a background waterfall. Louisa had been eradicated, a victim of the woman's scissors. Such" cleansing" of her photograph album must have made her feel quite powerful at the time. When I happened to see those excised photos, I couldn't help laughing at the naivete of such an obvious attempt to forget all the pain, real or imagined, Louisa's behavior had elicited and at the same time to satisfy the woman's need to cling to other faces, other shreds of the past. Or else she would have torn up entire photos in which Louisa appeared rather than merely perform surgery on them.

A few years later the joke was on me. More than twenty years have passed since I set foot on the island; odds are that I'll never see it again, let alone walk upon it. My then husband and I parted ways in 1988 and without his boating skills I had no means of getting there. Besides, its shared nature was intrinsic to my fantasy of the ritual dinner serving as a repeatable moment. (I doubt he would think about it in the same way if I ever asked him; he is one of those people who insist they live only in the present, never looking back.) A neighbor who shared the island with us on occasion continued to rent the place

. after 1988, as did my ex and his new woman until for health reasons they decided to vacation elsewhere. A few years ago, the neighbor told me the white platter had broken beyond repair: so the table scene was unrepeatable after all.

What I called the Photoshop of the Mind, capable of transforming memories, pales in comparison with the actual Photoshop computer

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program that first became available in the late I980s and has gone through several different versions since that time. The program has been used to modify images to make them more aesthetically appealing as well as to "doctor" photographs for commercial and political pur- poses. Recent examples of the latter as I write this are the transformed photographs of the Gulf oil spill edited to make BP less culpable.

Photography

Only minimally savvy when it comes to technology, I was delighted to discover the creative possibilities, call them distortions, of images I had uploaded, of both my own artwork and various family portraits, some very old, as well as a few travel shots (not my metier) and unusual picture postcards. What fun! I could place a confederate flag in the hands of Abraham Lincoln-a trick made to order for car- toonists. When I transposed one of my abstractions by inserting images of my grandchildren, making them part of a scene that, of course, they never had and never could experience, they found the result strange, even disconcerting, much more so than any of my many traditional collages. Why? Because of the traditional misconception, even on the part of kids, that photography captures reality pure and simple.

Still more entertaining, my discovery that through the use of vari- ous "filters" I could transform my own, generally abstract, paintings into textured swirls, better yet, shift their shapes radically through use of the Polar Opposites option. I could "spherize" a round shape so it protruded from the background, creating an illusion of depth. Two round shapes could be spherized enough to suggest eyes, thus chang- ing the original flat image into a statement about, say, voyeurism or Big Brother who observes and controls everything. A red area could magically become purple or chartreuse, an ordinary window-like shape could, with a click, become a stained-glass masterpiece. How Dali would have exulted had he had access to such a program, but likely he would be chagrined by the all-too-simple ways of making instant Dali imitations, quickly and without much thought to the symbolic implications of a melting watch.

Which brings me to the image of a room, located, according to the uploader, in Berlin, I937. A menorah (specially designed Jewish

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seven-branched candelabrum linked with the lighting of oil lamps that is the essence of the Chanukah legend) is prominently displayed on a windowsill with its lit candles casting the sole source of light in the dark room. But clearly visible outside the window is a flag with a Nazi-style swastika and a storefront with yet another swastika-not a sprayed graffiti swastika but the dominating image of an actual metal sign. Coming upon this image on YouTube, with a voiceover of the Swedish singer Zarah Leander, a known collaborator with Goebbels, inspired me to write "Menorah, Swastika, YouTube," an essay modeled on the prose villanelle, an unusual and semi-invented form with which I have often experimented for several years. My fleeting comments and questions about the juxtaposition of swastika and menorah form the crux of the piece. The photographer is unnamed, but the irony led me to assume he or she was European, with a propensity towards irony, a quality often lacking in the American consciousness.

Did the scene actually exist on a Berlin Street or any other street? Did anyone ever gaze from the candlelit window at the shop front with the Nazi flag? Maybe. But given the almost too blatant irony, the juxtaposition of inside and outside the room suggests more than a casual snapshot. No, there was no Photoshop at the time, but what was to prevent the photographer from deliberately setting a scene by arranging props inside the room to suit his ironic purpose, in particular the menorah, which mayor may not have been on the windowsill in the first place, whether the occupants of the flat were Jewish or not? Which raises a key question about the illusory nature of a photo, which is not greatly different from the illusory nature of a memory. The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that the video itself was a carefully crafted illusion, at best an ironic political statement. Why else the Zarah Leander song in the background?

In the essay I move back and forth between the photo of the room to comment in more depth on the significance of the menorah and the nature of YouTube, ultimately questioning my assertion that photographs are equivalent to false memories. Rather, most memo- ries consist of the distorted photographs pasted inside the randomly arranged scrapbooks of the brain. They repeat the same images time after time, images subsequently open to various perceptions and in- terpretations. In another sense, photos, too, are infinitely repeatable given the easy means of replication. Both memories and photographs

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are illusions-albeit many illusions can serve a useful purpose. That video's dark photo: an accident? A double act of defiance, a set

arranged and captured for eternity by the mechanistic aid of a camera and a recording of a song? If the photo were not marked Berlin, 1937, one could take its brief joining of images as a politically correct col- lage that juxtaposes the brute and his victim: a Klansman and a black slave, a rifle and a lilac, Milosevic and an Albanian Muslim.

But despite their similarities, a memory and a photograph can clash, even contradict each other. Inside a gold frame, a tea-colored photograph of a long-ago family Thanksgiving dinner hangs on a wall in my own dining room. (One of many such ritual dinners in a variety of settings celebrating the familiar shared legend about America's early history as distinguished from the Ragged Island ritual dinner, a personal memory whose hidden motive was the wish to stop time.) My parents, my maternal aunts and uncles as well as my grandparents are posed around a table in the latter's Brooklyn three-generational house, where I myself lived for a while as a four-year-old child. The date is November, 1939: this I learned from my parents. Everyone in the photograph is now dead, though I recognize their long-ago faces. Aunt Rhea is lifting a white coffee cup, its contents never to be tasted or consumed. My father is leaning forward at one end of the table, as if he had just told a much appreciated joke. Uncle Sam, quietly hand- some, looks as genial as I remember him from later years.

But my own face does not appear, though I clearly remember sitting at the table between my Uncle Jack and my mother, directly across from Uncle Sam. No software existed at the time that would delete me and bring my mother and Uncle Jack closer to fill in the gap. Had I, for some mysterious reason, been sent out of the room prior to the rest of the people? Punishment for spilling something on my dress? A need to take me out of earshot of some jokes or secrets deemed inappropri- ate for me? More phantasmagoric: had I been spirited away by some mysterious force? Less dramatically, perhaps my sense of sitting at the table is a false memory. Yet I clearly remember Uncle Jack telling about a dead body found under the Coney Island boardwalk-a verbal rather than visual memory. But certainly disturbing. Did I start to cry, which led to my being ushered "out of the picture?" As in many other instances related to both memory and photography, I'll never know. Perhaps if I had an eidetic memory, capable of retaining perfect

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images after a single glance ... The popular term for such a talent is photographic memory. But modern research affirms that the latter is nigh onto mythical except perhaps for small children.

First, or earliest, memories are likewise prone to mythologizing. Dat- ing such memories is always approximate, but usually they hark back to the age of two or three. When I recently asked my adult daughter to tell me her first memory she mentioned sitting on a table while a photographer snapped her picture. She said she had no recall of what she looked like, since she was looking, of course, at the photographer. In the undated picture that resulted she has a round face, large dark eyes, a slight smile, and seems to be about eighteen months old. A photograph of being photographed, a meta-photograph as it were!

We have come full circle. If only I could spin once again in that wooden swing with its pungent ropes.

Author's Note: Shortly after completing this essay, as part of my latest effort to de- clutter, I went through two large boxes of photographs as well as old albums. Many • photos I simply tossed out-especially of scenery with no reference to its location, as well as aesthetically dreadful photographs. But I discovered that photographs can elicit memories, but not vice-versa. Example: why are all these people, most now deceased, posing in a room with bookcases and a fringed chandelier? Ah yes, that must have been the party in honor of a cousin's return from the War. Forgot all about it. Come to think of it, I found the party boring because I had no one my age to play with ... Now what was the name of that woman in the back row wrapped in a fur shawl?

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