There is no memory without media
Before my family moved to Australia, I spent my early childhood years growing up in a small city near Shanghai, China. Having lived in Australia for the majority of my life ever since, the places and things from these early stages of my life have slowly faded from memory. I haven’t gotten the chance to go back to my hometown and revisit these places in real life for almost a decade, so the only things I have to help me recall that time period are my childhood photo albums.
In the above collage, I have found three photos from those albums and made drawings of the images my mind conjures up from the places I recognise the photos to be taken in – my kindergarten, the park and recreation area my family would frequent on the weekends, and the first house I grew up in.
According to Garde-Hansen (2011), media is the “main source for recording, constructing, archiving and disseminating public and private histories in the twenty first century”. Wilson (2011) says of private formats such as the home video that they “often evoke connections between the past and the present that ultimately claims ground between identity and memory”. Indeed, my childhood albums are precious keepsakes. These tangible artefacts of my history act as anchors for the faded and disjointed memories lingering in my subconscious from years past, connecting them to specific times and places again. Without these photos to act as prompts that spark recollections, all the memories I have from that time would continue to be lost.
However, we must also consider that the memories we recall from home photos and movies can be constructed. Bevan (2012) argues that we construct home movies in anticipation of when we revisit them – directed not merely by the need to record what happens at the event, but by how we want to remember that event in the future. When I saw the photos above, the only concrete aspects I could picture in my head were the locations in which they took place. As for the actual events happening, I wondered whether the photos were stimulating real memories, or if my brain had learned to piece together the things I recognised as familiar to create constructed narratives of what I thought what those times must have been like, forming pseudo-memories.
The relationship between private media such as family photos and personal memories is incredibly complex. Home media is directly linked to capturing moments and freezing memories; “why should a moment be recorded if not for its evanescence?” (Kuhn, 2002). Ultimately, media acts as constructed 2D representations of the real life objects, senses and places that evoke memories and feelings, but the fact remains that it is regarded as the main preservative of personal archives in our society today.
Works cited
- Wilson, S. (2011). ‘Remixing memory through home movies.’ Image & Narrative, 12(2).
- Garde-Hansen, J. (2011). Media and Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bevan, A. (2012). ‘Nostalgia for pre-digital media in Mad Men.’ Television & New Media, 14(6), 546-559.
- Kuhn, A. (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I. B. Tauris.
