| Abstract | “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.”And the camera shows, inexorably.” A year later, she would go on to expand on these ideas in her timeless treatise on photography, exploring its function not only as commemoration but as “aesthetic consumerism” — an insight which time has proven astoundingly prescient as we confront the insatiable voraciousness of visual culture in the age of the social web.Nearly half a century later, the Nigerian-American writer, art historian, and photographer Teju Cole — perhaps Sontag’s closest contemporary counterpart — examines this dual role of photography as commemoration and consumerism in an essay titled “Memories of Things Unseen,” found in the altogether spectacular Known and Strange Things: Essays (public library).It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.But when the photograph outlives the body 00 when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down — it becomes a memorial.Who hasn’t looked at an early childhood photograph of oneself, predating the age of conscious remembering, and not felt the mirage of a memory in beholding that moment?The same Möbius strip of representation and remembrance, Cole suggests, exists in our collective memory…
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