strong memories of the wallpaper and the room it was in. Now though, I am remembering the images from the collection very vividly. I experienced being where the photographs were taken in Trinidad, yet as I was so young they seem not to have remained in my biological memory. With this work I am trying to convey the sense that memory is malleable and is affected by the external sources by which we are helped to remember our pasts, in this case my grandfather‘s photographs.
In Camera Lucida Barthes divides photography into three practices. This is so he can narrow down the field of his inquiry. He names these as: the operator [the photographer], the spectrum [the photographed], and the spectator [the viewer of the photograph]. After rejecting looking at photography from the photographer‘s point of view, as he is not a photographer himself, he meditates on what it is like to be photographed. He is uneasy when he is photographed and is dissatisfied with the resultant images of himself. They never capture who he thinks he is or wants to be [Barthes 2000:10-15]. Because of this he sees, ‗the Photograph is the advent of the other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.‘ [Barthes 2000:12].
He also thinks that, looking at oneself in a photograph creates a different way of viewing the world and finds it ‗odd that no one has thought of the disturbance [to civilisation] which this new action causes.‘ This rupture occurs because for the first time people have been able to see their image in a fixed and ‗unmediated‘ state as a photographic object and because of this he wants a new way of ‗thinking about looking‘ and even a ‗History of looking.‘ [Barthes 2000:12]. It is this ‗disturbance‘ that Barthes talks about in relation to the way photography has changed the way we perceive the world, which is crucial to my concern with autobiographical memory and photographs. I argue this same ‗disturbance‘ has also altered our relationship with autobiographical memory. It has changed the way we look at ourselves and therefore changes the way we think about ourselves. As a consequence of these changes autobiographical memory has also changed. My project is about how and why this alteration has occurred and how it can be the subject for my art.
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