1.7 Reflections on the Autobiographical Account.
Writing this account made me aware that however objective I thought I was being, the act of writing down my memories and remembering events, whether triggered by the transparencies or from what I ‗knew‘ about my past, had an effect on these ‗memories‘ themselves. 33 Inevitably, the account was an approximation, an editorial process whereby I was adding and taking away from what I thought I knew. Even at the time of writing I was aware of editing to a certain extent, but I later came to question by what criteria I had come to mention some events and exclude others. This suggests another level of complexity at work in autobiographical memory, leading me to question how different ‗types‘, ‗systems‘, and ‗processes‘ can be interpreted and represented.
Following my initial impulse to investigate the relationship between visual art and mathematics, as I used the collection further I gradually became more interested in autobiographical memory‘s connection with photography. In particular, I became interested in my own autobiographical memory and how this, through photographs, could be linked in with ideas of biography and autobiography.
When I read Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida I noticed that he investigates photography from the viewpoint of himself as a spectator of photographs. He says that, ‗The disorder which from the very first I had observed in photography – all practices and all subjects mixed up together – I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate.‘ [Barthes 2000:16] He starts this investigation by choosing certain photographs that ‗agitate‘ him and cause an ‗adventure‘ to occur. He names this attraction an ‗animation‘, adding: ‗The photograph itself is in no way animated [I do not believe in ―lifelike‖ photographs], but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.‘[Barthes 2000:18-20.] I experienced a similar ‗animation‘ when I looked through my grandfather‘s collection of photographs. Most were interesting on the level of curiosity, but one, the boy somersaulting into a swimming pool, set me off on an ‗adventure‘ that created an associative chain and network of memories.
K. Hastrup says of this that, ‗ Memories … are placed in the time they are remembered, narrated, reinterpreted, sometimes rejected and often forgotten. Recollection are immediately experienced. Memory makes a critical difference to these: in being remembered an experience becomes a memory.‘ [Coffey:127] 33
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