The Collective Memory

I believe in the collective conscious. Because we all have the same biological makeup, we all understand certain things, such as what it is like to have a beating heart, what it means to feel pain, and the effect that emotions have on our psychological and physical lives. Likewise, we all understand memory, we all have memories, and we all have the ability to recall information from deep inside our brains- the physical act of remembering. We all have memories of being excited to learn something new, being with someone we care about, and feeling pain. We have these memories, and they are individualized with details from our own lives, but they are not entirely unique. They are universal.

My family has been struck hard by dementia and Alzheimer's. Because the memories that we share are in such a fluid state, I am interested in examining and preserving the ideas of the memories that we, as a family, share. The memories that I have right now will fade over time and be replaced with memories I have yet to make. When I have reached the age of my grandparents, it is likely that I, too, will succumb to dementia. If or when that happens, all I will have left to remember my life right now, will be the photographs I have.

Memories are important to all of us. As we are young, our memories are as strong as our body, unfaltering in our own mind. As we age, memory is often the first thing to go. We become forgetful about where our car keys are, or leave to take the grocery list at home when we go out shopping. In our last few years, for some people, memory is all that remains. Our body strength is gone, so we are often left to sit in a chair and remember our past. For less fortunate others, there is no memory, and if there is, it could not possibly be 'accurate' according to what happened forty, fifty, or sixty years ago. Time changes everything. Although details like the name of the elementary school one attended can be recalled, the look of the hallway may be remembered differently. If I went back to the school I attended in the first grade, seeing it would change my memory. Fifteen years later, I am much taller and am physically seeing the school differently. This new memory would somehow mesh into the old one to create a new hybrid memory- replacing the other with altered versions of themselves.

When first starting to work with memory and relating it to photography, there were a lot of questions that entered my mind.

“Am I remembering an event or the memory of the memory of the event? Am I simply remembering the photograph and projecting the event in my mind? I want to call this an inspired memory. For that matter, do we ever have original memories? Once we remember something (which is pretty much immediately after the event) are we remembering the event or remembering the memory of the perception of the event after it happened? Do we experience anything at all or is it all just immediate perception memory?”[1]

How does a photograph affect memory? I have seen so many family photos from that birthday party that I am unable to discern which memories are real and which are fabricated from a photograph. Voices are not captured in photographs, so I know that my memory of my late great-grandmother’s voice is a real memory. The smell that lingered on her after she came home from the nursing home for a holiday is captured in my mind- not a photograph. However, the feel of the sweater that she always wanted me to wear may be fabricated because I have felt that fabric many times since she died. Because of these things, my memory of her is affected, perhaps even altered, to a point that I could not identify what was a real occurrence and what was conceived in my own mind.

Figure 1, "Ballerinas"

Over the course of the year, the work I have been doing has grown and changed. What was conceived as a separate project became a necessary process for my thesis work. I started using historical photos and layering them in Photoshop to make them nightmarish (figure 1.). My work grew into a critical process: I found images (which were my own family photos- no longer anonymous historical photos), scanned them into digital copies using a high quality scanner, then layered them in Photoshop to create a distorted effect, much like our memories become distorted over time. I began looking at and collecting my own family photos. Originally, they were all from long before I was born. I was not to have any connection to them, because my family history did not yet include me. I was remembering these people I had never met through their photographs. I transitioned to using my own family photos, that included myself, and my work became more about my own memories and how my peers and viewers connected with them. Some people saw something in the images that connected with their own memories, such as a shirt or wallpaper. The aesthetic changed from a chunky drop-in-place blend of my own photos with those from my family’s past to layering and blending of similar photos on top of each other (figure 2). My research has consisted of finding and collecting these old photos and scanning them into Photoshop, then print them at various sizes on matte paper. Matte paper was important to me because it felt historic. It represented the paper choice of 20th century portraiture.

Figure 2, "Couch"

Keeping a blog is something that I have done since I was old enough to be on the Internet. All of my thoughts and ideas that I remember now are still somewhere out in cyberspace today. The process of art school has required many blogs. Last semester, though, was the most productive. As stated above, I have had many ideas and having a blog was the best way to record them and discuss them with my classmates. Writing throughout the process of art school, whether it was for blogs or even for this thesis, helped me clarify my work. It made me question things that I would not have seen had I not written my thoughts down. Writing will continue to be a part of my creative process in the future.

There have been many artists that have influenced my work and my ideas. Jeffery A. Wolin influenced me to include text in my work. His series of portraits of Holocaust survivors have their memories from concentration camps handwritten on the images (Figure 3).

Figure 3, Jeffery A. Wolin

I have tried this method with my own work, which creates a strange balance between what really happened and what I simply remember. I am also interested in the repetition of history that artist Carra Sykes portrays with her portraits of her mother and herself in parallel portraits (figure 4).

Figure 4, Carra Sykes

The old saying “there is nothing new under the sun” applies to almost every aspect of life. Even though we may think that our generation is the most rebellious and intelligent, every generation before us thought the same thing. Bryon Darby also shows the passage of time in his work, and his aesthetic of numerous layers overtop of each other inspired my work as I had begun to develop it.

For DAAPworks, I have created a timeline of common photos from the average life. This timeline contains events from throughout my life thus far. These events that I have chosen show some sort of significance, and because they are significant, we photograph them. Some of these events include the first day of school, and meeting my favorite Disney Princess at DisneyWorld for the first time. These important life events are documented in a way that we would document something for our financial records: make a copy (or in this case take a photo) and file it away just in case we need to view it again. The format that my thesis has taken is a conglomerate collection of photographs in a single image. I sourced photos from the internet that were of the same life event. For example, I chose 30 images of little girls meeting Belle at DisneyWorld and spliced them together to create one image (figure 5).

Figure 5, "Belle"

The photos were chosen because they looked the same. As stated before, we all have the same memories, and I want to present that we all have the same photos that reflect those memories. To accomplish this, I use repetition.

To find the photos that I am used for this work, I used a special feature in Google image search. There is an option that you can search images online by uploading an image that you want to find similar images to. The most prominent similarity that Google finds is color. In order to avoid this obstacle, you can also add tags like “mother with baby” or “girls before prom” to find more specific pictures.

Figure 6, "Prom"

Hillary Savioe states, “While collective memories are based on individual lived memories, they also constitute a commonality, a universal story,” in the abstract of her article titled Memory Work in the Digital Age: Exploring the Boundary between Universal and Particular Memory Online published in the Global Media Journal in the spring of 2010.[2] This article really helped me invest myself in using the Internet as a medium. For so long, using other people’s pictures felt like cheating or stealing. As I kept reminding myself that these people posted these images online for the entire world to see, I felt that what I was doing was showing them in a positive light. If by chance, anyone shown in any of the images would show up and be upset, I would simply remind them that they posted the images to the Internet, and I was simply using my artistic license to use them to present a positive idea.

Historically, portraiture and the idea of posing for pictures have influenced my earlier work because the practice of studio portraiture is dying. With the development of camera phones, candid photos are the norm, even if they are “posed” for. The social media platform Instagram has especially skyrocketed the amount of photos shared. These photos range from the ever-popular ‘selfie’ to images of food and sunsets from the top of every skyscraper in the world.

Figure 7, "Backyard"

Emotionally, my family influenced my work. When they view my work, they remember the same things I do, seeing my grandpa in his blue striped shirt, and remembering how my mother made matching dresses for all the girls in the family. Because my family was there for my memories, they experience nearly the same one I do. My fiancé grew up twenty minutes away from where I did, with an older sister (like I did), in the same years I did. We have had similar lives, and that shows in our memories, and more specifically in our family photos. We both have photos of a family portrait standing in front of Niagara Falls. We both have photos of our mothers holding us with no one else around. Although our circumstances were different, we grew up essentially the same. This is reflected in our memories. We both remember going on Easter Egg hunts in our maternal grandparents’ backyards (figure 7). The similarities in our photos and essentially, in our lives may represent that we both grew up in the same social and economical class. We are both white, middle class 90’s kids. Our lives are similar, yes, but the memories we access are not solely reserved for they same type of people as we are. Most other people remember celebrating some kind of holiday with their families or those like family.

Theoretically, my views have not changed much since the beginning of this project. I believe that the collective conscious is very much present in my generation, especially since the “90’s kid” generation is so obsessed with nostalgia. We remember things that may have been terrible circumstances, but we remember it as great because it was in a time that national security was sound and we had little threat of anyone toppling us over. Childhood was another factor that influenced our feelings: we had no worries of the future, our safety, or the economy- all of which are uncertain and anxious factors that we, as a collective generation, feel today.

My work has been described as “late 90’s” and not contemporary by some of my professors. I feel at ease about this because so much of what I am working with happened in the 90s. It is fitting for my work to be outdated as such because the ideas are from my childhood, while my childhood influences my ideas. A large percent of my generation is obsessed with this idea of the 90s being perfect and holy and feeling nostalgic most of the time to try and feel as safe as they did when they were seven years old. This is reflected in the art world. As a 90’s kid, I fit in.

I have learned that we all try to be individuals, but it is impossible to be completely original. This has caused me to feel more at ease with the fact that everything in the art world has been done already. Since I cannot make anything new, I shouldn’t worry about what I’m making and just make what I want to. I have learned that the brain is powerful enough to archive everything we have ever seen, smelled, touched, or experienced. This information is all logged into our hard drives and propels us to move forward as our own individual, even though everyone else in the world has seen something similar, smelled something the same, touched the same thing, or had a parallel experience.

Figure 8, "Niagara Falls"

Sometimes, this work makes me feel sad. I fell in love with Photography at such a young age, that it is all I want to do for most of my life. This work is not based on my own photos, but those of my life and what I remember. The majority of the photos I am showing in these event strips are not my own and found from the Internet. Coincidentally, a lot of my memories come from behind the camera, or are of photos I have taken, not necessarily the memory of me actually taking the picture.

Without memories, time is immaterial. Only the ideas that are locked in our brains remind us how time comes and goes. I believe in the collective conscious, that we all are the same, and that we are all equal. We all have memories that are special to us, but those memories are not unique. Just like we all have a brain, skin and bones, we all have the memory of sitting with someone we love, in a special place, at a special time. I want to explore how we experience memories, how they change over time, and how collectively, our memories all become essentially the same. Memory is seriously dictated by perception- perception that is incredibly different for everyone. Even at different ages, our perception changes when the world around us changes. There is a collective conscious, but it is only part of who we are. In order to tap into it, we have to connect with those around us to share our similar experiences. Even if a memory is not exactly the same as someone else’s, it still triggers a memory in the viewer’s mind, which connects the two memories, adding to the web that is the collective conscious.

Figure 9, "First Day of School"

[1] Taken from my blog, rjbickers.wordpress.com on November 22, 2013

[2] Savoie, Hillary. "Memory Work in the Digital Age: Exploring the Boundary between Universal and Particular Memory Online." Global Media Journal 9.16 (2010): n. pag. Print.

I thought it might be helpful to publish my updated artist statement to give my work some more context!

Without memories, time is immaterial. Only the ideas that are locked in our brains reminds us of how time comes and goes. I believe in the collective conscious, that we all are the same, and that we are all equal. We all have memories that are special to us, but those memories are not quite unique. Just like we all have a brain, skin and bones, we all have the memory of sitting with someone we love, in a special place, at a special time.

How can we have such similar memories if we have different lives? To explore this, I have been using the Google image search feature to upload a photo and search for similar photos. I find photos that are remarkable similar to mine. These photos have the same memories: hugging a friend before prom, a messy baby, taking ballet as a little girl. These images capture the memory in a pictorial form. By showing how many of these images are out there in the world, I show that many people have the same memories I do.

I want to show these images in a lenticular print form. This means that there are many frames in a single image. Using a special lens, the different images can be seen at different angles, so at one angle you see one part of one person’s memory and part of a different person’s memory. Connecting them is the same memory: ballet, or prom, or messy babies.