My brother and I are home for our grandma’s 90th. We sit on the floor, tailbones aching, paging through dusty stacks of family albums. We trace faces through the protective gloss of picture sleeves. We smile. We laugh. But we also complain: why is it so hard to eliminate the material glare of each photo so we can take snapshots with our cell phones? No matter how we angle the coveted photos, we can’t prevent light from ricocheting off its shiny surface.
Our problem is paradoxical: we wish to preserve that which photos resurrect and remind us of—“the fragility of life” (Han 30)—yet in doing so, we transform the encounter of the photograph into something that is “hyper-real” and beyond the sphere of material, human life (30). By trying to sustain a memory through digitization, we distill out its light. Is this one of the greatest puzzles of memory and narrative in the digital age: how to preserve without perverting? How to make a thing accessible without turning it into a non-thing that’s taken for granted?
As I archive family stories, often through recording oral histories and digitizing old photos, I’m struggling to create “an experience of presence” from material fragments are perpetually decaying: the playful voice of my grandmother as she details finding a cobra coiled in her typewriter; words written in my grandfather’s memoir that resurrect Zion Hill, his family home by the Irrawaddy River; my own hazy memory of story told about a haunted tree whose branches were heavy with spirits. How can I recover the matter of my family’s histories in a space that de-historicizes? When my grandma’s voice translates into data, will it lose the warmth of her body? When my grandfather’s words are woven into hypertext, will the physical landscapes they conjure recede into non-space? What is my own memory without its embodied referents? Can the digital be a body if bodies need beginnings, endings, and material entanglements?
My grandma is seated at her birthday table, surrounded by balloons. Her family members constellate into different formations, taking selfies. She falls asleep, contended with the fact that everyone was together in this space, on this day, however fleeting. (365) [JZ-09]
[Han, 2022]
Sure can relate to that “tailbones aching” yoga pose! Strikingly relatable. I really like what you’re keying on here, with the concern for what a letdown (or deflationary exhale…maybe a sigh) it can be to translate a physical photograph into a digital version. The mention of dust, especially, reminds me of the fascinating relay from Derrida’s Archive Fever (on the inexhaustability of the Freud archive, once its circulation spilled over into email and the digital order) then to Carolyn Steedman’s Dust where she describes the mites in the carpet of the hotel where she slept while away on a research trip, and the “feverlets” of obsession felt by the archivist who cannot let go of certain nano-scale details. In November 2011, I spent 2-3 long days in the art department at EMU scanning a paper bag full of my great-grandfather’s kodak slides. He would set them up for basement slide shows during family gatherings; all of the big holidays back then brought cousings x-times removed and multiple generations to their Sheboygan, Wisc. home. But the scans now just sit in a folder. I look at them from time to time. But I have also held onto the bag of slides, and it feels right doing so even though I don’t have (and don’t know anyone who has) an old-timey slide projector.