Moment and Memory

"The road makes memory bearable." 

The traditional definition of photography tells us that it is a record of memory. -I was there, I experienced this, I saw that, etc. But what do images mean for the memory that experiences, reacts and relates all these things with a causality? Let's think of a memory from the recent past or from our childhood. In other words, let's visualize it. We realize that these distorted and uncanny images are actually recorded together with other things. In a sense, these visual images are just reference points of that moment. Some are references of happiness, some are sharp images of a traumatic moment. These images themselves do not necessarily have such sharp features. For example, who would expect a doorstep to be a traumatic image? The smell of quince blossom, traces of plaster on the wall, the sound of waves, a cheap plastic toy car... In a sense, all these images are like harbingers of every moment I live and am the subject of. Since this visual hoarding began, nothing can be just that thing. Therefore, a phenomenological approach is also not possible. Wandering through memory is often like visiting a grave. To get a sense of it, we need to visit its image.

If you have the misfortune of living in a modern city, and are too busy with the burden of your memory, the routine of taking photographs can lead you to a momentary and soothing feeling of "disappearing". You are no longer a stakeholder in the moment, but an observer. But a dilemma arises here. That is that each scene we record is again a reference of memory. This is why we want to define "things". We clarify the images, but we also clarify what the sounds, the texture, the smell belong to. To set out is to go against this maddening absolutism. We know from our childhood races that it is much harder to carry a load while standing still than while walking. This is also true for memory. To be on the road is to have one's memory blurred. The road we mean here is, of course, the intellectual road that emerges from the physical road.

In a general approach, the photographer's relationship with the moment, with all its learned anxieties, makes him an observer. A tree he might not normally be so interested in can be photographed - it is beautiful, or an animal whose life he is not so interested in can be photographed - it is beautiful... But how realistic is it for the observer, who is objectively a stakeholder in the moment, to approach the experience he is recording like a tourist? Or let's ask it this way; how much can the record kept through such a process serve the memory of the observer? 

This point we have reached means a constant state of unease for the self. We are proposing an uncanny method for the self, which always tends to exist in the cave of absolutes with the anxiety of a "safe zone". But perhaps what we are looking for is in a fuzzy place, beyond or beyond the things we tend to focus on.