Photography Changes Everything

By Karolina Debowczyk
    Reading through the articles on "click!" and becoming familiar with all the ways photography affects our lives, I concluded that it has the strongest impact on how we remember things. Photographs play a major role in capturing moments in time. A simple snap of a camera leaves you with a beautiful image that can be shared in the future, for people to remember, and learn what you have lived in the past. Photos can also change your perspectives on situations and the ways that you remember them. When you walk into a persons home and see the photographs on their walls and in picture frames on tables, it reads a story of their past and present and act as an anchor for how you remember them. The story they have set up in their homes can be very different from reality, but these photographs have a strong effect on the memories you have of them.


    Photographs can also be a mnemonic device. Jeff Sandozs' " Photography changes how we access the memories necessary to function in everyday life" is a great example of this. He tells a story of a retired physician and octogenarian, Dr.H, who self diagnosed himself with Alzheimer’s disease. Alzhiemer's disease is a disease of the brain that causes memory loss. After Dr.Hs' self diagnosis was confirmed, he could no longer live on his own and had been moved into a nursing home. During his time there he was determined to find ways to cope with his disease and ease his loss of memory. He carried a pencil and pen around with him and took pictures of everyone he would meet and make notes about them on the back of each photo. Dr.H also posted these pictures on his walls and would review them each day in order to refresh his memory. This type of memory retention through photographs enabled him to maintain a certain level of his daily activities.Thanks to the beauty of photography he was able to retain memory from those images and instead of changing what he remembers, caused him TO remember and trust that these photographs told the story of his day to day life.

 
    I found photography has the greatest impact on what we remember because our memories are what we have left after moments have passed, and what better way to spark that memory than with a photograph?

 

            Here is a photo of myself and a friend while I was pregnant with my daughter.  
       Sometimes I forget the feeling I had when she was fluttering and kicking around in my 
        tummy.Photos like this help me remember the great memories I had of my pregnany.


 

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