Collective Memory and Photographs

For this week's blog, I decided it would be a good idea to peruse the Useful Links website for some kind of inspiration. One of the first links on that site is one for collective memory, which is, incidentally, what this week's reading was about. What I found was a collection of photographs of September 11-related images. There are some from before the attack, artistic pictures of the twin buildings, others during the crash, and some of the devastation left behind. These two particularly stood out to me. Barthes' darn punctum.

The first is much clearer and better depicts the wreckage from that day, but the second really speaks to me for some reason. The first is almost pretty in a weird way. It's very saturated, the colors are rather brilliant, and the image is very crisp, but the second to me better represents what actually happened. It is dark and morose and almost sort of forlorn...it seems more appropriate, if not as detailed.

I've never really thought about it before, what collections of photographs could mean to a group of strangers, particularly as a way to commemorate some sort of tragic event like this, as a way to remember it. As a way to never forget the horrors of that day, but also to bring people together. This site is a way for perfect strangers to post pictures of that day or something that reminds them of the event, alongside others that were affected by it. This act not only binds people together because of the commonality between them that it obviously creates and demonstrates, but the photos themselves create this collective memory that others like myself can stumble upon and discover and become a part of ourselves. I can really see now how this sort of collective project could create memories, locked forever in these photographs.

What was particularly interesting for me when looking through this collection of memories was to think about how that day has affected me. It's kinda bizarre to think about, because I was so young when the actual event took place that it did not gain the proper importance until several years later, when I became old enough to realize the affect this attack had on the United States and on the world. It's so strange to think about being alive when it happened but not being able to understand it yet. Now that I can, pages and archives like this one seem more important to me.

http://911digitalarchive.org/galleries.php?collection_id=26&page=1
Just in case anyone else wants it ^