{"id":194,"date":"2025-10-02T17:04:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=194"},"modified":"2025-10-02T17:04:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:04:36","slug":"holding-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/194","title":{"rendered":"Holding Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by me at the Laver Cup 2023 – making memories with friends<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a quiet intimacy in holding memory in your hands. My Fujifilm Instax camera has become a way for me to pause time, to transform fleeting moments with friends and family into fragile objects that I can touch, arrange, and carry. Unlike the endless scroll of images on a phone, each Instax print is deliberate. Film is limited (and a bit expensive), the picture develops slowly, and the print itself is singular. And by the time the image fully appears, the moment it records has already slipped into the past, leaving me with both proof and loss. This happened, and it’s gone.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I keep every print in a small photo album, a growing collection that has begun to feel like its own living archive. Flipping through its pages is different from scrolling through a phone gallery. Each print takes up space, carrying its own imperfections like a fingerprint smudge, a faded corner, a hint of overexposure. That’s why I think it’s an evocative object, one that teaches me how media hold onto time, how photos can mediate between presence and absence, and how the simplest object can become a way of thinking about what it means to remember. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand why these images feel so different from the thousands on my phone, I turn to media theory, which helps me see how the Instax mediates memory, materiality, and presence in ways that resist digital ephemerality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theory Part I \u2013 Objects & Materiality<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sherry Turkle writes that objects are \u201cthings we think with,\u201d extensions of our inner lives that carry paradoxes into tangible form. My Instax camera has become exactly that. Every time I press the shutter, I\u2019m reminded of what Turkle calls the way objects \u201cextend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within.\u201d This camera collapses an instant into a card I can hold, an object that forces slowness and attention in a world of infinite scroll. In the quiet ritual of waiting for an image to appear, I feel what Turkle describes in her account of Seymour Papert\u2019s childhood gears, the way falling in love with an object can also mean falling in love with an idea. For Papert, gears opened the door to mathematics. For me, Instax prints open the door to thinking about time and how memory is always both preserved and already slipping away. Each print becomes, in Turkle\u2019s phrase, a \u201cpartnership\u201d that helps me live with presence and absence layered in the same frame. To hold one is to realize, as Turkle suggests, that theory itself can become an evocative object and that even in the smallest square of film, theory is brought down to earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Brown helps me see why this matters so much especially now. He says, \u201cmateriality has come to matter with new urgency,\u201d because we live in an era where images and information are constantly dissolving into pixels and numbers. With that context, my Instax photos feel like small rebellions. Unlike the phone gallery, where thousands of pictures blur into the endless scroll, each Instax print insists on its body. It can bend, fade, and hold the trace of a thumbprint. These so-called imperfections, in my opinion, are what make it feel alive and what Brown might call the \u201cmateriality-effect,\u201d the way an object persuades us of its reality. Sliding a print into my album makes me realize that remembering is tactile and fragile, always mediated by surfaces, fibers, and light. Brown notes that new media often provoke a melodrama of threatened materiality as though the physical world is vanishing into code. But the Instax resists that narrative. It’s stubbornly here. A one-of-one artifact you can’t swipe away or back up to the cloud. In a time when digital photographs circulate endlessly yet somehow lose weight with every reproduction, my Instax reasserts the stubborn truth that memory is also matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theory Part II \u2013 Images & Memory<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images live in contradiction. They are, he writes, both \u201cthere and not there\u201dmaterial objects you can hold and spectral apparitions that summon what is absent. My Instax photos embody this paradox in the most literal way. When I watch a white square slowly darken into an image, I feel that double moment Mitchell describes: the excitement of recognition as my friend\u2019s face or a fragment of sunlight appears, paired with the sudden awareness that the moment itself has already slipped away. Each print, I feel, is like a ghost, present enough to touch yet haunted by absence. Unlike the thousands of phone photos that blur together into a continuous stream, an Instax photo freezes the contradiction in miniature. <\/em>Again, the feeling that this happened, and it’s gone.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bernard Stiegler gives me another way of understanding what\u2019s at stake here. He distinguishes between anamnesis (the living act of remembering) and hypomnesis (the technical supports) like writing or photography that externalize memory. The Instax makes me aware of both at once. Taking the photo is an act of attention, of choosing and framing a moment, an embodied practice of remembering. But the print that emerges becomes hypomnesis, a technical memory that lives outside me, tucked into an album. Unlike the automatic flood of digital images, though, this process feels deliberate. I decide what to keep, how to arrange the pages, what story the album tells. In Stiegler\u2019s terms, my Instax resists the \u201cindustrial exteriorization of memory\u201d that digital platforms often produce, where algorithms and infinite storage do the remembering for us. Instead, my album feels like a collaboration between lived memory and technical support. It\u2019s not infinite, not perfect, definitely not optimized, and that\u2019s what makes it special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking About Memory Now<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We live in a time when most of our memories are outsourced to clouds and algorithms, where platforms decide what resurfaces for us through \u201cmemories\u201d notifications and automated feeds. The Instax, by contrast, resists that industrial exteriorization of memory. It asks me to be deliberate, to decide what is worth holding onto and to give memory a material home. In that sense, it’s nostalgic but critical as it makes visible the stakes of how media mediate our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a way, this is a return to photography\u2019s origins. Early cameras required patience and darkrooms producing images slowly and with effort. It feels like a strange return, a twenty-first century camera that reintroduces limits and imperfection. Maybe that’s what makes the Instax an evocative object. It reminds me that media are central forces in how we experience time, relationships, and even ourselves. And in thinking about memory now, in this moment of digital abundance and digital forgetting, we can see more clearly why theory matters as it helps us make sense of the fragile, human ways we hold on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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References<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown, B. (2005). Materiality<\/em>. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies<\/em> (pp. 49\u201363). University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). Image<\/em>. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies<\/em> (pp. 85\u201398). University of Chicago

Stiegler, B. (2005). Memory<\/em>. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies<\/em> (pp. 64\u201387). University of Chicago

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with<\/em>. MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blog post by Maryam Abusamak<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by me at the Laver Cup 2023 – making memories with friends There’s a quiet intimacy in holding memory in your hands. My Fujifilm Instax camera has become a way for me to pause time, to transform fleeting moments with friends and family into fragile objects that I can touch, arrange, and carry. Unlike … Continue reading Holding Memory<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101467,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,8,45,30],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","tag-materiality","tag-media-theory","tag-memory","tag-my-evocative-object"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}