To photograph is to freeze a moment in the present, but even as a picture is taken, we have made a connection with history and its ghostly companions, memory and mortality. We feel their presence particularly when we view images of the deceased— loved ones, family or ancestors—transporting us back to the time when the image was made, or being once again in the presence of a lost person. As time passes, photographs may become the memory, providing more certainty about a person or events than our wavering recollections.
One of the most famous examples of photographic recall is the Winter Garden photograph of French thinker Roland Barthes who, in his 1980 book , summoned the essence of his late mother in an image of her, aged five, standing next to her young brother in a conservatory. Other photographers have used the ability of photographs to fix time as sequences that stretch over years. This allows us to look at other people aging and remind ourselves of this collective fate. A recent example is American photographer Deanna Dikeman's 27-year ritual of making a picture of her parents waving goodbye as she left their home in Sioux City, Iowa, published as (Chose Commune). ‘I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving. It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual,’ she says.
