The moments I remember

I have thousands of photos on my phone that I don’t remember taking. The ones I made with a camera, I remember almost all of them.

Not the settings. The situation. Where I stood, what the air was like, what happened a minute after.

I think it is because making a photograph takes time. You arrive, look, move, wait. Five minutes in one spot is a long time when you are travelling, long enough for the place to leave a mark. The photograph becomes an anchor, and when I look at it later the rest comes back with it.

Choosing is remembering

There is research on this, and it points both ways. In 2014 Linda Henkel asked people to walk through a museum and photograph some objects while only looking at others. They remembered the photographed objects worse: the camera did the remembering for them. A few years later, Alixandra Barasch and colleagues found the opposite when people chose what to photograph themselves. They remembered what they had seen better, because choosing a frame means looking hard.

That matches how it feels to me. Shooting everything on a phone lets me forget. Choosing one frame makes me remember.

West Lake Boat, Hangzhou.

West Lake is a good example. The photograph is almost empty: mist, water, one boat. The far shore had disappeared and the water and the sky had turned the same grey. What is not in the frame is the rest of the day around it, and all of that comes back when I look at it.

Why a print

This is also why I care about prints. A photograph on a wall gets looked at again, on an ordinary Tuesday, for no reason. One in a phone gallery waits to be scrolled past.