Since its invention, photography has been inextricably tied up with the act of remembrance. Photographs, for instance, help us to recall family, beloved friends, special moments, trips, and other events, speaking across time and place to foster an emotional bond between subject and viewer. But what kind of memories are these? Can photographs conjure the immediate, physically embracing experience of involuntary memory (an emotional response stirred by smell and sounds), or is the photographic medium only capable of providing frozen illustrations of the past?

Nostalgia I would have thought. Recalling times, lives and persons gone with a fondness and sadness, if we think of family albums that reconnect us with a history that is long gone. People preserved memories as evoked by photographs, keeping them from becoming merely historical documents.

However, some claim that painted images – precisely because they lack the pictorial authority and truth-telling capacity of photography – can more easily trigger a free play of association or become a catalyst for a web of connections that relate to the viewer’s own memory bank. Inverting the photograph’s claim to instantaneity, the painstaking, artisanal nature of a painting’s own making metaphorically relates to the mental intensity and time required by the act of reminiscence. With photography in command of specificity, advanced painting seeks ambiguity.’

With photography we do seem to desire to connect with the historical reality in which the photograph was made. We imaginatively try to picture that history.