"Memory Full, Vol. 6 - Secrets," V/A

In the words of the publication's editors: "MEMORY FULL is a group publication that was started in 2011 as a way to show and share cell phone pictures away from a screen and in the real world. It is published on an irregular basis, with each volume possibly being the last." Another product of Western Massachusetts, one I again picked up from the Northampton Art Book / Print fair <3

I have a passion for small photographs - the 4x6 prints in a family photo album, contact prints, wallet pictures, postcards. There is no picture smaller than the smartphone photograph, a form of image matter reduced essentially to zero, an ephemeral little thing even teensier than a 35mm negative. Because speed shrinks space, and there's nothing faster in the world of image capturing tools than your phone.

Of course there is a limit, they're not totally immaterial. I fly home at least once a year, and without fail - the time we're in the air is an annual opportunity for a purge. Whatever entertainment I've planned will start to bore me on the 6 hour flight and, craving The Scroll, I'll begin exterminating the digital detritus in my camera roll, deleting images of receipts taken for the purposes of expense reports, screenshots of events to attend, screenshots of pictures that appear twice or three times earlier in my camera roll, selfies that make me feel bad. All little bits of digital dust to sift through. What makes something worth keeping among all that dreck?

To the extent that there are pictures that truly captivate me in this half size volume (and there are: a toppling tower of pizza boxes, a disaffected woman about to be snared by a robo-claw, a holy font infested by a spider) they captivate me the way a piece of tinsel might enthrall a bird. A delight with no utter-able source other than the way they glom on to my neurons and spark joy. The fun in this volume is 1) the tasteful, subtle sequencing and grouping of images, and 2) the semiotic alchemy that occurs when something that's nothing is given scope and scale. "Secrets," is an exemplary theme for anything related to photography. In the words of Siegfried Kracauer, "Beneath a human being’s photograph, its history is buried like under a blanket of snow.”

Live photos press against this limit by a second and a half in each direction sure, but at the end of the day there's nothing beyond the four borders of a picture - it's terra incognita. If you're out of the club of contributors, you'll never know if that pregnancy test sparks joy or terror, where to find that sea lion cutout, who's beneath the sheet.

A pessimist would look at this work like glacial erratics, left behind in the slow advance of the civilization-wide project to photograph everything. But the bulk of images here aren't exactly technical images - they're stripped of whatever didactic function they were taken for. We're left with something playful, something fun, an earnest attempt to enjoy your camera roll outside of the split second of recognition, to mine those thousands of HEIC files for a shimmer of the unsayable.

--> View it here :) <--