Because memories needed somewhere to live.
By Jorge Javier Peña Tovar.
Today photographs live in phones, televisions, giant screens, and even in the cloud. I remember that the person who lived in the clouds was looked at sideways — “leave him alone, that one lives in the clouds.” Thinking about it now, living in the clouds wasn’t so bad. You lived in your own world, in your dreams, in your thoughts.
As I was saying: today, photographs live in stories that disappear after twenty-four hours, and in family group chats where, inevitably, someone’s sister-in-law responds with glittery confetti, animated flowers, and a “blessed Wednesday to everyone.”
Photographs changed houses. They didn’t disappear. They simply moved somewhere else.
Before, they lived in enormous albums stored in drawers that closed with difficulty because inside was half a Latin American childhood compressed between plastic pages — or those they called magnetic, covered with a transparent film that over time fused itself to the surface of the photograph until there was no separating them without taking the whole image with you.
Some appeared taped with transparent tape into school notebooks. Others slept inside shoeboxes, tucked between books, hidden and dedicated in careful handwriting — “for Jorge, with love.” And there was always a mom, a grandmother, or an aunt who knew exactly where every photograph was, even when the rest of the family seemed to be participating in an archaeological expedition every time they tried to find one.
Then there were the slideshow nights.
That strange ritual where someone turned off the lights, loaded a metal carousel full of memories, and turned any white wall into an improvised family cinema.
Click. Click. Click.
Every sound brought birthdays, beaches, small cousins, new cars, and adults wearing pants that today should be under serious investigation by the international fashion police. One of my uncles — who was actually more of a cousin of my mother’s but we called him uncle anyway, because that’s how families work in this part of the world — had a pair. Bell-bottomed. Mustard colored. With an enormous buckle that probably had its own zip code. And he wore them with admirable dignity, like someone who has absolutely no doubt they are perfectly dressed. History would prove him right or not, but he never found out because we never told him.
Back then, photographs didn’t appear immediately. You had to wait for them. Take the roll to the lab, endure days of uncertainty, return with the nervous excitement of someone going to pick up exam results. And when you finally opened the envelope and saw the images, some made you happy, others disappointed you, and a few made you seriously wonder who had taken that particular photo and with what possible intention.
But all of them had weight. Physical weight and emotional weight. You held them in your hand and felt like you were holding something real.
Today we take more photographs in a single weekend than my generation took in an entire childhood. We have cameras in our watches, our computers, our doorbells, and obviously in our phones. We photograph the food before eating it, the sky before it changes, our children every five minutes as if time were going to accelerate precisely in the moment we put the device down.
And yet, curiously, we remember less.
Because it turns out that abundance has a strange effect on memory. When everything gets recorded, the brain decides it doesn’t need to make the effort. Why remember if the photo is right there? Why hold onto the moment if the phone, the memory card, or the hard drive is holding it for you? And so, without noticing, we end up living the experience halfway — half present, half documenting — and then we wonder why the photograph doesn’t produce the same emotion as the moment did.
The answer is uncomfortable: because sometimes we weren’t entirely in the moment to begin with.
Before, when a roll had thirty-six exposures, and each one cost real money, you thought before photographing. You waited. You looked for the instant. And that wait, that small ritual of attention, made the moment matter three times: once when it happened, again when you decided it deserved to be photographed, and finally when you could actually see it and relive that unrepeatable moment again and again.
Today we photograph by reflex. And there’s something beautiful in that — the democratization of the image, the possibility that any person anywhere can document their life with a tool they carry in their pocket. But something also escaped along the way. Something resembling a pause. A deliberation. That small ceremony of looking before shooting.
There are people capable of staring at a photograph for entire minutes, as if trying to hear something hidden inside it. And others who flip through a family album faster than a flash takes to recycle. But even so, we keep taking photographs, keep saving them, keep returning to them.
Because deep down photographs were never just paper, screens, or digital files.
They changed houses many times. From the album to the phone, from the carousel to the cloud, from the drawer that never quite closed to the twelve thousand unsorted files sitting in some corner of everyone’s phone waiting for a rainy day and a great deal of patience.
But they never changed their real owner.
Which was always us — the ones who insist on stopping time, even though time, technology, and even the sister-in-law in the family group chat have completely different plans.
You can read more in Explore the Journal
If you read Spanish, you’ll find more of these ideas at Háblame de Fotos.