On the ruined image: questioning the materiality of the photograph and its role in depicting the process of recollection

Prompted by an encounter with an archive of microscopic scans produced by my grandfather in 1976, this paper analyses the potential of disintegrative photographic processes, which deliberately set out to interfere with, subvert and sabotage the original images, to make visible the fragmented state of our memory. Interrogating the work of Stephen Gill and Daisuke Yokota in tandem with theories surrounding the nature of memory and its relationship with photography, I suggest that through the acceptance of the photograph’s own decay and degradation, photography may more accurately depict the process of recollection than the recollection itself. With particular reference to cultural geographer, Caitlin DeSilvey, who disassociates decomposition from loss, this paper establishes the image’s disintegration as generative. It is within such practices, which are open to, and encouraging of, an entanglement with “other than human agencies” and time passing, that photographs depict a reality; the reality of how memories reside in our minds and are brought back into consciousness.