Seeing Photographically and the Memory of Photography

“Seeing photographically” is an act of cultural memory. In an era of AI-generated images, screenshots, “disappearing” or “view once” photographs, and myriad other practices that challenge the definitional boundaries of photography, the phrase invokes past understandings of the medium’s sensory affordances, transferring them into a continually changing present. Focusing on a case study of the digital “rescue” of found film chemical photography, the article excavates cultural memory processes that relocate photographic seeing to digital arenas. The memory of “seeing photographically” does more, it claims, than preserve photography as a “zombie category” that disguises the reality of computational imagery. Rather, it helps construct and maintain a media ideology of what photography was and is, and of its continuing cultural, and especially existential, significance. Mobilizing worldviews, social values, and moral obligations associated with photography in the past, “seeing photographically” reanimates them in contemporary contexts of media ubiquity, intensified visibility, and existential anxiety, with profound ramifications.