FOSSIL MEMORY

Photography as a fossilizing agent of History

Abstract

From natural light, as an agent that reveals the form and substance of natural expression (Deleuze and Guattari 2007), to technically mediated light, which since Modernity has made photography its symptom, there seems to be a latent photography embedded in the Earth’s materials, visible in the natural expressiveness with which fossils that predate photography by millions of years have been imprinted — the material evidence that indicates the existence of events or entities prior to human consciousness, the archéfossils (Meillassoux 2009). Take it as an axiom: fossils are the first photographic memories of the Earth.
The photographic device, both in its capture and in its mnemotechnical recording, participates in this co-affinity with nature: this is what we can read in Walter Ben-jamin when he says that photography, as an object, has been torn “from history into the continuum of historical evolution [...] represented within it its own pre- and post-history [...]” (Benjamin 2019, [N 10,3]). In this visual essay, we also seek to suspend historical linearity by confronting fossils and objects of industrial production (which, due to the erosion and aggregation of substances, are already proto-human fossils of things to come), all found in the western coastal area of Portugal. Similarly mediated by the visuality of the photographic image, this small collection instigates an ontological inquiry into the fate of both fossils and human traces as fossilized memory.
Both the fossils of Natural History and the objects that become fossils, when framed by the camera, become, according to Vilém Flusser, “[...] the meaning of Post-History [...]. The history of Natural History is the film itself.” (Flusser 2002, 145). When removed from their stratigraphic context and reframed in history as techni-cal images, a taphonomic exercise is speculatively embodied — the analysis of the processes of preserving traces (from burial to their photographic becoming) by linking photographic images to geo-logical legends about fossil memory, which finds in photography the fossilizing agent from pre- to post-History.