Reaching Back

2018 | In recent years, I have been studying how memorials and museums function to make sense of senseless events in human history. In 2018, I visited the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. As I snapped a photo of a museum display with my iPhone, the facial recognition feature activated, randomly highlighting the faces of individuals in the historic photos recreated in the exhibit. I was struck by this automated, futile attempt to identify people from the past, from long before we carried so much technology around in our pockets. The activities of remembering, forgetting, and bearing witness often intertwine in complicated ways. Photography has played a role in all of it, documenting the past for the people of the future, revealing both the joy and the darkness of humankind. This random occurrence drew a tangible thread from the then of the individuals in the photos to the now of my visit to the museum, suggesting, perhaps, that the past, the present, and the future may not be so separate after all.