Preface
It seems that the number one hobby around the world these days is photography. Billions of photos are shot every day. Every year, 1.72 trillion photos are taken worldwide—that equals 54,400 snapshots per second (or 4.7 billion per day). By 2030, around 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year; 92.5 percent of these photos will be shot by smartphones.1 People are creating a tremendous number of photographic memories.
It all began in 1826 with the first known photograph, “View from the Window in Le Gras,” taken by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. In 1988, Fujifilm introduced the world to the first digital camera. Even though imaging technology developed rapidly at that point, photographs were not plentiful until digital cameras were installed in smartphones.2 My first camera was a Ricoh 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR) that my parents bought for me when I was fourteen. An SLR is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of analog camera.
My father and I built a small darkroom near the basement steps of our house, and it was there that I spent many hours processing my first black-and-white images. From framing a scene in the camera’s viewfinder, reading the light meter, setting the shutter speed, determining the f-stop, and pressing the shutter release, to winding the exposed film back into the canister, opening it in the dark, threading it onto a developing tank reel, mixing photo chemicals, processing the film, hanging the negative images up to dry, and then inserting them into the enlarger to create positive images onto photo paper, was a magical process to me. Watching an image slowly appear on paper under the amber illumination of a safelight was like the unwrapping of a Christmas gift; what gets revealed was always a surprise. The surprise came from remembering what was shot through the viewfinder and how the expectation of that mental image almost always turned out different on film/paper. There is something about the latent image in the mind versus the one that ended up on film that created a sense of awe. Preeminent writer and philosopher Susan Sontag once said: “[Photographs are] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement of it.”3
I abhorred writing when I was a kid. Being the only deaf student in all-hearing public school classes, I barely got by stringing words together intelligibly enough to pass to the next grade. Instead, I learned to take good photographs before I could create good phrases. Basic Photography and Nature Photography were two of my favorite courses in high school. Besides physical education, they were the only courses that I earned an A in. This led to being selected to participate in a prestigious career development program during my senior year in high school. My career counselor found me a part-time job working for the pathology photography department at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. This valuable experience helped get me accepted into the undergraduate biomedical photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It wasn’t until I was enrolled there with other deaf students, along with teachers who used sign language, that my writing improved. I believe that as my access to ASL, my self-identity as a Deaf person, and my education grew, my ability to write strengthened.
During my junior year, I took a course from a deaf professor named Dr. Robert Panara. Back in the 1970s, he was the first deaf professor at RIT. He taught an intriguing class called Deaf Characters in Literature and Film. (If you ever want to know more about this magnificent human being and teacher, check out Teaching from the Heart and Soul.4)
We studied different novels and films that had deaf characters in them, such as Johnny Belinda, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and In This Sign. All were fascinating, well-written stories, but the one thing that stood out about them was that they were written by hearing writers whose observations of the Deaf experience were inauthentic or inaccurate.
One of our assignments was to write a personal essay about a deaf experience we had. All of us in class looked at each other—“Deaf experience? What was that?” Dr. Panara taught us that it was whatever unique, odd, thought-provoking experience that impacted a deaf person in the hearing world. A brief example would be a deaf person going into a fast-food restaurant to order a burger, fries, and a soda. The deaf person gestures not being able to hear and that they would like a pen and paper to write down the order. The clerk would then hand over a braille menu. Everything that the deaf person had tried to gesture went completely out the window.
For the assignment, I started thinking about my own Deaf experiences. One that immediately stuck out in my head happened during a medical photography internship at Yale School of Medicine. One day I was called to the operating room to photograph open heart surgery—STAT! None of the other photographers were available. Usually, I knew in advance when I was scheduled to photograph surgery. I would meet surgeons ahead of time to let them know I was deaf and to come up with some simple hand signals for what type of photographs they wanted.
I wrote about this experience, which became my first essay involving creative writing. Dr. Panara gave me an A on the paper and encouraged me to submit it to Symposium, RIT’s literary magazine at the time. Symposium decided to publish my story. Years later, I revised the story and had it published, along with a photograph of the human heart, in a national literary magazine. Seeing my own writing creations in black-and-white on the page enthralled me and spurred me on to write more. The very same feeling happened when I saw my first published photograph.
Sometimes a photo will trigger a memory that gives me a spark to ignite a story or a play. In my book Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays, there is a play (The water falls.) in the collection where the leitmotif is the reverberation of a grandfather’s suicide among his family members.5 I had a photograph of a rock impacting a still pond with ripples expanding outward. This image was the inspiration for my leitmotif.
Two plays in this collection had their beginnings created by photographs. Remains of Bosnians originated from my being greatly disturbed by images of genocide from the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. And in The Practice of Medicine, I used medical photographs to subtly protest how even in modern times doctors were still “practicing” their craft on live patients. This was my dramatic reaction to a personal experience of enduring the excruciating pain of retinal reattachment surgery.
One of the fascinating mysteries of writing for me is how I take small incidents from my life and expand upon them. I find it amazing how my mind takes me on a wild ride with where a character went or with what a character did. When I look back on a story I wrote, sometimes I am not sure how much of it was actually borrowed from my life. For instance, in “Every Man Must Fall,” a story in this collection about how a fellow high school student/coworker’s drowning deeply affected the main character, I based it on a real-life remembrance of the news about a high school classmate’s drowning. Throughout my mid-teen years, I worked as a dishwasher at a local restaurant. What I could not remember was whether or not my classmate really worked with me. I thought to myself, “Wow—I made that up?” When rereading the story, the fiction I created felt so real to me.
Our memories may fade with time until we go back and review a photo of an event, after which the memory becomes refreshed. The incidents leading up to the event and of what happened after would come flooding back in the mind. But it is the exact moment recorded in the photograph that brings back a total recall with precision. (For an articulate, philosophical, and scholarly probe into the interrelation of memory and photography, the reader should explore Sontag’s book On Photography.6)
Sometimes we alter this memory with retouching to make it more romantic, aesthetic, cleaner, rosier, starker, more focused, better composed, less distracted, less traumatic, and so on. A photo accompanying a news article may be cropped for clarity, to allow for more writing space, or to channel the reader’s gaze to a specific individual or object. Years ago, it was only the professionals who did the retouching of photos. With the advent of Photoshop, Instagram, and other photo apps, anyone with a smartphone can manipulate their photographs and, hence, their memories.
During the summer of 1987 while on vacation at Deal Island, Maryland, I took a camera with me to do what we called in photo school “street shooting.” It doesn’t mean to go shooting with a gun in the streets but with a camera armed with film. The idea is to be ready to snap whatever catches one’s eye. I found many subjects that were intriguing to shoot: dilapidated bait shacks, abandoned houses, cars rusting in a field, weathered boats, family graveyard plots, old churches. One day outside of a general store, I saw a run-down ice machine with its shiny door hanging askew. Seeing a reflection of myself on the door, I decided to take a self-portrait. A week later after the color slides were processed in a lab and sent to me, I discovered an image that captivated me. It was not a perfect mirror image of myself, but more reflective of the imperfect qualities of me: some rust on the machine, lettering with a retro style, and small dents in the metal door that gave it a warped look. I grew to like this self-portrait—not only for its representation of certain aspects of my personality, but also for its invocation of specific memories of that day when I went street shooting.
There is a so-called psychological or scientific phenomenon called “photographic memory,” or “eidetic memory” as it is sometimes called. According to New Scientist magazine, people who have photographic memory indicate that they have the ability to recollect a past setting or situation in detail with precision. Even though a lot of people proclaim to have photographic memory, there is no scientific evidence of it. On the other hand, there is an ability called “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM), where people can recall a past event in detail with a precise date of the occurrence. However, fewer than 100 people in the world have been recognized as having HSAM, and although their memories were outstanding, they were not as dependable as a photographic documentation.7
When an individual can clearly remember an image that they were briefly shown, it is called eidetic memory. For example, if a photo was revealed to someone, that person will continue to see the image for thirty seconds, sometimes even a few minutes after the photo was taken away.8
“A Photographic Memory,” my autobiographical account of the open-heart surgery, was such a profound experience that it was burned into my memory. When I completed the operating room shoot, the image of the exposed, momentarily arrested heart flashed itself repeatedly in my head. At the time, I thought my precise reminiscence of it meant I had a photographic memory. And, when I wrote about this recollection a year later, it became a memory that I looked back on from time to time. Of course, over time, the memory was not quite exactly like the photo of the open heart I had taken on that extraordinary day.
The act of writing allows me to recall memories and shape them the way I like—much like a person taking a snapshot with their phone and retouching it to their personal tastes. The pieces in this volume are divided into three sections: essays, playlets, and stories. The essays involve a collection of published magazine articles, sidebars, dramaturgical pieces for stage production programs, and photo essays. The playlets—short, simple comedies and dramas—are grouped under nonverbals, meaning without spoken or signed language, and under verbals, referring to pieces involving spoken and signed language. Some of the stories are pieces that formed parts of my novel The Deaf Heart,9 while others are stand-alone short fictions that were published in literary magazines and anthologies.
These selected, shaped works in written and visual form are my photographic memories.
Willy Conley
March 24, 2022
1. Matic Broz, “Number of Photos Statistics (2022),” Photutorial (March 10, 2022), https://photutorial.com/photos-statistics/.
2. Broz, “Number.”
3. Barbara F. Lefcowitz, “Memory and Photography,” Southwest Review 96, no. 2 (2011): 231, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43473144.
4. Harry G. Lang, Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2007).
5. Willy Conley, Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2009), 246–80.
6. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 2019).
7. Alexandra McNamara and Matt Hambly, “Photographic Memory,” New Scientist (May 25, 2021), https://www.newscientist.com/definition/photographic-memory/.
8. McNamara and Hambly, “Photographic Memory.”
9. Willy Conley, The Deaf Heart: A Novel (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015).