[Unstagram] Similarities Between 'Seomgwang Memory' and a Telephoto Lens

Hearing that a ‘Super Blue Moon’ would rise, I grabbed a high-magnification zoom lens and went outside. The large moon, hidden behind clouds in the early evening, finally peeked out between the clouds later on. I hurriedly took photos by ‘zooming in’ with the telephoto lens. The moon, which began to appear faintly through the clouds, became rounder and clearer as time passed. While taking photos of the moon that had come close in a big way, I thought that the way it appeared suddenly reminded me of an old memory. Just like how a scene from long ago, thrown into the front yard of memory for unknown reasons, becomes clearer the more you look at it, as if it were happening right before your eyes...

The 'Super Blue Moon' began to appear through the clouds, captured with a high-magnification telephoto lens. Photo by Heo Young-han

Why is it that a scene from not the recent past but 20 to 30 years ago, something I had never recalled even once during that time, suddenly appears vividly before my eyes? Scenes from memory, the more you revisit and touch them, become overlaid with imagination and turn more concrete. Memories of moments that were disappointing or regretful are more poignant and vivid than those of joyful and satisfying moments. Satisfaction is easily forgotten, while regret or dissatisfaction is inflated and sharpened. The clearer the memory becomes, the sharper the emotions and the deeper the curves of remorse. The present emotions and desires, which were impulsively swayed without knowing that this moment would someday become a clear past and suddenly return, are also seen belatedly. Many things that were thought to disappear over time come back.

I thought, ‘This is why seasoned writers write about the distant past as if it were a concrete present.’ Proust wrote in In Search of Lost Time that the moment a madeleine dipped in tea touched the roof of his mouth, scenes from his childhood in his aunt’s neighborhood vividly came back to him. The memory was preserved in the body’s senses and suddenly burst forth like an explosion. Some memories, once recalled, become as vivid as the reality before your eyes and become a second experience of the past event. Many scenes from memory flash without any reason. American psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik explained such cases with the term ‘flashbulb memory.’ They said, “The flash of memory illuminates everything nearby, and it does so astonishingly in a short time.”

Hong Kong, 2011 ⓒ Heo Younghan

As I continued photography, I thought that memory is like looking into the past through a high-magnification telephoto lens. A telephoto lens pulls distant objects closer and enlarges partial details. And the image reached through the telephoto lens reduces or erases the depth and three-dimensionality of space. The highlighted image is clear but flat. It resembles a vivid memory of a moment whose context and causality are unknown. Awareness of origin and process disappears, and only the present scene is starkly revealed. That is also what a telephoto lens does. Just as memory’s relation to fact is loose, it is difficult to say that the image highlighted by a telephoto lens exactly matches reality. Everything seen is relative and varies depending on the viewpoint and method of seeing.

Editor's NoteThis piece writes about photography and what is seen, the passage of time, and human relationships. ‘Unstagram’ is a coined term meaning photographic (gram) stories that are not instant (insta~) but rather un-instant (un~).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.