Steve Norquist: "The viewer/reader/listener takes an
eminently subjective position on any work of art...to me these photos do not
deserve any attempts to banish them from memory. Somehow I think the
photographer would agree.
JM: I didn't mean to
suggest that these photograps should be banished from any
"historic or historical memory"(of course!), but I described my
private attempt to avoid having them pop up, unexpectedly, in my
computer.
"Electronic memory" is quite distinct from Proust's
"involuntary memory," from Freud's "return of the repressed." or from
Nabokov's "Mnemosyne's mysterious
foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative
imagination may want to use when combining it with
later recollections and inventions"... The need to explain my intention shows how
easily misunderstandings arise (and can be verbally set right) is
another instance of having images "speak out their
thousand words" (Nabokov even expected that his "words", such as
garden or water, by their power to conjure up visual, tactile, and/or
sonorous images, should be interpreted following the sentence in which
they are used!)