The ghosts that broke my heart before I met you...

"In the moment and flow and flux of everyday life, the photograph preserves what the eye might otherwise not capture. This is the point at which image and photograph must be seen as dramatically different. For although the photograph has an existence separate from the viewer it can never be removed from the process of interpretation." ~ Berger

Recently I attended a good friends going away party. It took place around the time of the full moon - so it was all a tad loose and wild as people howled at the moon and rebalanced their water levels with beer. As tends to happen now that all of our faces have become books, around a week later photos of the event started popping up in the online public and clogging up our notifications and news feeds. As my sister Ellis and I looked over the most recent additions ... cringing and 'de tagging' the slatternly, droopy eyed images of our inebriated selves ... we came across several photos of a friend who neither of us remembered having been in attendance. One of these photos even included Ellis! Bemused by this and wanting answers, the following postings ensued

I found the final comment most interesting, that perhaps our friend Pap had not been there at all ... but the author of the photos had 'Photoshopped' him in.

The idea of 'ghosts' in photographs is becoming a more realistic phenomenon in a time where we have the aid of myriad nifty technological programs which can alter our memories to 'supernatural' effect...

Make a photo brighter,

a smile whiter,

or skin tighter...

Or to the entire displacement of people and objects into places in times they weren't actually apart of. This can also occur through a person being caught in a photo unaware, becoming apart of an archive they had no investment in. This happened to Ellis when she found herself apart of an archived picture of an old residence on 'Google Maps' - no longer there, though captured in that space within the webosphere. So what is the consequence of this on the 'truth' of the photograph? Are our memories becoming scripted by the liberties we have been granted in authorship?