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Photography Changes What We Remember

Photography influences and alters our relationship to history, memory, and even death. Images and commentaries investigate how photographic images impact commemoration, history, truth, and the future.

Featured Stories


Photography changes the way we plan, experience, and remember weddings
By Laurie Lambrecht
In the limo on the way to the wedding ceremony a father of the bride photographs his daughter. by Laurie Lambrecht

Laurie Lambrecht, photographer, describes how weddings are both conceived of and experienced as a series of photo ops.


Photography changes how we access the memories necessary to function in everyday life
By Jeff Sandoz
PET scan indicating Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB) found in the brain of a cognitively healthy person, versus in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease.

Jeff Sandoz, psychologist, describes how a doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, devised a clever photographic system to help him in his daily life.


Photography changes the historical research curators do
By Michelle Anne Delaney
Albumen portrait of the Reverend Levi L. Hill, Baptist minister and early daguerreotypist, West Kill, New York and New York City, b. 1816-d. February 9, 1865.

Michelle Anne Delaney, curator of the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, investigates some controversial examples of early color photography.