Memories Of Things Unseen Summary

In “Memories of Things Unseen,” Teju Cole passes by Thomas Demand’s photo “Clearing” while entering a landscape exhibition at the FotoMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium. He notices the photo of the “forest”, but ignores it, concluding that it was just “another” (3) landscape photo. But after exploring the exhibition, Cole comes back to “Clearing” and, after reading the caption, realizes that the photo didn’t picture a forest at all, but instead a model of a forest made by Demand himself. He acknowledges Demand’s laborious endeavor to construct the model, but found himself more intrigued by the model’s fate, how Demand ended up destroying the model. Through this experience and others similar to it, Cole reminds himself of the one-dimensionality of photos.

For example, the introduction of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram has allowed people to share photos of daily activities online. Despite this, these photos are “not only unforgettable but inescapable” (5). Once these photos make their way onto the Internet, they remain there for eternity. This makes it difficult to take back a photo that you didn’t want to post in the first place. But once uploaded, people start to form different opinions about you and the way you act, dress, and maybe even sleep. In doing so, the viewer is left with this distorted and fragmented perspective on the moment and the person himself/ herself. So how should we interpret a photo? It’s not like the global population stop using their cameras for the rest of their lives. Jean Piaget, in his essay “Genetic Epistemology”, suggests that we should act upon it (38). Piaget believes that copying a model would only lead us into this “vicious circle” (38) in which we can’t determine if the “copy of the model is like the model or not” (38). In order for us to do that, we would need to know the model we plan to copy (38); however, that will be impossible considering the fact that we don’t know anything about the model to begin with. Even if we do create a copy, it can never replace the original model. The copy didn’t exist at the time in which the original model was created, nor did