Quotations appear to visualize and describe events that have happened in the past. However, they are not capable of explaining what has passed around that space, time, and place. If quotations are honest, they deliver the real incompletely, if not they mix with imagination. When quotations appear in the vast social-historical scale, they convert an important part of the history to the collective memory.
Historical images seem to be the visual appearance of historical events. They are common images of what has been recorded of those specific events in the public mind. Pictures are collective memories. However, they narrate particular moments despite what has happened before and after. Pictures are determined simulations of facts and cannot recall what has happened in reality completely and perfectly. This disability provides narrators the chance to distort and even change reality.
Pictures can mix with imagination, sentiments and individual beliefs, and so they can separate from their context and transform into brand new stories. The collective memory is interrupted. We look for unreachable truth in pictures and memories. The collective memory is built on unreliable images and incomplete quotes.
Bahar Taheri, July 2014.
Bahar Taheri 